It was a heroic effort, yet Croft failed to say why we should be fighting to protect key Seifert buildings now under threat. It’s as if the most resolute of officers had made it through enemy lines to rally the troops, only to offer a few observations and anecdotes.
Seifert himself was an officer in the British Army in India, and was known as Colonel Seifert. Croft drew heavily on the British Library’s sound archive of Seifert interviewed in 1996, five years before his death, painting an intriguing picture of the man. She brought us nuggets such as his feigning of amoebic dysentery to get out of the army so he could design a factory, his first post-war commission. She correctly identified his remarkable mastery of planning regulations that enabled him to push through schemes like Centre Point. Seifert later said he ‘absorbed’ the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, in part by meeting and probing Lord Silkin, the minister who introduced it. Croft also highlighted the swashbuckling developers of the time, quoting from Terence Kelly’s 1965 fictional book The Developers to suggest something of their god-like power.
Centre Point was infamous in the 60s because developer Harry Hyams left it empty for a decade, not because of Seifert’s architecture. On the question of whether Seifert or partner George Marsh designed it, Croft seems to lean towards Marsh. That’s a tricky question, but my own research indicates that Seifert himself conceived the concrete T-sections which are the basis for its revolutionary load-bearing and visually mesmerising facades.
While she praised some aspects of Seifert design – the ‘dinosaur leg’ piloti, for example – and even mentioned Niemeyer as someone to compare him with, she didn’t convey why Seifert buildings could astonish. The answer is simple: almost all commercial architecture of the time was bland rectilinear variations on the glass-and-spandrel curtain wall and/or the tower-and-podium formula, but Seifert buildings where sculptural, expressionist, and had experimental facades that defied convention. They were each unique and often quintessentially Swinging London. Seifert and Marsh delivered magic elsewhere, such as the flowing, wavy facade of Manchester’s Gateway House or the inflected slab of Birmingham’s Alpha Tower. Admittedly, the practice delivered dubious work as well, such as the Penta Hotel or Glasgow’s Anderson Centre.
The Twentieth Century Society defines its mission as ‘campaigning for twentieth century architecture’ and they have a fantastic record of doing exactly that, with many buildings now listed as a result of their painstaking work. But Croft identified not one amongst many Seifert works currently under threat. We have already lost the sublime Draper’s Garden (Blueprint September 2006) and New London Bridge House towers. King’s Reach Tower is about to be obliterated by a Make-designed make-over. (I praised the transformation plans in my 2006 book London High, something I now regret). Now, the International Press Centre looks like a goner.
A survey of remaining Seifert works and listing recommendations are urgently needed. Croft had a platform to say so, and missed the opportunity. That’s more than a technical glitch.
Reputations Reassessed: Catherine Croft on Richard Seifert
21 March 2012
Twentieth Century Society, The Gallery, Cowcross Street, London
Herbert Wright
