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One of world's seven ancient wonders to be reconstructed, but not copied, thanks to new funding

The Sheet Architecture News

'I didn't lose any work in the first recession I experienced," says Zaha Hadid, "because I didn't have any work." This was the early 1970s, the time of the three-day week, when the lights of Great Britain Ltd appeared to be switching off for good. "I was drawing with freezing cold hands in rooms lit by candles. It seems almost unbelievable now. If I learned something, it was that anything can happen. We're doing well today, but this is partly because so many of our projects are in places like Dubai, which seem immune from recession. But you never know."

You certainly don't. Last week, Frank Gehry's first major project in Britain was ditched, making it the first big victim, architecturally, of the credit crunch. Plans for a dramatic development of 750 flats facing the sea at Brighton were dropped when the developer, Karis, failed to find fresh funds, three months after Dutch bank ING pulled out. If Gehry - creator of the famous "Bilbao effect", by which thrilling architecture triggers urban regeneration - can be tossed aside by recession-wary banks, what about less celebrated architects?

"Housebuilders are in such a hurry to drop projects," says Amanda Baillieu, editor of Building Design magazine, "they're text-messaging architects to tell them to stop work. At the same time, banks are foreclosing on loans made to small architectural practices set up over the past few years, in the hope of cashing in on the housing boom. The prediction is that one in five will go bust."

Some 40% of architects lost their jobs in the last recession, says Sunand Prasad, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. "It was very hard for young architects in the early 1990s. Luckily, architecture encourages broad thinking. Many found new careers in law, academia, catering and so on. But, when the good times came again in the lead-up to the millennium, it seemed an entire generation had gone missing. It took some time to find them again."

Older architects are no strangers to recession. The current slump, though, is likely to be very tough indeed. Why? Because in the past, the public sector - whether in Britain, continental Europe or the US - was able to step in when housebuilders and developers pulled in their horns. Take President Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority. Between 1933 and 1944, some 16 magnificent dams with hydro-electric power stations were built along the river, giving thousands of jobs to architects, engineers and contractors, not to mention bringing irrigation, power and economic growth to the poor farming communities of seven southern states.

Today, not only is the TVA the biggest energy producer in the US, its mighty structures remain tourist attractions. Closer to home, the superb architectural and engineering work accomplished by the London Passenger Transport Board, a public corporation established in 1933, proved what could be achieved when the going was tough: extensions to the tube, new stations and rolling stock. Such work was inspiring; it also created many jobs.

Today, though, the public sector in Britain has increasingly been privatised. Schemes such as PFI and PPP - private finance initiative and public-private partnerships, which fund new public buildings, especially hospitals and schools, and the renovation of the London underground - have turned out to be as ill-conceived as critics said they would be a decade ago. With banks and markets floundering, public projects are feeling the squeeze, and there is certainly nothing around the corner as grand and bold as Roosevelt's awe-inspiring TVA.

"About three-quarters of our work is in the public sector," says John Pringle of Pringle Richards Sharratt, architects of the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. "But, as we can't be sure what will happen to PFI and PPP, we can't rest easy. I feel for the many young practices that were hoping to design intelligent new housing. Aside from the sudden fall-off in work, they're up against new layers of bureaucracy." Pringle is referring to increasingly complex building contracts and the rocketing numbers of quangos and regeneration agencies poking their noses into the business of architecture. The simple client-architect relationship of yore - there's a building I need and I'd like you to design it - has been buried beneath jargon-laced red tape.

"The bureaucracy is bloody awful," says Will Alsop. "To get jobs beyond house extensions, young architectural practices have to show satisfactory accounts for the past three or four years to prove they're a safe pair of hands. How the hell are they going to be able to do that during a recession? There wasn't any work at home when I set up in the late 1970s. We went to Germany and got some good work without anyone asking us about our finances - zilch! - or even our track record. What the Germans wanted was imaginative new architecture."

