Про
то, как менялось отношение к Trellick Tower, написан очень подробный
материал на The Guardian, датированный мартом 1999-го года. Уже тогда, почти 25 лет назад, многих ставил в тупик тот факт, что бетон постепенно становится популярным, и здания, которые презирались и высмеивались несколько десятилетий, вдруг оказались культовыми. Отсюда и заголовок - "How did this become the height of fashion?"
"From the outside it looked even worse, said just about everyone. What yawned upwards was a monstrous disfigurement, 31 storeys of concrete brutalism, 322 feet of high-rise council folly branded one of the ugliest buildings in the world. It would scar the west London skyline until it was demolished and forgotten.
Drawing freehand in 3B pencil on butcher's paper, Goldfinger sketched what he considered a beautiful creation: a slab block linked to an enclosed walkway on every third floor, leading to a detached service tower, containing lifts, stairs and refuse shutes, on top of which was planted a cantilevered boiler house. Some said it resembled the bridge of a warship, others said a Cyclopean eye, others said a mutant fridge.
Blame for what happened next has been laid at many doors - Goldfinger, the tenants, vandals - but there is another villain, one whose blunder secured Trellick a footnote in history: as the first victim of 1970s radical socialist utopianism.
All the while the odium flowed, for Trellick's exterior was seen as an extreme, some said pathological, rejection of the English picturesque tradition. An ageing Goldfinger continued to defend it as a work of pure geometry, of beauty, a perfect resolution of horizontal and vertical elements. But it was a cry in the wilderness. His career never recovered from Trellick. No one would touch him. He died in 1987, defiant, bitter, his reputation in ruins, his tower loathed.
Word of Goldfinger's attention to detail had spread: the balconies with cedar cladding, the architrave light switches fitted into metal door frames, the timber-framed double-glazed windows that turn inside out for ease of cleaning, the space-saving sliding doors, the natural light, the sunsets. A year later the now-defunct London Daily News declared Trellick "terrifying but now fashionable". Their Dark Age had lasted decades, but the residents were suddenly living in some of Britain's most sought after flats. Many were stunned."
What happened inside the tower was an evolution. Things changed. Outside nothing changed. The concrete never shed its austere, cold precision. Goldfinger refused to give the British the stylistic mannerisms they craved, and they would not forgive."
#sexybrutalism
Public date:Sat, 19 Aug 2023 14:40:01 +0000
