Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

Two towers

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World Trade Center, New York City (1981)

World Trade Center, New York City (1981)

Anyone who was sentient at the time recalls where they were on September 11th 2001.  I was taking a class of sixteen-year-olds through the text of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and we were discussing – in relation to the three Witches – whether there could be an independent force of evil, or whether it existed only in the hearts and minds of human beings.  We only realised later that during that time the planes were slamming into the World Trade Center.

The so-called “twin towers”, which were not actually identical, were developed in the late 1960s to revitalise the southern tip of Manhattan.  Their genesis was controversial, because they belonged to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which was independent of city and state planning jurisdiction.

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates in conjunction with Emery Roth & Sons, they were not universally liked.  These elegant modernist towers, clad in aluminium alloy, were dismissed by one writer, Lewis Mumford, as “filing cabinets”.

Inevitably, they grew to be an immediately recognised part of the cityscape.  Ed Vulliamy, in an Observer article [August 21st 2011] describes how they told the passing of each day:  “…deep gold at the eastern edge in the early morning, becoming paler towards midday and deepening again to a tangerine glow at dusk”.

They also contributed to New York legend.  Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker, walked from one tower to the other in 1974 and was, for his pains, arrested for trespassing.  Three years later George Willig climbed the outside of the south tower using suction-pads.

And they were celebrated by tourists.  Express lifts carried the public in slightly under a minute past ten million square feet of office space to the indoor observation deck on the 107th floor, from which escalators gave access to a surprisingly unvertiginous roof-deck.  Bizarre effects were experienced at this height, including upwardly mobile rain.

The towers attracted the attention of terrorists because of their particular design and their proximity.  A bomb which exploded in the basement on February 23rd 1993, destroying five floors, killing six people and wounding at least a thousand, was apparently intended to tip one tower over to demolish the other.

The final atrocity, which killed over 2,752 people in the buildings, on the planes and in the frantic rescue operation, was no random attempt to create a terrorist “spectacular”.

The people who perpetrated this massacre knew perfectly well that flying a plane into, say, the Hancock or the Sears Towers in Chicago would do great damage but might not engineer a collapse.

The World Trade Center towers were constructed with external load-bearing walls to provide open-plan office space.  Though they had been designed to withstand an accidental collision, the airliners’ wingspan of 156ft ripped through buildings only 209ft wide.

The height of the impacts was far beyond the range of ground or airborne firefighters, and the amount of kerosene on board aircraft at the start of transcontinental flights created enough heat to weaken the steel structure, causing the floors to implode with terrifying speed.

Among the 9/11 terrorists were individuals with civil engineering expertise, trained to build things.  This wasn’t only a violent and a perverse act.  It was calculated evil.

Everyman

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Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1978)

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1978)

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (2018)

Almost opposite Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral stands – for a short while longer – an undistinguished building of huge cultural importance.

The former Hope Hall, a nonconformist chapel of 1837, after many transformations, became the Everyman Theatre in 1964.  This was the cockpit of artists, writers and playwrights in the great wave of Liverpool’s prominence that followed the success of the Beatles.

The poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, the playwrights Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, and a cluster of actors including Bernard Hill, Anthony Sher, Julie Walters and the late Pete Postlethwaite were associated with the building before and after a further rebuilding in 1975-7.  The premieres of Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo…and Bert (1974) and Shirley Valentine (1986) took place at the Everyman Theatre.

The building was also celebrated for its Everyman Bistro, founded in 1970 by Paddy Byrne and Dave Scott in the basement.  Here was as good a buffet as you could find in Liverpool, and a convivial atmosphere without rival.

Now the Everyman is to be replaced by an entirely new building, opening in 2013, and you can watch the process, day by day, at http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/content/Home/AboutUs/NewEveryman/LiveCam.aspx.  Sooner or later, you’ll see the queue for the reopening.

Sarah Horton and Ronnie Hughes’ film tribute to the Everyman Bistro is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EibgxJnWMKU&feature=player_embedded.

The opening season at the new Everyman begins on Saturday March 8th 2014 with Twelfth Night:  http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/show/Twelfth_Night/1031.aspx.

