Ethics versus aesthetics: AD 1965-74

A 20 minute paper/talk I gave at the student-led theory forum on the subject of "ecology" at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture this weekend:

I want to start with a bit of a long quote from Warren Chalk of Archigram*. This quote was published in AD in April 1971 and also as the last piece in the 1972 Archigram book which essentially became their monograph. In other words, it represents their last word:

Ecology - there, I've said that word - is a social problem. We have been told so by Time, Life, Newsweek, Look and the Nixon administration. Pollution is insidiously growing. Either the environment goes or we go. And you all know what will happen if the environment goes. We have produced a society with production for the sake of production. The city has become a market place, every human being a commodity. Nature is a resource. Human beings are a resource. Well. Our very survival depends on an ecological utopia, otherwise we will be destroyed.
The technological backlash we are experiencing must be fought with a more sophisticated technology, a more sophisticated science … But if we are to prevent eco-catastrophe it can only be done by more sophisticated environmental systems, not by dropping out. Nor the hippy type philosophy. Did you see Drop City in Easy Rider?...Let's face it, total dispersal won't work economically any more than total centralisation. Apart from being a head-in-the-sand attitude, we need to fight technology with technology, to produce David Greene's cybernetic forest … What we look for is technological play, so that individuals can create an even greater environmental stimulation. A person switched on to the electric tomato, or the proud possessor of the personalised robot like Manzak, can extend an existing situation, and a new man/machine [relationship] be established getting people, through their extension with a machine, into action.
Experiments such as these could achieve a people-oriented technology of human liberation, directed towards pleasure, enjoyment, experimentation: a try-it-and-see attitude …
Hopefully some environmental magic will then prevail and we will again think up the impossible in order to be realistic.

What I'm going to do in this paper is look at the ongoing, changing relationship between the non-mutually exclusive, twin themes of 'ethics' and 'aesthetics' as they appeared on the pages of Architectural Design between 1965 and 1974. You will see that many of the issues we are talking about today were being discussed 40 years ago – even before the oil crisis of 1973 – and that therefore the architects' political capacity to affect change has proved extremely limited despite continuous calls to architectural arms.

The magazine Architectural Design was already successful and widely read by the time Robin Middleton took over as Technical Editor in 1965 but for the next ten years, under the direction of Middleton and his successor, Peter Murray, it was to become the architectural magazine that defined the period.

Earlier, from 1953 to '62, Technical Editor Theo Crosby had used the magazine to promote architecture-as-building, and especially the New Brutalist movement and Team X of the Smithsons et al. In 1966, Reyner Banham published the canonical The New Brutalism, with the subtitle “Ethic or aesthetic?”. Its content was heavily based on articles from each of the Architectural Review and Architectural Design, and in it, Banham documented his search for “une architecture autre”. He oscillated between the two defining characteristics of ethics and aesthetics for this now unfashionable movement, finally deciding that the movement was all about aesthetics after all: “For all its brave talk of 'an ethic, not an aesthetic', Brutalism never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of reference.” he wrote in his summation.

It could be argued that Brutalism as an avant-garde (or neo-avant-garde) movement died with that last sentence, but in fact as the vanguard, it had barely moved into the sixties: the Smithsons' Economist building had already by that time betrayed Banham's belief in une architecture autre and once more demonstrated the avant-garde's propensity to be absorbed into the larger movement of modernism. But by that time anyway, Banham had transferred his allegiances to The Brutalists' natural heirs to the neo-avant-garde title who were already well established and continuing to push architecture in the direction of pop culture, Americana and beyond. I speak, of course, of Archigram.

Half of the Archigram group (Dennis Crompton, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron) had already been working on the Brutalist structure of the South Bank Centre for the London County Council and they joined the other half (Peter Cook, Michael Webb and David Greene) at Taylor Woodrow Construction working on the Euston redevelopment under the supervision of former AD Technical Editor Theo Crosby and alongside future AD Technical Editor, Robin Middleton. Although Archigram as a “fanzine” had been going since 1961, the group behind the fanzine wasn't published in the mainstream British architectural press – the “trade rags” – until 1965. As mentioned above, earlier that year, Robin Middleton had become Technical Editor of AD and by this time, Archigram were on to number six with a circulation of 2,500 themselves. In November of that year, Architectural Design was among the very first to publish Archigram's work with Reyner Banham's two page article called “A Clip-on architecture” and a 15 page chronological survey later in the same issue. From that point onwards, and for the next ten years, Archigram as a group and as individuals were to dominate the pages of AD.

