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Boris Johnson’s London Cycle Hire scheme flogs our birthright to Barclays

The Sheet — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:46:52 +0000

The mayor's deal has smothered London's public spaces with what may be the largest piece of corporate branding in existence

London's long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there's no doubt it's a valuable addition to the capital's public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there's the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.

Maybe it's not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital's road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city's new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called "Barclays Cycle Superhighways" and painted Barclays blue.

London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It's not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it's the principle. We're not talking about some supersized billboard here: we're talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad.

The sponsorship deal, worth £25m, has been presented as a coup for Boris Johnson. It has enabled him to recover some of the £140m Transport for London spent on the cycle-hire scheme and has even been presented as "payback" for the mayor's support of the banks during the credit crunch. Surely, however, £25m is a small price to pay for such an invasive piece of branding? If a city of the global stature of London can't afford to provide rental bikes without turning its urban fabric into a massive endorsement, we're in trouble.

There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion. Johnson seemingly lacks any sensitivity to the ethical or aesthetic side-effects of his deal-making – this is, after all, the man who condemned the Stratford Olympics site to a hideous 115m-high sculpture – precisely the kind of vainglorious ego trip the Olympics can do without – based on a 45-second chat with Britain's richest man in the cloakroom at Davos. We must be careful not to assume a loss of innocence; private ownership and interests have held sway in this city for centuries, and often cooperation between private and public bodies is the best way to meet the city's needs. However, the public realm that the Victorians handed over to municipal authorities to manage in the public good – including streets and pavements, squares, and infrastructure such as transport and sewage networks – has been under steady assault since the privatisation of the Thatcher years.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued in her book No Logo that we had reached a point where it seemed nothing could happen anymore without a corporate sponsor. The inevitable upshot of their growing social power was that brands wanted an expanded visual presence. T-shirt logos and media advertisements were no longer enough: branding had to be a fully immersive experience. As the superhighways prove, there is no amount of space a brand will not happily fill, with public bodies all too willing to hand it over. TfL is becoming ever more imaginative about the bits of Tube stations it will sell off to advertisers – including, now, the space between escalators and the gates of the exit barriers. Every year the Regent Street Christmas lights, once a public gesture organised by the Regent Street Association, turn a major thoroughfare into a 3D advert for some fashion label or blockbuster movie.

Increasingly entire pieces of London have become brands in their own right, a process that began in the 1980s with the privately owned Canary Wharf development. Since then, so-called "business improvement districts" have been popping up all over the capital under the banner of regeneration: Broadgate in the City, Paddington Basin, Kings Cross Central, the new Spitalfields Market, the More London development near Tower Bridge. It's a national phenomenon, too, exemplified by "malls without walls" such as Liverpool ONE or Brindleyplace in Birmingham. They might look like other parts of the city, but they are very different. Stroll through Broadgate and you'll notice the logo of developer British Land studding the pavements. These are privately owned developments, policed by private security guards who can throw you out for the slightest misdemeanour or – if you happen to be sleeping rough, say – simply for disrupting the projection of affluence. In the case of More London – a series of sterile glass blocks set amid some rather uptight landscaping on the South Bank – the very name is a deliberate deception. The developers are trying to claim this is just an ordinary piece of the city. Don't believe it.

Anyone who wants to find out more about the insidious privatisation of British cities should read Anna Minton's latest book, Ground Control. The point is that we are in danger or running out of unbranded space. Though it may seem innocuous, the branding of cycle lanes sets an all-too-exploitable precedent. As citizens we have a communal birthright, which includes the public realm. Our representatives are supposed to protect that – not sell it off to corporations who are neither responsible nor accountable for the spaces of which they claim symbolic ownership. Politicians seem only too ready to turn our cities into horizontal billboards. If we're not vigilant, the urban landscape is going to become a brandscape.

Justin McGuirk

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The stratospheric Strata

The Sheet — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:10:56 +0000

Elephant and Castle's Strata has dramatically changed the south London skyline – and the integrated turbines are a world first

Wren’s carbuncle

The Sheet — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:01:24 +0000

Unsurprisingly, the lead letter in today's Daily Telegraph sticks up for Prince Charles and his "unexpected and unwelcome" covert interventions in the Chelsea Barracks saga. I'm more impressed, however, by the subtler message of the fourth one down. It's from Geoffrey Shaw of South Croydon:

Sir - How very unfortunate that Charles II did not share his successor's views on modern architecture. His influence during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire could have resulted in giving Londoners the cathedral with which they would really have been comfortable – a nice, familiar, Gothic "retro" building, rather than the monstrous carbuncle that now defaces the top of Ludgate Hill, built by that upstart young mathematician Wren.

