After Nordgren’s Baltic, it is timely to remember the act
of faith in 1960s Newcastle which brought back Ralph Erskine from
Sweden in time to prevent the wholesale collapse of the housing
community at Byker along the North side of the river from the Baltic
centre. Today this pioneering housing scheme is still visible, and
embedded effectively in the city grain, its bright colours untarnished
along the elegant superstructures, radical innovations in Britain
at the time. Recently Erskine, now in his late eighties, designed
the famous Ark office building (now occupied by Seagram) in Hammersmith,
London. Very recently, his Millennium Village at Greenwich looks
set partly to redeem the disastrous Dome implant effect on the Greenwich
environment. After training in London, Erskine who grew up as a
Quaker, soon settled in Stockholm and established with his wife
a small office. His Swedish work grew in the post-war period, and
his key assembly buildings for Stockholm’s Frescati University
developed over thirty years are five distinctive, almost unrelated
structures. The Gymnasium, the students’ union, and other buildings
still harmonise with each other in some indecipherable manifestation
of Erskine’s basic humanist philosophy. He became perhaps Sweden’s
best known architect in the 1960s, and led new ideas in the activist
European grouping of young architects known as Team X. He received
the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture here as long ago as 1987.
If the Aula Magna, his great assembly hall for Frescati smacks a
little of monumentality, he can forgive himself at this late stage
in a long and brilliant career. To look across from the Baltic viewing
level to Erskine’s massive revision of outmoded housing dogma
of the post-war period is to recognise that Newcastle, even pre-Baltic
Centre, had grown an architectural tradition which always could
look to Sweden, as the Town Hall still demonstrates.
