John Voelcker
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
Old barns were invariably retained as feed stores and new long span sheds constructed for wintering cattle.
In 1956 Voelcker collaborated with the artists Richard Hamilton and John McHale as Group Two on the seminal This is Tomorrow exhibition at London’s Whitechapel gallery.
[12] The art historian John-Paul Stonard has claimed that ‘Although Voelcker played an important role, the combined interests of McHale and Hamilton largely determined Group Two’s contribution.’[13] Construction drawings for the screens upon which the displays were mounted exist but nothing is known about the evolution of the intriguing grid which formed the basis for their disposition.
[17] He was particularly close to Giancarlo De Carlo and Aldo van Eyck, who described him as a ‘Founding member and quintessential Team X thinker’.
The subject matter ranged from domestic oil equipment to floor assemblies, farm buildings to playgrounds and from Team 10 meetings to the Philips pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.
[20] This was intended to be followed with the results of an investigation by a consortium formed by Voelcker to review the design, fabrication and construction of agricultural buildings.
Instead, he worked in the countryside where, as he explained to Aldo van Eyck, his aim was ‘to build an efficient but not very exciting practice because I am more interested in architecture as a social necessity than as an art’.
