COMMUNITY INVESTMENT MANAGER

This building first appeared on my Flickr site on 19 April 2008, when a last minute campaign to save it was being fought. Last I heard, the bulldozers were at work.
The following abstract is from the original upload, which is in the Evans & Shalev set.

Competition winning scheme by Evans & Shalev. 1972.
By the time you see these photos the demolition of this building would have probably started. This is the latest example of the barbaric behaviour of British politicians, who are completely blind to the merits of good design. Initially, adequate maintenance of projects is ignored and upkeep is under-funded. There is often a good case for claiming higher funding to resolve the ‘teething’ problems of some of these outstanding buildings, often designed by young practices with potential problems not weeded out at the construction stage. We are getting particularly good at letting the ‘brutal’ looking buildings deteriorate and then claim that these are now beyond repairs and not fit for purpose. Pimlico School has gone, Cambridge Library by Stirling just survived and now future of Leicester Engineering Building is in doubt.

Some big names in architectural world recently wrote letters asking for the reprieve of the building but to no avail. The Welsh Heritage Minister refused the school its listing application at the end of March. Welsh threw away Zaha Hadid’s prize winner Opera Building through lack of guts and seem to suffer from some phobia of good standards of design.

Richard Rogers wrote in his appeal to save the school;
“The school is an outstanding example of British modern architecture. It is based upon a clear hierarchy of ordered spaces from small to large, resulting in a building that is unique in its architectural beauty and intellectual rigour. Walking through the building, one is astonished by the special harmony and poetic scale.”

Gordon Benson (Benson & Forsyth) in a similar letter wrote;
“The project …. is flexible, adaptable and capable of accommodating a contemporary education/ transformational brief, given the opportunity and appropriate levels of investment.”

A rally of higher education students at the Colorado Capitol in Denver. The students were protesting massive budget cuts to the state's higher education system in order to balance the budget.