Posts Tagged Norman Foster
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 22, 2011
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.
London’s new airport: should Beijing be a blueprint for the Isle of Grain?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 6, 2011
Architect Norman Foster says a Thames estuary hub is essential for Britain's economy; critics warn of a £50bn white elephant that could harm the environment
What is at stake, according to all sides of the argument, is nothing less than the economic and spiritual future of the nation. We are in danger of "denying future generations to come", says architect Lord Foster. It is about the importance of our "world-class natural environment", says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It could be a "white elephant" that would deal a near-fatal blow to our economy, says Sir Terry Farrell, another leading architect. Also at stake is national identity: how much Britain should try to match growing countries such as China, and how much we should do our own thing.
They are talking about airports, more particularly the idea of the "hub", the place where airlines choose to have interchanging flights, which is not only good for the airport business but also any business that relies on the best possible air connections. Heathrow is such an airport now, but its two runways are at 99% of their capacity, and air travel keeps growing, so it is in danger of losing ground to Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris. A third runway, deeply unpopular with people living under its flight path, has been ruled out by the government, the opposition, and the mayor of London.
So last week Foster, in partnership with engineers Halcrow and economic consultancy Volterra, unveiled a plan for Thames Hub, a four-runway airport to be built on the Isle of Grain in north Kent, on the Thames estuary.
Building anew would achieve the best possible integration of planes and trains, the best provision for logistics, and the most modern, efficient terminals. Planes would mostly approach over water rather than densely populated areas. It would connect to the high-speed rail link built for the Channel tunnel and provide tens of thousands of jobs for the never-quite-achieved revitalisation of the area known as the Thames Gateway.
It is not the first plan to build an airport in the estuary. An attempt to build one at Foulness in Essex was scuppered by the 1973 oil crisis, and more recently Cliffe, near the Isle of Grain, has been mooted, but the Foster plan is the most ambitious. It is not just for an airport, but a new tidal barrier to protect London from flooding, a high-speed orbital railway that would roughly follow the path of the M25, and railway connections to seaports and northern cities. The total cost is put at £50bn, with benefits to the economy put at £150bn. Backers say that they are attracting interest from private investors.
Foster's inspiration is China. In the 1990s he designed Hong Kong's new airport, which required the levelling and reshaping of a bumpy island. He also designed the gigantic Terminal 3 in Beijing, which took four years to realise and opened in time for the 2008 Olympics. Now an even bigger airport is already being planned for the city. Foster has long admired the speed with which these were built, and laments how Britain has dithered about London's airports. Heathrow's Terminal Five took 26 years from conception to completion, including the longest planning inquiry in history.
Britain wasn't like this, says Foster, in the age of the great engineering projects. He urges that we "recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears", which means action to speed up and simplify the process of planning and public inquiries, and dealing less tenderly with the many objections projects like this provoke. He raises the spectre of Bric, the growing nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. If Britain does not match their investment in infrastructure, "we are rolling over and saying we are no longer competitive – and this is a competitive world. So I do not believe we have a choice."
There are certainly objections. The Isle of Grain is not an abstract piece of nothing, but a rare wilderness surprisingly close to London. It is part of the atmospheric flat lands where Dickens set the opening of Great Expectations, and the airport would not so much be built on it as completely annihilate it. In the Thames estuary there are, says the RSPB, up to 200,000 birds, and another 30,000 in the nearby Medway, a population "of global importance" which is unlikely to mix well with an airport. Huw Thomas, a director of Foster & Partners, says replacement habitats could be created elsewhere, but the RSPB is unconvinced. Neither will it be easy to run high-speed trains through the green belt unopposed.
Farrell questions whether Foster's infrastructural wonderland would really work. The airport is "on the wrong side of London for growth – the heart of Britain is clearly on the other side". If Heathrow were shrunk or closed, he says, the investment that has gone into the airport would be squandered. More than that, the huge array of businesses that have grown up around Heathrow, from corporate headquarters in the Thames valley to hotels and warehouses and the UK's biggest food distribution centre, would have to relocate. Heathrow currently creates nearly 80,000 airport-related jobs, and many more in associated businesses. Homes for all these workers, with their schools, hospitals and shops, would have to be recreated in the east. No one planned that Heathrow would be what it is now, but for all its faults it is an extraordinary success, which should not be lightly discarded.
"Can we afford to flip London over?" Farrell asks, and cites Montreal-Mirabel airport, which opened in 1975 as the biggest in the world, misjudged its market and ceased passenger flights in 2004. Its main problems were its distance from the city and the introduction of longer-range aircraft, making them less likely to stop over in Montreal. The Foster plan carries some of the same risks, such as having a less convenient location than the existing airport and requiring a long-term bet on patterns of flying that may change.
