Lionel March was no stranger to the press. His vocal views about architectural education and research, planning and land use, and their politics, together with his headship of prominent research groups and institutions in British academia, enticed architectural and popular media. In the Lionel March fonds held at the CCA, we find documentation of this construction of his media persona. We discover typewritten drafts of a three-part BBC radio show on Frank Lloyd Wright—who March researched as a Harkness fellow from 1962-64—and democracy, that aired in January 1970.¹ We encounter a full-page feature on “The Ideas of March” published in the architectural news magazine Building Design as a foretaste of his path-setting RIBA talk “Modern Movement to Vitruvius” in 1972.² In the talk, March, who was director of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies at the University of Cambridge at the time, declared mathematical models as heralds of a kindling, but long desired, scientific approach to architecture. In a series of folders, two of which March labeled “RCA Rake’s Progress,” we leaf through a collection of news articles about his tumultuous rectorship at the Royal College of Art (RCA), from his inauguration in fall 1981 to his resignation in 1983.³

Like Hogarth’s paintings and Stravinsky’s opera that inspired some of the RCA folders’ sardonic titling, their contents—news clippings, correspondence with higher administration, personal notes—paint scenes of rise and decline in lavish detail.¹ In 1981, with the RCA in crisis after a damning report from the Department of Education and Science about its failure to train industry-level designers, reforms seemed urgent. Within one of the RCA folders, a magazine profile hand-marked “Vogue Jan” celebrates March’s “great vitality … energy and enthusiasm” and declares him as “the man who can supply the vision.” March, as one journalist suggested, was the “new man” to “back the new knowledge.” Only two years later and a few clippings away, a Sunday Times news piece reports “cracks showing in Britain’s design college” due to “personality clashes.” Feuds, March’s emphasis on computer-aided design and manufacturing in the traditionally arts and crafts setting, and his equivocal relationship with the industry, we read in other news articles, drove the resignation.

The RCA files are so many, and in multiples, that the odd single-page document may be easy to overlook—especially a likely unanswered letter that eludes the tantalizing storyline of institutional drama. I don’t think that March ever replied to the invitation by Mia Gullperel, Features Editor for the News Group Ltd.—the company that publishes the tabloid newspaper The Sun. There is no record of a response letter, no clipping to show for an article. “In this, the Year of the Disabled,” the letter begins, “we wish to bring to the attention of people the fact that many of the disabled may lead full and productive lives.” The invitation date, 20 November 1981, places it at the end of the International Year of Disabled Persons proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly with the theme “Full Participation and Equality.” “As with Beethoven’s deafness and Neil Armstrong’s fear of heights,” the letter continues, “we can all take heart when someone with a disability such as yours can achieve so much in the world of art.” Rife in condescension, the letter is an exemplar of the “supercrip” stereotype, a term long-used by the disability community to describe, as Jessica Martucci writes, “the ways disability is often spun into sentimental narratives consumed as inspirational by the nondisabled.”¹ We read about March’s “touching story,” his “overcoming of all odds,” his “act of true heroism” in becoming Rector of the RCA despite his disability. March, we learn if we endure and finish reading, was colour-blind.

What to make of this surprising statement, so questionably rendered, so singular in the archive? As a scholar of March who has interpreted his work in relation to attitudes toward the visual world, this evidence seems significant. But are we to trust the letter, and how does its assertion matter? At first, I expected that the absence of archival testimony about how March saw colour would be overturned by an abundance of personal corroboration. I asked erstwhile close collaborators of March, many of whom figure prominently in the archive. Their accounts were split and, in some cases, accompanied by cautions about March’s deliberate editing of his public persona. Some confirmed March’s colour-blindness with certainty; others refused to believe it. All of them talked about his paintings.

