The first entry of C20’s Building of Month was published nearly 25 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.
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 globally. In the archive below, you will find over 250 entries spanning more than 30 countries.
For pitches, or to discuss ideas, please contact: mark@c20society.org.uk
Mark Bessoudo is editor of Building of the Month. He is a writer, researcher and architectural historian and a C20 volunteer.
Feliksas Vizbaras (1931-2) “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” - this famous phrase by Sir Winston Churchill could be applied to one of the unique stories of the 20th century, which comes from Lithuania in Northern Europe. It is...
Peter Smithson (2001-8) It is not well-enough known that Peter Smithson designed a museum, and that it was actually built. Perhaps that is because it’s in a sleepy suburb of a sleepy German town. Or perhaps because it was designed so late in his c...
by Tim Benton In 1926 Eileen Gray bought a plot on the Côte d’Azur, squeezed between a railway line and the rocky coastline with a beautiful view over the Bay of Monaco. Here she designed and built, with the help of her lover Jean Badovici, a vil...
Boston City Hall, Massachusetts, USA Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles (with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty), 1962–1969 by Mark Pasnik As the keystone of Boston’s ambitious sixty-acre Government Center project, Boston City Hall represents an im...
by Kenneth Powell This year marks the 70th birthday of the Aldeburgh Festival, founded in 1948 by Benjamin Britten, then a relatively low-key regional event, now a major feature of the international musical calendar. The principal base of the Fest...
by David Knight The Church of Santo António da Polana, inaugurated in 1962 to the designs of Nuno Craveiro Lopes, is an extraordinary formal gesture in its context – a 20th century suburb of Maputo, Mozambique – but it also represents an extrao...
March 2018 by Alistair Fair Sixty years ago, the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan saw the completion of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, as the beginning of a new era. ‘Enter most theatres and you enter the gilded, cupidaceous past’, he wrote. ‘En...
February 2018 by T J Zupančič “Construction of the International Automatic Telephone Exchange, nicknamed The Piano, was quite a big technological challenge in the 1970s,” explained a sprightly, forthright Milan Mihelič, then 85, in a charmin...
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...
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