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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Isokon Building

Concrete flats of 1934 with tiny kitchens, built as an experiment in how little you need.

HousesModern movementYou can go insideFree

Photo by Jim Osley, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in The World in London.

Wells Coates, a Canadian engineer, designed the Lawn Road Flats for Molly and Jack Pritchard and they opened on 9 July 1934: reinforced concrete, decks along the front, and thirty-two minimum-sized flats on the Existenzminimum principle, with kitchens barely big enough to stand in because there was a communal kitchen downstairs. What it attracted was extraordinary. Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus all lived here after leaving Germany; so did Agatha Christie, from 1941 to 1947. So, in flat 7 in the mid-1930s, did Arnold Deutsch, the NKVD officer who recruited Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five. The garage at the end is now a small free gallery about the building.

Where
Lawn Road, NW3 2XD
Nearest station
Belsize Park · 3 min walk

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