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Plans for £80m new Design Museum unveiled

The Sheet — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:25:07 +0000

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.

Jonathan Glancey

A Room for London – in pictures

The Sheet — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:00:26 +0000

A small vessel perched on top of the Southbank Centre has become London's most coveted hotel room

A Room for London – review

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:51:31 +0000

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.

Rowan Moore

The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin’s stage-managed show?

The Sheet — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:27:03 +0000

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.

Justin McGuirk

Olympic Village – review

The Sheet — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:06:24 +0000

London's Olympic Village will be home to 17,000 athletes this summer and a new community when the Games are over. They'll find a development of long-distance vision marred by short-sighted flaws

The huge housing estate is something that went out of fashion at about the same time as the Osmonds. Its reputation was as low as a British Leyland car or the Nixon presidency, and it was less likely, it seemed, to come back into favour, especially if it was made of concrete and funded by the government. Examples such as the crescent-shaped blocks in Hulme, Manchester or the slabs of the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, London have been and are being torn down. Yet thanks to the magic of the Olympics, planned, publicly funded concrete housing on a grand scale has made a comeback. The rather important question is whether it will work.

The athletes' village has been built to house the 17,000 competitors and officials in the Olympic Games, after which it will become a new neighbourhood of about 1,400 affordable homes and another 1,400 for profit. Its success is vital to London 2012's hopes of legacy: if it prospers, office blocks are likely to rise around it and dreams of regeneration – the theoretical justification of the whole Olympic exercise – are more likely to come true.

Most housing nowadays consists of expedient, opportunistic developments thrown up with minimal consideration for the larger area of which they will be a part. The athletes' village is almost alone in including such things as a school, a health clinic and shops, and for being built to a plan by the architects Fletcher Priest, Arup and West 8 that envisages generous and well-maintained landscaping. It includes such radical ideas as balconies that are big enough for a table and chairs and it is made of solid, enduring-looking stuff rather than the ticky-tacky cladding favoured by most urban home-builders.

It seeks to emulate the much-loved planning of Maida Vale and other parts of Victorian west London, where the interiors of blocks are given over to gardens shared by residents. These gardens are raised above street level to allow concealed parking underneath, which is a clever way of keeping cars out of sight. Around the bottom of the blocks are bands of what are called "town houses" – three-storey units with further floors of flats stacked on top of them. The idea is to create "active frontages", to animate the streets by having the units' front doors on them and also to cater for residents who would like a house or at least something house-like.

All this planning is good, even great, given that it is so unusual in new housing developments. Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration.

But it also has to be said that the look of the village is a tad forbidding, not indeed very villagey at all. It consists of a series of cuboid blocks of eight to 12 storeys, clad in prefabricated concrete panels, laid out on a rigid rectangular grid. They are repetitive in form and colour but varied in detail, as some of the country's better-respected housing architects were given the job of variegating the external treatment. Their construction technology is essentially that of those much-criticised estates of the 1960s and of East German plattenbau, though, it's to be hoped, with higher specifications.

Potentially mitigating features, such as pavilions planned for the open areas, have been sliced out by budget savings and opportunities for intimacy or unforced variety are lost. The bands of "row houses", for example, could have been more clearly expressed; as it is, they are submerged by the mass of flats above them. There are the attempts of different architects to liven up the basic formula – some brightly painted panels on some balconies, reproductions of the Elgin marbles embossed on some walls, explorations of the expressive possibilities of rearranging windows – but they can only go so far.

In a former job I helped to select these architects, and they are all fine people, but they struggle to overcome the relentless order of the grid and the construction. Again, there is nothing wrong with regularity, and architects Fletcher Priest cite John Nash's classical facades around London's Regent's Park as a precedent, but Nash had a lightness of touch that has here gone missing.

Meanwhile, although the original masterplan had the best intentions to join up the village with nearby neighbourhoods, it has a disconnected feel. If you want to walk to the centre of Stratford, and the tube station, you must first cross the giant concrete trench of Stratford International station and then creep round the inhospitable edge of the Westfield shopping centre or else plunge through the middle of its shopathon.

