back up test

The dozens of consultants appointed to take part in the design of a major project now include 'facade specialists', but these people don't presume to design the look of the elevations - that is one of the few jobs still left to the architect. However, a quick walk round many new developments suggests that some architects aren't much good at designing elevations. I don't offer any examples, but you can picture your own at this point. Is there a need for a new specialism? The handsome  immeuble Lavirotte (or  immeuble d'Alexandre Bigot ) in Avenue Rapp (two great names there), in Paris near the Eiffel Tower, has a sign explaining that it won 'le prix des facades de la Ville de Paris' in 1903. The design of elevations was also taken seriously as a discipline in its own right in London in the first part of the twentieth century.  In the Survey of London one can find two typical examples of interwar buildings in Mayfair getting facade upgrades at the request...

Saturday's Guardian profile of EH boss Simon 'It's absolute nonsense to say that I'm a fogey!' Thurley notes that his new book The Building of England has been criticised for ending at 1940, and cites The Times's Richard Morrison's claim that 'he stops his survey after 1930...but most of us live and work in an England built since then.' Which made me wonder whether (depending on who the 'us' in 'most of us' might be) the latter claim is in fact true. There must be a date such that half the buildings in the country were built before that year, and half after.  What is that date?  Quite a lot was built during the 1930s - for example major suburban extensions to many towns and cities - and my guess is that the answer lies around 1930-1940 - certainly a significant amount of the country's building stock is from the interwar period. But there are many places where you see very few buildings built since the Second World War; and many s...

A current makeover of Debenhams department store in Oxford Street involves overcladding the very dull 1960s elevations of a building described in the Pevsner guide as 'big and dispiriting' with a 'kinetic facade' of suspended aluminium panels, which are intended to ripple in the breeze. When I walked past, there was drizzle but no breeze, and not much rippling going on - the effect was plain and static, rather than lively as indicated in the publicity  - no doubt it will be better on a day that is both sunny and windy. When a dull building that one has walked past many times has gone, it's hard to remember what it was like. The wonders of Street View (which the idle who use it for virtual site visits should always remember illustrates the recent past, not the present) show the old elevations of windows in vertical strips, alternating with strips of concrete cladding - pretty dispiriting even to a concrete enthusiast, and clearly a candidate for a makeover. But while...

Changing the built environment to allow step-free access - an exercise which is costing a huge amount of money, and if you consider London's tube network, has really only just begun - is a good thing.  I have pushed buggies and I still push a wheelchair from time to time, and the world has got better over the last few decades for the millions of us who do this. But the move to Flatworld is not without a downside, and this doesn't seem to be discussed much. Making the world safe for wheelchairs and buggies has also made the pavements safe for tourists with luggage on wheels that is too heavy to lift; for badly controlled infants on scooters and badly behaved adults on roller blades (and bicycles); and, in a further contribution to the continuing atrophying of human muscle power, for the Segway. Anything that had George W Bush as a famous early adopter needs to be looked at with suspicion. Here at Port Soller in Mallorca, for example, a huge sum of public money has been spent in ...

The postwar Golden Lane Estate, on the northern edge of the City of London, is more lovable and more human than its later and bigger cousin at the Barbican (though both are good, with plenty to inspire those designing high density housing today). Golden Lane has also been been more extensively customised (before listing put a stop to all that at both estates), most notably in the case of the Shakespeare pub - originally a modern design admired by Ian Nairn, but now with an Olde England pubbe makeover, complete with retro joinery mouldings, repro carriage lamps and twiddly typography on the fascia (the big sans serif lettering on the white wall on the right looks original). It's hardly surprising, of course - the modernist pub, as opposed to bar, is an oddity that has never found much favour.  A rather fine postwar example in St John's Wood, the Rossetti, on the corner of Queens Grove and Ordnance Hill, with open plan split level bars, did flourish - it was knocked down and repl...

Estate regeneration - mainly, knocking down and starting again - is taking place, or planned, on a massive scale across many of the biggest postwar public housing estates all over London. Last week, developers Berkeley organised a morning of talks and tours at Kidbrooke in Greenwich, where the Ferrier Estate, built forty years ago by the GLC and now in the hands of Greenwich Council, is being demolished and turned into a mixed tenure development, at about twice the density of the old housing.  That ratio appears to be typical for such schemes, the 50% of housing for sale helping to pay for the 50% of affordable housing, reprovided in the same total amount as before. Work has been going on for four years now - the first phases, of an admirably high standard of design and finish, are occupied, and the last of the old buildings were being flattened in front of our eyes. The Ferrier, very isolated from surrounding areas, had become notorious for physical and social problems as early as...

Peter Frame's Rock Family Trees  are a delight for music geeks - and appear to be a nice little earner for their author and artist.  Someone should do the same for postwar UK architecture - though I suppose the market might be a bit more limited. An example of an architectural family get-together can be seen at Cannon Street.  The powerful exoskeleton of Foggo Associates' new building over Cannon Street Station (centre of picture) has a clear affinity with its neighbour, Arup Associates' 80 Cannon Street of 1972-6 (the Pevsner guide calls the latter a 'startling tower', though rather more startling towers have appeared in the vicinity since that was written...). Foggo Associates emerged in 1989 from Arup Associates, where Peter Foggo (who died in 1993) and his team had been responsible for many of the latter's most notable projects through the 1970s and 80s. The recent reminiscing prompted by Lady Thatcher's death has reminded us how much there was that was ...