Posts Tagged Design
Canada Water library – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 4, 2011
Southwark's new library is a bold venture at a time when similar institutions are being shut by the dozen
OMG! It's a library! An absolutely new one, with books in it, too! Aren't such things supposed to be dinosaurs, driven to extinction by the cuts of George Osborne and the inventions of the late Steve Jobs?
Not in the London Borough of Southwark, apparently, where they have decided to keep all 12 of their existing libraries, as well as build this new one. And not, according to its architect, Piers Gough, for whom "books haven't gone away. Libraries still hold these magic realms of invention, realms of ideas. They're places where you're not told what to think; they're also places where you can stay and stop and spend as long as you like."
And so he has designed a celebratory building. On the outside, it is an inverted pyramid, clad in bronzed aluminium, so as to "look civic and grand without being pompous".
Inside, he has placed a big, wooden spiral stair at the centre, which rises from a constrained ground floor up to a bright, expansive top floor ringed with a gallery. Below is mostly cafe; above is where the books are, with staff offices sandwiched unobtrusively between them. "I was keen that people would really walk up," says Gough, "from the noisy downstairs to the quieter, more relaxed place above."
The location is Canada Water, in the old Surrey Commercial Docks, on a big bulge into the Thames that was once so excavated by docks that it was more liquid than land. The land that remained was occupied by wharves and warehouses for the timber trade until, as in the rest of London's docklands, all the business disappeared. Ever since the 1980s, the intention has been to regenerate it, both to bring business and create something like a town centre.
Creating town centres is not that easy, especially in a place where there has never been such a thing, and especially when this is done in the British way, whereby the private sector is nudged and enticed to achieve the thing officially desired by public bodies, which lack the resources and authority to lead and plan. Whatever might be called civic or public has to emerge as a byproduct of property development, at such time and in such a way as it suits the market.
For these reasons, Canada Water is what can most charitably be described as a work in progress. The things that have settled most naturally here are more out-of-town than town-centre uses: a shopping centre with big car parks, a Decathlon shop in a large shed, the print works of the Daily Mail. There is an oblong of water left from the old docks, softened at the edges with environmentally responsible-looking reed beds, and coots and ducks floating about. There are blocks of flats of different vintages, 1960s brutalist, 1980s aspirational, 00s "urban renaissance". A stylish bus and tube station, completed in 1999, long stood here almost alone, awaiting a neighbourhood for it to serve.
The quality most obviously lacking, apart from charm or delight, is coherence. You go from car park to reed bed to tin shed to a wooden bridge redolent of old Holland, without apparent logic. A regeneration plan led by the developers British Land, more ambitious than previous ones, promises to unify these oddments, but even this plan has its strangenesses. A reasonably handsome block of flats, with balconies designed to take advantage of the water view, finds itself parked behind a huge ventilator for the underground such that some of the balconies in fact have a close-up view of large, dusty louvres.
The library is placed next to the tube station – indeed, a new exit rises within the fabric of the library itself – and alongside a new public square, which is not quite ready yet. And at first sight this goldish crystal looks perilously like another of those random gesticulations which are felt to be substitutes for thought or planning in, regeneration projects up and down the country. What sets it apart is that there is actually a sense to its shape.
The best form for a reading room is wide and horizontal, but there was not enough space for this at ground level, squeezed between the tube exit and the waterside. So the reading room is at the top, with the building widening as it ascends to make space for it, with the added benefit that the most important part of the building is placed high up – if not in the clouds, at least sufficiently far from the ground to feel removed and a little dreamy, as a library should.
Raised, it makes occasion for the spiral staircase, which in turn makes the business of going somewhere for a book into a little event or ceremony, rather than a sideways drift such as you might make into a supermarket.
From a practical question – how to put a library on a site too small for it – comes the pleasure of the architecture. Within the ample volume of the reading room, zigzagging shelves create more intimate places in a way almost reminiscent of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.
Gough's practice, CZWG, is not often compared with the careful and subtle Aalto, having made its name at the more playful and enjoyable end of 1980s postmodernism – Docklands apartment blocks built around a great cylindrical courtyard in blue-glazed bricks; a house for Janet Street-Porter as raucous as their client's voice; a public lavatory cum flower shop with touches of art nouveau – but then it has not had the chance to do something like a library before. "I am in my sixties, and this is our first big public building," exclaims Gough.
Aalto fans will also be quick to point out that the Canada Water library does not achieve Scandinavian levels of craftsmanship. There's an awkward crunch where a revolving door meets cladding panels, for example, and things don't always align and join up as well as you might want them to. The consultant who placed the radiators and air-conditioning units seems to have set out to do so as clumsily and obtrusively as possible. Budget constraints mean that an auditorium has to rely for its architectural expression on large quantities of maroon paint.
But the important thing about the Canada Water library is that a new public place has been created, where the architecture contributes to and expands the experience of using it. It's worth mentioning that here private/public partnership has had some good effects – CZWG was appointed by British Land which, unlike local authorities, does not have to follow European rules for choosing architects. These rules make it difficult for architects to design something such as a library if they have not done so before, which would have ruled out Gough and CZWG.
9: Lincoln Cathedral
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 4, 2011
The Observer's architecture critic introduces a spectacular, interactive 360-degree photograph of the cathedral so admired by Nikolaus Pevsner
• Explore the panoramic image of Lincoln Cathedral
"A bicycle shed is a building," wrote Nikolaus Pevsner. "Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture", a statement so begging to be contradicted as to send one searching for the nation's most beautiful bicycle sheds. As for his choice of Lincoln as an ultimate exemplar, out of the whole wealth of European architecture, it's an intriguing one. It is not the most famous, glamorous, biggest or most perfect of gothic cathedrals, although it was possibly the tallest building in the world until its spire collapsed in the 16th century. Its appeal is something to do with its balance: French cathedrals of the same period – the 12th and 13th centuries – pursued the greatest possible height and the most logical possible structure, whereas Lincoln has more ribs in the vaults than structurally necessary and enriches its clean lines with decoration. It is also, if not the biggest, big enough to be impressive. In any case, Pevsner had company in his admiration: John Ruskin called it "the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles".
