Posts Tagged Culture
Alain de Botton’s ‘temples for atheists’ have a foundational flaw
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Aren't believers just as likely to appreciate a shrine to perspective? And doesn't the Large Hadron Collider qualify as a rationalist temple? De Botton's doctrine feels a trifle holy
Perhaps emboldened by the success of the atheist bus, or his own Living Architecture initiative (in which top architects design desirable holiday homes), or the fact that he's got a new book to promote, Alain de Botton is now proposing a series of temples for atheists to be built around the UK.
"Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?" he asks. "It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals."
Sounds great, Alain. But what are we worshipping?
"You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," he continues. "That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective."
In order to make atheism more attractive, De Botton argues in the accompanying book, Religion for Atheists, its advocates should pick and choose from the aspects of religion they all like. So, yes to a sense of community and civic responsibility; no to persecuting gay people and abusing choirboys. And one of the things we all like about religion, especially De Botton, is the architecture, isn't it? It gets the message across far better than something like a book. Unless that book is the Bible, or the Qur'an, but certainly if that book is Religion for Atheists.
De Botton's first monument will be the "Temple to Perspective", a hollow stone tower located in the City of London, that well-known hotbed of religious fanaticism. Its height corresponds to the age of the earth – one centimetre per million years, with mankind's time on the planet represented by a gold band around the base one millimetre thick. It was designed by a young architect named Tom Greenall, who collaborated with De Botton on the book. Several other possibilities are suggested: a Temple to Love, which looks like a box whose facades are rose windows from cathedrals; a Shrine to Care, filled with little glass figurines of humans filled with blood, and so forth.
They come across like witty art installations, but would these follies – sorry, "temples" – convince any religious adherent to cross over? It's unlikely. And why couldn't a Christian or a Muslim enjoy the Temple of Perspective, just as an atheist can be stunned by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia? Architecture and godliness don't necessarily go hand in hand. The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the beautiful Cathedral of Brasilia and several other churches, laughs about the fact that he has been a lifelong atheist.
What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.
To answer De Botton's original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it's about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.
The height of suspense: Hollywood’s love affair with the skyscraper
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Nine of the world's 10 tallest buildings are now in Asia – and Hollywood wants to jump off all of them
Aerial shots over Manhattan's forest of skyscrapers. Yellow cabs crawling like ants through the city grid. The hero stands on a ledge 20 floors up, provoking a street theatre of police cordons, firetrucks, news crews and onlookers. Meanwhile, in a top-floor office, a corporate villain admires an architectural model of another shiny skyscraper. Elsewhere, an acrobatic thief hangs precariously in an elevator shaft, dropping a spanner that goes clanging down innumerable storeys to the ground. The ominous ping of an approaching elevator spells danger. The hero and villain finally meet for a climactic rooftop showdown.
These scenes could be from a hundred Hollywood movies or more, but in fact they're from just one: Man on a Ledge, an enjoyably silly new thriller that at least sets out its stall in the title. You can guess most of its plot from those generic snippets, but Man on a Ledge is just the latest piece of proof that movies love skyscrapers and skyscrapers love movies. They always have. In fact, they're practically twins. The exact date of birth could be disputed, but it's safe to say that while rising land prices and advances in steel were pushing buildings upwards in Chicago and New York at the end of the 19th century, inventors like Edison and the Lumière brothers were realising they might be on to something with their moving-picture machines.
Where would the movies be without the thrilling cinematic images tall buildings provide, both inside and out? The alone is estimated to have featured in more than 250 movies. Then there's their crashingly unsubtle metaphorical value. It doesn't take a genius to fathom the symbolism at work with, say, the diminutive Tom Cruise scaling the world's tallest building in the latest Mission: Impossible, or a rampant King Kong roaring from the top of the Empire State Building; or San Francisco's TransAmerica tower looming priapically in the background of Basic Instinct as Michael Douglas gets into a lather over Sharon Stone. For most of the 20th century, it was simple: the home of the movies and the home of the skyscraper were the same place. These two distinctly masculine enterprises worked together to broadcast America's virility to the world. But the marriage now has complications. In metaphorical terms, the attacks of 9/11 hit the US where it hurt, and the current financial crisis hasn't helped.
