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Boris Johnson’s London Cycle Hire scheme flogs our birthright to Barclays

The Sheet — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:46:52 +0000

The mayor's deal has smothered London's public spaces with what may be the largest piece of corporate branding in existence

London's long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there's no doubt it's a valuable addition to the capital's public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there's the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.

Maybe it's not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital's road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city's new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called "Barclays Cycle Superhighways" and painted Barclays blue.

London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It's not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it's the principle. We're not talking about some supersized billboard here: we're talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad.

The sponsorship deal, worth £25m, has been presented as a coup for Boris Johnson. It has enabled him to recover some of the £140m Transport for London spent on the cycle-hire scheme and has even been presented as "payback" for the mayor's support of the banks during the credit crunch. Surely, however, £25m is a small price to pay for such an invasive piece of branding? If a city of the global stature of London can't afford to provide rental bikes without turning its urban fabric into a massive endorsement, we're in trouble.

There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion. Johnson seemingly lacks any sensitivity to the ethical or aesthetic side-effects of his deal-making – this is, after all, the man who condemned the Stratford Olympics site to a hideous 115m-high sculpture – precisely the kind of vainglorious ego trip the Olympics can do without – based on a 45-second chat with Britain's richest man in the cloakroom at Davos. We must be careful not to assume a loss of innocence; private ownership and interests have held sway in this city for centuries, and often cooperation between private and public bodies is the best way to meet the city's needs. However, the public realm that the Victorians handed over to municipal authorities to manage in the public good – including streets and pavements, squares, and infrastructure such as transport and sewage networks – has been under steady assault since the privatisation of the Thatcher years.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued in her book No Logo that we had reached a point where it seemed nothing could happen anymore without a corporate sponsor. The inevitable upshot of their growing social power was that brands wanted an expanded visual presence. T-shirt logos and media advertisements were no longer enough: branding had to be a fully immersive experience. As the superhighways prove, there is no amount of space a brand will not happily fill, with public bodies all too willing to hand it over. TfL is becoming ever more imaginative about the bits of Tube stations it will sell off to advertisers – including, now, the space between escalators and the gates of the exit barriers. Every year the Regent Street Christmas lights, once a public gesture organised by the Regent Street Association, turn a major thoroughfare into a 3D advert for some fashion label or blockbuster movie.

Increasingly entire pieces of London have become brands in their own right, a process that began in the 1980s with the privately owned Canary Wharf development. Since then, so-called "business improvement districts" have been popping up all over the capital under the banner of regeneration: Broadgate in the City, Paddington Basin, Kings Cross Central, the new Spitalfields Market, the More London development near Tower Bridge. It's a national phenomenon, too, exemplified by "malls without walls" such as Liverpool ONE or Brindleyplace in Birmingham. They might look like other parts of the city, but they are very different. Stroll through Broadgate and you'll notice the logo of developer British Land studding the pavements. These are privately owned developments, policed by private security guards who can throw you out for the slightest misdemeanour or – if you happen to be sleeping rough, say – simply for disrupting the projection of affluence. In the case of More London – a series of sterile glass blocks set amid some rather uptight landscaping on the South Bank – the very name is a deliberate deception. The developers are trying to claim this is just an ordinary piece of the city. Don't believe it.

Anyone who wants to find out more about the insidious privatisation of British cities should read Anna Minton's latest book, Ground Control. The point is that we are in danger or running out of unbranded space. Though it may seem innocuous, the branding of cycle lanes sets an all-too-exploitable precedent. As citizens we have a communal birthright, which includes the public realm. Our representatives are supposed to protect that – not sell it off to corporations who are neither responsible nor accountable for the spaces of which they claim symbolic ownership. Politicians seem only too ready to turn our cities into horizontal billboards. If we're not vigilant, the urban landscape is going to become a brandscape.

Justin McGuirk

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Letters: Get Carter car park

The Sheet — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:05:45 +0000

Owen Hatherley (In praise of Brutalism, 27 July) criticises the demolition of the car park in Gateshead featured in the film Get Carter. As the local MP, I can tell him that people in Gateshead are very keen that it is replaced by a long overdue £150m redevelopment of the town centre, which had been blighted by this unused and unsafe car park. The film will keep it alive forever, but the vast majority of the Big Society in Gateshead are glad to see the back of this monstrosity – and in these days of localism, their views should come first.

