Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Corn Cobs

Marina City, Chicago

The twin towers of Chicago’s Marina City (1959-64) – inevitably nicknamed the “corn cobs” – were a social as well as an urban landmark. Their architect, Bertrand Goldberg (1913-1997), insisted their floor-plans were derived from the sunflower, “where the core is the center of the flower and each of the bays emanating from the core are very much both in shape and organization – like the petal of the flower.”

These two concrete towers were an exciting practical departure from established development thinking: their construction is transparent, with a spiral of car parks leading to cake-slice shaped apartments with open semi-circular balconies; the intention – which proved highly successful from the start – was to provide downtown accommodation for single and childless city-centre workers who wished to live virtually, if not actually, within the Loop.

The first nineteen storeys form a ramped multi-storey car-park (staffed by valets, presumably to minimise misadventures). The twentieth floor is given over to services, included a launderette, and the floors above consist of apartments with some of the most enviable views in Chicago.

Conceived as a “city within a city”, Marina City was equipped with shops, restaurant, entertainment facilities and hosted both radio and television studios, as well as a marina with direct access to the Chicago River.

To provide nine hundred apartments economically, Goldberg chose to build two sixty-storey towers, and rejected steel cladding as too expensive. Consequently, they were for their time the tallest reinforced-concrete structures in the world.

At a time when “white flight” to the suburbs was a major problem for urban planners, Marina City helped to turn the tide, making inner-city living desirable and convenient – though its residents, driving in and out and sweeping home in high-speed elevators, need hardly set foot on the sidewalk for weeks on end.

A helpful description of Marina City is at http://www.chicagosavvytours.com/apps/blog/show/3230412-marina-towers-the-city-within-a-city.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City: the architecture of Chicago please click here.

Less is more

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Former IBM Building, 330 North Wabash Avenue, Chicago

The towering figure of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) ensured that Chicago led the world in the development of the modernist International Style. He arrived in Chicago, a refugee from Nazi Germany, in 1937 to head the school of architecture at Armour Institute, which subsequently became the Illinois Institute of Technology. Having designed the IIT campus in the Black Belt area of Bronzeville, he took up full-time architectural practice on his retirement in 1958.

Rooted in the principles of the pre-war Bauhaus School,– that architecture is intended simply to define space, buildings should have absolute regularity unless variation is functionally necessary and there should be no applied decoration – the buildings of this style are instantly recognisable as rectilinear boxes floating above a ground-level podium. They show no sign of their function, ignore their surroundings and could be positioned anywhere. Mies van der Rohe’s principle was that “less is more”.

His last American commission was the 52-storey, 695-feet-high IBM Building at 330 North Wabash Avenue, built posthumously in 1969-71 (or 1971-3, depending on the source). Its distinguishing feature is the use of dark aluminium instead of black structural members, and of bronze-tinted glass instead of clear.

It represents a landmark in building design because its owners, necessarily, specified features to accommodate what was then an unusual quantity of computers – an under-floor duct-system to permit cabling and reverse refrigeration to disperse the heat from the machines.

The building is a beautiful shape, but it could have been built anywhere. Unlike the nearby Wrigley Building, which is carefully designed to fit with the bend in the Chicago River, the IBM Building is parked unceremoniously in a position that required the realignment of North Wabash Avenue.

It remains a practical building now that it’s to an extent outlived its original purpose. As 330 North Wabash, it is being refurbished to incorporate a five-star hotel on floors 2-16: http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1043/330-North-Wabash.php.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City: the architecture of Chicago please click here.

Lady Isabella

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Great Laxey Wheel, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man’s most distinctive industrial structure is the decorative but entirely practical Great Laxey Wheel, which is properly named Lady Isabella after the wife of the Lieutenant Governor, the Hon Charles Hope, at the time of its construction, 1850-54.

On an island entirely devoid of coal, the spectacular 72½-foot diameter backshot wheel was the economical solution to the need to drain the Laxey mines to a depth of 1,200 feet.

The wheel is driven by the waters of the Glen Mooar river led by gravity from an upstream cistern to the top of the tower behind the wheel.

In turn it drives a crank connected to a rod-system, carried on a 200-yard viaduct of 34 arches to power the pumping gear.

Because of its prominence in the valley, it was given an elaborate architectural treatment, with a vertiginous spiral staircase leading to a viewing platform above the supply aqueduct.

The Great Laxey Mining Company became hugely profitable. Peak production was achieved in 1875 – 2,400 tons of lead, 107,420 ounces of silver (worth over £90,000) and 11,753 tons of zinc-blende. In 1876 £4 shares yielded a 50% dividend.

From then on production declined, until flooding bankrupted the company in 1901, and attempts to revive the mine finally gave out in 1929.

