Alan Clawley on recent developments in the listed building world.
With the recent statutory listing of Preston Bus Station I would imagine that an application made today for the Central Library to be listed would be successful. The present Government Minister Ed Vaisey is rumoured to be a fan of Brutalist archutecture, unlike his predecessors Margaret Hodge and Jeremy Hunt. As if to mark the changing preception of modern architecture, English Heritage has just opened an exhibition in London entitled ‘Brutal & Beautiful’ at the Quadriga Gallery, Wellington Arch, London, until Nov 24.
Journalist Christopher Beanland, attended the opening and kindly sent me this review.
http://www.english-heritage.or
Have we turned a corner? One day after Preston Bus Station was saved for future generations, Richard Rogers is publicly defending Robin Hood Gardens at a white wine and canape-fuelled press launch for an English Heritage exhibition lionising the present – well, the recent past at any rate. Maybe modern architecture and modernisms (modernism’s various ‘isms’) are making sense to people once more? Maybe architects are making sense to people once more?
Of course we know that it’s about fads. A good building is a good building whether it is 1973 or 2013 or 2073. It’s all the other social, economic and cultural factors that squeeze bricks and mortar. And so, for promoting the present and encouraging us all to look again at modern buildings, Brutal & Beautiful deserves praise indeed.
It has to be said that there’s rather more beauty than brutalism in the spare photographs of Great Britain’s great buildings – well actually the geographic spread stops at Offa’s Dyke and Hadrian’s Wall as that’s the edge of EH’s remit. The exhibition is roughly bookended by Graham Sutherland’s majestic tapestry at the heart of Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral from 1955-62, and Rogers’ Lloyds Building (1981-86). A neat progression then from religion to capital and the individual, with the great academic and housing adventure of the second half of the 20th Century squashed in between.
A model of the Smithsons’ Economist Building shows that the Richard & Judy of the avant garde aren’t entirely out on their ear despite their residential streets in the sky eliciting a ‘mixed’ reception. There’s no Rodney Gordon here, no Douglas Stephen, no Zaha Hadid (yet). And no Birmingham.
The photography itself is very good, especially at showing the sculptural detailing of concrete: in Marsh and Seifert’s Centrepoint and Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican. Staring at this pair – now apparently exiting their era of being seen as a gruesome twosome and now being seen as something different entirely (though I’m still not entirely sure what it is people see them as) I can’t help but imagine something else sat between them. A close up of a top corner of Birmingham Central Library framed against a bright blue summer sky. In another life it would have looked rather perfect here with its protected peers. If only we’d started turning the corner ten years ago.
