the-sheet.com Your Architecture Resource » Architecture

Country diary: Portland: Messages in limestone

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:52:49 +0000

Portland: Behind us, in Portland stone, was the great pile of St George's church, looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here

We were chilled by gusts blowing off a rough sea across a bleak graveyard close to the windswept edge of Portland – the great limestone promontory, almost an island, only tenuously linked to the mainland below Weymouth by the narrow pebble strand of Chesil Bank. Between us and the shingle beach below was a quarry extracting the famous stone, good for carving yet durable, that Wren used for St Paul's Cathedral and that has adorned fine buildings before and since.

All around us were ranks of seemingly numberless tombs and gravestones leaning at varied angles, made of Portland stone, and most fashioned with elaborate carving, a tribute to the tradition and skill of Portland craftsmen. And behind us, also in Portland stone, was the arresting sight of the great pile of St George's church, in its solitary space outside the town, built by a local man, inspired by Wren, and looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here. Pevsner's guide to the buildings of Dorset calls it the finest 18th-century church in the county.

On our last trip to these parts, we had kept to the sheltered mainland coast and the wooded Rodwell trail, but now we had been brought to this exposed place by a chance meeting with the granddaughter of a man who had once been sexton and gravedigger here. She told us of the toil and problems involved in his work digging in the shale, and of his care of the graves for families who had moved away. And this stark place at a southern extremity of the country had an elemental feel, emphasised by inscriptions on tombstones near the church door; there is a memorial to Wm Pearce, killed by lightning while on Her Majesty's service "atop Chesil Beach" in 1858, and to Mary Way and William Lano, shot by the press gang in April 1803 (she died of her wounds in May).

• This article was amended on 26 January 2012. The original referred to William Leno instead of Lano.

John Vallins

Adrian Cave obituary

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:26:21 +0000

The architectural career of my friend Adrian Cave, who has died of cancer aged 76, exemplifies the way disability issues have moved to the foreground of our culture. At an age when others consider retiring, Adrian embraced the concept of inclusive design and pioneered the transformation of disabled access to public buildings, so that it became integral to the creative vision rather than an add-on.

Adrian was the UK's first registered access consultant. In the past 10 years, he worked with architects including Norman Foster and Herzog & de Meuron and advised at the formative stages of projects such as Crossrail, the Olympic village, Tate Modern and the revamp of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. His mantra was "access with elegance". At Christopher Wren's Royal hospital, in Chelsea, west London, he concealed a lift behind 18th-century panelling to aid those with difficulties climbing the staircase, satisfying English Heritage in the process.

Adrian worked as a Samaritan and with Emmaus House on behalf of the homeless. He was made OBE for his dogged work in the transformation of a defunct cinema near his home into Ealing Community Resource Centre.

He was born in Great Bromley, Essex, and attended Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire. He adored adventures, such as navigating the canals with his grandchildren and walking with friends in Italy or Spain. He is survived by his wife, Felicity, whom he married in 1964; his son, Ben, and daughter, Zoe; and five grandchildren.

Alain de Botton’s ‘temples for atheists’ have a foundational flaw

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:08:43 +0000

Aren't believers just as likely to appreciate a shrine to perspective? And doesn't the Large Hadron Collider qualify as a rationalist temple? De Botton's doctrine feels a trifle holy

Perhaps emboldened by the success of the atheist bus, or his own Living Architecture initiative (in which top architects design desirable holiday homes), or the fact that he's got a new book to promote, Alain de Botton is now proposing a series of temples for atheists to be built around the UK.

"Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?" he asks. "It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals."

Sounds great, Alain. But what are we worshipping?

"You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," he continues. "That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective."

In order to make atheism more attractive, De Botton argues in the accompanying book, Religion for Atheists, its advocates should pick and choose from the aspects of religion they all like. So, yes to a sense of community and civic responsibility; no to persecuting gay people and abusing choirboys. And one of the things we all like about religion, especially De Botton, is the architecture, isn't it? It gets the message across far better than something like a book. Unless that book is the Bible, or the Qur'an, but certainly if that book is Religion for Atheists.