In times of recession, architects may well need to follow commissions around the world. "If I tell you we've got work in 22 countries," says Norman Foster, "it's not to brag, but to underline how you can only really beat a slump - unless you're a one-man band with minimal overheads - if you have commissions spread internationally. Foster and Partners is not 100% recession-proof, but we've always been prepared to go where the work is. Today, we're also known as urban planners and product designers, so we're not hostage to sudden drops in the building market. We were lucky to win the commission to design the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in 1979, when there was little work at home. In fact, this was about the only job in the office. So we gave it our all."

This building, one of Foster's finest, opened in 1986, when the British economy was beginning to pick up. It stood Foster and his team in good stead, setting a new standard for corporate HQ. Foster has never looked back. In a curious way, the recession served him well.

Yet, as Nigel Coates, professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art, tells his students: "You don't choose architecture for the money. You should only do it if you love the idea of being an architect. But I've also been saying that recession isn't altogether a bad thing. Of course, I don't want people to lose their jobs, but there's been a lot of boring and plain bad new building during the boom years - frumpitecture, I call it. Young architects are unlikely to find an interesting job, or any job, in the coming months, so it's a good time for them to study, think and dream of what a next generation of architecture might be."

What might post-recession architecture be like? Alison Brooks, an architect whose practice shared the 2008 Stirling prize for the design of the much-feted Accordia housing development in Cambridge, says: "So much housing raced up in recent years has been mean and transitory. No one wants to lay down roots in homes that are pokey, fast-buck products. What's the point of building houses no one really wants just because they're low cost and meet official targets?"

A new housing scheme Brooks designed at Newhall, Essex, shows what might be done. It is a fine balance of modesty and ambition, modernity and tradition. Timber-framed family houses, with generous rooms, offer a fresh take on traditional local styles. They use every square inch: roof spaces are family dens, while courtyard gardens are like outside rooms. As for energy conservation, they meet current guidelines, or even exceed them.

Indeed, what we may see is a swing towards a less showy architecture, with invention squeezed into pint pots. Some of Christopher Wren's most inspired buildings, after all, were the gem-like City of London churches he built around St Paul's. Clamber up the steps of St Stephen Walbrook and, behind modest ragstone walls, you find yourself beneath a magnificent dome that might belong to one of the great baroque churches of Venice. Or visit Le Corbusier's Petit Cabanon and see how a tiny building can be highly charged. "I have a chateau on the Côte d'Azur," he wrote to a friend. "It's for my wife. It's extravagant in comfort and gentleness." It is less than four metres square.

The years following the Wall Street Crash saw in "Depression deco", a sort of late-flowering art deco. While we might not see anything as distinct as that, we could yet discover a likable new modesty: offices gathered around courtyards with rooftop gardens, rather than look-at-me skyscrapers; supermarkets dug underground rather than swaggering over historic towns; schools doubling as performing arts centres. And, if the Olympic Delivery Authority cares to take up the offer of a low-cost, take-apart sports building, as suggested by Dipesh Patel, a director of Arup Associates, we may yet see the 2012 Games proving that swanky buildings are not the only way of going for gold.

Still, if you happen to be an architect hooked on wildly adventurous design and are willing to travel (and work competitively), then Dubai, Abu Dhabi, India, Russia and South America beckon. In Britain, meanwhile, the recession, while painful, might spark fresh debate and instill new ideas, readying us for the next building boom when the money flows again.

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The Sheet Architecture News

Obituary: Residential architect who was in at the start of Britain's sheltered housing programme

The Sheet Architecture News

There must have been a time when the only thing architecture students had to worry about was ensuring that their buildings looked nice and didn't fall down. Now they are being asked to contribute to the fight against terrorism.

The Home Office has just launched a competition for architecture and design students to encourage them to think about "security and safety issues" when designing public places. The brief asks them to imagine that a city square, one hectare in size, has been destroyed by a terrorist attack and they've been commissioned to construct a replacement.

