Alison and Peter Smithson lecture, 1976

Here's an absolute gem, recorded by some forward-thinking genius on April 4th 1976: a lecture for the Architecture Association by Peter and Alison Smithson. Here they present a number of their key urban schemes on the theme of connection:

Berlin Hauptstadt, their entry for a 1957 reconstruction competition, which would have united parts of West and East Germany in the years before the wall went up. For the housing sections it re-used designs from their failed but influential 'streets in the sky' Golden Lane competition entry. As they say of this project, 'present-day cities have a scattered urban structure and patchwork form – that is, the characteristic urban form is cluster.'

We also see the Hamburg Steilshoop competition of 1961, for a suburban mass housing scheme which has many echoes of the Hauptstadt project. As they wrote: 'every house in Steilshoop is linked the the centre by routes suitable for perambulator pushers and bicyclists.'

Berlin Mehringplatz was another competition entry, this time from 1962. Given a series of motorways to build around in the centre of the city, they describe the architecture they planned here as 'a series of events', including restaurants, shops, galleries and administrative buildings.

As ususal, none of these were built. They go into detail on all these schemes in their huge, glossy and somewhat incomprehensible tome The Charged Void: Urbanism, published in 2005.