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CONSTRUCTION WORLD
JUNE
2017
22
PROJECTS & CONTRACTS
In the inter-war years the English town of Slough was used as a
dumping ground for redundant war materials and quite abruptly,
just before World War 11, became the home of hundreds of ugly
new concrete and brick factories. Betjeman was so struck by the
desecration caused by industrialisation and what he perceived as the
“menace of things to come” that he was prompted to write the poem
but later regretted its harshness.
The ‘new’ trading estate appearance of Slough, however, was a
foretaste of the Brutalist brick movement, which flourished from
the 1950s to 1970s, and which has some severe critics,
amongst them Charles, Prince of Wales. His writings and
speeches have often been condemning of the movement
and in 1987 at a Corporation of London Planning and
Communication Committee annual dinner he said: “When
they (Luftwaffe) knocked down our buildings, it didn’t
replace with anything more offensive than rubble”.
Luckily, not everyone shares these Brutalist
sentiments. Deckler who, together with his wife Anne
Graupner, runs a practice named 26’10 South Architects
after the latitude of Johannesburg – this is in part a
commitment to this rather fraught but exciting city – is a
fan of brick.
And, while many of us who grew up in the 70s still
BRUTALLY BRILLIANT BRICK
Unlike Johannesburg architect, Thorsten Deckler,
who feels that you can pretty much build anything
with facebrick, many people over the decades have
felt differently about utilitarian brick and concrete.
Including English poet, writer and broadcaster,
Sir John Betjeman who wrote a 10-stanza poem,
entitled Slough which called for the destruction of
the English town by the German Luftwaffe.
have mixed feelings about suburban facebrick housing, Deckler has
less qualms professing to a “somewhat warm and fuzzy feeling for
knotty pine and facebrick”.
“I guess I associate these materials with both the happy homes I
spent time in as well as a period in which honesty of materials was
valued,” he explains. However, he admits that the opposite can also
be true: exposed brick deployed in an oppressive environment can
lead to a strong aversion for the material.
Exposed brick
Asked to name local and international architects that have worked
with exposed brick who he admires, Deckler admits to being a fan of
the Swedish Brutalist architect, Sigurd Lewerentz (1885 – 1975) and
local architect, Jack Clinton. However, he wonders if, “Lewerentz fits
the Brutalism bill 100 percent”? In photographs his work might seem
forbidding but Deckler, who recently returned from a trip to Sweden
where he visited a number of Lewerentz projects, comments that
when you “visit his works, they feel humane, even friendly.”
According to Deckler, Lewerentz used brick in a gripping manner
which is witnessed in many of his projects from the Eneborg housing
A window in Sankt Petri, seen from the inside. The glass was fixed to the
outside of the walls by means of mastic so that no window frame would
be visible, heightening the primal and raw qualities of the space.
Exterior of vestry offices at St. Mark’s in Bjorhagen showing
characteristically thick mortar joints containing slate chips for
additional strength.