While the “ethic versus aesthetic” split remained a subtitle throughout the New Brutalist years, it was to become a more obvious dichotomy in the late sixties and early seventies. This was clearly seen on the pages of AD and readers spelled it out in their letters, such as the following:

There is no doubting that Archigram was all about the aesthetic. Whereas the New Brutalists sought to drag art down to the level of life, Archigram wanted to raise life to the level of art. Rather than addressing existing society's problems, they chose to envision exciting new worlds and solve completely non-existent problems, viewing the user as consumer and turning architecture into another product of consumption. As Banham wrote, in that “Clip-on” article, “Archigram can't tell you for certain whether Plug-in City can be made to work, but it can tell you what it might look like.” The emergence of Archigram demonstrated the shift from architecture-as-building to architecture-as-concept and to seemingly keep abreast of the architectural profession's shift in attitude, Architectural Design changed its name to AD in May 1968. There is a distinct shift from the main features being concerned with building studies, products and technologies in the April issue to more sociological concerns in May. For example, April's issue features the Nuffield transplant surgery unit in Edinburgh; student accommodation at Oxford University; a service station and several features comprising experimental designs for large scale cable supported roof spans, all of which were entirely in-keeping with the magazine's content up until that point.

The title for May's issue, however, guest edited by Cedric Price, is “What about Learning?” Its cover sports a hand with a mock-up of a futuristic video watch. The articles inside enforce the idea that learning isn't just for schools, that technology can enable long-distance learning, learning by closed circuit TV (for children in Niger), and other different models of learning focussed on the individual. Peter Cook's Ideas Circus appears: “A proposal for a system of trucked units containing a power plant, printing press, library, teaching machines, various audio-visual assemblies and minimal transformable enclosures.” It's a kind of educational precursor to Archigram's later Instant City. The month May 1968, of course, chimes with political unrest in Paris and beyond, a topic taken up by historian Eric Hobsbawm later that year in AD when he wrote about “Cities and Insurrection” in an issue called “Metaphoropolis” dedicated to a socio-political study of the city. Anti-establishment reaction had been rising in young people throughout the sixties and while the shift in editorial direction of an architectural publication and riots on the streets of Europe's capital cities and sit-ins in the universities are poles apart in terms of scale, they can both be seen as symptomatic of a tectonic shift in underlying thinking, especially amongst students.

Archigram came face to face with the student unrest at the Milan Triennale in 19685 where they were exhibiting the “Milanogram” (Archigram number 8). No sooner had the exhibition opened than it was occupied and trashed by students for 10 days. While Archigram talked of “direct action” they were uninterested in politics and left Milan non-plussed.



If Archigram represented the aesthetics of AD during this period, the ethics appeared through the pervading preoccupation of ecological issues that were wafting from the US, such as Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog first appeared in the Autumn of 1968 and was published regularly for only three years. In contrast to the European model of insurrection of the time, the Whole Earth Catalog encouraged an American counterculture of grass-roots radicalism. As the write-up in AD's Cosmorama put it, “the Whole Earth Catalog is a unique compendium of the hip and the home-spun, of far-out technology and down-home atavism, dedicated to the proposition that “we are as Gods – and might as well get [good] at it,” and to the assumption that anything practical, cheap, of high quality and easy availability can serve as a tool towards that end.”

The Whole Earth Catalog was basically a compendium of tools aimed at those who wanted to challenge conventional lifestyles. The word “tools” included books, of course, and many of the entries were book reviews. Architectural Design itself made it into the first number, featuring the “Architecture of Democracy” issue with the comments “This is the only architectural magazine we've seen that consistently carries substantial new information, as distinct from the stylistic eye-wash characteristic of most architecture journals. It galls my jingoistic soul to see the British publishing so much of the best technological information … Dave Evans, a local Australian whiz, says it's because English bright guys don't have much to grip them commercially, so they spread their brightness around. (Also they flock to America in search of commercial ferocity.)"

Peculiarly, even Archigram made it into the last Whole Earth Catalog (right above the feature called “You'll Build Your Next House of Molasses”). Of it, they say, “Archigram is the “Captain Billy's Whiz Bang” of architecture, with lots of imitators by now and still no equals. Dream architecture, joke architecture, blasphemy architecture, science fiction architecture, adolescent wet dream architecture, leather architecture. Sin. Fun. For a while.”

