The Contemporary

My lovely friend S. always asks the right questions. So there was I, pontificating about modern architecture, when he challenged me to name five really good London buildings of the last five or ten years.

That's hard. So of course I cheated and pondered for a day or so, and this is my list:


I've started with the Shirley Sherwood botanical art gallery at Kew, which has featured on here before and is, I think most of us would agree, an exquisite Modernist jewel box. By Walters & Cohen it opened in 2008.

My next choice is, for me, bizarre -- who'd have thought I'd go for a Terry Farrell building (most of whose lumpen Po-Mo work I despise). But here it is, of all things the Home Office, from 2005:


Jack Straw may have been a shite Home Secretary but he could commission good architecture.

This next one is a bit of a curved ball: the graduate studies centre of Queen Mary Westfield.


Designed by Surface Architects as a pair with a delightful old lock-keeper's cottage in the vernacular, their modern sculpture is in sub-Gehry style but is delightful (just look at that diagonal slash of staircase):


This next building, the View Tube, has also appeared on here before -- by Urban Space Management it's a container structure designed as a viewing platform for the Stratford Olympic site:


Another structure from Kew (though this is probably cheating -- a bridge not being a building):


This is the Sackler Crossing, a delicate yet modern piece that is also like a sculpture -- utterly beautiful.


This in complete contrast is a lovely office block in the City, by Eric Parry Associates. I've got some interior shots of it somewhere but can't lay my hands on them at the moment. Sophisticated and civilised:


That had a fortune spent on it but, by contrast, this was dirt cheap -- waterside student housing for the University of East London:


And even cheaper, just a stone's throw away, is this rather nifty cycle rack -- who says cycle racks have to be utilitarian:


This next one is a cheat because I think the exterior of this building is very ordinary, but hidden in the basement is this exquisite concert hall:


That was Kings Place (and I find it insanely annoying that they deliberately miss out the apostrophe. Fuckers).

In the home stretch now and here's something unusual for London -- a grand public building in brick. It's UCL's School of Slavic and Eastern European Studies, by Short & Associates:


And I'm going to finish with another building that is more interior than exterior -- Canary Wharf Underground station:


By Foster, of course; there's something about this station that catches my breath every time I use it.

I'm rather pleased with that list though I suspect there's much on it that a lot of people would disagree with.

And I'm surprised how hard it was to come up with modern buildings that I truly liked.