Posts Tagged guardian.co.uk
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 6, 2012
Helsinki's Chapel of Silence combats consumer culture, New York's cats get designer shelters and Arash and Kelly propose an inverted pyramid for Tahrir Square
The new year is a time to reflect on the excesses of consumer culture. As an antidote, may I recommend the Kamppi Chapel of Silence on Helsinki's Narinkka Square? Designed by K2S, a firm of young Helsinki architects, the chapel opens later this year and is very close to the main entrance of the city's big, slick Kamppi shopping mall. The idea is for the Chapel of Silence to be a place of respite for those worn down by retail culture in the most commercially active part of the city.
The curving, windowless chapel – it will be lit, numinously, from slits and chutes around its roof – is clad in waxed spruce planks with an interior lined in oiled alder. I have a feeling that it will be a very beautiful sanctuary indeed, this new, compact, not-for-profit building. City centres used to be this way, with markets and places of worship, the sacred and the secular (whether church, temple or mosque) nestled and working together. Today, our new retail centres are soulless places. Could we begin a campaign to introduce such contemplative beauty to city centres elsewhere? After all, we have nothing to lose but our shopping bags, and everything to gain from architecture offering nothing for sale.
The Chapel of Silence has been included in Architectural Digest's list of exciting new buildings to look out for this year. It could hardly be more different from the others chosen by the Manhattan-based magazine, or from the winning entry by Co Adaptive Architecture – a prototype cat shelter (itself the winner of a competition arranged by New York's Architects for Animals). The city has 10,000 stray cats and the mayor has decided to do something for them. The winning design is a bright yellow plastic shelter, lined with denim and topped with a moss-covered lid. Nifty electronics will connect each shelter to a central database so the city can monitor the welfare and whereabouts of the cats. Gee whizz: most cities do far less than this for their two-legged inhabitants.
Baghdad, and Iraq in general, is desperate for new homes. This week, Peter Besley, director of Assemblage architects announced that the London, Doha and Baghdad-based firm has won the United Nations Habitat competition to design new housing in Iraq. The Assemblage proposal, says the practice, is for "a fully integrated settlement for 3,000 people including schools, markets, a health centre and a variety of green spaces and playing fields ... combin[ing] modern construction methods with aspects of traditional Iraqi urbanism." Images of the new housing do indeed reveal an updated form of design that has been around in the region for many thousands of years.
As an ideal new year present for Cairo – and Tahrir Square in particular – Arash and Kelly, an industrial art and design studio run by Royal College of Art graduates, proposes a beautiful "inverted pyramid-shaped auditorium for people to come and talk and participate and share ideas and to have a focal point ... a space to celebrate liberty."
Hopefully, there will be many inspiring ideas for new homes and public places at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. Now that Paolo Baratta (the Biennale president who Silvio Berslusconi tried to oust last year) is secure in his role, the new board of administration has announced that David Chipperfield is to be director of the Architecture Sector.
Given the hurly burly of the first weeks of the Biennale, and Venice in general during the summer, perhaps Chipperfield should take a leaf out of Helsinki's book and offer visitors a Venetian cappella contemoporanea di silenzio. Happy new year.
‘I can see the Shard from here’ – your pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 3, 2012
As the tallest building in Western Europe the iconic Shard can be seen from all sorts of high rises and walkways in London. Inspired by a Flickr group of the same name, here's a selection of some of the best and most interesting images of the Shard as viewed by Flickr users. If you want to add your view of the Shard, send an email to community.coordinators@guardian.co.uk
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 23, 2011
Snøhetta draw inspiration from the sea for Maggie's Aberdeen, Rhem Khasiev conjures up an 'Olympic Zeppelin' from the Trafalgar Square air, and churches find their saviours
Maggie's centres have proved one of the most imaginative and sensitive architectural patrons this year, with the opening of two new cancer care buildings, in Nottingham, by Piers Gough and Paul Smith, and Swansea, by Kisho Kurokawa. Next year looks to be no different, as Aberdeen City Council considers designs by the Oslo-based Snøhetta for Maggie's Aberdeen, planned for the Foresthill site of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
The continually curved concrete shell of the building (which resembles a giant seashell) will wrap around a courtyard with a flowering cherry tree at its heart and a warm timber interior. But planning permission has yet to be granted and, as Snøhetta know well, even the most poetic proposals don't always go to plan. Snøhetta's competition-winning design, with Spence Associates, for the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate was dropped after projected costs began to rise way beyond what was affordable. David Chipperfield was called in to design a robust, if less ambitious, design.
