Deposed buildings

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.

There's talk of demolishing Antoine Predock's building at Cal Poly Pomona, built in 1994. Apparently circulation inside is horrible, it's dark, it leaks, etc.

http://la.curbed.com/uploads/2010_09_pomona2.jpg

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. The rest are abandoned with boarded-up windows, doors, and walkways. The council or whoever finally managed to force out the few remaining holdouts, it seems... for a while there were still people refusing to move well after everyone else had already left.

> it's dark

it does look like the architect has shares in a lightbulb company...

deposed builders

John Bancroft (1928-2011)

http://www.thecollectormm.com.au/gallery/postcards/1920s-1980s/slides/YarraView4.jpg

Melbourne. Those buildings in the foreground (Gas & Fuel Corporation Towers) were demolished almost 15 years ago. Not loved by anyone ever.

bizarre to build such a thing on a riverfront.

Christopher Inn looks alot like the Capitol Records Tower.....

It was razed almost a decade ago, but it's still hard for me to believe that the Capital Centre (a.k.a. The Building Shaped Like A Pringle) is just a memory. It doesn't seem that long ago that the building was almost new and held out as the state-of-the-art ultramodern stadium in town with all of the latest amenities (video screens! hot stuff in the '70s). If you grew up near Washington D.C., *this* was the go-to place to see your '70s and '80s arena-rock bands. Immortalized in the indie film "Heavy Metal Parking Lot". The parking areas were A Like seemingly everything in Washington D.C., it wasn't really in DC but rather an hour's drive away in Landover, Maryland, which was one of the main beefs with the place (except for people who happened to live near Landover, Maryland).

But what was contemporary in 1976 somehow was a dinosaur by 1997, when the main Washington hockey and basketball teams moved to a new stadium that actually was in Washington DC and had the all-important big-ticket luxury suites, and five years later after scant use for rock festivals and the like, the Capital Centre was imploded. A new shopping mall, also called Capital Center (now spelled the customary US way) was built on the old site, and it too is underutilized.

http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slideshows/909/slideshow_90938/display_image.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Kiss19790708.jpg

oops started to write "'the parking areas were all named after American symbols like "Eagle" and "Liberty Bell"' in above post, then decided that detail was too trivial to mention, but forgot to delete the first part of the sentence i started to write.... Bad me.

The Pan Pacific Auditorium
http://laist.com/attachments/lindsayrebecca/PPA_1937_LAPL.jpg

Ambassador Hotel
http://blog.allanellenberger.com/wp-content/uploads/ambassador.jpg

And too many others in L.A. to even list.

Penn Station
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Penn_Station3.jpg

http://www.docomomo-us.org/files/404x276xmaritimeunion.jpg.pagespeed.ic.9OzFpFEEr6.jpg

The National Maritime Union's Joseph Curran building, New York City. Later the Edward and Theresa O'Toole Medical Services Building of St. Vincent's Hospital. Albert C. Ledner, 1964.

Not yet flattened AFAIK, but as doomed as doomed can be.

More doomed 60s: Columbia Savings, Los Angeles, by Irving Shapiro, 1965. It had been used as church before being torn down 3 years ago.

http://lac.laconservancy.org/images/content/pagebuilder/15099.jpg

man, pictures of penn station. it is so terrible how they have pictures of old penn station in new penn station. idk if it is an attempt at atonement or if it is just the final straw intended to reduce people forced to spend time in the building into utter breakdown.

Haha totally. I believe there's a plan afoot to shift things around so one enters through the grand old post office building across the street. Which would be an ungodly expensive and complicated thing to do but some kind of sad, late compensation for what was done.

haha. that's total bait & switch! tbh it is just gonna turn the sadness of witnessing the decline of penn station into a one-two punch in which we also mourn the deterioration of the post office. it isn't closing or anything, is it? that you can go mail a letter at 11pm sunday night is one of those awesome uniquely nyc things to me.

Love that columbia savings/church.

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

Old news already but the Folk Art Museum building by Tod Williams & Billie Tsien is doomed, a scant twelve years since it was completed.

The Ambassador College Fine Arts and Science buildings, Pasadena, being torn down now for condos.

http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/51c0f6faf92ea14ad7034475/ambassador4.jpg

partnership house, waterloo, london, home of the church mission society and notable for its catchy slogan on the portico.

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/imageuploads/1309868174_80.177.117.97.jpg

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/161/433375046_65ef9d7f07_z.jpg

:(

Started being torn down yesterday in Los Angeles. Not a great one, but nice nonetheless.

https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/t1.0-9/10344840_10152488376575549_7133884080302667381_n.jpg

And more Moderne in LA under the hammer! Not yet demolished but threatened with it.

http://deadhistoryproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/9080-SMB_WurdemanBecket_Dog-Cat-Hospital-exterior-BB.jpg

More info/pics here.
http://deadhistoryproject.com/

The Windsock, Dunstable

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhZwtHOCcAEa9hw.jpg

(1971-1984)

Wow! Do I recall that being featured on one of Ian Nairn's roadtrip TV shows?