62 C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 Richard Holdsworth, who joined the dockyard trust as curator in 1985, Paul Hudson, who has overseen the development of those parts of the wider dockyard where development was envisaged, and Paul Jardine, who writes knowledgeably from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s position. All the essays repay careful study, and give a good overview of the social, economic and political issues involved in the ‘resurgence’. Expertly, and (given his work at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust) appropriately edited by Neil Cossons, the book ably demonstrates best practice in seeking to conserve so large a site. Wholeness is all with large complex military (and civilian) sites such as Chatham. Think of what has been lost through the dissolution of such historic sites of even relatively recent times such as Croydon Airport, Trafford Park or the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Overall, the point of this book is not simply to revisit the history of Chatham dockyard and its buildings since their Elizabethan origins – that has already been ably done by Jonathan Coad’s Support for the Fleet – but to learn how to protect and project that history after 1984. The first and foremost lesson is to try to maintain the wholeness of the site. Even here that has not been possible, and decisions were made to save what represented the ‘age of sail’ at the expense of the age of steam and diesel. Another of the lessons is to have friends in high places, and with access to large funds. Even then, with one of the largest grants ever awarded, the future of Chatham has been financially tempestuous. Perhaps the most important lesson is to have a willing director of planning on side. That came in the shape of Kent County Council’s Harry Deakin, clearly a man with vision. The book should be required reading for anyone faced with the disposal and/or redevelopment of large complex sites.We could do with more such exemplary studies. To end on a personal note, when the docks closed in 1984 the entire Medway towns went into shock. Some of the skilled civilian staff took the opportunity to retrain in the local art college, Medway College of Design, especially in the silversmithing and jewellery department. Having been a young lecturer there at the time, it is sad to learn that the college, its late 1960s design modelled partly on Fort Pitt, one of the chain of artillery fortresses built to protect the dockyards, is itself now due to close. Julian Holder is a senior associate tutor in architectural history at the University of Oxford and director of graduate programmes at theWeald and Downland Museum. Supporting role Steel Architecture: the designed landscape of modernity Angus J McDonald, Crowood Press, 2021, 160 pages, colour and black and white illustrations, hardback, ISBN 978 1 785009 95 5, £20 This book by a leading Scottish academic and professor of architectural structures is not, as might be anticipated, a survey of steel architecture.While it does briefly explain the origins of ferrous materials and the development of steel for use in architecture, the author’s principal objective is to question the way in which steel as a structural material was and still is being exploited by modernist architects for formalistic rather than functional ends.To present his case, he selects certain building types involving steel construction and sets them in the context of modernist ideas to reach a critical understanding. His argument is that whereas in the early decades of the 20th century a steel framework was chosen for its strength and practicality, such as for the erection of tall buildings in the USA, from the post-war period onwards steel was frequently used by modernist architects solely for its aesthetic potential. For example, McDonald claims that Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House were intended primarily to establish a new vision of what a house should look like, while largely ignoring the practicalities of habitation in a glass box and the poor durability of minimalist fabric. In the case of skyscrapers, where practicality had been the determining factor in their structural form for the first 100 years, the development of more sophisticated technology in the late 20th century, combined with a movement away from rectilinearity, led to the current fashion for oddly shaped and wacky designs. Here McDonald cites the China Central Television HQ, Beijing, by OMA and Rem Koolhaas, which uses extreme quantities of steelwork to create a distinctive shape that is nonsensical structurally. Likewise, he questions ‘high tech’, the style that emerged with the Pompidou Centre. The style was heralded as honest in displaying the steel structure and service elements, yet it was wasteful in its use of natural resources and expensive to maintain. The most severe criticism is reserved for those buildings that are currently featured in the media and win international awards, such as the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, by Frank Gehry and the Riverside Museum, Glasgow, by Zaha Hadid. Although steel plays a vital role in supporting such buildings, their designers disdain the idea that the structure should be part of the visual
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=