Farrell argues instead for "consolidation of what we've got", for better train connections between existing airports, for example, so that they can work better together. "Foster is right to propose his hub," he says, as a contribution to debate, but we should not be dazzled into accepting it uncritically. Such solutions are "tremendously glamorous and sexy", but "you can't just take the say-so" of people such as architects and engineers, with a vested interest. Nor that of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, an enthusiast for estuary airport plans, given that relocation would shift the environmental problems "from thousands of his voters, and dump them on someone else's".
Farrell argues that what works in China may not work here: "They have a growth economy and can afford to make mistakes." And China, not being a democracy, doesn't have to worry too much about opposing voices. "We can't emulate the Chinese. We've got to find our own position, which could be very clever and very smart, but different."
This debate assumes that endless growth in air traffic is desirable and inevitable, although it contributes significantly to climate change. It also enjoys the remarkable tax break of exemption from VAT on fuel. Should this ever end, people will fly less.
Meanwhile, engines are becoming quieter, which alters the discussions about noise pollution, and with the Airbus A380 aircraft are becoming bigger. John Stewart of HACAN Clear Skies, which campaigns to control the effects of aviation over London, thinks Heathrow could expand by handling larger planes for long-range flights, while high-speed trains would take over much of the short-range traffic. If he is right, it may not be necessary to build a new super-hub.
What is most striking is that no one knows for sure which option is best. This may be the most critical decision on infrastructure, environment and planning that this country has to take, but the implications and complexities are too big for anyone to have mastered them yet. The Foster hub could be as successful as Hong Kong, or a new Montreal-Mirabel. Confident though they are, the Foster camp acknowledge that their hub is partly speculative. Farrell isn't saying for sure that his idea of consolidation is the best one, but only that it deserves full investigation.
Whether either, or something else, is the best option is for the moment almost pure guesswork.
Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer
Conran retrospective, New Review page 36
Lord Foster reveals £50bn Thames Hub project
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 3, 2011
Ambitious Thames estuary plan to include international airport, railway and housing with new freight and energy infrastructure
"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realised." These famous words are attributed to Daniel Burnham, the ebullient American architect and planner who reshaped Chicago, extended Washington DC and championed the City Beautiful movement of the late 19th century.
On Wednesday Lord Foster announced a plan so big that even Burnham would have been impressed. The Thames Hub, a £50bn project devised by architects Foster and Partners, planners and builders Halcrow and Volterra, a consultancy group of British economists, aims to revolutionise Britain's often creaking and largely inadequate national transport and energy infrastructure.
From a proposed new Thames Hub, comprising an international airport, railway terminus, freight depot and port along with a new Thames Barrier sited all together in the Thames estuary, a new four-track high-speed orbital passenger and freight railway would run around the north of London before joining main lines to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Felixstowe, Cardiff and Southampton.
Aiming to take thousand of container lorries off the roads, this radically enhanced national transport "spine" would also carry power lines and communications cables, cutting down on the need for new pylons. Built to a continental loading gauge, the railways would connect directly with high-speed passenger and freight lines in the rest of Europe.
New homes, hi-tech factories and other workplaces would be built around existing and new railway lines with tens of thousands of new homes connected directly to an ultra-modern transport network. Most new homes in Britain are currently scattered on the fringe of old towns and across the green belt with little consideration for transport and other infrastructure.
"We need to recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears, " said Foster on Wednesday, "if we are to establish a modern transport and energy infrastructure in Britain for this century and beyond."
The Thames Hub and the "spine" are bold plans indeed. "They're born out of necessity, enthusiasm and frustration," says Foster. "In Hong Kong, a decade ago, we were able to build a major new international airport and all the associated infrastructure including a new island reclaimed from the sea within four years. If Britain wants to compete with rapidly developing global economies, it must sort out its infrastructure and, if this is holistically planned with real political commitment it can also be a thing of beauty and environmentally friendly."
"I know it's against the national grain to come up with big plans and we'll be accused of playing Napoleon, but we have to get the debate going and show what a difference a radical new infrastructure plan could make to Britain."
"Infrastructure is the key", says David Kerr, group board director of Halcrow. "Britain ignores development and investment in infrastructure at its peril. Look around the world and you see the way in which China and Latin America are investing heavily in infrastructure. They see it as a passport to strong economic development."