De Botton's first monument will be the "Temple to Perspective", a hollow stone tower located in the City of London, that well-known hotbed of religious fanaticism. Its height corresponds to the age of the earth – one centimetre per million years, with mankind's time on the planet represented by a gold band around the base one millimetre thick. It was designed by a young architect named Tom Greenall, who collaborated with De Botton on the book. Several other possibilities are suggested: a Temple to Love, which looks like a box whose facades are rose windows from cathedrals; a Shrine to Care, filled with little glass figurines of humans filled with blood, and so forth.

They come across like witty art installations, but would these follies – sorry, "temples" – convince any religious adherent to cross over? It's unlikely. And why couldn't a Christian or a Muslim enjoy the Temple of Perspective, just as an atheist can be stunned by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia? Architecture and godliness don't necessarily go hand in hand. The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the beautiful Cathedral of Brasilia and several other churches, laughs about the fact that he has been a lifelong atheist.

What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.

To answer De Botton's original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it's about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.

Steve Rose

The height of suspense: Hollywood’s love affair with the skyscraper

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:55:45 +0000

Nine of the world's 10 tallest buildings are now in Asia – and Hollywood wants to jump off all of them

Aerial shots over Manhattan's forest of skyscrapers. Yellow cabs crawling like ants through the city grid. The hero stands on a ledge 20 floors up, provoking a street theatre of police cordons, firetrucks, news crews and onlookers. Meanwhile, in a top-floor office, a corporate villain admires an architectural model of another shiny skyscraper. Elsewhere, an acrobatic thief hangs precariously in an elevator shaft, dropping a spanner that goes clanging down innumerable storeys to the ground. The ominous ping of an approaching elevator spells danger. The hero and villain finally meet for a climactic rooftop showdown.

These scenes could be from a hundred Hollywood movies or more, but in fact they're from just one: Man on a Ledge, an enjoyably silly new thriller that at least sets out its stall in the title. You can guess most of its plot from those generic snippets, but Man on a Ledge is just the latest piece of proof that movies love skyscrapers and skyscrapers love movies. They always have. In fact, they're practically twins. The exact date of birth could be disputed, but it's safe to say that while rising land prices and advances in steel were pushing buildings upwards in Chicago and New York at the end of the 19th century, inventors like Edison and the Lumière brothers were realising they might be on to something with their moving-picture machines.

Where would the movies be without the thrilling cinematic images tall buildings provide, both inside and out? The alone is estimated to have featured in more than 250 movies. Then there's their crashingly unsubtle metaphorical value. It doesn't take a genius to fathom the symbolism at work with, say, the diminutive Tom Cruise scaling the world's tallest building in the latest Mission: Impossible, or a rampant King Kong roaring from the top of the Empire State Building; or San Francisco's TransAmerica tower looming priapically in the background of Basic Instinct as Michael Douglas gets into a lather over Sharon Stone. For most of the 20th century, it was simple: the home of the movies and the home of the skyscraper were the same place. These two distinctly masculine enterprises worked together to broadcast America's virility to the world. But the marriage now has complications. In metaphorical terms, the attacks of 9/11 hit the US where it hurt, and the current financial crisis hasn't helped.

Where the skyscrapers have gone, the movies have had to follow – and nine of the world's 10 tallest buildings are now in Asia. That recent Mission: Impossible benefited greatly from the use of Dubai's 163-storey Burj Khalifa (over $500m at the box office and counting). Dubai hasn't done badly out of it either. When the Burj Khalifa opened two years ago, the emirate had an image problem, what with its economic and architectural bubble bursting. But Mission: Impossible seems to have fixed that. According to the movie's producers, the first time they visited Dubai, they said: "We have to come back here and shoot a movie." But Dubai was also a hefty financial backer of the film, and using the Burj as a major location appears to have been a condition. So the building, designed by US architects SOM, not only featured in loving closeups, inside and out, but Dubai also got to hold the world premiere of this "local" film – bringing Cruise, celebrity special guests and the world's media to the Dubai film festival last month.

Whenever a new Asian skyscraper is completed, it seems, Hollywood rushes to get there and jump off it. In the preceding Mission: Impossible, Cruise also leapt off a tall building, this time in Shanghai. Before that, in an indication of how quickly the gimmick can date, we had Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1999's Entrapment, dangling off Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, then enjoying a brief reign as the world's tallest buildings. You could say the process of America's corporate emasculation began as far back as 1988, with Die Hard (surely a high-point in skyscraper movies): although set in Los Angeles, the film decided to rename its hijacked building the Nakatomi Plaza and make it Japanese-owned (in fact, it was the city's Fox Plaza).

