A Look at the Old Slough Estates Office Building
The Mayan temple meets the monolith: Former Segro Offices, Bath Rd (completed 1975, demolished 2014)
This building was commissioned to serve as the headquarters of Slough Estates, the company that operates the Trading Estate. It was one of Slough’s most distinctive buildings, and certainly the best example of the Brutalist style in the area. Completed in 1975, it arranged pre-formed concrete panelling and bronzed glass in an inverted ziggurat, with an unassuming, almost hidden entrance and an identical plan on all four aspects.
Uncompromising, immovable and unyielding, the daintiness of the early 20th century and the precise fussiness of Modernism well and truly buried under a thousand tonnes of blunt primitivism. There is no ornament, because here form is ornament– the building can only be assessed as a whole structure rather than by dwelling on any particular feature. Roof? Unimportant. Entrance? Unimportant. Surface? Unadorned. Orientation? Irrelevant. Impact? Instant and slightly scary, as Brutalism should be.
Some vintage shots of the building's construction in the 70s.
The building served as a headquarters for the company that controls the whole Trading Estate and was thus designed to be a class apart, drawing from the pagan rather than the classical or Christian; cathedrals are for choral singing and bake sales, ancient Brutalist temples are for genuflection and human sacrifice. The dark, impenetrable bronzed window space suggests the depths of a cave or the shadows beneath the dolmens of a megalithic structure, continuing the primal, primitive feeling evoked by Brutalism in general and the layered, prehistoric structure of this building in particular. Architectural Review described it as "the Modern Movement's answer to the Doric temple... the device of the oversailing storeys and the columnar peristyle give an impression which is rightly called 'monumental'. Such a building, you instinctively feel, could never die".
But sadly it is no more. In 2014 it joined so many of its Brutalist brothers and sisters in disappointing destruction, to be replaced by something bigger, and brighter and bolder-- something with more glass, of course-- and Slough lost one of its most iconic structures.
Taken during its demolition, the above shot gives a handy cross-section of the building, dispelling the myth that Brutalist buildings were all composed of solid concrete metres thick. Here we see that the outer structure is actually a shell just a few inches thick wrapped around the frame of the building, which is itself a lattice of steel-reinforced concrete slabs. Humble brickwork then makes up some of the interior walls.
A barely forty-year lifespan actually wasn’t bad for a modern commercial building– their usual lifespan is usually barely half that. Commerce hates nostalgia, and baulks at the idea of conservation– it’s all about tomorrow’s fashions, tomorrow’s glamour, associating business prominence and commercial capability with ever newer designs, concepts and chic. In the world of digital platforms, app development and smart space, Brutalism went out with the brick telephone and the milk float; a sad loss, in this new world of the intangible, the disposable and the indifferently-designed.
