5 ms·

The Rise of 'Facadism' in London

136 points by ZeljkoS 7y ago

mcv 7y ago
We've got some buildings like this in Amsterdam too. Sometimes it's done really well, and I'm happy they managed to preserve a beautiful ancient facade while updating the insides to modern standards for non-collapsing structures. And sometimes it's an atrocity.
rekabis 7y ago
This is… _sad_. I mean, if there is no other choice because restoration of the building is no longer technically feasible, fine. But just to throw up something bigger and newer? For shame.
- iguy 7y ago
  But you assume the alternative is to keep the whole building. If the alternative is to keep nothing, then this is great. (Although some of the examples work better than others, of course.) Much of the feeling of the streets is about the first few stories of the buildings facing them. And big new buildings tend to be terrible at this, and are widely hated for it. Better to have strange hybrids than a whole city frozen in time by preservation.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  I can't believe they build new buildings behind the façade where the windows don't line up. London's bigger problem is the shoddy quality (at all stages) of new construction, in the unbound race for profit.
  - kiney 7y ago
    > I can't believe they build new buildings behind the façade where the windows don't line up. That surprised me also. Here (germany) we got the trend of "facadism" too. But usually they try to properly integrate the old facade with the new structure.
  - myspy 7y ago
    Looks pretty awful. I see a lot of old buildings that can be modernized and saved but the costs are probably higher. Extending the old building with new constructions can definitely be done better than this. At least make use of all outer walls and the roof.
  - eru 7y ago
    The race for profit is pretty malleable. Just set up the taxes and other incentives right, and people will do the right thing for profit.
    - afarrell 7y ago
      Taxes, incentives, and regulations don't directly achieve the goal. If the real goal is a shift in company cultures across an industry, then there also needs to be well-informed communication. Incentive structures can be part of that communication[1]. But people don't obey incentives unless they keep those incentives in conscious thought. If incentives were all it took for organisations to pay the cost of changing priorities, then there would have been no value in naming a bug "Heartbleed". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teach-the-oss-community-about-marketing/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...
      - eru 7y ago
        Who says incentives have to be purely monetary?
        afarrell 7y ago
        Not me
    - sideshowb 7y ago
      Or they might judge that it's more profitable to lobby against the incentives.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    I have the impression at this point that it is "Spite House" style Mallicious Compliance from owners fed up with trying to actually use the building for something useful and facing all of those constraints so they make it functional and in the laws while ugly as possible in protest to discourage future meddling.
grzte 7y ago
If these are the worst examples they can find in the entire city of London, I'd say things are not going so bad.
- eru 7y ago
  Indeed. The topic itself is fascinating, but it doesn't seem like much too complain about. The ugly part is when they don't line up the windows. Otherwise, it's fine.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    There's also at least a potential aesthetic problem where the new building behind the facade is taller than the facade, especially if it extends above by a significant amount. That's very common indeed.
    - eru 7y ago
      I'm happy with that look. If you can't hide the change perfectly, I'd rather the building be honest and blatant about being a hybrid. But I can see how tastes differ.
      - tomatocracy 7y ago
        It varies in how well it’s done - much as with windows, some are very sympathetic and others not. It’s also particularly noticeable for people who occupy higher floors in other nearby buildings and I’m not sure this is often considered in the planning process.
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  There are many good examples across the whole of London, but those don't make for interesting news copy.
  - isthisnametaken 7y ago
    Even 10 Downing Street was essentially flattened in the 1960s and rebuilt as a new building behind the facade of the original.
beaner 7y ago
I actually appreciate this. Glass and steel are nice from a distance, but when's the last time on the sidewalk you actually took a pause and leaned on one for a break? These new textures are cold and distant, pristine and fragile. You're not supposed to touch them. Concrete, stone and brick are the opposite. They're timeless and welcoming. You can touch them without having to worry about leaving a print. They feel like they take care of you, rather than the other way around. And aesthetically, IMO, there's nothing more incredibly boring than just sheets of untouchable glass straight down the street. There's no texture and no character. A good compromise is to allow the warmer facades of old buildings to continue to exist, and leave the new ones to the skyline, so long as they continue to be isolating.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  I'd rather they put in a building that actually uses the facade they sit behind, in keeping with the architecture they supposedly want to preserve. The examples where it's just a wall with new style building sat behind look awful, and the windows don't even line up - so probably very inconsistent light, times of deep shadow and limited views from inside. Looks more like the sort of thing your neighbour might do if they were a builder and you'd really upset them. :)
  - netcan 7y ago
    Like most architecture, there are good and bad examples. Planning/regulation can't really do much about the subjective, and the nature of these tends to make permissions a central player. "Facadism" is becoming a "best practice" compromise between preservation, modernity, commercials & such. The danger there is box ticking tokenism and the ugly architecture that comes from that. Some bad architecture will always exist regardless but a lot of the bad examples in this style come from this "designed for planners" tokenism.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Can you provide a single good example? Every example I know of is bad for building occupants and looks terrible at street level.
twelvechairs 7y ago
Images 2 and 4 are the worst - where they are trying to squeeze an extra floor in so the new facade windows dont align with the old facade windows. Images 6 and 7 are postmodern additions - maybe its not your style but they aren't without architectural thought The others are all standalone facades unclear what their final outcome will be. Perhaps they were never of a good standard, were beyond repair at the time or were taken away during construction. In any case just keeping the facade is probably better than 50 years ago when theyd just demolish the whole thing.
- molteanu 7y ago
  I wouldn't want to live on the 1st floor in that 6th building , though.
- altacc 7y ago
  The mismatch in floor heights is something I also find jarring. The changes in standards mean that floor heights are reducing, leading to this. It'd have cost them more to build matching floor heights and they might have had to have one storey less to get planning permission. Something similar happened near where I lived in London. Developers got permission to build an apartment block on condition that it looked the same as its older neighbour. The result was an odd looking mini version, about 2 metres shorter than the original.
