Posts Tagged Boris Johnson
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 2, 2011
It's all about train stations this week, with the Tube bringing beauty to Battersea and Canada Water unveiling its flashy new library. Meanwhile, LA's Union Station is ripe for a revamp
Last year the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, approved the idea of building two new Tube stations on London Underground's Northern line, at Vauxhall and Nine Elms, as part of the long-awaited £5.5bn redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and the surrounding area. This is one of central London's last great wastelands. Long ripe for regeneration, developers have been wary of making a move in this surprisingly cut-off quarter of the capital despite the opportunity to build shops, offices, hotels, places of entertainment and up to 16,000 homes here – until the arrival, or solid promise, of a Tube line.
In his Autumn statement this week, Chancellor George Osborne said the government would support the scheme. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine two handsome new Underground stations, such as Arnos Grove and Southgate by Charles Holden from the 1930s, or the pick of the fine stations along the Jubilee line extension from Westminster to Stratford.
This week, however, the curiously named Battersea Power Station Shareholder Vehicle, the holding company for the forlorn former temple of power designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, was told that its lenders intend to take the 15-hectare (38 acres) site into receivership, as no progress has been made on development. This will scupper the ambitious scheme by Rafael Viñoly to revamp the listed building. Will the chancellor and mayor remain keen on building a costly Tube line to Battersea Wasteland?
In Los Angeles, the site up for redevelopment around Union Station, an exquisite late-30s design by, among others, John Parkinson and Donald B Parkinson that oozes Hollywood (the waiting area was used as a police department in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), is even bigger than Battersea. This week, the LA Transportation Authority revealed a shortlist of architects, one of whom will masterplan the redevelopment of 17 hectares (42 acres) of downtown railway land. The shortlist includes Britain's Foster and Partners teamed with the IBI Group, and Grimshaw Architects with Gruen Associates, as well as Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Parsons Transportation Group. Architects who failed to make the list include Rem Koolhaas, Morphosis and Zaha Hadid. The plan is for mixed-use development. Will it happen? Maybe not in the current economic climate, but it would be sad if the scheme were rushed. Union Station might seem remote, even from downtown LA, but its warm, welcoming and beautifully crafted architecture could yet set a tone for LA's equivalent of Battersea.
A more modest development at a railway station opened this week in London's Docklands. This is Southwark Council's £14m Canada Water Library. Designed by Piers Gough of CZWG in the guise of a half-buried upside-down pyramid clad in a gold anodised aluminium mesh, the library is connected directly to Canada Water station on London's Jubilee line.
The shape of the building is not wilful; the plot of land – part of a new public square – was small, so Gough came up with the idea of splaying the library upwards and outwards. Unveiling the new building, Veronica Ward (Southwark's cabinet member for culture, leisure and sport) said: "What we've managed to do is listen to people. Over 6,000 people said they would rather we did things like reduce hours or use volunteers than close libraries. That was enough people saying libraries were important."
If libraries remain essential for our mental health, Maggie's Cancer Care Centres are proving to be a godsend to those seeking inspiration, support and companionship. Following the opening of the Nottingham Maggie's Centre, designed by Piers Gough and Paul Smith, the Swansea Maggie's Centre at Singelton Hospital is now complete. Set by woods and overlooking Swansea Bay, it opens officially on 9 December 2011. Designed by the late Kisho Kurokawa, one of the founders of the Metabolist movement in Japan, the building is based on Kurokawa's concept of a "cosmic whirlpool" representing "everlasting forces swirling around a still centre".
"The new Maggie's Centre will come out of the earth and swing around with two arms like a rotating galaxy," said Kurokowa. "One side will welcome the visitor and lead to the other side, which embraces nature – the trees, rocks and water. A place set apart, as Maggie [Jencks] said of a garden. The connection to the cosmos and contacts between east and west – two motives that Maggie and I shared – are in the design. I hope she would have liked it."
Meanwhile, Quentin Blake, the children's illustrator best known for his drawings for Roald Dahl stories, won this year's Prince Philip Designers prize, the last to be judged by the Duke of Edinburgh himself. Other nominees included architects David Chipperfield, Chris Wilkinson and Jim Eyre, and the engineer Cecil Balmond, co-designer of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the grounds of the 2012 London Olympics. The structure is connected by a pedestrian bridge to Stratford station, where Jubilee line trains will take you to Canada Water, if not to Battersea.
The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 13, 2011
The London River Park is a proposed floating green space on the Thames that could be ready in time for the Olympics. But is it really a 'public' amenity. Our architecture critic charts the stealthy rise of pseudo-public spaces
What could be lovelier? A new park on the river Thames, south-facing to catch the sun, which like something in a fairytale would also float. Here people could bask and stroll, close to the lapping water, or splash in a swimming pool. It would be ready for the blessed summer of 2012, enriched not only by the Olympics, but also by the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's 60-year rule. It would make a perfect viewing point for joyous throngs to watch the 1,000-boat river pageant that is planned for the Queen's Jubilee. It would be like those Venetian paintings of aquatic festivals in La Serenissima, brought to life in the here and now.