Amazing Grace

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Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, up on the heights of Nob Hill above downtown San Francisco, is an uplifting space.

It’s a pure thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, built of concrete between 1928 and 1964 to the designs of Lewis Parsons Hobart (1873-1954) to replace a predecessor destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.  Hobart’s wife was a cousin of William H Crocker, the donor of the site.

In the tradition of much older churches, the interior of Grace Cathedral is an essay and a narrative, with murals by Jan Henryk De Rosen, and stained glass by Charles Connick of Boston and Gabriel Loire of Chartres, two of the greatest stained-glass designers of the twentieth century.  The bronze Ghiberti west doors are the reproductions that the Nazis made of the Florentine originals which they removed during the Second World War.  The 44-bell carillon in the north tower was built by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, and donated by a Methodist dentist from Penzance, Nathaniel T Coulson:  it was first played in 1940.

It’s a beautiful building to visit – light, spacious, peaceful, welcoming.  The glass tints the interior blue, Gabriel Loire’s preferred colour because, he said, “La paix donne la joie.” (Peace gives joy.)  There are two labyrinths, one on the forecourt and the other at the west end of the nave – mysterious aids to meditation based on the medieval original at Chartres.

There’s something curiously Californian about this inclusive, relaxed place that takes itself seriously with delicacy.

The Grace Cathedral website is at http://www.gracecathedral.org.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral (Gibberd version)

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Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

When I take groups to Liverpool, I love to lead them from one cathedral to the other, usually from the Anglican Cathedral, which has pointed arches and a vista towards a distant high altar, to the spectacular circular space of the uncompromisingly modern Catholic Cathedral.

The Metropolitan Cathedral, as it is properly known, was initiated in 1960 when Archibishop (later Cardinal) John Heenan decided a cathedral had to be built, and quickly, on the Brownlow Hill land that had been a building site since the 1930s.

His brief, in the years before the Second Vatican Council, was to have a building that would give a congregation of two thousand an uninterrupted view of the high altar, would cost no more than a million pounds, and could be built within five years.

The competition winner was Sir Frederick Gibberd, who engineered a circular space, with a corona supported by ring beams held in place by sixteen angled pillars and diagonal concrete buttresses.

Within each bay of this structure he placed a variety of free-standing chapels, most of which were initially left plain for future generations to embellish.  The echoing space of the interior is lit by John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens’ deeply coloured glass.

The Metropolitan Cathedral was consecrated in 1967 – completed on time and within budget.

Like so much 1960s architecture, the haste to complete meant that new, untried materials were used which did not stand the test of time.  Within a generation, the leaking roof had to be reinstated and much of the cladding replaced.  The processional approach that Gibberd intended was only constructed at the start of this century.

Nevertheless, the spiky profile of the Metropolitan Cathedral has integrated into the Liverpool skyline with a much lighter touch than Lutyens’ bombastic basilica ever could.

It’s ironic that the architect of the Anglican Cathedral, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was a Catholic;  Sir Frederick Gibberd, architect of the Catholic Cathedral, was in fact a Methodist.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral (Lutyens version)

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Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool: Lutyens crypt (foreground); Gibberd cathedral (background)

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool: Lutyens crypt (foreground); Gibberd cathedral (background)

When Liverpool’s Catholic community returned to the task of erecting a cathedral in 1930 under Archbishop Richard Downey using the site of the former Brownlow Hill Workhouse, they planned a church to dominate the cityscape even more than E W Pugin’s elegant Gothic design of 1853 at Everton would have done.

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) designed a monster basilica in what he called his “Wrenaissance” style.  Nearly as long, yet wider and higher than St Peter’s in Rome, its dome would have been half as tall again as the tower of the Anglican Cathedral, and significantly larger than the domes of St Peter’s or London’s St Paul’s.  The Victoria Tower of Liverpool University, across the road on Brownlow Hill, would have fitted inside the entrance arch.