  - mcv 7y ago
    For #2 and #4 it's not just the floor height, it's that they built a new building while pretending the old facade wasn't there. It's just a random wall standing in front of a completely unrelated building.
- beardyw 7y ago
  From the street, number 6 (Stamford Street) looks worse than the photo. To me it looks a bit like how I imagine a Las Vegas hotel. Whatever the building had before is lost anyway.
m-i-l 7y ago
The ones where the old and new windows don't line up always seem a bit dumb. Must be a horrible experience for the people inside the new buildings, looking out of their windows onto a brick wall a few centimeters away. Both cited examples of this (Artillery Lane and Caledonian Road) are student accommodation, so I wonder if building at ultra-low cost has something to do with it. Many of the others I don't have a particular problem with to be honest. There's actually one (not cited in the article) on the adjacent street to where I live, but they're building the new house to match up with the old facade so the nice Victorian era terrace isn't really disturbed. I'd much rather that than what they've done on another adjacent street - some overseas developer has bought one in the middle of a row of identical terraces, torn it down, built an iceberg basement, and a big new "modern" building that looms threateningly over the other buildings in the street like a largely windowless slaughterhouse with odd disproportionately large misshapen windows in improbable locations. I don't want to sound like Prince Charles with his "monstrous carbuncles", and I accept that perhaps there may be some people that somehow find that sort of "modern" building somehow aesthetically appealing, but I can't see how anyone would possibly think it was in keeping with the rest of the terrace either side, and have absolutely no idea how they got planning permission in such a strict conservation area.
- cygaril 7y ago
  Building regulations for student accommodation are less stringent than for regular housing, so possibly these designs wouldn't be allowed otherwise.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    I can see how that would be true for building regs (though not sure why - in general the standards for commercial buildings are higher, not lower, than those for residential buildings if anything in my limited experience). But isn't 'look' more a matter for planning permission/listing/conservation area rules? Why would those be any different? Speculating, perhaps this is more a case of large developers having the resources to get their schemes in front of higher level decision makers who are more able and willing to make exceptions?
LeanderK 7y ago
'Facadism' is also getting popular in germany and I think there are some really nice examples here. If done well, i think it really achieves the best of both worlds. The buildings fit in and preserve the atmosphere and character of the city while also being modern, livable and built for their real purpose on the inside. There are some examples where it's hard to tell that in fact only the facade survived and the entire back got replaced, others archive a good harmony between the old and the new. I think it's a great idea! But, as always, poor executions can always be found (some examples can be found in the article).
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  The buildings fit in and preserve the atmosphere and character of the city That's the questionable bit. I don't think they do, it's disjointed and jarring. It has all the hallmarks of design by committee for me - everyone gets their box ticked, but the overall picture is a shocking mess. But then this is all subjective, so I guess you can't please everyone.
  - LeanderK 7y ago
    > But then this is all subjective, so I guess you can't please everyone. Of course. To elaborate a bit on my thoughts: many cities have a distinct historical style reflecting the unique development of the city. If we replace every building that's unfit for purpose with an completely new building (i think) we will converge to an indifferent mess, where every city starts to look the same. The globalisation of architectural style, if you will. Preserving the facade means allowing some part of the history to continue and preserve a bit of the character of the neighbourhood. It's all generalised, of course. It doesn't always make sense, it doesn't always look good and it doesn't always preserve something in a meaningful sense. But there are quite a few examples here that I think are nicely done. Some executions are done in a styl where you don't even realise that only the facade is old and everything else got replaced! > I don't think they do, it's disjointed and jarring. This might be one of the things where we just disagree. I often really enjoy the contrast when of old vs new. There are some interesting buildings that playfully combine old structures with new. Not in the article though. But this contrast is not well received by everyone, here's an example that I think does this very well, but others hate it: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/dbxnyj/new_library_of_the_university_of_graz_austria/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/dbxnyj/new_library_...
altacc 7y ago
Some of these designs are great and others show the laziness and focus on cost-cutting in much of modern architecture. Just putting a new building behind an old facade is not architecture, it's copy and pasting. The true architects are those who manage to reuse the facade and fuse new and old into something that blends and flows together.
- afarrell 7y ago
  When I think about the delays to Crossrail, I feel compelled to defend laziness, copy and pasting, and focus on cost-cutting. It was originally scheduled to open in 2018[1] and is now not going to be finished until well into 2021. Why? A large part of that is the work they need to do in order to "manage to reuse the facade and fuse new and old into something that blends and flows together"[2] [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50345344 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50345344 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qi046Xn6lA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qi046Xn6lA
kome 7y ago
This is horrible. Those photos are pure examples of architectural laziness. There were so many ways to integrate those facades in a real modern building - instead of keeping them outside as a pointless wall, prone to degradation. At this point it would have been better to destroy everything. Mixing old and new is an art... you need harmony between the two. And this harmony is missing in those pics. Perhaps in other countries they are better at it (italy? france? hungary?)
lordnacho 7y ago
Classic: http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses-at-23-and-24-leinster-gardens-bayswater-london-w2/ http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses-at-23-and-24-lei... That one at least keeps the houses looking similar. For a lot of the ones in the article I don't see how you are keeping thing aesthetically similar when you put a huge monster building behind the facade.
King-Aaron 7y ago
