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By the 1930s the Liverpool School of Architecture was the most famous British school of architecture in the world, promoting modern architecture and city planning internationally. This book looks at the cultural environment in Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century which enabled such an important institution to come to fruition. It examines attitudes towards design practice through the work of patrons, practitioners, institutions and theorists in the city, and considers the way their ideas were formed by national and international trends. From a city microcosm of contesting design aesthetics emerged a unique synthesis that was to exert a profound international influence in architectural and planning design.

By the 1930s the Liverpool School of Architecture was the most famous British school of architecture in the world, promoting modern architecture and city planning internationally. This book looks at the cultural environment in Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century which enabled such an important institution to come to fruition. It examines attitudes towards design practice through the work of patrons, practitioners, institutions and theorists in the city, and considers the way their ideas were formed by national and international trends. From a city microcosm of contesting design aesthetics emerged a unique synthesis that was to exert a profound international influence in architectural and planning design.

Using the Bible as the foundational source and guide, while also bringing contemporary sociological data to the conversation, seven biblical scholars and theologians construct a powerful dialogue about gun violence in America, concluding that guns are incompatible with the God of Christian Scripture. God and Guns is the first book to argue against gun culture from a biblical studies perspective. Bringing the Bible into conversation with contemporary sociological data, the volume breaks new exegetical and critical ground and lays the foundations for further theological work. The scholars assembled in this volume construct a powerful argument against gun violence, concluding that a self-identity based on guns is incompatible with Christian identity. Drawing on their expertise in the Bible's ancient origins and modern usage, they present striking new insights involving psychology, ethics, race, gender, and culture. This collection, carefully edited for clarity and readability, will change conversations—and our culture. Contributors include: * T. M. Lemos * David Lincicum * Shelly Matthews * Yolanda Norton * Brent A. Strawn

By the 1930s the Liverpool School of Architecture was the most famous British school of architecture in the world, promoting modern architecture and city planning internationally. This book looks at the cultural environment in Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century which enabled such an important institution to come to fruition. It examines attitudes towards design practice through the work of patrons, practitioners, institutions and theorists in the city, and considers the way their ideas were formed by national and international trends. From a city microcosm of contesting design aesthetics emerged a unique synthesis that was to exert a profound international influence in architectural and planning design.

NATIONAL initiatives, such as the Technical Instruction Act, enabled the development of ideas about architectural education in Liverpool, but were it not for its own vigorous cultural life the city would not have been able to capitalise upon the events taking place. The city had its own institutions and a number of powerful figures who were eager for cultural change. In examining their attitudes it is possible to see where Liverpudlian intellectual life meshed with national preoccupations and where and how the local initiatives developed. The interlocking web of personalities and the organisations created a cultural environment in Liverpool that contained the ingredients necessary for the instigation of the new venture in design education, and the political will to put it into operation. This sense of a city culture is important because it militates against the idea (as has been suggested in the past) 1 that the founding of the Liverpool School can be attributed to a specific individual, or to a single set of ideas. To do so is to neglect the wider cultural sphere with all its complications and contradictions, and to make the supposition that the concurrence of ideas by different protagonists also means their active collaboration. The city's institutions were neither self-sufficient nor self-enclosed. Institutions, whether the existing School of Art, the city council's Technical Instruction Committee, or the Liverpool Architectural Society were in constant negotiation with each other and with national bodies. Sometimes in agreement with each other, sometimes not, these multiple acts of institutional negotiation created the intellectual and practical environment in which the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Arts was conceived and founded.Conway's last act in Liverpool, in partnership with Philip Rathbone, was the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry. He was acting outside his role as Roscoe Professor, although one must assume it was his status as professor that enabled him to gain the support of so many eminent practitioners. The Liverpool Congress of the Association was the first of three, the other congresses were held in Edinburgh and Birmingham, and Conway's resignation as secretary to the Association led to its ultimate demise.

IT should not suprise us that when the aims and objectives of the new Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art are scrutinised, a number of contradictions emerge. Neither should it be a suprise to find those contradictions have already been identified in the wider aspects of design culture within the city. A body of opinion sees the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art as a paradigm of Arts and Crafts education; yet even a cursory comparison between Jackson's inaugural address, and Professor Simpson's first scheme of work, shows substantial differences in expectation for the course. Jackson looked to a national vernacular design rooted in the past; Simpson looked to the new experiments in architectural education in the United States. What links the two men was their interest in methodology. If the early American influence on design thinking in Liverpool is emphasised, it fundamentally alters the traditional perception of the evolution of ‘Beaux Arts’ training in Britain, placing its origins in Liverpool a decade earlier than has previously been thought. It also alters the ideological perception of the Beaux Art style as practised at Liverpool in the early twentieth century, because the style emerged from within the Arts and Crafts debate, and was not solely a reaction against its ideas.The Liverpool School was formally opened by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in the University Arts Theatre on 10 May 1895. His views on architectural education are not of quite the same authority as those of T. G. Jackson, who gave the inaugural address, but are worth a glance in order to gauge the local establishment's opinion of the experiment which was taking place in the city. In his opening speech the Mayor talked of Liverpool's ‘civic love of art’, and painted a picture of slow cultural progress from the instigation of the Society for the Encouragement of Designing, Drawing and Painting in 1768 to its culmination in the municipal funding of the School of Architecture. Philip Rathbone's role in helping to establish the School was formally acknowledged, and the man himself spoke with the cultural emphasis that would be expected from him. The Daily Post reported him saying that: ‘it was only right and fair that they should help skilled labour to become more common.

