Posts Tagged Art and design
John Madin obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 19, 2012
Architect who helped transform postwar Birmingham
No single architect changed the face of Birmingham as radically as John Madin between 1950 and 1975. His buildings, however, are subtly different from the concrete hulks surrounding New Street station and lining the inner ringroad, created by the city engineer, Herbert Manzoni, which gave Birmingham its 1960s consumerist image. Madin, who has died aged 87, was the architect to the Calthorpe estate, west of the city centre, which he transformed with sensitive new housing and an office strip, before he progressed to build many of the city's most individual offices and public buildings.
Madin was born in Moseley, Birmingham, the only child of a master builder and cabinetmaker who fostered his interest in architecture from an early age. He began his career in Manzoni's office aged 16, before entering the Birmingham School of Architecture, a training interrupted by second world war service with the Royal Engineers. As with many of his contemporaries, the war encouraged Madin to think big, and to see the answer to the depressed and damaged city he found on his return in 1947 in the Modern movement.
He set up in independent practice in 1950, designing housing and shops for the council and private developers, before in 1954 he was commissioned to design offices for the Engineering and Allied Employers' Federation. This small block in Edgbaston, realised in the decorative Scandinavian style that he had admired when, as a student, he had hitchhiked round Sweden, led to commissions from the Chamber of Commerce in 1960-61 and the Birmingham Post and Mail, whose offices (opened in 1966) included a 17-storey glazed office tower set over a low podium, in the style of Lever House, New York. Madin's buildings grew to match the ambitions of the 1960s, with glass giving way to heavier concrete finishes later in the decade.
The Engineering Employers' building also led to Madin's appointment by the Calthorpe estate to produce a master plan for its landholdings in Edgbaston, where he designed many important buildings. Low-rise housing in brick was followed by mixed schemes with tall blocks of flats, carefully sited and combined with rich planting. Landscaping also played a part in the offices along the Hagley Road that Madin and his rapidly expanding practice produced into the 1970s, which included his own offices, from 1966, in dark brick, and Neville House, from 1975, clad in mirror glass.
Two other buildings in Egbaston were more monumental still: the BBC's Pebble Mill studios, and the fortress-like Grand Lodge (now Clarendon Suites) for the Warwickshire Lodge of Masons, both completed in 1971. Pebble Mill was demolished in 2005, but the Clarendon Suites exemplify the richness Madin brought to his most prestigious interiors, combining modernism with traditional materials and works of art.
The same contrast between exterior and interior informed Madin's best-known but most controversial buildings, both of them in central Birmingham and under sentence of demolition: the avowedly brutalist National Westminster Bank, opened in 1974, and the Central Library. The latter is the only local authority library in Britain with the scale and stature of a university facility, and its stepped exterior conceals exceptionally calm reference areas, partly of double height.
It was the vigorous campaign to save this building, rejected for listing against the advice of English Heritage and set to be replaced by a new library from the Dutch architects Mecanoo, that led to the work of Madin's practice being re-evaluated, culminating in a monograph by the local architect Alan Clawley. Madin's last public appearance was at the launch of this book in March 2011.
Madin formed a large, multi-disciplinary practice in 1967, the John Madin Design Group, which worked across the West Midlands and in Leeds. It planned the new town of Telford, Shropshire, and extensions to Corby, Northamptonshire. He withdrew through ill-health in 1975 but continued to run its international arm until 1989, working in Europe, the Middle East and the US, mainly for the leisure industry.
A keen sportsman, Madin met his wife, Judith Jackson, on a tennis court. They married in 1956. He was an accomplished water-skier and sailor, and, following a move to Southampton, in 1992 joined the Royal Southern Yacht Club, for which he designed a new clubhouse at his own expense. Sailing holidays with his son and two daughters had earlier led him to the Welsh coast, where in 1965 he acquired a site at Aberdyfi, Gwynedd, to save it from less sensitive development. Over the following 45 years, Aberdovey Hillside Village slowly emerged, with pairs and terraces of flats and houses along the contours. Madin was still working there in 2011.
He is survived by his wife and children.
• John Hardcastle Dalton Madin, architect and planner, born 23 March 1924; died 8 January 2012
A high water mark: artists moor holiday houseboat on London roof
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 17, 2012
Vessel installed on top of Queen Elizabeth Hall on South Bank is open to the public for overnight stays
There are just a few things missing to complete the scene. Savage dogs, rusting engines from white vans plundered for parts, seagulls squabbling over landfill, scuffed barges laden with gravel and a backdrop peppered with indifferent high-rise housing. Add a slight scent of sewage and the 27-tonne Le Roi des Belges (King of the Belgians) might be berthed on some wind scythed stretch of the Thames Estuary far east of Tower Bridge.
