Posts Tagged Comment
The Shard is a broken society’s towering achievement | Jonathan Jones
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 26, 2011
London's new skyscraper is a monument to wealth and power run way out of control, a flashing warning sign of disease
London has suffered an attack. The damage is ugly, and it is permanent. Most of all it tells us more than we would like to know about the kind of society we are and the moral anarchy that shapes our culture. The riots were bad enough. But the Shard is shattering.
This year has seen the rise and rise of Renzo Piano's new skyscraper by the Thames. When finished it will be over 1,000ft high and the tallest building in Europe. As it has grown, remarkably fast, its appearance has become clear. If it seemed wiser to give the Shard the benefit of the doubt when all that could be seen was a T-shaped concrete spine – ah, but it will be beautiful when it is a skyborne sliver of glass, said defenders – now most of the shining transparent skin has been added a fair assessment can be made. And that assessment has to be damning.
It is out of all proportion to its surroundings. On the Tate Modern bridge the other day I stopped, transfixed. This is an architectural catastrophe for London. Forget what this ethereal spike would look like in a city of towers, a financial district already soaring. Stabbed into the historic fabric of a city that has never built especially tall, dwarfing Southwark Cathedral and such nearby landmarks as Tower Bridge, the Monument and even Tate's converted power station, it seems a lunatic attack on London.
A photograph taken when it still showed its concrete heart, ironically romantic in misty light with a dog posed as if wanting to be immortalised in a Doisneau urban scene, reveals how minuscule it makes the mighty dome of St Paul's Cathedral. The meaning of this new building's monstrous size is blatant. The Shard is self-evidently a monument to wealth and power run way out of control. It screams with dazzling arrogance that money rules this city and says money inhabits a realm way above our heads. It is a vision of the financial sector floating above the proletarian streets, living by different rules and shaping events below it with icy ease.
I am sorry if my allusion to the riots earlier seemed facetious. It is deadly serious. This summer has seen London riven by attacks on property and people. The national soul-searching has been exhaustive. But if you are really looking for clues to how Britain got broken, if you really want to see, with your own eyes, a manifest symptom of a society gone wrong, just take a good long look at the Shard. Anyone who criticises modern architecture risks sounding like Prince Charles with his talk of "monstrous carbuncles." So instead of waiting for others to predictably make the comparison I shall invite it: this growth on the body of London, this carbuncle, is a flashing warning sign of disease. But the madness and disorder it manifests come from above, not from below.
Only architecture can express social history in solid, permanent signs that are carved in the very life of a city. The Shard may be doing us a favour, for it makes visible what is otherwise artfully hidden. We can see the damage done by rioters, in broken glass and burned-out buildings. We can't see, in that tangible, in-your-face way, the nature of the modern British economy. We can't see the staggering inequalities between a small financial elite and everyone else, can't easily visualise the brutality of investment capital that runs rampant while social mobility declines and unemployment grows in the real world far below wealth's abstract sphere. But this building makes all that grotesquely visible.
The Shard's lack of all proportion to its surroundings is a physical demonstration of the completely disproportionate distribution of resources and potential in our society.
Throughout the early years of this century in Britain social mobility was declining and the poor were being marginalised. These problems were ignored as New Labour presided over a credit boom, and it was in those heady days that the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, gave permission in 2003 for the Shard to go ahead. English Heritage objected, but who cared about the complaints of culturally conservative fuddy-duddies? The mood of the time was glibly modernist, the proposed tower not far from the wildly successful new museum Tate Modern.
In retrospect, this undiscriminating reverence for the new in early 21st-century Britain may come to look like a culture that bonded the credit-guzzling middle classes with the super-rich and the cynical City. As hedge fund tycoons bought pickled sharks, the bourgeoisie applauded their taste and cheered on the rise of the Shard.
Even today, plenty of people will defend this transparently misconceived and prodigiously cocksure colossus, in the misguided belief that it advances modern design. But it merely represents the most corporate and unenlightened traditions of high-level business architecture, superficially dressed in a symmetrical glass skin. Funded, since 2008, mainly by a consortium of Qatari investors, The Shard is not an avant-garde revelation of new possibilities for London. It is quite obviously and even gleefully the imposition of a style of architecture that is banal, moneyed, and grimly businesslike. It would fit into any financial district on earth. And anywhere on earth it would say the same thing, that finance is king.
But finance has proved a feckless, shallow, and heartless ruler of the world. The disproportion the Shard makes visible in Britain, the licence we in particular, more than most, have given to what Margaret Thatcher called the "wealth creators", has been allowed to shape British society since the 1980s.
By the end of that decade most people accepted that unfettered financial capitalism did indeed seem to liberate society and let creativity flow. This summer we have started to see the monstrous results, a society atomised and shattered. Like a shard raised from the windows of this summer and made permanent, the tower that now dominates the capital's skyline is a terrible vision of the future we have been building.
