Brutalism – Page 13 – Modern Mooch

Pegwell Bay Hoverport

Posted on January 31, 2016May 25, 2016 by modernmoocher

Once, for a very, very long time indeed there was a shoreline, then sure enough, eventually there was a Hoverport – then there wasn’t.

Opened in 1969 just outside Ramsgate along the Kent coast, Hoverlloyd a Swedish owned company began a cross-channel hovercraft service to Calais.

Along came Prince Philip:

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/prince-philip-opens-hovercraft-at-ramsgate

Can came:

And went:

The passengers’ every need was attended to with alacrity and style.

“As a Stewardess your appearance was paramount, a beautician would come in during training to teach us how to apply make up.”

But it simply wasn’t enough.

The life of Christopher Cockerell’s bold British invention, was short and bumpy.

Genevieve Payne, a former stewardess:

“I remember the summer of 1979 as a year of really bad weather and rough seas.”

“I was working on a craft in a force 8, so on this day we were literally hitting the ceiling, passengers were throwing up everywhere.”

“One lady became hysterical I had to slap her to calm her down.”

By the 1980’s Pegwell and the hovercraft were in terminal terminus decline.

It’s a lot less bother without a hover.

What prevails is the shoreline, a concrete landing skirt and the slow process of reclamation, as nature decides that the council is quite right to decide to create a nature reserve.

Thanks to and for further information http://www.hoverlloyd.org/index.html

Here it is today:

Liverpool – Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King

Posted on January 5, 2016March 13, 2026 by modernmoocher

The cathedral’s architect, Frederick Gibberd, was the winner of a worldwide design competition.

Construction began in 1962 and was completed in 1967.

William Mitchell designed the concrete relief below the bell, two front and two side doors.

Possibly, probably and inevitably the finest Modernist building in Britain.

It continues to surprise the surprised visitor on each successive visit.

A compelling structure which articulates the ever changing marine light, both inside and out – physically and spiritually.

Dizzy detail waiting to be discovered and rediscovered.

A decorative order of the highest order.

Treat your body and mind to a day out – or simply banish the last traces of Cartesian Dualism and immerse yourself, soon.

http://www.liverpoolmetrocathedral.org.uk

Park Hill – Sheffield

Posted on December 13, 2015January 16, 2018 by modernmoocher

An estate with a chequered career.

Once a beacon of Modernist design, now a listed concrete grid, in arrested decline, an essay in status and stasis, high above the city of Sheffield.

A handful of former residents of the once acclaimed social housing, cling to the western edge.

Phase one of the Urbansplash redevelopment has carefully coloured in a portion of the eastern corner, then exited, their cladding tucked tightly under their arms.

Impasse.

All tinned up with nowhere to go, to walk the walkways, is to enter a ghost town, where no tumbleweeds tumble. Billy the corporation cleaner is happy to work alone, sweeping the empty spaces.

“Some don’t like working up here, I don’t mind my own company. Even if there was just one resident left, we’d still have to keep the place in order. You’d love my house, it’s an Army Barracks in the centre of town. Wife’s the caretaker, been in her family for three generations.”

This is the second of three visits I have made from across the Pennines.

Mark – “Why are all these photographers coming here from Manchester?”

“Been here some time, this is the second flat I’ve had, just missed out on one of the new ones though. Had this one nine years. Bloke threw himself off last week, he had a wife kids, parked up and just jumped.”

Take a look around.

Moore Street Electricity Substation – Sheffield

Posted on November 23, 2015May 28, 2018 by modernmoocher

Moments from the centre of the City, bordered by dual carriageways and a substantial roundabout, sits a most remarkable building.

What is it?

It’s almost unfathomable.

A carpark lacking entrance and exit, abattoir, contemporary art space?

No – an electrical substation, on such a colossal scale as to relieve you temporarily, of a gasp or two.

Finished entirely in unfinished concrete, a great volume, broken by vertical and horizontal lines, punctuated by intermittent abutments.

Accessed externally via a most extraordinary glazed and enclosed staircase.

Wisely Historic England have had the site listed:

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1415383

“Electricity substation. 1968 to designs by consulting architects Jefferson, Sheard and Partners, Sheffield, led by Bryan Jefferson, in association with the Regional Civil Engineers’ Department of the CEGB North East Region. Contractors, Longden & Sons Ltd, Sheffield. Reinforced concrete frame with board-marked finish with formwork bolt marks, construction and daywork joints emphasized, concrete floor slabs, blue engineering facing bricks, cladding panels of Cornish granite aggregate.”

Go see for yourself, if you don’t believe my eyes.

Hexagon Tower – Blackley Manchester

Posted on November 22, 2015August 20, 2016 by modernmoocher

Manchester Orbital – a coach trip around the outer and upper limits of the city’s Modernist Architecture.

Organised by the Manchester Modernist Society

http://www.modernist-society.org

“Seifert’s corporate buildings were regularly bold, those in Manchester no exception, but this is perhaps the most monolithic of his North-West schemes. The site, in a depression adjacent the River Irk in Blackley, was formerly owned by ICI, by whom the building was commissioned. At one time, a four storey ICI laboratory building by émigré architect Serge Chermayeff also stood close. Here, the simple massing, formed by the junction of horizontal and vertical volumes, bears several of Seifert and Partners trademark gestures; the hexagonal geometries, the cut away sections of wall to form entrance ways between structural elements, and the repetitive facade. The end wall is reminiscent of Tolworth Tower, also by Seifert. The tower and podium configuration is a product of the brief; the machine hall had to be at ground level and have no construction above. The narrow tower has no internal columns, the structural grid is mirrored in the services arrangement and the two co-exist outside the usable volume of the laboratory space, in the walls and floor. This solution is expressed in the deep reveals of the main façade, services travel vertically between the window modules. Whilst somewhat hidden, the building reveals itself fantastically from elevated vantage points, the tram south from Bowker Vale station being one such location. Originally it was intended that four of these towers would be built and run along the river valley in some sort of massive futurist domino arrangement.”