The illusion, conjured on a grey and blustery January morning is not so very whimsical. Le Roi des Belges just happens to be moored on top of the brutalist Queen Elizabeth Hall between the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre. This, though, is no weather beaten Thames trader; it is, rather, an artwork – houseboat, too, which the public can stay in. It was designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, with Artangel for Living Architecture, an organisation set up by the philosopher Alain de Botton to build innovative holiday homes around the shores of Britain.
The shock, having ridden a slow and brutally utilitarian lift up through a jagged concrete interstice between the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, is to find the houseboat anchored to the vast concrete roof of the 1960s concert hall, a terrain as bleak, and as compelling, as any found downriver from Tower Bridge.
Artist and architect say they were inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, set on the Thames and the River Congo, and by Conrad's tales of how he steamed up the Congo in a boat of the same name in 1889. But, where Conrad experienced the all but unspeakable horror of the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State by King Leopold II, what you see spread out before you as you board the artworld Roi des Belges, also known as A Room for London, is the most compelling, and gloriously wide-angled, panorama of central London, framed by the Palace of Westminster on the port side and St Paul's to starboard.
"The idea is that where once ships sailed out from imperial London to the rest of the world, today the world has come willingly to London," explained de Botton. "The boat is here to provoke, stimulate and adjust how people feel about London."
Two people can stay here for a single night during the course of this year. Snuggled into their cabin – complete with neat galley, dining a pair of room, bunks that can be slid together, a shower with a view of the dome of St Paul's and a library. Those stowing their jib aboard this happily unexpected houseboat, are offered shelves stacked with books on London, peerless views and the strangest sense of being marooned alone in the heart, not of darkness, but of a neon, fluorescent and sodium-lit city and with the sound of Thames water lapping the South Bank shore overlain with the noise of night buses and emergency service sirens.
A Room for London is a year-long arts venue. A programme of visiting writers includes Swedish author and cultural historian Sven Lindqvist and novelist Jeanette Winterson. Among the musicians staying on board will be Andrew Bird, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist, German composer Heiner Goebbels and Laurie Anderson. Video and installation artist, Jeremy Deller, and Talking Heads' David Byrne will also be part of the crew. Somewhere between July and December you might want to book yourself on board, too, before, Le Roi des Belges is lifted off the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall and packed off to her next port of cultural call.
Le Roi des Belges is the sixth of the adventurous new rental houses commissioned by Living Architecture. These include the Balancing Barn on the Suffolk coast between Aldeburgh and Walberswick by Dutch architects, MVRDV, the Shingle House on the extreme south-easterly point of England at Dungeness, by the Glaswegian team NORD Architecture, and the Dune House on the fringe of Thorpeness,Suffolk, by Norway's Jarmund/Vigsnaes architects. All are moored by the sea, yet none is as literal in form as the shipshape Roi des Belges.
• This article was amended on 17 January 2012. The original referred to atrocities committed in the Congo Free State by King Alphonso II. This has been corrected.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
Blackpool gets its very own Vegas-style register office, a Scottish giant goes to the great studio in the sky, and the sad demise of two close-knit London housing estates
A week of happy beginnings and sad departures. On Thursday, Simon Garrick and Kelly Goudie from the Fylde, Lancashire, were the first couple to get married at Festival House, a dazzling new gold register office on Blackpool's Golden Mile. The £2.7m building, designed by dRMM, is one glittering part of the seaside town's £250m improvement plan that has already seen the refurbishment of the 158m (518ft) Blackpool tower and the extension of Blackpool Central Library by Bisset Adams architects.
Blackpool's "Tower of Love" register office is a British take on the kitsch wedding chapels of Las Vegas. The structure is clad in gold stainless steel shingles – it's very hard to miss when the sun's out – and boasts a tall window framing pretty much the entire length of Blackpool tower. There is quite possibly some Freudian symbolism at play here.
The chapel of the once-beautiful seminary of St Peter's at Cardross near Glasgow, consecrated in 1966 and abandoned in the early 1980s, is sadly a ruin today. This week saw the death of Isi Metzstein, co-designer of St Peter's and one of Scotland's greatest modern architects. Born in Berlin in 1928, Metzstein came to Scotland not a moment too soon: just before the outbreak of the second world war. He joined Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the long-established Glaswegian firm he was to run with Andy MacMillan; together, Metzstein and MacMillan designed some of the most challenging and profound churches in Europe.
