The Cool Architecture thread

Karasu

yeso this is extremely good, thank you! How had I never heard of Nonsite before??

rootfifthoctave

i recently attended a film screening of Paradise Lost: History in the Unmaking, about birmingham’s brutalist central library that recently got pulled down. the whole thing left me feeling depressed. the library had been but one planned aspect of a modernist “Paradise” complex, a pedestrianised hub of public services amidst the commercial motorway sprawl of postwar Birmingham.

while i don’t especially love the look of the building, the purposeful disregard for the structure by local authorities, followed by the privatisation of what was once public space just paints a picture of this societies race to some kind of dystopia. the new library is even uglier and barely ever open. the brutalist/modernist one was built low so as not to impede the skyline of the more ornate victorian buildings around it. that kind of consideration has been rare during and since the postwar restoration efforts.

the site of the old brutalist library is the epitome of bland instagrammification. pale stone that catches the light on the three sunny days we get, evoking… the mediterranean maybe? anywhere on earth but the west midlands, where the soil is usually black due to high carbon content. glass-clad feats of architectural vulgarity housing white-collar financial firms and their upper-mid chain bars and cafes, somehow often heaving with the kind of people who wouldn’t know what culture was if it kicked them between the legs. this is where the tory party conference is happening right this moment.

Karasu

rootfifthoctave I think there’s a whole thread to be written about the purposeful destruction of post war architecture in the UK. It’s depressing, and makes me want to have a sit-down over it. It’s also so wild to me how the new Birmingham library immediately brings to mind present day shopping mall architecture tropes in a way that will almost certainly lead to it being viewed as tacky and old fashioned in even less time than the old one took to get to that point.

Edmonton is far from the kind of architectural city that Birmingham is, but we recently ‘repurposed’ the old Centennial Library building, a relatively sedate but still cool 60’s brutalist building…

…into a building that one local journalist compared to the tanks in Battlezone.

Don’t get me wrong! It’s not that I hate it, per se, it’s that it’s got that very recent contemporary thing of being designed to look like it was built in 2020, exactly, not 2019 or 2021, pretty much guaranteeing its dismissal as dated sooner rather than later.

yeso

I remember loling about a glass tower in I think London that focused a beam of sunlight at a certain time of day and it melted a car

yeso

here it is

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675.amp

connrrr

yeso I’m most amused that it was a Jaguar

thebryanjzx90

yeso oof looks like the blacked out D pillar on an XJ? Expensive car.

yeso

the owner is quoted as saying “crikey” in the article

BluntForceMama

Wish I had a better picture, but I’m fascinated by this home every time I pass it (only visible from the highway, and on a gated private road).
It seems to have some kind of Super Mario Bros castle - looking brick dungeon attached on the back.
Maybe this is an east coast thing but out of the ordinary in these parts.

Karasu

I thought that after being depressed over building demolitions and other things, we deserve something a little lighter. Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist who started designing buildings in the late 1980’s, and his built work is… well, it’s kind of a mess, honestly. I appreciate some of his work where he’s playing with shape and colour and line, but I’m not so much of a fan of his pseudo-Gaudi-piped-through-postmodernism repeated motifs like giant gold finials and onion domes. Also, his work is wildly impractical– even more than famously impractical architects like Frank Lloyd Wright– and it’s all absolutely by design. I’ve visited Kunst Haus Wien, a museum of his work that’s housed in a building he designed, and none of the interior floors are flat.

Anyway, here’s the Maishima Incineration Plant and (beautifully named) Sludge Centre in Osaka:

Hundertwasser was (predictably) a really odd guy– a hyper environmentalist but also somehow an outspoken fan of monarchy.

yeso

thought I share some photos of residential architecture in Chicago, IL

Was in the Pullman neighborhood on today and went for a walk w my new fancy (my by standards) camera. Pullman is an interesting place bc it was a planned company town and it’s buildings followed a particular aesthetic (fans of brick and the color green are going to like it). Pullman manufactured and designed luxury rail cars and was apparently a big deal before everyone had a dang car.