Ian Mearns MP

Labour, Gateshead

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Response: Though I didn’t have his diaries, my biography of Nikolaus Pevsner is still reliable

The Sheet — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:05:18 +0000

My sources are legitimate. I've interviewed those who knew him and accessed his archive

Rosemary Hill must have good judgment as a historian: she has won a prize for her book on Stonehenge and enjoyed praise for her study of Augustus Pugin. But she doesn't give that impression in her review of my new book Pevsner – The Early Life: Germany and Art (The adopted Englishman, Review, 10 July).

She is aware, for example, that in writing this first volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's first-ever biography, I haven't had access to his diaries. She therefore says, vaguely but insidiously, that I "make grave insinuations knowing that much of the evidence is missing". In doing so she makes three "grave insinuations" of her own: that what I've written is suspect; that without the diaries I've been handicapped; and that my knowledge of that handicap should have held me back.

Of course I'd love to have had the diaries, but it's wrong that nothing else matters or that, in Hill's words, only "in the diaries [Pevsner] kept at the time" is there "the evidence that would confirm or refute" conclusions sourced from elsewhere.

It's entirely possible to know about Pevsner from other sources. Mine include the 70 shelf-feet of papers in the Pevsner archive in Los Angeles, the archives of the many bodies he was associated with, a mass of official documents, his own privately circulated family history, and the memories of the people I've talked to who knew him in Germany, including his wife's sister, two first cousins, surviving former students in Göttingen, and contemporaries from his schooldays in Leipzig.

These sources aren't illegitimate or inadequate, as Hill implies. In fact, they often provide an independent means of testing what Pevsner said about himself. If Hill has a basis for discounting them, I'd be the first to make appropriate corrections, but she shouldn't sound alarm bells just because she doesn't like what the best available evidence currently shows.

Equally, it's essential not to borrow what Pevsner did later to explain what he did earlier and in different circumstances. Hill challenges evidence of Pevsner's political attitudes by offering readers a simplistic (and inaccurate) story, often trotted out, about how his behaviour in 1939 (six years after my book closes) proves that he was "simply naive about Nazism" in the early 1930s, adding tritely, "what other explanation is there?" Well, several.

She also makes her unfounded doubt about Pevsner's uncomfortable relations with his father into a giant doubt about the whole project, and minimises, in one grudging sentence, my achievement in "establishing the academic and intellectual context in which, in his twenties, Pevsner's career blossomed", when in fact this is the core of the book.

Hill has fallen back lazily on the very canards my research has challenged, and on the "imminent" appearance of another biography, based on the diaries, in which she has more trust. But that book hasn't appeared yet, and until it does its use as a yardstick for measuring an actual work is speculative and improper. Hill should know better.

Stephen Games

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Gateshead car park: in praise of Brutalism | Owen Hatherley

The Sheet — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:00:17 +0000

The Gateshead car park is being demolished this week. It's a tragedy, and not just for its architect

Owen Luder, twice president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, is Britain's unluckiest architect. In the 60s his firm designed several once-celebrated, subsequently reviled Brutalist buildings – all now either demolished, defaced or derelict.

The latest casualty is Trinity Square in Gateshead, a combined car park and shopping centre most famous for its malevolent, melodramatic presence in Mike Hodges' Get Carter. It's one of a series of commissions that bankrupted their developer, E Alec Colman Investments – along with the (mutilated, clad in white plastic) Eros House in Catford and the (demolished, replaced by a surface car park) Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth.

Though Luder's name was on the contracts and blueprints, the lead designer was Rodney Gordon, a former social architect with the London county council seduced into shopping centres. Trinity Square promised the realisation of his dreams – a metropolis architecture of dramatic skylines, multiple levels and striking forms, on a parsimonious budget. He died last year, entirely unrepentant.

And why should he have been? These are – or rather, were – wrenchingly powerful, physical buildings, in a tradition of dark, looming, twisted architecture that stretches from Newcastle Cathedral to John Vanbrugh. Unfortunately, we have collectively decided that architecture must be either Heritage – only Baroque is allowed to be bulging and overwhelming, only Gothic can be freakish and discordant – or Regeneration, in which case all must be glassy, shiny and colourful. Luder and Gordon's generation were too modern for the former, not patronising enough for the latter.