Harrumph. Frightful business.

Dave Hill

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Battersea power station fires up for London stock market listing

The Sheet — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:09:35 +0000

• Irish owners refinance and want to list the project on Aim
• See our gallery of previous redevelopment plans

The troubled owners of Battersea power station have unveiled plans to float the building on the stock exchange in the latest in a string of attempts to redevelop the derelict London landmark.

Despite numerous plans for the 40-acre site, it has stood empty for more than a quarter of a century while the rest of the Thames waterfront around it has undergone huge change.

Now Irish property group Real Estate Opportunities (REO), which bought the Battersea site in 2006 for £400m, wants to spin it off and possibly float it on London's Alternative Investment Market (Aim). It is also looking for a partner to take a 50% stake in the project and provide the financial firepower.

REO has been hit hard by the Irish property slump. It reported an underlying loss before tax of nearly £1bn for the 14 months to 28 February, reflecting an £811m drop in the valuation of its property portfolio.

The firm has drawn up a shortlist of possible investors after being approached by a number of international real estate groups, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds from around the world, including the Middle East.

REO hopes to get permission to redevelop the site in September after submitting the largest ever planning application made in central London, in terms of financial value, last autumn. If it gets the go-ahead, the site's value is expected to soar from the current valuation of £388m.

"It's an opportunity to turn the power station into a cultural icon for London," said Robert Tincknell, who runs REO's parent firm, Treasury Holdings. "A year ago, people were saying 'it's not going to happen'. That's changed enormously over the last 12 months, with the planning permission having gone in and the support we have [from the London mayor, Boris Johnson, English Heritage and Wandsworth Council]." The Conservatives launched their election manifesto at the power station in April.

Treasury Holdings was forced to tear up its plans for the imposing building, one of London's most recognisable landmarks, and start again after Johnson decided that a proposed tower would ruin the view from Waterloo Bridge to the Palace of Westminster. The original plan, drawn up by the New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly, included a futuristic 300m glass funnel and atrium, rising from an enormous transparent dome.

Viñoly and Treasury Holdings came up with a new blueprint a year ago that is capped at a height of 60m, as stipulated by the mayor. It includes 3,700 homes, office space, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, at a cost of £4.5bn. Treasury Holdings also hopes to co-fund an extension of London Underground's Northern Line to the site.

The high cost means the company needs a partner – "someone who can bring big financial strength to it to make sure it happens," said Tincknell. Building work could start at the end of 2011.

When the power station was decommissioned in 1983, its then owners, the Central Electricity Generating Board, wanted to tear down the building and replace it with housing, but it had been given a Grade II listing in 1980. For developers, the real prize is the land around it; most have little interest in its heritage status.

REO said today it had negotiated new lending terms for Battersea with Lloyds Banking Group and Nama – Ireland's "bad bank" – which means its existing bank facility will be extended and all outstanding breaches waived.

Julia Kollewe

Dan Milmo

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Battersea Power station: the power of dreams

The Sheet — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:56:24 +0000

Battersea Power station is to be demerged from the loss-making Irish property company that now owns it, and floated on the Aim market. There have been many false starts on the redevelopment of the station over the years...

Chelsea barracks hearing witnesses accused of perjury

The Sheet — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:09:07 +0000

Developer CPC Group accuses site owners Qatari Diar of deliberate removal of 19 emails involving Prince Charles and lying about involvement of emir

Witnesses lied under oath to cover up Prince Charles's influence over designs for the £3bn redevelopment of Chelsea barracks, while a senior aide to the Qatari royal family, owners of the site, deliberately deleted emails on the prince's involvement, the high court heard.

Mr Justice Vos was told that John Ward, the managing director of Qatari Diar — the Qatar royal family's development arm, which bought the prime London site — deleted 19 emails that referred to either the Prince of Wales or Sir Michael Peat, his private secretary.

Witnesses from Qatari Diar also "concocted an untrue story" to cover up the role of the prince and the Qatari emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, in the cancellation of the modernist housing project and lied to the judge, the court heard. Among those accused were Ghanim bin Saad al-Saad, the global chief executive of Qatari Diar.

Lawyers for Qatari Diar denied any cover-up and insisted the allegations were entirely unjustified. They said the allegations were effectively a claim that the Qataris perverted the course of justice.

The allegations are the latest twist in a court battle that pits Christian Candy, a London developer, against Qatari Diar, his former development partner on the barracks project.

The case centres on whether the Qataris abandoned the planning application drawn up by the firm of modernist architect Lord Rogers because of planning considerations or because Prince Charles complained about it directly to the emir and his wife one evening at Clarence House. If it was the latter, Candy's company, CPC Group, argues it is owed up to £81m by Qatari Diar.