A vast architectural model, seventeen feet long and over eleven feet high, was built as an aid to fund-raising:  it has survived and is displayed in the Museum of Liverpool at the Pier Head:  [http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/conservation/departments/models/lutyens]

Lutyens cheerfully declared that the actual cathedral would take four hundred years to build.  The foundation stone was laid in 1933 and the first mass said in the crypt in 1937.  At the time of the 1941 Blitz, the sole remaining mason was obliged to down tools and work stopped entirely.  The crypt, which had already consumed four million blue bricks, was partly adapted as an air-raid shelter, and otherwise left open to the weather.

After the war, a reduced version of Lutyens’ design was commissioned from Adrian Gilbert Scott, brother of the architect of the Anglican Cathedral, but dismissed as unworkable.  The incomplete crypt was put to use for worship and as a parish centre.

What was built of Lutyens’ cathedral is an awesome space which hints at the scale of the unbuilt structure.  Within, under what would have been the high altar, the tombs of some of the early archbishops are contained in a vault guarded by a seven-ton marble rolling stone, representing Christ’s tomb in Gethsemane.

I once saw the rolling stone roll.  It’s operated by the sort of winch that’s still sometimes used for the house-tabs in school assembly halls.  The sound of seven tons of marble rolling into a doorway is like nothing else.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Modern architects in Liverpool

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Unity Building, Liverpool

Unity Building, Liverpool

It’s a sign of the times that the guide to the twenty-first century buildings in the city centre of Liverpool, is already in its second edition. The New Liverpool:  modern architecture for a modern city in fact includes buildings back into the 1990s.

Andrew F Robinson’s survey lists and describes Liverpool’s new buildings in five well-mapped itineraries around the city-centre, and occasionally indicates what is proposed for currently empty sites.  His list shows how prolific are such architectural practices as Falconer Chester Hall [http://www.fcharchitects.com].  He also nods to the buildings lost to these new developments and, in some cases refers to structures conserved, retained as façades or rebuilt in replica.

He provides the sort of informal insights that don’t crop up in volumes of the Pevsner series – which architect designed his mother’s name in Morse code into a building (Paul Monaghan at the Unity Building, 2007), which building was topped out by its occupant and the architect wearing pink hard hats (Herbert’s ‘Bling’ Building, 2006) and which architect omitted to provide waste disposal in an apartment block (no names, see page 9…).

Sometimes he’s obliged to note “architect and builder unknown”, a recognition that information about new buildings isn’t easy to come by.  Newly-built buildings don’t always show up on the internet or, indeed, in Liverpool’s excellent local studies library.  In one case, Andrew Robinson reports that a builder flatly refused to disclose details for publication (no names, see page 27…).

The New Liverpool fills a gap between publications of record, such as the Pevsner volumes, and the current architectural press, which is aimed primarily at professionals, so that people who are simply interested in buildings and those who live in and with developing cities can identify who designed what and why in their community.

The New Liverpool:  modern architecture for a modern city is obtainable from West Derby Publishing, 279 Eaton Road, West Derby, Liverpool, L12 2AG for £3.00.  [ISBN 978 1 871075 09 0].

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Younger architect in Liverpool

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Liverpool Cathedral

Liverpool Cathedral

The achievement of Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, winning two competitions to design what became St George’s Hall, Liverpool, between the ages of 25 and 27, is remarkable;  even more surprising was the result of the competition to build Liverpool Cathedral fifty years later.

1880s plans to build an Anglican cathedral on the St John’s site, backing on to St George’s Hall, came to nothing:  no-one could find a way of building a church that would sit comfortably alongside Elmes & Cockerill’s great classical temple.

The eventual site, St James’ Mount, was chosen and the customary architectural competition organised, with a controversial stipulation that Gothic designs would be preferred.

When the 103 anonymous entries were assessed, the judges were disconcerted to discover that the winner was the 21-year-old Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott, who had designed, amid much else, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station.  To add to their discomfort, Giles Scott was a Roman Catholic.

The committee asked him if he’d designed anything before.  Yes, he said, a pipe-rack for his sister.  In the end, Scott was given the commission, as was his right, but under the supervision of one of the assessors, the veteran Gothic Revival architect, George Frederick Bodley.

