Thursday, January 28, 2010

Nelson's Car Park


Via @mondoagogo's twitter feed, I came across this fabulous image of Trafalgar Square re-imagined as a multi-storey car park. The image is from the 1938 Bressey Report* which proposed re-designing London as a city of the car. It's easy to laugh at these images now, seeing them only as acts of deluded, if comical, folly. But there's something bracing about such un-misty eyed brutalism, even when executed in a charmingly un-progressive 1930's draughting style.

Beats the 4th Plinth anyway.

Read and see more here.....

* Correction. The drawings are from a 1938 edition of the London Illustrated News which speculated on the implications of the 1937 Bressey Report.

3 comments:

Lang Rabbie said...

Except of course that the image isn't from Bressey's report - it is from a creative interpretation of his plans by the Illustrated London News looking at applying American traffic engineering to London.

Sir Charles himself can be seen presenting his plans in this GPO film unit short but under the current BFI licensing it is only available to user with access from an education location:

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/999708/index.html

Rebecca Pasternack said...

Do these drawings remind anyone of the black and white hand-drawings in Delirious New York? They're the same sorts of suggestions proposed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (not 100% sure that's the name of the 1930s traffic engineer I am thinking of), which involve elevated highways just for cars, widening of streets, removal of all pedestrians from streets, placement of pedestrians on second level walkways, bridges between buildings, etc.

shailena said...

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appreciated by everyone.
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johndouglas

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