Deposed buildings

Does no-one else have stories of buildings loved and lost?

Here's a purely personal one. David Russell Hall, St Andrews, my hall of residence for years one and four at uni. Fairly unremarkable cookie-cutter accommodation blocks, but the slight ski-slope roofs and geometrical arrangment provided a modicum of charm. 1960s-2003

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-ash1/v132/37/16/773455552/n773455552_1187325_2437.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Maths_Tower%2C_University_of_Manchester_2.jpg/220px-Maths_Tower%2C_University_of_Manchester_2.jpg

I went for an interview here (I had no real interest in going there, the course was just filling up my spaces on the UCAS form and I wanted a day off school to go record shopping in Manchester), and in the lift I was told the story about how the building was built 90° off the correct alignment. I'm pretty sure that's not true. I went to Salford uni anyway, and spent most of my 4 years in Manchester going up and down Oxford Road. It still looks weird to me that this is missing. University of Manchester Mathematics Tower 1968-2005

I've been inside Pimlico School many times, it was incredibly dark and labrynthine.

http://www.plasticbag.org/images/extra/tricorn_image.jpg

Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth - RIP "Britain's Ugliest Building".

The Tricorn Centre and Mondial House are amazing.

Hatherley's book is really interesting. The focus is definitely on the cheap identikit developments thrown up during the Blair years, rather than the the architecture they were replacing, but it has some great stuff about the unfashionable brutalist developments in places like Sheffield that are being torn down or remodelled. It's totally polemical but a really passionate, invigorating piece of work.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Marsham_Towers_Three_Ugly_Sisters.jpg

Marsham Towers, headquarters of the Departments of Transport and the Environment from the 70s until the mid-90s. I worked here for a time in the early 90s. Three unlovely towers in a row, which was ridiculous as you often had to walk from one tower to the next.

> places like Sheffield

i always liked the eggboxes...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/image_galleries/peace_gardens_eggboxes_gallery.shtml?8

It still looks weird to me that this is missing. University of Manchester Mathematics Tower 1968-2005

oh yeah otm, that's a good one, it was such a striking, interesting looking building from wilmslow road; the slightly lopsided windows looked like segments of stained glass somehow. & replaced with such a fucking weird building.

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/00/24/002412_ea578088.jpg

Disused Ministry of Defence building on Portsdown Hill near Portsmouth in Hampshire. Not sure if the demolition of this one is complete yet but it is certainly underway. I also worked here for a time, it had excellent views across the Solent.

Marsham Towers looks great in that photo - the scaffolding bookends add a real weight and sense of orwellian government menace. Can imagine how dingy they'd have been irl though, Elizabeth House at Waterloo is similarly dilapidated - and due for demolition in current regeneration plans.

This thread is making me revisit all my old Civil Service workplaces.

http://landmark.lambeth.gov.uk/siteimages/pic05/fullsize/04542.jpg

Lambeth Bridge House, another Department of Transport building. Demolished in 2001.

I'd love a 3d model of the Tricorn. Personally I dig that shit but I can see how it garnered such a bad reputation. Otoh in some aspects it's not dissimilar from the Barbican, and that's pretty well loved. (Wondering about a separate "Brutalism, C/D" thread now...)

The Barbican was hated by almost everyone for a good 30+ years.

Seems a shame Preston Bus Station is apparently being demolished. i must admit to never having seen it first-hand- anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Preston_bus_station_232-26.jpg

i think, no? it's reputation only started to revive in the last 10 years or so.

oops

http://www.placenorthwest.co.uk/assets/_files/cached/img/402x270.09375/jan_10/pnw__1264752626_preston_bus_station.jpg

I'd love a 3d model of the Tricorn. Personally I dig that shit but I can see how it garnered such a bad reputation. Otoh in some aspects it's not dissimilar from the Barbican, and that's pretty well loved. (Wondering about a separate "Brutalism, C/D" thread now...)

Give you a clue - one's full of rich people.

^^^

yeah but the reasons why the Tricorn were hated were largely practical rather than aesthetic – it was badly constructed, dark and damp, and towards the end it was literally falling apart. I can get behind it as architecture but if a building doesn't function properly then it's no good to anyone

Yeah that's more or less where I was coming from.