Qatari Diar insists no instruction to withdraw was issued by the emir. It withdrew the application on the eve of a consent hearing at Westminster city council after the prince voiced his dislike of the design.

Evidence of the deleted emails and of 41 other documents emerged today — more than two weeks after the court finished hearing evidence in the case.

Qatari Diar admitted that it had not searched an email server in its London office during pre-trial evidence gathering. Following a court order, emails containing references to the prince and his most senior aide that had been deleted by Ward from the server in the firm's Doha office were then found and placed before Vos on Friday.

"It looks on the face of it that whenever he spotted a reference to the Prince of Wales he deleted the email," said Lord Grabiner QC, representing CPC.

He said that Ward deleted 24 emails, all but five of which referred to Prince Charles or Peat.

Grabiner said his actions appeared to be "a deliberate distortion of relevant emails by Qatari Diar".

"The court should infer that Mr Ward deliberately deleted sensitive emails in order to prevent their disclosure. This was a determined effort by Mr Ward to delete what he believed would damage Qatari Diar's case."

Joe Smouha QC, representing Qatari Diar, said the new documents "do not add anything material to the evidential position as it was at the conclusion of the trial".

He said that far from being covered up, the deleted emails would have been available as they would have been held on their recipients' servers.

Smouha said they had not been released earlier partly because "the disclosure of electronic documents [in court] is never a perfect process".

Grabiner said that executives at Qatari Diar knew all along about the emir's involvement but had given evidence in court that the withdrawal of the planning application was triggered by other causes.

"All those witnesses lied to your lordship when they gave evidence. They were motivated by concern to conceal what actually happened to protect Qatari Diar and the emir to enable them to avoid paying the money under the contract. It was a political decision not permitted under the terms of the contract."

One email released to the court from Qatari Diar's then public relations consultant, Christopher Joll, shows he believed that the scheme had been withdrawn on the emir's orders.

Alluding to press reports that Qatari Diar wanted to get the "warring factions" around the table he said: "The media seized on [this] as a thinly coded signal that the scheme is being withdrawn which it is, on the instructions of the Emir, but no one outside Candy & Candy and Qatari Diar knows that is the reason."

The judgment is due to be handed down by early July, Vos said.

Analysis: 'Absolute power', the public good, and the reach of royal influence

Anyone dropping into Court 57 at the Royal Courts of Justice over the past month has been granted a peek into two of the world's most opaque powerbrokers: the Prince of Wales, who wields the influence of the British monarchy from the stucco splendour of Clarence House, and the emir of Qatar, whose oil- and gas-rich nation this week emerged as the biggest international property investor in the world.

The Chelsea Barracks case, on the face of it, is a contract dispute between property developers – the emirate's investment arm, Qatari Diar, and the Monaco-based developer Christian Candy. It hinges on the extent to which the emir and the prince were instrumental in halting the £3bn project. But it also sheds light on how royals use their clout when it comes to matters of public interest.

The court heard how Prince Charles plotted a "fight to the finish" campaign to block architecture he didn't like, scrawled handwritten notes to Qatari royals, and would lobby anyone with the influence to have the project halted.

Aides to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani spoke of the Qatari ruler's "absolute power" and the court heard how the emir "went mental" when he thought he may have offended the design sensibilities of a fellow royal – a claim that emerged from a process of Chinese whispers, according to lawyers for Qatari Diar.

It also emerged that the emir stood aloof from even his most senior officials, speaking to the chief executive of Qatari Diar only five times in the past six months and then for no more than 15 minutes in meetings arranged by appointment through the manager of his private office.

The Qataris bought the site for almost £1bn from the Ministry of Defence, but concerns about the project within the two royal households were more of a diplomatic than commercial nature.

"Many would be eternally grateful to Your Excellency if Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment could bequeath a unique and enduring legacy to London," Charles wrote to the Qatari PM after first seeing the original modernist plans. He underlined the words "eternally" and "enduring".

The Qataris were also concerned about the project's legacy. Ghanim bin Saad al Saad, the global chief executive of Qatari Diar who oversees projects for the state-owned firm, told the court: "My aim was to protect the project from delays and the reputation of the state of Qatar."

Candy's company, CPC Group, argues it was a meeting between Charles and the emir that triggered the scrapping. One spring evening last year the prince received the emir and his second wife at Clarence House. A note of the meeting by the prince's private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, revealed "the emir was surprised by [the architect Lord Richard] Rogers' designs for Chelsea Barracks and said that he would have them changed". It was Candy – whose sometimes coarse language and directness in his business dealings became clear in court – who said the Prince had "pissed in [the emir's] ear".

