English brutalism ‘one of most creative and imaginative’ periods

Rem Koolhaas has called for Preston’s threatened bus station to be saved from the wrecker’s ball and treasured.

Speaking on Radio 4 this morning, the Dutch architect, whose practice OMA is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Barbican, praised English brutalism as “one of the most creative and imaginative” architectural periods.

In an interview on the Today programme about his new Maggie’s centre in Glasgow he was asked about BDP’s 1969 bus station in Preston, which the council wants to raze to make way for a shopping centre.

He praised brutalism but said: “There’s almost a global consensus that any architecture from the late sixties, seventies and eighties should disappear from the face of the earth because it’s so harsh and presumably so socialistic.

“But we should keep them and treasure them and see them as emblems of a period when architecture was interested in good things.”