Plans on Film

Back to school: understanding the evidential value of the modern documentary

“…61 This absence of the individual architect-expert can be contrasted with films about planning and reconstruction of the same period (eg, Proud City, 1945 and The Way We Live, 1946) in which figures such as Sir Patrick Abercrombie are shown explaining planning schemes and being interviewed directly. 62 However, like the infant school at Kensal House, Impington was untypical of the secondary-modern school immediately after the Second World War, and the anonymity of modern architecture in film in part reflected the increasing responsibility that local authorities and council departments took in designing and delivering public architecture, rather than individual practitioners. 63 At Impington, the then Director of Education in Cambridgeshire, Henry Morris, and the architects re-thought the model of the rural, village school as a landscaped community centre shared by children and life-long adult learning and training.…”