The Eureka Skyway, Ashford, Kent

An Infection of Iconic

Bridges. What are they for? To help transport people over an obstacle? Not if they were built in the last decade and a bit. Bridges are now a much beloved metaphor for councils and landowners, they “connect communities”, “cross boundaries” and provide “iconic” structures for “transforming the landscape”. But, why? Why do they have to do these things, why can’t they just get people from one place to another?

It’s not hard to trace the lineage of this lust for iconicism. In the late 90s there was an abundance of money around to pay for anything transformative and shiny for the millennium. The two, vastly successful, examples of this trend that spring to mind are The Millennium Bridge in London (here) and The Millennium Bridge in Gateshead (here) but for these two landmarks there are dozens of others out there crossing lonely canals and motorways that have been built as icons but will never be such.

I’ve always been slightly irked by the relentless lust for landmark status that has infected architecture in the last decade but it wasn’t until I walked across the new Porth Teigr Outer Lock Crossing in Cardiff that I really contemplated its effect on bridges. The bridge in question, which you can see (here), doesn’t even have a proper name because it crosses an incredibly short lock-entrance. The previous bridge was a small and inane affair but that simply will not do for an area so full of landmarks and breathless iconicism. So now we have the new bridge, a bright-red explosion of a bridge that clashes astonishingly with the low-key surroundings of the Norwegian Church and the Lightship. A £2.5m reminder of Cardiff Bay’s incoherence and desperation.

Why does something as simple as the crossing of a lock have to be turned into torturous architectural theatre? Why not just build a simple bridge for half the price? It seems almost unthinkable that a bridge could be built today that is simply a bridge, at least where there’s money sloshing around to make it otherwise. There’s a common process to be followed; architectural competition, council commission, local outrage/delight, sky-high costs, building delays, local paper grumbling and then finally the inaugural opening/spinning/lifting/swinging/blinking of the bridge.

A great example of this process is in evidence (here) where we can see a half dozen ’iconic’ designs for, what should be, a very simple crossing of a footpath over a motorway in Sheffield. There’d have been no local discontent if a low-key crossing was built here, it could have been done in about a month with a pre-fabricated steel walkway but, no, the council must have its icon so the locals have to wait longer for their bridge and when they get it it may well be a vortex or a porcupine. 

Bridges aren’t like buildings, there’s no-one to look after them on a day-to-day basis. They rust and their metal dulls and people graffiti all over them. A bridge I cross often is Valentine’s Bridge in Bristol which you can see (here), a curvy, suspended piece of nonsense that creaks incredibly loudly under foot and is always covered in stickers and gum and then there’s the nameless footbridge not 200 yards downstream that is in an even worse state and is even uglier, see (here).

I’m not arguing against all exciting bridges here, not at all, Stockton’s Infinity Bridge is truly a landmark, see (here), but could Ashford really have dealt perfectly fine with a girder bridge instead of its £8m Eureka Skyway (here) and could Poole have not thought of something better to spend £37m on than a bascule bridge which was predictably beset by displays and chronically ugly warning lights, see (here). Please can someone tell me why a bridge can’t just be a bridge any more and why something as simple and practical as this is so unfashionable and unthinkable to icon-obsessed councils and developers.

Dorset Fire & Rescue Service HQ, Poundbury, Dorset

Prince Charles, the well-known critic of modern architecture has stuck his neck out in the last few years overseeing the construction of Poundbury, a village that tries to transplant the spirit of twee English villages into a brand new suburb of Dorchester. This particular building, a 2009 Carbuncle Cup nominee is the home of Dorset’s fire service.

Some time around a decade ago, after years of standing on the sidelines of the architectural community hissing and booing HRH decided to answer the question “if you think you can do better why don’t you?”. The result is a chintzy, ugly village in Dorset, a marriage of New Urbanism and strawberries and cream jingoism, a collection of architectural set-pieces where even the bus stops seem to have the hand of Windsor upon them, see (here).

