Celia Scott, Robert Maxwell and others
Ideas, Faces and Places: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless

Ideas, Faces and Places is a record of an exhibition and symposium that took place in Dublin at The Irish Architectural Archive in the autumn of 2022, “Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Ideas, Faces and Places”, which transferred to RIBA headquarters in London in the Spring of 2023. The book is a repository for some of the observations that arose at these events made by architects and critics including John Tuomey, Ed Jones, Irina Davidovici, Kenneth Frampton and others. The exhibition juxtaposed Celia Scott’s busts of the architects James Stirling, Leon Krier, Alan Colquhoun, Ed Jones and others, with a pictorial biography of her husband, the eminent architect and academic Robert Maxwell (1922-2020). The view that this book offers of the exhibition and of the work of Scott and Maxwell is provisional and partial, offering the reader the chance to meander and to relish unexpected juxtapositions and oblique views of its subjects - almost exactly like the rooms that Celia Scott created in Dublin and in London. Robert Maxwell was one of the most important architectural theorists and teachers of the second half of the 20th century - this book is an essential addition to his oeuvre.

“Jim Stirling’s head is actually life-size, but probably looks larger because of the adjacent smaller heads. Alan Colquhoun had a small head, and I think probably Sandy’s head has become smaller than life-size. Just by way of explanation, I count myself a modern artist and the heads are meant to be ironic. I was playing games. They consciously do not show the hand of the artist, in order to show the difference between the sitters. I was using the bust form to reflect an idea about their public persona, so Leo’s head is done in strict 1850s style akin to his own passion for the architecture of that era. Jim was done as a German baron (he was doing a lot of work there and highly thought of in that country at the time), and the curved undercut of the front of the bust reflects the giant cornice at Stuttgart. Alan Colquhoun as Seneca.”

Celia Scott, 2022

“The exhibition is an important tribute to a group of people who were significant players in British architecture (and beyond) in the latter half of the twentieth century and, perhaps more importantly, to those who have educated and influenced the architects of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.”

Robin Webster, Drawing Matter, 2022

"... a beautiful compilation of drawings, photos and texts published by Canalside Press, the imprint created by architects Patrick and Claudia Lynch. Meticulously designed by Emma Kalkhoven, ‘Ideas, Faces and Places’ reproduces images of the busts from the exhibition with short biographies by John Tuomey, illustrations of all of Maxwell’s key buildings, excerpts from his writings – critical and theoretical – and essays and reminiscences from Ed Jones, Kenneth Frampton, John Tuomey, Mark Swenarton, Irina Davidovici, Anthony Vidler, Janet Abrams and Adrian Forty. It seems curious that in reviewing an exhibition of sculpture and architecture – of three dimensional artefacts – that it has seemed necessary to focus so much on names, to catalogue in such detail the relationships the Maxwell enjoyed and that bound the figures represented in the busts together. But what is really being recorded here is an architectural culture, one whose influence I think – and I suppose I hope – is still being felt today."

Bob Allies, Building Design, 09.03.2013