The park, invented and designed by the architects Gensler, would run from the Millennium bridge and St Paul's Cathedral to close to the Tower of London and Tower bridge, linking some of London's prime tourist spots. It would serve the City of London, an area short of open space. It would be there for five years, after which it could be taken away if people didn't like it. It would also cost the public nothing. The Singaporean asset-management company Venus will pay the entire £50m cost, and has already put £5m into developing the idea, including building a 35-metre model of a 35km stretch of the Thames, to test the park's hydrographic effects. "We either do it beautifully," says John Naylor of Venus, "or we don't do it at all", to which end Venus doubled the budget that Gensler asked it for.
Boris Johnson is enthused. After an impromptu Sunday morning meeting with Gensler and Venus, he declared: "The sheer beauty and design brilliance of this structure will provide yet another amazing and unique attraction for the capital." Daniel Moylan, of Transport for London, has said of it that "improved connectivity, gracefully designed, can bring pleasure and joy to an area once written off". The outgoing Lord Mayor of London, Michael Bear, was said to favour the scheme, as a legacy of his mayoral year, although the Corporation of London would not confirm this. Gensler and Venus claim "overwhelming backing from Londoners" although this turns out to be based on an unscientific poll of whoever turned up to two exhibitions of the proposals.
But there is, as the economists have taught us, no free lunch. Venus is not putting up all this money out of the pure goodness of its heart nor, entirely, to raise its "brand awareness" in London, as John Naylor puts it, although that is a factor. It is "looking to create a platform for inward investment" and intends to make money renting out pavilions in the park for corporate exhibitions and events, at a handsome rate. It also thinks it can sell space to TV companies, especially during the Olympics, using Tower bridge as a backdrop. It is almost certainly right. This means that the park is not a "public space", as Gensler calls it, but a private space into which the public are allowed to come, subject to certain limitations.
In this it is the latest example of a widespread type of the 21st century, the pseudo-public space, in which the City of London and its satellites are world leaders. The Broadgate development of the 1980s was a pioneer, followed by Canary Wharf, Paternoster Square next to St Paul's, and the More London development where City Hall, the headquarters of the Mayor of London, stands. In each the shapes and attributes of town squares are imitated – an oblong or round shape, outdoor art, cafe tables, fountains – and sometimes real public assets are created, but ultimate control is in the hands of private landowners. As Anna Minton pointed out in her book Ground Control, they control security, access, and rules of entry. Activities and people deemed undesirable, such as photography with a tripod, public displays of affection, picnics, or chaining up a bicycle, are banned. Or public protest, and you don't have to wish to protest yourself to sense the oppressive feeling that things are prohibited. The most extreme example is the "public park" promised for the top of the forthcoming "Walkie Talkie" tower in the City. By no stretch of the imagination is a roofed-over room in a private office tower, reached via security-controlled lifts and lobbies, "public".
These places had their bluff called by the Occupy movement. Anxious to keep out the tented rebels, Broadgate and Canary Wharf reached for the injunctions that asserted their rights as private landowners. Paternoster Square put up barriers, manned by both police and private security, that jarred with its architectural look of traditional civic values: arcades, monuments, streets, stone and brick, a classical style.
It also put up a sign that said: "Paternoster Square is private land. Any licence to the public to enter or cross this land is revoked forthwith. There is no implied or express permission to enter the premises or any part. Any such entry will constitute a trespass." Which is strange, as almost every architectural statement, planning application, and press release, in the protracted redevelopment of Paternoster Square, described this "private land" as "public space".
These spaces (what shall we call them – privlic, publate – let's say publoid) don't always have to be bad things. Cities are made of places with degrees of publicness, including museums, restaurants, theatres, shops, malls and transport systems. Canary Wharf and Broadgate were both built on sites that formerly had limited public access – docks in one case, a railway station and its tracks in the other – and offer more to the public than they did before. The sky garden of the Walkie Talkie might turn out to be a fun place to go. (And, if they try to pressure you into buying expensive drinks at its bars, you will be able to whip out the planning consent that says it is a public space.)
But one issue is the honest use of language. If a space is private, it should not be called public, and planners should send back any application that makes this false claim. This matters because, if we are kidded into thinking that there is a civic realm that is not actually there, we will suddenly find that there is less space than we had thought for such essential public actions as protest. This is what the Occupy movement found when it looked for a location to make its point in the City of London. It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's. Oddly, the Occupy movement looks like the sort of colourful cultural event that local authorities and even businesses pay good money to subsidise, so as to jolly up their town centres: it is only when they are trying to say something that they officially become a problem.