What's chilling is the precision with which the fictional attack is described. The competition document describes two suicide bombs (PBIEDs – person-borne improvised explosive devices) and two car bombs (VBIEDs - vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) going off in a "piazza full of people enjoying lunch on a warm, sunny day".

One VBIED was able to enter the front atrium of an office block facing onto the piazza. The resulting blast caused the building to collapse. The two PBIEDs were detonated within the crowd of people on the piazza and the second VBIED managed to get close to a building but was unable to penetrate it. Although there was extensive damage to the building, it did not collapse.

The four devices resulted in more than 500 fatalities and 1,500 people injured. Most of the casualties were caused by the building collapsing and secondary fragmentation from glass and office furnishings (desks, office partitions and office equipment) flying through the air.

The competition brief, which was drawn up in collaboration with the Home Office and the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, doesn't specify London. In fact, it speculates about the fictional attack occurring in "a major city in Europe" in 2007. But, just in case anyone is having trouble imagining the scale of the site, it points out that "Trafalgar Square in London" occupies approximately one hectare.

In the press notice publicising the scheme Lord West, the security minister, says: "The designing-in of counter terrorism protective security measures at the earliest design stage will be crucial to the future of safer crowded places."

I'm off home soon, on a bus that goes past Trafalgar Square. I hope he's right.

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The Sheet Architecture News

One of Barack Obama's first tasks as president will be to redecorate the Oval Office in the White House. We asked some top architects and designers to tackle the job

The Sheet Architecture News

One of Barack Obama's first tasks when he takes over the presidency will be to redecorate the Oval Office. We asked some top designers and architects to tackle the job

The Sheet Architecture News

Judged by their facades alone, the block of 19th-century houses on West 28th Street just off Broadway in Manhattan would have little to detain the passerby. They are painted a sickly shade of green, and front an array of bucket shops selling hastily-printed Obama T-shirts, cheap jewellery and imitation perfumes.

But to initiates in the history of early 20th-century American music, they are a temple of musical largesse to be revered and protected. It was in this row of four-storey buildings, with its classic New York iron fire escapes and elaborate plaster work, that the modern popular music industry was created.

The nickname by which the block came to be known - Tin Pan Alley - in time came to represent the entire music industry. But now the block is threatened, having been put up for sale by its owners for $44m (£26m) with the probable intention of knocking it down for replacement by an office block.

Tenants living in the apartments, as well as music lovers and architectural conservationists are all trying to fend off the sale.

They are pressing for permanent landmark status for the buildings.

"That these buildings, where the sheet music business began, still exist is wonderful. We don't need another faceless office tower when we could preserve something as historic as this," said Simeon Bankoff of the New York preservation body, the Historic Districts Council.

The historic links of the block date back to 1893 when the music publisher M Witmark & Sons moved here, attracting other firms to follow. On their coattails in turn came songwriters, performers, agents and managers and before long the place was buzzing with energy and sound.

David Freeland, who has written an upcoming book on the city's disappearing cultural spots, Automats, Taxi Dances and Vaudeville, said the street was "filled with the cacophony of upright pianos being hammered day and night by song writers demonstrating their latest creations, looking for the next hit. It was a place of noise, activity and competition".

The cacophony is probably what gave rise to the name, in unflattering allusion to the noise of clashing pans.

Between the l890s and 1930s, some of the great names in American music set up shop here in what must rank among the highest density of creative brain-power per square foot in any place or time. George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin had offices, as did jazz and blues greats Scott Joplin, Cole Porter and Fats Waller.

Out of the cramped premises, some of the best known songs also emerged. They include Take me out to the Ball Game, the tune sung with almost religious fervour at baseball games; Happy Days are Here Again, which Franklin Roosevelt adopted as his 1932 campaign song, and Berlin's unofficial anthem, God Bless America.

By its peak, this short strip of real estate had become to music what
the Model T Ford factory was to car production. "It was here popular
music grew up into a mass force, and was marketed just like any other
factory product," Freeland said.