The Whole Earth Catalog supported hippie, artistic communities like Drop City and inspired future alternative thinkers such as Steve Jobs, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. The folk who were into that culture at that time seem to have migrated into internet culture at the end of the century.
The Whole Earth Catalog also inspired other catalogs such as the Domebooks, number one of which was featured on the first page of September 1970's AD and sold through the magazine from then on: “a practical account of the construction of ten different domes built at an experimental high school in the California hills within a period of four months.” Domes were everywhere on the pages of the leading magazines of the time and some were even being built. While it couldn't claim to save the world in itself, it at least could represent an aesthetic of a new way of thinking – that of Buckminster Fuller's ethos of doing more with less.

Richard Buckminster-Fuller can, in fact, be considered the spiritual father of both sides of AD's dichotomy of aesthetic and ethic. He was Archigram's hero, largely due to his technological aesthetic and techno-babble way of talking. Simon Sadler points out that whereas Fuller espoused the economics of lightweight component architecture, Archigram pursued its pleasures (note the scantilly clad female occupants of Warren Chalk's Capsule and Fuller's Dymaxion house). Fuller is, of course, most famous for his geodesic dome – a structure that envelopes maximum volume with minimum material. This found its way into the Taylor Woodrow Design Group's (which, as mentioned above, employed the Archigram members) Fulham Study of 1963 and Montreal Expo '67 Tower of 1964. Subsequently, the geodesic dome's triangular steel struts were the substructure for Peter Cook's megastructural Plug-In City of 1964 and many other projects beyond. Fuller epitomised the “technology is the answer, what's the question?” stance of twentieth century modernism and Archigram adopted and adapted this for their hedonistic zoom-wave designs. Whereas Fuller's world assumed plentiful provision for a limited population, Archigram's assumed infinite resources for infinite pleasure for infinite people – as long as they were good looking.


If Archigram were apolitical, then Fuller was simply politically naïve. On winning the RIBA Gold Medal in 1968, AD published an abbreviated version of his 16,500 word (!) acceptance speech containing a paragraph on politics: “I am transcendental to all political thinking. I am utterly convinced that the world can be made to work and I'm convinced that all the politicians of both sides have really an extraordinary sense of responsibility to their people. I don't question their integrity as human beings; I'm sorry for them, however, because nothing in their particular art can ever help man to be a success.” Fuller was so blinded by technology that he was ignorant of the fact that nothing is ever done but by political will. As an aside and contemporary analogy, if he were alive today, he would no doubt subscribe to the benefits of genetically modified crops due to the argument that it would make yields more plenty and we would be able to feed the world, completely ignoring the fact that we already have the technology to feed the world now,but not the political will.

Monica Pidgeon, who was the editor of Architectural Design from 1946 to 1975, was quite taken with Buckminster-Fuller, who she met while helping organise the VIIth congress of the UIA held in London in July 1961. Although not architecturally trained himself, Bucky believed that the world could be saved by designers – and architects in particular. During the UIA Congress, Pidgeon invited him to contribute his views on the role of the architect in the present world situation and published his call to arms the following month as “The Architect as World Planner” declaration of intent. It starts, “I propose that the architectural departments of all the universities around the world be encouraged by the UIA to invest the next ten years in a continuing problem of how to make the total world's resources serve 100 per cent of humanity through competent design.” (In 1965, it served 40%). He goes on to claim, “It is clearly manifest … that the architects are able to think regarding such world planning in a manner transcendental to any political bias.” Fuller's vision was implemented as the “World Design Science Decade” starting in 1965, intent on spanning exactly the same years as is being looked at here. AD continued to publish Fuller's ideas throughout the 1960s as it suited AD's international perspective and target student audience. The outcome of the World Design Science Decade was six verbose documents of ideas, research and tools on resource planning for use by architectural schools worldwide in the pursuit of his initial declaration. The last document, The Ecological Context, Energy and Materials, was published by Fuller and his associate, Independent Group artist John McHale in 1967.