If the Aberdeen project goes ahead, this will be Snøhetta's first building in Britain. The firm has designed some of the world's most adventurous new buildings, notably the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Cairo, and Oslo's iceberg-like Opera House.
Where Snøhetta take their inspiration from the land and sea, Moscow architect Rem Khasiev has looked to the air and imagined what he calls an "Olympic Zeppelin" landing in Trafalgar Square and bursting out into a multipurpose information and entertainment pavilion for the London 2012 Olympics. Well, why not? The Zeppelin connection might seem odd, but Khasiev's design would certainly complement the fragmented, bizarre Olympics logo, and Trafalgar Square is well-suited to temporary designs, from sculptures that come and go to music and exhibition arenas.
Elsewhere, Christmas has come early to some of Britain's most important churches – the Cathedral Fabric Repair Fund has announced its latest grants. The buildings awarded grants include the cathedrals of Bradford, Coventry, Peterborough and Portsmouth. Projects include preventative work at Peterborough aimed at protecting the building from increased rainfall in future years and a pioneering programme for the "Chapel of Industry" at Coventry Cathedral looking at the kind of major building repairs that affect specifically modern designs.
The threat of maintenance costs very nearly led to the demolition of the modern Roman Catholic church of St Raphael the Archangel in Milbrook, Stalybridge, Greater Manchester. Closed in April, it was designed by Edward J Massey of Massey and Massey of Warrington (does anyone know more about them?) and consecrated in 1963. The church has been saved and listed Grade II in time for Christmas, thanks to the efforts of the Manchester Modernist Society. The interior is adorned with striking stained glass by Pierre Fourmaintraux and custom-made ceramic Stations of the Cross by Alan Boyson.
A report by English Heritage on St Raphael's notes that "the church retains its original character to a high degree, being largely intact and architecturally unaltered, and retaining the majority of its high-quality contemporary fixtures and fittings ... the church is a showcase for contemporary arts and crafts".
Sadly, no modernist society, nor Father Christmas, has been able to save Saab, the ill-fated Swedish carmaker that filed for bankruptcy this week after failing to secure funding from Chinese investors. It is a sad end for a firm that once made cars architects, designers and engineers adored. Designed by Sixten Sason, who had previously worked on Saab aircraft, the 92 was the firm's first car and a resounding success. It would be a great car to drive around looking at modernist buildings, in Manchester as in Stockholm – although there would be no grants to help restore or rescue it when things went wrong.
Battersea Power Station: the power of dreams
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 21, 2011
Battersea Power Station will go on the market early in the new year after its latest redesign collapsed into administration. There have been many false starts over the years …
Stay in your very own Frank Lloyd Wright house
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 17, 2011
Three of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic houses can be seen on a day trip from Pittsburgh – and there's even the opportunity to spend the night in one of them
Frank Lloyd Wright was coming towards me in his trademark pork-pie hat and opera-goer's cape, frosty eyebrows raised, when I woke up. As a rule I don't dream of world-famous architects – never, so far as I recall, have I dreamed of Frank Gehry or IM Pei – but there were extenuating factors. I'd nodded off over a biography of Wright, reading about how he'd arrive unannounced at a house of his design to see how its owners were treating it. And the house where I lay, the Duncan House, an hour south-east of Pittsburgh, was an actual FLW, one of only half a dozen where Wright-lovers can stay the night.
