Each month we highlight a building of our period, in the UK or internationally, that we think deserves attention. As well as featuring well-known examples, it has become an invaluable platform to document and ultimately help save many lesser-known, yet equally remarkable, twentieth century buildings. In the archive below, you’ll discover over 250 entries spanning more than 30 countries.
2023: Climate and Sustainability
Throughout 2023, the Building of the Month feature will focus on a selection of Twentieth Century buildings from across the globe that were designed with climate and sustainability at the forefront. Given the seriousness with which the climate crisis is unfolding around us, we have decided to use this column to highlight those buildings which have made a conscious and active decision to reduce their reliance on new materials and on mechanical heating and cooling. Instead they prioritise a careful and considerate dialogue between the building and the natural environment. As the need to lessen the carbon footprint of the built environment is made abundantly clear, we explore a collection of buildings that offer a diverse range of responses to this problem, but all with a similar ambition – to reduce the burden of architecture on the planet, and to provide a more passive and sustainable relationship with their immediate climate and context.
As our president Cath Slessor has written “Buildings account for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are rapacious consumers of resources and energy, yet too often sustainability is seen by architects and clients as just another box to tick.” This series of BOTM sets out to celebrate those architects and buildings who saw sustainability and engagement with the environment as an opportunity – as a responsibility – and not just a requirement. The buildings selected vary greatly in their approaches – from simple passive solar buildings, those with an interest in self-sufficiency and the use of recycled materials, to buildings that were at the vanguard of sustainable technologies. But in their variety, they demonstrate that an environmental consciousness is not a new thing for the architectural profession. Rather, it has been a preoccupation for a very long time.
by Alistair Fair The origins of what was originally known as the New University of Ulster lie in a report produced in 1965 for the then Northern Ireland government by Sir John Lockwood, which, as Lord Robbins had done in 1963 with reference to Engla...
by Henrietta Billings Cressingham Gardens estate in south London was built between 1967 and 1979 to the designs of Lambeth Borough Architects, led by Edward Hollamby. It is impressive for the quality of the accommodation and layout, and for ...
by Barry Arden The Casa de Serralves, in the park of Serralves in Porto’s western suburbs, lies testimony to the enterprise and international good taste of its builder, Carlos Alberto Cabral, 2nd Count of Vizela. The villa forms part of the Serral...
Freya Wigzell The house at Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) was built for Sir Peter Scott, artist, conservationist and broadcaster, who lived there for over thirty years. The house closely reflects Scott’s life and personality. It ...
by Susannah Charlton A northern cousin of the De La Warr Pavilion, the Rothesay Pavilion brings the glamour of the International Style to the seafront of the Isle of Bute. Rothesay has been one of Scotland’s major seaside resorts since the late C1...
by Lou Robson The shabby foyer of Coventry's central baths holds few clues to the magnificent arena perched above. A modern kiosk is shoehorned into a corner and vending machines obscure the stone plaque marking the opening in 1966 by a Lord Mayor w...
When John Betjeman addressed the Solent Protection Society in the days before construction began on Fawley Power Station (1964-71, Farmer and Dark) he spoke of the “new architecture of power”. At Fawley, he argued, the plans would bring a “broo...
by Claire Bennie In these straitened 21st century times, the architectural and residential development world is feverishly concerned with building homes for the ‘private rented sector’. These are typified by small stacked flats, communal facilit...
by Alan Powers In the summer of 2014, the newly cleaned façade of the old St Martin’s School of Art emerged from scaffolding. Facing east in a narrow street and dimmed by decades of dirt, it was never easy to appreciate its quality, and Pevsner/B...
In the early 1970s, in the West Riding of Yorkshire (as it still was - just - then), three buildings went up within 12 miles and three years of each other, all the headquarters of northern building societies, and all in variants of high-brutalism. T...
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