It has come to us from a dystopia where the rulers of the world pass their lives in glass towers way above the mean streets. Down there the excluded loot and burn, and the sky-dwellers profess to be shocked by their lack of morality.
The conversation: Architecture – modernism v traditionalism
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 8, 2011
Is there an establishment bias against traditional architecture? Modernist Michael Taylor talks pastiche and passion with traditionalist Robert Adam
The war between traditional and modernist architects flared up again this week after Paul Finch, chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, praised the fact that modernists had prevailed in bids to create Olympic buildings. Robert Adam, a member of the Traditional Architecture Group, and Michael Taylor, a senior partner of Hopkins Architects, the firm that has finished the Olympic velodrome, met to discuss architecture, Marcus Vitruvius and half-timbering, with Lanre Bakare in the middle.
Robert Adam: The prejudice towards traditionalists is rather like sexism. It's just in the culture. If you're in the profession, that's just what you do. When you're delivering the prejudice you don't really notice it, but if you're on the receiving end of it, then it's a problem.
Michael Taylor: Underlying that is the slightly strange notion that only one style or approach should prevail. That goes way back. You hear stories about people who supported Le Corbusier fighting with people who supported Mies van der Rohe.
RA: Some people are so passionate about what they do they cannot separate their personal preference from what is good. I've known students who were not let on to courses because they've worked for me or who were told they'll fail a course if they carry on with a traditional style. To get through an architectural college pursuing traditionalism is extremely unlikely.
MT: It's particularly odd when there is a shortlist for a competition, something like an Oxbridge college, and you have a list which encompasses a range of styles and you think, "Are you really going to look at them on their merits or have you already made your mind up about what kind of building you want?"
RA: Most traditionalist architects know there is no point going in for competitions if they are going to be judged by other architects. Then the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are planning guidelines for local councils which specifically say "pastiche" will not be favoured over good modern design.
Lanre Bakare: Should modernity be preferred precisely because it is innovative and forward thinking?
MT: You've got to look to the root of the issue, really. I wouldn't say you shouldn't have neo-classical buildings or that children shouldn't learn Latin or Greek in schools. By definition every building which is built today has to be a contemporary building. What I'm more interested in is the consistency of thought which goes through that process. For instance, if you got [the Roman writer, architect and engineer] Vitruvius back here now, his core values of commodity, firmness and delight are still absolutely essential to everything we do. Yet would he expect you to be working in blocks of stone and pediments? Well, no, I don't think so. People are benefiting from cars, aeroplanes and other modern technology, and so to take the appearance and facades of your architecture as one separate element which should make a very clear and literal quotation back to history seems to be inconsistent. And I think people struggle with that.
RA: I think only architects struggle with that. Most people don't have a problem with a Ferrari in the drive and a Georgian house behind it.
MT: Let's agree vast parts of our cities are covered in very bland modern buildings with too much glass and steel. People like interesting materials, Vitruvian values, things based on human scale and a sense of place. I don't think modernism does away with any of those things. The way the traditionalist groups talk about modernism is as though it is a form that is a derivation of the international style, but I would argue the more progressive modernism does take on board context, scale and materials, and includes those in a modern way. I don't think you have any choice but to accept your contemporary status. My challenge to you is: why don't you embrace those challenges, but without explicit quotation from the past?
RA: In a way that's the key point – the direct quotation from the past. Modernism quotes from its own past, and in the end it is a tradition as well.
MT: In terms of an architectural language, surely with everything that's at our fingertips today – we have such a huge amount of materials to choose from, and computers to help us – why do we not take the materials and opportunities we have and build a sensitive and responsive modernism out of that?
RA: Take the modernism out of that and I agree with you. I think evolving is fine but I don't think saying, "I have something new at my disposal and therefore I should use it regardles" is right.
MT: So how do you prevent your buildings from being skin deep? If they are built with steel or concrete frames and use the technology we have available, how do you stop your familiar-looking classical architecture from being just a skin on the outside of the building? For many people, and for me, that is deeply unsatisfactory.
RA: I think this disappointment only comes from architects and others who have this structural, rationalist view of it. If people want to feel comfortable in their environment and need some reference to the past to do that, then I don't have a problem with it. I remember speaking to a woman about the appearance of half-timbering. She said she knew it wasn't the real thing, but for her it was a souvenir of something she liked. That is important, and I've never forgotten it.
MT: There are some buildings where there will be common ground – for example, the works of Brunel, or Crystal Palace. I'm sure you would see classical references, and I would see great engineering, incredible innovation and three-dimensional satisfaction. I just think architecture is a complete three-dimensional experience, and you should go beyond your souvenirs on the facade and look at the entire depth of experience.
RA: I do agree with that, actually. The thing I disagree with most is that you become frozen out because people don't believe it is possible for a traditionalist to adapt. I believe there are examples which show that is not the case.
MT: Anyone would recognise the problems with modernism and see values in traditionalism which they like, but the problem is traditionalism is fixed and isn't something that people think is moving forward. The direct quotation is the problem I have with it. People can point out the failings of modern architecture, but the answer is not to go back in time, pick a moment and transport it to the here and now.
