Lost London

[El_Greco]

^ but then...you love concrete monsters...

[Monters]

What you mean is that I am balanced in my appraisal of modern architecture, as opposed to being of the sheepthinking "prewar good, postwar bad" school.

Actually I like this thread because it shows there were fugly buildings in the olden days too.

FYI there aren't any concrete monsters in view in the "today" version odf the round building picture.

[wearethefuture]

Originally Posted by Monters

What you mean is that I am balanced in my appraisal of modern architecture, as opposed to being of the sheepthinking "prewar good, postwar bad" school.

Actually I like this thread because it shows there were fugly buildings in the olden days too.

FYI there aren't any concrete monsters in view in the "today" version odf the round building picture.

What about the building to the right? IMO that's what spoils that view, i think it would look a hell of a lot better without that concrete building on the right.

[Monters]

Hardly monstrous, is it.

[Joe 2007]

Originally Posted by Monters

I think this view looks better now. Alright the space is not brilliantly used at present, and round buildings as a rule are generally cool, but the old street looks cramped and the buildings to the right are dirty, tired and oppressive looking.

Your havin' a laugh arne't ya?
The buildings on the right were beautiful and imperial London architecture, and that looks like a stunning boulevard to me!. It makes me very sad seeing pictures of how great areas like this once looked, cosy, full of charm, elegance, and grandeur. It is a very old camera shot, which possibly gives the impression of dirty buildings, but then again London was a very foggy and Industrial place at that time, so what if they were dirty?. I'd rather have them there now than the ugly dross (apart from the church tower) that is currently there.

[Monters]

I am partially joking, but I do like the openness of the space now. The round building was lovely.

[the spliff fairy]

someone needs to do a bit of guerilla art and post pics up all over the city on what those streets looked like in the past. Biggest offenders methinks are Holborn, the Strand and Aldgate.

The problem is new buildings replace postwar modern tosspot ones, and noone knows what was actually forerunner to them in turn.

Thats the only way I can think of of getting public support for new buildings to look better than the old (lets face it which faceless multinational is going to finance rebuild rather than corporate box stylee). This happened most famously after the IRA bomb destroyed that gorgeous building where the Gherkin now stands. After having rebuilt it already and seeing it destroyed once again the general consensus was new build, but this new build had to be an improvement on what was there before.

A similar thing happened with the old Lloyds building and the fantastic new one.

In short we have to set our level higher, not to improve the look of the street from circa. 1968, but the look of the street from circa. 1938, before the war if were going to build anew.

[Monters]

You've got to remember, in defence of modern buildings, that cramped old chambers of the old style are next to useless for large scale modern commerce of the type that pays London's way nowadays. Big groundscraping concrete office blocks of the type seen all over London are what the citys modern walth is founded on. The shelter and space provided by the first generation of megablocks like Barrington or Bucklersbury or New Change or those around London Wall enabled the city to get back on its feet and assume world leadership after the second world war. It's inside these lumpy blocks, now so unloved, that our grandfathers and fathers and now us - three generations of City workers! - toiled to make London what it is today in financial services, broking, shipping, insurance, law. Three generations of Londoners worked, hoped, sweated, feared, saw good times and bad, drank to celebrate them both, burned the midnight oil, even fell in love; saw out the best part of their lives. Then in the bronzed glass and marble clad horrors of the eighties and early nineties - the Alban Gates, the 200 Aldersgates, designed built and wired for a computerised, open plan world - the post-big-bang city stretched its legs and found its stride, growing and spreading into the Canary Wharves, the Broadgates, the City Place Houses, becoming the envy of the world. I'm not defending the architecture, just observing that far from devastating London these buildings have given it economic life.

[Monters]

On another note, I'm struck by how few large buildings seem to have been completed in London between about 1992 and 2000. There seem to have been a few concentrated waves of building in London, roughly one per decade since WWII:

- mid to late fifties: Bucklersbury, Barrington, New Change, Atlantic House, bow Bells House, Fleet Building, CLements House and much of the rest of Gresham Street


- sixties and start of the seventies: London Wall, the Barbicam, Britannic House (now CityPoint), the original Paternoster complex, Puddle Dock & surrounds, Draper Gardens, CU Tower, 99 Bishopsgate, Winchester House (a high rise complex that stood where Deutsche Bank are at Winchester St/London Wall now), the now-abandoned-and-creepy Moorfields complex, numerous other hate crimes;

- a brief uptick at the end of the seventies (NatWest Tower, Angel Court, Mondial House hehe)

- late eighties and start of the nineties (Canary Wharf, Alban Gate, Embankment Place, 200 ALdersgate, Broadgate, City Place House, much of the rest of Aldersgate St, the delightful Milton Gate), numerous tastecrimes on Lower Thames St;

- post-2000: a surprisingly slow build up despite the prosperous times, but big developments include the expansion of Canary Wharf, CityPoint, 100 Wood St, More London, the stuff east of broadgate, around Appold Street, New Atlantic House, Plantation Place, the development around the Tower of London, now God knows what else.

I really struggle to think of any big projects completed between 1992 and 2000. The refit of 99 Bishopsgate after the bombing is one. The Bt centre just north of St. Paul's (St MArtins le Grand) may be another. The law firm Linklaters vacated old Barrington House in 1997 and moved into a refit at Silk Street; new Barrington House was opened in about late 1999 or 2000. That's it.