Poundbury comes across as a kind of architectural in-joke. It takes Charles’ aesthetic ideals to their logical extremes and creates a kind of neo-Georgian playground for him and his fellow Mailites to wallow around in and complain about the rest of the country going to hell in a handcart. There’s no architectural merit here, the kind of office blocks you can see (here) wouldn’t look out of place on a Basingstoke office park and what isn’t incredibly ugly is just a carbon-copy of vernacular buildings from elsewhere.

What really riled me though is the building I mentioned before, the fire station. It’s plain wrong, the proportions have nothing to do with Classical architecture and there is no detail that suggests any knowledge of classicism. Instead it is a stately home’s stable block, it is a copy of a copy of a copy and as you’d expect it has all the subtlety, poise and elegance of a Duchy’s Original scone dipped in honey and sprinkled with icing sugar. Not only does it look like something that would give Pevsner a heart attack but it’s also a working building, there’s three massive garage doors plumbed into the side and for the next few decades some poor firemen are going to have to live their lives through Prince Charles’ experiment. It’s just exasperatingly ugly and a massive middle finger to anyone who thought the Prince wouldn’t be able to live out his dreams. 

I guess he’s got to keep himself busy somehow. He probably thought he’d be king by now.

Coventry Cathedral

Glasgow Airport

British Embassy, Rome

Sir Basil Spence has the honour of being responsible for some of the most wonderful post-war buildings in Britain but he also has the responsibility for some of the worst at his feet. He designed Coventry Cathedral a building which I had the absolute pleasure of visiting yesterday, a building that is probably one of my favourite of all time, a building that is practically perfect from spire to vestry. Yet the same man also designed St Anne’s Gate, see (here), a carbuncle of a building that rubs up against bourgeois St James’ Park and that seems to be suffering from some kind of concrete tumour.

Overall I’d like to think that Spence comes out on the side of the architectural angels or, at least, he does for someone with my aesethics. For me his saving grace was in his attention to detail and that he always took an active hand in not only designing the exterior but also the interior, often commissioning custom furniture and fittings. Glasgow Airport is a good example of this, it’s simple and fairly low-key and it also had a smashing interior at the hands of Spence, see (here).

Sir Basil Spence Archive Project (here)

Central Library, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Central Library was built in 1973 as part of a pioneering plan for a new Civic Centre in Birmingham. In the optimistic spirit of post-war city planning a masterplan was hatched to construct not only the library but a School of Music, drama centre and a variety of shops and offices all interconnected with that familiar feature of 60s planning; elevated walkways.

The library was built and opened in 1974, and along with the Conservatoire it was the only major part of the plan to be salvaged before spending cuts hit. It is an inverted ziggurat with an atrium at the centre suspended over the ring-road (and what was proposed to be a bus station). The ziggurat forms the reference library and next door is the much more modest lending library with it’s three story, convex façade, see (here).

The library is being replaced next year by the new Library of Birmingham. I am certainly not the kind of person to bash a new library being built and it’s possible that Birmingham needs it but I’d like to think there was a better reason to spend millions of pounds on a replacement just because what is currently there is ugly. In my humble opinion the architecture employed at the new site is a post-modern mess, a perspex box covered in barbed wire that hasn’t a patch on the original. See (here). 

The 38 year-old library will be demolished in 2013 once its replacement is open and this, well this is a travesty. The biggest issue as far as I can see with the exterior is the lack of windows, a lack which inspired everyone’s favourite architecture critic, Prince Charles, to proclaim “it looks more like a place for burning books than keeping them”. There is some truth to that, the exterior looks Orwellian even if the intention was to protect books from sunlight, see (here), but the interior, the light-filled atrium and the high-windows of the entrance hall are a different story. 

These days it’s another victim of our tendency to let buildings decay until we can justify demolishing them. The concrete cladding is stained and in poor condition but then it hasn’t been cleaned since the early 1970s so that’s no surprise. In 2001 the tall entrance hall was ruined by the addition of a perspex lobby which gives way to the atrium, redesigned in the 1990s from civic space to miniature shopping mall complete with McDonalds and Wetherspoons. 

