Eighties Buildings

Chancery Lane

INSPIRATIONS: Toytown. Egyptian revival (again). Art Deco. Palisades. Coronets (cylinder with spikes round the top). Totem poles. Let’s shove together the Platonic solids and make them huge. Give it that “assembled from a kit” look. Let’s copy those Victorian warehouses we’ve been renovating. And put a Greek temple on the top. Combine the following:

angular greenhouse on the top of a building

lunettes (and anything lunette-shaped)
giant fanlights
triple giant fanlights like a child’s drawing of a cloud
shallow curves
giant silver tubes

stripes, stripes, stripes

neon

bay windows
dark-blue mirror tinted windows, copper tinted windows
square windows divided into squares
windows with shallow curved tops
round porthole windows
wraparound windows
square windows with rounded corners
diamond windows (square windows tilted 45 degrees)
oriel windows

outsize, misused classical motifs
giant pediments
pyramids
balls
round towers

catslide roofs
Swiss chalet roofs in case it snows
Italian villa overhanging roofs
barrel vaults, barrel roofs
sharply peaked roofs

grids
treillage (garden trellis-work)
lattice, red lattice, red window frames
as above, in Kelly green

ribs, slats, struts, Meccano
steel and glass porticos
metal clapboarding
corrugated metal

ziggurats
ziggurat-inspired stepped patterns
upside-down ziggurat patterns
upside-down ziggurat windows with square panes

pillars, big fat squat pillars, fluted pillars
arches and pillars that support nothing

pastel pink and green
terracotta, brown, pink, yellow ochre
pink marble

silver and glass
tinted glass
rusticated bottom storey, all-over rustication

buildings that look like spaceships
panopticons
metal balconies

rows of square or circular motifs along a “pediment”, or circle in square motifs

atria with splashing fountains, waterfalls and trees (nice)

formal gardens with lattices, struts, slats, pergolas, gazebos, oriental plants, fountains

Put them all together and you've got Postmodernism.

More eighties style here.