AArkitekt magazine

� State of British HousingThe ubiquitous terrace is fast becoming fashionable again

� Cannistraro on SANAAIn depth analysis of the studio’s latest designs and its future

� Interview with LivingstoneViews on architecture and civic planning in higher education

Issue 146 / June 2010 / British EditionGBP £8 / EUR €11 / USD $10

REVIVAL OFBRUTALISM?Tom Joplin examines how changing attitudes could pave the way for Neo-Brutalism

South Hill Park is a middle-class dream. It is quintessential Hampstead: a leafy avenue with the heath on all sides. Its huge brick terraces are crammed with North London media types keeping up appearances behind furiously twitching Cath Kidston curtains. And the house prices are enough to make you wince. Perfect. Well, not quite.

Number 78, to many locals, is the worm in the apple. No 78 is concrete. Very concrete. In fact it almost revels in its very unHampstead concreteness, with rough, muscular, bunkersized slabs that don’t even nod good morning to the neighbours, but glower at them. Its roofline, low and flat, cold-shoulders their pitched roofs. It looks unfinished, awaiting its pretty facade. But this is it - solid, brutish, without a care for the delicate sensibilities of Hampstead. There’s no other house like it in Britain. I love it. »

The Tricorn Centre, the South Bank...

No one has a kind word to say about

the brutalist concrete experiments

of postwar British Architecture.

Except, that is, for Tom Joplin

HOORAYFOR

CARBUNCLES

16 / Arkitekt / June 2010 / Feature

FEATURE

Architecture Review

Feature / June 2010 / Arkitekt / 17

Who put this abomination here? Brian and Margaret Housden, an awfully genteel pair as it turns out, dressed in tweed and twin-set as if permanently primed for afternoon tea. When Brian, fresh from architecture school, started on No 78 40 years ago locals were aghast. “People kept coming to the front door and peering in,” he is able to recall, puffing benignly on his pipe. Housden’s inspiration was Aldo Van Eyck, a colleague of the Smithsons, who tried to build intimate spaces that felt more rich than they looked.

“Van Eyck called it deliberate ambiguity,” says Housden. “He wanted an evocative architecture which aspired to poetry. That’s what I’ve tried here.” He has decorated the house in symbols, quotes from Heraclitus, and sheets of glass lenses which fracture Hampstead Heath into a collage.

Many still haven’t got used to it. Think of the house prices! Quick unscientific poll of passers-by: three against (“looks like a prison”), one hurrying doctor for—”It’s fun. Look at all these boring ones up the street.” As far as Brian and Margaret are concerned, they are just exercising their Englishman’s right. And if people don’t like the, well, castle-like look of their castle? “They can look the other way,” chuckles Brian. He has a steely glint behind the pipe. “I don’t think they understand,” adds Margaret. “I can see how some people wouldn’t be able to live with it. All these browns and greys are a bit dismal, admittedly. But if you look close it glistens.”

People have been upsetting the neighbours with eyesores for centuries. Overcrowded Britain is spiritual home to the Nimby, battling against the modern, which, in whatever fornever quite fits in with some undefined, somehow “authentic”, green and pleasant British landscape. Britain has only just come to terms with white-walled modernism, thanks to 40 years of Terence Conran.

But the house at No 78 belongs to a breed of modernity that gets passions boiling like no other: postwar concrete carbuncles.

Concrete is still beyond the pale. So much so that, 20 years after the Prince of Wales’s infamous “carbuncle” speech, the carbuncles themselves, ironically, are under threat, like Victorian or Georgian architecture 50 years ago. This year’s highest profile victim was the Tricorn Shopping Centre in Portsmouth, whose elephant hide turrets, once so a la mode, didn’t suit the city’s shiny new image; it’s being demolished for a glitzy new model shopping mall.

Birmingham wants to demolish its Central Library, a spirited upside-down ziggurat that the Prince likened to an incinerator. The future of the Hayward Gallery, says the chief executive, Michael Lynch, is far from secure in his masterplan to polish up the South Bank. What to do with postwar architecture causes the most headaches at English Heritage, which raised the possibility of listing it in 1995. Concrete Brutalism is beyond the cutting edge of taste, not the kind of thing you’ll see on Restoration. Many find it difficult to think fondly about the kind of architecture once the very enemy of conservation.

It’s easy to hate Brutalism. It seems to conform so effortlessly to that hackneyed image of the ruined concrete jungle photographed in black and white, windows smashed concrete stained and dripping.

It was a very convenient image for those in the late Seventies and

Eighties keen to “prove” the failure of the welfare state. Here were the ruined monuments. Their ruination was often the fault of developers, architects and planners, pushing technology and a material which, despite being used by the Romans, was still in its infancy in Britain. But then we did need to repair a whole postwar country fast. More often, though. the failings were due to money.

Most Brutalism, though, was built as public space, and when public finances shrivelled up in the Seventies Brutalism was often left unfinished and unmaintained. The Hayward, for instance, was meant to be draped in hanging gardens, Pop Art neon and projections; instead, budget cuts slowly sealed off its walkways and terraces, leaving it a Cold War bunker. Only recently, with its walkways reopened, its concrete cleaned and a new entrance built by the artist Dan Craham and architects

‘Concrete is still beyond the pale 20 plus years after the Prince of Wales speech’

Previous page

Brian Housden

Clockwise from Above

Boston City Hall, Boston

National Theatre, London

Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth

28 / Arkitekt / June 2010 / Feature

perturbat (that which seen, affects the emotions). Brutalism is gutsy stuff. You have to get inside it to appreciate its sculptural forms, its tactile surfaces. This is architecture to explore like sculpture, to let yourself go in. Not something the British are awfully good at.