The fate of Tin Pan Alley now partly hangs on what happens to the wider US economy. The financial crash may have bought it some respite, as potential buyers are likely to have been discouraged from a quick purchase.

Shop owners in the block are resigned whatever happens. No 49, where Witmark & Sons first pitched camp, is now a flower wholesalers.

"There's nothing we can do about it. In New York they'd knock down every building if they could make money out of it," said Paul, one of the flower sellers.

In No 53 they are counting on being round a little while yet. The shop sells party trinkets, and has stocked the front window with plastic hats celebrating New Year and the advent of 2009.

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The Sheet Architecture News

From ice palaces to modernist lairs, the architecture in James Bond films is never dull. Take a look at some of the highlights

The Sheet Architecture News

Most people will be too carried away by the relentless action in the latest Bond film to notice the background, but design-minded viewers will find it more exciting than most. It's unlikely to go down as the best Bond ever, but Quantum of Solace wins hands down when it comes to best architecture.

Perhaps it's because he's Swiss, but director Marc Forster certainly has an eye for a good building, usually a piece of hard-edged European modernism with a conveniently flat roof. A key location, for example, is the Festival House Bregenz, in Austria - a dauntingly sophisticated ensemble of steel cladding and huge glass windows that opens out on to a spectacular open-air amphitheatre facing the lake, with the stage in the middle of the water. Designed by Austrian architect Dietrich Untertrifaller, it's the perfect venue for a covert mid-opera meeting of arch-villains. It's also great for crane shots, tuxedo-clad shootouts, and the odd rooftop punch-up. Forster seems to have passed up on another local landmark, mind you: the Kunsthaus Bregenz, designed by his revered compatriot Peter Zumthor. Perhaps it just didn't have enough places to plug in a Klieg light.

Elsewhere we get a precarious chase over the terracotta tiled roofscape of Siena, a brief tour of London's Barbican, some grand colonial buildings in Panama, even a car chase through Italy's Carrara marble quarry - birthplace of Rome's Pantheon, among others. Topping the bill, though, is the ESO Paranal Residencia in Chile, where the traditional climactic rendezvous between Bond and his nemesis takes place. In reality, this stunning building is a hostel for astronomers at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere. Designed by German architects Auer and Weber it's a fine choice: a long rectangular strip of a building, sunk into the barren landscape that contains a splendid indoor garden and swimming pool lit by a 35-metre glass dome. Being situated in the middle of the Atacama desert, 2,400 metres above sea level, it's a place very few of us are likely to ever see inside for real, so here's your chance. Be dazzled by the rhythmic concrete facades! Thrill to the earth-toned interiors! Swoon over the long internal perspectives. Salivate over the minimal detailing! Then watch it all get blown to smithereens!

Yes, almost inevitably, the building does not survive its encounter with Bond, and as he saunters away from its smoking ruins, it occurred to me that few buildings ever do. Bond movies invariably end like Quantum: with 007 single-handedly trashing not only the plans of would-be world dominators but also their hideouts, which is a pity because most of them are rather splendid. Think of the stupendous submersible lair of Stromberg in the Spy Who Loved Me with its circular underwater windows and 2001-style furniture, the hollowed-out volcano in You Only Live Twice, the vertiginous control room in Moonraker, the elegant, if structurally unfeasible, ice palace in Die Another Day, and so forth. Some of the low-rent Bond baddies settle for oil rigs and such, but whatever the villain's crib of choice, you can guarantee it's going to get exploded. Those villains tend to put a great deal of effort into their bachelor pads, recruiting tasteful but evil architects, contractors, interior designers etc - it can't be easy. Then along comes Bond. The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He's basically an enemy of architecture.

Even beyond the villains' lairs, Bond is a menace to the built environment. Think back to Casino Royale. For once there was no hideout at the end, so what does Bond do? He demolishes a priceless Venetian palazzo instead, not just smashing it up but actually sinking it into the lagoon. That seemed like an awful lot of damage to inflict in the name of a $150m theft, or whatever it was. How much would it cost to repair that building? Probably more. It's a similar story when it comes to historic cityscapes in Quantum of Solace. The chase across the rooftops of Siena leaves plenty of tiles in need of replacement, and culminates in Bond and his quarry crashing through a skylight, swinging about on pulleys and knocking over statues inside some antiquated chamber.