The Lady Isabella, on the other hand, has been a consistent success as a tourist attraction. In 1877 16,445 visitors climbed to the top of the Wheel. The miners’ wives did good business providing ham-and-egg teas for visitors, so that Dumbell’s Terrace became and remains known as Ham and Egg Row.

Admission charges (£200 in 1887) were donated to the Miners’ Poor Relief Fund until 1897, when they were diverted to the Mining Company’s own increasingly depleted funds.

The Lady Isabella continued to operate as a private tourist attraction until 1965, when it was sold to the Manx Government. After a thorough restoration it reopened in 1967, and the derelict mining remains of Glen Mooar were investigated and conserved to form the Mines Trail which opened in 1986.

There is a vivid if haphazardly shot video of the Wheel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNLc5r3R8sc, and tourist information about visiting is at http://www.manxnationalheritage.im/plan-your-visit/groups/laxey-wheel-group-travel.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Blackpool’s Big Wheel

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Former Big Wheel Café, St Michael-on-Wyre, Lancashire

Regular clients on Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times tours are used to finding that the tour contains more than the outline promises.

This isn’t simply perverse marketing: sometimes opportunities arise at the last minute, too late to advertise, and I like to have a reputation for providing more than it says on the tin.

The guests on the Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage (July 10th-15th 2013) tour were mystified to be taken to see Judith Hunter’s conservatory next to her caravan-site in St Michael’s-on-Wyre, a few miles inland from Blackpool.

I told them they would see perhaps the only surviving relic from the Blackpool Winter Gardens’ Big Wheel.

The Big Wheel, along with the Empress Ballroom, was the Winter Gardens manager Bill Holland’s response to the arrival of the Tower in 1894.

The Ballroom was a great success, and provoked the Tower Company to embellish their assembly room into the Tower Ballroom.

The 220ft-high Big Wheel of 1896 largely failed to compete with the higher, simpler Tower, except in one respect: in quiet periods (there were many) young men escorting young ladies sometimes bribed the attendant to hold the Wheel for a time when their carriage was at the top.

When the Tower Company took over the Winter Gardens in 1928, almost their first act was to dismantle the Wheel.

The thirty carriages were auctioned off as garden sheds and summer houses, and Judith’s was bought by Miss Edith Swallow, the first matron of Blackpool Orphanage, to serve as a holiday home for the orphan girls.

For some years Judith used it as a café but now she keeps it for private use.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The empty envelope

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St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (August 29th 2013)

After the public meeting about the demolition of St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield Paul Beckett, the Assistant Diocesan Secretary (Property) of the Diocese of Sheffield, invited me to see the interior of the church to gain a better idea of its condition.

It would indeed need serious money to deal with the water ingress, the fallen plaster, the undulating floor in the undercroft and the shot-to-pieces wiring.

If someone could contrive a practical way of recouping an investment of up to a million pounds to save the Church Commissioners spending perhaps £200,000 demolishing the place, they’d have a very beautiful building for their money.

Kenneth McKenzie’s church looks much bigger inside than you’d expect. It’s a broad, light, elegant space, picking up the elements of traditional churches in the stripped-back manner of inter-war architecture.

As it stands, it has a melancholy time-warp feel: although disused for the past couple of years, the hymn-books are still on the shelf and the vestments hang in the vestry.

Because the parish was always at the high end of Anglo-Catholicism, it retains statues of saints, a Pietà and a highly ornate reredos of 1923 which is in fact a refugee from the demolished church of Holy Trinity, Preston via another demolished church, St Margaret’s, Burnley. Presumably it will once more go on its travels.

St Cecilia’s also has an impressive-looking organ, built in 1986 by Cousans of Lincoln from the previous organ by Vincent’s of Durham (1972) with additional parts from two other organs by the Sheffield firm of Brindley & Foster.

Checking the organ in the National Pipe Organ Register [http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=N01088] alerted me to a revealing chronology:

1972: new organ
1986: another new organ
1999-2003: renovation of undercroft (nearly £400,000 funded largely by the Single Regeneration Budget and the National Lottery)
2010: roof, heating and electrical wiring beyond economic repair
2011: church closed

It’s clear, with the luxury of hindsight, that it would have been better to prioritise maintaining the outer envelope of the building rather than embellishing the interior.

As it is, the cost of doing anything with it – knocking it down or reviving it – will be onerous.

I mentioned again the stern requirement in the Pastoral Scheme for St Cecilia’s that the church shall be demolished, and Paul assured me that if anyone were to come up with a practical scheme to save the building the process towards demolition could be stalled.

It’s a big ask to fill an empty envelope.

