Daft Old Duffer returns, this time with his view on the new school buildings. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
Yet again our councils are being courted by bright young architects flaunting their bright new concept of bright new building designs, all incorporating the very latest of bright new materials and building techniques to produce bright new buildings, for a bright new tomorrow.
And I am filled with foreboding.
Towers of the future
I remember, you see, the wonderful new designs of tower block that were going to solve all our housing needs cheaply and cheerfully.
And all of which had to be pulled down again a handful of years later, because they were so damp and smelly they were a very real hazard to the health of all the babies condemned to live in them.
All those that had not already collapsed of their own accord, that is.
‘Wonderful’ new materials
The wonderful new roofing materials, that were so marvellous it was no long necessary for roofs to be so expensively peaked up and clad in tiles.
Wonderful materials that cracked and leaked and rotted so fast no-one could keep up with them. And which had to be continuously patched and re-laid and eventually renewed.
And the fantastic development in new concrete mixes that allowed us to put up fluid new structures so wonderful to behold in the architects drawings.
Ugly grey blodge
Buildings such as the ugly grey blodge that disgraced Portsmouth for so long, and that no one wanted to use or even to walk through.
And all those brightly coloured plastic panels from the fifties that were were going to transform our buildings into a permanently cheerful and uplifting new wonderworld. Panels that became almost immediately the very symbol of decay and grot and city centre depression.
And the marvellous idea of putting all the drains and pipework onto the outside of buildings in that terrifically quirky new-age way.
Buildings like that disgrace of Paris, the Pompidou Centre, that no-one nowadays can bear even to look at.
Breeding grounds for spiders and rats?
I am wondering you see – ancient pessimist that I am – whether those grass roofs and heating- panel clad walls are going to leave us with schoolrooms so infested with spiders and rats and kindred creepy crawlies our kids – and their teachers – will be scared even to enter them.
Surely not. Surely they’ve got it right this time. Haven’t they?
Image: Golden Ribbon under CC BY 2.0
