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Parting shot | The photographs collection

MASTER STROKE

WHERE ONCE THRONGEDcrowds of visitors to Crystal Palace’s parkland and where stone dinosaurs still stand in mute testament to those headier days, now lies the National Recreation Centre. After the Palace burnt down in 1936, the area grew increasingly derelict and in 1951 passed from the care of the Crystal Palace Trust to the London County Council. Sir Gerald Barry, director of the Festival of Britain, proposed

an international exhibition and recreation centre be built. This sports element, aided by the feeling that Britain was lagging behind its Olympic rivals, soon emerged as the main focus of the LCC Architects Department – to whom the scheme was entrusted. The result was the opening of the Centre in 1964 comprising a sports hall, stadium and a residential hostel that sought to give the best possible facilities to amateur

athletes and their coaches. Of these three, the most impressive structure architecturally is the sports hall, boasting a reinforced concrete spine frame that is triangulated both longitudinally and transversely. With its echoes of the work of the great Italian architect-engineers, Pier Luigi Nervi and Riccardo Morandi, it houses the Olympic standard swimming pool – the first in the south of England –

which allows for both racing and diving. The diving stage itself is an impressive scissor- shaped Brutalist structure that was criticised by the Architects’ Journal for being allowed to dictate the height of the building – although it praised the Centre for its architectural quality and landscape setting. n

Robert Elwall

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WWW.RIBAJOURNAL.COM : SEPTEMBER 2011

BILL TOOMEY | ARCHITECTURAL PRESS ARCHIVE | RIBA LIBRARY PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION