The World Monuments Fund (WMF) is calling for international attention to the 1969 Preston Bus Station. Once the world’s largest bus station, the brutalist monument is scheduled for demolition as part of the city center’s redevelopment plan. The building is one of thirty UK “at risk” sites featured by WMF.
Rem Koolhaas stated in an interview with Radio 4’s Evan Davies, “Yes, I think that it is true that in retrospect the brutalist tradition of England is one of its most creative and imaginative architectures and it’s only in the last 5 years that we ourselves are becoming interested in the issue of preservation and I’ve personally campaigned for preserving modernist architecture because 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 also because it’s so socialistic. And I actually think that we should keep them and treasure them and see them as emblems of a period when architecture was interested in doing good things.”
Follow this link and sign the petition to promote Preston Bus Station’s refurbishment as a key part of the Preston Tithebarn redevelopment scheme.
The video was provided by architectural photographer, Andy Marshall. You can follow him on twitter @fotofacade.
