Norwich Goldsmith Street council housing

Housing developers need to start designing for life – Big Issue

“For too long developers have been throwing up high-density homes that look more to profit than people. But the secret to better building isn’t rocket science” says TV architect Laura Jane Clark in the Big Issue.

“The vertical city was an idea by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, where he combined homes with shops, salons, nurseries, play spaces and even a fantastic swimming pool on the roof. Yet when this model was adopted to create high-density housing in our cities in the 1960s and ’70s, in order to cut costs the communal elements were removed, including the shopping and the hairdressers, the entertainment and, of course, the rooftop swimming pool.”

Cites Norwich Council estate Goldsmith Street as an example of a modern success story. And Cumbernauld as an example of a pedestrian heaven, that didn’t work out.

Norwich Goldsmith Street council housing

“Joined-up thinking with developers, architects, landscape architects, town planners and builders is the way ahead, ensuring future residents are foremost in the design, with each member of the team asking themselves “would I like to live here?”” Doesn’t sound unreasonable, does it?

A visit to the incredible East Kilbride church regarded as a British brutalist masterpiece

From Glasgow Live – “[We] were left completely blown away by the sheer magnificence of the Gillespie, Kidd & Coia church, which was built between 1957 and 1964.

Claims it was “affectionately nicknamed ‘Fort Apache’ by the workies who built it” – which I have never heard before.

Quotes the Guardian article from 2019 which calls it “an architectural and spiritual outlier, a brooding, brutalist box, with thick brick walls, which aped the heft of medieval Caledonian castles”.

Compares it, strangely, to the Bhutanese prison Christian Bale’s Batman heads to in Batman Begins, but perhaps they are referring to the Pit in a Dark Knight Rises – similar brick work, at any rate: