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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Across the Thames, from the OXO Tower in the west to the Southwark Cathedral in the East, extending southward to St George’s circus, the borough of Southwark faces, throughout its history opposing—or reflecting–the city center of London. Throughout developments of centuries, Bankside, traditionally defined as the short riverfront path running east from Bankend to a western point somewhere just past the Tate Modern, has been the hotbed of culture and character of this borough.
Largely, contributions of Southwark to the city have been overlooked by historians who preferred to ignore certain elements of the city they’d rather not bring to light. Historically, it has been seen as “unruly, badly run, poor industrial, overcrowded, immoral, polluted, coarse, raucous, and unhealthy.� What is often obscured beneath its seedy reputation, however, is its “creative, independent, cosmopolitan, tolerant, vigorous, reforming, resilient, enterprising� character. All in all, it has served as a sanctuary: a home for prostitution, for criminals, for the poor, for immigrant communities, for the theater, and for “a culture-led regeneration that is the envy of London� (Reilly).

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The 1000-year-old Tower of London stands menacingly on the North Bank of the Thames. One of the biggest tourist attractions in London, the Tower is an infamous structure that has served as a palace, a prison, a place of execution and torture, an armoury, a treasury, a zoo, a mint, an observatory, and a public records office. It receives 5 million visitors each year, half of whom actually pay for the tour; the other half just take pictures. With that many visitors to the Tower, it is vital that the space around it be able to handle large crowds. However, until recently, this was a major problem. Over the years, the area around the Tower had become cluttered with urban development which made the approach to the tower unpleasant both logistically and aesthetically. Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), the trust that manages the Tower, decided that a drastic change was needed.

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In 1987, At the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee’s annual dinner, the Prince of Wales delivered a blistering speech attacking modern architecture in general and tower blocks in particular. “Countless people are appalled by what has happened to their capital city, but feel totally powerless to do anything about it�(Wales, 3) he began, criticizing the “scientifically conceived slabs�(Wales, 4) of flats and offices that rear up into the London skyline. He is not the only one complaining. From the 1930s on, avant-garde architecture has been ideologically charged, pursued by architects with unwavering enthusiasm and well supported by government authorities, yet it has never been a popular success. Indeed, more often than not, the modernist tower blocks of the 50s, 60s and 70s have been reviled, criticized, and even passionately hated by the general public. Council estates, those bleak redevelopments that march across the British landscape, may be the most despised of all: hotbeds of poverty, crime and vandalism, universally dystopian and hostile, it seems inconceivable that they could ever have formed the vanguard of a utopian vision. Yet the planners and architects rebuilding Britain after the Blitz had a utopia in mind; these were men who believed that socialism, rationalism and planned architecture could solve all Britain’s social ills. No man believed in the future more than Russian émigré architect, Berthold Lubetkin, “the undoubted star of 1930s modern architecture in Britain�(Powers, 39). He and his collaborative partnership, Tecton, were called upon by London’s Finsbury Council to help rebuild the district after the blitz annihilated entire neighborhoods, to erect council estates where Georgian row houses had once stood. However, the bureaucracy and austerity of Lubetkin’s long-hoped for welfare state took its toll on construction efforts, and even Bevin Court, with its magnificent staircase, seems today- for all Lubetkin’s grand hopes and painstaking care- like just another formulaic tower block.

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The London Zoo has a longstanding tradition of working with both architects and zookeepers to create a neighborhood—even a lot like a gated community—for its animal residents and visitors. So invested in creating these environments, the zoo has been known to raise their entrance fees to cover the production of these architectural monuments, with a fee now soaring around £16 for entrance! Even so, the zoo has been able to attract visitors from far and wide to show off the residential, commercial, and civic space it embodies.

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In 1938, the renowned architect Erno Goldfinger began to build 2 Willow Road for himself and his family in Hampstead. The house was completed in the summer of 1939, very shortly before the start of the World War Two in September of the same year.

At 2 Willow Road, Goldfinger merged more traditional Georgian styles with the concepts celebrated by the Parisian avant garde movement of the nineteen-thirties. This allowed him to create a house that was both widely different in its organization from traditional structures, but one that also blended with the surrounding Georgian architecture.

