This photograph depicts the cooling towers of Ironbrige B power station, which was designed to blend in with it’s surroundings:
Project architect Alan Clark worked closely with landscape architect Kenneth Booth, in order to ensure that the station merged as seamlessly as possible into its natural surroundings.[1] In this respect, the power station is unique amongst British coal-fired stations. When viewed from Ironbridge, the surroundings of the station are hidden by wooded hills. The cooling towers were deliberately constructed using concrete to which a red pigment had been added, to blend with the colour of the local soil. This had cost £11,000 in the 1960s. The towers cannot be seen at all from the world famous landmark, The Iron Bridge. The station’s single 205 m (673 ft) high chimney is fifth tallest chimney in the UK. It is the tallest structure in Shropshire, as well as being taller than Blackpool Tower and London’s BT Tower.[5]
The station’s turbine hall is decoratively clad in chipped granite faced concrete panels, aluminium sheeting, and glazing. The turbine hall obscures the rather more functional metal clad boiler house from view. A free-standing administration block continues the theme of concrete panelling, albeit with extensive use of large floor to ceiling windows.[1] Period fittings within the administration block include a board room, containing murals that reference the industries of the Ironbridge Gorge, and a grand entrance hall with a metallic mural.
So impressive were the measures taken to ensure that the power station was an asset to the gorge and not an eyesore, that it was short listed for a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors/The Times conservation award in 1973.[1]
Click here for a photograph that I took a few years ago that shows the complete power station from the other direction. I will let you judge for yourselves whether or not the architect achieved his aim in merging the structure into the surrounding landscape.
Tags: Architecture, Architecture 100, Buildwas, Buildwas Power Station, Cooling Towers, Heritage, Ironbridge Power Station, Shropshire
These photographs were taken in Dale End today…
Tags: Dale End, Ironbridge, Reflections, River, Shropshire, Water
Image from Wiki
ABC Brisbane reports that missing fragments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead have been discovered stored in a Queensland museum:
World-renowned Egyptologist Dr John Taylor was viewing the museum’s Egyptian collection when a name on a papyrus fragment caught his eye.
Dr Taylor is the curator of the British Museum’s mummy collection. The British Museum currently has a mummy exhibition on display at the Queensland Museum.
He was taken to the museum’s storeroom to see more and says what came next is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
“After a very short time it became apparent that we did indeed have many fragments of the Book of the Dead,” he said.
Dr Taylor says the rare specimens belonged to a high priest of the Temple of Amun, around 3,400 years ago.
“This is not the papyrus of just anybody, this is one of the top officials from Egypt at the peak of ancient Egypt’s prosperity,” he said.
“So it is a significant find, and if we can reconstruct the whole document that’s going to tell us a lot.
Tags: Archaeology, Book, Egypt, Egyptian Book of the Dead, History
From the St Paul’s Cathedral website:
The present St Paul’s is the fifth cathedral to have stood on the site since 604, and was built between 1675 and 1710, after its predecessor was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. This was the first cathedral to be built after the English Reformation in the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII removed the Church of England from the jurisdiction of the Pope and the Crown took control of the Church’s life.
The architect of St Paul’s, Sir Christopher Wren, was an extraordinary figure. Although he is now best known as an architect, he was also an astronomer, scientist and mathematician.
Wren was a founder member in 1660 of the Royal Society, a national academy for science, but he was also a man of profound Christian faith. He came from a family of clergy who had been loyal to the Royalist cause during the Civil War, and it was faith that inspired his though. ‘Architecture’, he once explained, ‘aims at eternity.’
As an architect favoured by royalty and state, Wren’s commissions varied wildly. They included the Greenwich Observatory and Greenwich Hospital, and extensive work at Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace, as well as some magnificent building in Oxford, where he studied and worked as Professor of Astronomy from 1661 to 1673.
Tags: Architecture, Architecture 100, London, Sir Christopher Wren, St Paul's Cathedral