Rich people comment otm too, I don't know for sure how the Barbican's fortunes and favour have waxed and waned over the decades but it was designed for young professionals, rather than as social housing, unlike the once very much deprecated and now definitely rejuvenated Trellick Tower.

The Tricorn was also, if I remember correctly, strangled by a ring-road and largely inaccessible by foot, unless there were underpasses. Obviously it was neglected but I went there once near the end and it genuinely did appear to be huge and empty and possibly containing a fair few drug addicts and the odd sad-looking pet-shop still hanging on in near the entrance.

Here's the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, now absolutely terrifying, nearly empty and part-demolished, when it was new:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3240/2614575877_693defba83.jpg

Weird to look at these places when they're new and shiny and look like architect's drawings.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3153/2614575341_cbcf4c1d19.jpg

amazing photo

it's funny that so many of these are Brutalist structures. or, it isn't funny or surprising, really, but i've always found distaste for Brutalism rather perplexing, as i find many Brutalist structures rather striking and beautiful. but then again, i think that i am spoiled by memories of my university's library.

My love for Brutalism did take a while to develop. On moving to London I was probably kneejerk-negative about the National Theatre, now it's my favourite building.

I need a sensible book on the causes of decay in post-war housing estates, stat. Presumably social/economic factors far outweigh any of the supposed downsides of these structures.

there's nothing perplexing about hatred for brutalism. a lot of shitty tower blocks scarred cities, communites and individuals.

How can an individual be scarred by a tower block?

jed, i get you, and know my architectural history re: the scarring of cities and communities.

still, you seem to miss the caveat, which is that i find the hatred perplexing because 'i find many Brutalist structures rather striking and beautiful.'

Of course I would move out of my flat in a four storey block into a house at the drop of a hat..

http://home.freeuk.net/timarchive/assets/images/Mosley_Westgate_House_LS.jpg

Yet another government building I did time in, Westgate House in Newcastle, demolished in 2007.

by living in one? by being moved from your glasgow tenement street which was being demolished and dumped in a badly detailed concrete tower block with damp walls and condensation on the windows all year round? by being surrounded by people you don't know and don't have the chance to speak to?

table, i got what you said but it barely counts as a caveat re. people's hatred of brutalism. it's only a caveat in that it says why you don't hate it.

i get all that, but

a) what were the conditions like in those tenements?
ii) damp walls etc are of course a problem but not a direct function of any particular architectural style
3) why couldn't they speak to their neighbours?

ah, yes, right you are. i will mourn the day that Mudd Library in Oberlin is demolished. love that building.

tenements were on the whole notoriously crowded and insanitary
brutalist tower blocks were on the whole notoriously badly detailed and constructed
moving families and individuals from tenements to tower blocks on the whole notoriously meant being rehoused amongst many more people probably strangers and a feeling of being removed from the street and communities

ledge, you don't think that people can be scarred by living in a tower block? i spent a lot of my life in one and i wasn't scarred but i was in a good one. it was structurally sound, quiet and had community facilities, communal laundry rooms etc.

but most are quite bad and have zero facilites and were build on vast out of town areas with no shops (ok this is an infra structure problem but the two are interrelated). what about older people who were brought up in tenemental streets and moved to the 13th floor of a tower with a lift and four flats on a landing with no real way to get to know anyone. we are all more isolated now but street life in communities and knowing most of your neighbours meant a lot in those poorer areas. *of course* a huge number of those demolished communities were essentially slums but it seems strange to not see how a transformation like that that could scar an individual.

and like matt said about the tricorn centre, or similar, if you have to access a building you use daily through an ill lit underpass well, that can be scarring too in its own way.

i'm essentially on the same side as you but the dark side of it had very bad effects. not that it's being replaced by anything better, on the whole.

"and like matt said about the tricorn centre, or similar, if you have to access a building you use daily through an ill lit underpass well, that can be scarring too in its own way."

i mean, even if it's just to go daily to the bus station, for example.

well, speaking of deposed buildings as well as housing projects and tall buildings, Minoru Yamasaki is perhaps the only architect whose two most major architectural works were destroyed: the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis, MO (destroyed 1972, ushering in the postmodern era etc. etc.), and of course, the Twin Towers.

