Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in.

How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century, yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation, planning controls and bureaucracy.

Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects, planners and students of architecture, design, town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects, critics and historians, including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period.


List of contributors: Cedric Price, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, Ben Highmore, Yona Friedman, Paul Barker, Clara Greed, Barry Curtis, Colin Ward, Ian Horton, John Beck, Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. VIII)
• Contributors (p. X)
• Credits (p. XII)
• #01 Paul Barker Thinking the Unthinkable (p. 2)
• #02 Cedric Price Cedric Price's Non-Plan Diary (p. 22)
• #03 Ben Franks New Right/New Left: An Alternative Experiment in Freedom (p. 32)
• #04 Colin Ward Anarchy and Architecture: A Personal Record (p. 44)
• #05 Barry Curtis the Heart of the City (p. 52)
• #06 Ian Horton Pervasion of the Picturesque: English Architectural Aesthetics and Legislation, 1945-1965 (p. 66)
• #07 Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas Recovery and Reappropriation in Lefebvre and Constant (p. 80)
• #08 Jonathan Hughes the Indeterminate Building (p. 90)
• #09 Yona Friedman Function Follows Form (p. 104)
• #10 John Beck Buckminster Fuller and the Politics of Shelter (p. 116)
• #11 Hadas Steiner Off the Map (p. 126)
• #12 Simon Sadler Open Ends: the Social Visions of 1960s Non-Planning (p. 138)
• #13 Ben Highmore the Death of the Planner?: Paris Circa 1968 (p. 156)
• #14 Jonathan Hughes After Non-Plan: Retrenchment and Reassertion (p. 166)
• #15 Clara Greed Can Man Plan? Can Woman Plan Better? (p. 184)
• #16 Malcolm Miles Living Lightly on the Earth (p. 198)
• #17 Chinedu Umenyilora Empowering the Self-Builder (p. 210)
• #18 Martin Pawley Towards an Unoriginal Architecture (p. 222)
• #19 Michael Rakowitz Parasite (p. 232)
• Index (p. 236)