Left in sole possession, my wife and I struggled that first evening to make ourselves at home. To begin with, we tried going for a walk. The house is at the end of a mile-long private driveway, set amid a 125-acre wooded estate. In October the trees were in their autumn finery, spanning the spectrum from deep red to palest yellow. Climbing a hill, we looked out over the rolling Laurel Highlands, one of Pennsylvania's prettiest landscapes and a favourite getaway for Pittsburghers, before following a trail to a secluded pond. On our return leg, we looked in on the estate's two other houses, both designed by a pupil of Wright's and bearing his influence.
Back at home base, we tried walking around the single-storey house, considering it from every angle: the horizontal bands of bleached mahogany, the gutterless eaves, the stonework of the chimney, and the carport (Wright hated enclosed spaces like garages, attics and basements). Inside the house was a vintage 1950s American kitchen, like the set of Happy Days, but instead of cooking we made a picnic at the living room table. This was our favourite space, the heart of the house with its cathedral roof and fireplace, and the expansive windows that allowed us to sit warmly inside without missing the magnificent foliage. It wasn't until we were ready for bed that we noticed another typical FLW feature – no curtains or blinds on the windows.
So, up at first light, we made the 40-minute drive south through the Laurel Highlands to Fallingwater. Wright built Fallingwater in the 1930s, when he was pushing 70, and such was its impact that he never again lacked for commissions. People have been visiting, photographing and writing about the place ever since but it still has the power to startle at first sight. The family who commissioned Fallingwater, owners of a Pittsburgh department store, anticipated something more conventional: a weekend cabin with a view of the falls. What they got instead was a bravura exercise in modern architecture and engineering – the core of the house resting on boulders with terraces of reinforced concrete cantilevered out over the falls. To their credit, they were content to foot the bill, which, in true Wright style, never ceased to climb.
Seven miles from Fallingwater and now under the ownership of Lord Palumbo, Kentuck Knob is another FLW favourite. Crowning the brow of a hill and shrouded by trees, Kentuck Knob is built around a hexagonal kitchen and its angles just keep getting odder. Wright hated the dark, Victorian houses of his childhood, calling their rooms boxes within boxes; one of his abiding aims was to break down those boxes and blur the line between inside and out. Built for local ice-cream barons, Kentuck Knob achieves these aims with considerable charm. Adding to its appeal, the house and grounds are dotted with modern art – works by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Serra – from Lord Palumbo's collection.
Having toured these two houses, we returned for a second night at the Duncan House and found ourselves looking on "our" FLW with fresh eyes. Now that we'd learned a little about Wright's methods and motives, certain things made more sense: the absence of decoration (Wright abhorred "inferior desecrators"); the narrow gallery leading to the bedrooms (a mere passing-through space, to be minimized as far as possible); the built-in shelving; and the division of the house between living areas (spacious and open) and private spaces (smaller and darker, places to sleep and take shelter rather than for living).
FLW houses try to teach their inhabitants how their paternalistic designer would you to live: together, around the fireplace; in harmony with nature; simply and without clutter. If Americans have largely ignored his lessons, holding on to their garages and basements, preferring to live in bigger and bigger boxes on sub-divided estates, that isn't Wright's fault.
The Duncan House is no Fallingwater. In common with the other five Wright houses where you can stay the night (all in the Midwest), it's a Usonian. Usonians, designed and built in the last decades of Wright's life, were prefabricated houses that could be assembled according to one of a dozen blueprints. They were meant to be affordable, bringing good design within reach of middle-class America. (Though affordable was always a very relative term with Wright.)
The only way you'll ever get to experience Fallingwater is on a guided tour. Staying at Duncan House felt a bit like being able to take a Rembrandt home from the gallery – not a major work, a sketch, but a Rembrandt all the same.
We certainly got to like the place and were sorry to leave – perhaps, if we'd been allowed to stay, we'd have become better people! Lingering on our last morning, I took time to flick through the comments book. In the couple of years since the Duncan House opened, Wright aficionados from all over the world have stayed there, adding an extra, personal facet to their FLW tour. It's not cheap but very few were complaining. 'The dream of a lifetime' wrote more than one.