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As a current architect, Zaha Hadid seems to reach toward the future. Although critics tout her as the visionary of modern-day architecture, Hadid’s work, characterized by free-flowing forms, streamlined shapes, and even at times gesturing towards, as one puts it, “intergalactic space stations,� nevertheless incorporates fundamentals of the modernist movement which came before it.

Born in the architecturally global, modernist-infatuated Baghdad of the 1950s, Hadid grows up concurrently with the modern architectural movement. After receiving a degree in mathematics from the university of Beirut, she moves to Europe: first to Switzerland, and finally to London by the mid-seventies. While in London, she attends the Architectural Association and there latches on to a wave of 60s architecture which experiments with the utopian idealist forms of Soviet Constructivism. Her designs for a 14-story inhabited bridge over the Thames in her senior thesis are a poster child for this movement, taking their inspiration from an image of Malevich’s Tektonics—a fragmented city, floating through space.

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The Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951 and is the only surviving structure from that year’s Festival of Britain. Its design is most commonly credited to the architects Leslie Martin and Peter Moro. As our guide (name?) pointed out, however, the postwar development of the Southbank site was a complex collaborative process that involved many engineer-architect teams as well as administrative bodies like the (now defunct) London County Council. The Royal Festival Hall stands at a nodal point both in London’s political history and on the modern architectural timeline. As the sole remnant of the Labour-Party-planned 1951 extravaganza, the RFH reflects that government’s preoccupation with social welfare programs and its aim for broad postwar socio-economic reform (strongly opposed by recently-ousted Conservatives, including Churchill). The building echoes Labour’s left-wing agenda from within. Its design embraces the egalitarianism (or “democratic-ness,� as we heard several times in reference to the auditorium) of the modern architectural zeitgeist. In 1951 its concrete walls maybe seemed to whisper: “social change is in the air.�

Much has been made of Martin et al.’s “egg in a box� design metaphor. As we discussed in class, the innovation here was to enclose and elevate the auditorium. The acoustically-isolated room faces south and almost suspends in the air, shouldered by an Atlas-like skeleton of foyers. The architects’ principal intent was practical: to shield the auditorium from the rumblings of the Northern Line below ground (thus the room’s elevation) and the commuter rail above (thus the building’s buffering frame). The egg was to be an enclosed space, enveloped in the protective glass and concrete of the surrounding foyers.

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The Gilsey House is not a particularly famous building in the Manhattan cityscape. Completed in 1869 as a hotel (the first hotel to offer telephone service to its guests), it is now a residential building somewhat overshadowed by the Empire State Building behind it, as the picture shows. However, I was drawn to it because it reflects a style I had not seen in New York particularly often (a style, I have learned, that is called Second Empire Baroque). The clock, positioned to face directly into the intersection of 29^th Street and Broadway almost immediately catches attention - particularly at night, when it is illuminated. The structure is a cast-iron facade, and indeed, the heavy ornamentation and many pillars give the building a sense of weight and strength not seen in other, more modern buildings.

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Figure 1. The Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern observation deck.

Why did the public cross the bridge? To get to the other side.

That joke is old news, just like crossing the Thames by foot is old news. The Romans built the first bridge across the river almost 2000 years ago, and the oldest surviving bridge,  Newbridge - dates from the 13th century (South). So how did the Millennium Bridge, something as simple and old-fashioned as a footbridge, draw over 80,000 people to its opening day in 2000? Perhaps location is the answer, as the bridge connects two high profile landmarks: St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern Gallery. Then again, Southwark and Blackfriars, two other bridges perfectly functional for crossing the river (as most bridges are wont to be), flank the new site relatively closely on either side. Perhaps the appeal lies in the bridge’s technologically sleek design? The designers touted the project as a “blade of light across the Thames” an emblem of technology at the start of the 21st century that “gives space back to the people” (Foster). Perhaps it was just the novelty of the new. In any case, whether the draw was function or inspiration or something else entirely, the opening of the bridge enticed the modern masses to come out and cross the Thames. So many came out, in fact, that they caused a modern building based on an idea as old as antiquity to become structurally unsound. But more on the unsound bit later on!

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