Dennis WilkinsonA Ruddy Turnstone at Gooseberry Island in Westport, MA.
#photography #birds #wildlife #birdphotography #nature #masswildlife #westport #massachusetts #wildmassachusetts #massachusettswildlife
Andy Arthur - ThreadinburghThe thread about Argyle House; “preposterously large and a potential rival to the Castle rock”
Brutalist buildings are the Marmite of architecture – passionately loved or loathed. It’s easy to assume that the term comes from their brutal appearance (adj. savage; violent; unpleasant or harsh) and not the French béton brut for raw concrete. One such specimen was much in the news in Edinburgh yesterday when it was announced that plans had been lodged for the demolition and replacement of Argyle House in the West Port area of the city. But while other news sources make much click capital out of it having briefly appeared in some Netflix police show or another, here at Threadinburgh I prefer instead to go down the rabbit hole of the hows, whys and whats of this much-critiqued building of the moment.
“Argyle House vs. New Barracks. A shot taken to deliberately contrast the ‘ugly’ Argyle House (I disagree), with what is frankly the ugliest part of Edinburgh Castle – the New Barracks from the 1790s. A soulless block, totally out of scale and unsuited to its context, with few relieving features. Yes – I’m talking about the category A listed barracks” (quotation from the learned Tom Parnell). CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrArgyle House takes its name from its developer; Argyle Securities Ltd. This was an Edinburgh-based property development company that had been formed in 1960 to take advantage of the wave of prominent civic redevelopment schemes sweeping the nation in that decade. Its chairman and managing director was Meyer (Mike) Oppenheim, a prominent local businessman, philanthropist and managing director of the James Grant & Co. (West) chain of furniture stores.
Meyer – known as Mike – Oppenheim and his wife Violet (Vi). Photo via Meyer Oppenheim Trust (meyeroppenheim.org)Meyer had done very well for himself in life and he and his family lived at the historic Whitehouse in Barnton, that quiet and leafy quarter of the city to where the real money retreats behind tall hedges and well manicured lawns and driveways.
The Whitehouse in Barnton, the Oppenheim family home in Edinburgh. The core of the building is 17th century and it was subsequently sold to the businessman David Murray and then a well known author of wizarding novels.In October 1960 it was publicly announced that Oppenheim had acquired the Royal Lyceum Theatre from Howard & Wyndham. This coincided with a plan first mooted in 1956 to replace the adjacent Synod Hall on Castle Terrace, whose occupants included Poole’s Synod cinema, with a new opera and concert hall for the city.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The buidling with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redelopment.Oppenheim wasn’t really that interested in running a theatre – instead he came up with his own, rival million-pound plan to transform the block into a “magnificent centre… for the Edinburgh Festival“. This would replace both the Synod Hall and Lyceum with a multi-purpose performance, entertainment and commercial venue replete with restaurants and a hotel.
Oppenheim’s rival scheme, by Rowand Anderson, Kininmonth & Paul, for the Castle Terrace plot, Evening News, September 15th 1961The Town Council approved his scheme in 1962 with a promise to lease it back off of Oppenheim once it was complete. But as a businessman known for sticking scrupulously to budget and deadlines, he soon tired of rising costs and delays from the meddling of officialdom and walked away from the whole thing. Instead he gifted the Lyceum to the city in 1964. The city tried to take up the opera house scheme on its own and had the Synod Hall demolished in 1966, but each of its multiple subsequent attempts faltered and instead an ugly gap was left on the Castle Terrace site for almost 40 years.
Before that scheme had collapsed, in 1961 Argyle Securities acquired the long-established Edinburgh firm of garage proprietors, Rolls-Royce body builders, car hirers and undertakers John Croall & Son for £300,000, substantially outbidding a number of other offers that had wished to take it over as a going concern. Like the Lyceum, Oppenheim wasn’t actually interested in owning a garage for the purpose of running it, he was much more interested in the plot of land on the corner of Castle Terrace where Croall’s had their main works.
