Le Flâneur » Architecture http://www.le-flaneur.com Seeking out the Beautiful and the Monstrous... Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:04:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 #1 in an occasional series: Ugly Buildings of Birmingham http://www.le-flaneur.com/2010/01/26/1-in-an-occasional-series-ugly-buildings-of-birmingham/ http://www.le-flaneur.com/2010/01/26/1-in-an-occasional-series-ugly-buildings-of-birmingham/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:20:50 +0000 Chris http://www.le-flaneur.com/?p=255 I have to walk past this monstrosity to get to Saint Philips Cathedral in  the center of town.  I haven’t been able to ascertain the name of the building yet.  I’m not sure anyone would want to own up to it; it’s probably shared by a number of smallish financial services companies.  What you can’t tell from my pictures is that it sits next to an eight-lane motorway.  The image here is taken from an almost unbelievably bleak footbridge above said motorway.  A face-on view can be seen here.

What I am going to do with this series is avoid noting Birmingham’s obvious and controversial Brutalist structures, and instead point to the designs that somehow sneaked through without anyone really noticing yet nevertheless have a largely detrimental effect on the life of the average citizen,  the buildings that are so bad that we just try and ignore their existence.  I’ll try and get more details about this first one too.

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