If Bond has a problem with architecture it can probably be traced back to his creator, Ian Fleming, who was certainly no fan of modernism. He even went as far as to name one of his best baddies after the Erno Goldfinger, architect of London's Trellick Tower among others. Goldfinger the architect was apparently a neighbour of Fleming's in Hampstead, and the conservation-minded author was incensed when he demolished two Victorian houses to build his now-classic modern villas on Willow Road. So he returned the insult by lending Goldfinger's name to his fictional gold-loving megalomaniac. Another, less-controversial version of the story has it that Fleming played golf with Goldfinger's wife's cousin, but either way, poor Erno tried and failed to stop Fleming appropriating his name, and had to bear the association for the rest of his life.

Fleming's views on Le Corbusier were equally scathing, according to associates. In fact, on closer inspection, what is the archetypal Bond villain if not a modern architect? He is usually on a mission to "improve" humanity by wiping out the messy status quo and replacing it with some orderly, rational utopia of his own design. In Moonraker it's Hugo Drax who wants to start civilisation afresh in space. In the Spy Who Loved Me, it's Stromberg, who tries to wipe out the world's cities and create his own underwater world of Atlantis. "The only hope for the future of mankind," he says, echoing Le Corbusier. "We all have our dreams," responds Bond, resolving to ensure Stromberg's scorched-earth vision remains just that - a dream.

The association between evil and modernism runs through many Bond movies. In Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery is taught a lesson by Bambi and Thumper in John Lautner's beautiful Elrod House in Palm Springs - all futuristic concrete domes, dynamic diagonals and circular furniture. Villain interiors are often modelled on similar modernists. Osato's spacious office in You Only Live Twice is rather Corbusier in Japan. Goldfinger's "rumpus room" is distinctly Frank Lloyd Wright, as is Hugo Drax's behind-the-waterfall lair in Moonraker, whose Mayan-patterned relief panels resemble those of Wright's Ennis House. The association continues in Quantum of Solace. When they find a mole within MI6, where do you think he lives? London's Barbican centre, of course. What kind of house does Bond himself live in, I wonder? Does he even have one?

If Bond is the scourge of modern architecture, the movies at least have a champion in the form of Ken Adam, production designer extraordinaire. He was the man behind most of the classic Bond villain headquarters - from Dr No to Moonraker, and he designed and furnished them with great skill and devotion, as a new book from Thames and Hudson details. Adam studied architecture in London before the second world war, and he deserves to be considered one. Inarguably, he created some of the most memorable spaces of the modern era. Usually, we look at buildings in a city and wonder what they look like inside. Adam's spectacular interiors do the opposite, inviting us to wonder what the buildings look like on the outside. In reality of course, most of them were just flimsy sets in Pinewood studios whose ultimate fate was to be dismantled or blown up (like the Venetian palazzo in Casino Royale, and the interior of the Paranal Residencia in Quantum of Solace), but Adam's designs have been as influential as any "real" pieces of architecture.

Bond might deploy his licence to trash with worrying abandon, but his motive should be seen less as a grudge against modern architecture and more an extreme form of criticism. He makes a mockery of buildings' functions and pricks the pomposity of their designers. Flat rooftops become platforms from which to dangle henchmen by their neckties; tall chimneys are there to drop wheelchair-bound villains down; corridors become racetracks, balconies vantage points, buildings as a whole turned into giant climbing frames, their carefully designed details relegated to mere footholds and escape routes. Perhaps that's just fanciful thinking on the part of someone who writes about architecture for a living, but as I loosen my bowtie, unholster my revolver and mix a stiff vodka martini, I can't help but identify with him.

