The problematic object of the London Underground

Abstract

This perspective looks at the London Underground station building and proposes that it has a problematic status which is yet to be fully acknowledged in architectural writing. The emergence of the London Underground in the second half of the nineteenth century challenged some of the basic premises of what would become, by the twentieth century, the standard interpretations of Modernism and, yet, it remains insufficiently researched. In outlining a trajectory that leads from Crystal Palace via the railway station and the hybrid nature of the arcade to the London Underground, the aim is to indicate that the spatial and visual regimes of the Underground – and its main architectural object, the Underground station – trace a lineage that was never fully reconciled with the dominant narratives of Modernism.