The bigger issue comes when publoid places occupy areas that were formerly genuinely public. Then they are not conditional gifts, as at Broadgate, but appropriation. The banks of the Thames are largely public – you can walk there unrestricted, and advertising is kept from the waterfront. The view of the water is public property, and one of the great free pleasures of London.
It may, conceivably, be possible to cut deals with the private sector if they are genuinely beneficial, but only when it is completely clear that the public qualities of a place are not being compromised. This is very far from the case with Gensler's designs for the London River Park, in which budget and architectural ambition are lavished on the silvery pods which will house the money-making stuff, while the offer to the public is ordinary-looking, standard-issue publoid design: some trees and benches of reasonably good quality, a stainless steel balustrade, a nondescript deck surface, the promise of some information panels explaining the history of the surroundings.
An obvious comparison, made by Gensler, is with the High Line in New York, the phenomenally successful park made out of an old railway viaduct, which like the River Park is long and thin. But a big part of the High Line's success is its planting and landscaping, which is intelligent, imaginative and well considered, in the way it converts industrial relics into a place of urban pleasure. There is no sign of this level of thought in the Gensler design, even though they have submitted a detailed planning application to the Corporation of London. Nor is there the playfulness of Paris Plage, the annual conversion of the banks of the Seine into a beach, or the floating swimming pool that was installed in Copenhagen. Gensler is a global practice, with more than 3,000 staff, but there is limited evidence in its portfolio that it has the touch and finesse to pull off a project like this.
Instead the park offers a marginal upgrade on the existing riverside walkway. It would be wider, and with a more intimate relationship to the water. On the other hand you would lose the sense of unrestricted wandering and gathering that is currently there. You would be all too aware of the selling going on in the pavilions. You would know you were in a managed and controlled space, with uniformed wardens. This, says John Naylor, would be like Disney World, to the extent that "you know you're protected; you know that you won't be attacked or bothered by vagrants and sellers" (except, of course, for the approved corporate sellers in the pavilions). Is the City of London such a crime zone, financial misdemeanours apart, that people need such protection?
Essentially the London River Park is a gigantic hospitality suite with a fairly nice walkway threaded through it. Meanwhile the design of its silver pods is offensively indifferent to the dignified buildings, such as Old Billingsgate Market, on which they intrude, and actually do not seem well suited to the events that might go on inside them. The only purpose of their look seems to be self-promotion. It is, for good measure, likely that the piles that hold the park in place will, at low tide, be unpleasantly conspicuous.
As it happens, the park idea is not meeting with unanimous approval, despite the support of the mayor. Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, said that "we are not convinced by the description of the project as a 'park'" or that it is "appropriate to the character of the river". They find the design of the pavilions "unimaginative". English Heritage noted that "temporary" constructions like this have a way of becoming permanent. They were "not convinced that the design was worthy of such a sensitive site", and thought that the view towards the dome of St Paul's "would be distracted by the blades of silver", which are "flashy and corporate". The City of London School for boys, which is on this stretch of embankment, is none to happy that these large objects will block its view of the river.
When I meet Gensler and Venus, they assure me that discussions are going well with the Port of London Authority, which manages the river and is notoriously picky about intrusions on it. They also say that the planners of the Diamond Jubilee are very interested in their ideas. The next day, however, it is announced that the PLA has "serious concerns regarding the application scheme's impact on navigational safety", and the Corporation of London is delaying making a decision about the planning application. I also see a letter from the Diamond Jubilee organisers, saying that the park would "have a significant negative impact on the river pageant". It would for example make the tide run faster, with the result that rowed boats would be unable to take part, which would reduce the planned 1,000 boats by a third. Gensler and Venus have now given up on trying to be ready for the Jubilee in June, even though their extraordinarily ambitious timetable – to have everything ready for the Olympics – is still in place.
Buried deep within the London River Park is a good idea. If it were truly an aquatic High Line, it could be wonderful. It might work better if it were funded differently, let's say by a levy on all City businesses, such that it were no longer a promotional and profit opportunity for just one. If there were a longer timescale than the current insane rush to summer 2012, its design and detail could get the attention it deserves. It would also help if Gensler graciously stepped back from the detailed design, having been thanked and rewarded for having the idea, and pushing it thus far with energy and chutzpah, in favour of practices with the ability to think and work like those of the High Line.
If all these ifs were sorted out, the lovely floating park might just happen, subject to the satisfaction of the PLA. But there are an awful lot of ifs, and not much sign of the will to address them. If they are not addressed, the London River Park is simply an Occupy London event carried out by big business, rather than harmless folk in woolly hats and funny masks. The corporation's planners, when they finally get to consider it, should just say no.
London 2012: Olympic flame will be lit in one year’s time, but still much to do
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 26, 2011
IOC hail progress as Tom Daley dives into Aquatics Centre pool, completed on time and budget
With 366 days to go, 2012 being a leap year, until the Olympic flame is lit in east London, organisers, the government and the International Olympic Committee are queuing up to hail progress to date.