Luder didn't descend from Hampstead to foist his gigantic concrete buildings on the benighted proletariat, but from the Old Kent Road. "Growing up as I did in rented rooms in tightly built Victorian terrace houses with no inside loo," he said, "I went along with Le Corbusier's vision of beautifully appointed multistorey houses set in big landscaped open spaces." Yet Eros House, the Tricorn and Trinity Square were cranky, strange things, doomed to commercial failure because of their architectural caprices. The Tricorn never had enough retail space to entice an "anchor", was not sufficiently freeze-dried and air-conditioned. Proles for Modernism, a mysterious south-coast group who picketed the Tricorn's redevelopers, praised it for exactly this reason.

The Tricorn's demolition inspired protests, artworks and graffiti ("WARNING – THIS BUILDING MAY PROVOKE INTEREST"). As if to neuter this, Gateshead council has sponsored both Trinity Square's demolition and its commemoration in various art events.

When he was Riba president, Luder famously hailed Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building – essentially a more expensive Tricorn in steel – as "sod you" architecture. But at the same time, he is rare in architectural circles for actually trying to explain his buildings – when Trinity Square popped up on Channel 4's Zhdanovite Demolition, Luder managed to sway some of its haters.

Trinity Square failed to be sufficiently boring. That's not the case with its mooted replacement – a Tesco store with student flats on top, clad in as many materials as possible so as not to offend, concrete-framed but avoiding the dreaded faux pas of showing the material. Rodney Gordon claimed "architecture should appeal to the emotions. It should give you that feeling from your balls to your throat". With this demolition, we're exchanging architecture as a physical experience for buildings as a mute, grinning, lobotomised accompaniment to consumerism. We should lament it, not cheer it on.

Owen Hatherley

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Riba Stirling prize 2010 | Architecture

The Sheet — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 23:05:53 +0000

The 2010 Riba Stirling shortlist is out and, as usual, the committee has missed some of the best candidates

There is a band of buildings, skilful and brave in their design, that will feature prominently in future histories of current architecture. Some are world famous, some are hugely popular, some represent new ideas surfacing for the first time. All share the same badge of honour. They did not win the £20,000 Riba Stirling prize, the award for "the architects of the building which has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year".

These buildings include the Eden Project in Cornwall, Tate Modern, Selfridges in Birmingham, the New Art Gallery in Walsall, Will Alsop's Hotel du Department in Marseille, Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg and her BMW Central Building in Leipzig. The British Library in St Pancras, London, should also have won: although unfashionable and controversial when it opened, its quality becomes more apparent with each passing year.

Meanwhile the prize has been awarded to projects that have since subsided into obscurity. These include the Magna Centre in Rotherham, whose victory in 2001 seemed to surprise even its architect, Chris Wilkinson. The prize has an instinct for the compromise candidate, for the one least likely to frighten any horses.

This year some exceptional buildings haven't even made the shortlist, announced last week. One is the Nottingham Contemporary Art Centre by Caruso St John, a building that responds professionally to a demanding brief, budget and site. It is the work of client and architects who are both good and committed. Its galleries are scrupulously designed for the display of art. It deals beautifully with sloping terrain, allowing internal and external public routes to run through it. More than that, it tries something unusual, which is to see how ornament can be used on a modern building. It is clad in pale green concrete panels imprinted with lace patterns, creating a play of apparent lightness and actual heaviness.

Idea is translated into material, which is something architects should do. Nottingham Contemporary stands outside the usual run of decent-but-predictable modern architecture of which there is plenty. It is a public, civic building that makes a contribution to its city. It is an opportunity to recognise buildings north of Watford, which is something Stirling juries sometimes worry about, but the opportunity was not taken.

The list also omits the British Embassy in Warsaw by Tony Fretton, who must wonder what he has done to upset the Stirling fairy. Last year Fretton was the victim of a bizarre and nasty press campaign, which complained that two of the five prize judges were predisposed in his favour. This overlooked the fact that the other three weren't, or that, year after year, the Stirling jury is loaded in favour of the established and middlebrow.

As it turned out, the supposedly biased jury didn't choose Fretton's shortlisted entry, the Fuglsang art museum in Denmark. Instead they opted for Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Hammersmith, London, by Richard Rogers's practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour. This is a nice building, but it wasn't pushing any boundaries to reward a small project by a 76-year-old already amply recognised.

