Conversion Parables

The future historians of the built environment of Blairism won’t be consulting back issues of AD or the glossy monographs of the starchitect. On the contrary, they’ll be hoarding and rifling through the advertisements in the back pages of the London free papers, the property pullouts of The Guardian or the Telegraph. That is, if they can stomach the antiseptic parade of stunning developments, loft conversions and suchlike. As a contribution to such a future history, here’s a couple of interesting conversions of places previously industrial or uncomfortably dirigiste, recently found amid such pages. First, found in a Telegraph supplement, is what describes itself, with frankly rather admirable chutzpah, as the Bauhaus building, Croydon. The skeleton of this building is one of the many office blocks erected in the southernmost outpost of London, when it was a brief proto-Canary Wharf, ‘London’s Mini Manhattan’, ambiguously featuring in the pre-Sex Pistols work of Jamie Reid. These Wilsonian spec towers were rather lacking in the colour and flash required by their distant successors, so accordingly the building has been given what would once have been called a ‘jazzy’ façade, declared by the developers to be ‘Constructivist’ in inspiration, and opened up to the young couples and media professionals. To point out that this blatantly superficial act of facading is the antithesis of the Bauhaus’ ethic and aesthetic is almost churlish – unlike the Libeskinds of the world with their ludicrous messianic pretensions, this is a sort of aesthetic blag, designed only to make a quick killing before the building is remade again in 25 or 30 years time.



The other stunning conversion, this one again at London’s periphery, only West rather than South – Wallis House, on the Great West Road’s Golden Mile, found in London Lite, as I recall. This is in prime Ballard country, where, this time without municipal prompting, an attempt was made at creating a little America at London’s edges. The art deco factories built for American businesses in the 1930s still mostly cling to this endless arterial road, Brentford’s own Gotham. The tallest of these has been under scaffolding for some time, during which a poster declared ‘DECO IS BACK!’ beside a drawing akin to those horrible Hed Kandi sleeves for 'chilled' 'beats', depicting a woman with a hairstyle more Jackie Kennedy than Louise Brooks. The factory as a place of fashionable living has become so familiar since the early 80s that it now barely merits comment, but for the way in which this particular machine glamour is used as an explicit selling point. And I admit to being rather disappointed that it’ll mostly be filled with business types attracted by the proximity to the Great West’s slick-tech office blocks and Heathrow. I’m not so bothered that it no longer houses a cigarette factory or whatever – rather, would that it were full of Joan Crawford types with cigarette holders and brutal bon mots. In both of these two conversions, art history is pressed into the service of commerce in an interestingly straightforward way. A journey to both towers to measure and report upon their hauntogeographical effects is being planned.