Wednesday's events to mark the milestone, which will see the £269m Zaha Hadid designed Aquatics Centre formally handed over to organisers by the Olympic Delivery Authority and Tom Daley diving into the pool, will have an air of celebration.
"Marking one year to go, by diving in the Aquatics Centre is an incredible honour. Only a few years ago, this was a distant dream," said Daley, who finished fifth at the world championships in Shanghai on Sunday. "I can't wait for next year and the honour of representing Team GB." But although world class athletes are beginning to test the venues, there remains much to do.
Venues
The Aquatics Centre is the sixth and final permanent venue to be handed over to organisers by the ODA, which has spent £7.25bn of public money building them. Chairman John Armitt said the successful completion of the venues had helped boost the image of British contractors around the world.
"It's very satisfying to be handing it over on time and keeping within the budget. It's a great tribute to everybody that has played a part in this," he told the Guardian. "It is something that as a country and an industry we should be proud of and we should try to maximise opportunities in other parts of the world while memories are still fresh about what the industry can do."
Some venues, especially the velodrome that has already been nominated for the Stirling Prize, have garnered more plaudits than others. The clean lines and simplicity of the stadium have also been praised but there has been criticism of the ugly temporary "water wings" that have been attached to the aquatics centre to boost the capacity to 17,500 for the Games. When it was designed, the high cost was justified by the signature design, which will be obscured by the temporary stands. "When you're inside it, it's fabulous," says Armitt, diplomatically.
Despite outward appearances, the London organising committee still has a huge task. Each venue must be "fitted out", a task that includes the laying of the track in the main stadium, and several major temporary venues must be built from scratch. They include a 15,000 capacity hockey stadium, a 23,000 capacity arena for the equestrian events at Greenwich Park and a 15,000 seat bowl on Horseguard's Parade for the beach volleyball.
Tickets
London organising committee chief executive Paul Deighton has confirmed the last batch of 1.2m tickets that will go on sale from December will first be made available exclusively to those who took part in the initial ballot in April and have yet to get a ticket. Around 6m tickets have already been sold, considered unprecedented with a year to go, with only around 1.5m for football matches around the country and those final 1.2m across all sports – to be made available when the final seating configurations are decided – remaining. Next year, Locog also plans to sell "non-event tickets" which will allow entry to the park but not the venues.
Later this year, millions of free tickets for the live sites, with big screens and concerts in Hyde Park, Victoria Park and Potter's Fields will also be made available on a first come, first served basis. The mantra from Locog chairman Lord Coe and other organisers has been that while they understand the "disappointment" created by the huge demand, which saw 22m applications in the initial rush for tickets, they stand by the controversial process.
Transport
Ever since London was awarded the Games in 2005, transport has been considered a potential achilles heel. The ODA passed responsibility for operational matters to Transport for London last year, but retains an overall co-ordination role. The first stirrings of a backlash have already been felt about the so-called "Olympic lanes" that will whisk 18,000 athletes and officials around the capital during the Games.
They make up roughly a third of the 109-mile Olympic Route Network and have already sparked loud protests from London's black cab drivers. Meanwhile, much will rest on the ability of organisers to persuade businesses and individuals to modify their behaviour during the Games.
"The message must be business as unusual," said Armitt. They take some comfort from the variety of routes into Stratford, including the Jubilee Line and the new Javelin train from St Pancras, but will be desperate to avoid a millennium eve style meltdown.
On the nine busiest days of the Games there will be more than 1m Olympics-related journeys, with a report earlier this year warning of "extreme" conditions on a system already "creaking at the seams".
Security
Olympics minister Hugh Robertson said that security plans needed rethinking when the coalition came to power. Before she quit, Lady Neville-Jones led a government review that resulted in the government predicting security at Games time could be delivered for £475m, though the overall £600m envelope will be retained.
Ministers and organisers have sought to play down the significance of the resignation of Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, but he said in his own statement that a key reason for it was to allow time to get someone new in place for the Olympics. Locog will spend £282m on security within the venues, chiefly through contractor G4S, but there will also need to call on several thousand non-uniformed military personnel.
'Look and feel'
For all the operational challenges Coe's organising committee will face, in many ways the bigger challenge is building public enthusiasm for the Games to reach a crescendo around 27 July next year when the flame is lit. Coe has talked of Britain being a "slow burn" nation. He hopes the torch relay, which will begin at Land's End on 19 May and visit 74 locations in 70 days via 8,000 runners, will be the point at which cynicism is cast aside and enthusiasm ignites.
Part of the task will be to keep those without tickets engaged, through the big screens planned for cities throughout the country and cultural events that will culminate in Festival 2012. London mayor Boris Johnson has a budget to "dress" key areas of the city, including placing Olympic rings on the capital's landmarks. The BBC, which has promised to broadcast every event from every venue live, will also have a big role to play.
