Lecture date: 2013-12-03
This event pre-empts the release of AA Files 67, in which the architectural historian Mark Swenarton interviews architect Neave Brown about his life and career. Offering a synoptic repeat of the same conversation, Swenarton will host an evening at the AA in which he will discuss with Brown the architect’s transatlantic upbringing, his studies at the AA alongside Kenneth Frampton, David Gray, John Miller, Adrian Gale and Patrick Hodgkinson, his subsequent work at Lyons, Israel & Ellis, his friendship with James Stirling, his teaching stints at the AA, Cornell, Princeton and Karlsruhe, and the three great housing schemes he designed and built with and for Camden council – Winscombe Street, Fleet Road and Alexandra Road.
Neave Brown was born in 1929 and after his training at the AA in the early 1950s, and a brief stint in private practice, he subsequently worked under Sydney Cook in the architecture department of Camden council, producing two ground-breaking social housing schemes at Fleet Road and Alexandra Road. He has also combined his architectural work with teaching in the UK, Europe and the US.
Mark Swenarton is an architectural historian and the James Stirling Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool. He formerly acted as head of the Oxford Brookes school of architecture and was a co-founder of the monthly review Architecture Today. He is the author of Homes Fit for Heroes (1981), Artisans and Architects (1989) and will soon complete a new book on the activities of the Camden council architecture department.
