Old Birmingham pictures from the 60s in colour

[mjmooney]

Walter Gropius.

[blandy]

What about this sort of thing (to stay on topic in very much in the er, extended outer 'burbs of Brum). In terms of style

[villakram]

6 minutes ago, blandy said:

What about this sort of thing (to stay on topic in very much in the er, extended outer 'burbs of Brum). In terms of style

It got that, we have all the money and control your lives vibe, perfect.

[chrisp65]

25 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Walter Gropius.

Mies Van Der Rohe was the name I was struggling for, got it once you mentioned Gropius. LMVDR's work is just superb, just breathtaking.

The SIS building will be described as post modern because it has one red column and some green bits stuck on. Personally, I think the density and shapes make it Post Deco, but as their's no such niche I guess I'll have to admit defeat.

Anyway, Brum Library:

 

[OutByEaster?]

I quite liked the inverted ziggurat. I think when we started bolting bits onto it, adding in the shops and units underneath and trying to decorate it up, it lost some of the starkness that made it interesting. it's a shame we couldn't have kept the core shape and built around it - the problem with the library wasn't the bit in the picture above, it was the huge waste underneath that was meant to be a bus station and the unfinished bits that pointed away from the city centre.

 

[sidcow]

10 hours ago, The_Rev said:

My great auntie lived in Coventry during the blitz.   When I was a kid doing WW2 at school she would tell me stories about it (all of that generation would actually) but Coventry was completely annihilated by the Germans. The city was poorly defended which is why the raid was so incredibly successful, the luftwaffe flew over Coventry and dropped their bombs and because they weren't being engaged they had time to do a second pass and drop some more. Quite why it was so poorly defended is something of a mystery considering how much of our military equipment was being manufactured there but I guess there is not much anyone can do about it now. 

Just looking at studies on the blitz of Coventry now and it seems that people are quoting a figure of 75% of all buildings in the city were hit and 100,000 of the cities then population of 150,000 people were displaced and I don't think the city had ever completely recovered.  My Aunt told me that the city centre used to look like Stratford upon Avon, now it's a concrete jungle. 

There are still quite a few wooden frame medieval buildings around coventry,  certainly a lot more than our old crown in Digbeth. Only problem is is filled to the rafters with utter twonks with a huge Aston Villa shaped chip on their shoulders who genuinely don't believe that we couldn't give a t0ss about them. 

Oh yes and an awful lot of concrete monstrosities. Thing is in brum we are gradually working our way through them with various regeneration schemes but literally no one wants to invest in coventry 

[maqroll]

My junior high school was a Brutalist building with hardly any windows. It felt like a prison. They built it on a marshy area, and after heavy rain the gymnasium would flood. The theory was that the school was slowly sinking, like a half inch a year. Inspiring learning environment, eh?

[maqroll]

3 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Mies Van Der Rohe was the name I was struggling for, got it once you mentioned Gropius. LMVDR's work is just superb, just breathtaking.

The SIS building will be described as post modern because it has one red column and some green bits stuck on. Personally, I think the density and shapes make it Post Deco, but as their's no such niche I guess I'll have to admit defeat.

Anyway, Brum Library:

 

City Hall in Boston...looks similar in a way-

[maqroll]

You can see the freeway in the back and the cut off North End neighborhood just beyond it. Today the freeway is underground, and that area is mostly green space. 

 

[sidcow]

Has anyone seen those new apartments going up on the ring road near millennium point opposite The White Tower pub?  Everytime I see them it feels like I am in the 1960's watching a bit of brutalist architecture being built as new. They look like all those old buildings being pulled down other than they are shiny and new. In a few years once they are grimy I bet people couldn't tell the difference. It's like they have learnt nothing! 

[leviramsey]

21 hours ago, The_Rev said:

The Luftwaffe contributed to a lot of the demand for "improvements" to a lot of the major cities in the UK.  They dropped a couple of thousand tons of bombs on Brum and practically wiped Coventry and Hull off the map. East London got royally flattened too. Then it all needed rebuilding quickly by a government who didn't have any money.  Concrete cubes flew up.  Quite why the same happened on that side of the pond where there was zero bomb damage and a booming economy is beyond me, but a lot of that is just the fact that I really dislike brutalism. 

The general consensus in a lot of the world was that cities as they existed pre-war (and pre-pre-war) were damaging to the human spirit or some such.  Look at Le Corbusier, etc.  In the US at least, as the largely WASP and rural/suburban Progressive ideology took hold from the 30s onwards, cities were fairly systematically dismantled (witness the war on public transit that started with FDR).

[The_Rev]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

Has anyone seen those new apartments going up on the ring road near millennium point opposite The White Tower pub?  Everytime I see them it feels like I am in the 1960's watching a bit of brutalist architecture being built as new. They look like all those old buildings being pulled down other than they are shiny and new. In a few years once they are grimy I bet people couldn't tell the difference. It's like they have learnt nothing! 

Student digs.  The whole university campus is moving from Perry Barr to the city centre in an attempt to make the centre feel bigger and bring a bit of life to that side of town and, I guess by extension, to Digbeth. The new Eastside park has been there for a couple of years now, HS2 will terminate behind the old Curzon Street station (one of the prettiest buildings in Birmingham) and the tram is going down there too.  It could be a really vibrant bit of the city in 5-10 years.  I like it. 

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

There are still quite a few wooden frame medieval buildings around coventry,  certainly a lot more than our old crown in Digbeth. Only problem is is filled to the rafters with utter twonks with a huge Aston Villa shaped chip on their shoulders who genuinely don't believe that we couldn't give a t0ss about them. 

Oh yes and an awful lot of concrete monstrosities. Thing is in brum we are gradually working our way through them with various regeneration schemes but literally no one wants to invest in coventry 

Spon Street is the place in Coventry you are talking about.   When they rebuilt the city after the war all the surviving medieval buildings were relocated to one street to give it a sense of place.  

[maqroll]

1 hour ago, leviramsey said:

(witness the war on public transit that started with FDR)

The automobile industry was probably shrewd enough to demand post war concessions from FDR in return for retrofitting their plants to make planes and tanks etc. 

 

[leviramsey]

5 hours ago, maqroll said:

The automobile industry was probably shrewd enough to demand post war concessions from FDR in return for retrofitting their plants to make planes and tanks etc. 

 

No, it goes back to the beginnings of the New Deal.  Among other things:

* Federal funds to pave roads were only available where there were no streetcar lines operating on the street, causing many cities to revoke streetcar franchises and rip up the rails

* The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 required the electric companies to stop operating streetcar lines; lines would have to pay normal rates for their power and, as they were legally barred from raising fares, many lines ended up not being able to find a buyer and shut down.

[chrisp65]

[mjmooney]

[blandy]

Someone's spotted a gap in the books market and looks like taking advantage.

[The_Rev]

That was all over Instagram yesterday. Some lovely shots of Brum every day on there.