The destruction of Tottenham’s buildings isn’t just a sentimental loss | Lucy Inglis
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 8, 2011
The importance of the built environment to people's investment in their communities is consistently underestimated
Tottenham developed rapidly from a small village during the Georgian period, into a place of cheap housing for ordinary workers in the Victorian period. It was much influenced by the railways and built to be inhabited by people who were never far from the breadline. They did, however, live in a time when there was an abundance of work for the unqualified and unskilled, even if it was poorly paid.
As a predominantly Victorian settlement Tottenham has many buildings typical of Victorian England's sturdy efforts at public architecture and some of the commercial buildings date from early in Tottenham's history. Tottenham has continued to attract people because of cheap housing and the chance to live among familiar voices while remaining close to central London, and it saw diverse ethnic groups arrive before the end of the 19th century.
Many of the communities which settled and continue to occupy these traditionally poor areas are those which have the strongest internal ties. And many of these communities are now struggling with unemployment and the consequences of poverty and poor education.
One of the early residential/commercial terraces is the burnt-out shell, pictured left. There are still some of this type of building in Hackney and Dalston, but they don't fit with modern requirements and have been phased out over the last 30 years, along with some of the traditional housing, making way for new developments. Developments such as the experimental Broadwater Farm estate, the likes of which scar many of London's Windrush settlements.
It's unlikely, I know, that the people who took part in burning these shops and homes will care about the effect their actions will have on the heart of Tottenham. What does it matter to them if ugly boxes replace the many buildings from different periods which made up a street as varied as the people who shopped there?
The majority of the buildings destroyed that have appeared in the news are the older ones (1840-1930). They informed Tottenham's built history and looked back to a time when Tottenham, though always a low income area, was a place full of working families and a large community living in attractive if modest housing with decent municipal buildings.
Recent investment from English Heritage in the restoration of some Tottenham High Road shopfronts reflected the presence of buildings important to our knowledge of commercial architecture, but also the history of people in Tottenham. These riots will not only fragment the community in the short term, but increase a sense of dispossession and alienation in the long term. The importance of the built environment to people's investment in their communities is consistently underestimated.
I hope the people left homeless, without their premises or injured by the riots are soon back on their feet, both physically and financially. But the urban fabric is not unimportant and its loss shouldn't be neglected, no matter how lowly.
Listening to the news, all I am hearing is how the work of the past 25 years has been undone. Wrong: the work of the last century and a half has been undone. I don't mourn the loss of these buildings as a sentimental lover of old bricks, but I see their destruction and know it to be a loss to the spirit of Tottenham itself.
• This article was first published on Lucy Inglis's blog, georgianlondon.com
Response: There is no modernist conspiracy in how we judge architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 4, 2011
Getting ready for London 2012 is about focusing on the buildings, not heritage politics
Robert Booth's article (London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names, 31 July) implicates the newly merged Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) charity, by association, with its chairman Paul Finch's recent article in the Architects' Journal written in a personal capacity. Surely Finch is able to express his admiration for the architecture for the 2012 games without it being seen as the official position of "England's national architectural review body"?
I am a trustee of Design Council Cabe, but I write this primarily as an architect who has presented schemes at Cabe that have been praised – and others that have been criticised. I have also chaired reviews and am confident that the process shows the necessary impartiality.
The request referred to in Booth's article that the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, should "instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks" would be extraordinarily counterproductive if implemented.
The whole intention behind the arrangements for design review is that a group of reviewers – only some of whom might be architects – use their knowledge and experience to discuss and comment on design proposals. It is the varied viewpoints that are on offer that validate the process.
There is no conspiracy-peddling modernist dogma, so readers need not be concerned with the inference that "Prince Charles's favourite architects" would never get a good Cabe review. They should know, however, that very little "traditional architecture" or classical design actually appears before us.
With the motto for the Olympic Games being "Faster, Higher, Stronger", you can forgive progressive architects getting a bit excited. What we all want is better-quality architecture, and the focus of Finch's article decries the problems brought on by a clumsy procurement process, making good architecture – of whatever style – a rarity.
It is indeed refreshing to see the London 2012 Olympics producing a set of exciting schemes built with confidence and without the need for any kind of heritage lobby intervening to force a late change in direction. How members of the Traditional Architecture Group might have approached these projects is an interesting but hypothetical question.
Not all of the venues involve "resolutely modernist designs" – let's not forget that some celebrate historic sites, such as the equestrian arena at Greenwich and beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade. Design review of these stadia actively encouraged them to integrate architectural heritage – hardly the "significant prejudice" claimed by the Traditional Architecture Group.
Design review, in my experience, is much more focused on the important issue of the spatial relationships that proposed new buildings will create with their surroundings, and raising their sustainability credentials. This has nothing to do with questions of architectural style.