What happened next is disputed. Candy said the emir "went mental at Ghanim, telling him how awful the design was and to withdraw ASAP". The court also heard the Qataris "floundered" at the prince's intervention and the emir's reaction. Not so, said al Saad, insisting the emir was not involved in the decision to withdraw.

Despite the insights from court 57, there is a gap in the court papers that looks unlikely to be filled. No correspondence relating to Clarence House and the emir has emerged for between 11 and 15 May, the five days after the prince met the emir.ends

Robert Booth

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Ten years of the Serpentine’s star pavilions

The Sheet — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:04:07 +0000

Since the year 2000 London's Serpentine Gallery has been home to a series of temporary architectural creations. The summer pavilions, by the world's most celebrated architects, are a highlight of the UK's cultural year. But which have best stood the test of time?

The annual Serpentine pavilion is a great achievement based on some dodgy ideas – that architecture can be made into a collectible artwork, and that it can work its magic independent of use or purpose. Also that hiring a famous architect is the same thing as achieving a great building. Also that you can build structures at a speed and in a way that makes considered detail almost impossible without the quality of the finished work suffering. The achievement is that it has created a series of intriguing, sometimes beautiful, occasionally dud structures that have livened up our summers. The series has given glimpses of what architects can do with space, structure, material, light and nature, and the human habitation of these things.

The Serpentine pavilion was invented 10 years ago, in the year of millennium fever. It was not funded by the national lottery or the Millennium Commission, and sought to deliver no sonorous messages about modern Britain, but it crystallised the feeling that we were in a new century and that, somehow or other, this should be celebrated with new architecture.

Each year, architects were asked to design and construct, in a breathless six-month period, temporary structures outside the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, and had the freedom to try out ideas that the planners would have ground into dust had they been permanent. The gallery's rules were that the pavilions had to be designed by leading architects who had built nothing in Britain, and those at the spectacular, eye-catching end of the profession were favoured. Grabbing the attention of the media was, after all, one of the objectives.

The pavilions were presented as artworks and put up for sale to collectors with the help of the estate agents Knight Frank. They also drew heavily on sponsorship in kind – building materials and skills given free and expertly marshalled by Peter Rogers, of the property developers Stanhope, who is one of the unsung heroes of the pavilion project. The structures were prodigies of the arts of fundraising and PR. They were unveiled to the world with compendious lists of sponsors' names and logos attached. Long rounds of glamorous parties were held to justify the sponsors' investment. The pavilions flourished at the fertile intersection of art, glamour, corporate sponsorship, iconic architecture, PR and property development. They became part of the summer season, like Henley or Cowes with a radical edge.

Inadvertently, they have become excuses for London's failure to achieve comparable levels of design or imagination in the everyday, permanent spaces of the city. The rise of the Serpentine pavilion accompanied a profligate construction boom, yet the list of the pavilion's designers is also a list of architects not invited, with one or two exceptions, to contribute anything else to London. The success of the pavilions allows the city to look more architecture-loving than it actually is. Clearly, this is not the pavilions' fault.

2000: Zaha Hadid

The first pavilion was created to shelter a fundraising dinner, attended by luminaries including Sting, Steve Martin and the Duke of York, to celebrate the gallery's 30th anniversary. Its aim was to "radically reinvent the accepted idea of a marquee". A folded triangulated structure rose and fell to define different internal spaces and vary the degree of openness. Inside were ranks of angular tables, in shades graded from pale to dark grey.

Hadid was then the world's great unbuilt architect, with few completed buildings but a huge international reputation based on the promise of her extraordinary drawings. The structure was only supposed to last for a week, but the then culture secretary, Chris Smith, liked it so much that he persuaded the planners to let it stand for three months. The pavilion was not one of Hadid's finest works: it was built in a hurry and with difficulty, and it had something of a lashed-together quality. It wasn't as assured as it might have been, but it pioneered an idea – the excitement and interest it aroused got the pavilion concept going.

It was bought by the Royal Shakespeare Company and reassembled in the car park of Stratford's Globe in 2001, after which it was given to a local farmer. One of the angular tables is in my living room: its splayed legs have a habit of tripping people up, which inspires a kind of exasperated affection.

2001: Daniel Liebeskind with Arup

In 2001 Libeskind was famous for his first major international building, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, finished in 1999 when he was aged 53. He was also still hoping to build the Spiral, an extension to London's Victoria and Albert Museum composed of cascading, ceramic-clad planes, which had somewhat miraculously got planning consent from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The extension eventually foundered on funding issues.

