Treating architectural research: the Nuffield Trust and the post-war hospital

Abstract

This paper explores the influence of medicine on architectural research after the Second World War. I look at the funding of research into hospital design by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust as a case study. This charitable foundation was set up in 1939 by the industrialist Lord Nuffield, William Morris, founder of Morris Motors. In 1949 the Trust partnered with the University of Bristol to investigate the functions and design of hospitals, triggering one of the most influential architectural research programmes in post-war Britain. I argue that the Trust’s interest in the hospital as a building type initiated a new understanding of architectural research on the model of medical research, triangulating a profession, post-graduate university training, and private philanthropy. I focus on the writings of Richard Llewelyn Davies (later Baron Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe), the Director of the Trust’s investigation into hospitals from 1949–1960. His contributions to research as Chair at the Bartlett School of Architecture (1960–1969) are well known. Scholars including Reyner Banham, Anthony Vidler, and Alise Upitis have explored how he pioneered the techno-scientific turn in architectural pedagogy. However, the structural change for the profession he envisioned and its basis in the Nuffield Trust model remains unexamined. Looking at his work as an extension of the history and agenda of the Nuffield Trust allows us to move away from the disciplinary assessment of architectural research as a problem in pedagogy and re-centre it as a question of how architecture might participate in improving social welfare.