The fading genius of the US post office | Gray Brechin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 2, 2011
The superb post offices of the New Deal era are a monument to America's democratic ethos. Now we're selling off FDR's legacy
On 9 June, the General Services Administration threw Modesto's downtown post office onto the auction block. Like so many other postal facilities, the Renaissance-style palazzo had long served as an anchor for downtown stores of the California town, a public space where citizens met to exchange news as well as transact business in an ennobling lobby of polished travertine and marble beneath murals of local farming activities.
The federal government once designed its post offices to elevate and inspire the public whose assets it is now selling. An architectural journal in 1918 spoke of the tutelary value of post offices:
"They are generally the most important of the local buildings, and taken together, [are] seen daily by thousands, who have little opportunity to feel the influence of the great architectural works in the large cities."
President Hoover's administration built facilities such as Modesto's in a last-ditch effort to end the Depression, before Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal unleashed a far greater torrent of public works that succeeded where Hoover had failed (pdf). In less than a decade, the Roosevelt administration built over 1,100 post offices, distinguished by fine architecture, materials and detailing, as well as by a lavish programme of public art that, for the first time, reflected back to patrons and workers their regional identity.
Mandated by the US constitution as a service vital to democracy, the post office has fallen victim to structural adjustment as well as to electronic communication. Congress has successively demanded that the US Postal Service run itself more like a business since making it a quasi-corporation in 1971. Required to provide universal service, even as the internet and private carriers cut into its profit centres, the USPS has spun into a death spiral, raising its rates as it slashes employment and service. It's now stripping its assets, as well.
Since January, the US Postal Service has closed 280 post offices, despite community resistance and the objections of local business people horrified to watch downtown magnets decamp for peripheral strip malls and trailers. Those closures were only a warmup for what was coming. On 26 July, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe listed nearly 3,700 more, saying "The Postal Service of the future will be smaller, leaner, and more competitive." Those facilities constitute well over a tenth of the nation's post offices, buildings that once physically embodied government honesty, efficiency and even culture. Perhaps, that is why they must go.
The distinguished Modesto building, like many other New Deal post offices, has earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places, but a buyer could still demolish it to utilise the real estate beneath it. In that case, law requires the developer to donate its murals to the federal government. But as Congress and the White House hack ever deeper into the services that Americans until recently took for granted, no one may be at home in Washington to find lodging for such art other than that for which it was made.
New Deal critic Amity Shlaes has claimed that "It's not really the government's business, art, is it?" Roosevelt shared with other New Dealers a considerably more expansive notion of what the US could achieve. He forecast that "one hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not for its relief." The New Dealers envisioned a new Renaissance. Its successors are knocking that legacy down to the highest bidder, and with it goes what we once were and might yet be.
Stirling prize shortlist: big names stop the judges in their tracks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
The six architects on the Stirling prize shortlist 2011 have all been there before. But could a political dark horse say 'on your bike' to the bookies' Olympic favourite?
It's never worthwhile to reduce the Stirling prize shortlist to some overriding theme, but having said that, there is one thing that unites this year's six architects: they've all been shortlisted before. Some of them several times – this is Zaha Hadid's fourth building, and David Chipperfield's seventh, which puts him in joint second place in the Stirling prize league table alongside Richard Rogers, with Norman Foster just one ahead. Does this suggest there were clear frontrunners in the Stirling race, or that a big name counts for more and smaller practices don't get a look-in?
Anyway, on with the reckless speculation. The traditional Stirling winner is a large public building, but in the current cash-strapped construction environment, there have been few of these to trumpet.
Which makes the absence of two of the main buildings on the London Olympics site conspicuous. No plaudits for the main stadium by US-based architects Populous – understandable in a way since its brief was practically to be as bog standard as possible – at which it succeeds (having a silly name for your practice doesn't help either).
And nothing for Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre – also understandable given its troubled history of redesigns, budget increases, temporary "water wings" imposed on it, and the fact that, er, it still isn't finished.
That leaves Michael Hopkins's Velodrome with the podium all to itself. As expected, it's currently the bookies' favourite and deservedly so. It's a handsome, unfussy building, quietly distinctive (enough to earn it a nickname: "the Pringle") and engineered as efficiently as a track bicycle. It's already had the thumbs-up from the Team GB cyclists, too, who described it as "the best in the world".
Looking at the other contenders, laudable though they are, they're not necessarily game-changing. AHMM's Angel Building reconfigures a 1980s office building with Louis Kahn-style barefaced concrete and a sheen of Mad Men mid-century glamour – very nice but perhaps too conventional to win. Bennetts Associates' Royal Shakespeare Theatre makes new sense of a messy accumulation of older buildings, but it's not a scene-stealer like the Tate Modern. Zaha's Evelyn Grace Academy is a consolation for the Aquatics Centre, and proof that her swooshing parametricism can work within tight budgets and design guidelines (is that Z-shape a touch of covert branding?). The fact that Zaha won the prize last year could hamper her chances, though. Likewise David Chipperfield's Museum Folkwang extension in Essen, another refined, sharp-edged German culture house for his collection.