While Archigram took Bucky's faith in technology to an aesthetic conclusion, AD was looking all over for inspiration for architects. The New Scientist magazine was a favourite and features from this often became topics for publication in the Cosmorama section, fuelled by the excitement of the moon landings and questions of where man would inhabit – and therefore architects build – next. In contrast to this “high-tech” editorial approach, they were simultaneously publishing “low-tech” features similar to those espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog. During this period, features appeared on shanty towns, squatting, ecology, with columns called “Eco-tech” and “Recycling” by Colin Moorcraft. They looked at wind and solar power. July 1972's issue – a year before the oil crisis – was concerned with “designing for survival” and a year earlier, they published Martin Pawley's Garbage Housing. That year, AD also published extracts from Victor Papanek's “Design for the Real World” which was anti-good taste and pro-social responsibilities for designers. It was almost universally derided by design professionals at the time of the first edition in 1971, but it demonstrated a radical alternative to design practice that Pidgeon was looking to promote, especially to the students and young architects who were her main target audience at this time. AD had slipped into “little magazine” mode by this time, using the “book economy” whereby subscriptions were the magazine's main income rather than advertising, and this allowed them considerable editorial freedom as opposed to, for example, the Architectural Review, which at this time was quietly self-destructing with the Manplan and Civilia issues. AD was therefore free to explore the very fringes of acceptability to architects and enter into whatever agenda they chose to be important.


Eventually, at least some members of Archigram conceded to the ecological wave. Archigram Nine included a packet of seeds and its cover of an allotment was inspired by David Greene's Bottery (“a fully serviced natural landscape”) and the disappearance of architecture completely into the landscape. Greene published his LAWUN (Locally Available World Unseen Networks) project number one in AD in 1970, where he explained, “Lawun means the striving after basic objectives – doing your own thing without disturbing the events of the existing scene and in a way which is invisible because it involves no formal statement, and because it is related to time, may or may not be there at any given point in time.” Lawun project two, published in AD the following year utilises Greene's earlier Rokplug and Logplug designs ostensibly to promote mobile architecture. However, this is a loss of confidence Archigram, one that's less discussed and less famous, representing the opposite pole of their thinking, striving for the complete dissolution of building and, as the quote at the beginning showed, reluctantly coming to terms with the ground swell of ecological thinking that was happening at the time.


In summary, I've looked at the decade of 1965-74 in Architectural Design, covering the Technical Editorships of Robin Middleton and Peter Murray. This period exactly spans Buckminster Fuller's World Design Science Decade and sees the arrival and decline of Archigram within the mainstream architectural press, at least in AD (the Architectural Review were to leave Archigram well alone until it had passed as a phenomenon). Archigram promoted a consumerist, throw-away architecture and were about as ecological as they were feminist: which is to say, not at all. Nevertheless, in its shift from promoting architecture-as-building to architecture-as-concept (essentially reflecting the shift from an industrial to post-industrial society) AD was keen to engage students and young architects and become a radical mouthpiece for alternative architectural culture. This didn't stop at a de-politicised aesthetic, but followed through with Fuller's more ethical ideas, looking at how to save a doomed spaceship earth.
While ethics and aesthetics were kept apart as concepts on the pages of AD, they were at least united on the page.



* Thanks to Owen for introducing me to this quote.

2 questions

Q1: While recently reading Simon Sadler's excellent "Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture" I came across the term "crush of architects" (p.23). Whether he meant it as a possible collective noun for architects is not clear, but it got me thinking what a suitable collective noun would be. A cult of architects perhaps?

Q2: Another long held question of mine is when did the term "built environment" become common terminology? It seems so commonplace and natural nowadays that it's hard to imagine a time before it was coined, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't common parlance when I did my degree in the early nineties. So when was it first used and by whom?

Jencks, Goldschmied, Rogers and 2 pineapple heads

Last week's Stirling Prize demonstrates what a strange, small, autonomously incestuous world architecture really is.

Richard Rogers (rightmost male above) won the prize for a building designed for the architecture critic, Charles Jencks (leftmost male above). And how galling for the new sponsor, former RIBA president Marco Goldschmied (middlemost male above), to have to give his former partner and current tenant the prize money after only 3 years ago suing him. The picture above was taken at the moment he handed over the cheque. Lord Rogers never shook his hand or even looked him in the face.

But who cares? Nobody but architects stayed in to watch the programme buffeted by a pair of pineapple heads (each trying to out-pineapple the other for Ms Saunt's attention below). A 450,000 viewing figure will surely threaten its televisation next year.

