The British Library – which is Grade I-listed – was the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century.
The next time you visit, take a moment to notice the superb quality of the materials used in the interior of the building.
“A fascinating and indefinable book … How Buildings Learn is a hymn to entropy, a witty, heterodox book dedicated to kicking the stuffing out of the proposition that architecture is permanent and that buildings cannot adapt.”
– Stephen Bayley
“Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design.”
– Stewart Brand
How Buildings Learn is Stewart Brand’s remarkable and memorable book which proposes – convincingly – that “buildings work best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants”.
What, Brand asks, “makes some buildings keep getting better, and others not?” The approach he took was to “look at buildings after they’re built. That’s when the users take over and begin to reshape the building to suit their own, real needs. What kinds of buildings work well with that evolution, and why do so many buildings work so badly?”
“Magazine architecture” is the phrase Brand coins to describe the sort of famous, or would-be famous, buildings which are functional failures. “A major culprit is architectural photography. Clare Cooper Marcus said it most clearly: ‘You get work through getting awards, and the award system is based on photographs. Not use. Not context.’ Tales were told of ambitious architects specifically designing their buildings to photograph well at the expense of performing well.”
Do seek out the book – it is out of print, but secondhand copies are easy to find online; and the six-part TV series broadcast on BBC2 in 1997, can be found here.
We hope that more painters and decorators in London discover the fine paints made by Colour Makes People Happy, which is run by Simon March in East Dulwich.
In Port Magazine’s interview, Simon nicely removes the mystique which so often surrounds the marketing of paint…
“Making paint is no more difficult than making bread. It’s made of three basic ingredients. If you want your paint for outside use, you put more resin in it: if you want it interior use, very often people want it to appear “flatter” so you take resin out and put more chalk into it. It’s quite a simple thing to do.”
A brief nod on a Friday afternoon to a firm of craftsman whose work we have respected for several years.
Miles & Wilde, founded and run by Leigh Miles and Jason Wilde, specialise in the manufacture and supply of fibrous plasterwork such as cornices, ceiling roses, corbels and panel mouldings.
We recently recommended Miles & Wild to clients in Belsize Park; by the time we arrived at the project, new cornices had already been installed by M&W in the living room and main bedroom. We used an XVLP sprayer to paint the cornice; we’ll post the photos of the work in the next couple of weeks.