Where the skyscrapers have gone, the movies have had to follow – and nine of the world's 10 tallest buildings are now in Asia. That recent Mission: Impossible benefited greatly from the use of Dubai's 163-storey Burj Khalifa (over $500m at the box office and counting). Dubai hasn't done badly out of it either. When the Burj Khalifa opened two years ago, the emirate had an image problem, what with its economic and architectural bubble bursting. But Mission: Impossible seems to have fixed that. According to the movie's producers, the first time they visited Dubai, they said: "We have to come back here and shoot a movie." But Dubai was also a hefty financial backer of the film, and using the Burj as a major location appears to have been a condition. So the building, designed by US architects SOM, not only featured in loving closeups, inside and out, but Dubai also got to hold the world premiere of this "local" film – bringing Cruise, celebrity special guests and the world's media to the Dubai film festival last month.
Whenever a new Asian skyscraper is completed, it seems, Hollywood rushes to get there and jump off it. In the preceding Mission: Impossible, Cruise also leapt off a tall building, this time in Shanghai. Before that, in an indication of how quickly the gimmick can date, we had Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1999's Entrapment, dangling off Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, then enjoying a brief reign as the world's tallest buildings. You could say the process of America's corporate emasculation began as far back as 1988, with Die Hard (surely a high-point in skyscraper movies): although set in Los Angeles, the film decided to rename its hijacked building the Nakatomi Plaza and make it Japanese-owned (in fact, it was the city's Fox Plaza).
As Die Hard reminds us, skyscrapers are movie shorthand for "faceless corporation", usually going hand in hand with overbearing evil and phallic overcompensation. Man on a Ledge is no different: predictably, the ledge he's on is owned by the chief baddie, the one with a model of a skyscraper (his next one). For good symbolic measure, he also smokes a huge cigar. Yet, for all that they celebrate the manly tumescence of tall architecture, such movies are invariably on the side of the little man (and we're not just talking about Cruise here). The juxtaposition of a lone individual and a gigantic edifice often tells you all you need to know about a movie's intentions.
In the silent era, skyscrapers were something of a fad. There's the much-imitated image of Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock 10 storeys up in 1923's Safety Last! Lloyd made a string of high-rise movies, such as High and Dizzy, Look Out Below and Never Weaken. In most, his little man rises to the summit, overcoming the emasculating forces of urban life. His myriad successors have done the same. In 2008's Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, in which French tightrope walker Philippe Petit conquers the Twin Towers, the little-man thrill is the same, albeit enhanced by such an emotionally loaded location.
Which brings us to the other thing that's changed about skyscrapers. The destruction of the Twin Towers was the final nail in the coffin for America's skyscraper-and-movie marriage. In the immediate aftermath, the towers were digitally removed from up-and-coming movies like Spider-Man, whose scenes of the superhero swinging between skyscrapers suddenly looked very out of date; and now they have to be digitally reinserted into New York movies that are set in the past.
In 2004, the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote: "The skyscraper has become less interesting in inverse proportion to its success. It has not been refined, but corrupted; the promise it once held … has been negated by repetitive banality." You could say the same thing about Hollywood. Just as the high-rise has nowhere to go except upwards, so movies like Man on a Ledge find themselves stuck on a familiar narrative track, running from street level up to the inevitable rooftop showdown.
In the 1960s and 70s, architectural groups like the metabolists and Archigram proposed alternatives to the boom in towers, while Britain's Leslie Martin and Lionel March argued that they don't solve urban density problems. Koolhaas, who was a screenwriter before becoming an architect, presented his own anti-skyscraper in the form of Beijing's CCTV television headquarters, which effectively folds a tower in half and brings it back down to the ground.
If there is a crisis, both industries are in denial. The genre-movie production line churns on, and the skyscrapers keep going up. There are a few more security measures beneath the skin of the Freedom Tower, which stands where the Twin Towers once stood, but externally its generic-looking design says: "Nothing's changed." Upcoming movies like the rebooted Spider-Man also seek to reassert the primacy of the New York skyline in the face of all this competition: Norman Foster's Hearst Tower is a key location in the movie.
And some of that competition is now coming from London, thanks to its belated stab at high-rise kudos with the Shard. Looming large over the city, Renzo Piano's 87-storey tower seems destined to figure in the new era of "more commercial" British movies the government is calling for. According to the Shard's marketing agent, they've been receiving filming requests at the rate of about one a week. So far they've turned them all down, they say, but you can just picture Colin Firth struggling to express himself to Keira Knightley in its lift, or Daniel Craig and Tom Cruise fighting it out on the rooftop to see who gets to use it first, James Bond or Mission: Impossible. Meanwhile, back in real life, details of the next 007 novel have just been released. It's set in Dubai.
