Otto Saumarez Smith
@OSaumarezSmith
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Historian of shopping precincts, leisure centres, power stations, derelict landscapes, inner cities, new towns, & city centre redevelopment. @c20Society trustee
instagram.com/osaumarezsmith
Joined July 2014
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My
@OUPHistory
book "Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Renewal in 1960s Britain", is out now in affordable paperback.
It covers a constellation of ideas about the rebuilding of city centres for affluence and the car in the 1960s.
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My new out of office reply, courtesy of John Ruskin:
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Ron Hitchins died in 2019 aged 98. He was a Chinese Lithuanian East Ender, who worked as a tailor, a coal miner, a flamenco dancer, & an abstract sculptor & ceramicist.
His estate is selling off the contents of his house in Hackney - the photos of which are completely divine.
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I'm reading Michael Gage's 'Guide to Exposed Concrete Finishes' (1970). Catnip for me - so here follows a thread of some of the tasty things in it.
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Wonderfully surreal photograph, apparently showing a street carnival in Frankfurt (1929) where the Roofers Guild dressed as Modernist houses to protest against the flat roofs putting them out of business.
Fastnacht-Umzug in Frankfurt, 1929. Mir wurde von einer vertrauenswürdigen Person erläutert, dass mit dieser Kostümierung die Dachdecker-Innung gegen die Arbeitsplätze bedrohenden modernen Flachdachbauten protestierte.
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Under the 30 year rule buildings in England are not normally eligible for listing until they reach that age. So to mark the new year, here is a list of 10 buildings completed in 1993 that are now eligible, & I think are worthy of listing. 🧵
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A great glut of architecture in Buffalo, a tremendous city. First up Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1895); a famous building in the history of proto-modernism & skyscrapers, but the luscious, incredibly beautiful ornamental terracotta the great, ravishing surprise.
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Obsessed with this 1760s Staffordshire teapot with a pattern of fossil crinoids (from
@metmuseum
). Hard to believe it isn't modern.
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I don't think I'd ever seen Charles Rennie Mackintosh's beautiful watercolours from his alcoholic retirement from architecture in the South of France during the 1920s. Oh for a summer holiday.
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Intercom for a 12-storey block of flats in Bedford (1958-60), on a lovely wall of ceramic tiles plausibly by Peggy Angus.
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London and its villages from a fragment of the Sheldon Tapestry Map (1590s). I particularly like the windmills on Hampstead Heath.
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Thrilling multiple levels of an 18th Century megastructure. Chambers’ Somerset House
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John Soane got his pupils to make progress perspectives of his buildings under construction as part of their training. The results are exquisitely beautiful & offer an astonishingly vivid insight into Georgian building methods.
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Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx's jubilantly abstract gouache plans for modernist gardens & parks (these examples made between 1948 & 1953):
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1. Alan Short & Associates Queen's Building for De Montfort University, a phantasmagoria of techno-arts & crafts, giving a muscular Butterfieldian grandeur to its pioneering systems of natural ventilation.
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1970s interior makeover of Heathrow Terminal 2 was plastic fantastic
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Houses for Visiting Mathematicians, University of Warwick, by Howell Killick Partridge & Amis, 1968-9, utterly loveable in the snow.
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Have long wanted to visit the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces the baker, gloriously strange and tough little structure, which dates from c. 50–20 BC, although certainly isn’t my idea off classical antiquity. Absolutely love it.
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A couple more (better quality) photographs of the potentially 10th-century ironwork of St Helen’s, Stillingfleet - a door off powerful peculiar beauty I think.
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2. CZWG's public lavatories and florists in Westbourne Grove - a lovely project, slicing out a bit of public use between two roads. It tones down some of the b-movie flamboyance of the firm's earlier pomo work, for something more cheerfully urbane and rather 1930s.
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Liliane Lijn's 1971 screen prints of cooling towers.
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I like the reverence with which this GNER microwaved cheeseburger package is housed in York Railway Museum. 🚆 🍔
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Gerd Winner's atmospheric early-1970s screenprints of London dockland wharfs:
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Chic late seventies detailing on Littlebrook 'D' power station, demolished 2015.
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I've been teaching a class on representations of the North of England in the 1930s - & had never seen these beautiful collages by Julian Trevelyan of Bolton (1937-8), done as part of Mass Observation.
Newspaper perfectly captures the scruffy dereliction of industrial wastelands.
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Final curtain. The mosaic tomb of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev in the Cimetière de Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (1993).
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Here are drawings by early inhabitants of the kindergarten in Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation, Marseille, depicting their home as a joyously kaleidoscopic friendly beast. I think they capture magic of the place, & offer a lesson in how different people can view the same place.
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A pretty perfect example of Festival Egyptian slab serif in Derbyshire.
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George Pace’s Scargill Chapel in the Yorkshire Dales (1960)
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I’m unsurprised that the Imperial Hotel on Southampton Row is looking to rebrand & refurbish, so whilst it’s still there here a record of the lushly peculiar mixture of concrete, gold mosaic, & orange san serif. C. Lovett Gill & Partners, 1970.
