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.
Text by Sally Wainman, Secretary of the Broomhill Pool Trust Pictures courtesy of Jo Edwards (Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects), the East Anglian Daily Times and Paul Beaumont Broomhill Pool was opened to the public on April 30th 1938 with special ...
Text and Images by Annie Atkins I'm not going to go into more detail here about the history of the Isokon. There are plenty of people far more knowledgeable than me about the building, not least the Twentieth Century Society (see Casework: The Lawn ...
Melnikov House Studio 10 Krivoarbatsky Pereuolok, metro Smolenskaya (1927-1929) Text by Clem Cecil and photographs courtesy the World Monuments Fund in Britain "Ahead of its time and also behind it," was the criticism levelled at Russian architect ...
Text and photographs by Mike Ashworth, Curator (Infrastructure) and Heritage Station Advisor, London's Transport Museum The first station in Loughton was on the Eastern Counties Railway (later part of the Great Eastern Railway or GER). Opened in Aug...
Text by Harriet Atkinson, photographs by Matthew Worland © 2005 New Zealand House is London's most distinguished 1960s office block. Completed in 1963, it is an important landmark, set between the Nash terraces of Pall Mall and the Victorian theatr...
designed by Percy Rothwell 1931 Text and pictures by Christopher Warren© Designed by Percy Rothwell, a physicist by profession, 'Rysted' was built mainly between August 1930 and the spring of 1931, and is a very early example in Great Britain of a...
Text and pictures by John Deffenbaugh Scottish Provident sold its first life assurance policy in 1837, and by the late 1990s had become one of Edinburgh’s key financial services employers, with over 900 people based in the capital. In 2000, and wi...
Text and photos by Achim Schröer The Alte Pinakothek (Old Gallery) in Munich is a product of two different periods in German history and architecture: the early nineteenth century and the post-war years of the twentieth century. It is the work of b...
Text by Michael MacAmhalai Transport House is the Belfast headquarters of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union. Built in 1959, in the International Style, it has become the focal hub of the Province’s trade union movement, and on...
by Frederick Gibberd, 1936 Text by Eva Tyler and pictures by Jaime Gili Pullman Court is the first major work of the architect Frederick Gibberd and one of the first developments built in the International Modern style in Britain. The building can...
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