County Hall, Aylesbury

The original County Hall in Aylesbury was an 18th-century building in Market Square.[1] The foundation stone of the new concrete and glass County Hall was laid on 22 October 1964 by Sir Henry Floyd, Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. The building stands 200 ft. (61m) high and consists of 15 floors sitting above a complex containing the County Reference Library, Aylesbury Register Office, and the County Record Office. Inside it brought together for the first time all the departments and machinations of Buckinghamshire County Council. The building is visible from many villages and towns several miles distant. Dominating a predominantly low-rise 18th-century town, it proved to be a conversational piece of architecture.[2] Often referred to locally as "Pooley's Folly" or "Fred's Fort" (after the architect Fred Pooley) the building took just two years to build and was completed in 1966 at a cost of £956,000.[3]

Analytically, if not architecturally, the new County Hall is in keeping with the town's architecture, its design history is as provincial as its more classical predecessors. While its design is a bold conception freely using works by such architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and De Stijl and it has similarities to Paul Rudolph's School of Art and Architecture at Yale completed in 1963. However, as early as 1904 Auguste Perret designed a block of flats in the Rue Franklin, Paris which has similar angles, bayed windows and canted recesses to County Hall in Aylesbury,[4] and these flats too were constructed of concrete. With its Brutalist roots in the 1940s, and earlier, Aylesbury's County Hall was, like its classical predecessor, already dated by the time of its 1966 completion: by then architecture was moving on to the cleaner and straighter lines and sheets of plate glass advocated by such architects as Mies van der Rohe.[5]