Posts Tagged Education
Letter: Architects can inspire – look at Mossbourne
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 8, 2011
I am confused by recent statements from Michael Gove. Last week he told a free schools conference that "we won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school; we won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer". Yet the previous day he had told BBC Radio 4's The World at One that "The truth about free schools is that they will introduce the sort of innovation and dynamism that we've already seen in schools like Mossbourne."
He neglected to add that this former failing school in a deprived area of London – which is now achieving spectacular academic success – was designed by my practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP). Given how many times Mr Gove and David Cameron have held up Mossbourne as the model for what they wish to achieve in their education policy, it seems odd that he now ignores the positive impact the building has had on the achievements of the school.
The design was recognised with a Riba award in 2005 and a Civic Trust award in 2006. As its architects, we are extremely proud of the considerable positive impact which the academy has had on the lives of the local community. Mossbourne (the only school RSHP has designed in the UK) was delivered outside the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. Surely it would be more appropriate to interrogate the BSF programme to see if it has been able to deliver the quality and value which it was supposed to do?
Ultimately, school design is about creating a vibrant, stimulating and motivating environment for staff as well as students. If we want schools which really reflect the commitment which this and future governments should be making to young people and their teachers, those schools should be designed by architects who really understand and care about the communities who will use them.
Good design quality, improved educational performance and value for money go hand in hand; Mossbourne community academy clearly demonstrates how all of these can be achieved.
Richard Rogers
Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
Masons’ marks get a revival
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 16, 2010
Masons' marks may be an ancient tradition, but academics find they could have plenty of modern uses
It's the flat-pack furniture problem that almost all of us have faced. You open the box, trawl through its contents, lay everything out, then cross-reference the instructions. You look at them every which way since they appear to be in Sanskrit, then have a go, and feel like you've done a decent job. Only then, disaster strikes. You turn around and see an extra three pieces of your flat-packed furniture kit lying innocently behind you. Will the bed collapse in the night?
But a remedy could be in sight. New research into the work patterns of medieval masons by academics at the University of Warwick could spell an end to the leaflet-grappling, component-finding problem of furniture assembly. So build-your-own cupboard and bed designers, listen up.
The idea is centred around a system called masons' marks, a series of sophisticated symbols that, for the past 4,000 years, have been used by designers and builders to inscribe patterns on stones to enable instructions to be transferred with ease. Originally, they helped illiterate masons to carry out their orders and know which materials fitted in where. But now Dr Jenny Alexander, of Warwick's history of art department, believes modern manufacturers could use the marks as a cheap and efficient way to help us put together self-assembly furniture at home.
"If companies that make flat-pack furniture used a system similar to masons' assembly marks to show which pieces went together, it could remove the need for the complex and often impenetrable instruction booklets they currently issue," she explains. Doing so would resurrect a system popular for centuries. Indeed, the inspiration for Alexander's research came when she was studying for a doctorate at Lincoln Cathedral, which was built in 1072 but destroyed by an earthquake soon after, and later rebuilt. The cathedral, Alexander says, "had so many of the marks all over it that I decided to see if I could use them in some way, as part of a study of the construction of the building".
She discovered that the simple designs and ciphers were cut into several faces of the dressed stone, and learned that as well as being used to transmit instructions between designers or master masons and their workforce, the marks were also used to help assemble pieces that had been carved elsewhere and then transported to the building site – just as we do with self-assembly furniture. Alexander also discovered that medieval stonemasons used to have their own marks for when they were working on part of a specific project, which would then be used as a kind of "clocking in" system to ensure they were paid for their part of the work.
"The marks had an agreed meaning within the building trade, and are understood in the same way as mathematical symbols," she explains. "So, for example, when the sign '+' means one thing in maths, another thing on a road sign, and a third thing in a religious context, as a masons' mark it has a fourth meaning – indicating where in the overall design the piece fits – which has nothing to do with the other three meanings."
Even nowadays, there's no need to travel too far to find masons' marks. They are visible on old buildings all over the world, from the stone buildings found in Pompeii to the Capitol building in Washington, and on kerb stones in Newcastle upon Tyne. "They can also be found on most medieval cathedrals and plenty of Elizabethan houses," Alexander adds, before going on to say that her research into the marks' existence stemmed from her interest in understanding how the great buildings in the past were designed and built "before the advent of modern technologies".
She explains: "It's clear that you could set a medieval mason to work building a modern cathedral and he would be able to work alongside his modern counterpart, but there's no longer an equivalent to the master mason, the person who designed and oversaw the engineering of the building – the job has now fragmented into a lot of specialisations." Alexander's current research includes an examination of the period during the 16th and 17th centuries when the architect – as we understand the job today – began to emerge, and the master mason disappeared.