Saddam Hussein's "super mosque" is a religious ruin in a very different mould. Work began on this vast 11-acre complex close to Baghdad airport not long before the Iraqi dictator was toppled in 2003. The convoluted story of the three huge mosques Saddam was building at the time of his fall can be found online. Here is a telling chunk:
"The Umm al-Mahare ['Mother of All Battles'] mosque on the outskirts of Baghdad has four outer minarets shaped like Kalashnikov assault rifles, and four inner minarets shaped like Scud missiles. The surrounding reflecting pool is shaped like the Arab world. The mosque also featured a Qur'an written in Saddam's blood (28 litres, said to have been donated over two years) … Al-Rahman ['the most merciful'] mosque featured no fewer than 14 domes and was scheduled to be completed in 2004. The Saddam the Great mosque was a construction site with skeletal columns, and was schedule[d] to be completed in 2015."
The site of the last of these is to be the home of the new $100m Iraqi parliament building. A shortlist of designers has been drawn up. This includes architects Assemblage, with Buro Happold and Al Khan as engineers – though Assemblage's Peter Besley tells me he has no idea who else is in the running as "the ministries [in Baghdad] are notoriously hard to get this kind of information from".
Isi Metzstein's finest buildings have often been labelled "brutalist", a term coined by the critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1950s. Now, one of the most famous – or infamous – brutalist monuments, the long-threatened Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, is finally on the verge of demolition. While some might cheer, the replacement housing is not exactly a cause for celebration.
Home Sweet Home, meanwhile, is an exhibition opening tomorrow that tells the story of the 1960s-era prefabricated concrete Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke, south London. Now that its denizens have been moved out in the name of "regeneration", and 4,398 new homes are moving in, what happens to former residents' sense of community? To their hopes, fears and memories? It was home to thousands of people – even though, as the curators point out, the Ferrier estate "came to be seen as the problem it was designed to solve". The curators of this moving show are photographer Anna Batchelor and designer Sarah Colson.
This week also saw the opening in Boston of the latest design by Renzo Piano – yes, the Shard guy. This is the $118m extension to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The modest, low-lying new building provides space for temporary exhibitions, concerts and education programmes. The original building, dating from 1903, was designed by Willard T Sears in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, for the collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner. It's awash with art of all kinds, from Botticelli to John Singer Sargent. Although this is prohibited, both the old and new buildings would make glamorous wedding venues, if not quite in the inimitable style of Las Vegas ... or Blackpool.
• This article was amended on 16 January 2012. The original used the term registry office. This has been corrected.
A Room for London – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
A small vessel perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall has become London's most coveted hotel room
The river Thames has a way of defeating plans for its jollification. For decades architects have looked on its great, tempting emptiness and felt an irresistible urge to propose beaches, inhabited bridges, lidos, zones for festivals fluttering with pennants and balloons, places to promenade as if it were the edge of the Mediterranean. In the 1980s Richard Rogers imagined an archipelago of pleasure, with the forms and construction methods of oil rigs remade into towers and pinnacles of fun. Most recently, the architects Gensler proposed the floating hospitality suite they called the London River Park.
Mostly these plans don't happen. The river flows on, lugubrious and imperturbable, which is possibly because, as Joseph Conrad observed, it is not really a fun sort of thing. "And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation. For him it was the "sleepless river" of a "monstrous" and "brooding" city. "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river," he also wrote, "into the mystery of an unknown earth!"
One Thames project that has happened is A Room for London, a boat-like object perched high on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, as if stranded there by a receding deluge. Where many Thames proposals want to put things of land on to water, this puts something riverine – a boat – on to land. It is a temporary structure, a cross between building and sculpture, by the architect David Kohn and the artist Fiona Banner. It contains a single hotel room which anyone can in theory book, if with rather more difficulty than Olympic tickets. When nights for the first six months were made available they sold out in 12 minutes; the next batch goes on sale on Thursday (at £120 a night).
This little space is the production of an impressive array of cultural impresarios: the Southbank Centre, Artangel, and Living Architecture, the organisation set up by the writer Alain de Botton to build beautiful new houses which can be rented for holidays. It comes, like many cultural projects in 2012, with an Olympic tag, being officially part of the cultural Olympiad. As well as paying guests, writers, artists and musicians have been invited to stay there, and be creative.
