guaranteed rental properties | Look away Prince Charles, Goldfinger’s Tower is wonderful
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Ernö Goldfinger’s Alexander Fleming House, now called Metro Central Heights, has been listed by English Heritage and, although Prince Charles might find fault, the buildings is an idealistic statement about what thoughtful architecture could bring to public life.
The Japanese have a word for it. Wabi-sabi is the mystical property that time, weather and human contact confer on materials. Leonard Koren, California’s fabled Zen master of the subject, says things wabi-sabi “often appear odd, misshapen, awkward, or what many people would consider uglyâ€.guaranteed rental properties
To be aware of wabi-sabi is to be aware of the language, even the poetry, that mute buildings and dumb things speak. Until recently, few people thought fine Zen thoughts while passing through the grimly urban and diesel toxic Elephant and Castle in south London. Now we all can. Indeed, will.
The English Heritage listing of Ernö Goldfinger’s Alexander Fleming House this week recognises several important things. For example: the fragility of prejudice, the permanence of concrete (which if we are honest, weathers very beautifully) and the way the solemn gravity of great architecture transcends the spiky little fits and pricks of temporary taste. It also recognises that “modern†has become a period style-label, joining Gothic and Baroque.
Now re-branded Metro Central Heights, Alexander Fleming House has been creatively re-used. The discoverer of penicillin has given way as nomenklatura to an address for first-time buyers who pay a premium to live in a great building. Once thought confrontational and aggressive, the Goldfinger design has mellowed into its locale’s texture. The Elephant and Castle would be unrecognisable without it. Adaptability and endurance are two tests of good architecture.
Officially adding Ernö Goldfinger to a list of admired architects that includes Wren and Vanbrugh, not to mention Pugin and Scott, makes this a remarkable moment in the history of taste. It is a moment that I dare say has made Prince Charles cross. It is a fair guess that Goldfinger is regularly anathematised during lively group therapy sessions in bosky and chintzy Highgrove.
Why? Because this noble building is the distillate of all that the heir so contumaciously detests: urban, cosmopolitan, right-angled and, most loathsome of all, concrete and flat-roofed. Never mind that it is meticulously designed and a potent statement of artistic purpose: it seems, if this is the way you see things, to represent all that is hateful in “modern†life. Not that it looks like a wireless – for some reason a favoured term of abuse in the Royal critical vocabulary; it looks like a Khruschev-era secret police academy (another one of the same).
But I think it looks rather wonderful. And one day Prince Charles will agree. This is because the one thing certain about taste is that it changes: what is reviled in one generation is revered in the next. This is as inevitable as night following day. Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, once rather grandly said that no one would ever want to revive the nineteenth century. A few years later, in 1918, Lytton Strachey published his best-selling Eminent Victorians and eight years after that Kenneth Clark confirmed the trend with his The Gothic Revival. It was a small step to Laura Ashley: history is a wave of revivals and survivals. Modern has survived and is being revived.
Yet buildings are complex and subtle things and there is much more to understanding them than to glance momentarily at their carapace with dismay or delight. Too much architectural commentary, including the Prince’s, has been based on superficial judgments about surface effects. Turrets and fiddly bits? Good! Flat roofs and metal glazing-bars? Bad!
True, Alexander Fleming House is confrontational, exactly as its architect intended it to be. But it was designed as a manifesto, an idealistic statement about what thoughtful architecture could bring to public life. Eventually, Prince Charles will look upon it with wistful affection and a wet eye.
Ernö Goldfinger was responsible for the design of many subsequently demonised buildings. People forget his gorgeous and luxurious Art Deco French Tourist Office in Piccadilly, but his Trellick Tower in Notting Hill and its twin sister Balfron Tower in Poplar (already listed) are hatefully remembered icons of infamy for those who lazily condemn all modern architecture as heartless and inhumane. Yet a thoughtful appraisal reveals as rich a variety of historical sources in their design as you would find in Vanbrugh: the bravura Futurism of Antonio Sant’Elia, the bold shape-making of Auguste Perret and the structural theories of Le Corbusier, for example. More importantly, the internal plans are subtle and intelligent.
