The Rise of 'Facadism' in London

Concrete, stone and brick are the opposite. They're timeless and welcoming. You can touch them without having to worry about leaving a print. They feel like they take care of you, rather than the other way around.

And aesthetically, IMO, there's nothing more incredibly boring than just sheets of untouchable glass straight down the street. There's no texture and no character.

A good compromise is to allow the warmer facades of old buildings to continue to exist, and leave the new ones to the skyline, so long as they continue to be isolating.

Each of these steps leaves another complex layer of hacks, fixes and dead pipes behind making it a long and challenging job to strip out and replace.

Similarly, when built it probably had no electrical supply at all, eventually being attached to the grid and wired with mineral insulated cable and re-wirable fuses. Over the years electricians have probably updated bits of this leaving old wires in place behind walls and ceilings.

Then you have the walls which would initially be lath and lime based plasters, with horse hair for strength and arsenic to stop the rats eating it. As these buildings got more sealed up, windows improved and fireplaces boarded up the condition of the plaster deteriorated. In places the plaster is patched with modern gypsum based plasters which aren't really compatible with the naturally porous building materials.

Even if all that is fixed and updated there is little or no insulation in the construction of the building. Adding it internally can cause issues with condensation buildup in the fabric of the building and is all but impossible to achieve without fairly large cold bridges due to the existing construction. Adding it externally can't be done without significantly altering the appearance of the building.

If that is all dealt with you probably have accessibility issues with steps and narrow door ways. Possibly fire safety issues etc.

Many of the others I don't have a particular problem with to be honest. There's actually one (not cited in the article) on the adjacent street to where I live, but they're building the new house to match up with the old facade so the nice Victorian era terrace isn't really disturbed. I'd much rather that than what they've done on another adjacent street - some overseas developer has bought one in the middle of a row of identical terraces, torn it down, built an iceberg basement, and a big new "modern" building that looms threateningly over the other buildings in the street like a largely windowless slaughterhouse with odd disproportionately large misshapen windows in improbable locations. I don't want to sound like Prince Charles with his "monstrous carbuncles", and I accept that perhaps there may be some people that somehow find that sort of "modern" building somehow aesthetically appealing, but I can't see how anyone would possibly think it was in keeping with the rest of the terrace either side, and have absolutely no idea how they got planning permission in such a strict conservation area.

http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses-at-23-and-24-lei...

That one at least keeps the houses looking similar. For a lot of the ones in the article I don't see how you are keeping thing aesthetically similar when you put a huge monster building behind the facade.

Sometimes this makes sense as the old buildings were extraordinarily energy inefficient and preservation rules make it near impossible to insulate using modern materials. Some buildings are uninhabitable or cannot meet modern standards for environmental control yet are protected from demolition for historic reasons.

Unfortunately, the loop holes are exploited to the maximum, making a mockery of culture heritage preservation intentions. The government is responsible for many of the re-development decisions, causing the arbitrariness of architectural styles in some parts of the cities.

We've seen several buildings, in choice locations, be destroyed by "accidental" fires because of cultural heritage preservation rules.

At this point it would have been better to destroy everything.

Mixing old and new is an art... you need harmony between the two. And this harmony is missing in those pics. Perhaps in other countries they are better at it (italy? france? hungary?)

Sometimes can be pleasing entering an "old facade" but inside everything is brand new and modern.

I expected samples how new is incorporated into old but this free standing facade is just plain ugly. Most of the houses seem to be built so at X moment they can just tear the facade down, because it now looks ugly.

I personally would prefer incorporating new with old. Keep the old facade, but it should be part of the house and working with the overall architecture.

You can take any survey of the most beautiful cities in the world and they will all have something in common: they were beautiful long before urban planning, historical preservation committees, or design review boards existed. Their beauty is of one of evolution...the slow process of tearing old ugly things down and building new things in their place, some of which may also be ugly, but others which will become iconic to the point where nobody wants to tear them down. Democratic ideals shoved into beautification and preservation processes will only ever result in the preservation of things that shouldn't be preserved, and the construction of the lowest common denominator of putrid architecture.

Images 6 and 7 are postmodern additions - maybe its not your style but they aren't without architectural thought

The others are all standalone facades unclear what their final outcome will be. Perhaps they were never of a good standard, were beyond repair at the time or were taken away during construction. In any case just keeping the facade is probably better than 50 years ago when theyd just demolish the whole thing.

Whilst some of these examples are particularly ugly, it strikes an interesting balance between maintaining the historically important aspects of the building, whilst modernizing it (or at worst, preventing a safety risk).

What's fascinating is when the aesthetics of the past don't align with the economics or building regulations today. Large windows and high-ceilings are both energy in-efficient and waste a lot of potential square-metreage.

So are they like this because someone thinks this looks good???

And 'facadism' is not that new. In some English cities, around 1800, it was common to get a land plot with an already built facade. It worked fairly well as a way to keep unity while allowing fragmented private iniciative.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755

The Kennington water-tower conversion is a nice example (S10,E5).

To think it never occurred to anybody in the decision chain that this might be a bad idea.

Opposite, inbetween some terraces, I suspect as a result of WW2 bombing, was a council block. 5 floors in the same space as the 4.

So it goes.

At least it gives the public some vague sense of what it was like when architecture wasn't adversarial.

I like old buildings, a lot, and I also understand that growth requires new construction sometimes replace old buildings, but this is kind of the worst possible outcome. It still destroys the old building, and puts an incoherent one in its place. Some mergers of old and new are interesting and cohesive, but it seems like there isn't even an attempt to make them work together in a lot of cases.