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Otto Saumarez Smith
@OSaumarezSmith
Historian of shopping precincts, leisure centres, power stations, derelict landscapes, inner cities, new towns, & city centre redevelopment. @c20Society trustee
instagram.com/osaumarezsmith
warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/arthi…
Born June 16
Joined July 2014
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Sep 3, 2020
    My @OUPHistory book "Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Renewal in 1960s Britain", is out now in affordable paperback. It covers a constellation of ideas about the rebuilding of city centres for affluence and the car in the 1960s. global.oup.com/academic/produ…
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Jul 25, 2020
    Light switch at Coventry Cathedral
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Oct 20, 2020
    My new out of office reply, courtesy of John Ruskin:
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Apr 1, 2024
    Gropius staircases at the Dessau Bauhaus.
    127K
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Feb 14, 2021
    Ron Hitchins died in 2019 aged 98. He was a Chinese Lithuanian East Ender, who worked as a tailor, a coal miner, a flamenco dancer, & an abstract sculptor & ceramicist. His estate is selling off the contents of his house in Hackney - the photos of which are completely divine.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Jul 19, 2023
    I'm reading Michael Gage's 'Guide to Exposed Concrete Finishes' (1970). Catnip for me - so here follows a thread of some of the tasty things in it.
    384K
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Oct 11, 2020
    Wonderfully surreal photograph, apparently showing a street carnival in Frankfurt (1929) where the Roofers Guild dressed as Modernist houses to protest against the flat roofs putting them out of business.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Dec 31, 2022
    Under the 30 year rule buildings in England are not normally eligible for listing until they reach that age. So to mark the new year, here is a list of 10 buildings completed in 1993 that are now eligible, & I think are worthy of listing. 🧵
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Apr 16, 2022
    A great glut of architecture in Buffalo, a tremendous city. First up Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1895); a famous building in the history of proto-modernism & skyscrapers, but the luscious, incredibly beautiful ornamental terracotta the great, ravishing surprise.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Sep 21, 2020
    Obsessed with this 1760s Staffordshire teapot with a pattern of fossil crinoids (from @metmuseum). Hard to believe it isn't modern.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    May 31, 2020
    I don't think I'd ever seen Charles Rennie Mackintosh's beautiful watercolours from his alcoholic retirement from architecture in the South of France during the 1920s. Oh for a summer holiday.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Feb 2, 2021
    Intercom for a 12-storey block of flats in Bedford (1958-60), on a lovely wall of ceramic tiles plausibly by Peggy Angus.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Jun 21, 2021
    London and its villages from a fragment of the Sheldon Tapestry Map (1590s). I particularly like the windmills on Hampstead Heath.
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    Otto Saumarez Smith
    @OSaumarezSmith
    Sep 8, 2018
    Thrilling multiple levels of an 18th Century megastructure. Chambers’ Somerset House