As Die Hard reminds us, skyscrapers are movie shorthand for "faceless corporation", usually going hand in hand with overbearing evil and phallic overcompensation. Man on a Ledge is no different: predictably, the ledge he's on is owned by the chief baddie, the one with a model of a skyscraper (his next one). For good symbolic measure, he also smokes a huge cigar. Yet, for all that they celebrate the manly tumescence of tall architecture, such movies are invariably on the side of the little man (and we're not just talking about Cruise here). The juxtaposition of a lone individual and a gigantic edifice often tells you all you need to know about a movie's intentions.

In the silent era, skyscrapers were something of a fad. There's the much-imitated image of Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock 10 storeys up in 1923's Safety Last! Lloyd made a string of high-rise movies, such as High and Dizzy, Look Out Below and Never Weaken. In most, his little man rises to the summit, overcoming the emasculating forces of urban life. His myriad successors have done the same. In 2008's Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, in which French tightrope walker Philippe Petit conquers the Twin Towers, the little-man thrill is the same, albeit enhanced by such an emotionally loaded location.

Which brings us to the other thing that's changed about skyscrapers. The destruction of the Twin Towers was the final nail in the coffin for America's skyscraper-and-movie marriage. In the immediate aftermath, the towers were digitally removed from up-and-coming movies like Spider-Man, whose scenes of the superhero swinging between skyscrapers suddenly looked very out of date; and now they have to be digitally reinserted into New York movies that are set in the past.

In 2004, the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote: "The skyscraper has become less interesting in inverse proportion to its success. It has not been refined, but corrupted; the promise it once held … has been negated by repetitive banality." You could say the same thing about Hollywood. Just as the high-rise has nowhere to go except upwards, so movies like Man on a Ledge find themselves stuck on a familiar narrative track, running from street level up to the inevitable rooftop showdown.

In the 1960s and 70s, architectural groups like the metabolists and Archigram proposed alternatives to the boom in towers, while Britain's Leslie Martin and Lionel March argued that they don't solve urban density problems. Koolhaas, who was a screenwriter before becoming an architect, presented his own anti-skyscraper in the form of Beijing's CCTV television headquarters, which effectively folds a tower in half and brings it back down to the ground.

If there is a crisis, both industries are in denial. The genre-movie production line churns on, and the skyscrapers keep going up. There are a few more security measures beneath the skin of the Freedom Tower, which stands where the Twin Towers once stood, but externally its generic-looking design says: "Nothing's changed." Upcoming movies like the rebooted Spider-Man also seek to reassert the primacy of the New York skyline in the face of all this competition: Norman Foster's Hearst Tower is a key location in the movie.

And some of that competition is now coming from London, thanks to its belated stab at high-rise kudos with the Shard. Looming large over the city, Renzo Piano's 87-storey tower seems destined to figure in the new era of "more commercial" British movies the government is calling for. According to the Shard's marketing agent, they've been receiving filming requests at the rate of about one a week. So far they've turned them all down, they say, but you can just picture Colin Firth struggling to express himself to Keira Knightley in its lift, or Daniel Craig and Tom Cruise fighting it out on the rooftop to see who gets to use it first, James Bond or Mission: Impossible. Meanwhile, back in real life, details of the next 007 novel have just been released. It's set in Dubai.

Steve Rose

Tall orders: the best film skyscrapers – in pictures

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:19:17 +0000

Hollywood is drawn to multi-storey architecture like … well, like a colossal prehistoric gorilla is drawn to multi-storey architecture. From the caped crusader posing on rooftops in The Dark Knight to Phillipe Petit's death-defying walk between the twin towers in Man on Wire, here's a selection of the greatest movie moments involving everyone's favourite phallic symbol

Plans for £80m new Design Museum unveiled

The Sheet — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:25:07 +0000

London museum's 2014 move to Commonwealth Institute aims to make it 'the world's leading museum of contemporary design and architecture'

Plans for a new Design Museum were unveiled at a press conference today in the Odeon Kensington across the road from the long-abandoned Commonwealth Institute. Jonathan Ive, the much-feted British-born designer of the iPod, iPad, iPhone and other Apple gizmos appeared, larger than life, on the screen. "Thank," he said at the end of his two-minute message of congratulations. Before he could add "you", the screen froze and the limits of nascent digital technology and design left poor Ive's face stuck in a ginormous gurn.