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Perhaps the world’s most uncompromising brutalist building: Pfohl, Roberts & Biggie’s petrifying City Court Building (1971-4)
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Peter Behrens’s thrilling AEG Turbine Factory (1908), somehow simultaneously far ahead of its time and monumentally ancient. A sublime building, happily still humming with industrial use.
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Reading the
@SurveyofLondon
for the Isle of Dogs, and struck by the scarcely believable docklands juxtaposition of this photograph showing the barque Penang looming over the crowded backyards of a Millwall terrace in 1932.
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Buffalo City Hall, an Art Deco banger inauspiciously dated 1929.
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Back to stonking Great Coxwell barn (1290s) - well described by William Morris as ‘unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral’.
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I'm overjoyed Harlech's magnificently peculiar brutalist Theatr Ardudwy (by Colwyn Foulkes & Partners, 1973)- which has been empty & derelict since 2016, despite listing - is reopening this summer. It is a fabulous building.
Story here:
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‘British Pond Life’ is an ebullient mid-1960s ceramic mural by Kenneth Barden. It is part of Halifax Swimming Pool, a fine building itself, which the council are proposing to demolish (for a car park). Isn't it gorgeous...
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Helmut Jacoby drawings for Walter Gropius & The Architects Collaborative's University of Baghdad (1960). 🌴
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Mounts Public Baths, Northampton (1938) by J.C. Prestwich & Sons. 🏊♂️
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1972 Shankland Cox scheme for a new district centre near Reading
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Harry S. Fairhurst’s York House, Manchester (1911), a textile warehouse with a sloping rear wall of cascading glass, allowing in light for the inspection of cloth. Recognised as a precursor of constructivist Modernism by Gropius, Pevsner, Kahn, & Stirling, but demolished 1974.
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Struck by the ravishing blues on a particularly well preserved shop front on Warren Street, originally a dairy.
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Scarborough College (1963-5), intricate, thrillingly multi layered interior spaces, Piranesian brutalism deploying every trick of 1960s avant- garde architectural discourse. Exploring had me squealing with excitement at the heightened spatial drama.
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Thomas Jones's oil paintings of crumbling walls in Naples (c. 1782).
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James Stirling’s propulsive copper roofed library pavilion at the Venice biennale (1991), described by him as a ‘book ship’.
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Holy moly, who knew one of the greatest bits of British Corbusianism was in Cornwall? New County Hall in Truro by F.K. Hicklin (1963-6), landscaping by Jellicoe. La Truro-ette. Thrilling piloti.
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1971 GLC proposal for a ‘mini ride’ system from Southbank to Oxford Circus
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Alfred Thomson's 1934 painting of Lubetkin's Penguin Pool at London Zoo. 🐧
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A building to make one gasp at its modernity. The Citroën showroom, Marbeuf, Paris (c. 1929), designed by A. Laprade and L. Bazin, with Jean Prouvé as engineer. The plate glass facade, gloriously displaying five shelf-like floors to show the cars. It was demolished in 1952.
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Spiral staircase at Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians (1960-4)
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In England for a building to qualify for listing at Grade II it needs to be at least 30 years old. So to mark the end of the year here is my list of 10 buildings that were completed in 1994, so are now eligible. 🧵
(You can see my 1993 list here: )
Under the 30 year rule buildings in England are not normally eligible for listing until they reach that age. So to mark the new year, here is a list of 10 buildings completed in 1993 that are now eligible, & I think are worthy of listing. 🧵
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No one will ever see more, or know more about, post-war architecture than Elain Harwood - it would be impossible. Tragic for my discipline &
@C20Society
all that knowledge, kindness, & energy has gone.
Here looking glam at book launch for her magisterial Space Hope & Brutalism:
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A small, inexplicable hand, in North Stoke Church
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Astonishing photograph of Stepney's Stifford Estate in 1961, from an exhibition 'David Granick: The East End in colour, 1960-1980' opening at Tower Hamlets archive on February 3rd
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Looking for inspiration for modernist open plan kitchens - Perriand's Unité d'Habitation & Kandya obviously - but here the kitchen for Michael Brawne's own house in Hampstead (1960). Hit me up with kitchens. 🧑🍳
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Carlo Scarpa’s sunken ziggurat sculptural garden at IUAV, incorporating the old classical broken pediment doorway of the Venetian architecture school (realised 1983):
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Euston Station as it was imagined, and could & should still be.
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Finally got to Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee, Co. Durham (1969) - it’s stupendous.
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A fish filled mosaic stream flowing down the nave of Honan Chapel, Cork. By Ludwig Oppenheimer (1914-17). 🐟
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John Piper abstract mosaic mural at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce & Industry building (1960)
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The news from Stoke is absolutely bleak, levelling down & erasure of history at its starkest. These museums make Stoke, without irony, one of my absolute favourite places to visit in Britain, but the council has a devastating culture of self destruction.
