It's quite an amazing feat to make a building that has so complete a lack of texture that it looks like the windows are drawn on to the facades. This is curtain walling at its most bland, taking the building beyond bad into the realms of the hyper-real.
Dovetail (?!) Architects seem to be bad at bits of buildings that need to stick out, so they do as few as possible.
The ones they do do are great. I'm really digging the 'giant eyebrow' motif at the top of the entrance tower, together with the robotic quiff of the roof itself. And, in particular, the tiny little entrance canopy, which gets its own gutter and two (count 'em) downpipes. Do it's a bit like a classical portico. With a bit of sheet steel and some downpipes.
Go Basildon!
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Yes, why Dovetail? Since I started reading this blog, I have noticed how many bad British architects have bad names. It once was that architectural offices were named after their principals, so they had names like Unman, Wittering and Zigo. Now they have "funky" names, such as Archial, Eco-Mods and ( worst of all) DV8 Designs. Whatever happened to the profession's dignity?
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a Cyclops with two eyebrows
ReplyDeleteIt's like they printed the elevations on canvas and stuck them on a poor old office block.
ReplyDeleteIt's made of cardboard, right?
ReplyDelete"The building is so pleasing on the eye that a group of RIBA members made a special trip to come and view it".
ReplyDeleteHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
http://www.kingspan.com/kingspangroup/products_solutions/case_studies/case_studies_text/phoenix_place/
Can you imagine the sheer joy of taking a long run up the ramp-like "quiff" in order to make sure your suicide makes "best in class" in Basildon this year ?
ReplyDeleteIf I were an Essex Samaritan, I'd be RECOMMENDING this building to callers.
It looks a lot like the awful Visteon building down the road - sadly, when Visteon shut down and the workers occupied the building to force them to pay up, they somehow omitted to set the fucking eyesore on fire.
ReplyDeleteAmazing. It manages to be authoritarian/menacing and insubstantial all at once, like a panopticon made out of cake. And it combines featureless dullness with wanky decorative bits. (Also, I reckon the building itself looks more like a drawing than the drawing looks like a building.)
Ah. I'd forgotten I had these photos, but having found your blog I feel I must call your urgent attention to this structure. I don't know the architect, but it appeared at Royal Holloway, University of London in June, 2007.
ReplyDeleteI've put together a Flickr set here.
Yaaagh. It's not by Reid Jubb Brown is it? Looks like their cladding on the Haymarket Hub in Newcastle. Incidentally, why is the hub not on this blog yet?
ReplyDeleteSomeone commenting has informed me that it might be the work of "Todd Architects".
ReplyDeletethis is what you get when you leave the detailing to Kingspan.
ReplyDeleteA quick google reveals that it's the headquarters of an NHS trust. But it makes me sick just to look at it.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do quite like the idea that it might actually be a photo of a model or a visualisation, what with those weird-looking curtain walls. Never having been to Basildon, I have no objective proof that this building really exists. I hope this is the case.
Living ten minutes away from this building, I can tell you without hyperbole, it's even worse in real life.
ReplyDeleteI like how the aerodynamic shaped grey elements sharply contrast with the fat bulk of the thing...
ReplyDeleteJay - I pity you for having to live near it, but it must act as a good motivational tool; showing what not to do.
Vigar.
On the plus side, it's next to a KFC. Oh wait.
ReplyDeleteThe cladding, yes, the heavy quiff element, yes, also. But what is really floating my boat are the little wishbone props between the two. As though
ReplyDeletea. The cantilevers are so ambitious and delicate that they need propping.
b. The kingspan cladding gives such a sense of solidity that we truly believe these wishbones are providing stability.
This building is SO wrong but strangely familiar because it's 'type' gets built up and down the country all the time.
ReplyDeleteThey should bring back capital punishment for buildings that bad.
ReplyDelete