Yesterday I watched a towering thin chimney being demolished. I'd always liked it as I went about my work and was sad to see it go. The huge white tube reminded me of the Saturn V!
I've always enjoyed seeing the space race in architecture, whether it be real or imagined like the chimney rocket.
With a childhood diet of space missions and cosmic mysteries it was inevitable I would be drawn to the New Age as a teenager. I read Daniken's Chariots of the Gods with gusto [did you?] and Hitching's World Atlas of Mysteries, which I adored and still have in the bookshelf.
Like many of you my passion for outer space and its mysteries spilled over into magazines, TV and records. One album I loved was featured in Roger Dean's Views, the amazing rocket steeple on the cover of Rameses' Space Hymns.
I must have stared at that painting for hours and even now I can't look at a church without thinking that the steeple's a rocket! Somehow it seems fitting that they should be cosmic vessels, perhaps even space arcs heading for a new Earth!
As a kid the Corgi Rockets Skypark always gave me a thrill, one of those iconic towering toys from the dawn of the Seventies. It always reminded me of the vast buildings in Gerry Anderson's TV shows and a teetering needle space age car cark design by Mike Trim I think, the name of which I forget. Do you know it?
One modernist tower near where I grew up is still there on the M6 motorway. Its the Forton Services and is a Grade II Listed building! As a kid I was convinced it was a parked flying saucer!
[The Twentieth Century Society]
A couple more sites that I really like are the rocket testing battery on the Needles, Isle of Wight, where the old Black Arrow was fired up. We visited it a few years back.
Perhaps though, the most iconic of all space-age buildings I've ever seen were the 'golfballs' of RAF Fylingdales perched on top of the moors near Whitby on the Yorkshire coast.
Here's a remarkable image of them being constructed in the Sixties as part of the Cold War [seen on Corridor 8]. Truly arresting, the futuristic spheres were removed in 2006 and replaced with a small pyramid. Did you get chance to see the balls?
Have you a favourite space age building or bit of space building art readers?
