Behind door 671 : forging the tectonics of the London County Council Schools Division

Of the many rooms in the North Block of County Hall, Room 671 reveals a microcosm of the human and non-human influences acting upon the tectonic approaches adopted in the work produced by the LCC Schools Division in the 1950s.

The room itself possessed an agency in the experiences to which the architects who worked there were exposed, due to its proximity to the Department’s other in-house divisions, its location overlooking the developments on the Southbank in the shadow of the emerging Shell Centre, and for access to exhibitions at the nearby Tate Gallery cited by those within the Division to be influential to the design approaches they discussed and adopted here.

It also served to draw together biographical histories through the practice of JH Forshaw’s Group Working strategy, some of whom – such as those of Warren Chalk of Archigram (though Ron Herron was down the hall in Room 678), and John Bancroft – went on to achieve architectural renown in their own right and with whose histories we are more familiar, whilst others remained unattributed within the ethos of anonymity practiced by the LCC “Schools Division”. From tracing the educational, interpersonal and sabbatical experience these architects brought in, Eric Classey, Peter Banting and John Killeen can also be shown to have acted as links between the LCC and otherwise external factors, such as the tectonic ethos established at Brixton School of Building in the use of concrete, and the site layout, brick detailing and sculptural approaches of projects studied in Scandinavia and the United States. Within this room, these factors intertwined to generate the immaterial networks which were key to the development of the material structures produced by the Schools Division at the time.