How Liverpool architects helped shape the world

Mar 18 2008 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

THEY helped shape the way the world looks. Now the students who emerged from the Liverpool School of Architecture are to be honoured in a new exhibition.

It will also honour the school itself, Britain’s oldest university school of architecture.

The exhibition – The World in One School – will run at the RENEW Rooms, Wood Street, Liverpool from April 4 until April 30.

Graduates would change the cityscapes of Britain while others would take the same style to South Africa, Egypt, Iraq and beyond.

A number of graduates from this period such as Maxwell Fry and George Checkley were at the forefront of British Modernism and others like Lord William Holford and George Stephenson helped shape town planning, designing city schemes around the world.

In the post-war period, the school continued to produce graduates of outstanding international reputations like Sir James Stirling and his teacher Colin Rowe who became known as an influential theorist and educationalist.

More recent graduates have included Jim Eyre. Practice Wilkinson Eyre helped design the new Echo Arena and convention centre.

In 2005 another graduate Patrick Lynch was named Young Architect of the Year.

The new exhibition – designed as part of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture celebrations – will feature work from many of the school’s big names and some lesser-known.

There will also be a film in which ten well-known architects from the school talk about their work and the school’s influence.

One novelty is an animated film on architecture from the 1930s created by one of the graduates. Photographs will explore the breadth of the work of the school’s graduates, many whom came from overseas to take back with them the ideas fostered here.

Also on show will be architectural models and plans of designs that were never competed.

* The World in One School is at the RENEW Rooms, Wood Street, Liverpool, April 4-30.