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The Future Passed: The Trellick Tower at 50

27/6/2022

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Trellick Tower and the Edenham Way houses. Image from RIBAPix.
The Trellick Tower has loomed over Golborne Road in North Kensington for 50 years, now an iconic part of the neighbourhood, its profile gracing t-shirts, prints, cushions and much else. The tower is the most visible part of the Cheltenham estate, officially opened on 28th June 1972. It was designed by Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian emigre architect, and commissioned by the Greater London Council. Goldfinger was born in Budapest, and studied under Auguste Perret in Paris before moving to London in 1934. His career in Britain before World War II consisted mainly of small projects such as shop outfitting and a couple of private houses. He came to prominence with his design for three houses in Hampstead, 1-3 Willow Road, including one for himself and his wife, Ursula Blackwell (of the Crosse & Blackwell family). The house's design caused a major planning argument between the Goldfingers, Hampstead Council and interested parties, who were aghast at a modernist design arriving in the genteel neighbourhood. The Goldfingers eventually won on appeal and the terraced houses were completed in 1938.
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Axonometric of Trellick Tower and the estate. Image from the Architectural Association.
The immediate postwar period was somewhat fallow for Goldfinger, with his hard edge designs out of step with the prevailing Scandinavian influenced Festival style. In this time he designed offices for the Daily Worker (now demolished) and a couple of primary schools. His fortune picked up in the 1960s with a commission for Alexander Fleming house at Elephant & Castle, occupied by the Ministry of Health. Goldfinger was then commissioned by the GLC to design two estates, one in Poplar known as the Balfron estate (1965), and the Cheltenham estate in North Kensington (1967). 
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Perspective of Trellick Tower South Elevation. Image from Architectural Association.
The estate was built on an 11 acre site previously occupied by demolished terraces, between the Grand Union canal and the railway line that cuts through the area. These two boundaries mean the estate is fairly compact, unlike the spread-out earlier LCC/GLC schemes like the Alton Estate in Roehampton. The centrepiece is Trellick tower, a 31 storey block in bush hammered concrete. The building's dramatic profile is created by the separation of services into a slender tower topped by a boiler house which projects like the bridge of a ship, with walkways connecting the service tower to the main block. Each flat in the tower has a balcony and large south facing windows. The deep recessed balconies, lined with cedar boarding, give the tower's facade a three dimensional effect with the play of shadows changing as the sun moves from east to west.  
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Trellick Tower entrance on Golborne Road with Club room above. Image taken by Erno Goldfinger, from Architectural Association.
As well as the tower, the estate was designed with five terraces of houses, two smaller blocks of flats and maisonettes, a community centre, a doctors surgery,  a nursery, underground parking and an old people's home (the last two now demolished). A pub was included in the initial designs but was not built. The estate would also be home to Goldfingers office from when it was completed. The terraced houses sit along Edenham Way to the east of Trellick. They are three storeys high with an integrated garage on the ground floor, and coloured wooden panelling on the exterior. The two six-storey maisonette blocks sit just to the north of the houses, overlooking the canal. The estate was officially opened on 28th June 1972. But even at this moment of triumph, the days of the publicly commissioned concrete estate were numbered. The oil crisis and public and architectural reaction against such overwhelming use of concrete spelled the end of estates like Cheltenham. Smaller schemes made up of brick houses with gardens and irregular rooflines came to the fore and large estates were starved of funds for their upkeep.
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Edenham Way housing. Image taken by Erno Goldfinger, from Architectural Association.
Like many postwar estates, the Cheltenham and Trellick came to signify the bleakness of modernity, despite their egalitarian intentions. After a number of incidents in the early 80s, security was improved on the estate and a residents group was formed to take over the management of the estate. The Right to Buy era also saw some of the flats pass into private ownership driving up property prices and increasing the gentrification of the area. The tower was listed in December 1998, with the remainder of the estate Grade II listed in November 2012. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea planned to add five new blocks to the estate, designed by Haworth Tompkins, in 2018, but eventually pulled the scheme after a public outcry. 