Like I said, I do get most of these problems, but I think a few things are being conflated, to the detriment of Brutalism as a style. The shoddy construction, and lack of attention paid to environmental aspects e.g. as detailed in the icebox/greenhouse nature of the pimlico school above, were a terrible shame, but (to repeat myself) not a fault of the style, although of course when the two tend to go hand in hand the association is obvious and compelling. And as for the lack of community, I don't see why there would necessarily be more of a disconnect from ones neighbours and the street than one would get in a five-storey tenement block. You say lift like it's a bad thing, but if I were a pensioner I might rather go up 13 floors in a lift than 5 on the stairs. A broken lift that smells of piss might be less appealing, but again other social and economic factors are at work there.

Old Chicago Main Post Office:

1932:

http://archpaper.com/uploads/image/old_post_office.jpg

Now:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Old_Post_Office.JPG/800px-Old_Post_Office.JPG

Apparently they're working on renovating it.

I feel the same way about the brutal beauty of a lot of this stuff. at its best it can be soul stirring. e.g. i've seen Unité D'Habitations in Marseilles and Berlin and stayed in the Marsielles one overnight.

xp one of those looks a lot bigger than the other...

looking at it the other way

chicago post office reminds me of something very obvious:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battersea_Powerstation_-_Across_Thames_-_London_-_020504.jpg

i feel like i'm being called to denegrate a lot of stuff i actually like but

The shoddy construction, and lack of attention paid to environmental aspects e.g. as detailed in the icebox/greenhouse nature of the pimlico school above, were a terrible shame, but (to repeat myself) not a fault of the style

indeed it is a fault of the style, what else could you blame it on? The style is not just the abstract visual impact, the brutality and severity of the shapes themselves but follows through from planning right down to window detailing. It's all part of the style, and *they* made it all one thing, deliberately so. because those architects, took their inspiration from Le Corbusier, mainly and he advocated a lot of that kind of destruction of cityscapes to build "streets in the sky". The Problem was that barely any of them knew hot to make them, plan cites or schemes let alone detail a window!

and even Le Corb's attempts at it were mostly unsatisfactory experiments. Furthermore The Unité is glorious, absolutely, but its located in the baking Marseilles sun. Believe me, concrete looks a hell of a lot better against an azure sky than it does against grey clouds and after it's been piss-rained on for three days on the trot. also it doesn't exactly perform so well either. and what else? maybe those metal window frames and flat roofs Le corbusier made weren't such a great idea either 1500 miles north of Marseilles. Beleive me these faults are the faults of The Style because The style said yes, we can do all of these things. But they couldn't. Its easy in hindsight to say that but true nevertheless. They tried! not to denigrate all of them.

And as for the lack of community, I don't see why there would necessarily be more of a disconnect from ones neighbours and the street than one would get in a five-storey tenement block.

this is ridiculous, sorry. we're talking about poor communities and, as i said, street life meant to much to those communities, that is not just nostalgia, it's a fact. they can have as much green space round the base of the flat as they like, it's not the same as living on a street and knowing your neighbours.

You say lift like it's a bad thing

as i said, i lived a lot of my life in a block with a lift. a lift is a good thing. a piss stained lift is a very very bad thing but it's not the fault of the style that they didn't put urinals in them.

I'm not defending brutalism so much as tower blocks... for all that in Ireland and Britain (maybe to a lesser extent in the Britain) they are a byword for hellish living, lots of people in other countries seem happy enough to live in them. OK, there are tower block developments that are by-words for social problems on the Continenet but there are many others that seem genuinely to work as unproblematic living space that have a certain actual community to them.

So I think there is either problem with the people who ended up in tower blocks in Britain and Ireland or maybe something unique about the physical design of our tower blocks as opposed to the ones in Spain, France and Germany. But who knows.

as jed says climate is pretty key esp with the corb-inspired here-is-a-universal-building-that-can-work-as-well-in-a-desert-as-in-a-northern-european-city attitude

(Pedant mode: 'streets in the sky' is primarily a Team 10 thing (Smithsons, Van Eyck et al), not Corbu.)

