I actually like the Barbican towers, they're almost distopian which makes them interesting, the shard just looks like a half finished tower, i understand the shape is so that it doesn't interfere with St Pauls vista.

Speaking of views from London, Archway bridge locally known as suicide bridge in Highgate has some cracking views as long as you don't pick the day some one just received their credit card bill.

Totally agree on this – and yes, 'elegant' is exactly how I'd describe it too.



This is a really wonderful description.



It also makes me think of Paternoster Square, where Big Ears stuck his oar in about ensuring that it was 'appropriate' architecture for standing next to Wren's glorious cathedral.

In the end, what we got is dismal – the infantilism of architectural pastiche. Personally, I'd have given the space to the likes of Rodgers or Foster and said: 'go to it!'

The Barbican and the South Bank I am rather fond of, personally.

There is a vast amount of dross around. The 'Walkie Talkie' is dire. Heron Tower is ... well, what? All height and nothing more. Broadgate Tower is moderately interesting because it's a rhomboid, but so much else is just all about height.

I do like the no-longer-very-new Lloyds Building (been inside it on one of those 'open house' tours) and the Willis Building nearby (Rodgers and Foster respectively), and the 'Cheesegrater' will be amazing (another Rodgers) although it much taller than I realised.

Perversely, Docklands works rather well, I think – perhaps because it's in one area.

The big buildings are spreading: City Road, which I travel up and down every weekday, is going mad. There's one medium-sized block nearly finished, but at least four more going up on the short stretch from Old Street roundabout to the City Road Basin. The Lexicon is going to 36 stories. Canaletto is going to be 31 (the names are hilarious). From what I can gather, there's also a planned 40-plus storey building. And so on.

If you search enough, there are some really beautiful and/or quirky buildings in London, i don't understand though why they have to be tall to be 'noticed'.

There's a quirky building on Holloway Road (London Met Uni)
and even though it's full of the worst kind of human beings known to man T HoP is an absolutely gorgeous building.

Not easy to do, but it's fascinating to take a stroll down Oxford Street – looking above shop front level. It's surprising what's up there. And beyond Oxford Circus, you have the changes to department store architecture – and even a Barbara Hepworth sculpture on the side of John Lewis.

So would I.
Pastiche is right ... like a 1990's Portmeirion, without the fun.

It's a bit of an indictment when the only bit that's not blandly forgettable is a small sculpture in one corner (Frink's [iShepherd and Sheep[/i).

Perfect description.



Good point.

I used to work in Greenford and although it's now a tesco, The Hoover Building and it's blue and green lighting always stands out, when i sometimes come back from the North and the M1 is snarled up i use the M40 and come in that way, as soon as i see it i strangely (because i'm northern) feel like i'm home.
Then perversely i have to drive past BX shopping centre (awful looking repressive building).

A wonderful building.

I don't know it's name, i'm currently googling to find out but there's a building in the city on Leadenhall Street that i absolutely love, it's a metal looking industrial design, it has a stair case on the outside and it's always been my favourite building because it reminds me of buildings you see in dark futuristic films.


*edit Llyods Building

I used to get a bit of that sort of feeling from the Bibendum building as I fancied it was faced with Burmantofts ceramics from Leeds ... reminds me, I need to verify that.

I have a soft spot for Art Nouveau and London lets me down in that respect, I guess that the popularity of the Arts and Crafts movement (of which I am also a big fan) eclipsed it in the UK.
Nonetheless, the Bibendum building is one that cheers me up (although I guess it is more Secessionist than Nouveau really).

[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/mintball/sets/72157601935868073/A few pics from outside[/url.

We've also seen the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and then there's also 88 Wood Street (or London Wall, as most people think of it), which both have the same inside-out approach. I've also seen his law courts in Bordeaux, which are interesting too.

I didn't like it when it was first built but it's grown on me in recent years.
The inside-out nature of it is better looking than the Pompidou Centre, also by Rogers and also inside-out, which I still dislike.

*Edit ...Just seen Mintball's post ... makes this one a little redundant

On modernity and out of London, I do like what they've done in Liverpool around the docks, keeping the essence of the historic dock buildings, but also adding some really interesting new ones.

[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/mintball/9212985835/[/url

[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/mintball/9215760950/[/url

You might like the Carreras Building in Hampstead Rd.
I'd never heard of it until I was poking around the Mornington Crescent area (*) and suddenly came across this huge painted thing with Egyptian columns up the front.


