Bauzwangsvorstellung: Holiday Inn London

Of London's tall buildings, the best, the strangest, the most admirable are the decades-old, concrete chess pieces of West London, solitary sentries guarding these residential quarters. They make a striking juxtaposition in shape, size, height, and material, contrasting with the cream-colored terraces and garden squares. 

I spent a lot of time in London during the middle of this year, and could see the Holiday Inn Kensington from the window of my bedroom. It is startling and hideous, a massive wall of crummy, soulless hotel rooms, the largest building of the tourist-lodging district of busy Cromwell Road, which deposits foreign tourists from Heathrow Airport into ‘posh’ West London. 

The building makes an even more striking contrast nearby, as the hotel looms over the large and surprisingly quiet garden square nearby, Cornwall Garden. If the area had more tall buildings, the effect would be diminished, but this westernmost hotel high-rise of West London stands by itself. 

The Banks

 LONDON.

Among the landmarks of London whose appearance from afar is considered precious, the Palace of Westminster, positioned particularly on a broad curve of the River Thames, is among the most sacrosanct. The views towards Parliament are protected by an act of Parliament.

It is therefore strange that either side of this critical, historic stretch of London's brown artery stretches an increasingly incongruous phalanx of large, tall buildings.

Partly, this is a result of the property and preservation paradox itself: water views are always valuable, and the wide vistas across the water, itself mostly free of buildings, make its edge a prime location for prominent buildings, beginning with Big Ben itself.

But, like in so many other rarified quarters of the capital, when post-war Britain needed to rebuild, and as later decades came, architectural statements needed to be made, bold new buildings of varying merit rose up on either side of the river.

It all started out rather well when peace came more than half a century ago: not least the brutalist Festival Hall, which is often considered one of London's best 20th century buildings, and deserves its own consideration aside from this overview. But perhaps this lovely, brave civic endeavor opened a pandora's box of contemporary construction, an outflow which is accelerating even now, all around it.

Charing Cross from the London Eye: 

Peering down on Thatcherist public monument from Blairite cool tourist icon.

 Directly opposite is exhibit A: Charing Cross, Terry Ferrell's high-pomo shopping shed train station, welded to the back of the dainty Victorian railway hotel, a monument to late Thatcherist love of American commercial argot in all things, especially civic infrastructure.

Since the Millennium, the mid-century leisure attraction has been overshadowed in all senses by the London Eye, which itself has become a jewel in the crown of London's indisputable architectural icons. It's nice, and playful, and neat, and family-friendly, and touristic, but it's not in the least respectful of its context, usurping the stately sweeps of parliament for its own ticket receipts.

South Bank, in the very near future. 

Of an earlier era, and what seems now almost quaintly more controversial at the time, was the Shell Centre, a stone-white office tower lovingly celebrated in this contemporary film below, when riding in elevators and working more than three stories above the ground was a marvel. It will soon by joined by more high-end speculative developments.

Among the oldest skyscrapers along the Westminster side of the Thames is the bulky Millbank Tower, built in 1973 near the site of the old Millbank Prison. Standing like a third tower of parliament, after Big Ben's Clock Tower and Victoria Tower, it is hard to photograph Britain's legislative house without this drab block in the background. It was once a home to Britain's Labour Party, somehow fittingly.

This monolith is now joined by the "riverside stunning development"of St. Georges Wharf, a green-glass Vancouver-upon-Vauxhall that manages to become increasingly obnoxious as it slowly metasticizes decade after decade.

The first mega-structure of the Lambeth shore was Terry Ferrel's second superstructure facing the mid-Thames. Known variously as the MI6 Building or SIS Building, it was built on spec until Thatcher let the spooks lease some floors. Aside from having its naming-rights occupants be a government agency whose existence wasn't acknowledged for decades afterwards, the building's realization is unbelievable in two aspects: firstly that a faux-copper-capped neo-art-deco ziggurat would be proposed anywhere, and that a government's clandestine intelligence division would occupy a bombastic Babylonian building on such a premiere site, a Legoland Lubyanka in Lambeth done up in Michael Graves Mesopotamian. It was famous even before it featured memorably in the otherwise forgettable 2012 James Bond episode Skyfall. The secret police have a celebrity building.

It might have been easier to just not build it in the first place…

Then its Canadian cousin arrived

What could possibly share space with such a ridiculous building, other than luxury flats? A decade after the secret government agency openly moved in to its bankside behemoth, a vapid, Vancouverish, over-fenstrated fortresses. Nominated for a Carbuncle Cup on completion in 2006, it goes to show how much bad architecture is produced every year that this shiny flock of seagulls lost to an even worse building. That this bizarre pair are in and of themselves unquestionably referential just illustrates how warped the contextual parameters of the Thames have become. London wasn't first to the finish line, yet it now enjoys a quintessential 'stunning riverside development.'

