Alexander Fleming House Building Sights

BBC

Four Collections -

archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Janet Street-Porter

has selected

programmes about post-war architecture.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

Dominating the Elephant and Castle, Alexander Fleming House

would look more at home in Moscow or Leningrad.

Here is an imposing building, a rare example of constructivism.

I've always found its dour massiveness remarkably impressive.

And it may lack charm, but it's serious architecture.

Constructivists wanted to emphasise the way a building was put together,

not hide it.

Today, such ideas are unfashionable and the building is under threat.

Alexander Fleming House was built for the Department of Health

in the early 1960s.

It's actually five buildings - four of them

linked together by daring walkways.

It's the masterpiece of the late Anglo-Hungarian architect

Erno Goldfinger.

Goldfinger was born in 1902 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

It was the Paris of Le Corbusier, Max Ernst and Man Ray

and when Goldfinger came to London,

he brought with him a package of cosmopolitan intellectualism which

so helped invigorate the flaccid English culture of the 1930s.

This is one of the best perspectives of Alexander Fleming House.

Goldfinger made no attempt at concealment,

but indeed it was part of his architectural idea to reveal

structure and to express the way the building was made.

There are characteristic details - the cornicing.

Goldfinger didn't want to create banal, desiccated architecture,

he wanted to create interesting, forceful stuff.

So the water tower is exposed,

every fifth floor is different and the rhythms of the facade express

the architect's commitment to making an interesting,

strong and powerful building.

Modern architecture is not necessarily banal and reductivist.

Alexander Fleming House is a subtle and complex design which betrays

many of the elements of Goldfinger's classical training.

The proportions of the building, the clarity of the structure,

the rich modelling of the facades with their bays and recesses,

all reflect an architectural concept of the first water.

The contrasts between transparent and solid, the dramatic modelling,

produce the very effect of hazard and surprise

sought by that great neo-classicist Sir John Soane.

Goldfinger may have had the sanction of Soane and the constructivists,

but he was interested in realism, not fantasy

and this may be why his architecture frightens us.

Just imagine Alexander Fleming House had been in a city like Berlin -

it would have been a place of pilgrimage for architecture students.

Or imagine it in a modern city like Sydney -

proud of its present and confident of its future.

Instead, this building, the winner of a civic design award

when it was completed in 1967, is a victim of the new 1980s philistinism.

A plan to clad it in vulgar mirror glass has been

approved by the Department of the Environment,

against protests from the architectural profession.

Almost everybody except the profession complains about

Alexander Fleming House, particularly the people who work in it.

But the building's problems come not from its architecture,

but from underfunding and negligent maintenance.

Part of its sinister aspect is caused by hideous, makeshift black mesh

screens, a half-hearted attempt to provide thermal protection in

an ugly fit of penny-pinching.

Sophisticated heating and ventilation were actually in Goldfinger's

original design.

Were they now implemented, the building would become perfectly

habitable and immediately more attractive.

But vengeful preservationists and get-rich-quick PLCs

demand a sacrifice and that is Erno Goldfinger's fine building.

Goldfinger was a classicist whose sympathy with his surroundings

and with traditions are apparent in the house

he designed for his family by Hampstead Heath.

Built against much conservative opposition in the 1930s,

these houses are now listed by exactly those authorities who

neglect Alexander Fleming House.

In the Hampstead houses, Goldfinger used concrete for the frame

but faced the structure with English brick in a clever fusion

of traditional materials and modern design.

The modernism is uncompromising, but it's not sterile.

I mean, Goldfinger's conception of a machine for living in was one which

included landscape, art and books.

What he wanted was a sort of modernist utopia for everyone.

Idealism is no longer considered attractive,

but remember that since the end of the Second World War, Goldfinger

had had plans to rid London of its slums and squalor.

In 1956, London County Council published a detailed plan

for the rebuilding of the Elephant and Castle.

On the site of Alexander Fleming House, there would not only be

offices, but also shops and entertainments as well.

Goldfinger's winning design was meant to be an ideal vision. With space,

trees and a cinema around the four blocks, it was conceived before less

benign and more punitive modernistic experiments had been proved failures.

It wasn't Erno Goldfinger's fault that short sight

and political muddling caused the original vision to blur.

Alexander Fleming House is now a grimy,

lonely jewel in a busy wasteland.

The architect and his architecture cannot be blamed for the slum that

the Elephant and Castle has become, a sleazy stew of architectural

mediocrity surrounding one of London's busiest traffic junctions.

A place where people are forced into open sewers

while traffic congeals on the surface.

To suggest that Goldfinger contributed to today's mess

is like attacking the sculpture of the Venus de Milo

because the arms have been knocked off.

Not every modern building has charm

and not every one has been successful.

What's more, I'm certain a die-hard modernist like Goldfinger would

have welcomed the demolition of Alexander Fleming House

and its replacement by something better.

But to clad the building in mirror glass is an insult to our recent

heritage, an act of vandalism as brutal and ignorant in its way

as the destruction of the Euston Arch or the vandalising of any relic.

There are impressive letters of protest to Nicholas Ridley,

but with an historic buildings committee opposed almost to a man

to modernism, there was frankly very little chance

that Alexander Fleming House would ever get listed.

But the issue of the cinema was left unclear.

On the very day an article was published

suggesting that the cinema might be listed, the demolition men moved in.

This opportunistic destruction is a chilling reminder

of the power of market forces.

Because of this building, Goldfinger, the very best of his sort,

has become a whipping boy of the ferocious anti-modernists,

restless in their determination to turn the clock back.

Alexander Fleming House's problem is that it's out of fashion,

in a style-conscious age.

We hear a lot about a classical revival,

yet here you have a modern building whose classical qualities

of integrity, rationality and clarity

are about to be destroyed.