Canalside Press

Patrick Lynch and Others
Dialogue and Imagination: Conversations with Architects
2027

Softcover Book

£15 (forthcoming 2027)

Dialogue and Imagination is a study of the character of creativity. The book is in two parts: the first brings together a number of conversations between the architect Patrick Lynch and some of the most interesting thinkers of our age. Participants in these conversations include Rafael Moneo, Peter Zumthor, Joseph Rykwert, Francesco Venezia, Jeanette Kuo, Birkin Haward, Tom de Paor, John Meunier, Jessica Reynolds, Craig Hamilton, Timothy Hill, Dalibor Vesely, Joseph Rykwert, Kate Mackintosh, Tony Fretton, Tim Waterman, plus Aaron Peters and Stuart Vokes. The second part of the book is a critical reflection on the role of empathy in poetic imagination, drawing on John Keat’s famous term “negative capability”. Oxford professor of English Johnathan Bate suggests that: “As in Immanuel Kant’s theory that the Beautiful, in contrast to the Agreeable and the Good, is disinterested, a creation born of negative capability is its own self, free from the imposition of the artist’s own identity.” (Bright Star Green Light, 2021). Dialogue and Imagination takes this assertion seriously and seeks to test it further in the author‘s reminiscence of conversations with six clients held over the past three decades. In each case, something unexpected emerged in dialogue, transcending the original brief in a way whereby creativity resembles how Keats defined ”Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The influence of Keat’s theory of poetic empathy is clearly evident in the work of novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bates reveals. The question this book poses is, might it also offer us a way to think about the architectural imagination today, and in particular the relationships between the natural world and human artifice, and poetics in general?

The conversations cover wide ground. As dialogues between creative colleagues, questions recur concerning the role of history, drawing and teaching in an architect's life. Also, the influence of literature and painting upon the architectural imagination, as well as the role of theology, science and philosophy in imaginative design work. These topics are discussed with candor and an unusual degree of frankness. What emerges, Tom de Paor suggests, is an alternative history of the recent past of modern architecture: a richer, more nuanced, and more honest account than you normally encounter today.

JoCA 11 On Continuity: John Spence in Hackney
2027

Patrick Lynch, Claudia Lynch and Rachel Elliott (editors), Andy Groarke, Federico Tranfa, et al
Forthcoming 2027
£25

Issue 11 of the JoCA - On Continuity: John Spence in Hackney - is a special edition dedicated mainly to the work of the little-known London architect John Spence. On Continuity describes the ethos of Spence's work at The Christchurch Estate (1969-1977) for The Crown Estate, and a series of infill sites in South Hackney - the result of enemy ordnance during World War - around the northern fringes of Victoria Park, London E9. Little is known about the elusive architect: he shunned publicity, whilst devoting himself diligently to building housing for low income workers over a thirty year period after the war. On Continuity represents an ongoing act of architectural detection, seeking out the sources of Spence's design decisions, and Issue 11 presents archival drawings and photography alongside new drawings by Lynch Architects. It also includes essays by Patrick Lynch and Andy Groarke, as well as new photography by Grant Smith and Tara Darby.

Paul Shepheard
Autobiography
2024

Softcover Book

224pp

£15

"There is no past, and no future. Everything exists in the present. All our speculations of the future are hosted by the present moment, and what we know of the past is sustained by memories and what physical evidence survives. How long is the present? Is it a twentieth of a second, the time it takes to blink? Or three minutes, the duration of a pop song, the time it takes to recognise something new? Or is it longer still? The present moment could encompass your whole life, from the time you were conceived till your last breath. Only you know what’s in it. And an autobiography is a portrait of that lifelong present moment."

Paul Shepheard

Aaron Peters and Stuart Vokes
Migrations from Memory
2023

Softcover Book

£15 / A$30

SOLD OUT

Aaron Peters, Stuart Vokes (Vokes and Peters), Brit Andresen and Patrick Lynch.

Migrations from Memory is an anthology - a collection of offerings reminiscent of a bunch of flowers picked from the roadsides of Brisbane - of words and images by the celebrated Australian architects Vokes and Peters. The book is structured as a series of dialogues, email exchanges that expand upon the themes in essays that grow out of their shared love for the geography and architecture of Brisbane. Accompanying these are essays by the legendary Norwegian architect and teacher Brit Andresen and London architect Patrick Lynch.

Penny Cliff
Oriel
2023

Softcover Book

80pp

£12.99

Penny Cliff (with archival and new photography by Penny Cliff, Valentin Lynch and Patrick Lynch)

Oriel is a luminous collection of transformations forming a portrait of an ordinary London house over the past forty years. The extraordinary and ultra-mundane rhythms of life there coalesce into twenty five poems about various guests, freight trains, animals, friends, lovers, children, music and death.

