Posts Tagged London
‘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
Summits at the summit: the Shard could host talks for world leaders
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 30, 2011
Europe's tallest building could include exclusive space on 78th floor for top-level meetings, says building's developer
It would be the summit at the summit. The top floor of the Shard, Europe's tallest skyscraper, could be made available for high powered conferences and political talks, the building's developer has told the Guardian.
Irvine Sellar said he is considering making the 78th floor, which is so elevated it is sometimes above the clouds, an exclusive meeting space which would allow political leaders to hold talks with an unrivalled bird's eye view above London Bridge.
"We could send Europe's top politicians up there and not let them down until they solve the Euro crisis," he said
The highest room anywhere in Europe has space for up to 60 people and would be accessed by a dedicator elevator off the public viewing galleries.
The plan is being debated by Sellar and his architect, Renzo Piano. Already a four-storey public viewing area is being built starting on the 68th floor which is likely to cost around £20 to access.
But the developer, keen to recoup investment of around £2bn in the building, is aware of the revenue-generating potential for the even-higher space.
Piano, who said he believes the building "celebrates life and in some measure, poetry", has mooted an alternative use as a meditation suite and is said to be keen the space should not become a playground only for the super-rich and powerful.
At the Shard's upper levels, helicopters and planes coming into land at City airport fly along at eye level and on a clear day the view stretches 40 miles. Construction workers said it sometimes snows at the top while it is raining at ground level.
The idea has echoes of the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan's capital Astana. That Norman-Foster-designed building has a 200-seat chamber at the apex for meetings of the leaders of the world's religions.
The 310m-tall Shard is due to be fully built next June and looks likely to open in the depths of Britain's economic slump. So far no tenants have signed up for the 27 floors of office space, although the developers said they are in talks with several and are being selective. It is 80% owned by the Gulf emirate of Qatar and has been described by critics as "a sharp piece of global capitalism" and "a latter-day pyramid celebrating the arrival of the Qataris on the world stage". But many Londoners have taken the building to their hearts.
Piano insisted that the building was not an out-of-date monument to "arrogance and power", and pointed out it could help save the countryside from sprawl. "This is not about money," he said. "It is about surprise and joy. This is about the way cities should go. They should stop and we should not go beyond the green belt. If you do this by going vertical that sends a message about conserving land. The building is not about arrogance and power but about increasing the intensity of city life."
Works have begun on fitting out an 18-storey five-star Shangri-La hotel within the Shard and ten huge apartments at its top, which are likely to sell for tens of millions of pounds each.
Sellar, whose company owns 20% of the tower, insisted the building was not out of sync with the era of austerity.
"If we want to get out of this malaise then this is the sort of project that should be done," he said. "We think it is a great image. It says, 'This is London, this is the Shard and we can kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower.'"
Unesco will next year consider whether to downgrade or even remove the World Heritage status of the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey in part because of the Shard's looming silhouette.
This month inspectors from the United Nations world heritage committee paid a four day visit to London to consider the effectiveness of measures to protect the World Heritage status of the sites.
"We are concerned that the sites might lose their outstanding universal value by being dwarfed by inappropriate development," said Patricia Alberth, programme specialist for the Europe area at Unesco in Paris. "They could decide to remove their status or decide whether they should be placed on a list of danger which means they could be delisted."
Geoffrey Darke obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 21, 2011
Architect determined to break down barriers in social housing
The architect Geoffrey Darke, who changed the look of social housing, has died aged 82. In a bid to break down the barriers between public and private housing, Darke and his partner John Darbourne designed irregular terraces in homespun brick, which were widely imitated all over Britain.
The pair founded the firm Darbourne and Darke in 1961. It is hard now to imagine the impact of their first project, Lillington Gardens, an estate in Westminster, central London. It adopted the red brick of one of London's finest Victorian churches, GE Street's St James the Less, which the estate surrounds; the church's spire dominates the staggered terraces and internal squares.
Complex plans gave even small flats a dual aspect, and planting boxes on the walkways (watered from the roof) provided colour and interest. Darbourne and Darke felt that these details personalised the large development. It was popular both with critics and residents, and the flats are now greatly sought after, notably by MPs as it is near parliament. A later phase combined maisonettes (with gardens for families) with pensioners' flats on the roof.
Darke was born in Evesham, Worcestershire, where his father was a car mechanic. With encouragement from his parents, he and his brothers won places at Prince Henry's grammar school in Evesham. There, a supportive art teacher helped Darke to secure an RIBA scholarship to the Birmingham School of Architecture in 1947. His first job, for Stevenage Development Corporation, was interrupted by national service in Malaya for the Royal Engineers.
