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Country diary: Portland: Messages in limestone

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:52:49 +0000

Portland: Behind us, in Portland stone, was the great pile of St George's church, looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here

We were chilled by gusts blowing off a rough sea across a bleak graveyard close to the windswept edge of Portland – the great limestone promontory, almost an island, only tenuously linked to the mainland below Weymouth by the narrow pebble strand of Chesil Bank. Between us and the shingle beach below was a quarry extracting the famous stone, good for carving yet durable, that Wren used for St Paul's Cathedral and that has adorned fine buildings before and since.

All around us were ranks of seemingly numberless tombs and gravestones leaning at varied angles, made of Portland stone, and most fashioned with elaborate carving, a tribute to the tradition and skill of Portland craftsmen. And behind us, also in Portland stone, was the arresting sight of the great pile of St George's church, in its solitary space outside the town, built by a local man, inspired by Wren, and looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here. Pevsner's guide to the buildings of Dorset calls it the finest 18th-century church in the county.

On our last trip to these parts, we had kept to the sheltered mainland coast and the wooded Rodwell trail, but now we had been brought to this exposed place by a chance meeting with the granddaughter of a man who had once been sexton and gravedigger here. She told us of the toil and problems involved in his work digging in the shale, and of his care of the graves for families who had moved away. And this stark place at a southern extremity of the country had an elemental feel, emphasised by inscriptions on tombstones near the church door; there is a memorial to Wm Pearce, killed by lightning while on Her Majesty's service "atop Chesil Beach" in 1858, and to Mary Way and William Lano, shot by the press gang in April 1803 (she died of her wounds in May).

• This article was amended on 26 January 2012. The original referred to William Leno instead of Lano.

John Vallins

Kevin McCloud’s grand design for British housing | feature

The Sheet — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:46:44 +0000

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.

Rowan Moore

Eco-home developer BioRegional Quintain to shut

The Sheet — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:50:59 +0000

Property developer behind environmentally sustainable schemes will halt work after Middlehaven first phase

The UK's highest-profile sustainable developer, BioRegional Quintain, is to be wound up after its parent company, the property developer Quintain, decided to focus on the London market.

BioRegional Quintain, originally set up as a joint venture by the influential environmental charity behind "One Planet Living" and Quintain in 2005, will finish the 80-home first phase of the Middlehaven scheme in Middlesbrough, and then wind itself up.

BioRegional Quintain's chief executive, Pete Halsall, told this week's Building magazine: "It is extremely sad but it is part of a wider decision of Quintain's board to focus on its core business. My understanding is that Quintain wants to be able to express sustainability in its developments in a different way."

Halsall confirmed that the venture would shut, with the loss of five jobs. It leaves the Homes and Communities Agency's (HCA) £200m, 750-home Middlehaven scheme without a residential developer for its later phases, raising fears for the project's green credentials.

BioRegional Quintain will also withdraw from the London Development Agency's prestigious One Gallions project in east London, where it was selected in 2007 with Crest Nicholson and Southern Housing Group to build a model 260-home environmentally sustainable development.

At its peak before the downturn, BioRegional had a £350m development pipeline on six sites. Its most successful scheme was the award-winning One Brighton joint venture with Crest Nicholson, which completed last year and included allotment spaces for residents to grow their own food on the roof of the development.

The joint venture was dedicated to the 10 principles espoused by BioRegional Quintain's "One Planet Living" philosophy, including the need for developments to be zero carbon and zero waste, to use local food, and promote residents' "health and happiness".

Wembley developer Quintain bought BioRegional's share in the joint venture last year. Halsall, who will leave the business, said the move did not mean that the kind of development promoted by BioRegional Quintain was a thing of the past, and that he would shortly be announcing a new venture dedicated to "deep green" developments. "There is still tremendous potential. Quintain has to focus on its primary portfolio right now but this kind of development is absolutely still the future."

The firm's demise was lamented by two Stirling prize-winning architects, both of whom have worked with the developer. Peckham Library architect Will Alsop, who was the master planner on Middlehaven, said: "It is very sad news. This was a company very committed to doing things in a more responsible way."

Peter Clegg, of Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, which designed One Brighton, called the development a "great shame".

"It was a joint venture between some of the most conscientious sustainability thinkers of the past 10 years and one of the more significant developers, which had significant resources," he said.

David Curtis, HCA executive director, said: "While this is disappointing news, we remain firmly committed to Middlehaven. We are in discussions with BioRegional's parent company, Quintain Estates, to find the best way forward for their work at Middlehaven."

