Alan Clawley talks about the work of a forgotten architect.
John Madin is not the only modernist architect to live to see his work destroyed. Richard Seifert (1910-2001) was 14 years older than Madin and an even more prolific architect.
Seifert saw his pioneering 1965 Newtown Shopping Centre pulled down a mere thirty years after it was opened. Like John Madin he designed hundreds of modern concrete buildings, including the recently listed 1969-73 Alpha Tower which was part of the ATV complex now being demolished to make way for Arena Central. His other major work in the Birmingham is the strangely-named Centre City office block on Smallbrook Queensway.
Newtown Shopping Centre seems to have been Seifert’s first job in Birmingham. It comprised an open-air shopping mall with a circular market hall. A block of council flats and a public swimming pool completed the modernist complex. I used to buy my lunch from a cake shop in the mall when I worked in the first-floor offices of the council’s Environmental Health Department in 1983. Flat roofs were the norm in those days – the car park was on a flat roof over the shops and the office occupied by the team of Environmental Health Officers had a flat roof that was so badly insulated that when the summer sun beat down on it got unbearably hot.
I was told by the experts on the team that the Office Shops and Railway Premises Act didn’t stipulate the temperature above which we were not allowed to work. We wore as few clothes as was commensurate with the dignity of a public servant. At lunch-time once a week my wife and children would meet me for a dip in the on-site swimming pool, a facility that will be lost in 2015 due to cuts in council funding.
The shopping mall declined in the nineties, shops were left vacant and the once fashionable white tiles or tessera that clad the buildings and covered a multitude of sins, began to fall off. I have a small chunk of it on my desk that serves as a paperweight. The end came in 1995 when the whole shopping centre was demolished and a new one built in its place. The block of flats was refurbished and a small new office block built at its base.
Seifert’s buildings seem to have avoided being commonly labelled Brutalist whilst John Madin is often described as a Brutalist architect largely because of the Central Library and the NatWest tower. The buildings of both architects are illustrated in Alexander Clement’s book entitled Brutalism published in 2011.
Seifert’s 1971 Centre Point in London comes from the same stable as the NatWest tower; both are clad in exposed precast concrete units. If anything Madin’s version of Brutalism is more restrained than Seifert’s, yet it is burdened with what has become a pejorative label and condemned to oblivion, just like the Central Library. In the meantime Centre Point and many other Seifert buildings remain admired and inviolate.