St. Peter's Seminary at Cardross

There's no sorrier site than a great building less than 40 years old lying in ruins. Here are some recent photos of St. Peter's Seminary design by Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan of Gillespie Kidd and Coia (finished in 1966). They were taken a few weeks ago after the lovely, patient locals helped us find it amidst the undergrowth, next to the golf course. The concrete is amazingly still in fine condition, but precious little else is. It's hard to imagine this building can be usefully salvaged - it would be so incredulously expensive - and for what use? A 19th hole? Urban Splash were linked to it but in today's credit-crunched market, it's hard to see it being used as housing, especially in this fairly remote - and stunningly beautiful - site.






"The machine has rejected ornament and the machine has everywhere established itself. We are irrevocably committed to a machine age" Herbert Read










The high altar.









Other photos and features here:
20th Century Society's casework report
20th Century Society's Risky Buildings Register
Photos of the Seminary in its original state.
Wikipedia entry
Brian Dillon's Guardian piece
Concrete Quarterly's feature from Spring 1967 (p. 16 of this pdf)

The Apollo Pavilion

Peterlee was founded in 1948, one of the first and few New Towns to be built outside of what is now commuting distance from London. Lubetkin designed a first high rise version but this was considered unsuitable for the mining-compromised land where Peterlee was to be built. Lubetkin resigned and BDP founder George Grenfell-Baines stepped in his place. Artist Victor Pasmore was teaching at Newcastle at the time and was brought on board as "consulting director of urban design" for the Sunny Blunts estate of Peterlee. Pasmore's contribution was, of course, aesthetic, dealing with the landscape layout and appearance of the houses - a cold fusion of art and architecture. This aesthetic culminated in the Apollo pavilion, which has just been refurbished for its 40th birthday. The pavilion, optimistically named after the moon landings, is a focal point for the picturesque Arcadia-in-the-abstract layout of the estate.


Art like this isn't supposed to exist in places like Peterlee. The pavilion is a great hulk of concrete: a strictly Cartesian, constructivist sculpture at the scale of architecture in the context of an urban masterplan. It's a monument to concrete relying on the sun to give the monochromatic material depth and character primarily through its cantilevers and perpendiculars but more subtly through its smooth and rough textures. You can't help but be reminded of war-time bunkers by the horizontal slit in the central block. As you move around and through it, new compositions of the planes are revealed: a Cubist's dream. Any shadows provide the diagonals and a typical amoeba-like Pasmore mural is painted at either end. The pavilion originally boasted a stair at either end too, allowing passage over a feature pond.

The pavilion itself could therefore be cynically deemed a solution to an artificially created problem - it was essentially a bridge across an man-made pond, around which two-storey houses cluster. This wasn't its real function, of course. As Pasmore wrote in a letter of 30.05.76 to Gary Philipson, General Manager of Peterlee Development Corporation,

the object of all the sculpture, including the Pavilion, was to give dignity, focus and “impact” at various central points in the environmental complex of what is virtually a Council housing estate. But, to my mind, Peterlee is not a housing estate, but an important town. If for nothing else, therefore, the function of the sculptures is justified to underline and demonstrate this.

The subsequent story of the pavilion is one of high art meeting working class life. Peterlee was a town for miners, a fact ingrained in its very name: Peter Lee was an early twentieth century miner and trade unionist. Victor Pasmore, in contrast, was educated at Harrow.

During the pavilion's early years, over the channel in France, Pierre Bourdieu was doing some sociological research into taste and art and class. This was published as Distinction in 1979 where he demonstrated that working class taste doesn’t see any beauty in anything that isn’t functional, whereas the learned and well-bred appreciate form over function. The most modernist of tenets, “form follows function” (which incidentally, first appeared as “form ever follows function” in Louis Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered", Lippincott's Magazine of March 1896) should therefore imply a unison of aesthetics and use, leading to a style acceptable by both high and mass culture. This turned out to be far from the case in reality, demonstrating how taste is artificially constructed rather than innate. As Bourdieu wrote, “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.”
According to Bourdieu, working class taste considers that art should be of something – and something beautiful no less. Failing that, an artefact should be useful in order, the theory goes, that it reduce the labour required to get through working life. Having financial means implies that things of no use can be purchased and kept – follies, trinkets, art. Additionally, having an educated taste implies that art can be appreciated beyond the object and the beautiful – art that imitates art rather than art imitating nature.
That the ethic or aesthetic dilemma appeared as a sub-title to Banham's The New Brutalism is no coincidence. In the end, Banham decided that it was all about the aesthetic after all, despite the Brutalists' case to the contrary.

