Work has begun on the demolition of the UK city of Birmingham's former Central Library, designed by home-grown Brutalist architect John Madin. The move by Birmingham Council to not retain the structure of the library, in spite of ideas and petitions put forward by numerous public groups (including one titled Keep The Ziggurat), has been widely met with disappointment among the architectural community. The BBC recently compiled some of the most interesting ideas for reuse which included, among others, transforming the concrete structure into a new English Parliament, an international trade centre, and an enormous space for rock climbing.
Madin, who passed away in 2012, had at least three of his major Modernist projects demolished during his lifetime. His design for Birmingham Library had been met with criticism from the likes of the city's Director of Planning and Regeneration of the time who described it as a "concrete monstrosity." Prince Charles famously described it as "looking more like a place for burning books than keeping them."
See photographs of the former library under construction and in use after the break.
To celebrate the start of 2015, Xinran Ma, a New York-based architectural designer and illustrator, has created this brutalist-inspired greetings card. Based on his work illustrating over 50 of the classic projects of modernist and brutalist architecture, this card features pieces of these recognizable buildings, remixed and adapted to create a typeface.
Xinran says that the buildings he illustrates all have one unfortunate thing in common: "they are extremely attractive and inspiring to me," he says, but "ironically they have been somehow gradually forgotten." As a result, the illustrations he produces are not just a hobby, but part of an obligation he feels "to defend, memorize and deliver the classics that I believe are immortal." Xinran has shared 18 of these illustrations with ArchDaily to spread the word about these buildings; check them out after the break, and click on the images to find out more about each one.
London-based Avanti Architects, along with Glasgow-based ERZ Landscape Architects and NORD Architects, have released the first image of their design to revitalize one of Scotland’s modern masterpieces: St Peter’s seminary. Designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1966, and built on the former Kilmahew estate, the Category-A listed Brutalist structure was voted as the best modern building in Scotland by readers of Prospect Magazine in 2005. However, the building has been abandoned for the past 25 years, leaving it dilapidated and facing numerous problems.
Public art charity NVA is leading a £7.3 million initiative to rehabilitate the building and its surrounding landscape to create an art, heritage and educational site. The designs include a performing arts venue with a 600-person capacity, informal indoor and outdoor teaching spaces across the 144 acre site and over 4 kilometres of woodland paths. In addition, the site will contain a heritage exhibition and a locally-led productive garden.
Black Dragon Press has shared a set of prints and a booklet on Brutalist architecture in London with illustrations by Thomas Danthony, complemented by text from "Fuck Yeah Brutalism" curator Michael Abrahamson. See Abrahamson's intro to the booklet reprinted below.
Brutalism is an unusually evocative word. Like the architecture for which it’s used as a descriptor, it can elicit a powerful, bodily discomfort or psychological repulsion. Standard dictionary definitions itemise the materials (exposed concrete, but also brick and block) and describe the physical character (forceful, unadorned, imposing) of this type of building, and would likely also mention the time frame during which it was the dominant tendency in architecture (from the late 1950s to the early 1970s).
https://www.archdaily.com/572150/an-homage-to-london-brutalism-by-thomas-danthony-and-michael-abrahamsonAD Editorial Team
The UK's National Trust has announced the 'pop-up' opening of a property in Ernö Goldfinger's famous Balfron Tower in London, offering public access to Flat 130 of the brutalist icon from the 1st to the 12th of October. Completed in 1967, the Balfron Tower was the first of Goldfinger's two distinctive London housing blocks (the other being Trellick Tower), and in 1968 Goldfinger himself lived for two months in Flat 130, to demonstrate the desirability of high-rise living.
Are Brutalist buildings, once deemed cruel and ugly, making a comeback? Reyner Banham's witty play on the French term for raw concrete, beton brut, was popularized by a movement of hip, young architects counteracting what they perceived as the bourgeois and fanciful Modernism of the 1930s. Though the use of raw concrete in the hands of such artist-architects as Le Corbusier seems beautiful beneath the lush Mediterranean sun, under the overcast skies of northern Europe Brutalist architecture earned a much less flattering reputation. Since the 1990s, however, architects, designers, and artists have celebrated formerly denounced buildings, developing a fashionably artistic following around buildings like Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower, "even if long-term residents held far more ambivalent views of this forceful high-rise housing block." To learn more about this controversial history and to read Jonathan Glancey's speculation for its future, read the full article on BBC, here.
Inspired by an article written by Michael Hebbert in 1993, Chris Bevan Lee's forty minute documentary explores the elevated post-war infrastructural redevelopment of the City of London, fragments of which still stand across the square mile today. The Pedway: Elevating London examines London planners' attempt to build an ambitious network of elevated walkways through the city that largely never saw completion. In a carefully produced film those 'pedways' that remain are photographed and discussed as symbols of a utopia that almost was.
