THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW

摘要

The AR's cover for January 1944 (30), by the artist Kenneth Rowntree, says much about the magazine's layered view of heritage. This cover dates five months before D-Day; until that immense and heroic Allied action was undertaken, there was no guarantee that the war with Hitler would end any time soon. One thing Britain had promised itself was a national health service. Here, Rowntree shows a gleaming white hospital of the future through the Gothic arch of a blitzed church. This, of course, is Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanitorium (completed in 1932), a building much feted by the AR. Rowntree's cover was a play on a series of public posters designed two years earlier by Abram Games under the banner 'Your Britain - Fight for it Now' for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. One famous poster depicted a gleaming Finsbury Health Centre (Berthold Lubetkin/Tecton, 1938) emerging from the ruins of a London slum in which a frightened boy is evidently a victim of malnutrition. Significantly, this same poster series also featured the very different artistic style of Frank Newbould whose idealised English pastoral scenes worth fighting for included Salisbury Cathedral, Alf riston Fair and the South Downs. Ultimately, both of these visions of Britain were worth the fight, and this happily mixed message occupied pages and entire issues of the wartime AR (for example (33,34) Windmills, September 1945). During these years, the AR devoted considerable attention to the kind of early industrial buildings the editorial team, including Nikolaus Pevsner, saw as precursors of Modern Movement design. In the AR's mind, Modernism and Heritage were to walk together into a postwar future. This was not going to be easy, yet after decades of 'comprehensive redevelopment' when history was treated as bunk to be bulldozed, Heritage fought its way to the top of the architectural and planning agenda.