Happily, though, the new £80m Design Museum, scheduled to open in 2014 and housed in the early-60s architectural splendour of the Commonwealth Institute, will be a showcase of three-dimensional objects as well as digital wizardry. Britain can and will make it was the message from Terence Conran, who took to the rostrum below the cinema screen. The famous designer and entrepreneur charted the history of the Design Museum from its first home, which opened in 1981 in a former boilerhouse in the basement of the Victoria & Albert Museum. He called for design to be part of the DNA of this country – as it is in Scandinavia.

Deyan Sudjic, the museum's director, described how he had long seen the Commonwealth Institute as "the most exciting, utopian building in London", going on to highlight its future role as "the world's leading museum of contemporary design and architecture", an "active museum where new things and new ideas can happen, where research can flourish".

The Grade II* building, designed originally by Robert Matthew of Johnson-Marshall architects and crowned by a copper-clad hyperbolic paraboloid roof (realised without computers), is to be tuned up by the Dutch architects OMA with Arup as structural engineers. The interiors will be transformed by John Pawson, whose designs – whether for private houses, Calvin Klein stores, art galleries or contemporary monasteries – are never less than luminously beautiful.

The museum is on the move from its home in a former banana warehouse at Butler's Wharf, which was considered a no-go area for property development until it (and an eagerly greeted slew of Conran restaurants) arrived here from 1989.

The soaring interior of the Commonwealth Institute offers the museum three times the space it enjoyed at Butler's Wharf. It hopes for half a million visitors a year and is confident that its presence, on the southern fringe of Holland Park (close to both the Royal College of Art, where many of Britain's best designers have trained, and the world-famous South Kensington museums) will transform "High Street Ken" itself. For many years, this has been one of London's least design-conscious high streets.

With bright new galleries for temporary exhibitions as well as permanent displays, a handsome library and research centre funded by the Sackler Foundation, and the kind of atrium-like interior you expect to find in the latest shopping malls, the new Design Museum should prove to be a magnet not just for the design-conscious but curious passers-by.

None of its plans would have been possible without the help of local property development. Just as the old Design Museum was a part of Conran's redevelopment of the Victorian Butler's Wharf, so the new Design Museum will be at the core of a new residential development led by Stuart Lipton, chairman of Chelsfield Partners. Lipton has commissioned a block of flats by OMA that will flank the refurbished Commonwealth Institute. Plans for the flats were discreetly absent at the unveiling, with the new museum looking as if it will stand in splendid isolation. It won't.

"If I was a student leaving the RCA today", said Conran, who is putting up £17m for the museum through the Conran Foundation, "I'd try to team up with an engineer from Imperial College and an entrepreneur with a bit of money to makes things of quality and originality."

This is a glimpse of the future, and the big hope is that the new Design Museum will help root intelligent design – along with a new wave of manufacturing – into Britain's curiously design-resistant DNA.

Jonathan Glancey

Leaning tower of Big Ben worries MPs

The Sheet — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:23:28 +0000

House of Commons commission meets to discuss what can be done to shore up crumbling Palace of Westminster

Once again, the splits and misalignments are beginning to show in the mother of all parliaments.

This time, though, it is not a bickering coalition or a cabinet riven with discord that is causing concern but rather the state of the Palace of Westminster itself.

A committee of MPs will meet on Monday to see what can be done to stop the tower that houses Big Ben leaning any further and to shore up Pugin and Barry's neo-gothic edifice.

Subsidence has led to cracks appearing in walls around the Houses of Commons and Lords, with Big Ben's bell tower leaning 46cm (18in) at its peak.

The House of Commons commission – which is responsible for the upkeep of the parliamentary estate – will discuss a surveyor's report that suggests options for dealing with the problems, including repairs which may lead to peers and MPs temporarily moving out.

However, experts have dismissed suggestions that the palace could be reclaimed by the Thames.

According to Prof John Burland of Imperial College London, who designed the five-storey car park underneath the Palace of Westminster, the clock tower's tilt is nothing new.

"[It's] been there for years," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "When I first started work on the car park it was obvious that it was leaning.

"We made measurements on it. It was leaning at one in 250 to the vertical, which is just about visible. That's the break point between looking vertical and looking like a slight lean."

Burland said the lean had probably developed early on as there was no cracking in the cladding.