London’s new airport: should Beijing be a blueprint for the Isle of Grain?

The Sheet — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:12:27 +0000

Architect Norman Foster says a Thames estuary hub is essential for Britain's economy; critics warn of a £50bn white elephant that could harm the environment

What is at stake, according to all sides of the argument, is nothing less than the economic and spiritual future of the nation. We are in danger of "denying future generations to come", says architect Lord Foster. It is about the importance of our "world-class natural environment", says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It could be a "white elephant" that would deal a near-fatal blow to our economy, says Sir Terry Farrell, another leading architect. Also at stake is national identity: how much Britain should try to match growing countries such as China, and how much we should do our own thing.

They are talking about airports, more particularly the idea of the "hub", the place where airlines choose to have interchanging flights, which is not only good for the airport business but also any business that relies on the best possible air connections. Heathrow is such an airport now, but its two runways are at 99% of their capacity, and air travel keeps growing, so it is in danger of losing ground to Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris. A third runway, deeply unpopular with people living under its flight path, has been ruled out by the government, the opposition, and the mayor of London.

So last week Foster, in partnership with engineers Halcrow and economic consultancy Volterra, unveiled a plan for Thames Hub, a four-runway airport to be built on the Isle of Grain in north Kent, on the Thames estuary.

Building anew would achieve the best possible integration of planes and trains, the best provision for logistics, and the most modern, efficient terminals. Planes would mostly approach over water rather than densely populated areas. It would connect to the high-speed rail link built for the Channel tunnel and provide tens of thousands of jobs for the never-quite-achieved revitalisation of the area known as the Thames Gateway.

It is not the first plan to build an airport in the estuary. An attempt to build one at Foulness in Essex was scuppered by the 1973 oil crisis, and more recently Cliffe, near the Isle of Grain, has been mooted, but the Foster plan is the most ambitious. It is not just for an airport, but a new tidal barrier to protect London from flooding, a high-speed orbital railway that would roughly follow the path of the M25, and railway connections to seaports and northern cities. The total cost is put at £50bn, with benefits to the economy put at £150bn. Backers say that they are attracting interest from private investors.

Foster's inspiration is China. In the 1990s he designed Hong Kong's new airport, which required the levelling and reshaping of a bumpy island. He also designed the gigantic Terminal 3 in Beijing, which took four years to realise and opened in time for the 2008 Olympics. Now an even bigger airport is already being planned for the city. Foster has long admired the speed with which these were built, and laments how Britain has dithered about London's airports. Heathrow's Terminal Five took 26 years from conception to completion, including the longest planning inquiry in history.

Britain wasn't like this, says Foster, in the age of the great engineering projects. He urges that we "recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears", which means action to speed up and simplify the process of planning and public inquiries, and dealing less tenderly with the many objections projects like this provoke. He raises the spectre of Bric, the growing nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. If Britain does not match their investment in infrastructure, "we are rolling over and saying we are no longer competitive – and this is a competitive world. So I do not believe we have a choice."

There are certainly objections. The Isle of Grain is not an abstract piece of nothing, but a rare wilderness surprisingly close to London. It is part of the atmospheric flat lands where Dickens set the opening of Great Expectations, and the airport would not so much be built on it as completely annihilate it. In the Thames estuary there are, says the RSPB, up to 200,000 birds, and another 30,000 in the nearby Medway, a population "of global importance" which is unlikely to mix well with an airport. Huw Thomas, a director of Foster & Partners, says replacement habitats could be created elsewhere, but the RSPB is unconvinced. Neither will it be easy to run high-speed trains through the green belt unopposed.

Farrell questions whether Foster's infrastructural wonderland would really work. The airport is "on the wrong side of London for growth – the heart of Britain is clearly on the other side". If Heathrow were shrunk or closed, he says, the investment that has gone into the airport would be squandered. More than that, the huge array of businesses that have grown up around Heathrow, from corporate headquarters in the Thames valley to hotels and warehouses and the UK's biggest food distribution centre, would have to relocate. Heathrow currently creates nearly 80,000 airport-related jobs, and many more in associated businesses. Homes for all these workers, with their schools, hospitals and shops, would have to be recreated in the east. No one planned that Heathrow would be what it is now, but for all its faults it is an extraordinary success, which should not be lightly discarded.