Chipperfield already won with one of these in 2007, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, and was shortlisted for another, the Neues Museum, last year. Perhaps he should design a Museum of German Museum Designs.
That leaves a dark horse: An Gaeláras by Dublin-based O'Donnell & Tuomey in Derry, Northern Ireland. It is the first purpose-built Irish-language cultural centre in the UK, a product of the Good Friday agreement, and thus freighted with political relevance (there hasn't been much of that in Stirling world since the Scottish parliament won in 2005). But it's also a beautiful design on a hostile site. Despite being walled in on three sides, it boasts a sculptural four-storey atrium criss-crossed by stairs and galleries, smartly mixing colours and materials – the type of space that stops you in your tracks. Uplifting and finely crafted, it could well tick all the boxes.
Sir George Gilbert Scott, the unsung hero of British architecture | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 13, 2011
The restoration of the St Pancras hotel should remind us of Scott, who towered over his profession yet has no biography
I remember it as a rat-infested dump. Water dripped down walls. Wires hung from ceilings. Pigeons colonised turrets and rafters. Gormenghast could not do justice to the profile of that destitute old lady, slumped at the far end of Euston Road. Poor St Pancras hotel embodied the contempt of modernism for anything old, stylish, romantic and, above all, Victorian. The place should be left to rot, an example to any who might find beauty in antiquity or economy in restoration.
Thirty years ago I staged a "flash" party in the derelict staircase of St Pancras, to draw attention to its plight. British Rail and its architects had fought for years to demolish it in favour of a new King's Cross in the style of Euston. So we crammed the flights of steps with rail enthusiasts, put trumpeters on the landings and toasted the old lady with champagne. Valiant campaigners from the Victorian Society led by John Betjeman and others had managed to get the building listed, but at the time it seemed at risk of collapse. Nobody cared.
Last month St Pancras hotel finally reopened to defy the forces of darkness. It is restored to its old magnificence, courtesy of three noble firms, London and Continental, Manhattan Lofts and Marriott hotels. The finest booking hall in Europe clinks with cocktails. The murals on the old staircase throb with colour. Arches leap across corridors and gilt drips from vaulting. Victorian restaurants, bedrooms and bars are booked solid. Sometimes, just sometimes, beauty wins.
By happy coincidence, next week also marks the bicentenary of the birth of the creator of St Pancras, Sir George Gilbert Scott. He was the most prolific architect of his age, and possibly of all time, and also the most unsung. His works spanned the empire, from New Zealand to Newfoundland. In England alone, he designed 800 buildings and oversaw hundreds more restorations. He produced churches, schools, hospitals, workhouses, asylums and vicarages galore. He has 607 structures listed as historic, more than any other architect (next is Lutyens, with 402), including the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office, Edinburgh Cathedral and the universities of Glasgow and Bombay. Scott restored 18 of the 26 English medieval cathedrals. From his office his grandson, Giles, designed Liverpool Cathedral, Battersea power station, red phone boxes and what is now Tate Modern. Scott towered over his profession, yet he has no biography.
At least the Victorian Society has done him the honour of a celebratory magazine, adorned with a picture of Scott's great colonnade at Bombay university in rich Venetian gothic. The issue is more than a hymn of praise. It seeks to explain the role of taste in governing the changing appreciation of historic style. For decades, as Ian Dungavell points out, Scott was seen as a vandal, "the bête noire of the society for the protection of ancient buildings", for what was seen as his over-restoration of medieval churches. This helped fuel hostility to Victorian architecture through most of the 20th century. When Scott died, his enemy William Morris hailed "the happily dead dog".
The Victorian Society has recovered Scott's reputation not as a destroyer of old buildings but as their scholarly rescuer. He was a meticulous lover of medieval architecture, reinstating hundreds of medieval churches in the manner in which he envisaged their builders had intended. He confronted an Anglican inheritance that had been neglected and was on the verge of collapse. He had to rebuild Chichester cathedral tower after it actually fell down, and used hydraulic rams to prop up St Albans Abbey.
As Gavin Stamp points out, "Scott treated buildings with careful, loving respect and intuitive structural knowledge", so as to put them back to the use for which they were designed. At one derelict site after another, he had his assistants comb the ground to find fragments of medieval stone to re-erect and copy. He was a devoted follower of Pugin, giving him pride of place in the parade of architects on the Albert Memorial, with his own profile carved, diminutive, behind him. Morris's attack was unfair. Scott merely rejected Morris's authenticity of material in favour of authenticity of style. Had it not been for him, hundreds of English churches would today be ruins, stabilised in the picturesque wreckage beloved of the old ministry of works, with fragmented walls and gaunt gables set in immaculate government lawns.
Scott was certainly a partial gothicist. His argument with Palmerston in 1858 over the design for a new Foreign Office in Whitehall saw an epic "battle of the styles". Palmerston pitted his imperial classicism against Scott's city-state medievalism. The plans passed through a compromise byzantine before coming to rest on the present Italian renaissance. Rarely was meaning in architecture subjected to such furious public debate, battle being joined in the press and in parliament, those being the days. A Tory minister, Geoffrey Rippon, tried to demolish the building as "obsolete" in 1963 but was stopped.