Tall orders: the best film skyscrapers – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Hollywood is drawn to multi-storey architecture like … well, like a colossal prehistoric gorilla is drawn to multi-storey architecture. From the caped crusader posing on rooftops in The Dark Knight to Phillipe Petit's death-defying walk between the twin towers in Man on Wire, here's a selection of the greatest movie moments involving everyone's favourite phallic symbol
Plans for £80m new Design Museum unveiled
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 24, 2012
London museum's 2014 move to Commonwealth Institute aims to make it 'the world's leading museum of contemporary design and architecture'
Plans for a new Design Museum were unveiled at a press conference today in the Odeon Kensington across the road from the long-abandoned Commonwealth Institute. Jonathan Ive, the much-feted British-born designer of the iPod, iPad, iPhone and other Apple gizmos appeared, larger than life, on the screen. "Thank," he said at the end of his two-minute message of congratulations. Before he could add "you", the screen froze and the limits of nascent digital technology and design left poor Ive's face stuck in a ginormous gurn.
Happily, though, the new £80m Design Museum, scheduled to open in 2014 and housed in the early-60s architectural splendour of the Commonwealth Institute, will be a showcase of three-dimensional objects as well as digital wizardry. Britain can and will make it was the message from Terence Conran, who took to the rostrum below the cinema screen. The famous designer and entrepreneur charted the history of the Design Museum from its first home, which opened in 1981 in a former boilerhouse in the basement of the Victoria & Albert Museum. He called for design to be part of the DNA of this country – as it is in Scandinavia.
Deyan Sudjic, the museum's director, described how he had long seen the Commonwealth Institute as "the most exciting, utopian building in London", going on to highlight its future role as "the world's leading museum of contemporary design and architecture", an "active museum where new things and new ideas can happen, where research can flourish".
The Grade II* building, designed originally by Robert Matthew of Johnson-Marshall architects and crowned by a copper-clad hyperbolic paraboloid roof (realised without computers), is to be tuned up by the Dutch architects OMA with Arup as structural engineers. The interiors will be transformed by John Pawson, whose designs – whether for private houses, Calvin Klein stores, art galleries or contemporary monasteries – are never less than luminously beautiful.
The museum is on the move from its home in a former banana warehouse at Butler's Wharf, which was considered a no-go area for property development until it (and an eagerly greeted slew of Conran restaurants) arrived here from 1989.
The soaring interior of the Commonwealth Institute offers the museum three times the space it enjoyed at Butler's Wharf. It hopes for half a million visitors a year and is confident that its presence, on the southern fringe of Holland Park (close to both the Royal College of Art, where many of Britain's best designers have trained, and the world-famous South Kensington museums) will transform "High Street Ken" itself. For many years, this has been one of London's least design-conscious high streets.
With bright new galleries for temporary exhibitions as well as permanent displays, a handsome library and research centre funded by the Sackler Foundation, and the kind of atrium-like interior you expect to find in the latest shopping malls, the new Design Museum should prove to be a magnet not just for the design-conscious but curious passers-by.
None of its plans would have been possible without the help of local property development. Just as the old Design Museum was a part of Conran's redevelopment of the Victorian Butler's Wharf, so the new Design Museum will be at the core of a new residential development led by Stuart Lipton, chairman of Chelsfield Partners. Lipton has commissioned a block of flats by OMA that will flank the refurbished Commonwealth Institute. Plans for the flats were discreetly absent at the unveiling, with the new museum looking as if it will stand in splendid isolation. It won't.
"If I was a student leaving the RCA today", said Conran, who is putting up £17m for the museum through the Conran Foundation, "I'd try to team up with an engineer from Imperial College and an entrepreneur with a bit of money to makes things of quality and originality."
This is a glimpse of the future, and the big hope is that the new Design Museum will help root intelligent design – along with a new wave of manufacturing – into Britain's curiously design-resistant DNA.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 20, 2012
Stuttgart launches a controversial redevelopment of its central station, Burgundy gets a new museum and Frank Gehry's Eisenhower memorial sparks a battle
The recession might be biting hard in Britain, but elsewhere in the world, things are clearly booming. The city of Stuttgart is so gung-ho about the €7bn redevelopment of its central railway station that it can afford not just to go ahead with the ambitious new plan designed by Dusseldorf-based Ingenhoven architects, but to demolish a large part of the existing historic building, a masterpiece by Paul Bonatz and Friedrich Scholer completed in 1928. As recently as 2009, Unesco was considering listing this magnificent building as a World Heritage Site.
The new design by Christoph Ingenhoven's team appears, superficially at least, to be rather fine. Well, have a look at this creamy Deutsche Bahn propaganda film (it's in German, but the visuals speak for themselves).