This is big in Western Australia, where a lot of our heritage buildings have had their facades kept in place. Makes for a wonderful aesthetic. https://freoview.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/fantastic-fremantle-facades/ https://freoview.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/fantastic-fremantl...
esotericn 7y ago
I used to live in a Victorian townhouse made of 4 flats. Opposite, inbetween some terraces, I suspect as a result of WW2 bombing, was a council block. 5 floors in the same space as the 4. So it goes.
hotz 7y ago
That's just retarded.
nness 7y ago
Context which might be missing is that the buildings shown here are some grade of "listed buildings," where demolition prohibited under law for cultural or historical reasons. Whilst some of these examples are particularly ugly, it strikes an interesting balance between maintaining the historically important aspects of the building, whilst modernizing it (or at worst, preventing a safety risk). What's fascinating is when the aesthetics of the past don't align with the economics or building regulations today. Large windows and high-ceilings are both energy in-efficient and waste a lot of potential square-metreage.
galfarragem 7y ago
Most times 'facadism' is not an architectural choice, is the only way to get a permit to renovate a building. In case of doubt, 'gatekeepers' will always leave it as it is. And 'facadism' is not that new. In some English cities, around 1800, it was common to get a land plot with an already built facade. It worked fairly well as a way to keep unity while allowing fragmented private iniciative.
jalla 7y ago
In Norway, the government protects heritage building's facade but allows for the internals to be rebuilt to modern standards. Sometimes this makes sense as the old buildings were extraordinarily energy inefficient and preservation rules make it near impossible to insulate using modern materials. Some buildings are uninhabitable or cannot meet modern standards for environmental control yet are protected from demolition for historic reasons. Unfortunately, the loop holes are exploited to the maximum, making a mockery of culture heritage preservation intentions. The government is responsible for many of the re-development decisions, causing the arbitrariness of architectural styles in some parts of the cities. We've seen several buildings, in choice locations, be destroyed by "accidental" fires because of cultural heritage preservation rules.
- andrewjrhill 7y ago
  I live in Oslo and I am genuinely shocked at the quality of construction here - so many corners are cut it is insane. They are not cheap either - we're talking 15k to 25k NOK per month. My offices are in a beautiful modern well known office district / tourist hotspot and just yesterday one of the doorframes fell off the wall in the kitchen. My own apartment is 90sqm, modern and in a well known central "expensive" part of town, was built only a few years ago, and the floor is so noticeably slanted that my bedroom cupboard door will slide open on its own from time to time. The floorboards (whilst stunning) feel like they are built on-top of roots and boulders - the cement was clearly not levelled properly before the boards were placed. I put a level on the kitchen counter and the bubble is obviously not centered. On more than one occasion I have viewed apartments in Oslo where the master bedroom is so small that the property owners have to put a door on either side of the bed so you don't have to step over the bed to get out of the room. These apartments were also in the 20k NOK range. 1 in 10 apartments have ceiling lights. Apparently Norwegians really like standing lamps?
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    I have no ceiling lights in my house except for the kitchen and bathroom. Free standing lights give me a lot more flexibility and a powerful uplighter gives much better shadowless light than any ceiling light I have ever had. I don't live in Oslo though, I don't think I could afford it. And though I work for StatNett at the moment I work remotely and only have to go in once a week or so for meetings so I don't have to deal with rush hour trains every day. But if you can put up with commuting you can find much cheaper, much bigger, places to live within quite easy commuting distance of Oslo.
VBprogrammer 7y ago
I wonder how much the difficulty in bringing these building up to modern standards plays into these decisions. Over the years these building would have been fitted with a variety of different heating systems; perhaps starting with open hearth fires when they were built with large brick chimney stacks to provide thermal mass. Over the years they probably got coal gas put in, or perhaps a back boiler hot water system operating on a thermal syphon, eventually being replaced by an early gas or oil boiler central boiler. Each of these steps leaves another complex layer of hacks, fixes and dead pipes behind making it a long and challenging job to strip out and replace. Similarly, when built it probably had no electrical supply at all, eventually being attached to the grid and wired with mineral insulated cable and re-wirable fuses. Over the years electricians have probably updated bits of this leaving old wires in place behind walls and ceilings. Then you have the walls which would initially be lath and lime based plasters, with horse hair for strength and arsenic to stop the rats eating it. As these buildings got more sealed up, windows improved and fireplaces boarded up the condition of the plaster deteriorated. In places the plaster is patched with modern gypsum based plasters which aren't really compatible with the naturally porous building materials. Even if all that is fixed and updated there is little or no insulation in the construction of the building. Adding it internally can cause issues with condensation buildup in the fabric of the building and is all but impossible to achieve without fairly large cold bridges due to the existing construction. Adding it externally can't be done without significantly altering the appearance of the building. If that is all dealt with you probably have accessibility issues with steps and narrow door ways. Possibly fire safety issues etc.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Thank you for a well-informed comment that points out that old buildings are at best a labrynthine nightmare of hacks and at worst a potential death trap. Too few people moaning about what's happening to these buildings are willing to pony up the cash to actually pay for it. Tell me, if _you_ had the choice between paying 500k for a new, insulated, safe, building or 500k + much higher insurance for an old, cold, dirty, impossible to work on building, which would you pick? The former, of course, which is why "protecting" a building is basically stealing a home from its owners (and why old listed structures can be a dirt cheap adventure if you like a challenge) I own and live in a protected structure (thatched cottage in Ireland). Here's some of the issues. 