"Can we afford to flip London over?" Farrell asks, and cites Montreal-Mirabel airport, which opened in 1975 as the biggest in the world, misjudged its market and ceased passenger flights in 2004. Its main problems were its distance from the city and the introduction of longer-range aircraft, making them less likely to stop over in Montreal. The Foster plan carries some of the same risks, such as having a less convenient location than the existing airport and requiring a long-term bet on patterns of flying that may change.

Farrell argues instead for "consolidation of what we've got", for better train connections between existing airports, for example, so that they can work better together. "Foster is right to propose his hub," he says, as a contribution to debate, but we should not be dazzled into accepting it uncritically. Such solutions are "tremendously glamorous and sexy", but "you can't just take the say-so" of people such as architects and engineers, with a vested interest. Nor that of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, an enthusiast for estuary airport plans, given that relocation would shift the environmental problems "from thousands of his voters, and dump them on someone else's".

Farrell argues that what works in China may not work here: "They have a growth economy and can afford to make mistakes." And China, not being a democracy, doesn't have to worry too much about opposing voices. "We can't emulate the Chinese. We've got to find our own position, which could be very clever and very smart, but different."

This debate assumes that endless growth in air traffic is desirable and inevitable, although it contributes significantly to climate change. It also enjoys the remarkable tax break of exemption from VAT on fuel. Should this ever end, people will fly less.

Meanwhile, engines are becoming quieter, which alters the discussions about noise pollution, and with the Airbus A380 aircraft are becoming bigger. John Stewart of HACAN Clear Skies, which campaigns to control the effects of aviation over London, thinks Heathrow could expand by handling larger planes for long-range flights, while high-speed trains would take over much of the short-range traffic. If he is right, it may not be necessary to build a new super-hub.

What is most striking is that no one knows for sure which option is best. This may be the most critical decision on infrastructure, environment and planning that this country has to take, but the implications and complexities are too big for anyone to have mastered them yet. The Foster hub could be as successful as Hong Kong, or a new Montreal-Mirabel. Confident though they are, the Foster camp acknowledge that their hub is partly speculative. Farrell isn't saying for sure that his idea of consolidation is the best one, but only that it deserves full investigation.

Whether either, or something else, is the best option is for the moment almost pure guesswork.

Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer

Conran retrospective, New Review page 36

Rowan Moore

Lord Foster reveals £50bn Thames Hub project

The Sheet — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:33:41 +0000

Ambitious Thames estuary plan to include international airport, railway and housing with new freight and energy infrastructure

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realised." These famous words are attributed to Daniel Burnham, the ebullient American architect and planner who reshaped Chicago, extended Washington DC and championed the City Beautiful movement of the late 19th century.

On Wednesday Lord Foster announced a plan so big that even Burnham would have been impressed. The Thames Hub, a £50bn project devised by architects Foster and Partners, planners and builders Halcrow and Volterra, a consultancy group of British economists, aims to revolutionise Britain's often creaking and largely inadequate national transport and energy infrastructure.

From a proposed new Thames Hub, comprising an international airport, railway terminus, freight depot and port along with a new Thames Barrier sited all together in the Thames estuary, a new four-track high-speed orbital passenger and freight railway would run around the north of London before joining main lines to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Felixstowe, Cardiff and Southampton.

Aiming to take thousand of container lorries off the roads, this radically enhanced national transport "spine" would also carry power lines and communications cables, cutting down on the need for new pylons. Built to a continental loading gauge, the railways would connect directly with high-speed passenger and freight lines in the rest of Europe.

New homes, hi-tech factories and other workplaces would be built around existing and new railway lines with tens of thousands of new homes connected directly to an ultra-modern transport network. Most new homes in Britain are currently scattered on the fringe of old towns and across the green belt with little consideration for transport and other infrastructure.

"We need to recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears, " said Foster on Wednesday, "if we are to establish a modern transport and energy infrastructure in Britain for this century and beyond."

The Thames Hub and the "spine" are bold plans indeed. "They're born out of necessity, enthusiasm and frustration," says Foster. "In Hong Kong, a decade ago, we were able to build a major new international airport and all the associated infrastructure including a new island reclaimed from the sea within four years. If Britain wants to compete with rapidly developing global economies, it must sort out its infrastructure and, if this is holistically planned with real political commitment it can also be a thing of beauty and environmentally friendly."

"I know it's against the national grain to come up with big plans and we'll be accused of playing Napoleon, but we have to get the debate going and show what a difference a radical new infrastructure plan could make to Britain."

