Westminster Evening Lecture: John Allan - Finsbury Health Centre – Metaphor of Modernism

Department of Architecture, University of Westminster, History and Theory open lecture series, 2009-10

Open lectures, no charge, and all are welcome.  Baker Street tube.
email enquiries to: jsbold@hotmail.com 

Thursday 18th March, 6.30pm

John Allan: Finsbury Health Centre – Metaphor of Modernism

In this lecture, John Allan will use the example of Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre of 1938 as a metaphor for the aspirations and values of the early Modern Movement. This ground-breaking building provided a model of modern social architecture and municipal planning, anticipating the introduction of the National Health Service by a decade. The talk will examine the wide range of references and lessons to be found in this project. It will also include coverage of the speaker’s own partial restoration of the building in the 1990s and conclude with an account of its current difficulties in the era of Private Finance Initiatives and New Labour.

John Allan is a director of Avanti Architects for whom he has led a number of  Modern Movement conservation projects over the past 25 years. His monumental study Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (RIBA, 1992) was awarded the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion, 1993.

Room M/421, Marylebone Campus,
University of Westminster,
35 Marylebone Road,
London NW1 5LS