(*) Having originally gone to the area to see Sir John Soane's tomb (from which Giles Gilbert Scott is supposed to have got his idea for the shape of the iconic red phone box), Hardy's tree (just Google it, fascinating story about Thomas Hardy and the railway to St Pancras) and the tomb of Mary Wollstonecroft ... all of which are in the pleasant churchyard of Old St Pancras Church, well worth an hour of one's time and only a short walk from St Pancras station, where the hotel was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the grandfather of the aforementioned Giles.

Just a shame that they've blocked the Liver Building from your viewpoint



The study of architecture is always fascinating and on the rare occasions that I get dragged by the females into Leeds then I stand around outside various shops waiting for them to do whatever the hell it is that women do in their womens shops, and I stare at the upper floors of whatever street I am stood in, up above the corporate branding vandalism of most of our high streets are the story of the high street and on main thoroughfares like Briggate in Leeds you get the full history of the city and an idea of how affluent some of the Victorian and Edwardian developers were - why else would you decorate the outside of your building with terracotta trimmings that serve no other purpose but to broadcast tot he world that YOU, the person who owns this retail outlet, are VERY, VERY wealthy and so deserving of the public confidence - something that you never ever see these days - when was the last time that you looked at a new B&Q warehouse and thought, "they must be worthy of our commercial trust, I mean, look at the money they've spent on that anodised orange cladding".

There's also a story behind the development of Leeds as a legal and financial centre in the 1970s and 80s over and above its neighbour in Bradford (which arguably has some much nicer remaining old buildings, yes really), from the awful 1960s functional but very ugly office buildings (fortunately not as all-pervasive as Bradfords centre was), through the 70s and 80s when someone at the council decided that plain old concrete was horrible and that brickwork should be seen once again in the city, preferably with contrasting brick features, and a proper pitched and tiled roof too - so much so did they buy into this concept that it became known as "The Leeds Design" and after a decade or so someone shouted "STOP" because it was becoming boring again



You can't win sometimes with architecture, the real answer is to have a good mix.

I rather like the compositions it creates with those diagonals, and then the Liver Building rising behind.

I used to be a London Bus driver, my route was the 24, i drove past it 8 times a day, 5 times a week for 2 years

I, like you, do that "upward looking" thing in Leeds and you see stuff like "Thornton and Co, India Rubber Manufacturers" above a shop front just a bit further up Briggate from M&S, very rewarding sometimes.
I heartily recommend buying/borrowing a copy of the latest version Of [iPevsner's Architectural Guide to Leeds[/i (as updated by Susan Wrathmell) ... it has short walks in the City Centre in it and I guarantee it will point out stuff that the lifelong Loiner never knew.


Aha, a Burmantofts-faced building? (e.g. Atlas House which houses the Allied Irish Bank in King Street, faced in "Marmo" ... or e.g. The interior of the cafe in the City Library, a great place to leaf through that Pevsner ... fantastic).

Amazing.
Is that the one from Victoria?

Did you like it?
The building, not the bus.

It goes through Victoria but not from it.

Yes, enough to actually look it up on the net

I worked in it for a short stint.

Well of course we can't let this comment pass without an honorary mention of Temple Mill in Leeds and a whole article dedicated to it [urlhttp://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/temple-mill-leeds/[/url, pure unadulterated Victorian entrepreneurship sticking two fingers up at his rivals in the city and building in a totally bizarre and unnecessary design , just because he had the money and time and will to do so - not forgetting that he then made a fortune out of the manufacturing process therein.

Temple Mill is in Holbeck, an area south of the city that housed huge swathes of the population in cramped back-to-back houses but also contained much of the heavy industry that the city grew to prominence in, the mills and the Hunslet Engine Works for instance so it was an intensively developed, probably filthy, industrialised area - why the hell would you build an Egyptian temple in the middle of it



Compare and contrast to any modern industrial estate you like and you'll see nothing of a modern equivalent either in design or simple "Balls to the rest of you" attitude amongst business leaders today.

It is remarkable looking at 19th century industrial architecture just how many flourishes were added – even to chimneys.

Well funny you should mention that



Just a short way along the river from the Temple Mill in Leeds [url=http://www.leodis.net/discovery/discovery.asp?page=200335_284221828&subsection=2003520_912014187&subsubsection=2003521_375591457&topic=200335_929714382we have a pair of rather splendid Italian Capaniles[/url although they were never bell towers but factory chimneys for "Joe Soaps", or Joseph Watson's soap works, they still stand although the main factory is long gone - but two factory chimneys built to resemble very intricate and highly decorative Italian bell towers which would hardly have been visible in the industrial landscape of the time anyway, indeed its only in recent decades that they have become as prominent as they are now.

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