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 2, 2011
It's all about train stations this week, with the Tube bringing beauty to Battersea and Canada Water unveiling its flashy new library. Meanwhile, LA's Union Station is ripe for a revamp
Last year the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, approved the idea of building two new Tube stations on London Underground's Northern line, at Vauxhall and Nine Elms, as part of the long-awaited £5.5bn redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and the surrounding area. This is one of central London's last great wastelands. Long ripe for regeneration, developers have been wary of making a move in this surprisingly cut-off quarter of the capital despite the opportunity to build shops, offices, hotels, places of entertainment and up to 16,000 homes here – until the arrival, or solid promise, of a Tube line.
In his Autumn statement this week, Chancellor George Osborne said the government would support the scheme. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine two handsome new Underground stations, such as Arnos Grove and Southgate by Charles Holden from the 1930s, or the pick of the fine stations along the Jubilee line extension from Westminster to Stratford.
This week, however, the curiously named Battersea Power Station Shareholder Vehicle, the holding company for the forlorn former temple of power designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, was told that its lenders intend to take the 15-hectare (38 acres) site into receivership, as no progress has been made on development. This will scupper the ambitious scheme by Rafael Viñoly to revamp the listed building. Will the chancellor and mayor remain keen on building a costly Tube line to Battersea Wasteland?
In Los Angeles, the site up for redevelopment around Union Station, an exquisite late-30s design by, among others, John Parkinson and Donald B Parkinson that oozes Hollywood (the waiting area was used as a police department in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), is even bigger than Battersea. This week, the LA Transportation Authority revealed a shortlist of architects, one of whom will masterplan the redevelopment of 17 hectares (42 acres) of downtown railway land. The shortlist includes Britain's Foster and Partners teamed with the IBI Group, and Grimshaw Architects with Gruen Associates, as well as Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Parsons Transportation Group. Architects who failed to make the list include Rem Koolhaas, Morphosis and Zaha Hadid. The plan is for mixed-use development. Will it happen? Maybe not in the current economic climate, but it would be sad if the scheme were rushed. Union Station might seem remote, even from downtown LA, but its warm, welcoming and beautifully crafted architecture could yet set a tone for LA's equivalent of Battersea.
A more modest development at a railway station opened this week in London's Docklands. This is Southwark Council's £14m Canada Water Library. Designed by Piers Gough of CZWG in the guise of a half-buried upside-down pyramid clad in a gold anodised aluminium mesh, the library is connected directly to Canada Water station on London's Jubilee line.
The shape of the building is not wilful; the plot of land – part of a new public square – was small, so Gough came up with the idea of splaying the library upwards and outwards. Unveiling the new building, Veronica Ward (Southwark's cabinet member for culture, leisure and sport) said: "What we've managed to do is listen to people. Over 6,000 people said they would rather we did things like reduce hours or use volunteers than close libraries. That was enough people saying libraries were important."
If libraries remain essential for our mental health, Maggie's Cancer Care Centres are proving to be a godsend to those seeking inspiration, support and companionship. Following the opening of the Nottingham Maggie's Centre, designed by Piers Gough and Paul Smith, the Swansea Maggie's Centre at Singelton Hospital is now complete. Set by woods and overlooking Swansea Bay, it opens officially on 9 December 2011. Designed by the late Kisho Kurokawa, one of the founders of the Metabolist movement in Japan, the building is based on Kurokawa's concept of a "cosmic whirlpool" representing "everlasting forces swirling around a still centre".
"The new Maggie's Centre will come out of the earth and swing around with two arms like a rotating galaxy," said Kurokowa. "One side will welcome the visitor and lead to the other side, which embraces nature – the trees, rocks and water. A place set apart, as Maggie [Jencks] said of a garden. The connection to the cosmos and contacts between east and west – two motives that Maggie and I shared – are in the design. I hope she would have liked it."
Meanwhile, Quentin Blake, the children's illustrator best known for his drawings for Roald Dahl stories, won this year's Prince Philip Designers prize, the last to be judged by the Duke of Edinburgh himself. Other nominees included architects David Chipperfield, Chris Wilkinson and Jim Eyre, and the engineer Cecil Balmond, co-designer of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the grounds of the 2012 London Olympics. The structure is connected by a pedestrian bridge to Stratford station, where Jubilee line trains will take you to Canada Water, if not to Battersea.
New Court – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 27, 2011
Rothschild is one of the world's most august financial institutions, reflected in its discreet yet opulent new City HQ designed by Rem Koolhaas's OMA
The City of London is, in its own special way, surprisingly fond of architecture. You might have thought that niceties of design would get in the way of its relentless contest with other financial centres to be the most fearsome money machine in the world, but no. The rulers of the City permit themselves the incredible luxury, inconceivable in Singapore, Shenzhen or even Canary Wharf, of weighing and deliberating every tweak of its fabric.
There are the historic buildings, the monuments of Wren, Hawksmoor and Lutyens, that are reverentially coddled. There are also the monuments of the masters of our own time, as recognised by the biggest architecture award in the world, the Pritzker prize. There are works by no fewer than five winners of the prize (Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Jean Nouvel, James Stirling and Rem Koolhaas's practice OMA) within the Square Mile. A sixth, Renzo Piano's Shard, makes its presence felt from just outside its boundaries. Such concentrations are hard to find outside places such as Saadiyat Island, the instant cultural district under construction in Abu Dhabi, or the 1980s tea services designed for the Italian company Alessi, by the biggest stars of the time.