"By looking at the organisation of this workforce and their use of non-literate communication systems in comparison to the medieval ones like masons' marks, we can get a sense of how long the medieval traditions lasted," she explains. "The great houses of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans can now be understood more fully by this sort of buildings archaeology, and the people who actually built these structures emerge from the shadows at last."
Some modern stone masons still use marks, but they are no longer made on to visible surfaces. Alexander does, however, have one exception: "I once met a mason in the cathedral at Trondheim, in Norway, who had a masons' mark as a tattoo," she says. But if you're hoping the marks will make a comeback in furniture flat-pack, you'll have to cross your fingers that one of the firms' bosses is reading this. "There are a few bookcases in my house with shelves the wrong way around, but I haven't contacted the manufacturer," says Alexander. "I'm just an academic, trying to understand the great buildings of the past."
The scariest building in Britain?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2010
Is the Royal Masonic School for Boys the scariest building in Britain? As Halloween looms, Jonathan Glancey visits the school adored by film-makers that's being turned into luxury flats
When the film-maker Merlin Ward was scouting for a location for his 2003 film Out of Bounds, a psychological thriller set in an eerie boarding school where bells toll ominously and a chill wind rarely stops moaning, he could scarcely believe his luck when he was shown the Royal Masonic School for Boys, a hulking structure built in 1903, in the Hertfordshire town of Bushey.
"It wasn't just that this vast Edwardian school was conveniently close to London and the film studios around Elstree," says Ward. "It was the gloriously spooky entrance tower and the sense of foreboding evoked by the surrounding buildings: cavernous, ominous, Halloween-like. I couldn't have asked for a more unnerving setting."
Nor could other directors. When Ward began filming in 2001, four other production companies were busy there. In fact, before it closed in 1977, the school had been a popular setting for murder mysteries and thrillers, including the cult 1960s TV show The Avengers. Since then, it has featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Harry Potter movies, Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and 1985's Lifeforce, in which a shuttle returns to Earth carrying space vampires. Scarier still, it even served as a law court in EastEnders.
When the school, surely a contender for Britain's scariest building, closed, its next incarnation was as an international college, before becoming the property of Comer Homes, a company founded by Brian and Luke Comer, two plasterers from County Galway. They have redeveloped some great abandoned buildings, including Colney Hatch Asylum in London, which they rechristened Princess Park Manor, after turning it into sumptuous flats complete with gyms, swimming pools, spa facilities and pretty much every luxury expected by their clients, who include high-earning footballers. They have now repeated the trick with the Royal Masonic School – or Royal Connaught Park, to give it its new name.
"It's sad in a way that it's been redeveloped," says Ward. "The school was such a brilliant studio. It was highly atmospheric. We camped out there during our shoot. It was cold and forbidding. We never saw a ghost, sadly, not even in the mortuary." The mortuary? "Oh yes – the boys who came here as orphans from the Boer and great war would sometimes die of flu and TB, if not from beatings. It seems odd today, but there was nothing unusual about a school mortuary then."
Comer Homes employed architects ADP, specialists in such work, to exorcise the Halloween spirit from the old school. "I've spent more years involved with Royal Connaught Park than any schoolboy did," says project architect Catherine Yeatman, who, with Comer's Basil Nwalema, is taking me on a tour. "Planning began in 1998, and it has evolved gradually ever since."
There are 157 flats in the old buildings, with 200 to come in new residencies hidden in a dip in the extensive grounds. The cheapest flat, which has just one bedroom but could never be described as cramped, costs £369,000; the most expensive, a three-bedroom penthouse, is £2.5m.
"It's hardly a fast-buck project," says Nwalema, "but this type of complex – big and beautifully built, at a time when British architecture was exceptionally well crafted – makes for special homes today."
As a mournful drizzle sets in, we start off from under the clock tower. Originally built by freemasons for sons of impoverished and bereaved families, the white-stone-and-red-brick complex was designed by the firm Gordon, Lowther and Gunton. Their approach was, to say the least, eclectic. For their schools, chapels and office blocks, the architects employed a pageant of styles drawn from the spectrum of British history: the daunting tower alone reads like an encyclopedia of gothic design.
Their work could be epic, though. It takes an age to walk from the tower to the enormous dining hall at the far end of a cloistered quadrangle. Almost too large for the eye to take in, the hall, which will be used for big social events, boasts dark timber panelling, exposed beams and lofty gothic windows that pour light into an echoing cavern. I'm assuming it wasn't much fun here. A record of school life written by Geoff Kirby, a pupil from 1949 to 1953, is divided into sections entitled: I Enter Hell, The Curse of Games, Censored Letters and Beaten Bare Buttocks, and My Eyes Are Ruined By Incompetent Medical Staff.