"Infrastructure is the key", says David Kerr, group board director of Halcrow. "Britain ignores development and investment in infrastructure at its peril. Look around the world and you see the way in which China and Latin America are investing heavily in infrastructure. They see it as a passport to strong economic development."

Bridget Rosewell of Volterra says that, if implemented, the Thames Hub plan would generate £150bn in financial benefits alone. It has also been planned to save the green belt from rapacious commercial development, to generate hydroelectric power from the tidal Thames and to beautify transport corridors around London and along the country's main traffic arteries.

"If it went ahead, even in part," says Foster, "the very realisation of the plan would create thousands of skilled jobs in engineering, manufacturing and construction alone."

Although Britain has rarely been a country of grand plans, these have existed. The building of the railways, sewers, National Grid, motorways and water supplies are all examples of how Britain has made it in the past. Huge infrastructure projects like the city of Birmingham's water supply from the Elan Valley, completed in the early 20th century, prove how such works can be breathtakingly beautiful as well as discreet and highly effective. They can also be highly controversial, politically sensitive and hugely expensive.

"The cost of not doing anything will ultimately be much higher," says Foster, an architect used to moving mountains in the far east. "We've stuck our heads up like coconuts in a funfair expecting them to be knocked down. But we need to do something soon, and this plan is national, aiming to redress the imbalance of the economies of north and south."

Could it happen? Could we soon be flying in and out of one of the greatest ports in the world where fleets of modern aircraft, ships and trains power Britain's economy into a newly competitive age? Will we live in fine new homes connected to brand new transport, energy and communications spines and hubs? Or will we decide it's business as usual in little Britain and carry on building junk housing on what were once meadows and unsustainable supermarkets and shopping malls on the land that's left and between overcrowded roads and railways? Foster and his team have offered a big-spirited vision of Britain, but do we have eyes to see it?

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:37:24 +0000

Burlington Arcade's independent traders face the (leather) boot, Frank Gehry eats humble pie and Scotland gets a bridge made entirely from recycled plastic

The protests at St Paul's Cathedral are getting all the attention, but for a certain echelon of London society, the real battle is going on at Burlington Arcade, whose proposed £5m redevelopment has galvanised conservationists, traditionalists and Michael Winner. For the uninitiated, Burlington Arcade is the posh people's equivalent of Diagon Alley from Harry Potter – a secluded, beautifully preserved 19th-century arcade whose historical opulence is matched by the retro luxury wares of the outlets, such as vintage fountain pens, handmade shoes, cashmere scarves and dragon bridles – well, maybe not the last one. The Grade II-listed building has been acquired by retail investment firm Meyer Bergman and the ominous-sounding Thor Equities, and the plan is to replace all those independent traders with high-end fashion brands such as Prada and Jimmy Choo.

Few people have seen the actual designs, but one suspects the Arcade brigade are not encouraged by the architect: New Yorker Peter Marino, who specialises in upmarket fashion stores. Not only has Marino stated that his work is not built to last, he likes to dress in black biker leathers, accessorised with sunglasses, leather cap, leather gloves and straps around his biceps. It's not yet clear if Burlington's top-hatted beadles will have to dress the same way, but Marino's look is a sign of how architects' style has moved on. Gone the days are when some Issey Miyake (à la Zaha Hadid) or a pair of Le Corbusier glasses qualified as sartorial flamboyance in design circles, now you've got to look like a missing member of the Village People. Take note, British architects, and up your game!

Talking of architectural flamboyance, Frank Gehry has not been having a good time of it recently. Last week, the 82-year-old designer was forced to acknowledge criticisms of his ambitious design for the Dwight D Eisenhower National Memorial in Washington DC. In terms of memorial architecture it's a radical departure, proposing giant tapestries of woven stainless steel held up by huge stone columns, which effectively screen off the building behind them. The size of this $90m-plus project has caused much public consternation. Three of Eisenhower's granddaughters even issued a statement expressing concern about the "concept for the memorial, as well as the scope and scale of it." "The people are asking good questions," Gehry acknowledged, doubtless wondering if he shouldn't have just given them another Bilbao Guggenheim and have done with it.

Then again, Gehry's Abu Dhabi Guggenheim also hit trouble this week, when it emerged that the company building it had withdrawn the contract for the concrete work and was "reviewing its strategy". The government-backed gallery, which will sit next door to a branch of the Louvre and new museums designed by Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, has already had its opening put back from 2013 to 2015. There are now rumours it's to be cancelled altogether. These have been denied by the Abu Dhabi side, but the project seems to have stalled, at least temporarily.

