Why I like cooling towers…

Earlier this week I read that three cooling towers at Richborough in Kent were blown up in an event lasting only a few seconds and it sparked a quick, but memorable burst of nostalgia…

 

Cooling towers are without doubt one of the most instantly recognisable building forms in this country. When I was growing up and dad  would occasionally drive us to Birmingham for some family jamboree or other, I always used to look forward to seeing two things from the car: Fort Dunlop on the right hand side of the M6 (now a hotel development by Urban Splash) and the two huge, elegant structures that were the cooling towers of the Nechells Power station on the left.

I could never understand what such huge structures were for, especially after dad patiently explained that they were completely hollow on the inside, so allowing the hot steam and gases generated by the power station to be cooled and condense into water in these vast concrete spaces, before all heading up into the atmosphere…  I obvioulsy made a comment that stuck in my dad’s mind, as they became known in our family (and still are in fact, despite having being demolished many years ago) as “Joe’s waste of brick towers”…

It was this hollowness of form that resulted in a second part to my nostalgia trip…

When I was at Leeds learning to be an Architect, the journey back up the M1 after visiting friends and family in the Midlands, took me along the Tinsley Viaduct in Sheffield and past two cooling towers that sat eerily close to the road. As with the Birmingham ones, I was always taken with their effortless grace and beauty, and I can remember being very impressed when I was told that Terry Gilliam had shot the closing scenes of his dystopian masterpiece Brazil in one of these very towers, using the huge industrial scale to such stunning effect in the tourture scene…

I believed and told many people this fact for years, learning only a few years ago that it was untrue and the sequences had been shot in Croydon… Memories as shattered as these wonderful structures…

If like me, you find cooling towers fascinating and alluring things, and you know of some near you, I suggest you go and visit them soon.. Our recent industrial heritage seems not to merit the protection afforded their more domestic and residential cousins. All the towers mused over in this post have long since gone. As technology moves inexorably forwards, these peaceful old dinosaurs are destroyed and removed from the landscape, and I for one think that is criminal.

27b/6 – David Thorne

My friend Darren sent me an email recently which introduced me to the exquisite humour of David Thorne.

Obviously something of a prankster, (although its obvious from his site, that he’s regularly called much worse than that) the email sent to me contained copies of 10 Formal Complaint Forms made out against Mr. Thorne by a rather sad sounding “co-worker” called Simon…. and once I’d stopped laughing, I thought I’d help spread the word….

Now whether the complaint forms are real or not is beside the point, what they is are very, very funny. I particularly liked the idea of Thorne overhearing Simon saying he would like a white iPhone, and then covering the one he has in Tipex, whilst “I’m too busy researching wasps” has to be one of the best excuses to get out of helping someone rebuild the office space that you’ve just dismantled, that I’ve ever heard.

The link above takes you to his own rather excellent site, 27b/6, which is full of lots of wonderful stuff. (Sad fact, and I swear I knew this without looking it up, the site’s name comes from the film Brazil, and is the form that Robert DeNiro tells Jonathan Price to ask for to prevent Bob Hoskins getting into his home)

Anyway, it seems that David Thorne is an Australian living in the US and is a man who has obviously honed his sarcastic email writing skills, to the point where he can produce a seemingly never ending stream of  letters to people about things that mostly wind him up.. a man after my own heart.

His site is definitely worth checking out if you have some spare time. There’s the one where he tries and fails to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider, but I really like this brilliant email exchange with a snowboard shop: after being sold rubbish gloves and refused a refund, he took out an ad in the local paper saying the shop was giving away 500 free snowboards.. and the relationship goes downhill from there…

Very clever & very funny….

It seems that a book of David Thorne’s writing has recently been published in the UK, although as the sticker on the front claims it contains everything that’s already online, I’m not sure why I should buy it…

Maybe I should write to Mr. Thorne and ask him, see if I can get into the inevitable second book…