Posts Tagged Communities
London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2011
Design Council chief celebrates Prince Charles' lack of involvement as traditionalists complain about 'overt prejudice'
A new skirmish in a long-running and often bitterly fought architectural "style war" between modernists and traditionalists has broken out over the stadiums and arenas of the London Olympics park.
Prince Charles's favourite architects have accused the head of England's national architectural review body of "overt prejudice" after he made a barbed attack on the heir to the throne's love of traditional buildings, and heaped praise on the resolutely modernist designs that will be beamed around the world as the backdrop to next summer's games.
Paul Finch, chairman of the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government-funded design watchdog that vets major planning applications with the help of government funding, applauded the selection of Zaha Hadid, the avant garde Iraqi-born architect who designed the sinuous aquatics centre, and Populous, the designer of the main 80,000-seat stadium.
But, more provocatively, Finch celebrated the fact that the country's leading traditional architects, who are favoured by the Prince of Wales, were not in any way involved. "One of the good things about the London 2012 Olympics is the realisation that we have a set of buildings produced not by Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam, John Simpson, but by Hopkins, Hadid, Populous, Make, Heneghan Peng et al," he said. "None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales, none of it to do with heritage."
The Traditional Architecture Group, whose members include Terry and Adam, both leading exponents of classical buildings inspired by architects from the past, including Sir Christopher Wren and Andrea Palladio, has complained to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and communities secretary, Eric Pickles, that Finch's remarks, made in the Architects' Journal, displayed "significant prejudice against one style or architectural philosophy at the highest level". The group said its members were "dismayed and alarmed".
"His is a fundamentally prejudicial point of view from someone in a senior position," added Adam. "He shouldn't be in the position he is in."
Prince Charles has previously enraged some British architects by speaking out against modernist designs. In 2009 Richard Rogers was dropped as the designer of a £3bn housing development at Chelsea Barracks after the Prince questioned his design in a private letter to the Qatari client. In 1984 he torpedoed a modernist extension to the National Gallery in London by complaining it was "like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend".
Now the prince's architectural allies feel they have found in Finch a lightning rod for their own simmering sense of injustice that a parallel "modernist establishment" is seeking to marginalise them with the result that some traditional architects believe commissions for Olympic projects were effectively closed to them. "It was considered a waste of time to go for the Olympic work," said Adam, a classicist who has designed a new 4,000-home settlement in Wales with the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
Lord Rogers chaired the selection panel for the aquatics centre and Ricky Burdett, professor of urbanism at the London School of Economics and a close ally of Rogers, was hired as chief design adviser to the Olympic Delivery Authority. Finch continues to chair the panel scrutinising designs for stadiums and arenas for the Olympics.
The firm of Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed the Portcullis House MPs' office, was responsible for the velodrome which is favourite to win this year's Stirling prize for the best building designed or built in Britain. Make, a firm led by Ken Shuttleworth who was a lead designer on the gherkin tower in London, has designed the handball arena, while Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based firm, has designed a sinuous complex of footbridges between the main stadium and the aquatics centre.
In his remarks Finch singled out Terry, who provided architectural advice to Prince Charles in his successful attempt to block the modernist redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks, and John Simpson who was hired to carry out alterations to Kensington Palace.
The Traditional Architecture Group has asked Pickles, whose department funds the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, to instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks. "It is the policy of this and recent governments to favour no architectural style in planning decisions," wrote Alireza Sagharchi, the group's chairman. "Yet by contrasting some better-known traditional architects with those working on the Olympics, Mr Finch has expressed his very clear bias against traditional architecture." He asked for assurances that Finch's views would "not be allowed to taint the planning system", according to Building Design magazine.
In response Finch said: "I will respond to them when they show me the courtesy of writing to me and I will be only too happy to point out the many apparent errors in what passes for their analysis."
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "These are opinions expressed in a magazine article, not official advice to central or local government. As such we have no comment to make."
Finch's comments in favour of the modernist appearance of Olympic Park architecture appear to undermine the neutral stance he advocated last year when asked about a proposal by Prince Charles's Foundation for the Built Environment to take on some of the design review role now undertaken by the Design Council.
He said: "The public interest is better served by concentrating on the quality of a piece of architecture rather than style which can come down to superficial visual appearance. It comes down to whether their advice would be independent and disinterested and they obviously have a stylistic preference."