The neighborhood was also recently designated a national park (thanks Obama) due to the architecture and the fact that it’s an important site in labor history. There was a big ass strike there back in the heyday of militant labor organizing.

info to that effect in the visitors center

“it belongs in a museum!!” - Dr. indiana jones

one of the train car toilets @antillese

the old factory HQ and town hall, now the NP visitors center

the wheelhouse, now a ruin

the old hotel, which was a VFW post for a while iirc, now awaiting restoration work

labor power mural

green limestone church that is usually a striking color, but it covered by a net for some reason. NP doing more restoration

the blocks surrounding the factory are workers rowhouses

all the individual homes are variations within the planned style, with the occasional never construction that kinda sorta tried to fit in like the yellow brick house on the left below (sick evil clown though)

lots of upkeep and renovation. I passed a good half dozen houses being worked on just on the blocks I covered

newly built affordable housing trying to blend in

the old arcade has these cool curved buildings facing the town market thing

wonder what they have planned for the space. There used to be a lot more rusted metal and trash in there before the park service took over

There are a number of former company towns/utopian planned communities scattered through the midwest, and they tend to have their own idiosyncratic architectural styles. Hard to imagine amazon having any taste or giving a shit about something like this. Not that Pullman was good to people or anything though, they had weird company scrip and all kinds of racist shit. Nice to see normal ordinary people still living here though imo!

streetview if anyone wants to virtually hang out

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6912895,-87.6071908,3a,60y,217.8h,93.47t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s6QevMzOGGkEt0H_BUThhFQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

antillese

yeso Gorgeous photography, though getting tagged in making me think hard about whether or not I have a positive personal brand on the forums! … Also wood is hard to clean.

I didn’t put the “Pullman” name together with rolling stock until you mentioned it which makes me feel silly about missing it. My dad was a modest model train hobbyist and the Pullman cars were always cool.

I also appreciate the concept of reclamation of transit hubs back to public spaces and repurposing the rail alignments for paths and parks. They were located where they were for a reason and old train stations still generally have great proximity to places where you want to be. Portland’s Union Station is like that but unfortunately (this may be controversial) it’s still being used as a passenger rail station instead of something cooler that would serve more people more effectively.

Karasu

yeso Thanks for posting! I’m a huge fan of planned communities of all ages, and of brick architecture in general, so I loved seeing all the photos! A close friend who is also a total dork about architecture (like me) recently moved to Chicago, so I’ll have to let them know it’s relatively close to them and obviously worth checking out!

BTW I think I might know why the church has netting on it– I am almost certain it’s to discourage birds from landing directly on the stonework! Or at least I’ve seen places put netting on old stone buildings for that reason!

yeso

I knew you would have a toilet take, but you know train stuff too. impressive

connrrr

There’s a garage here with a really neat building that specializes in Japanese cars, it’s called Takaki Automotive.

The building is really striking and cute and I see it every time I’m on my way toward Mechanicsville on the Somerset West viaduct, over the railway and bike path. It has an entrance meeting Somerset and is the first stop you can reach that way on either side before the bridge touches down properly.

They are also supposedly a good mechanic—makes me wish I owned a Japanese car!!

Karasu

Yikes, realized I had forgotten to comment on this cool lil building.

connrrr it’s extremely good! It reminds me just a little bit of grain elevator architecture, but obviously on a much smaller scale.

connrrr

In Toronto’s Beaches there’s a water treatment plant called the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. I first became aware of it after seeing this inline skater’s video of himself skating around the area with wheels on his Bauers that have flint in them.

I’ve always wanted to try spark wheels but I have a feeling the urethane is trash.

I got really curious about what the hell that building was called and where a month or two before I left town, so I found out and took a daytrip to the place. It’s crazy how big it is.

« Previous Page