Libeskind's pavilion, called "Eighteen Turns", was created with the engineer Cecil Balmond from Arup who collaborated with Anish Kapoor on the gigantic ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture proposed for the 2012 Olympics. The pavilion was an origami-like composition of aluminium panels that folded up and over each other, creating overlapping spaces: some more intimate, enclosed from the park and the elements.

Greenery reflected in the metal, creating a 3D collage of nature and structure. It was less freighted with significance than other projects of Libeskind's, and also more light-hearted and direct in its appeal. Bought by an anonymous buyer, it re-emerged outside Fota House in Cork, as part of its European City of Culture programme in 2005. Not sighted in public since.

2002: Toyo Ito with Arup

Perhaps the most satisfying of Serpentine pavilions, the 2002 building had an intricate and enigmatic steel structure. It was something like a late-Gothic vault gone modern, with an apparently random arrangement of intersecting lines. It had, in fact, an underlying pattern, based on an algorithm of a cube that expanded as it rotated. Panels between the lines were solid, open or glazed, creating the semi-internal, semi-external quality that is common to almost all the pavilions. The building ^managed to achieve both a powerful presence and, in its white interior, a dazzling brightness. Lime-green chairs by Ross Lovegrove added to its gaiety.

It was designed by Toyo Ito who worked, like Daniel Libeskind, with Cecil Balmond of Arup. Ito had recently completed what is still his most impressive work, a Mediatheque (that is, a library with several kinds of media in it) in the Japanese provincial city of Sendai. Like many pavilion designers, he has not had a sniff of another London project since.

His pavilion, however, has had the most prominent afterlife of any. It was bought by Victor Hwang, then owner of Battersea power station, as a visitor centre for his proposed development there. It is now used for events at his Hôtel Le Beauvallon, overlooking St Tropez in the South of France.

2003: Oscar Niemeyer

The 2003 pavilion came with a great story: the then 95-year-old Brazilian maestro Oscar Niemeyer, who worked with Le Corbusier on Rio's prewar ministry of education, and who created the most dazzling landmarks of Brasilia, would make his London debut. It was like getting Carmen Miranda to turn up and do a gig.

The reality wasn't quite as good as the story. Niemeyer did some sketches in Brazil, which were translated into a building, but it lacked the effortless swoop of his best work. Nor did it quite catch the light-on-its-feet spirit of a temporary structure. It was made of steel and concrete, and had a basement, more like a permanent building that happened to have a short lifespan. Faintly saucy drawings, based on Niemeyer's many decades of fascination with the female form, decorated the walls. But it was still better to have a Niemeyer in Britain than not to have one.

The Niemeyer pavilion, along with the Siza, Koolhaas and Eliasson structures, was bought by a single anonymous buyer for a "considerable sum … many millions", and all four are in storage. The buyer intends that they will one day be seen again in public. He says he does not want them to become "private follies".

2004: MVRDV

In about 2002 the Serpentine's director asked me for my thoughts as to who might design future pavilions. MVRDV, I said. Who are they? she asked. Rising stars of Dutch architecture, I said. We need someone more established, she said. How about Alvaro Siza? I replied. I therefore felt a modest pride when both MVRDV and Siza were successively chosen to design pavilions. MVRDV's, however, was the one that never happened. It was invented at the peak of the great noughties concept boom, when nothing seemed too impossible or outrageous, and the idea was to bury the entire Serpentine Gallery beneath an artificial mountain, up which the public would be able to promenade.

It was an inspired departure from the idea of a more-or-less-pretty object standing on a lawn, but it was extremely challenging in terms of issues such as budget, difficulty of construction, and disabled access. As a result, there was no pavilion in 2004. The Serpentine still hoped to build it in subsequent years but eventually gave up the attempt. Like the gigantic tower that Gordon Selfridge wanted to build on his Oxford Street store, it has joined the ghostly legions of London's great unbuilt.

2005: Alvaro Siza/Eduardo Souto de Moura with Arup

Alvaro Siza, and his ex-pupil Eduardo Souto de Moura, are two Portuguese architects noted for a certain simplicity and lightness of touch. They typically work with plain walls of stone or white plaster, and rely on subtleties of light, space and material. Siza, now in his late 70s, is venerated for his patient, consistent, unflashy work.

Generally the Serpentine Pavilion favours spectacular more than subtle architects, as the 2005 edition confirmed. Siza and de Moura designed a low, humped roof of interlocking laminated timber that "created a dialogue" with the gallery's permanent building.

The roof turned into sloping walls, which stopped a few feet off the ground, like a big skirt. This created a cut-off view of the surroundings from inside the pavilion. It offered a few quietly rewarding moments, but it didn't zing. That it looked like a tortoise didn't help.

