amykpearce: Don't stand in the way of progress.

People often ask why I wanted to study architecture and I'm never really sure what to say. For some reason this question compels me to try and justify my chosen career path with a wonderful, momentous tale of enlightenment.

I am yet to script a rehearsed response fulfilling this, however the question does always prompt certain memories to surface. One of these particular, building related childhood memories, involves the Kodak tower in Hemel Hempstead. Correction, the former Kodak tower.

http://www.hertsmemories.org.uk/page_id__65.aspx

Ok, so my memories don't quite stretch back as far as this photograph but I can certainly recall seeing the tower in all these later states.

For me, as a child, the Kodak tower had a magical, other worldly quality that always had me peering out of the car window. Perhaps this did have something to do with the adjacent magic roundabout. But this tower was like nothing in my little town and yet somehow different from things I'd seen in London.

http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1018327354011645349uyWpNsLUZm

It stood isolated, not quite of the town on its one side and not quite of the moor come park on its other. The rigour in its rhythm of windows was of such contrast to the river, the park and the swirling roads of the magic roundabout, that it stood out for more than just its height.

And what was most confusing for this young girl was the slab or plinth that the tower sat on. I could just never understand how cars could get onto the ramp adjoining the slab and quite why it was there. How a young mind can boggle over a bit of modernism and a car park.

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/156599

As the digital age boomed, Kodak fell off its modernist pedestal and left this landmark of the new town of Hemel, empty.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robep/2742637142/in/photostream/

And what better use for the tower of a failed utopian dream... oh thats it, flats! And so the work began, first removing its cladding, then of a couple of storeys. Up went some glass, jaunty blue stripes and a plethora of lower rise retail and office units.