Monday 24 August 2009

UNDERGROUND CONTROL CENTRE, WEST LONDON BY MORGAN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

This is the kind of shite that London Underground commissions these days. While in Switzerland you get signal boxes by Herzog & de Meuron etc, in our nation's capital you get a giant bunker that isn't so much ugly as completely undesigned. It's just acres of grey surface, undifferentiated apart from what appears to be four downpipes marching across the facade. Interesting how shit architects are always very precise about downpipes in their visualisations.
Morgan Professional Services is the kind of multi-disciplinary that believes in 'creative collaboration', the kind of platitude that today's construction industry sprouts like acne on a teenager's face. It's impossible to not believe in creative collaboration, of course, but when all you have to send press releases out about is a building like this one, you have to ask yourself what all that creativity and collaboration has brought you to.
Here's the back:
A close up of that green wall (designed to 'minimise visual impact' and 'soften' this humungous building), two years on:
No, not really. That's DSDHA's little bit of Paradise. But it's a fair approximation.
Inside, it's the normal Dr Strangelove/Gattaca kind of thing:Many thanks to an esteemed correspondent for this one...

3 comments:

  1. Eugh, words fail me.

    Lets hope cross rail doesn't turn out this kind of crap.

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  2. The Gattaca reference intrigues me... The building in that movie was a Frank LLoyd Wright? Anyways I totally agree this building is offensive... but does not deserve comparison with FLW....

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

    SEE: Filming section

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  3. A little late to the party for comments on this one but it strikes me as doubly disappointing that London Underground of all people would commission this box.

    London Underground has a history of superb uplifting design from its' tube map to the underground symbol to the wonderful art-deco tube stations.

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