March’s paintings, results of a dedicated artistic practice that spanned decades, are not housed at the CCA. Yet the fonds includes a remarkable collection of the written notes and graph paper sketches with which March planned his “Occasional Pieces.”¹ Usually acrylic on canvas and mostly painted after his move to the United States West Coast in 1984, these paintings were made to mark occasions (birthdays, most often) and gifted to loved ones—his daughter Candida, his grandsons Sam and Tyler, Alexandra, daughter of close friends and shape grammar theorists George Stiny and Terry Knight, to name a few. Each piece was a meticulously planned overlay of typography—spelling the name of the giftee—and colour. March stylized the letters to fit on a grid, permutated and overlaid them to the brink of recognizability, and assigned colour to emerging areas based on intricate associations among number systems, numerological constructs (the magic square of Saturn), colour wheels (March was a reader of Newton’s Opticks), musical harmonies and symmetries (the Dorian scale), symbolic meanings (“2,” he writes, “the first even number is characteristically female”), and mythological references (from Hera to Osiris). A boggling game of analogies and mappings.

Alongside the intimacy, and the humour, and the excess of these personal works resided a quest, or rather a question, around the analogies between art, architecture, and music. Throughout his academic career, March advocated for the use of mathematical models to reveal similarities between disparate domains. As director of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies and aligning with visions around the unification of the sciences, and of the arts, through systems, he heralded isomorphism (equality of form) as an intellectual agenda for architectural research. Coupled with deliberately iconoclastic rejections of “draughtsmanship” and cautions against the seductiveness of appearance, March urged a plunge beneath the visual surface and a rigorous study, through modern mathematics, of the “mathematical rock bed beneath,” “the structural patterns of objectivity behind the surface subjectivity.”¹

March’s interest in the common, solid bedrock beneath art, architecture, and music extensively manifested in his creative work, from his well-known 1962 exhibition “Experiments in Serial Art” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, to his valedictory lecture (“The Music of Colour … and the Number Seven,” coupled with the exhibition “Intervals and Chords”) at the RCA right before his departure, and his “Music of Colo(u)r” lecture at UCLA soon after his arrival.² Named after Edmund George Lind’s eponymous 1894 unpublished essay, the “Music of Colo(u)r” sought out a ground for the analogy between these two domains that acknowledged the difference between the behaviour and perception of sound and light. Drawing inspiration Kazuo Kondo—a Japanese mathematician whose profound spirituality and wry wit evoke affinities with March—March advocated an independence of the analogy from empirical facts and the experiential world.³

The rejection of empirical givens and the espousal of abstractions that are autonomous, built from the inside, and immune to the contingencies of embodied experience is a familiar attitude characteristic of mathematical modernism—a cultural phenomenon of which March was an eager observer and avid translator for design and architecture.¹ Elsewhere, I have argued that March’s relentless, affectionate drawing of these hidden structures shows an ambivalence toward seeing: a search for a new way of seeing and representing architecture where the surface of appearance persists but is tamed by steadfast mathematical skeletons.² Enter the almost overlooked archival trace of March’s colour-blindness and the ambivalence perhaps becomes more personal. The visual surface shifts from a discursive term to lived experience; its manipulation through a mathematical proxy becomes a quest for access, an act of empowerment. Perhaps March’s abstractions were not skeletons; they were scaffolds all along.

The game of metaphors—telling the skeleton and the scaffold apart—is slippery but worthwhile. To think of March’s abstractions as skeletons is to imagine him engaging in an act of excarnation, a project of stripping architecture from its (material, visual) flesh to reveal its mathematical bare bones. To consider his abstractions as scaffold, on the other hand, is to envisage March participating in the labour of building a new kind of disciplinary edifice where mathematics encodes an awareness and absorbing of constraint. If we follow the visual and discursive vernacular some of March’s contemporaries, like Christopher Alexander, Yona Friedman, John Habraken, to name only a few, we might also think of the scaffold as a kind of support or infrastructure that bears democratizing power. Through absorbing constraint, the scaffold ushers in possibility. Whether mathematics and computation are a skeleton or a scaffold, a set of disembodied objectivizing abstractions or an infrastructure affording unhindered expressions of subjectivity, is an irresolvable tension that lies at the heart of architectural computing in its historical and contemporary expressions. The beginning of this political question may be technical, tied to the protocol by which the abstract, the skeleton, the scaffold, relates to the relentlessly concrete. Can the building bend the scaffold; the flesh recast the skeleton? Can seeing—in its varied embodied expressions—alter steadfast computational structures, which as March prophesized, puppeteer the images we make and consume in our digitally saturated media environment today?