On a more optimistic note, Europe's first road bridge made of recycled plastic opened this week in Scotland. Crossing the river Tweed in Peeblesshire, the 30-metre-long bridge was made from 50 tonnes of household recycling material, such as drinks bottles, and took just two weeks to put up. That's got to be better than shipping our plastic to China for recycling. Added to which, this thermoplastic composite material has several advantages over standard materials such as timber, steel and concrete: it never needs painting, it won't rust or rot, and it's 100% recyclable. The technology was developed in the US but it's being made in Wales by a new company named Vertech. As well as bridges, they hope to develop a range of recycled sheet materials to replace plywood and MDF in construction, which suggests an entirely recycled plastic house is now possible. Who'll be the first to do it?

And finally, looking much further into the future, who can resist an event called Thrilling Wonder Stories? This is the Architectural Association's third annual speculative sci-fi-inspired design jam, where architects are invited to think way out of the box, their imaginations cross-fertilised by "mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries". They're not joking. Guests in London this Friday and Saturday (there's a parallel event in New York) include Vincenzo Natali, director of warped sci-fi movies Cube and Splice, author Bruce Sterling, taxidermy artist Charlie Tuesday Gates (hosting a live workshop) and special effects supremo Andy Lockley, the man who folded up Paris in Christopher Nolan's Inception, among other feats. It's the shape of things to come, you know.

• This article has been amended. The original stated that the bridge made from recycled materials was 9 metres long and in Wales. This has been corrected.

Steve Rose

Urbanized: a documentary about city design that comes in the nick of time

The Sheet — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:52:40 +0000

As the global population teeters on 7 billion, Gary Hustwit's film portrays the world's exploding number of city dwellers as the solution rather than the problem

A series of familiar images unfolds on the screen: a wall of glass towers, a Brazilian favela, the Shibuya pedestrian crossing in Tokyo. Visual shorthand for a crowded planet, they are accompanied by an equally familiar sequence of statistics: half of humanity – or 3.5 billion people – now live in cities, and urbanisation is so rampant that by 2050 this figure is projected to be 75%. So begins Urbanized, a new film about the challenge that cities pose in the 21st century, which had its London debut this weekend, playing to a packed house at the London School of Economics. It is directed by Gary Hustwit, who made the cult hit Helvetica in 2007 (an unlikely film about a Swiss typeface) before taking on the much broader topic of industrial design in 2009's Objectified. With Urbanized, he zooms out even further to complete his trilogy, a cinematic story about design moving from the micro to the macro.

With each leap in scale, Hustwit risks pointing his camera at a topic so big he ends up saying nothing at all. Yet Urbanized is a brave and timely movie that manages to strike almost exactly the right tone. For a sense of the scale of the urban problem, simply look at Mumbai, a city of 12 million people that is set to be the world's biggest by 2050. Already, 60% of its population lives in slums with such poor sanitation that there is only one toilet seat for every 600 people. The municipality is reluctant to build toilets for fear that it will encourage more migrants to come. "As if people come to shit," retorts the activist Sheela Patel in the movie. Quite. Most people come to work. Cities are basins of opportunity, and their citizens drive national economies. It is peculiar, then, how poorly cities reward their citizens for that contribution.

The film takes a clear line on what makes a city habitable. Why is Brasilia, for all its drama, inhospitable? Because it was designed with a bird's-eye view that left the poor mugs on the ground hiking across town beside a highway. The movie illustrates the catastrophe of designing cities for cars rather than people with the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses – the saintly advocate of Greenwich Village's street life and the panto-villain masterplanner who scarred New York with his highways. These days the Big Apple is starting to atone for Moses's sins with public spaces such as the High Line. This new elevated promenade doesn't make up for the growing inequality that is turning Manhattan into an island for the rich, but it is a noble case of the city giving something back to its citizens.

Even more impressive is the way the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, changed the dynamic of the Colombian capital by creating a network of cycle lanes and a public bus service. In a city known for its crippling traffic, it is now the poorest – those without cars – who move the fastest. As Peñalosa points out, showboating on a mountain bike as he overtakes a car squishing through the mud: this is democracy in action. Only by prioritising pedestrians have cities rediscovered their vibrant centres. In the 1980s, by contrast, cities were hollowing out as the middle classes fled to the suburbs. Here the camera pans the suburban sprawl of Phoenix, all identical houses and driveways, as land use attorney Grady Gammage epitomises the selfishness of the American dream with the words "I like the way I live". Nowhere has that dream gone more wrong than in Detroit. The most powerful scene in the movie is an eerie train ride through the deserted city, now depopulated thanks to its dying car industry.