• The Duncan House, 187 Evergreen Lane, Acme (+1 877 833 7829) costs $425 per night (two night minimum); the house sleeps up to six – extra $50 per night for fourth, fifth and sixth guests. Fallingwater, 1491 Mill Run Road, Mill Run, (fallingwater.org; book tours several months in advance). Kentuck Knob, 723 Kentuck Road, Dunbar (kentuckknob.com; advance bookings recommended). Flights from London to Pittsburgh with various US airlines start at around £340, if booked via kayak.co.uk.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 16, 2011
Finland gets a newfangled mountain motel, northern lights come to a ceiling near you, and London's new Routemaster rides out
If I were the Lapland town of Levi, 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle, what would I like for Christmas? Snow? No, I have heaps. Santa? He lives here. Northern lights could be pretty. You mean aurora borealis? Tell me something new. How about a modern ski-resort hotel? Because you haven't seen a ski-resort hotel quite like this one before …
Designed by Big Architects (Bjarke Ingels Group) from Copenhagen, the proposed Koutalaki Ski Village at Levi, Finland's biggest ski resort, was revealed in detail this week. It has been designed neither to fight the sub-zero temperatures nor as a foil to the slopes, but to be part of them. Its cluster of buildings – hotel, restaurants, bars, shops – will flank a central square, and the village will be crowned with its very own slopes. These will connect to the local pistes, so you'll be able to ski from your room, up, down and across the hotel roofs and out into the wide white yonder.
The entire complex will blur into the landscape, especially in heavy snow. As Bjarke Ingels told a press conference in Levi, "the Ski Village is conceived as an extension of both the summit and the resort. Grown from the natural topography rather than dropped from the sky, the architecture … creates a new hybrid integrating distinct identities such as village and resort, shelter and openness, cosy intimacy and natural majesty, unique character and careful continuity, or simply, architecture and landscape."
In summer the green roofs will blossom with flowers and be used for picnics and for walkers to wander over into the surrounding hills. To date, much ski-resort architecture – in Finland as elsewhere in the world – looks as if it has been designed without a thought for aesthetics or the effects of snow. Big's is a small move in the right direction, making architecture work with snow rather than pretending to be apart from it.
To recreate the effect of the northern lights in your home, how about asking Santa for a brand new "el Masterpiece" chandelier designed by Daniel Libeskind? Nine foot high and weighing 159kgs (350lbs), this striking object – shaped in the architect's trademark zig-zag, or lightning-bolt, motif – is sheathed in polished stainless steel. Inside, it is coated with 23-carat gold leaf. The clever bit is the lighting. "Illumination is provided by 1,680 specially designed LED modules," say the architects in a press release on behalf of lighting suppliers Zumtobel. "These can be called up wirelessly via a special iPad app that activates individual, built-in mechanisms attached to each module. The variety of colour scenarios and the quality of light emitted by each mimic the cosmic light that fills the universe."
One better than aurora borealis? The effects should be spectacular – they are the result of an algorithm developed by the architect's son Dr Noam Libeskind, an astrophysicist expert in dark matter at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam. And it's enough to make architects take off their designer glasses and rub their eyes in amazement.
I can imagine quite a few Londoners rubbing their eyes when the first of Transport for London's new Routemaster buses makes it debut in Trafalgar Square on 16 December. Whether this is a Christmas present from Boris Johnson to Londoners or to himself is open for debate. In any event, the new double-decker, designed by Thomas Heatherwick working with Wrightbus of Northern Ireland, is a striking machine – a London bus as imagined, perhaps, by set designers for the Batman movies. But it also re-establishes the idea that a London bus should be designed especially for the streets it serves. Traditionally, London buses were considered an integral part of the streetscape, and by the 1930s as a form of mobile architecture. Charles Holden, architect of the best Underground stations of the time, was called in to work on the look of new buses. And big red buses really do have a big effect on the character of the city.