The royal heir did not arrive until 2013. It is again glassy and green, but instead of a sprawling palace, it is a tower. It's realization in this once-distant corner of the city is emblematic of how, in just a decade, all efforts to hold back skyscrapers from London's skyline and its neighborhoods have been exhausted under the foot-tread of property developments. Together with the 40-year old Millbank tower, they stand like pillars of Hercules, ominously blocking the source of the Thames, triumphant in their fight over what this city will ultimately look like.

But it is not a war without real-life casualties. In what seemed not only ironically-reminiscent of the kaboom from the Daniel Craig Bond flop, but also an epic allegory for this era of high oligarchy, a helicopter, whizzing across the grey early morning with important people in a rush, struck the tower crane as it was crowning this latest yuppiedrome. Flames and debris not set off by Hollywood effects specialists rained down on the morning joggers and bikers along the river. Two died. A baptism by fire by helicopter crash; buildings have been deemed cursed from far less.

If there's death to be mourned beyond this loss of human life in all this technological violence, perhaps this is yet another eulogy for part of Britain itself? For in all the hand-wringing about view corridors, what is meant to be preserved, what is wished distilled, is the concept of a country, a place not of property speculation but pastural charm, even in its great, grand capital. Of late, this heritage has extended to the honoring the technological past, the age of engineering which gave Britain its summiting might, and so much of its great architecture.

That this would be the alluding myth of an office building for lobbying speaks to the sorry condition of both building design and its society. Michael Hopkin's addition to the Parliament promenade, Portcullis House is not even necessarily a bad building, and it is certainly not the worst that one's eyes could meet, scanning the skyline from the panoramic viewpoint of the river's shores. But neither is it great, for such a great and celebrated spot; it's a minor player in an orchestra, drowned out by bigger instruments, which play an incongruous tune. If that song were a paean, what myths would it lyricize, for us to believe that the river passes by heroes, as it winds through this capital and out to the sea. 

Victor Victoriana

Above: Portland House & Westminster Cathedral over Green Park. ©2013 Bauzeitgeist. 

Below ©Google.

LONDON.

The increasing hideousness of the City of London's skyline is frequently decried just for the ugliness of the new architecture itself, but the loss of the capital's historic vistas, mentioned in terms of the now-carefully-studied "view corridors"–of St. Paul's in particular but also the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. The new glass-and-steel financial towers block the distant appearance of the cathedral's dome or the heroic Big Ben and Victoria Tower of Parliament. Paradoxically, the concern over these sight lines seem to overshadow the demerits of the new skyscrapers themselves, which it seems can be hideous as long as they are a referential distance  from London's more ancient landmarks.

A counterargument to this is that it ignores all the terrible office buildings that have been rising in prominent locations across London for decades. As mentioned in the last post, this is a different issue in leafier west London, away from the narrow jagged alleys of the medieval City. These more residential areas have had fewer demands for tall buildings, more restrictions on new construction, and are home to two of the capital's largest parks, the perimeters of which space out a handful of tall towers, most of which were realized decades ago.

Portland House over the top of Green Park. ©2003, 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

The West London district that most closely resembles the City of London is Victoria. Before ever visiting Britain, I heard the name, and assumed that only one of London's nicest areas would be named after a queen. But this is not the case. The grandeur evoked by its moniker seems grossly misapplied to the tangle of busy, dirty streets, in misnomers like the busy Buckingham Palace Road.

171 Victoria Street, HQ of John Lewis.

Victoria is sort of the District of Columbia of London, with a heavy dose of Madison Square Garden at its center. Home to a large portion of the British government, it features several busy thoroughfares lined with dull office blocks, home to a lot of the back-office bureaucracy and the UK lobbying industry. This sad zone stretches between Parliament and Buckingham Palace, forming a triangle with its namesake, the enormous Victoria Railway Station, an ugly procession of dusty sheds, which somehow managed to become even more revolting by a partial conversion to a low-ceilinged shopping mall, which itself continues on to a massive bus terminal, its steel frames covered in several decades worth of dust and pigeon poop. An analytical post could be dedicated to just this low-lying carbuncle itself, oozing across the southern threshold of one of the world's most expensive neighborhoods, minutes from bedrooms which go for a million-and-a-half pounds each, and a 15-minute walk from one of the most famous houses on the planet.

