No_4_December_1962 — Page 72

COMMONWEALTH IN

A 'big top' in Londo

HERE to begin in describing this great tent which encloses the taut skeleton of structural bones. flying staircases and floating shelves housing the administration and ac- tivities of the Commonwealth In- stitute in Kensington London?

From Kensington High Street the hall is first seen like the big top of

View in the exhibition hall showing roof detail.

TH

a circus through a thin veil of trees. The frontage is 125 feet wide and lies completely open to the road. At the rear of the deep. paved fore- court, planted with flagpoles bearing the standards of the Commonwealth. a raised pool forms a barrier be fore the wide lawn sweeping back to the walls of the building. The main pedestrian approach skirts the eastern edge of the rising site. along. side a stepped canal with weirs fed from a pool beneath the entrance bridge. Cars drive in on the west side to a separate entrance.

TENTED ROOF

The building comprises a domin- ant square set diamondwise deep in- to a long rectangle. The roof is in the form of a huge tent. supported internally solely by two slender piers of concrete and externally by two flying buttresses of concret: which descend to the ground some 30 feet from the walls.

The copper roofed tent rises to two peaks with a saddle between them: one of these peaks is seen from the forecourt and it sweep- down to a brim which flies away upwards and backwards upon each side of a centre point over the hut

tress.

Hung from this brim is a visor of aluminium framing filled with blue translucent glass (a bad colom. incidentally), shielding the exhibition platforms inside. The visor deeply overhangs the purple brick walls of the ground loor and the whole re- calls the gigantic mystical helmet which Horace Walpole's hero Man-

fred found

one morning in the courtyard of the Castle of Otranto. The present edifice, however. far from raising the romantic associa- tions of that horrific novel is never- theless a design which can truly bei described as "exciting."

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