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Neil Jackson, architect & architectural historian

Neil Jackson (born 1951) is a British architect and architectural historian who writes on 19th and 20th-century British, American and Japanese architecture.

Early Life

He was born in September 1951 and educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, a building which first raised his interest in architecture. He trained as an architect at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) and at the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University) before taking a MA in History of Art at the Courtaud Institute of Art. After qualifying as an architect in 1978, he became a Research Assistant at the Polytechnic of the South Bank (now South Bank University) where he completed a PhD on 'The Speculative House in London, 1832-1914' under Dr Roger Dixon and Sir John Summerson.

Career

In 1980 he was appointed Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at South Bank and, following one year as an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas (1983-84), moved in 1985 to the California State Polytechnc University at Pomona, California, where he was an Associate Professor of Architecture until 1990. On returning to England, he was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Unversity of Nottingham before being appointed Reader in Archtectural History. In 2000 he was made the Hoffman Wood Professor of Architectural Engineering at the University of Leeds before moving to the University of Liverpool in 2005, where he was the Sir Charles Reilly Professor of Architecture. He retired in 2020.

Academic work

His undergraduate study of the architect of Fettes College led to his assisting Dr Alistair Rowan and Valerie Fiddes in their 1976 centenary exhibiition 'Mr David Bryce' at the University of Edinburgh. Simarly, his work on the architect F W Troup, which won the SAHGB's (Society of Architectral Historians of Great Britain) Hawksmoor Essay Medal in 1983, resulted in the 1985 exhibition F W Troup, Architect at the RIBA Heinz Gallery in London. His studies of mid-century modern California architecture, published in Architectural History (vols. 32 and 33), led to his 1995 exhibition Steel Houses, at the Heinz Gallery and the first of his books on the genre, The Modern Steel House. His next book on California architecture, Craig Ellwood (published in the USA as California Modern: The Architecture of Craig Ellwood) won the 2003 Sir Banister Fetcher Prize, awarded by the Author's Club and the RIBA. Meanwhile, his interest in 19th-century architecture remained, with essays in Architectural History (vols. 23, 43, 45 and 47) on constructional polychromy and books on Bath and Saltaire. An Arts and Humanities Research Council award led to the recataloguing of the Culshaw and Sumners collection at the Lancashire Records Office and the 2009 exhibition Culshaw and Sumners at the Picton Reading Rooms in Liverpool Central Library. In 2013 he returned to Caifornia as a Residential Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute, which led to his second book on Pierre Koenig. His concurrent work on Japanese architecture, first begun in 2005 and developed with a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship in 2009-11, resulted in the book, Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue.

After helping found the Avon Group of the Victorian Society in 1978 he served on the Society's Main Committee and the General Purposes Sub-committee between 1980 and 1985. In 2016 he joined the Society's Events Committee, which he has chaired since 2020. From 2007 to 2011 he was a Trustee of the Twentieth Century Society and from 1992 to 2005, Registrar of Research for the SAHGB. From 2011 to 2014 he served on the SAHGB’s Executive Committee and since 2017 has been a Trustee and the Society’s President.

Selected Publications

F W Troup, Architect 1859-1941. London: Building Centre Trust, 1985. ISBN 091919101.

Nineteenth-century Bath: Architects and Architecture. Bath: Ashgrove Press, 1991 & 1998. ISBN 1853980161 & 1853981206.

The Modern Steel House. London: E & F N Spon, 1996. ISBN 0419 217207 ; New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1996. ISBN 0442024142.

California Modern: The Architecture of Craig Ellwood. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. ISBN 9781568983035.

Craig Ellwood. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2002. ISBN 1856692825.

Pierre Koenig. Köln, Taschen, 2007 & 2017. ISBN 9783822848913 & 9783836544375.

Saltaire: The Making of a Model Town (with Jo Lintonbon and Bryony Staples). Reading: Spire Books, 2010. ISBN 9781904965213.

Pierre Koenig: The View from the Archive. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2019. ISBN 9781606065778.

Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue. London: Lund Humphries, 2019. ISBN 9781848222960.