In 1958 he joined the architect Eric Lyons and Darke's housing concerns came to the fore. Lyons designed for the public sector, but is remembered for his flats and houses for the developers Span; Darke assumed a similar rigour in his complex planning, detail, high densities and rich landscaping. It was in Lyons's office that he met Darbourne. Both entered prestigious housing competitions in 1960, Darke in Harlow, Essex, and Darbourne for Lillington Street. Darke secured a commendable second place with his scheme for Bishopsfield and when, in 1961, Darbourne won Lillington Street, in Westminster, he invited Darke to form a partnership.
Darke's hand was most clearly seen in the firm's smaller-scale developments, as good and as admired today as when they were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Meticulous and thorough in his own work, Darke was also responsible for the practice's cheery office ambience. He had a humorous and calming influence that got the best results out of his staff.
After their work on Lillington Gardens, as it became, there were commissions for the London borough of Islington, where Darbourne and Darke repeated Lillington's formula at the Marquess Estate, though the plan proved too complex to be adequately policed. More innovative were infill schemes between Islington's older terraces led by Darke, at Camden Road, Northampton Park and with the best being perhaps Aberdeen Park.
Darke's Worcestershire connections led to a commission for low-rise housing on back-land plots at Pershore, in which he took a personal hand, and which included a library and health centre, other genres in which the practice excelled. The houses were scaled-down versions of Darke's own house in Montpelier Row, Richmond, near the practice's office, whose proportions were carefully related to its Georgian neighbours, but executed without pastiche and in a way that makes the house more spacious than it first appears. It expressed Darke's personality, with glass walls to the office so that he was not cut off from his family, and a superb sound system that reflected the love of music he shared with his wife, Jean, whom he met in the chorus of The Gondoliers and married in 1959. They had one son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah.
The practice's last major housing in Britain was also in Richmond, in Queen's Road, for the London and Quadrant Housing Association, in 1978-88, sensitively grouped and detailed. Darbourne and Darke were one of the few British practices to achieve success in international competitions in the 1970s, with housing in Stuttgart and Hanover, in Germany, and in Bolzano, Italy (1980). Darke concentrated on this housing work, while Darbourne expanded the practice into office work and, through Richard Attenborough, took on the rebuilding of Chelsea FC's Stamford Bridge stadium, never completed.
Darke set up his own practice in 1987 at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he and Jean could devote more time to music as members of the Festival Chorus. Their music interests continued latterly in Oxford, and they were singing together in a concert only 24 hours before his sudden death. He is survived by Jean and his children.
• Geoffrey James Darke, architect, born 1 September 1929; died 8 November 2011
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 …
Lloyd’s building joins Grade I elite at tender age of 25
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 20, 2011
Heritage minister's decision puts Richard Rogers's hi-tech design in the top 2.5% of all listed buildings
Richard Rogers's hi-tech, postmodern Lloyd's building, with its pipes, lifts and toilets presented on the outside, has become one of only a few modern buildings to be given Grade I listed status.
The decision, by the heritage minister, John Penrose, puts the building in the top 2.5% of all listed buildings. It now has the sort of protection given to St Paul's Cathedral and Windsor Castle.
The listing was recommended by English Heritage. Its designation director, Roger Bowdler, said it was "fitting recognition of the sheer splendour of Richard Rogers's heroic design. Its dramatic scale and visual dazzle, housing a hyper-efficient commercial complex, is universally recognised as one of the key buildings of the modern epoch."
Bowdler said its listing, which provides substantial protection but did not mean it is "pickled in aspic", had been enthusiastically supported. Penrose said the Lloyd's building "stands the test of time with its awe-inspiring futuristic design, which exemplifies the hi-tech style in Britain. It clearly merits the extra protection against unsuitable alteration or development that listing provides."
The Lloyd's building was opened in 1986, built after the success Rogers, with Renzo Piano, had with that other great inside-outside building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Providing a headquarters for Lloyd's of London, it manages to be both head-turningly futuristic and resolutely traditional. It includes the traditions and fabric of earlier Lloyd's buildings, not least the Adam Room, which was moved from Bowood House in Wiltshire, and the Lutine Bell, which was once rang to indicate an "overdue" ship but is these days is only used for ceremonial occasions.
It is one of only a handful of postwar buildings and structures to be given Grade I listing, joining Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral (listed in 1988) Norman Foster's Willis Corroon Building in Ipswich (listed in 1991) and the Severn Bridge (listed in 1998).
Lloyd's chief executive, Richard Ward, said: "The building remains modern, innovative and unique – it has really stood the test of time just like the market that sits within it. This listing decision will protect the building against unsuitable alteration or development while retaining its flexibility to adapt within the market's needs."
