The Worsley Medical Building 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.

This is either a godless building,

or God.

But if God did exist, I could imagine him looking like this building -

in a way of having strength but...a lack of emotion.

When I first came here, I came here to study anatomy.

I was doing life drawing at the art school

and then drawing from cadavers in here to make it all make sense.

The first time I went into the dissecting room and walked through,

I thought I was going to vomit or pass out and die.

Cos I spoke with a doctor who said to me,

"Have you dealt with corpses before?" And I said yes, when I hadn't.

But, very quickly, that got normalised,

and now going through the dissecting rooms,

I don't really have any emotion, except maybe nostalgia.

Buildings cut and dissect space

to create living environments for live people.

This is a building for live people to cut and dissect dead bodies.

That's why I like this building. I like that contradiction.

I like the way that it's like a building getting its own back.

It's almost as if the outside of the building, the exterior

is denying that it's part of the same processes of decay and destruction

and corruption as the human bodies inside the building.

The dead bodies come and go and the living bodies come and go

and the building stays the same.

I get a feeling from the building that it's more alive than me,

which is terrifying.

It dwarfs everything.

I think the building ignores all the buildings around,

and becomes...a focus.

It's just relentless in what it is.

Just formally it's very fascist, it's like a cube.

A cube can represent a fascist idea of

"This is what we are and we're not backing down on any angle."

It's solid from all angles.

A solidity - and people always look for solidity -

I think is a great strength.

I love the idea of solidity,

but to actually find solidity in my body means that I will be a skeleton.

With a person, the most solid part of a person, physically,

is the skeleton,

and that's on the inside.

Whereas, with a building, the most solid part of it is on the outside.

The exterior of this building is incredibly strong,

it's like armour, armour-plated.

It's like a castle, or a castle keep, a fortress.

Alongside the building, there are two enormous chimneys,

which aren't part of the building,

but because they are such a simple form, and the building

is such a simple form, you visually connect them immediately.

And wherever you are, round the building, up to a mile away,

you see the chimneys and know that that's where the building is.

And in a way they give it a very strong fascist feeling,

like a concentration camp,

or the gas chambers, which is very eerie for a place of study.

I wouldn't be surprised if more dead people

had passed through the ninth floor than living people, which is weird.

It's a building for dead people.

For me, the ninth floor is the one floor where it is most apparent.

And it filters out as you go up and below that floor.

It's all related to bodies, the whole of the floors.

Even if you're doing microbiology,

there's still dead culture, dead tissues, dead blood cells.

But on the ninth floor is where it's most apparent.

To have a clinical building, I think is a great idea.

The most unclinical thing about this building is the canteen.

The difference between the mural

and what's actually going on in the mural

and what's actually going on in the rooms,

is like the difference between loving somebody

and murdering somebody.

But why do a painting of something when you can have the real thing?

I've always been obsessed by medical waste,

much more than any other kind of waste,

because it's so clean, it's so organised, so clinical.

The building consumes energy - light, heat, food,

medical supplies, students, cadavers, tutors,

everything.

Buildings have entrails -

for wires, for the pipes, the heating, the electricity,

for the air conditioning.

In this building, they're all contained inside

these convex features to keep more space on the inside for the students.

In the building, I like the idea that the services are all on the outside,

so that even though, visually, it looks like it has this strength,

it's like its most vulnerable parts

are actually very near to the surface,

which is quite a fragile position.

I was always fascinated by the NASA photographs of the moon -

the way that by laying a grid over an unknowable landscape,

they create a kind of confidence, something solid and believable.

But I always felt that the moon and the grid were never connected,

they were always separate.

I see buildings like that - as a three-dimensional graph,

or a grid, like a geometrical structure to live in,

to give us meaning in our lives.

And in the same way that the grid on the landscape of the moon

doesn't make sense and can never be combined,

I think buildings never fully combine with us.

I guess that's why they fall down.

It's like, buildings are at their most perfect

before the people move into them, and then it's just a matter of time.

Looking at the building, I get torn between ugly and lovely.

There's a beauty in ugliness that I think exists in this building,

along with its function.

So, for me, the first time I saw the building,

it was instantly fused with that idea of death.

There's a lot of different ways that I can see the way that

the outside and inside are connected,

but in a way it's like I can't bring the function of the building

and way it looks on the outside together, and I can't take it apart.

It's like one without the other doesn't make sense.

For me, it completely affected my whole idea of death.

Seeing bodies in this building with the mystery completely removed

made me realise that God didn't exist.