[El_Greco]

Originally Posted by Monters

You've got to remember, in defence of modern buildings, that cramped old chambers of the old style are next to useless for large scale modern commerce of the type that pays London's way nowadays. Big groundscraping concrete office blocks of the type seen all over London are what the citys modern walth is founded on. The shelter and space provided by the first generation of megablocks like Barrington or Bucklersbury or New Change or those around London Wall enabled the city to get back on its feet and assume world leadership after the second world war. It's inside these lumpy blocks, now so unloved, that our grandfathers and fathers and now us - three generations of City workers! - toiled to make London what it is today in financial services, broking, shipping, insurance, law. Three generations of Londoners worked, hoped, sweated, feared, saw good times and bad, drank to celebrate them both, burned the midnight oil, even fell in love; saw out the best part of their lives. Then in the bronzed glass and marble clad horrors of the eighties and early nineties - the Alban Gates, the 200 Aldersgates, designed built and wired for a computerised, open plan world - the post-big-bang city stretched its legs and found its stride, growing and spreading into the Canary Wharves, the Broadgates, the City Place Houses, becoming the envy of the world. I'm not defending the architecture, just observing that far from devastating London these buildings have given it economic life.

So what?Concrete buildings are still ugly.Knock them all down!

[the spliff fairy]

the same kind of living and dying, the successes and falls, blood sweat and tears were in the same old buildings for centuries before their destruction too. I abhor how St paul's used to be the bookmakers quarter and is now no more, not a shred - 6 million rare books went up during the Blitz, those institutions were replaced by the dross of 1960s Paternoster Square, in turn replaced by the LSE and er, M&S. Lost icons such as the Wool Exchange, the Bloomsbury squares plan etc. replaced by moneymaking concrete.

What Im saying is the living and the blood will always be there, itd just be nice that the form that that living takes place in is more evocative, detailed, a higher pedigree than cheap modernism where the building is no longer a positive, inspirational foil but a cold function (and in many cases not even that).

[Monters]

Originally Posted by El_Greco

So what?Concrete buildings are still ugly.Knock them all down!

Bollocks. You can't do modern commerce in old fashioned pretty buildings. You need big buildings with massive open floorplans and huge windows, and those aren't pretty.

Your lack of appreciation of the romanticism of any building, no matter how plain, shames you Sir.

[DarJoLe]

Originally Posted by Monters

I really struggle to think of any big projects completed between 1992 and 2000. The refit of 99 Bishopsgate after the bombing is one. The Bt centre just north of St. Paul's (St MArtins le Grand) may be another. The law firm Linklaters vacated old Barrington House in 1997 and moved into a refit at Silk Street; new Barrington House was opened in about late 1999 or 2000. That's it.

Recession, innit. I seem to remember the City seriously considering converting a lot of the empty office space into residential. But things picked up in the late nineties.

[Mr Bricks]

Originally Posted by Monters

Bollocks. You can't do modern commerce in old fashioned pretty buildings. You need big buildings with massive open floorplans and huge windows, and those aren't pretty.

Your lack of appreciation of the romanticism of any building, no matter how plain, shames you Sir.

Victorian buildings were/are often large with big windows etc. Another idea would be to construct big buildings and devide their facades into different sections so that they would look like many small buildings side by side.

Sort of like this, only more beatiful.

[El_Greco]

Originally Posted by Monters

Bollocks. You can't do modern commerce in old fashioned pretty buildings. You need big buildings with massive open floorplans and huge windows, and those aren't pretty.
Your lack of appreciation of the romanticism of any building, no matter how plain, shames you Sir.

Im talking about concrete crap.
I also hate glass boxes but at least they are not as depressing as concrete monsters.

And I hate modernism.Modernism ruined our cities.

[El_Greco]

[DarJoLe]

Originally Posted by El_Greco

I hate modernism.Modernism ruined our cities.

I wouldn't go as far as saying it ruined our cities, what ruined modernist architecture was a lack of understanding about human psychology and how you can't shoehorn people into certain environments. People tend to place the blame on the architecture, when in actual fact it was more society's failings (rising crime, fear of crime, lack of maintenance) that made the cheaper level of the architecture a failure.

Modernism was a direct reaction against the idea of a British empire, a nation ravaged by war was looking for something new, modern and fresh. Modernism gave them that, albeit for a decade or two.

[johnnypd]

it's simply rubbish to say that business cannot be conducted in old buildings. Look at Paris or the West End for instance. Or even The City, where hundreds of old buildings have been updated and refurbished to modern standards. And then there's old buildings whose facades have been retained so that their relationship with the historic street patterns has been maintained. Modern offices don't need to be Plantation Place, in fact there's very few buildings of that size around. If we're going to build a few of them, i'd rather they weren't built in the City and that the ethnic cleansing of what is London's true, mutli-layered and historic heart into an office ghetto stops.

As for Suomi's picture, the old buildings there actually look larger than the modern dross, and manage to mix beauty with solidity and permanence very well, whereas beauty doesn't seem to have been considered in the construction of the modern offices.

[Snowy]

Originally Posted by El_Greco

So what?Concrete buildings are still ugly.Knock them all down!

What, even Guys and the commie-blocks that you love?!

Come on, most ARE bad, but there are some which do look good, or at least have a bit of character. Centrepoint, the Barbican and the Brunswick Centre are modernist masterpieces. I quite like the National Theatre too.

I agree that most concrete buildings are hideous and should be demolished, but we needn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[El_Greco]

Originally Posted by SnowyBoy1

What, even Guys and the commie-blocks that you love?!

Where did you get that "love" nonsence from?Ive never said I love them.I actually wouldnt cry if Guys was demolished.I think I said that before.Same goes for commie blocks.
I hate modernism its ok to have few modernist buildings though but others must go because theyre crap.
I like Victorian/Georgian/Tudor etc architecture.End of story.