THE City of Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art was inaugurated in 1895. It has been briefly described by several authors in the past, all of whom acknowledge that the School was an innovative episode in the history of architectural education, in part because of its alliance with the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement. Its place in the history of architectural education is more easily established than trying to define the Arts and Crafts milieu in which it operated. It was not the first architectural course to be organised in Britain, although it was the first extra-metropolitan one. Nor was it the first full-time course – that had been established by Kings College London three years previously. What made the course unique was a combination of elements; its relative newness, its response to specific cultural circumstances, its funding in part by the municipal authorities, and its adoption of an integrated teaching programme that was briefly to become a teaching norm, principally under the direction of William Lethaby, firstly at the Central College of Arts and Crafts in London and then at the Royal College of Art.The first architectural instruction in England was to be found at the Royal Academy Schools that were inaugurated in 1768. The value of such instruction was historically undistinguished until the Professorship of Architecture was awarded to Sir John Soane who held it from 1806–37. His commitment to his teaching at the Academy was the reason he felt unable to accept the Presidency of the newly founded RIBA in 1834. In 1870 the Academy set up a separate School of Architecture under Phené Spiers, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.The first certificated technical architectural education was offered by University College London in 1841 with the appointment of T. L. Donaldson (the first secretary of the RIBA) to the Professorship of Architecture. This took the form of a diploma offered by the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture. The year 1841 also saw the establishment of an architectural course at King's College London. Both these courses were seen as supplementing, rather than supplanting, the process of office training. During the 1840s the Government School of Design had architectural students in attendance, but there was no provision for an architectural education.

IN 1915, after a national competition for a new Town Hall in Stepney, London, the architectural critic Randall Phillips wrote to Charles Reilly to say that ‘eighty per cent of the designs were in the Liverpool manner’. By this he meant an architectural style that had been consciously derived from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, a style that was a rationalised classical one, large in scale and restrained in detailing. This tale illustrates the considerable impact that the Liverpool School of Architecture made during the first decade of Reilly's Professorship. The influence of the School was exercised through two channels: the teaching of an architectural style that became synonymous with the School, and with the further dissemination of this style through the establishment of the first Civic Design course in the UK. Reilly was only in part responsible for the first aspect of the School's national reputation, drawing together as he did issues that were already current. In the latter though, he was an important instigator of events. Reilly's skill was in acting as a catalyst in the architectural education debate, and his ability in the manipulation of events.When Reilly took over at Liverpool in 1904, the course of study no longer resembled that initially envisaged in 1894. Its formal organisation and the links that had already been established with the processes of architectural education in the United States, meant that Reilly's full adoption of Beaux Arts practices were not as radical as has often been been assumed, albeit primarily on the basis of his first-hand testimony. Reilly was considerably aided in his task of making the School one of national consequence by the deliberations of the RIBA's Board of Architectural Education.The RIBA had initiated the Board in 1903 after informal approaches to interested professional associations and teaching establishments. Its brief was to establish a coherent architectural educational structure, and forestall the potential chaos that was latent in the disparate means by which architects could become professionally qualified. The Board's conclusions were read to the RIBA by Reginald Blomfield on 20 February 1905. The points made were pragmatic and devoid of the power broking that had characterised the attempts of the RIBA to rationalise architectural study a decade previously.

FREDERICK Simpson's interest in the architectural education initiatives of the United States of America was not the only interest in the USA in Liverpool at the time of the inauguration of the Liverpool School. William Lever, who was such an important figure in both reflecting and moulding architectural attitudes in Merseyside, became interested in the new American architectural styles, and there is evidence of considerable traffic by the Liverpudlian architectural community between the city and the USA. Economic contacts between the port and the United States of America were of course fundamental to its survival, and along with trade connections there were also those of travel. It was possible to get to New York in a week, and to travel at a variety of levels of comfort and expense. The passenger traffic to the USA was considerable and it would be surprising if there had not been any contact between the two cultures. There was a familiarity with American life in Liverpool at all social levels, from sailors to merchants. American news was regularly reported in the local papers, The Courier and The Daily Post – a necessity as there was a constant flow of visitors to and from the United States of America. Economically, New York was more important to Liverpool than London, and lavish municipal entertainment for visiting American professionals was commonplace.General anecdotal awareness of the architectural wonders of the United States of America was high. On his world tour during 1892, Lever wrote a regular series of travel articles for the Birkenhead News. A flavour of the local conception of the USA can be gleaned from his descriptions. From New York he wrote of ‘the hustle and bustle of the place, the nervous energy, the vitality and force of the American people, and the high speed at which buildings there are being put up’. He reported back to readers on the marvels of the architecture of the Chicago World's Fair a year before its formal opening, and it can be assumed, as the Beaux Arts style was to so drastically modify the development of Port Sunlight village, discussed its merits with his architectural circle on his return.By 1895 Lever had opened offices in New York and Philadelphia, and thus opened a further channel by which cultural interchange could take place.