GREEN, FREE & MODERN

aidan turner-bishop 

The Irish Free State began to rebuild war damage and to create a new identity; Dublin was emerging as a European capital. As in other new national capitals (Warsaw, Kaunas, Riga, Tallinn, Helsinki) in the 1920s, Modernism was the new architectural vocabulary. Small changes were first: pillar boxes were painted green, moderne concrete ‘TELEFON’ boxes appeared, elegant coins, designed by Percy Metcalfe, entered circulation, new stamps were issued...

 

BERLIN, CAPITAL..

Honor Gavin and Richard Martin

Between 1949 and 1990, while West German government business was shifted to Bonn, East Germany kept its capital in Berlin. The designs of this period – the clothes, the furniture, the compact Trabants – are now either ridiculed, museumed, or re-developed as commodities whose selling power is precisely their ridiculous or retro nature. If a company called Herpa has its way, the car that so many waited so long to get will eventually make a commercial comeback as the ‘hip and state-of-the-art’ automobile everyone would surely love to buy...

 

SCOTLAND'S UNITE

Clive B Fenton

A striking building in the Gorgie area of Edinburgh, known locally as“the Banana Flats” due to its narrow crescent plan, has the reputation of containing the warmest council-owned dwellings in the city. Completed in 1952, Westfield Court was the first twentieth century residential building in the city to rise above five storeys...

 

THE CONTINUATION OF WARSAW..

ben tallis

Appropriately sited on the corner of Aleja Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) and Nowy Swiat (New World St), a red-hued mosaic celebrates the heroic resistance of the doomed 1944 Warsaw Rising, while its accompanying inscription offers a post-war rallying cry of unity “Caly Narod Buduje Swoja Stolica” (The Whole Nation Builds Our Capital). The familiar narrative of a shattered nation pulling together to rebuild in the aftermath of Second World War destruction is particularly poignant in Poland, where one in five people were killed, and especially visible in Warsaw, where nearly ninety percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed...

 

ETERNAL CITY/MODERN CITY

1960, Fellini’s Rome and La Dolce Vita
Stephen Hale

Italy’s capital city was at the centre of the world’s attention in 1960. The country’s post-war economic miracle was finally bearing fruit for millions of previously impoverished peasants and industrial workers, the Olympics had been successfully held in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico. Fascism had been dead for a decade and a half, Italy in its own way - was now a functioning Republic and Rome was riding high on a wave of cultural optimism...

 

SHOOTING THE MOON 

Tom Brooks

The 1951 Festival of Britain was egalitarian, ambitious, modern. Its iconic architecture is well remembered for reflecting the social optimism of the post-war period (think the cigar-shaped, gravity-defying Skylon and the comforting, Britannia’s-umbrella Dome of Discovery). It's easy to forget that before the progressive, shiny nationhood of the Festival there had been real, noisy industry on London's South Bank...