Modernist Estates: The buildings and the people who live in them

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A unique studio apartment on the ground floor of a new building in Forest Gate, designed by Marcus Lee, formerly a director at the Richard Rogers Partnership. The accommodation benefits from its own private entrance and comprises a spacious open-plan room with a fitted plywood kitchen, a sleeping area, and a large en-suite bathroom with a walk-in shower. Polished concrete floors with underfloor heating run throughout. This geographical spread and chronology is interesting as it reminds us that Modernism in these terms is much more than a stylistic label. Although the examples selected include Le Corbusier’s Unite in Marseilles and works by Arne Jacobsen, there are also projects by Aldo Rossi and Ricardo Bofill, architects who defy easy categorisation as orthodox modernists. The exterior of each complex is featured, along with an informative article about how the building was designed and what its fate has become over time. Then a resident is interviewed with a standard set of questions and there is a set of stunning photographs of the interior of their homes. It's amazing how much beauty can be found even in the most brutal of brutalist structures! Photographs of buildings - 2 stars - pretty tedious really. Where original features are shown they are interesting, but in general you get not-especially-good photographs of living spaces which, on the whole, have a pretty uniform taste in decoration.

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But I would certainly recommend a Bauhaus-themed tour of Germany this year. In Thuringia, the towns of Erfurt, Gera and Jena all have architectural landmarks. Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Münster and other cities have houses, factories, dams, foundries and garages built by Bauhaus-influenced modernists (see grandtourofmodernism.com for an interactive map). Gorgeous and absolutely fascinating! This is a thorough and affectionate exploration of almost two dozen Modernist public housing complexes in England. Most were built during the postwar era, though the overall range spans from the 30s to the 90s. It brought to mind some of the later seasons of Call the Midwife, which often dealt with London's housing crisis. Several characters moved into flats like these and it was interesting to get a real-life look at the types of places they lived. Jazz age … the Ellington Hotel, Berlin, a regular haunt of the eponymous Duke. Photograph: Peter Delius/Alamy Since living in Amsterdam, we started to collect Dutch mid-century furniture. The style works well with the space and although we try to avoid the ‘museum’ look, we do have a lot of 1960s pieces.

I knew a little bit about the building before I moved here. The scheme was part of Camden’s ‘golden era’ of housing along with estates such as the Highgate New Town in Archway by Peter Tabori, and Alexandra Road in Swiss Cottage by Neave Brown. These young and progressive architects rejected the trend for high-rise developments that had been popular after the war in favour of good quality, well-planned, low-rise buildings. Sprowston Mews is located five minutes walk from Forest Gate train station, and is home to an emerging creative community of architects and self-builders, inspired by the experimental mews house-building of the 1960s, such as Murray Mews in Camden. Forest Gate is named after the southern gate to Epping Forest, one of the largest expanses of common land in London. Wanstead Flats, with its 450 acres of heathland, are within a fifteen minutes’ walk. It is incredibly well connected with frequent trains to Liverpool Street via Elizabeth line taking just 13 minutes. Wanstead Park and Woodgrange Park are on the Overground with trains to Gospel Oak and Barking. It doesn’t take an imaginative leap to grasp that Bauhaus was at least as revolutionary as republicanism in 1919. The old town is staid and stately: 12 of its mainly baroque buildings are Unesco-listed as “Classical Weimar”. Less than 15 minutes’ walk away is the Haus am Horn – a pioneering “white cube” that hosted the first Bauhaus exhibition, in 1923. Squat and flat-walled, sober verging on drab, this “test house” has its own Unesco listing. The online platform, Modernist Estates, has for several years been an essential go-to source for those interested in the many excellent and often under-appreciated housing estates produced by 20th century architects, many on behalf of local authorities. Having previously published a review of UK examples, mostly around London, Stefi Orazi has now taken the format across Europe to 15 estates from Scandinavia to Spain, and covering a period from the early 1930s right up to the completion of Neave Brown’s Medina project in Eindhoven in 2002. However, in a pointed introduction, the author makes it clear that the European approach transcended geographical boundaries as evidenced by the inclusion of high quality estates in both Birmingham and Edinburgh.

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We weren’t even seriously looking, and I just said: ‘Let’s just go look at this house this weekend.’ It was the sort of house I’d always loved; it was geographically just about doable; it was just about workable for work; it wasn’t too far from London; it was near a town that looked nice …” That was in April. In July, they put in an offer. “It took us a really long time to get over taking that leap,” she says. “And in the end we just realised we would never know if it was right for us unless we just did it.” With its striking stepped-concrete terraces, the Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate is the most famous of the social housing schemes built during Camden’s “golden age” in the 1960s and 1970s. Rowley Way was built between 1972-78 by the revered Modernist architect Neave Brown and has been given a rate Grade II* listing by English Heritage in recognition of its architectural significance. What sparked the interest for Laurent? "I was influenced by my experience in China where I lived for six months in 2008, where I also discovered photography" he tells Creative Boom. "The big cities of this territory stunned me by their gigantic size, their tentacular immoderation, their paradoxes, their metamorphosises, their contrasts and the way the human being lives in this abundant and overpopulated town planning. I was literally absorbed by the atmosphere of the megalopolis and by its astounding mix of futurism and tradition. It certainly unconsciously stimulated the search for a juxtaposition of ages in my later projects."Bella had long been on the Modern House mailing list. “I’ve always been slightly obsessed with modernist architecture,” she explains. When she first spotted the listing, it was at an emotionally charged time – shortly after the death of her mother, when Bella was four months pregnant.