1) The previous owner had "protection" foisted on them against their will. This made their house and its land (aka "curtilage" basically worthless. I paid next to nothing for it. 2) It's massively inefficient, and I need (difficult to get) planning permission to upgrade the heating system. Imagine needing planning permission to replace your boiler with a heat pump!!! I may be able to do a wood pellet stove, but would really prefer heat pump (0 carbon). Right now it's an ancient POS oil stove (looks neat, though I've grown to loathe it) - bit like http://www.handfenterprises.ie/products/details/wellstood-two-oven/28 http://www.handfenterprises.ie/products/details/wellstood-tw... . I also am forbidden from using double-glazed windows, etc. 3) In the most technical, literal reading of the law, I literally cannot hang a picture on the wall without planning permission (using a nail or drilling a hole alters the original material, after all!) - of course nobody does this, so instead everybody just has to guess what their council's particular heritage officer cares about (some are damn-near gestapo like) and hope they don't find themselves on their bad side. 3) I am not allowed to add windows or make them bigger. This is a problem because only one of the windows is big enough to crawl out of, and there is one door. In a fire we may well die 4) Not ONLY do I have to keep a "plaything for the rich" thatched roof, I have to keep it _specifically_ in oaten straw, a material that decays quickly. It's about 20k for a roof on this tiny, ~550 square foot house that will last, oh, 10 or 15 years. Thatch offers literally no advantage whatsoever over a modern roof. At one time, it was what you used if you were poor and couldn't afford anything else, because straw was a waste material, but now with combine harvesters instead of traditional threshing and short-straw oat varieties you can't use straw from normal oats, so you specifically grow oats to make straw for roofs. In the UK I understand water reed is more commonly allowed, and it can last several decades, but Ireland forbids it (in the midlands at lest). 5) House insurance is about 5X as expensive as it would be. I knew all of these things before I bought the house, which is how I have a place on a few acres a 15 minute bike ride through a nature preserve from a train station rthat has commuter service to Dublin for under €70,000, but the ONLY way this place makes sense is because I have an assumed resale value of 0 and can pretty much toss it in the bin and still come out ahead compared to paying rent. For the previous owner, "protection" was a complete disaster. Sadly the only reason it got protected was because the last owner was too poor to upgrade it before the law changed, and they could've benefited most of all from increasing home values.
DocG 7y ago
Oh my god these are ugly. I expected samples how new is incorporated into old but this free standing facade is just plain ugly. Most of the houses seem to be built so at X moment they can just tear the facade down, because it now looks ugly. I personally would prefer incorporating new with old. Keep the old facade, but it should be part of the house and working with the overall architecture.
- rurounijones 7y ago
  Thes "spotted dog" pub one looked interesting to me and quite nice in a mix of old-new but it follows on to what you said about incorporated vs the freestanding pointless stuff that doesnt match up and has a gap to the new building. It looks horrendous.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  This surprised me too. Toronto does a lot of integration with older buildings. People like it—at least better than just demolishing some beautiful or historic architecture. That’s what I expected until the first photograph.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    I hate the new trend of preserving tacky neon signs. The Sam The Record Man sign is just ugly. So was the Honest Eds sign (although that one is a bit nicer).
- jotm 7y ago
  Same thing is happening in other cities, btw. Always thought it looks ridiculous.
inception44 7y ago
I thought 'Faragism' is in the rise.
djohnston 7y ago
The spotted dog is the best example imo. Seems like they thoughtfully integrated old with new. But wtf is that atrocity on calendonian road?
jlarcombe 7y ago
That one on Stamford Street was there for decades as a very grand frontage to a car park! It was quite weird walking past it. The new building behind it doesn't 'work' with it at all, really.
senectus1 7y ago
Seen this a lot in Perth Western Australia in the last 10 years or so.
lelima 7y ago
I live in Dublin and they do similar things but I haven't seen buildings not aligned like Thomas Lloyd is pub's in the article. Sometimes can be pleasing entering an "old facade" but inside everything is brand new and modern.
vearwhershuh 7y ago
Well, I suppose it is slightly better than just bulldozing everything. At least it gives the public some vague sense of what it was like when architecture wasn't adversarial.
Tade0 7y ago
And I thought "eggshelling" (removing and rebuilding from scratch the insides of a building) we had in Warsaw was bad. To think it never occurred to anybody in the decision chain that this might be a bad idea.
jccalhoun 7y ago
I"m assuming that they need to keep the facade because of historic value or something but why not attach it to the new building? Some are saying it is laziness but it seems like it would take a lot of work to make sure this freestanding wall is structurally sound. Not to mention all the extra work having to clean two walls instead of just one (I guess it would actually be 3 different surfaces, the front and back of the facade and the front of the new building). Of course, the architect won't be the one cleaning it... So are they like this because someone thinks this looks good???
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  Most of the time they do tbf, but these are mostly very bad examples.
rhplus 7y ago
For any non-Brits looking for a glimpse into the (multi-million pound) challenges of converting London buildings into modern homes, check out Grand Designs: https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755 https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755 The Kennington water-tower conversion is a nice example (S10,E5).
SwellJoe 7y ago
Most of these are trash. I like old buildings, a lot, and I also understand that growth requires new construction sometimes replace old buildings, but this is kind of the worst possible outcome. It still destroys the old building, and puts an incoherent one in its place. Some mergers of old and new are interesting and cohesive, but it seems like there isn't even an attempt to make them work together in a lot of cases.
warrenmiller 7y ago
You can blame Prince Charles for this
kylehotchkiss 7y ago
Yerevan, Armenia really loves this style of building too
darksaints 7y ago
Outside of the most well-executed instances, facadism does one of two things. It either highlights how terrible the new building behind it is, or it highlights how terrible the old facade is in front of the new building. I think the true legacy of Facadism will be that it illuminates the ridiculousness of indiscriminate preservationism, much in the same way that Brutalism and International Style illuminated the ridiculousness of trend chasing. You can take any survey of the most beautiful cities in the world and they will all have something in common: they were beautiful long before urban planning, historical preservation committees, or design review boards existed. Their beauty is of one of evolution...the slow process of tearing old ugly things down and building new things in their place, some of which may also be ugly, but others which will become iconic to the point where nobody wants to tear them down. Democratic ideals shoved into beautification and preservation processes will only ever result in the preservation of things that shouldn't be preserved, and the construction of the lowest common denominator of putrid architecture.
auiya 7y ago
Many of these examples seem dangerous, like a place for water inclusion and freezing/melting and rot. The examples where the buildings tie together well aren't so bad. But the ones where the windows don't even line up?! Throw that builder in the sea.