City streets of the future, meanwhile, might resemble the new-look Exhibition Road in South Kensington, which reopened this week with no pavements, no pedestian crossings and very few traffic lights. Cars, cyclists and pedestrians will now all share the same stripped-back road space. The architects are Dixon Jones, who remodelled the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden, designed the Guardian's offices at Kings Cross and have just transformed the old Regent Palace Hotel at Piccadilly Circus into a svelte combination of modern offices and restored art deco restaurants. Although removing pavements and integrating roads for all users has been a success in Scandinavia, we will all be watching closely as the great, tail-gating British motorist tangles with pedestrians in the shadows of the Victorian museums of Albertopolis.
Finally, a thought for the New Year. Pantone has revealed that the colour of the year for 2012 is … Pantone 17-1463, or Tangerine Tango. Pantone, the self-proclaimed "global authority on colour and provider of professional colour standards to the design industries", says Tangerine Tango will provide "the energy boost we need to recharge and move forward" next year. I must check to see whether this colour can be found in el Masterpiece. And you might find it in the northern lights, but not – ever – as the colour of a London bus, at Christmas or at any other time of this year or next.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 13, 2011
This week architecture awards enjoy an office romance, Germany's walkable rollercoaster is loopily lovable, and a new exhibition shows us light at the end of the Tube
It's been a golden week for architecture and design, with awards and prizes aplenty. RIBA announced that Herman Hertzberger, the 79-year-old Dutch architect, will receive the 2012 Royal Gold Medal at a ceremony in London in February. "Given in recognition of a body of work," says RIBA, "the Royal Gold Medal is approved personally by Her Majesty the Queen and is given to a person or group of people whose influence on architecture has had a truly international effect."
Hertzberger has had an international effect, and yet the lessons of his most important building – a radical and democratic office block for the Centraal Beheer insurance company in Apeldoorn – have either been forgotten or ignored as office design since the mid-70s has become ever more indebted to that of the call centre and panopticon, a form of building originally intended for prisons.
In a talk given in Dublin four years ago, Hertzberger said that offices such as Central Beheer's – designed for the workforce to occupy freely and as they saw fit – are no longer possible given the "widespread engraining of a managerial mentality" and its power-based psychology, which dominates the workplace today.
For Hertzberger, an office can and should be like a city, with many different places for people to meet and work openly, and as equals. It is a simple, profound idea and yet Central Beheer remains the exception rather than the rule. Hertzberger's humanity, however, has shaped modest, informal buildings – from the Montessori School in Delft to the brand new Faculty of Science at the University of Utrecht – that have made him a behind-the-scenes force in modern architecture. Here is someone who needs to be listened to afresh in our increasingly corporate world.
In his thrilling animation Robots of Brixton, Kibwe Tavares, a student at the Bartlett at University College London, has created a dystopian world far removed from corporate London. We showed this in Constructive Criticism in July when it was a part of Tavares's MA degree show. This week it won the Bartlett student Silver Medal (there's a Silver and a Bronze, but no Gold) in RIBA's President's Medals Student Awards 2011. The judges said: "We were stunned by the research work that went into making this film: not only had an urban environment been designed but the film itself was a complex design project. An amazing piece of work that is truly exciting and inspirational."
This year saw the highest ever number of entries for the President's Medals: 276 entries from 83 schools of architecture in 27 countries. The Bronze Medal has been awarded to Basmah Kaki, a student at the Architectural Association for An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism, "a design which exploits the natural environment to create a sanctuary for workers, protecting them from damage caused by noise pollution in an Indian granite quarry".
Hannah Robertson of the University of Melbourne won the Dissertation Medal for her work Bush Owner Builder, which looks at culturally sensitive and appropriate homes for an indigenous community in the far north of Queensland. Designs that emerged from working closely with the Aborigine community, says RIBA, are now being built on "homeland" sites. The judges said: "This dissertation warmed our hearts with its social concern. A sensitive and respectful piece of work, it rethinks the world of the architect and shows people not as clients but as genuine participants in the creative architectural process." Herman Hertzberger would like the sound of this.