Today, a glazed section in the dining hall floor gives a glimpse of the luxurious underground swimming pool. Its blue waters look enticing: for a happy moment, all the daunting school architecture is warmed and tamed. Yet if the old dining hall, with its horribly long echo, feels in any way sinister, the unrestored assembly hall is the stuff of a Hammer House of Horror nightmare. Yeatman tells me that this appallingly large room will eventually be conjured into five four-storey flats, each with a pair of cathedral-sized windows.
We move on to imposing towers and wings, now flats, some big enough to house an entire football team. There is an impressive gym with gothic decor; and that swimming pool, underground yet ingeniously daylit; as well as other rooms due to be turned into club rooms and restaurants. A magnificent kitchen block, with clerestory windows, is to be made into further flats boasting impressive top-lit, oak-beamed roofs.
"One of the good things," says Yeatman, "is that we've been able to demolish poor ancillary buildings that grew up alongside the walls of the Edwardian school like architectural fungus. Now the school has been turned into homes, you see it more as it was [originally]. We've also been able to replace black-pitch yards and playgrounds with gardens."
"And," says Nwalema, "the birds have returned, along with a lot of wildlife." Just as I'm about to suggest bats, rats and giant spiders – if not vampires and zombies – a murder of crows alight on a gothic gable and arrange themselves into a line, cawing menacingly.
There are still a large number of buildings like this in Britain: schools, hospitals, asylums dating from a time when Britain was able to indulge in architecture that was the stuff of architects' dreams and gothic horror nightmares. While it is good to see them returning to favour, their ghosts and demons expelled, it does pose a question: where will directors of the future go to find places as scary and Halloween-like as the Royal Masonic School for Boys?
Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 18, 2010
A Brixton school designed by Zaha Hadid contributes to the debate on education – mainly by being so excellent, writes Rowan Moore
Zaha Hadid is a celebrated architect. You have probably read the articles by now: most famous woman architect in history, Pritzker prize winner, forceful character, born in Iraq or possibly, if the journalist hasn't done their research properly, Iran. She has just completed her first school, a powerful, singular object in Brixton, south London, called the Evelyn Grace Academy, it serves Coldharbour Ward which, according to the school's principal, has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe.
As it happens, Hadid's office in Clerkenwell, central London, is in a former school building. It is one of hundreds built in a few years to the designs by Edward Robson, following the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which introduced universal free education. Robson created a basic standard design with simple architectural qualities – light, airiness, durability, good details and proportions – that could be varied and adapted to different sites. His schools became beacons of dignity in areas where there was little, and when some were eventually replaced, their innate qualities meant they converted easily into desirable flats, or design studios like Hadid's.
Both Hadid's work and her business premises are pertinent to the debate going on about the design of schools, prompted by the remarks of the education secretary Michael Gove and the waspish columnist-turned-education-reformer Toby Young. They claim that the last government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme was a monstrous waste of money, that architects "creamed off cash which should have been going out to the front line", that "the link between buildings and academic performance is practically zero", that "vainglorious architects" had inflated budgets with "extravagant fantasies."
Gove and Young make important points – that teachers matter more than buildings, and that Building Schools for the Future wasted much money – but spoil it with some gamma minus homework and a seeming delight in being boorish and ignorant. Young resembles a yapping attention-seeker in the back row of form IIIC.
They seem to be saying that it doesn't matter if children are educated in leaky sheds. They have also decided that architects are the main culprits of the failings of the Building Schools for the Future programme, when the main folly of BSF was the last government's grandiose decision to transform every secondary school building in the country, without much assessment whether this was the best way to improve education. It then created absurdly complicated and expensive contractual procedures, in which spending on architectural quality was cut to a minimum, with the result that very many truly terrible school designs were produced. The creaming off was done by contractors, financiers, lawyers and other consultants, not architects, and there was too little design, not too much. "A new loo seat is all very well," guffaws Young, "but does it have to be handcrafted by an Italian artisan? What's wrong with B&Q?", seemingly unaware that the chance of anything being handcrafted under BSF was remote.
Into the midst of this debate sails the stately form of the Evelyn Grace Academy. This is not part of the Building Schools for the Future programme, but is the result of different Labour policy – the creation of state-maintained but independently run schools called academies, whose construction costs would be partly sponsored by businesses and benefactors. If BSF schools were bought in bulk, academies were bespoke. The present government likes the idea of academies, if not their architecture, and wants to make more schools like them.
The academy is one of eight supported by ARK (Absolute Return for Kids), "whose purpose is to transform children's lives". This glamorous charity was set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, hedge-fund multimillionaire and squire of Uma Thurman. Evelyn Grace is also individually sponsored by another hedge-fund manager, David Gorton. ARK's other schools include the Globe Academy in Southwark, south London, by Amanda Levete.
