ABSTRACT
The following is one sample of a larger research project that has mobilized the work of Henri Lefebvre in order to contest the ‘canon’ of mid-twentieth-century British modern architectural history.1 The empirical base for the research lies in one of the more banal activities of the building process – soil mechanics, a technical practice that hardly impinges on the formal properties of architecture. As such, the research departs from Anglo-American architectural projects that engaged with Lefebvre’s work at the turn of the century in that it provides openings for a reassessment of architecture’s historical relationship to social democracy and the emergent welfare state of mid-twentieth-century Britain.
