Plan
Plan. Architectural Students Association Journal.
London (and Birmingham), 1948-51.
Full Description
Small 4to. Issues 1-10 (complete set). Original pictorial wrappers, each issue ring-bound. In the present set issues 1, 4, and 7-10 belonged to Brian Housden, and the other issues are from various private sources.
A rare complete set of this incarnation of PLAN, a periodical edited on behalf of the Architectural Students Association, initially by a group of architectural students in London (issues 1-8) and then by a similar group of students in Birmingham (issues 9-10). The issues typically contain between 30 and 40 pages, incorporating articles on contemporary architecture and architectural theory, photo illustrations and diagrams, with additional advertisement pages at the end. Those initially involved included Michael Ventris, soon to become famous as the decipherer of the Minoan script Linear B, but the dominant figure behind issues 4 to 8 seems to have been the future Sir Andrew Derbyshire (1923-2016), eventually to become senior partner in the architectural practice Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall and Partners. The final two issues, edited from Birmingham, have a more radical edge, and issue 10, the concluding one, published after the publication of an intervening special issue (see that item under Festival Plan) not approved of by the editorial group and thus not truly part of a set of the periodical, contains a campaigning editorial arguing for “richly patterned, dust-free, high-density living”. Sets of PLAN between 1948 and 1951 have proved difficult to assemble, and the Weinreb firm was only ever able to catalogue a partial set. It should be noted that PLAN in this format was a replacement for a much less interesting periodical issued in octavo format under the same title as a quarterly between 1943 and 1947, which was geered towards news and comment rather than to controversial feature articles.