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The Sheet Architecture News

The Great Exhibition held in the Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park in 1851 was, so the late Clive Wainwright, a much missed curator at the Victoria and Albert museum, told me, a "great opportunity to go shopping" for millions of British people who could never have seen, let alone imagined, anything like a modern mall such as Westfield, the £1.7bn Australian-owned retail complex that opened to a deafening fanfare in west London this week.

Wainwright's idea made me sit up and think. I'd always thought, a little unthinkingly, of the Great Exhibition as a stirring, if sometimes kitsch, celebration of all that was meant to be best in British and British imperial design in the middle of the 19th century. But, Wainwright was right. The Crystal Palace was indeed a progenitor of today's colossal shopping malls. Some of the malls and other big shops built in Britain in the 1980s even borrowed more or less directly from the design of Joseph Paxton's revolutionary iron and glass exhibition hall.

Significantly, the vast Westfield mall occupies the site of what, long ago, had been the legendary White City, a fairytale gathering of exhibition halls in the guise of exotic palaces designed by the Hungarian engineer and showman Imre Kiralfy. For a number of years, the White City, first opened for the 1908 Franco-British exhibition, was a playground for Londoners. It stood empty for several decades before the last surviving of its buildings, long shorn of fancy decoration, were demolished in the 1990s. I remember walking through these lofty halls when the biggest were nothing more than giant aviaries for distinctly messy feral pigeons and the haunt of scuttling rats.

So, Westfield has opened in the right place. White City is the spiritual home of the contemporary shopping mall, which is as much a place to buy things as it is a place to seek entertainment and amusement and, indirectly, to make an exhibition of ourselves. The big ambition of Westfield is very much a reflection of who we have become in Britain over the past 150 years, a nation of shopkeepers and avid shoppers crazy for ever more bangles and beads as long as they are "branded" made by sweated labour in developing countries and implausibly expensive.

The huge new buildings, designed largely in-house by Westfield architects are far, far less interesting from a design point of view than either Kiralfy's White City or Paxton's Crystal Palace. They look like a cross between a giant 1980s airport terminal and, well, a big, brash and shiny shopping mall of the sort you might expect to find anywhere today from Des Moines to Dubai via Shanghai and Sydney.

Originally, this mega mall with its chain stores, interspersed with unlikely branches of Neal's Yard, the independent Covent Garden cheese shop, and Rigby & Peller, purveyors of undergarments to HM Queen Elizabeth II, multi-screen cinema, chain cafes and bling'n'branded luxury good outlets, for celebrities, footballers and credit card junkies, was to have been designed in an adventurous, tented way by the London architect Ian Ritchie. But, who wants innovation when there is so much more to buy and sell than Paxton's Crystal Palace could ever have offered?

Perhaps there are people in London who have never walked through a shiny, mega mall like Westfield before and who might well be impressed by its bright lights, sheer scale and the daunting range of costly gewgaws on sale inside. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is certainly impressed. Good luck to him, the Westfield company and anyone else who feels the need for yet another giant mall. My own preference for traditional city streets, a mix of architecture historic and new, covered markets, street markets, independent shops and a sense of normal, everyday life - birdsong, dogs, passing traffic, sun, showers, frost and snow - will mean very little to the millions who will come here to mill around, gawp, spend and lark about as the crowds once did in the long forgotten halls of White City and the burned down naves and aisles of the Crystal Palace.

If you've seen the Disney film Wall-E, you'll certainly recognise Westfield and malls like it. In the film, humans who long ago abandoned the Earth they messed up through greed, live a supremely sedentary life shopping and eating. They are very tubby and have lost the use of their legs. Is this how we'll end up? Or will we plunge into the depths of some mammoth recession or some fearful age of global warming, or cooling, and end up with nothing and nowhere to spend? My feeling, though, is that in the short to medium term, Westfield is just a tiny step towards our collective desire to undermine the life and culture of the traditional city, along with its architecture, and to shop and shop some more.

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The Sheet Architecture News