Withal, any Ernö Goldfinger building is, for those willing to see and think, satisfyingly complex. Proportions are fine, details careful, the effects measured (even if that measurement is often on the bombastic scale) and the results enduring. These are buildings designed with care and forethought; Goldfinger’s visually challenging tower blocks have, apart from height, nothing in common with their thin, stupid, cynical, cheap and mean equivalents in Liverpool or Glasgow.
Designed by Ernö Goldfinger, Chelsea’s Brutalist Trellick Tower was built in 1966 and listed in 1998.
And if you want another telling contrast, a mile away from Alexander Fleming House there is The Shard and beyond it, the grotesque laboratory of yah-boo, look-at-me, brain-dead architectural gestures that is the City of London. To his client and the first tenant, the Ministry of Health, Goldfinger brought notions of pride and civic utility. Up the road, architects such as Rafael Vinoly or the American hyper-practice Kohn Pedersen Fox pander to the egos of developers and inflate tiny architectural ideas to bursting point and beyond.
Their triviality is indicated by their nursery names; Walkie-Talkie and Cheesegrater are notably wince-making. As for The Shard, it is a new building, but an old-fashioned idea. Its inflexibility, thermally inefficient glass skin and flatfooted intrusion are archaic and insulting. One day we will marvel how we let such mediocrity corrupt a great city.guaranteed rental properties
The City’s architectural playpen makes the once derided Goldfinger seem positively polite in comparison. He made buildings designed to dignify and delight the occupants; celebrity architects today prefer to ignore people in the cause of bigging-up corporate swagger.
Until this week, Goldfinger’s reputation was effected by two things. First, his personality. He was a flamboyant Hungarian Jew, not plagued by any lack of personal confidence nor hobbled by English reticence nor much interested in mediocrity. His personal sense of self-worth was practically enhanced by marrying the heiress to the Crosse & Blackwell soup fortune.
As an awe-struck youth, I met him and was suitably impressed by his mane of hair, loud shirts, bow ties, Astrakhan hat, cigars and rakishly parked big Rover. These same swaggering qualities made the Old Etonian Ian Fleming cringe, which is how the name Goldfinger joined Blofeld in the Bond universe of caricature villains. Certainly, Goldfinger had a reputation for being difficult, but the day after we met, I received a book inscribed, “To my dear friend, Stephen, with affection EGâ€. I liked him a lot.
Second, his association with Brutalism. Some may think that the word was coined by an adviser to the Prince of Wales, keen to add a new term of condemnation to a vocabulary stuck on the wireless metaphor. Its origins are different: we owe the term to the architectural historian Reyner Banham whose The New Brutalism picked up the French expression “béton brutâ€. This simply means raw concrete and was not intended as condemnation.
Banham explained Brutalism as an architectural ideology intended “to make the whole conception of a building plain and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function and circulationâ€. This is what you get in Goldfinger: clarity and intelligence, but now overlaid with a lot of wabi-sabi.
Goldfinger would have ruefully enjoyed being listed by English Heritage. A few years ago his shade ruefully enjoyed having his own 1939 masterpiece house at Willow Road in Hampstead acquired by The National Trust. He might have regretted that English Heritage was not more even-handed in its respect for antique raw concrete and would have argued for Brutalist buildings in Gateshead (Trinity Square, whose car park starred in the film Get Carter) and Portsmouth (the Tricorn Centre) to be saved from the wrecking-ball, but I think he would, puffing on a cheroot and sitting back in his Marcel Breuer tubular steel armchair, have felt a Mittel-Europa rush of intellectual pride at having his work safely accommodated into respectable British culture.
Listing Goldfinger’s Alexander Fleming House is a timely reminder about important principles in architecture. Buildings are not good because they are old. Nor are they bad because they are new. Instead, great architecture across the ages is connected by the same timeless principles. A good building is related to its site. Its function should be suggested by its form. Its spaces and materials are carefully arranged and specified so as to cause surprise and delight to the people who use it. And good buildings soon come to occupy a place in the popular imagination.
On this last point there can be no debate. Look away now, Prince Charles: Goldfinger is classic.
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