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The National Theatre in London is a wonderful, vital means of gathering people together. But the building is an anachronism

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to give a talk on what the future of
the arts might be. I suggested that one of the things I'd like to see would be the National Theatre going bankrupt and being squatted by people who don't have any idea what they're doing.

I've changed my mind. It's a fine thing that we have a National Theatre. It is a means of gathering people together – of communally exploring and articulating what it means for all of us to exist together. Like the United Nations or Milton Keynes, it's one of those ideas so naively hopeful and optimistic it makes you wish things had turned out as planned.

But here, too, is the problem. The National as an organisation is a wonderful, vital idea. The national theatre as a building is an anachronism: a brutal(ist) articulation of one narrow and archaic vision of theatre that, if not obsolete, is certainly one-dimensional.

Let's start with its location. The most exciting performance work in England is made for festivals such as Manchester's International festival, Mayfest in Bristol or Fierce in Birmingham, or
at regional spaces such as the Royal and Derngate or the Drum in Plymouth. Or it's created by companies such as Artangel, Artichoke,
Paines Plough and Headlong who roam across the country. In Scotland and Wales, their new National Theatres are agile, light on their feet and generously expansive in their scope. In England, we are chained to a million tonnes of concrete.

And what about that building? There are those bourgeois grazing-areas
of the lobby, designed for highbrow people-watching. Then there is the strict division between public product and the private process of supporting and creating theatre. Incredible work goes on at the NT Studio, but you'd never know about it. More people should do, and be invited to contribute. Most importantly, there are those three theatres, beautiful cathedrals to performance but prohibitive of so much that is exciting in theatre across the country. The National can, of course, support Shunt and sell tickets for BAC and Punchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death, but while those auditoriums remain, like three well-lit albatrosses round its neck, they will continue to be its priority, to the detriment of so many companies and artists deserving of being a part of it.

In Sunday school, I was always taught that a church is not the building but the community that inhabits it, and I think the same should be true of a theatre. At the moment, though, the community around the National Theatre is created by the building, not the other way around. Which is not to say that there shouldn't be a building: more and more, I feel that a sense of home, of locatedness, is important. As is the opportunity for artists and audiences to feel as though they can explore, inhabit and take ownership of a space. But all of this should come out of need, not necessity.

I love the National Theatre as an organisation. I love much of what it does, and the effort that it puts into encouraging a passion for and interest in theatre. And I don't want it to go bankrupt. But perhaps I'd like it to be homeless for a little while – to borrow spaces up and down the country, to make do, to adapt, to create something new. And, in doing so, perhaps discover what kind of home is right for it, rather than all of us having to conform to the proscriptions of that prison on the South Bank.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Manchester international festival, Punchdrunk, Stage, Theatre

This piece of no-award-winning photography shows you what I gaze upon while waiting at London Bridge station for number 48 buses to convey me back to Clapton after visits to City Hall. I decided yesterday that I'm going to like The Shard of Glass. While generally suspicious of skyscraper incursions in London, this one is going to work for me: shiny, sparkly, cheeky, original and a bit kitsch.

As you can (just about) see, the real thing is starting to take shape behind the barriers. The credit crunch seems not to have halted its rise, which will cease at a pointy peak of just over one thousand feet - the highest in the capital. It's scheduled to be completed next year and will become Transport for London's new home. I'm planning to visit on day one. Will wave.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Blogposts, guardian.co.uk, London

The Waterloo installation of Sue Hubbard's poem Eurydice was a very successful, and very popular, piece of public art. Why on earth has it been painted over?

What is it with poetry and subterranean London? Poets always seem to be spiralling down, descending, recovering and returning. Are we running away from some loss above or retrieving something from below? Poets seem to find such echoes inescapably poignant. One public piece of poetry certainly showed Londoners share these powerful feelings.

In early October 2009, Time Out suggested one of the unmissable features of London was the poetry installation in the Waterloo underpass where, en route to the Imax, you could walk past Sue Hubbard's poem "Eurydice".

Taken from her collection Ghost Station, it is a poem painted on the tunnel walls which raids the tale of Orpheus and his wife, but puts Eurydice centre stage, and Hubbard's poem subverts the tale, where the female narrator actually seems to yearn for separation and takes pleasure in her underground journey and sojournment. The power of the piece doesn't lie in Orpheus's extraordinary rescue but in a kind of female withholding. Hubbard's Eurydice almost demands her descent and exults in it. I think she really loves the tunnel more than Orpheus; he's never named, he's purely a lover's memory. You can read the full text here.

Painted in a font called Disturbance (surely a typographer's secret pleasure), this installation was a public art collaboration between Hubbard and the distinguished architect Bryan Avery. The poem was commissioned by the Arts Council and the BFI to make the experience of taking the tunnel from Waterloo to the Imax Cinema less dreary and more theatrical. The poem spanned the whole length of the tunnel and next year, 2010, would have been it's 10th anniversary.

