Making the completely unacceptable somehow respectable

This is really perverse:  http://cw.na1.hgncloud.com/

It is as if the Guardian is so confident of its marketing ability that is can take the the most inhuman examples of residential architecture, repackage them as "hip happening now" and people are so gullible they fall for it.

What the Guardian is doing for brutalist architecture is what Tony Blair is doing for brutalist dictators - making the completely unacceptable somehow respectable (if you don't think for yourself).

The Best Store in Houston

Sorry to see the Best Store in Houston has gone:  http://www.failedarchitecture.com/the-ironic-loss-of-the-postmodern-best-store-facades/

Surely America has some form of listing for buildings?

It should have been moved into an open-air museum of architecture.

A case study in why socialists should never be allowed to commission social housing

I think we always knew brutalist architecture damaged people psychologically:  http://www.southwarknews.co.uk/news/my-conscience-is-clear-council-leader-peter-john-comes-out-fighting-as-heygate-deal-scrutinised/#.VaeI3weBdAM.twitter

Councillor Peter John, (Labour) Leader of Southwark Council, talking about the Heygate Estate:  "...brutalist architecture wasn’t conducive to building a successful economic community. These were hard to let properties. We shouldn’t forget that”.

Recently I was in Westbourne Grove and went to see Ernest Goldfinger's Trellick Tower.  As you can see, the bold dynamic design is just the sort of thing you want on your CV as an architect.  For the unfortunate people who have to live in the flats, the experience is less than sublime (all the crime and social problems you would expect from a community with a collective breakdown induced by the ugliness and inhumanity of their surroundings).

The tall thin design means that even on a summer day the wind howls around the upper floors.  Sickening feelings of vertigo when using the walkways.  And did the architect really specify that shade of muddy-coloured concrete?

This building is a case study in why socialists should never be allowed to commission social housing.  I suppose the intention was to put working class people into an entirely new environment where they would be purged of their bourgeois aspirations and made to conform to an internationalist socialist world outlook.  Instead the socialists just made people unhappy.

The building is much admired by Guardian social affairs writer Hannah Fearn.

The building appeared in the Depeche Mode video for Little 15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBBFufxHj3M

It also appeared in the Blur video For Tomorrow:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gghFPavXE7Q

Full-stop.

Above the dangerously cracked lintel a datestone proclaimed Workman's Institute 1879.

I was charmed by the full-stop after the date.  It somehow encapsulated an earnest desire to do the correct thing, combined with a lack of polished education that would know a full-stop was not usual.  I tried to  imagine what took place at this Institute - the long hours of self-improving study by exhausted workers anxious to get on.

Boarded up and soon to be pulled down.

Not enough is being done to protect Victorian industrial buildings (especially warehouses - indeed, especially warehouses in east of England ports).

Open-plan endlessly flexible

With Alec Nussbaum at the BBC.

I asked him what he thought about the open-plan endlessly flexible studios and concepts such as weather broadcasting from a balcony looking over the office workers etc.

"All been done before in the seventies.  This is just Pebble Mill writ large.  Didn't like it then, don't think much of it now."

The new extensions make a feature of All Souls Langham Place much as an 18th century nobleman would incorporate the local church into the landscaped view from his mansion.

The Family That Built Gothic Britain on BBC4

Dan Cruikshank performed a hatchet job on George Gilbert Scott last night in The Family That Built Gothic Britain on BBC4.

What is the point of all this nastiness?

The idea that George Gilbert Scott was a forerunner of modernism was absurd.

Egyptian Revival

The gates to Abney Cemetery are in a 19th century Egyptian Revival style by William Hosking.

It seems suitable that the entrance to the kingdom of the dead should be in an Egyptian style (given their preoccupations and everything).

Hugh Gaitskell House opened in 1964

Walking around I came across Hugh Gaitskell House opened in 1964.

Does this not typify socialism?  Grey, utilitarian, conformist.  Modernist in style, divorced from the historical continuum of English culture.

Anyone living in this building is likely to become neurotic, resentful, angry.

