John Voelcker

John Harold Westgarth Voelcker (20 July 1927 – 14 September 1972) was an English architect.

A member of the Team 10 group of architects, he ran a small rural practice before his appointment first Professor of Architecture at the University of Glasgow.

Born in Preston, Lancashire, Voelcker was the son of an electrical engineer.

He was educated at Abbotsholme School and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London (AA).

His time at the AA (1944–1952) was interrupted by three years of compulsory military service (1945–1948) followed by a brief period with the Architects' Co-Partnership.

He met his wife, Ann (Lambert), at the AA.

Voelcker’s final AA design thesis, The Zone, undertaken in 1951–1952 with Pat Crooke and Andrew Derbyshire, was for a new settlement on a 72 square mile ‘micro region’ in Hertfordshire.

Agriculture was a key component and the proposed mix of farming and light industry was much the same in the area of Kent where Voelcker was later to practice.

The Zone’s population was set at 72,000 – of whom 60,000 were accommodated in a series of multi-storey interlinked structures in the urban section at its centre.

Reacting against the town/country separation created by Green Belt policies, the three students adopted an analytical framework in which qualitative differences between groups of people provide the differentiation in the Zone structure.

Looking back, Voelcker was critical of many aspects of this huge project, describing the method of design and organisation as ‘very schematic’.

Nevertheless, he claimed that the method showed that it was possible to find a method of work through which ‘any environment can be ordered, through which every part … has its own quality as a place'.

Following The Zone’s completion, the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) group asked its authors if they would present it as part of the UK’s contribution to CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) IX at Aix the following year, 1953.

Voelcker whittled down the 120 drawings to a ‘grid’ of 80 drawings (now held in the RIBA Drawings Collection) based on the format devised by the ASCORAL (Assemblée de constructeurs pour une rénovation architecturale) group.

Nearly 25 years later, four years after Voelcker’s early death, the architectural critic Reyner Banham cited The Zone as the earliest example of the relationship between academe and megastructure.

He observed that, because it was largely concerned with agriculture, not all of the project could be seen as ‘proto-megastructure’ – although a substantial part of the urban portion was contained in a large and complex structure.

As students, Voelcker and his wife spent four months with BBPR in Milan, assisting on furniture design.

After qualifying as an architect, he joined Derbyshire at Farmer and Dark to work on the design of electricity generating stations, mainly the Marchwood Power Station, near Southampton.

Uncomfortable with the firm’s approach, the pair resigned and Voelcker started to practice on his own account in London on a project for a house in Highgate, featured in Architectural Design, but unbuilt.

In 1954 the couple moved to Kent, where Ann came from, settling in one half of a modest eighteenth-century house in the village of Staplehurst.

Work was limited, consisting mainly of the modernisation of agricultural dwellings (providing, with grant aid from seven local rural district councils, basic kitchen and bathroom facilities), conversions and the occasional dwelling.

In 1957 the government’s Farm Improvement Scheme provided direct grant aid toward the construction of farm buildings.

Later, this aid was extended to fruit enterprises under the Horticultural Improvement Scheme.

The introduction of these grants provided Voelcker with a considerable amount of agricultural work.

Lyttelton House, Arkley, 1958.

A courtyard house designed for the jazz musical artist Humphrey Lyttelton including a "splendidly witty" pop art mural by John McHale, which was the subject of the first successful appeal against a Planning Authority’s refusal – on aesthetic grounds – of permission to build.

Featured in Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism: ethic or aesthetic?.

Between 1959 and 1968, there was an average of about 30 jobs a year and, at its height, around 1963, nearly double that.

Commissions for other building types gradually came in – a primary school, two offices and a social housing scheme.

In 1962 the Voelckers moved to a much larger, former farmhouse at Sutton Valence, with a magnificent view over the Weald of Kent.

Here, the practice expanded to include four assistant architects and some support staff.

By 1965, the practice was in difficulties.

A project for Maidstone Rural District Council offices was never built and the government’s agricultural improvement programmes had, locally, run their course.

The new government’s Selective Employment Tax hit architects hard and the remaining architectural staff left the practice.

Voelcker was unwell and the practice became unviable.

Despite the large number of projects undertaken, few were of architectural significance.

Among these were:

Demolished in the 1990s for a much larger house.

Blackwall Farm, Hinxhill.

Typical of the many farms upgraded by Voelcker.