Ian Douglas Nairn (24 August 1930 – 14 August 1983) was a British architectural critic who coined the word "Subtopia" to indicate drab suburbs that look identical through unimaginative town-planning. He published two strongly personalised critiques of London and Paris, and collaborated with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who considered his reports to be too subjective, but acknowledged him as the better writer.
Early life
Ian Nairn was born at 4 Milton Road, Bedford, England. Nairn's father was a draughtsman on the R101 airship programme based at Shortstown. The family moved in 1932 when the airship programme was terminated, and Nairn was brought up in Surrey. It was the balancing-act nature of this essentially suburban environment which he stated "produced a deep hatred of characterless buildings and places". Nairn had no formal architecture qualifications; he was a mathematics graduate (University of Birmingham) and a Royal Air Force pilot, flying Gloster Meteor aircraft.
The Architectural Review and "Subtopia" In 1955, Nairn established his reputation with a special issue of the Architectural Review called "Outrage" (later as a book in 1956), in which he coined the term "Subtopia" for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place. The book was based around a nightmarish road trip that Nairn took from the south to the north of the country – the trip gave propulsion to his fears that we were heading for a drab new world where the whole of Britain would look like the fringes of a town, every view exactly the same. He also praised modernist urban developments such as the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham, which became increasingly unpopular due to the subordination of pedestrians to cars and was demolished in the early 21st century.
Jonathan Glancey has compared Nairn's opinions with those of the town planner Thomas Sharp, as well as with earlier writers such as William Cobbett and John Ruskin, all of whom shared a vision of potentially invidious urbanization needing to be mitigated by clearly delineated rural space, "compact towns co-existing with a truly green countryside of which we are stewards, not consumers or despoilers". "Outrage" was followed by "Counter-Attack Against Subtopia" in 1956 (published as a book in 1957).
Both books were influential on Jane Jacobs, who was then working at Architectural Forum, the most widely read US architectural magazine. Jacobs cited "Outrage" and "Counter-Attack" in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and she recommended Nairn to her contacts at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded Nairn's book The American Landscape: A Critical View (1965).
The Buildings of England
Nairn admired Nikolaus Pevsner's work (if not his methodology) on the then fledgling Buildings of England series, and had approached Pevsner in the early 1960s as a potential co-author. Pevsner, who wrote about "Visual Planning and the Picturesque", was influential on the formation of the Architectural Review'''s "Townscape" series of columns, which evolved into the movement to which Gordon Cullen and Nairn were key contributors.
In common with several architectural writers and academics at the time, Nairn had already made small contributions to the series – in his case the volumes on Essex, Norfolk and Northumberland. Pevsner in turn had been influenced by Nairn in earlier volumes: Rutland, for example, Pevsner described as having "no 'subtopia'". Nonetheless, Pevsner was initially reluctant, having thus far written the guidebooks alone. He was also aware of Nairn's views on the 'house style' of the series from reviews Nairn had written on earlier volumes. However the scale of the project began to demand assistance and Pevsner eventually handed almost all responsibility for writing the Surrey volume to Nairn, whose text ultimately constituted almost four-fifths of the finished volume.
Pevsner was content to give sole authorship to Nairn for the volume on Sussex, but as work progressed Nairn felt that his approach was increasingly at odds with the relative objectivity Pevsner required. Nairn began to feel that this was acting as a constraint on his writing, and ceased work on the Sussex volume before it was completed. According to Pevsner, in the foreword to the Sussex book, "When he (Nairn) had completed West Sussex, he found that he could no longer bear to write the detailed descriptions which are essential in The Buildings of England. His decision filled me with sadness...." Consequently, the guide was published with Nairn being given credit for the West Sussex section and Pevsner East Sussex.