Part of a series of monographs produced by Solidspace, this brochure illustrates our development at Stapleton Hall Road designed by Stephen Taylor Architects and completed in 2014.
The publication is entitled Underneath the arches, I dream my dreams away and is envisaged as a catalogue for an artwork for living in. The monograph includes a foreword by architectural critic, Stephen Bayley. An extract…
“On an awkward and impossibly asymmetric corner site with a Piranesian railway bridge overcome by creeper to one side and a sloping red-bricked suburban avenue with gravity-drawn buses scarily descending to the other, Roger Zogolovitch’s Solidspace has built a show-piece. The houses are brick with stone-dressing and neither obviously new nor notably antiquarian in aspect. They fit in, but not in a craven, head-doffing way. They look both old established and newly arrived which is just as it should be.
But the talking-point here is not the street face, but the heart. It is difficult to define excellence in architecture, but easy for a building’s cardiologist to detect it. Some buildings immediately change your mood, for good or for bad. Some buildings alter a sense of what’s possible, making you sigh involuntarily when you step inside. Some buildings make you optimistic while others drain your enthusiasm. The Solidspace houses make you feel, as you progress up a surprising number flights of stairs, through unusual light-drenched spaces onto floors you had not imagined: “I’d like to spend a little more time here”. Turn a corner and you are surprised. A small footprint in N4 is promoted to heroic stature by punctuated levels. That may sound pompous, but only if you have never visited.”
Photography by David Grandorge, Max Creasy and Dominic French and the monograph is designed by Abrahams.