Posts Tagged Green building
Kevin McCloud’s grand design for British housing | feature
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 23, 2011
The Channel 4 presenter turned enlightened property developer just wants to make people happy, he says
A former editor of mine was fond of saying, as he watched his eminent colleagues accept toxic invitations to advise on projects such as the Millennium Dome, that "journalists can't do things". We might spend our lives telling others how to save the euro, or select an England team, or design a skyscraper, but when it comes to organising people to achieve a shared aim, we tend to lack patience or the ability to work towards a deadline months rather than days away. Writers tend to be individualists, looking for new discoveries, not methodical team players.
The same could be true, with knobs on, for TV presenters. So it is striking that Kevin McCloud, presenter of Grand Designs, should now be trying his hand as an enlightened property developer. For years, he has cast his eye over the hopes, follies and struggles of people trying to build beautiful homes for themselves. Now he is daring to show how it should, or could, be done. "I would get on a train to go from one location to another," he says, "and pass another 5,000 houses in Ilfracombe or Norwich or Aberdeen and they would all look the same. I thought, 'Is this the best we can do?' "
Five years ago, he set up a company called Hab (Happiness Architecture Beauty) in order to "build houses that make people happy". The recession has slowed its progress, but its first creation, a 42-home development in Swindon called the Triangle, is now complete. Next month, Channel 4 is screening Kevin's Grand Design, a two-part documentary about the project, which was achieved in partnership with the housing association, GreenSquare Group. When it is suggested that the attention these programmes will attract will be a double-edged sword, he says: "It will be a one-edged sword with the blade laid across my throat."
He is addressing the great British housing problem. For decades, it has been plain that new houses are unimaginative, overpriced, undersized and resistant to the kind of technical improvement that is standard in industries such as car making. Changes in planning law, to improve design or make housing more accessible, are forever tried and forever failing. The rather daunting task he has set himself is to deflect the glacial flow of change, to make "a very significant difference from conventional development".
With his trademark energetic enthusiasm, he reels off technical details about attenuation tanks and swales. He wants to create a truly sustainable development. So the Triangle's open spaces are designed to soak up rainwater, so that the risk of flooding is lowered, the pressure on Swindon's drainage is reduced and the planting remains lush in hot weather. It has what Hab's design director, Isabel Allen, calls a "muddy, soggy landscape" which has the added benefit that it is fun for children to play in it.
The external walls of the houses are made out of hempcrete, a material that is not only highly insulating but, being made out of a plant – hemp – takes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it puts in. The houses also have chimney-like objects on their roofs, which are actually ventilators, that help the houses to cool naturally.
"Anyone can build an eco-home," he says, "but it doesn't solve anything. There is nothing to stop them turning up the thermostat. What's more interesting is the way people live and behave." So the Triangle has allotments and polytunnels where people can grow their own food, and a car club and a scooter club that make their use of transport less wasteful. He sees such things as more important than the design features of individual houses.
Most of all, McCloud wants to create a community. The houses of the Triangle are arranged in traditional terraces, enclosing a kind of village green. Here, children can play on slopes and interestingly arranged logs and splash in water. Conventional swings and slides are avoided, however, on the grounds that these would mark the place as only for children and alienate the adults and teenagers who, it is hoped, will also enjoy the green.
Part of the point of the allotments and polytunnels is to bring people together and such things as barbecues and Halloween parties are encouraged. Irrigation is achieved with old-fashioned water pumps – more fun than standpipes – around which residents might gather. Each house is fitted with a "shimmy" – a touch-screen computer that McCloud calls a cross between "an iPad and a parish magazine". This enables residents to exchange information, help and advice and tells them about upcoming events.
Of the 42 homes, 21 are what is called "social rented", which is for people on the local authority's list of people in need of new homes. Eleven are "intermediate rented", which is at 80% of the market rent. Ten are "rent to buy", which means people rent them at below-market rates, with a view to saving for a deposit and ultimately buying their homes. There is therefore a mixture of people: teachers, retirees, single mothers formerly in council hostels, families who were in accommodation for the homeless.
The Triangle is so designed that no distinction is made between the house types. This, says McCloud, is "unlike schemes, including one that won the Stirling prize" – he means the Accordia development in Cambridge – "where the houses for sale are lovely and the social stuff is behind a wall".