Victoria Coach Station, Buckingham Palace Road. ©2006 Bauzeitgeist.

The other side of this district hosts a handful of half-tall, boring office towers. What is most shocking to a visitor's sensibility is that this cluster of buildings, a sort of office park right in the center of Westminster, is within a few blocks of one of the greatest monuments of modern monarchical mythology, Buckingham Palace. The group of dull blocks spoil the background of the pristine royal fantasy, Green Park gets the backdrop of a suburban office park.

The most noticeable building to rise over the treetops of Green Park is Portland House, a building so bland it is hard to pick it out of a lineup. As if the area between the regal Mall and the train station wasn't turning out badly enough, somehow a shortened Pan Am building (with nearly identical octagon shape and depressing ground floor porticos) dropped down like a lead curtain; the Monster that ate the Green Park. In a classic Maupassantian moment, the property company boasts of the tower's "stunning views" while Portland House prominently detracts so many others from elsewhere in the city.

Portland House, visible with Big Ben, the Shard, Victoria Tower, One Canada Water, and the Westminster Cathedral.

©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

In a quintessential New-Ruins-of-Great-Britain move, the forecourt was done over ten years ago as a glass-domed mall, so the cubicles full of bureaucrats could have their basement gym and food court and shopping. The fourth floor is leased out to the Kazakh resource group that is currently taking over disgraced commodities firm ENRC.

The front of Buckingham Palace, with Cardinal Place and Victoria in the background. 

©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

If anything could ruin the scene from Buckingham Palace more than this, it would have to be the erstwhile Home Office, now the Ministry of Justice, which today, like all soulless structures, is most commonly referred to only by its street address, 102 Petty France. Perhaps only in England could such an enormous and over-bearing structure somehow end up referred by such a cute little name as Petty France, as if the façade's fenestration referenced a particular style of lace doily rather than a Brutalist blockbuster.

This is another realization of Sir Basil Spence, designer of the Household Calvary Barracks covered in the last post. Celebrated another of the most hated buildings in Britain, it caused a Lord to once remark that Spence ruined two London parks with his monstrosities: the Household Calvary wrecked the bucolic idyll of Hyde Park, while the Home Office destroyed the serenity of Green Park (Portland Place aside).

Whether to instills admiration, or admonishment, its mass make one of the most compelling attractions of the whole quarter, another helmeted, cement-paneled soldier rudely wrecking a precious royal vista. Its block-long body features  a double-row of giant goggled bay window galleries staring wide-eyed at the street, monitoring. The higher stacks feature more repetitive windows, its bulbous noggin blotting out even more light. This bureaucratic fortress remarkably resembles the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and is therefore all the more fitting that the building's apparent nickname was Lubyanka, after the enormous palace headquarters of the KGB in Moscow.

(4) Previous photos of 102 Petty France ©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

Its tempting to conclude that this repulsiveness was somehow intentional, that the bloated absurdity of this building, while a fitting home to a bloated agency of bureaucracy, was in fact impugning the ridiculously over-large imperial manor sitting just a short walk away–that the narrow lane of Petty France was the closest that Spence could get to stage his protest.

Türme im Park

Hyde Park sits just a few miles west of the increasingly carbuncled crown of the City of London. While City's medieval streets burst with more and larger office towers, to the west lies the pastorial idyll, London's leaf Elysian field.

It's surrounded mostly by mannered quarters arranged in terrace rows powder-white town-homes. Protected by legal restrictions, the rooflines of Belgravia, Mayfair, and Kensington cannot be altered. In contrast to the spider-limbed tower cranes frenetically assembling steel plate skeletons over the City, the skyrocketing change to Westminster's property is in its value, not its outward appearance.

However, Hyde Park is not without its highrises. Before the era of sight lines making headlines and nicknames for buildings, London was a postwar city in need of reconstruction with fewer rules on shadow-casting, including in these aristocratic arrondissments.

The gimmicky shapes and narcissism of east London's thicket of office blocks contrast the blander 1960-70 era towers across West London.

The skyline of Bayswater, on the north side of the Park, from Marble Arch to Queensway, is a semmingly-intentionally dull assembly of rectangles.

The Queen of the west London chess set might have to be the 1963 Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, a glass-and-cement tripod standing atop a rectangular base at the end of Curzon Street. It should also be the Queen of this game board because the real Queen reportedly hates it and has never gone there in its fifty years.

Nearby Knightsbridge, now more than ever a metonym for disgustingly rich plutocrats burning immense amounts of money as a spectator sport, looks low key from the lawn, with only the top levels of the notorious One Hyde Park visible over leaf line.