Croall’s Motor Garage on Castle Terrace, the ornamental entrance to a very substantial works. Photo from 1915, via Edinphoto.org.uk with credit to The Museum of EdinburghIn 1953 Edinburgh had adopted its City Development Plan which had re-zoned much of the decrepit old housing of the West Port and High Riggs area for commercial purposes. This made what was then almost worthless residential land potentially very valuable to commercial developers; it was protected from rebuilding the housing and could be easily acquired on the cheap. Meyer Oppenheim was once such developer of the moment. Times were good – Argyle Securities had quickly gained a reputation for completing projects on time, on budget and for a handsome profit. It floated on the stock exchange in 1962 with a market capitalisation of £400,000 at which time it owned a portfolio worth some £843,000. Argyle added to the Croall’s site by buying up adjacent condemned residential properties between the West Port and King’s Stables Road Lane and formed a grand new redevelopment scheme. This would become the eponymous Argyle House and was approved by the Corporation Planning Committee in September 1966.
The site of Argyle House in 1952, showing Croall’s garage, and then in 1969. Ordnance Survey 1:1250 maps. Move the slider to compareThe architects were Michael Laird & Partners and the principal contractors were James Laidlaw & Sons of Rutherglen, probably best known for the enigmatic St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross. Curiously, Laidlaw’s Edinburgh office at 24 Manor Place was shared with Argyle Securities. But this was no coincidence – Oppenheim had bought the firm in 1964 as he sought to vertically integrate his operations.
Artist’s impression of the Argyle House scheme, as published in December 1966.To mark the commencement of work, Laidlaws took out a half page spread in the Scotsman extolling the worthiness of their new construction.
Argyle House. A new building for the New Town will be worthy of the fine architectural traditions in this unique area
To finance the £1,500,000 development, loans were provided by Standard Life Assurance who also bought the site and leased it back to the developer for 175 years. At this time Croall’s business operations were sold to new owners and relocated to Corstorphine. Demolition commenced in 1966 with construction starting the following year. Argyle already had occupants lined up, a sixty-three year lease having been agreed with the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works for the entire building. This would allow the centralisation of existing government departments in the city including the headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of Employment and Department of the Environment in Scotland and offices of HM Stationery Office.
The lower storeys of Argyle House begin to emerge from the ground. The development dug down some 50 feet from street level, leaving the lower four storeys below ground level, resulting in some office floors suffering from a lack of natural light. In the background stands the Chalmers Territorial Free Church, which would soon be demolished. Scotsman, August 31st 1967.A two-storey L-plan block on Castle Terrace and Lady Lawson Street would contain public facilities such as enquiry counters, a job centre, and meeting rooms for the DHSS. This lower section, which the untrained eye can mistake for a separate building entirely, was faced in Blaxter stone with the pair of public entrances dominated by massive abstract concrete reliefs by George Garson: “bound to cause discussion and some bewilderment… if they have a message it is that the ways of authority are mysterious and that the symbolism of government through sculpture is a happily dead art“.
To enter Argyle House’s public-facing block, one first had to walk beneath either of George Garson’s huge, abstract concrete reliefs. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrRising up behind this were the two J-shaped office towers which extended down to eleven-storeys at their deepest point and were connected by a central service core. Their construction made use of the Bison prefabricated large panel system (LPS) which promised reduced costs and quick, easy construction but resulted in a highly repetitive and monotonous “impersonal egg-box”external appearance of the 4.5 ton wall slab panels.
The montonous wall of “impersonal egg-boxes” rising up behind the low-level public building on Castle Terrace. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrArgyle House was completed on schedule and on budget, as was the Oppenheim way, and was officially opened by John Silkin MP, Minister of Public Buildings and Works, on July 22nd 1969. At this time, with a floor plan totalling over 250,000 square feet of office space, it was both Edinburgh and Scotland’s largest commercial office and could house between 1,400 and 1,700 civil servants. At 320,000 square feet, the equally visually controversial New St. Andrew’s House at the St. James Centre took the city’s number one spot the following year (although it would not be occupied until 1974).
Aerial photo showing Argyle House (bottom left) in 1982 and the still-vacant plot of the Synod Hall above it. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.Colin McWilliam, the Scotsman’s architecture critic (“he admired modernism, but his taste was catholic and his judgement sound“) was quite taken with the end result and tried valiantly to compare the building’s scale and architectural effect with Playfair’s Georgian Royal Terrace on the Calton Hill. He summarised it as:
A huge three-dimensional balance-sheet set up specifically to show the maximum profit to investors.
He gushed over the “pencil-slim margins in limestone-concrete” and “backwards splay of the dark flint facing below each window“. His main complaint was that too much had been crammed in to too small a site, resulting in a building that was “preposterously large and a potential rival to the Castle rock“.
