Mark Swenarton

Biography

I have dual interests as a historian and a critic of architecture. I trained originally as an architectural historian and have practiced as such over many years, focusing on twentieth-century housing. Later I became also an architectural critic and editor, co/editing the monthly review Architecture Today from 1989 to 2005 and chairing design review at CABE from 2010. These twin interests, in history and design, informed my work as an educator, from 2005-10 as head of the architecture school at Oxford Brookes and from 2011-15 as inaugural James Stirling Chair of Architecture.

Research Interest

My research interests as a historian centre on the politics of architecture in the twentieth century, and particularly on the relationship between architecture, housing and politics. Over many years my work centered on the development of a new form of urban housing, namely the garden suburb, in the early twentieth century and its adoption by social democratic governments across Europe, led by the UK, for the social housing programmes launched in the aftermath of the First World War. Sole-authored outputs from this include Homes fit for Heroes (1981) and Building the New Jerusalem (2008). More recently I have been looking at the emergence of another new type of urban housing, the high-density low-rise type developed by architects at the London Borough of Camden in the 1960s and 1970s, most famously Neave Brown's Alexandra Road, and this forms the subject of my current research, started in 2008. Funding has come from the RIBA and, most recently, the British Academy (Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship 2013-14) and a monograph is planned for publication in 2017. Alongside this close-up study I have been involved in establishing a network of European and American scholars researching the relationship between architecture and the welfare state on an international basis. Milestones include sessions at the conferences of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) in 2010 and 2012 and an invitation-only international symposium in Liverpool in 2012, published as Architecture and the Welfare State (Routledge, 2014), co-edited with Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel from TU Delft.