Fretton is not an ingratiating architect. His plain buildings can look ordinary in photographs. Nor is he a slick minimalist. What's good about his work is the subtle relationships he creates between building, people, landscape and – when they are galleries – art. It is surely part of the job of prizes like the Stirling to draw attention to the un-obvious, the things whose qualities are easily overlooked.

Rather than Nottingham and Warsaw, the shortlist this year's prize includes two schools, and a house and studio built by an architect couple for themselves. All are good buildings, designed by lovely people, and it's possible that the jury wanted to send a message to the government by including the schools. Look, they seem to be saying to the school-axing Michael Gove, the design of places of learning does matter. But the house doesn't open up new ideas the way Nottingham does, or have its public importance, while the prize's role is to recognise the best architecture rather than send messages.

Also on the shortlist is the extended Ashmolean museum, Oxford, by Rick Mather Architects. This earns its place for the way it organises a complex array of galleries behind the museum's original, Grade I-listed building. But it displays a cloth ear for materials, structure and detail. Its glass and steel balustrades are in jarring shopping-mall moderne, and if the choice was between this and Nottingham, the latter should have won.

The good thing about this year's list is that it includes the two projects that were always the most likely and deserving winners, Zaha Hadid's MAXXI (Museum of 21st Century Arts) in Rome, and the Neues museum in Berlin by David Chipperfield with Julian Harrap. The latter is a beautifully poised, meticulous, but also creative shaping of a new museum out of the bombed-out ruin of an old one. It is a smash hit in its home city. It represents a way of doing architecture, where the signature of the architect is not always apparent, that breaks with the icon-building of recent years.

MAXXI is a Wagnerian blast from the brass section of the orchestra. It is the consummation of years of imagining and fighting for new ways of forming and arranging buildings. It has flaws, but it is a magnificent urban experience, a passeggiata played out on multiple intersecting levels. Hadid, the most famous woman architect in history, and possibly the most famous living British architect, has never been recognised by the Stirling. In Stirling-think, this would be a reason for giving her the prize.

To choose between these two is tough – Berlin just shades it for me – but if either wins the Stirling will break its habit of shirking the most powerful works. The thing to fear would be a split jury when the winner is chosen in October, with a third, compromise candidate surging through. Then the Stirling really would have lost all claim to be about the best architecture, as opposed to the smooth management of judging committees.

Rowan Moore

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Carbuncle Cup shortlist names and shames Britain’s worst architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:52:58 +0000

London's Strata Tower and Robert Burns memorial in Kilmarnock among six buildings in running for dubious honour

Six buildings have been chosen for an award that highlights the worst examples of architecture in the UK. The Carbuncle Cup, run by Building Design, aims to draw attention to buildings constructed in the last 12 months that most offend the aesthetic sensibilities of passersby.

Over 30 suggestions were received, but the list was whittled down to six and published to coincide with today's announcement of nominees for the 2010 Stirling Prize for architecture.

Two London buildings feature in the shortlist, the first of which is Strata Tower in Elephant and Castle, the first skyscraper to have wind turbines built into its design. The building's design has divided critics and locals, earned the nickname the Electric Razor, and was recently described by the Guardian critic Jonathan Glancey as a "sleek silver sentinel".

The Georgian Group – which campaigns for Georgian-inspired architecture – described London's tallest residential building, at 147 metres, as "pure visual grotesqueness" when it submitted it for consideration.

The second building nominated in the capital was the Bézier Apartments, near Old Street, which was accused of being shaped like a bum. Birmingham's The Cube, a 23-floor building with a glass-panelled roof, was put forward because of its "clunky windows", "inelegant vents" and gold colour, which was meant as a nod to its location in the city's jewellery quarter.

The memorial centre for the Scottish poet Robert Burns in Kilmarnock, the St Anne's Square development in Belfast and the Haymarket Hub in Newcastle also made the list.

Last year the prize went to Liverpool Ferry Terminal. Its ugliness was thought to be award winning because it was argued that it blighted a world heritage site.

The Carbuncle Cup judge Ellis Woodman, deputy editor of Building Design magazine, said: "I would like to think that this might be a good opportunity to reconsider what was built in the in the last building boom.

"These buildings could have been so much better if there had been better levels of consultation in the planning process."

The six buildings on the shortlist will be considered by a panel of expert judges in consultation with architects and local residents.

The winner of the Carbuncle Cup will be announced on August 27.

