The Modern Home
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The New B.B.C.
WE stretch the limits of the " Modern Horne " to the utmost this week in order to include a consideration of the building which is henceforth to supply it with radio "—the neW Broadcasting House in Portland Place. Most readers will by now be familiar, if only through the Press, With the external appearance of the great pile which has recently loomed up at the end of Portland Place. It has been fatuously likened to a battleship—and, like a battleship, its front door is difficult to find. For myself, I could never decide whether the main entrance was that which faced Regent Street or the smaller but more generously embalconied portal on the west front. I know now that the former has it.
Regarded as architecture, the best that can be said of the building is that it is less fussily pseudo-classic than its deplorable neighbours in the new Regent Street. It is, at least, moderately restful. Beyond that one can say little. And .'et consider the chance that has been missed. Here was a site that might have inspired even a plumber, a site whose grand curve would seem almost to have forced beauty on any building planned for it. The building itself was to he the headquarters and expression of the newest art of mankind. Surely in contemplation of all that broadcasting means and may come to mean to the world there was inspira- tion enough to call up- something great ! And from all this we get a building which, shorn of its two aerial-towers, might well be a Bloomsbury hostel for students, so far as the outside serves to show. One would have liked to see Broadcasting House the result of a competition for which all our best and most vital architects would have entered, men who would have been moved by the opportunity before them.
The interior is less obviously disappointing. , It is largely the work of engineers who found most of their problems stated clearly, and so were able to solve them in a satisfactory manner. Where architecture stepped in the results are less happy. Incomparably the most beautiful sight in the building is the Control Room, a well-lit, L-shaped room on the eighth floor. where two rows of six and eight control-desks and uncounted racks of amplifiers, switch-boards, testing-equipment and the like are 'arranged with no thought beyond that of efficiency ; probably the ugliest is the Concert Hall, which, striving for effect, lacks a restful surface anywhere and possesses an organ-grille that would be more fittingly housed in a not-too- modern cinema. In making this comparison I am not being arty nor " modernist " : it is my honest belief that almost anyone; however unused to switch-boards, would find a beauty in the Contrial Room lacking iri the other place.
The general plan of the building, being dictated by practical requirements, appears good. The studios, twenty-two in number, were a primary consideration. They are housed in a central tower, built of brick to avoid the transmission of sound along a steel framework. Around this is the stone-faced shell containing offices for seven hundred and fifty persons. Long corridors run between the offices and the tower, which is thus further protected from noise. One result of this plan is that almost the whole of the tower has to be artificially ventilated and lit, and the various problems arising appear to have been most satisfactorily solved. I cannot speak so surely of the office accommodation. The few offices which I saw seemed small for the number of occupants, and not par- ticularly well equipped. The corridors should have bee" naturally lighted through from the offices, instead of whirl' they are punctuated by imitation windoWs (complete with bars !) on the inner wall, and streaked with hundreds of yards of frieze lighting ineptly imitating the section of the conduit boxing along the frieze opposite. Among the work of those responsible for the decoration of the studios that of Mr. Wells Coates stands out sharply by reason of its complete sanity and restraint. One could wish that the whole of Broadcasting House were more strongly marked by the same qualities.
G. M. BOUMPHREY.
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