Huxley reaches final of architecture competition
After seven rounds of voting, the Huxley Building has been selected as a finalist in the “Christopher Wren Demolition Award”. The competition, set up to celebrate the upcoming 350th anniversary of St Paul’s Cathedral, asked the general public to submit the building in London whose “absence should most improve the urban landscape”. Competition runner, Forman Noster, said he was inspired by thinking about all the “visual tragedies St Paul’s Cathedral has been forced to witness over the last 350 years with the changing urban landscape. We oftentimes think about the beauties but overlook the worst.” The Huxley Building in the South Kensington campus has cemented itself in history as one of these tragedies.
The other two-buildings to make it this far are 2015 Carbuncle Cup winner 20 Fenchurch Street (“The Walkie-Talkie”), and Grimshaw’s Grand Union Canal Walk Housing (1989). One Computing student, Feb Senton, told NegaFelix, “It isn’t all bad, we recently got also got selected as one of the top dogging spots in South Ken, so really all publicity is good publicity.” Another student Hevin Kalme did not mind about Huxley’s poor public perception and was far more stressed about the prospective move: “Any ugly building is better than the shithole that is White City.”
We reached out to the Maths and Computing departments to gauge their future plans after the news. A student respresentative, Jriff Aazlan, said that, “The Huxley Family is choosing to focus on other sensory issues, such as smell, that the space struggles with right now, before tackling the exterior. Though most students are pressing for an eco-brutalist redesign, the real brutalities take place inside the Huxley walls.”
