Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect

Patrick and Claudia Lynch and David Porter (editors), Neave Brown, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Maxwell, Ed Jones, Peter Barber, Amy Young, Tony Fretton, Jonathan Sergison, Simon Henley, Paul Karakusevic, John Zhang, David Evans, Reyner Banham, Patrick Hodgkinson, Christopher Woodward, et al with new photography by Sue Barr et al

Clothbound Hardcover Book
416pp
£38

Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect explores the ethos and ideas of the Anglo-American architect Neave Brown (1929-2018), winner of the RIBA Gold Medal 2017. Part of a City gets its title from Brown’s Gold Medal acceptance speech, when he observed: “We weren’t making housing, we were making part of a city.” The book brings together his writing and design projects, including his celebrated large-scale urban housing work for Camden Council, and the later projects in Italy and The Netherlands, the latter undertaken in private practise with David Porter. Part of a City re-presents original critiques from the 1960s and 1970s by prominent figures such as Reyner Banham, Bob Maxwell, Christopher Woodward and Ed Jones, with new writing by architects and critics including Kenneth Frampton, Jonathan Sergsion, Simon Henley, Paul Karakuservic and Peter Barber.

Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect is the third book in Canalside Press’ Modern Architecture in Reflection series alongside Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect (2021) and On Intricacy: The Work of John Meunier Architect (2020). In common with the other titles in this series, Part of a City is a portrait of a period of optimism in modern architectural culture: it reveals the profound intellectual and artistic ideas that inspired a communal social effort and is also a portrait of a gifted and unusually articulate architect. Neave Brown continues to inspire generations of architects and architecture students, and his work and ethos is exactly pertinent to the housing and ecological crisis that affects so much of the world today.

Part of a City was launched at Brown's alma mater, The Architectural Association, on 18th November 2022, alongside a symposium devoted to his legacy that day.

Part of a City was chosen as one of the Financial Time's Best Books of 2022: Architecture and Design. The FT's architecture correspondent Eddie Heatcote wrote: "Neave Brown's Alexandra Road Estate in Camden represented the zenith of British council housing; humane, green, communal, successful. His work was both Brutalist and beautiful, public and intimate and this book from the admirable Canalside press (run by architects Patrick and Claudia Lynch) finally does him proper justice." (26.11.2022)

In his review of the book for Building Design, Mathew Wickens declares: "This is a handsomely produced, competitively priced volume for which the editors (Patrick Lynch, Claudia Lynch and David Porter) should be congratulated. The book is, in essence, a primer on Neave Brown, and pulls together most of the published writing both about, and by him, along with some enlightening newly published material. The new essays by Patrick Lynch and David Porter are especially well-rounded exercises in scene setting, in the case of Lynch, and taking us back to the period in question. This is an architect’s architecture book - by architects, for architects. Treat yourself to a belated Christmas present!" (19.01.2023)