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As I was near, I have made the pilgrimage to
@PpeterPeter
’s very beautiful new sweeping brick terrace at Edgewood Mews - an oasis of urbanity & enclosure despite curving along the north circular. Superb - Barber deserves every architectural prize going. 🧱
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Townscapes on 1940s Swedish Lycium textiles, designed by Sofia Widén
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Here a porcelain palette plate (from
@V_and_A
), made in Paris 1810-20, so that a painter could gauge the eventual colour of enamels after firing.
A functional object that inadvertently ends up looking like it was made by the Bauhaus.
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Wonderful aerial photograph of an outdoor service at Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut
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Some summer colour for wintry day:
Angiolo Mazzoni's delicious post office in Sabaudia (1932-4)
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Tubular banister of the staircase to Stirling & Gowan’s flats at Ham Common (1958)
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One of a number of fisherman’s stores on Holy Island, made from an upturned boat (a Northumberland coble apparently) cut in two. In the 19th century they were regularly used as dwellings on the Northumberland coast.
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I love love love this archive of 12000+ photographs of the everyday built environment in provincial France: . The photography is consistently superb & the search function, by typology, material, date, region, or even shape (try triangles) is brilliant.
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This is so depressing. I can give a long list of statements by 1960s politicians using almost precisely the same rhetoric & language for Victorian architecture. This wave of architectural bloodletting will be similarly regretted, once it is too late.
Planning reforms are ‘big opportunity’ to tear down brutalist buildings, says Jenrick
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Get in touch if you'd like to do a PhD with me. I'm interested in shopping precincts, leisure centres, power stations, derelict landscapes, inner cities, new towns, city centre redevelopment, & the way that the everyday built environment illuminates political culture & change. 👍
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Edmund Frazer Tomlins’s Grafton Chambers (1927), Euston, towering & with a creepily expressionist external staircase. A deeply un-London building which it’s curiously difficult to find anything about.
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Here he is posing with his statue outside Stamford Hill library. What a dude.
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Glass mosaic by Phillip Suffolk on the staircase of Powell & Moya's Mayfield School, Putney (1955).
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I like this slightly sinister Victorian house in Camden, peppered with blind windows.
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Henry Moore’s tasty sculpted screen for the Time & Life Building, Bond Street (1954)
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4. Evans and Shalev's
@Tate_StIves
, Cornwall - overlooking the sea& built on the site of a former gasworks, its nautically curving entrance echoes that former use, it is a densely layered & historically literate neo-modernist building. Eldred Evans died earlier this year.
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This 18th century house in Cley, Norfolk, has a cornice made of whale bone 🐳☠️
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Dropped into Stockwell Bus Station, a cathedral for double deckers, which makes them look like toys. 1952, Addie, Button & Partners. Grade II* listed I’m pleased to say.
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So I’ve made the trip to Finchley - and here is the beautiful mosaic mural, by Avinash Chandra & dated 1963 - abstract but plausibly referencing cigars.
There is an application in to demolish Alexander House in Finchley, which to my eyes is a delightful nugget of Festival Modernism, but
@C20Society
have struggled to find anything substantial about it, even an architect. Anyone have any leads?
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"Geologists say that the land upon which London is built has subsided 68 feet during the last 500 years... Assuming that the subsidence is still going on, one can imagine the metropolis some day sinking below Thames level and becoming a 2nd Venice"
1899 ecocatastrophe collages
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Some more of Alexander Graham Bell’s wonderfully peculiar tetrahedral kites, 1902-1912.
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Spectacularly groovy space-age drawings for Henri Ciriani and Borja Huidobro's entrance into the 1967 Amsterdam City Hall Competition.
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A beautifully detailed modernist building in Berlin Mitte, the Jewish Girls School, with the shatteringly inauspicious date 1927-30. The architect, Alexander Beer was himself murdered at Theresienstadt.
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Demolition has started on Fawley Power Station control room in Southampton. Surely it could have been repurposed & made the centrepiece of a new development.🛸
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Here something deeply satisfying: 1951 machine embroidered lace, manufactured by A.C. Gill in Nottingham, and designed by the Festival of Britain Pattern Group, based on microscopic crystal structures. Here Polythene, two Haemoglobin, & Apophyllite.
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Some exquisitely beautiful things in this article on the artworks made for post-war Athenian apartment buildings:
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Graffiti drawing of old St Paul’s Cathedral from the north-east (possibly 14th-century), scratched on an inside wall of the tower at Ashwell Church, Hertfordshire
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There is an application in to demolish Alexander House in Finchley, which to my eyes is a delightful nugget of Festival Modernism, but
@C20Society
have struggled to find anything substantial about it, even an architect. Anyone have any leads?
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Carlo Scarpa’s entrance to the Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia (1976-8)
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How good is this zigzagging romanesque column in San Esteban, Moradillo de Sedano?!
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I love these photographs of the sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe creating her giant sculpture for the Man-Made Fibres building at the University of Leeds (opened 1956).
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Some close-ups of the woodcut blocks for Jacopo de’Barbari’s huge & intricate printed map of Venice (1497)
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