Issue 11
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
BOOK REVIEW
November 25, 2024
A Mind-Body Experience of Architecture, Delivered in a Photo
by Marianela D’Aprile
13
PERSPECTIVE
November 18, 2024
Seeing Chinatown as a Readymade
by Philip Poon
13
PEOPLE
November 11, 2024
The Place of the Handmade Artifact in a Tech-Obsessed Era
by Anne Quito
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 4, 2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
October 21, 2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
October 7, 2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 23, 2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 9, 2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 26, 2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 19, 2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
August 12, 2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
August 5, 2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
July 29, 2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
July 22, 2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
July 15, 2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
June 24, 2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
June 17, 2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
June 3, 2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 28, 2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 13, 2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 6, 2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
April 29, 2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
April 22, 2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
April 8, 2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
April 1, 2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
March 25, 2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
March 11, 2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
March 4, 2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 26, 2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 19, 2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 12, 2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 5, 2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 22, 2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 16, 2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
January 8, 2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
December 18, 2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
December 11, 2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
December 4, 2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 27, 2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
November 6, 2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
October 30, 2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
October 23, 2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
October 16, 2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
October 9, 2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
October 2, 2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
September 24, 2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
September 18, 2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
September 11, 2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
September 5, 2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
August 28, 2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
August 21, 2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
August 14, 2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
August 7, 2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
July 31, 2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
July 24, 2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
July 17, 2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
July 10, 2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
June 26, 2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
June 19, 2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
June 12, 2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
June 5, 2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 30, 2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 21, 2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 8, 2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
May 1, 2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
April 24, 2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
April 17, 2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
April 10, 2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
April 3, 2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
March 27, 2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
March 20, 2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
March 13, 2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
March 6, 2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 7, 2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
February 20, 2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
February 13, 2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
February 7, 2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
February 13, 2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 27, 2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
February 7, 2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
February 7, 2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 7, 2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
URBANISM
06.24.2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished

In Britain’s Birmingham, a development-at-all-costs approach destroys the very structures that might help the city make better decisions about its future.

Close up of Birmingham's Ringway Centre façade in 2016
The façade of the Ringway Centre, in 2016. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)


Smallbrook Queensway is a boulevard in the center of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, located just around the corner from New Street railway station, one of the United Kingdom’s busiest. It is a spectacular piece of urban scenery—strongly modernist, sleek, and dramatic—an effect created by a huge but low-rise building called the Ringway Centre, designed in 1962 by architect James Roberts and later deemed, by the Birmingham Pevsner architectural guide, as “the best piece of mid-20th-century urban design in the city.”

Curved, the building swoops suddenly downhill, with a sculptural concrete surface of louvers and abstract reliefs, giving it the effect of go-faster stripes. It ends in a two-level underpass and two high-rise public housing blocks, also by Roberts, with the tight streets of Chinatown just behind. Now vacant and condemned, it remains an unusual structure and the epitome of “carchitecture,” designed to make for an equally pleasurable experience whether walking or driving by.

The Ringway Centre is slated for demolition—it’ll be replaced by giant glass, mixed-use towers—as are many of central Birmingham’s modernist structures, from the 1950s to the 1970s, that signal a time when the city took risks to transform itself into a futuristic, multilevel metropolis. Today, the city’s reputation, locally and globally, is one of chaos. Due to some bizarre misunderstandings over a highly publicized (and substantially manufactured) schools scandal, Birmingham is often considered abroad as a no-go area for non-Muslims, a notion most locals find hilariously inaccurate. Within Britain, where I live, it has become known for a descent into a financial crisis, caused by 15 years of austerity enforced by the central government, and the council’s drastically mismanaged transition to a new computer system, making the city effectively bankrupt.

It is a city in trouble, and the solution to save it—a development-at-all-costs approach to the urban landscape—is appalling. When I visit, three or four times a year, any compelling building I find will likely have fallen into dereliction or erased the next time I stop by. Cheap, nasty, and above all, facile, new construction is perhaps best symbolized by the nearby New Street station, a flashy superstructure designed to hide a bunker-like 1960s building. It is little more than a giant billboard concealing a sagging tent, a failed shopping mall, and a baffling system of circulation.

As a result, conservation and enthusiasm for modern architecture have often merged here in unexpected ways, as campaigners struggle to save the aggressive concrete edifices that replaced Victorian townscapes 60 years ago. This past February and last year, on the two occasions the city council met to vote on demolishing the Ringway Centre, they were surprised to find large crowds outside, demanding the retention of the sort of lumbering, carbon-intensive, car-centric building that conservationists typically oppose.

Underlying their position is a counterintuitive view of urban development: For the campaigners, the path to revitalization isn’t knocking everything down and starting over again. It’s about identifying and preserving the best of what’s already there, and using that knowledge to inform the improvements that happen next.

Wide exterior shot of the Ringway Centre, a large curved building in Birmingham, in 2017
The Ringway Centre, in 2017. (Photo: Elliott Brown)


One person at the heart of the campaign to save Birmingham’s Brutalist architecture is Mary Keating. When I spoke to her, she was just back from giving a courier an application for judicial review of the council’s narrowly approved decision to demolish the Ringway Centre.

A co-founder of the Brutiful Birmingham action group, formed in 2015, her group’s articles, full of enthusiasm for mid-20th century buildings, regularly appear in the local newspaper and were collected into the 2022 book Birmingham: The Brutiful Years, illuminating the impacts of the area’s architecture on history and people’s lives.

