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||| home ||| ||| Quotations ||| Huddersfield Daily Examiner 6 April 1970 "Architecturally, the new Market Hall is one of the most interesting buildings to have been erected in Huddersfield for many years. When the work began, the site was dominated by a huge crane, but there soon appeared strange mushroom-like structures on the skyline around Ramsden Street. What were they people asked. Back came the answer - asymmetric hyperbolic parabaloids. Not much wiser, people watched as the giant mushrooms increased, until they seemed to be springing up all over the place. In fact, twenty-one concrete mushrooms were built, each measuring about 56ft. by 31ft. and each one free-standing and supported on a single column. It was impossible to imagine what kind of a building could result from such strange objects. But people soon admitted that here was something new and exciting. Something of which to feel proud." Ian Nairn (1930 -1983) 'The towns behind the teams', The Listener 28 August 1975, pp272-3 "The one place where modern architecture has really thought about the inner Huddersfield is in the new market hall. The designer here had a really difficult problem. It was a sloping site in which he had to fit this market hall. Although the outside was a bit glam, he really went to work on the inside. The firm was J Seymour Harris who do a lot of town centre schemes up and down the country, and whoever was the designer in that firm really did Huddersfield proud here. To cope with the slope and to fit everything in he used concrete mushroom columns at intervals - mushroom because they splay out at the top and this could have been a structural gimmick; but here that are used to define spaces, to relate them, to bring the light in from the top so that you at one with the building itself. That combined with the fact that the stalls are not regimented has made it a marvellously human place, the opposite of most indoor shopping centres. It is in-fact, and this is pretty rare in Britain-a real modern market." Economic Development Service, Kirklees Metropolitan Council Huddersfield: the guide, 2003 "A well designed building containing about 180 stalls linked to the modern arcades" Guy Deghy (1912 -1992) p 24 'The New Gourmet; a cookbook for the eighties', Dent 1980 "None [of the British supermarkets] is a "universal provider", as the late William Whiteley of Queensway liked to call himself in the days of Queen Victoria. The nearest thing to that in this country I found when I visited Huddersfield Market. The variety of goods on sale was nothing short of dazzling. Every cut of every kind of meat, all the game is season, all sorts of condiments, spices, sausages from, or in the manner of, all parts of the world, vegetable primeurs as well as the fresh, crisp run of the mill stuff. Apart from Paris and certain supermarkets in Holland, I have not seen such a cornucopia of gastronomic raw-materials. Alas I have yet to find anything like it in London" Cordula Zeidler, Twentieth Century Society BBC Radio Leeds, 17 June 2004 I believe it's a cultural phenomenon related to the material of concrete. There are some 60s and 70s buildings that are now slowly getting appreciated by the public. We think that in decades to come, perhaps ten or twenty years people will start appreciating these buildings more and it takes about two generations for architecture to become accepted by the public. Culture Minister David Lammy Department for Culture, Media and Sport press release, 4 August 2005 Huddersfield's Queensgate Market is the best surviving example of a retail market from the 1960s and 1970s. It is an imaginative structure that combines innovative technology of its time to produce a dramatic space full of natural light with the striking focal point of the roof. Professor Neil Jackson 2004 It was immediately apparent to me that here was something special. Paul S Skepper Letter to the Huddersfield Examiner, 2005 From the first moment I saw it I was instantly drawn to the dynamism and intensity the composition possesses. The building successfully combines the aesthetics of architecture with the science of architectural engineering. President of The Concrete Society 2007 The 21 hyperbolic concrete shells of the Queensgate Market Hall in Huddersfield are iconic in their structural form. In many ways the method of construction was significant and the forerunner to several other structures. In the opinion of the judges, Queensgate Market Hall is a remarkable and splendid building in very good condition. |
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