Legacy
Given the relatively smooth progress of organisers to date, much of the controversy has centred on the legacy claims that helped secure the Games in the first place. The Olympic Park Legacy Company has taken on responsibility for the park after the Games and must prove it can make a commercial success of it while meeting the needs of local residents.
The fate of the stadium, the object of a furious row between Spurs and West Ham, is mired in high court litigation and it will face searching scrutiny over the affordability of thousands of homes that will be left behind, partly the athletes village.
One of the biggest challenges for the OPLC will be finding a tenant for the cavernous media centre, although there are renewed hopes that a major broadcaster may take an interest.
But even more of a challenge is the "soft legacy", with figures showing that the number of people playing sport is resolutely refusing to budge and ongoing debate about whether the predicted opportunity to get more young people engaged in sport, build links between clubs and schools and raise the profile and quality of coaching, is really being seized. They were famously planting the trees in Athens the day before the opening ceremony, but the landscaping on the Olympic Park is starting to take shape.
More than 4,000 new trees are planned, with 1,500 already planted. Over 300,000 wetland plants have been planted and there are bold claims for the Park that will be left behind. Eventually, there will be up to 11,000 new homes on the site, in the heart of an area that the Olympic Park Legacy Company hopes will be resurgent. Westfield, the giant shopping mall at the entrance to the Park and on which politicians are relying for many of their legacy claims about jobs and regeneration, opens for business in September.
Crossrail goes with the flow as London’s mayor unveils designs for eight stations
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 18, 2010
British architects and engineers have shaped calm, elegant and free-flowing spaces for the capital's 2018 east-west rail link
Sudden demolitions. Unexpected views of central London opened up as if someone has taken a giant tin opener to the city's skyline. The disappearance of much loved venues, including the London Astoria on Charing Cross Road. Heated arguments over the compulsory purchase of properties along the route. A fear, even, that anthrax and bubonic plague might be released from mass 16th-century graves under Smithfield.
These urban dramas and revelations prove that, at long last, Crossrail – the £16bn mainline railway linking far-flung east and west London suburbs through four miles of tunnels between Paddington and Farringdon – is finally on its metalled march.
Today, Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and Theresa Villiers, the transport minister, unveiled the designs of the eight new stations that will serve Crossrail and its 200 million future passengers each year from 2018, on a service that promises a 10-coach, air-conditioned train every two and a half minutes. As Crossrail was first announced in 1989, passengers will have waited just 29 years for their first train to arrive.
The mayor, the minister, Crossrail and its owner, Transport for London, are determined that this bold new venture will be nothing less than impressive. And efficient. "As Crossrail moves from the drawing board to reality," said Johnson today at the New London Architecture gallery, "we can see the breathtaking benefits it will bring to our city, and I'm thrilled Londoners can finally see the designs of the world-class stations we will construct. When complete, they will run east to west in a solid backbone of quality infrastructure and style."
The style of the stations, by British architects and engineers with a solid track record – among them Norman Foster, Allies and Morrison and John McAslan – appears to be sober, robust and calmly elegant. Whether in the booking offices, concourses or platforms of Paddington, Tottenham Court Road or Farringdon, every effort appears to have been made to shape generous and free-flowing spaces designed to cope with future demand. The lessons of the high-quality Jubilee line extension between Westminster and Stratford have been learned. Flow is all.
The simple finishes of the stations – concrete, aluminium, steel, glass, recessed and diffused lighting, a minimal palette of colours – reflect a belief that these structure are engineering-led and designed for optimum efficiency. The architecture of each – drawing daylight from streets above wherever possible – is free from fashion or whimsy. The sheer number of passengers passing through these spacious stations will provide more than enough noise, people and colour.
Crossrail's computer-generated images, however, show the eight central stations peopled by just a few relaxed, nattily dressed travellers who look as if they might be boarding the Orient Express rather than a commuter train to Heathrow, Shenfield, Abbey Wood or Maidenhead.
"London has a glorious railway design history," said Villiers, "that ranges from the Brunel-designed Paddington station, through Charles Holden's Tube stations of the 1920s and 30s to the revival of St Pancras International. Crossrail intends to build on this design legacy and create cost-effective stations fit for the 21st century while regenerating local communities."
After so very long, Londoners will expect trains to run on time, allowing only, perhaps, for the wrong sort of disease – bubonic plague – if not the wrong strand of design on the line.
Boris Johnson’s London Cycle Hire scheme flogs our birthright to Barclays
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 29, 2010
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.
The Orbit: £19m for a ‘piece of string’? It could turn out to be a bargain
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 3, 2010
Anish Kapoor's Olympic tower will be a draw during the Games. But after that?
The success of Britain's best-loved piece of modern public art, the Angel of the North, has been a boon to the nation's sculptors. In every district, especially those scarred by an industrial past, councillors point towards Gateshead and ask: "Can we have one of those?"