The trouble with this "Stuttgart 21" scheme is that it not only requires the demolition, starting this week, of the south wing of Bonatz's station, and the felling of 200 trees in the adjacent Schlossgarten, but it reduces the historic concourse to a meaningless architectural void, because all the important activity will take place below ground. Passions are running high: on the night of 12-13 January, 2,000 police were drafted in to clear protestors from in front of the south wing – although a recent referendum suggests that a narrow majority of local people want the project to go ahead.
A far distant fight, two millennia before the railway age – that of the 52 BC Battle of Alesia, when the Roman army under Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls – is commemorated in the fascinating Alesia Museum, Burgundy, which will open to the public on 26 March. Designed by Paris and New York-based Bernard Tschumi Architects, the cylindrical, timber-clad building rises from the spot where Caesar's army gathered. Inside, visitors will see interactive displays contextualising this critical battle. A second circular building, crafted in stone and also by Tschumi, will follow in 2015; set higher up, where the Gauls had their fort, this will house artefacts unearthed from the ancient battlefield.
While the Tschumi buildings are designed to be a subtle intervention in the rural Burgundy landscape, the design and construction company Capita Symonds has announced outlandish designs this week for the Kampala Tower, a 222m-high commercial phallus rising proudly from a new public square in Kampala, Uganda. The 60-storey tower will be the tallest in Africa – although it could just as well be built in Kowloon or Kuala Lumpur. Another country that is apparently booming in terms of new construction is New Zealand.
One architect you might think immune to recession or planning controversies is Frank Gehry. This week, however, Gehry's proposals for a memorial to Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States and, from December 1943, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe ("Ike" oversaw the liberation of western Europe that took place with the D-day invasion of France in June 1944), have made the news because the Eisenhower family feels that the architect has underplayed the president's role as a war leader.
Gehry's design is for a memorial park in Washington DC framed by large metal tapestries showing scenes from Eisenhower's roots in Abilene, Kansas. Clearly, Gehry has picked up on Eisenhower's famous quote when he said, at the height of his career, "the proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene." Susan Eisenhower has told AP that "Just about everybody on the [Washington] Mall had humble origins. But, you don't get to the Mall because you had humble origins. You get to the Mall because you did something for which the nation is grateful."
The memorial, and the Mall, are not far from Washington's Union Station, Despite a rollercoaster history over the past five decades, the magnificent station remains intact. Perhaps Stuttgart could learn from Washington, or perhaps from Eisenhower's beloved Abilene, where the local station has certainly seen more productive days.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
Blackpool gets its very own Vegas-style register office, a Scottish giant goes to the great studio in the sky, and the sad demise of two close-knit London housing estates
A week of happy beginnings and sad departures. On Thursday, Simon Garrick and Kelly Goudie from the Fylde, Lancashire, were the first couple to get married at Festival House, a dazzling new gold register office on Blackpool's Golden Mile. The £2.7m building, designed by dRMM, is one glittering part of the seaside town's £250m improvement plan that has already seen the refurbishment of the 158m (518ft) Blackpool tower and the extension of Blackpool Central Library by Bisset Adams architects.
Blackpool's "Tower of Love" register office is a British take on the kitsch wedding chapels of Las Vegas. The structure is clad in gold stainless steel shingles – it's very hard to miss when the sun's out – and boasts a tall window framing pretty much the entire length of Blackpool tower. There is quite possibly some Freudian symbolism at play here.
The chapel of the once-beautiful seminary of St Peter's at Cardross near Glasgow, consecrated in 1966 and abandoned in the early 1980s, is sadly a ruin today. This week saw the death of Isi Metzstein, co-designer of St Peter's and one of Scotland's greatest modern architects. Born in Berlin in 1928, Metzstein came to Scotland not a moment too soon: just before the outbreak of the second world war. He joined Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the long-established Glaswegian firm he was to run with Andy MacMillan; together, Metzstein and MacMillan designed some of the most challenging and profound churches in Europe.
Saddam Hussein's "super mosque" is a religious ruin in a very different mould. Work began on this vast 11-acre complex close to Baghdad airport not long before the Iraqi dictator was toppled in 2003. The convoluted story of the three huge mosques Saddam was building at the time of his fall can be found online. Here is a telling chunk:
"The Umm al-Mahare ['Mother of All Battles'] mosque on the outskirts of Baghdad has four outer minarets shaped like Kalashnikov assault rifles, and four inner minarets shaped like Scud missiles. The surrounding reflecting pool is shaped like the Arab world. The mosque also featured a Qur'an written in Saddam's blood (28 litres, said to have been donated over two years) … Al-Rahman ['the most merciful'] mosque featured no fewer than 14 domes and was scheduled to be completed in 2004. The Saddam the Great mosque was a construction site with skeletal columns, and was schedule[d] to be completed in 2015."
