3 Willow Road, Hampstead, London NW3

Famous as the house Goldfinger built for himself and his family in 1938 it is the central house in a terrace of three. There was a major battle with the planners and local residents to get the houses approved - they replaced a terrace of run down cottages. Sounds as though conservation was the same big issue - the finishes probably reflect this in the use of brick (unlike the other white rendered modernist houses that were going up in Hampstead by Amyas Connell, Maxwell Fry etc). The rhythm of the front elevation is particularly nice.

by stevecadman on Flickr

It is smaller in scale inside than I expected, but having said that, a masterpiece of spatial organisation and storage planning: circulation spaces are kept small but well lit and brightly painted - a scarlet walled stairwell another surprise - leaving the living and bedrooms well proportioned and high ceilinged. Flexibility rules on each floor with dividing folding doors and spaces leading one into another. Fascinating to see the study where Goldfinger worked with all the job files still on the shelves.

Amyas Connell's Frognal House, front/flank view...

...and the back.

Detailing everywhere is high quality - my favourite being the steel door frame and architrave that is used throughout, plus the unobtrusive but generous storage designed in everywhere. The sense of it being a family home is very strong with as much thought given to the childrens' rooms and furnishings as to the main reception rooms. Light floods in everywhere and a sense of rationality and warmth pervades...enhanced by the collections of paintings, small sculptures and found objects etc that reflect the family's life.

Unfortuately we were not allowed to take photos of the interior, nor is it possible to get into the lower level as that is now used as a flat for the N.T caretaker.

For a very entertaining insight into Goldfinger see Gillian Darley's review for Nigel Warburton's book about him in London Review of Books.

Text and all images by Leo Noble except front view of Willow Road by stevecadman on Flickr.

I'm in a forest. I see trees.

Have been picking up some interesting links this week from Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG including an interview where Manaugh discusses the architectural side of J G Ballard's novels and a history of text-only adventure games, the link to which I'm afraid I can't now track down.

I was a big fan of this type of game in the 1980s and still find the idea of them, the language they used and the atmosphere they evoked to be quite mesmerizing. There seems to be a fair bit of commentary out there should you wish to know more but a talk given by one of the key game designers - Scott Adams - would be a good place to start.

One thing Manaugh observes in Ballard's work is how the settings are defined more by the lack of detail they contain than the quantity - or specificity - of it... and I think this applies equally to the world in which text adventures take place, where often very little is said and your imagination is allowed a greater liberty to invent than is the case, for example, in traditional descriptive prose.

Another good link I got from BLDGBLOG was to the Archigram Archival Project - organised under the auspices of the University of Westminster.

Now I had it firmly (and obviously erroneously) in my mind that Archigram hated architectural drawing, distrusting it's sinister charms and establishment wiles, whereas infact they were bloody good at it and created some wonderful images with their Rotring pens, and even some quite buildable looking curvy brutalism...Take this Ron Herron project, for example. Mondial House actually looked a bit like this.

Lillington Gardens, Pimlico, London SW1
Darbourne & Darke 1964-72

Partly by accident but nevertheless with a great sense of satisfaction... I recently stumbled upon a building which seems to explain a lot of the other bricky brutalist offerings collected here below, whilst being bigger and bushier than all of them put together.

Bit of background on the architects here.

Saturday 20th June 2010 William Whitfield Odyssey

Information on Whitfield seems pretty scant and if anyone can point me towards any books, websites etc I'd be grateful. The bare bones can be gotten here.

Below are images of four of his buildings in London, and you can see the full sets on the Flickr site.

1. Bessborough Street/33 Vauxhall Bridge Road

Think that's a Paolozzi.

Ribbed fascias/soffits with rounded edges in what looks like cast iron - super robust detail taken from the London Underground pattern book? (The entrance to Pimlico Underground station is contained within the building).

Facade of the long, narrow section of the building fronting onto Vauxhall Bridge Road.

2. Oriel House, Connaught Place, London W1R

Above, seen from Edgware Road.

3. Richmond House, 79 Whitehall, London SW1A

The familiar 'squeezed-in' frontage of the Department of Health

...and view from a side street suggesting there's quite a bit more of the building hidden from view.

4. Extension to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England & Wales. 1 Moorgate Place, London EC2R

A few building's I've been meaning to post on for a while, more images of each of which can be found here.

First the unmanned Falconbrook Pumping Station in Wandsworth which has the ubiquitous blue gates etc and I believe is still in operation. I say this because what, really, are the chances of it surviving for long without it's original purpose? But, on the other hand, if Urban Splash can take on Park Hill, why shouldn't George Wimpy make sixty four one bedroom flats out of this beauty?