Celia Scott, Robert Maxwell and others
Ideas, Faces and Places: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless
2023

Softcover Book

144pp

£15

Ideas, Faces and Places is a record of an exhibition and symposium that took place in Dublin at The Irish Architectural Archive in the autumn of 2022, “Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Ideas, Faces and Places”, which transferred to RIBA headquarters in London in the Spring of 2023. The book is a repository for some of the observations that arose at these events made by architects and critics including John Tuomey, Ed Jones, Irina Davidovici, Kenneth Frampton and others. The exhibition juxtaposed Celia Scott’s busts of the architects James Stirling, Leon Krier, Alan Colquhoun, Ed Jones and others, with a pictorial biography of her husband, the eminent architect and academic Robert Maxwell (1922-2020). The view that this book offers of the exhibition and of the work of Scott and Maxwell is provisional and partial, offering the reader the chance to meander and to relish unexpected juxtapositions and oblique views of its subjects - almost exactly like the rooms that Celia Scott created in Dublin and in London. Robert Maxwell was one of the most important architectural theorists and teachers of the second half of the 20th century - this book is an essential addition to his oeuvre.

Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect
2022

Hardcover Book
416pp
£38

Patrick and Claudia Lynch and David Porter (editors), Neave Brown, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Maxwell, Ed Jones, Peter Barber, Amy Young, Tony Fretton, Jonathan Sergison, Simon Henley, Paul Karakusevic, John Zhang, David Evans, Reyner Banham, Patrick Hodgkinson, Christopher Woodward, et al with new photography by Sue Barr et al

Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect explores the ethos and ideas of the Anglo-American architect Neave Brown (1929-2018), winner of the RIBA Gold Medal 2017. Part of a City gets its title from Brown’s Gold Medal acceptance speech, when he observed: “We weren’t making housing, we were making part of a city.” The book brings together his writing and design projects, including his celebrated large-scale urban housing work for Camden Council, and the later projects in Italy and The Netherlands, the latter undertaken in private practise with David Porter. Part of a City re-presents original critiques from the 1960s and 1970s by prominent figures such as Reyner Banham, Bob Maxwell, Christopher Woodward and Ed Jones, with new writing by architects and critics including Kenneth Frampton, Jonathan Sergsion, Simon Henley, Paul Karakuservic and Peter Barber.

Graeme Brooker
50|50 WORDS FOR REUSE – A minifesto
2021

Softcover Book

144pp

£12.99

SOLD OUT

50|50 Words is a collection of language to describe reuse. It is not a taxonomy, a word that stuffs all it encounters, nor is it a hectoring bleat. It is a minifesto; a big shout in small type. Why 50? Well, why not? Each word is an instrument; a contrivance chosen deliberately in order to activate another 50 associations. Words are like buildings. They reflect cultures and embody continuous change.

The revisions of both are comprehended through the processes of reuse. Yet, present lexes do not effectively describe the future of the past. 50|50 is both polemic and a paean. The idiosyncratic poetry of a voice finding its feet. Its claim is to declare a current vocabulary, one that articulates centuries of practice, the unfinished business of words and buildings in unending change.

Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect
2021

Robin Walker, Patrick Lynch and Simon Walker (editors), Elizabeth Hatz, Tom de Paor, Douglas Carson, Niall McLaughlin and Laura Evans

Hardcover Book
329pp
£30

Produced in the same format & size as On Intricacy, Change is the Reality is the second book in our Modern Architecture in Reflection series. It explores the ethos and ideas of Irish architect Robin Walker (1924-1991), a partner in the RIBA Gold Medal winning Dublin practice of Scott Tallon Walker. Produced in concert with Walker's son, the architect and teacher Simon Walker, Change is the Reality is an archive of Robin's articles and lectures, presented alongside new and original photographs of a number of his seminal projects, including Bothar Bui, An Bord Failte, UCD restaurant, house at Kinsale, etc. The book also includes essays by Simon Walker and Patrick Lynch, Elizabeth Hatz, Tom de Paor, Douglas Carson and Laura Evans.

Alex Niven, Adam Sharr & Patrick Lynch with photography by Euan Lynn
Newcastle, Endless
2021

Softcover Book

64pp
£12.99

Newcastle, Endless is a collection of lyrics and lyrical reflections upon the endlessly embroiled landscape of the city: it reveals a poetic landscape infused with the effects of topography and technology upon its architecture, language, politics and planning. It is a love poem of sorts, one dedicated to the modernist dream of “the perfect line between the/townhouse and the mephedrone highrise”, and to the myths that lurk still beneath this dream: “the river becomes a symbol of/death it is insurmountable Styx/like the lovers cannot cohere across/it”. In common with Alex Niven’s recent prose concerning the possibilities of “a new form of radical culture beyond the idea of England”, Newcastle, Endless fuses scholarship with meditation, experience with imagination, memory with speculation, inviting us to “pause our vortex for a moment to consider im/possibilities”. A utopia of actual places is revealed in the photographs of Euan Lynn and in the poet’s elliptical observations of a situation where, “here and there/everything is open".

