New Apartment Building, Buckingham Gardens

 

 

 

New apartment building, Buckingham Gardens

 

The sun shines on a new development: this multi-storey residential apartment block was recently completed and replaces a forgettable four-storey office building. The colour scheme is bronze, beige and grey (according to the planning application specs the horizontal stripes are of ‘zinc or anodised metal’) and comprises six storeys. Nearly everybody gets a balcony, constructed of slightly ill-fitting-looking panels and with the underside left exposed; also, the sides of the balconies don’t quite reach the walls, being about six inches removed. Perhaps this was another lazy attempt at the deconstructed structural expressionist style that’s oh-so-vogue at the moment, but it comes across as simply shoddy and cynical– the building looks jerry-built and unfinished. It was with a surprised expression that friendly-bombs first walked past and saw lights on and people inside, and thought “Really? That’s it? That’s finished?”.

 

Another annoying quirk that is cropping up on modern architects’ ticksheets is the irregular arrangement of windows, or in this case balconies. Perhaps the original thinking was that it would look cute or naughty to have a random positioning of what are usually regular, symmetrical features, but it certainly doesn’t look great here, with an undecided, half-hearted deployment of strict spacing and alignment on the sides but baffling irregularity in the centre; the fact that there appears to be two balconies missing just makes it worse, giving it a kind of amateurish, dodgy third world bodge-job appearance, the kind of thing you see in dire buildings in Russia or China built by the constructively challenged, complete with lampposts in front of windows, stairs that don’t align with entrances, doors that open out on the third floor etc, like these hilarious examples I found online:

 

 

We must locate these geniuses. A job in modern British architecture awaits!

 

 

 

 

Another shot of the new apartment building on the corner of Church Street and Herschel Street. Overall it has a half-finished, temporary feel to it, like a kind of modern pre-fab that hasn’t been built to last.

 

Here the humble fire escape has been turned into a major structural feature of the building– another modern cliché that fails to fool anyone as original anymore. Bafflingly, it is enclosed in a kind of metal mesh, that surely fails as shelter and has presumably been used to make the feature knowingly bland and utilitarian– the same design conceit that deliberately seeks out ugly clothing and thick-framed ‘nerd’ glasses as a kind of sophomoric statement against the mainstream. Fun fact: half the people who wear ‘nerd’ glasses don’t even need them.

 

 Additional: It is at least good to see some of Slough’s interminable office buildings being redeveloped for residential use, even if it is for the predictable ‘luxury flats’ (the luxury’s on the inside, presumably)– there’s a 2-bed currently listed for a paltry £289k, if you’re interested. For a long time it was considered sacrilege for Slough to lose an office even when they were cropping up on every corner; even the planning application for this building wailed that “whilst the loss of relatively modern office accommodation in a central location is regrettable the prospect of it being reused for that use is unlikely in the near future. As the location and immediate surroundings are reasonable for flatted residential accommodation the principle of the loss of the office to residential use is acceptable.” Gee, there might be a housing crisis at the moment, but won’t somebody please think about the offices?!

 

 

30 Bath Road, or Why I Hate Glass Balconies

 

Residential housing design conflating with office architecture– the building does not look all that different from many of the large office buildings it shares this stretch of the Bath Road with; the over-use of steel and glass coupled with the strips of grey panels and windows is the kind of thing you would expect in a building you push pens in, not one you sleep in (indeed, friendly-bombs walked past this building many times thinking it was some kind of office complex before the sight of people’s washing hung up to dry let slip that it was housing).

 

Glass-panelled balconies especially are all the rage now, usually constructed with grey, unpainted metal frames, bonus points if you leave the bottom exposed in a dubious attempt at some kind of structural expressionism. Friendly-bombs is not a fan: the use of glass on the balconies has the effect of making them seem cold and brittle, you can imagine the whole lot shattering with a loud thunderclap; they also don’t seem appropriate for our blustery climate.

