‘Chalcott’, apartment building, Windsor Rd.

 

Ladies and gentlemen: a box! A classic example of 60’s low-rise flats. A combination of modernism and Scandinavian minimalism give us the style: little in the way of ornamentation, perfect symmetry and a design dictated by geometric order. Notice how the windows on the left 'reflect’ those on the right from a central line of symmetry, rather than just having the same window twelve times. Modernism had done away with the classic roof, so no passe gables or pitched roofs here, and no chimney– by the early sixties it was expected that new housing would automatically come with central heating, doing away with the chimney stack forever. This left the architect with the possibility of a perfect cuboid, which would have looked refreshingly radical when first built, but alas! the novelty wore off pretty quickly. 

There is no embellishment in the brickwork at all, and the only concession to superfluous ornament is the minimal white weatherboarding at the top; this classic combination of red brick and white weatherboarding would come to characterize lazily designed, generally crap housing from the sixties and seventies (for examples, see, er, everywhere). This example just about gets away with it by sticking to its theme of purity by simplicity and symmetry (if you’re going to be a box, then be a box, dammit!), and also because it’s really small; make it seven storeys tall or twice as wide, and you’ve got an eyesore. It’s the only building in this style on this road, so it again escapes censure by being something of an oddity; an estate full of these would be mind-numbing, but the odd one adds to the diversity of housing stock, not just in style but in provision–apartments don’t need to come in seven storey mountain blocks!