Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

Made good

Leave a Reply
Citicorp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue, New York City

Citicorp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue, New York City

When they designed Citicorp Center, now renamed 601 Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan in 1977, the architect Hugh Stubbins and the structural engineer William LeMessurier were faced with the uncompromising elders of St Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, who were entirely happy to have their tired nineteenth-century Gothic building replaced but refused point-blank to give up its corner site.

Consequently, William LeMessurier supported the tower on four stilts planted firmly in the centre of each side so that it overhangs the corners of its footprint.  This odd-looking construction is stabilised by a series of stacked braces that transfer the load of the 59-storey structure to the nine-storey supporting columns.

The Citicorp Center was fitted with a 400-ton tuned mass damper to stabilise the effect of high winds.  Other tall towers of the period, while rolling safely with the wind, had made their inhabitants nauseous.

The wedge-shaped top was intended to carry solar panels which were never installed because the slope faces north.

The building is remarkable, not only for its engineering attributes, but for the fortuitous discovery and surreptitious repair of its structural weaknesses.

Within a year of the opening, LeMessurier received a phone-call from a trainee architectural engineer questioning the ability of the centre columns to support the building in extremely high winds.

Niggled, LeMessurier revised his calculations, and realised that in following the regulations by calculating wind-resistance square to the building he’d ignored the potential effects of quartering winds, hitting the tower cornerwise where there was no support to ground-level.

Casual discussions of the specification for a new project alerted LeMessurier for the first time to the fact that his office had sanctioned the use of bolted braces instead of welded ones in the Citicorp tower.  This made the building vulnerable to a once-in-55-year wind, but if the tuned mass damper was disabled by a power failure, the vulnerability increased to once in every sixteen years.

This came to light in June, just at the start of the hurricane season.

The building’s owners, Citibank, a team of construction-industry specialists and the City of New York – all of them anxious to avoid a public panic – arranged for the two-hundred-odd braces to be quietly patched with heavy steel plates, one by one, during evenings and weekends, without disturbing the building’s users.

The press were fed an innocuous explanation which remained unprobed because, as the work began, the entire New York newspaper industry was shut down by a strike.

And the city’s Office of Emergency Management created a plan to evacuate the building and 156 blocks of the surrounding neighbourhood if high winds were forecast.

Part way through the process Hurricane Ella headed directly for New York City, only to turn eastwards and follow the coast northwards towards Canada.

This remarkable episode remained outside the public domain for twenty years until an article in the New Yorker [http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm] was published in May 1995.

Le Messurier, whose entire career had been on the line eighteen years earlier, was hailed for his integrity in owning up to the problem and providing a solution.  601 Lexington Avenue is now rated as resistant to a once-in-700-year hurricane even without the damper.

A more critical view of Le Messurier’s ethics can be found at http://www.crosscurrents.org/kremer2002.htm.

Other accounts of the whole episode are at http://www.damninteresting.com/a-potentially-disastrous-design-error and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

Funny Girls

Leave a Reply
Former Odeon Cinema, now Funny Girls, Blackpool, Lancashire

Former Odeon Cinema, now Funny Girls, Blackpool, Lancashire

In the summer of 1939 Blackpool ignored the possibility of war.

The huge new Art Deco, 2,920-seat Opera House auditorium opened in the Winter Gardens, starring George Formby Jnr (who was paid £1,000 a week) in a review entitled Turned Out Nice Again.

A short distance down Dickson Road the Odeon Cinema, designed by W Calder Marshall for Harry Weedon’s practice, opened on May 6th 1939.  Its capacity of 3,088 made this the largest auditorium in the company’s chain, bigger even than the flagship cinema in London’s Leicester Square:  it cost £82,500.

This was one of the relatively few 1930s Odeons intended to have an organ, a magnificent five-manual Compton instrument, big enough to stand comparison with the Wurlitzers in the Tower and Winter Gardens.  Oscar Deutsch disapproved of theatre organs:  he thought they were a waste of money.

As it happened, the Odeon organ was not delivered until after war broke out, and was apparently bombed in the railway sidings at Blackpool.  Eventually, in 1946, the Conacher organ from the Ritz, Southend, was installed.

The Blackpool Odeon was tripled in October 1975 and closed in 1998.

It stood derelict for some years, until Basil Newby recreated it magnificently as Funny Girls [http://www.funnygirlsonline.co.uk], refreshing the meaning of the expression “holiday camp”.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, 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 Yorkshire Lutyens 2

Leave a Reply
Sion Hill Hall, North Yorkshire

Sion Hill Hall, North Yorkshire

Sion Hill Hall has been described – convincingly but imprecisely – as “the last of the great country houses”.  It was built for Percy Stancliffe, the son of a wealthy brewer by one of Yorkshire’s foremost local architects, Walter H Brierley, in 1912-3. 