 

The use of glass in balconies, banisters and balustrades has a further, unnerving psychological affect, that of giving the impression that there is nothing there. So we have panels installed for safety which at first glance don’t appear to be there and thus offer no instinctive reassurance– you have to consciously remind yourself not only that the barrier is there but also that it is probably, probably, not going to break. Glass has never evoked strength and security in the popular mind, and perhaps it never should.

 

Here the identically-sized and spaced balconies, one per flat, face onto the psychotically busy Bath Road dual carriageway, providing probably not the best view or the healthiest air, but actually offering the passer-by a good look in at the occupants. This is because these glass balconies are also de facto windows, offering inadvertent glimpses of the life inside, particularly at night when the flats light up in a kind of snooper’s advent calendar.

 

There’s something slightly depressing about the little hints of humanity you can see in each balcony– a plastic chair for the Summer, kids’ toys, some potted plants, the ubiquitous washing drying in the car fumes– that has perhaps something to do with the uniformity of the flats and the meagreness of the personal space, and the realisation that here, amidst the rush-hour noise, clamour and pollution are people trying to quietly exist in modestly-accessorized lives (Thank goodness the nearby Salt Hill Park provides at least a partial escape). And the more the building you live in looks like the building you wage-slave in, the less comfort both occupant and passer-by gain from it.

 

‘The Urban Building’, corner of Windsor Rd and Albert St.

 

Formerly occupied by some very dingy 60s office blocks, this site now hosts a new office development trendily named 'The Urban Building’ (you can just about see its name in white letters right at the top of the building). Annoying, generic, common noun names seem to be in vogue at the moment– we already have 'The Curve’, 'The Centre’ and 'The Foyer’ in town, and the previous owners of this building advertised it simply as '123 Windsor Rd’. Quite why the owners opted for such unassuming names is strange, as the building itself is anything but: eight storeys and a wide frontage set right onto the road is as in-yer-face as you can get.
 

The building is young, under ten years old, and is therefore 'contemporary’– this can mean only one thing: glass, glass, glass, baby. We are confronted with a wall of glass, stretching up like the vertical water at Niagara Falls, glass along the sides, glass behind the portico. Light aquamarine panelling alternates with the glass, completing the illusion of a blue sky reflection even if the weather doesn’t comply. A nod to structural expressionism gives us the mesh-wrapped fire-escape stairs on the left hand corner and external metal support girders, while the steel-flap eaves at the top are reminiscent of industrial chic– warehouses, airports, factories. The 'columns’ (poles, really) provide a visual, structural aesthetic but not much else, the portico not being wide enough to casually walk down; perhaps a smoke-breaker from the offices within could huddle against the cold there, but not much else.
 

The drawback to the grid pattern of glass and panelling, in that particular greenish shade, is that the whole frontage looks like a piece of graph-paper or, for us kids of the 80s, the light green lined 'computer paper’ we used to use for scribbling at school. It evokes the paraphernalia and dull practice of office-work: spreadsheets, accounting, graphs, figures. The pleasing colour cannot save it from being another office-drudgery-building as generic as its name. Its overall message seems to be 'Back to work Jenkins, that’s enough daydreaming’. It’s trying so hard to be cool and sober for Business People and Business Practice that it’s forgotten to be any fun, and remains professional, but cold and clinical. Work should be prestigious and precise, but never too much fun, it seems.
 

Is it an improvement on what was there before? Certainly. Is it oversized and overbearing for its site? Certainly. One of Slough’s finest churches and churchyard is directly next door (the dramatic Victorian-Gothic St Mary’s), and some also-listed buildings at Upton Hospital a few paces up from that, but little attention was paid them– this very large glass rectangle was dropped in by a mouse-click nonetheless to appease the office-god. But this merely continues a proud Slough tradition, as the buildings it replaces were equally at odds with the neighbours.
 

Locals complain that the bloody thing is often lit up like a Christmas Tree at night, while during the day it appears dead and dormant; to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a single company renting space in it since the day it was built. Like Slough Borough Council it is expecting a kind of miracle of business growth to occur after the Crossrail transport project is finished, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Slough has a loooot of offices to choose from these days.
 

UPDATE: The building is no longer empty! KP Snacks are to move in and a café is to open on the ground floor, possibly even open to the public.