The site of the last of these is to be the home of the new $100m Iraqi parliament building. A shortlist of designers has been drawn up. This includes architects Assemblage, with Buro Happold and Al Khan as engineers – though Assemblage's Peter Besley tells me he has no idea who else is in the running as "the ministries [in Baghdad] are notoriously hard to get this kind of information from".
Isi Metzstein's finest buildings have often been labelled "brutalist", a term coined by the critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1950s. Now, one of the most famous – or infamous – brutalist monuments, the long-threatened Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, is finally on the verge of demolition. While some might cheer, the replacement housing is not exactly a cause for celebration.
Home Sweet Home, meanwhile, is an exhibition opening tomorrow that tells the story of the 1960s-era prefabricated concrete Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke, south London. Now that its denizens have been moved out in the name of "regeneration", and 4,398 new homes are moving in, what happens to former residents' sense of community? To their hopes, fears and memories? It was home to thousands of people – even though, as the curators point out, the Ferrier estate "came to be seen as the problem it was designed to solve". The curators of this moving show are photographer Anna Batchelor and designer Sarah Colson.
This week also saw the opening in Boston of the latest design by Renzo Piano – yes, the Shard guy. This is the $118m extension to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The modest, low-lying new building provides space for temporary exhibitions, concerts and education programmes. The original building, dating from 1903, was designed by Willard T Sears in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, for the collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner. It's awash with art of all kinds, from Botticelli to John Singer Sargent. Although this is prohibited, both the old and new buildings would make glamorous wedding venues, if not quite in the inimitable style of Las Vegas ... or Blackpool.
• This article was amended on 16 January 2012. The original used the term registry office. This has been corrected.
A Room for London – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
A small vessel perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall has become London's most coveted hotel room
The river Thames has a way of defeating plans for its jollification. For decades architects have looked on its great, tempting emptiness and felt an irresistible urge to propose beaches, inhabited bridges, lidos, zones for festivals fluttering with pennants and balloons, places to promenade as if it were the edge of the Mediterranean. In the 1980s Richard Rogers imagined an archipelago of pleasure, with the forms and construction methods of oil rigs remade into towers and pinnacles of fun. Most recently, the architects Gensler proposed the floating hospitality suite they called the London River Park.
Mostly these plans don't happen. The river flows on, lugubrious and imperturbable, which is possibly because, as Joseph Conrad observed, it is not really a fun sort of thing. "And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation. For him it was the "sleepless river" of a "monstrous" and "brooding" city. "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river," he also wrote, "into the mystery of an unknown earth!"
One Thames project that has happened is A Room for London, a boat-like object perched high on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, as if stranded there by a receding deluge. Where many Thames proposals want to put things of land on to water, this puts something riverine – a boat – on to land. It is a temporary structure, a cross between building and sculpture, by the architect David Kohn and the artist Fiona Banner. It contains a single hotel room which anyone can in theory book, if with rather more difficulty than Olympic tickets. When nights for the first six months were made available they sold out in 12 minutes; the next batch goes on sale on Thursday (at £120 a night).
This little space is the production of an impressive array of cultural impresarios: the Southbank Centre, Artangel, and Living Architecture, the organisation set up by the writer Alain de Botton to build beautiful new houses which can be rented for holidays. It comes, like many cultural projects in 2012, with an Olympic tag, being officially part of the cultural Olympiad. As well as paying guests, writers, artists and musicians have been invited to stay there, and be creative.
From the outside the jaunty vessel seems to fall within the "fun" category of Thames projects. It juts perkily into the void, and three little wind turbines, like displaced propellers, whirr on the top of a triangular rig. It is a toy, palpably and deliberately incongruous. It is a folly. But it turns out that its makers also had Conradian ambitions. The boat is called the Roi des Belges, after the vessel in which Conrad himself sailed up the river Congo, in the journey that would inspire Heart of Darkness. Inside there is a cabinet containing old maps of the Thames and the Congo, in reference to the parallels that Conrad made between the two rivers. An octagonal table and a box of dominos echo similar objects described in the master's novels.
There are other inspirations. The intricate house and museum of the architect Sir John Soane is cited by David Kohn as a help in designing the "episodic" sequence of small spaces that are inside the boat, as you progress from a little vestibule to a galley, to a bedroom that opens up to penthouse views of the river, bracketed by the Palace of Westminster to the left, and St Paul's Cathedral to the right. Alongside the river maps there is a copy of a drawing by Soane's collaborator JM Gandy that shows Soane's Bank of England as if it were a Roman ruin, and which might be taken as a comment, if desired, on financial calamity, or on the fragility of civilisation described by Conrad. Kohn also mentions the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as an influence, even though his heavy white stone churches would come top of most lists of Structures Least Likely to Float. The spire-like superstructure of A Room for London refers to these churches, and to the spires of London in general.
