Oh Birmingham....

    

  ....what has become of you? Have you really so sunk so low?

     I am talking here about the planning application by Marrons (for HJB Investments) for 80 Broad St, in the city.  I first came across this application in the current edition of 'Private Eye' last week.  It has also been reported on by the BBC and GBNews.  In addition to the 'Eye' it has also featured in other traditional print media such as 'Building Design' and 'Construction Enquirer' - most of these articles are essentially a re-write of a post on the Marrons' website.

 

     To the scheme and it really is a shocker, entailing the proposed construction of a 438ft high tower over the top of a late, rather attractive, Grade II listed, Georgian mansion called, in a couple of on-line articles, 'Islington Villa'.¹  (This end of Broad St was in the beginning of the 19th century known as Islington and Broad St as Islington Rd.)  As far as I can make it both the architect of the villa and the date of construction are unknown; Pevsner says c1830s, while Flickr 1814.² It was the home of Owen Johnson, one of the founders of the Islington Glassworks, but most of its life has not been domestic but institutional i.e. a series of hospitals.  In recent years it has been a restaurant and a bar and has since Lockdown been empty.  For all its vicissitudes it is one of the last remaining pieces of the old Broad St. and, with the extraordinary former Broad St Presbyterian Church (1848-9 by J R Botham), perhaps the best bit of architecture going on on the street.  And, let's face it, Broad St needs all the help it can get. It abounds in ugliness, but then the whole of the City Centre is slowly sinking into vulgarity. 

     Let's hope this really doesn't get planning permission. Marrons' design will not only set a dangerous precedent should it get permission, but it will do nothing to enhance Broad St while actually demeaning the current structure. 

Great news! As of today (25.04.24) the scheme has failed to get planning permission.  Islington Villa is safe.  For now.

1  The tower, I believe, will be mainly, as the headline on 'Business-Live.co.uk' so elegantly puts it, 'resi'.  That's residential to you and me.

2 The architect of the sympathetically designed wings is however known.  It was John Jones Bateman (never heard of him).  They date from 1863, when 'Islington Villa' was already a hospital.  The railings are also listed.

 

The Counter Project

     It is now over 24 hours since an acquaintance of mine, the Irish classical architect and fellow member of RIBA TAG, Conor K Lynch tweeted four images of a counter proposal by 'Apollodorus Architects' for the new rugby stadium in Bath.  In those 19 hours the response has extraordinary: 18,800 likes and counting; 1,948 retweets; 472 comments. The latter have been overwhelmingly positive.  It has certainly caught the public imagination, on Twitter at least.  Of course, there had to be the snarky comment about Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect from a practicing modernist(?) architect.  Ah yes, that go to criticism of modern classicism. It really is a tired-out old trope.  It's not even a criticism of the architecture as such, but guilt by association.  Not only is it such a bore, but says much about the intellectual vacuity of the mainstream architectural profession that they should trot some old garbage like that.

    Now for some specifics: the Apollodorus Architects Classical proposal (here) stands counter to the Modernist one designed by Grimshaw (here) for Bath Rugby, who are in need of permanent stadium.  Bath Rugby play on the Recreation Ground - the 'Rec' - just over the river Avon from Bath city centre - in Bathwick, that large and unfinished late Georgian development by Thomas Baldwin I wrote about here.  So a particularly sensitive site then when any building on the 'Rec' could be seen from outside the e end of Bath Abbey.  One can also understand the reluctance of the club to leave - they have, after all, played there for decades.  On their website Bath Rugby claims of the Grimshaw design (here): We have created an iconic, yet sensitive design that will deliver an incredible match day experience.  I mean, who writes this guff? 'iconic yet sensitive'?  I'm not even sure what that means. In any case 'iconic', that hideously over used term, is not for Bath Rugby to claim.  I could go on as the Bath Rugby website and in particular their Development Brief, and which has now been formally submitted to Bath & North East Somerset Council, is full of such management speak, but I'll spare you.