Peter Walker, principal of Evelyn Grace, stresses old-fashioned discipline and endeavour. Its ethos is to "achieve excellence" in "an industrious, orderly and respectful environment". It has a longer school day than most, from 8.30am to 5pm. It has uniforms – blazers, ties, V-necks – which pupils are expected to keep in good order. As we tour the school he calls children to order for standing in the wrong place or in the wrong way. But the strictness is also tempered: the academy, which will eventually have 1,200 pupils, is subdivided into four "small schools", so that children are not swamped by the vastness of the whole.
And then there is the building. On the breast pocket of the traditional-looking blazers is a traditional-looking shield within which a surprisingly constructivist crest appears, a leaning Z with a dot above it. This is based on the plan of the school which, with the dynamism for which Zaha Hadid Architects always strive, this thrusts diagonally from one side of the site to the other. Playgrounds and sports pitches occupy the spaces between the building and the streets on either side, with a bright red 100m running track stretching from one side to the other, the building bridging it at half way. As a proclamation of alertness to dozy morning arrivals, the track is hard to beat.
More oblique lines stride across the elevations, veering into curves where the building takes corner, and helping mark out the four "small schools". Inside, the building has a basically simple plan, with classrooms on either side of broad corridors, but rendered complex by the architects' irregular geometries and double-height halls serving the small schools at different levels.
The aims of the school and of the architects are not a perfect fit. Hadid's architecture communicates the seriousness and high ambition that Walker claims for his school, but it expresses the intimacy of the "small schools" less well. There's also a conflict between the flying angles and the rectangular shapes that classroom planning and economic construction tend to favour. In places it looks like a standard gridded building to which exotic geometries have been cosmetically applied.
What the building does best, says Walker, is communicate to pupils that "someone is valuing them". It is palpably exceptional, adult and unpatronising. You can tell that dedicated people have tried hard to do something out of the ordinary. It also creates moments of adventure and intrigue, such as the unexpected overlapping of spaces, which counter the potential boredom of big schools.
As to its contribution to the great schools debate, it can be taken as evidence for both sides, or neither. Young would count it among the "extravagant fantasies", as it was neither easy nor especially cheap to build (£36m, with a contractor pulling out in the process). Proponents of design would repeat Peter Walker's argument, that this is a piece of magnificence dedicated to children whose lives don't have much.
The truth is that the Evelyn Grace Academy is a one-off from an age that has already passed, when the City of London's firestorm of wealth threw off sparks of philanthropy to less lucky districts a few miles distant. It is not something that is repeatable for hundreds of new schools, and Young would be right not to hire Hadid or Norman Foster for the free school he is trying to establish.
But it is idiotic to conclude that spaces of learning are unimportant. Even if no connection can be proved between design and exam results, which is subject to debate, children should experience well-made spaces, just as they should experience art and music. The task is how to achieve this without extravagance. The search should be on for a new Edward Robson, an architect who could do this. The aim should be to find an updated version of the London Board Schools.
Gove, Young and the architectural profession should be on the same side. They should stop squabbling, find a bit of Evelyn Grace Academy discipline and work together. And if Arpad Busson wants to spend ARK's resources most effectively he should fund their efforts.
Letters: Yesterday’s Maxxis
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2010
Thank you, Owen Hatherley, for pointing out the paradox that British architecture seems to have more success as an export, despite some amazing opportunities in the UK (Our cheap old blocks, 4 October).
However, many countries where British architects build (including Italy) have some pretty dreadful modern buildings and their fair share of "cheap detailing". Perhaps your correspondent misses a more obvious reason for the brilliance of buildings such as Maxxi – that in civic architecture we British have lost the ability to be good clients.
Great civic architecture needs confident, visionary clients, not committees encumbered by procedures. In the UK we eschew the raw intensity of the relationship between client and architect with layers of advisers and project managers.
Think back to the heyday of great civic architecture in the UK – not just the Victorians but between the world wars and the early 1950s – and one will find examples of individuals in public office with a breadth of vision. This, together with creative architects, made enduring public buildings of the quality of today's Maxxi.
Malcolm Reading
London
University architecture shapes up for a revolution
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 31, 2010
Learning Landscapes, a research project into the relationship between students, lecturers and researchers and the buildings they use, aims to bring a new creativity to campus design
Student hostels aren't hotels", says Professor Mike Neary, "nor are university campuses business parks." That, though, is what they have been in danger of turning into over the last decade, says Neary, political sociologist, dean of teaching and learning, and director of the centre for educational research and development at the University of Lincoln. "A decade," he says, "in which neo-liberal economics and the business model for education and politics, as well as business itself, appeared to have triumphed. Yet, it's all over now. Finished."
