12m40s
And then we’re into the final phase, of the big housing for the GLC…there we have it, standing up on its own, before its neighbours were built (which I’ll talk about later) the lift tower pulled apart from the slab block. This is not Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, although there are some similarities, it is the maisonette on two levels which allows you to put in the lift stops and corridors only every third floor. It was a device that was developed in the 1920s, it’s not original, but it’s turned into a very particular expression here that then gets reused at Trellick.
Here you see the buildings around cast shadows, Blackwall Tunnel Approach running across the foreground, this is a place that needs tough architecture and it certainly gets it here, and James [Dunnett] has written very movingly about it. Its castellated defences, second world war gun turret-type qualities, but the flats are pretty nice, and there is one that is quite often available to visit that now belongs to Tower Hamlets Council and they’ve done a very good job, I think, of educating people about this building by means of having this available.
So there you can see the sort of skip stop corridor arrangement, and each of those flat plans you should read the middle either with the one above or the one below because you go in through the front door, and in some cases you immediately go downstairs and then you’re in the flat, and there are some which are single-storey on each level as well.
And here, past and present, this bridge, drawbridge over a moat to enter the dark tower. The railway-carriage-profiled links that carry you, slightly precipitously over thin air, before you go into your flat.
Note the contrast, the gas holders, the chimneys all gone. A changed landscape. Olympic stadia will no doubt loom into place. I mentioned the marble and here you have it. And it’s wonderful and not only the marble the concrete is wonderful as well. With those very warm coloured pebbles in the aggregate.
And this is what happens, you come out of the lift and you go through that door and in the middle picture you go through the railway carriage as it were and then you go into your enclosed corridor, no windswept, rainswept street decks here, it really is too high for that. Glazed towards the tunnel with sealed, double-glazed units from the start. And here, looking out over the landscape from a flat, if you like panoramas this is a good place to be.
But how the building meets the ground is something that architects worry about quite rightly because it is not at all easy to do. And this does it very neatly with the help of a sort of supporting cast of small buildings gathered around the base, not all of which are still there, but there are schemes afoot to try and make it nice, which I’m not sure is the right thing to do at this point in time. I think it wants to be safe, it wants to be useable, but the idea of softening it does seem to me to be the wrong move.
These are the flankers, coming up to what were really the last buildings that were built in this style, providing a sort of chorus of appreciation for the big act that towers up as you see there. It is a wonderful landmark, you really know where you are in East London when you see this, it does matter.
And then we’re into the final phase, of the big housing for the GLC…there we have it, standing up on its own, before its neighbours were built (which I’ll talk about later) the lift tower pulled apart from the slab block. This is not Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, although there are some similarities, it is the maisonette on two levels which allows you to put in the lift stops and corridors only every third floor. It was a device that was developed in the 1920s, it’s not original, but it’s turned into a very particular expression here that then gets reused at Trellick.
Here you see the buildings around cast shadows, Blackwall Tunnel Approach running across the foreground, this is a place that needs tough architecture and it certainly gets it here, and James [Dunnett] has written very movingly about it. Its castellated defences, second world war gun turret-type qualities, but the flats are pretty nice, and there is one that is quite often available to visit that now belongs to Tower Hamlets Council and they’ve done a very good job, I think, of educating people about this building by means of having this available.
So there you can see the sort of skip stop corridor arrangement, and each of those flat plans you should read the middle either with the one above or the one below because you go in through the front door, and in some cases you immediately go downstairs and then you’re in the flat, and there are some which are single-storey on each level as well.
And here, past and present, this bridge, drawbridge over a moat to enter the dark tower. The railway-carriage-profiled links that carry you, slightly precipitously over thin air, before you go into your flat.
Note the contrast, the gas holders, the chimneys all gone. A changed landscape. Olympic stadia will no doubt loom into place. I mentioned the marble and here you have it. And it’s wonderful and not only the marble the concrete is wonderful as well. With those very warm coloured pebbles in the aggregate.
And this is what happens, you come out of the lift and you go through that door and in the middle picture you go through the railway carriage as it were and then you go into your enclosed corridor, no windswept, rainswept street decks here, it really is too high for that. Glazed towards the tunnel with sealed, double-glazed units from the start. And here, looking out over the landscape from a flat, if you like panoramas this is a good place to be.
But how the building meets the ground is something that architects worry about quite rightly because it is not at all easy to do. And this does it very neatly with the help of a sort of supporting cast of small buildings gathered around the base, not all of which are still there, but there are schemes afoot to try and make it nice, which I’m not sure is the right thing to do at this point in time. I think it wants to be safe, it wants to be useable, but the idea of softening it does seem to me to be the wrong move.
These are the flankers, coming up to what were really the last buildings that were built in this style, providing a sort of chorus of appreciation for the big act that towers up as you see there. It is a wonderful landmark, you really know where you are in East London when you see this, it does matter.