Charles's tastes: rated and hated
• Charles praised Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, for its "underlying intuitive grammar of design", saying it represented a better model for housing populations in the developing world than western architecture
• He backed Quinlan Terry's alternative designs for Chelsea Barracks which were inspired by the work of Sir Christopher Wren, the 17th century architect of St Paul's cathedral
• Poundbury in Dorset is the most complete version of Prince Charles' architectural vision, including the fire station which has been described as "the Parthenon meets Brookside"
• When talking to soldiers destined for service in Afghanistan in 2008 he said the Ivor Crewe building at Essex University "looks like a dustbin from the outside"
• Earlier that year he warned a series of planned skyscrapers in London would be "not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners"
• Charles said the brutalist concrete Birmingham Central Library, designed in 1974 by John Madin, looked like "a place where books are incinerated, not kept"
Stirling prize shortlist reflects new austerity in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
Two buildings on the Riba shortlist have been retrofitted to save money and energy, rather than built from scratch
A 1980s office block and a 1930s theatre are in the running to be named best new building of the year, as architects turn to retrofitting to save money and energy.
The Angel building in Islington, London, which BT vacated before the financial crash, has been shortlisted for the Stirling prize after a £72m refit. The 1932 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which has been overhauled at a cost of £60m, has also been nominated.
The Royal Institute of British Architects' (Riba) annual £20,000 award has never been won by a refurbished building but the presence on the shortlist of two refit projects represents the emergence of austerity architecture.
New buildings commissioned before the public spending squeeze also made the shortlist, including the sweeping velodrome for the 2012 Olympics designed by Hopkins Architects, and one of the most expensive city academy schools ever built, the £38m Evelyn Grace Academy in Lambeth by Zaha Hadid Architects.
The velodrome is the first major Olympic venue to be completed and is favourite to win with odds of 2/1 at William Hill.
The Royal Shakespeare Company originally planned to demolish its 1932 listed home in Stratford-upon-Avon, designed by Elisabeth Scott, and replace it with a futuristic building by the Dutch architect Erick van Egerat.
The plan was revised amid cost concerns and local objections. Instead the RSC hired Bennetts Associates to slot a new thrust stage into the main auditorium, redesign the public areas and erect a viewing tower.
As well as saving money and reducing emissions, the refurb "captured the spirits and ghosts of the theatre", said Rab Bennetts, the architect.
The Angel building was stripped back to its concrete frame and reclad as a speculative office block, shaving almost 15% off the cost of a new building and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about a third, the designer said.
"Refurbishment saves money and reduces the environmental impact of construction," said Simon Allford. "It also shows that we should be paying more attention when we design new buildings to ensuring they are capable of being adapted for future uses which we can't yet imagine."
This month Peter Rees, chief planner for the City of London, claimed there would be fewer new skyscrapers in the current economic climate and that applications to refurbish existing office blocks had increased. He said refurbishment projects were often cheaper, more environmentally friendly and provoked fewer objections than new buildings.
"My prognosis is there will be fewer towers and that's no bad thing," he told Building magazine. "There's a lot of late- [19]80s buildings that we shouldn't be throwing away."
Also on the Stirling shortlist is An Gaelaras, an Irish language arts and cultural centre in Derry, designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey Architects. It is the first publicly funded facility of its kind since the Anglo-Irish agreement.
The Folkwang art gallery in Essen, Germany, designed by former Stirling prize winner David Chipperfield, completes the line-up."Creative redevelopment is a strong theme in this year's list, with a major museum extension, a remodelled theatre complex and the innovative retrofit of an old office building featured, showing how even with tight planning and building constraints, talent and imagination can totally transform existing structures and sites," said Ruth Reed, president of the RIBA.
The selection of Hadid's academy highlights an ongoing row between architects and the education secretary, Michael Gove, who scrapped a major schools building programme and complained that architects were "creaming off cash" from contracts.
Architects reacted angrily to the claim, saying the high cost of the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was down to wasteful procurement rather than their fees. In February Gove renewed his attack, telling a conference on free schools: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school, we won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer."
In June the Conservatives claimed architects and landscape architects had received £98m in fees to build 113 schools under BSF, with the biggest single fee being £2.7m. The Department for Education said it wanted to see more standardisation in school design to cut costs, sparking fresh concern at Riba.
The winner of the Stirling prize will be announced on 2 October.
Stirling prize 2011 shortlist – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
From a 1980s office block to Zaha Hadid's bank-busting academy, we take a look at the six spectacular buildings competing for RIBA's annual award
Broadgate centre not worth listing, says culture secretary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 15, 2011
Jeremy Hunt refuses to protect 1980s complex in City of London, enabling British Land to build new HQ for investment bank UBS
British Land and the City of London were celebrating on Wednesday after culture secretary Jeremy Hunt brushed aside a recommendation from English Heritage that Broadgate estate in the Square Mile should be listed, paving the way for an £850m European headquarters for UBS.
