Marathon House is a landmark building completed in 1960 (then Castrol House), it exhibited the first use of an American-style fully-glazed curtain wall in England. It is high and has 15 floors. The building was influenced by New York City's Lever House (1951-2).
Description The twenty years following the second world war saw an extraordinary period of reconstruction as bomb-damaged towns and cities were rebuilt and as new designs and construction techniques were adopted. Marathon House exemplified the trend, arriving on the cusp of sixties, with such modern conveniences as lighting without switches that responded to ambient light.
It represented a post-war reprise of the American invasion of London exemplified earlier by the construction using new steel frame techniques of Selfridges in Oxford Street (1908) but now with added vertical vigour as new towers sprung up in quick succession.
The architects, Gollins Melvin Ward and Partners, in association with Casson, Conder and Partners, originally designed a 22 storey high tower (52 ft x 110 ft in cross section), later reduced to 16 storeys, over a patio on a one-acre site at ground level. The Royal Fine Arts Commission, however, wanted a rectangular building parallel with Marylebone Road. The building was redesigned accordingly—the tower was reduced in height, an extra storey was added to the podium, and the public space at ground level in the original design was sacrificed. The smaller tower was, nevertheless, one of the first to break the 100 ft restriction of the then London County Council. The reduction in height was dictated by a need to prevent the building overshadowing the Marylebone Town Hall directly opposite, dating from 1914 to 1920.
It has been called the "daddy of slab and podium buildings in the country" but it was, in fact, preceded by Fountain House (1954–58) in Fenchurch Street—a drab, unattractive building with a partially-glazed curtain wall which was approved for demolition in 2014, and by Basil Spence's Thorn House in Upper St. Martin's Lane (1957–59; now renamed Orion House after a complete "facelift" in the 1990s which transformed its appearance). Town planner Walter Bor felt Castrol House and Thorn House 'enriched the townscape'; David Kynaston wrote of their arrival (in Modernity Britain, Book 2: A Shake of the Dice, p26) that "the march of the vertical was undeniable."
The architectural style is International Style of modern architecture, or more specifically the Miesian school, whereby the structural and economic logic of the gridded steel or concrete frame was exploited to produce highly rationalized buildings, generally rectilinear, whether low or high, deep or shallow, whose external expression -- usually an elegant iteration of the glazed curtain wall -- was precisely the celebration of their own technology.
The "International" dimension derives from the habit of post-war architects to replicate designs:
Soon after Lever House was built in New York, replicas of it appear in all corners of the globe from Marylebone Road in London (Castrol House) to Atatürk Boulevard in Ankara. So the buildings become independent of place and of regional culture; often of course, such examples are totally inappropriate from a climatic point of view and the original technology is only indifferently emulated. Another characteristic is that many buildings at this end of the spectrum will proclaim their adherence to the International tradition quite literally by being independent of the site-lifted above it. The Villa Savoie at Poissy (1929/31) by Le Corbusier is the archetype here but the Maison Suisse (1930/32) or the Unite d'habitation (1947/52) are equally good examples.
In the case of Lever House air-conditioning was an important enabler of the style, but none was provided at Castrol House, "just radiant ceiling panel heating and natural ventilation by sliding windows which proved to be a poor substitute." The building must have been, like many others of its time, an uncomfortable place to work in summer (see e.g., People in Glass Houses, 1967). Today the building features a cooling system with dry coolers on the roof, chilling plant in the basement, and fan coil heat exchange units throughout the building.
Early photos of the building may be found on Royal Institute of British Architect's web site and that of the Courtauld Institute, with at least one in the Francis Frith collection. A gallery of contemporary photographs taken from different vantage points may be found at Marathon House.
Completed in 1959, the building was opened by Minister of Transport Ernest Marples on 22 February 1960. It wasn't universally well regarded:
Castrol House, on Marylebone Road, that British wannabe rip-off of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's giant Lever House in New York, said entirely different corporate cool things to my schoolboy self in the 1960s. Completed in 1959, opened by Ernest Marples, Supermac's minister of transport, it was used endlessly in film and TV as a backdrop because there was so little glamorous new office building around. (The owners actually wanted to demolish it in the 1990s. Under threat of listing, they converted it into a block of flats, full of flight capital from God knows where. They also revised the glazing to the slab, with dinky little Edwardianate quarter-lights. Hardly worth bothering.)--The New Statesman
In contrast, John Grindrod, author of the widely praised retrospective Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, has described it as "the best office building in London".
At night, the tower was illuminated internally through translucent green glass panels., via cold-cathode tubes, to create a spectacular effect—one considered "optically disturbing"! (sic) in Pevsner's Architectural Guide. Unfortunately, no photographs of this are readily available. The effect is more clearly described in Light and Lighting (1960 p. 63)
Exterior lighting, switched on every evening from half-an-hour before sunset to 11PM comprises a 4ft length of green cold-cathode tubing at the base of each spandrel panel of the tower. These panels are of green tinted glass and the lighting creates at night fourteen green bands of light around the building.
