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Otto Saumarez Smith Profile picture
Otto Saumarez Smith
@OSaumarezSmith
Historian of shopping precincts, leisure centres, power stations, derelict landscapes, inner cities, new towns, & city centre redevelopment. @c20Society trustee
2 subscribers
Dec 22, 2023 • 11 tweets • 9 min read
In England for a building to qualify for listing at Grade II it needs to be at least 30 years old. So to mark the end of the year here is my list of 10 buildings that were completed in 1994, so are now eligible. 🧵

(You can see my 1993 list here: ) 1. Nicholas Grimshaw's swooping techno-futurist spiderweb of a station at Waterloo. It closed in 2004 when Eurostar terminal transferred to St Pancras, but here all the high-tech cliches about recapturing the thrill of great Victorian engineering ring truest. At risk; save it.


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Jul 19, 2023 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
I'm reading Michael Gage's 'Guide to Exposed Concrete Finishes' (1970). Catnip for me - so here follows a thread of some of the tasty things in it. Image Steel moulds being used to cast the diamond units for the Prince Street Car Park in Bristol:


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Jun 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Obsessing over the simulated building types built for the Fire Service Technical College in Moreton-in-Marsh (built from 1967 on an ex-RAF base) - creating an incredibly odd blasted landscape of post-apocalyptic accidental brutalism. 🚒🔥🏡 ImageImageImageImage Here the moated simulation reinforced concrete ship. Image
Dec 31, 2022 • 14 tweets • 9 min read
Under the 30 year rule buildings in England are not normally eligible for listing until they reach that age. So to mark the new year, here is a list of 10 buildings completed in 1993 that are now eligible, & I think are worthy of listing. 🧵 1. Alan Short & Associates Queen's Building for De Montfort University, a phantasmagoria of techno-arts & crafts, giving a muscular Butterfieldian grandeur to its pioneering systems of natural ventilation.
Aug 16, 2022 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
Taking up the @WillWiles's challenge here is a list of ten 'non-London' London buildings.

2. The great Dutch architect H.P. Berlage’s only London building, the black polished granite & faience clad Holland House, 1914- 16 - with its shipshape corner. 🚢 3. Hollywood Dutch at Ealing Village - built for film stars working at Ealing Studios (1934-6)
Jun 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I am enjoying @Francespalding’s rich new book about English Interwar art, which is full of surprises; I’m amazed this 1916 oil painting by Frances Hodgkins of Belgian refugees, entitled ‘Unshatterables’ isn’t better known with its long echoes. Image Also new to me, Cedric Morris’s ‘From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London W1’ (1926) - which reminds me of Steen Eilar Rasmussen’s line about the functional backs of London’s houses being more interesting than their classical fronts. Image
Apr 16, 2022 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
A great glut of architecture in Buffalo, a tremendous city. First up Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1895); a famous building in the history of proto-modernism & skyscrapers, but the luscious, incredibly beautiful ornamental terracotta the great, ravishing surprise. Same date as the Guaranty, D.H. Burnham’s Ellicott Square Building, where the real thrill is the splendid internal covered courtyard - a superb civic space, also wonderful elevator doors.
Dec 2, 2020 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Here a porcelain palette plate (from @V_and_A), made in Paris 1810-20, so that a painter could gauge the eventual colour of enamels after firing.

A functional object that inadvertently ends up looking like it was made by the Bauhaus. Image Interesting to compare with a later and more formal, but to my eyes much less beautiful, example of the same concept from later in the century: Image
Nov 21, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is the last surviving example of an extraordinary run of 1970s leisure centres by Gillinson Barnett & Partners (after recent losses in Sunderland & Rhyl). Almost all pioneering leisure centres have gone. Its demolition would, inexcusably, mean loss of an entire typology. Here is the 45m glazed dome under construction.

The band @oasis were named after the Swindon Oasis, after then saw the name on an Inspiral Carpets tour poster. Image
Jun 23, 2020 • 33 tweets • 24 min read
Nominated by @gilliandarley for 10 buildings I love.

1. Laon Cathedral - here I am sitting in empty nave. Laon wears the then-new Gothic style with such graceful & intellectual ease I wondered if all later Gothic a debasement. I'm not normally into perfection - but here it is. 2. Weltenburg Abbey. I wonder what the Benedictine monks were up to when they commissioned the Asam brothers to concoct the showbiz-rococco church, with histrionic George, dragon & princess. A building so jolly my cheeks hurt with smiling *&* there is a beer garden right outside.