It is striking, with all this ingenuity in the design, how very plain-looking the houses are. Any Grand Designs fan expecting another of the exotic creations featured in the programme will be disappointed. They are pitched-roofed, in straight rows, partly inspired by the railway workers' cottages that Brunel built in Swindon. Their elevations are in shades of cream and grey that echo the existing terraces and semi-detacheds of this part of town.
Glenn Howells, the architect of the Triangle, says that "the conversation we had was, 'Do we have the nerve to do something very, very normal?' With Kevin, everyone was expecting it to be more eye-catching, more televisual. People go there and say, 'Blimey, it looks normal.' That's the point." The idea of the terrace, he says, "started a long time ago and it will go on for another 500 or 600 years. It is such a good form". The only problem is that "there is a perception in the housing market that it won't sell, so developers have to make things convoluted, even though those to-die-for streets of Islington, where Boris Johnson lives, are all repetitive".
The aim, says Howells, is to "prove you can do excellent ordinary housing that sells and that people want to live in". It is about little things achieved within the standard budget for housing association developments – apart from a little additional support for some of the more adventurous environmental features. Bedroom doors are placed away from corners, so it is possible to place wardrobes behind them, and windows are larger than in most new housing. Ceilings are higher than standard on the ground floor (which means, to stay within budget, they are lower upstairs). The porches include space for bike racks, so that they don't have to be lugged through houses from the back garden, which makes it more likely they will be used.
On the outside, architectural expression is sought in such things as oversize rainwater pipes, which, together with change of hue from one house to the next, and vertically proportioned windows, help to define individual houses. In front of each house are gabion walls, gabion being the form of construction used in road embankments, where loose stones are placed in wire cages. Here, they screen parking spaces, so that cars do not dominate the appearance of the space.
McCloud says that "the design of spoons and the design of cities is one process" and it is the totality of the Triangle's inventions that matters. He is particularly keen on the importance of landscape design. Usually, says the Triangle's landscape architect, Luke Engleback, his role is to "decorate masterplans by others". Here, Engleback was involved from the outset in shaping the concept and form of the development.
McCloud keeps saying that "it's about the residents – it's their happiness that will determine the success of scheme". It will take years to find out if it really works but, meanwhile, I am introduced to 64-year-old Maggie Lowton, who was forced out of her home of 38 years by negative equity. "Since I started my affair with Kevin," she says, she has bought into his dream. "We love the house and feel privileged and proud. It's lighter, airier and easier to clean. It feels too nice and too new." The architectural aesthetics are of secondary importance. "People say, 'What are those stones for?'" she says of the gabions.
She says you can see a community forming, even if there are some points of friction – "you do hear snippets, like someone parking in someone else's space". As a Christian, she is wrestling with the problem of other people's faiths, including paganism. "Perhaps we can have a multi-faith Christmas tree," she says, "but I don't know how to do that… maybe we can have a pagan log." She wants "it to work for everyone. I want Kevin's dream to come true. What a waste if it didn't".
For McCloud, the dream seems to originate in a love of the organic. "I grew up in the countryside – Bedfordshire. I was interested in birds and bees and flowers and mushrooms." He says there is "a spiritual dimension" to living with nature that he wants to give to the residents of Hab's developments. The village where he lived was also the kind of place where "kids played in the street on their bikes, and if a car came round the corner, it had to slow down".
Realising this dream requires a great deal of technical grind, of dealing with planners, highways authorities, water suppliers. It requires responding patiently to officials such as the one who, Engleback says, objected to fruit trees on the grounds that "someone might slip on a berry". McCloud's celebrity means that "doors are opened a little more quickly", but also that "it is very important for local authorities not to be seen to be granting us the smallest favour. We can't cheat or push or cut corners".
The Triangle has required an exceptional amount of effort by Hab, GreenSquare, their architects, engineers and other consultants, all to achieve a simple array of row houses which – albeit without such high environmental performance – would once knocked have been knocked up almost without thinking by builders. Larger developments are now on the way in Oxford and Stroud, but McCloud is not expecting these to be much easier. The hope is that others will follow the example.
He acknowledges that the Triangle is not as advanced as some of the continental schemes in Tubingen, Stockholm and elsewhere which were his inspirations. They "emerged from a culture of planning and construction that is far more evolved, and far more sophisticated, than in Britain," he says. "But," he adds, "I feel we have hit on the grail. We have made a very significant difference from conventional development… we're 90% there, and to do it in Swindon in a difficult economic climate – I'm happy."