I get both sides of this, because there were faulty assumptions among architects about, eg, the desirability of exposed concrete in a northern climate, and more importantly the entire urban planning ambition to tear down the corrupt old city and build the new towers-in-a-park etc etc. (Worth noting that Barbican, for example, is smack in the middle of town, although not seamlessly tied into the surrounding street network...I think this helps it immensely. My personal favorite of the London ones is Alexandra Road - how's that one managing, socially?) But at the same time, I agree that blaming the architectural style for all the failings of (some of) the postwar housing estates is a bit myopic. I'm coming at this from an American perspective here - our big housing projects were planned on staggeringly minimal budgets and were conceived in the main as a way of kicking undesirable, poorer blacks out of inner city neighborhoods that were desired for office space, highways, stadiums and what-have-you. In that scenario, does it really matter if the building is clad in beton brut, factory-shed brick, or prefabricated neo-Gothic tracery- the buildings were going to be leaky, ill-maintained, and socially disrupted regardless. That's down to politicians and technocrats generally, not architects as such. There's an interesting article on 'The Pruitt-Igoe Myth' which documents how few of the major design features of Pruitt-Igoe where actually left to the architects by the time it got to them - the site plan, number and size of buildings, etc., had all been fixed by the bureaucracy.

Architects, of course, LOVE to believe that it was all their fault, as it (a) suggests they have enormous clout and capacity to change the world while (b) providing a convenient excuse to not try to do so- look how badly we screwed things up last time and so on.

The shoddy construction, and lack of attention paid to environmental aspects e.g. as detailed in the icebox/greenhouse nature of the pimlico school above, were a terrible shame, but (to repeat myself) not a fault of the style

this is frying my brain. the style was built on these ideas, you can't disconnect them. "Fenêtre en longueur", i.e. walls of glass (essentially) was one of Le Corbusier's five points towards a new architecture. the pimlico building looks (looked) the way it does because of the style and it doesn't work because of the style.

Le Corb started "streets in the sky" with the unité and intended to roll it out too. the name may have come later as you say but i imagine it was only a team ten thing in that it was an extension of Le Corb's idea.

CBR Building in Brussels is apparently on the chopping block.

https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/34746455_1410096875802208_1678301738412539904_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=07c9eba7cc63e915e4746cee9d3d2fba&oe=5BADB53A

More pics here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:CBR_Building_in_Brussels

Like a giant cheesegrater full of liquid bronze.

was talking about this on flickr a while back - this particular type of bronze-colored reflective glass is rare among late-modern/brutalist tics in having basically NO defenders, as of yet....

The Founders National Bank of America located in Oklahoma City. Designed by architect Robert Bowlby and completed in 1963. Photo: Julius Shulman

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/43342632_1541533439325217_6375721720749228032_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&oh=ec30bc000f12f914c0f1fcecfbf26257&oe=5C55E972

And today:

https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/43384937_1541533419325219_5432836091285602304_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&oh=8e3d2802e9fb281461a55e4d25e7af27&oe=5C6330D8

;_;

what the fuck

an outrage

couldn't they find someone to stick a McDonald's in it

savages

, disgusting

I dunno. Lose the arches and it looks pretty much like any other branch.

https://i.imgur.com/m7EzBQ0.png

I dig that building in the background though.

https://i.imgur.com/XBJBZea.png

While undoubtedly controversial, I think the addition of a bulldozer is a bold design element.

Developer tears down a Neutra, city orders him to rebuild it.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/City-requires-property-owner-who-demolished-13467909.php?utm_campaign=CMS+Sharing+Tools+%28Mobile%29&utm_source=whatsapp.com&utm_medium=referral&fbclid=IwAR2gEvEvHTM_VH7bmsHC7GF8q3b5gAvyuOhXa7fsPdJOCUL7T9m-YRdycuI#photo-16648644

Zillow of the house pre-tear down.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/49-Hopkins-Ave-San-Francisco-CA-94131/15131464_zpid/?fbclid=IwAR1QNX7XbsfklJwR6CodJTVKfVcD9PJ6ft4iE03FwAmt7BhYnHNGYXFaNXY

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/17/goodbye-to-gomorrah-the-end-of-italys-most-notorious-housing-estate?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

When finished, the corridors were narrower than planned, the tower blocks closer together and the proposed transport links and social spaces non-existent. The effect was to isolate hundreds of the city’s most destitute families without access to work in a vast concrete slum.

a familiar story, but like the parkhill flats in sheffield - despite all the failings of making tower flats that are dignified living spaces - it looks awesome.