From the outside the jaunty vessel seems to fall within the "fun" category of Thames projects. It juts perkily into the void, and three little wind turbines, like displaced propellers, whirr on the top of a triangular rig. It is a toy, palpably and deliberately incongruous. It is a folly. But it turns out that its makers also had Conradian ambitions. The boat is called the Roi des Belges, after the vessel in which Conrad himself sailed up the river Congo, in the journey that would inspire Heart of Darkness. Inside there is a cabinet containing old maps of the Thames and the Congo, in reference to the parallels that Conrad made between the two rivers. An octagonal table and a box of dominos echo similar objects described in the master's novels.
There are other inspirations. The intricate house and museum of the architect Sir John Soane is cited by David Kohn as a help in designing the "episodic" sequence of small spaces that are inside the boat, as you progress from a little vestibule to a galley, to a bedroom that opens up to penthouse views of the river, bracketed by the Palace of Westminster to the left, and St Paul's Cathedral to the right. Alongside the river maps there is a copy of a drawing by Soane's collaborator JM Gandy that shows Soane's Bank of England as if it were a Roman ruin, and which might be taken as a comment, if desired, on financial calamity, or on the fragility of civilisation described by Conrad. Kohn also mentions the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as an influence, even though his heavy white stone churches would come top of most lists of Structures Least Likely to Float. The spire-like superstructure of A Room for London refers to these churches, and to the spires of London in general.
The main point, says Kohn, is to combine the intimate and the epic, in a way not unlike the relation of domesticity to vastness that you get in boats. "The interiors feel comfortable and you know what to do there, but it's not just an easy or twee kind of comfort. You are connected to the Thames, to a wider world, also to what one thinks of the world. You have a relationship to disputed, uncertain territory."
In all this the intention was to avoid kitsch and creating a one-line joke. The timber-lined interior, stained in places in rich pinkish-red, is not pushed to the point where it is literally boat-like in every detail, but rather seeks other architectural qualities, which is where the influence of Soane comes in. It was also important to Kohn and Banner that the structure was exactingly well made, by the specialist company Millimetre. "It is solid; it has a kind of earnestness," says Kohn, which keeps it away from being a stage set.
And so the lucky purchasers of nights in the hotel room, the intellectual aesthete's equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, will be able to contemplate the "venerable stream" much as Conrad's characters did in the cruising yawl Nellie. At sunset they will be able to watch the gloom "become more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun". They can, should they want to, think their thoughts about the world and their place in it.
A Room for London is small, and temporary, and will only be fully enjoyed by a few people. It is not a prototype for future Thames-side development, and offers no solutions to the problems of urban regeneration. It may, even, not quite match the fathomless profundity of its inspirations, being rather an enjoyable and well-made jeu d'esprit. But I have a feeling it will give satisfactions that other Olympic projects will not match: it is intelligent, witty, pleasurable, and is based on observing its surroundings as they actually are, rather than imposing a bombastic idea of what they should be.
The Rev Maurice Walton obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 14, 2012
My uncle Maurice Walton, who has died aged 80, was a founding partner of the architects Stimpson Walton and Bond and left a noticeable mark on his home town of Northampton with his award-winning designs. These included a lift-testing tower, built in concrete for the Express Lift Company, which was opened by the Queen in 1982. The tower attained celebrity status, being referred to by Terry Wogan as the "Northampton Lighthouse". It was listed by English Heritage in 1997 and, at the time, was the youngest building to be listed.
Maurice was born in Northampton and educated at the town's grammar school, which he left at 16 after his headteacher advised him to seek employment. He was happy to remind the incumbent headteacher of this advice when he was invited, as a distinguished old boy, to present prizes more than 50 years later in the school's splendid new hall, which he had designed.
He studied architecture at Liverpool University, graduating in 1953, and set up in practice with Tony Stimpson in 1964. Their commissions encompassed commercial, ecclesiastical and domestic projects, including state-of-the-art homes for himself and his family.
Maurice's design for an extension to Northampton's Victorian guildhall was arguably one of his most striking. He and Alf Bond created a design which complemented rather than copied Edward William Godwin's masterpiece. The new build received a Civic Trust commendation in 1993 along with two other awards for construction using natural stone. In a 2007 survey for the Royal Institute of British Architects, the people of Northampton voted the Guildhall and its extension their most loved building. A gargoyle on the building bearing Maurice's image serves as a lasting reminder of his work.
A lifelong Christian, Maurice was ordained into the church at the age of 63 after many years as a lay preacher and served as a non-stipendiary priest. For eight years he combined his two vocations until his retirement from the church. He continued to work as an architect until December 2010.
He is survived by his wife, Gill, whom he married in 1961; his daughters Kate, Elizabeth and Jane; and his grandsons Frank and Wilf.