He thinks he is doing better than the Prince of Wales's Poundbury. "One positive thing about Poundbury was the way perceived ownership of the public realm meant the residents adopted it," he says. But "one of the failings is the way the external appearance is at the expense of internal architecture". In order to achieve the look of old cottages, "you get low ceilings and tiny windows".
The Triangle is in a tradition of model villages beloved of aristocrats, princes, of Brad Pitt in New Orleans and the Bordeaux sugar-cube manufacturer who commissioned workers' housing from Le Corbusier. Such places can be over-scripted, too much about fulfilling their makers' picture-book fantasies about contented communities. There is a whiff of this with Hab's gooey talk about "making people happy", although they are conscious of the need not to over-control. "If they decide they don't want to grow food and just want to park cars, we'd be a bit upset," says Isabel Allen, but in the end it will be up to the residents.
Maggie Lowton sounds a note of caution by citing other communities in Swindon that started well but went downhill. No amount of forethought and attention to detail can guarantee the success of the Triangle. But at the very least it is an imaginative and well-designed project, which achieves about as much as can be done with its budget. It focuses on what matters most and gives itself the best chance of success. Which is far more rare than it should be in British house building and a much better application of celebrity philanthropy than most.
Eco-home developer BioRegional Quintain to shut
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 11, 2011
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."
Lord Foster reveals £50bn Thames Hub project
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 3, 2011
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?
Europe’s biggest new monastery starts building in Liverpool
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 2, 2011
Nuns will harvest rainwater, use ground source heating and plant a wildflower meadow - while Bradford's Anglicans install the UK's first cathedral-roof solar power
Liverpool's long association with the Roman Catholic faith is taking another step forward with the building of Europe's largest new Carmelite monastery in Allerton.
The £3 million project includes the planting of 1500 trees and aims to give 30 Carmelite nuns the peace and quiet they have lost in their present home in busy West Derby.
Two big schools are expanding next door to the existing building which was an almost rural haven when the order moved in 104 years ago. Rather than risk tensions with their young neighbours, the nuns decided in the words of their prioress Sister Mary to "bow out gracefully and let the schools enjoy the area."
The move follows the opening in 2009 of Stanbrook Abbey, a new home in Yorkshire for nuns of the order of Our Lady of Consolation, whose innovations include rainwater harvesting, power from a woodchip boiler and sedum plants on a 'green roof.' The Allerton monastery (the correct name, albeit that nuns inhabit it rather than monks) features a wildflower meadow, ground source heating, solar panels and similar rainwater harvesting to Stanbrook's.
Sister Mary says
The new monastery will allow us to be much more energy efficient and the gardens will also enable us to be self-sufficient whilst protecting the local habitat.
West Derby has been our home for over 100 years and we will be sad to leave, but we felt it was time to move to a location which will be more compatible with our way of life.
These are good times for the somewhat recherche world of ecclesiastical construction. The Liverpool building firm Nobles, which has contracted to finish the new monastery in 60 weeks, also has work under way onalterations to Wesley Methodist Church in the city centre, refurbishment at Rosemount Convent and a new church hall at St Michael's and All Angels Church in Pensby.
In Bradford meanwhile, the Anglican cathedral is to be the first in the world to install solar panels to generate its own electric if not spiritual power. The £50,000 scheme on the roof of the south aisle adds to a long and curious record of additions to the Grade 1 listed building. When Royalists besieged the stoutly Cromwellian city during the English Civil War, the tower was protected against stray canonballs by enormous bales of wool, like a stone version of the Michelin man.
Stirling prize shortlist reflects new austerity in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
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.
Bjarke Ingels designs incinerator that doubles as ski slope in Copenhagen
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 4, 2011
Architect's latest project to transform an incinerator in heart of Copenhagen shows the playful side of sustainability
How do you turn a 100-metre-tall incinerator in the heart of Copenhagen into a social and cultural hub? By building a ski slope on the roof, of course.
The unlikely combination of green energy and alpine sport was the winning bid in a competition to design a new waste-to-energy plant which aims to be one of the cleanest in the world when it opens in 2016. For the winning architect, Bjarke Ingels, it made perfect sense to inject a bit of fun into the proceedings.
"When you spend 3.5bn kroner [£424m] creating an energy plant in the middle of Copenhagen you make sure it doesn't become an ugly box that the neighbours will protest against and clutters the cityscape," he said.
"You have to make sure it becomes a public park, an attraction. And when the kids come to go skiing on top of the plant they will probably be curious to find out what's going on inside the mountain."