2006: Rem Koolhaas with Arup

Rem Koolhaas, always suspicious of architecture for its own sake, intimated scepticism about the pavilion concept, but with his collaborators came up with an instantly appealing monument. His big idea was to create a gas-filled balloon, or "cosmic egg", that would hover above an "amphitheatre". The balloon echoed the inflatable structures beloved of radical 1960s architects. It was designed to rise in good weather, opening up the amphitheatre to fresh air and views of the sky, and descend again to keep out rain.

It proved a cumbersome way to manage the environment, although there was something hallucinatory about the appearance of this luminous orb, like a grounded moon, in the park. The balloon was more a sign of spontaneity than the reality. But more than any other pavilion, it became a place of public exchange thanks to the events devised by Koolhaas and Serpentine co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist. The most memorable were the 24-hour interview marathons, in which, for example, you could hear Gilbert and George discourse at 6am. Koolhaas's practice OMA has had more success in London than most pavilion designers. Its Rothschild Bank HQ is going up in the City, and he masterplanned the proposed conversion of the Commonwealth Institute to rehouse the Design Museum.

2007: Olafur Eliasson/Kjetil Thorsen

The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson was billed as the lead designer of the 2007 pavilion, assisted by Kjetil Thorsen, of the Norwegian architects Snøhetta. This didn't quite hit the right note, as the whole point of the pavilion until then had been that it was the work of architects in the grounds of an art gallery.

It also didn't help that Eliasson had created a smash hit in London's other series of high-impact temporary structures, the Unilever commissions at Tate Modern. His Weather Project of 2003, with its artificial sun and reflecting ceiling, had thousands lying on the ground as if in a hippy sci-fi movie.

Eliasson's Serpentine pavilion was tamer. It was a timber-clad spiral that allowed you to go to the top, look at the view, and go down again, while experiencing some quite nice bits of design on the way. The Snøhetta/Eliasson collaboration produced the much more powerful National Opera House in Oslo – the roof of which acts as an artificial hillside in the middle of the city. Their Serpentine pavilion was perfectly nice, but one of the least memorable in the series.

2008: Frank Gehry

Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Düsseldorf, Prague, Dundee and Bilbao all have permanent buildings by Frank Gehry but somehow London, with its prodigious appetite for construction never got round to it. As he is now past 80, the 2008 Serpentine Pavilion is likely to be the great Canadian-born Californian's first and last appearance in the capital.

The commission gave him the chance to return to the direct style of his earlier career, before the Bilbao Guggenheim made him into a specialist of elaborately curving glossiness. He also saw it as a chance to give experience to younger people in his office, including his son Samuel. Made of chunky pieces of timber, it comprised a "street" running axially towards the gallery, sheltered by flying planes of wood and glass. Banks of seats on either side also gave it the quality of an amphitheatre.

"It had to be wood – I'm Canadian, right?" was how Gehry described it. "And then we were thinking of those old catapults. This is Britain, and the Romans invaded you. I came up with the idea of a four-poster structure with a big pillar in each corner and it looked OK, but it needed to be a little more festive. Then Sam made a model with butterflies flying through it, and that turned into the glass roof."

Like most of the pavilions it was sold to a private and anonymous buyer.

2009: Sanaa

By 2009, it began to feel as if the Serpentine Pavilion idea might be running out of puff, but the Japanese architects Sanaa came up with one of the most delightful, as well as the most delicate yet. Sanaa's two protagonists, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, designed a thin, freeform aluminium roof which, as they put it, drifted "like smoke" between the trees. It had no walls, but was supported on skinny poles. It reflected sky and grass and when it rained its mirrored soffit made it look as if rain was falling upwards. It "expanded park and sky," as they also put it, and "melted into its surroundings".

Architects talk like this quite often but on this occasion the building did what they said.

The Serpentine Pavilion has always had a close relationship with the Pritzker prize, the award that is the Nobel Prize for architecture in all but name. Eight pavilion designers have the prize, including the architect of the forthcoming 2010 pavilion, Jean Nouvel. This year Sejima and Nishizawa joined the Pritzker gang. The private buyer of the pavilion, again, remains anonymous.

2010: Jean Nouvel (pictured top)

The 2010 pavilion will be in a vivid red, intended to contrast with the green of the park, and evoke London buses, post boxes and phone boxes. It will also, according to the Serpentine, be "a contrast of lightweight materials and dramatic, metal, cantilevered structures". It will have "bold geometric forms, large retractable awnings" and a 12m-high, sloping wall rising above the lawn. Table tennis will be added to the pavilion's usual programme of talks and cafe and there will be a "Marathon of Maps for the 21st Century", in which "artists, writers, thinkers and scientists will present maps encompassing their experience of the world today".

