ABSTRACT
Being employed by Birkbeck College School of Law in London, while also attending the postgraduate programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, I had occasion to walk around the Bloomsbury area of London quite a bit. Doing so, I began to notice one or two peculiar ‘architectural’ features that set me thinking. I put ‘architectural’ in quotes, because to refer to these features as architectural is actually a bit of a stretch: they don’t derive from, or aspire to, the tradition of architectural craft that seeks, at its best, to combine aesthetic possibility with the potentials of social and political life. Rather, these features seemed to be afterthoughts, ad hoc additions that, in an extremely rough and ready manner, sought to answer an apparent problem that, at the time of the architectural plan, had not been foreseen. Being improvised, these features have no common factor in the usual sense of architectural design or form, making it difficult to group them within a particular category or genre. What they do share is an intent, or particular relation to the world. Consequently, their commonality is more virtual than actual (but nonetheless real), and it was this in particular that forced me to start thinking about them. Device at the Britannia Building Society, Euston Road. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203770283/8bccfe5f-e7e1-4d22-9696-b014d6d27054/content/fig3_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