Ingels grew up wanting to become a graphic novelist, but the 36-year-old Dane is now hailed as one of the most exciting architects of his generation.
For the 2010 Shanghai Expo he gave visitors a sense of sustainable life in Copenhagen by moving the city's most famous landmark, the Little Mermaid statue, to China, complete with her own pool of water from the city's harbour. Visitors on bikes viewed it from spiralling cycle lanes inside the Danish pavilion.
"I work with the idea of hedonistic sustainability, which is sustainability that improves the quality of life and human enjoyment," said Ingels. "The fact that Copenhagen is so clean you can actually jump in the harbour [water] in the city centre is almost a miracle. The city is sustainable but doesn't become synonymous with making lots of sacrifices.
"People are willing to make sacrifices from time to time but they are not going to stop driving their kids to football. People don't drive cars because they want to pollute; they drive cars because they want to visit their friends. It's not about changing our behaviour – it's about designing our society in a smarter way. For example instead of dumping our waste we start to see it is a resource – one tonne of waste almost equates to two barrels of oil."
The waste-to-energy plant, which will be Copenhagen's tallest building, will replace a 40-year-old incinerator located in an industrial area on the fringes of the city centre. More than 50% of waste in Denmark is already used to create energy and the new power plant will be 20% more effective than its predecessor. The building will be wrapped in a green facade created from planters and a lift inside will guide visitors to the top of the "ski mountain" while offering them views of the machinery inside.
To remind visitors of the city's carbon footprint, the smokestack on top of the plant will eject a 30-metre smoke ring every time a tonne of CO2 is released.
"One of the problems with emissions is that they are so abstract and intangible," Ingels said. "You can see there is smoke coming out of the chimney but you don't really know whether this is a significant amount. In Copenhagen in 2016 you will simply have to count the smoke rings.
"You are turning a factory into a public park and the chimney, which traditionally is a symbol of the problem, is now becoming something playful."
Ingels's studio, BIG, made its name designing a string of innovative residential buildings in Copenhagen, including the award-winning Mountain Dwellings, where flats were stacked on a multi-storey car park and furnished with individual roof gardens. The firm has won several international commissions in recent years, including an apartment building on Manhattan's west side and a new town hall in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.
For the town hall project, Ingels plans to add a huge mirror to the slanted roof of the tower that houses the city council's meeting hall. He calls this the "democratic periscope".
"When the politicians need to make a tough decision they can look up to the roof, which will work like a giant periscope, reflecting views of the city," he said.
"When citizens gather to protest the periscope will work the other way so they can see whether some of the politicians are absent or if they are asleep – and if people have binoculars they can even read the meeting notes.
"It's a type of radical architectural realisation of political transparency."
• This article was amended on 3 July 2011. In the original 3.5bn kroner was converted to £364m. This has been corrected.
Brockholes nature reserve visitor centre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 3, 2011
At Brockholes – a wildlife reserve near Preston – the floating visitor centre offers a reassuring glimpse into a flood-proof future
If you turn off the M6, on the ragged edge of Preston, and follow some brown badger signs through a series of truck-filled roundabouts and ramps, you suddenly see a huddle of roofs above a lake, which look like a bronze-age settlement. The view recalls those meticulous yellow-brown reconstructions you get in old, earnest children's books, and you half expect to see men carrying spears and dead deer, and the smoke of a campfire.
It is in fact a brand-new visitor centre for the just-opened Brockholes nature reserve, and rather than spear-carriers you see citizens of local cities wearing sensible outdoor clothes. It is a complex of buildings with claims on the future rather than the distant past, in that it aims to be extraordinarily sustainable. And it floats.
Brockholes sits on a concrete raft, made buoyant by hollow chambers, held by four steel posts to stop it drifting across the lake. This is the building's way of dealing with flooding, to which the site is prone. It can rise up to three metres, which would only be necessary in a catastrophe, but will regularly go up and down by 400mm over a year. Whether we are immersed by the effects of climate change or simply persist in our fondness for building on flood plains, floating buildings might come to seem like a very good idea. "People have been in denial about flood risk," says the building's architect, Adam Khan.
Brockholes is an overlap of wildness and industry. It has been formed over 10 years out of a former gravel quarry, with a range of habitats added to existing woodlands and water to "create a microcosm of what old Lancashire was like". It has been "carefully crafted" to attract different species and is aimed less at dedicated bird-watchers and nature lovers than the general public of the big cities an hour's drive or so away – Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds – and at tourists on their way to the nearby Lake District. The idea is to introduce people to nature who don't see enough of it.