"We think it probably leant while they were building it and before they put the cladding on," he said. "That was a long time ago and buildings do lean a little bit."

Burland added that the cracking, which he said was not caused by the tube's Jubilee line or the car park, was actually good for the palace.

"They're beneficial because the building moves thermally more than is caused by the Jubilee line and the movements concentrated around the cracks and, if they didn't, there would be cracking elsewhere," he told Today.

He also said the clock tower's lean was visible to the naked eye: "If you stand in Parliament Square and look towards it, you can just see that it moves very slightly to the left – but I wouldn't put any political slant on that."

Sam Jones

Isi Metzstein obituary

The Sheet — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:06:57 +0000

Innovative architect who designed some remarkable postwar British buildings

Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable and distinguished modern architecture in postwar Britain. Under the umbrella of the Glasgow practice of Gillespie Kidd & Coia (GKC), for whom he worked throughout his career, he and his colleague Andrew MacMillan designed a series of striking churches in and around Glasgow, as well as school and university buildings further afield, including Robinson College, Cambridge. They were also the architects of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Argyll and Bute, once widely regarded as the finest modern building in Scotland but now a derelict ruin.

Metzstein was born in Berlin, the son of two Polish Jews, Efraim (who died in 1933) and Rachel. He escaped Germany in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme. The boy, his siblings and their mother were scattered all over Britain until the family was eventually reunited. The young Isi had been taken in initially by a family in Hardgate, Clydebank, and he remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life.

In 1945, having left school, he decided he wanted to become an architect, and a chance connection led to an apprenticeship with Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the firm he had taken on in the late 1920s. At the same time, Metzstein enrolled for evening classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met MacMillan, whom he brought into the firm in 1954. Together, they were to transform the practice and, as "Andy and Isi", became a celebrated double-act, as designers, teachers and talkers.

Coia, the son of Italian immigrants, had reopened the office after the second world war and resumed his association with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Glasgow, having built a number of churches in the 1930s. The archdiocese was about to embark on a programme of churchbuilding. At first, Coia's archi tecture continued in the manner of his prewar work, but soon the influence of his two and open-minded assistants became evident, familiar as they were with avant-garde buildings in continental Europe, in particular the work of the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.

The turning point was the church at Glenrothes, a new town in Fife, which was completed in 1957. With its tapering, open plan, austere aesthetic and white exterior, this was clearly the creation of different hands. Henceforth, Coia's task was to secure the commissions, while the work was carried out by his young and expanding office. Although GKC were responsible for schools and some housing during the late 1950s and 60s, what stood out was the series of bold and inventive churches. It is ironic that, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed the architect to be the almost mythical Coia, the designing was in fact carried out by a Jewish refugee from Berlin and a Glaswegian of Highland Presbyterian ancestry.

Metzstein, who described himself as a "lapsed atheist", had a strong sense of the numinous, achieved in his churches by the dramatic handling of light in dark interiors. Some of the churches were in the tradition of tall and powerful brick boxes, such as those at East Kilbride (1962) and Kilsyth (1964). Others – St Benedict's, Drumchapel (1970), Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun (1965) – had highly inventive plans and unconventional internal spaces.

However, their masterpiece was undoubtedly St Peter's (1966), where neo-Corbusian ranges with a brilliant stepped-section were disposed around an existing Victorian mansion.

The work of GKC stood out from that of their equally modern-minded contemporaries in England. As Metzstein explained: "We got the unique opportunity to design modern buildings that were not modern programmes – churches, convents, seminaries … We were relatively young and more excitable, maybe … We were designing churches, which are one-off buildings with an emotional and religious context."

By good fortune, the firm never jumped aboard the high-rise, system-building juggernaut. Metzstein and MacMillan were also unusual in having a serious interest in history, appreciating the character of Glasgow's urban fabric of stone tenements and extolling the merits of the work of the city's great architects of the past, Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at a time when it was either ignored or under threat.

In 1969, when Coia was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture, he asked that his two partners be associated with the honour. But by then things were beginning to go wrong. The patronage of the archdiocese was coming to an end (although new jobs appeared in England) and problems were emerging with the firm's experimental buildings. As with Frank Lloyd Wright, stories abound about leaking roofs and structural problems. The campanile at the East Kilbride church was taken down and in 1991 the wonderfully dramatic church at Drumchapel was summarily demolished a few days before it was due to be listed. As for St Peter's, which was superbly constructed (unlike some of the churches), it was rendered almost obsolete as soon as it was finished by the new policy, after the Second Vatican Council, of training priests in urban settings. It was abandoned by the archdiocese in 1980 and fell prey to vandals. Despite its grade A listing by Historic Scotland and its inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's list of sites most at risk, the structure remains a ruin.

