#john grindrod

[considermycat]

‘I am frequently charged with being on the one hand, a dyed-in-the-wool preservationist, and on the other a callous destroyer. I plead guilty to both, for choices have to be made. The world cannot become a vast museum, with the living population relegated to marginal and temporary shanty towns.

Robert Matthews, explaining in 1972 how (in John Grindrod’s words) he could be both “the big-thinking moderniser behind the Festival Hall and the riverside Gorbals scheme” and the (successful) campaigner “to secure the Georgian heritage of Edinburgh’s New Town.” Quoted by John Grindrod in Concretopia. 

This quotation sums up my own attitude towards the tension between conservation and innovation in architecture - even if it’s not always easy to decide where to strike the balance in specific (I almost said “concrete”...) instances. 

[considermycat]

It may sound fanciful, but Venice provides an excellent example of a city with segregated traffic and pedestrians. The traffic, which is all on water, is at one level, and the pedestrians are all at another level. So it provided a ready-made example of what we were exploring in terms of pedestrian/traffic segregation in the Barbican.

John Honer, project architect for the Barbican, on why his team visited Venice. Quoted by John Grindrod in Concretopia. 

[considermycat]

Geologists can pinpoint global extinctions and climactic events by pointing to lines in the strata of rock, where the geological record abruptly changes; an analogous hiatus occurred in our town centres, between the frenetic activity of the fifties and sixties, and the mid-eighties, when widespread building began again. By that time styles had changed so much that the edifices of the postwar period seemed like relics from a distant age – a foreign country where they did things differently, where plans to demolish Covent Garden, put Newcastle on stilts or plough urban motorways through London’s most desirable districts seem like alien curiosities, at which we can only scratch our heads in wonder.

John Grindrod, Concretopia. 

[considermycat]

Postwar buildings are 'concrete monstrosities' in the same way that political correctness is always 'going mad'. It’s a potent and irresistible cliché, worming its way into your psyche, even if you don’t agree with the sentiment.

John Grindrod, Concretopia, chapter 1.

[considermycat]

Started #reading: Concretopia: A Journey around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, by John Grindrod.