Deposed buildings

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.

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 wasn't doing that (if you were referring to me) merely answering ledge's Q: "How can an individual be scarred by a tower block?".

Wow, i was sure that had more paragraph breaks before i posted it...eek.

The other thing is that by the 50s and certainly the 60s, modernism WASN'T really about the one-size-fits-all replication of Corbusian elements across the globe - there was a real attempt to develop particular local strategies relating to climate and social situation...just keeping concrete and mostly right angles as a signifier of modernity. Maybe this was the Acchiles heel in the North. But you see all kinds of invention within the language - the Swiss hillside terraces intended to preserve farmland and give everyone a view, the mat buildings proposed to knit their way in AMONG the old city fabric, Doshi in India fusing in traditional ventilation and shading strategies, and so on. Maybe some of these were more successful than others, but the popular conception (following Tom Wolfe, Charles Jencks, and I guess Prince Charles) that this was just a bunch of inexperienced zombies slavishly copying the works of the big hero architects is just not viable.

yeah no one is saying that today

The Corbusian point is for horizontal windows (intended to provide equalized light among other things), not walls of glass. Corbu did basically one full curtain-wall building, the budget for the ventilation got cut, it was an oven, and he started experimenting with other things. The Unite had a 'shopping street' level, yes, but 'streets in the sky' usually refers to wider, elaborate balcony-access schemes intended (no doubt witb misplaced optimism) to re-create the historic city street, eg in Park Hill, Robin Hood Gardens, or the Smithsons' unbuilt Golden Lane project. As such, they're both an improvement on the Unites (which have exceedingly dark corridors) and a serious break from Corbu on theory, as he would never have WANTED to recreate the messy vitality of the slums.

DC, can you post some pics or links to the swiss hillside buildings or the indian ones? i don't know them and am interested to see them.

aye walls of glass was the wrong thing to write i know well enough that it wasn't that.

the unite concept was more community geared than a shopping street level but you know

Will def post links after lunch - am on phone now so it's hard! The Swiss ones are really spectacular (tho they have their own share of failings)...

they have dark corridors in the unité because they were lit darkly, right? intentionally. i can't see the park hill streets in the sky as being an improvement since it did not work and the "streets" were ugly imo.

They are lit darkly but they also have no windows at the ends. I haven't been to Park Hill but they look great to me, so YMMV...I found the ones at Robin Hood Gardens just short of breathtaking when I visited this June - just this sense of striding along at the top of the world. Probably would be different if I'd gone in December to be fair!

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.

Just to pick up on this point again, I still don't get how living in a tenement block any more conducive to communal life. If your flat doesn't directly open onto the street and you only share common landing space with a handful of neighbours, this seems pretty similar to estate conditions.

tenement living less contained with more defined garden areas and had established communities broken abruptly in upheaval to new residential blocks jed and I may both have a particularly glasgowcentric pov in mind here

there's a difference in having a balcony outside to a street though, the width if nothing else, no neighbours opposite. and there would be less of a choice - i had friends all up and down the street when i was young, 5 in my class at school*, but if that was restricted to the nearest 10 houses i'd've been stuck.

* 2 of whom went on the set light to said school, but hey...

This is Owen Luder's thread.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2673/4040329058_b7e7b69a57.jpg

He did the Tricorn (and several other centrs under threat) and is still alive.
As is John Maddin, and if Brum city council get their way, his central library will have to be added to this thread at a later date, depressingly. As it is several of his buildings that I liked have already gone.
The Birmingahm Post and Mail
http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/typo3temp/pics/P_22ba9f68ad.jpg
and Pebble Mill
http://u.jimdo.com/www7/o/s0031f87db135fdc9/img/i7a36ebeeaca884c7/1279253596/std/bbc-pebble-mill-image-downloaded-from-birminghamuk-in-accordance-with-accordance-with-their-copyright-rules-see-acknowledgements-for-a-link-to-their-website.jpg

York House, Manchester
1911(!)-1974http://iloapp.manchestermodernistsociety.org/blog/a-z?ShowFile&image=1305845251.jpg

woah

! indeed

this is a great thread

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.

This is the one the NHS took over and is still standing afaik. I actually dreamt about this building the other night.

DC, can you post some pics or links to the swiss hillside buildings or the indian ones? i don't know them and am interested to see them.

― jed_, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 11:38 AM Bookmark

Swiss hillside bldgs, there are a number of these (most famous, maybe, is the Halen Sidelung by Atelier 5) - my favorite scheme is the one in Umiken by Atelier 2000.

India - most important figure here is probably B. V. Doshi (see for example his fabulous IIM campus in Bangalore), although it's also worth looking at the earlier, pre-PoMo work of Charles Correa, for example his thoughtful little Gandhi ashram museumin Ahmedabad. Doing a "fusion of East and West" is sort of a standard departure point for the first generation of Indian modernists, although personally I think it's more interesting and more broad-minded to see them as participating in the larger sweep of international Modernism's exploration of complex, locally-informed solutions.)

None of these, of course, have been demolished. :-/ The only big thing here in Columbus, OH that I wish we still had going is this thing:

http://www.cardcow.com/images/set92/card00279_fr.jpg

(The Christopher Inn, by Karlsberger Architects. 1963-1988)

BTW, those down with Brutalism as a style that produced some really fabulous buildings (every once in a while) should add Fuck Yeah Brutalism to their feeds. Lots of eye candy!

Awesome example of "the car is king" architecture.

Richard Seifert - of Natwest, King's Reach and Centrepoint towers fame - is a rich vein to be mined for this thread. To start, Draper's Gardens, at a shade under 100m the tallest building ever to be demolished in the UK! 1967-2007

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/6/76055876_1bd6d65b89.jpg

and a thoughtful article:
http://www.skyscrapernews.com/news.php?ref=648

wow, the same guy did the Command Module AND Centre Point?

He's probably more responsible for London's current skyline than any other individual! Check out his list of works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seifert

Limebank House, 69-98

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4071/4698132715_e32591a4cd.jpg

This is a great thread. Has there ever been a bad architecture thread on ILX? The Jed/Doctor Casino/et al commentary is icing on the (brutalist, tiered concrete) cake.

"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/