Neave Brown - Unique Housing Models - Alexandra Road (Excerpt)

In the full talk (https://www.pidgeondigital.com/talks/...) you can also hear Neave Brown discuss his work with Fleet Road, Winscombe Street and Lillington Street.

The architect Neave Brown, born 1929, qualified at the AA School of Architecture, and worked with Lyons Israel & Ellis for three years. But the peak period of his life was when he worked for the London Borough of Camden, and was selected to design and build the huge Alexandra Road housing estate, against enormous political opposition.

The prototype for this and all the other schemes he describes in this recording, was a terrace of identical houses he built for himself and four friends. These are structured in section and in plan responding to the priority of sequences of privacy and public life.

All his work is dominated by strong ideas of social structuring and the recognition of the inter-related identity of all the pieces in a project, while at the same time solving the problem of architectural and urban composition.

His talk is equivalent to a primer in how to design housing at any scale.

Brown won the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2017 for Alexandra Road, and sadly passed away in January 2018.