The architect is the Parisian Jean Nouvel, who first came to widespread fame with his Institut du Monde Arabe in 1987. There, he charmed people with a wall of steel shutters, inspired by the traditional perforated screens of Cairo, that opened and closed like the aperture of a camera. Generally, his work combines a sensuousness of surface, a touch of showmanship and outbreaks of harshness. He has no house style, using different techniques on different projects. His work includes the forbidding, black law courts in Nantes and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where layers of glass generate a field of reflections. He designed a luxury hotel in Bordeaux wrapped in rusty metal screens and the Torre Agbar in Barcelona. The latter is like London's Gherkin in form, but has a more intriguing wrapping of layered and coloured glass. Like the Gherkin, it is more interesting for its effect on the skyline than for the abrupt way it descends on the streets. Nouvel is now working on an outpost of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, where he has designed a huge, shallow dome like an inverted saucer that is perforated to create dappled patterns of light.

Rowan Moore

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Prince Charles accused of pressurising Qatari royal family over residential development

The Sheet — Tue, 18 May 2010 09:16:54 +0000

Royal letter allegedly marked opening salvo in campaign that led to scrapping of Chelsea Barracks plan, high court hears

The Qatari royal family was forced to scrap plans for a £3bn housing development in central London for "political and diplomatic" reasons after the Prince of Wales urged the emir of the gulf state to abandon them, the high court has heard.

The Qataris "floundered" after Prince Charles and his aides launched a "fight to the finish" to derail designs for more than 500 apartments on the former site of the Chelsea Barracks by Lord Rogers, the modernist architect with whom the prince has repeatedly clashed.

The court heard on Monday that during a face-to-face exchange over tea at Clarence House, the prince "pissed in [the emir's] ear about how awful the scheme was", causing him to order aides to withdraw the designs.

The claims about Prince Charles's intervention came on the first day of a trial in which the Qatari government's former development partner, CPC group, owned by Christian Candy, sought to recoup up to £81m in alleged lost earnings after the prince became involved last spring.

At the time, the prince's intervention sparked accusations he had overreached his constitutional role by interfering in a live planning application that was shortly to be considered by the planning committee of Westminster city council.

The emir met the prince at Clarence House on 11 May 2009 with his second wife, Sheika Mozah. A note of the meeting by Sir Michael Peat, the prince's private secretary, said: "The emir was surprised by Rogers's design for Chelsea Barracks and said that he would have them changed."

The impact was dramatic, with the emir described in court papers as issuing "a bollocking" to the managing director of the Qatari Diar real estate firm, Ghanim bin Saad al-Saad, about the architecture.

An email from Candy shortly after the meeting said the emir "went mental at Ghanim, telling him how awful the design was and to withdraw ASAP".

In the same email, Candy related how al-Saad told his own planning director that the prince had been "pissing" in his ear.

The decision was made to scrap the scheme and develop an alternative, and the emir assured the palace in more graceful language and through intermediaries that "he was keen for the development to be a lasting legacy which will reflect well on Qatar".

Representing CPC, Lord Grabiner QC said it was his client's case that the designs were scrapped "for diplomatic and political reasons between the emir and the Prince of Wales". That, Grabiner said, constituted a breach of contract.

Prince Charles began his campaign two months earlier with a private letter to the Qatari prime minister, the emir's cousin, stating: "I can only urge you to reconsider the plans for the Chelsea site before it is too late. Many would be eternally [underlined] grateful to Your Excellency if Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment could bequeath a unique and enduring [underlined] legacy to London."

He objected to Rogers's glass and steel design which had been commissioned by the emir's property investment vehicle, Qatari Diar, and attached a sketch of an alternative design by one of his favourite neoclassical architects, Quinlan Terry.

The project had been proceeding well until Charles's intervention, the court heard, and the Qataris were not even put off by the global financial crisis, shaking off the collapse of Lehman Brothers and writing to CPC Group that they were convinced the prudent course of action was to continue with the Rogers plan.

Candy, 35, sat in court today opposite representatives of the Qatari royal family to hear his company's case that the prince's intervention denied it a payment due upon planning permission being granted of between £68.5m and £81m.

The Qataris had tried to assuage the prince's fears with a secret undertaking to revisit the designs after planning permission had been secured. That was not enough for the prince, and John Ward, a Qatari Diar executive, was told by Peat that Charles was "going to fight to the finish".

Peat told Ward: "It [is] an enormously important site and it was difficult for many people to stand by and let, in their view, an inappropriate scheme go forward on an informal understanding."

The court papers show that Charles met two key planners, Sir Simon Milton, the deputy mayor of London, and Robert Davis of Westminster city council, the next day.