Goodbye St Hilda’s

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St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (September 2013)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (August 31st 2013)

At the belated start of the belated campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I knew a good deal less about the byzantine workings of the Church Commissioners than I now do.

As the scaffolding goes up to begin destroying St Hilda’s, I’ve learned that to develop the land on which an Anglican church has stood requires unusual tenacity.

The conditions of sale demand that a prospective purchaser has a practical business plan and planning permission for the proposed development.

Planning permission involves a significant amount of expensive professional support.

Then, I’ve discovered, the prospective purchaser has to demolish the church building before they can purchase it.

Clearly, this requires nerves of steel and a great deal of faith, because it can cost close on a six-figure sum even to create an empty site.

I hope whatever goes up in place of St Hilda’s looks at least as good.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Palace tram

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National Tramway Museum, Crich: Derbyshire: London United Tramways 159

The National Tramway Museum, like all good tourist sites, needs novelties to encourage visitors to return repeatedly: http://www.tramway.co.uk/plan-a-visit/opening-times-prices-2013.

This year’s pride and joy is London United Tramways no 159, built in 1902 and now newly restored after twenty-one years of service in London and fifty-five years as part of a residence in Surrey.

It was originally used on the routes out to Twickenham, Hampton and Hampton Court, where expectations were understandably high, so this W-class tram was one of the LUT’s “Palace cars”, its palatial lower deck fully fitted in a manner thought suitable for its upper-class passengers, with an inlaid walnut ceiling, plush carpet, velvet curtains and upholstery and silk tassels instead of leather hanging straps.

It was not, as such, a first-class vehicle, simply what the residents expected. (Liverpool tramways did have first-class trams in which workmen could not ride so that passengers could travel without fear of dirtying their clothes on their fellow passengers’ overalls. Presumably the LUT didn’t expect workmen in Twickenham and Hampton: they are, after all, a long way from the docks.)

The National Tramway Museum, in conjunction with the London County Council Tramways Trust and the Arts Council’s Prism Fund [Preservation of Industrial and Scientific Material], has spent £400,000 on bringing 159 back to its glorious original condition. The original cost in 1902 was £669.

It’s the biggest restoration project the Museum has tackled so far.

Sitwells at home

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Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire: south front

Of all the eccentrics associated with Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire, Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943), whose legend was immortalised by his three famous children, Dame Edith (1887-1964), Sir Osbert (1892-1969) and Sir Sacheverell (1897-1988), is my favourite.

He appeared oddly myopic about the roots of his prosperity: Evelyn Waugh describes him standing on the terrace at Renishaw gesticulating towards Barlborough across the “farms, cottages, villas, the railway, the colliery and the densely teeming streets” and remarking, “You see, there is no-one between us and the Locker Lampsons.” His children, however, told of sitting in the quiet of a Renishaw evening, listening to a faint tapping below which came from the miners hewing the black wealth beneath their feet.

He had a toothbrush that played ‘Annie Laurie’, and a miniature revolver for shooting wasps. He considered stencilling blue willow pattern on the white cows in the park, “to give distinction to the landscape”, but found it impractical. His schemes for estate improvements were never ending.

He had a passion for gardening, and began altering the surroundings of Renishaw in 1887. He also had a passion for local history, particularly when its minutiae illuminated the distant doings of his remote ancestors. Sir Osbert said that his father was “adept at taking hold of the wrong end of a thousand sticks”; John Pearson commented that “much of Sir George’s life was…spent correcting experts”. He was particularly proud that he “captured a spirit at the headquarters of the Spiritualists, London, 1880”.

He passed on a considerable share of eccentricity to his children, some of it deliberately: he advised Edith on one occasion that there was “nothing a young man likes so much as a girl who is good on the parallel bars”. She it was who in her youth at Renishaw once disguised herself as an armchair, covered in a dustsheet, in order to be carried upstairs by her brothers to avoid an aunt. Sir Osbert described himself as “educated during holidays from Eton”.

Sir George befriended the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and brought him to Renishaw repeatedly: Sir Reresby Sitwell describes Lutyens’ effect on his grandfather’s plans as “restraint rather than…guidance”. It was on the Sunday morning of one of these weekend visits that Lutyens asked the butler, “Is Lady Ida down?”

From 1909 onwards Sir George became increasingly preoccupied with the restoration of the castle he purchased at Montegufoni in Tuscany, until eventually in 1925 he moved out there permanently, and handed over Renishaw to his eldest son, Osbert, and his other English estate, Weston Hall, Northamptonshire, to Sacheverell.

His nephew, the late Sir Reresby Sitwell (1927-2009), carried on the tradition of celebrating eccentricity, particularly the manifest oddities of his grandfather.