Much more noticeable is the corpulently rotund Sheraton hotel, the robot that ruined Lowndes Square. Its resemblance to R2D2 is enhanced by its brutalist, bug-eyed bay-window pattern. If this wasn't rude enough to its terrace-house neighbors, the base of the building, which houses a casino, looks like a series of temporary partitions to cover the construction of a real lobby. But of course none of the ground-level mess is visible from lovely Hyde Park, where it peaks out above the plane trees, as if on reconnaissance.

Lastly, the King of Knightsbridge has to be the totally unbelievable Household Calvary Barracks, the tallest and strangest building in West London. Non-Brits might question why household calvary even exist for in the era of the skyscraper, and imagining horse guards in a high-rise on the edge of historic, high-priced homes might require further explanation.

Wedged between the Park and the traffic of the Knightsbridge artery, this vertical dormitory wins the crown for best headgear, as the building's concrete posts flare into a finned helmet, the metallic roof sloping to a slim visor at the roofline, almost recalling the elements of an African Songye mask.

Widely hated, Basil Spence's 1970 masterpiece might be reborn as Two Hyde Park, as the MoD is looking to sell the 33-story tower for around £500,000,000.

In the current skyscraper boom, there have been repeated lamentations that London's skyline is being ruined. In earlier years, before the City's horizon was blotted out by cartoonish cutouts, the argument that London is not a high-rise city was even asserted.  Like its untouchable acres of terraced houses, London's panoramas and vistas have been treated as delicate, endangered, in need of protection and legislation. This argument convincingly impugns the bombastic buildingscape which continues to grow east of St. Paul's, but conveniently ignores that London has comfortably featured large buildings in its most celebrated areas for half a century or more. 

Invasions like the Household Calvary could not get planning permission today, for better or worse. What was allowed to go up all across London in earlier decades, from Tower 42 to Trellik, have been neither widely admired or thoughtfully contextual, and this might be viewed not simply as a series of mistakes but as as possibility of a more realistic metropolis. West London especially, with its few tall buildings spaced around an enormous park, shows how London is treated as a mythical rural village but acts as any other dense city, home to big ugly blocks up against pretty, historic buildings. 

Peinlich

LONDON.

The obvious problem with this sort of episode illustrated above is that it is just silly. It is embarrassing for everyone involved in the realization of a skyscraper to have the building appear on international cable news because the building is unexpectedly ridiculous.

But beyond the reporter-frying-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk antics, this is another own-goal for architecture.  what does it say about architecture that this is one of the few times that not just regularly-scheduled programming would be interrupted, but surreal graphics like the one above appear, and that Twitter hashtags blow up-- in other words, that this is one of the few times that architecture is a news story?

Even if rows of laser-fighting louvres were value-engineered out, well, that also sort of proves the point, doesn't it?  In one way or the other, the celebrities of the architectural profession are no more adept at spotting latent risks in their designs as the financial titans they build for.

The unexpected absurdity of 20 Fenchurch Street only compounds the already unmitigated silliness, which can only be either intentional or unplanned. Even before it fried a trader's jag on a climate-changingly-stupendous late summer day, it was already reaching the prize circle as the worst of the starchitectural sheds to shove their way into the medieval streets.

Who has ever looked at a walkie-talkie and thought it would make an attractive office building? What is a walkie-talkie? Does anyone still use them? How does this warpy UN Secretariat look like a Walkie Talkie? Don't walkie-talkies have antennae? If the building doesn't look like anything, why give it a nickname of an outdated technology?

Wheras a genuinely-derived popular nickname for many buildings around the world has been 'the box that another building came in,' 20 Fenchurch Street could only aspire to be recognized as a piece of the styrofoam packaging that the Gherkin came in.

Even many ultimately hideous skyscrapers look alluring in their skeletal infancy. Yet this tornado-column of steel plates, bulging up over the Thames, only suggested the horrible combination of the infantile and the egomaniacal that the wavy, twisty, torquey, turny, kissy, misshapen trend manifests. Moreso than even the Shard, Fenchurch Street is the arrival of Gulf-style showmanship to London.

Long before its glazing summoned a death ray from the September sun, swoops of steel swung out over the narrow, ancient streets, blocking out just a bit more of the sky. Even without that perfect metaphor of the glossy, reflective surface of a financial house suddenly and without anticipation melting the possessions of its neighbors, these corpulent corners fanned out to grab just that much more light and air for itself.

But if you're planning to blot out the sun, at least get that right.