On Arrows: British Architecture 1930 - 1970: History and Theory of Architecture VIII (FS 25)

In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they had all but disappeared.

During its short, intense period of use, the arrow pointed beyond any one singular author, typology, or scale, to the operative dimension of architecture and its environments, working both as an appropriate representational technique and a concrete tool for design, that would shape postwar British architecture and its environments: the constructive aspects, structural properties, infrastructural innovations, spatial challenges as well as their aesthetic and practical consequences.