Westfield, meanwhile, presents an unlovely wall and roofscape of car parks to the new housing. All this construction – many billions worth of station, shopping and housing – has been delivered in the past few years, with the help of public money and the close oversight of public planning authorities, yet it does not feel like a work of unified intelligence.

The strengths and weaknesses of the athletes' village reflect the way it was achieved. It started off, in the mid-90s, as a bold plan by the developers Chelsfield for a "new metropolitan centre", with homes, offices and shopping, which was drawn up over six years of planning and consultation. In 2005, London won the bid for the 2012 games, while Chelsfield and its properties were sold and resold. Westfield took over the shopping part while another company, Lend Lease, took over the housing.

When the credit crunch hit, Lend Lease decided it could not raise the money to build the village, so the government took it over. Now it has been sold back to the private sector, in the form of Qatari Diar and the British company Delancey, which will take it over after the games.

This history is reflected in the fabric. Because the shopping and the housing are in separate ownerships, there is not much care given to the way they join up. As there were different owners at different times, original intentions have been imperfectly followed through. Due to the rush to complete in time for the Olympics, and because the International Olympic Committee has exacting standards for athletes' accommodation, standardised plans and prefabricated construction were used.

There was also little time to reflect on and reconsider Fletcher Priest's somewhat schematic and regimented arrangement of blocks. Because the government took over the development, and was nervous about risk, it paid a very large fee to the project manager CLM, which seems to have squeezed out some of the more life-enhancing aspects of the design.

But it is there, a rare example of a planned housing development that, for all its flaws, shows more thought and quality than most things comparable built in Britain in recent decades. Importantly, the plan is to rent rather then sell the homes, which improves its prospects of success. It means that Qatari Diar has an incentive to maintain its open spaces and that the village is likely to fill up more quickly than it would if it relied on thousands of individual homeowners to stake their mortgages and deposits on what is a pioneering location.

Much of London, including Maida Vale, was built on the basis of large landowners putting up developments to rent, and it would be no bad thing if the village sets a precedent for moving away from our fixation with home ownership. It should not, however, require an Olympic Games to achieve it.

Rowan Moore

London Olympic Village – in pictures

The Sheet — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:05:58 +0000

When it opens this summer it will house 17,000 athletes, and after the Games become 2,800 homes

Art and design: the ones to watch in 2012

The Sheet — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:06:43 +0000

Cage fighters, Olympic cushions and novel uses for crude oil distinguish our people to watch in the world of art and design

Bedwyr Williams

As 37-year-old Bedwyr Williams flicks through images of his work on his laptop you can see why some people classify him as a stand-up comedian as much as an artist. There's the 26ft-tall skyscraper beehive, a bicycle covered in wool with sheep horns for handlebars and a piece inspired by two cross-dressing cage fighters in Swansea's city centre – all described in a laconic and often hilarious deadpan. "He's marvellously talented and – unusually for contemporary art – very funny," says Laura Cumming, the Observer's art critic. "I caught sight of him in the 2006 Beck's Futures and he has never made anything that didn't fascinate ever since."

Williams is not unduly concerned that his light-hearted approach will mean his work is taken less seriously. "Is it comedy? Is it art?" he muses. "Call it what you like, it's either good or bad in the end. I like that moment when I do a performance in a gallery setting when the audience doesn't know if it's going to be serious or funny. It's a bit like coaxing a constipated well."

If anything, Williams is relieved to make pieces at all. After studying at Central Saint Martins in London, he moved back to his native north Wales in the early 2000s. He was close to giving up art, but then won a Hamlyn Foundation award in 2004: "It was like being refuelled in midair when I was considering making an emergency landing," he says. In May, he will have his largest solo show to date, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. "My work is darker now and, I think, stronger. I live in the arse-end of nowhere, so I'm always having to trade on the last thing I did, but I've definitely got more of an idea of what I'm up to now."

Chloe Dewe Mathews

The 29-year-old documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews was a few months into an overland trip from China to the UK in 2010 when she stopped in Naftalan, Azerbaijan. She had heard about a sanatorium where locals – since the days of Marco Polo in the 13th century – have sworn by the therapeutic benefits of bathing in sludgy crude oil heated to 37C and she thought it might make a diverting subject for a portfolio of pictures. Dewe Mathews says, "I remember thinking, 'Would this interest anyone at all? Well, I might as well just do it anyway.'"

