Peter Gowan, RIP

The current issue (59) of the New Left Review has an interview with the late Peter Gowan, born a year before me (to the day), and dead from an asbestos-derived cancer "probably contracted in the ramshackle postwar building that housed Barking Tech" where he taught early on. (I was reminded of this, glancing at an article in the New York Times today about the ill effects of Chinese drywall.) Gowan described his work as an "effort to perceive what's going on in the world from a non-provincial perspective: to try to make sense of it from the angle of the great mass of the world's population." Buildings have consequences, but then so do markets, ideologies, and fears of the loss of hegemony. To read Gowan is to read a counter-narrative. Cities need one, too, and architecture perhaps most of all.