The latest addition to the collection, OMA's whitish tower for the financial advisory group Rothschild, has ghosted its way on to the skyline with a surprising degree of discretion. Usually every sneeze of Rem Koolhaas and his team is the object of global fascination by architects and followers of architecture, but this not-small building has been sitting there for some time, its exterior more or less finished, without anyone paying much attention. Now the interior fit-out is also complete, bar a few details.
The discretion is part of Rothschild's corporate personality. As a distinguished 200-year-old institution, it doesn't feel the need to shout. It doesn't put its name on the door, and while it hangs a coat of arms outside, reused from former buildings, this is not very communicative to non-students of heraldry. It is located in a lane of extraordinary narrowness a short distance from the Bank of England, a narrow strip of pitted tarmac that seems one remove from being a cart track. You are supposed just to know that it is there and if you don't, you are not someone who needs to know or whom it needs to know.
You do, however, know that you are in the presence of something with a high degree of self-confidence. From the lane you rise through a steel colonnade to an ample podium of perfect emptiness, the main body of the building overhead, which then opens on to an also ample reception area. You are treated to the luxury of sheer space, precisely delineated with the oblong architecture. The floor is of travertine, also the ceiling, which creates a vertiginous blurring of up and down. Off to one side is an oak-shelved library that will house the Rothschild archive.
Should you be allowed past the security barriers you can then rise through the building, past the gym and cafe, and floors of close-packed desks, to the top levels of meeting rooms, dining rooms and events suites. There is a quasi-Soviet collectivism about the way the place is organised; as in the 1920s Narkomfin housing project in Moscow, the space allotted to individuals is modest, but the shared spaces of exercise, eating and meeting are generous.
In these spaces, an ever more magnificent panorama unfolds. In one direction St Paul's Cathedral sits in mighty repose, placed in the middle of a glass wall as if it were put there for the special benefit of Rothschild. In another there are the Gherkin and other towers of the City, which somehow look more impressive and serene than they do from ground level. These are celestial, Olympian spaces that convey the certainty that this – here, at this elevation, in this part of London – is where Rothschild belongs.
It is not all about sheer pomp and prestige. This is not OMA's way, and running through the building are touches of wit, irony and teasing. There is a play of small and big, which starts with the transition from lane to podium and continues with such things as extra-heavy or extra-light handrails. There are very thick walls ("Like castles and palaces," say OMA) and very thin ones made of glass.
There is also a play with the history of which Rothschild is so proud. In the meeting rooms are ancestral portraits, of well-mounted men riding to hounds and such like, and antique furniture. These are placed, with a touch of the eclecticism of a boutique hotel, alongside glass and aluminium, the latter embossed, in another moment of old/new overlay, with woodgrain patterns from the old oak panelling.
In Richard Rogers's Lloyd's Building a Robert Adam interior, imported from the institution's earlier premises, was recreated. There, it is a touch embarrassing in relation to the high-techery around it. In Rothschild the interplay of oak, oil paint, silk and aluminium is where all the fun is to be had. It delivers the required message that the institution is both ancient and modern. More than that, it is shown to be cultured, sophisticated, self-aware and sufficiently self-assured to allow a little humour. Rothschild advises but doesn't lend, which sets it apart from the casino banks of ill-repute, and its architecture reminds you of this fact.
OMA also likes to squeeze whatever public value there might be in a commission, even out of a discreet private bank. The colonnade along the lane can be used by anyone, in effect widening the street, and on the far side of the podium a view opens up to the churchyard of Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. It is clear that the podium is privately owned space, but the building still offers more than the many City blocks which rise sheer and opaque from the pavement. Next door, for example, one of Foster's least good works has been squelched on to the ground, an assertive, ribbed, over-inflated blob that is oblivious to its surroundings. OMA's building interacts with its neighbours, enriching itself and them in the process.
The City's fondness for architecture has, in fact, its limits. Often it runs as far as licensing a big name to sculpt the external form of a block, but not to such architectural qualities as the play of volumes and scale, the interconnection of outside and in or the creation of three-dimensional settings for the lives that go on in and around a building. Rothschild does all these things, with skill and subtlety. The only shame is that some of the best bits are on the far side of the security barriers. Come the revolution, though, it will make a great collectivist housing scheme.
Kevin McCloud’s grand design for British housing | feature
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 23, 2011
The Channel 4 presenter turned enlightened property developer just wants to make people happy, he says
A former editor of mine was fond of saying, as he watched his eminent colleagues accept toxic invitations to advise on projects such as the Millennium Dome, that "journalists can't do things". We might spend our lives telling others how to save the euro, or select an England team, or design a skyscraper, but when it comes to organising people to achieve a shared aim, we tend to lack patience or the ability to work towards a deadline months rather than days away. Writers tend to be individualists, looking for new discoveries, not methodical team players.
The same could be true, with knobs on, for TV presenters. So it is striking that Kevin McCloud, presenter of Grand Designs, should now be trying his hand as an enlightened property developer. For years, he has cast his eye over the hopes, follies and struggles of people trying to build beautiful homes for themselves. Now he is daring to show how it should, or could, be done. "I would get on a train to go from one location to another," he says, "and pass another 5,000 houses in Ilfracombe or Norwich or Aberdeen and they would all look the same. I thought, 'Is this the best we can do?' "
Five years ago, he set up a company called Hab (Happiness Architecture Beauty) in order to "build houses that make people happy". The recession has slowed its progress, but its first creation, a 42-home development in Swindon called the Triangle, is now complete. Next month, Channel 4 is screening Kevin's Grand Design, a two-part documentary about the project, which was achieved in partnership with the housing association, GreenSquare Group. When it is suggested that the attention these programmes will attract will be a double-edged sword, he says: "It will be a one-edged sword with the blade laid across my throat."