Paul Shepheard
Slogans and Battlecries
2020

Softcover Book

128pp
£9.95

Architects are a controversial bunch. Each new theory is heralded by a slogan that advertises its difference from what went before, piling complexity upon confusion. In this collection of very short essays – he thinks of them as poems - Paul Shepheard investigates the flurries of meaning that the slogans invoke. He also looks at the Building Regulations and the Material World; and uncovers an inclusive theory of architecture, implied rather than explicit, residing in the fragments. Slogans and Battlecries is the sixth book by renowned architectural writer and teacher Paul Shepheard, and continues his witty and eclectic investigations into the relationships between everyday life, the human imagination, and the natural world. Slogans and Battlecries is the first book in our paperback series Reflection in Action, which is devoted to the poetic and philosophical writings of architects and artists.

On Intricacy: The Work of John Munier Architect

On Intricacy: The Work of John Meunier Architect
2020

John Meunier, Simon Henley Patrick Lynch (editor)
Hardcover Book
288pp
£30

On Intricacy is the first book in our Modern Architecture in Reflection series. It is perhaps unusual in that it’s not a monograph, nor is it a hagiography: John Meunier is still alive. On Intricacy celebrates and proselytises the ideas that John has articulated throughout his career. On Intricacy is not a book about him as such, nor simply a book by him, but a book with him, and it reflects his life’s work as an architect and teacher, in the UK and USA. On Intricacy continues conversations between John Meunier and Patrick Lynch that first appeared in Issue 2 of the Journal of Civic Architecture. It also includes essays by Meunier, Lynch and the architect Simon Henley, as well as new photography of the Meunier House at Cambridge by David Grandorge.

Still Beautiful
2018

David Grandorge, Paul Shepheard, David Campany and Patrick Lynch (editor)

Hardcover Book

158pp

£35

David Grandorge’s work is a type of Reconnaissance. In his photographs of cities, architecture appears as part of a network of reciprocal situations. His landscapes evoke a sense of balanced disequilibrium, of great energy and stillness. Natural and man-made aspects of reality seem to occur simultaneously, almost casually, as if discovered by the photographer in a state of un-selfconscious innocence.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 10
December 2023

Contributors to issue 10 include John Tuomey, Timothy Hill, Geraldine Cleary, Luke Hayes, Kerstin Thompson, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Ed Jones, Filip Galic, Amy Young and John Meunier.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 9
June 2022

Contributors to issue 9 include Julian Lewis and East, Mark Pimlott, Neil Davidson and J&L Gibbons, Duncan Gibbs, Paul Shepheard, Alba Deangelis, Arijit Chatterjee, Marina Engel, Carmody Groarke, Andrew Carr, Miraj Ahmed and Claire Potter.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 8
December 2021

Contributors to issue 8 include Aaron Peters and Stuart Vokes, Lasse Erkola, Simon Pendal, Fabio Vericat, Cathy Hawley and Hugh Strange, Christophe Van Gerreway, Francesca Torzo, Anne Whidden, Anna Sofia Hartmann, Missouri Williams and Alex Niven.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 7
May 2021

Contributors to issue 7 include Tony Fretton, Sue Barr and Farbrizio Ballabio, Hannibal Wasser, Giles Reid, Luigi Snozzi and Liam Dewar, Matthew Jones, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Marina Engel, John Merrick, Pandora Vaughn, Charles Holland, Hans Munthe-Kaas and Jesse Hager.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 6
November 2020

Contributors to issue 6 of the JoCA include Graig Hamilton, Caroline Voet, Shahed Saleem, Grant Smith, Anthony Coleman, Roz Barr, Peter Carolin, Fulvio Orsenigo, Lars Ridderstedt, Richard Irvine, Oscar Mather, Trevor Garnham, Gianni Nottariani and Eleanor Hooker.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 5
June 2020

Contributors to issue 5 of the JoCA include Birkin Haward, Ellis Woodman, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, Dennis Goodwin, Fulvio Orsenigo, Mark Durden and Joao Leal, William Tozer, Jacques Lucan, Patrick Lynch, Matthew Wells, Thaddeus Zupancic, John Meunier, Vittorio Greggotti, Tom de Paor, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Alex Niven.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 4
December 2019

Contributors to issue 4 of the JoCA include Peter Carl, Michael Higgins, Tim Waterman and Will Jennings, the architects Kate Macintosh, Paulo Moreira and Stephen Taylor, photographers Peter Finnemore and Jack Orton, and poet Sarah Arvio.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 3
June 2019

Contributors to issue 3 of the JoCA include the architects Francesco Venezia, Alun Jones, David Evans and Peter Youthed, novelist Tom McCarthy, artist Eva Stenram, architectural historian Nick Temple and poet Emily Hasler.

Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 2
December 2018

Contributors to the second issue include John Meunier, Simon Henley, Will Jennings, Rut Blees-Luxemburg, Herman Bauer (translated by Claudia Lynch), Luis Fernandez-Galiano Ruiz, Patrick Lynch, David Grandorge and Stephen DP Richardson.

Sold out
Journal of Civic Architecture, Issue 1
June 2018

Contributors to the first edition include Tom de Paor, Johan Celsing, Joseph Rykwert, Laura Evans, Luisa Collina, Cino Zucchi, Indra Kagis McEwen, Andrew Crompton, Michael Badu, Geraldine Clarkson and Simon Walker.