Gordon Cullen y The Architectural Review: ideas no construidas para Marlow New Town | Gordon Cullen and The Architectural Review: unbuilt ideas for Marlow New Town

Resumen

Tratar de las ideas de Gordon Cullen en la década de los cincuenta, nos remite a sus artículos en la revista The Architectural Review y a la campaña orquestada por sus editores en defensa de las ideas del Townscape aplicadas al diseño urbano y a los New Towns. Los artículos de Cullen incluían siempre dibujos magistrales con los que conseguía sintetizar y transmitir a sus lectores sus conceptos, no siempre fáciles de exponer por escrito. En el presente ensayo analizamos su propuesta gráfica de un posible New Town situado en un meandro del río Támesis, junto a la pequeña localidad de Marlow, idea no construida con la que Gordon Cullen pretendía ofrecer en 1950 una alternativa al urbanismo y a la arquitectura de los New Towns que se estaban creando en la campiña inglesa.

Dealing with Gordon Cullen’s ideas in the decade of the fifties refers us to his articles in the magazine “The Architectural Review” and the campaign orchestrated by its publishers to defend the ideas of Townscape applied to urban design and New Towns. The articles by Cullen always included masterful drawings through which he managed to synthesise and transmit his concepts to the readers, which were not always easy to describe in words. This paper analyses his graphic proposal for a possible New Town located on a meander of the River Thames, next to the small town of Marlow. This idea was never actually built, although Gordon Cullen tried to put forward an alternative to urbanism in 1950 and the architecture of New Towns that were being created in the English countryside.