Listed Buildings

Grade II* - Park Hill Flats, Sheffield

Buildings of significant historical, architectural and cultural importance are given a ‘Listing’ which protects them from structural and/or aesthetic change without prior consent from local planning authorities. Although the list compromises mainly of buildings; other structures such as bridges memorials and even parks can be found on the list.  There are currently 3 types of listing in England;

· Grade I – These are buildings of outstanding Architectural or Historic interest and compromises mainly of Church of England Parish Churches.

· Grade II* - Significant buildings of more than local interest.  Such as Battersea power station.

· Grade II – Buildings of special architectural or Historical interest, such as the BT tower.

There are 442,000 listed buildings in England with almost 95% of those being Grade II. Generally all buildings built before 1700 and surviving in anything like their original condition are automatically added to the list. Selection comes into play with Victorian buildings and those from the 19^thC and it is rare for anything to be listed that is less than 30 years old and impossible for anything less than 10 years old to be added.

James H Kunstler - Dissection of suburbia

A Sense of Place

• The quality of space within places that are meaningful and which character and quality depends on how the space is defined by buildings.
  • Using the grammer and syntax of building and planning to inform us who and what we are.
• The Pulic Realm has two roles
  • The dwelling place of civilisation and civic life,
  • The 'Physical Manifestation of the common good'

• When this public realm is degraded you also degrade the quality of civic life.

• Civic design - A body of methods, skills, principles and knowledge that helps to define places worth inhabiting.
• The public realm has to inform us where we are geographically as well as culturally.
  • It must show where we have come from and the people we are, where we are going and thus allowing us to dwell in a hopefull present.
• Recent developments have prevented us from doing this with depressing and poor building and urban planning.
  • This reults in places not worth caring about. 

• What is needed is places that are well designed and worth caring about, eg Town squares and Plazas.
  • Outdoor areas need to function like active rooms.
  • Active and permeable membranes - surrounds such squares with shops, cafe's bars, restaurants etc.
    • Things go in and out giving a place people want to go to.

Role of 'Green' in the city centre is Formal

The role of trees are four fold;

1. To Spatially denote the pedestrian realm,
2. To protect pedestrians from vehicles in carraigeways,
3. To filter sunlight onto paths,
4. To soften the landscape of building and create a vaulted ceiling.

• Suburbia has destroyed the ditinction between the urban and rural.
  • You can't solve the problems of the city by dragging in the countryside.
• 'Suburbia' derived from the horror of the industrialised city.
  • There needed to be an antidote to the industrial city.
    • eg, the little cabin in the woods.
  • This was developed as villas in the country were connected to the city with railroad connections allowing a realtionship with the city with the enjoyment of the country.
  • These small houses grow into communities and towns.
    • They become cartoons of country houses and cartoons of the countryside.
  • You then get fascades of ideas, such as the picket fence or the porch.

• The age of oil is coming to an end and means we now have to rething how we live.
  • We will have to live closer to work.
  • We will have to stop importing and exporting in such vast quantities.
  • We will have to stop travelling as much. 

Le Corbusier - Elizabeth Darling

Le Corbusiers town plan, 'La Cite Industrielle', was his first attempt to create a modern form of the city, built entirely from concrete. He worked alongside Germans as part of the 'Deutche Werkbund' design group.

• Maison Dom-Ino, Corbusiers standardisation of house type.
  • Made from concrete and indended for mass production.
  • Whilst standardised so it was also flexible allowing customisation.

A Purist Architecture

• A modern city  is needed for modern lifes new demands.
• 'The house is a machine for living.' p15.
• His desire was to replace the chaos of contemporary architecture to allow a state where nature and machine co-exist in a state of equilibrium. Termed 'Machine-age classissism.'
• Corbusier began with with his housing designs with the 'Immeuble-villa'

Maison Citrohan'The Immeuble-villa' was a maisonette unit with a double height living space, alongside which was placed a garden. Corbusiers intention was for each unit to be stacked vertically, or horizontally to create small housing blocks.' p 13 

• The Maison Citrohan was of a similar design, but placed on stilts.
• Their designs were to be functional and suitable for mass production.
• Only one set of these designs were built, at Pessac new Bordeaux.

• His main designs were for wealthy families and individuals.
  • These designs relied on basic elements from the above.
  • But for appearance he developed a basic grammer and set of 5 rules.

The Five Points of a New Architecture

1. Pilotis; to life the house off the ground.
2. The Free Plan; the framed construction of the building allowing the interior space to be organised as desired.
3. The Free Facade; Since the external walls were not load-bearing, they could be divided up wherever necessary by windows or other apertures.
4. The Ribbon Window; a long horizontal window
5. The Roof Garden; Intended to replace the ground covered by the house and bring its inhabitants into direct relationship with nature. 

• The main body of the house was to be away from ground level.
  • Internal furniture was to be deisned to be functional and not decorational. Pieces were to be built into the fabric of the building. 

The City of Tomorrow

• Corbusiers first design for the reformation of town design was in 1915 with the Ville Contemporaine.

Ville Contemporaine

• To replace a chaotic unorganised mess with slims and a lack of nature he proposeed a zoned city where things like housing, indistry and administration occupied specific areas.
  • These would be connencted by networks for cars, trains and planes.
  • Contrete allowed to build high giving room for parks. 
• In his city plan for 3 million at the heart was a traffic terminus, then high rise glass skyscrapers for the central commercial district. Then housing for those who worked in the towers. 
  • A green belt seperates this from the manufacturing area and another divides the housing for those working in the factories. 
  • However this design was seen as elitist as it subordinates the workers to the outskirts of the city. 

