No mo' PoMo

Please clean me, rather than knocking me down. Oh, too late. 

So, Birmingham's old Central Library is to be flattened this very January.  It's a real shame, because the inverted concrete ziggurat is a great bit of engineering, and because it's undeniably part of Birmingham's history - the ambitious, hopeful, car-centric rebuilding of the city after the War.  The library is just as much part of the city's fabric as safely-old bits of Victoriana, or the shiny-shiny new bits of post-Millennial reconstruction (like the pleasingly-blobular Selfridge's bit of the new Bull Ring, or the Cylon-chic chrome cladding on the new New Street station).

But Madin's library (which I've prattled about more here) is of an unhappy age, where its Modernity is still too jarring, but years of dirt and fumes and systematic abuse (like the cluster of crappy shops cluttering up the ground floor) had left it grimy and unwelcoming.  The Central Library had been made into an undeniably nasty place to be; but we shall miss the building in years to come.

Traumatic urban realm.

But, elsewhere, perhaps Brutalism is finally being rehabilitated from everyone's Least Favourite style, to something it's acceptable to appreciate.  The Beeb screened two Jonathan Meades documentaries on Brutalism, which were typically super and typically difficult. These documentaries were later shown in the Barbican's very own Brutalist cinema, which really is preaching to the converted. Impressively, Preston's concrete fantasy bus station was listed in November 2014, a curious success of sculptural awe over commercial gain.

So, gang, having warmed you up to the nearly-socially-acceptable delights of Modernist concrete, how's about we push the envelope a bit? At the risk of sounding like an unexpectedly sleazy turn to a suburban dinner party, how's about we all try a bit of the old, y'know, Post Modernism?

Let me broaden your mind, like a slightly over-generous glass of soave as poured by an eager and clearly sweating host, with what was Marco Polo House (1987).  You may have known this better as the QVC building, next to Battersea Park. It was by Ian Pollard, who I'd never heard of either. 

These photos of mine date from 2013.  Marco Polo House has since been knocked down and the now-muddy site will be filled by another lump of luxury flats within flobbing distance of the thousands of trains that daily thunder to and from London Victoria.  Such lucky residents-to-be, stroking their iPad Airs and rattling with delight in their Smeg-fridged studios (Unique Prime Opportunity Stunning Development Aspirational Living etc etc).  The block will be named Vista, a curious homage to Microsoft's least good C21 operating system.

In Pollard's building, vertical slices of black-glass Miesian minimalism were interspersed for no apparent reason with heavy slabs of banded travertine.  It looked like some fantastical Lego set, built for real for adults to play in. I'm surprised to see that marble apparently goes manky with age, foxing in the sunlight like a copy of the Beano on the back seat of a Ford Orion. 

The slim volume Postmodern Architecture in London also enjoyed Marco Polo House, noting that it 'is often regarded as the most vulgar building in London', and broadsiding it as having 'the design integrity of a car-showroom'.  But, perhaps perversely, I can see an integrity and coherence in that alternating façade.  The building is not pretending to be ancient.  But people do insist on liking that classical stuff - so, here it is, just as you wanted, with a bit of kitsch 80s pep to keep it lively.  If you squint, it looks a bit like ruins.  Yes, it'll date in precisely the same way that shoulder pads and big hair must do, but that is an inherent feature, not failure, of fashion. Would be have more integrity were it a full-on pretend Grecian temple plonked next to the train tracks?

Pollard also built an early Homebase, up on Warwick Road near Earl's Court, in '88.  Homebases are so often big sheds.  Like huge ringroad supermarkets, they often seek to disguise their warehouse proportions by affecting tiled roofs and little vernacular clocktowers, whispering reassuring messages about being 'in keeping' to dense middle-Englanders and they wheel their trolley back to the Volvo. It's technically impossible to look at Godalming's sort-of-quaint, sort-of-thatched Homebase without getting dewy-eyed and humming Jerusalem, like an aunt at Christmas after her third sherry.

Pollard's building, however, really is special stuff. 

Demarking the edge of the carpark, essentially a fence, is a colonnade of Egyptian columns.  It's unclear if this is borrowing from antiquity, or Temple Mills in Leeds.  Is it important to know which?

There are etchings and glyphs on the Homebase walls, some picked out in gold. 

One of the figures is, charmingly, sitting on the fire escape.  The sharp comic-book boundary with the banded stonework does not permit any pretence that this is any real Egyptian artefact, uncovered in a London carpark. Nope, this is unapologetically fake.  The Egyptian style was an unrealistic representation of the human form; this is an unrealistic representation of the Egyptian style.

When the Georgians and Victorians aped the forms of Greek or Gothic buildings, they did so in part because they felt those forms were the aesthetic zenith and, in some confused quasi-moral assertion, were how buildings ought to look.  Pollard here is borrowing the Egyptian style not because it's the best style ever, and not even because it best suits the demands of the 80s DIY-enthusiast.  Rather, because he can. Egypt in West London? Why not?

Which leads to the cheekiest bit of pillaging - this curvy glass undulation along the side.

Which, as of course you'll know, is nicked directly and completely from James Stirling's art gallery in Stuttgart.  Notice how Stirling's red fire alarm box has been acquired and transmuted into a terracotta snake for Pollard's version.

(Credit: http://presse.stuttgart-tourist.de).  

Again, why not?  On one side of the building, Egyptian art; on the other, art gallery.  We are used to architects stealing from the ancient past for their new buildings.  Pollard, with admirable honesty, steals from both his ancient forebears and his modern contemporaries.  Or, even, Post-Modern contemporaries.

Pollard's Homebase, gaudy as it is, has far more integrity than Quinlan Terry's waver-thin Georgian shams (such as Richmond Riverside, which was being built at the same time).  Pollard is faking it, proudly producing a collage of nonsense for West Londoners in need of some magnolia emulsion and rawl plugs. Which I prefer infinitely to the saccharine pillock-pleasing crap of HRH Chaz's Poundbury in Dorset.

It's one of the most delightful, weird buildings I know. But I'm afraid you can't go and look at this building, either.  It's gone.  To be replaced by, yup, more Luxury Premium Ideal Opportunity flats. London doesn't know it, and probably won't notice for a few decades, but it's much the poorer for the loss of these two whimsical bits of PoMo.