Next up...a Miesian box near the Wandsworth Municiple rubbish dump (which will feature in it's own right on these pages shortly...)



And lastly Lockyer House near Putney Bridge. A very crisply detailed sort of brick-brutalism set around an attractive and quite spacious internal courtyard (pictured).

Brutalist Architect, London, circa 1974:

'You can have the gates and railings any colour you like so long as it's blue'

Sunday 25th April 2010: Container City I & II, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London E14

It's not quite a city but it is made out of containers. We nerdishly noted that the walls looked a bit on the thin side to meet current building regulations but didn't let it spoil our day. More photos of this project and nearby Robin Hood Gardens on Flickr.

B&B's first ever visit was to have been to Mondial House on the north bank of the Thames near Canon Street Station, but this didn't happen because it had been demolished shortly before. Below are a few bits and pieces related to MH, in no particular order of merit of consequence...

MH the music video...

www.Emporis.com ('the world's building website) credit the building to Hubbard, Ford and Partners and classify it as Brutalist.

Hubbard, Ford and Partners also built Cale Cross House, near Gateshead.

'The building was designed futuristically, with state-of-the-art concrete and white plastic cladding surrounding a huge building of 57,000 square metres. ' (BT founded 'ConnectedEarth.com')

'Watermark Place is the new 10 floor office and retail development designed by Fletcher Priest Architects for banking giant, UBS. The site is currently occupied by the infamous Mondial House, a 70s building shaped almost like a computer that was planned to have been the biggest switching house in Europe.' (SkyscraperNews.com)

Whilst in former Estates Gazette Editor Peter Bill's view the new Fletcher Priest design scheme is 'deeply undistinguished', he has this to say about Mondial House...
'The decision to take Watermark Place was both technical (two sources of power supply thanks to the legacy of the even uglier BT building, Mondial House, that used to sit on the site) and political: OK, let's all get everyone together in the one spot, even though it is not such a nice spot.

Wednesday 3rd Feb 2010.
Capital Studios. Wandsworth Plain, London SW18:

Property developer Minerva currently have a planning application at appeal stage for a large scale mixed use redevelopment of Wandsworth town centre involving the site of the old Youngs Brewery, a chunk of Buckholt Road and the land currently occupied by Capitol Television Studios. Collectively the scheme seems to be known as the Ram Brewery Development.

While bits of the brewery are to be saved and incorporated into the new plan, the flinty, brutish Capitol Studios is to be demolished which is, to an extent, a shame as parts of it have real character but, as a whole, the building does seem a bit of a mess... with an uncertain relationship to it's site and a pretty unresolved relationship between it's constituent parts (ie between the small scale entrance block and the large masses of the sound studios) and so I for one won't be mourning it unreservedly, should the wrecking ball swing...




Hard almost irridescent blue/red/black engineering bricks combine with rough(ish) concrete details and nicely modelled window reveals. And hey, isn't that another blue gate? Yes it is. So more proof that light blue is the only choice for your miscellaneous ironwork if you don't want to get laughed at by your brutalist architect friends.



Don't know how old the building is - would guess about 35yrs. If so this timber oriel window is bearing up well.




All the shots above are of the 'good' bit of the building, meaning the entrance/ reception block but if you wander round the site in search of more of the same...




....things get a little bit less convincing.

And there are no other elevations (the opposite side of the building to that shown in the image above is completely blocked from view by other buildings)...apart from the one below which could be a scene straight out of Jarvis Cocker's grimy northern imagination.


Totally unrelated - other than being nearby to the Capital Studios site - a small plot which might otherwise have been used for fly-tipping has been made over with brick paving in a pleasing way to create a worthwhile bit of public space.

Sunday 31st Jan 2010. Upper Richmond Road, Putney, London SW15

NICE BUSH.

These are actually quite spiky, and I wouldn't like to get tangled up in one, but I do like the generosity with which the line of commercial buildings pictured below offer themselves up to the street.

I also think they work pretty well en masse and, although variety is obviously the spice of life, I personally could quite happily imagine a whole district of this stuff, cascading bushes, recessed pointing, dark window frames and all.






Some draconian planning laws will be needed to achieve this of course, enforcing a strictly limited palette of materials, maximum building heights etc, which is all starting to sound a bit Poundburyesque...and is probably unhealthy.

THE POETRY OF THE LEAFLESS TREE

One lovely thing about this chilly and in many ways depressing time of year is the poetry of the leafless tree.

AND FINALLY...



Obviously this is the back of a building. Except it isn't. I checked.

Perhaps this nice mural is compensating for lack of refinement in the detailing elsewhere?




It seems today i've been holding my camera consistently about 1 degree out of level, and although i've been too lazy to correct this in photoshop i do promise to square my sh*t up next time