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Tallest skyscraper by a British Architect tops out in China

The Sheet — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:06:04 +0000

Sir Terry Farrell said fast-growing China gives British architects and engineers an opportunity to capitalise on their expertise

British architecture is about to hit a new high with the "topping out" of a record-breaking 441-metre (1,440ft) tower in south China's finance capital.

The 100-storey Kingkey Finance Tower, based in the city of Shenzhen, is part of a 417,000 square metre office, retail, entertainment, apartment and hotel complex. It will rank as the tallest building ever designed by a British architect and will tower over anything seen in the UK.

The Shenzhen structure is nearly twice the height of 1 Canada Square, the Canary Wharf tower block that is Britain's tallest building. It is also much taller than the Shard of Glass, the 310m-high development near London Bridge that will be the top dog in the UK capital when it is completed.

These claims to fame will see the architect, Sir Terry Farrell, adding another landmark to a portfolio which includes a host of high-profile projects such as the MI6 headquarters, known in the intelligence community as "Babylon-on-Thames".

The tower is the eighth-tallest building in the world, with apartments covering 210,000 square metres and 173,000 square metres given to office space. The bottom six floors will be shops, while the 28 upper floors will be occupied by a five-star St Regis hotel, complete with conference centre. The tower is topped off with a five-storey "sky garden", complete with a variety of restaurants.

"I've always been fascinated by mixed-use developments and that's the key here," said 71-year-old Farrell.

"It will be like an urban district, a market square where you can congregate, meet people and have a coffee. I love the liveliness and the buzz of mixed-use areas, which draw in people for a variety of reasons. Mono-use developments feel dead and just don't work," he added.

Farrell said that the phenomenal growth of China gave British architects and engineers – and, in turn, the struggling UK economy – a clear opportunity to boost their coffers.

"It's often said you go to America for its can-do attitude, the far east for application and detail and Europe for design and imagination – and I think that's still true. There's definitely demand for British architectural and engineering expertise in planning in China," Farrell said.

In fact Farrell, who was behind the redevelopment of the South Bank, Covent Garden and Charing Cross station – and is redeveloping the Earl's Court exhibition centre and regenerating Holborn, Bloomsbury and St Giles in central London, is already working on another even taller building in China.

Last month, his firm TFP Farrells was appointed to help design the Z15 Tower, which will come in at more than 500 metres, or 120 storeys tall.

Farrell, who has a Chinese wife, studied architecture at Newcastle University and city planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tom Bawden

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Antonina Pirozhkova obituary

The Sheet — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:43:09 +0000

Russian engineer and wife of the writer Isaac Babel, whose legacy she fought to preserve

Antonina Pirozhkova, who has died aged 101, was the leading female engineer during the construction of the Moscow metro in the 1930s. But she had an even bigger role as first the wife of the writer Isaac Babel and, following his death in 1940, the custodian of his legacy.

Pirozhkova was born in the Siberian village of Krasny Yar and showed early academic ability, helping her widowed mother at the age of 14 by tutoring other children in mathematics. By the age of 21 she was a qualified engineer and two years later she moved to Moscow. She was given a job by the newly formed Metrostroi company and helped design some of the most famous "underground palaces" in the Soviet capital, including the stations Mayakovskaya, Paveletskaya, Kievskaya, Arbatskaya and Ploshchad Revolyutsii. In 1964 she published the standard Soviet engineering textbook, Tunnels and Metros.

Pirozhkova met Babel in 1932 and they formed a relationship that lasted seven years. Their daughter, Lidiya, was born in 1937. As with many Soviet couples of the era, their marriage did not depend on a formal declaration or ceremony. The Soviet authorities later recognised Pirozhkova as Babel's widow and heir.

Outwardly it was an unusual pairing: a young Siberian engineer and a bespectacled Jewish writer, who was 15 years older and already had a daughter by his first wife and a son from a relationship with the actress Tamara Kashirina. Pirozhkova was an anchor for Babel as he faced political and artistic isolation. The couple disliked the Moscow literary scene and Babel was proud of his partner's highly skilled job. He turned down invitations on her behalf: "She is a working woman; she has no time."

