Research Projects

The Primitive

Juliet Odgers, Flora Samuel, Adam Sharr

This innovative edited collection, derived from a conference held at the Welsh School of Architecture, charts the rise, fall and possible futures of the word primitive.

The word primitive is fundamental to the discipline of architecture in the west, providing a convenient starting point for the myth of architecture's origins. Since the almost legendary 1970s conference on the Primitive, with the advent of post-modernism and, in particular, post-colonialism, the word has fallen from favor in many disciplines. Despite this, architects continue to use the word to mythologize and reify the practice of simplicity.

Primitive includes contributions from some of today's leading architectural commentators including Dalibor Vesely, Adrian Forty, David Leatherbarrow, Richard Weston and Richard Coyne. Structured around five sections, Negotiating Origins; Urban Myths; Questioning Colonial Constructs; Making Marks; and Primitive Futures, the essays highlight the problematic nature of ideas of the primitive, engage with contemporary debate in the field of post colonialism and respond to a burgeoning interest in the non-expert architecture.

This now controversial subject remains, for better or worse, intrinsic to the very structure of Modernism and deeply embedded in architectural theory. Considering a broad range of approaches, this book provides a rounded past, present and future of the word primitive in the architectural sphere.

The book's contents are as follows:

Introduction
Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr

Part 1: Original matters
1 Primitive: the word and concept
Adrian Forty

Part 2: Negotiating origins
2 The primitive as modern problem: invention and crisis
Dalibor Vesely
3 Origins redefined: a tale of pigs and primitive huts
Mari Hvattum
4 The primitive hut: fantasies of survival in an all-white world
Lorens Holm
5 Gottfried Semper's primitive hut: duration, construction and self-creation
Jonathan Hale
6 Mineral matters: formation and transformation
Richard Weston

Part 3: Questioning colonial constructs
7Post-colonizing the primitive
Felipe Hernández and Lea Knudsen Allen
8 Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut
Stephen Cairns
9 Reinventing 'primitiveness': Henri Lacoste and the Belgian
Congo Pavilion at the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris
Johan Lagae
10 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism
Styliane Philippou
11 The need to be critical
Robert Brown

Part 4: Urban myths
12 Practically primitive
David Leatherbarrow
13 Giants and columns
Nicholas Temple
14 The emblematic city: John Wood and the refounding of Bath
Jo Odgers
15 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb
Harry Charrington
16 Metaphorical Manhattan - paradise lost
Lorna McNeur

Part 5: Making marks
17The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness: the primitive in Tadao Ando's architecture
Jin Baek
18 The 'primitive' surface: carving, modelling,
marking and transformation
Stephen Kite
19 The modern-day primitive hut? 'Self-building' with Jung, Aalto and Le Corbusier
Flora Samuel and Sarah Menin
20 The wisdom of the sands
Simon Unwin
Part 6: Primitive futures?
21 Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption
Richard Coyne
22 The primitive and the everyday: Sergison Bates, Lefebvre and the guilt of architectural expertise
Adam Sharr
23 Heart of darkness: air of comfort
Helen Mallinson
24 Primitive: from which construction begins
Peter Salter
25 United cultures of Britain
C. J. Lim