Holburne Museum, Bath

Take a look at

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The developers are moving in on Bath (England), and using completely inappropriate architecture. There are wars on several fronts. They need to be stopped, before the destroy the city.

One such front is The Holburne Museum, a classical building, in a classical landscape, and they're going to bolt a glass and ceramic cube on the back of it. The Holburne was the original hotel building for Sydney Gardens, the ONLY 18th Century pleasure garden still in use as a public park. Dropping the uncompromisingly modern cube between it and the gardens destroys that connection.

It is landscape vandalism.

Help fight this destruction of Bath.

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Holburne
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Washington, D.C. has been altered by just such inappropriate juxtapositions. A rather nice classic row of townhouses becamse imbedded in a fatalist crass glass facade.

Unfortunately, prissy preservationist that I am, I do note vote in England.

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Link?

Reply to
Michael Bulatovich

Basically, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood (near George Washington University and a Metro stop ), an entire block of townhouses was demolished except, to satisfy some preservationists, their facades alone, which became a part of a mid rise strip concrete and strip glass boring office building. The result was interesting, garnered a positive review in the Washington Post by Benjamin Forgey, if I remember correctly, but is unsettling and irritating ,an example of a curse instead of a neighborhood context because it became the excuse for all manner of architectural salvage as building material, without it being even amusing like the sort of shop with the Cadillac through the glass storefront or some other visual joke.. Today, we have a variation on the preservation of single facades with "wedgie" architecture that imposed a glass atrium entrance in part or the whole of a recovered, sometimes boring re adapted facade that is a part of some new pedestrian office building once a pedestrian office building of the past. .

Here's a writeup on the project:

You see, the original facade just didn't provide enough A office lease space Hmm, can't believe it but someone has put it into Wikipedia.:

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It occurs to me that one of the elements that simply does not work is that all the windows end up looking like paper cutouts instead of operable windows of the period.

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It doesn't help that the office buidling itself looks hideous (from what I can see of that tiny picture). There is absolutely no communication between the two, and just using the facades just makes it worse IMO. Looks like a Universal Studios backlot.

Reply to
Edgar

We get quite a bit of that here. I call it 'the facade of preservation'. The argument is that a facade is better than nothing at all, and it's hard to argue with that when the facades are really good, but it denies the completeness of the architectural of the original buildings: their scale, their typology, etc.

Ouch. I didn't know you got whales that far south. Those little ones in front look to be preserved in 3d, not just the facades....

Reply to
Michael Bulatovich

Yes, it is absolutely awful, the back building, and the front facades were rendered into something flat and lifeless from something formerly rhythmic and textural. THe building in back, like a lot of strip architecture of that period, looks like someone filled in a parking garage with glass

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