I love St Pancras but see Scott's Albert Memorial as a more exquisite masterpiece. Restored by English Heritage in 1998, it is England's Taj Mahal, encasing the golden statue of Victoria's departed Albert in a soaring shrine in honour of western civilisation. Promenaders arriving at the Albert Hall next week should turn awhile from that pompous bosom of a building and admire this supreme work of gothic art. Catch it above all as an imperial sun sets across Kensington Gardens.
What the neglect of Scott illustrates is how fickle is the eye of fashion. The dirt that came to encase his buildings, much of whose appeal lay in ornament and colour, was mistaken for ugliness. His attempt to rescue old buildings was seen as philistine, and judged worthless. Anything to do with the medieval revival was regarded as pastiche. The contrasting blank facades and unadorned interiors of 20th-century modernism were seen as clean, socialist and virtuous.
All architecture is a pastiche of something, none more so than today's "neo-modernist" revival. Scott was wholly up to date in his use of such materials as steel, concrete, plate glass and the technology of steam. He even put a modern bathroom on each floor at St Pancras. But he understood the spiritual exhilaration of the vertical line, the pointed arch and the soaring turret. In an age of relentless novelty, he understood that architecture could reassure people, that buildings could perform new uses yet offer comfort in continuity.
What was sad in the campaign to save St Pancras was the absence from it of Scott's own profession of architect, to which anything old is a nuisance and anything new is a fee. Anyone wishing to see what today's architects preferred need only trot down the road to Euston station, a building with no respect for any style past or present, indeed with no sense of visual delight at all. I gather it is to be demolished. I have struggled to see Euston as the St Pancras of our age but failed. If there is a "save Euston" society being formed, I am afraid it is not for me.
• This article was amended on 12 July 2011. The original said Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was the son of Sir George Gilbert Scott. This has been corrected.
Will no one halt the vandalising of London’s skyline? | Catherine Bennett
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 2, 2011
Buildings such as the Shard are proof positive that the capital has become a greedy developer's playground
The creator of London's Gherkin, Ken Shuttleworth, likes to think of his work as "outrageous". "I'd rather have controversy," the architect once said, "than produce a dull, boring building that nobody comments on."
Unesco duly commented, when it was finished, on the unfortunate way Shuttleworth's huge, flashy edifice eclipsed a humble, if quite sweet little relic called the Tower of London, a world heritage site. Conservationists were disappointed that it replaced the listed Baltic Exchange, damaged by the IRA in 1992. But the new building, commissioned by a reinsurance company, won the Stirling prize in 2004, for the greatest contribution to British architecture. Unanimously approving judges said it was "already a popular icon".
When wrangles occur over dramatic changes to the capital's skyline, the Gherkin is invariably invoked as proof that, when in doubt, shiny architectural outrageousness should trump the case for heritage and the popular aversion for more tall buildings. Only someone as idiotic as Prince Charles, you gather, would dispute that the Gherkin and its far taller successors are spectacularly appropriate emblems for a dynamic, forward-looking nation in no more need of planning regulations than it is of Viagra.
It appears, however, that Prince Charles may have found a new ally. Ken Shuttleworth has just declared that "the age of bling is over". Si monumentum requiris, don't look at Ken's Gherkin. He wants architects to abandon "crazy shapes, silly profiles and double curves". If he were designing it again, he says, the Gherkin would look "different", with less glass. Interviewed by Emily Wright for Building magazine, Shuttleworth said the market should focus instead on "beautiful, simple, rectangular forms", eg not forms like gonads – the current mayor of London's term for Shuttleworth's sloping, all-glass City Hall. The architect has discovered the modest, the plain, the energy-saving corrective to showy, all-glass buildings. "Companies no longer want to be seen spending that type of money on their HQ building as it doesn't look good," he said. "Buildings need to reflect the time they are in."
This is the world of architecture, of course; a layperson cannot be sure Shuttleworth was not just saying it to cause one of his trademark controversies or, indeed, to prepare the way for his new, lower-rise, solid-walled development at Broadgate, an HQ for the investment bank UBS that is attractively described as "an engine of finance".
But still, for Shuttleworth, that acknowledged master of architectural bling, to cancel the legacy of his own past is surely, when you try to conceive of an equivalent style reversal, up there with Katie Price denouncing pink. Except that a multitude of disappointed little girls leaves less impression on the landscape than the capital's still-advancing army of giant dicks, the emissaries, as Shuttleworth reminds us, of a time they are no longer in. Just last week work resumed on the ludicrous Pinnacle (or "Helter-Skelter"), approved in 2005 and still a "unique product", according to its rescuers, a consortium of investors intent on bringing us the tallest skyscraper in the city.