Metzstein later announced the foundation of the Macallan club (named after his favourite whisky), whose members are the architects of buildings "demolished or mutilated without the involvement of its designer" and who, "the victims of brutal, premature 'scrap-heaping', are witnesses to the fragility of permanence which characterises [the] century". This may have been a joke, but it all hurt – deeply.

The firm's last building was Robinson College, an complex and inventive redbrick response to the growing reaction against the Modern movement, which was completed in 1980. Metzstein then devoted himself to teaching and lecturing, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (of which MacMillan was head), at the University of Edinburgh (where he was professor) and elsewhere.

He was held in great affection and respect by architects all over Britain, and was both revered and feared for his incisive and often devastating criticism of student work. It was annoying that recognition – and a growing admiration for the work of GKC – came so late. When Metzstein and MacMillan were presented with an award by the Royal Institute of British Architects for their teaching in 2008, Metzstein noted that "it would have been even better to receive this while we were still alive".

He remained until the end the conscience of a rational modernity, and was "allergic to 'starchitects' whose work fills the magazines". He much disliked the posturing arbitrariness of such buildings as Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, "which I can't take, both as an architect and as a Jew born in Berlin".

Behind Metzstein's acerbic wit, uttered in his guttural accent – a distinctive combination of German and Glaswegian – was a warm and generous personality. For an architect, he was unusually well-informed, intellectually curious and cosmopolitan in outlook.He lived with his wife, Dany, also of central European Jewish origin, and his family, in Hillhead. At home he created an ideal city made of metal tourist souvenir models of buildings which his many friends would send him from all over the world.

He is survived by Dany, his children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his brother and twin sister.

• Israel Metzstein, architect, born 7 July 1928; died 10 January 2012

Gavin Stamp

‘London’s British Museum is a map of the world, and a time machine too’

The Sheet — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:22:11 +0000

Our architecture correspondent celebrates London's most popular tourist attraction, the British Museum – at once a map of the world, a time machine and a treasure chest

Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Simon Jenkins on the Tower of London

My walks to the British Museum as a young boy must have been as much a visual and emotional education as they were an untiring thrill. The time I spent there as a child is probably one of the reasons I came to travel so much to remote spots and folds of the atlas in later years.

The museum itself is a map of the world, a time machine, too, offering mind trips to Mesopotamia, Memphis, Athens in the golden age of Pericles and to an encyclopedia of compelling civilisations, or haunting fragments of them. Here, dreams of exotic places, peoples and buildings were brought to kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional and mesmerising life.

I liked, too, and lapped up, the way in which the tight, regular grid of what remained of Georgian Bloomsbury – streets animated by uniform parades of red double-decker buses and ranks of gleaming black cabs – gave way, all of a sudden, to an enormous courtyard set behind glossy black iron railings.

Beyond – up the most generous flight of steps – lay the museum itself, and its compelling collections veiled by a great Greek Revival pediment at the centre of an ambitious colonnade of no fewer than 44 Ionic columns, their design based, as I learned much later, on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor (now western Turkey).

There was all this to take in even before walking through the doors into the echoing lobby and deciding whether to turn left – into the dark realm of Egyptian mummies and Assyrian gateways guarded by warriors who were half adventurously bearded men and half vigorous blue ceramic bulls – or right into the Corinthian light of the King's Library, with its double-deck rows of gold-embossed leather spines.

Here I could stare at the pencilled pages of Scott's Diary, not knowing that one day I would hold this most moving of documents in my own, white-gloved, hands, turning its heart-rending pages.

I enjoyed the gloom of the Duveen Gallery, built just before the second world war to designs by the American architect John Russell Pope, where the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon frieze – were on display. I was ignorant then of the controversy around these "stolen" sculptures and the desire of many modern Greeks to see them returned.

I learned to love Sydney Smirke's circular Reading Room set under an iron-ribbed dome in a courtyard of his elder brother's Grecian pantechnicon. Robert Smirke had travelled extensively in Greece and Sicily to sketch the ruins of ancient temples before he turned his cool mind and his elegant hand to the design of what is today, in terms of visitor numbers, Britain's most popular tourist attraction.

