The AA remembers alumnus and RIBA Royal Gold Medal winner Neave Brown, architect of three of the most pioneering housing schemes of postwar British architecture.
The following was written in 2013 by architectural historian Mark Swenarton as an introduction to his conversation with Brown. It has been republished here in its original form as a tribute.
To the greater majority of architects and scholars Neave Brown is known as the man responsible for Alexandra Road (1968–69), a masterwork of postwar British architecture and one of only a small number of English housing projects to command worldwide attention. Yet Brown’s story is a good deal more complex than this might suggest. To start with, he is only half-British – his mother was American, he was born in the United States and schooled equally in the US and the UK. In formation as much as outlook, therefore, Brown is transatlantic – although by no means in the Churchillian sense that this might imply.
Secondly, while famed as a practitioner, Brown has had a parallel career as an academic. The most complex part of Alexandra Road was designed while he was at Princeton. Through his teaching he also made links – personal and intellectual – in unexpected quarters: at one end of his career Colin Rowe asked him to come to Cornell, at the other Jo Coenen invited him to take over his own professorship at Karlsruhe. Here, then, was a rich mixture of ideas and inspirations.
Thirdly, Brown has an unusually broad view of the role of the architect. As a schoolboy he was passionate about modern art and his initial desire was to go to art school; but he then decided to read English at Oxford. Only while doing his National Service did he settle on architecture at the AA. As Brown matured, these broader interests remained: designer of buildings, of course, but also artist and public intellectual, a person informed about the issues of the day.
Finally there is the complexity of Brown’s attitude to Le Corbusier and the legacy of modernism. Like many of his contemporaries Brown believed in modernism but also in Englishness. Specifically he loved Corb but hated his ideas about cities. From that dynamic sprang the inventiveness of his own proposals for housing and cities: proposals that were mainly made in Britain, but were also the product of much more besides.
Read Neave Brown’s complete conversation about his life and work, published in AA Files 67 and watch his 2013 conversation with Mark Swenarton at the AA.