The Fridays London Ride - Windows and Death - 29th December

[subaqua]

I gather the Finsbury Health Centre didn't do it for you?

Actually, if you look at it through half-closed eyes it does have some charm. It's just an unpalatable fact that flat roofed, white rendered buildings with steel windows go off a bit after a while. And that, for whatever reason, the tiling is and was always rubbish. And sitting at the front desk was like being in an oven.

another of Tectons wasn't it? despite looking gash he had a social vision for housing . something that current developers should look upon IMVHO

 

[dellzeqq]

Here's one I snapped while pedalling around Germany this summer:

View attachment 16525

A long time ago I went to the Villa Savioe. The space underneath was used for storing..............

cans of white paint. Hundreds of them.

Yes indeed - Tecton. Spa Green (Grade 2 listed), just round the corner from the Health Centre has just been refurbished at a cost of some millions. Those who had taken bought in to the estate as leaseholders were given bills of up to £40,000. When I masterminded the refurbishment of a traditional brick and concrete floor block, built in the same year as Spa Green it cost the leaseholders £9,000 each and every penny they spent increased the value of their flats twice over.

 

[srw]

Ah yes. Contemporary (almost exactly) with another white-painted house.
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/england/high_and_over_house.htm

 

[subaqua]

A long time ago I went to the Villa Savioe. The space underneath was used for storing..............

cans of white paint. Hundreds of them.

Yes indeed - Tecton. Spa Green (Grade 2* listed), just round the corner from the Health Centre has just been refurbished at a cost of some millions. Those who had taken bought in to the estate as leaseholders were given bills of up to £40,000. When I masterminded the refurbishment of a traditional brick and concrete floor block, built in the same year as Spa Green it cost the leaseholders £9,000 each and every penny they spent increased the value of their flats twice over.

I worked on the refurb it was 2006. did the new lateral mains and the kitchen and bathroom ugrades as part of the Decent Homes scheme . the architect in charge was a good guy Paul Tobin from LB Islington. every single kitchen was bespoke and it was a nightmare installing the lateral mains as we had such little space inside the landlords areas to install new equipment. a lot of leaseholders across the whole of LBI had massive bills.

 

[User10571]

A long time ago I went to the Villa Savioe. The space underneath was used for storing..............

cans of white paint. Hundreds of them.

Yes indeed - Tecton. Spa Green (Grade 2 listed), just round the corner from the Health Centre has just been refurbished at a cost of some millions. Those who had taken bought in to the estate as leaseholders were given bills of up to £40,000. When I masterminded the refurbishment of a traditional brick and concrete floor block, built in the same year as Spa Green it cost the leaseholders £9,000 each and every penny they spent increased the value of their flats twice over.

Lovely.
That building is the future I was promised as a pre-teenager.
How did we get it so badly wrong?
Barrats?
Meh.
And Merde.

 

[ianmac62]

Here's one I snapped while pedalling around Germany this summer

My snap was of the Kandinsky / Klee Haus, one of the Meisterhäuser a few minutes pedalling from the Bauhaus building in Dessau (in Sachsen-Anhalt in the former DDR). The East German regime didn't know what to make of Bauhaus and it all became a little run-down. It looks good now because it's been restored since the events of Die Wende. The foundation which restored it is working on the other häuser in the same street. This is the Moholy-Nagy / Feininger Haus under restoration this year:

Outside Dessau I found The Törten, a 1920s housing estate which Gropius and others designed. I was fortunate in that one of my two companions was a member of The Twentieth Century Society and he'd packed a English-language guidebook in his panniers.

 

[mmmmartin]

I was fortunate in that one of my two companions was a member of The Twentieth Century Society

Such exalted companions you travel with, I hope this ride will not be a complete letdown when I turn up.....

on the other hand

guidebook in his panniers.

Panniers? panniers? Does Dell know you consort with such people?

 

[srw]

Ah yes. Contemporary (almost exactly) with another white-painted house.
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/england/high_and_over_house.htm

I know I keep coming back to this, but the more I read about it the more extraordinary it seems. You've got several Le Corbusier houses in the mid 1920s, built for avant-garde Parisians by a middle-aged radical. You've got several Bauhaus houses about the same time, built for the architects themselves, all of whom were part of the interwar German/Austrian renaissance that also saw Mahler and Klimt.

Then you've got this. Built by a 20-something New Zealander straight out of university in Italy. Built for an art historian specialising in the scuplture of ancient Greece who would later take charge of the British Museum. Built in a Buckinghamshire backwater as a country house. Unlike all the contemporary houses in Europe, it makes best use of its steeply sloping site by being built in the shape of a Y, with the arms open to embrace the sun to the south (everything else is basically a variation on a cuboid).

That Y-house must have come from somewhere, but I can't for the life of me think where.

 

[srw]

Lovely.
That building is the future I was promised as a pre-teenager.
How did we get it so badly wrong?
Barrats?
Meh.
And Merde.

The early 1930s - houses built on spec by a private developer.

The late 1930s - houses built on spec by a private developer.

About 12 years ago, a detached three bedroom example of each was on sale for the same price. We didn't investigate the early 1930s one very hard when we realised an architect with more money than us was in the running. Getting the late 1930s house up to the state where it will last another 60 years without major work (and refitting the interior, and building a new kitchen) has cost about the same as the equivalent work on the older house would have cost.

 

[clarion]

Anyone putting a flat roof on a house in the UK is an idiot.

 

[dellzeqq]

Anyone putting a flat roof on a house in the UK is an idiot.

the trick is to make it a flat roof that isn't a flat roof. But, yes, water's been coming out of the sky for a long time, and the clever thing to do is to get it off the edge of the building as soon as you can.

 

[clarion]

Yes, I suppose you are right. There are many ways to make a 'flat roof' unflat. I wish that more architects realised it.

I have to confess that I have loved buildings such as the Villa Savoie and High-and-Over (though I'd not seen that one before) for many years. Indeed, I used to doodle houses on pillars (and bermed houses, but that's another story, and CAT's fault) when I should have been paying attention in various lessons at school.

 

[User10571]

In which case, I give you this little gem.
Stillness in Sundridge Park...

The entire swimming pool uses a hydraulic mechanism to drop by four inches, and then slides on linear bearings to one side to reveal a sub-terranian rocket launch pad, teh original owners of this property having long since eschewed the hovercraft as a means of everyday transport.
Which is precisely how the future should've turned out, and not the anaesthetised, sterile, risk-assessed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life world we find ourselves in.

 

[srw]

That Y-house must have come from somewhere, but I can't for the life of me think where.

Yes I can.

The house I grew up in was built in the late 1920s (at the same time as High & Over) in the grounds of what had been Abingdon workhouse. And down in the town was an arts and sports centre that had been converted from a prison built by, and to house, Napoleonic POWs. It's now been converted into luxury flats.

You have to envy someone with the imagination to turn a penal ground plan into a luxury house, and the chutzpah to sell it to a client.

 

[mmmmartin]

I'm not sure I ought to come on this ride. I am actually a bit of a thicko.

Just popping into town to buy a notebook so I can record the pearls of wisdom I will hear on this ride and drop them into conversations at later times.