You can tell that Neary is more than pleased that attitudes to education in Britain are changing now that politicians and educators have finally realised that the brutal, roller-coaster ways of global capitalism are no friends to learning. And yet, over the last decade, many universities have invested in eye-catching architecture aimed, he says, at attracting investors and business, as a way of transforming places that should be free-thinking and outside the immediate commercial equation into marketing-driven "brands". Students have become "customers" in business-style machines for teaching; these are expected to serve the economy by slotting graduates neatly into profitable jobs.
To counteract this tendency and help re-think what universities are, what they are for and how they might build, occupy and use space intelligently – even critically, Neary has spent much of the last three years leading the research for a project called Learning Landscapes in Higher Education. This was set up at Lincoln with Professor David Chiddick, former vice-chancellor of the university, in the chair. Chiddick is the town planner, urban and transport economist who led the University of Lincoln from its old home in Hull to the cathedral city in the 1990s. He has been responsible for some fine-looking buildings on the new Lincoln campus, not least the elegant new school of architecture designed by Rick Mather in the long Gothic shadow of the medieval cathedral.
The Learning Landscapes project probed the ways those who commission university buildings, those who run them, as well as those who teach, learn and research in them actually relate to built space. What role, if any, do students and academics play in the design and use of lecture theatres and other conventional teaching spaces? To what extent are new buildings simply supplied, something that staff and students blindly accept? Is there a growing gap between the concerns of academia, architecture and estate management?
Working with the architects and space-planners DEGW, Neary and his colleagues visited 12 universities in Scotland, England and Wales, conducting extensive interviews in each. The team asked their hosts, including student representatives, what buildings on their campus they would like to "keep, toss or create". What sort of buildings and spaces did they think might live up to Neary's "three Es" – "efficiency, effectiveness and expression"?
As John Worthington of DEGW puts it, the practical aim of this research has been "to dissolve the division between estate departments and teaching and learning that so often results in silos of responsibility and a lack of understanding of each others' work and needs."
Neary, though, believes that the research – published in the spring – is only a stepping-stone on the way to campuses that function as well as they should. "It's been an academic exercise," he says, "and this is just what it needs to have been. Universities are academic. What we need to do is to think of the ways in which the process of research, of critical, academic thinking by students and teachers alike can shape the physical environment around them. A university's architecture and the spaces within it, though, might adopt many different forms and models."
Before I get the chance to ask how such buildings and spaces might possibly look, and how they might be used, Neary points me to Virginia Woolf's advice on how to build a university in Three Guineas, a book-length essay published in 1938. Seeing, during the heyday of totalitarianism in Europe, that our universities had done precious little to breed either a respect for liberty or a hatred for war, Woolf believed such institutions should go back to true basics. "Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap easily combustible material, which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cages. Let the pictures and books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation by their own hands cheaply."
"The most convincing new university buildings", says Neary, "are those where students are given real responsibility for managing and supervising the spaces within which they learn, as well as acting as support for other students' learning. The Learning Grid at the University of Warwick is the most developed form of this new kind of space."
Neary was at Warwick before Lincoln. Designed by the university library with architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, the Learning Grid is, according to its manager, Rachel Edwards, "a technology-rich, flexible and informal learning environment, open 24/7 with a capacity for 300 people". Essentially, this is a fusion of a library and a common room. It allows disciplines to cross. It encourages students to help one another as well as themselves. It is generating fresh lines of research. "It's been breaking down the gap between students and teachers," says Neary, "with students becoming part of the academic project rather than consumers of dispensed knowledge."
Now that Neary had given me a concrete, and successful, example of what a new "learning landscape" might be, my mind flashed back to the visit I made a few months ago to the new Rolex learning centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Designed by the Tokyo-based architects, SANAA, this extraordinary curved and light-filled building, with its garden courtyards, its continually shifting floors, its almost complete rejection of conventional rooms, its lack of corridors and doors, and its gentle spirit of playfulness and inquiry, has been built to bring students from all faculties together. Here is a happily uncertain place of research, of academic inquiry, of debate, research and new thinking. Everything seems possible here. No restrictions on physical movement or thought. "Our focus", says SANAA, "is always to find different relationships."
This is very much what Neary and his colleagues are rooting for, too. It implies, though, nothing less than a quiet revolution in the ways British universities are designed and run. It also demands fresh and original thinking. "One thing I noticed as we travelled from university to university", says Neary, "was how there's a tendency to copy or clone what other universities have already done. While this leads to some incremental learning about what makes teaching and learning spaces work, it does point to a rush to conformity rather than experimentation."
"You can't contain a university," says Neary, meaning that its academic mind should always be expanding and that architecture and space planning within buildings need to respond to this idea. "I suppose you could sum up my approach, in headline terms, as a damning critique of the neo-liberal university. It is, but it's far from impractical. In fact, as Woolf implied, you could create a new, innovative and academically challenging environment in buildings designed in a spirit of poverty."