He is addressing the great British housing problem. For decades, it has been plain that new houses are unimaginative, overpriced, undersized and resistant to the kind of technical improvement that is standard in industries such as car making. Changes in planning law, to improve design or make housing more accessible, are forever tried and forever failing. The rather daunting task he has set himself is to deflect the glacial flow of change, to make "a very significant difference from conventional development".
With his trademark energetic enthusiasm, he reels off technical details about attenuation tanks and swales. He wants to create a truly sustainable development. So the Triangle's open spaces are designed to soak up rainwater, so that the risk of flooding is lowered, the pressure on Swindon's drainage is reduced and the planting remains lush in hot weather. It has what Hab's design director, Isabel Allen, calls a "muddy, soggy landscape" which has the added benefit that it is fun for children to play in it.
The external walls of the houses are made out of hempcrete, a material that is not only highly insulating but, being made out of a plant – hemp – takes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it puts in. The houses also have chimney-like objects on their roofs, which are actually ventilators, that help the houses to cool naturally.
"Anyone can build an eco-home," he says, "but it doesn't solve anything. There is nothing to stop them turning up the thermostat. What's more interesting is the way people live and behave." So the Triangle has allotments and polytunnels where people can grow their own food, and a car club and a scooter club that make their use of transport less wasteful. He sees such things as more important than the design features of individual houses.
Most of all, McCloud wants to create a community. The houses of the Triangle are arranged in traditional terraces, enclosing a kind of village green. Here, children can play on slopes and interestingly arranged logs and splash in water. Conventional swings and slides are avoided, however, on the grounds that these would mark the place as only for children and alienate the adults and teenagers who, it is hoped, will also enjoy the green.
Part of the point of the allotments and polytunnels is to bring people together and such things as barbecues and Halloween parties are encouraged. Irrigation is achieved with old-fashioned water pumps – more fun than standpipes – around which residents might gather. Each house is fitted with a "shimmy" – a touch-screen computer that McCloud calls a cross between "an iPad and a parish magazine". This enables residents to exchange information, help and advice and tells them about upcoming events.
Of the 42 homes, 21 are what is called "social rented", which is for people on the local authority's list of people in need of new homes. Eleven are "intermediate rented", which is at 80% of the market rent. Ten are "rent to buy", which means people rent them at below-market rates, with a view to saving for a deposit and ultimately buying their homes. There is therefore a mixture of people: teachers, retirees, single mothers formerly in council hostels, families who were in accommodation for the homeless.
The Triangle is so designed that no distinction is made between the house types. This, says McCloud, is "unlike schemes, including one that won the Stirling prize" – he means the Accordia development in Cambridge – "where the houses for sale are lovely and the social stuff is behind a wall".
It is striking, with all this ingenuity in the design, how very plain-looking the houses are. Any Grand Designs fan expecting another of the exotic creations featured in the programme will be disappointed. They are pitched-roofed, in straight rows, partly inspired by the railway workers' cottages that Brunel built in Swindon. Their elevations are in shades of cream and grey that echo the existing terraces and semi-detacheds of this part of town.
Glenn Howells, the architect of the Triangle, says that "the conversation we had was, 'Do we have the nerve to do something very, very normal?' With Kevin, everyone was expecting it to be more eye-catching, more televisual. People go there and say, 'Blimey, it looks normal.' That's the point." The idea of the terrace, he says, "started a long time ago and it will go on for another 500 or 600 years. It is such a good form". The only problem is that "there is a perception in the housing market that it won't sell, so developers have to make things convoluted, even though those to-die-for streets of Islington, where Boris Johnson lives, are all repetitive".
The aim, says Howells, is to "prove you can do excellent ordinary housing that sells and that people want to live in". It is about little things achieved within the standard budget for housing association developments – apart from a little additional support for some of the more adventurous environmental features. Bedroom doors are placed away from corners, so it is possible to place wardrobes behind them, and windows are larger than in most new housing. Ceilings are higher than standard on the ground floor (which means, to stay within budget, they are lower upstairs). The porches include space for bike racks, so that they don't have to be lugged through houses from the back garden, which makes it more likely they will be used.
On the outside, architectural expression is sought in such things as oversize rainwater pipes, which, together with change of hue from one house to the next, and vertically proportioned windows, help to define individual houses. In front of each house are gabion walls, gabion being the form of construction used in road embankments, where loose stones are placed in wire cages. Here, they screen parking spaces, so that cars do not dominate the appearance of the space.
McCloud says that "the design of spoons and the design of cities is one process" and it is the totality of the Triangle's inventions that matters. He is particularly keen on the importance of landscape design. Usually, says the Triangle's landscape architect, Luke Engleback, his role is to "decorate masterplans by others". Here, Engleback was involved from the outset in shaping the concept and form of the development.
McCloud keeps saying that "it's about the residents – it's their happiness that will determine the success of scheme". It will take years to find out if it really works but, meanwhile, I am introduced to 64-year-old Maggie Lowton, who was forced out of her home of 38 years by negative equity. "Since I started my affair with Kevin," she says, she has bought into his dream. "We love the house and feel privileged and proud. It's lighter, airier and easier to clean. It feels too nice and too new." The architectural aesthetics are of secondary importance. "People say, 'What are those stones for?'" she says of the gabions.
She says you can see a community forming, even if there are some points of friction – "you do hear snippets, like someone parking in someone else's space". As a Christian, she is wrestling with the problem of other people's faiths, including paganism. "Perhaps we can have a multi-faith Christmas tree," she says, "but I don't know how to do that… maybe we can have a pagan log." She wants "it to work for everyone. I want Kevin's dream to come true. What a waste if it didn't".
For McCloud, the dream seems to originate in a love of the organic. "I grew up in the countryside – Bedfordshire. I was interested in birds and bees and flowers and mushrooms." He says there is "a spiritual dimension" to living with nature that he wants to give to the residents of Hab's developments. The village where he lived was also the kind of place where "kids played in the street on their bikes, and if a car came round the corner, it had to slow down".