I would love to see this building saved. It has so much potential, an iconic lump of architecture soon to be emptied right in the heart of the civic centre of Birmingham. The atrium lends itself perfectly to a more fashionable renewal, reinstating some pools of water and trees and replacing the tacky 90s shop units with something more akin to a high street. Above the library spaces could be converted into offices or flats, the concrete exterior could so easily be painted white and perhaps some of it dismantled to allow for larger windows. 

Another idea that’s been floated is the creation of a TATE West Midlands. This could work especially well in such an iconic space, I’d love to see walkways across the atrium connecting different galleries and the smaller lending library being turned into a museum or offices for local creative organisation. Whatever happens it’s going to be a crying shame when the buldozers come. Just as we look back to 1971 and wonder how people could have been so blind as to demolish the elegant Victorian building we’ll look back on 2013 and wonder how it is that we replaced this slice of architectural history and vision with a perspex box covered in barbed wire. 

Birmingham Central Library by Alan Clawley (here)
‘A Place where books are incinerated not kept’ by Ben Flatman (here) 
Library of Birmingham on RIBA Blogs (here) 

The Brunswick Centre, London

On a pleasant spring day you can sit outside in the high street of the Brunswick Centre and enjoy food from the farmer’s market, peruse the shops and pick up a coffee to enjoy by the fountain. Its bustling shops and highly sought after flats have become a residential hub in Bloomsbury. The Brunswick Centre is what everyone dreams of when they imagine saving Robin Hood Gardens or Birmingham Central Library.

It was refurbished between 2000 and 2006 and when you look at what was done it really wasn’t anything radical or unfamiliar. The concrete structure was repaired, the empty and neglected ‘high street’ was transformed and the flats were gradually renovated. Importantly the bare concrete was painted white and all of a sudden the hated mega-block became the community the architect intended. 

Looking at photos from before the work was done (here) it’s clear to see why there were calls for its demolition. It looks just like every other Brutalist building to have been demolished in the last decade and a half, it looks desolate and alien but look now (here). It fulfils the architect’s ideas of creating a community and that goes to prove a point. Why should we demolish buildings we perceive as failing and replace them with our own flawed ideas of architecutre? Why don’t we combine hindsight with the vision of modernist architects to create something like The Brunswick Centre?

One of the most striking and simple renovations that took place was the painting of the bare concrete. To say this was pragmatic would be untrue, it was the architect, Patrick Hodgkinson’s, original intentions to paint the building;

It was only after I left in 1970 that they decided not to paint it. I thought, ‘That’s damned stupid.’ I knew that that concrete, which was very cheap, would never stay fair-faced. And of course, after a few years it started getting filthy.

There has never been a period in time since the 60s where anyone’s made an effort to renovate these buildings (perhaps until now). Councils and planners imposed a kind of architectural apartheid on the buildings, leaving the concrete to degrade and making no attempts to breathe life into them with even the simplest of renovations. They often allowed residents and shop-owners to suffer for years in sub-standard conditions because if they repaired these structures people would begin to question whether it mightn’t just be cheaper and better to keep what was already there. 

Robin Hood Gardens is ugly and decrepit but so were The Brunswick Centre and The Bullring and the Park Hill Estate. Look what they want to replace Robin Hood Gardens with (here), how is this any better than what’s there now? All they’ve done is take “streets in the sky” and make them vertical. If this monstrosity of tiny rooms and tiny windows isn’t demolished in forty years time then I’ll eat my words but for now I’m going to say that our current architectural fetish for PVC windows and poor-quality cladding is no better than the 60s obsession with utopian communities and poor-quality concrete. 

We don’t need bulldozers and the heartless architecture of today we need a can of paint, a few Cypress trees and a branch of Waitrose.

Long live the Brunswick!

Steven Rose on The Brunswick Centre (here)
Rowan Moore on Robin Hood Gardens (here) 
City of Sound; The Brunswick Centre (here) 
Heterotopia; The Brunswick Centre (here)