Beverly Bernstein obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 13, 2012
My friend and former colleague Beverly Bernstein, who has died aged 72, moved to London from New York with her husband, David, in 1964, intending to spend a year or so in the UK. Instead they stayed and made a significant contribution to architectural education, social housing and development planning around the world.
Beverly's appointment, in her early 20s, to the role of senior registrar at the Architectural Association School coincided with the end of a turbulent period in the AA's history. She became part of the selection process for a new principal, John Lloyd, and was the right person for the new registrar's role. She combined creative management with sound financial sense and the ability to form a young, responsive and fun-loving administrative team. Her reform of the AA's organisation was tested both when negotiations went on for two years on the merger of the AA School with Imperial College, and when they failed, as the AA continued its independent path.
In 1970 she left the AA to follow her development-planning interests, working with Colin Buchanan and Partners and Land Use Consultants. By chance rather than design, she specialised in the development planning of islands and had success in the Seychelles, Malta, the Channel Islands and Saudi Arabia. She edited Habitat International, Housing Review and The Works of Charles Abrams. Together with David Bernstein and David Levitt, she had a significant effect on social housing, helping to create the modern housing association movement and, in 1968, Circle 33 Housing Trust.
She was born Beverly Joan Liden in New York, the daughter of an executive of A&P Stores. She read labour economics at Cornell University and studied European literature under Vladimir Nabokov. She became an economic researcher for the US Conference Board and then the British Institute of Management in London. She married David in 1962.
Beverly was awarded an MPhil in town planning from University College London in 1974 and became a British subject in 1988. In retirement she needed her tennis-playing prowess to counter the efforts of being a restaurant critic of the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
David survives her.
Rome’s Colosseum restoration sparks inquiries into contract
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 12, 2012
Shoe firm Tod's had struck a €25m deal to fund restoration, but this is being investigated
Italy's most visited monument, the Roman Colosseum, is suffering from "about 3,000 lesions", a government minister said last year. Sometimes, bits fall off, as did a chunk dislodged by a pigeon on Christmas Eve.
But the chances of the aged patient receiving emergency surgery receded on Wednesday when it emerged that Rome prosecutors and the Italian audit court had each launched inquiries into the award of a contract for the funding of restoration. In January 2011, the luxury shoe firm Tod's announced it had struck a deal under which it would put up €25m (£21m) for the cleaning and strengthening of the arena where gladiators once grappled with wild animals – and each other.
Tod's obtained the right to use the image of the Colosseum until two years after completion of the work. But the company's founder, Diego Della Valle, promised not to exploit his sponsorship for commercial purposes, saying he was happy just to give something back to his country.
The agreement has nevertheless been a subject of controversy ever since. And, on Monday, Italy's competition authority was reported to have condemned the procedures used.
According to a consumer group that lodged the original complaint with the authority, an inquiry found that Tod's should have been made to organise, and not just fund, the project; that it had been granted sponsorship rights for too long; and that rival bidders had not been given enough time to top its offer.
But the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, warned: "If, with €25m of private cash available, we don't get work under way now, we cannot then complain if parts of the Colosseum collapse."
Swirl power: Aberdeen’s new £57m university library
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 10, 2012
Aberdeen university's extraordinary new library has put the Silver City back on the architectural map. But will its students ever get any work done?
It is an architectural riddle wrapped in a cultural mystery inside a financial enigma. I'm talking about Aberdeen, ever since it became oil rich and the effective capital of Europe's petroleum industry. The puzzle is how this near recession-proof Scottish city has managed to be awash with money (compared with much of Britain), yet hasn't raised a single notable building in the last quarter of a century.
It is a situation made all the more baffling by the fact that the Silver City of yore was, along with Bath and Edinburgh, one of the finest and most readily identifiable architectural compositions on these islands. Its granite monuments – shining silver in sunlight and resembling some artificial mountain range on sunless days – were crafted from a single quarry at Rubislaw. Some 6m tonnes were hewn from the earth until the quarry's closure in 1971, leaving one of the largest man-made holes in Europe.
But the lull is now over – thanks to the completion of the eye-catching new £57m library at the University of Aberdeen. Set on the campus at King's College, the building stands between the city and the sea like a super-modern lighthouse, beaming out a message – loud, clear and dazzling – that Aberdeen is back on the architectural map.
Rising like a perfectly geometric glass monolith from a clutter of university structures, but with the beautiful late-medieval King's College buildings close by, this seven-storey tower comes as something of a shock: despite its solid square shape, the library has an ethereal air, especially when lit up at night, thanks to its gleaming striated facades, boasting 720 panels in all. This gives a striking contrast to its rugged setting.