The main point, says Kohn, is to combine the intimate and the epic, in a way not unlike the relation of domesticity to vastness that you get in boats. "The interiors feel comfortable and you know what to do there, but it's not just an easy or twee kind of comfort. You are connected to the Thames, to a wider world, also to what one thinks of the world. You have a relationship to disputed, uncertain territory."
In all this the intention was to avoid kitsch and creating a one-line joke. The timber-lined interior, stained in places in rich pinkish-red, is not pushed to the point where it is literally boat-like in every detail, but rather seeks other architectural qualities, which is where the influence of Soane comes in. It was also important to Kohn and Banner that the structure was exactingly well made, by the specialist company Millimetre. "It is solid; it has a kind of earnestness," says Kohn, which keeps it away from being a stage set.
And so the lucky purchasers of nights in the hotel room, the intellectual aesthete's equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, will be able to contemplate the "venerable stream" much as Conrad's characters did in the cruising yawl Nellie. At sunset they will be able to watch the gloom "become more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun". They can, should they want to, think their thoughts about the world and their place in it.
A Room for London is small, and temporary, and will only be fully enjoyed by a few people. It is not a prototype for future Thames-side development, and offers no solutions to the problems of urban regeneration. It may, even, not quite match the fathomless profundity of its inspirations, being rather an enjoyable and well-made jeu d'esprit. But I have a feeling it will give satisfactions that other Olympic projects will not match: it is intelligent, witty, pleasurable, and is based on observing its surroundings as they actually are, rather than imposing a bombastic idea of what they should be.
Rome’s Colosseum restoration sparks inquiries into contract
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 12, 2012
Shoe firm Tod's had struck a €25m deal to fund restoration, but this is being investigated
Italy's most visited monument, the Roman Colosseum, is suffering from "about 3,000 lesions", a government minister said last year. Sometimes, bits fall off, as did a chunk dislodged by a pigeon on Christmas Eve.
But the chances of the aged patient receiving emergency surgery receded on Wednesday when it emerged that Rome prosecutors and the Italian audit court had each launched inquiries into the award of a contract for the funding of restoration. In January 2011, the luxury shoe firm Tod's announced it had struck a deal under which it would put up €25m (£21m) for the cleaning and strengthening of the arena where gladiators once grappled with wild animals – and each other.
Tod's obtained the right to use the image of the Colosseum until two years after completion of the work. But the company's founder, Diego Della Valle, promised not to exploit his sponsorship for commercial purposes, saying he was happy just to give something back to his country.
The agreement has nevertheless been a subject of controversy ever since. And, on Monday, Italy's competition authority was reported to have condemned the procedures used.
According to a consumer group that lodged the original complaint with the authority, an inquiry found that Tod's should have been made to organise, and not just fund, the project; that it had been granted sponsorship rights for too long; and that rival bidders had not been given enough time to top its offer.
But the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, warned: "If, with €25m of private cash available, we don't get work under way now, we cannot then complain if parts of the Colosseum collapse."
Swirl power: Aberdeen’s new £57m university library
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 10, 2012
Aberdeen university's extraordinary new library has put the Silver City back on the architectural map. But will its students ever get any work done?
It is an architectural riddle wrapped in a cultural mystery inside a financial enigma. I'm talking about Aberdeen, ever since it became oil rich and the effective capital of Europe's petroleum industry. The puzzle is how this near recession-proof Scottish city has managed to be awash with money (compared with much of Britain), yet hasn't raised a single notable building in the last quarter of a century.
It is a situation made all the more baffling by the fact that the Silver City of yore was, along with Bath and Edinburgh, one of the finest and most readily identifiable architectural compositions on these islands. Its granite monuments – shining silver in sunlight and resembling some artificial mountain range on sunless days – were crafted from a single quarry at Rubislaw. Some 6m tonnes were hewn from the earth until the quarry's closure in 1971, leaving one of the largest man-made holes in Europe.
But the lull is now over – thanks to the completion of the eye-catching new £57m library at the University of Aberdeen. Set on the campus at King's College, the building stands between the city and the sea like a super-modern lighthouse, beaming out a message – loud, clear and dazzling – that Aberdeen is back on the architectural map.