Bodley’s influence is apparent in the florid decoration of the first section of Scott’s cathedral, the Lady Chapel, begun in 1904.  It was an uncomfortable arrangement:  Giles Scott’s resignation was ready to post when he heard the news of Bodley’s death in 1907.

By the time the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1910, Scott went to the building committee and calmly proposed a radical redesign.  Instead of twin towers, he wanted a single tower above a majestic central space.  This was not straightforward, for the foundations of the two towers were already in place, which is why the cathedral as built has twin transepts and twin central porches, one of which stares vacantly over the chasm of St James’ Cemetery.

The 331-foot Vestey Tower, named after the Dewhurst butchers’ dynasty that paid for it, contains the highest and heaviest ringing peal of bells in the world.  The central space below could accommodate Nelson’s Column if Nelson took his hat off.  The tower was completed in 1941, in the darkest days of the Second World War.  “Keep going, whatever you do, even if you can only go on in a small way,” King George VI advised on a wartime visit.

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott died in 1960, his final contribution the Nave Bridge which frames the vista towards the High Altar.  The west end was eventually finished, to modified designs by his professional partner, Frederick Thomas in collaboration with Roger Pinckney, and dedicated in the presence of HM Queen Elizabeth II in 1978.

Sir Giles and Lady Scott’s remains lie before the west door of the completed cathedral.  The Winter 2010-11 edition of C20 – the magazine of the Twentieth Century Society mentioned that the stone marker of [their] grave has been removed and that they rest “in an unmarked grave as cars and delivery vans to the café and shop frequently drive over [them]”.

That may be true, but it can’t be right.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

All sorts of stories about Beulah Road

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Hillsborough Leisure Centre, Beulah Road, Sheffield

Hillsborough Leisure Centre, Beulah Road, Sheffield

I will always have a particular regard for the Hillsborough Leisure Centre, the third and smallest of Sheffield’s World Student Games sports facilities, because members of its staff saved my life when I had a cardiac arrest in the gym.  It’s because of Mel who pressed the panic button, Ryan who ran for the defibrillator and John who kick-started me to excellent effect that I’m here to write this.

Until the Centre was built in 1991, Beulah Road was lined with typical Sheffield artisan terraced houses, which before they were demolished figured as a location in the gloomy, award-winning Barry Hines/Mick Jackson TV film, Threads (1984).  My mate Phil’s uncles lived here, and there are glorious family tales of their fanatical devotion to Sheffield Wednesday FC.  One of the uncles apparently threw himself in the River Don once when his team lost.  The river is at least a foot deep at this point.

Sheffield Wednesday is so-called because it was originally a butchers’ side, and they played on early-closing day which was, in the late-nineteenth century, Wednesday.  Though the ground is officially called Hillsborough, it more or less stands in Owlerton, which is why the team are called the Owls, and devoted fans go to considerable lengths to acquire car-registrations ending in OWL.

(Sheffield United’s colours are red and white, apparently because of the red headscarves of the formidable buffer girls who polished the blades of Sheffield-made cutlery, which is probably why their team is known as the Blades.)

But the Beulah Road landmark that means most in Sheffield’s history and popular culture is the factory of George Bassett & Co, whose salesman accidentally tipped his display box of liquorice sweets all over a customer’s shop counter, and before he could replace them neatly in their compartments was offered an order for them as they were – “all sorts”.

 

Inconvenient city

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Manchester Town Hall Extension (left) & Central Library (right)

Manchester Town Hall Extension (left) & Central Library (right)

The city of Manchester now boasts only one public convenience for its population of nearly half a million.

Visitors must follow Queen Mary’s precept, never to miss an opportunity to take the weight from one’s feet or to relieve oneself.

In the basement of a branch of the food-chain Eat, at the corner of Cross Street and King Street, I visited one of the most peculiar gents’ lavatories I’ve ever encountered – one of those hand-driers that burst into action as soon as you walk through the door, mirrors on all four walls (very distracting for a gentleman), no sign of the stairs you came down when you come out, and instead another staircase that disappears into the ceiling.  It’s worth visiting for the sheer drama:  http://www.118.com/restaurant/1883714.mvc/manchester-restaurants-eat.