Hunt's controversial decision not to protect Broadgate, a symbol of the brash 1980s City culture, from demolition came much earlier than expected, after furious lobbying by the City, and angered heritage groups.
A Grade II listing for the 80s complex, designed by Peter Foggo of Arup, would have derailed plans by British Land and private equity group Blackstone to knock down 4 and 6 Broadgate and build a 700,000 sq ft "groundscraper".
The proposed building has pitted financiers against conservationists, architects against developers.
Construction of the UBS headquarters can now start as planned this summer, with the Swiss investment bank due to move in the second half of 2014.
British Land's chief executive, Chris Grigg, said: "I am delighted by [the] decision as it allows Broadgate to continue to evolve as a sustainable and flexible office location that will meet the future needs of occupiers whilst maintaining the sense of space and place for which it is rightly renowned around the globe. With the decision made today by Jeremy Hunt, the government has also sent out a message loud and clear to the world that the UK is open for business."
English Heritage had described Broadgate as a "triumph of urbanism" and argued that it represented "outstanding quality" in terms of its architectural and historical interest. In his first listing decision, Hunt disagreed with his official adviser.
In a letter to English Heritage, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: "[The Secretary of State] has concluded that Broadgate phases 1-4 is not of sufficient architectural or historical interest to merit listing protection under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990." Hunt said the estate was impressive but fell short of the outstanding quality needed to list buildings less than 30 years old.
The City of London Corporation's policy chairman, Stuart Fraser, was jubilant. He said the City was opposed to the listing from the start, "not only on architectural grounds but also because of the impact it would have had on the City's international competitiveness. The City is – and always has been – first and foremost a place of business and it must be allowed to adapt to meet the long-term business needs of current and potential future occupiers.
"Time and again, the government has emphasised the importance of demonstrating that the UK is open for business; by refusing to list Broadgate, Jeremy Hunt has sent a positive message to the international business community. Post big bang, Broadgate helped facilitate the growth of the Square Mile into the world's leading financial centre and, as a result of today's decision, I have no doubt that it will play a leading role in helping the City to retain this status for many years to come."
The culture secretary's decision was a slap in the face for English Heritage, which said: "There has been some suggestion that listing stunts investment or creates 'streetscape museums'. This is to entirely misinterpret the purpose and effect of listing ... Every year, consent is given for change and adaptation to thousands of listed buildings. It would have been entirely possible to consider significant alteration to the inherently flexible Broadgate Square buildings while enabling the original scheme's intrinsic qualities to shine as an exemplar of commercial development in the City."
It added: "Broadgate Square may not be everyone's idea of heritage, but every decade has its architectural high points, and the 1980s are no different."
The Twentieth Century Society heritage group also deplored the decision. The group's Jon Wright said: "We believe that the ongoing vitality of the City rests on it retaining and valuing the best buildings of all periods of its construction. This is the latest in a line of recent cases where the C20 Society believes factors other than those that should be considered in the listing process have decided the fate of an important historic building. Only architectural or historic significance should be taken into account.
"London may be open for business," he said, "but the loss of Broadgate's best buildings will send another clear message, that the process by which we have assessed and designated our collective built heritage since 1945 has broken down."
In most cases, ministers accept English Heritage's recommendations, although they recently ignored its advice to list the 1970s Commonwealth War Graves Commission headquarters building in Maidenhead, and in March overruled English Heritage on ABK's 1970s Redcar library.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, had described English Heritage's plans for listing the Broadgate site as "ludicrous". The new UBS building, which has been designed by Ken Shuttleworth, of Make Architects, will include four floors that can each hold 750 traders. At the moment, the Swiss bank's 6,840 workers are spread across five buildings at Broadgate, occupying just over 1m sq ft. UBS declined to comment on whether it would need more space beyond the new building, saying it was too early to say.
Broadgate arena, which houses an ice rink in the winter, sculptures and open spaces, will be retained.
The developers of the original complex, Sir Stuart Lipton and Peter Rogers, have described Shuttleworth's design as "the worst large building in the City for 20 years" and "an environmental disaster". The dispute had turned personal when the City of London's chief planner, Peter Rees, claimed that Foggo was unhappy with the original buildings because he was made to redesign them. This was strongly denied by Foggo's widow, who described the claims as "scurrilous".
Demolition of London housing estate to begin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 15, 2011
The Heygate estate in Walworth, which was the backdrop for the Michael Caine film Harry Brown, is being redeveloped
Demolition teams are to move in to one of Britain's best known housing estates on Friday.