There we have the full spectrum of the problem: some cities are bursting at the seams while others are becoming ghost towns. Who has the answer? Is it Norman Foster with his Masdar eco-city in Abu Dhabi? Is it Rem Koolhaas with his behemoth of a headquarters for Chinese state television in Beijing? To its credit, the film is unequivocal that architects – especially starchitects – are not the solution. What happened when Brad Pitt rallied a group of well-meaning architect friends to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? The city got an odd assortment of houses that look like they were parachuted in from Malibu sitting amid a sea of devastation. Not all that effective.

If there is a new orthodoxy in urban design, it is citizen participation. And Urbanized revels in this so-called "bottom up" approach. It depicts several cases of community engagement, from an energy measurement scheme in Brighton to a new pedestrian area in the South African township of Khayelitsha. It devotes a good chunk of time to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, whose system of half-houses that residents complete themselves is often cited as a paragon of "participatory design". The idea is that citizens, not god-like architects and planners, are the solution to the urban question. And Hustwit knows just how effective people power can be: his movie was partly paid for through the crowd-funding site Kickstarter.

This aspect of the movie is very much in tune with the zeitgeist. 2011 is the year of people power after all, the year when across the world, from Tahrir Square to the streets of Santiago to Wall Street, citizens have been making themselves heard. Indeed, there are several protests featured in the film. The message is undoubtedly a positive one, and the focus on small-scale, tangible solutions is at pains to be uplifting. The only caveat is that at times this borders on the naive. Watching people plant community gardens in the abandoned lots of Detroit, or plaster New Orleans with stickers that let citizens have their say, creates a cosy feel-good factor, but the problem is scale. On one hand, favelas and shanty towns are emblematic of the tremendous capacity of people to look after themselves. But no amount of self-organisation is going to introduce running water and sewage to the favelas. That kind of infrastructure requires politicians, not just residents.

Perhaps that's where a film such as Urbanized can be useful. Undoubtedly there are limits to what can be said about cities in a one-and-a-half-hour documentary – for instance, maybe this notion that 75% of us will live in cities by 2050 is bogus, and that as the global economy falters so will urbanisation. But this is not the purview of films like Urbanized. Whatever the drawbacks of a mass medium when it comes to nuance, it is redeemed by its ability to reach a mass audience. The more people who see this movie the better. And the more politicians who see it – and are persuaded to look beyond the vested interests in front of them – the more powerful a tool Urbanized will be.

Justin McGuirk

Danish T-Pylon wins design contest

The Sheet — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:11:33 +0000

Bystrup design can be a real improvement on existing towers, says National Grid, but pylon fans dismiss it as 'just a pole'

A spare and quietly elegant Danish design has been announced as the winner of a competition to create the next generation of electricity pylons.

National Grid engineers will now work closely with the Copenhagen-based practice Bystrup to develop the design into a production model, and the T-Pylon – or something close to the competition entry – will soon enough be stepping politely across the hills, dales, sunlit uplands and rain-drenched lowlands of Britain.

"In the T-Pylon we have a design that has the potential to be a real improvement on the steel-lattice tower", said Nick Winser, National Grid executive director. "It's shorter, lighter and the simplicity of the design means it would fit into the landscape more easily. In addition, the design of the electrical components is genuinely innovative and exciting."

It might be preferable to bury electric cables and to do away with the need for pylons as far as possible, but this is unlikely to happen even in the long-term future due to the high costs involved. The T-Pylon, however, has been designed as far as possible to be little more than a wraith in the landscape. It will be two-thirds the height and weight of existing 50-metre, 30-tonne pylons, the design of which dates from the late 1920s.

The original National Grid steel-lattice pylon was also designed by a non-British firm, the American Milliken Brothers, although with guidance from Sir Reginald Blomfield, a late-flowering classical architect, who ensured that the structure was well proportioned as well as functional and enduring. Pylons will always be loved or loathed, yet there was something inherently brilliant in a design that could be tucked away in woods or stretched to cross the widest reaches of the river Thames.

The competition, with a £5,000 prize, was organised by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the National Grid and the Royal Institute of British Architects. The energy minister, Chris Huhne, said: "We are going to need a lot more pylons over the next few years to connect new energy to our homes and businesses and it is important that we do this in the most beautiful way possible."