Realising this dream requires a great deal of technical grind, of dealing with planners, highways authorities, water suppliers. It requires responding patiently to officials such as the one who, Engleback says, objected to fruit trees on the grounds that "someone might slip on a berry". McCloud's celebrity means that "doors are opened a little more quickly", but also that "it is very important for local authorities not to be seen to be granting us the smallest favour. We can't cheat or push or cut corners".
The Triangle has required an exceptional amount of effort by Hab, GreenSquare, their architects, engineers and other consultants, all to achieve a simple array of row houses which – albeit without such high environmental performance – would once knocked have been knocked up almost without thinking by builders. Larger developments are now on the way in Oxford and Stroud, but McCloud is not expecting these to be much easier. The hope is that others will follow the example.
He acknowledges that the Triangle is not as advanced as some of the continental schemes in Tubingen, Stockholm and elsewhere which were his inspirations. They "emerged from a culture of planning and construction that is far more evolved, and far more sophisticated, than in Britain," he says. "But," he adds, "I feel we have hit on the grail. We have made a very significant difference from conventional development… we're 90% there, and to do it in Swindon in a difficult economic climate – I'm happy."
He thinks he is doing better than the Prince of Wales's Poundbury. "One positive thing about Poundbury was the way perceived ownership of the public realm meant the residents adopted it," he says. But "one of the failings is the way the external appearance is at the expense of internal architecture". In order to achieve the look of old cottages, "you get low ceilings and tiny windows".
The Triangle is in a tradition of model villages beloved of aristocrats, princes, of Brad Pitt in New Orleans and the Bordeaux sugar-cube manufacturer who commissioned workers' housing from Le Corbusier. Such places can be over-scripted, too much about fulfilling their makers' picture-book fantasies about contented communities. There is a whiff of this with Hab's gooey talk about "making people happy", although they are conscious of the need not to over-control. "If they decide they don't want to grow food and just want to park cars, we'd be a bit upset," says Isabel Allen, but in the end it will be up to the residents.
Maggie Lowton sounds a note of caution by citing other communities in Swindon that started well but went downhill. No amount of forethought and attention to detail can guarantee the success of the Triangle. But at the very least it is an imaginative and well-designed project, which achieves about as much as can be done with its budget. It focuses on what matters most and gives itself the best chance of success. Which is far more rare than it should be in British house building and a much better application of celebrity philanthropy than most.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 22, 2011
From a seashell-collecting Le Corbusier to a grand new college for creatives, Jonathan Glancey looks at a winning week – as architecture reaches for the moon
Stanton Williams has won Building Design magazine's architect of the year award, largely for the brilliant Central St Martin's college of art and design at King's Cross in London. The award is presented annually to the practice BD's editor "deems to have made the most significant contribution to British architecture over the past year".
"The practice," says Ellis Woodman, "has completed not just one but two of the most impressive buildings built in the UK over the past 12 months: a new home for Central St Martins and the Sainsbury in Cambridge.
Central St Martin's is a tour-de-force, a great meeting place, with studios and a theatre gathering the college's 4,000 students and 1,000 teaching staff (many part-time) in one place for the first time. Here, historic and contemporary design aren't just happily married, they're celebrated and enhanced by this exemplary education project.
Alan Stanton worked for Norman Foster before studying at UCLA in California and then assisting Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano on the design of the Pompidou Centre, Paris. He set up Stanton Williams with Paul Williams, an expert in the design of museums, galleries and exhibitions.
Jonathan Hendry won the magazine's young architect award (young means under 40 in architecture). Six years old when the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977, Hendry worked for Allies and Morrison and Jamie Fobert Architects, two practices that are as concerned with building well as making a big name for themselves. He then opened up his own practice in the Lincolnshire Wolds in 2000 where he has crafted one small building after another in decidedly modern yet modest ways: an arts and heritage centre here, a bus shelter there, a village hall and the restoration of a tenpin bowling alley. It is heartening to see such a considered talent – he could probably get a high-powered job in pretty much any major international practice – working on the small-scale projects in English country towns that need such thought, craft and care.
If there was ever an architect of the century award, the 1900s would surely have been won by Le Corbusier. Still a controversial figure, Le Corbusier has been studied in such detail you'd think there couldn't be more to say about this architect and provocateur. It's a real pleasure then to read Niklas Maak's Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach. Maak, who did his thesis on Corbusier, is an art critic for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Here he analyses the architect's love of beaches, sea and seashells and shows how these affected his approach to design as he moved from white cubism to new forms of geometry and organic forms. "Shells, snails, flotsam and jetsam crop up everywhere in Le Corbusier's work," says Maak. And, most of all, in the beautifully sculpted and deeply poetic pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp.
In a postscript to this confidently brief and engaging book, Maak shows how Le Corbusier's beachcombing has affected architects, through buildings as disparate as Rem Koolhaas's shell-like Seattle Public Library of 2004 and Sou Fujimoto's nest-like Final Wooden House of 2008. As for a design award, well, if there was one for British designer of the past half century, it would surely go to Terence Conran, who has just turned 80. One of his presents is The Way We Live Now at the Design Museum, London, a show of his work from his days designing for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From soup kitchens to grand brasseries, from Habitat to Storehouse, Conran has made waves as big in the world of British design as Le Corbusier made in modern architecture.
Mind, you, architects and designers – as we know them – might just vanish if scientists working for Nasa have their way. Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) from the University of Southern California (USC) have won a prestigious Nasa grant to explore the potential use of the robotic fabrication technology, Contour Crafting, for building structures on the moon. The grant, says a USC press release, "was one of only 30 awarded to over 700 applicants by the Nasa Innovation Advanced Concepts Program.
In Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Professor Otto Silenus, an architect, has a mission to eliminate the human element from the consideration of form. Looks like the USC professors might get there yet. If the Moonbase is built, BD may well find itself championing Design Robot of the Year 2020. A human, I suppose, might just get to program the robots. If not, beachcombing is fun. Instructive, too.
The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 13, 2011
The London River Park is a proposed floating green space on the Thames that could be ready in time for the Olympics. But is it really a 'public' amenity. Our architecture critic charts the stealthy rise of pseudo-public spaces
What could be lovelier? A new park on the river Thames, south-facing to catch the sun, which like something in a fairytale would also float. Here people could bask and stroll, close to the lapping water, or splash in a swimming pool. It would be ready for the blessed summer of 2012, enriched not only by the Olympics, but also by the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's 60-year rule. It would make a perfect viewing point for joyous throngs to watch the 1,000-boat river pageant that is planned for the Queen's Jubilee. It would be like those Venetian paintings of aquatic festivals in La Serenissima, brought to life in the here and now.
The park, invented and designed by the architects Gensler, would run from the Millennium bridge and St Paul's Cathedral to close to the Tower of London and Tower bridge, linking some of London's prime tourist spots. It would serve the City of London, an area short of open space. It would be there for five years, after which it could be taken away if people didn't like it. It would also cost the public nothing. The Singaporean asset-management company Venus will pay the entire £50m cost, and has already put £5m into developing the idea, including building a 35-metre model of a 35km stretch of the Thames, to test the park's hydrographic effects. "We either do it beautifully," says John Naylor of Venus, "or we don't do it at all", to which end Venus doubled the budget that Gensler asked it for.
Boris Johnson is enthused. After an impromptu Sunday morning meeting with Gensler and Venus, he declared: "The sheer beauty and design brilliance of this structure will provide yet another amazing and unique attraction for the capital." Daniel Moylan, of Transport for London, has said of it that "improved connectivity, gracefully designed, can bring pleasure and joy to an area once written off". The outgoing Lord Mayor of London, Michael Bear, was said to favour the scheme, as a legacy of his mayoral year, although the Corporation of London would not confirm this. Gensler and Venus claim "overwhelming backing from Londoners" although this turns out to be based on an unscientific poll of whoever turned up to two exhibitions of the proposals.
But there is, as the economists have taught us, no free lunch. Venus is not putting up all this money out of the pure goodness of its heart nor, entirely, to raise its "brand awareness" in London, as John Naylor puts it, although that is a factor. It is "looking to create a platform for inward investment" and intends to make money renting out pavilions in the park for corporate exhibitions and events, at a handsome rate. It also thinks it can sell space to TV companies, especially during the Olympics, using Tower bridge as a backdrop. It is almost certainly right. This means that the park is not a "public space", as Gensler calls it, but a private space into which the public are allowed to come, subject to certain limitations.
In this it is the latest example of a widespread type of the 21st century, the pseudo-public space, in which the City of London and its satellites are world leaders. The Broadgate development of the 1980s was a pioneer, followed by Canary Wharf, Paternoster Square next to St Paul's, and the More London development where City Hall, the headquarters of the Mayor of London, stands. In each the shapes and attributes of town squares are imitated – an oblong or round shape, outdoor art, cafe tables, fountains – and sometimes real public assets are created, but ultimate control is in the hands of private landowners. As Anna Minton pointed out in her book Ground Control, they control security, access, and rules of entry. Activities and people deemed undesirable, such as photography with a tripod, public displays of affection, picnics, or chaining up a bicycle, are banned. Or public protest, and you don't have to wish to protest yourself to sense the oppressive feeling that things are prohibited. The most extreme example is the "public park" promised for the top of the forthcoming "Walkie Talkie" tower in the City. By no stretch of the imagination is a roofed-over room in a private office tower, reached via security-controlled lifts and lobbies, "public".
These places had their bluff called by the Occupy movement. Anxious to keep out the tented rebels, Broadgate and Canary Wharf reached for the injunctions that asserted their rights as private landowners. Paternoster Square put up barriers, manned by both police and private security, that jarred with its architectural look of traditional civic values: arcades, monuments, streets, stone and brick, a classical style.
It also put up a sign that said: "Paternoster Square is private land. Any licence to the public to enter or cross this land is revoked forthwith. There is no implied or express permission to enter the premises or any part. Any such entry will constitute a trespass." Which is strange, as almost every architectural statement, planning application, and press release, in the protracted redevelopment of Paternoster Square, described this "private land" as "public space".
These spaces (what shall we call them – privlic, publate – let's say publoid) don't always have to be bad things. Cities are made of places with degrees of publicness, including museums, restaurants, theatres, shops, malls and transport systems. Canary Wharf and Broadgate were both built on sites that formerly had limited public access – docks in one case, a railway station and its tracks in the other – and offer more to the public than they did before. The sky garden of the Walkie Talkie might turn out to be a fun place to go. (And, if they try to pressure you into buying expensive drinks at its bars, you will be able to whip out the planning consent that says it is a public space.)
But one issue is the honest use of language. If a space is private, it should not be called public, and planners should send back any application that makes this false claim. This matters because, if we are kidded into thinking that there is a civic realm that is not actually there, we will suddenly find that there is less space than we had thought for such essential public actions as protest. This is what the Occupy movement found when it looked for a location to make its point in the City of London. It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's. Oddly, the Occupy movement looks like the sort of colourful cultural event that local authorities and even businesses pay good money to subsidise, so as to jolly up their town centres: it is only when they are trying to say something that they officially become a problem.
The bigger issue comes when publoid places occupy areas that were formerly genuinely public. Then they are not conditional gifts, as at Broadgate, but appropriation. The banks of the Thames are largely public – you can walk there unrestricted, and advertising is kept from the waterfront. The view of the water is public property, and one of the great free pleasures of London.
