Category: General

Baptistry window, Coventry Cathedral; by Basil Spence

Baptistry windowBaptistry window, originally uploaded by Heaven`s Gate (John)

The new St Michael’s Cathedral, built next to the remains of the old, was designed by Basil Spence and Arup, built by John Laing and is a Grade I listed building.
Basil Spence (later knighted for this work) insisted that instead of re-building the old cathedral it should be kept in ruins as a garden of remembrance and that the new cathedral should be built alongside, the two buildings together effectively forming one church. The selection of Spence for the work was a result of a competition held in 1950 to find an architect for the new Coventry Cathedral; his design was chosen from over two hundred submitted.

Boulevards of unbroken dreams

, originally uploaded by simple pleasure

Paris is different. London is a union of disparate villages with blurred boundaries. Paris is divided into areas determined by bureaucrats, not by history or geography. And when you look at the map, the number of institutions astonishes. Paris seems to be dominated by hospitals. Look at the plan of the 13th arrondissement and you see whole city blocks given over to medicine. And next to hospitals on the Paris maps, cemeteries. French officials have tidy imaginations.
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Architecturally, Paris has a special consistency. Regulations limit height , so only the 210m Tour Montparnasse (conceived in a Gaullist euphoria of modernisme and eventually finished in 1973) stands out. Otherwise, the central city skyline is uniform. You have to look west to La Défense, beyond the city limits, to see skyscrapers. Through the Arc de Triomphe on the misty horizon are the faint profiles of Saubot and Jullien’s 1974 Tour Fiat and their 1985 Tour Elf, each 180m tall. Nearby is the landmark 1989 Arche de la Défense by Johann Otto von Spreckelsen; Notre-Dame would fit underneath its daunting, white marble, cubic arch.

Check out Boulevards of unbroken dreams for a great walking tour of Paris.

Tuesday Links

The Beauty of Parking Garages

closing in.closing in., originally uploaded by D.James

Simon Henley in The Architecture of Parking, finds beauty in dark garages:

Cars can indeed be lovable but how can anyone love the bleak oil-stained chunk of concrete called a parking garage? One person who does is Simon Henley who writes of their “mysterious inhumane beauty” in “The Architecture of Parking,” a coffee-table history just published by Thames & Hudson. Henley even likes the spookiness that makes garages such iconic (and inexpensive) settings for bombs, murders and rapes in film. In fact, sometimes he sounds like the equivalent of a travel writer giving five stars to the Bates Motel.

The Architecture of Parking by Simon Henley.