BATTERSEA POWER STATION!

Heh heh - still not fixed the roof then...
This looks great. Thanks emsk!

why are we weird?

yeah, why are we weird?

nothing. nothing at all -- i love old power stations, how could i not?

Damned post-modernists wanting the vitality of the modern world hidden from view.

http://www.bhk.co.jp/english/0top/topics/img/050912en.jpg

xp

maybe 3.30-6.30 cos we might get some sunset action?

The Battersea Power Station is an architectural work of art.

x-post, yes, 3.30 sounds about right.

xpost beaubourg is modernist.

i kind of periodize post-modern as, well, post-modern, post-20s. not an expert. but there is something pomo about visiting a (defunct) power station.

we tru modernists prefer NUCULER power, i should think.

BPS beauty comes from it's surroundings as much as it's own inherent grandeur i think.

if you love the BPS but HAET the Dome/New Wembley, what are you? just a fickle romantic bastard?

post 20's does not mean post modern - you know that enrq, stop pretending to be thick.

desire to create huge open spaces drives the technology/ exterior structure
exlicit refs to the machine age/transportation
exposing the workings an extension of honesty/clarity in design
i dunno
...something about movement on the outside of the bulding

xpost

what revivalist said.

why u smoek crack?

And the lower buildings, how the introduction of plants has turned them into a cascade of flowers, like some natural jungle rock formation.

I like the walkways, too, I think they're elegant - though they're not always in the most sensible of places. And the bits of the London wall and the ancient church that stick up through the sea of concrete. Very effective.

The flats are quite interesting on the inside, too.

Much smaller than the Barbican but amazingly ugly with toilet-style tiling, eighties corporate pomo effects... I can't find a photo on the Net unfortunately, but anyway it's this building...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo_House

xpost revivalist otm again.

xpost

the only people i've known to have had flats there are rich, but hey if they chucked a few working folks in there, lucky them.

exactly right.

this building is modernist

http://www.londonist.com/attachments/Matt/Trellick.jpg

but liking it/talking about it is post modernist.

Architecture, for me, is not really spoiled by the wealth or poverty of the people that use it. It is an artform in its own right. You might as well say "Anish Kapoor's sculptures are crap because only rich people can afford to buy sculpture that costs millions of pounds" rather than debating their aesthetics.

Ed OTM.

that's fair enough, but when the purpose of the building comes into it, so do all these narky class questions, surely? i'm a young fuddy-duddy so don't like the barbican anyway.

(added to this -- oh my word -- the sheer *impossibility* of getting to the smaller cinemas -- the layout is truly absurd. i don't feel comfortable there.)

fuck you, rob tincknell

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/people-power-why-the-battersea-power-station-redevelopment-will-have-a-village-feel-9235293.html

Tincknell says he wants to fill the 3,500 homes with “Londoners” — in the broadest sense of the word — who buy into his village vision and hints that he would rather not sell to people who don’t. “I don’t want to judge but if you can select a group of buyers who really get the whole community aspect... why would I not sell my homes to those people rather than distant investors looking for a place to store cash — you just wouldn’t do it.”

Tincknell — who has already bought a townhouse in the first phase — diplomatically gives as an example of the sort of “new Londoners” he has in mind: his boss Tan Sri Liew, the Malaysian chairman of the Battersea Power Station Development Company.

“He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho. I would argue he contributes a lot to the fabric of London — he’s always here doing things, he is almost a local, and that’s the kind of people you want.”

KILL THEM ALL

He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.
He spends a week in London every six weeks with his family and they’ve got a couple of homes in Soho.

couldn't think of a more ideal resident to contribute to a true london community feel, really i couldn't

Funny how cat's always got Farage's tongue and he clams up whenever he's asked what he would do about these "almost locals." Really, just put a huge hydraulic slicer somewhere around Brent Cross and just cut London adrift from the rest of Britain. Then it can run itself the way it wants and be a colder Cayman Islands.

Architecture and morality. It seems impossible to separate them now, in a way that seemed easy before.

A quote from that Standard piece:

All 18 acres of open space will be fully wi-fi’d up so that residents can sit there to go online rather than be cooped up pursuing “rugged individualism” in their flats.

In practical terms, this means that whatever flats they build will be so tiny and cramped that people who live in them will have no choice but to go outside to use their laptop. That'll be great in winter and when it's raining.

In other terms, the prospect chills the blood. A village feel? This village, perhaps?

http://www.planetizen.com/files/u5174/20091112-prisoner3.jpg

I'm not sure separating them was ever that easy. Even a lot of the great Victorian architecture in London would have represented a colossal waste of resources at a time when much of the city was living in slums.

I rep for this book here periodically, but Anna Minton's Ground Control should be required reading for anyone interested in the development of modern British cities:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/05/ground-control-anna-minton-review

I mean I think a development like this is genuinely better than another massive gated riverside "community" but let's not kid ourselves about who will and won't be welcome in this place. Gates don't need to be visible to exist.

Ian Martin absolutely bloody OTM in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/19/urban-vibrancy-social-cleansing-gentrification

I'm not sure separating them was ever that easy. Even a lot of the great Victorian architecture in London would have represented a colossal waste of resources at a time when much of the city was living in slums.

Well, I meant personally. Because, as a former architecture student, I was always taught to look at buildings in two ways: 1) is it beautiful, is it pleasant or even uplifting to inhabit this space, versus the tension of: 2) is it utilitarian, does it function as a "machine for living in", does the material perform the structural role it is intended for.

The idea of who would be living there, and why, and what mixture of people, who was excluded and who was welcomed <- these were things that I was not, at the time, taught to thoroughly interrogate. Noble ideas of La Corbusier (oh god I cannot spell that man's name) towerblocks as being "better than slums" (or not) aside. I was taught architecture; I was not taught sociology. And I really should have been. These ideas of architecture as exclusion or inclusion, what homes are available for what people, and how, are really ideas that came to me through ILX (and further reading). Just kind of noticing the amount of education that has happened to me over the past 10 years without really noticing it, until confronting your self and your ill-informed ideas of a decade previous.