> But after two days wandering the streets and talking to residents who have forked out big money to be guinea pigs in this experiment, it’s clear Poundbury’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses.
I'm sure the area being pre-gentrified has nothing to do with the opinions of the locals whatsoever. Cynicism aside, I do empathize with Prince Charles view on brutalist architecture here.
(But what do I know? The only books on architecture I ever read were Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way Of Building and A Pattern Language, and only because I heard they somehow were influential on software development)
I have not understood what you mean by "pre-gentrified".
According to the article, this was built on land previously owned by the Duchy of Cornwall. I assume that the land was not inhabited, so there were no former locals who were displaced by the new ones.
Moreover, the article says that one third of the houses have been reserved for those who cannot afford to buy such a house, so a majority of the current locals might belong to the "gentry", but a significant part should have a lower income.
Ramraj- you are racist. I am sure Komodo health would love to see your postings about your complete distaste for white people. If you are so bothered by white people, move back to Chennai.
> Moreover, the article says that one third of the houses have been reserved for those who cannot afford to buy such a house, so a majority of the current locals might belong to the "gentry", but a significant part should have a lower income.
Hah!
>The royal family has used a secretive procedure to vet three parliamentary acts that have prevented residents on Prince Charles’ estate from buying their own homes for decades, the Guardian can reveal.
>His £1bn Duchy of Cornwall estate was later given special exemptions in the acts that denied residents the legal right to buy their own homes outright. [1]
If you're interested in human-centric urbanism like this, I wholeheartedly recommend the twitter account @wrathofgnon [1]. One of the most knowledgeable and diverse sources of information I've seen on the topic.
> The second problem is that so often the criticisms are purely aesthetic and have little underlying understanding of what’s going on beneath the surface.
To contrast to Charles’ views on why existing cities are bad:
> Birmingham’s post-industrial building boom had left the city a “monstrous concrete maze”, Charles once declared, while the city’s new Brutalist library - since demolished - looked “like a place where books are incinerated, not kept”.
Both sides seem pretty similarly superficial and vacuous to me.
This article gives Charles waaaay too much credit. The Brutalist architecture he railed against was yes, bad, but it was popular because it was cheap and the UK was rather poor and in a period of war recovery.
It's hardly a surprise that you can create something nicer if you set aside a bit of cash.
Even so, Poundbury (I grew up around there) is a very uninspired part of Dorchester.
>Thirty-five per cent of homes are affordable housing reserved for rent, shared ownership or discounted to the open market. It’s impossible to distinguish private from public housing because the latter is built to the same high standards as everything else, and it is evenly dispersed throughout the town.
Is a good idea, but the reason it doesn't happen elsewhere is because profitability takes precedence over good town planning. This article does demonstrate that the "stink" of socialism can be overcome by dousing it in the perfume of royalty.
Mock Georgian is the lamest/ugliest thing going and it's already all over the UK (like every town or suburb). Sure original Georgian architecture is beautiful in many ways. However, mock versions are a blight because people cannot afford to use the correct materials and resort to stylistic similarity with garish bricks and pvc windows. Where is the vision in the above for alternative materials or cheaper reuse of existing ones that are also beautiful etc? There's also a little mock Grecian-Dutch-Turkmeni (see those horrific cylinders on the big building or the car park entrance that looks like a downtown Ashgabat-in-Dorset) which seems utterly bizzare and surreal.
Southbank does look like a nuclear site and/or antarctic base (some of these are dope imo). But it is so brilliant to walk around and the diversity of the people that use the skatepark there or hangout says it all tbh. Poundbury seems like a fake past, cosplay village, where "no ball games" signs and death by sandwich committees would make life miserable for anyone with a whiff of interest in contemporary culture.
Matters of taste, so yes there's a truth to what you are saying and those buildings were literally meant as aberrations on the history of the city. Brutalist vs traditional works for those cases but compare Luytens with Poundbury and its not so easy. The former invents while also making something at ease with the surroundings while the latter just reinvent with a fake version of the past.
I don't think the choice is even 'Mock Georgian' vs Brutalist.
The problem is more like a random compilation of ransom-note pseudo-architecture with decals, whatever is profitable at the moment for a builder and maybe makes nods to 3 different styles at once, doing none of them right or with any actual sense of proportion, and done with cheap materials. Brutalism is less bad (and I hate it), but it is less bad than the blight that is everywhere.