Its buildings serve the usual needs of such places – cafe, shop, information – but also host a large education space and a series of conference rooms that will be rented out to generate income. Naturally, in such a place, they have to be scrupulously environmental, and so they are designed to achieve the "outstanding" category in the official measure of such things. (The British Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, if you really want to know, or Breeam.) Until recently, buildings could only be "good" or "excellent"; Brockholes is on course to be the first building in its particular niche to achieve "outstanding", although the final judgment will not be made until it has been in use for a while.
Breeam concerns itself with everything from heating and ventilation to the height of light fixtures off the ground, to the sources of materials, the energy that goes into materials, their durability, their potential for recycling, and the distance they travel to the site.
Often, the pursuit of Breeam's approval leads buildings to pursue a box-ticking series of technical fixes, and an assembly of products designed to fulfil their requirements without much thought to how they look and feel. At Brockholes, Adam Khan wanted to challenge this "factoid-led" approach, and use the pursuit of sustainability as the means to create more beautiful buildings, not less.
So he designed high, steep-pitched roofs enclosing large volumes (good for air circulation and extraction), clad in oak shakes – rough tiles formed out of tree stumps, which would otherwise be burned as waste. Gutters are in copper (long-life, recyclable), which adds a touch of luxury. Ventilation is entirely natural. The roofs are held up with timber beams made in a precise German process, and arrive on the site "as sharp as pencils". Insulation is a cheap but effective stuff made from recycled newspapers.
Then, charmingly, the building connects with its natural surroundings in a way that cannot be measured by technical indices. Because it floats, it has an intimacy with the water that it would lack if it were ringed with defences against flooding: the water is turned from an enemy into an ally. Reed beds have been planted around the building so that when they are fully grown the roofs will seem to emerge from them. From within, visitors will – in places – be able to look into the reeds, and into spaces carved out of them "like crop circles". In other places they will look onto open water.
The complex's buildings are arranged around a series of courtyards, which provide both a sense of enclosure and openness to views, and one of which is planted with a little orchard. The oak roofs change in the weather, from black in rain to gold in sun. Nor is it a matter of sight alone: the natural materials have distinctive scents, and the newspaper insulation of the cafe gives an echo-less acoustic "like a hay barn". The wobbly oak and the copper are tactile.
The experience is not one of the building or of nature alone, but of the two together, and comes from a certain openness: to what was already on the site, to its possibilities, to ancient and modern materials, to high and low technology. There is also an interest in what things are as much as what they look like – how they feel and work, and how they combine, rather than in the single glamour shot. It does not strive for effect, but lets the effect grow out of its situation.
There are some clunks: extract flues poke through the roofs; it is on the edge of folksy, and worthy, albeit offset by playful disco moments such as reflective light fittings and, at one point, a mirrored vault; and without the vegetation fully grown, it looks raw. But it is rare that the stuff of a building, as well as its relationship to nature, gives so much pleasure. The interior of the cafe – with its high roof, the big, taut Vs of the German beams, the grey fuzz of the newspaper insulation, the sideways views of water and orchard, its reflected light and touches of colour – offers a rare and delightful balance of energies.
As for the floating, the cost consultants Jackson Coles, who played an active role in making Khan's ideas possible, found that the expense was reasonable. The costs compared well with building (as is common) on a large amount of concrete set in the ground, making what are known as raft foundations. "If you have raft foundations," the great architect and thinker Cedric Price once said, "why not have a raft?"
At Brockholes, someone has finally taken up his suggestion.
Grand Designs: The home truths of Kevin McCloud
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 8, 2011
Kevin McCloud won't talk price. For him a dream property is all about enriching your life, not your wallet
It wasn't the best morning to interview Kevin McCloud, presenter of Grand Designs and the nation's architectural critic-in-chief. "The not so Grand Design," screamed that day's Daily Mail, featuring a Thames barge given an £80,000 makeover lying washed up and unfinished on a drab Essex beach. "A Grand Design for Failure," said the Guardian.
McCloud is not familiar with failure. Grand Designs is in its tenth series, and its presenter is regarded as one of Channel 4's most bankable assets. The TV programme has spawned a number of spin-offs, including a popular magazine and a home improvement show, Grand Designs Live.
