Description:
<jats:p>This article argues that the UK’s vanguard magazine <jats:italic>Architectural Design</jats:italic> (<jats:italic>AD</jats:italic>) promoted appropriate technology (AT) to prompt ‘architectural thinking’ about the late-modern crisis following the collapse of post-War consensus in the welfare state and its architecture. This was to be a crisis settled by the decade’s end in postmodernism and neoliberalism, a new consensus so overwhelming that it was heralded even in AT, especially those variants drawn from the Californian libertarianism of the <jats:italic>Whole Earth Catalog</jats:italic>. But British AT was also drawing from the UK’s eco-socialist Radical Technology group and its publication, whose chief artist, anarchist Clifford Harper, and editor Peter Harper, contributed to <jats:italic>AD</jats:italic>. At the beginning of the decade, the magazine’s sub-editor Martin Pawley insisted on the role of a lateral ‘architectural thinking’ of the sort inherent to AT, which pointed to futures by turn libertarian, socialist, and social democratic (its first advocate, Ernst Schumacher, had been a stalwart Keynesian and manager of nationalisation). Beyond politics per se, paradox and analogy were keynote to the decade’s epistemological uncertainty, from the ‘wickedness’ besetting design as a ‘problem-solving’ activity, to a post-structuralism eroding the long Enlightenment project, to a post-colonialism challenging Eurocentric technologies of exploitation. Indeed, <jats:italic>AD</jats:italic> could position design and AT as ‘non-aligned third way’ much as the so-called Third World indicated a ‘third way’ between the capitalism and communism of the so-called First and Second Worlds.</jats:p>