Category Archives: Walter Segal

Keeping away from the alluring and addictive surf (I find I’ve wasted hours before I get surf-bored), I was surprisingly nudged awake this week by a younger architectural historian friend asking if I’d see a tweet about Walter Segal’s archive. She then kindly showed it to me.

Perhaps it happens to all tweets at holiday periods which ask a question. Certainly here a fascinating chain ensued, all stemming from an innocent private chat at a New Year party. Who knows, it may end with a wonderful, safe, organised and accessible home for the life-long material left by the ever meticulous Walter Segal.

But once on the surf this morning, that soon got me floating past all sorts of undecaying plastic in the data ocean – and suddenly meeting one of my own photographs of Walter Segal up a ladder. 

Ho hum. This opens a piece in a magazine called AnOther, it seems.  Quite a charming little piece about the Segal self-built streets in Lewisham (actually a puff for Alice and Taran’s lovely book), it also used two more of my pictures from those early self-building days. I wonder where they found them? But at least, although I was never show this 18-month old article before, they correctly credit my photos. It can be read here. 

0

0

SPECIAL OFFER!  I have a copy of this classic masterpiece at greatly reduced price one week only – £129.99!

Otherwise, Segal fans, you will just have to wait for a while more for a new book to  appear… soon…

0

0

Final preparations for the Walter Segal exhibition at the Architectural Association which opened with a packed party last night. In the foreground, a “Segal” pavilion by Assemble – winners of the latest Turner Prize – which now replaces the ‘temporary little house’ Segal built in his Highgate garden.

Beyond the model, to the left, are John Frazer and his wife, who built an interactive computer model of Segal’s system in 1980s to aid clients in designing themselves; to the right of the column are Jon Broome, Segal’s partner and successor with self-build; Nicholas Taylor, author of The Village in the City and, as Lewisham housing chair, the key enabler of the Segal method being taken up by a public housing authority; and John Segal, the architect’s son (seen again below portrait of Walter Segal by his father, Arthur Segal).

Five minutes after this picture was taken, there was barely room to move.

0

0

A Walter Segal exhibition is at The Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square London, from 16th January until 13th February – more details here.

I have only just learned the details myself, from this tweet.

As part of that event, there is a panel discussion on Walter Segal and the Future of Self-Build, with Jon Broome (Segal’s collaborator years ago, and today a leading exemplar of timber-frame, self-build and low-energy buildings), Charlie Luxton (architect well known from regular television appearances) and Alice Graham (exhibition promoter, journalist and inhabitant of a Segal-Broome house at Walter’s Way).

It will be at the Architectural Association on 26th January at 6.00 pm.

I have written much about Walter Segal, including but not only his pioneering of self-built timber-frame affordable houses for those on local authory lists as being in housing need.

The only book on Segal is my Learning from Segal (Birkhaueser, 1989) now long out of print.  But various other writings on Segal are now available here.

Walter Segal photographed by John McKean

0

0