The sprawling Heygate estate in Walworth, south-east London, is close to the Aylesbury estate, which Tony Blair visited hours after his 1997 election victory. In his first leadership speech he described the residents as the "forgotten people" and pledged to tackle social exclusion in the area.
More recently, Heygate was the backdrop for the 2009 Michael Caine film Harry Brown.
The destruction of the Heygate estate is part of a £1.5bn regeneration project in Elephant and Castle, an area widely considered as one of London's eyesores. It aims to transform it into "a brand-new town centre" over the next 15 years.
Southwark council said the 98 units on the Rodney Road side of the estate would be "carefully and meticulously" dismantled within hours. This will be followed by further demolition in the next few weeks before some of the larger blocks are brought down in May.
The entire estate, which is one of the largest in Europe, will be demolished in less than a year.
Rob Deck, Lend Lease project director for Elephant and Castle, said: "The demolition of the Heygate estate is a major milestone in the scheme to rejuvenate Elephant and Castle.
"This is one of the most significant regeneration projects in Europe and Lend Lease will be working in partnership with Southwark council to transform this area of London into a vibrant place for people from all backgrounds to live, work and recreate."
The estate comprises six concrete blocks which, alongside smaller groups of maisonettes, stretch along several roads in Elephant and Castle.
It was home to more than 3,000 people before residents were rehoused around the borough in 2008, leaving the site a virtual ghost town. Many residents were reported to be against the demolition, arguing that it was unnecessary as living conditions in the flats were still good.
Now only 11 dwellings are occupied, mainly by leaseholders who are still negotiating leaving terms with the council.
The enormous blocks were designed in the 1960s by the architect Tim Tinker and construction was completed in the early 1970s. At the time, the buildings were futuristic and were designed to offer a utopian ideal where communal living provided a social hub for those who were first to benefit from the postwar welfare state.
But Southwark council says the estate has become increasingly expensive to maintain and heat and, by today's standards, is "no longer an ideal place for people to live".
Councillor Fiona Colley, who is a cabinet member for regeneration, said: "It's hard to describe what a monumentally huge project the Heygate estate regeneration is. What comes next is what so many people in the borough are anticipating – the emergence of brand-new, warm, safe homes for all."
The Business podcast: The growth of modern cities
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 17, 2011
More than half of the world's population now live in cities. For many people this means enhanced employment opportunities, free exchanges of ideas, culture, enterprise and wealth. But for millions more it means slums, poverty, crime and disease.
The trend towards urban living in the developed and developing world is set to continue so in this week's podcast we look at the reasons behind this migration and ask whether city life can be made better and more productive.
In the studio we have the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City; the Guardian's architecture critic and author Jonathan Glancey; and our environment editor John Vidal.
And as the government gets ready to announce the creation of 10 enterprise zones in Britain, Andrew Carter, director of policy at the thinktank Centre For Cities, explains why the policy must evolve from a similar one enacted by Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s.
Leave your thoughts below.
Letters: Architects and new-build constraints
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 14, 2011
It is encouraging to see government ministers berating the banality of many new homes (Fed up of 'Legoland' estates? Then reject plans, says minister, 9 March). Although there is a growing number of innovative, exemplar housing schemes, the bulk of the new-build housing is of an unacceptably poor quality and shows little regard for its surrounding area.
However, it is wrong to imply that architects are complacent about improving the delivery of good housing. There's nothing that depresses architects more than seeing the soulless, drab, identikit estates being built in our towns and cities. The reality is that those architects who work for major housebuilders face severe constraints. The traditional housebuilder-business model relies on pattern-book designs, which can be quickly and easily rolled out across the country, often with little consideration to the local context or the needs of the people who will live in them. The lack of empowerment that local communities have had on planning decisions to date, and consumers have had on the types of houses available to them, has let to the cheaply replicated housing models Grant Shapps has rightly criticised. Let's hope that localism really does bring communities, developers and architects closer together to deliver better housing.
Ruth Reed
President, Royal Institute of British Architects
Fed up with ‘Legoland’ estates? Then reject plans, says housing minister
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 9, 2011
Grant Shapps praises conservative housebuilders and urges communities to take advantage of bigger say in developments
Local people will be urged on Wednesday to use new powers to vote down housebuilding plans if architects continue to propose identikit "Legoland" estates.
In a signal of the coalition's aesthetic taste, the housing minister, Grant Shapps, will praise a range of developments that use local stone, reflect local architecture and recognise tradition.
Shapps's taste appears to be similar to that of Prince Charles, as he has given his seal of approval to four exemplar developments that are especially conservative.
