Теории и практики Москвы. Love London council housing. Move over, Foster: here are the actual Brits who built the modern world | Art and design. You see it in hospitals and offices, airports and schools. It is the go-to architectural language for service stations and retail parks, data centres and storage sheds. The ubiquitous acreage of grey cladding panels, offset with struts and wires and pointless bits of rigging, windows enlivened with grids of louvres, rooftops adorned with inflatable pillows. If you’re lucky, you might even get a swooping tensile canopy strapped on to the entrance, bringing a touch of yachty glamour to the grim shed beyond.
The scourge of our cities and out-of-town centres, this wretched language of Portakabin-moderne has become the default setting for countless developers and local authorities, bereft of budget and ambition. So it might come as some surprise that this dreary style has a noble ancestry. It reminds us that this world of curtain walls and clip-on facades was once brave, modern, and even shocking. But this is not the whole story. Neave Brown James Gowan Kate Macintosh Ted Cullinan. The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden: ‘a magical moment for English housing’ | Municipal Dreams.
In the sixties, London was swinging and Harold Wilson had promised a new Britain forged in the ‘white heat’ of a technological revolution. That may have been hype but something of it resonates when you look at Camden’s Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate – Alexandra Road or even Rowley Way to its friends. There was hope in the air and Camden was well placed to capture it. The Metropolitan Borough of Camden was formed in 1964 and comprised the former boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras – respectively intellectual, wealthy and radical.
It was also the third richest borough in London in terms of rateable value.(1) Add the politics of a young and ambitious Labour council, for whom ‘the main aim was more housing – beginning and end’ and conscious of its flagship role, and that made for some of the most exciting council housing of modern times.(2) Rowley Way in the 1970s © Martin Charles In Neave Brown, the architect of Alexandra Road, he found an ally. Brown wanted to: (4) Rowley Way today. Architonic | Architecture and Design. Fuck Yeah David Hockney. Hi-Fructose Magazine | The New Contemporary Art Magazine. Losing Sight of Magritte by Francine Prose. In high school, I took a weekly drawing class at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and every Friday afternoon I’d stand—reverent, transfixed—in front of Magritte’s The Empire of Light.
In the painting, one of several similar works done during the 1950s it is night; a street lamp illuminates a city block; lights glow behind a few windows of the houses whose occupants are presumably unaware that, just above their neighborhood shrouded in darkness, is an expanse of sunny blue sky, dotted with cottony clouds. How enthralling it seemed to me, how magical and deep, how suggestive of a meaning that was obviously profound yet tantalizingly elusive.
Now, when I look at that painting in reproduction, and at the works displayed in the new MoMA show on Magritte, I can’t recapture the faintest hint of my former emotion. A locomotive comes roaring out of a fireplace. A pair of boots morphs into a pair of feet, with toes. A seated man in hat and a blanket has a birdcage instead of a torso.