The first entry of C20’s Building of Month was published over 20 years ago, in October 2001. Then chairman Gavin Stamp decided to write about a derelict building instrumental to the foundation of C20 as the Thirties Society in 1979 – Oliver Hill’s modernist Midland Hotel, Morecambe (1933). In 2008, this vast sea fronting complex was refurbished and restored to its original use, which continues today. Since Stamp’s article, Building of the Month has developed into an invaluable platform to document and ultimately help save countless twentieth century buildings in the UK and across the world. In the archive below, you will find over 250 entries spanning more than 30 countries.
For pitches, or to discuss ideas, please contact: joe@c20society.org.uk
Joe Mathieson is editor of Building of the Month. He is an Architectural Adviser at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust and a C20 volunteer.
Text and Images by Robert Proctor Despite its sudden expansion in the 1950s with the arrival of the car industry, Leyland remains a pleasant Lancashire town of Victorian terraced cottages and suburban greenery. It would seem an unlikely setting for ...
Text and images by Barnabas Calder This is Cambridge’s most elating piece of Brutalism. No other post-war building in the city has such a Piranesian charge to it, nor such elegantly ostentatious engineering. By the mid 1960s the university had be...
Text and Images by David Walker Kensington & Chelsea Town Hall is often considered the last work of Sir Basil Spence. It was completed on 29 November 1976, ten days after the passing of its architect. But Spence had in fact been commissioned in ...
Austen T Parrott for Widnes Borough Engineers' Department Text and all photos: Eddy Rhead Even its most staunch supporter would be hard pressed to claim that the town of Widnes, on the banks of the River Mersey, is a beautiful place. It is ...
Summersgill to Ellisgill Courts off Langcliffe Drive, Local Centre and Sheltered Housing, Glowers Lane, Heelands, Milton Keynes Commenced on Site: 1976 Client: Milton Keynes Development Corporation Architect: Henning Larsen Executive UK architect: Pe...
Clifton Roman Catholic Cathedral, Bristol, by Ronald Weeks of the Percy Thomas Partnership, 1966-73 Text and images by Robert Proctor Set amongst the leafy stone terraces of Clifton, the Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Pa...
Built by the former Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch,now London Borough of Hackney Text and images by Stefan Muthesius When one thinks of the splendours of Twentieth Century architecture, ‘Council Housing’ - the British term for publi...
Words by Mark Goldie, photographs by Barry Phipps There is a chapel at Churchill College, but no chapel of Churchill College. The preposition denotes a truce after a battle, a donnish compromise. It was a device by which those who passionate...
Words and images by Simon Pepper The former-LCC Ossulston Street housing estate may be familiar to British Library users entering through the courtyard on the St Pancras (east) side. Look to your left and you can’t miss it. Built between ...
Words and photographs by Barnabas Calder This is Paul Rudolph at his most expressive. Yet although the Government Service Center is a near neighbour of Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles’s Boston City Hall, many architectural tourists visit the latter...
Text by Elain Harwood, Images Courtesy Arup Associates When the wind comes from the south, a sickly smell pervades Nottingham’s smart western suburbs. It is a reminder that cigarettes are still made here as well as consumed in their thousands on...
A massive building in one of the world’s biggest cities, the Copan Building in São Paulo has a highly distinctive presence. Seen in the background of television news programmes and in advertisements, its sinuous shape and distinctive ribs of concr...
Laurent Stalder Translation by Steven Lindberg Black and white images courtesy Architectural Press archive/RIBA Pictures Collection ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas l’école’ (it’s magnificent, but it’s not a school) – with this...
Ron Thom’s work at Trent University, Ontario by William Fawcett Trent University is a fascinating contemporary of Britain’s new universities of the 1960s. The campus masterplan – on a greenfield site outside Peterborough, Ontario – was commi...
Architect: Joseph Emberton Text and pictures by Ted Lightbown Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach developed at the southern end of the resort from an informal fairground at the beginning of the twentieth century. It relied from the outset upon American ...
Rika Devos, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium Three monuments prefigure on the wish lists of tourists visiting Brussels: the Grand Place, Manneken Pis and the Atomium. The popularity of the latter has conside...
Architect: H. Benson Ansell Text and pictures by Chris Wild Founded in 1870, Winchester School of Art originally occupied the City's twelfth-century Wolvesey Palace. The School sought a permanent home for ninety years, until, in 1962, it received a...
Text and photographs by Nick Dermott RIBA Margate has re-invented itself several times. In five hundred years it has changed from a monastic farmstead to an aristocratic watering hole to a place of entertainment for the masses and it is at present, ...
Engineers: Sir Basil Mott and JA Brodie, architect: Herbert J Rowse Text by Eddy Rhead Whilst great credit for the design of the tunnel that links Liverpool and the Wirral should go to the engineers, the honour for final detailing and the abovegroun...
Text by Jo Edwards of Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects (PTEA), photographs courtesy of PTEA and David Churchill Brockwell Lido in Herne Hill, south London, is a great place. Over the three years I have been working on it, I've met people who have l...
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