136 points by ZeljkoS 7y ago

mcv 7y ago

We've got some buildings like this in Amsterdam too. Sometimes it's done really well, and I'm happy they managed to preserve a beautiful ancient facade while updating the insides to modern standards for non-collapsing structures. And sometimes it's an atrocity.

rekabis 7y ago

This is… _sad_. I mean, if there is no other choice because restoration of the building is no longer technically feasible, fine. But just to throw up something bigger and newer? For shame.

iguy 7y ago
But you assume the alternative is to keep the whole building. If the alternative is to keep nothing, then this is great. (Although some of the examples work better than others, of course.) Much of the feeling of the streets is about the first few stories of the buildings facing them. And big new buildings tend to be terrible at this, and are widely hated for it. Better to have strange hybrids than a whole city frozen in time by preservation.
Symbiote 7y ago
I can't believe they build new buildings behind the façade where the windows don't line up. London's bigger problem is the shoddy quality (at all stages) of new construction, in the unbound race for profit.
- kiney 7y ago
  > I can't believe they build new buildings behind the façade where the windows don't line up. That surprised me also. Here (germany) we got the trend of "facadism" too. But usually they try to properly integrate the old facade with the new structure.
- myspy 7y ago
  Looks pretty awful. I see a lot of old buildings that can be modernized and saved but the costs are probably higher. Extending the old building with new constructions can definitely be done better than this. At least make use of all outer walls and the roof.
- eru 7y ago
  The race for profit is pretty malleable. Just set up the taxes and other incentives right, and people will do the right thing for profit.
  - afarrell 7y ago
    Taxes, incentives, and regulations don't directly achieve the goal. If the real goal is a shift in company cultures across an industry, then there also needs to be well-informed communication. Incentive structures can be part of that communication[1]. But people don't obey incentives unless they keep those incentives in conscious thought. If incentives were all it took for organisations to pay the cost of changing priorities, then there would have been no value in naming a bug "Heartbleed". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teach-the-oss-community-about-marketing/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...
    - eru 7y ago
      Who says incentives have to be purely monetary?
      - afarrell 7y ago
        Not me
  - sideshowb 7y ago
    Or they might judge that it's more profitable to lobby against the incentives.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I have the impression at this point that it is "Spite House" style Mallicious Compliance from owners fed up with trying to actually use the building for something useful and facing all of those constraints so they make it functional and in the laws while ugly as possible in protest to discourage future meddling.

grzte 7y ago

If these are the worst examples they can find in the entire city of London, I'd say things are not going so bad.

eru 7y ago
Indeed. The topic itself is fascinating, but it doesn't seem like much too complain about. The ugly part is when they don't line up the windows. Otherwise, it's fine.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  There's also at least a potential aesthetic problem where the new building behind the facade is taller than the facade, especially if it extends above by a significant amount. That's very common indeed.
  - eru 7y ago
    I'm happy with that look. If you can't hide the change perfectly, I'd rather the building be honest and blatant about being a hybrid. But I can see how tastes differ.
    - tomatocracy 7y ago
      It varies in how well it’s done - much as with windows, some are very sympathetic and others not. It’s also particularly noticeable for people who occupy higher floors in other nearby buildings and I’m not sure this is often considered in the planning process.
Jaruzel 7y ago
There are many good examples across the whole of London, but those don't make for interesting news copy.
- isthisnametaken 7y ago
  Even 10 Downing Street was essentially flattened in the 1960s and rebuilt as a new building behind the facade of the original.

beaner 7y ago

I actually appreciate this. Glass and steel are nice from a distance, but when's the last time on the sidewalk you actually took a pause and leaned on one for a break? These new textures are cold and distant, pristine and fragile. You're not supposed to touch them. Concrete, stone and brick are the opposite. They're timeless and welcoming. You can touch them without having to worry about leaving a print. They feel like they take care of you, rather than the other way around. And aesthetically, IMO, there's nothing more incredibly boring than just sheets of untouchable glass straight down the street. There's no texture and no character. A good compromise is to allow the warmer facades of old buildings to continue to exist, and leave the new ones to the skyline, so long as they continue to be isolating.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
I'd rather they put in a building that actually uses the facade they sit behind, in keeping with the architecture they supposedly want to preserve. The examples where it's just a wall with new style building sat behind look awful, and the windows don't even line up - so probably very inconsistent light, times of deep shadow and limited views from inside. Looks more like the sort of thing your neighbour might do if they were a builder and you'd really upset them. :)
- netcan 7y ago
  Like most architecture, there are good and bad examples. Planning/regulation can't really do much about the subjective, and the nature of these tends to make permissions a central player. "Facadism" is becoming a "best practice" compromise between preservation, modernity, commercials & such. The danger there is box ticking tokenism and the ugly architecture that comes from that. Some bad architecture will always exist regardless but a lot of the bad examples in this style come from this "designed for planners" tokenism.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Can you provide a single good example? Every example I know of is bad for building occupants and looks terrible at street level.

twelvechairs 7y ago

Images 2 and 4 are the worst - where they are trying to squeeze an extra floor in so the new facade windows dont align with the old facade windows. Images 6 and 7 are postmodern additions - maybe its not your style but they aren't without architectural thought The others are all standalone facades unclear what their final outcome will be. Perhaps they were never of a good standard, were beyond repair at the time or were taken away during construction. In any case just keeping the facade is probably better than 50 years ago when theyd just demolish the whole thing.

molteanu 7y ago
I wouldn't want to live on the 1st floor in that 6th building , though.
altacc 7y ago
The mismatch in floor heights is something I also find jarring. The changes in standards mean that floor heights are reducing, leading to this. It'd have cost them more to build matching floor heights and they might have had to have one storey less to get planning permission. Something similar happened near where I lived in London. Developers got permission to build an apartment block on condition that it looked the same as its older neighbour. The result was an odd looking mini version, about 2 metres shorter than the original.
- mcv 7y ago
  For #2 and #4 it's not just the floor height, it's that they built a new building while pretending the old facade wasn't there. It's just a random wall standing in front of a completely unrelated building.
beardyw 7y ago
From the street, number 6 (Stamford Street) looks worse than the photo. To me it looks a bit like how I imagine a Las Vegas hotel. Whatever the building had before is lost anyway.

