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September Publishing - Simon Phipps

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194 pages

English

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There has been a recent explosion of interest in Brutalist architecture.

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Architecture

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Publié par	September Publishing
Date de parution	30 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910463642
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	10 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

BRUTAL LONDON SIMON PHIPPS
First published in 2016 by September Publishing Text and photography Simon Phipps
The right of Simon Phipps to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
Printed in China on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Everbest Printing Co Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-910463-64-2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
September Publishing septemberpublishing.org
CONTENTS

5 Brutal London
11 Camden
35 Greenwich
45 Hackney
57 Hammersmith and Fulham
65 Islington
75 Kensington and Chelsea
87 Lambeth
103 Lewisham
111 Southwark
127 Tower Hamlets
143 Wandsworth
153 Westminster
165 City of London
179 Building Information
191 Further Reading
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BRUTAL LONDON

Growing up in Milton Keynes in the 1970s, alongside architect parents who d come to make their contribution to the emerging new town, proved somewhat underwhelming. There was not very much of the promised utopia of The New Town, just countryside, some existing villages and a few housing estates. But, among the fields and hedgerows, what began to fascinate and intrigue me were the rationalist geometries of the early modernist estates appearing amid the ever-increasing grid of roads.
Each of these new areas of housing was contained within a grid square of dual carriageway, meaning that entry as a pedestrian or cyclist was through an underpass. The ubiquitous Milton Keynes underpass, composed of in situ cast concrete, was minimalist and forcefully detailed, with walls of ribbed fins creating contrast and texture. These portals were to provide an auspicious frame to the architecture that lay beyond - a threshold of concrete and expressed form that I came to know as Brutalism.
It is unusual to encounter a building or arrangement of buildings all at once with no preview. The approach is usually mediated by glimpses offered from differing vantage points - along a side street, through some trees, a fleeting appearance from a train window. Transitory introductions tend to moderate expectation before the moment when a grainy thumbnail from a 1970s architectural almanac materialises into view. Usually there is an estate map, wall mounted or freestanding, stating you are here - the blocks and plan-form of the architecture, named and numbered, explore the boundaries of the vitreous enamel panel, much as concrete poetry investigates the page, emphasising the space between words and the word within space.
Dom Sylvester Hou dard was a Benedictine monk and a concrete poet, whose typographical works explore the shape of words as well as their meaning. Introduced to Hou dard while at art college, I was impressed by the visual poetry, its intricate form and meaning wrought by a typewriter. Art college was full of events, encounters and clashes of artists, poets, film makers and musicians. I made my contribution through various means and materials: cutting, casting, welding, laminating, grinding and editing using cardboard, aluminium,
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steel, fibreglass, chipboard, video and film. It was a mixed-media course, which led me to a postgraduate course in sculpture. There was, however, among this multifarious activity, a common thread emerging from the weft and warp of this art and that was the built form: architecture and expressed structure. Once recognised, this thread was to grow into a guide rope, with which I explored the foothills of modernist architecture, seeking out interesting nuggets of architectural detail which were to inform the artworks I was making. It soon became apparent that the memory of a building was not enough; it becomes skewed with time. These walks, journeys of architectural prospecting, needed some record: an aide-memoire. It was time to invest in a camera.
Having adopted the role of fl neur , peripatetic surveyor of the urban terrain, what is it that snags the eye? The image provided by Brutalism, an architecture of sensual extremes, is often an extra- ordinary and unfamiliar experience for the city explorer. There can be something thrilling about the aggressive and brash vocabulary of board-marked concrete, exposed aggregate, hard-edged brick and heavy sectioned timber - the expressed palette which displays the truth of its materials and a disdain for the frivolous.
