Fake 9

An office building in East Street which irritates me every time I go past it.

Which it perhaps should not, as the architect did try. He did work out that a brick wall with three lines of windows was a bit bleak and needed to be broken up a bit, to be given some surface texture to break up the office block beneath. Surface texture of the kind that architects of places like County Hall and the government offices in Great George Street were quite good at. Or all the banks and such like in the city built around the same time. Probably also true that they had quite good budgets to work with.

But here the architect tried but failed, with these fake dormers being particularly naff, with it being very clear from the road, even to the casual passer-by, that the triangular pediments are just stuck on top of their windows and serve no functional purpose at all. Failed at the all-important trick of making trim look like it belongs, that it is fully part of the structure which it is trimming.

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