Rising like a perfectly geometric glass monolith from a clutter of university structures, but with the beautiful late-medieval King's College buildings close by, this seven-storey tower comes as something of a shock: despite its solid square shape, the library has an ethereal air, especially when lit up at night, thanks to its gleaming striated facades, boasting 720 panels in all. This gives a striking contrast to its rugged setting.
Designed by Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen, the library has plenty more surprises. If those exteriors aren't enough to stop you in your tracks, then what about the spiralling off-centre atrium at the core of the building, soaring up from the double-height entrance lobby to a distant glass roof? This offers the kind of giddying spatial shock normally associated with 17th-century baroque churches. The atrium, an architectural whirlwind, seems to twist around as it climbs up and through the structure, pushing its way further on to each successive floor. Stand at the foot of this highly theatrical space and, as the winter sun moves around the library, you feel as if you're inside a hollowed-out iceberg. It also makes you feel part of an intriguing architectural conundrum: the library is both icily calm yet restlessly alive, as modern as it is baroque.
Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Founded in the Danish port of Aarhus in 1986, SHL has a reputation for making distinctive cultural buildings that marry elements from nature and science. The firm came to global attention in 1997 with the Katuaq Cultural Centre in Nuuk, Greenland. Its undulating walls, clad in larch, were inspired by the rippling bands of the northern lights, a feature of the night skies over the Arctic – and not unknown to Aberdeen.
But SHL's most famous building is the Black Diamond, as the momentous Danish Royal Library extension on the Copenhagen waterfront is known. Opened in 1999, it takes the form of a giant angular prism clad in dark granite and split in two by a clear glass atrium, clearly the firm's strong point. SHL are currently working on what will be Scandinavia's largest library, the €228m (£190m) Urban Mediaspace in Aarhus, a huge building – again all prisms and atriums – that the architects describe as a covered public space.
You could say the same of the Aberdeen library. The public is welcomed into the foyer. Here, alongside the eye-boggling view upwards, there is a coffee bar named the Hardback Cafe, not to mention spaces for presentations and a big cube of a gallery. I enjoyed its first show, Rebels with a Cause: Jacobites and the Global Imagination, drawn from the superb archive housed in the lower ground floor. Here, in and around the elegant Wolfson reading room, there are some 200,000 rare books, as well as material dating back to the third century BC.
Chatter, clatter and hiss
The students' library proper is housed on the floors above the foyer. White-walled, grey-carpeted and boasting fine views out to the university, the city and the sea, these are reached by sleek glass lifts or warehouse-like stairs. The core of each floor is given over to smart white stacks of books: there are 13km of shelves above ground holding 400,000 books, their colours offsetting that quietly dominant white-and-grey colour scheme. It was quiet when I visited recently, the vast majority of students being away for the holidays, so I couldn't be sure about the noise in term time. But surely all the cafe chatter and clatter, the steamy hisses and gurgles of coffee-making, will percolate up the atrium?
"What I've noticed," says Stuart Hill, a lead designer on the project, "is that the students tend to gravitate towards the more vibrant spaces around the atrium closer to the ground floor. Most seem to work with headphones on anyway, blissfully unaware of any unwanted noise. The collaborative study areas are being used extensively, while the silent study spaces aren't used as much as we thought they would." The nature of libraries, adds Hill, is changing in the digital era. "One of the questions we were asked before we finalised the design is: why build a new library at all in this day and age? The answer is: we've been helping to build a new type of library. "
Indeed, the wide-open floors are clearly intended as a social space as well as a place of learning, with Wi-Fi available throughout the building as it is around much of the campus. Unlike the traditional silence associated with libraries, it seems there will always be a background hum; perhaps many students today are happy with this. Personally, I would find the top floor a rather distracting place to work: looking out through its windows, I felt that the entire Granite City had been laid out for my inspection. It was all too easy to let time slide by, watching the big blue and white ferries setting off for Orkney and Shetland, as seabirds wheeled across a boundless sky.
While a thrilling design, the library may yet need a little work to make it shine in the manner it deserves to. Some of the finishes seem a little rough and ready, while the unisex lavatories are a curiosity that may prove a step too far. Hill points out that the building won't be complete until September, when it will be officially opened. "There are areas we're not totally happy with, but we'll sort these out."
The library faces and dominates a new public plaza, also by SHL. As I step out on to it, the glass and steel tower behind me lights up for the night, not quite shimmering like the northern lights, but drawing attention to itself in a way that makes it quite clear that this modern addition is the new focal point of a university aiming high.
Curiously, the library rises from a plinth made of Caithness stone. Why not granite? "Unbelievably," says Hill, "granite as a facing stone for buildings isn't available today, except from China. But one geology student noticed that the pattern on the facade is very similar to granite when viewed under a microscope – a rather poetic connection, we think, to the traditional architecture of Aberdeen."