Meanwhile, in another case of retro, early 21st-century exhibitionism, the growing Shard, designed to be the highest building in Europe, persists in its incredible deformation of the London skyline. Asked for his opinion of Renzo Piano's spiked tower/obelisk, his fellow icon-maker, Shuttleworth said: "I just don't get it. I don't understand it." A principal objection appears to be its costly glassiness. "I was there the other day," Shuttleworth said, "and I can't see how they are going to make it work environmentally."
But that is missing the point. The point of the Shard is showing off, not sustainability. Timed, inevitably, for Olympics readiness, this tall object is due to light up, and have rings or something coming off it, to show the world how mighty we are once we've called in an Italian architect and Middle Eastern finance. Once construction had begun, thanks to John Prescott, in his then role of taste-arbiter for the nation, Boris Johnson hailed the building as follows: "If you want a symbol of how London is powering its way out of the global recession, the Shard is it, rising confidently up to the heavens."
Does anyone, with the possible exception of bankers, want a symbol of how London is "powering its way out of the global recession"? As is now customary, with the mayor in charge of London's aesthetics, I don't believe we were ever asked. But if, as Londoners, we'd said oh yes please, would we have chosen this import from the Dubai school of economic symbolism, erected in a place where it overturned, at a stroke of Prescott's pen, planning principles that protected the inner London skyline from speculators for half a century?
Already, viewed from what was supposed to be, even when Prescott destroyed it, a protected – even iconic – view from Hampstead Heath in north London, the Shard, "rising confidently up to the heavens", has, as predicted by all its opponents, reduced Christopher Wren's elderly competitor to an earthbound, fussy-looking nuisance. The Shard, for God's sake. Like professional entertainers – give it up for the Gherkin! The Cheesegrater! The Helter-Skelter! The latest piece of speculative crap funded by the well-loved Qatari royal family! – new towers now arrive with ready-made nicknames, possibly to preclude the invention of ruder ones, probably to advertise, in advance, their guaranteed iconic status. Anyway. In the happy time when the fate of this particular building was still uncertain, with English Heritage describing it as a "spike through the heart of historic London", and most of the public saying they were against very tall buildings, its supporters deftly aligned critics with the Prince Charles school of Toytown philistinism. Concerns about views were dismissed as ignorant nimbyism. "Only if you live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, darling," mocked one passionate Shardist, as if the thing were a shrine to low-cost housing, not greed.
Whatever architects may say about Charles's interference, his fondness for pastiche has surely been a boon for skyline trashers everywhere, allowing their critics to be stigmatised, instantly, as thick Poundburyites whose very objections to new architecture only confirmed the geriatric worthlessness of their opinions. Conversely, the transformation of the capital into a developers' playground could be portrayed by someone such as Ken Livingstone as clever and modern. That he pledged, in the absence of any skyscraping mandate, "to promote the development of tall buildings" is worth remembering, now he's up for re-election.
Even now, critics of Piano's spike are apt to dilute their heresy with some judiciously expressed devotion, to the effect that his wonderful Shard would be simply marvellous if only it were somewhere else. Unless, that is, the heretic happens also to be an architect, such as Ken Shuttleworth. You can't say carbuncle: you can say silly, crazy and bling. As moments go, this feels positively iconic.
Eco-mosque is another powerful symbol of Islamic ingenuity | Bilal Badat
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 24, 2011
From the Great Mosque of Damascus to a German minaret wind turbine, Islamic architectural tradition is all about innovation
News that a small Muslim community in Norderstedt, Germany, has pioneered renewable energy sources by placing a wind turbine within the minaret of their mosque comes as a welcome surprise to most. Yet for some commentators the minaret continues to symbolise the march of an intolerant Islam intent on proselytising liberal Europe, a view made clear in 2009 when a Swiss referendum banned the construction of any new minarets.
To those versed in the proclivities of Islamic art and architecture, however, the mosque and its minaret have always stood as positive examples of syncretism.
In the seventh century, during the earliest stages of Islam, Muslims conducted their prayers in simple courtyard-like structures (or simply open spaces), which had partially covered areas to protect worshippers from the fierce Arabian sun. As Islam spread out of the deserts of Arabia and into the cityscapes of Damascus and Cairo, the rapidly expanding Muslim population required houses of worship that continued to meet their social and spiritual requirements. There are very few doctrinal guidelines as to what specifically constitutes a mosque (the only essential requirement being direction towards Mecca) and so Muslims either legally appropriated and modified existing structures or created completely new buildings.
The mosques that followed are magnificent and innovative examples of architecture that are paradoxically original through the way they borrowed from other cultures.
Take the eighth-century Great Mosque of Damascus: with its central nave, corner towers and sumptuous golden mosaics one could be excused for mistaking it for a late-antiquity church. On closer inspection, however, one notices the complete absence of figurative imagery in the building's mosaics that are so ubiquitous in Byzantine architecture. Here, the figures have been replaced by fantastic foliate arabesque and detailed depictions of classical architecture to align with the Islamic sanction against figural imagery in the mosque.
