Keith Moon's taste in iconic properties

From The Who Location Guide:


"Keith Moon's house "Tara" began life at the hands of Peter Collinson, the film director responsible for Up The Junction and The Italian Job. Collinson owned the original property that graced the site, but having been refused planning permission to extend it, demolished it. In its place he built "Tara".

Named after his son, the house was was a strangely cuboidal and pyramidical construction, packed with all manner of futuristic labour-saving gadgetry.

Collinson put the house up for sale after deciding to emigrate to the USA. Moon purchased it from him in 1971 for £65,000."

And some pictures of Moon's Malibu Beach house here.

Walking mall in Helena, Montana, 1970s

Images of the Montana capital city in the early '70s...

Touring LA with Rayner Banham

Lovely set of photos on this virtual tour of LA here...for more background see this earlier post

Brunswick Centre, 1972

From Nothing to See Here, a lovely little piece about the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury:

"The Brunswick finally opened in 1972 but the flawed execution doomed it to membership of an inauspicious club of similar buildings which all shared a love of concrete, as well as the knack of being distinctly unpopular. Other offenders included the Trellick Tower in west London, the Bull Ring in Birmingham and the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth. These ambitious structures were collectively labelled as Brutalist architecture, a style which became synonymous with failed social projects. Decline was often hastened by government reluctance to supply adequate funding during the recessions of the 70s and 80s. Over the years the public association between brutalism and decay became entrenched and the buildings became a prime focus for Prince Charles’ carbuncle obsession. Yet, although often flawed, the modernist utopian vision which underpins the schemes is emblematic of a post war vision to engineer a better world. That their design still provides us with a powerful sense of the future so far in the past, perhaps says much about our contemporary desire and ability to build a better tomorrow."

Dan Hill on 1970s brutalist architecture, australia, tropicana and climate change

This post from the excellent blog CityofSound encapsulates precisely why we should be interested in the 1970s as a source of zeitgeist fuel in the early years of the 21st century.