...that Corbuserian arch – it’s so elegant, so intelligent. The Palace of the Soviets and Termini Station cross in Scotland

Abstract

In 1931, Le Corbusier took part to the competition for the Palace of the Soviets with the well-known project featuring an assembly hall whose beams were hung to a large parabolic concrete arch. While this project was doomed to remain on paper, in 1954 – twenty-two years later – in Renfrew near Glasgow, William Kininmonth (of Scottish firm Rowand Anderson, Kininmonth and Paul) realised a smaller-scale version of the same parabolic arch structure for the airport’s new terminal. Other than rendering structural calculations easier, this scale reduction entailed adapting a much grander project to a smaller site and a different brief: architectural form – and its structural expression – detached from a specific function.

Jean-Louis Cohen recognised some of the structural work by Freyssinet – and particularly the hangars in Orly – as one of the possible references adopted by Le Corbusier for the Palace of The Soviet’s arch, designed in that case at a much larger scale than the Orly hangars. Kininmonth’s design can appear as a sort of reversal of a process: by scaling Le Corbusier’s design down again and employing it for an air terminal, it metaphorically closes the circle back to Freyssinet’s work. There is, however, another model that comes into play for the Renfrew terminal, again interpreted at a smaller scale: Montuori and Vitellozzi’s 1952 building for the Termini station in Rome, particularly the glazed atrium and its curved, projecting beams. The shape of those beams was used for the passenger hall of the terminal and cleverly combined with the Corbuserian arch.

The essay aims to investigate the project by considering it as the elaboration of two different models ‘exported’ from two different contexts, and reduced in scale in order to be effectively – and safely – combined; how the building was received after construction and whether its models were fully acknowledged, and the building’s early demise. It was abandoned in 1966, after slightly more a decade, allegedly due to its lack of flexibility for expansion: perhaps, the clever and well-realised combination had proved both a striking defining feature and an insurmountable limit.