STANMORE SAUNTERING

 

You want to know why Modernist architecture never really took off in England?  I’ll tell you 

why Modernist architecture never took off in England.  It’s the lack of blue skies, which is 

perhaps also to say lack of sun. 

 

I was walking in Stanmore last week, peering at some modernist houses (only the outsides) with flaneuse and professional walking tour guide (Jen Pedler) and we arrived in the morning when the sky was grey and there was rain in the air.

It was easy enough to see that these houses on Kerry Drive and Valencia Road, designed in the 1930s, were architecturally special but under a low grey sky they really didn’t look as fantastic as they might have.  

 

In fact the houses are mostly built of brick and coated with Snowcrete which is still easily available.  I wonder if a pure Modernist might think that was cheating.

 

So we wandered around Stanmore, looking at this and that, and we ended up in the Stanmore Country Park, which was surprisingly muddy in places but worth it because in the end we got this extraordinary view of London – in fact it’s called the London Viewpoint.

 

         While we were up there the sky brightened and by a circuitous route we returned to our starting point, by which time the sun was out, the sky was blue, and the Modernist houses looked absolutely magnificent.

 

Of course whiteness isn’t everything. We had also taken a detour to see the house at 2, Aylmer Close, designed by Gert Kaufman in the sixties (he also designed one of the houses in Kerry Avenue).

It looks like this; not so much modernist as Brutalist

 

From Pinterest

Not that we saw it with our own eyes.  The owners obviously want their privacy, and the best view we could get of it was this:

 

Other attractions in Stanmore, well I can’t guarantee it’ll be there for long, but this car on Stanmore Hill, a Buick Eight:

 

It’s cool enough in itself but the rear number plate said “A Quinn Martin Production.  Quinn Martin was the producer behind The Fugitive, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon among many other fine TV shows.

 

What Quinn Martin's name (and just conceivably his car) were doing in Stanmore, I have no idea.

SEVEN HILL ARMY

I was walking in Sheffield again. It’s a good place to walk.  It has seven hills (no, not much like Rome), but they do keep you fit, if they don’t kill you.

That isn’t me in the photograph above, in fact I don’t know who it is.  I took the picture years ago while leaning out of the window of one of these towers, where a friend lived at the time.

Sheffield has always had ‘interesting’ architecture, little of it truly great, and very little of it genuinely Brutalist. There’s Park Hill of course, now desired by hipsters, 

and there used to be the terrifying, now demolished, Kelvin flats, 

But those towers always had a certain brut charm about them. I know they weren’t very popular in their day, and my friend was only living there because she was working for the council and they gave her the flat because it was hard to let.  But times change.

Today there’s all kinds of zesty new architecture all over the city, a great many towers, and as far as I can tell as an outsider, these aren’t very well loved either.

So I was wandering around looking at all the new, computer-generated, Lego buildings, and suddenly there they were – those very towers – which have been given cladding to hide their brutish exteriors.  

Purists would have sneered at this under any circumstances but I don’t think we quite feel the same way about cladding as we used to.

I also went to look at my parents’ old house: they died a long time ago. It didn’t appear to have changed a bit, which was in some ways the most surprising thing of all.

CONCRETE WINTER

Back in the day when I had a “real” job, I worked near Oxford Circus in London, and I lived for the lunch hour when I could go out walking and explore the neighborhood.  And I was always struck by a building in Welbeck Street, which I knew nothing about, but thought it was just great.  It’s a multistory car park but I felt it could have been almost anything.  Maybe a spy headquarters.   I even took a picture:

Westminster Council has now approved its demolition, and it’ll be replaced by a fancy, ten-story hotel, which I suppose will have a car park of its own.  Demolition of the existing structure presumably won’t be too hard since it's made of prefabricated concrete sections.  Maybe they can even be recycled.

At the time I first admired that Welbeck Street building I’m not sure I’d even heard the word Brutalism, which is how it’s been described by people who object to the demolition, because I suppose Brutalism is now thought as a good thing.  Frankly I think it seems a bit too light and ornate to be truly Brutalist. Can you have Brutalism-lite?  But I’m not going to fight about definitions. Compare and contrast the Welbeck Street car park with the American Cement Building in LA; now being converted into lofts:

Before I lived in London, I was in Sheffield and I often used to walk by this monster in Sheffield, brutal in every way.  

