Still standing after 62 years, with only 5/8 in thin concrete shell roof.
Posted on 12/17/2012 8:58:55 AM PST by Cvengr
A clampdown on so-called architectural extravagance means British schools will no longer feature anything other than straight lines. Why is the joy of curves lost on our education secretary?
That's Frank Gehry out of the running then. And don't expect to see any new schools paying homage to Antoni Gaudi, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier or even Christopher Wren. And Zaha Hadid might have won the Stirling prize for a school last year (Brixton's Evelyn Grace Academy) but she can forget about building another one here any time soon, no thank you, Dame. You might want to check your child's pockets for protractors as well.
Why? Because the government has banned curves from new school buildings. Not just curves but also "faceted curves", indents, dog legs and notches. In other words, any shape you like as long as it's a plain box. The Department for Education is cracking down on what it saw as architectural extravagance in the now-scrapped Building Schools for The Future (BSF) programme. Its new "baseline designs", unveiled on Monday, call for affordable, stripped-down, purely functional school buildings. Nothing wrong with that per se, but in taking his war with architecture into abstract geometrical realms, Michael Gove is revealing the source of his secret trauma.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Not necessarily. A more conventional form can be both economic and beautiful.
I think the guy is wrong too, but for a different reason. Good architecture and economics are not mutually exclusive if you hire someone who is really creative.
Just use the nearest prison for design inspiration. Thats what all our newer high schools look like here.....prisons.
if you have to waste taxpayer dollars to be a ‘superior’ culture, you ain’t. a ‘superior’ culture is one in which the government does not engage in grandiosity, but keeps things humble and efficient.
now if YOU wanted to spend YOUR money on something grandiose and foolish, then go right ahead.
Still standing after 62 years, with only 5/8 in thin concrete shell roof.
Strictly rectangular is grandiose and inefficient.
You’ve taken for granted some key words in your rebuttal. Waste, grandiosity, humble, efficient, and foolish are subjective. I don’t think any architect or municipality would advocate being arrogant, wasteful, grandiose, foolish, or inefficient.
Now if you believe there’s a maximum cost/sf that a municipality should employ based on some vetted considerations, they can live or die on those considerations. Calling for banality for its own sake, which seems to be what this joker is doing, is a whole other matter. Who would advocate such a thing? Believe me, many people are afraid of creative architecture and will default to tried and true (banal).
Ya’ll need some Soviet in your public building style?
Still ugly too.
This article is making a design specification sound like a ban. I’d rather see a demand for a density ratio or something like that, but I suspect Gove is suspecting monkey business with anything less than clear demands.
My Goodness, that is hideous.
i work in a public building. you should have seen all the drooling and extravagance that went into designing this mess. and the quality is horrendous. but don’t worry the taxpayers paid for it, and now with out higher operating costs and cuts to the budget, we’re losing people.
i know a lot of freepers dislike government employees, but...
I’m interested in forms that reflect their time. Convention, as it’s commonly understood, means “traditional” which really has no meaning for architecture. “Traditional” architecture is a manifestation of the considerations of a specific time and place. It’s not always transferable. What is called traditional is really derivative or thematic. The true tradition of architecture is innovation that matches cultural and physical constraints.
True conventions, many of them, are being negated by new technology such as visualization, documentation, and fabrication tools.
“Note: the no curve and straight line philosophy also applies to no eaves, no wings to the bldg, etc.”
No wings??? Are you saying that classic building design patterns are now being ruled out by building codes?
BFL
Sounds like they wasted the tax payers’ money. There’s nothing wrong with working for government. Daniel worked for the government.
He's a legend that will last a lunchtime.
One of the thinnest concrete shells ever built (1951). Designed as a Cosmic Ray Lab in Mexico City.
Note, no re-entrant corners.
The reason and the answer lies in the book...Fountianhead
No, traditional and convention are not the same.
Even so, tradition is not static or unadaptable. Its ‘time and place’ had endured for thousands of years.
All of architecture is derivative. New technology doesn’t fundementally change that.
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