Validation was not long in coming: in June last year, she was signed to the photo agency Panos Pictures; then, in November, her series Caspian, including images from Naftalan, won the 2011 international photography award run by the British Journal of Photography. More enduringly, she now had a blueprint for a lifetime's work: "I was away for nine months, but I realised it could be a long-term thing, almost a recce for my career."

Dewe Mathews is smart and assured, and her approach is fearlessly single-minded: for example, she crossed Asia and Europe entirely by hitchhiking. "If you're on a bus the whole time, you have that lovely staring-out-of-the-window thing," she says, "but it's not the same as going from one person's car with all sorts of funny things hanging from the mirror and them telling you their stories. It makes for a much more fertile atmosphere."

She returns to Russia this month to continue the Caspian series and will exhibit the new photographs next October at the 1508 Gallery in London. This time, however, she has been forced to make arrangements for the transport. "It will be too cold to stand out on the road," she sighs, genuinely disappointed. "But I'm going to do couch surfing, so hopefully I will hear stories that way."

Pernilla & Asif

They officially launched only last month but already it's clear that Pernilla & Asif is no ordinary design company. Pernilla Ohrstedt, 31, and Asif Khan, 32, met in their first year at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. After distinguishing themselves individually (Ohrstedt curated the Canadian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale; Khan designed the award-winning West Beach Cafe in Littlehampton), they decided to work together. Their first collaboration, a Design Museum commission called Harvest – described by Khan as "furniture made from flowers" – set out their ambitions: "We wanted to test the limits of people's imaginations and introduce new ways of seeing things."

The work that followed also made striking use of offbeat materials. The pavilion for a Singapore architecture festival consisted of two cones made of ropes and steel filled with ice and sand. A performance piece called Cloud, for Design Miami/Basel 2011, created a sort of canopy by sending puffs of helium-filled soap clouds into an overhead net. (They used a larger-scale version to launch their practice at York Hall in east London last November.)

Now they're working on a major commission for the Olympic Park called the Beatbox. Described by Ohrstedt as "a building that people can interact with like it's a musical instrument", it contains 200 cushions which activate sounds of athletes in action, recorded by DJ Mark Ronson. "Mark turned these sounds into an anthem for 2012," says Khan, "and our building deconstructs them again."

Unusually, for a young company with such experimental projects, they have had support from the likes of the British Council and Coca-Cola. Ohrstedt says they want to keep their company "slim and agile" and Khan says their ambition is to do "things we don't expect to be doing. It'd be interesting to do a music video, or a set design, or a bridge or a road. Anything that challenges us."

Killian Fox

Tim Lewis

The rise of Aedas is a triumph for efficency

The Sheet — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:32:42 +0000

British giant Aedas is now the world's biggest practice, but is size and adaptability any substitute for vision and flair?

Last week's news from the world of architecture is that there is a new global No 1 practice. It is British in origin, although now spread all over the world, which should inspire a warm glow in these troubled times. The firm in question, Aedas, has deposed the former leader, the American Aecom, in Building Design magazine's World Architecture 100 list of leading practices, which measures a practice's size by the number of architectural employees. Aedas has nearly 1,500 of them.

It is likely you haven't heard of either, still less be able to tell these similarly named practices apart. They don't get the same column inches as the Zahas, Rems, Franks and Normans, nor much by way of Stirling prize nominations. Aedas have, however, designed more than 1,000 schools. The West Kowloon Terminus, part of a programme to connect Hong Kong to the largest high-speed rail network in the world, is being built to their designs, and they have done their share of glassy tower projects in Abu Dhabi, Saigon and Chinese cities such as Shenyang and Wuxi that, like the architects, are both big and little known over here. They are working on a performance venue in Singapore that is something like a colossal beetle, and the new Crossrail station at Farringdon in London.

Aedas are part of a phenomenon – the rise of the very big architectural firm – that does more to shape the lives of more people than the work of celebrity designers. The company, what is more, is under 10 years old, albeit made out of the merger of practices founded decades ago, and in one case, the Yorkshire practice of Abbey Hanson Rowe, in the 1830s.