     However the use of management speak isn't really the argument here, regrettable though its dominance of the discourse is.  Neither are the merits or otherwise of either scheme my concern, though as an associate member of TAG my sympathies are with the Classical design, which is based on the Roman Amphitheatre at Arles in Provence. Whatever my reservations about the design, and there are some, we have to honest at this juncture and admit it is very unlikely ever to be built if only for the 'mundane' reason that Bath Rugby is nearly an unsustainable £40,000,000 in debt.
     For me the response to this proposal highlights two interconnected phenomena.  Firstly, the growing appeal of Classical/Traditional architecture on social media.  All ready there are any number of twitter streams dedicated to traditional architecture & urbanism, and the culture necessary to sustain them.  Secondly, the continuing gulf between the public and the profession - a gulf that has lasted so far for some sixty plus years. We have a profession that is arrogant and unresponsive to the public.  It has attempted to establish itself as a secular priesthood of true believers. How long must this continue?

The Architecture of Disenchantment

     Last week a welcome return trip to Brecon in the Usk Valley. On our last visit the museum was closed for a major re-ordering. The Museum reopened in 2019 and then, obviously, closed due to Lockdown in 2020, so this was our first opportunity to look round. Now, before I go any further I should say that the project has been controversial, the project being neither to schedule or budget, and may still be the subject of a council enquiry. This post is not about the logistics of the scheme but its aesthetic qualities, which are sadly baleful.

     But first a little history, a little context. The site, I think, is situated just within the circle of the Medieval town wall, at the point where it meets the main road east out of the town. It is  roughly triangular; if it helps think of a leaf with its point to the east. And it is at that apex stands the most important structure on the site: The Shire Hall of 1839-43, by T H Wyatt and D Brandon; Neo-classical and remarkably correct and severe for its date with none of that richness, even over ornamentation, that is associated with the 'Victorian'. Doric order under the influence of the heavy architecture of the Magna Greacia, and lots of plain wall surface. Crisp detailing.  It also has to be noted that it is built of ooltic limestone from the Limestone Belt. For many years it served as the Assize Court and the court room is a particularly fine space, with a beautiful apse at the west end. After the court moved out, the building became a museum and art gallery. The recent work has been added at the rear of the Shire Hall as part of a multi-million pound redevelopment - a 'cultural hub', God help us, called 'Y Gaer', the fort. The architects are PowellDobson. And to be fair to the architects at this point I have to say that the brief was a difficult one: the site is cramped and there was a lot to cram in - library, café, teaching space etc.

     And so to the new work. Our first view was from the car park on Canal Rd., and it was not good. Chaotic. Discordant. The Architecture of Disenchantment in which nothing has been really resolved or reconciled. And while one can have some sympathy for the idea of giving expression to the various functions of a building like this, the truth is that this symbolic language is used here in a purely arbitrary manner. Old and new stand together rather like an unhappily married couple, barely talking to one another. From our low vantage point the 'cultural hub' (ha,ha,ha) consists of three sections; (from the right) the side of the old Shire Hall, a glass and steel atrium, and a taller red-clad block, the most prominent feature of this side of the building (you can hardly call it a façade). It presents itself as one of those 'basking shark' facades rather like the open end of an enormous cardboard box that suggests it contains a single volume space, a significant space.  These things have been oh-so-fashionable recently. I suppose the original 'basking shark' was 'The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts' by Norman Foster, completed in 1978.
     We approached the 'complex' from Captain's Walk - itself now contentious - and its lack of integration with the warp and weft of the urban fabric became clear. Closer to, the cladding reveals itself to be stone or an imitation thereof. I couldn't decide. The colour (which is strident) suggests the former, but I could be wrong. Perhaps the elements may have a tempering effect over time. Now these oblong slabs have a remorseful logic of their own which works well enough on the long west façade but on the short end facades this logic simply breaks down. The attempt at a resolution of the conflict between architecture and material was inept. It just wasn't thought out properly. The utter rigidity of the dimensions of the cladding slab dictate everything in these circumstances. The design should have been re-thought.  The entrance façade is just as ill-handled as the south façade. 

      The interior is no better. The atrium is incoherent and the clad block reveals itself as a merely inconsistently applied façade. Nothing more. It contains no significant space. All that signification, that symbolic representation of interior space expressed on that outward facing façade has been immediately subverted. It cannot even contain the library which spills out into the atrium. There is a total lack of integration between the old and the new, with the former, one feels, looked upon as an embarrassment. In all a terrible disappointment, and in many ways symbolic of our age.