CONTINUITY IN ARCHITECTURE

All our Preston Bus Station posts. The demolition vote is being held by Preston City Council on Monday 17th December.

The Council’s background documentation is here … Including costings and rejected urban design proposals.

The silhouette of Istanbul, sailing West on the Bosphorus towards the bridge connecting Europe and Asia.

Jugendstil/Art Nouveau building, Istanbul. Note the heavily modelled floral decoration.

Next to the baptistery, Santa Sophia, Istanbul.

Slides from a lecture given by Dominic Roberts at Liverpool School of Architecture, 9 March 2012.

Picture: Blackpool Tower on fire, 1897

All Saints RC Church, Hassop, Derbyshire. Designed by Joseph Ireland and built 1816-18.”The design is in the severest Classical Revival style: a correct Etruscan temple front, tetrastyle, prostyle.” (Pevsner, Buildings of England)

Photoset 

Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery

Caruso St John Architects

Completed November 2009

Photoset

Salisbury Cathedral cloister.

Lattice and font. St Edward the Confessor, Kempley, Gloucestershire. Randall Wells, architect.

More … 

Three Mirage 2000 jets of L’armée de l’air fly north towards the Franche Comte/Lorraine border in this odd postcard from Ronchamp*. The aerial view is not particularly flattering to a building that was designed to be approached from the slopes below. The previous chapel on the site was bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War and the remains were used as building materials in the new building. I suppose the chapel is being protected rather than threatened by the jets but what is the meaning of the title on the postcard back: flagrant delit?**

Mirage fighters were a feature of motorway travel in France in the ‘seventies and, flying in formation above the Autoroute near Dijon, evoked the over-dubbed delights of The Aeronauts*** a Saturday morning TV programme shown alongside Robinson Crusoe and The Flashing Blade.

*bought in the early ‘nineties and found in ‘the bottom drawer’
** in flagrante delicto
*** Les Chevaliers du Ciel in France (link)

This is the cover of the June 1969 issue of BDP Preston in-house magazine ‘Contact’.

BDP was founded in Preston and pioneered a team-based, democratic approach to building design in the era of the mandatory fee scale. In this illustration entitled THE INTEGRATED TEAM the BDP ethos is affectionately satirised.

I believe the artist was Peter Jones, an architect in the BDP Preston office. Note the representation of the QS ‘CALCULUS ABACUS’ in what appears to be a dunce’s cap.

seier+seier’s photograph of Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul. Click here for picture & discussion.