best building in london?

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owen

Well-known member
oh i like that place. rips off the erechtheion in athens
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but the grime adds to the effect i think.

today i went down to colonel seifert's (of centre point fame) drapers gardens, which is about to be knocked down--very desolate and ballardian, crumbling masonry everywhere...took some pics but this is the best one i could find on google
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owen

Well-known member
i was on a bus stuck in fleet st yesterday which meant i got to admire at length the two sides of 1930s brit architecture--functionalist, mendelsohn-esque as in the Express building
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and fun fascist deco travesty for the Telegraph
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boringly both are now owned by some bank or other, and aren't populated by figures from HM Bateman cartoons
 
trent park, middlesex

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not one of your sexy modernist efforts, this, but it's where I hang out whilst being harrangued by my supervisor and listen to exciting papers on Levinas.

It used to be owned by Philip Sassoon (the cousin of the poet Siegfried Sassoon), who invited Charlie Chaplin to come and stay.

In the Second World War they kept German generals here and plied 'em with whisky, bugged their rooms and stole all their secrets. Now it just houses lots of dance students (generally very pretty), a rubbish caff and some maudlin philosophers.

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Dunno who this chica is, but she's clearly happy to attend her local ex-poly!
 
millennium village

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although master modernist owen is deeply sceptical about this place (my house!), I'm a big fan - yes, it's like living in a failed vision of someone else's future, but it's also like living in a Ballardian hotel where the toilets have public locks on 'em (they switch from red to green, even in the one-bed appartments! you'd think you'd probably know if someone was on the bog in a place that small)...the alienation, eerie silence, and the low-flying but soundless planes from the city airport drift down like feathers from a futurist sky.

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The communal gardens are more or less completely empty at all times, impeccably tidy and the peace is only occasionally broken by a group of boistrous lads from the David Beckham football academy down the road, who quieten down when they realise they've blundered into a DEADZONE populated by washed-out Canary Wharf zombies, stumbling towards the mirage of Ikea-like building blocks stacked up on the swamp like precarious rabbit hutches for the terminally aspirational.

Other local joys:

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Greenwich gasometer - it goes up and down a lot, but you never catch it moving.

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'On the west of the peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock.' - Iain Sinclair

I love the dome. And it loves everyone. They're gonna try and turn it into a giant casino but they're gonna FAIL because Bugsby's Marshes is HAUNTED and NO GOOD will come of trying to project any nu-labour schemes for its regeneration. It's a GHOST CITY, permeated by the stench of yeast and plague! Go home projects! You'll NEVER WIN!

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And the brilliant, brilliant Thames Barrier. Work started on this in 1974, but it could have been 2074 and sent back in a time machine. That's how frikkin cool it looks.

Tho you do have to put up with these fuggin images of twats on sofas eating noodles in some kind of corporate pyjama orgy all over the billboards.

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more north greenwich!

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almost forgot - foster's delirious north greenwich station on the jubille (the only tube line you can't commit suicide on! well, not by jumping in front of the train, anyhow).

o2, who now own the Dome, laughingly imagine that part of the complex will comprise 'a mix of restaurants, cafés, bars and 'chill out' zones, all lining an avenue as wide and as long as Bond Street'. Well maybe, but you won't get any bastard person to go there...

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An al fresco atmosphere captured the imagination of London's great and good, as they strutted longingly in their Muji pyjamas, reeling in a post-Starbuck coffee haze, desperately seeking the nearest wi-fi hot-spot before realising they were not really people at all, but the feverish faceless fantasies of an architect's insomniac doodles.
 
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Rambler

Awanturnik
infinite thought said:
almost forgot - foster's delirious north greenwich station on the jubille (the only tube line you can't commit suicide on! well, not by jumping in front of the train, anyhow).

All the new Jubilee line is lovely: in the first few weeks after it opened before everyone cottoned on to it and made it horribly crowded it was a genuine pleasure to travel on. I think the subterranean James Bond-villain hideout that is Westminster is my favourite:

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yes, westminster station is incredible - I love the fact that mere mortals are made to shuffle through the alien apparatus as if by lucky accident that human beings could slot into the place without being shredded to bits.

It's weird and massive and alienating in the best possible way.

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owen

Well-known member
brilliant, brilliant posts IT-- and nice defence of your manor, though there'll still be too much faux-pine there for my taste. still there is that mentalist school. i guess what is fun about millenium village is that it takes ikeaness to a truly demented, megalomanaical conclusion, viz-

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owen

Well-known member
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the <a href="http://www.open2.net/modernity/3_6.htm">pioneer health centre</a> was a bit depressing visiting the other day- it's now a gated community, following the rule that any given area in london can become luxury bloody flats.

but i was reminded in the week of the true aceness of the barbican, taking a friend there who'd never been before. lovely in the sunshine, like a kind of benign ballardian, the counterpoint between all that lovely jagged concrete and the little psuedo-lakes...ignore the stockbrokers, rubbish exhibitions and paying 2 quid for a lemonade and it seems positively utopian...

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btw i don't just like modernist buildings in london...i also like this

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(nb deptford high st no longer quite looks like this) not just cos it's on my street, but because of the shiny enlightenment rationalism of the thing-- hang around there for a bit and one forgets the amount of talkers-to-self, drinkers of special brew and general wrongness that prevades. more appropriate to the area really is st nicholas', towards the river, with it's delightful gateposts...
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owen

Well-known member
and near to that is this utterly ludicrous statue (in, ah, 'millenium quay') of tsar peter the great, who has for some reason an elbow bigger than his head and is flanked by a dwarf covered in giant flies

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jenks

thread death
Remember a great radio programme on Peter the Great in London. Apparently he arrived mob handed and proceded to trash the joint - good old fashioned posh boorish behaviour.
 
millennium etc.

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This is the view from my, er, balcony. Look! There's the dome and everything.

I dunno what that bloke is doing there! It's not supposed to have any actual people in it.
 
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more modernist mallarky

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66 Frognal, Hampstead, completed 1938, designed by Colin Lucas of Connell, Ward and Lucas. Made of reinforced concrete 'in the extreme idiom of the day'.

Nice angular topiary.
 
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