Sir Simon’s baby

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Symphony Hall, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Town Hall was the centre of its musical life from its opening in 1834 until 1991, and the home base for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from its inauguration in 1920.

When Sir Simon Rattle became Principal Conductor & Artistic Adviser in 1980, and Music Director from 1990, he made it his business not only to develop the orchestra further but to provide it with a better home.

He had told Russell Johnson, head of the acoustic consultants Artec of New York, that “If I am ever involved in a new concert hall, you will design it…”

And they did.

Symphony Hall is primarily a concert hall which can be adapted for conference use, with 2,200 seats, 63m long, 31m wide and 22m high. The seating is tiered, with 877 on the main floor, 347 on the first gallery-tier, 291 on the second and 485 on the third. At the rear of the platform there is seating for a choir of up to two hundred.

The design combines traditional materials and sophisticated technology to provide flexible acoustics for every musical genre from chamber music to the most ambitious orchestral and choral works. It has sliding acoustic control banners to reduce reverberance, an adjustable reverberation chamber above and behind the stage fitted with twenty concrete swing-doors each weighing approximately eight tons to vary the volume of the auditorium by up to 30% and a 42-tonne acoustic canopy.

Its reverse fan shape is based on traditional opera houses and concert halls, with the audience stacked in tiers in a narrow chamber.

Russell Johnson advocates using wood “…similar to that of a violin”. The perimeter walls of the Hall are one foot thick, and much of the acoustic quality comes from this sheer weight of materials.

Ironically, this masterpiece of modern acoustic design stands only 35m from the busiest rail tunnel in Britain, running under Monument Lane to the southern approach to New Street Station. In fact the Hall is located as far away as possible from the railway line. (A proposal to create further space by moving the Crown public house across the canal was rejected.) The railway tracks were relaid with rubber-lined sleepers, and the silence of the Hall is protected by noise-insulating piles and mountings designed by Ove Arup & Partners.

Like its predecessor, the Town Hall, it was incomplete when it was opened. The front pipes and casework for the Klais organ were installed in time for the opening by HM Queen Elizabeth II on June 12th 1991; the organ itself – the largest mechanical-action instrument in the United Kingdom – was inaugurated in 2001.

Now the two halls run in tandem, providing the city of Birmingham with an unrivalled diet of musical experiences.

Take a look at what’s on – the variety is astonishing: https://www.thsh.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Parson Cross

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St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (2013)

The huge Parson Cross municipal housing-estate on the north side of Sheffield dates only from the 1930s, though the place-name – written as “Parson’s Crosse Lane” – goes back at least to 1637.

There are, inevitably, lots of jokes about grumpy clergy.

Because the adjacent Shiregreen community missed out on opportunities to intervene in the plan to demolish the redundant church of St Hilda, I’ve since kept an eye on the disused church of St Cecilia, Parson Cross.

Not far off £400,000 was apparently spent on upgrading St Cecilia’s undercroft as a youth club as recently as the Millennium. Yet demolition has been on the cards since at least 2010.

Early in August I responded to the Church Commissioners’ pianissimo advertisement of a drop-in meeting to discuss the proposed scheme to demolish.

The local residents who turned up vehemently opposed the destruction of St Cecilia’s, though none of them were members of the final congregation of ten that moved out in 2011.

People care deeply about their local parish church even if they don’t darken its doors from one year’s end to the next. The place where their families were baptised, married and taken for their funerals means a great deal.

It’s strange that clergy and active church members have such difficulty attracting new members.

The process of disposing of redundant church buildings is convoluted. The building is vested in the incumbent, and is the responsibility of the parishioners. When the parish can no longer maintain the building, a divided responsibility between the diocese and the Church Commissioners triggers a byzantine legal process with little scope for the secular community to intervene.

It all looks underhand, and it makes local people impotently angry.

A diocesan document of 2010 which I’ve quoted in a previous blog-article about St Cecilia’s declared, “The Church building has reached the end of its life.”

Conversely, the Church of England Church Buildings Council in 2011 advised, “The problems are superficial, although investment would be required to rectify them.”

The Statutory Advisory Committee of the Church Buildings Council concluded a few months later that demolition was ill-advised because of the “low cost of essential repair and [the] potential for the cost of long-term repairs to be (part) absorbed into the cost of conversion”.

Yet a Scheme, as it’s called, for demolition is under way.

I wanted to know why demolition was presented as the only option, and I was told that demolition has to be written into Pastoral Schemes in case it may become necessary, but an acceptable scheme to retain the building, backed by planning permission and a credible business plan, would be preferred.

I’d love to see the people of Parson Cross put together a credible proposal for re-use, but to give them a fair chance, they should have been alerted at least three years ago.

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