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

Below a belated write up of our B&B daytrip to Barking before Christmas...

Sunday 6th December 2009: Barking Town Square, MUF Architecture/Art/+ Peter Barber Architects - Tanner Street Gateway

There's a fairly full description of this scheme in a November issue of BD online giving a good overview of MUF's approach to the landscaping of this newly created series of public spaces.

The most notable features are a fake-old folly which terminates the end of a piazza (and screens off the back end of a delivery yard) and a dell-like wooded area, which brings to mind some forgotten,non-picturesque fragment of Hampstead Heath.

Fronting the latter is a raised 'stage' which is rather crudely put together and both dell and stage are ringed by hurdle-like barriers 'protecting' the patches of wooded ground or keeping you safe from some fairly unthreatening little slopes.

There's also a concrete tree stump housing a water fountain (presumably for children as it's aperture is too small for an adult head), and an Alice in Wonderland chequer-board floor to the arcade fronting the re-vamped library building.

Despite Muf's apparent determination to embed their work into the hearts and minds of those who use or experience it, Barking square feels oddly alien - even aloof and it's quite easy to imagine the whole thing reassembled in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern and somehow making more sense there.

The other question our visit raised in my mind is why a firm with sufficient stamina and self belief to persist in what, over the years, must have been a pretty unsupportive climate, haven't executed here with more conviction, either in terms of detail or the weight of the conceptual punch.

The new buildings surrounding all this seem generally to scream out for more funding, or simpler detailing and it the only uplifting image I was left with on my camera for the whole trip was this council run sports centre which at least sits comfortably in it's own skin.




On our way back to the station we also took a turn around the Peter Barber designed Tanner Street Gateway project where three mid-size slabs of social housing have been replaced by 2.5 street's worth of terraced 'dwellings' - which is an urban planning point bluntly put - and one which I would guess demostrates accurately the temperature of the times.

What this appears to offer over it's bulldozed precursor is safer communal space (ie overlooked streets) and a reduction in the impact of antisocial behaviour (of the weeing-in-the lift/loitering in the stairwell type) though whether you buy into the former may depend on whether you can think of any streets you've ever avoided walking down.

For me the reality is that these are really quasi-streets - being considerably narrower than those which neighbour the development and with no front gardens, hedges, fences etc to define the private realm. And while opening your front door directly onto the street worked when the only traffic was the rag and bone man, these ones unsurprisingly, are full of cars - both parked-up and in motion.

All this may or may not point to the irony that, having pulled down three large residential blocks it's then quite difficult to shoe-horn the same number of people back into a couple of terraced streets....

Jan 21st - London

Photographer Jamie Barras has collected (and, crucially, annotated) rather decent photos of buildings in London for every decade since 1840...which makes interesting comparative viewing and has helped me put (architects') names to a lot of buildings I've seen over the years but never properly identified. (Jamie Barris Flickr Site)

17th Jan 2010 Farnham, Surrey

You'll need to zoom in on the photo but here's what I like about this...

1. dark window frames
2. brick soldier course 'plinth' - even though i'm not sure it's working very well
3. chamfered brick on edge window cills
4. the way the side gate is surrounded by a kind of flying buttress which morphs seamlessly into the facade
5. funky font and random positioning of '13' and 'Flat 1' - and that it's black
6. blackness of the roofing tiles.
7. corbelled eaves gable
8. the way the party wall projects up in a highly positive manner and the jagged lead flashing

If I were commissioned to tidy it up a bit here's what I'd do:

1. change the front door and paint it black
2. have a look at what's going on with that lead panel above the front door and paint those three horizontal bars black
3. paint the gate to 'no.4', you guessed it, black (and change their letter box)
4. change the velux for one of these.
5. do a stepped lead flashing on the other party wall
6. move the bin out of shot before taking the photo for my portfolio

ROMAN HI-TECH

I am extremely proud of having found this building in Rome (area Pyramide) and would lay down a challenge to all comers to find anything remotely like it in the rest of the city....which possibly proves something Terry Kirk points out in his very useful guide to 20C Italian Architecture..which is that while Milan was open to rationalism & technology for it's post war architecture , Rome wasn't so keen - preferring to keep faith with ideas based on mass and monumentality* instead. (More images here).

STILO INGLESE

The area in Rome where I stayed over Christmas is about twenty minutes walk from the historic centre south of the Tiber, is almost entirely residential and, I'd guess, began to be developed in the 1930s.

It's typical structure is the apartment block between 5 and 8 storeys high, squarish on plan, sometimes with parking below but often not. A block might have fifteen flats in it and these blocks follow the streets, which follow the hilly ground.

While it all works well enough (apart from the desperate lack of parking) there's precious little to point a camera at either, so I was glad to find this - which I am told was quite well publicised when built - and which now functions as an old people's home on the lower floors and private apartments above.



Anyone who saw my photos last month of Lockyer House in Putney will no doubt be immediately struck by the connection.

QUANTO SEI BRUTAL!

Lastly, a big hulking chunk of raw concrete in the form of the Lyceo Scientifico Statale 'G.B.Morgagni' which demonstrates the sublime marriage of verdure, concrete and decay as well as the tendency brutalist architects have to use a particular colour of blue for their entrance gates (see here for another example of this little known phenomenon).

And if anyone has a picture of a knobblier bit of bush hammering, then I'd like to see it.

*Kirk sites Rome's Fosse Ardeatine war memorial as being a key example of this Roman monumentalism.

Additional images of all of the above buildings can be found on my Flickr site and I apologise in advance for the quality which does't by any means do them justice. From now on I take the proper camera.

B&B02: Friday November 20th 2009; Sampson House, 64 Hopton Street, London SE1, Fitzroy Robinson Architects

This was actually the second choice for this months B&B, the first being the charming Mondial House on Upper Thames Street, which turned out already to have been raised to the ground. See here for the full, gruesome story. Not that Sampson House suffers by comparison.

image courtesy of Willster K

image courtesy of Stephen Richards

A true mega-structure, it's about as big as the Bankside Power Station if you look at it it from space - and oozes unexpectedly, eerily, out between much lower buildings on the Southwark Street side.

The Pompidou in Paris was being built around the same time and they have a similar, alien, presence at ground level - which is interesting considering their utterly different ambitions - but rather than Pompidou's oil rig chic, SH presents as a massive gothic fortress....with acres of lead sheet, arrow slit windows and soaring ribbed concrete towers at each end...all handled with great gusto and creating - particularly at night, a rather mysterious and dreamlike effect.

image courtesy of Stephen Richards

B&B01: Friday October 16th 2009: 66 St.James's Street, London SW1, Tripos Architects

photo courtesty of Jamie Barras

The Brutalist connection here being that it was designed by Rodney Gordon, architect of much fine, derided and increasingly, demolished, true Brutalism (Tricorn Centre, Trinity Square Car Park etc). See here for a good Gordon primer - sadly his obituary.