Neary doesn't demur when I suggest that is what certain orders of medieval monks tried to do. The austere beauty of a Cistercian monastery was no real bridle to thought, although, of course, such places were there to serve God before anyone or anything else.
So, has much of new university building been carried out in vain over the past decade? "Of course there've been some beautiful and excellent buildings", says Neary. "What's been wrong is the whole approach to treating universities as businesses, as an appendage to the economy, rather than places where ideas can be dangerous."
Learning Landscapes in Higher Education makes the point that while academics have been able to make an important contribution "as clients and customers of the project management process", they need to inject academic ideas into the shaping of university buildings and campuses. The Learning Grid at Warwick and the Rolex learning centre at Lausanne give some idea of what may yet be done, and yet, as Neary would say, these examples, no matter how alluring, are not there to be copied. Universities must work things out for themselves.
Meanwhile, as Morag Schiach, pro-vice chancellor for teaching and learning at Queen Mary, University of London and one of Neary's interviewees, bluntly reminds us, "the extent to which higher education should foster intellectual and cultural liberty in the face of pressing economic demands from industry and government is still unresolved."
Letters: Historic schools
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 27, 2010
While impressive GCSE scores at the Barclay school in Stevenage were rightly the main story (Leaking roofs and crumbling classrooms can't halt George and Co's learning surge, 25 August), it's a pity that the piece repeated the pervasive myth that listing always stands in the way of work on a building, whether necessary repairs or alteration to suit changing needs. Many listed schools from every period have been adapted and modernised as educational needs have changed. Recent schemes for listed 20th-century schools, such as Richmond school in Yorkshire and Haggerston school in London, have delivered sensitive and effective refurbishment at a fraction of the cost of a new building, and this would be possible at the Barclay school too. Listing is there to flag up buildings of national special interest, not stand in the way of progress.
Jon Wright
Is straw the building material of the future?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2010
Straw houses could help to cut carbon emissions – and new research proves that they won't blow down
Building his house of straw didn't do the first little pig any favours, but a modern take on straw-bale construction may well be the grand design of the future if results coming out of the University of Bath are accepted by the construction industry.
Think of a straw-bale house and you might imagine a tumbledown shack that leaks, creaks, slumps and smells somewhat of the farmyard. But step into BaleHaus, a startlingly contemporary looking prototype home that has been built on the Bath campus, and there's nary a wisp of straw to be seen. Instead, you're in the hallway of an upside-down house with two bedrooms and a bathroom on the ground floor, and an airy open-plan living area upstairs. It feels like a little piece of Scandinavia has just arrived in Somerset.
The straw bales, it turns out, are all packed tightly inside a series of prefabricated rectangular wooden wall frames, which are then lime-rendered, dried and finally slotted together like giant Lego pieces, called ModCell panels.
The problem with straw houses, it seems, isn't that they don't work, but that people perceive them as being a bit hippy and not particularly durable. Add to that the problems of getting a mortgage – very few lenders will consider straw-bale construction – and it's hardly surprising that most homes in the UK are still built of either brick or stone.
The benefits of straw, points out Professor Peter Walker, director of the University of Bath's BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials, are that "it's cheap, widely available and a good insulator. It's been used in building houses for hundreds of years."
As a by-product of an industry that exists all over the world – the stalks that remain after grain has been harvested – straw also helpfully soaks up carbon from the atmosphere and locks it in, so long as it is not allowed to decompose. For the building industry, which currently depends on materials with very high embedded energy costs – concrete and brick are expensive in carbon terms both to make and to transport – straw could therefore offer a welcome solution to housing's greenhouse gas emissions.
However stylishly modern your environmentally friendly straw-bale house may look, however, you still want to know that it won't get sopping wet in a thunderstorm or go up in a whoosh of flames if you knock over a candle. The results now being published by Walker and his research partner, Dr Katharine Beadle, who have spent the last 18 months testing the BaleHaus against an exhaustive list of risk factors that could rot it, burn it or blow it down, so far seem to be reassuring.
"You always want a bit of drama, but we didn't get it!" laughs Beadle of the day the team took a ModCell unit to a test laboratory and tried to reduce it to ashes by strapping it to a fiery furnace and raising the temperature to over 1,000C.
"It's a standard test to replicate a fire in a building," explains Walker.
"You want a minimum of 30 minutes' resistance; that means you know that a house will at least retain its structural integrity for half an hour, which gives people a chance to get out."
It took an hour-and-a-half of being in direct contact with the flames, says Beadle, before the lime render began to drop off, "and then the straw did start to burn back, but because it's so compacted it suffered more charring than actual disintegration."
After waiting another 45 minutes and finding that the panel still hadn't failed, the team gave up and stopped the experiment, secure in the knowledge that the material had performed way beyond the requirements of building regulations.
