E27002 wrote:


Thank you. I agree. It is not, primarily, about the material.
Concrete can be used most effectively. My issue is with the
mentality that gave us Westway, Euston Station, and Centre Point.
For what type of humans where these structure built.


Westway's an interesting one - it was clearly massively destructive of
an established community, but also built and designed to very high
standards. It took 30 years or so for the city to come to terms with
it, but it's actually done so, and in a way that has actually
strengthened the community (and notably in ways that none of the
politicians, engineers and planners of the original road foresaw).

http://www.westway.org/about_us/history/#a

There's a rather fine music venue and club underneath it, for instance,
for which the lack of light and ambient noise are obviously not issues -
you can't hear the traffic when the amp's been turned up to
ear-splitting levels anyway, plus it doesn't have any upstairs
neighbours to annoy, because they're in cars.

What else? Centre Point's a fine piece of architecture let down by the
base of it being designed for a car-based city rather than a pedestrian
based one. This is finally being remedied as part of the TCR station
upgrade, which will arguably complete the job of integrating the
building with the city properly. There's a common thread linking CP and
Westway, which is insufficient attention paid to the interface between
old and new, which I grant you is a valid criticism of a lot of post war
planning.

Euston we've covered - by any stretch it's a better *railway station*
than the old Euston, and works as part of the city scape in a consistent
and rational manner - the side down Eversholt St. is a bit of an
eyesore, but the side of Kings Cross on York Way isn't much better than
a blank brick wall either, and nobody criticises KX for being what it is
- a functional, stripped down modern building (that happens to have been
built in the mid-19th century rather than the mid-20th century).

So I'm not sure what the point of that was. There are plenty of bad
examples of concrete use around, so why pick 2 good examples and one
fifty-fifty one?

Tom