Brian Johnson, chairman of Aedas's European operation, describes its growth in pragmatic terms. They wanted to be able to compete for larger projects, and they wanted to be large enough to have a professionally managed business. They saw a boom coming in commissions for schools and other public buildings under the now infamous private finance initiative, and positioned themselves to take full advantage.

They joined up with a firm in Birmingham, then one in Hong Kong, to increase their geographic spread, and move into new areas of work, such as transport. If they see an opportunity in a particular place or a sector, they move into it. Because "there are only so many dead architects you can have in your practice's name", they chose Aedas, based on the Latin for "to build". They don't seek out glamour: their British offices are spread around the major cities, with quite a modest one in London.

They do well, says Johnson, because they are big. They can summon a large amount of expertise to huge projects at short notice. They can pay for the latest software and good research. They can make sure that they have up-to-date knowledge about technology and sustainability. They can afford to fund themselves when bidding for major contracts, for which architects don't get paid unless they win the job.

They aim to provide, in other words, an efficient, well-oiled, technically efficient service, which is suited to the scale and speed of modern projects, especially in the Far East, and to the demanding contracts under which architects have to work everywhere. They have an advantage in a world where architects can't survive without computing power, because they can afford to invest in it.

They are also the logical outcome of Margaret Thatcher's transformation of the British economy. Johnson points out that in the 1970s there were also large architectural practices, but they were part of the public sector, in the form of architects departments for local authorities and the health service. Thatcher's policies had them closed and privatised to the extent that only one in three local authorities now employ any architects on their staff. The likes of Aedas have soaked up the work that used to be done by employees of the state.

All of which is somewhat threatening to the old idea that architecture is somehow an art, or a craft, and about shaping spaces for inhabitation by the imagination and the body. Most of the strengths Johnson lists are technocratic, and about the processes of business.

Aedas would certainly like to be liked for the architectural quality of their designs, and to attract more attention from awards juries, but it is clear that their systems of delivery are their main selling points.

They have no house style, but allow their architects to choose their own, which also means they can choose the approach that works best in a given situation. For schools they can do the skimpy business-park-plus-bright-colours look – the almost inevitable outcome of the PFI process. In Abu Dhabi they can do big curves with an Islamic flavour, like everyone working else there. With their Kowloon station they channel Zaha Hadid's bunches of energetic curves. They can do Foster-ish, and Koolhaasian, and more sober Netherlandish styles, as the occasion demands.

In this they are neither the best nor the worst of the very big practices. Aedas differ from Aecom and some others in that they focus on architecture, whereas many of their competitors are enormous engineering firms with an architectural wing attached. At times their work does not seem so very different from that of the more esteemed Foster and Partners (sixth in the BD list, with 879 architectural staff): because all these architects are dealing with the same pressures and demands, their projects have a way of ending up quite similar to one another.

Aedas is what you get when you weigh up the way the modern world works, and adapt architecture to suit it. It is not about challenging or criticising, but trying to do a good job in the prevailing circumstances. It is about adaptation, not friction or resistance, because the financial forces to which they are responding can't really be bothered with such things. Architecture, in the place-making sense, is tolerated to the extent that it doesn't get in the way. The results can be more or less pretty, and when it is not it is because the forces behind them are not particularly pretty, either.

Aedas pose an important question, without entirely answering it: if businesses and governments want to make cities where almost everything is shaped by efficiencies and processes, what can architects do to make them better?

Rowan Moore

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:41:25 +0000

Finland gets a newfangled mountain motel, northern lights come to a ceiling near you, and London's new Routemaster rides out

If I were the Lapland town of Levi, 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle, what would I like for Christmas? Snow? No, I have heaps. Santa? He lives here. Northern lights could be pretty. You mean aurora borealis? Tell me something new. How about a modern ski-resort hotel? Because you haven't seen a ski-resort hotel quite like this one before …

Designed by Big Architects (Bjarke Ingels Group) from Copenhagen, the proposed Koutalaki Ski Village at Levi, Finland's biggest ski resort, was revealed in detail this week. It has been designed neither to fight the sub-zero temperatures nor as a foil to the slopes, but to be part of them. Its cluster of buildings – hotel, restaurants, bars, shops – will flank a central square, and the village will be crowned with its very own slopes. These will connect to the local pistes, so you'll be able to ski from your room, up, down and across the hotel roofs and out into the wide white yonder.