With thanks to Mainstream Modern

http://www.mainstreammodern.co.uk/casestudies.aspx/Detail/72/hexagon-tower

Margate – Car Park

Posted on June 17, 2015August 8, 2017 by modernmoocher

There’s a world going on underground.

At ground level.

Fenced off, rather poorly though.

Not much here to deter even the faint hearted urban explorer.

Find a gap and get in.

Join the taggers and lollygaggers,

Underground.

Margate – Arlington House

Posted on June 15, 2015May 12, 2020 by modernmoocher

Arlington House is a 58 metre high eighteen-storey residential apartment block in Margate, Kent, England.

It was built in 1964, it has 142 apartments, and was designed by Russell Diplock & Associates, developed by Bernard Sunley Trust, and built by the contractors Bernard Sunley & Sons.

The sides of the building have a wave-like design, providing both inland and sea views.

It was initially advertised as Britain’s first park and buy shopping centre with luxury flats , incorporating a theatre, restaurant and rooftop swimming pool.

Arlington Margate

I’ll try anything twice.

So off I went to Margate, on a train, again.

Rushing out of the station agog, eager, looking for a long lost friend.

An impudent exclamation mark at the end of a rowdy Georgian row.

Arlington House.

A mad amalgam of angles, incautious concrete surfaces and glass.

Entranced, enchanted, we both stare out to sea and eye each other admiringly.

Huddersfield – Buxton House

Posted on April 16, 2015August 12, 2016 by modernmoocher

Slap dab in the middle of the town stands a lone tower block of residential, social housing.

Buxton House backs onto the lower rise Civic Centre and is conjoined to the main shopping street and precinct, linked by a low wide underpass. Adorned on its street entrance by the most enchanting mosaic, announcing a spry geometric optimism to those shoppers and residents that pass under, through the underpass.

Ten floors of homes are bound in brick concrete and glass – a truly commanding central location, graced by the inclusion of an incongruous Chinese restaurant – The Mandarin.

Take a stroll around.

Huddersfield – The Piazza

Posted on April 15, 2015September 8, 2016 by modernmoocher

Huddersfield West Yorkshire shares a legacy with many other towns, a legacy of successive shopping developments of varying styles and quality. Shaped by fashion, topography and finance each makes a more or less bold statement on the fabric of the area.

In order to survive each geo-retail layer of architecture, must reinvent itself or die – adding new branding, covering period detail with newer, ever more impermanent fascias, flagging flagging and flags of all stripes.

I encircled the Piazza – its monumental nether regions, enlivened with almost temple like scale and applied brick, stone and concrete surfaces, the dark and forbidding, cinematic subterranean service tunnels, and the open walkways of the main shopping areas.

I came away impressed, hope you do too.

Huddersfield – University née Polytechnic

Posted on April 13, 2015November 17, 2021 by modernmoocher

Spanning the Huddersfield canal and set on a hillside site of a hilly Yorkshire town, the University Buildings dominate the Colne Valley area to the south.

Typically their history spans an earlier site which evolves during the 50s and 60s, as part of the drive to develop the industrial/educational base of the area and the burgeoning growth of the provincial Polytechnics.

The result is a confident yet dizzying panoply of styles and materials on a fairly compressed but expanding site.

Brick, concrete, glass and more recent modern clad additions collide in a bun fight of assertive volumes.

It all seems very exciting.

“David Wyles, The Buildings of Huddersfield: four architectural walks – facing us now is the impressive bulk of the Central Services Building in front of which stood a six-storey building; its structure emphasised by the reinforced concrete frame which projected skeleton-like above the main roof level. This was part of the earlier Technical College development which included several buildings of similar style designed from 1957 onwards by Frederick Gibberd. The six-storey blocks have since been demolished.

The focal point of the campus, the Central Services Building, was designed by Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley of Manchester and constructed between 1973 and 1977 at a total cost of £3,651,000. The building contains the main non-teaching facilities.

Much of the layout derives its form from the hillside site and this is accentuated by the undercover concourse leading through to the canal, which gives access to all parts of the building. The construction is based on a grid of reinforced concrete with floors supported on circular columns. The building is clad in light buff coloured bricks intended to harmonise with local sandstone.”

https://www.hud.ac.uk/about/the-university/history-of-huddersfield/

Congleton – Trinity Methodist Church

Posted on April 10, 2015October 9, 2020 by modernmoocher

How incongruous, to find a little of the space age in a suburban provincial Cheshire street, keeping company with solid, stolid brick built homes and sensible Victorian stone structures.

Trinity is dominated by its diamond shaped stained glass, framed in unfinished concrete, emboldened like a wide ecstatic grin, extending beyond the bounds of the street, beaming towards heaven.

To the side are concrete columns pierced by irregular rectangular windows.

Completed in 1968, architect was Gorden Ball from VWB Architects.

This tiny gem deserves your attention – take yourself off to Mill Street pronto.