The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin’s stage-managed show?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 9, 2012
Young Russians no longer pay homage to him, but the Bolshevik leader 'lives on' in a carefully choreographed show of solemnity inside a Moscow mausoleum. But for how long?
In Moscow at this time every year the debate resumes about what to do with Lenin's body, which, contrary to the Bolshevik's wishes to be buried next to his mother, has lain in state in Red Square since his death on 21 January 1924. Last year, Prime Minister Putin held an online poll in which 70% of participants felt his body should be buried. That result yielded no decision either way (no doubt because it was not the one Putin had hoped for). Nevertheless, when I found myself in Moscow just before Christmas, I seized the opportunity to pay Lenin a visit while I still could. What I encountered was part reliquary, part freak show – and an impressive work of experience design, as stage-managed as anything in the London Dungeon.
The experience begins with a procession along the wall of the Kremlin from a set of metal detectors at the very entrance to Red Square. In Soviet times, a 100m-long queue was a permanent fixture. Today, the queue has disappeared but its infrastructure – a chain cordon – remains, as I discovered the hard way. Not seeing the way in, I stepped over the chain and soon met with a policewoman charging at me and blowing her whistle. Finally inside the mausoleum (having been sent back to the top of Red Square) I was respectfully stomping the snow off my shoes when I was violently shushed by a guard. All of this is part of the choreographed solemnity that includes the prohibition of hats, cameras, talking, hands in pockets and lingering. Because, despite the morbid voyeurism of wanting to see the body of a man who died 88 years ago, this is not a freak show; it's a piece of political theatre.
The mausoleum itself was designed by Alexey Shchusev in 1929 to replace a temporary wooden one he'd erected within days of Lenin's death. Made of marble and granite, it is a series of concentric cubes resembling a step pyramid. Shchusev shared the suprematist Kazimir Malevich's belief that the cube symbolised eternity. Since his masters, known as "the immortalisation commission", were using the latest technology to make Lenin last forever, his tomb was to be a kind of Mecca. And not withstanding the irony of a secular political system creating its own saint, there is something of Mecca about it, processing around the body the way Muslim pilgrims process around the cuboid Ka'aba.
Or at least there should be. But I found myself alone inside the chamber – alone, that is, except for two guards and Lenin himself – and not so much processing as gawping. It is one of the most impressive rooms I've ever entered, though this is only partly down to the architecture. The black granite floor and walls, with their red marble lightning motif, communicate such density you feel like you're at the heart of a mountain. But most of the impact comes from what is inside this container: the bizarre sight of this embalmed body lying there like a bald Snow White in a black double-breasted suit and polka-dot tie.
The atmosphere is one of incredulity. Is that waxy thing Lenin at all, and if it is, how is he in such good condition? Only a blackened fingernail hints at the deterioration of an actual body. As to whether he is real or fake, the answer is of course both. For as solid as the architecture is, it is merely a stage set. The real architecture of this would-be religious experience is the framework of chemicals that keeps Lenin's skin firm. The scaffolding in the cells of his face is a solution made up of potassium acetate, glycerol and alcohol, in which he is routinely bathed. All that marble and granite is merely compensating for the frailty of Lenin's mortal body.
Similarly, whatever the atmosphere in the chamber, the only thing that matters is inside the glass sarcophagus. Designed by Nikolai Tomsky, the purveyor of socialist realist statues to public squares across the Soviet Union, it echoes the ziggurat shape of the tomb. But more importantly, it conceals the machinery that regulates the climate around the body to 16 degrees and 80% humidity – just as in a shopping mall, the air conditioning is more important than the architecture.
The same team that looks after Lenin has reportedly been embalming North Korea's Kim Jong-il, continuing a fine communist tradition that has included Stalin (briefly), Mao and Ho Chi Minh. The motives of the communist ideologues in preserving Lenin as their prophet in perpetuity are clear. What this pickled body has to do with modern Russia is less so. The younger generation no longer pays homage to it. Boris Yeltsin wanted to bury it, but Putin had no wish to dispose of this pseudo-religious relic. In fact, just as he has sanctioned the continued fortifying of Lenin's skin, Putin has created his own cult of the body. He has made a show of his judo skills and posed topless for the cameras. In contrast to the semi-real Lenin, Putin is the "muzhik", or the "real" man. But is he? Rumours abound that Putin's expressionless face and smooth skin are down to Botox and plastic surgery. It's almost as though the more outmoded a politician becomes, the more artifice is required to keep him fresh.