He had a bad feeling about the Thames barge programme. "The project was compromised from the beginning. They were not prepared properly from the beginning and were relying on happenstance. I didn't want to do that one from the start." In that programme's summing-up, he dubbed it a "floating scrapheap challenge" rather than a true Grand Design.
But disapproval is rare in McCloud's bountiful vocabulary. The homilies delivered at the end of each programme aim to inspire rather than moralise, and in person, McCloud is no different. "There are plenty of others who delight in schadenfreude," he says. "I'm not keen on shows that do that. What we do is set out to celebrate architecture and find projects that move the architectural canon on a bit."
The idea for the interview is that McCloud will talk about what the average homeowner can do to their property to maximise its value. But despite fronting a home improvement show that counts Velux, Dulux and Miele among its chief sponsors, McCloud is almost evasive when it comes to talking about kitchen makeovers or loft extensions. The thinking man's answer to Linda Barker, his passion for architectural innovation and style keeps him from telling you how to improve a mundane three-bed semi with a slap of paint and a bit of decluttering.
McCloud won't talk price, but he will talk value, a rare enough commodity in the TV property shows. "I don't look at what people do with their homes in terms of money, but the social and personal value of what they're trying to do and achieve," he says. "I never use the 'P' word. I'm not interested in just doing something up and selling on."
His personal favourite Grand Design cost just £28,000. It was built by Sussex woodsman Ben Law from the trees in the woods in which it stands. Recycled newspaper insulates the floor and thick straw bales line the walls, covered in lime plaster. All the electricity comes from solar panels and wind turbines, while water is taken from a nearby spring. "He built the most delightful home and he built it all on budget. It's the extraordinary personal values of people like Ben Law that matter. It's not about half a million or three-quarters of a million pounds. It's the brutality of those sorts of figures that stops people in their projects."
Beautiful crafting, innovative design and highly personal touches are what makes a home improvement work, not piles of money, says McCloud. He points to Monty Ravenscroft's home built on a sliver of land in Peckham on a small budget as one of the enduring stars of Grand Designs.
The plot was 80ft-long but in places just 13ft-wide, yet Ravenscroft squeezed a four-bed family home on to the site, at a cost of £170,000, plus £40,000 for the land. That compares with typical prices of £350,000-plus for family homes in the area. There are no external windows, but light floods in through a retractable glass roof. A double bed slides back to reveal a double bath underneath, while a toilet doubles up as a wet room. "He was on a very restricted budget but what his project showed was an extraordinary example of personal craft. It's very easy, isn't it, to slit open a fish and sell the eggs as caviar. What Monty did was miraculous."
Forget what all the other property programmes tell you about improving your property to maximise its sale value. Do it for yourself, not for the market. "Ask yourself how long you are going to live there. My father died at the age of 73. Hell, that doesn't give me an awful lot longer [he's 52]. How am I going to spend the next two decades? How am I going to be happy?
"Your home should be about enriching the daily experience. I don't want to be too philosophical, but next week you might be under a bus. Figure out what you have, do you like it, do you really want it? Don't try building a fantasy of how you should be."
Behind the scenes, McCloud admits guiding some self-builders rather more than the programme always shows. "Look, I'm not the architect, but off camera I say, ring this person up for help and advice, or I really counsel someone not to put in, say, a swimming pool, at the expense of insulating the home. If I really like the people, I do tend to get involved."
Twelve years after he started work on Grand Designs, McCloud says he remains as excited as the day he began. "Every series is different, every project is different. But the series is evolving – not least the issues around where people get the money from to do projects."
He also has his own £18m grand project: a development of 109 new-build homes in Oxford. It will perhaps be a bigger challenge than most Grand Designs. McCloud's company, Hab, is aiming to create low-cost, affordable and sustainable homes that embrace an eco-vision that includes car clubs, cycleways and food collectives.
McCloud calls it an "intelligent approach to regeneration". But at the end of the project it will be – for once – the public who decide, not him.
McCloud's do's and don'ts of home renovation
• Grand Designs don't happen without what McCloud believes to be the essential component of any home improvement project: an architect. "Expert help needn't be impossibly expensive. Everyone deserves and needs to work with talented individuals. If you go to a good architect, your fees will pay for themselves."
• Don't design things as you go along. "We did a programme on a house in Spain, but sadly they didn't invest in the design process. And then there was a conversion of a church in Tipton [in the West Midlands]. There was no architect, no design input, and it was pedestrian and clunky."
