Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

BIOTECHNICS

The name Geddes has made three impacts at different times upon the minds of British people. There was Jenny Geddes who threw a stool at the head of the preacher in St. Giles’ Cathedral, 1637. There were the brothers Sir Aucland and Sir Eric Geddes, chiefly associated with axing civil servants, though one of them wrote a remarkable book. And there was P.G.—Sir Patrick Geddes (who might, incidentally, have sympathised with both the stool-throwing and the axing, though his own methods were different) whose thought and activity have had far more effect than many people realise—though many would recognise some of it as found in the influential books of Geddes’ devoted follower Lewis Mumford. Such words as ‘conurbation’ and ‘megalopolis’ are to be heard or seen almost daily now, but those who can trace these words to their origin in Geddes are still few.

Sir William Holford, then President of the Town Planning Institute, said at the Geddes Centenary in 1954 ‘The Greek epigram on Plato is applicable to him: “Wherever I go in my mind I meet Geddes coming back” ’. Another professor at that time compared him to Leonardo da Vinci, and in 1924 he had been called ‘a modern Michelangelo’. He has also been compared to Aristotle. This is clearly very odd, and we shall have to try and unravel it.

For much of the factual background of this lecture I am of course, as all interested must be, particularly indebted to the published work of Amelia Defries, Philip Boardman, and Philip Mairet. I have talked with many of the dwindling number who knew him personally. I remember vividly how, when I spoke of Geddes to the late Sir Patrick Abercrombie (whose post-war plans for London were not taken sufficiently seriously), his face lit up and he exclaimed “He was my master!’.

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