In 1924 Babel had been hailed by Pravda as "the rising star of our literature". Saying he had "no imagination", he chose to experience the new Soviet era at first hand, living in Odessa's gangster neighbourhood, the Moldavanka, and riding with General Semyon Budyonny's Red Cavalry in the Soviet-Polish war in 1920. This was the material for the original and phenomenally successful short-story collections Odessa Stories (1923) and Red Cavalry (1926). But by the time he met Pirozhkova, his vivid modernist style and natural nonconformism were much less welcomed and, as he himself sardonically put it, he began cultivating "the genre of silence".

As the Stalinist repression worsened, Babel characteristically tried to play by different rules. He kept up his links with his first family, in France, had an Austrian lodger and rashly attended a salon hosted by Yevgenia Yezhova, the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the secret police, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD, which became the KGB). His luck finally ran out on the night of 15 May 1939, when he was arrested on trumped-up charges (spying for foreign powers, being a Trotskyist agent) at his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow. Babel and Pirozhkova were driven into the city and parted at the gates of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police.

Babel was shot on 27 January 1940, although his death was confirmed to Pirozhkova only in 1954 and the correct date was concealed from her for another 30 years. Pirozhkova was isolated, although allowed to keep her job. As an evacuee in the Black Sea region of Abkhazia with her daughter during the second world war, she ran the engineering team building the railway tunnels there.

Pirozhkova later said with regret: "From the beginning Babel frightened me and told me I shouldn't read what had not been finished. He said: 'I'll write it and then read it to you myself.' So even when something lay open and I passed the desk, I tried not to look at it." She began a campaign to reclaim a decade's worth of Babel's unpublished work, which had been confiscated during his arrest.

In 1989 the literary researcher Vitaly Shentalinsky discovered that the NKVD had seized 15 folders of manuscripts, 18 notebooks and pads, 517 letters, postcards and telegrams and 245 various loose sheets of paper from his apartment alone. They included all Babel's letters to Pirozhkova. In 1987 two officers from the Lubyanka visited her and told her that all of this had been burned. It was later suggested that this was not true.

In 1965 Pirozhkova retired to devote herself to Babel's legacy. In 1972 she oversaw the publication of the first reminiscences about him by writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Paustovsky and finally (in 1990) a two-volume edition of Babel's collected works.

Pirozhkova's own memoir of her life with Babel, By His Side, was published abroad after the end of the Soviet Union, with a Russian-language edition finally coming out in uncensored form in 2001. Her reminiscences about some of the remarkable contemporaries she had known, such as the film director Sergei Eisenstein, remained unpublished at the time of her death.

In 1996, Pirozhkova emigrated to the US, where she lived with Lidiya and her grandson, Andrei, who survive her.

• Antonina Nikolayevna Pirozhkova, engineer and writer, born 1 July 1909; died 12 September 2010

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Lord Foster fires up campaign to save rusting Russian radio tower

The Sheet — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:00:15 +0000

Architect brands Lenin-commissioned structure as a work of 'dazzling genius' and inspiration that must be saved

From a distance it looks a bit like an upturned wastepaper basket, soaring over the concrete skyline of southern Moscow.

The Russian capital's unique Soviet-era radio station was built in 1922 to spread the message of revolutionary communism around the world, but it is badly neglected and suffering from corrosion.

Now British architect Lord Foster has backed a campaign to save the 150-metre-high steel tower designed by the engineering genius Vladimir Shukhov.

In an open letter, Lord Foster describes the tower as "a structure of dazzling brilliance and great historical importance". Calling the structure Shukhov's masterpiece, Foster says it is the "first major landmark of the Soviet period".

Made up of a delicate lattice structure, the tower has five interlocking "hyperboloids", each smaller in size, giving the impression of an inverted telescope. The revolutionary design is an inspiration for several of Foster's own landmark projects including the Gherkin, or Swiss Re building, in the City of London.

Lenin commissioned the tower to adorn his new Soviet Union during a period of romantic optimism. It was built between 1919-1922. Nearly 90 years on, it is badly neglected and suffering from corrosion.

Russia's federal and local government are locked in dispute over which one of them should pay for repairs. Neither seems willing to stump up the cash.

