Brutal London. Construct Your Own Concrete Capital. By Zupagrafika. Prestel

Transcription

1 Brutal London Construct Your Own Concrete Capital By Zupagrafika Foreword: Norman Foster Texts: John Grindrod Photographs and captions: Peter Chadwick Contains 9 models to press out and build Prestel Munich London New York

2 The Barbican Centre and Shakespeare Tower, from the lakeside

3 Contents Foreword 4 Introduction 7 Alexandra Road Estate 11 Alton Estate 15 Aylesbury Estate 19 Balfron Tower 23 Barbican Estate 27 Ledbury Estate 31 National Theatre 35 Robin Hood Gardens 39 Space House 43 Note on the Author 46 Acknowledgements 48 Models to Press Out and Build 49

4 Foreword Norman Foster I have always held a fascination for models of all kinds. As a child, I often spent all my pocket money on Trix construction kits and Meccano sets, later graduating to model airplanes built with balsa wood and tissue paper. My first memories are of a pop-out paper model of a circus my father built for me it actually worked as well. As an architect, I know that the model tells the story of a building better than any number of drawings and visualisations. The very making of it is also informative. This book of pop-out models of brutalist buildings in London has a particular resonance, given that there has recently been a rising interest in and respect for brutalist works around the world. The term was first popularised by Reyner Banham in his seminal essay The New Brutalism, in relation to Alison and Peter Smithson s school at Hunstanton, and it gained widespread usage because it was simultaneously an insult and a badge of honour, depending on your point of view. But the genesis of the style can be traced back to Le Corbusier at Unité d habitation and his restless explorations of textures, materials and forms. In a letter to the Spanish architect Josep Lluis Sert in 1962 he wrote: Béton brut was born at the Unité d Habitation at Marseilles where there were 80 contractors and such a massacre of concrete that one simply could not dream of making useful transitions by means of grouting. I decided: let us leave all that brute. I called it béton brut [bare concrete]. The English immediately jumped on the piece and treated me (Ronchamp and Monastery of La Tourette) as Brutal béton brutal all things considered, the brute is Corbu. They called that the new brutality. Like all movements in art and architecture, it can be seen as a series of successive patterns that developed over time that were later identified as brutalist. A whole generation of talented creative architects transformed over their careers from works of exquisite delicacy the epitome of the roots of the Modern movement, early in their careers to works of heavy, monumental concrete buildings. Paul Rudolph s early Florida houses in the 1950s were light and airy, more in the tradition of the early modernist style, with deep roof overhangs in response to the local climate. While his later work the A & A Building at Yale and the car park in New Haven are masterful examples of brutalist architecture, carrying his 4

5 trademark corduroy concrete finishes. Marcel Breuer began his career at Bauhaus designing his delicate tubular steel furniture. His experiments with cantilevered structures for the houses in New Canaan, Connecticut, reflect the streamlined aesthetic of the International Style. He subsequently went on to build the bold, monumental and austere Whitney Museum building (now the Metropolitan Museum s Breuer extension) in If one looks carefully, the staircase detail at the Whitney is almost replicated at another major brutalist work closer to home the Barbican. The architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, however, started their professional career with works in which the frame and infill panels were clearly expressed. For example, their school on Old Brompton Road in London is eccentric in its use of primary colours, featuring a bright yellow freestanding water tank outside, but it has a refinement and quietude reminiscent of Japanese modernism. A similar transformation is seen in the work of Ernö Goldfinger, whose Balfron Tower featured in this book is a perfect exemplar of brutalist housing estates. He famously moved into a flat on the twenty-fifth floor for two months to experience in real life his ideas about the advantages of high-rise living. However, his early works were anything but brutal. For example, his permanent home in Hampstead one of a set of three low-rise flats he designed was immaculately proportioned in an early modernist tradition with a large horizontal window looking onto the Heath across the road. In his book The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes proclaims the demise of the grand doctrine, saying they no longer have the power to inspire visions of a new world. While it is true that the all-encompassing vision of modernity is flawed, perhaps the way we look at the architecture of that time is changing. There is great nuance in brutalist architecture, which can be seen more clearly if one traces the connections with the early work of its proponents. What was earlier viewed as a movement shorn of all aesthetic consideration is now regarded with resp ect and devotion, illustrated by the sensitive restoration of Marcel Breuer s Whitney building back to its roots. I visited it recently and was impressed by how it had weathered both time and tastes. This book will enable a wider audience to engage with the brutalist architecture of London in a new way through crafting the models with their own hands. I hope by this process that they will inspire a fascination for the subject just as my father s circus model did for me. 5