Walter Brierley (1862-1926) was a partner in the dominant York architectural practice which was begun in the eighteenth century by John Carr and had included in the intervening years such figures as J P Pritchett (1789-1868) and G T Andrews (1804-55, architect to the North Eastern Railway).

Like John Carr, Walter Brierley’s fame was limited because his work is concentrated in the North.  He built a rich collection of houses, churches and public buildings including a distinctive series of 1890s school buildings for the York School Board and the Principal’s House at the King’s Manor in York.  He restored Sledmere House after the major fire in 1911 and designed Welbeck Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire, which was built (1930-1) after his death.

At Sion Hill Hall there were temperamental clashes between the rich but parsimonious Percy Stancliffe and his perfectionist architect, whose belief that “cheap work is always there to remind and annoy us” did not encourage a quiet relationship.

Nevertheless, the resulting building made Brierley’s reputation as “the Lutyens of the North”, and its expansive horizontal façades, enlivened by generous hipped roofs and tall chimneys, have a strong air of assurance, with an ambitious classical doorcase, dated 1913, as an entrance and on the south-facing garden front, roundels and painted shutters.

In fact, the house is only one room deep, with connecting corridors the length of the north front and all the principal rooms facing the sunny south.  At the western end the corners are stepped, so that Percy Stancliffe’s study and his wife’s boudoir share the advantage of south- and west-facing windows.

(The real Edwin Lutyens, on one of his rare Northern commissions, took no nonsense from his rich Yorkshire client, whom he despised.)

Percy Stancliffe lived at Sion Hill House until his death in 1949.  It was eventually purchased in 1962 by a remarkable collector, Herbert W Mawer (1903-1982), who rose from humble origins, trained as a chef at the Royal Station Hotel in Hull and started his own model bakery, “Our Herbert’s”, at Stokesley in 1926.  The family business prospered enough for Herbert to retire in his forties with sufficient wealth to support a passion for antiques which had begun with the purchase of two candlesticks for £1 5s in Hull when he was eighteen.

In the late 1930s he bought Ayton Hall near Guisborough, but by the 1950s that modest Georgian house was too small to house his accumulating possessions.

Herbert Mawer chose, in the absence of an heir, to establish the H W Mawer Trust to administer Sion Hill Hall and the Mawer Collection, which has since his death been increased to include the remarkable pot that contained the Breckenbrough Hoard (discovered in 1985) and paintings by the identical twins Dorothy and Elizabeth Alderson (respectively 1900-1992 and 1900-1987), who were Herbert Mawer’s aunts.

The house is open for group visits by prior arrangement:  http://www.sionhillhall.co.uk.

 

Exploring New South Wales: St Patrick’s Orphanage, Armidale

Leave a Reply
Former St Patrick's Orphanage, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

Former St Patrick’s Orphanage, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

When I lectured to the Armidale Decorative & Fine Arts Society, I was invited to dinner by Les and Libby in their spacious Gothic Revival apartment, part of the former St Patrick’s Orphanage.

This surprisingly late example of Gothic design was built between 1919 and 1921 for the Sisters of Mercy by George Nott, who had previously built Armidale’s Catholic Cathedral of St Mary & St Joseph.

By 1924 there were 120 children at the home, cared for and largely educated by the Sisters.  The regime at St Patrick’s Orphanage was not, it seems, a bed of roses:  http://www.clan.org.au/news_details.php?newsID=568.

The orphanage transferred to two cottages in 1976 and eventually closed in 1984.  The 1921 building stood derelict for some years, and has now found a happier fate as an opulent apartment-block.

There is an image of the building when it was new at http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofvictoria_collections/6819575484.

Theatre for heroes

Leave a Reply
Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire: theatre wing

Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire: theatre wing

The Stanford Hall estate on the Nottinghamshire-Leicestershire border has been in limbo ever since the Co-operative College moved out in 2001.  Two developers have successively raised schemes to finance the restoration of the hall and its grounds by constructing houses and apartments in the park, and both have come to nothing.

Its long history is both complex and sensitive – owned by two successive gentry families, a Burton brewer, the eccentric furniture millionaire Sir Julien Cahn and latterly the College.  In particular, Sir Julien’s external additions – various sporting facilities and a fully-equipped private theatre – have been greatly valued by the local community during the years that the College ran the place.

In 2011 the 6th Duke of Westminster bought the Stanford Hall estate as a future base for the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre, which supports members of the armed services and civilians as they recover from traumatic injuries.