Modernist Property for Sale | The Modern House

The lower end of the market always sells so well,” says Hill. “One of the founding principles was: it’s not about price, it really is about design, and we’ve always tried to keep as broad a price spectrum as we can.” Modernist Estates provides an inside look at remarkable and sometimes controversial estates in Britain and the impact they have on their communities. Featuring twenty-one modernist homes and their residents, including the Barbican, Isokon, Balfron Tower and Park Hill, it presents an overview of the building, architect, historical and political context. It explores, with fascinating interviews and contemporary photography, what it’s like to live on a modernist estate today. Prior to moving here, I’d lived in Golden Lane Estate and the Barbican Estate, so I had accumulated quite a few pieces of furniture. I’ve always tended to buy mid-century classics such as a Robin Day sofa, Alvar Aalto table and a George Nelson bed. Not because I want to live in a museum, but because their proportions tend to fit smaller spaces better than modern, bulky furniture. I’ve bought a few pieces specifically for this flat, including an Alfred Roth daybed. My favourite piece of furniture, however, is by the contemporary furniture designer Michael Marriott. I have his Croquet shelving – simple oak uprights with colourful folded sheet steel shelves. I just love them and they’ve moved with me across five different flats over the last 15 years. As the 1920s wore on, Weimar became increasingly conservative and, in 1925, Gropius moved Bauhaus 130km north-east to Dessau. Home to the Junker aeroplane factory, this city had a strong tradition of industrial design and it was here the movement reached its apogee. A short walk from Dessau’s main station is the movement’s radical-looking glass-fronted HQ, the Bauhaus Building. Commissioned by the city, it was designed by Gropius and built in 1925-26 to house the various departments of a school that taught everything from furniture design to architecture to typography.An impressive two-bedroom duplex apartment in a unique mews in Forest Gate. The building, completed in 2019, was designed by Marcus Lee, formerly a director at the Richard Rogers Partnership, and comprises a studio apartment on the ground floor and this duplex on the top two floors, complete with its own roof terrace. Each study begins with a concise but informative history of the project, illustrated with high quality new photography. However, what particularly illuminates this book is alluded to in the second part of its title the buildings and the people who live in them today. Interviews with present day occupiers cut through conventional academic analyses to reveal answers to questions that we would probably all want to ask: what is it like to live here, how successful is the community, how do the homes cope with young families, is the building fabric holding up, is statutory protection a blessing or a burden? We had lived in the better-known Isokon building for six years and dreamt of living in Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint in Highgate but couldn’t afford it, so it had to be a 1930s building of architectural merit. Whitehall Lodge has plenty of original features, and also a generous landscaped garden. Muswell Hill is a very nice part of north London, a real village with lots of small shops and cafés. It’s extraordinary, the rise of interest in these homes,” says John Grindrod, author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain. “I think Grand Designs has had a bit to do with it, and I think it’s partly a reaction against developers’ houses of the 80s and 90s – heritage design, fake Tudor, with small rooms and small windows. Instead, these houses are open, with entire glazed walls.” One of the deciding factors when choosing this particular flat was we have the only intact original bathroom in the building – both tiles and appliances are from 1937 – and we live in one of the turrets, with a semi-circular living room. Like all flats in the building, we still have the original Crittall windows. The previous owner had added internal secondary glazing with plastic frames but we removed those.

Modernist Estates - Europe | Book Review | Urban Design Group Modernist Estates - Europe | Book Review | Urban Design Group

The meeting point is on Triton Square, at the junction with Drummond Street. Organised by London Borough of Camden Of course, the Grands Ensembles are usually full of life but Laurent wanted to create an atmosphere of there being a "parallel world mixing past and future while consciously conveying the impression of towns that would be emptied of their residents". I think Bauhaus was a very German phenomenon,” says Bettina. “We were very late to industrialise. It responded to a need to re-educate craftsmen and catch up with France and the UK. The first world war had destroyed nationalism of the imperial kind and 1919 was a new dawn.”Without Bauhaus, neither Hansa-style social housing nor modernism as we know it would have happened. The couple moved here in the autumn of 2015, shortly after the birth of their second child, leaving behind their two-bedroom flat with cantilevered stairs on the Golden Lane estate in London. “It was tiny,” says Bella. “Our living space was the size of what is now our playroom. And that was fine when we had one child. But then we were hankering after more space, and this place came up …” A walking tour around Regent’s Park Estate to discuss the masterplan and designs of the new infill housing on the estate. The walk is led by architects Hilary Satchwell (Tibbalds), Alex Ely (Mae) and Matthew Lloyd (Matthew Lloyd Architects). Dance in Glass, by Oskar Schlemme, at the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau. Photograph: Ronny Hartmann/Getty Images The trip was supported by the German tourist board. See bauhaus100.de for more information. Original Bauhaus: the Centenary Exhibition runs from 6 Sept to 27 Jan 2020 at the Berlinische Galerie in Kreuzberg. Direct Deutsche Bahn trains run Berlin Hbf-Dessau (from €19.90); Weimar-Berlin usually involves a change at Erfurt (from €29.90 bahn.com); Dessau-Weimar may involve 2-3 changes (from €19.90) Beyond Bauhau: more modernist classics in Germany