Nicky Gavron on mixed estates
August 31st, 2011
“The mayor wants private, market housing to be built in areas with lots of social housing. But his plan does not seek new social housing in areas with lots of private homes.”
An article from the Guardian today highlights yet again where the Tory London administration is failing when it comes to housing policy. Nicky Gavron has been spot on with her analysis of where the problem lies and has been saying this for some time but nobody seems to be listening.
Needs based allocations – Robin Wales
August 30th, 2011
UPDATE: 16/6/11 Dave Hill has an interesting article today in the Guardian on the same theme, that needs based allocations are a disaster for council housing allocation:-
Newham-mayor-plans-olympic-regeneration
Charities condemn plans to let councils house locals before immigrants
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/big-ideas-32075
Old link – Man on a mission
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/nov/30/housing.uknews
City of Towers – Christopher Booker – BBC 1979
August 27th, 2011
City of Towers is a two hour documentary made by Christopher Booker for the BBC, first broadcast in 1979 and a master class in the history of Modernism that covers its birth from ideas first put forward by Antonio Sant’Elia, Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier in the early part of the Twentieth Century . . .
. . . to its fall from grace in the latter part of the same century when its supposed beneficiaries, the people who had to live in the concrete blocks that followed the Modernist model, rebelled, and it came to be seen for what it truly was, a failed philosophy.
City of Towers – Christopher Booker BBC 1979 – film notes
August 26th, 2011
Footnotes (by blog author while writing it up)
“Under a perpetual blanket of smoke”
Ebenezer Howard – Letchworth. The Garden City 1903
Tony Garnier – What is a city for – zoning 1904
Skyscrapers early years of C20th
H.G.Wells – The Sleeper Awakes 1898 – London in 2100
Italian futurists – machines
Antonio Sant’Elia – A manifesto of a futurist architecture 1914
Russian Revolution – large buildings, skyscrapers from communism
Manhattan skyline – skyscrapers from capitalists
Germany – Mies van der Roe & Walter Gropius
August Perret – City of Towers – early 1920s
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret – Le Corbusier (crow like) – early 1920s
“Towards a new architecture” – Corbusier – 1923
“The City of Tomorrow” – Corbusier – 1925
This stupendous vision – an entirely new kind of society
Fritz Lang – Metropolis “as the most appalling nightmare” – 1920s
CIAM – avant garde architects on a Mediterranean cruise in 1933
Comprehensive Estate Initiative – research notes
August 25th, 2011
UPDATE: 21/11/16 Buy the book – “The Dynamics of Local Housing Policy” by Keith Jacobs. (At the time of writing available second hand for £22.52 – 21/11/16) HT @municipaldreams
In the early 1990s I would periodically return from a long trip overseas to notice fewer and fewer tower blocks standing on an estate once well known to me as a carpenter with the GLC . . .
Read Hansard on Trowbridge
. . . I would drive past on the Eastway and the Trowbridge Estate would have lost a couple more of its tower blocks. I began to forget how many there were to start with.
Opposite, between Eastway and the factories along the railway and the cut, the G.L.C.’s Trowbridge estate left only the north-south line of Osborne and Prince Edward roads from the centre of the old street pattern. First opened in 1965 and completed in 1969, the estate included 117 bungalow homes but was most striking for its seven 21-storeyed towers, (fn. 68) with mosaic facings and glass balconies.
From Here to Modernity
August 22nd, 2011
Click image to see full Wordle
Kirsty Wark charts the rise and fall of the Modern movement from the 1930s to its fall from popularity, in three half hour programmes made for the Open University.
Here follows a comprehensive list of the buildings featured in the programme, in the form of stills. It is not by any means a review of the programme but rather intended as an introduction by way of showing the content.
Title shot – click above for larger image
The link to the Open University details about the series is here:-
Fleet Road by Neave Brown – Camden
August 20th, 2011
The architect Neave Brown lives within the estate he designed which stands in the rectangle formed by Fleet Road to the north, Southampton to the East, Dunboyne, private and within estate to the South, and Parkhill to the West. He refers to it as Fleet Road so that’s the one I’ll go with.
Housing – 17 Camden Road, NW1
August 20th, 2011
At the end of a busy week photographing housing schemes in London I found myself in a wet and crowded Camden Town standing on the bank of a canal, brolly wedged under one arm, digital camera precariously balanced in the other hand and trying to avoid fast moving bicycles threatening to knock me into the canal.
Highpoint 1 Highgate
August 20th, 2011
During a week in London while looking at Lubetkin’s buildings this one came round on a rather soggy Saturday afternoon, the large ribbon windows proving a delight in the face of modern housing design that prefers to keeps its owners in the dark.
From Here to Modernity – Part One
More photos at my Flickr page:-
https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627430102967/
Modern Architecture has photos and floor plans here:-
https://modernarchitecturelondon.com/pages/highpoint.php
Architects Journal Buildings Library
https://www.ajbuildingslibrary.co.uk/projects/display/id/2902
Branch Hill Hampstead
August 20th, 2011
Built on a slope in the grounds of a large house, Branch Hill is Maiden Lane in miniature, albeit less tatty and with wealthier residents. Both “by the great Scottish Corbusian architects Benson and Forsyth” – Douglas Murphy
I couldn’t help being reminded of my own past where a college was built on a sloping site in the 1970s in the grounds of a stately home. It must have been the pattern of the time, to make the best use of available land.