• Don't just add rooms but use the process to re-evaluate the layout of your home. "Rejig your rooms to how we live today rather than a hundred years ago."
• Hire a project manager. "A big project will drain you night and day, but the ride need only be as hard or as easy as you make it … People have got to get over the fear of not being able to trust others. I come across people who are very successful in their own sphere, and really believe they can do it all themselves, but they can't."
• You can find cheap solutions. "Vision and ideas are free. But there are reasons why not everyone opts for glass balustrades. I'm a big fan of intelligent cheap solutions. There's no reason for your imagination to be fettered by money."
• Expect cost overruns. "If you are disciplined, add 20% to your budget. If you are not disciplined, then add 59%."
• Don't expect the bank to keep bailing you out. "We used to see people go back to the bank for bigger loans. Now that has stopped and projects have been mothballed."
Be a winner with Guardian Money
Fifty free pairs of tickets are up for grabs for Grand Designs Live, at ExCeL in London's Docklands from 30 April-8 May. There will be more than 500 exhibitors, seven distinct sections and a "Grand Village" hosting full-scale properties.
All you have to do is email money@guardian.co.uk, put Grand Designs Live in the subject line, and add your full address. The closing date is 1pm on 14 April. The Money team will select emails at random and let you know if you're a winner!
If you're not lucky enough to win a free ticket, you can buy tickets for £9 by booking by 14 April. That is a 50% saving off the weekend door price. Book at granddesignslive.com or call 0844 209 7349 and quote GUAR9
Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 award nominations – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 18, 2011
From energy-harvesting paving slabs to quick-assembly emergency shelters, see the projects at the cutting edge of design in 2010
Junkitecture and the Jellyfish theatre
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 24, 2010
It is Britain's first fully functioning recycled theatre – made of old nails, pallets and discarded doors. As the Jellyfish opens, Jonathan Glancey examines the rise of 'junkitecture'
'One man's trash is another's man treasure," says Martin Kaltwasser, screwdriver and saw in hand. The German architect and conceptual artist is rushing to complete the Jellyfish theatre, which stands in a south London playground, 10 minutes' walk from the Globe theatre on the banks of the Thames. To say that this building is junk would be disparaging. And yet junk, of a sort, it is.
The Jellyfish theatre, which opens next week, is being built from the detritus of markets, timberyards and building sites; from redundant school furniture, hand-me-down front doors, recycled nails and pretty much anything that local residents and businesses have contributed – prompted by a public appeal by the Red Room film and theatre company. As work progresses, ever more planks of wood and stuff that would otherwise be "landfill" have been piled up in this playground in Southwark.
Dreamed up two years ago by Red Room's artistic director, Topher Campbell, and its producer, Bryan Savery, the Jellyfish theatre looks, most of all, like a shrine to the humble timber pallet. Until a few weeks ago, these hundreds of pallets were being used to stack fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden market. Cheap, strong and hugely adaptable, they also happen to have a distinctly architectural look, especially when flipped on their sides and turned into walls. Some will be left as they are, others clad with sheets of plywood to keep the rain out and to usher in the darkness needed inside an auditorium.
Kaltwasser and his wife and business partner Folke Köbberling are, in fact, building Britain's first fully functioning theatre made entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials. There are no fixed plans, few drawings; Kaltwasser orchestrates his fellow builders as Mike Leigh does his actors. The building has a strong, if very basic steel frame to keep its structure in check, and yet beyond this basic architectural necessity, all else is improvised: a pallet positioned here, a sheet of plywood there, some MDF on top.
This 120-seat theatre, which fully complies with local building, fire and safety regulations, will enjoy no more than a fleeting life, however. Campbell is busy rehearsing a pair of eco-themed plays that will run from 26 August to 9 October: Oikos (pronounced "ee-kos", the Greek root for economy and ecology) by Simon Wu, and Protozoa by Kay Adshead. After that, the Jellyfish will be dismantled, and its recycled components recycled yet again.
Both plays deal with people rebuilding their lives after political and environmental catastrophe. "They're our response to climate catastrophe," says Campbell, "a condition that might yet come about – partly through our collective greed, our insatiable desire to consume, to waste energy, materials, nature. I imagine how I'd cope if the sky fell in: I'd want to know I could find people who'd be able to create shelters to keep us safe, and allow us space to think about what we were all going to do."