Parker Center, Los Angeles, includes a 1-min time lapse.

https://urbanize.la/post/city-completes-above-ground-demolition-parker-center?fbclid=IwAR1GeaqYbn0AAmU-21u2S7i_Pv866kwUB_oa1Pg2YzcFdTwSnZea71fHNEI

Oh no! Now they're building it back up!

https://i.imgur.com/1XBShvV.gif

The ghost of William H Parker is powerful.

here's a nice wee video depicting the whitevale and bluevale towers which were taken down a few years ago.

they were glasgow and scotland's tallest buildings - or thereabouts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluevale_and_Whitevale_Towers

https://vimeo.com/169669169

30% of Glasgow's high rise flats have been demolished in since 2006. Next on the list are the Whitevale and Bluevale flats - Glasgow's so called Twin Towers. When they were built in 1969 they were seen as the utopian answer to the city’s housing crisis. 45 years later they are a dystopian nightmare after years of crime and neglect..Lights Out is a short film that comprises of 4 years of documentation, timelapse recordings and audio interviews with the first and last residents of the Twin Towers in Glasgow prior to their demolition. Photographed, directed and edited by BAFTA Scotland New Talent award winning filmmaker - Chris Leslie. Soundtrack by John Maxwell Hobbs.

a remember someone who had lived in the lower floors of one of the towers when it was still new and he was young telling me that there were huge cracks up his family's living room wall, so no expense was spared clearly!

must admit some of the views look amazing

always remember them from visits to CP - we used to park opposite

Whatever you say about how fucked up and corrupted and incompetent many UK social housing projects were in the 50's/60's, at least there was a will to actually build them.

xp. i always get to one game at cp when I'm home and walk into town down the gallowgate and I'm still not used to those big behemoths being there.

if they'd actually built them well and thought about the social cohesion and community aspects when moving folk then they could've been a success i reckon

The Zack House by Craig Elwood burned by the Getty fire in Los Angeles.

https://www.facebook.com/KCMODERN/photos/pcb.2525595454199945/2525593230866834/?type=3&theater

An MCM in the So Cal desert is slated for demolition. Probably unavoidable as I can't image anyone with the money to restore it would want to live out there. The "Hilltop House" in Apple Valley.

https://paradiseleased.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/newts-paradise-apple-valleys-spectacular-hilltop-house/

"Marcel Breuer's first binuclear house, Geller I in Lawrence, New York has been demolished in the dead of night."

https://docomomo-us.org/news/marcel-breuer-s-first-bi-nuclear-house-is-demolished

This is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. (Detroit, MI) pic.twitter.com/OHBjTOKuJI

— Hayden Clarkin (@the_transit_guy) July 6, 2022

?

"On the subject of tower blocks, streets in the sky, etc, I suppose soon we'll be able to add the Aylesbury and Heygate estates to this thread. So far I think only one of the buildings has been demolished."

I remember the Heygate Estate - it was popular with photographers and film-makers. I remember the final gun battle in a film called The Veteran was shot there. It felt odd because the estate was often portrayed as a drug-ridden hellhole, but the few times I visited there was almost nobody about and it was actually quite pretty because it was being reclaimed by nature.

https://i.imgur.com/K7cKTqY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/BlBGVao.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/a8Ygn7O.jpg

At least it's now still buildings, although they aren't finished and I imagine they aren't cheap:
https://goo.gl/maps/89bAH1MpQzE59NsY8

Top Gear (or whatever the new one is called) did a show that featured that Detroit garage - it was an early 20th century theater that became a concert hall that became a garage IIRC.

I did whippets behind this one in San Francisco:

http://photos.cinematreasures.org/production/photos/170048/1465168115/large.jpg

"In addition to the main sanctuary building locally known as The Egg, there are a trio of additional buildings on the First Christian Church campus, all designed by Conner & Pojezny."

Oklahoma City

https://www.archpaper.com/2022/09/oklahoma-city-egg-shaped-first-christian-church-demolished/

Booooooooo!

most thin shelled concrete buildings won't last 100 years tbh

Chris Martin Tears Down John Lautner’s Garwood Residence

https://www.dirt.com/gallery/entertainers/musicians/chris-martin-house-malibu-teardown-1203603490/garwood3/