One can also hear the melodious call to prayer from one of the mosque's minarets. The Great Mosque of Damascus was formerly a church purchased from the Christians and transformed into a mosque; the minarets themselves were previously Christian corner towers. Prior to Damascus, the Muslim call to prayer was conducted from the tallest part of the urban landscape (eg on top of a house or mosque wall). When the Muslims came to Damascus, naturally the call to prayer was performed from the top of the church tower and thus, the architectural feature that is the minaret came to be.
Damascus is of course not the only example of cultural borrowing. One can witness the same phenomena in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which has its own take on the pre-Islamic centralised shrine architecture of the Levant (eg the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre).
Perhaps the most obvious example of adaptive architecture is in Istanbul, Turkey, where the old and the new have sat opposite each other for almost 500 years: on one side is the magnificent sixth-century basilica Hagia Sofia, and on the other is the early 17th-century Blue Mosque, a monument that bears startling resemblance to its Byzantine predecessor yet remains unequivocally unique in appearance.
Traditional Muslim societies therefore had no qualms about absorbing and learning from the cultures that they encountered and adjusting them within the philosophical framework of Islam: Islamic architecture is, and always has been, a medium for syncretism rather than proselytisation.
Fast-forward almost 1,400 years to the eco-friendly minaret in Germany. In Europe minarets no longer serve the practical function of calling people to prayer that they once did in the eighth century and instead remain as symbols or bastions of a traditional aesthetic.
What better way to return to the ingenuity of the Islamic architectural tradition than to transform the minaret once again into a highly productive and practical architectural feature which still retains its aesthetic and symbolic responsibilities.
Such resourcefulness is the perfect riposte to critics who accuse Muslim communities of self-marginalisation as well as social and religious "backwardness". Especially in Europe, where the apparent failings of "multiculturalism" seem to be the issue of contention, it is highly refreshing to see Muslim communities so emphatically adjusting their sails and letting the turbulent winds carry them to the shores of reinvention.
Response: Don’t ignore Britain’s pre-Christian architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 15, 2011
No comprehensive guide to our islands' buildings should exclude Hadrian's Wall or Stonehenge
Jonathan Glancey's introduction to the Guardian's Guide to British Architecture encourages a reading of architecture and an immersion in its language (Architecture: an autobiography, 10 September). The buildings "tell tales of people who have lived, loved and worked inside them". The stories of buildings' birth, life and death, their design and fabrication, use and abuse, rebirths and ruin, are indeed the narrative that describes a society and its architecture.
Yet the guide as a whole surely misses the deep and longer story of British architecture. Joseph Rykwert's seminal work The Idea of the Town views the myths and rituals of many previous civilisations; Glancey only allows a brief view of "eight millennia" of architecture with a mention of "the cities and ziggurats (towers) of ancient Sumeria, now hidden from the world in the deserts of southern Iraq".
Surely Britain is allowed its ancients: does the history of architecture only start with the arrival of Christianity, the dominant force in architecture? Surely it should include places deep in our psyche and defining the last six millennia. Where are the precise fabrications of Stonehenge, and the domestic and environmental connectivity exhibited at Skara Brae? Where are the Romans' technical marvels, Hadrian's Wall, and their integrated plumbing and heating?
Are we witnessing an editing moment similar to the TV series Civilisation; or perhaps these Unesco world heritage sites are seen as just buildings, like Nikolaus Pevsner's bicycle shed – and therefore written out of the story? They were important enough for John Wood, the designer of the Circus in Bath, to survey Stonehenge; and earlier Christopher Wren, a great baroque master, allegedly visited and marked the stones. Peter Ackroyd, in his Hawksmoor novel, develops a narrative that connects Wren at Stonehenge to the death of Wren's son at the Pyramids of Giza.
Glancey compares the reading of literary greats to the reading of buildings, yet he misses the sensory duet between body and buildings, exemplified by Georges Perec, who combined mathematical and literary puzzles across the life of a Parisian apartment block in Life: a Users Manual. My own favourite from Dickens is a body landscape duet from Great Expectations as Magwitch turns Pip in Cooling churchyard, creating a large-scale metaphoric Thames rotation, moving London west to east.
For me as an architect and tutor, the longer view of British architecture, with civilisations waxing and waning in the face of creative and destructive environmental change, wields salutary lessons.
We can take fictional futures that use the deep and modern past such as those of China Miéville, JG Ballard and Italo Calvino. Digging beyond Calvino's Invisible Cities, one arrives at the architecture of Cosmicomics, and a fascination in new and rare materials, scientific concepts that become mythical in the Italian's hand – they are hinted at in your guide's article on new materials.
Perhaps we should be projecting a Guide to British Architecture for the next eight millennia: now, that would be popular with my students.
Architecture, Art and design, Books, Charles Dickens, China Miéville, Comment, Comment is free, Culture, Design, Italo Calvino, JG Ballard, Nikolaus Pevsner, Peter Ackroyd, Stonehenge, The Guardian
No Comments