Modern British Architecture

Everyone in Camden Town is selling something. The women working the food stalls in Camden Lock Market shout and wave free samples at passersby, while drug dealers lurking along the canal flash Ziploc bags full of weed. A walk through the neighborhood becomes almost harrowing, as one must navigate both the teeming crowds and the relentless appeals to one’s wallet. Made bleak by the industrialization of the mid-19th century, Camden Town has been revitalized in recent years by the conversion of unused industrial buildings into bustling marketplaces. The marketplace of the present and the industry of the past now exert a joint influence on the neighborhood’s urban fabric. The north/south axis of Camden High Street is defined and influenced by the markets on its northern end, reflected in the stall-ification of early Victorian shopfronts to the south. The buildings themselves become peddlers, selling themselves, their wares, and often an entire image to passing pedestrians. The buildings on the east/west axis of the canal are just as preoccupied with the idea of “selling it,� but they are also influenced by the area’s industrial roots, perpetually revising and revisiting the 19th century warehouse. All of this culminates with the Sainsbury’s superstore at the end of Hawley Crescent, a building that evokes both traditional marketplace and industrial shed.

Our neighborhood of interest is highlighted in yellow, and the Sainsbury’s block is shaded in blue.

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The De La Warr Pavilion (originally the Bexhill Pavilion) is a public arts, education and entertainment building located in the seaside resort town of Bexhill-on-Sea on the southern coast of England. Designed in 1933 by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and completed in December of 1935, it is considered one of the world’s best examples of Modernist architecture.

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Designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry and completed in 2003, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is considered to be one of the best acoustic performance spaces in the world. Going into the design process with Tokyo acoustician Tasuhisa Toyota, Gehry was interested in creating a building whose shape would be “evocative of music.” The striped and sculpted waves of the stainless steel exterior are suggestive of colliding musical staffs, while a warmer wood was chosen for the interior in order to create a visual link to the orchestra’s wooden instruments.

This association with music by way of two vastly different materials is in keeping with the referential nature of postmodern architecture. Rather than adhering to the minimalism of modern architecture, the building is sensitive to and reflective of its function as a concert hall. The seating arrangement, which follows the same wavelike design of the exterior, was likened by Gehry to a “ceremonial barge” on which the orchestra and audience take a musical journey. I’ve never been inside the Hall myself, but the warmth of the wood, the relatively small groupings of seats, and the low-slung ceiling (which, like the Denver Airport, invokes a tent-like gathering space) all provide a sense of intimacy that is crucial to the performance of and experience of music.

But while the building’s design concerns itself with creating an intimate relationship between the orchestra and audience, it seems slightly less preoccupied with its relationship to the outside world. Soon after the building was completed, neighbors began complaining that the sun reflecting off of its polished exterior created unbearable temperatures in their loft apartments, as well as hot spots on the sidewalks of up to 140 degrees. After an investigation by the city government, the architects were asked to fix the problem by sandblasting some of the building’s surfaces. This blip in the Concert Hall’s history, which Gehry blamed on a construction error, raises some provocative questions about the ownership of space–Is one person’s property allowed to intrude on another’s by creating a glare or casting a shadow?–, about architectural boundaries–Does a building begin and end at the sidewalk or at the skyline?—and about the need for social and environmental accountability in architecture. The postmodern building must not only respect its functional context, but its physical and social context; while achieving the former with great success, this building reminds us of some of the challenges that arise in achieiving the latter.