m-i-l 7y ago

The ones where the old and new windows don't line up always seem a bit dumb. Must be a horrible experience for the people inside the new buildings, looking out of their windows onto a brick wall a few centimeters away. Both cited examples of this (Artillery Lane and Caledonian Road) are student accommodation, so I wonder if building at ultra-low cost has something to do with it. Many of the others I don't have a particular problem with to be honest. There's actually one (not cited in the article) on the adjacent street to where I live, but they're building the new house to match up with the old facade so the nice Victorian era terrace isn't really disturbed. I'd much rather that than what they've done on another adjacent street - some overseas developer has bought one in the middle of a row of identical terraces, torn it down, built an iceberg basement, and a big new "modern" building that looms threateningly over the other buildings in the street like a largely windowless slaughterhouse with odd disproportionately large misshapen windows in improbable locations. I don't want to sound like Prince Charles with his "monstrous carbuncles", and I accept that perhaps there may be some people that somehow find that sort of "modern" building somehow aesthetically appealing, but I can't see how anyone would possibly think it was in keeping with the rest of the terrace either side, and have absolutely no idea how they got planning permission in such a strict conservation area.

cygaril 7y ago
Building regulations for student accommodation are less stringent than for regular housing, so possibly these designs wouldn't be allowed otherwise.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  I can see how that would be true for building regs (though not sure why - in general the standards for commercial buildings are higher, not lower, than those for residential buildings if anything in my limited experience). But isn't 'look' more a matter for planning permission/listing/conservation area rules? Why would those be any different? Speculating, perhaps this is more a case of large developers having the resources to get their schemes in front of higher level decision makers who are more able and willing to make exceptions?

LeanderK 7y ago

'Facadism' is also getting popular in germany and I think there are some really nice examples here. If done well, i think it really achieves the best of both worlds. The buildings fit in and preserve the atmosphere and character of the city while also being modern, livable and built for their real purpose on the inside. There are some examples where it's hard to tell that in fact only the facade survived and the entire back got replaced, others archive a good harmony between the old and the new. I think it's a great idea! But, as always, poor executions can always be found (some examples can be found in the article).

cs02rm0 7y ago
The buildings fit in and preserve the atmosphere and character of the city That's the questionable bit. I don't think they do, it's disjointed and jarring. It has all the hallmarks of design by committee for me - everyone gets their box ticked, but the overall picture is a shocking mess. But then this is all subjective, so I guess you can't please everyone.
- LeanderK 7y ago
  > But then this is all subjective, so I guess you can't please everyone. Of course. To elaborate a bit on my thoughts: many cities have a distinct historical style reflecting the unique development of the city. If we replace every building that's unfit for purpose with an completely new building (i think) we will converge to an indifferent mess, where every city starts to look the same. The globalisation of architectural style, if you will. Preserving the facade means allowing some part of the history to continue and preserve a bit of the character of the neighbourhood. It's all generalised, of course. It doesn't always make sense, it doesn't always look good and it doesn't always preserve something in a meaningful sense. But there are quite a few examples here that I think are nicely done. Some executions are done in a styl where you don't even realise that only the facade is old and everything else got replaced! > I don't think they do, it's disjointed and jarring. This might be one of the things where we just disagree. I often really enjoy the contrast when of old vs new. There are some interesting buildings that playfully combine old structures with new. Not in the article though. But this contrast is not well received by everyone, here's an example that I think does this very well, but others hate it: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/dbxnyj/new_library_of_the_university_of_graz_austria/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/dbxnyj/new_library_...

altacc 7y ago

Some of these designs are great and others show the laziness and focus on cost-cutting in much of modern architecture. Just putting a new building behind an old facade is not architecture, it's copy and pasting. The true architects are those who manage to reuse the facade and fuse new and old into something that blends and flows together.

afarrell 7y ago
When I think about the delays to Crossrail, I feel compelled to defend laziness, copy and pasting, and focus on cost-cutting. It was originally scheduled to open in 2018[1] and is now not going to be finished until well into 2021. Why? A large part of that is the work they need to do in order to "manage to reuse the facade and fuse new and old into something that blends and flows together"[2] [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50345344 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50345344 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qi046Xn6lA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qi046Xn6lA

kome 7y ago

This is horrible. Those photos are pure examples of architectural laziness. There were so many ways to integrate those facades in a real modern building - instead of keeping them outside as a pointless wall, prone to degradation. At this point it would have been better to destroy everything. Mixing old and new is an art... you need harmony between the two. And this harmony is missing in those pics. Perhaps in other countries they are better at it (italy? france? hungary?)

lordnacho 7y ago

Classic: http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses-at-23-and-24-leinster-gardens-bayswater-london-w2/ http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses-at-23-and-24-lei... That one at least keeps the houses looking similar. For a lot of the ones in the article I don't see how you are keeping thing aesthetically similar when you put a huge monster building behind the facade.

