LIONEL MARCH

Lionel March was educated at the Hove Grammar School. At the age of seventeen he produced an original mathematical paper generalizing the theory of complex numbers to n-dimensions. This was seen, among others, by the computer pioneer Alan Turing who wrote: ‘You have done this research with imagination and competence.’ Having been awarded a State Scholarship, March then spent two years on national service in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he was commissioned a Sub-Lieutenant. March was awarded a State Scholarship and on the personal recommendation of Turing was admitted to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to read mathematics under Turing’s former colleague at Bletchley Park, Dennis Babbage. There he gained a first class degree in mathematics and architecture while taking an active part in Cambridge theatre life.

He was elected a member of the Footlights and was President of the Cambridge University Opera Group for whom he designed sets for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Liebermann’s School for Wives. He was designer for Sophocles’ Philoctetes and for Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows at the ADC, and a staged production of Honegger’s Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher in the Guildhall. He went on to design for the New Opera Company at Sadler’s Wells, including the London premier of The Rake’s Progress, and productions of Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love, Arthur Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities and Werner Ekg’s The Government Inspector.

topology.jpg In 1962 he held a one-man exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, entitled ‘Experiments in Serial Art’. He also designed several early paperbacks for Cambridge University Press, including Max Newman’s Elements of the Topology of Plane Sets of Points which proved to be influential in March’s development of serial art. Also in 1962, as part of the statuary quinquennial review, he illustrated, designed and mounted ‘The Shape of Cambridge — a Plan’, a public exposition of the University’s proposals for the planning of Cambridge. At the same time he authored Cambridge, an edition of Cambridge Opinion, on the planning proposals. Despite ongoing discussions to design at the Royal Court Theatre and at Glyndebourne, he abandoned a career in theatre design and chose instead academic research on being awarded an Harkness Fellowship of the Commonwealth Fund at the Joint Center for Urban Studies, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the directorships of Martin Meyerson and James Q. Wilson.

He returned to Cambridge, England, and joined Sir Leslie Martin and Sir Colin Buchanan in preparing a plan for a national and government centre for Whitehall, 1965. In relation to this project, he instigated one of the earliest computer-aided architectural investigations convincingly demonstrating that, in terms of land use, traditional court forms were an improvement on high-rise developments. March was responsible for the master drawing and original strawboard maquette which became the basis for the final presentation model.

Whitehall Drawing Whitehall Model

Subsequently, March became the first Director of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies, now the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, Cambridge University. As founding Chairman of the Board of Applied Research of Cambridge, a private computer-aided design company, he and his colleagues were among the first successful contributors to the 'Cambridge Phenomenon' - the dissemination of Cambridge scholarship into high-tech commerce. The company’s software was eventually taken over by McDonnell-Douglas. In 1978, he earned the Doctor of Science degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge, for mathematical and computational studies related to contemporary architectural and urban issues.

Before coming to Los Angeles in the 1984, he had been Rector and Vice- Provost of the Royal College of Art, London. During his Rectorship he served as a Governor of Imperial College of Science and Technology. He has held full Professorships in Systems Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Ontario; and in Design Technology at The Open University, Milton Keynes. At The Open University, as Chair, he doubled the faculty in Design and established the Centre for Configurational Studies. He came to University of California, Los Angeles in 1984 as a Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He was Chair of the Architecture and Urban Design program from 1985-91. He is currently Emeritus Professor in Design and Computation and remains a member of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

He was a General Editor of the twelve volume Cambridge Architectural and Urban Studies, and Founding Editor of the journal Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. The journal, now edited by Michael Batty, is one of four sections of Environment and Planning, which together stand at ‘the top of the citation indexes’. During his editorship, he fostered and promoted the discipline of shape grammars originated by George Stiny and James Gips. Among the books he has edited, authored or co-authored are: as editor Cambridge; as assistant to Leslie Martin Whitehall: a Plan for a National and Government Centre; with Philip Steadman The Geometry of Environment; with Leslie Martin Urban Space and Structures; as editor The Architecture of Form; with Judith Sheine R. M. Schindler: Composition and Construction; as author The Architectonics of Humanism: Essays on Number in Architecture; with Kim Williams and Stephen Wassell The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti; and most recently as guest editor Shape and Shape Grammars, Nexus Network Journal.

This web site shows over 200 of his studies and serial artworks completed over the last fifty years.