It may, conceivably, be possible to cut deals with the private sector if they are genuinely beneficial, but only when it is completely clear that the public qualities of a place are not being compromised. This is very far from the case with Gensler's designs for the London River Park, in which budget and architectural ambition are lavished on the silvery pods which will house the money-making stuff, while the offer to the public is ordinary-looking, standard-issue publoid design: some trees and benches of reasonably good quality, a stainless steel balustrade, a nondescript deck surface, the promise of some information panels explaining the history of the surroundings.
An obvious comparison, made by Gensler, is with the High Line in New York, the phenomenally successful park made out of an old railway viaduct, which like the River Park is long and thin. But a big part of the High Line's success is its planting and landscaping, which is intelligent, imaginative and well considered, in the way it converts industrial relics into a place of urban pleasure. There is no sign of this level of thought in the Gensler design, even though they have submitted a detailed planning application to the Corporation of London. Nor is there the playfulness of Paris Plage, the annual conversion of the banks of the Seine into a beach, or the floating swimming pool that was installed in Copenhagen. Gensler is a global practice, with more than 3,000 staff, but there is limited evidence in its portfolio that it has the touch and finesse to pull off a project like this.
Instead the park offers a marginal upgrade on the existing riverside walkway. It would be wider, and with a more intimate relationship to the water. On the other hand you would lose the sense of unrestricted wandering and gathering that is currently there. You would be all too aware of the selling going on in the pavilions. You would know you were in a managed and controlled space, with uniformed wardens. This, says John Naylor, would be like Disney World, to the extent that "you know you're protected; you know that you won't be attacked or bothered by vagrants and sellers" (except, of course, for the approved corporate sellers in the pavilions). Is the City of London such a crime zone, financial misdemeanours apart, that people need such protection?
Essentially the London River Park is a gigantic hospitality suite with a fairly nice walkway threaded through it. Meanwhile the design of its silver pods is offensively indifferent to the dignified buildings, such as Old Billingsgate Market, on which they intrude, and actually do not seem well suited to the events that might go on inside them. The only purpose of their look seems to be self-promotion. It is, for good measure, likely that the piles that hold the park in place will, at low tide, be unpleasantly conspicuous.
As it happens, the park idea is not meeting with unanimous approval, despite the support of the mayor. Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, said that "we are not convinced by the description of the project as a 'park'" or that it is "appropriate to the character of the river". They find the design of the pavilions "unimaginative". English Heritage noted that "temporary" constructions like this have a way of becoming permanent. They were "not convinced that the design was worthy of such a sensitive site", and thought that the view towards the dome of St Paul's "would be distracted by the blades of silver", which are "flashy and corporate". The City of London School for boys, which is on this stretch of embankment, is none to happy that these large objects will block its view of the river.
When I meet Gensler and Venus, they assure me that discussions are going well with the Port of London Authority, which manages the river and is notoriously picky about intrusions on it. They also say that the planners of the Diamond Jubilee are very interested in their ideas. The next day, however, it is announced that the PLA has "serious concerns regarding the application scheme's impact on navigational safety", and the Corporation of London is delaying making a decision about the planning application. I also see a letter from the Diamond Jubilee organisers, saying that the park would "have a significant negative impact on the river pageant". It would for example make the tide run faster, with the result that rowed boats would be unable to take part, which would reduce the planned 1,000 boats by a third. Gensler and Venus have now given up on trying to be ready for the Jubilee in June, even though their extraordinarily ambitious timetable – to have everything ready for the Olympics – is still in place.
Buried deep within the London River Park is a good idea. If it were truly an aquatic High Line, it could be wonderful. It might work better if it were funded differently, let's say by a levy on all City businesses, such that it were no longer a promotional and profit opportunity for just one. If there were a longer timescale than the current insane rush to summer 2012, its design and detail could get the attention it deserves. It would also help if Gensler graciously stepped back from the detailed design, having been thanked and rewarded for having the idea, and pushing it thus far with energy and chutzpah, in favour of practices with the ability to think and work like those of the High Line.
If all these ifs were sorted out, the lovely floating park might just happen, subject to the satisfaction of the PLA. But there are an awful lot of ifs, and not much sign of the will to address them. If they are not addressed, the London River Park is simply an Occupy London event carried out by big business, rather than harmless folk in woolly hats and funny masks. The corporation's planners, when they finally get to consider it, should just say no.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 11, 2011
Architects reach for their comic books, David Chipperfield sets his sights on Venice, and the people of St Leonards-on-Sea get very excited about a diving board
Is the recession causing escapist fantasies in architects? It seems so. This week sees the publication online of the first instalment of Looking for Spinoza: A Shooting Bad Guys Saga. This dark, retro-style comic book by Franco Falconetto is especially enjoyable for lovers of architecture, with its detailed and rather beautiful chiaroscuro studies of Italian baroque churches and piazzas appearing as stage sets for knife-fights and shoot-outs between heroes and villains.
I hear a rumour that Falconetto is none other than Francis Terry, of classical architects Quinlan & Francis Terry. Own up, Terry. "Yes, these are my drawings," he confesses. "Originally, I started them to amuse the children, but it fast became a way of amusing myself." Explain yourself, buster, I snarl. "Architects are natural comic-book writers," says Terry, singing like a canary. "It uses the same skills of imagining people in spaces in different scenarios."
Terry clearly has a second career ahead of him, as an author and illustrator of knowing pulp fiction. So, too, has Peter Murray, former editor of the RIBA Journal and co-founder of Blueprint magazine. Murray calls A Passion to Build, his online novel, "a racy tale of two architects, Harry Jamb and Frederick Shaw, who start out in practice together but, after an acrimonious 'divorce', compete furiously". The denouement is set in the distressed fictional city of Frampton-on-Tees, a coded reference to architect and historian Kenneth Frampton, where the architects slug it out "in the competition to design the buildings for the Olympic-style EuroGames". Plot and sub-plot race along "watched and reported on by the sexually voracious Rachael Dove, architectural correspondent of the Gazette". Blimey. The book will be online next week at Clip-kit.com.
