Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

where it was all that remained of Sir Thomas More’s great house, once a palace of Richard III. Geddes saved it from destruction by bankers and got it transported bodily to the site of More’s garden at Chelsea, where it serves a thoroughly Geddesian purpose as the refectory for a hall of residence for university women, and as the setting for artistic events.

To recall briefly how Geddes, with immense dynamism, started to carry his ferment of ideas into practice we have to go back to the beginning of the century. His way was to seize an opportunity and turn it into an example. Andrew Carnegie had left some of his vast fortune for the improvement of his native town of Dunfermline. Geddes was invited to make suggestions for development for a park and appropriate buildings around it. The resulting proposals can be studied in the substantial volume called ‘City Development’, published in 1904. It is one of the foundations of the modern art and science of town-planning, for which many people all over the world still turn to this country. In Edinburgh Geddes and his wife and associates were building up a new type of civic museum in the Outlook Tower on the Castle Rock, with a camera obscura as the summit and starting point, giving as it does what Geddes often referred to as ‘The Synoptic Vision’—and giving it in rich colour too, so that it is the artist’s vision rather than the scientist’s which comes first. The museum below led one from the local to the worldwide, by the imaginative use and logical arrangement of a surprising variety of exhibits. But all around were some of the worst slums in Britain, in the abandoned houses of the former great families of the Royal Mile, their descendants now so much better housed by the Adam Brothers and other master architects in the New Town. So Geddes and his wife moved into one of these tenements and proceeded, by doing it, to show how they could be transformed.

This is an example of what the late Prof. Fleure in a lecture to us before the New Atlantis Foundation was set up, called Geddes’ ‘teaching by action’. That work is still going on today, and the results are worth seeing. Then he opened people’s eyes to the wonderful heritage of Dublin, and showed the way to practise his ‘conservational surgery’ there, where he was the guest of the Viceroy, while tackling some of that city’s housing problems.

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