There are more than 88,000 pylons in Britain, including the 22,000 carrying the National Grid's main transmission network across England and Wales.

National Grid has also expressed an interest in working with the designers of the two second-place competition entries, Ian Ritchie Associates, a London firm (with consulting engineers Jane Wernick Associates), and New Town Studio, an architectural practice based in Harlow.

The competition attracted 250 entries. The designs of the six finalists were put on show at the Victoria & Albert Museum during last month's London design festival. Bystrup's design was unanimously recognised by the judges as being the simplest and least demanding in terms of the effect it would have on the landscape. The Danish architects have designed a number of prototype pylons since 2000 aiming, as Erik Bystrup has said, to "turn eyesores into art".

The membership of Britain's Pylon Appreciation Society might disagree, although there is little fear that the Milliken pylons will be replaced in the near or distant future. "The winning design is OK," said Flash Wilson Bristow, founder of the society, "but it's a pole and not a pylon. Pylons are latticed structures. They frame views of the landscape. They're special, but a pole is just a pole."

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:53:59 +0000

The design world hits high-voltage this week, with flash openings at historic houses, electric cars racing to the future and RIBA unveiling the British pylons of tomorrow

London Open House takes place this weekend, allowing us to see inside hundreds of historic buildings normally closed to the public. Some, such as the hugely popular Midland Grand Hotel (fronting St Pancras station) and Jimi Hendrix's flat in Mayfair's Brook Street are sold-out, but the choice of buildings to visit is still vast.

What about that trip to Ruislip you never promised yourself, to see 97 Park Road, an unexpected house built by Connell Ward and Lucas in 1936 in the style of Le Corbusier's white Parisian villas of the 1920s? This is the best-preserved of a row of three houses that dumbfounded its neighbours (Ruislip is awash with mock-Tudor and neo-Georgian homes) when they were built. Today, though, it is No 97 that is so very desirable.

Or how about the political and architectural drama of Wrotham Park in Barnet, a magnificent English Palladian country house designed by Isaac Ware in 1754 for Admiral John Byng. The house has featured in numerous films and TV shows including Gosford Park and Sense and Sensibility; doubtless you will spot others. Voltaire satirised poor Byng's death in 1759's Candide: "In this country [England], it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."

British design is to be encouraged in future at the Commonwealth Institute, Kensington, open to the public this weekend for the last time in its original state before John Pawson converts it into a new home for the Design Museum. With its dramatic hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof (as beautiful to look at as the words that describe it are clumsy), this "tent in the park" pavilion was designed by RMJM; it first opened in 1962.

Details of Open House, Dublin were also revealed this week. Clearly a passionate event, it offers (along with visits to many historic and new buildings) a "Destruction of Dublin" walking tour: all too much of the Georgian city has been destroyed by mindless new development over the past 50 years. Not an event, then, for those heading to Dublin for hen or stag parties and the "craic", but a time to get intelligently under the city's grey stone skin.

This Way Up: 15 Years of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council is a show opening in Hoxton, east London, as part of the London design festival. It tells the story of the Council's attempts to get British creativity noticed by people worldwide. Designs by Tom Dixon, Peter Kennard, Pearson Lloyd, Sebastian Bergne, Nigel Shafran, Michael Marriott and Anthony Burrill will be on show together with four one-off dresses by Basso and Brooke, inspired by their British Council exchange to Uzbekistan.

Designers will be on hand to recycle materials left over from British Council exhibitions. Other objects will be auctioned off, including "everything from giant rolls of Sellotape to fascinating chairs commissioned for shows in Venice," says Vicky Richardson, the British Council's director of architecture, design and fashion. "We wanted to clear out all this stuff, but we didn't want to throw anything away." The money raised will fund a new British Council scholarship giving young British designers the opportunity to work in Brazil.

Audi evoked memories of the intriguing relationship between architects and automobiles when it announced its Urban Concept car this week in time for the Frankfurt motor show. This lightweight, electric two-seater has been designed, says Audi, according to Mies van der Rohe's guiding principle "less is more". More than Mies, though, it calls to mind Le Corbusier's influential, if overlooked, 1929 design for a city car.