Time Out are latecomers to the celebrations though; the work has featured regularly as a London favourite for years, it's been on many lists. You can find comments on the web from citizens and visitors to our capital about how the poem has affected them, moved them. Hubbard herself has scores of emails and letters from fans of the piece. You can find glimpses on Flickr, the online photographic site. It's one of the Poetry Society's Poetry Landmarks. You can even see the poem used as the backdrop to a contemporary TV thriller, where Hubbard's words are appropriated for another more sinister narrative.

This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.

The poem's melancholy closing stanzas begin:

Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.

Well, in a strange premonition, the poem has now physically been drowned in blue. A couple of weeks after Time Out drew renewed attention to this treasured piece of public poetry, the owners have painted out the entire installation, indeed the entire tunnel is now bathed in lavatorial blue. It's gone. I think London would like it back. If you share my view you can join the campaign on Facebook, or indeed on the Salt blog. Let's hope that we can recover this marvellous, singular, splendid place.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Blogposts, Books, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Poetry

Plans to build a Jerwood art gallery in the town's distinctive fishermen's district have upset locals. Will regeneration endanger this lovely spot?

There's a battle going on down in Hastings. Walking through the small but remarkably well-preserved old fishing community that occupies one end of this East Sussex town's beach, I was finding it all richly unfamiliar. Here, fishing boats are moored on the shingles, and strange black huts built in the 19th century house a market for the daily catch. In a museum of the town's fishing tradition, you can look at stuffed fish, a blackened boat and memorials to men lost at sea.

It's a tiny bit of living history in a town otherwise mired in the economic decline of Britain's seaside. But there, among the fishermen's houses, I suddenly came across an unexpected name. That name is Jerwood, as in the culture-vulture Jerwood Foundation. NO TO JERWOOD, say the signs. Big signs – prominent, angry signs. Some people around here don't like the Jerwood, it seems. But why? What's Jerwood got to do with Hastings?

Hastings borough council plans to build a gallery for the Jerwood collection of modern art on this part of the seafront. The plan has attractions for a place so obviously in need of a bit of regeneration. Art has done wonders for other coastal resorts: the Tate has brought a touch of class to St Ives, an additional incentive to visitors looking for a bit more from their beach. For Hastings, an easy day trip from London, it makes sense to offer a cultural attraction that will draw the kinds of visitors from the capital who just won't come for a few grotty arcades. Local sceptics might want to look at the huge success of last year's Folkestone Triennial to see how art can lure the Londoners.

So why the savage debate?

At first sight, the two sides in Hastings are easily pigeonholed. On the one side you have art lovers and a council desperate to inject some modern glamour into a faded town. In the other corner you have enemies of all they lambast as "arty." The quarrel resembles disputes elsewhere about public art – in fact, seeing the posters, my first thought was that Jerwood must be paying for a public art commission. Modern art and the metropolitan ways it epitomises versus bigoted know-nothings.

But just as rows about public art are often complex and surprising, so is this. Protestors claim they object not to the proposed Jerwood gallery but its planned location, right next to the fish market in the old area known as the Stade. Admittedly, the site it will occupy is now a coach park, which most would consider more intrusive and ugly than an art gallery. But I got a fresh perspective, stumbling across the protest on a walk through this interesting little area – and it does seem arguable that a modern gallery next to the black fishing huts, right above the moorings of the town's working boats, intrudes on something. It's a unique and very real bit of East Sussex. On a Wednesday lunchtime, a young mother and child were greeting a fisherman home as a boat was tugged up the shingle.

Apparently the Jerwood Foundation insists on this location. You can see why. The rest of the seafront at Hastings is a wasteland of stupid ideas and wasted space, a no man's land between land and sea. Of course they'd like to be close to the nice bit of the town. Yet they'd be doing more for Hastings – it seems to an outsider – by helping to redeem its bad bits. A location further along the seafront might save a disaster area.

It seems to me that the gallery is a good idea that will help this town's economy. But the Stade really is a bit special, and it would be a disgrace to bland it out. It feels like this part of Hastings has a distinctive human ecology that it would be a crime to mute in the name of "regeneration".

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Heritage, Regeneration, Society

Paris's radiant gothic masterpiece soars as weightlessly as any modern glass edifice, yet it's 750 years old

If you want to have your intellectual world turned upside down, if you want to throw away every preconception you possess about architecture, history and modernity, there's a church in Paris you really must visit.

Saint-Chapelle stands at the very heart of Paris, a few steps away from Notre Dame, but it's hidden away within the Palace of Justice, and to visit it you must pass through the court security checks. Only then can you climb a spiral staircase into a room that resembles paradise.

This place is a weightless dream of pure colour. Everywhere you look, bright and glittering stained glass filters daylight in the most subtle ways. The glass teems with pictures, but what overwhelms is the sheer ecstasy of light. Tall and elegant windows separated by the slenderest of pillars create a startling effect of total transparency, like standing in a crystal.

