A few years ago in Hamburg, I walked past an occupation of derelict buildings, about to give way to yet another complex of office blocks and luxury flats. Around were tents, little geodesic domes, and some words, chalked up on a blackboard. They read: “If architecture can only commit to the bourgeois model of private property and society, we must reject architecture. Until all design activities focus on primary human needs, design must disappear. We can live without architecture.”

The quote was uncredited, but was from Adolfo Natalani, of the Italian architects’ Superstudio, and it encapsulates 1968 in architecture. Because capital made a humane architecture impossible, architecture would remain on paper.

Looking from the perspective of 2018, the dystopian perspectives can seem puzzling. Many architects in Europe now look back on the 1960s both as a time when they had a degree of power in society and one they would never repeat. In Britain, for instance, every town and city had a group of architects in its direct employ, who would then shape the city through the mass construction of public housing, schools, parks, and hospitals. Now, when new, architect-designed public housing is either residual, in France, Spain or Germany, or inconceivable, as in Britain, Ireland or Eastern Europe, the statist sixties appear as a period of remarkable equality and fairness. This is seldom how they were seen at the time. Radical architects strained at the era’s limits.