I can see an award coming the way of Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth. The Hamburg-based artists, who have worked together for the past seven years on innovative public artworks in Germany, have triumphed with Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain, a swirling steel stairway, lit at night, that loops its way over the top of a hill in south Duisburg overlooking the western Ruhr. Although it is impossible to loop the loop – humans just can't run fast enough – this crazy and beautifully engineered sculpture is a symbol of contemporary life: a rollercoaster with its share of excitements, enticing vistas and dead ends. The artists put it slightly differently: "Tiger and Turtle refers with its immanent dialectic of speed and deadlock to the situation of change in the region and its turn towards renaturisation and restructuring."
The contrast between man-made speed and nature is beautifully captured in Autumn Woods, a 1938 poster designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer for the London Underground. This is one of several artworks by the American graphic artist on show until 18 December at the Estorick Collection, London. The Poster King: Edward McKnight Kauffer focuses on the artist's years in England (1914-1940), during which he brought many of the latest trends in modern art, from vorticism and cubism to futurism, to the public's attention.
Kauffer's biggest audience was the millions of commuters who travelled by Underground when, under the direction of Frank Pick, it was the world's finest metro system. "The tunnels of the Tube," said Wyndham Lewis, the vorticist artist, "became … his subterranean picture galleries." They did indeed. The Underground, a futurist's dream – all speed, noise, energy and efficiency – also offered the opportunity to escape to the woods and forests on its fringes: Autumn Woods captures a sense of fairytale magic waiting at the end of all those iron-clad Tube tunnels.
After Liverpool, the capital’s heritage site is being investigated
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 5, 2011
Unesco's inspectors are in London following a similar visit to the north west last month over concerns about tall buildings
Liverpool is not the only UK city under threat of losing a world heritage designation, it emerged on Monday
Unesco inspectors will visit London this week to check out developments around the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster.
In a move that is reminiscent of the Liverpool world heritage debate, Unesco is concerned their status as prized buildings of world importance is being damaged by the building of skyscrapers.
Liverpool was warned it will be stripped of its World Heritage Site status if a £5.5bn skyscraper plan goes ahead without "radical" changes, when inspectors visited in November.
The three-day Unesco inspection, led by Ron van Oers, had left Liverpool with clear guidance "100%" that, unless Peel's Liverpool Waters project was radically changed, they will recommend the city be stripped of the World Heritage accolade.
The official inspectors' report will be completed by December 23 and will then be sent to Liverpool council and Peel within two to four weeks.
Peel, having already dramatically reduced the number of skyscrapers, has indicated it is not willing to compromise its Liverpool Waters scheme further. It also reduced the height of the tallest planned building – the Shanghai tower – to 55 storeys.
Ultimate responsibility for the UK's 28 World Heritage Sites falls to the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport.
Heritage campaigner Wayne Colquhoun, who was instrumental in bringing the inspectors to Liverpool, said the fact Unesco were now visiting the capital would reinforce the importance of local heritage concerns.
"If London is threatened, then hopefully people in positions of power that think Liverpool is just a provincial outpost may sit up and take the matter seriously," he told the Liverpool Daily Post.
Unesco has a number of specific concerns about London.
It has warned that the Tower of London could be downgraded because of the negative impact of the Shard of Glass on its panorama.
The 1,020ft-high Shard, a 66-storey office block next to London Bridge, will be the tallest building in Europe when it is finished.
Unesco's World Heritage committee has ruled that: "Incremental developments around the Tower over the past five years have impacted adversely its visual integrity."
Unesco is also concerned about the 43-storey Doon Street tower, which is being built in Lambeth across the river from the Palace of Westminster.
The World Heritage committee has said specific measures to protect the immediate and wider settings and have not yet been sufficiently developed.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 2, 2011
It's all about train stations this week, with the Tube bringing beauty to Battersea and Canada Water unveiling its flashy new library. Meanwhile, LA's Union Station is ripe for a revamp
Last year the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, approved the idea of building two new Tube stations on London Underground's Northern line, at Vauxhall and Nine Elms, as part of the long-awaited £5.5bn redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and the surrounding area. This is one of central London's last great wastelands. Long ripe for regeneration, developers have been wary of making a move in this surprisingly cut-off quarter of the capital despite the opportunity to build shops, offices, hotels, places of entertainment and up to 16,000 homes here – until the arrival, or solid promise, of a Tube line.
