WILL SELF
The future once: The Croydon skyscraper built in 1968 and, right, Le Corbusier’s colourful balconies in Marseilles
© MIKE BARNES/FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES, CHRIS HELLIER / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
In 1965, Frederic Osborn responded to the Sunday Times’s characterisation of “two apparently irreconcilable groups of people who want to determine the character of our future towns and cities.” According to the newspaper these two schools were dubbed—in mutual antipathy— “water colour” and “arrogant, intellectual, theorising, high-density madmen.” Osborn, a leading light of the first Garden City group, made his remarks in a letter to the chairman of the Cumbernauld Development Corporation, that quintessential example of New Town radicalism. This article, he said, has “escalated a border incident into a nuclear war.” Osborn was percipient, for the fallout from this massively escalated conflict continues to haunt its objective correlative—namely, the British built environment.