Six free-to-read essays return to the campaign that asked architects to plan for people rather than statistics, and ask why so much of its agenda remains unfinished

n 1969, the AR set out to publish 20 issues asking what Britain needed from its schools, homes, hospitals and town halls. It managed eight before readers, advertisers and even one of the magazine’s own editors turned against it.

Manplan was unlike anything the AR had printed before. Its first issue, Frustration, replaced plans and building reviews with grainy photographs of queues, strikes and failing public services, set against pages of matt-black ink. Later issues made the case for schools that stay open to the whole neighbourhood long after the last bell, and imagined picture telephones and wristwatch walkie-talkies decades before either became part of daily life.

More than 50 years on, the questions Manplan raised about public services, housing and who architecture is for have outlasted the campaign itself. Curated from the AR archive, these six free-to-read essays return to the campaign that asked architects to plan for people rather than statistics, and ask why so much of its agenda remains unfinished.

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Manplan 4, Education: Introduction, AR January 1970, AR Editors
‘If there is a school at all, it is the school of life, often a hard one’

Manplan: the bravest moment in architectural publishing, AR March 2014, Stephen Parnell
‘He didn’t need to build: Manplan was his architectural masterpiece’

Humanplan: a 21st century pocket manifesto for architects, AR March 2015, Catherine Slessor
‘The AR has an obligation to goad architects out of their narcissistic comfort zones’

AR 120: Jonathan Glancey on Campaigns, AR January 2017, Jonathan Glancey
‘Manplan irritated as many architect readers of AR as it provoked and inspired’

AR In Pictures: Frustration, AR November 2020, Max L Zarzycki
‘The AR had called into question, in ardent fashion, what exactly architectural publishing was for’

Manplan gets its moment, AR September 2023, Reuben J Brown
‘Manplan was a call for brave, socially responsive and intentional decision-making on a slew of pressing societal problems’