ICI office building (now AkzoNobel), Wexham Road (built 1956-7)

Designed by T.P. Bennett & Sons and built over 1956 and 57, this distinctive office complex was built for the ICI paint company, which had already been resident at the site for some years. It is designed as a tri-radial star, with three prongs stretching out with green garden in between the northern wings and parking space to the sides of the southern wing. This unusual plan coupled with its modest height (only four storeys) places it at odds with the kind of office buildings being built today– generic glass and steel cubes extending ever higher and with a cynical view of character and design, dismissive of the aesthetic considerations of the passer-by.

 

Here its moderate late fifties modernism (a style that would very quickly become mundane itself) still retains a little elegance, warmth from the use of light brick and informality from the curved line where the wings intersect and the differing angles of the wings to each other (the building’s wings do not span a rigid equilateral triangle but more of an elongated Y shape). The unassuming entrance can just about be seen on the left of the picture by the garden area. If the building has a downfall, it is the sheer area around it dedicated purely to funneling in, checking and parking cars; even a good picture needs a decent frame.

 

 

Sun Shines on an Empty Parking Lot: Car Parks and Urban Sprawl

 

 

Sun shines on an empty parking lot...

 

The consummate space-eater, as Lewis Mumford might have described it, the car park is as much a feature of Slough’s mundane industrial landscape as the smokestacks of the old factories and the glass and steel facades of the office mega-blocks. The above shot was admittedly taken out of hours when there are fewer cars parked here, but the principle still stands: car parks waste a hell of a lot of space, covering large areas that may have seemed quite normal and expected as adjuncts to industrial spaces in the past, but are now becoming ever more conspicuous as wasted area as space in the town runs perilously short.

 

Car parks such as these enjoy peak usage for up to half of the day, usually Monday to Friday, and exist as redundant space for the rest of the week. They do not perform any other function. In the bird’s eye-view of the same space (below) we see that the space devoted to simply storing cars while you’re at work dwarfs the size of the actual buildings the parking lots serve, and they’re big buildings.

 

 

Such senseless sprawl makes for a flabby and discontent landscape, distended over larger distances than needs be, and visually mundane for local and visitor alike. The sheer lack of imagination involved in car park design adds to their misery; not a tree, bush, shrub or blade of grass interrupts the tyranny of tarmac (a good metaphor for the town of Slough, as it happens), and its completely-levelled topography makes for a disheartening and endless vista, a vast sea of asphalt without any hint of dry land to comfort the urban sailor.

 

Increasingly, modern industrial and business developments (and these days even some high-density residential blocks) are taking the wise and over-due step of raising their buildings on piloti and having the cars park underneath; this is simple sense and makes for an elegant solution to minimising the space devoured by the automobile. Older developments such as these pictured (1950's offices) rarely have such provisions, as they were built when space was relatively plentiful, and during an era of unchallenged economic growth and dogma; we look back at them now as unimaginable sprawl.

 

Incidentally, there’s no shame in the humble multi-storey; mundane and uninspiring they may be, but if done correctly (see this post, for example) multi-level car parks can be unobtrusive solutions to high-density parking needs. By using a subterranean level, a ground level and utilising the roof as more open-air space you can effectively triple an area’s parking capacity with only a single-storey building. Drivers (who tend to be habitual moaners anyway) may whinge at the extra time taken to park in multi-storeys, but this is a small price to pay compared to the benefits of relieving valuable space in an already crammed town; there’s certainly no excuse for business/industrial parking not to follow these templates.