Towards a Monumental Architecture

Pavillion Suisse

• Pavillion Suisse was a residential student housing block that represented a movement into a new phase of design.
  • It was a reworking of his 5 points where there was now a grander and more powerful architectural language.
• His design also changed eg, the Pilotis were now irregular.
  • his approach to finding a completely modernist movement. 

Brutalism and Spirituality; The Post War Work

Unite d'Habitation

• Post war Europe meant a shortage of housing and Corbusier was approached by the French government. 
  • Unite d'Habitation was a culmination of all Corbusiers pre-war ideas about housing and the city combined into one.
  • Corbusier wrote that the block would 'provide while silence and solitude before the sun, space and greenery, a dwelling which will be the perfect receptacle for the family.' p22
• Its design is similar to a giant bottlerack with units slotted in for living and leisure.
  • Most appartments were doubel height.
  • Accessed from corridors or 'streets' running through the centre of th building.
  • Dotted around the building are things which help make it a community; such as clubs, meeting rooms, shops and on the roof a recreational area.
• Alike most of his work concrete was left untreated. This was know as 'beton brut' and gave the name to the period of work Brutalism.
• This block was seen as a sculpture to the ordinary people living in the block. 
  • It had much influence over other european architecture such as the Alton West estate in London.

Alton West London

• He also explored the brutalist aesthetic in a number of other ways into beautiful and spiritual buildings.
  • eg. Notre Dame du Haut which was rebuilt from concrete but also included pieces of the old destroyed church into a beautifully curved organic structure.
    • He wanted to create a spiritual place and so used carefully designed windows to filter light and the was also a cavernous space.

Notre Dame du Haut

• His greatest challenge came from India to design a city plan for Chandigarh. He designed not only this but four government buildings and several monuments.
  • On the exterior were deeply inset balconies called brise soliels to shelter inhabitants from the sun. 

• Corbusier died in 1965.
  • He has taken the blame for much of the pood design of modern cities with his 5 points.
    • Yet he had no control over how his ideas would be used.
    • Even now his designs are seen as very different and fresh in many ways. 

Stewart Brand - Squatter Cities

This is a little summary of a rather intense lecture by Stewart Brand over on Ted talks on squatter cities. A lot of what he say's im not too sure I agree with but there is some useful information in there about population distrubution and its effects on cities. 

Current global urbanisation is the largest movement of people in history.

• Every week 1.3 million new people move to the city
• This is 70 million a year - equivelent to the population of England

Villages of the world are emptying out.The reasons being;

• Life in the country - Dull, Backbreaking, Impoverished, Restricted, Exposed and Static. Whilst..
• Life in the city -  Exciting, less greuling, better paid, Free, Private, Safe and Upwardly mobile. 

Some go to the major cities, others go to squatter cities;

• They are vibrant and productive places with communities and work forces. 1/6th of Indias Gross Domestic Product (GDP) comes from Mumbai. 
• These squatter cities are constantly upgrading and in a few cases with help from the Government. 

Informal Enterprises - What is going on in the streets of Mumbai.

• Food stalls, cafe's bars, hair dressers, church's, schools, clothes shops, copy centres, video's (pirated) music (pirated), gadget shops, public and mobile phone shops, public transport, day care and dentists.

Informal Economy

• Rent (of undeeded property), Construction (of undeeded buildings), Employment (in unlicenced, untaxed businesses), Services (untaxed and unlicenced) 

These squatter cities hold 60% of the employment in developing contries and are known as the 'dark energy' of economic theory. Furthermore there is no unemployment in these slums, everyone has a job.

One billion now live in squatter cities, and this is expected to rise to two billion.

Cities are population sinks.

• They always have been. The world population with level off at 8 or 9 Billion then drop rapidly. 

Cities are also wealth creators.

• They always have been. In the newly burgeoning cities, billions are climbing out of poverty. The urbanising world is a place of massive transformation and surprising hope.

Rank - Picturing the Social Order

George Cruikshank The British Bee HiveThe library in Sunderland is currently exhibiting an excellent exhibition entitled Rank, examining social order. Here is an exerpt taken from the exhibition website...

''"2009 will be the year when the question of how
society should be arranged will cease to be an idle,
abstract topic dwelt upon by ivory-tower intellectuals
and will instead enter the workaday mainstream
with a vengeance." Alain de Botton, December 2008

Who do we think 'we' are? 'Rank' asks: how have we
imagined the shape of our society? It is the first ever
exhibition to examine how British artists - and many
others - have represented the shape of their society
from the Renaissance to the present. It brings together
nearly 100 contributors, placing masterpieces from
almost all England's national collections - the British
Library, Tate, British Museum, V&A and Arts Council
Collection - next to images made for the urban poor
from the Working Class Movement Library, and those for
Victorian middle-class collectors from libraries
and archives. 'Rank' reveals the shape of our society
through objects from different social strata, as well
as representations of 'ranks', 'classes', 'orders'
and 'estates'.

WP Frith's 'Derby Day', shows what was described as
"a gathering clearly subversive of the proper distinctions
which should always in a well-governed country
exist between class and class." 'Rank' mixes objects
which occupy different positions in our hierarchy of
images. It also juxtaposes works by some of the
greatest names in British art with new research from
academic experts and public agencies, so that pictures
of our myths and stereotypes of our national life sit
alongside those based on hard fact. All seek to visualise
the ways in which our societies are and have been
ordered and classified.''

There is also a review of the exhibition from BBC Radio4 here..