Common Interests #4: Catherine Croft on shifting attitudes towards ‘concrete monstrosities’

Re-using existing buildings comes with clear environmental benefits, such as avoiding the embodied carbon of new-build and preventing landfill waste, but there’s another key role that renovation can play: maintaining the architectural ‘lineage’ of a place - its aesthetic history.

For this edition of #CommonInterests, we spoke to catherine croft , director of the Twentieth Century Society – a highly influential organisation founded in 1979 to champion and protect 20th-Century architecture and design. Catherine is the Editor of C20 Magazine, Co-editor of Concrete: Case Studies in Conservation Practice (published in 2019), author of Concrete Architecture, and contributor to Historic England ’s Practical Building Conservation volume on Concrete.

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What have been the major attitude shifts toward modern architectural heritage in the last five years?

It’s certainly a whole lot less often that we hear a building dismissed off-hand as being ugly or a “concrete monstrosity”: things are definitely going in the right direction . Whilst for years Brutalist buildings were seen as the most “difficult” to love, we seem to have moved on, and it’s widely accepted that Brutalism has a legitimate and growing fan club.? It’s now Post-Modern’ and High-tech’ buildings (generally dating from the 1980s and 1990s) which people now struggle most with, but attitudes are changing there too.? It was great that the recent listing of John Outram’s Sphinx Hill, an Egyptian-themed private house on the banks of the Thames, got the positive response it deserved.?

The retention and re-use agenda, and the growing appreciation of the amount of carbon emissions already embodied in our existing buildings is brilliant, both from a purely environmental standpoint, and because it encourages building owners, developers and architects to ask “how can we keep and reuse this building?”.? People are now increasingly starting out by looking to find a building’s most positive points. All too often though, so-called retrofit projects end up stripping a building back to just its structural frame, losing almost everything which is significant in heritage terms as a result.

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What are some of the perceived barriers to retrofitting 20th-century buildings, and can you tell us about an exemplary project that has overcome them?

In some cases, it’s the undoubted fact that buildings were designed and constructed for a very different set of circumstances to those of today, i.e. for an age when electric power was going to be readily available for evermore at minimal cost. Moreover, the catastrophic impact on the environment of pumping out heat, and relying on air conditioning not just in hot weather but year-round in buildings with deep floorplates, was totally unrecognised.? Leaky, single-glazed buildings with practically no insulation were the result. There was also very little understanding about the problems of cold-bridging and condensation, so the whole approach to heating and ventilation of these buildings, as part of re-using them, is challenging.

Whilst many of the components of more traditional buildings show clear evidence of craft skills, most people see twentieth-century building components as being machine-made, with a limited intended lifespan, and don’t intuitively think that they are of value either aesthetically, or in terms of telling a story about the building and the people who built and used it.

A project that has overcome this is the reinvention of Farrell and Grimshaw’s 1976 high-tech factory for Herman Miller in Bath. Grimshaw Architects returned to this project, years later, and converted it for Bath Spa University to serve as their School of Art and Design -? an excellent fit for the building (and a demonstration of its inherent flexibility). The work included repairing and upgrading the insulation of the original GRP panels which clad the exterior of the building—and to do that they set up a mini-factory on site.

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What makes you most hopeful about our built environment today?

The attitude of today’s architecture students is pretty amazing — their increased recognition of our environmental responsibilities and enthusiasm for working with existing buildings, rather than feeling they can only make their mark by designing new buildings.??

Secondly, more architects and developers are contacting C20 Society early in the development cycle of their re-use projects, so we can support with advice right from the beginning and avoid costly interventions later in the design and planning process.

Finally, the ever-growing public interest in buildings as repositories of stories and memories, and the appetite people have to share those, is inspiring -? together with the invaluable backing of the Society's growing membership who always support us in what we are fighting for.

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#CommonInterests is an interview series by development company Common Projects, where we talk to leading thinkers in the built environment.

Interested in learning more about the 20th Century Society? Visit their website.