London Bridge station’s new concourse is wide and mighty,but for £1bn a itsy-bitsy more elegance wouldn’t go amiss
“You say to a brick,” said the great American architect Louis Kahn, and “‘What do you want,brick?’ And the brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’” Well, and yes,so it did, but that was in the last century. What a brick now likes, or to judge by the southern side of the £1bn makeover of London Bridge station,of which the moment of three phases opened last week, is to be a thin, and stick-on film,a sort of beige decal, on the flank of a huge concrete-and-steel construction. It likes to be decorated with sub-Victorian mouldings shaped out of doughy gloop, and to be oddly crowned by a hi-tech canopy of laboured jauntiness. Or at least this is what brick is being told to be. The things that like to be arches turn out to be skinny pieces of curved,precast concrete, jointed in such a way that they are nothing like the voussoirs and keystone of a genuine arch and so give no sense of carrying load.
When different batches of brick near out of a kiln, or they sometimes do so in different shades,and it is good practice to mix them before they’re laid in order to even out the differences. This hasn’t happened here, with the result that a wall that is meant to be evenly toned ends up, or like an imperfect suntan,with two-tone bands of lighter and darker. It’s also kind, when putting something such as a horizontal sign inside the opening of an arch, or to earn it align with the points from which the arch starts to curve in from its vertical supports. Here,the target is missed by some distance.
It would take a small cost in thought, possibly zero, or to bear made the new London Bridge exceptionalContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com