What has changed since I was a child? Renovations, extensions, and the exodus of the British Library to Colin St John Wilson's red-brick monument alongside the fairytale Gothic of the Midland Grand Hotel and St Pancras station, Norman Foster's roofed-over Great Court and, most of all, the sheer number of people tramping through the museum's halls and galleries, so many that the last time I came to look at collections from ancient Mesopotamia I was all but swept away on a tide of visitors: the gallery I had chosen has become one of many intensely busy thoroughfares in the museum.

It can be too busy for its own good. And yet anyone who is tired of the British Museum is tired not just of tourism or the crush of central London, but of the entire world and the history of its civilisations captured here in untiring architectural splendour.

• Admission to the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1 (020-7323 8299, britishmuseum.org) is free

Jonathan Glancey

‘The surrounding modern buildings show no respect for the Tower of London’

The Sheet — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:18:50 +0000

The iconic 11th-century citadel that is the Tower of London, with its ancient walls, streets, steps and turrets, has been let down by a towering failure of City planners, says Simon Jenkins

Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum

Bad news. Unesco may soon strip London's two most prominent tourist sites, Westminster's Parliament Square and the Tower of London in the City of their world heritage status. Chief reason is the towering Shard, which will be western Europe's tallest building, now looming over both of them from its launch pad on the south side of London Bridge. Westminster's grouping of Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Whitehall is probably far enough away to survive the shock. The Tower of London is a different matter.

The rough-and-tumble old citadel has become such a London familiar that few people really know it. William the Conqueror's White Tower still sits nobly in the centre of the composition, sadly deprived of the original limewash that gave it its name. Inside are the original apartments, two chambers to each floor, and a Norman chapel. In the basement is a magnificent armoury museum. This remains the finest 11th-century structure in Britain.

On the river side of the Tower is Traitor's Gate and a suite of medieval chambers fitted out for Henry III (who kept a zoo in the grounds). This mini-palace has been recreated, complete with throne room and peaceful oratory looking out over the Thames – a serene view touched by the sadness of those passing to their deaths beneath.

Within this palace runs the last medieval street in London, a maze of ancient walls, steps and turrets. Here are the Bloody Tower, Raleigh's prison chambers, the Crown Jewels and the "leads" where Princess Elizabeth walked and contemplated death or coronation during the reign of her Catholic half-sister, Mary. The Tower enclave as a whole is a remarkable medieval town within a town. When inside, we can just about lose ourselves in Beefeaters, ravens, blood, guts and history.

Until the 1960s Tower Hill, overlooking the tower itself, was surrounded by the buildings, mostly warehouses, of a working Georgian and Victorian city. Most eye-catching of all, Tower Bridge, designed by the City architect, Horace Jones, in 1886, rose downstream in deference to the tower itself. The most famous bascule bridge in the world and still working, it perfectly complements the battlements and vigour of the Conqueror's fortress. Visitors can climb it and look down on river and city beneath, getting a closer and more evocative view than from the big wheel upstream.

That is about it. As Unesco rightly suggests, no city in Europe has shown less concern for the setting of its historic buildings than London. St Katherine's Dock just downstream of the bridge has been partly restored, but its tower facade is wrecked by an overwhelming glass box by Lord Rogers, and by the appalling concrete Tower Hotel. Whoever allowed this to be put up should be shot, and one day I assume it will be taken down.

Across the river lies the benighted site of warehouses cleared in the 1970s and left fallow as planners argue over what to do next. Had the waterfront been restored, as happened downstream in Wapping, this area would have been yielding rent and jobs for a quarter of a century. That is the true cost of so-called redevelopment.

Directly opposite the Tower is the mayor of London's oval building designed by Lord Foster and described by former mayor Ken Livingstone as a "glass testicle". It lurches strangely towards the river with, to its right, the frigid More London development. Meanwhile, on the north bank upstream of the Tower, is a giant atrium block also by Foster, blundering across the contour.

These buildings show not the slightest respect for the Tower or Tower Bridge. They are monuments only to insipid steel and glass.

• Admission to the Tower of London (0844 482 7799, hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon) from £17 adults and £9 children, if booked online

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and chairman of the National Trust

Simon Jenkins