Designed by Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen, the library has plenty more surprises. If those exteriors aren't enough to stop you in your tracks, then what about the spiralling off-centre atrium at the core of the building, soaring up from the double-height entrance lobby to a distant glass roof? This offers the kind of giddying spatial shock normally associated with 17th-century baroque churches. The atrium, an architectural whirlwind, seems to twist around as it climbs up and through the structure, pushing its way further on to each successive floor. Stand at the foot of this highly theatrical space and, as the winter sun moves around the library, you feel as if you're inside a hollowed-out iceberg. It also makes you feel part of an intriguing architectural conundrum: the library is both icily calm yet restlessly alive, as modern as it is baroque.
Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Founded in the Danish port of Aarhus in 1986, SHL has a reputation for making distinctive cultural buildings that marry elements from nature and science. The firm came to global attention in 1997 with the Katuaq Cultural Centre in Nuuk, Greenland. Its undulating walls, clad in larch, were inspired by the rippling bands of the northern lights, a feature of the night skies over the Arctic – and not unknown to Aberdeen.
But SHL's most famous building is the Black Diamond, as the momentous Danish Royal Library extension on the Copenhagen waterfront is known. Opened in 1999, it takes the form of a giant angular prism clad in dark granite and split in two by a clear glass atrium, clearly the firm's strong point. SHL are currently working on what will be Scandinavia's largest library, the €228m (£190m) Urban Mediaspace in Aarhus, a huge building – again all prisms and atriums – that the architects describe as a covered public space.
You could say the same of the Aberdeen library. The public is welcomed into the foyer. Here, alongside the eye-boggling view upwards, there is a coffee bar named the Hardback Cafe, not to mention spaces for presentations and a big cube of a gallery. I enjoyed its first show, Rebels with a Cause: Jacobites and the Global Imagination, drawn from the superb archive housed in the lower ground floor. Here, in and around the elegant Wolfson reading room, there are some 200,000 rare books, as well as material dating back to the third century BC.
Chatter, clatter and hiss
The students' library proper is housed on the floors above the foyer. White-walled, grey-carpeted and boasting fine views out to the university, the city and the sea, these are reached by sleek glass lifts or warehouse-like stairs. The core of each floor is given over to smart white stacks of books: there are 13km of shelves above ground holding 400,000 books, their colours offsetting that quietly dominant white-and-grey colour scheme. It was quiet when I visited recently, the vast majority of students being away for the holidays, so I couldn't be sure about the noise in term time. But surely all the cafe chatter and clatter, the steamy hisses and gurgles of coffee-making, will percolate up the atrium?
"What I've noticed," says Stuart Hill, a lead designer on the project, "is that the students tend to gravitate towards the more vibrant spaces around the atrium closer to the ground floor. Most seem to work with headphones on anyway, blissfully unaware of any unwanted noise. The collaborative study areas are being used extensively, while the silent study spaces aren't used as much as we thought they would." The nature of libraries, adds Hill, is changing in the digital era. "One of the questions we were asked before we finalised the design is: why build a new library at all in this day and age? The answer is: we've been helping to build a new type of library. "
Indeed, the wide-open floors are clearly intended as a social space as well as a place of learning, with Wi-Fi available throughout the building as it is around much of the campus. Unlike the traditional silence associated with libraries, it seems there will always be a background hum; perhaps many students today are happy with this. Personally, I would find the top floor a rather distracting place to work: looking out through its windows, I felt that the entire Granite City had been laid out for my inspection. It was all too easy to let time slide by, watching the big blue and white ferries setting off for Orkney and Shetland, as seabirds wheeled across a boundless sky.
While a thrilling design, the library may yet need a little work to make it shine in the manner it deserves to. Some of the finishes seem a little rough and ready, while the unisex lavatories are a curiosity that may prove a step too far. Hill points out that the building won't be complete until September, when it will be officially opened. "There are areas we're not totally happy with, but we'll sort these out."
The library faces and dominates a new public plaza, also by SHL. As I step out on to it, the glass and steel tower behind me lights up for the night, not quite shimmering like the northern lights, but drawing attention to itself in a way that makes it quite clear that this modern addition is the new focal point of a university aiming high.
Curiously, the library rises from a plinth made of Caithness stone. Why not granite? "Unbelievably," says Hill, "granite as a facing stone for buildings isn't available today, except from China. But one geology student noticed that the pattern on the facade is very similar to granite when viewed under a microscope – a rather poetic connection, we think, to the traditional architecture of Aberdeen."