If we don't like centering the style on Georgina, then pick something else, Greek Revival, Federalist, Craftsman, cottage, even actual modern styles... whatever but pick SOMETHING, implement it with good design, proportions, materials, and consistency (both self-consistency with the style, and with a sense to build something consistent with history), it'd be an improvement.
It also seems to me that the lede got buried, which is that there is a lot of opposition to development of new housing, which is not surprising since new development is so consistently ugly and a blight, not an improvement. Do the work to make development good, and we'll see less opposition.
(post script at the start, this is meant to be a bit faux outrage/tongue in cheek, I didn't realize my childhood dislike of brutalism was still so strong :D everyone has different tastes, it's not that big a deal etc)
I feel like this is just horribly pretentious stuff that I hear all the time in Britain from posh people. I moved to the UK from Romania, I grew up surrounded by brutalist apartment buildings. They're ugly and awful and everyone I know from back home agrees.
Poundbury looks quite pretty, I would enjoy living there. The barbican towers look absolutely hideous. They're literally too ugly for socialist architecture committees, our 1980s Bucharest apartment buildings look a lot nicer than that(and they're still ugly). Also brutalist buildings weather horribly, that sickly yellow mouldy look, you end up needing to repaint them every 10-15 years or just deal with the shabby look.
It all just sounds like "Oh no, poor people are mimicking the architecture of their 'betters' quick lets mock their plebeian tastes. You either live in a legit bajillion pound period home or a concrete box. Know your place, plebe! PVC windows gasppearl clutch"
My post-socialist country working class taste says that if we are to have a standardized building style we could do far worse than mock georgian. No comment on the type of person that would want to live there, I can imagine given that it's a trial run it'll be some fairly "you have no authority here, jackie weaver" type folks. But in a random village/burb that's just styled like this, I think the people would just be average normal.
The barbican is super expensive, fwiw. They are also really nice inside.
Personally, I like brutalist buildings. I feel like a lot of the fake georgian cutesy stuff is built to look good (for a certain taste) but almost always sucks to live in. I spent my student years living in mouldy little semi-detatched houses in the UK, and they are really shit houses. Brutalist flats I've lived in have all functioned pretty well as flats (no mushrooms in the walls, etc).
You're 1000% correct about build quality. Ironically, re my prior post, I've been missing soviet style flats ever since I moved to the UK many years ago. Affordable, better soundproofing, no mold, way better plumbing, no personal boiler to have to screw around with. Also 4-story apartment buildings are obviously a better way of doing medium density than stuffing 4-8 people into a 4 bedroom house the way South East England does it.
However, that's sort of orthogonal(maybe wrong word) to he architectural style. I'm sure decent build quality can be done with a decent outside facade, even though private British home builders are all awful these days.
I have joked to friends several times (when angry about rentals' value/money ratio) that Oxford could have benefited from a Ceausescu figure tearing down the crappier working class neighborhoods and replacing them with 4-6 story apartment buildings. Only about 10% serious about it, since he would've torn down the downtown as well to build himself a McPalace, tacky bastard that he was.
The thing is, georgian houses only look good if they are actually made with all the right materials and skills - and that stuff is expensive. If you look at all the neoclassical / retro stuff the nazis built, for example, it generally looks really dystopian, no matter how well you look after it,
My personal feeling, aesthetics-wise, is that materials look good and work well when you respect their innate properties. Trying to force an aesthetic from one material on another is, at best, a recipe for an cheap and ugly chimera - which is kind of how I view Poundbury. More often, it just results in buildings that don't work (every UK house ever). Georgian buildings come from a specific set of materials and skills, many of which don't really exist any more. You can replace the stucco with concrete or polystyrene or whatever, but it's never going to look the same, because part of the 'aura' of the old stuff is it was made by really skilled people who had generations of experience showing in every move they made.
I can’t get from the article what the habitants of Poundbury do. Looking at wikipedia [0] there’s around 180 local businesses, which doesn’t seem to be a lot for a whole town.
If the point is to show a real world city functioning around Charles’ ideal, it seems to be pretty far off yet. It still seem weird to have a city with a completion date.
I stayed there for a weekend about four years ago and thought it was a decent place.