Later, I found the one loo that will remain open, located at the back of the Town Hall Extension, the deft 1938 design of Vincent Harris, the architect who was commissioned to create a building that could stand between Alfred Waterhouse’s great Town Hall of 1877 and his own Central Library of 1934.

The Town Hall is one of the great Gothic buildings of the Victorian period, built in Yorkshire sandstone on an odd trapezoid-shaped site;  Harris’ circular Central Library is grand-slam classical, built in white Portland limestone.  Two more different public buildings could hardly be imagined, and it’s ironic that Vincent Harris landed the job of uniting them with an office building on the site between.

This he did with consummate skill – devising a tall, steeply-gabled building which echoes the Town Hall, but with plain surfaces and regular lines, aligned to the Town Hall and embracing the circumference of the Central Library.  Though not universally accepted when first completed, time has shown that Harris’ group forms a far more inspired and respectful piece of civic planning than most twentieth-century public architecture.

Who would have thought in 1938 that this monument to twentieth-century civic pride would become the only official place in Manchester to “spend a penny” – a landmark of the poverty of local government in the twenty-first century?

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

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 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.

Lutyens in Yorkshire

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Heathcote, Ilkley, North Yorkshire

Heathcote, Ilkley, North Yorkshire

A short distance outside Ilkley town-centre is Heathcote, a dignified, over-scaled villa designed by Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) and constructed 1905-7, which is hugely significant as Lutyens’ first design in the classical style he called “Wrenaissance”, which led directly to such great works as New Delhi and the unbuilt Liverpool Catholic Cathedral.

Lutyens was appalled by the location:  “…an ultra suburban locality over which villas of dreadful kind and many colours wantonly distribute themselves – a pot pourri of Yorkeological details” and he was privately dismissive of his client, a wool merchant called John Thomas Hemmingway.  Lutyens declared that his client hadn’t an ‘h’ to his name, and said that he “could not spend his money – until he met me”.  He was scathing about Mrs Hemmingway – “…does nothing all day and takes turns with the cook to go out…”, the daughter – “…photographs [of her] posing as a professional beauty, but when you see her she is shrimpish – about 4 foot high, full of self-confidence – adored by her admiring parents and her charm takes the form of giggles”, and the son:  “…overnosed and very young and shy…No initiative.  He works hard but…spends no money…”

Quite how Hemmingway came across Lutyens and chose to commission him is unclear.  Lutyens, then an ambitious young architect with a reputation for charm, showed his inner steel by his choice of style and materials:  he later told his colleague, Herbert Baker, “To get domination I had to get a scale greater than the height of my rooms allowed, so unconsciously the San Michele invention repeated itself.  That time-worn Doric order – a lovely thing – I have the cheek to adopt.  You can’t copy it.  To be right you have to take it and design it…”

The result is a massive building of dour Guiseley stone – “a stone without a soul to call its own, as sober as a teetotaller” – with grey Morley stone dressings, lightened by the adventurous use of red pantiles rather than Yorkshire slate on the hipped roofs.  The entrance vestibule is a magnificent space, paved in white marble which is inset – as a nod to the local vernacular – with herringbone brick waxed till it shone.

Heathcote cost J T Hemmingway £17,500, and he didn’t get what he wanted.  Certainly, a demand for storage space gave him exquisite china cupboards with arched glazed doors and teardrop glazing bars;  similarly, in the morning room the built-in bookshelves either side of the fireplace incorporate drop-plan writing desks.

However, one of Lutyens’ assistants, John Brandon Jones, told how on a site-visit Lutyens and Hemmingway viewed the space intended for the black marble staircase.  Hemmingway said, “I don’t want a black marble staircase.  I want an oak staircase”, to which Lutyens replied, “What a pity.”  On a later visit, when Hemmingway was shown the completed black marble staircase, he complained, “I told you I didn’t want a black marble staircase.”  “I know,” the architect replied, “and I said ‘What a pity’, didn’t I?”

Christopher Hussey, Lutyens’ official biographer, commented that this was “the outstanding example of a client thus getting the exact opposite of what he originally wanted, down to the smallest detail, and becoming immensely proud of it”.