Originally Posted by
Peter McGurk
The architects for Wellington Business Park were DLA from Manchester. DLA have completed many buildings with much design merit.
Industrial/Commercial buildings of this type have been honed and refined for decades. The brief would have been very tight indeed without much room, or call for, architectural expression.
It's a light industrial park offering cost-effective space to get business going in the area. Architecture with a capital A here just wouldn't work - in fact, would put some tenants off.
Buildings must do a job. Sometimes part of that job is to look exceptional or even just good. Sometimes not. This building has a good BREEAM rating (is energy efficient) and no doubt performs on many other levels.
I'm sure DLA did a good job to meet the brief - anything else and they may have been called for messing about instead of getting the job done.
Sometimes you can't win. Other times you must lose.
---------- Post added at 02:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:44 PM ----------
Very little modern housing has an architect within a hundred miles of them. More's the pity.
As construction prices have increased, so houses have got ever smaller to stay even vaguely affordable. The Parker Morris standards were meant to be a minimum not a guide. Now they've been dropped, they're an aspiration.
On the plus side they're warmer and cost less to run but in the old days you'd just put a jumper on, so...
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