On Sep 28, 10:28*am, Tom Barry wrote:
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

London works as a high density metropolis. It was not built for
cars. Had the rest of the ringway been build London would not have
been to same City. You may find that desirable. I don't.

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.

IMHO, Centre Point is out of place. It lacks sympathy with its
surroundings. Although the main issue, as you say, is its base. It
belongs next to a Freeway exit, not a subway station.

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).

Euston is somewhat functional. I prefer, the rebuilt, Liverpool
Street as an example of what can be done. King's Cross is a great
historical monument. I am not convinced that it functions especially
well as a railway station. :-)

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?


Sure, there are plenty of other examples. The discussion was about
the merits of rebuilding the Euston "Arch", albeit in concrete. I
think that would be a good thing. It was destroyed by people with the
same mentality that gave the UK so much, IMHO, bad architecture. I
cited three examples of utilitarian 1960s structures that look, to me,
as if they were built for robots.