Hugh Gaitskell introduced prescription charges for the NHS - remember this whenever lefties claim the Conservatives are opposed to the idea of free healthcare (which we are not).

How sinister the Barbican looks

Look how sinister the Barbican looks, towering over the City in a menacing brutalist way.

Many MPs have flats in this complex.

Smithfield

Many times I have wandered around Smithfield Market, which has a wonderful melancholy atmosphere.

The best time is to go there in the evening when everyone has gone home.

Inevitably it will be developed and tarted up and go the way of Covent Garden, but perhaps the Victorian architecture can be preserved.

I am very pleased that Eric Pickles has thrown out the proposals to put a seven story block at the western end of the site destroying the interior.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/08/eric-pickles-smithfield-market-redevelopment-plans-support-campaign

Redevelopment of the Shell Centre

I am disappointed that the redevelopment of the Shell Centre is so unimaginative:  http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1297712/pickles-approves-shell-centre-redevelopment

Why was it not possible for a William Burges-style gothic citadel to have been designed as a complement to Westminster?

Are we going to keep nodding these designs through until the whole of London subscribes to modernist ideology?

Every day a new Pruitt-Igoe is being erected around the world

Fascinating event this Friday:  http://failedarchitecture.com/fab01/

The most chilling line in the blurb is:  "Every day a new Pruitt-Igoe is being erected around the world".

Despite the "death" of Modernism it still lives, vampire-like, killing communities and transposing them into replicas of itself.
 

Naked in Portland stone

Two naked male figures (guards) at the front of the Bank of England - naked in Portland stone, holding gigantic keys and chains.

The sculptor was Sir Charles Wheeler.  Early 1930s.  Each statue carved from a single block of stone.

They have six-pack stomachs, absolutely straight backs, stern expressions.

Normally naked statues and classical architecture would indicate the inspiration of ancient Greece, Sir Charles Wheeler said he was inspired by John Milton's 1637 poem Lycidas, and the figure with the key is St Peter "The Pilot of the Galilean lake."

National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham

The 1976 National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, designed by Edward Mills, is an hideous example of brutalist modernism - the canopy is supposedly a Mills motif.

More of the NEC - an open-air cafe area or a prison exercise yard?

Is it true that Edward Mills slept with a sketchbook at his side in case he should wake suddenly and forget one of his nightmares?

Only 103 affordable homes?

The new designs for Battersea are ghastly and repeat all the usual mistakes:  http://www.building.co.uk/news/gehry-and-foster-unveil-battersea-power-station-designs/5067733.article

Are we supposed to believe that the pristine white structures that look as if they are from the promonade of some Mediterranean water-front are going to appear like that when put up in sarf London?

And what lack of originality in the rip-off wavy block of apartments - an architectural cliche.

And only 103 affordable homes?

Art deco block of flats at Princes Gate Mews

Beautiful 1938 art deco block of flats at Princes Gate Mews designed by Adie, Button and Partners who also designed the incredible Charters at Sunninghill (since spoiled and mutilated).

Bryanston Court

Bryanston Court in the West End, by the south end of Edgware Road.

1920s vaguely art deco mansion block.  Anonymous, discreet, debased sort of opulence.  Home of Wallis Simpson in the mid-1930s, although a blue plaque has been refused (surely not because she was divorcée?).

HH Bridgman's St Pancras Workhouse

Back elevation of HH Bridgman's St Pancras Workhouse, now part of St Pancras Hospital.

It fulfills all one's imaginative conception of a Victorian workhouse - gloomy, overpowering, forbidding.

When it first became an NHS hospital many elderly people in the borough were afraid to go there as they thought they were being put in the workhouse.

The 1870 neo-Byzantine West London Synagogue

Passing the 1870 neo-Byzantine West London Synagogue I was impressed by these beautiful capitals of acanthus leaves. 

I didn't like to go inside.

Tower of Imperial College

The tower of Imperial College rising above the hideous 1960s extensions and veiled by the natural gothic tracery of the bare trees.

The tower is all that is left of Thomas Collcut's original design for Imperial College.