The architect’s brief for this supermarket was to design an inner-city supermarket that really wanted to be out-of-town. What the client got was a cranky and now ageing development with an aggressive note to it. In fact, its all rather admirable, although the battleship grey (latterly softened in some areas to greyish baby blue — a mistake, apparently) and grey aluminium cladding betray the technocratic concerns and military roots of Hi-tech — whicch, mixed with Sainsbury’s low maintenance standards and the love of Camden youth for graffiti, hasn’t engendered a lovable image. But it’s a clever design.
Grimshaw provided an entirely column-free shopping area, together with loading areas, administration facilities, underground car parking and housing along the canal, on the north side of the development. Two features stand out. First, the main facade makes an attempt to build up the massing of the supermarket shed and to provide a bay rhythm corresponding to the Georgian terrace of late eighteenth century houses opposite – a sound move, realised with the aid of characteristic Grimshaw structural acrobatics. Second, the terrace of maisonettes along the canal have only northern light (their southern side being directly onto the service yard), yet Grimshaw manages to cope well, providing a double height space with garage doors giving onto canal balconies (which frequently offer that key signal of domesticated contentment: flowers).
Located in the suburbs, one suspects the building would have been of higher quality and better maintained — which is a shame, because this scheme is still capable of being a real boon to Camden Town.
л л The fagade of MTV (Formerly TVAM – now MTV; Hawley Crescent, NW1; Terry Farrell Partnership;
42 Tube: Camden) was arguably once one of the most exhilarating in London – straight into an architectural tradition going back to Googie coffee shops of ‘50s L. A. and even the spirit of the 1950’s British Pop movement reinvented in latter-day terms: the converted garage reinvented as a metaphor of the rising sun, complete with a dark horizon (the base) and layers of diminishing textures rising into the sky. At the centre is a rising sun/arched entry, its ‘keystone’ scrawled in neon. The egg cups on the canal-side are fun but less successful. Inside, the original scheme was well-planned, but eclectic and thematically over-the-top and emphatically global locations from where the news was coming.
Just like those 1950’s Googie coffee shops in California, TVAM was here today and a memory tomorrow.
TVAM lost their licence and in came MTV who toned the whole thing down, stuck roundels over the TVAM logo at each end of the sweeping fagade, and generally ruined the whole thing in homage to good-designer taste. For a while Camden had the only pure Pop building in the UK. And it is still there, just beneath a surface of denial, out of fashion but nevertheless addressing the issue of the building fagade read as a sign. Meanwhile, its spirit is carried on throughout Camden High Street in the form of huge fibre – glass boots and similar features that increasingly adorn the run-down fagades of the institutionalised flea-market. Who knows, the old TVAM fagade might one day be resurrected as an act of retro.
As an aside, Grimshaw and Farrell’s careers have strangely paralleled one another since they broke up, both receiving knighthoods and, here in Camden, building next to one another. (See the Sainsbury supermarket.)
ло The Talacre Sports Centre is a sports /
43 community centre within Kentish Town from the practice that did the Indoor Cricket School at Lord’s. (Prince of Wales Road, NW5; David Morley Architects. 2002; Tube: Camden / Chalk Farm). It’s a good example of a local community building of this type.
ЛЛ The Isokon flats have an iconic status within 44 London’s architectural tradition: one of the few impressive examples of inter-war Modernism (Wells Coates, 1934; Lawn Road, NW3). The 22 apartment block is simply a walk-up, deck-access scheme of relatively small flats, financed by an arts patron, the furniture maker Jack Pritchard, and initially tenanted by (now) famous names, with the Pritchrad’s in a penthouse apartment. But its living attraction is clearly its formal, abstract qualities which are simultaneously a welcoming habitat. It seems like a complete gesture — especially now that it has been renovated — and architects love this image of wholeness and unity. We’re told that the current white paintwork dates from 1983 and the building was originally ‘pale greyish pink’ (sounds rather Po-Mo). Incidentally, both Denys Lasdun and Patrick Gwynne (see p.253) briefly worked for Coates.
ЛС Camden Gardens (Jestico Whiles, 1994), 45 is a difficult site opposite the Grimshaw housing on the Sainsbury site, with five villa-like apartment blocks (18 units) tightly squeezed onto it. Three villas face the street, and further accommodation provided in a terrace that faces onto the canal. Europeans might wonder what the big deal is, but (until recently) London has all too little of this kind of considerate housing.
46 CZWG’s Green Building in Camden (2001;
46 Jamestown Road, Camden Lock) comprises apartments above a ground floor of retail units. Unusually for such a location and building type, huge amounts of glass have been used — which certainly helps to lift an area that can sometimes be less than salubrious.