King-Aaron 7y ago

This is big in Western Australia, where a lot of our heritage buildings have had their facades kept in place. Makes for a wonderful aesthetic. https://freoview.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/fantastic-fremantle-facades/ https://freoview.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/fantastic-fremantl...

esotericn 7y ago

I used to live in a Victorian townhouse made of 4 flats. Opposite, inbetween some terraces, I suspect as a result of WW2 bombing, was a council block. 5 floors in the same space as the 4. So it goes.

hotz 7y ago

That's just retarded.

nness 7y ago

Context which might be missing is that the buildings shown here are some grade of "listed buildings," where demolition prohibited under law for cultural or historical reasons. Whilst some of these examples are particularly ugly, it strikes an interesting balance between maintaining the historically important aspects of the building, whilst modernizing it (or at worst, preventing a safety risk). What's fascinating is when the aesthetics of the past don't align with the economics or building regulations today. Large windows and high-ceilings are both energy in-efficient and waste a lot of potential square-metreage.

galfarragem 7y ago

Most times 'facadism' is not an architectural choice, is the only way to get a permit to renovate a building. In case of doubt, 'gatekeepers' will always leave it as it is. And 'facadism' is not that new. In some English cities, around 1800, it was common to get a land plot with an already built facade. It worked fairly well as a way to keep unity while allowing fragmented private iniciative.

jalla 7y ago

In Norway, the government protects heritage building's facade but allows for the internals to be rebuilt to modern standards. Sometimes this makes sense as the old buildings were extraordinarily energy inefficient and preservation rules make it near impossible to insulate using modern materials. Some buildings are uninhabitable or cannot meet modern standards for environmental control yet are protected from demolition for historic reasons. Unfortunately, the loop holes are exploited to the maximum, making a mockery of culture heritage preservation intentions. The government is responsible for many of the re-development decisions, causing the arbitrariness of architectural styles in some parts of the cities. We've seen several buildings, in choice locations, be destroyed by "accidental" fires because of cultural heritage preservation rules.

andrewjrhill 7y ago
I live in Oslo and I am genuinely shocked at the quality of construction here - so many corners are cut it is insane. They are not cheap either - we're talking 15k to 25k NOK per month. My offices are in a beautiful modern well known office district / tourist hotspot and just yesterday one of the doorframes fell off the wall in the kitchen. My own apartment is 90sqm, modern and in a well known central "expensive" part of town, was built only a few years ago, and the floor is so noticeably slanted that my bedroom cupboard door will slide open on its own from time to time. The floorboards (whilst stunning) feel like they are built on-top of roots and boulders - the cement was clearly not levelled properly before the boards were placed. I put a level on the kitchen counter and the bubble is obviously not centered. On more than one occasion I have viewed apartments in Oslo where the master bedroom is so small that the property owners have to put a door on either side of the bed so you don't have to step over the bed to get out of the room. These apartments were also in the 20k NOK range. 1 in 10 apartments have ceiling lights. Apparently Norwegians really like standing lamps?
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  I have no ceiling lights in my house except for the kitchen and bathroom. Free standing lights give me a lot more flexibility and a powerful uplighter gives much better shadowless light than any ceiling light I have ever had. I don't live in Oslo though, I don't think I could afford it. And though I work for StatNett at the moment I work remotely and only have to go in once a week or so for meetings so I don't have to deal with rush hour trains every day. But if you can put up with commuting you can find much cheaper, much bigger, places to live within quite easy commuting distance of Oslo.

VBprogrammer 7y ago

I wonder how much the difficulty in bringing these building up to modern standards plays into these decisions. Over the years these building would have been fitted with a variety of different heating systems; perhaps starting with open hearth fires when they were built with large brick chimney stacks to provide thermal mass. Over the years they probably got coal gas put in, or perhaps a back boiler hot water system operating on a thermal syphon, eventually being replaced by an early gas or oil boiler central boiler. Each of these steps leaves another complex layer of hacks, fixes and dead pipes behind making it a long and challenging job to strip out and replace. Similarly, when built it probably had no electrical supply at all, eventually being attached to the grid and wired with mineral insulated cable and re-wirable fuses. Over the years electricians have probably updated bits of this leaving old wires in place behind walls and ceilings. Then you have the walls which would initially be lath and lime based plasters, with horse hair for strength and arsenic to stop the rats eating it. As these buildings got more sealed up, windows improved and fireplaces boarded up the condition of the plaster deteriorated. In places the plaster is patched with modern gypsum based plasters which aren't really compatible with the naturally porous building materials. Even if all that is fixed and updated there is little or no insulation in the construction of the building. Adding it internally can cause issues with condensation buildup in the fabric of the building and is all but impossible to achieve without fairly large cold bridges due to the existing construction. Adding it externally can't be done without significantly altering the appearance of the building. If that is all dealt with you probably have accessibility issues with steps and narrow door ways. Possibly fire safety issues etc.

CalRobert 7y ago
Thank you for a well-informed comment that points out that old buildings are at best a labrynthine nightmare of hacks and at worst a potential death trap. Too few people moaning about what's happening to these buildings are willing to pony up the cash to actually pay for it. Tell me, if _you_ had the choice between paying 500k for a new, insulated, safe, building or 500k + much higher insurance for an old, cold, dirty, impossible to work on building, which would you pick? The former, of course, which is why "protecting" a building is basically stealing a home from its owners (and why old listed structures can be a dirt cheap adventure if you like a challenge) I own and live in a protected structure (thatched cottage in Ireland). Here's some of the issues. 1) The previous owner had "protection" foisted on them against their will. This made their house and its land (aka "curtilage" basically worthless. I paid next to nothing for it. 2) It's massively inefficient, and I need (difficult to get) planning permission to upgrade the heating system. Imagine needing planning permission to replace your boiler with a heat pump!!! I may be able to do a wood pellet stove, but would really prefer heat pump (0 carbon). Right now it's an ancient POS oil stove (looks neat, though I've grown to loathe it) - bit like http://www.handfenterprises.ie/products/details/wellstood-two-oven/28 http://www.handfenterprises.ie/products/details/wellstood-tw... . I also am forbidden from using double-glazed windows, etc. 3) In the most technical, literal reading of the law, I literally cannot hang a picture on the wall without planning permission (using a nail or drilling a hole alters the original material, after all!) - of course nobody does this, so instead everybody just has to guess what their council's particular heritage officer cares about (some are damn-near gestapo like) and hope they don't find themselves on their bad side. 3) I am not allowed to add windows or make them bigger. This is a problem because only one of the windows is big enough to crawl out of, and there is one door. In a fire we may well die 4) Not ONLY do I have to keep a "plaything for the rich" thatched roof, I have to keep it _specifically_ in oaten straw, a material that decays quickly. It's about 20k for a roof on this tiny, ~550 square foot house that will last, oh, 10 or 15 years. Thatch offers literally no advantage whatsoever over a modern roof. At one time, it was what you used if you were poor and couldn't afford anything else, because straw was a waste material, but now with combine harvesters instead of traditional threshing and short-straw oat varieties you can't use straw from normal oats, so you specifically grow oats to make straw for roofs. In the UK I understand water reed is more commonly allowed, and it can last several decades, but Ireland forbids it (in the midlands at lest). 5) House insurance is about 5X as expensive as it would be. I knew all of these things before I bought the house, which is how I have a place on a few acres a 15 minute bike ride through a nature preserve from a train station rthat has commuter service to Dublin for under €70,000, but the ONLY way this place makes sense is because I have an assumed resale value of 0 and can pretty much toss it in the bin and still come out ahead compared to paying rent. For the previous owner, "protection" was a complete disaster. Sadly the only reason it got protected was because the last owner was too poor to upgrade it before the law changed, and they could've benefited most of all from increasing home values.