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7 Introduction Have you ever walked around the Barbican Estate, the Southbank Centre or Alexandra Road while listening to, say, John Barry s soundtrack to The Ipcress File, or Bernard Herrmann s theme to North by Northwest? It can leave you quite transported. In those moments you can see the buildings for what they are: monuments to a time that we have tried to forget. Reminders of an era of welfare state optimism. Ghosts of buildings destroyed in the blitz. Places whose space-age ambition and cold-war glamour can still thrill us. Londoners are lucky to have so many of these incredible post-war landscapes and landmarks on their doorsteps. There are the housing estates built by the London County Council, and its successor, the Greater London Council. There are the privately developed office blocks, hotels and shopping centres. There are even upmarket private concrete estates. And yet while we might celebrate these landmarks, they have never been more under threat. Council estates are being lined up for redevelopment. The City of London too is losing most of its mid-century offi ce developments and the streets in the sky that linked them as it moves to replace them with a glossy CGI landscape pulled straight from Inception. We should treasure our familiar landscape of post-war brutalism while we still have it. Londoners are lucky to have so many of these incredible post-war landscapes and landmarks on their doorsteps. It s fair to say that almost all London buildings that might be referred to as brutalist wouldn t have been described in this way by their architects. Rather, they would have seen them as expressions of a wider movement in modernist architecture, unique structures rather than part of some fashionable brutalist subset. So, what is brutalism, and where did it come from? You can see its origins in one particular facet of modernist architecture, what architects referred to as structural honesty showing what a building is made of, and not hiding that beneath a façade. Modernist buildings could be made from steel, glass, brick, wood or concrete, as long as they didn t hide that. Brutalism was a rather perverse fetishisation of that idea a purist s desire not just to show the material the building was made from, but to celebrate that, and to push the possibilities of those materials. Ernö Goldfinger and Balfron Tower 7

8 National Theatre, stairwell The term became shorthand for massive forms of rough, exposed raw concrete. But it wasn t all about that: in fact, many of the most celebrated brutalist buildings are not predominantly concrete at all such as Peter and Alison Smithson s school in Hunstanton, which is steel and glass, or James Stirling and James Gowan s yellow brick flats in Langham House Close, Richmond. Rather, brutalism takes that modernist idea of structural honesty and combines it with a sense of theatrical drama. Concrete became the material that most easily enabled this. Following the lead of Le Corbusier and his vast 1940s housing unit in Marseilles, architects across Europe in the 1950s and 1960s became particularly fascinated with the possibilities of raw concrete. They used the material s fl exibility to sculpt entirely new building forms, and it is these flamboyant concrete shapes that we now most associate with brutalism. In those moments you can see the buildings for what they are: monuments to a time that we have tried to forget. 8 This book contains images of many of the best brutalist buildings in London, but don t think the tour stops there. Why not check out the 1970s new town at Thamesmead? Or the impressive commercial office towers such as Centre Point and No. 1 Croydon? There are space-age car parks, such as the

9 one on Welbeck Street, and the red-brick brutalism of Dawson s Heights flats. There are also the futuristic towers of Cotton Gardens, the grand shopping amphitheatre of the Brunswick Centre, and the JG Ballard landscape of the Westway. Behind this post-war boom in architecture of all styles was the necessity of rebuilding. Part of the reason for this was wartime Blitz damage. But there were also older motivations, such as the desire to clear the remaining industrial revolution slums. And there were different impulses behind the building boom too: some of it came from developers and architecture practices out to make a killing on cheap land with new offices, shops and private housing. Just as important were local authority architects and planners out to enact the government s vision of a welfare state from homes and schools to hospitals and civic centres. As we shall see, finding different ways to tackle the housing crisis pushed architects and planners to be at their most inventive. The legacy of building we have from that post-war era in London is a monument to creativity, energy and experimentation. Some of the great buildings have gone; others are soon to follow. And so we should cherish the ones we have, and keep them in good nick so that generations after ours can connect the incredible cultural legacy of the post-war period, from spy thrillers to sci-fi dramas, with an actual built landscape, and see where it was that people once dreamt those dreams. Balfron Tower, service tower containing lift shaft and access decks 9

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11 Alexandra Road Estate Architect: Neave Brown Built: Size: 2 parallel east west blocks (8 and 4 storeys), 520 apartments Rowley Way Camden London NW8 Welcome to the first post-war council estate to be listed in Britain: Alexandra Road in Camden. It s one of the most imaginative, beautiful and well-maintained brutalist estates in London. The complex, continuous, curving terraces are something of a local landmark, their dramatic diagonals in white concrete sprouting all manner of trees and shrubs from the gardens and balconies. It has become a world-famous film set too, beloved of makers of crime dramas from Prime Suspect to London Spy, despite being more Bath terrace than sink estate. The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate sub-area 1 terraced apartments from Abbey Road 11

12 UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE Zupagrafika Brutal London Construct Your Own Concrete Capital Gebundenes Buch, Pappband, 72 Seiten, 24,0 x 28,0 cm 47 farbige Abbildungen, 1 s/w Abbildung ISBN: Prestel Erscheinungstermin: Oktober 2016