Architecture

Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.

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Centre Point

A precast concrete lattice of 1966 that stood completely empty for nine years.

TowersConcrete & brutalist

Photo by Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net )., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

George Marsh of Richard Seifert's office designed it and it went up between 1963 and 1966 - 117 metres, thirty-four floors, one of London's first skyscrapers - on a deal with the council that involved re-routing St Giles High Street underneath it. The facade is its argument: a lattice of precast concrete pieces, each one a shallow chevron, stacked into a screen that changes as you move round it. Then nothing happened. The tower stood empty from completion until 1975 while its value rose, which made it the emblem of everything people disliked about post-war property development, and housing activists occupied it in 1974. It was protected in 1995 and turned into flats in 2015.

Where
101-103 New Oxford Street, WC1A 1DB
Nearest station
Tottenham Court Road · 1 min walk

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