ABSTRACT
If the activities of Team X and others merely constituted eddies that were ‘detectable at the edge of the modernist tide’ during the mid-1950s,2 then by the mid-1960s the flow of projects from the avant-garde had assumed a quite different order of magnitude and turbulence. In one sense, these were symptoms of a familiar restlessness. Given its history as a radical movement that had long cherished its avant-garde credentials, there was unease at the practice of modernism steadily coming to occupy the middle ground of architectural thought which, like middle age, was something to be avoided. At precisely the time when reconstruction and modernisation gathered pace, architecture experienced a period of radical innovation but not one that had much to do with the everyday world. Charles Jencks, deploying a military rather than marine analogy, saw British architecture in the 1960s as a ‘scarred battlefield . . . saturated with the shellholes of polemic’. The architect proceeded as the avant-garde did in any battle, ‘as a provocateur’, who ‘saps the edges of taste, undermines the conventional boundaries, assaults the thresholds of respectability and shocks the psychic stability of the past by introducing the new, the strange, the exotic and the erotic’.3