In his Autumn statement this week, Chancellor George Osborne said the government would support the scheme. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine two handsome new Underground stations, such as Arnos Grove and Southgate by Charles Holden from the 1930s, or the pick of the fine stations along the Jubilee line extension from Westminster to Stratford.
This week, however, the curiously named Battersea Power Station Shareholder Vehicle, the holding company for the forlorn former temple of power designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, was told that its lenders intend to take the 15-hectare (38 acres) site into receivership, as no progress has been made on development. This will scupper the ambitious scheme by Rafael Viñoly to revamp the listed building. Will the chancellor and mayor remain keen on building a costly Tube line to Battersea Wasteland?
In Los Angeles, the site up for redevelopment around Union Station, an exquisite late-30s design by, among others, John Parkinson and Donald B Parkinson that oozes Hollywood (the waiting area was used as a police department in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), is even bigger than Battersea. This week, the LA Transportation Authority revealed a shortlist of architects, one of whom will masterplan the redevelopment of 17 hectares (42 acres) of downtown railway land. The shortlist includes Britain's Foster and Partners teamed with the IBI Group, and Grimshaw Architects with Gruen Associates, as well as Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Parsons Transportation Group. Architects who failed to make the list include Rem Koolhaas, Morphosis and Zaha Hadid. The plan is for mixed-use development. Will it happen? Maybe not in the current economic climate, but it would be sad if the scheme were rushed. Union Station might seem remote, even from downtown LA, but its warm, welcoming and beautifully crafted architecture could yet set a tone for LA's equivalent of Battersea.
A more modest development at a railway station opened this week in London's Docklands. This is Southwark Council's £14m Canada Water Library. Designed by Piers Gough of CZWG in the guise of a half-buried upside-down pyramid clad in a gold anodised aluminium mesh, the library is connected directly to Canada Water station on London's Jubilee line.
The shape of the building is not wilful; the plot of land – part of a new public square – was small, so Gough came up with the idea of splaying the library upwards and outwards. Unveiling the new building, Veronica Ward (Southwark's cabinet member for culture, leisure and sport) said: "What we've managed to do is listen to people. Over 6,000 people said they would rather we did things like reduce hours or use volunteers than close libraries. That was enough people saying libraries were important."
If libraries remain essential for our mental health, Maggie's Cancer Care Centres are proving to be a godsend to those seeking inspiration, support and companionship. Following the opening of the Nottingham Maggie's Centre, designed by Piers Gough and Paul Smith, the Swansea Maggie's Centre at Singelton Hospital is now complete. Set by woods and overlooking Swansea Bay, it opens officially on 9 December 2011. Designed by the late Kisho Kurokawa, one of the founders of the Metabolist movement in Japan, the building is based on Kurokawa's concept of a "cosmic whirlpool" representing "everlasting forces swirling around a still centre".
"The new Maggie's Centre will come out of the earth and swing around with two arms like a rotating galaxy," said Kurokowa. "One side will welcome the visitor and lead to the other side, which embraces nature – the trees, rocks and water. A place set apart, as Maggie [Jencks] said of a garden. The connection to the cosmos and contacts between east and west – two motives that Maggie and I shared – are in the design. I hope she would have liked it."
Meanwhile, Quentin Blake, the children's illustrator best known for his drawings for Roald Dahl stories, won this year's Prince Philip Designers prize, the last to be judged by the Duke of Edinburgh himself. Other nominees included architects David Chipperfield, Chris Wilkinson and Jim Eyre, and the engineer Cecil Balmond, co-designer of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the grounds of the 2012 London Olympics. The structure is connected by a pedestrian bridge to Stratford station, where Jubilee line trains will take you to Canada Water, if not to Battersea.