Argyle House, showing the central service core that connects the two main office wings. This shows the slim, bare concrete verticals and the panels dashed in dark flints that Colin McWilliam so appreciate. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell via FlickrMcWilliam hoped that subsequent development would show a similar “high level of care in layout and detail” so that they would “not be a denial of Edinburgh’s own character” and result in the “hell of over-intensive commercial use, of which London already [held] so many examples“. Given much of the output of the Edinburgh architecture scene since, his hopes were probably in vain.
Argyle House in the early 1970s, before the office tower block of West Port House was built diagonally opposite. This new office is already suffering from the monotonously grey appearance of so many contemporary public buildings. The red sandstone building on the right is the Edinburgh College of Art, the blue hoarding marks were until recently the Chalmers Territorial Free Church stood © Edinburgh College of Art via Trove.Scot, DP 579486After Argyle House, Oppenheim’s next big scheme was through another company he controlled, the Scottish Homes Investment Company, buying over the rights to develop the private enterprise “new town” of Dalgety Bay, across the Forth in Fife. Laidlaw would make its mark on the city by constructing the Royal Commonwealth Pool in time for the 1970 Games. Meyer Oppenheim retired in 1971 at the age of 66, having grown the value of Argyle’s investments five-fold, its market capitalisation three-fold and its profits twelve-fold in a little over a decade. Standard Life Assurance, his long-term financial backer, bought over much of his shareholding and he retired to an active life of philanthropy. As well as the Lyceum and the vista of Argyle House, one of his lasting gifts to the city was founding and endowing the Water of Leith Walkway Trust in 1976. He passed away in 1982 at the age of 77, a year after the first section of what would become a fifteen mile walkway was opened to the public.
Tablets commemorating – left – the opening of the first section of the Water of Leith Walkway in 1981 and – right – Meyer Oppenheim. CC-by-3.0, Gyula Péter via WikimediaIf you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
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#brutalism #buildings #castleTerrace #edinburgh #government #jewish #officeBlock #theatre #westPort
The Mendocino Voice🚔 A Westport man on probation was arrested after deputies allegedly found firearms, ammunition, and meth at his residence Sunday.
Celebrity Split NewsBehind the scenes: At the set of Mayo based company filming RTÉ drama https://www.xnly.live/2P4wHKxslasc
World Focus NewsRetiring Mayo teachers receive special presentations https://www.xnly.live/79O4pArslasc
Mediterranean DietExplore the new Delamar Westport, featuring Christian Siriano-designed suites, Mediterranean food
WESTPORT – When guests …
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https://www.diningandcooking.com/2339047/explore-the-new-delamar-westport-featuring-christian-siriano-designed-suites-mediterranean-food/
A Ruddy Turnstone on the rocks at Gooseberry Island in Westport, MA.
#photography #birds #wildlife #birdphotography #nature #masswildlife #westport #massachusetts #wildmassachusetts #massachusettswildlife
Kimbo106Là où la Terre respire encore
Un aventurier fatigué, la pluie pour compagne et les glaciers pour horizon.
Flavien poursuit sa route, entre émerveillement et solitude jusqu'à Nelson, la ville du Nord de l’île du Sud.
Chaque arrêt devient une leçon : le recul des glaces, la force des mousses géantes, la danse des otaries. Les Pancakes Rock lui offrent un coucher de soleil voilé, quand à Nelson un lit et une lessive sont des luxes insoupçonnés.
Sur cette île du Sud, l'aventure se mêle à l'intime, au rythme du souffle de la Terre : fragile, intense, obstiné.
https://librexpression.fr/sans-chemise-sans-pantalon-29-55
#doc #France #grumpy #Haast #librexpression #NatureLovers #naturephotograpĥy #newzealand #photography #TAAF #Westport #nelson #journey #trip
(Crédits : Flavien Saboureau)
A Semipalmated Plover at Gooseberry Island.
#photography #birds #wildlife #birdphotography #nature #masswildlife #westport #massachusetts #wildmassachusetts #massachusettswildlife
A Semipalmated Plover ready for its close-up at Gooseberry Island.
#photography #birds #wildlife #birdphotography #nature #masswildlife #westport #massachusetts #wildmassachusetts #massachusettswildlife