Most postwar avant-garde artists and architects saught a common form to express and salve their existential angst. Not the easy nostalgia of the past, nor the Utopian machine age rationalism of Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier, but something modern and traditional, collective and personal, a physical version of John Osborne and Lindsay Anderson’s anti-intellectualising plays and films, something speaking the language of the street. Banham called them “new brutalists” not because they intended us misery, but in homage to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut.

Rawness was all. The architects Alison and Peter Smithson called it

“the warehouse aesthetic”, whose exposed structure and honesty would communicate more directly with us. It was a modern version of Arts and Crafts. Some saw this new vernacular in the “primitive” adobe towns of North Africa; the Tricorn was called “casbah” architecture. Denys Lasdun created the National Theatre as an English hillside.

The artist Dan Graham likens it to punk. Without this form of expression, where the experience of the building is more important than its looks, we’d have no Frank Gehry, no Daniel Libeskind, no Zaha Hadid. Brutalism never went away; it just got better looking and learnt to sell itself. In Waterloo, neo-Brutalist apartments, concrete raw-and hard, by the fashionable architects De Rijke Narsh Morgan sell for £750,000, packaged as the height of urban gritty cool. In South Hill Park, No 78’s no eyesore. It’s a gold mine. END

Haworth Tompkins, has the Pop Art fun palace its creators intended started to creep back.

Like all good art, Brutalism divides opinions as it demands effort from you. Its avantgarde “inventors” wanted to build the kind of architecture that both challenged us and comforted us. It challenged because it was so - well - architectural. The chief apologist for Brutalism Rayner Banham, wrote in the Fifties how, even then, people “complained of the deliberate flouting of the traditional concepts of photographic beauty, of a cult of ugliness”. Brutalism was “anti-art, or anti-beauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word”.

Britain, in particular, has long promoted a very picturesque appreciation of architecture. But Brutalism replaced Thomas Aquinas’s idea of beauty—quad visum placet (that which seen pleases) — with quod visum

Feature / June 2010 / Arkitekt / 29

They’ve been the constant butt of jokes, the spiritual home of the pigeon-keeping, cloth-capped worker with flying ducks on his wall or the aspirational petit-bourgeoisie who cover theirs with stone cladding. But now the traditional terraced house is back, big time. In fact, some experts think these under-rated national treasures are poised to come to our nation’s rescue in our time of housing need — although not in the shape we’re used to. The all-new improved terrace is no two-up, two-down. It’s coloured bright acid yellow, or checked like a Pringle sweater. It might have a living room on the top floor and a roof garden above. It might be the home of rich or poor. And there’s definitely no outdoor loo.

The modern terrace is a far cry from drab Coronation Street. Now they’re all colour, balconies and carports...

They’ve been derided for years. We demolish them with barely the bat of an eyelid, or sell them for 50p a pop when times are tough. They’re so ubiquitous, I bet that if you looked around right now you’d spy one.

Today’s Terrace House is Playing it Smart

Clockwise from top left

1920’s Terrace Housing, Brighton

Aston University Student Housing, Birmingham

Fall at West Park, Wolverhampton

Birmingham Magistrate’s Court, Birmingham

Wolverhampton’s Parks

Wolverhampton’s parks are located around the city. In fact, within 30 minutes of walking from any point within the city limits, you could well find yourself at one of the city’s green, open spaces, or one of our fine parks.

Recently, two of our most interesting parks were awarded Green Flag status for the second year running. West Park and Bantock Park were also awarded the prestigious Green Heritage awards for the first time.

St. Peter’s Gardens was also awarded a Green Flag Award after being submitted for the first time.

The Green Flag Award scheme was launched in 1996. Any green space that is freely accessible to the public is eligible to enter for a Green Flag Award. Awards are given on an annual basis and winners must apply each year to renew their Green Flag status.

by Craig Soong

by Tom Dyckhoff

32 / Arkitekt / June 2010 / News

NEWS

The period called Georgian, is very roughly equivalent to the 18th century. Although the reign of George III extended into the 19th century, and George IV did not die until 1830, the style of architecture most commonly associated with the Georgian England are most strongly identifiable in the period 1730-1800.

With all those disclaimers established, what characterized Georgian design? More than any other period of English historic architecture, Georgian style is linked with the classical period of Greece and Rome.

Georgian Architecture: An Introduction

The average cost of university accommodation has risen by 22% in the past three years, according to the National Union of Students (NUS). The survey of 132 university and private sector landlords found the average weekly room cost had risen from £81.18 in 2006-07 to £98.99 in 2009-10. The NUS blamed the private sector for pushing up prices of accommodation. But property developer Unite Group said the private sector had invested more than £5bn in new student flats. It said without that there would be a chronic shortage of accommodation.

There are huge regional differences in costs, according to the NUS. Students pay the most in London where the average room costs £151 a week. In Northern Ireland, which is one of the cheapest places to live, it is just £68 a week. Unless the industry is better regulated, critics like the NUS say students will not be able to afford to live away from home for too much longer.

by Anna Adams

Student Housing Costs Up Sharply, NUS Survey Suggests

Victorian Architecture: A Primer

Architecture Review

by Jeffrey Jamesson

What exactly is a Victorian? Many people use the term to describe an architectural style. However, Victorian is not really a style but a period in history. The Victorian era dates from about 1840 to 1900. During this time, industrialization brought many innovations in architecture. There are a variety of Victorian styles, each with its own distinctive features.

The most popular Victorian styles spread quickly through widely published pattern books. Builders often borrowed characteristics from several different styles, creating unique, and sometimes quirky, mixes.

by Simone Agagda

News / June 2010 / Arkitekt / 33