When it came to blowing the house down – hydraulic jacks were placed against the walls to replicate wind forces pushing against the bales – the ModCell panels moved a few millimetres, but stayed within the tolerances allowed for by the computer modelling carried out prior to its construction.
That, says Walker, could be very good news for the price of the eventual ModCell building system.
"It means the house is stiffer than it needs to be, so we now have the option of taking away some of that stiffness – ie, reduce its internal timber – and that could reduce the cost."
The approximate cost of the current modular building system for this design is £132,000 from above the concrete slab. For a smallish two-bedroomed house with one large open-plan kitchen/diner, that doesn't seem particularly cheap given that straw is supposed to be inexpensive, and you'd still have to buy the plot and dig the foundations.
"Cost is a challenge to the introduction of this technology, but as a prototype house I think it stacks up well," says Walker.
"The aspiration is that it should be cost-competitive, with more savings coming through reduced heating bills."
To replicate the heat given off by humans and appliances, arrays of incandescent lightbulbs on timers blaze in every room at pre-programmed times of day "to see how much heat escapes, and what level of heating would be needed at different times of year," explains Beadle.
"That environmental modelling will give us all the numbers about the energy the house is predicted to use. And if we are predicting how it will operate given climate change, we can then put in those variables."
Sensors embedded within each wall panel constantly monitor the degree of moisture absorbed and then released back through the breathable lime render into the air outside by the panels. And on the airtightness test that was carried out, BaleHaus came in way under the building regulations threshold, and did considerably better than the far lower "best practice" standard.
Next up is going to be the flood test. Disappointingly, the researchers aren't simply going to leave the bath taps running: instead, they'll stand a panel in a metre of water, measure how long it takes to dry out and assess whether using industrial dryers causes damage to the straw.
"Longer term, we'd like to maybe get some people to live in it, a family of three or four perhaps, and see how it performs in a real-life situation," says Walker.
Student accommodation, I wonder? Walker suddenly looks a bit concerned for his straw-bale baby, so probably only mature, well-behaved responsible students who will promise no rampaging house parties should apply. But who knows when the first straw-bale halls of residence will be built for students desperate for some decent, earth-friendly and thermally efficient digs?bre
Scientists to rebuild ‘Coronation Street’ house in lab to study energy use
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 28, 2010
Salford University staff to simulate life in terraced two-up, two-down in effort to make UK's housing stock greener
Energy-efficiency scientists are to study how people live by rebuilding an entire, redbrick Manchester terraced house inside a university laboratory's sealed testing chamber.
The two-up, two-down dwelling is identical to those portrayed in Coronation Street, television's oldest surviving soap, and to more than two million real-life homes.
It will be used for power-saving experiments in simulated climates featuring high winds, snow and Manchester's notorious rain.
The pre-first world war house is to be salvaged from a nearby demolition scheme. It will be dismantled within the next fortnight and rebuilt in the Energy Hub at Salford University.
Gas, water and electricity will be piped in and furniture installed, with staff from 13 academic departments taking turns to play the part of residents.
Life in this "Energy House" will be as busy as in any of the terraces which sprang up across the North of England to house those working in mines and mills, but focused on entirely modern concepts such as carbon-reduction equipment and smart-meter tests.
Psychologists will join engineers in a series of experiments to see if particular wall or carpet colours make people feel warmer and reduce the demand for heat. Home energy use accounts for 30% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.
"It's a house from the past, working for the future," said Dr Nigel Mellors, associate dean of science, engineering and technology at Salford and one of the team running a project aimed to last 20 years or more.
"But this one is only the beginning'" he said. "We reckon we'll know everything we need to about how to improve a terrace like this after about three years. Then we'll knock it down and build something different. Perhaps a typical 1960s house, to see how that can be improved."
The project is designed to parallel work on new-build energy-saving homes, recognising that many housebuyers prefer older properties for other reasons.
Dave Ritter, sustainability director at BDP architects, who are also involved with the scheme, said the sheer number of surviving terraces was proof of their appeal.
"They are in many ways an extremely successful design, with a particularly good sense of community and neighbourly links," he said.
"They are on a nice scale and sensibly laid-out inside. But energy-saving was not an issue at the time they were built, and this project is an imaginative and very practical way of putting that right."
Remodelled terraces have already proved a success in the Lancashire Pennine towns of Nelson and Colne and also in Salford, notably at Chimney Pot Park where the developers Urban Splash have "upended" the old model, giving 19th century terraces sleeping quarters downstairs and living rooms on the first floor.
Leeds has found a huge market as starter homes for its 40,000-plus back-to-back terraces, once condemned as slums for having inadequate ventilation but now, with three of their four walls comfortably sandwiched by other homes, praised for saving heat and economical use of space.
Green variations also include some Northern towns' policy of "alternate demolition", where the clearing of every other row of barrack-like terraces has doubled the gardens and open space of those left.
