Back to School

This looks like the atrium in a modern office but it isn’t.

Hammersmith Academy opened in 2011 on the site of a young offenders home – is there some irony? – in a side street north of Ravenscourt Park. It makes no attempt to blend in with the surrounding late Victorian architecture and it’s none the worse for that. I would be quite excited to be a pupil here.

BHM Architects make a speciality designing schools but do not work to a template. A short walk away is a primary school designed by a famous architect specialising in high-rise flats and schools. It also has an arresting entrance area.

Externally Greenside Primary is showing its age. It was built in 1951 when it must have been as visually arresting as its neighbour.

The architect, to his annoyance, is famous as the monicker of an Ian Fleming villain – Goldfinger in the eponymous book and film. Ernö Goldfinger’s (there should be two small commas over the ‘o’ in Erno but I cannot find them) reputation is hard to assess. This school, now Grade II* Listed, attracted the attention of Nikolaus Pevsner.

”The most interesting (post-war primary school) is Westville Road, designed by E. Goldfinger, 1950 – 1953, in conscious reaction to the earlier generation’s dominating monoliths. Low and informally grouped buildings with curved brick links, the airy classrooms looking out on a generous playground. Given presence by the tough exposed concrete framework, and by a rectangular brick tower close to the entrance.” (The Buildings of England, London 3: North West, Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner)

Gordon Cullen’s mural is contemporaneous with the building and stands the test of time better. You may not be familiar with Cullen (1914 – 1994). He “was an influential British architect and urban designer who was a key motivator in the Townscape movement. Cullen presented a new theory and methodology for urban visual analysis and design based on the psychology of perception, such as on the human need for visual stimulation and the notions of time and space. He is best known for the book Townscape, first published in 1961” (Wikipedia). His mural in Westville Road is one of his few large scale works on public display. He was appointed a CBE in 1978. There were no gongs for Goldfinger. Goldfinger’s problem or his panacea was, like so many of his contemporaries, to be excited by reinforced concrete. The cement mixer was seldom idle.