Murray's tongue may well be firmly in his cheek, yet he is following in a literary tradition that portrays fictional architects as egotistical, over-ambitious and perhaps even insane monsters. Think of Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand's blockbuster novel The Fountainhead (more than 6.5m copies sold since first published in 1943). Roark, played by Gary Cooper in the gloriously OTT film of the book, dynamites one of his own buildings after second-rate talents are brought in to complete it without him.
Then there's Malestrazza, the villainous architect in Serge Brussolo's novel Les Emmurés, who concretes his victims into the walls of a very disturbing building. In 2009, it was made into a straight-to-DVD horror starring Mischa Barton, AKA Marissa from The OC.
Venice is an architectural opera. And a soap opera, too. There were fears that Silvio Berlusconi was about to push Paolo Baratta from his role as director of the Venice Biennale in favour of his business buddy Giulio Malgara. Britain's David Chipperfield, apparently, didn't want to curate the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale if Malgara was in charge. Now, with the playboy Italian PM out and Baratta likely to stay, Chipperfield will curate the show, the most glamorous in the international architecture calendar. To date, Chipperfield's work in Venice has been for a renovation and extension to the city's San Michele cemetery. Death in Venice, you might say. He will have to think of something more life-enhancing for next year. And prontissimo too.
Ole Scheeren, former partner of Rem Koolhaas at OMA and project architect of the cinematic CCTV building in Beijing, this week revealed his design for the 268-metre Angkasa Raya tower to be built alongside the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, for Malaysian developers Sunrise Berhard. Images show a theatrical building Hollywood directors might well thrill to, with its air of Metropolis, Things to Come and The Fountainhead, in a tropical setting. The moody photograph of the architect that accompanies the press release is gloriously noir. Or possibly pulp fiction.
Finally, Quixotic Architecture has been commissioned by a group of local business people to design a new lido for St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. With views to the cliffs of Beachy Head, the proposed Lido, currently in the planning stage, is to be clustered around and below a homage to the original diving platform designed by Sidney Little. Striking, sunny images of the project evoke a world of 1930s design and seaside bathing, all brought happily up to date – architectural escapism at its sunniest.
Seaton Delaval Hall – 360º panoramic
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 7, 2011
Explore Seaton Delaval Hall using our 360º interactive panoramic tool
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 4, 2011
An octopus rescues an eyesore, shops pop up in shipping containers, and Australia ties me Barangaroo down, sport
The work of British architects spreads around the world like tentacles. And around Chiswick Roundabout, too, where Make has just won planning permission for a controversial 50-metre-high office block shaped rather like a 3D London 2012 Olympics logo wrapped in an LED-studded metal shroud. The west London building is known as the Octopus.
This particular Octopus, comprising a showroom and rooftop garden with viewing platform, as well as offices, will light up at night in a blaze of kinetic advertising and public art. Kim Gottlieb, managing director of London and Bath Estates, joint developer of the Octopus with Galliard Homes, has told Building Design magazine: "When one of the [local] councillors said: 'It's bold, it's brash, it's in your face,' I thought thank goodness someone's got it. This [London] is meant to be a 24-hour, modern, vibrant, top-three world capital city. Let's give it the architecture it deserves."
Not everyone will agree with Gottlieb. Who knows what drivers heading along the busy A4 to and from Heathrow will make of this dazzling apparition. Some – with long memories – may even refer Make, Gottlieb and the London Borough of Hounslow to Clough Williams-Ellis's spirited attack on brash new architecture, development and planning. Written in 1928 and still far from out of date, its title is England and the Octopus.
You can fish for octopuses in Sydney harbour, where work has started on the massive and highly controversial $6bn [Australian] Barangaroo development on the site of former container wharves. The sprawling area has been masterplanned by Britain's Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, and this week the Barangaroo Delivery Authority held a public meeting for local people to find out what the development, due for completion in 2020, means for Sydney. A gamut of new offices, shops and homes will fan out towards the waterfront, with a striking hotel standing above the water on a pier. The plan is for a pedestrian-friendly new quarter of Sydney, although its commercial tentacles spread far and wide.
Rogers aside, the British are clearly determined to make their mark in Australia. Whether or not this was sparked by the Queen's recent visit, now the Design Council's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment is to advise the country on how to design buildings. Some mistake, surely?
British architects, meanwhile, have been concerned by what's been going on in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a pop-up shopping centre opened last weekend. The idea of this instant mall, made from recycled shipping containers, is said to be a copy of the Boxpark mall designed by Waugh Thistleton architects and due to open any day now in Shoreditch in London. Wherever the idea came from, Boxpark and its kin are in marked contrast to developments such as Barangaroo; if and when the global economy slips into deeper recession, perhaps there will be a thrifty Boxpark lookalike near you.
In many parts of the world, where even a Boxpark mall can seem a luxury, architects need to think all the harder to make intelligent and attractive uses of scarce resources. So it is good to see the first architecture journal edited and produced in East Africa making its mark. Anza has emerged from a group of students and young architects at Tanzania's Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam.
"The printed magazine was launched at the symposium hosted by the Goethe Institute in Dar es Salaam called Global City – Local Identity?," artist and writer Leila Peacock, who is involved with the project, tells me. "The whole thing was electric. The situation there is made particularly difficult as a result of high-level corruption, but there is this strong idealistic thrust amongst the students – the first generation to be educated on home ground as opposed to going abroad, who are determined to change things."
The first issue was printed in a run of 5,000 and distributed free all over the city. At one point, the students wandered through a typical traffic jam handing out copies to people stuck in their cars. Perhaps we should try the same thing on the Chiswick Roundabout.