The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin’s stage-managed show?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 9, 2012
Young Russians no longer pay homage to him, but the Bolshevik leader 'lives on' in a carefully choreographed show of solemnity inside a Moscow mausoleum. But for how long?
In Moscow at this time every year the debate resumes about what to do with Lenin's body, which, contrary to the Bolshevik's wishes to be buried next to his mother, has lain in state in Red Square since his death on 21 January 1924. Last year, Prime Minister Putin held an online poll in which 70% of participants felt his body should be buried. That result yielded no decision either way (no doubt because it was not the one Putin had hoped for). Nevertheless, when I found myself in Moscow just before Christmas, I seized the opportunity to pay Lenin a visit while I still could. What I encountered was part reliquary, part freak show – and an impressive work of experience design, as stage-managed as anything in the London Dungeon.
The experience begins with a procession along the wall of the Kremlin from a set of metal detectors at the very entrance to Red Square. In Soviet times, a 100m-long queue was a permanent fixture. Today, the queue has disappeared but its infrastructure – a chain cordon – remains, as I discovered the hard way. Not seeing the way in, I stepped over the chain and soon met with a policewoman charging at me and blowing her whistle. Finally inside the mausoleum (having been sent back to the top of Red Square) I was respectfully stomping the snow off my shoes when I was violently shushed by a guard. All of this is part of the choreographed solemnity that includes the prohibition of hats, cameras, talking, hands in pockets and lingering. Because, despite the morbid voyeurism of wanting to see the body of a man who died 88 years ago, this is not a freak show; it's a piece of political theatre.
The mausoleum itself was designed by Alexey Shchusev in 1929 to replace a temporary wooden one he'd erected within days of Lenin's death. Made of marble and granite, it is a series of concentric cubes resembling a step pyramid. Shchusev shared the suprematist Kazimir Malevich's belief that the cube symbolised eternity. Since his masters, known as "the immortalisation commission", were using the latest technology to make Lenin last forever, his tomb was to be a kind of Mecca. And not withstanding the irony of a secular political system creating its own saint, there is something of Mecca about it, processing around the body the way Muslim pilgrims process around the cuboid Ka'aba.
Or at least there should be. But I found myself alone inside the chamber – alone, that is, except for two guards and Lenin himself – and not so much processing as gawping. It is one of the most impressive rooms I've ever entered, though this is only partly down to the architecture. The black granite floor and walls, with their red marble lightning motif, communicate such density you feel like you're at the heart of a mountain. But most of the impact comes from what is inside this container: the bizarre sight of this embalmed body lying there like a bald Snow White in a black double-breasted suit and polka-dot tie.
The atmosphere is one of incredulity. Is that waxy thing Lenin at all, and if it is, how is he in such good condition? Only a blackened fingernail hints at the deterioration of an actual body. As to whether he is real or fake, the answer is of course both. For as solid as the architecture is, it is merely a stage set. The real architecture of this would-be religious experience is the framework of chemicals that keeps Lenin's skin firm. The scaffolding in the cells of his face is a solution made up of potassium acetate, glycerol and alcohol, in which he is routinely bathed. All that marble and granite is merely compensating for the frailty of Lenin's mortal body.
Similarly, whatever the atmosphere in the chamber, the only thing that matters is inside the glass sarcophagus. Designed by Nikolai Tomsky, the purveyor of socialist realist statues to public squares across the Soviet Union, it echoes the ziggurat shape of the tomb. But more importantly, it conceals the machinery that regulates the climate around the body to 16 degrees and 80% humidity – just as in a shopping mall, the air conditioning is more important than the architecture.
The same team that looks after Lenin has reportedly been embalming North Korea's Kim Jong-il, continuing a fine communist tradition that has included Stalin (briefly), Mao and Ho Chi Minh. The motives of the communist ideologues in preserving Lenin as their prophet in perpetuity are clear. What this pickled body has to do with modern Russia is less so. The younger generation no longer pays homage to it. Boris Yeltsin wanted to bury it, but Putin had no wish to dispose of this pseudo-religious relic. In fact, just as he has sanctioned the continued fortifying of Lenin's skin, Putin has created his own cult of the body. He has made a show of his judo skills and posed topless for the cameras. In contrast to the semi-real Lenin, Putin is the "muzhik", or the "real" man. But is he? Rumours abound that Putin's expressionless face and smooth skin are down to Botox and plastic surgery. It's almost as though the more outmoded a politician becomes, the more artifice is required to keep him fresh.
