This conversion of a 1922 – 32 ‘grand manner’ building in Holborn started as a bid proposal to house the GLA (see City Hall) which was located at More London instead. But Alsop got a conversion job anyway, being commissioned to strip out its heart and convert the former insurance offices into 20,000 sq. m. of new office accommodation together with a health club and retail spaces at ground level. The ‘kerb appeal’ of it all is hidden away within two new atria of unusual section, inhabited by double storey ‘blob’ meeting spaces propped on legs like some mini version of Herron’s ‘Walking City’. It’s Peckham, Mecanoo’s Budapest bank, and Gehry in Berlin — quite cheerful and uplifting the dreary architecture of the average speculative office. But to see this kind of thing at its best (admitedly with less fashionable, ‘80’s Scandinavian styling) one still has to look at the interior of Erskine’s much under-rated Ark in Hammersmith.
77 Lindsey House on the west side of
Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Inigo Jones, 1640) was divided into two in 1751 and is without surviving interiors, but the outside gives a good idea of what was happening at the time, when such a fagade was a novelty in London. Strip it back and you have the basis of the Georgian London house front embodied in the building regulations of the C18. The key point about such designs is not only their intrinsic neo-Palladianism, but the very novelty of the idea of order and regularity that was meant to
spread along the street fagade and sweep away the remnants of medieval London. See it when you go to the Soane Museum.
George Street’s Royal Courts of Justice (in the
78 Strand, at its Fleet Street east end; 1871 – 82) are a familiar media image and a marvellous architectonic pile. As a project following a ‘thorny and troublesome’ path (as Wagner characterised architectural endeavour), the project was similar to St. Paul’s, the Palace of Westminster, the current British Library, etc., exhausting Street (who drew most details himself and died in 1881).
Plonked down into the heart of Georgian Bloomsbury, Patrick Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre project 79 arrived in 1972 like an alien ship: complete, almost fully formed and demanding of its own ‘living space’.
Conceived by Patrick Hodgkinson with Sir Leslie Martin, 1959-72, the complex was intended to stride further north, to have private tenants, and to have other features such as glazed covering to the pedestrian deck. Intended as a demonstration, high-density/ low-rise urban block, it is rather flawed, but will always have an important place in London’s architecture. But whatever merits the scheme had, they did not include respect for what existed or any attempt to ‘knit into’ the existing urban fabric. In fact, one is reminded of Hans Hollein’s contemporaneous drawing of an aircraft carrier nestled in a hilly landscape. Born in a climate of progressive big thinking by angry young men who preferred buildings to impose their own infrastructure rather than accommodate themselves to an existing one, Brunswick was truly a Modernist manifesto preoccupied with new ways of living as opposed to the hierarchical values believed to be implicit in the Georgian terrace.
This was especially true with regard to the most fundamental point that Hodgkinson was attempting to make: that low-rise / high-density could work as an alternative to tower schemes set in a parkland (as occasionally happened) or an urban wilderness (the usual reality). He was also attempting a mixed-use /mixed classes scheme that flew in the face of a current planning orthodoxy and its concerns to separate and zone.
Unusually, the project started off as a (then) rare example of mixed-use, speculative development. It ended up as another complex of single-class social housing and a not entirely successful project that has posed difficulties and problems to this day. However, the scheme made Hodgkinson’s name and he has been respected for it ever since. It’s worth comparing with the Alexander Road complex at Swiss Cottage (London Borough of Camden Architects, under Neave Brown, 1969 – 79).
The idea of a Visitors Centre and Archive Centre for both Guardian and Observer newspapers began with the need to house all original documentation from the papers’ histories, dating back to 1821 and 1791 respectively. A colonnade has been formed behind the existing brick fagade by removing and rationalising the jumbled assortment of openings. The key architectural elements occur in the three successive zones of the building, which become progressively more private on the main route through the building: the entrance area and a public cafe, which can be opened independently of the Newsroom; a permanent exhibition space bordered by a temporary space (which can be converted into a lecture theatre via a series of moveable partitions and a retractable seating unit); and highly environmentally controlled archive vaults which hold the original photos and paper documents. The third band of accommodation houses the more private education rooms, a study relating to the archive and ancillary areas. It’s worth a visit. This is Allies & Morrison at their best: when not swamped by commercial and instrumental values. (60 Farringdon Road, EC1; Allies and Morrison, 2002; Tube: Farringdon)
Bevin Court (1952 – 5) is a classic Skinner, Bailey and Lubetkin job (formerly part of Tecton): a ‘Y” shaped plan of 130 units, with splendid central staircase giving onto external access balconies. The fagade is of the kind that has become highly fashionable (an alternating pattern). There is also an unexpected entrance mural by Peter Yates
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This reinvention of a 1931 theatre is aimed at providing an intimate performance space with links to the local community. Its accommodation includes a new, large auditorium designed for watching dance performances and the refurbishment of the small, Lilian Baylis Theatre, together with an education centre, rehearsal rooms, etc.: a veritable community of facilities packed into the site. Internally, the designs are direct and functional, with an emphasis on simple finishes, glass and steel. Nicholas Hare Architects were involved as advisors on the exteriors. |