Single Aspect Blog

What a mess.  I don’t often take an instinctive dislike to a building but this thing is on such a gargantuan scale that you can’t ignore it, unfortunately, you have to have a view on it.  It is out of scale with its surroundings to an alarming degree, ugly, with few windows and a most unattractive finish on the parts that aren’t blue panels.

Out of keeping, out of place, out of scale, I wish it was out of sight.

This is what it looks like from Dawsons Heights in Southwark:-

Click above for larger image

It sits there like a cruise ship alongside a wharf at a Caribbean island, dominating the landscape for miles around but unlike a cruise ship has few windows and looks ugly.  This was my first view of the ugly beast, I was walking along Commercial Road making my way back into town from an A2Dominion development at Limehouse and was just passing Watney Market when I first saw it.  I thought it must be a new university building from the scale of it.  I realised it wasn’t housing because it has so few windows.  Who’d want to live in the dark?  Or have high lighting bills?

Patients apparently.  Or so the architects would have it.  The bit I don’t understand is this.  In 2004 an article appeared in the Guardian describing how the then Mayor, Ken Livingstone, was going to veto the plans for very similar reasons to those I’ve expressed above.   In the intervening years the plans don’t seem to have been changed very much.

The facade of the part without blue panels is bizarre.  It has been decorated, if that’s the right word, with a whole series of horizontal metal railings.  Are they for the window cleaners to stand on?  Are they to assist base jumpers in making their way to the top with a parachute?

These close ups show them in more detail, it’s an odd thing to do.  It doesn’t add to the attractiveness of the building at all which is already revolting, it just looks like a waste of scrap metal.

What’s wrong with daylight?  It provides a view for a start, and allows the biological clock to stay in time.  This is a place where ill people are supposed to be getting better and daylight is part of that.  What follows was written in 2004 and yet I cannot see what is different about the building I saw yesterday than that described in the Guardian article below.

On the detail of the proposed Royal London hospital it said too many rooms had no windows, that the blocks appeared “jumbled and ad hoc” and patients would be confused by the complex layout. It also objected to the proposed brightly coloured sides of the building.

Cabe said: “What looks new and modish now may look dated even by the time the building is finished, let alone decades later. We believe that buildings have a duty to represent more enduring qualities.”

https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/aug/03/hospitals.health

CABE

https://www.cabe.org.uk/press-releases/royal-london-hospital-proposals

I know that hospitals are not designed for their asthetic appeal but this one is revolting.  It’s not much better from the front, although I admit to liking the blue panels, again there are few windows.

Below a close up of the blue panelled front elevation facing Whitechapel Road

To sum up?  I don’t want to think about the money and effort that was spent creating this monstrosity and this is from somebody who doesn’t like Canary Wharf.  On a scale of a revulsion to overbearing tat, this one wins by a head, until the next one is built of course.

UPDATE: Yesterday somebody typed the following into Google, so it’s not just me . . .

A visitor from 188-221-47-151.zone12.bethere.co.uk (188.221.47.151)
arrived from www.google.co.uk “royal london” ugly hospital 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=4674
at 22:32:40 on Tuesday, December 7, 2010.
This visitor used Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.215 Safari/534.10.