Trellick tower and the estate have come almost full circle from a vision of the future through to a relic of the past and back to a reminder of the public sphere's lofty postwar ambitions. Hopefully it will be a landmark on the western approach to London for at least another 50 years to remind bypassers of this past and possible futures. 
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Anatomy of a House No.2 - Sugden House, Watford

14/6/2022

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Sugden House, Watford, Hertfordshire
1955-56
Alison & Peter Smithson

Our first Anatomy of a House featured the stark modernist High and Over in Amersham, a perfect example of the Heroic period of modernist architecture between the wars. Our second Anatomy moves about 8 miles west to the outskirts of Watford, to visit a house designed by a pair of architects determined to revive that heroic era, Alison and Peter Smithson. The Smithsons had come to prominence in the mid-1950s with a design for their own house at Colville Place in Soho. As they themselves declared in Architectural Design, had it been built “it would have been the first exponent of the ‘new brutalism’ in England”. Their design showcased the building materials, with no internal finishes leaving the brick and concrete structure for all to see. 
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Design for a House in Soho by Alison & Peter Smithson.
Plans for other houses came and went in the 1950s, but their first built house was to be for Derek Sugden, an engineer with Ove Arup & Partners. Sugden was born in Hitchin, attended Harrow Weald Grammar then worked for a couple of engineering firms before moving to work with Ove Arup. He and his wife Jean commissioned the Smithsons to build a house at the end of Devereux Drive, to the north west of Watford town centre. Sugden's brief was for "a simple house, an ordinary house, but… this should not exclude it from being a radical house", and this is what the Smithsons would eventually give them. Sugden was an admirer of the Smithson school at Hunstanton, and Derek asked Peter for the name of an architect to design a house. To Derek's surprise Peter said that he and Alison would do it. 
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First design for the Sugden House by Alison Smithson
The first draft was drawn up by Alison. She produced a design with a split pitched roofline and irregular arranged windows. The Sugdens did not approve this design, with them wanting more natural light inside and a kitchen facing north. Peter reorganised the house, giving the outline a more traditional appearance and enlarging the windows, whilst keeping Alison's off key intentions. The architects said they intended the house to look like “a blackish solid block pierced with windows in the manner of Vanbrugh Castle, Blackheath”.  Despite the obligatory dispute with the local planning committee, the house was approved on appeal. A covenant on the land specified that any house had to be built in brick with a tiled roof, leading to the ordinary but quietly radical design.   
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South East facade. Image from Architects Journal.
The house was constructed of reused London stock brick around a brick crosswall frame with concrete beams. The windows are large and metal framed, with an unusual arrangement, especially on the side facade. The roof is finished in concrete tiles and is much longer on one slope, covering the integrated garage. The front of the house faces south west, and sits at the top of a sloping lawn. Inside the house is arranged in a semi-open plan around a freestanding fireplace, with the flooring finished with chequerboard vinyl tiles. As intended with the unbuilt house in Soho, the interior is left with minimal finishes, showcasing the brick, concrete and timber construction materials. A timber, open staircase leads upstairs to four bedrooms and a bathroom. 
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Interior of Sugden House. Image from RIBApix.
The Sugdens were very pleased with the finished house and lived there for nearly 60 years. The garden was an ongoing project with Jean slowly landscaping the grounds, with shrubs, trees and wild grass eventually complementing the exterior of the house. The house was listed in July 2012 and is currently Grade II. Jean died in 2007, and Derek later married Katherine Douglas. Derek died in 2015, and for the first time the house was put on the market and sold. 

The Smithsons would go on to a career of many words but few buildings. Their most famous works post-Sugden House are the Economist Buildings (1965) in St James Street, SW1A and the Robin Hood Garden Estate (1972) in Poplar, now in the process of being demolished. You can watch the Smithsons talking about the design and building of Robin Hood Gardens in the short film The Smithsons on Housing by B.S. Johnson. The duo produced a handful of other domestic designs in their subsequent career, most notably Upper Farm Cottage (aka Solar Pavilion) in 1962, a timber framed house cum studio in Wiltshire. The Sugden House stands as a testament to both the Smithsons unique vision of what a house could be and to the Sugdens wish to make a house of their own, a simple but radical home. 
References
Alison and Peter Smithson (Works and Projects)- Marco Vidotto

Alison and Peter Smithson (Twentieth Century Architects)- Mark Crinson

Modernism without Rhetoric: Essays on the work of Alison and Peter Smithson- Edited by Helen Webster

​https://c20society.org.uk/obituaries/derek-sugden
 


​https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/13/derek-sugden

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