Thaddeus Zupančič
Our Christmas 2020 Gift List features ideas from our own C20 Society shop and from like-minded organisations that offer C20 architecture and design inspired products that we think you’ll enjoy. We have included items that focus on some of our past casework campaigns. Browse our list below for books, prints, cards and much more.
If you’re looking for a gift for someone who loves twentieth century buildings and wants to help protect them, then this is for them. With C20 membership, they will contribute to our cause and benefit from our free publications, e-newsletter and discounted events rates. We’re also expanding our virtual events programme in 2021 to reach all C20 architecture lovers that can’t attend London based programming.
Where better to pop your festive flowers in than a concrete vase made by Tipoii Studio, a contemporary product design studio based between Bangalore and London. They are pushing the boundaries of Indian craft and believe that ‘design is seen as a bi-product of living.’ This unassuming approach, with an emphasis on a quiet functionality, is what inspires and drives their creative process. The vases remind us of the Gawthorpe Water Tower whose listing application we are supporting.
If you enjoy 1930s architecture and missed Elain Harwood’s sold-out lecture about Art Deco earlier this year, this beautifully illustrated book is for you. Nearly a century after Art Deco first lit up the luxury store and cinema screen, it remains as glamorous as ever. The style – variously known as Jazz Modern or moderne until the 1960s – was transported by ocean liner across the world from its origins in Vienna and Paris, offering a slick of sophistication and succinct design to rich and poor alike.
Wallis Gilbert & Partners, 1933
The Modernist have commissioned artist Matthew Steele to design several prints of the building and its clock to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Those of you who follow our Casework will remember that C20 Society made three applications to list the building (eventually listed at Grade II in 2013), and successfully proposed it for inclusion in the World Monuments Fund Watch List.
This Christmas, pen your messages on our brand new colourful greeting cards featuring photographs by our members and supporters including the Bevin Court stairwell in Islington and the Former Granada Cinema in Tooting. The packs of 4 or 8 include free envelopes too.
Designed by the Barbican’s in-house studio, these Brutalism inspired socks are great stocking fillers. The Barbican is important to C20 Society and we recently supported their campaign to object to the City Of London’s Girls School expansion, which has since been shelved.
Chisel & Mouse is the combination of an artisan’s approach (the chisel) with modern innovation and transformative technologies (the mouse). By capturing life and its big ideas in miniature, the brand celebrates the beauty of our industrialised world. You can get small scale models of your favourite C20 buildings like Trellick Tower or The Glasgow School of Art, or even commission your own!
Chisel & Mouse
Written by a former director of C20 Society, this 2018 monograph discusses the work of the engineering firm from the years of the Arup Building Group in the 1950s to the 1990s and assesses the contribution of its leading designers, including Sir Philip Dowson, Derek Sugden and Peter Foggo. The text is based on interviews with many former and current members of the practice. The book is fully illustrated with images from the Arup archive and stunning new photography offering a new perspective on an exceptional body of work.
It’s not because travel has been restricted that you can’t explore C20 architecture through beautifully illustrated maps. Blue Crow Media have designed many to choose from and keep adding new styles and cities to their collection including Art Deco, Tbilisi and Pyongyang. They show key buildings in each city with photographs and descriptions.
The perfect bag to carry your Christmas shopping in! This smart and capacious black gusseted tote bag features Paul’s striking linocut print ‘Southbank Magenta’ from 2002 and is printed in Wiltshire on ethically sourced canvas.
Paul Catherall
If you were booked on our sadly cancelled C20 Chicago trip earlier in May you may like this set of FLW paper models by Mark Hagan-Guirey. Featuring step-by-step instructions, you follow the lines on the template, cutting and folding to make your own model. All you need is a scalpel, a cutting mat and a ruler. Clear cutting tips help you with the tricky stages, while photos of the finished model show you the final design. To make things easier, the most intricate parts of the templates are pre-die-cut.
This journal is a must have for anyone interested in a the architecture of the 70s, a decade of transition when, despite adverse economic conditions, new thinking emerged to modify the Modernist beliefs of the 1960s, incorporating greater concern for the realities of life. Wit, imagination, humility and sensitivity to people and environments helped to create more flexible approaches to the design of individual buildings and cities.
This bright yellow print of Sivill House near Columbia Road by illustrator Lukas Novotny would make an excellent present for tower block fans. The unique pattern like facade is the work of Berthold Lubetkin, one of the most influential architects of British Modernism and we were pleased to see it finally listed in June 2020.
A great gift for anyone interested in Church architecture. Velarde loved patterns, bold colour and gold. The Catholic churches he built in Liverpool and London are closer to European Expressionism than International Modernism; many of them have a toy like quality and come with a campanile like a rocket. Today his buildings seem fresh and playful, but also poignant as they evoke the 1950s, brightening the drab parts in which they are to be found and serving to make both spiritually and architecturally aware those who visit. Re-watch our virtual event with Dominic Wilkinson on our Lectures page.
We were pleased to hear of the listing of Alan Boyson’s three ships mural in Hull following the successful appeal of our rejected listing application. If you love the mural too, why not gift a t-shirt or bag by local artist, Esther Johnson. Part of the sales proceeds also go to foodbank organisations across the UK.
Artist and print-maker Paul Catherall’s shop is a treasure trove of ideal Christmas presents from postcards to large scale prints including this limited edition Empire State Building Print from 2002. All his prints are hand carved and printed by Paul on Saunders Waterford 300gsm acid free paper, using Van Son Royal Dutch and Lawrence linseed oil-based inks.
Have your Christmas day cuppa in a C20 Architecture mug by People Will Always Need Plates. They have a wide and colourful selection of buildings available, including the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral by Frederick Gibberd, Kensal house by Maxwell Fry and 1930s modernist seaside villas.
This book is the perfect present for anyone fascinated by movie villains. You may remember it from one of our first virtual events with its author Chad Oppenheim. He explores architecturally splendid lairs including Atlantis in The Spy Who Loved Me to Nathan Bateman’s ultra-modern abode in Ex Machina and shows these homes are much more than where the megalomaniacs go to get some rest. Instead, they are places where evil is plotted and where the heroes are tested and must prove themselves. See for yourself how lairs are stunningly designed, sophisticated, envy-inducing expressions of the warped drives and desires of their occupants.
Gift this issue of our journal for just £10. It explores a range of individual houses, from Harbour Meadow, Birdham to Dorich House at Kingston by way of the Villa Savoye and houses open to the public in Europe and America. There are thematic essays on patrons, textiles, plastics in the modern house, a fascinating interview with the architect Elisabeth Benjamin and a technical appraisal of conservation work to three 1930s houses.
Fill your stockings with these press-out nesting blocks inspired by the housing estates of the former Eastern Bloc. Blokoshka offers a playful insight into the ‘sleeping districts’ of Moscow, Plattenbau constructions of East Berlin, Warsaw’s large-scale housing estates, and the panelák blocks in Prague. The nesting blocks are designed to be opened in half and placed inside one another, in the same way as a Russian matryoshka.
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