The prize takes its name from a 1984 speech by Prince Charles, well known for his support for traditional architecture, in which he described a proposed extension to the National Gallery as a "monstrous carbuncle".

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Stirling prize shortlist 2010 – in pictures

The Sheet — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:15:02 +0000

The Stirling prize is awarded to the best new building in the UK and Europe by a British architect. Take a look at the shortlist

Zaha Hadid tipped to win Stirling prize for architecture

The Sheet — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:00:37 +0000

The British-Iraqi designer was nominated for her museum of 21st century art in Rome

Zaha Hadid, the Iraq-born British architect whose avant garde designs have struggled to win acceptance in the UK, was last night tipped as the favourite to win the country's top architecture award for a sinuous museum of 21st century art in Rome that the Royal Institute of British Architects regards as her best building yet.

The designer of the €150m MAXXI museum will vie for the Stirling Prize with a €200m reworking of the Neues Museum in Berlin, by David Chipperfield, another British architect who has struggled to win major commissions in his home country. Two schools, a project to double the size of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford and a home and office development in east London make up the remainder of the shortlist for the £20,000 prize which is awarded to the architect of the best new European building built or designed in the UK.

The bookmaker William Hill has Hadid as evens favourite, followed by Rick Mather at 5/1 for the £62m Ashmolean project and Chipperfield at 11/2.

Hadid, 59, is widely recognised as one of the world's leading architects, but is yet to complete a major building in the UK. Her first is set to be the London 2012 Olympic swimming pool and diving centre.

The Stirling shortlist also highlights the quality of school buildings completed prior to the deep cuts to the education budget. Architects last night seized on the naming of two schools for the first time in the award's 15-year history as evidence the government should continue to recognise the value of good design.

The £2.5m Clapham Manor primary school in south London designed by the firm of De Rijke Marsh Morgan and a £14.4m addition to Christ's College school in Guildford by DSDHA will challenge the more expensive arts projects when the prize is announced in October. The move comes after Michael Gove, the education secretary, announced the scrapping of the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

"They represent what all schools should be: light, well-laid-out and well-equipped environments in which all students can flourish," said Ruth Reed, president of the RIBA which runs the award. "Investment in well designed schools demonstrates to teachers and pupils how much they are valued and has measurable impact – attendance and results rise; truancy and bullying fall. With the programme to improve our extremely poor school estate now much reduced it could be some time before we see such exemplar school buildings on the Stirling shortlist again."

"If you engage good architects you get social value and community value that goes beyond the bottom line and has a more persistent legacy," added Deborah Saunt, a partner in DSDHA. "This is not about cost. Our school came in at less per square metre – £1,960 – than a typical school under the BSF programme, which cost around £2,400 per square metre."

Neither school on the shortlist was designed under the BSF initiative, which aimed to rebuild or refurbish most of the nation's secondary schools. Saunt added that BSF's "industrial production of schools is not something that has proven to produce quality yet".

"There have been a lot of commercial architecture practices churning out schools and not giving them the attention they deserve," she said. The smallest project on the shortlist is a £1.6m home and office building in Shoreditch, east London, designed by Theis and Khan Architects.

Robert Booth

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Manchester fire station granted a reprieve | Maev Kennedy

The Sheet — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:16:16 +0000

Manchester's magnificent Grade II listed London Road fire station, currently empty and decaying, looks like being granted a reprieve. Completed in 1906, the fire station once housed flats for 38 officers and their families, as well as a library, bank, stables, gymnasium, police station and court. Now, after almost a decade on the national buildings "at risk" register, owners the Britannia group have lodged a planning application to convert it into a 227-room luxury hotel, maintaining and restoring many of the building's original features. The engine sheds will become function rooms, the police station will be a bar – with booths in the cells. The original firemen's poles, which took the men straight from their living rooms into the engine sheds, are being kept, and will feature in many of the bedrooms. Most inventive of all, the coroner's court, used for an inquest as recently as 1998, will become a wedding venue. "Once the work is complete, it will be the first time in more than 20 years that the public will be able to go inside," said an exultant Alex Baldwin, conservation adviser for the Victorian Society, which has been keeping an anxious eye on the London Road site for a number of years.

Maev Kennedy

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Return to the High Line in New York

The Sheet — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:02:36 +0000

A stretch of elevated railway tracks along New York's West Side has been transformed into a park in the sky. Paul Owen photographs one of New York's most intriguing new attractions

Paul Owen