Jeremy Till Bücher

Polemics and reflections on how to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be.

Park Hill, a huge concrete-framed modernist social-housing scheme, was completed in 1961 when Sheffield had near full employment and young architects - in this case Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn - were developing new ways to satisfy the need for affordable flats for rent. Since then the national housing scene has been transformed, a change embodied in the fate of Park Hill, stripped back to its frame and recast for, largely, private ownership. Keith Collie's photographs capture the cliff-like grandeur and formal beauty of this massive structure in ruins and the epic scale of the renovation. David Levitt provides the background to the current renovation project by developer Urban Splashm and Jeremy Till's essay puts the Park Hill story into the wider context of architecture and the welfare state.

This book presents a thorough overview of alternative architectural practices, highlighting the need for richer approaches in the profession. It features various examples of successful implementations and explores future possibilities for architectural innovation.

This work features Jeremy Till, Ian Anderson, Ruth Ben Tovim, Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Jim Prevett, Trish O'Shea, Martyn Ware, and, Sarah Wigglesworth. This publication accompanies Echo / City, the British Pavilion exhibition for the 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture. Echo / City was commissioned by the British Council and conceived and designed by Jeremy Till, Professor of Architecture at Sheffield University, and presents Sheffield as an exemplar of post-industrial cities everywhere, using the city as a paradigm for discussion of their identity and renewal. Till Sheffield acts as a vehicle to push around wider ideas about cities and their social dynamics. In this way, it is an echo of many cities, buffeted by the social and technological forces of modernity. The exhibition has Sheffield at its heart, but is about much more than Sheffield; it is about any city.