In the meantime, Foster says, the structure is "neglected and dying" and without "faithful restoration" is doomed to fail. Several other leading European and US architects have backed Foster's letter, sent last month to the Moscow authorities. The art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon is another fan, and rode to the top in his recent BBC series on Russian art. Dixon-Smith hailed it as "one of the great monuments of the constructivist post-revolutionary period".

Today Shukhov's grandson, also called Vladimir, said the tower near Moscow's Shabolovskaya metro station was inaccessible and closed to visitors.

The idea was to restore it and turn it into a major Moscow tourist attraction, he said. Last year Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, expressed his support for the scheme, but since then nothing had happened, Shukhov said.

The steel framework had not undergone any anti-corrosion treatment for 20 years, he said, and was at risk of falling down. "We are in a very dangerous situation. There's been a lot of talk but no activity. You have the architectural equivalent of a diamond here, and yet nothing is being done to save it."

Under the headline "corroded masterpiece", Russia's Izvestiya newspaper contrasted official Russian indifference to the building's fate with Foster's vigorous campaign.

"Only foreigners care about its destiny," the paper said.

Russia's state TV and radio station – which owns the tower – had no money and even less desire to save it, the paper added.

Shukhov was one of the greatest structural engineers of the early 20th century and the leading engineer of his era in Russia.

He pioneered the use of new structural systems, creating hyperboloid structures of double curvature whose lightness and geometric complexity defy the imagination, even in the computer age. He also built Russia's first oil pipeline as well as numerous railway bridges.

Luke Harding

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Wheel deal: the London Eye turns 10 | Jonathan Glancey

The Sheet — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:59:14 +0000

Despite its wobbly beginnings, the capital's giant ferris wheel has become a much-loved symbol of London. And even urban sprawl seems beautiful from the top

Tony Blair officially opened the London Eye on 31 December 1999. But it was only after a number of technical glitches had been sorted out that the public was finally allowed aboard in March 2000 – 10 years ago this week. Since then, well over 30 million people have taken the vertiginous but breathtaking half-hour journey, in air-conditioned capsules, up and around what was, until two years ago, the world's biggest ferris wheel. That honour now belongs to the Singapore Flyer; with a height of 165 metres, it outranks the London Eye by a full 30 metres. But, while the Flyer looks like a gigantic version of a 19th-century original (the first of the breed, designed by George Washington Ferris, began revolving at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago), the London Eye is a fighter jet to Singapore's biplane. The Eye has since become as much a part of tourist London as Westminster Abbey, the Tower and Big Ben; a friendly curiosity, an urban eye-catcher, and an engineering wonder to compare with the Eiffel Tower.

When it was first announced, though, it was hard not to think that the London Eye was going to be some sort of Victorian throwback, an enormous music hall-era fun-fair ride among London's new wave of challenging millennium monuments– Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge and the Millennium Dome itself. At the time of its opening, the joke went that the Eye was a perfect symbol of contemporary British political culture, going around and around uselessly and getting nowhere in the process.

When, however, the design by the architects Marks Barfield was unveiled, most doubts were cast aside. The husband-and-wife team had come up with a striking and rather beautiful hi-tech big wheel. It wasn't just the high-spec design that drew attention, it was the bravura manner in which the Eye's prefabricated components were brought up the Thames on river barges to Jubilee Gardens, and the week-long drama during which, inch by inch, the giant wheel was raised from the river and up into place alongside County Hall. Now, every view in and through Westminster, and along the Thames, was changed. Suddenly, this spidery and beautifully resolved ferris wheel crowned Victorian terraces, filled unexpected views along avenues of plane trees and sat like a tiara atop government offices.

Perhaps its best aspect is that it also offers awe-inspiring and uninterrupted views over London. From up top on a clear day, the entire city can be peered down upon and encompassed. The patterns of London's growth can be seen spreading into subtopia and the green belt like rings marking the age of venerable trees. Rides on the Eye in rain, snow or at night offer their own haunting attractions.

Of London's deafeningly trumpeted rival millennium projects, the Eye has been, perhaps, the most endearing. The Dome was undermined by the unforgivably crass and soulless Millennium Experience exhibition of 2000; it was many years before it redeemed itself as today's O2 music venue. The Millennium Bridge linking Tate Modern and St Paul's Cathedral wobbled, and it was some while before its virtues could be discerned. Tate Modern became almost too popular for its own good, a heaving cultural souk – acutely in need of its planned extension – where art can occasionally be seen between massed heads and shoulders. Other millennium projects, such as the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House, were fine things, yet tame in terms of fresh design.