The Lloyd’s building is a time machine | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 20, 2011
A monument to 'high-tech', the Lloyd's of London building marries the capitalism of gentlemen with that of the industrialists
Richard Rogers's 1986 headquarters for the insurers Lloyd's of London has just been listed Grade I. This makes it, along with the Royal Festival Hall, one of the few 20th-century structures to be placed at the same level as, say, St Paul's. But, like the gothic cathedrals it so closely resembles, Lloyd's was not meant to be an entirely finished product. Look up to the top of its facade, and you'll find cranes are still there, left when construction ended, to make clear it could still be extended up and outwards. The gothic cathedrals did grow in this manner, but then they didn't get preservation orders 25 years after they were built.
There should be no doubt whatsoever that Lloyd's deserves its listing. But for a building so famous, Lloyd's is not well served by writers and historians. It is usually interpreted in one of two completely inadequate ways. For many, it's a metallic embodiment of the Big Bang, a Thatcherite machine for underwriting. In architectural history, it's a monument to "high-tech", a style that arose in the mid 1970s as a sort of last flicker from the white heat of the technological revolution, at the hands of currently ennobled architects – Lord Foster of Thames Bank, Lord Rogers of Riverside. High-tech, or a version of it, has been the dominant form of architecture in the UK for two decades, though you can read a lot from the change in its functions: in the 70s most of the above were designing factories. Now they design office blocks, cultural centres and luxury flats with a still residual "industrial aesthetic", including the world's most expensive One Hyde Park.
Lloyd's captures the tensions between industrialism and the "new economy" of financial services, then tries to resolve them. Before Rogers, the insurers were housed in a neoclassical building built as late as the 50s – an embodiment of a practically unchanging British gentlemanly capitalism. It was meant to reassure, to look eternal. If the 1986 replacement evokes any previously existing buildings of any kind, then they're industrial, almost temporary structures – oil refineries, or the North Sea oil rigs built off the east coast of Scotland in the 70s, much beloved of high-tech architects. These are visually striking because of sheer utility, because their functional parts are in no way sheathed or hidden, and because the refining process requires the baffling, twisting intricacies of pipes and gantries. The North Sea oil that kept Thatcherism secure in its confrontations with the unions provided inadvertent inspiration for the aesthetic of the City itself at the exact point it was let off the leash.
Lloyd's marks the point in British architecture where industrial features became something to enjoy in and of themselves; not coincidentally the point where industry itself faced forcible decimation. Maybe those bared ducts, those moving parts, those steel surfaces and gigantic, top-lit open spaces for working in were all some kind of unacknowledged appeasing of the gods of industry. It's also possible that Lloyd's was and is especially thrilling for people who have never worked in a factory, the only other kind of place where services are habitually left uncovered, in those places because "nobody" is looking.
What makes Lloyd's such a bizarre place, however, is seeing how the underwriters have conserved so many elements of their atavistic previous existence. These remnants were scattered around the new building, decontextualised fragments ripped from 1763, 1799, 1925 and 1958, rudely riveted onto the ducts and pipes. There's the antiquated uniforms worn by the service staff; the front facade of their earlier neoclassical offices is held up like a severed head. Inside, the Lutine Bell sits at the foot of the enormous, multilevel trading floor and, strangest of all, a complete 18th century dining room by Robert Adam was preserved and recreated.
At first, it seems like these are tokens kept on a sort of reservation of gentlemanly capitalism in order to placate the old guard. After a while you realise that what is really happening here is more like a marriage, a reconciliation, a mockery of the notion that there should be any difference or hostility between the capitalism of gentlemen and the capitalism of industrialists.
Inside the Adam Room, Lloyd's of London are still the organisation that built itself on the slave trade; it's a time machine that physically brings "old corruption" back to the site of its inception. British capitalism plays at modernisation, but keeps this place in reserve, as its ancestral home. Now, Lloyd's itself will be kept as a time capsule, a structure that can receive only the tiniest changes. When future generations want to know what happened to power in Britain in the 1980s, their questions will be answered here.
Architecture, Art and design, Banking, Business, Comment, Comment is free, guardian.co.uk, Lloyds Banking Group, UK news
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