National Life Stories: Architects' Lives

The Floral Hall in the Royal Opera House

The Floral Hall, with mirrored wall, part of the Royal Opera House redevelopment, Dixon Jones with BDP, 1983-1999

Published date:: 5 September 2023

National Life Stories’ Architects’ Lives was established in 1995 and provides a rare opportunity for British architects and those in associated professions to discuss in detail their life and work and the intersection between the two.

Amongst the earliest participants were members of the generation born in the first decades of the twentieth century, who experienced the Second World War and its aftermath. The collection documents the cultural impact of the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the political impact of the 1948 Labour government’s unrivalled building programme. This was initiated primarily to repair and replace much of the housing and public buildings damaged by under-investment in the 1930s and war in the 1940s. This political desire was assisted by a new wave of teaching in architecture schools which encouraged students to forefront the social context when thinking about building, and to do so within a modernist framework.

It also traces the moment when the profession began to question aspects of the modern movement. At a similar time, the change in government in 1979 had a profound impact on state funded public building, particular social housing. By the millennium, lottery funding provided finance for cultural projects across the nation, such as The Lowry in Salford Quays and the Royal Opera House in London. There was renewed interest in historical context and urban placemaking – documented in the regeneration of Kings Cross and the Olympic Park and its legacy.

As well as charting the physical transformation of urban centres in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the collection also eavesdrops onto the personal relationships which connected many of the emerging architects and practices. These include Neave Brown, Adrian Gale, John Miller, and Kenneth Frampton, who met as students at the Architectural Association in the 1950s, as did Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan in Scotland in the same period. It also charts other fundamental changes within the profession, from drawing as a craft process to one enabled by computer technology, innovations in building technology and materials, and most recently the architectural response to the challenge of climate change.

Many interviews from Architects' Lives can be accessed via British Library Sounds. You can discover other recordings on the topic of architecture online in the Architecture category. To explore the collection in detail, please search the Sound and Moving Image catalogue. The catalogue reference used for all the recordings in the project is C467. You can search British Library Sounds and the catalogue by interviewee name - see the recent list of interviewees (PDF, 52KB).

Further information about Architects’ Lives can be found within National Life Stories Annual Reviews, in particular the 2014-2015 Annual Review (PDF, 1.66MB) which focussed on Architects’ Lives and its sister project Artists’ Lives.

Whilst Erno Goldfinger was not recorded for Architects' Lives himself, NLS – in partnership with the National Trust at Willow Road – has added a series of life stories to the collection with people close to him. Extracts were published as a CD in 2004 by NLS and the National Trust entitled Passionate Rationalism: Recollections of Ernö Goldfinger. For more information please contact the curatorial team at nls@bl.uk.