Saint-Chapelle was built 600 years before the Crystal Palace amazed Victorian London, over 800 years before the Louvre's glass pyramid - but it anticipates such modern wonders with its walls of glass. This gothic masterpiece built in about 1241 to 1248 is a stunning coup of engineering. It demonstrates more clearly than any other building how radically the master masons of the middle ages rethought architecture. No one had created anything like this before - not the Greeks, not the Romans, not even Islam.

The principle of the Gothic architectural revolution in 13th-century Europe is a stroke of brilliant practical engineering. The Romans had invented the arch, which distributes weight equally downwards onto its two ends. In early medieval architecture round arches create aesthetic pleasure in buildings like the Great Mosque in Cordoba. But the Gothic takes it further: firstly making the arch pointed to increase its height, and secondly raising rib-like cages of vaulting that press the entire weight of the roof down through a system of arches on to a few columns. Although made of stone, a Gothic church is actually a structure of arched scaffolding with walls slung between it - the walls carry no weight. A final touch of genius is the use of exterior flying buttresses, again using the principle of the arch, to permit even more daring extensions of height.

All this is visible in its most pristine form at Saint-Chapelle. Here, the architect - traditionally identified as Pierre de Montreuil – experiments boldly. If the walls can be perforated with huge areas of stained glass, why not take that as far as it can go? The result is a building of glass, whose supporting frame of stone vaulting is as airy as the steel frame of a modern glass building.

The word "medieval" suggests a heavy, dark, primitive, brooding past. Sainte-Chapelle irradiates that cliché. Some of the greatest modern architectural thinkers and creators such as Ruskin and Gaudi were fascinated by the middle ages. Saint-Chapelle reveals why. This miracle of light is one of the most beautiful buildings on earth.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Heritage

Sri Carmichael and Mira Bar-Hillel:

The clash between the Labour government, which opposes high rise, and the Mayor, who has become a convert to new building projects, has ended in a planning stalemate as the recession bites. At least 21 London property schemes could be scrapped or dramatically shrunk.

There follows a telling round-up of the capital's stunted tower projects, each a tale of crunched credit or obstruction of Boris by Blears. What interests me - because I can't yet detect one - is the guiding principle behind the Mayor's policy on towers. He's said yes to them more often than his critics would like, yet he's just said no to Rafael Vinoly's intended 300 metre-tall glass chimney on the site of Battersea power station. Building Design and Construction reports:

After opposition from local residents and Johnson, REO, which is 67% owned by the Treasury, has decided to replace the dome with individual canopies covering the buildings and abandon plans for the tower, which would have been one of the tallest structures in London.

The Mayor's office emphasises that Boris isn't against tall buildings where they are "appropriate". But what does "appropriate" mean?

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Blogposts, Boris Johnson, guardian.co.uk, London, London politics

Amanda Baillieu:

Just as green belt land is often ordinary farmland with no special claim to preservation, we need to ask why we are protecting particular views that — with some notable exceptions — are no more special than others. Of course no one can not enjoy seeing St Paul's from the top of Primrose Hill or Richmond Park, but why is this more special than the view from the terrace of the National Theatre?

Now read on.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Blogposts, Boris Johnson, guardian.co.uk, London politics

At Building, Michael Willoughby:

Mayor Boris Johnson attacked his workplace, the 2002 Greater London Authority (GLA) building, as one of the worst in London shortly before handing its developer a planning award.

Love it. Now read on.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Blogposts, Boris Johnson, guardian.co.uk, London, London politics

Simon Jenkins in the Standard:

Boris Johnson swore that he would rescind Livingstone's towers. He told all comers that he would "stop the madness". Yet no sooner was he in "the testicle" than he craved a phallus. The developer lobbyists got to him and undermined his self-confidence.

The Mayor, of course, doesn't see it quite that way. Whatever, Jenkins might reflect that several boroughs have lobbied for towers too and that he, like Boris, spoke during the election campaign in favour of boroughs being free from bossy mayors. You can't have it both ways.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Blogposts, Boris Johnson, guardian.co.uk, London, London politics

An Evening Standard leader:

Boris Johnson's policy of restricting approval for tall buildings in London to limited areas was once a fundamental element of his approach to planning. But his approval for tall buildings in Wandsworth and Ealing, areas without existing clusters of blocks, suggests an approach more like the ad-hoc policy of his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, who took a notoriously lax attitude to skyscrapers. Now Mr Johnson has a chance to show whether his planning policy for our skyline has rigour or consistency.

A new proposal for The Spires, three enormous tower blocks right by City Hall, is being submitted for approval. It would be hard to justify. The tallest of the three would reportedly offer views of the English Channel; together they would interfere with the Mayor's own views. In a downturn, there is little economic rationale for projects like this; aesthetically, there is even less. Mr Johnson should say no.

Wow, Veronica really has left the building hasn't she? No wonder Boris is putting on a Russian festival, of which he says:

Russian Londoners are a thriving community who have made a significant contribution to the capital both economically and culturally. I encourage everyone to come and enjoy this fantastic festival offering.

Are you listening, Alexander?

More on The Spires and other Irvine Sellar proposals for central London here.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Blogposts, Boris Johnson, guardian.co.uk, London, London politics