Lord Rogers's practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, said in a statement that the listing was an honour: "It is important to conserve buildings of architectural and historical significance, and the work of English Heritage is central to that. It is also of vital importance for buildings to remain flexible spaces which meet the changing needs of those who live or work in them. English Heritage has recognised this, ensuring the spirit of the original design is retained while the building remains adaptable in the future."
At the other end of the heritage timeline, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport also announced that the early Mesolithic settlement Star Carr, near Scarborough – which contains what may be the earliest building in Britain – is being made a scheduled monument because of its rarity and archeological importance. The status gives the site an extra layer of protection against unauthorised change.
How we learned to love the Lloyds building
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 20, 2011
Richard Rogers' 'bowellist' creation in the heart of London has been Grade-I listed
Twenty-five years young, the Lloyd's building is still shockingly new. Yesterday it was announced that this hi-tech City of London tour-de-force, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership, has been listed Grade I by heritage minister John Penrose. The youngest to be granted that special status, it joins company with a select band of postwar buildings including the Royal Festival Hall and Coventry Cathedral.
Lloyds is also the first Grade I-listed building designed specifically for change. While listing protects historic monuments from insensitive alteration, the whole point of this late 20th-century reworking of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, crossed with a North Sea oil-rig, is the flexible space it offers, and the promise that, one day, it might be re-arranged as easily as if it had been assembled from Meccano.
The inside-out, or "bowellist", look of the 88-metre high concrete structure, with its external wall-climbing glass lifts, exposed pipework and plug-in, stainless steel clad lavatory pods, is graphic evidence of the way this breathtaking ensemble was clipped together like a giant kit of parts.
Naturally, Lloyds has never been to everyone's taste – too much like an oil-refinery thumped down next to Wren's City churches and Neo-Classical banks clad in Portland stone – and its provocative design is all the more remarkable given that it was commissioned by and for apparently conservative, pin-striped City types.
With its soaring central atrium, the radical, open-plan interior is nothing short of sensational. Even then, it abounds in surprises. High up in the building, a door opens to reveal a complete Robert Adam boardroom of the 1760s, representing most people's idea of what Grade I listed buildings look like. Attitudes to modern architecture have clearly changed.
The biggest change of all since then, however, has been among conservationists themselves: in the 1980s, they tended to see Lloyds as a modern monstrosity. Now they love it.
Viñoly brought in as Chelsea looks at move to Battersea power station
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 19, 2011
Architect behind latest failed redesign for London's Battersea power station hired as creative brain behind developer Mike Hussey's plan for stadium for Chelsea football club at the site
Rafael Viñoly, the architect who worked on the most recent failed redesign for Battersea power station in London, has been hired as the creative brain behind developer Mike Hussey's proposal to build a stadium for Chelsea football club at the site.
Viñoly worked on the £5.5bn revamp of the Grade II*-listed London landmark that won planning permission last year, but the plan collapsed a week ago when the power station was put into administration after its owner, the Irish property firm Real Estate Opportunities, failed to repay £324m to its lenders. The 16-hectare site in south-west London, valued at £500m in October, will be put up for sale by the administrators, Ernst & Young, with Chelsea's billionaire owner Roman Abramovich seen as a frontrunner to acquire it.
Viñoly is collaborating with the architects Kohn Pedersen Fox on the plan put forward by Hussey, a former Land Securities executive. Chelsea has not made a decision to leave its Stamford Bridge home but has appointed Hussey's Almacantar vehicle, along with KPF, to draw up plans for a 55,000-capacity stadium to be situated to the south-east of the power station.
New York-based Viñoly wants to retain as much of the power station as possible, keeping structural changes to a minimum. His new plan is thought to be less ambitious than REO's 750,000 sq metre development of 3,400 homes, as well as shops and offices. The power station's distinct four white chimneys were to be demolished and rebuilt, as they were deemed to be "beyond repair".
But Keith Garner, an architect and member of a local campaign group, said: "Jamming a large football stadium against Battersea power station is a bad idea." The Battersea Power Station Community Group wants the turbine hall turned into an exhibition centre – a showcase for British design and manufacturing – with offices and flats on the upper floors. Garner held up the successful revamp of the former Dean Clough Mills in Halifax, once the world's largest carpet factory, as an example. He has tried to get Google UK interested, which is based in nearby Victoria and needs more space.
REO's lenders, Lloyds Banking Group and Ireland's National Management Asset Agency, are keen to recoup their money. Nama is thought to prefer Chelsea, while other potential bidders for Battersea include the Malaysian property group SP Setia, UK developers including Berkeley, Development Securities and British Land, along with sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms such as Blackstone.