Having said that, it is worth nosing around the area, especially on the market weekend days.
A~j David Chipperfield’s studio (Cobham 47 Mews, NW1) is in a similar location to Arad’s – tucked away in a mews – but meaningful correspondence stops there. Chipperfield goes for a more cool, architectonic aesthetic, for a simple play on materials and abstract surfaces also evident in his designs for shops like Equipment (now closed) or the Wagamama restaurant in Soho. The Maison de Verre influence is again evident in the way the fagade cladding has been handled.
ДО The Burton house (1989), 1b Lady Margaret 48 Road, NW5, Kentish Town tube), is a two-person, timber-framed house by and for Richard Burton, of ABK. It is pushed against its northern site boundary, facing south in order to benefit from solar gain. But this is more than another timber-framed/ highly insulated eco-exercise: Burton manages to give his home extremely livable qualities that are totally integrated with the technical strategies.
Access from the ‘moon-gate’ is through a glazed access corridor (semi-open, as it were), off which are three rooms (study, living and kitchen-diner). From here, a stair goes to the bedroom upstairs. All this is supplemented by a garden studio pavilion and by an additional apartment for a member of the family — a splendid small grouping hidden behind Burton’s brick wall.
ДО This fine, two-storey Hopkins House, at 49a 49 Downshire Hill, NW3, was completed in 1975 and stood as an understated model of Hi-tech and eccentric living for many years (somewhat in the manner of the California houses built after WWII by Entenza, Eames et al, from which it drew inspiration).
The former came from its simple, 3.6 m span, steel and glass structure; the latter came from a home / work equation that optimistically placed a lot of reliance on louvres for spatial divisions, foreshadowing the latter-day enthusiasm for loft spaces and similar non-prescriptively defined spaces that are easily changed and adapted. The overall character is emotively ‘hot’ as well as shed-like in comparison with the calm elegance of the John Winter house.
ел St. Paul’s Church, Wightman Road, N8. (Inskip & Jenkins, 1993). The diagrammatic qualities of this church’s massing bear comparison with John Nash’s All Soul’s at Langham Place and, like the Nash church, it works. The key (as always) is context – in this instance, a hilly, Victorian domestic suburb, with pointed gables and dormers. The geometry gives the church a real presence and the simple interior is well handled. It’s not only the church’s name that draws a comparison with St. Paul’s in Covent Garden, but also its ‘barnlike’ qualities. There aren’t many contemporary churches in London, so it is worth a visit if you are in this area.
Cl These terraced houses built by Erno Goldfinger at 1-3 Willow Road, NW3 in 1938 (4C 44) are a
fascinating and intricate design that marries 1930’s Parisian avant garde values with design traditions informing the London terrace house that stretch back to the late 1600’s. In Goldfinger’s design,
Modernism as an ostensibly radical lifestyle found a place to root and nest within cosy Hampstead. Elegant living and salon conversations enthusing about Surrealism and socialist politics found resonance in spaces profoundly indebted to the good manners, tastes and support from the invisible servants of London’s 17th. c Georgian terraces. The fundamentals of their architectural form – especially the ‘vertical living’ between party walls (as opposed to a ‘horizontality’ between floors characterising Continental apartments) was enthusiastically taken up by this talented architect and his wife who saw no difficulties in attempting a synthesis of tradition with Modernism. No. 2 Willow Road epitomises a distinct period between quite different eras in England’s architectural history: between architectural traditionalists sceptical of the new ideas coming from the Continent and architectural values that were to be at the heart of a large post-war programme of urban regeneration; and also between pre-war and post-war social values. Here, in this small, pre-war family house in Hampstead, overlooking Hampstead Heath, the Goldfingers literally and demonstrably brought the issues home, set stylistic themes and standards that were to be copied by many post-war architects and lived a life that manifested the kinds of social changes that saw their servant’s quarters modified into a family apartment. Goldfinger’s own unit is now owned by the National Trust and is open to visitors. (Tel 020 7985 6166 for daily opening times and tours.)
С Q Camden’s rich legacy of social housing 52 from the 1960’s through to the mid – 1970’s is epitomised by this development of a hillside in Hampstead Village, tucked away in Branch Hill, NW3. Designed by a local authority whose programme gave young designers marvellous opportunities, this scheme (designed by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, 1970-77) bears reference to СогЬизіеґз beloved Mediterranean hillside villages as reinterpreted in Switzerland by Atelier Five.
Tucked away, this scheme is frequently forgotten. But if you are interested in housing,
Camden probably offers the best localised example of late 1950’s to early ‘70’s public housing, designed in a time when its team was rather prestigious and acclaimed for its work — the ways in which people live don’t change that much!