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.
by Geraint Franklin The Roehampton Lane estate, designed by Bill Howell, John Killick, John Partridge and Stan Amis, was one of the jewels in the crown of the London County Council’s feted post-war housing programme. Its magnificent site conjoined...
By Sam Hawksford White. In 1957, the sculptor John Bunting began to rebuild the ruins of a hillside farm to serve as a memorial chapel for those killed in the 1939-45 war. Although the artist produced figural sculpture for churches throughout his lif...
by Sam Hawksford White It is with regret that I have to report that one of the earliest purpose built holiday camp buildings remaining in the country is at risk of demolition following approval of a planning application to replace the structure. Bui...
by August Myrseth The UOP Fragrance Factory was designed in 1969 by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano as a purpose-built perfume laboratory and manufacturing site for Universal Oil Products. It was completed in 1973, and production began at the site in...
By Tess Pinto The intellectual HQ of fish fingers, Walton Court in Walton on Thames, Surrey, is under serious threat from a current application for total demolition. Designed by the highly influential and long standing British practice Sir John Bur...
by Susannah Charlton Colston Hall was one of the Festival of Britain concert halls, along with those on the South Bank, in Coventry and Manchester. It was part of Bristol’s contribution to the Festival and of the regeneration of Bristol after the ...
By Wendy Akers The fog which had shrouded San Francisco for days gradually started to lift as we climbed Cathedral Hill, making the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption ahead of us appear to almost float above the city. Taking inspiration from th...
by Victor Smith The Scottish architect James Robb Scott, (1882 - 1965) designed a string of railways stations - from Bishopstone to Bromley North, Horsham to Hastings, Ramsgate to Richmond - but his Art Deco masterpiece was Surbiton Station, in the ...
by Alan Powers What a site for a building! Durham Cathedral rides on its rocky promontory above the wooded gorge of the River Wear in a manner that is pure picturesque, as John Sell Cotman’s watercolours show us. How could a modern building match ...
by Israel Nagore Odhams Walk in Covent Garden, built in 1979 by the Greater London Council (GLC), was ahead of its time. Its complex geometry - stepped flats organized around common courtyards, elevated galleries, and private terraces - generates a...
by Neil Jackson The city of Izumo (population 146,000) is in Shimane Prefecture, a still remote and under-populated area located on the north coast of Honshū, the main Japanese island, facing the Sea of Japan. The Chūgoku mountains to the south sq...
Visiting the newly restored Villa Cavrois (1929-32, restored 2008-15) in Lille’s leafy northern suburb of Croix, I was taken aback, even on a gloomy, grey April day by the sheer, almost industrial, scale and exuberance of the building: a family ho...
by Eva Palacios The embassy of Czechoslovakia (1965-1970) was planned as a statement of the country’s new communist society, in the new style adopted by Czech architects: Brutalism. In the mid twentieth century the grandiose Italianate mansions on...
by David Quoroll Sayers Croft is a remarkable place. Nearly a million young people have passed the Weeping Beech tree and down its welcoming drive, many of them enjoying their first real experience of the countryside, and a taste of freedom from the...
by Andy Davies In February 1969 a momentous debate within the University of London about the redevelopment of a Georgian square in their Bloomsbury home marked the end of the free hand of authorities to plan cities in the Modernist tradition. The sc...
by Siri Hoem Erling Viksjø’s government buildings in Oslo, The Highrise (1958) and The Y-block (1969), constitute a unique architectural whole, and are key works of Norwegian modernist architecture. Both are decorated with integral art made by P...
by Alison Sinclair Terry’s of York originated in 1767 in the sugar confectionery business of Bayldon and Berry which by 1824 occupied premises in the fashionable centre of York close to the Mansion House in St Helen’s Square and just round the c...
by Owen Hopkins One of the key moments in my recent book on the architecture and ‘afterlife’ of the great English Baroque architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor (1662–1736), comes towards the end, when the story reaches the 1950s and 1960s. These decad...
by Adam Nathaniel Furman Venturi Scott-Brown’s National Gallery Sainsbury Wing extension (1991) was born into a precarious no-man’s land between the warring camps of neo-modernists and traditionalists who had been tussling over the direction of ...
By Clare Price If you can bear the diesel fumes from the queue of National Express coaches waiting outside, stand opposite the entrance to the Victoria Coach Station Arrivals Hall in Eccleston Place and you will be rewarded with the sight of this fi...
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