Despite best intentions, then, on behalf of the Peterlee Development Corporation and Pasmore, a useless behemoth of abstract sculpture in that modern, grey, stubborn material was always going to have a difficult time in a working class neighbourhood, regardless of its quality and the reputation of its creator. Perhaps this was the reason that a second stair was added to Pasmore's original design, effectively turning the sculpture into a bridge. The correspondence between Pasmore and Philipson as well as the press cuttings and corporation meeting minutes, constantly return to the subject of a suitable use for the sculpture. Throughout the seventies, it was being used "as a meeting place for the idle and the ill-disposed" (letter from Philipson to Pasmore, 12.02.82) which was apparently a bad thing. The Corporation's minutes from the meeting held on 08.04.82 talks about a “functional use” being found for the sculpture, as “Residents living nearby … claim it is used as a brothel and urinal and say it must be knocked down immediately.”

By 1978, when ownership of Peterlee was passed from the Peterlee Development Corporation to the District of Easington Council, the pavilion became the subject of what would now be labelled serious anti-social behaviour:



Rather than an aesthetic focal point, the pavilion had become a focal point of a rather different quality with youths congregating to do youthful things at youthful times in youthful volumes. Remember that this was the era of the ghetto blaster rather than the iPod. Residents who lived nearby the pavilion (and some of them are VERY nearby) complained. The Council clearly felt they had inherited a costly liability and a campaign was started for its demolition. A letter of 12.02.82 Gary Philipson to Pasmore confirms the sad situation:

In fairness to the local authorities, they have no real animus against the Pavilion itself: they are simply pestered by complaints about vandalism, noise, litter, courting couples (with the emphasis on the coupling) and demolition seems a simple if drastic solution to their problems.

In other words, it's not a question of either aesthetics or ethics, but of costs. The pavilion had become the symbolic and innocent target in a battle of art against life. It was pointed out that if the pavilion were demolished, youths would still congregate and be youthful either there or elsewhere. Pasmore's reaction to the residents calling for the pavilion to be removed was that the families who caused the trouble should be removed instead. To be fair to him, when he visited the tortured pavilion in 1982 he was sympathetic to the residents who he had placed too close to the pavilion. He also actually delighted at the impromptu use of the upper deck as artist's studio for children:

I fear that I upset some members of the deputation by my jocular response to this ‘mess’. But I had expected something really sordid and objectionable over the whole building: but when I was confronted upstairs with a gay and colourful exhibition of free child art I was so relieved that I could not help laughing and joking about it. It never occurred to me or my colleagues that the Pavilion would become a children’s painting studio:

(letter from Pasmore to Philipson of 23.04.82)


Fortunately, Apollo was too expensive to demolish. Instead, in 1985 stair access was removed to the upper deck which was turned into a “garden of Babylon” with planting which is how it remained until 2002 when, as Apollo moved into middle age respectability, albeit in a state of sorry disrepair, a ground swell of either pride or pity moved some members of the local community to try and restore it to its former original and optimistic glory. Thus in July of this year, at a cost of over £400,000 (more than 14 times its original cost to build), Apollo's refurbishment was complete.

It was decided to reinstate only the southern stair, as per Pasmore's original intention. Unfortunately, and contrary to Pasmore's original intention, it was also decided to keep a gate locked to the upper deck . There are signs at the top of the stairs warning of “risk of falls” from the roof to deter the local asbos and architectural historians alike from youthful exuberance. Today's suing culture means that there are also signs warning of the risk of banging one's head on the low concrete soffit of the upper deck. It goes without saying that there are also CCTV cameras overlooking the area.




The houses of the Sunny Blunts estate were vandalised themselves by the council in the 1980s with the addition of pitched roofs. Where tenants had exercised their right to buy, the roof remains flat (and one would speculate, leaking and under-insulated). Elsewhere, Pasmore's strict rectilinear lines and layered rectangles of timber, render, glass and brick on the façades are largely gone, never to return. Previously, it was compositionally consistent if materially distinct. Now, the pavilion stands out even more as a separate object rather than part of a whole, attracting the occasional passer-by, the odd architectural tourist and a multitude of local youths for whom the swings in the playground round the corner aren't cool or hard enough.






More photos from I like's Flickr stream.
A gallery of photos from the Apollo Pavilion's official web site.