This work currently takes place at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Epsom, Surrey, but this facility is no longer capable of expansion, though the need continues to grow:  casualties now survive injuries which would have been beyond recovery even ten years ago.

Stanford Hall is considered ideal for this new purpose because of its Midlands location, its tranquil environment and the space for magnificent new facilities which need not overpower the historic landscape.

Members of the local community have expressed concern about the future of the Stanford Hall Theatre, which Sir Julien built in 1937 as a venue for his private conjuring shows.

There’s a potential conflict between the desire of local groups for access to the theatre such as they enjoyed in the days of the Co-operative College and the needs of the Defence and Rehabilitation Centre, which will make active use of the theatre and requires higher levels of security than were ever needed by the College.

The proposed physical alterations to the Theatre, primarily to provide level access for wheelchairs, seem relatively benign:  a wrap-around block will provide much better access to the auditorium, and Sir Julien’s top-floor bedroom suite for his private cricket team will be stripped out to reduce loading on the outer walls.  I can find no mention in the planning application of the bomb shelter beneath the auditorium rake.

The plans don’t appear to stretch to a full restoration of the theatre facilities and the Wurlitzer organ, and this has exercised a consortium of local amateur-dramatic societies:  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/dukes-scheme-rings-down-the-curtain-8449399.html.

Let’s hope that the heroes and the thespians can live amicably together.

Goldberg Variation

Leave a Reply

River City, Chicago

River City, Chicago

Clearly visible from the Sears/Willis Tower, River City (1986) – despite its incomplete form – is Bertrand Goldberg’s complement to Marina City, a free-standing residential complex.  Instead of the intended height of seventy-two storeys, the existing building is only seventeen storeys high, incorporating a boat-dock giving direct access to the Chicago River.

Its S-shape is reflected in the spinal ten-storey atrium, the River Road, which runs through the building, so that the wedge-shaped apartments alternatively face out to the river or inwards to the atrium.  Originally the building was intended to extend a further 400 metres towards Roosevelt Road.

Bertrand Goldberg was a Chicago-born Bauhaus student and graduate of the Armour Institute.  He regarded Mies van der Rohe as his mentor, until he became repelled by the mechanical repetitiveness of modernist design.

Goldberg asserted a more humane design-language by his rejection of right-angles, spectacularly apparent in his Chicago housing-projects.

The fragment of River City that exists lacks the impact of the intended design.  Marina City is 65 storeys high;  the six clusters of “triad” towers at River City would have been 72 storeys, linked by bridges at intervals of eighteen floors.

Mies is regarded as an aesthetic hero by a whole generation.  The tall rectangular boxes that he and his followers erected in cities across the world look fine, but Goldberg’s towers feel like places to live in.

There’s an account of Goldberg and his life’s work at http://www.architechgallery.com/arch_info/artists_pages/bertrand_goldberg_bio.html.

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

The Corn Cobs

Leave a Reply

Marina City, Chicago

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

Leave a Reply

Former IBM Building, 330 North Wabash Avenue, Chicago

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.

Sir Simon’s baby

Leave a Reply

Symphony Hall, Birmingham

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.

The wreck of the Mexico

Leave a Reply

RNLI Station, St Annes-on-the-Sea, Lancashire: RNLB Her Majesty The Queen

RNLI Station, St Annes-on-the-Sea, Lancashire: RNLB Her Majesty The Queen

St Annes’ splendid modern £1.3 million lifeboat house, completed in 2003, offers members of the public a view of the boat, currently Her Majesty The Queen.

It is one of ten modern lifeboat stations by the Cornwall-based practice Poynton Bradbury Wynter Cole, who also designed the RNLI College, Poole (2004).

The historical display describes and commemorates the wreck of the Mexico, which resulted in the greatest loss of life in the history of the British lifeboat service on the night of December 9th 1886.

The entire thirteen-man crew of the St Annes lifeboat, Laura Janet, were drowned when it capsized on its way to assist.  Fourteen of the sixteen crew-members of the Southport lifeboat, Eliza Fernley, similarly perished when their boat capsized.

All the twelve crew-members of the German-registered Mexico were rescued by the fifteen-man crew of the Lytham lifeboat, Charles Biggs, on their maiden rescue.

The men who died were fishermen, most of them living in varying degrees of poverty.  They left sixteen widows and fifty orphans.

As a result, Charles Macara, a Manchester businessman who had taken up residence in St Annes, helped to initiate Lifeboat Saturdays, fundraising events which began in Manchester and Salford in 1891 and rapidly spread to other towns and cities.

The RNLI continues to rely entirely on voluntary donations and bequests to support the volunteer crews who continue to save lives at sea throughout Britain:  http://rnli.org/Pages/Default.aspx.