The building featured prominently, and supposedly located in Washington DC, in the 1960s ITV series Dangerman and in the films The Bank Job and The Young Ones. Rosamund Stacey, the protagonist of Margaret Drabble's 1965 "sixties feminist" novel The Millstone, lives in Castrol House, and says of it, en route to hospital by ambulance, that she was "glad to be going from so good an address" (p. 96).
The rear wall of the entrance hall featured a large opencast relief (15m long by 7m high) by British sculptor Geoffrey Clark, depicting the process of extracting and refining oil. It was cast in aluminium in sections on the floor of his barn in Stowe Hill. This commission followed one for an 18m tall metal sculpture for the original façade of Thorn House mentioned above (designated "The Spirit of Electricity" and incorporating allusions to electric lamp filaments), which, unlike that at Marathon House, has survived the redevelopment of the building (having been remounted onto an added lift and service riser).
During the conversion to residential use a service elevator at the north end of the tower was removed, as were lavatories on each floor of the tower, and one of three main elevator shafts was bricked in. A staircase to a mezzanine level in the lobby was removed, along with the double height foyer, and most of the mezzanine space was converted into an apartment—a late addition to the conversion plans for which the council was paid a further £9,000 toward social housing. Also lost was a spiral staircase from a VIP suite on the top floor, leading to a terrace on the roof; a cinema; two ground floor staff restaurants with seating capacity for 475 people; and a PBX room. In addition, a pneumatic postal chute system for delivering documents around the building! A roof-top window-washing gondola that moved about the parapet wall on tracks, like that of Lever House, was retained but is now used mainly for replacing windows.
Architects The GMW architectural practice is profiled in Architects and Architecture of London by Kenneth Allinson. Historic England's website describes the practice
Gollins, Melvin and Ward, still trading as GMW Architects, were established in London in 1947 by Frank Gollins, James Melvin and Edmund Ward. Their reputation was made with their award-winning entry for the competition for Sheffield University. While the practice maintained a sideline in public-sector work, it became renowned for commercial building and above all prestigious offices projects. James Stirling, briefly employed on the Sheffield project, described Gollins, Melvin and Ward as ‘the best of the safe, understandable moderns’. GMW pioneered the introduction of the American-style curtain wall office with Nos. 93-97 and 118-126 New Cavendish Street, 1953-56, now demolished, and Castrol House on Marylebone Road, an elegant tower and podium building of 1955-60, now re-clad. The Commercial Union Assurance/P & O development followed in 1963-69 (a Certificate of Immunity from Listing for the former was renewed in 2012 and the latter has been demolished). The three founding partners retired in 1974, leaving one of the largest practices in the UK and enjoying a particularly dominant presence in the City.
A former colleague quoted in Allinson's book (p. 381) says of the principals
Edmund [Ward] was the 'baby' and the 'design genius', eventually becoming a Royal Fine Arts Commissioner [...] He liked fast cars, beautiful women and his narrow gauge railway. James Melvin [...] was effectively the business brain and the office manager. [...] Gollins, by all accounts was the wheeler dealer who often brought jobs in.
A critique of their work (in Commercial, dead or alive, Architectural Design, August 1956, p. 243), even before the building was constructed, suggested
It is efficient, and it comes from an office that has set itself to be efficient, commercial and modern ... it can only be a matter of years before [buildings like Lever House] become commonplace. For they are not difficult to design they are the product of a system of exact thinking and meticulous detailing ... we should hail the appearance of the first completely anonymous piece of machine architecture to appear in London this century ... it is not pretending to be a palace, or a temple, or even to be a work of great architecture.
The building featured in City of Towers,Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: a 1979 BBC TV critique of modern architecture and documentary by Christopher Booker on the impact of property developers on London, which he called 'the greatest disaster to befall post-war Britain' and The Spectator called "high-rise vandalism":
The case expressed in City of Towers was made as long ago as 1961 in a superb New Yorker article by Lewis Mumford. He wrote of London: 'Today that unique city is in danger of turning into a mass of undistinguished, if not uniform, high buildings, encircled and penetrated by ever wider lanes of motor traffic, where a constant surge of motor cars and lorries will wipe out the last traces of those human qualities that have been protected by the very intricacy or deviousness of London's old web of streets, alleys, mews and cul-de-sacs.'
Frank Gollins (1910-1999), James Melvin (1912-2012) and Edmund Ward (1912-1998) retired in 1974, leaving a portfolio of images and architectural designs to Sheffield Hallam University. Some may be found online in the images and multimedia library. The practice continued, and the building merits a page on its web site. In August 2015 the practice was taken over by Scott Brownrigg.