The London Eye was always a brave and daring adventure, a throwback to 1951's Festival of Britain, held on the same site – an era when Britain could still claim to lead the world (just) in supersonic-era design and engineering. It looks to the past as well as the future.

Jonathan Glancey

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My Cambridgeshire: an insider’s guide

The Sheet — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:06:11 +0000

Kevin Jackson, author of Bite: A Vampire Handbook, lists his top tips for the county

Leper chapel, Cambridge

If it's eeriness you're after at this time of year, Leper chapel fits the bill nicely. You'll find it just outside Cambridge, on the road to Newmarket, and as its name suggests, it was once the place of worship for a hospital devoted to sufferers of leprosy. Its doors are locked much of the time, but a sign tells you how and where to pick up a key. In recent years it has made a highly atmospheric setting for a variety of dramatic productions, and there are rumours that a local vampire group has applied to stage an event there in 2010.
cambridgeppf.org/leper-chapel.htm

Wandlebury hill fort and the Gog Magog Hills

Just a few miles south of Cambridge, with a fine view over the city from certain points, this area in and around a prehistoric hill fort is a splendid place to walk by anybody's standards, but has been a particular magnet for occultists ever since the 60s, when the maverick archaeologist and advocate of pendulum power, TC Lethbridge, declared that he had discovered the forms of three solar gods hidden just beneath the turf. The fact that conventional archaeologists have declared these figures entirely imaginary has never daunted psychogeographers and other modern antiquarians. While there, be sure to visit the grave of the Godolphin Arabian, great-grandsire of a noble strain of racehorses.

St Wendreda's church, March

Churches with angel roofs are something of an East Anglian speciality, and all are well worth the visit, but the one at St Wendreda's is of mind-expanding intensity. If you can manage it, count the roof figures – there are 120 in all – carrying emblems of the Passion, musical instruments or shields. The church dates mainly from the 14th and 15th centuries. Uplifting, moving, unforgettable.
stwendreda.co.ukBite: A Vampire Handbook by Kevin Jackson, is published by Portobello Books (£9.99)

Bedford Old and New rivers

So-called because the Earl of Bedford was the head of the group of speculators who set about their creation. Running roughly from Earith north-east towards Wisbech and King's Lynn, these are the largest of the many artificial rivers that were built in the 17th century by English and Dutch engineers to help drain the Great Fen (pictured above), from which much of modern north-eastern Cambridgeshire – including Downham Market and March – has been recovered. Before then, the Fen was a swampy area of sedge and eels – a grey and chilly version of the Florida Everglades. The drainage was a huge act of public engineering, a heroic enterprise – though the locals who were forced out might have had a quarrel with that view. It makes a bracingly bleak walk; or if you're feeling lazy, you can drive alongside it via the B1098 from Chatteris or the B1411 from Ely. A good place to start might be . . .

The Prickwillow Engine Trust and Museum of Fenland Drainage, near Ely

This is the sort of museum that would no doubt make James May feel as if he'd died and gone to heaven. The heart of the collection is a set of six large diesel-pumping engines, five of them rescued from pumping stations around the Fens, and one – the Mirrlees engine – that was used in Prickwillow itself (installed in 1924). As well as a collection of smaller engines, the museum also boasts a series of historical maps, photographs and displays outlining the history of the great drainage, and there are plenty of additional exhibits, including local agricultural tools. An ideal afternoon out for anyone with the faintest feeling for industrial archaeology.
01353 688360, prickwillow-engine-museum.co.uk

The Queen's Head pub, Newton

A superb example of the entirely unreconstructed village pub: stone floors, blazing open fires and walls festooned with antlers and other animal trophies. The food is excellent, particularly the thick and tasty soups which bubble away perpetually, subtly changing consistency and flavour as new ingredients are added. Take friends from abroad – they will swoon. Or go alone, and fantasise that time has stood still for centuries.
Fowlmere Road (01223 870436)

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