The only negative thing that stuck out to me was that the shop density was too low as they were all intentionally spaced apart (more than shops in communities that have grown up organically over time) and this meant that they didn't get enough places in close together to be convenient for a shopper to visit in quick succession, you ended up traipsing much further than normal and this had a knock on effect on the buzz (or lack thereof) around the shopping area.
But other than that it was charming: things worked, the people were nice, the places were well built.
Where are the solar cells on the roofs? Where are the heat pumps for heating the housings? Where are triple insulated glass windows to reduce the energy consumption of the houses? Nowadays all houses must be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building . This should be especially true for new city experiments, which must be first and foremost carbon-neutral. The architecture of the future will have to follow this requirement. Otherwise it will be worthless soon and just showing your ignorance toward climate change.
The value of Poundbury is in demonstrating an alternative to endless monotonous suburbia by reinventing the village with allowance but not priority for cars. The style of the architecture is a matter of taste - for me it would work equally well with more modern buildings. At least it avoids the cheapest to build styles of buildings so common everywhere.
35 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 90.5 ms ] threadI'm sure the area being pre-gentrified has nothing to do with the opinions of the locals whatsoever. Cynicism aside, I do empathize with Prince Charles view on brutalist architecture here.
(But what do I know? The only books on architecture I ever read were Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way Of Building and A Pattern Language, and only because I heard they somehow were influential on software development)
According to the article, this was built on land previously owned by the Duchy of Cornwall. I assume that the land was not inhabited, so there were no former locals who were displaced by the new ones.
Moreover, the article says that one third of the houses have been reserved for those who cannot afford to buy such a house, so a majority of the current locals might belong to the "gentry", but a significant part should have a lower income.
I have no background but the reporter seems to be trying really hard to vindicate the prince and it’s not clear that’s justified from the contents.
“Even real estate agents love it” I mean yeah they love any monstrosity of a building if it sells, especially to white people.
Pretty much the same as the rest of Dorset and southwest England.
If it were otherwise I have no doubt the ethnic make up would be the same.
Hah!
>The royal family has used a secretive procedure to vet three parliamentary acts that have prevented residents on Prince Charles’ estate from buying their own homes for decades, the Guardian can reveal.
>His £1bn Duchy of Cornwall estate was later given special exemptions in the acts that denied residents the legal right to buy their own homes outright. [1]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/09/prince-charl...
Nice part of the country. It's where Thomas Hardy lived. Nearby Dorchester is "Casterbridge" in his books.
When I grew up, I saw a sandstone building get powerwashed for the first time in a decade.
Well, I realized it was yellow sandstone when it was clean. It was brown when they started.
Really valuable content.
[1] https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon
> The second problem is that so often the criticisms are purely aesthetic and have little underlying understanding of what’s going on beneath the surface.
To contrast to Charles’ views on why existing cities are bad:
> Birmingham’s post-industrial building boom had left the city a “monstrous concrete maze”, Charles once declared, while the city’s new Brutalist library - since demolished - looked “like a place where books are incinerated, not kept”.
Both sides seem pretty similarly superficial and vacuous to me.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a34736481/tampongate-scan...
It's hardly a surprise that you can create something nicer if you set aside a bit of cash.
Even so, Poundbury (I grew up around there) is a very uninspired part of Dorchester.
>Thirty-five per cent of homes are affordable housing reserved for rent, shared ownership or discounted to the open market. It’s impossible to distinguish private from public housing because the latter is built to the same high standards as everything else, and it is evenly dispersed throughout the town.
Is a good idea, but the reason it doesn't happen elsewhere is because profitability takes precedence over good town planning. This article does demonstrate that the "stink" of socialism can be overcome by dousing it in the perfume of royalty.
Irritating when you consider the value, tradition, and heritage of the arts and crafts movement and people like Edwin Luytens that is being destroyed here. Its just way cooler too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munstead_Wood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Drogo
and same goes for the Barbican which follows similar style but with more mixed results in terms of fitting in with the surroundings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Estate
Southbank does look like a nuclear site and/or antarctic base (some of these are dope imo). But it is so brilliant to walk around and the diversity of the people that use the skatepark there or hangout says it all tbh. Poundbury seems like a fake past, cosplay village, where "no ball games" signs and death by sandwich committees would make life miserable for anyone with a whiff of interest in contemporary culture.