I loved it, but at the time I didn’t even think to question what it was.  I was young and my sense of curiosity hadn’t been fully developed. Now I know it’s an electricity substation – and good luck trying to demolish that thing.

Last week was Concrete Week in the Guardian and Jonathan Watts, among others, has been telling us that concrete is a terrible, terrible thing - which is to say just one more damn thing to worry about.  Watts comes up with some extraordinary, if not fully explained, statistics.  Concrete is apparently responsible for up to 8% per cent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, more than any material after fossil fuels.  Not sure why it’s only “up to” 8 per cent – other sources put it at 5%.  Concrete also uses a lot of water, 10 per cent of the global industrial water usage, which actually doesn’t seem all that much when you read another statistic, that about ten billion tons of concrete are produced and used every year, and currently half of that is in China.

Then again, other sources will tell you that concrete has some has some environmental advantages. Trucks get better mileage on concrete roads than on tarmac, and concrete reflects light rather than absorbing it, which reduces the temperature in major cities by (here it is again)  “up to” 7%.

 I have no dog in this fight.  I’m all for the survival of the planet.  I just like concrete buildings, and car parks, including this one I discovered while wandering between Victoria and  Sloane Square, which is “greener” than some.  

It’s a multistory car park in Rysback Street, in London.  It’s not an especially attractive building, and it’s only borderline Brutalist (if you ask me).   However there’s some water leakage which has created ideal conditions for moss to grow.  Green enough to be getting on with for a (very short) while.

A BRUTAL WALK IN THE SUN

Now that I’m back in Los Angeles, I’ve been walking around looking for signs of Brutalist architecture.  There are certainly plenty of ugly buildings in L.A., some of them brutal with a small b, but I’m not sure how many classify as genuinely Brutalist in the grander sense.

The website for the Royal Institute of British Architects has a section labeled,  “What to look for in a Brutalist building,” and goes on to list:

1. Rough unfinished surfaces
2. Unusual shapes
3. Heavy-looking materials
4. Massive forms
5. Small windows in relation to the other parts

No mention there of concrete, which surprised me: Brutalism supposedly got its name from Le Corbusier who spoke of “breton brut” – i.e. raw concrete, and L.A. certainly has concrete buildings.  Various local online pundits also offer lists of Brutalist buildings in L.A..  These vary considerably and include: The American Cement Building:

The La Brea Tar Pits Museum:

The Japanese American Cultural & Community Center:

 

Even Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.

I’ve walked past, and around, and even inside, all of these at some time or another and I never thought they constituted Brutalism.  They all strike me as rather friendly buildings, but maybe Brutalism gets softened by the California sunshine, the blue skies, the palm trees.

However, I recently a walk I recently did from Hollywood to Larchmont Village (5 or 6 miles round trip) pitched up some examples that might get a person thinking about the real meaning of brutality in these matters.

This apartment block on Bronson Avenue certainly has heavy-looking materials
and strangely small windows in relation to the other parts; no unusual shapes though:

These buildings on Santa Monica Boulevard have no windows at all, but they do have mass, and certainly have heavy looking materials, although one of them is decorated with those elongated stars which would be unthinkable to Brutalist hardliners:

This carpet warehouse on Gower Street looks brutal as all getout, and I believe is made of concrete blocks:

 But I can see that you might argue these things are scarcely architecture at all, they’re just buildings, and not so much brutal but just crude.  However, just above Beverley Boulevard, on Larchmont Boulevard, is the Larchmont Medical Building, built by Welton Becket and Associates, “real” architects too be sure, completed in 1965.

Welton Becket was also responsible for the Capitol Building and the Theme Building at LAX – so not the most committed to Brutalism but I think this building fits the bill pretty well: big, concrete, blockish, the forms not so much unusual as uncompromising, but again rather friendlier than hardcore Brutalism.

I like it a lot. It’s also a place I’ve been to have root canal work, I seem to recall the main entrance lobby being tiled in blood red marble, but my memory made be failing me there.  I was expecting brutality in the dentist's chair, and it turned out to be considerably less brutal than you might imagine.