The entire complex will blur into the landscape, especially in heavy snow. As Bjarke Ingels told a press conference in Levi, "the Ski Village is conceived as an extension of both the summit and the resort. Grown from the natural topography rather than dropped from the sky, the architecture … creates a new hybrid integrating distinct identities such as village and resort, shelter and openness, cosy intimacy and natural majesty, unique character and careful continuity, or simply, architecture and landscape."

In summer the green roofs will blossom with flowers and be used for picnics and for walkers to wander over into the surrounding hills. To date, much ski-resort architecture – in Finland as elsewhere in the world – looks as if it has been designed without a thought for aesthetics or the effects of snow. Big's is a small move in the right direction, making architecture work with snow rather than pretending to be apart from it.

To recreate the effect of the northern lights in your home, how about asking Santa for a brand new "el Masterpiece" chandelier designed by Daniel Libeskind? Nine foot high and weighing 159kgs (350lbs), this striking object – shaped in the architect's trademark zig-zag, or lightning-bolt, motif – is sheathed in polished stainless steel. Inside, it is coated with 23-carat gold leaf. The clever bit is the lighting. "Illumination is provided by 1,680 specially designed LED modules," say the architects in a press release on behalf of lighting suppliers Zumtobel. "These can be called up wirelessly via a special iPad app that activates individual, built-in mechanisms attached to each module. The variety of colour scenarios and the quality of light emitted by each mimic the cosmic light that fills the universe."

One better than aurora borealis? The effects should be spectacular – they are the result of an algorithm developed by the architect's son Dr Noam Libeskind, an astrophysicist expert in dark matter at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam. And it's enough to make architects take off their designer glasses and rub their eyes in amazement.

I can imagine quite a few Londoners rubbing their eyes when the first of Transport for London's new Routemaster buses makes it debut in Trafalgar Square on 16 December. Whether this is a Christmas present from Boris Johnson to Londoners or to himself is open for debate. In any event, the new double-decker, designed by Thomas Heatherwick working with Wrightbus of Northern Ireland, is a striking machine – a London bus as imagined, perhaps, by set designers for the Batman movies. But it also re-establishes the idea that a London bus should be designed especially for the streets it serves. Traditionally, London buses were considered an integral part of the streetscape, and by the 1930s as a form of mobile architecture. Charles Holden, architect of the best Underground stations of the time, was called in to work on the look of new buses. And big red buses really do have a big effect on the character of the city.

City streets of the future, meanwhile, might resemble the new-look Exhibition Road in South Kensington, which reopened this week with no pavements, no pedestian crossings and very few traffic lights. Cars, cyclists and pedestrians will now all share the same stripped-back road space. The architects are Dixon Jones, who remodelled the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden, designed the Guardian's offices at Kings Cross and have just transformed the old Regent Palace Hotel at Piccadilly Circus into a svelte combination of modern offices and restored art deco restaurants. Although removing pavements and integrating roads for all users has been a success in Scandinavia, we will all be watching closely as the great, tail-gating British motorist tangles with pedestrians in the shadows of the Victorian museums of Albertopolis.

Finally, a thought for the New Year. Pantone has revealed that the colour of the year for 2012 is … Pantone 17-1463, or Tangerine Tango. Pantone, the self-proclaimed "global authority on colour and provider of professional colour standards to the design industries", says Tangerine Tango will provide "the energy boost we need to recharge and move forward" next year. I must check to see whether this colour can be found in el Masterpiece. And you might find it in the northern lights, but not – ever – as the colour of a London bus, at Christmas or at any other time of this year or next.

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:42:54 +0000

This week architecture awards enjoy an office romance, Germany's walkable rollercoaster is loopily lovable, and a new exhibition shows us light at the end of the Tube

It's been a golden week for architecture and design, with awards and prizes aplenty. RIBA announced that Herman Hertzberger, the 79-year-old Dutch architect, will receive the 2012 Royal Gold Medal at a ceremony in London in February. "Given in recognition of a body of work," says RIBA, "the Royal Gold Medal is approved personally by Her Majesty the Queen and is given to a person or group of people whose influence on architecture has had a truly international effect."