Even Le Corbusier never had the hard task of designing an electricity pylon. Contemporary architects, however, have been much involved in the competition organised by RIBA and the Department for Energy and Climate Change for a new standard British pylon. Models by the six pylon finalists will be on show at the V&A during the London design festival. The most convincing is Silhouette by Ian Ritchie Architects and engineers Jane Wernick Associates. It takes the form of a needle-like steel obelisk with well-resolved arms to carry the cables; seen in profile, it would be fairly unobtrusive. Other designs are a little top-heavy (T-Pylon by Bystrup Architects), too flamboyant (Flower Tower by Gustafson Porter with Atelier One and Pfisterer), or simply too dramatic for mass production (the taut, bow-like Plexus by AL_A and Arup). Whichever design wins – final judging takes place on 11 October 2011 – it may yet be back to the drawing board if the existing standard design, dating from 1928, is to be superseded, both technically and aesthetically.

The connection between architecture and engineering is realised memorably in the design of Norman Foster's 1978 Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. This week the Twentieth Century Society announced it was putting forward the building for listing. Expect Grade I status. Unlike Wrotham Park, 97 Park Road or the Commonwealth Institute, this hi-tech masterpiece is open to the public throughout the year.

Jonathan Glancey

Stirling prize shortlist reflects new austerity in architecture

The Sheet — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:11:38 +0000

Two buildings on the Riba shortlist have been retrofitted to save money and energy, rather than built from scratch

A 1980s office block and a 1930s theatre are in the running to be named best new building of the year, as architects turn to retrofitting to save money and energy.

The Angel building in Islington, London, which BT vacated before the financial crash, has been shortlisted for the Stirling prize after a £72m refit. The 1932 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which has been overhauled at a cost of £60m, has also been nominated.

The Royal Institute of British Architects' (Riba) annual £20,000 award has never been won by a refurbished building but the presence on the shortlist of two refit projects represents the emergence of austerity architecture.

New buildings commissioned before the public spending squeeze also made the shortlist, including the sweeping velodrome for the 2012 Olympics designed by Hopkins Architects, and one of the most expensive city academy schools ever built, the £38m Evelyn Grace Academy in Lambeth by Zaha Hadid Architects.

The velodrome is the first major Olympic venue to be completed and is favourite to win with odds of 2/1 at William Hill.

The Royal Shakespeare Company originally planned to demolish its 1932 listed home in Stratford-upon-Avon, designed by Elisabeth Scott, and replace it with a futuristic building by the Dutch architect Erick van Egerat.

The plan was revised amid cost concerns and local objections. Instead the RSC hired Bennetts Associates to slot a new thrust stage into the main auditorium, redesign the public areas and erect a viewing tower.

As well as saving money and reducing emissions, the refurb "captured the spirits and ghosts of the theatre", said Rab Bennetts, the architect.

The Angel building was stripped back to its concrete frame and reclad as a speculative office block, shaving almost 15% off the cost of a new building and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about a third, the designer said.

"Refurbishment saves money and reduces the environmental impact of construction," said Simon Allford. "It also shows that we should be paying more attention when we design new buildings to ensuring they are capable of being adapted for future uses which we can't yet imagine."

This month Peter Rees, chief planner for the City of London, claimed there would be fewer new skyscrapers in the current economic climate and that applications to refurbish existing office blocks had increased. He said refurbishment projects were often cheaper, more environmentally friendly and provoked fewer objections than new buildings.

"My prognosis is there will be fewer towers and that's no bad thing," he told Building magazine. "There's a lot of late- [19]80s buildings that we shouldn't be throwing away."

Also on the Stirling shortlist is An Gaelaras, an Irish language arts and cultural centre in Derry, designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey Architects. It is the first publicly funded facility of its kind since the Anglo-Irish agreement.

The Folkwang art gallery in Essen, Germany, designed by former Stirling prize winner David Chipperfield, completes the line-up."Creative redevelopment is a strong theme in this year's list, with a major museum extension, a remodelled theatre complex and the innovative retrofit of an old office building featured, showing how even with tight planning and building constraints, talent and imagination can totally transform existing structures and sites," said Ruth Reed, president of the RIBA.

The selection of Hadid's academy highlights an ongoing row between architects and the education secretary, Michael Gove, who scrapped a major schools building programme and complained that architects were "creaming off cash" from contracts.

Architects reacted angrily to the claim, saying the high cost of the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was down to wasteful procurement rather than their fees. In February Gove renewed his attack, telling a conference on free schools: "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."

In June the Conservatives claimed architects and landscape architects had received £98m in fees to build 113 schools under BSF, with the biggest single fee being £2.7m. The Department for Education said it wanted to see more standardisation in school design to cut costs, sparking fresh concern at Riba.

The winner of the Stirling prize will be announced on 2 October.

Robert Booth

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