A Bit of Looking and Seeing with Kurt Rowland

 Managed to pick these wonderful Kurt Rowland books up sometime ago. This series of books seems to have drifted in and out of my life for decades. I 1st remember seeing these at School in our strange old tatty library, then came across them again years later when at University. Was reminded many years after that when I saw them on the Toys and Techniques blog not long after that I decided to track them down. I am still missing the Development of Shape and The Shape of Towns. These do crop up on ebay and maybe one day I will get round to picking them up.

Ecclesiastical Modernism (slight return)

 

an amuse-bouche for the pictorial contents of this... 

The New Architecture of Europe

Found this superb book at a Car Boot sale recently. Picked it up for the grand sum of 20p. There were many other books (Pelican & Penguin) but the seagulls had managed to empty out all over them, and this was the only book left unsoiled. Luck I say, it was meant to be.

Concrete Finishes for Highway Structures

Published by the Cement & Concrete Association, 1972.

See the full set on Flickr: MOAR concrete

I put it to you that this is the purest hit, the Platonic ideal, of a certain strand of hauntalogical whatever-it-is.  That strand being the municipal, "mildly alien" one. Not overtly supernatural, not overtly sci-fi but somehow suggestive of both.  I can't pin down why, exactly, but it hits the spot for me even more than the big stuff - the megastructures, the brutalist icons etc. Those photos of spanking new bridges passing over nowt but grass send a shiver up my spine.  Phwoar!

Btw, those last two are of the Hockley Flyover in Birmingham.  Do a Google image search of hockley flyover and you get some fantastic colour pics taken during construction, and a bunch that appear to show that all the knobbly bits are still there.  Any locals able to confirm that?

Posted by Bollops at 12:09 No comments:

Adventure in Architecture

Thursday, 16 January 2014

Mixed development, Port Louise, Brussels

Luxury flats, Hendon Hall Court, London, NW4

Whickham Tower, aka Dunston Rocket, aka Derwent Tower

Hays Wharf Redevelopment Project

Out-of-town department store, Brussels

Stadium for Sunderland FC

Port Louise, Brussels

Lund Humphries, 1977.  Profile by Kate Wharton.

Note the model for the Hays Wharf project - made of Lego!

EDIT: The Derwent Tower (3rd pic down) was demolished during 2011 & 2012.  Here's an amazing set of photos taken by Ken Fitzpatrick:

The Demolition of Derwent Tower

Posted by Bollops at 23:21 No comments:

The future of pavilions... yesterday.

Thursday, 28 October 2010

In the 1950's, artist and architect Victor Pasmore was teaching at the university of Durham. Whilst looking for idea's to change and modernise the local Durham Town of Peterlee, a development manager from the local council spotted Pasmore's work at a local exhibition and immediately asked him to design a pavilion to give the town an arty edge..

It's a bit brutal, however it's still quite a haunting looking thing just sitting there, resonating images of the 60's and 70's PIF's and kids at play...


Victor Pasmore

Posted by KO at 16:14