PASTS BEYOND MEMORY: URBANITY AND JOHN OUTRAM’S UN-BUILT CITY PROJECTS A case study of John Outram’s proposals for Bracken House (1986-87) and Blackfriars Railway (1988-91), Queen Victoria Street, City of London
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JAMES SIMS
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1991, architectural critic Hugh Pearman said that ‘people do not exclaim: damn fine piece of Post-Modernism’ when they see a building by architect John Outram, rather ‘[t]heir immediate response is to wave and cheer’.1 Outram spent the majority of the 1980s on the fringes; admired by the public but little recognised by the architectural profession.2 Today he is known for his contribution to British Post-Modernism and his highly symbolic architecture that integrates complex iconography and decoration. Outram’s work has much to do with urbanism and relating architecture to the wider city. That said, he realised very few buildings within an urban context and none in Central London. During this study, I was lucky enough to meet John Outram, and through a number of conversations with him and colleagues such as architectural artist Carl Laubin and property developer Sir Stuart Lipton, my study offers an in-depth account of his two highest profile, un-built projects in the City of London. Through a discussion about the relationship between his work, Capitalism, Classicism and American construction methods, this paper illustrates how complexity in architecture can be used to elevate the city’s cultural response to urbanism by returning the medium to one which addresses the realm of thought. In 1986 Outram entered a competition for the Financial Times to redevelop their immaculate Bracken House; a Grade II* listed Modern Classical building designed by English architect, Sir Albert Richardson, in 1958. Outram believed that ‘it was not the motor car that ‘ruined’ urbanity, but the deliberate urbanistic illiteracy of the twentieth-century’.3 His un-built competition entry represented an ambition to reinvent a new architecture for an era that had grown tired of International Style Modernism, combining the revival of historicist