Coventry Civic Centre 2, St Michael's, Coventry

Summary

An office and studio block, built for the Architecture and Town Planning Department of Coventry City Council in 1957-1959 to the designs of George Sealey working under the city architect, Arthur Ling.

Description

MATERIALS: reinforced concrete frame. The northern block has curtain walling with an aluminium frame and stainless steel cladding. The roofing is flat and felted.

PLAN: the northern range has two tall storeys of studio space with an open ground floor, supported on pilotis, which provides a walkway for pedestrians and an entrance to the central courtyard. The sole interruption to this open ground floor space is a rectangular room with glass walls and doors which forms an exhibition space in which plans, drawings and models of new developments in the city could be shown to the public. The building had adaptable office divisions, with the northern block shown as capable of being entirely open or else divided by de-mountable divisions in the Architects' Journal (AJ) on April 13 1961 (see SOURCES). The building is joined to the medieval basement on the site of the Old Star Inn, which is listed at Grade II* and which was adapted to form the department bar.

EXTERIOR: the northern block exhibition room at ground floor level has glazed walls with sheets of plate glass butted at the corners. Mullions are of aluminium and stainless steel. Glass doors at the east and west ends have their original furniture and are acid etched with the word ‘ARCHITECTURE’. The pilotis which rise through the building are exposed at ground floor level and clad with mosaic tiles. They divide the north range into eight bays. The curtain walling of the upper studio floors has spandrel panels of milky glass and plain glass above. Stainless steel sheeting forms a frame to the sides of the block with fascia panels along the top of the wall. CC2 is joined to the Civic Centre 3 building (CC3) of 1974-1976 at its north-western corner. The former western end wall of CC2, which has a patterned surface that reflects the internal space, is believed to be still in situ. The courtyard was landscaped at the time of the building of CC2. The sloping site was levelled by the building of retaining walls along the southern and the eastern sides. The eastern retaining wall has panels of different bricks which have contemporary labels indicating their type and origin. The flat surface of the courtyard is divided into rectangular panels with borders formed by granite setts and was used as a test bed or sample board for different types of paving which could be read from the studio block to the north. A rectangular reflecting pool was dug on the east side and a smaller, circular pool with fountain was placed at the south-west corner, both of which featured later sculpture.

INTERIOR: the ground floor exhibition room has its original hardwood floor with sunken mat trays by the doors. Pillars at each corner of the space are copper-clad. Ceilings are coffered at the east end and a suspended ceiling has been inserted at the west. The original staircase at the east end is still in situ, but has been encased. This extends up through the studio block and its north wall is covered with samples of coloured and patterned tiles as a sample board which can be viewed on different floors. A tile near to the centre of the wall reads ‘CARTER TILES / by / COVENTRY TILE CO. LTD. / Edmund Road, Coventry’. Metal balusters and the hardwood handrail of the staircase are original as they are on the staircase at the junction between the north and east blocks. Suspended ceilings have been fitted throughout most of the building.

Persuant to s1 (5A) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 (‘the Act’) it is declared that the block to the east of the courtyard, which runs north-south, is not of special architectural or historic interest, with the exception of the 'Medieval Basement on site of Old Star Inn', which is separately listed at Grade II*.

History

The city of Coventry became a centre for engineering at the start of the C20, particularly motor car manufacture. Many of the most notable English car makers had their base in the city. This rapid influx to the centre of a medieval city with a pattern of narrow streets caused problems and the city engineer, Ernest Ford built a southern bypass and laid out Corporation Street and Trinity Street near the centre in the 1930s. Plans for rebuilding the area around the cathedral to form a civic centre were revealed in an exhibition, ‘Coventry of Tomorrow’ of 1939-1940, but the major air raid of 14 November 1940 destroyed large areas of the commercial centre of the city and led to a more comprehensive assessment and plan for the city’s future requirements. The city architect, Donald Gibson, who was appointed in 1939, outlined a new zoned plan in 1941 which included a large shopping centre to the west built around a central axis, aligned on the tower of the old cathedral. An area to the south-east of the cathedral included new buildings for an art school and library and a ‘Future College’. This city plan was refined during the 1940s and 1950s and the intended academic zone shifted slightly to the area north and east of the new cathedral and the planned Civic buildings moved to their present position to the south of Earl Street and the east of Little Park Street. This area, which now forms the Civic Centre in Coventry, was the subject of design and building activity between 1951 and 1976 and so developed during the time of four separate city architects. All of the work was the responsibility of members of the City of Coventry Architecture and Engineering Department, which played a crucial role in reconstruction after the war.

Following the initial, L-shaped group of Civic Centre buildings, erected in 1951-1955 to the designs of Gibson, the second phase of the civic centre was built in 1957-1959. It was designed by George Sealey working under the city architect, Arthur Ling, who had been appointed in 1955. It consists of two ranges, set at right angles to each other. One range is set along Earl Street and continues the East-West line of the street frontage and colonnade started by the five shops to its east which had been built in 1953-1954 to Gibson's design. The second range runs north-south and this L-shaped arrangement of the two joined blocks formed a loose courtyard with the earlier L-shape of the Civic Centre 1 (CC1) block with open corners at the north-west and south-east angles.

The function of the blocks of Civic Centre 2 (CC2) was to house the Architecture and Town Planning Department and this was reflected in a number of ways. The upper two floors of the northern block contained the drawing offices for sarchitects, with high ceilings and walls which were largely glazed. The ground floor of this block was open and supported on tiled pilotis, allowing public access to the central courtyard, with the exception of an exhibition room beneath the studio block, which had entirely glazed walls. This formed an exhibition space in which citizens of Coventry could inspect drawings and models of new, planned developments produced in the offices above. The former car park to the north-east of CC1, which now formed the courtyard enclosed by CC1 and CC2, was redesigned, with a rectangular reflecting pool and a circular fountain. A variety of paving materials were used in the courtyard, intended to be viewed as samples from the architects’ studio block, and panels of different bricks were also arranged as samples along the retaining wall on the eastern side of the courtyard. This feature of specimen examples extended to a stairwell within the building which was lined with a variety of plain and decorative tiles as well as to staircase balustrades and lighting.

A medieval undercroft (separately listed at Grade II*) which was formerly the basement of the Old Star Inn was incorporated into the building and converted to form a bar for the department.

Some offices and studio areas have undergone alteration including the insertion of suspended ceilings, new partition walls and fire doors.

Reasons for Listing

The Studio block of the Civic Centre 2 building, Earl Street, Coventry, the courtyard surface to its south and the eastern retaining wall of the courtyard are listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* Architectural quality: the deliberately spare, curtain-walled studio block with its concrete frame, supported on pilotis, is a good example of refined modern-movement design of the late-1950s which benefits from careful detailing;
* Historic interest: the building was the centre of design activity for the vibrant team of architects who were responsible for Coventry's redevelopment, several of whom subsequently had notable careers in other cities across Britain;
* Expression of the building's purpose: the studio floors with their glass walls and the panels showing different samples of tiles, brickwork and paving all showed the purpose of the building;
* Popular inclusiveness: by providing a purpose-built exhibition space at ground floor level with glass walls the building was designed to share the plans and models for the continuing redevelopment of Coventry with its citizens; a rare example of such inclusiveness at that time.

External Links

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