Certainly, this question seems to have driven London's mayor, Boris Johnson, to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics with "something to arouse curiosity and wonder". Or perhaps he is looking beyond Antony Gormley's Angel, at the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. The result is the £19m, 115-metre, ArcelorMittal Orbit by Anish Kapoor, "a loop of string arrested in mid-fall", in the words of our architecture critic Rowan Moore.
So will it achieve Johnson's dreams? Our willingness to invest in public art is hugely attractive. So is our love for it. The last two decades have seen great improvements to our public spaces and the Olympic Park in Stratford should add further magic. Public art, despite sponsors' attempts to brand it, can stand as symbol to our beliefs and ambitions.
Of course, not all attempts have had happy endings. While Mark Wallinger's Ebbsfleet horse is eagerly awaited, Manchester's B of the Bang, its steel shards falling at disconcertingly inopportune moments, failed.
It is almost impossible to predict what will work, but something that speaks to our shared sense of culture seems a good bet. That the Orbit is part of that great shared endeavour of the Olympics gets it speedily from the starting blocks. It is clearly designed as a spectacle to draw people. It will achieve that, at least during the Games themselves. And after that? Too often, these sites fall into disrepair. Johnson will need to ensure the new park matches his ambitions.
And if not? Well, Kapoor's Orbit will still be worth a visit, for it will allow us to climb to the top and look away.
Will the Orbit become London’s Eiffel? | John Graham-Cumming
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 2, 2010
How does Anish Kapoor's 'Mr Messy' design for an Olympic tower compare to Gustave Eiffel's Paris icon?
At the unveiling of Anish Kapoor's design for the Orbit tower it was compared to the Colossus of Rhodes and the Tower of Babel. But the history of those follies isn't auspicious. The Colossus of Rhodes was destroyed by an earthquake after standing for only a few decades, and the Tower of Babel was, the book of Genesis tells us, constructed to glorify those that constructed it.
I can't help wondering to what extent the ArcelorMittal Orbit is being built for the glory of Boris Johnson, Kapoor and Lakshmi Mittal. And as details emerge of its Olympic corporate entertainment role, it looks less and less like a work of art. But setting the motivation of the creators aside, the worst comparison of all is with the Eiffel Tower.
Gustave Eiffel's iconic tower was not designed as a piece of public art, nor was it intended to remain in Paris more than 20 years. It was built as a grand entrance for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, and was designed to be easy to take apart. It became a work of art in the eyes of the world against the protestations of the Parisian art world. And it remained, in part, because of its utility. It was used for early radio experiments at the start of the 20th century and in 1910 the tower was used to detect cosmic rays. To this day its top bristles with antennae, and its bottom bustles with tourists.
Another problem with comparing Kapoor's structure with Eiffel's is that what makes the Parisian tower so pleasing to the eye is that its shape was dictated by the forces of the wind, not by the foolishness of man. Eiffel is quoted as saying:
"Now to what phenomenon did I have to give primary concern in designing the Tower? It was wind resistance. Well then! I hold that the curvature of the monument's four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole."By following the forces of nature, Eiffel's massive iron structure appears graceful and almost part of the natural environment.
By comparison, Kapoor's structure is a prime example of man demonstrating his mastery over nature. The sweeping shape is reminiscent of melted roller coaster ride, or as one Twitter user put it: "It looks like congealed intestines". The horror of which was only replaced in my mind by the relief of recalling that Kapoor and not Damien Hirst had been awarded the design contract.
But the worst part about comparing the Orbit with the Eiffel is the idea that London needs to rival Paris in the metal tower stakes. London already beat Paris to host the 2012 Olympics; now it seems Johnson wants to rub salt in French wounds. The copycat unoriginality of building London's Eiffel verges on parody when one realises that the Orbit will be 100m shorter than the Parisian monument and 20m shorter than the diminutive Blackpool Tower.
The true determinant of whether the Orbit deserves a place on London's skyline should be how it is perceived by Londoners. It would be hard to find a Parisian today who hates the Eiffel Tower; Boris Johnson should set a 20-year time limit on Kapoor's tower and let the public decide. If in 2032 it hasn't endeared itself to the residents of Stratford and beyond it should be pulled down. Since the tower is to be made of steel it could be safely recycled.
That standard has applied to at least one other London icon. The giant ferris wheel London Eye, after all, was initially a temporary attraction that married engineering prowess with a graceful form. It has stood the test of time and looks set to stay on the banks of the River Thames. In it London already has a worthy rival for Eiffel. And from it a panoramic view of London is already possible.
Writing in the Times, the architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff described the tower as a "giant Mr Messy". But initial reactions should be tempered by allowing time to pass; perhaps I'll get over thinking it looks like a giant blood clot. Whether you love it or hate it, the last word should go to Johnson, who said of the Orbit: "It would have boggled Gustave Eiffel". There's no arguing with that.