The confrontational and provocative term New Brutalism was adopted by Alison Smithson, after the term Nybrutalism was used to describe Sweden s raw concrete 1950 Villa G th. Alison, alongside her husband Peter, played a hugely influential role in the development of post-war British architectural theory. The Smithsons were part of the Independent Group, a loose gathering of avant- garde artists, writers, architects and critics whose 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow , at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, is considered the start of British Pop Art. Members included Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and, crucially, the critic and historian Reyner Banham, who was to become the critical standard bearer for the New Brutalism.
New Brutalism s terms and attributes were to be developed and formalised by Banham in his seminal 1955 essay (see Further Reading ) as: formal legibility of plan, clear exhibition of structure and the valuing of materials for their inherent qualities as found . Banham further argued that good architecture derives from the correct interaction of structure, function and form, and requires a necessary conceptual element to achieve memorability of image , thereby becoming great architecture.
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The Brutalist tendency in post-war British architecture came under derision and assault from self-appointed expert critics such as Prince Charles. However, its ideals, as realised by skilled and innovative practitioners such as Ern Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun, can invoke the sublime with their expressed structure, massed forms and exposed materials of concrete, block and brick. The material and structural qualities, a disavowal of formality and anti-geometric plans allow for the necessary conceptual element that makes buildings such as Goldfinger s Trellick Tower (see Kensington and Chelsea ) and Lasdun s National Theatre (see Lambeth ) both memorable and great.
The urban explorer s d rive , unplanned, but engaged, continues. Moments of quietude descend as Piranesian elevated walkways, municipal squares and streets in the sky become reminiscent of the galleries and arcades of de Chirico s metaphysical paintings, offering dreamlike spaces punctuated with high-contrast light and shadow. It could be a Brutalist backdrop for Bertolucci s The Spider s Stratagem , in which the protagonist is entwined in a cinematographically created existential labyrinth that becomes ever harder to leave. The camera draws the viewer further and deeper into disordered montages of differing scales and levels. The texture, grain and sheer materiality of these heavily sculpted architectural topographies, the urban sublime, demands the attention of the eye and the camera lens. Capturing it in black and white removes the distractions of colour to concentrate on the shadows and light that describe the surfaces and forms. A stripped-down aesthetic for a barebones architecture.
Design elements suggest the socially progressive politics of the post-war state made manifest in the minds of the architects. Highly sculpted helical stairs revolve around their central column, potentially without end, as if the steps could have continued ascending ad infinitum. The implication of the repeated platonic forms progressing upward to sunlight and air suggest the aspirations of the building echo the lofty expectations and hopes of the post-war welfare state.
The photographs in this book are a partial documentation of the modernist rebuilding of London after the Second World War. The Blitz seriously damaged the city, all but wiping out the docks both north and south of the river and destroying vast swathes of the East End. The need for comprehensive reconstruction was recognised as vital and pressing. The architects response to this challenge
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presents, in some cases, a political response also: its aesthetic of roughness, montage and irregular texture an angry New Brutalist riposte to the tidy geometries and bland stylings of the Scandinavian- inspired modernists.
The preference for the super-suburban, with an indifference to the urban context, established the Swedish vision as the architectural house style for post-war British housing. The ideological schism was made concrete at the Alton Estate in Roehampton (see Wandsworth ), where the Corbusian-inspired Young Turks of the LCC overshadowed the earlier Swedish Modern of neighbouring Alton East in one grand gesture as they stamped their monumental mark on the quintessence of English parkland. The forceful, belligerent, conceptually considered and egalitarian architecture of social purpose that manifested itself across post-war London allows many opportunities to experience the memorability of image that was so important to Reyner Banham.
This, however, is not an experience that can be replicated in the spec-builder led, mass-volume estates that provide such an inadequate ongoing response to the continued housing crises of subsequent decades. The Thatcherite right to buy Housing Act of 1980 and private developers with their mean offerings of dwellings pinched and compressed, have subverted common ground which provided homes of both monumental futurism and understated and compassionate design. Instead, the present landscape is depressed by a twee vernacular of neo-modernist clich s - a dispiritingly neutered display of the bright vinyl-clad Wendy houses that count for much of today s banal and mediocre