Hertzberger has had an international effect, and yet the lessons of his most important building – a radical and democratic office block for the Centraal Beheer insurance company in Apeldoorn – have either been forgotten or ignored as office design since the mid-70s has become ever more indebted to that of the call centre and panopticon, a form of building originally intended for prisons.

In a talk given in Dublin four years ago, Hertzberger said that offices such as Central Beheer's – designed for the workforce to occupy freely and as they saw fit – are no longer possible given the "widespread engraining of a managerial mentality" and its power-based psychology, which dominates the workplace today.

For Hertzberger, an office can and should be like a city, with many different places for people to meet and work openly, and as equals. It is a simple, profound idea and yet Central Beheer remains the exception rather than the rule. Hertzberger's humanity, however, has shaped modest, informal buildings – from the Montessori School in Delft to the brand new Faculty of Science at the University of Utrecht – that have made him a behind-the-scenes force in modern architecture. Here is someone who needs to be listened to afresh in our increasingly corporate world.

In his thrilling animation Robots of Brixton, Kibwe Tavares, a student at the Bartlett at University College London, has created a dystopian world far removed from corporate London. We showed this in Constructive Criticism in July when it was a part of Tavares's MA degree show. This week it won the Bartlett student Silver Medal (there's a Silver and a Bronze, but no Gold) in RIBA's President's Medals Student Awards 2011. The judges said: "We were stunned by the research work that went into making this film: not only had an urban environment been designed but the film itself was a complex design project. An amazing piece of work that is truly exciting and inspirational."

This year saw the highest ever number of entries for the President's Medals: 276 entries from 83 schools of architecture in 27 countries. The Bronze Medal has been awarded to Basmah Kaki, a student at the Architectural Association for An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism, "a design which exploits the natural environment to create a sanctuary for workers, protecting them from damage caused by noise pollution in an Indian granite quarry".

Hannah Robertson of the University of Melbourne won the Dissertation Medal for her work Bush Owner Builder, which looks at culturally sensitive and appropriate homes for an indigenous community in the far north of Queensland. Designs that emerged from working closely with the Aborigine community, says RIBA, are now being built on "homeland" sites. The judges said: "This dissertation warmed our hearts with its social concern. A sensitive and respectful piece of work, it rethinks the world of the architect and shows people not as clients but as genuine participants in the creative architectural process." Herman Hertzberger would like the sound of this.

I can see an award coming the way of Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth. The Hamburg-based artists, who have worked together for the past seven years on innovative public artworks in Germany, have triumphed with Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain, a swirling steel stairway, lit at night, that loops its way over the top of a hill in south Duisburg overlooking the western Ruhr. Although it is impossible to loop the loop – humans just can't run fast enough – this crazy and beautifully engineered sculpture is a symbol of contemporary life: a rollercoaster with its share of excitements, enticing vistas and dead ends. The artists put it slightly differently: "Tiger and Turtle refers with its immanent dialectic of speed and deadlock to the situation of change in the region and its turn towards renaturisation and restructuring."

The contrast between man-made speed and nature is beautifully captured in Autumn Woods, a 1938 poster designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer for the London Underground. This is one of several artworks by the American graphic artist on show until 18 December at the Estorick Collection, London. The Poster King: Edward McKnight Kauffer focuses on the artist's years in England (1914-1940), during which he brought many of the latest trends in modern art, from vorticism and cubism to futurism, to the public's attention.

Kauffer's biggest audience was the millions of commuters who travelled by Underground when, under the direction of Frank Pick, it was the world's finest metro system. "The tunnels of the Tube," said Wyndham Lewis, the vorticist artist, "became … his subterranean picture galleries." They did indeed. The Underground, a futurist's dream – all speed, noise, energy and efficiency – also offered the opportunity to escape to the woods and forests on its fringes: Autumn Woods captures a sense of fairytale magic waiting at the end of all those iron-clad Tube tunnels.

Jonathan Glancey