Sheffield born Alison Gill, later to be known as Alison Smithson, was one half of one of the most influential Brutalist architectural partnerships in history. On the day that she would be celebrating her 86th birthday we take a look at how the impact of her and Peter Smithson's architecture still resonates well into the 21st century, most notably in the British Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. With London's Robin Hood Gardens, one of their most well known and large scale social housing projects, facing imminent demolition how might their style, hailed by Reyner Banham in 1955 as the "new brutalism", hold the key for future housing projects?
The Scottish arts charity NVA is looking for an architect to carry out the restoration of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1966. The building is an icon of post war brutalism; the Grade-A listed structure was voted as the best modern building in Scotland by readers of Prospect Magazine in 2005, and is likely to feature heavily in Scotland's show at the 2014 Venice Biennale. However despite this adoration, the building had a very short functional life and has been in a state of ruin ever since it was abandoned in the 1980s.
NVA is looking for an architect "highly skilled in the conservation of modernist buildings" to take on the £8 million restoration, which will see the sanctuary and refectory preserved in a "semi-ruinous state", and a nearby 19th-century greenhouse converted into a visitor centre.
Read on after the break for more on the restoration
Recently voted the UK’s ugliest tower, The Barbican Tower is one of the three residential towers of the Barbican Estate, built between 1965 and 1976 in London. Along with fourteen apartment blocks, the Barbican Estate contains 2014 flats, connected by a labyrinth of floating passageways and landscaped gardens.
Melbourne newspapers are reporting on an argument breaking out over the preservation of the city's postwar modernist buildings, centering (as ever) on the dispute between their value as cultural heritage vs their 'ugliness' (you can see all the contested buildings in a neat graphic at The Age). While many are in favor of preservation, Alan Davies, in anarticle for Crikey, warns that the cultural benefit in protecting these buildings should always be weighed against the cost of preventing the developments that would have taken their place. Read the full article here.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Meades has named the “incredible hulks” of Brutalism with a thought provoking A-Z list that ranges from Hans Asplund, who coined the term “nybrutalism,” to California’s fascination with Zapotec-like adornments in the 1960s. Read the list in full and discover why Quebec City, Yugoslavia’s Janko Konstantinov, and Danish architect Jørn Utzon are all considered incredible hulks here.
This article by Carlos Harrison appeared in Preservation Magazine as Reinvention Reinvented: Hope for Modernism, and discusses the issues surrounding the (increasingly popular) drive to preserve post-war modernism, including what we can learn from past successes and failures, and what it takes to preserve different types and styles of building.
Columbus, Indiana, is something of a modern marvel. It boasts more than 70 buildings by some of the architecture world’s greats, including titans of Modernism such as Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, and Richard Meier. Schools, churches, a library, a post office, and even a fire station stand as examples of the distinctively diverse architectural styles spanning the decades from World War II through Vietnam.
Crisp lines, sharp angles, connected like Lego blocks. Nearby: a 192-foot spire aims toward the heavens like a laser.
Read on after the break for more about preserving modernism
https://www.archdaily.com/469786/how-to-preserve-post-war-modernismCarlos Harrison
UMass Dartmouth Library, by Paul Rudolph. Image Courtesy of UMass Dartmouth
In this fascinating article on the Slate design blog, J Bryan Lowder takes on a commonly held myth: that brutalist buildings on college campuses were designed to prevent student riots. From the egalitarian design ethos of brutalism to the fact that many of these buildings were around before the widespread student uprisings of the late 1960s, he finds no support for the theory - however he does end with a possible reason why these buildings are now regarded with such suspicion. You can read the full article here.
When the concrete cloverleaf of Prentice Hospital sprouted from the Chicago ground in 1975, its award-winning design met the praise of critics and the admiration of many Chicagoans. Architect Bertrand Goldberg drew from Brutalism, but with a symmetry and grace that distinguished Prentice from more angular works in that style.
This week, as Goldberg’s famous work is pulled apart by wreckers, nothing about its loss seems symmetrical or graceful. Within 40 years, the building transitioned from a proud symbol of civic renewal and design innovation to the victim of old-fashioned Chicago politics. The controversy surrounding the demolition of Prentice, however, injected the preservation movement into an urban design discussion with a presence not seen in a long time.
https://www.archdaily.com/441977/is-the-demolition-of-prentice-hospital-another-penn-station-momentMichael R. Allen
This AD Architecture City Guide is dedicated to the vibrant city of Tel Aviv, originally established as a garden-city on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean in 1909. Although widely known as “The White City” for boasting the world’s largest collection of International Style Buildings, Tel Aviv is not merely a monochromatic Bauhaus colony: it presents a rich mosaic of locally interpreted styles, from Eclectic to Brutalist to contemporary, which are the result of foreign and locally-born architects who adapted to the local cultural and climatic conditions.
Join us for our architectural city guide through the "Non-Stop City" after the break…
Photo by Christopher via flickr.com/photos/identity-chris-is. Used under Creative Commons
The International conference center in Kyoto is a geometric megastructure of exposed, reinforced concrete designed by Japanese architect Sachio Otani in 1963. Although relatively unknown, the Center is a unique, Modern masterpiece that re-interprets traditional Japanese architecture and asserts itself powerfully into its peaceful, natural surroundings.
