The origins of the Oxford Conference within the networks of 1930s student activism

Abstract

It is sixty years since the Oxford Conference of 1958, which established the present-day model of British architectural education as a primarily intellectual pursuit carried out within a university environment. This paper traces the origins of this model to a network of young activists of the 1930s led by Leslie Martin, Richard Llewelyn Davies, Richard Sheppard, Max Lock, Justin Blanco White, and others. Walter Gropius addressed a number of key student meetings of the period, offering a major stimulus to the radicalism of the young. The resulting network sought to reform architectural education through student activism, aiming to produce architects adapted to the technical and intellectual challenges of modernism, and fit to work in the increasingly large and ambitious architectural offices of the public sector. The Oxford Conference is commonly portrayed as the culmination of a campaign hatched by a coterie of official architects infiltrating the RIBA. This paper adds to the understanding of the conference by demonstrating its origins within the fevered and energetic climate of 1930s student activism pervading not just the Architectural Association but national organisations such as the Northern Architectural Students’ Association and the RIBA Junior Members’ Committee. As architectural education once again comes under scrutiny, this paper rediscovers the atmosphere of student-led optimism, belief in progress, and passionate commitment to architecture as a public service which underpinned the origins of the current educational landscape. It also offers a reminder that reforming architectural education can be a slow and lengthy process.