Boris Johnson’s daft ‘Eiffel tower’ plan | Jonathan Glancey
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 26, 2009
The London mayor wants to build an enormous monument in Stratford. It sounds like a folly of Olympic proportions
You need to pinch and punch yourself to be sure this isn't 1 April. News that Boris Johnson is planning to build a £15m monument, in what appears to be his own honour – it couldn't be London's – in the grounds of the 2012 Austerity Olympics in Stratford, must surely be a joke. This is the kind of thing you'd expect from a Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or, of course Shelley's "Ozymandias" (Ramesses the Great), but not an elected mayor of London in the second decade of the 21st century.
The tower is, apparently, to be funded by the richest man in Britain, Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born steel magnate. The Telegraph of Calcutta has understandably dubbed the potty project the Mittal Monument, rather than the more appropriate Johnson's Folly, and has published an artist's impression of the proposal in the guise of an enormous, rust-red electricity pylon – a symbol, I suppose, of how Britain's attitude to industry and the economy in general, is viewed by more dynamic countries overseas.
It's hard to know if the Indian newspaper is taking the mickey or not, and indeed hard to believe that Johnson or his press department can be serious. This is especially true when Johnson talks of building a monument to rival the Eiffel tower, the showpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle and, ever since, a popular symbol of Paris. The Eiffel tower cost around 8 million francs, or at least £33m in today's figures, although given absolute increases over the ensuing 120 years in the prices of labour and materials, the cost of building a new Eiffel tower would be very much higher than this. The London Eye, completed a decade ago, cost £75m, which suggests an Eiffel tower would be more expensive again, and so, no matter how generous, Mittal's £15m won't go far to meet Johnson's vaulting ambition.
London, and its mayors, should have learned from the mistakes of such inane follies as the £1bn Millennium Experience to steer well clear of overweening monumentalism. London is a city of many modest monuments, from the City churches of Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor to the 1930s underground stations commissioned by Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board from the architect Charles Holden, two modest men who turned down knighthoods and were paid no bonuses for the great contribution they made to the workings and appearance of everyday London.
It seems significant, too, that this year's Stirling prize for architecture, an event taken seriously by those keen on the most fashionable contemporary landmark buildings, was awarded not to a monumental building but to the gentle and subtle Maggie's Centre, for cancer care, by London's Charing Cross hospital. Times have clearly changed, although not, it seems, for the mayor of London.
Perhaps, though, Johnson's head has been turned as much by Mittal's millions, as by a joint initiative between the Arts Council and London 2012 that also seems like one monumental joke. This initiative is called – and I'm not making this up, I hope – "Artists taking the lead" – although you may want to replace the final word with another of four letters. In this case, £5.4m is to be spent on 12 "extraordinary artworks" up and down the country to celebrate the 2012 Olympics. Announced on 21 October, the magnificent dozen includes three hand-crocheted 30ft lions for Nottingham, a "monumental spinning column of cloud and light" in Birkenhead and a gigantic Lady Godiva puppet for the west Midlands. Meanwhile, "an abandoned DC-9 aeroplane will 'nest' in locations across Wales, and be transformed and animated the local communities who take ownership of it."
Given all this, and still being unsure of whether or not Johnson or the Arts Council is being in any way serious, I recommend that Mark Wallinger's giant white horse should be erected not in Ebbsfleet, Kent, but in the Olympic park and named "Maybe it's a big horse ... I'm a Londoner" in honour of Johnson and the great 2012 event. Either that, or perhaps Mittal could be persuaded to stump up for a giant white elephant with the head of Mayor Johnson crowned with the satirical 2012 London Olympics logo.
Boris Johnson’s policy on tall buildings in London seems unclear
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 8, 2009
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?
Is the Orbit anything more than a folly on an Olympic scale? | Rowan Moore
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 3, 2010
It's the most extravagant example of the idea that a huge, strange object can affect tens of thousands. This could be the point at which the idea stops working
It's dangerous to compare it with the Statue of Liberty. The boosters of ArcelorMittal Orbit, the £19m, 115-metre tower to be built on the London Olympic site, announce it will be taller than New York's great green lady, but it's unlikely to be as eloquent. Is the ArcelorMittal steel company, one wonders, as great a cause to be celebrated as liberty? Well, no, but the aim is that this big red sculpture, by the artist Anish Kapoor and the engineer Cecil Balmond, will do more than glorify its generous sponsor. It is the most extravagant example yet of the idea that a big, strange object can lift tens of thousands of people out of deprivation. This idea has had some successes, but the Orbit could mark the point at which it overreaches itself and we decide to try something different in the future.
According to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, the Olympic site "needed something extra, something to distinguish the east London skyline, something to arouse the curiosity and wonder of Londoners and visitors. With £9.3bn going into the Games, we need to do everything we can to regenerate the area and ensure that crowds are still coming here in 2013 and beyond".
