Taste…

…it’s an individual thing. There’s a story in today’s Guardian about the design of a new town house that’s been built in Notting Hill. The story is very positive: "quite remarkable family house", "one of the finest new city homes to be found anywhere in the world", "a thing of architectural sorcery".

 

Intrigued, I did a Google, and found pictures of the house on the architect’s website. To my eyes it looks truly awful – like having to live in an inside version of London’s South Bank – all blank concrete and hard-faced steel. There’s also more whan a whiff of pretension about the description of the design process: "Our starting point was to represent the empty volume of the site as a three dimensional grid of voxel data points (3d pixels) each consisting of a range of varying attributes… a detailed environmental analysis for each individual voxel was carried out. This analysis produced a database of solar and daylight conditions throughout the year,taking into account weather patterns specific to London".

 

I assume the architect’s clients are delighted with the result. To me it looks as though they have just elected to live in a set of bare prison cells. Chacun à son goût.