RIBA, London
Dodging railway lines, squeezed into historic sites, or down a Highland lane… how building design responds to constraints, on projects from the British Library to the Eden Project, makes for a fascinating exhibition
There’s a concrete building on the right, as you head into London Euston station by train, that’s brooding, impressive in an almost-Roman way, and a bit mysterious. Its upper levels jetty towards the tracks, as if they were the outside of a stadium, but it’s also as long and insistent as a viaduct. This is, it turns out, the back of the Alexandra Road estate, the celebrated 1970s housing project by Neave Brown and the London Borough of Camden. The big, sheltering rear wall allows a peaceful and sociable gently curving street, overlooked by stepped-back terraces of homes, to be created within the development.
This structure grows out of the difficulties of building next to a mainline railway – the need to screen noise; the constructional demands of inserting foundations next to working tracks – and transforms them into something mighty and memorable. It may not have been strictly necessary to deal with such issues with so much spectacle. Something more calm and sensible might have been possible. But then architects do like to make drama out of a constraint.
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