He describes the collaboration as "total theatre": the playwrights have been fully involved with the idea, and reality, of the building, while Kaltwasser and Köbberling have, in turn, read their scripts. The building itself – the idea behind it, the way it's being built, the way it'll feel when completed – is very much a part of the plays. "This is true community theatre: we've been able to involve many different people, from local schoolchildren to office workers across the street."
"It's not just materials we got for free," adds Savery, "but the time and skill of unemployed architects, along with carpenters and people who've walked off the street during their lunch hours." By the end of last week, 81 volunteers had put in 4,200 hours between them over the nine weeks since work began. Eight hundred pallets and 750 square metres of plywood and other sheet material were donated.
"Projects like the 2012 London Olympics have promised public engagement," says Savery, "yet the entire Olympics site is walled and strictly out of bounds. We're a completely open stage, trying to prove that local people can create their own public projects. We found our own site by walking around, found Martin and Folke by asking around, asked Southwark if it was possible. And off we went. You can do it, too, without developers, quangos, huge professional teams – and with anyone taking part."
Well, not quite anyone. A hand-painted notice insists that no drugs or alcohol be brought on site. This is not some trippy 1960s-style architectural happening, but a serious, if good-natured, public building project.
Just nipping out to mow the roof
Building from found materials is, of course, nothing new. Humans (and animals) have always done this. The 1960s saw, however, a heady boom in self-build, initiated by all those alternative lifestyle movements. Self-build tended to fall into two schools: shelters shaped from found materials and other bric-a-brac; and buildings created by local communities with their own hands, to formal architectural designs.
The latter have included the self-build housing programmes initiated by architects like Walter Segal, the Swiss-born British architect who developed a system of prefabricated timber houses built by local people to his simple, elegant designs. In the 1970s, four such schemes were built in Lewisham, London, on sites unsuitable for conventional council houses. Segal's homes – clean, modern, environmentally sound and sometimes crowned with flowering turf roofs – are much sought-after today.
The alternative to Segal's style of self-build was the kind of free-spirited hippy homes that sprung up in self-consciously alternative communities, notably in California. Such shelters might be built from anything going. Their spirit lives on today in the guise of "benders". Hidden away in the English countryside, these simple shelters, made of coppiced hazel and willow covered in army-surplus canvas and other easily sourced natural materials, are part of a fine tradition of independent and ecologically savvy homemaking. Then there are the recent reports of the campsites on London's perimeters, filled with increasing numbers of commuters who can't afford the capital's house prices.
"It's definitely political," says Campbell of the Jellyfish project. "Martin and Folke see it as an architecture of resistance, against the ways people are so often just passive users of the buildings they're given by politicians, developers and their architects." He points to the Shard, designed by Renzo Piano, a mighty developer's tower rising close by, behind high guarded walls.
Kaltwasser (born in Munster in 1965) and Köbberling (from Kassell and four years younger) have been working together in Berlin, and more recently in Los Angeles, for the past 12 years. Kaltwasser received a conventional architectural education yet found himself a fish out of water in architects' offices. In 1989, he built his first house, from found materials, in central Berlin. He expected locals to hate it. They didn't. In fact, Kaltwasser found himself popular, and even cooked for by neighbours.
Better than a boring mall
Since then, he and Köbberling have built several remarkable buildings in the same vein. Two years ago, the Wysing Arts Centre, near Cambridge, commissioned Amphis, a large patchwork house assembled in just six weeks by 40 volunteers. Used, appropriately, for informal meetings and spontaneous events, it was made of materials thrown out by the University of Cambridge. The pair also cooked up a wholly unlikely urban interloper, the Werdplatz-palais, a social centre and soup kitchen built in 2008 in Zurich, cheek-by-jowl with the stock exchange.
When the three-month permit the authorities granted it expired, the structure was dismantled and recycled into a play space for local immigrant children, who also helped build it. At the end of 2008, that, too, was dismantled. "These buildings were short-lived," says Kaltwasser, "but it was great, in such a highly regulated city, to let people with so little economic and political power build for themselves and for their needs, rather than giving them more boring public places and shopping malls. Many people were sad when the buildings had to go."
So how did they come up with the name Jellyfish? "People find jellyfish a little disturbing," he says. "And yet they're fragile creatures. They need the clean waters we're making dirty. And they appear to come and go, just like that." And just like Kobberling and Kaltwasser's buildings, too.
• For more information on the Jellyfish theatre and its performances visit oikosproject.com