Cambridge

Curves

Shopfronts are not the most obvious items in the cornucopia that is the architecture of Cambridge, but here is one that pulled me up short as I walked around the town in the rain last week. My first response to this building in Market Street was a question: could this really be an original art nouveau frontage? The glorious collection of curves described by its carved woodwork certainly seemed to point that way and I guessed that it was late art nouveau, a survival from perhaps the early 1920s. When I got home and looked it up, I found that the building's official listing put it at c 1910, whereas Kathryn A Morrison in her excellent English Shops and Shopping dates it to c 1923, when the front was made for Stetchworth Dairies.

The front repays a close look. The woodwork above the door is a stunning collection of stylized foliage and multiple curves that turn back on themselves in a way that we're now more used to seeing in Paris or Brussels than in England and the flowers and stems in the glass echo these curves beautifully. The door and the wooden panels on either side take up the theme of curves too, as does the extraordinary metalwork.

The building must have made a remarkable diary. The front seems to have been designed to catch the eye more effectively than the display of eggs, cream, butter, and cheese in the window. If it's not perhaps as effective in its new role fronting a gift shop (it seems to cry out for a more sensitive sign than the one currently in place), at least it is in use, a curvaceous and exotic reminder of the skill with which which shops were designed and fitted out in the days when frontages like this were made to last.

Bromyard, Herefordshire

Hot tin roof

I’m stuck indoors writing, and with deadlines looming, getting out less and less to find new buildings to share with you. I’ve recently been describing the unlikely surfaces and forms of the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and its wafer-thin titanium cladding, which curves this way and that like an overgrown eel that’s been put through one of those apps you get for your iPhone, which distorts photographs in disturbing ways. Not inappropriately, since designs like the Guggenheim are only possible with the most advanced software, not to mention the most costly materials.

And, stuck indoors, writing, I looked through my picture files to find something to share with you, and found this: a shed in Herefordshire with a corrugated iron roof. Notice how the surface curves this way and that, like an overgrown eel that…

I know, I know. This modest length of bent metal covering a knockabout structure of assorted brickwork and decaying woodwork is hardly the Guggenheim. But its use of corrugated iron is still rather inventive, the way it starts at one end as almost a flat roof and finishes at the other as almost a vertical wall. And are those openings skylights or windows? I’m sure there’s some logical reason for the way this roof has been built. Something big and tall that had to be accommodated in the far end that didn’t quite justify the time, expense, or whatever needed to build the brick wall higher. Perhaps it has something to do with the planning regulations. Whatever its raison d’être, it made one passer-by look up and smile.

Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

French curves

When someone says ‘Art Nouveau’, I automatically think of Paris Metro stations and large houses in Brussels, buildings put up around the beginning of the 20th century and decorated in a style that owes its extraordinary movement and plasticity to curving, sinuous lines. It’s a style that lends itself to pottery, glass lampshades, ironwork, and jewellery, but it doesn’t always sit happily on buildings, which tend to have lots of straight lines and rectangles in them. As if recognizing this fact, the architects of Vienna – and their great Scottish colleague, Charles Rennie Macintosh – developed a more rectilinear form of Art Nouveau, involving abstract patterns and geometrical shapes, that they applied to all kinds of buildings from houses to art galleries. In Central Europe this style is called Secessionist, after the group of Viennese artists who seceded from the establishment.

All of this means that Art Nouveau architecture isn’t a very English phenomenon. Edwardian architecture was a riot of styles, from Arts and Crafts to Bankers’ Baroque, and the delicate wave patterns of Art Nouveau got squeezed out rather. But now and then you spot these forms, especially at the point where architecture and decoration intersect, and one of these points is the shop front.

The picture shows part of a shop front in Leamington. These little curved mouldings caught my eye and immediately reminded me of the sinuous Parisian Art Nouveau. How satisfying that some shop designer should have thought to set off his glass window – itself a great curving swathe of transparency – with this small detail. High up above eye level, mouldings like this are ignored by most shoppers. Why look at the window frame when you’re interested in the goods inside? But no doubt the designer was after a subliminal hint of quality and European sophistication. Hence, for a moment, this fleeting imitation of the way they ordered these matters in France.