One is Rostron Brow, in Stockport, where developers reused existing brick, stone and slate as well as redundant timber beams and stone features. Everything from window details, shop fronts and building facades has been designed to replicate previous houses, drawing on historic photographs.
He also highlights the Russells, Broadway, Worcestershire – a mixed use development of 77 homes that fits in with the surrounding 16th-century Broadway village buildings, built using locally sourced Cotswold sandstone.
Shapps will write to the Design Council, which recently merged with the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, encouraging it to help developers think harder about local identity and character. He says too many suburbs are full of identikit homes.
The decision will not necessarily be music to the ears of the business department, which has been urging the Treasury to rip up planning controls as a way of encouraging growth.
The localism bill currently before parliament allows communities to come together to draw up neighbourhood plans to decide what their area should look like. If people vote in favour of these plans in local referendums, councils would have to adopt them.
Ministers sense design will be more important because if houses are not attractive it is more likely that local people will reject developments.
In his letter to the Design Council, Shapps will complain: "We all recognise the bog standard, identikit Legoland homes that typify some new developments – all looking exactly the same on streets that could be anywhere in the country.
"Whilst we are seeing good examples emerging, too often new developments are dominated by the same, identikit designs that bear no resemblance to the character of the local area." He will say developers need to think outside the Legoland box.
Previous housing ministers have railed against uniform design largely driven by developers' lower costs, but ministers hope that the concept of neighbourhood plans, designed and voted on by communities themselves, might drive architects out of their complacency.
Planning and decentralisation minister, Greg Clark, joins Shapps in condemning British household architecture, saying "banal, identikit housing schemes have given development a bad name".
Clark claims: "Experience here and overseas shows that when local people have the chance to influence the function and appearance of developments, opposition can [be] turned into enthusiasm and buildings are constructed that we can be proud of."
Shapps also praises developments at Port Sunlight, Wirral, Merseyside – a conservation area since 1978 where nearly every building in the village is Grade II listed .
Critics will say it is not the quality but the quantity of homes being built that should exercise ministers. According to the Housebuilders Federation, across Britain just 33,000 homes were approved for construction in the last three months of 2010 – 9% down on the previous quarter and 22% down on a year ago. Social housing was hardest hit with only 5,500 approvals – a new low for the survey and particularly concerning with 5 million people already languishing on local authority housing waiting lists.
The number of new homes completed in England in 2010 fell 13% on the previous year – itself the lowest peacetime number since 1923.
Ray of sunlight
Port Sunlight, a purpose-built village planned in 1888 by William Hesketh Lever for the employees of the Lever Brothers soap factory, was an unprecedented combination of model industrial housing. It was created on the basis of the architectural and landscape values of the garden suburb, influenced by the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. The stated aims of Lever were "to socialise and Christianise business relations and get back to that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour". Nearly 30 architects were employed by Lever to create the unique style of the village, where each block of houses was designed by a different person and each house is unique. Lever named his creation after his company's Sunlight Soap. Containing 900 Grade II listed buildings, it was declared a conservation area in 1978.
Ben Quinn
• This article was amended on 9 March 2011. The original headline read: "Fed up of 'Legoland' estates?". This has been corrected in accordance with the Guardian's Style guide.
Letters: Diverse mix makes for real communities
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 8, 2011
I was disappointed to read the scepticism towards the potential for "pepperpotting" in plans for the redevelopment of the Heygate estate (Homes under the hammer, G2, 4 March). Having lived on a Southwark council estate for three years as a private tenant, and served as an active member of the Tenants and Residents Association, I experienced the richness that a diverse estate community can bring. With tenants both private and council as well as homeowners working together to improve their communities, a wide range of interests and expertise can be drawn on to tackle local issues, support neighbours and lobby the council for change. Without a mix of residents, an estate may risk perceived "ghettoism" and development of social stigmas towards council housing. I hope that once the regeneration project is complete, relocated people will return to Heygate and take a role in building a new community in the area.
Elle Perry
London
• The reason Utopia on Trial is, as Stephen Moss says, influential – it continues to sell 26 years after we first published it – is because its evidence-based recommendations for changes in the design of housing estates, when put into practice, have improved residents' living conditions. Demolition is avoidable. The polemical extract quoted in the article is from Professor Alice Coleman's summing up, but her conclusions are based on a survey of over 100,000 dwellings, mainly in Southwark and Tower Hamlets, and not on a political view.
Hilary Macaskill and Michael Shipman
Hilary Shipman Limited
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.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Comment is free, Communities, Olympic games 2012, Prince Charles, Society, Sport, The Guardian, UK news, Zaha Hadid
No Comments