Larger scale demolition of traditional terraces by government housing renewal projects has caused anger in Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire's former milltowns.
Professor Steve Donnelly from Salford's faculty of science said terraced houses had won their case for reprieve but now needed "ways of being more efficient, as they are going to house people for generations to come. That requires detailed and robust research, which the Energy House will provide".
Tony Juniper, former director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Domestic energy use accounts for a huge proportion of emissions which we have to reduce. The millions of real-life terrace houses like this one are going to play an important part."
John Alker, policy director at the UK Green Building Council, said: "This looks like a great piece of research and it will be particularly interesting to see the results on behaviour, where less has been done to date.
"But let's not forget that there is a hell of lot that we know already – the biggest barrier to low carbon home refurbishment going mainstream has tended to be the upfront cost to consumers, and that is set to be tackled by the Energy Bill in the form of 'Pay As You Save schemes'."
Our cheap old blocks | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 3, 2010
Again the Stirling prize goes to a building abroad. British clients prefer their architecture parochial
For the fourth time, the Stirling prize, the award for "the building that has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year", has been awarded to a building outside the UK. In itself, that isn't so alarming – the prize aims to show how influential British architecture is abroad. Yet looking at the shortlist, the contrast between the British and European entries was unflattering. We had a small block of "live/work units" assisting in the gentrification of east London; a drab remodelling of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; two schools, as a protest against Michael Gove's axing of the Building Schools for the Future programme; and two real contenders, neither of them realisable in the UK, David Chipperfield's fragmented remaking of the Berlin Neues Museum, and Zaha Hadid's monstrous, overwhelming Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome. With their cheap PFI detailing and stylistic bet-hedging, the UK entries didn't stand a chance.
There were worthy buildings in the UK that could have been on the list – most obviously the lace-patterned concrete shipping containers of Caruso St John's Nottingham Contemporary, though this is too allusive and peculiar for the optimistic Stirling. The judges usually have a message to communicate, and the small scale and alleged social purpose of recent winners – such as the Accordia housing scheme in Cambridge, or the Maggie's cancer care centre in Hammersmith – were taken as protests against the recent fetish for the spectacular, signature, "iconic" building. Apparently this time the judges were initially hostile to Hadid, but were won over by the relentless spatial aggression of Maxxi. Yet the unintended message about the provincialism of British clients is clear enough, given that Hadid is most famous for not building in the UK. Her most notorious British work is still the Cardiff Bay Opera House that was cancelled in 1995. However, she finished a tiny cancer care centre in Fife in 2007, and has finally completed a building in London – the Evelyn Grace Academy, which opened last month.
In her victory speech, Hadid drew attention to the architect the prize is named after, James Stirling, designer of three still deeply controversial red brick university buildings – the Florey halls of residence at Queens College in Oxford, the History Faculty in Cambridge and the Leicester Engineering Building. A new book, Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy, claims that the trauma these caused – not only were they architecturally extreme, but poor maintenance, changes made during construction and simple ineptitude condemned them to functional failure – set back British modern architecture, perhaps irrevocably. Although the trilogy are now listed and protected, Stirling designed council housing schemes too, in Preston and Runcorn, both long demolished.
In the fearlessness and fierceness of her work, Hadid is Stirling's heir, and this is surely one of the reasons why British clients avoid her. Modern architecture here is jolly, cheap, brightly coloured and optimistic. Hadid's major buildings, such as Maxxi or the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, are the sort of architecture that apparently terrifies British audiences – hewn from thick slabs of grey concrete, harsh and uncompromising.
For many of her clients, that flamboyance makes Hadid something of a heroic individualist, neglected by the masses. In recent years she has built prolifically in the Alps, in the United Arab Emirates – providing the sort of dramatic form-giving for ski-jumps, museums, opera houses and luxury towers that some have dubbed "oligarchitecture".
She has often expressed her desire to design, like Stirling did, social housing, functional buildings for everyday life. It's perhaps appropriate that the sponsor of her first educational building is hedge fund manager and "venture philanthropist" Arpad "Arki" Busson. Some have made the connection between the weightless, swarming formalism of Hadid's recent work and financialised capitalism – architect Sam Jacob called it "an architecture of spectacular, hollow unreality: based on unreal money, housing unreal programmes ... (inspired by) the systematised abstraction of late capitalism", so its patronage is apt.
Yet Evelyn Grace, in south London, was realised by the same PFI methods as any other school in the UK, pieced together by Capita. And while it might promise that architecture as powerful as Hadid's could be put to everyday use, it's as an exception, as the signature for an "aspirational" academy. Most of us will make do with what Alastair Campbell called "bog-standard comprehensives", and bog-standard architecture.
Architecture, Art and design, Building and town and country planning, Comment, Education, The Guardian, UK news
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