Keating and her colleagues constantly point out the overlooked quality of detail in these structures: richly modeled concrete surfaces (like the strips and louvers on the Ringway Centre), mosaic panels (such as the artwork by John Piper on John Madin’s Chamber of Commerce building), or the ornate bronze doors at the entrance of the now-demolished National Westminster Bank. Far from inferior and interchangeable, buildings celebrated by the Brutiful campaigners demand public interaction as well as a closer look, and consider the pedestrian as much as the driver. In one of its rare successes, the group helped get the Hockley flyover underpass, a giant sculptural work by William Mitchell under an inner-city motorway interchange, added to the heritage list, saving it from threatened demolition.

But the Ringway campaign, Keating points out, seems to have little hope of saving the building on an appeal to aesthetics. Now, she says, “we’re only going on embodied carbon”—that is, on the destructive environmental impacts of destroying the building and pouring loads of concrete to build a new one. (Perplexingly, Birmingham has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions to zero by 2030.)

That’s not to say that Birmingham’s urban framework—with its lack of public transport, sprawling suburbs, and overdeveloped center—is all great. According to Andy Foster, an architectural historian and former Labour councilor in the city, Birmingham is “haunted” by the dream of becoming a “new Chicago.” It suburbanized early, shifting in the 1930s to a city that made cars, where workers drove cars, and where new housing was designed around cars. From then until the 1970s, its development was dominated by the city engineer Herbert Manzoni, who plowed multilane roads into and around its center and, unlike the more interventionist, socialist planners of the era, let the market do the rest.

One local writer, who did not want to be named, calls Manzoni a “pound shop Robert Moses,” and like Moses, Manzoni was not a qualified architect or planner, and never held elected office. The same writer told me that Birmingham’s obsession with America intersected with its inferiority complex vis-à-vis the well-preserved medieval towns that surround it—which explains why Birmingham’s city authorities often display indifference to its historic architecture that, whether Arts and Crafts (seen in its suburbs) or Brutalist, is often cranky and odd. Much of it is intriguing, but rarely is any of it pretty-pretty.

Today’s developers often target the few buildings of real quality from Manzoni’s era because of the lucrative sites on which they stand. They include several structures by architect John Madin, most prominently Pebble Mill, a modernist television production studio; the Post and Mail building, a Lever House–inspired glass tower that housed a local newspaper; the National Westminster Bank, an angular and powerful Brutalist skyscraper; and the Birmingham Central Library, a symbol of British Brutalism that was pulled down and replaced with a dull office block and a new library. (Immediately upon completion, it had to cut its opening hours to six hours a day due to the period’s austerity policy.) Most of these buildings were both international and local: confident, modern structures that housed institutions native to the city.

Parts of Birmingham’s urban environment symbolize another key aspect of its roller-coaster history. During much of the 20th century, under Conservative rule, the city had a deep pride in its legacy of pioneering municipal socialism, with its empire of publicly owned gas, water, transport, schools, college, parks, and housing systems. Public services, recalls Foster, were simply “what Birmingham did,” running itself as a progressive business in aid of its people. But the collapse of Birmingham’s industry in the 1980s, and the loss of skilled jobs that went with it, threw the city into a crisis from which it never quite recovered.

That focus on service briefly resurfaced. In the 1990s, Foster says, some efforts were made to break with the American model of road-centric development, and create a more European, walkable, democratic city center. Much of this, he says, is owed to one council leader, Labour’s Dick Knowles, who had a personal interest in architecture. (Birmingham city council is run by a cabinet system, in which 10 councilors effectively make the decisions for a city of a million people.) His work culminated in a new Victoria Square, a series of fountains, pools, and set pieces around its grand 19th-century civic buildings; and Brindleyplace, a series of mid-rise office buildings around canals, focused on a conserved Arts and Crafts school that was transformed into a home for the avant-garde Ikon Gallery. Manzoni’s inner-city motorways were progressively dismantled, piece by piece. But when the council shifted to the right, around 1999, Birmingham’s insensitive, growth-at-all-costs development approach abruptly returned.

Medium exterior shot of the Ringway Centre's fire escape in Birmingham
A Ringway Centre fire escape, in 2016. (Photo: Scott Macpherson)


If Birmingham Council once saw itself as a social resource, it now sees itself as a development agency, focused on steamrolling opponents as a means to bringing jobs and new construction to the city. Keating, of the Brutiful Birmingham group, concedes some of this: The city needs jobs and housing—though, she notes, the homes being built seldom serve those on Birmingham’s public-housing waiting list, instead catering largely to a transient student population.

She is aware that there’s an irony in fighting for the preservation of the remnants of the last time Birmingham destroyed and rebuilt itself. But for Keating, saving the Ringway Centre “is about a bigger issue”: the question of who the city is actually for. The Centre is a case study, she insists, and if the campaigners change its trajectory, they’ll prove that civic action actually makes a difference in Birmingham. A conscious choice on the part of Birmingham to stop the endless cycle of development at all costs can give it a chance to take a breather, and to consider how its buildings might best serve its residents.

What remains of Birmingham’s bold experimentation should be preserved on its own merits, like its tourist-oriented Jewellery Quarter, which contains 19th-century metalworking factories and workshops. Such artifacts can also be an index of tried, tested, and failed modes of city-building. Mitchell’s Hockley underpass, for instance, is a thrilling piece of art fused with car infrastructure, but it would be exceptionally unwise for a city to embark on anything similar now.

Birmingham, and other such places in peril, could become models for urban revitalization by interrogating existing structures and using them to propose new answers to the questions of the 2020s. What might a 1960s megastructure in the 20th century be used for, and by whom? Who ought to own and manage such buildings? What do you do with areas that have been turned over to people rather than cars, and how do you make them work for everyone? What happens to a city when growth no longer works?