This week’s arts diary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 14, 2011
Two new Doctor Whos and a Dennis Potter are found; a Dutch architecture firm show Clouded judgment in their design for twin towers; and does Britain need a new capital?
Two new Whos and a Potter
Archive television fans gathered on London's South Bank last Sunday to witness the BFI's annual showcase of newly discovered shows that had been thought lost, or "wiped". The big news was the announcement of two Doctor Who episodes. More interesting, I thought, was an early TV play by Dennis Potter.
Emergency Ward 9 was broadcast in 1966 as part of BBC2's live Thirty-Minute Theatre series. A riposte to ITV's soap opera Emergency – Ward 10, Potter's play is set in a shabby London hospital ward and centres on the patients: an opinionated old man; a prissy preacher; a cocky businessman. The latter is black, and the casual racism he suffers forms the crux of the play. In 2011, it is shocking to hear the racist language.
The show's producer, Kenith Trodd, told the Diary the play did not feel particularly controversial at the time. "Seeing it now, I was totally amazed by the distance we've come," he said. Of course, it was first broadcast in the 1960s, when millions tuned in to laugh at the racist/sexist/homophobic rantings of Alf Garnett, though Trodd added: "I don't think there was much in that era that was quite as in-your-face as Dennis was in that piece."
The discovery of the missing Doctor Whos means there are now – shamefully – 106 considered lost, rather than 108. The BFI screened The Underwater Menace episode from 1967, with Patrick Troughton as the Doctor and people from Atlantis (incredibly hairy eyebrows, plastic tube headdresses). There were also entertaining adverts, featuring Frank Mumford puppets desperate for VB sweet wine and State Express 555 cigarettes; and a very funny Pete and Dud sketch.
But it was the Potter that stuck. Watching it, I yearned for the return of one-off TV plays. Sky Arts' Playhouse series shows it can be done: why not ITV and the BBC?
Clouded judgment
Those crazy architects, part one. The Dutch firm MVRDV has submitted designs for a pair of towers it plans to build in Seoul4, South Korea, by 2015. Called The Cloud, the towers appear to be exploding in the middle, which has caused offence in the US. On its website, MVRDV issued the following statement: "MVRDV regrets deeply any connotations The Cloud project evokes regarding 9/11. It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process."
A new capital for Britain?
Those crazy architects, part two. One hundred years ago this week, King George V announced that the Indian capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi. In the latest issue of Architectural Review, architect James Dunnett argues it is time to consider moving Britain's capital from London to, er, West Bromwich. It is an interesting essay that can be best summarised by using a direct quote from Dunnett himself: "I have never been to West Bromwich."
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.
Dorothy Annan murals listed as former telephone exchange faces demolition
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 25, 2011
Murals that celebrate 1960s technology will have to be preserved elsewhere if owner Goldman Sachs redevelops site
A sequence of tile murals celebrating the white heat of British technology – the teleprinters, wiring circuits, spiky aerials and banks of switching gear which constituted 1960s telecommunications – has been listed to preserve it as the grim grey building supporting it faces demolition.
The murals – in smoky blue, brown and green – were the work of Dorothy Annan, who was commissioned in 1960 at the enormous cost of £300 a panel to create them for the Ministry of Works, to decorate a huge new telephone exchange in central London.
Annan collected scores of images of communications kit, and visited General Post Office buildings for inspiration before designing the murals, which include stylised representations of pylons, cables, telegraph poles, cabling, television and radio aerials and generators. She visited the Hathernware pottery in Loughborough and hand-scored her designs onto each wet clay tile Her brush marks can be seen in the fired panels.
When it opened in 1961, the purpose-built Fleet Building on Farringdon Street – designed by Eric Bedford, architect of the Post Office Tower (now known as the BT Tower) – was the largest telephone exchange in the capital.
The IT revolution has made thousands of such buildings redundant across the country, and the Fleet Building has been a derelict eyesore for years. It is now owned by Goldman Sachs, which is believed to be planning to clear and redevelop the site.
Heritage minister John Penrose has not listed the building itself – although grim, it has its admirers – which probably means the tiles will be carefully dismantled for storage and reuse.
Annan, who died in 1983, exhibited with the leftwing Artists International Association, and once featured in a morale-boosting wartime show in an air-raid shelter beside work by Augustus John.
Her paintings are in many national collections, but she was also known for her tile murals, many of which have been destroyed in recent decades. Only three of her major public murals are believed to survive – the largest single example, the Expanding Universe at the Bank of England, was destroyed in 1997.