Charles's intervention was "a hand grenade requiring serious attention", according to Joe Smouha QC, representing Qatari Diar. But the Qataris denied Candy's case – that their decision to scrap the Rogers scheme was a breach of contract.

Smouha said the payment was dependent on planning permission, and it would not have been obtained either from Westminster city council or the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. "The claims advanced by the claimants go nowhere because they have suffered no loss."

The trial continues and is due to last two weeks.

A brief history of Charles's monstrous carbuncles

In 1984, Prince Charles launched his now-famous attack on Peter Ahrends' proposed extension to the National Gallery in London. At the Royal Institute of British Architects' 150th anniversary he lambasted the design as "a monstrous carbuncle". He got his way: the "carbuncle" was never built.

In the same speech he criticised the plans of his friend Lord Palumbo to replace the Victorian Mappin & Webb building in London with a skyscraper. But he was no happier with the Sir James Stirling alternative, which, he complained, looked "rather like an old 1930s wireless".

In 1987, Charles scorned Richard Rogers' redevelopment of Paternoster Square, London. He locked horns with the architect again in 2008, using Rogers' 44-storey "cheese grater" tower in the City of London to warn that historic cities were being wrecked.

In 1988 Charles described Colin St John Wilson's British Library reading room as like "an academy for secret police". He criticised the 1974 Brutalist central library in Birmingham, saying it looked like "a place where books are incinerated, not kept", and in 1991 resigned as president of patrons of the Museums of Scotland over the selection procedure for designs for the new National Museum. In 2008, he said the Ivor Crewe lecture hall at the University of Essex – later a RIBA award winner – looked "like a dustbin".

Robert Booth

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The Prince of Wales, the Emir of Qatar and the £81m Chelsea Barracks lawsuit

The Sheet — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:33:29 +0000

Property tycoons take dispute over prince's alleged torpedoing of £3bn Richard Rogers residential development to high court

A bitter dispute involving the Prince of Wales, the Qatari royal family and architect Lord Rogers, who claims a multibillion-pound property project was wrecked by the prince, will come to a head in the high court this week.

Luxury property tycoons Nick and Christian Candy have lodged a claim for breach of contract over the withdrawal of plans for their Rogers-designed residential scheme at Chelsea Barracks by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment, a property company backed by the emirate of Qatar.

The Candy brothers' company, CPC group, and Rogers had planned to develop the 5.2-hectare (13-acre) site, opposite Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital Chelsea near Sloane Square, London, into a £3bn mix of luxury flats and more affordable housing.

But the planning application was dropped last June, after Prince Charles wrote to the head of the Qatari royal family's firm, which owns the site, branding the design of 548 flats in 17 blocks unsympathetic and unsuitable for the area.

At the height of the dispute some of the world's leading architects, including Frank Gehry and Lord Foster, criticised the prince for using his position to interfere.

While the prince, whose outspoken views against modern architecture are well-known, will not be called to the stand, his presence is expected to loom large in the proceedings as letters and other documents reveal his influence over development at one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the UK.

The brothers claim it was the prince's interference that persuaded the Qataris to abandon the project, and are suing for a reported £81m.

The controversy was sparked after the leaking of a letter the prince had written on 1 March last year to Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim, the chairman of Qatari Diar. It emerged he had voiced concerns over "one more brutish development" and that, in May last year, he invited the Emir of Qatar and his wife, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missnesd, for tea at Clarence House.

In an interview last June after the project was scrapped, Lord Rogers told the Guardian: "Up to two months ago we were pretty convinced we were going to get out scheme through Westminster's planing committee. We enjoyed some of the strongest support I have ever had from Westminster and the Greater London Authority ... I thought we were home and dry. I just don't know what happened."

The scheme had been opposed by a residents' group, though much of the local opposition had been assuaged by changes to the scale of the blocks of flats.

The row carries echoes of previous disputes where Prince Charles has made his views on modern architecture plain. Twenty-five years ago he described a planned extension to the National Gallery by the architectural firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend".

Today, a spokesman for Clarence House said: "Prince Charles is entitled to his private opinions. Any dispute between the Candys and the Qataris is for them to resolve, not us. The prince knows the emir and his wife extremely well and the meeting would have happened anyway as part of his royal and diplomatic role.

• This article was amended on 17 May 2010. The original said that the target of Prince Charles's "carbuncle" remark was a Richard Rogers design for the National Gallery extension. This has been corrected.

Karen McVeigh

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Inside St Pancras Chambers

The Sheet — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:59:30 +0000

After a £200m makeover, St Pancras Chambers are open for business, with 67 new flats carved out of the interior of George Gilbert Scott's gothic masterpiece. Click through to tour the inside of London's most exciting address