The Orbit is therefore to join the ranks of the Angel of the North, the Millennium Dome and the London Eye. Also of the Eiffel Tower, the Seattle Space Needle, the Rotterdam Euromast, the Portsmouth Spinnaker Tower, the Oriental Pearl TV tower in Shanghai and the Unisphere of the 1964 New York World's Fair. Also of the Tower of Juche Idea, Pyongyang, a celebration of the late Kim Il Sung's unique fusion of Korean identity and Marxist-Leninism. The latter, at 170m, is taller than the Orbit and for some reason this is a comparison Johnson chooses not to make.
The Orbit is a landmark, an icon, a thing, a doo-dad, a wotsit. Its aim is to imprint an image on the consciousness of the world, which will also make people want to come to Stratford, east London, even after the Games have gone. It means that, as well as the new Olympic Park, the gigantic new Westfield shopping centre, and whatever might be happening in the ex-Olympic stadium, a great day out in these parts can include a ride to the top of the Orbit. By some associative magic, businesses, investors and housebuyers will want to be there more. This district, whose statistics of deprivation are often repeated, will begin to go up in the world. You might have thought that the Olympic billions were already enough to draw attention to this site, but the Orbit will be the icing on the cake.
It's not wholly fanciful that such landmarks can help lift places. No one can put a figure on jobs created or investments made in Gateshead thanks to the Angel of the North, but it has at least created a feelgood factor and sense of pride. The Bilbao Guggenheim of 1996, still the archetype of such town-boosting, certainly placed a relatively obscure city at the centre of attention.
Buildings can't do it alone and if people find their attention has been drawn only to a wasteland, they will go away again. The Guggenheim worked because there were also dull practical things in Bilbao such as new transport infrastructure and business parks. In this respect, the Orbit is in luck: Stratford, long the example of urban deprivation, has been love-bombed with train lines and parks.
But the most important ingredient of a successful icon is that it works. It has to strike a chord, sound the right note, catch a mood, win hearts and confound sceptics. It must justify the spending of money that might otherwise go on kidney machines or rehousing Haitians. It is a risky business: for every Angel of the North there are many more unloved rotting wrecks that no one has the nerve to demolish.
Here I fear for the Orbit. It's true that Kapoor is a crowd-puller and his recent exhibition at the Royal Academy drew unprecedented numbers for a one-man show by a living artist. But his Olympic monument seems to lack the pith and succinctness with which he usually engages people. His temporary Tarantantara of 1999 (another jewel of Gateshead) was a wonderfully direct construction of two giant funnels that created striking optical effects. His Marsyas in Tate Modern did something similar. Next to these, the Orbit looks ponderous and confused. Its basic concept seems simple, of making a giant structure that is something like a loop of string arrested in mid-fall, but this simplicity is compromised by the stairs and lifts needed to get people into it.
During the two-and-a-bit weeks of the Olympics, it will be animated by crowds descending its stairs, but it's hard to imagine this ever happening again, least of all in the damp east London Februaries of the future. The main thrill it offers is of a view slightly better than that enjoyed by residents of nearby tower blocks and less good than that of bankers in the towers in Canary Wharf. This doesn't seem enough to justify such an effortful work or the maintenance costs.
It's hard to see what the big idea is, beyond the idea of making something big, and the official blurbs don't add much light. These are full of words such as "wonderful", "incredible", "spectacular" and much-repeated "greats". There is some 24-carat guff. The work is variously said to be like "an electron cloud moving" and to have "this sense of energy, twist and excitement that one associates with the human body as it explodes off the blocks down the 100m straight".
Johnson also references his kids, in an ominous echo of Blair's belief that the Millennium Dome could be justified by the pleasure it would give young Euan. As with the Dome, it seems that grandiosity has caused a group of smart people, including Johnson, Kapoor and Balmond, to do something dumb. They all laughed, of course, when Christopher Columbus told them that the world was round and it's possible that in two-and-a-bit years we sceptics will be humbled by the joy and majesty of the Orbit. Right now, it threatens to be an urban lava lamp. It might look fun on 25 December, but by the 27th you're cursing the need to change its bulbs. So what else could be done with this creative energy and £19m?
It could have gone into beautifying those parts of Stratford where people live. It could ensure that the aquatic centre and other Olympic venues have enough money to keep running after the Games. It could have paid for uplifting places as needy as Stratford, but without its celebrity. It could have helped in making the safety-first architecture of the Olympic buildings a little less boring, so there would have been no need for another injection of excitement. But these would have been less good advertising for ArcelorMittal and you couldn't have compared them to the Statue of Liberty.
Anish Kapoor, Arcelor Mittal, Architecture, Art and design, Boris Johnson, Business, Comment, Olympic games 2012, Politics, The Observer, UK news
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