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Brutalist London Map

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Over the years, the movement has provoked strong reactions and arguments. Recently, a bid to grant listing status to the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London failed and the local MP called for it to be "brought down ASAP". National Theatre – photograph by Simon Phipps Hampstead isn’t all rolling heaths and quaint, cottage feels. It’s also home to a brutalist building with quite an origin story… And so, equipped with both, we embarked on our exploration to discover what this new guide might teach us. For this is a map with a mission statement, as Henrietta Billings of the Twentieth Century Society states on the reverse, ‘designed to affirm the value of these buildings and to inspire further consideration of Brutalist architecture today’. And herein lies something of a paradox between its didactic – even political – aims and its aestheticisation of London’s concrete behemoths, one that the walking tour perhaps allows us to bridge. Softer and curvier than the other buildings in this guide, The Standard is Brutalist London done differently. Alison and Peter Smithson are believed to have been the first architects to adoptthe term Brutalism – deriving from the French term for raw concrete béton brut used by Le Corbusier in the late 1940s.

The Alexandra Road Estate winds alongside Camden’s railway line, a swooping swish of striking architecture and intricate design that reflects Brutalism’s utopian vision. Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre is a splitter. In 2001 it managed to earn places in a Radio Times poll of both the most hated and most loved buildings in Britain.Another prime example of the grand public sector architecture that dominates London’s Brutalist scene, the structure is built around the concept of making theatre accessible to the masses. As such the large Olivier Theatre seats 1,160 people, alongside two smaller theatres that also seat significant numbers.

The Spirit of Brotherhood” (bottom right), completed in 1958 by sculptor Bernard Meadows, sits above the building’s main entrance and symbolises the spirit of trade unionism with the weak being looked after by the strong. There is a little confusion as to who first coined the term Brutalism — Swedish architect Hans Asplund claims to have used it in a conversation in 1950, but its first written usage was by English architect Alison Smithson in 1952. The term was borrowed from pioneering French architects and refers to unfinished or roughly finished concrete (beton brut in French). Apparently this distinctly curvy (for Brutalism) and attractive building has been earmarked for redevelopment (i.e to be demolished) so go and have a look at it while it still stands.This sprawling (and remarkably easy to get lost in) late Brutalist development houses the wonderful Barbican centre, the largest performing arts centre in Europe and home of the London Symphony Orchestra. The accompanying Barbican Estate gives you the impression of being in a Brutalist theme park. Though voted ‘the ugliest building in London’ in 2003 by some dullards, the tranquil waterside setting, complete with fountains and swaying reeds, renders it positively romantic. The soaring towers and vast concrete volumes are also nicely contrasted by the warmly-coloured tiled paving.

Swiss Cottage Library Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory (formerly the Metropolitan Police Central Communications Command Centre) What’s more, as mentioned above, Art Deco and pre-war modernism also made it onto our radar for the first time but adding examples of both genres into this post would create architecture-overload. Instead, I have put together a separate post featuring a collection of London’s best Art Deco and early modernist architecture. For fans all all things concrete comes this map of London’s most famous Brutalist buildings. Created by Blue Crow Media (see also their craft beer and cycling maps, it is the first in a new series of map-based guides to London architecture, focusing on the modern 1950s/60s “raw” concrete-heavy designs by Le Corbusier and others of the post-war architectural phase. The nearest stations are Barbican London Underground station (easy to remember!) and Liverpool Street national rail station.Warning that ‘many [Brutalist buildings] remain undervalued and under threat’, the map forces us to confront the fact that a disproportionate number of Brutalist structures were publicly funded, and are now threatened by spending cuts and a political consensus that doubts the value of 20th-century architecture. Soon the true value of this map may be found in its simple act of documentation. With several structures on the map having been rejected for listing or undergoing regeneration, this might truly be a ‘last chance to see’ tour. This ‘exhibition’ notion is perhaps problematic, for it exoticises these buildings and is in danger of subjecting people in precarious political and social situations to cultural tourism. In the 1980s, the emergence of Deconstructivism brought an end to the movement, though it continued to live on in popular culture, as noted buildings became locations for BBC spy dramas, movies with a Cold War theme, and contemporary British dramas including the film Beautiful Thing (1996) and the TV series Misfits (2009-2013).

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