Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:41:17 +0000

From a seashell-collecting Le Corbusier to a grand new college for creatives, Jonathan Glancey looks at a winning week – as architecture reaches for the moon

Stanton Williams has won Building Design magazine's architect of the year award, largely for the brilliant Central St Martin's college of art and design at King's Cross in London. The award is presented annually to the practice BD's editor "deems to have made the most significant contribution to British architecture over the past year".

"The practice," says Ellis Woodman, "has completed not just one but two of the most impressive buildings built in the UK over the past 12 months: a new home for Central St Martins and the Sainsbury in Cambridge.

Central St Martin's is a tour-de-force, a great meeting place, with studios and a theatre gathering the college's 4,000 students and 1,000 teaching staff (many part-time) in one place for the first time. Here, historic and contemporary design aren't just happily married, they're celebrated and enhanced by this exemplary education project.

Alan Stanton worked for Norman Foster before studying at UCLA in California and then assisting Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano on the design of the Pompidou Centre, Paris. He set up Stanton Williams with Paul Williams, an expert in the design of museums, galleries and exhibitions.

Jonathan Hendry won the magazine's young architect award (young means under 40 in architecture). Six years old when the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977, Hendry worked for Allies and Morrison and Jamie Fobert Architects, two practices that are as concerned with building well as making a big name for themselves. He then opened up his own practice in the Lincolnshire Wolds in 2000 where he has crafted one small building after another in decidedly modern yet modest ways: an arts and heritage centre here, a bus shelter there, a village hall and the restoration of a tenpin bowling alley. It is heartening to see such a considered talent – he could probably get a high-powered job in pretty much any major international practice – working on the small-scale projects in English country towns that need such thought, craft and care.

If there was ever an architect of the century award, the 1900s would surely have been won by Le Corbusier. Still a controversial figure, Le Corbusier has been studied in such detail you'd think there couldn't be more to say about this architect and provocateur. It's a real pleasure then to read Niklas Maak's Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach. Maak, who did his thesis on Corbusier, is an art critic for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Here he analyses the architect's love of beaches, sea and seashells and shows how these affected his approach to design as he moved from white cubism to new forms of geometry and organic forms. "Shells, snails, flotsam and jetsam crop up everywhere in Le Corbusier's work," says Maak. And, most of all, in the beautifully sculpted and deeply poetic pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp.

In a postscript to this confidently brief and engaging book, Maak shows how Le Corbusier's beachcombing has affected architects, through buildings as disparate as Rem Koolhaas's shell-like Seattle Public Library of 2004 and Sou Fujimoto's nest-like Final Wooden House of 2008. As for a design award, well, if there was one for British designer of the past half century, it would surely go to Terence Conran, who has just turned 80. One of his presents is The Way We Live Now at the Design Museum, London, a show of his work from his days designing for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From soup kitchens to grand brasseries, from Habitat to Storehouse, Conran has made waves as big in the world of British design as Le Corbusier made in modern architecture.

Mind, you, architects and designers – as we know them – might just vanish if scientists working for Nasa have their way. Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) from the University of Southern California (USC) have won a prestigious Nasa grant to explore the potential use of the robotic fabrication technology, Contour Crafting, for building structures on the moon. The grant, says a USC press release, "was one of only 30 awarded to over 700 applicants by the Nasa Innovation Advanced Concepts Program.

In Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Professor Otto Silenus, an architect, has a mission to eliminate the human element from the consideration of form. Looks like the USC professors might get there yet. If the Moonbase is built, BD may well find itself championing Design Robot of the Year 2020. A human, I suppose, might just get to program the robots. If not, beachcombing is fun. Instructive, too.

Jonathan Glancey

Science Weekly podcast: Solar activity and global warming, plus ‘female viagra’

The Sheet — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:49:39 +0000

Astronomer Stuart Clark joins us in the studio to look at the latest thinking about the effects of variations in solar activity on the Earth's climate. Dark matter gets a mention too.

Over the coming days he will be conducting question-and-answer sessions on Twitter - both on solar activity and dark matter. Follow him at DrStuClark and post your questions using the prefix #AskDrStu. (2:00)

There's a new BBC TV series starting this week called Paradox. Its writer Lizzy Mickery comes into the studio to tell us about the challenges of getting a drama based on science onto prime-time TV. (12:10)

In the newsjam we look at a new drug hailed as the "female viagra" and Nasa's announcement that its LCROSS probe found water on the moon. (15:30)

Duncan Clark from environmentguardian.co.uk responds to the s*** storm of blog comments arising from last week's podcast on eco-myths. Who'd have thought people could get so excited about nappies? (23:25)

Steven Levitt talks about his controversial views on geo-engineering, expressed in his latest book SuperFreakonomics. Hear more of that interview in the Guardian's The Business podcast. (26:15)

All the way from Denmark, Dr Rachel Armstrong discusses living buildings and metabolic materials. She is giving a Lunch Hour Lecture at UCL this week. (30:15)

We finish the show with more music ... the winner of Discover Magazine's "evolution in two minutes or less" video competition. (33:15)

Science correspondent Ian Sample lends us his wisdom in the pod. We promise to give it back soon.

WARNING: contains strong language.

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Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

Science Weekly podcast: Solar activity and global warming, plus ‘female viagra’