DocG 7y ago

Oh my god these are ugly. I expected samples how new is incorporated into old but this free standing facade is just plain ugly. Most of the houses seem to be built so at X moment they can just tear the facade down, because it now looks ugly. I personally would prefer incorporating new with old. Keep the old facade, but it should be part of the house and working with the overall architecture.

rurounijones 7y ago
Thes "spotted dog" pub one looked interesting to me and quite nice in a mix of old-new but it follows on to what you said about incorporated vs the freestanding pointless stuff that doesnt match up and has a gap to the new building. It looks horrendous.
52-6F-62 7y ago
This surprised me too. Toronto does a lot of integration with older buildings. People like it—at least better than just demolishing some beautiful or historic architecture. That’s what I expected until the first photograph.
- jdsully 7y ago
  I hate the new trend of preserving tacky neon signs. The Sam The Record Man sign is just ugly. So was the Honest Eds sign (although that one is a bit nicer).
jotm 7y ago
Same thing is happening in other cities, btw. Always thought it looks ridiculous.

inception44 7y ago

I thought 'Faragism' is in the rise.

djohnston 7y ago

The spotted dog is the best example imo. Seems like they thoughtfully integrated old with new. But wtf is that atrocity on calendonian road?

jlarcombe 7y ago

That one on Stamford Street was there for decades as a very grand frontage to a car park! It was quite weird walking past it. The new building behind it doesn't 'work' with it at all, really.

senectus1 7y ago

Seen this a lot in Perth Western Australia in the last 10 years or so.

lelima 7y ago

I live in Dublin and they do similar things but I haven't seen buildings not aligned like Thomas Lloyd is pub's in the article. Sometimes can be pleasing entering an "old facade" but inside everything is brand new and modern.

vearwhershuh 7y ago

Well, I suppose it is slightly better than just bulldozing everything. At least it gives the public some vague sense of what it was like when architecture wasn't adversarial.

Tade0 7y ago

And I thought "eggshelling" (removing and rebuilding from scratch the insides of a building) we had in Warsaw was bad. To think it never occurred to anybody in the decision chain that this might be a bad idea.

jccalhoun 7y ago

I"m assuming that they need to keep the facade because of historic value or something but why not attach it to the new building? Some are saying it is laziness but it seems like it would take a lot of work to make sure this freestanding wall is structurally sound. Not to mention all the extra work having to clean two walls instead of just one (I guess it would actually be 3 different surfaces, the front and back of the facade and the front of the new building). Of course, the architect won't be the one cleaning it... So are they like this because someone thinks this looks good???

Mindwipe 7y ago
Most of the time they do tbf, but these are mostly very bad examples.

rhplus 7y ago

For any non-Brits looking for a glimpse into the (multi-million pound) challenges of converting London buildings into modern homes, check out Grand Designs: https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755 https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755 The Kennington water-tower conversion is a nice example (S10,E5).

SwellJoe 7y ago

Most of these are trash. I like old buildings, a lot, and I also understand that growth requires new construction sometimes replace old buildings, but this is kind of the worst possible outcome. It still destroys the old building, and puts an incoherent one in its place. Some mergers of old and new are interesting and cohesive, but it seems like there isn't even an attempt to make them work together in a lot of cases.

warrenmiller 7y ago

You can blame Prince Charles for this

kylehotchkiss 7y ago

Yerevan, Armenia really loves this style of building too

darksaints 7y ago

Outside of the most well-executed instances, facadism does one of two things. It either highlights how terrible the new building behind it is, or it highlights how terrible the old facade is in front of the new building. I think the true legacy of Facadism will be that it illuminates the ridiculousness of indiscriminate preservationism, much in the same way that Brutalism and International Style illuminated the ridiculousness of trend chasing. You can take any survey of the most beautiful cities in the world and they will all have something in common: they were beautiful long before urban planning, historical preservation committees, or design review boards existed. Their beauty is of one of evolution...the slow process of tearing old ugly things down and building new things in their place, some of which may also be ugly, but others which will become iconic to the point where nobody wants to tear them down. Democratic ideals shoved into beautification and preservation processes will only ever result in the preservation of things that shouldn't be preserved, and the construction of the lowest common denominator of putrid architecture.

auiya 7y ago

Many of these examples seem dangerous, like a place for water inclusion and freezing/melting and rot. The examples where the buildings tie together well aren't so bad. But the ones where the windows don't even line up?! Throw that builder in the sea.