I'm someone for whom Southbank and the Barbican are architectural monstrousities, who piggy back on London's success, rather than contributing to it.
Concrete + England's maritime climate has a nasty tendency to look very grubby after a while, as it gets stained by moss.
Mock Georgian is an extreme imo (like below link) but I do like Georgian architecture in general if it is original or convincing: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
The problem is more like a random compilation of ransom-note pseudo-architecture with decals, whatever is profitable at the moment for a builder and maybe makes nods to 3 different styles at once, doing none of them right or with any actual sense of proportion, and done with cheap materials. Brutalism is less bad (and I hate it), but it is less bad than the blight that is everywhere.
If we don't like centering the style on Georgina, then pick something else, Greek Revival, Federalist, Craftsman, cottage, even actual modern styles... whatever but pick SOMETHING, implement it with good design, proportions, materials, and consistency (both self-consistency with the style, and with a sense to build something consistent with history), it'd be an improvement.
It also seems to me that the lede got buried, which is that there is a lot of opposition to development of new housing, which is not surprising since new development is so consistently ugly and a blight, not an improvement. Do the work to make development good, and we'll see less opposition.
I feel like this is just horribly pretentious stuff that I hear all the time in Britain from posh people. I moved to the UK from Romania, I grew up surrounded by brutalist apartment buildings. They're ugly and awful and everyone I know from back home agrees.
Poundbury looks quite pretty, I would enjoy living there. The barbican towers look absolutely hideous. They're literally too ugly for socialist architecture committees, our 1980s Bucharest apartment buildings look a lot nicer than that(and they're still ugly). Also brutalist buildings weather horribly, that sickly yellow mouldy look, you end up needing to repaint them every 10-15 years or just deal with the shabby look.
It all just sounds like "Oh no, poor people are mimicking the architecture of their 'betters' quick lets mock their plebeian tastes. You either live in a legit bajillion pound period home or a concrete box. Know your place, plebe! PVC windows gasp pearl clutch"
My post-socialist country working class taste says that if we are to have a standardized building style we could do far worse than mock georgian. No comment on the type of person that would want to live there, I can imagine given that it's a trial run it'll be some fairly "you have no authority here, jackie weaver" type folks. But in a random village/burb that's just styled like this, I think the people would just be average normal.
Personally, I like brutalist buildings. I feel like a lot of the fake georgian cutesy stuff is built to look good (for a certain taste) but almost always sucks to live in. I spent my student years living in mouldy little semi-detatched houses in the UK, and they are really shit houses. Brutalist flats I've lived in have all functioned pretty well as flats (no mushrooms in the walls, etc).
However, that's sort of orthogonal(maybe wrong word) to he architectural style. I'm sure decent build quality can be done with a decent outside facade, even though private British home builders are all awful these days.
I have joked to friends several times (when angry about rentals' value/money ratio) that Oxford could have benefited from a Ceausescu figure tearing down the crappier working class neighborhoods and replacing them with 4-6 story apartment buildings. Only about 10% serious about it, since he would've torn down the downtown as well to build himself a McPalace, tacky bastard that he was.
My personal feeling, aesthetics-wise, is that materials look good and work well when you respect their innate properties. Trying to force an aesthetic from one material on another is, at best, a recipe for an cheap and ugly chimera - which is kind of how I view Poundbury. More often, it just results in buildings that don't work (every UK house ever). Georgian buildings come from a specific set of materials and skills, many of which don't really exist any more. You can replace the stucco with concrete or polystyrene or whatever, but it's never going to look the same, because part of the 'aura' of the old stuff is it was made by really skilled people who had generations of experience showing in every move they made.
If the point is to show a real world city functioning around Charles’ ideal, it seems to be pretty far off yet. It still seem weird to have a city with a completion date.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury
The only negative thing that stuck out to me was that the shop density was too low as they were all intentionally spaced apart (more than shops in communities that have grown up organically over time) and this meant that they didn't get enough places in close together to be convenient for a shopper to visit in quick succession, you ended up traipsing much further than normal and this had a knock on effect on the buzz (or lack thereof) around the shopping area.
But other than that it was charming: things worked, the people were nice, the places were well built.
I will admit it is prettier than average sprawl. Lipstick does improve the pig so.
It's Chuck's eat cake for council estates.