Skyscrapers aren’t always about corporate pride before a fall | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 13, 2012
From the Empire State to the Burj Khalifa, skyscrapers predict recession. But not all towers are built by phallic capitalism
Tall buildings inviting accusations of hubris is as old as the Tower of Babel. The report this week from Barclays Capital merely puts an official stamp on the latest permutation of the myth, via a theory that has been around for at least a decade – the skyscraper index, which places the completion – or the proposal, it's not entirely clear – of a "world's tallest" tower as the sign of an incoming recession or financial crisis.
Empirically, it's true enough; skyscrapers were born of crisis in 1870s Chicago and New York, and most famous towers can be instantly tied to a collapse of some sort. The "Empty State Building", as the Empire State Building was dubbed, was finished in the Depression's deepest depths; the World Trade Centre and the Sears Tower neatly coincided with the end of the postwar settlement; the Petronas Towers accompanied the Asian crash of 1997. The current tallest, the Burj Khalifa, is self-explanatory in that sense, as its name – formerly the Burj Dubai – immortalises the bailout that the emirate received from Abu Dhabi when its bubble burst. Yet the skyscraper index has been around for so long that skyscraper designers are surely partly conscious of it. The largest residential tower in the world, also in Dubai, was quietly completed a couple of years ago. It was named the Index.
The reason why it is skyscrapers, as opposed to say, cathedral spires or telecommunications towers (which are frequently taller) that form the index are to do with what makes a skyscraper, and what differentiates it from a mere tower, office block or high-rise. The skyscraper came into being through a combination of innovation and accident, in a cauldron of unregulated capitalism. It became so tall because of rising land values on the tight, dense grids of New York and Chicago (the two cities still dispute ownership of the first skyscraper). It could get that tall because of two already extant inventions, the elevator and the steel frame, the latter used from Liverpool to Sheerness in the first half of the 19th century.
As to why these non-load bearing walls, merely tacked onto the frame, needing little craftsmanship, easily prefabricated, were so seductive to developers – well, one theory has it that the first skyscraper coincided with a strike of Chicago building workers. The towers were invariably offices, often for financial institutions, so were uniquely closely pegged to boom and bust. It bears repeating that in the middle of all this, nobody had ever deliberately intended, let alone "designed" the skyscraper – it was an effect, not an expression, of unstable financialised capitalism. This is, incidentally, one reason why the 1945-79 period was heavier on famous residential high-rises than luxurious corporate skyscrapers, at least in Europe.
Of course, there were soon attempts to consciously create skyscrapers, to make them into coherent pieces of architecture; in the 1880s, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan aimed to make of them a "proud and soaring thing", stripping off prefab baroque and applying his own original, deliberately height-emphasising ornament – but this "Chicago school" was always outnumbered by the mere stacking of Venetian, gothic or baroque detail up to 50 storeys. The result was the weird, retro-futurist towers that now appear as fascinatingly cranky as all obsolete technology, although at the time they were the ruthless expression of unmediated commercialism.
A couple of decades after Sullivan, Le Corbusier tried to create a becalmed "Cartesian skyscraper", largely for housing, leaving green space rather than traffic canyons underneath it. Not sufficiently flashy, the Cartesian skyscraper was eventually given the lumpy, prosaic English name of tower block. Accordingly, if you look at the current south London skyline, the ludicrously overpowering, overscaled, overpriced Shard is a skyscraper in its purest form; the Guy's hospital tower, next to it, is a mere high-rise. It's made of concrete, it's inexpensive and, worst of all, it serves a useful function.
All the record-setting buildings seem to have been equally useless, no matter how seductive their architecture. In the late 1940s, eight very tall skyscrapers in Europe were built, the tallest in the continent for three decades. They didn't coincide with any crisis, any financial exuberance, though their steel frames caked in pseudo-historical ornament immediately evoked 1910s New York. They were, respectively, housing towers, a university, a couple of ministries, a hotel and a "palace of culture"; the point was to build them, not what went in them, but in the process, the skyscraper stopped being stacked speculation. These skyscrapers, in Moscow and Warsaw, were an expression of ruthless dominance, but had certain curious differences. Some were and are open to the public. They were supposed to stand as points of orientation in the city, carefully planned. They were surrounded by squares and public space. Stalinists over stockbrokers might not seem like much of an improvement, but these ex-record breakers might remind us that the skyscraper need not be a combination of corporate phallus and crisis prediction instrument.
Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Comment, Comment is free, guardian.co.uk, United States, World news
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