Viewpoints – Placecloud (English)

London, United Kingdom. The Bull and Mouth was an important coaching inn in the 17th through 19th century. This viewpoint focuses on the inn's importance to the growth of 17th-century London Quakerism.

London, United Kingdom. In the 17th century, the Perwich school was one of the biggest and most renowned girls' schools in the London area and the country. The school taught girls from middling and elite families how to be accomplished and successful wives, mothers, and women in their own right.

London, United Kingdom. This viewpoint focusses on a toilet tower (a series of bathrooms stacked in the shape of a helix), built as part of scheme to transform four Victorian terraced houses into student housing in Paddington, London, in the late-1960s. More specifically, how architects Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell promoted plastics in architecture on aesthetic grounds in a way which has ultimately proved to be unsustainable.

London, United Kingdom. In this viewpoint, I tell the story of Terry Farrell & Partners' TV-AM building (1981-83), a maverick television studios near Camden Lock. The TV-AM building, which - as the name suggests - was home to one Britain's first breakfast television programmes, is associated with the architectural style of postmodernism and with colour in architecture and interior design. The building was substantially refurbished by architects Jacobs Webber in 2012-13 and is now home to Viacom International.

London, United Kingdom. The Barbican Redevelopment Scheme, comprising the Barbican Estate, Barbican Arts Centre and the office buildings around London Wall and Moorgate, is well known to people with an affection for twentieth-century architecture, and has become major cultural centre in its own right. Nevertheless, very few people are aware of how a type of plastic manufactured in rural Kent quietly revolutionised the design and construction of modern office building, in particular the curtain-walling systems that enabled open-plan offices. In the first of two viewpoints on the New Barbican, Alexander Davidson tells a story encompassing two office buildings built as part of the Barbican Redevelopment Scheme – Lee House and St Alphage House - and how the plastic Holoplast was manufactured, used in construction, and eventually came to be demonised by the City of London Corporation.

London, United Kingdom. The Barbican Redevelopment Scheme, comprising the Barbican Estate, Barbican Arts Centre and the office buildings around London Wall and Moorgate, is well known to people with an affection for twentieth-century architecture, and has become major cultural centre in its own right. Nevertheless, very few people are aware of how a type of plastic manufactured in rural Kent quietly revolutionised the design and construction of modern office building, in particular the curtain-walling systems that enabled open-plan offices. In the second of two viewpoints on the New Barbican, Alexander Davidson tells a story encompassing two office buildings built as part of the Barbican Redevelopment Scheme – Lee House and St Alphage House - and how the plastic Holoplast was manufactured, used in construction, and eventually came to be demonised by the City of London Corporation.

London, United Kingdom. This viewpoint focusses on a futuristic vision for plastics in architecture and interior design: Alison and Peter Smithson‘s House of the Future, which was shown at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show at the London Olympia Exhibition Centre in 1956. The exhibition structure, containing everything from chairs made of fibreglass to bedding fashioned out of Nylon, popularised an aesthetic for the materials’ use in architectural and visual design which has lasted until the present day.

London, United Kingdom. The viewpoint deals with four Greater London Council housing blocks - two in Tower Hamlets and a second pair in Westminster, where the architects employed an experimental plastics building system in their design and construction. More latterly, the buildings were involved in the "Homes for Votes" scandal in the 1980s, which has received renewed attention in the light of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Headley, United Kingdom. This viewpoint deals with BedZED, the most notable mixed-use sustainable community to be developed in London over the last twenty years. Develped by Bioregional and the Peabody Trust to designs by Bill Dunster Architects, BedZED was subject to significant media attention upon its completion in 2002 and no shortage of controversy. In this viewpoint, I argue that rather than being seen as good or bad, the scheme should be seen as an indication of how much our expectations regarding sustainabilty have changed over the last two decades.

London, United Kingdom. In this viewpoint, I tell the story of the BBC's headquarters, its design by Val Myer and FJ Watson Hart and its magnificent recording studios. The story features angry local residents, neo-Art Deco facades, and a type of early plastic made of formaldehyde resin.