Bridget Rosewell of Volterra says that, if implemented, the Thames Hub plan would generate £150bn in financial benefits alone. It has also been planned to save the green belt from rapacious commercial development, to generate hydroelectric power from the tidal Thames and to beautify transport corridors around London and along the country's main traffic arteries.
"If it went ahead, even in part," says Foster, "the very realisation of the plan would create thousands of skilled jobs in engineering, manufacturing and construction alone."
Although Britain has rarely been a country of grand plans, these have existed. The building of the railways, sewers, National Grid, motorways and water supplies are all examples of how Britain has made it in the past. Huge infrastructure projects like the city of Birmingham's water supply from the Elan Valley, completed in the early 20th century, prove how such works can be breathtakingly beautiful as well as discreet and highly effective. They can also be highly controversial, politically sensitive and hugely expensive.
"The cost of not doing anything will ultimately be much higher," says Foster, an architect used to moving mountains in the far east. "We've stuck our heads up like coconuts in a funfair expecting them to be knocked down. But we need to do something soon, and this plan is national, aiming to redress the imbalance of the economies of north and south."
Could it happen? Could we soon be flying in and out of one of the greatest ports in the world where fleets of modern aircraft, ships and trains power Britain's economy into a newly competitive age? Will we live in fine new homes connected to brand new transport, energy and communications spines and hubs? Or will we decide it's business as usual in little Britain and carry on building junk housing on what were once meadows and unsustainable supermarkets and shopping malls on the land that's left and between overcrowded roads and railways? Foster and his team have offered a big-spirited vision of Britain, but do we have eyes to see it?
Urbanized: a documentary about city design that comes in the nick of time
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 25, 2011
As the global population teeters on 7 billion, Gary Hustwit's film portrays the world's exploding number of city dwellers as the solution rather than the problem
A series of familiar images unfolds on the screen: a wall of glass towers, a Brazilian favela, the Shibuya pedestrian crossing in Tokyo. Visual shorthand for a crowded planet, they are accompanied by an equally familiar sequence of statistics: half of humanity – or 3.5 billion people – now live in cities, and urbanisation is so rampant that by 2050 this figure is projected to be 75%. So begins Urbanized, a new film about the challenge that cities pose in the 21st century, which had its London debut this weekend, playing to a packed house at the London School of Economics. It is directed by Gary Hustwit, who made the cult hit Helvetica in 2007 (an unlikely film about a Swiss typeface) before taking on the much broader topic of industrial design in 2009's Objectified. With Urbanized, he zooms out even further to complete his trilogy, a cinematic story about design moving from the micro to the macro.
With each leap in scale, Hustwit risks pointing his camera at a topic so big he ends up saying nothing at all. Yet Urbanized is a brave and timely movie that manages to strike almost exactly the right tone. For a sense of the scale of the urban problem, simply look at Mumbai, a city of 12 million people that is set to be the world's biggest by 2050. Already, 60% of its population lives in slums with such poor sanitation that there is only one toilet seat for every 600 people. The municipality is reluctant to build toilets for fear that it will encourage more migrants to come. "As if people come to shit," retorts the activist Sheela Patel in the movie. Quite. Most people come to work. Cities are basins of opportunity, and their citizens drive national economies. It is peculiar, then, how poorly cities reward their citizens for that contribution.
The film takes a clear line on what makes a city habitable. Why is Brasilia, for all its drama, inhospitable? Because it was designed with a bird's-eye view that left the poor mugs on the ground hiking across town beside a highway. The movie illustrates the catastrophe of designing cities for cars rather than people with the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses – the saintly advocate of Greenwich Village's street life and the panto-villain masterplanner who scarred New York with his highways. These days the Big Apple is starting to atone for Moses's sins with public spaces such as the High Line. This new elevated promenade doesn't make up for the growing inequality that is turning Manhattan into an island for the rich, but it is a noble case of the city giving something back to its citizens.
Even more impressive is the way the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, changed the dynamic of the Colombian capital by creating a network of cycle lanes and a public bus service. In a city known for its crippling traffic, it is now the poorest – those without cars – who move the fastest. As Peñalosa points out, showboating on a mountain bike as he overtakes a car squishing through the mud: this is democracy in action. Only by prioritising pedestrians have cities rediscovered their vibrant centres. In the 1980s, by contrast, cities were hollowing out as the middle classes fled to the suburbs. Here the camera pans the suburban sprawl of Phoenix, all identical houses and driveways, as land use attorney Grady Gammage epitomises the selfishness of the American dream with the words "I like the way I live". Nowhere has that dream gone more wrong than in Detroit. The most powerful scene in the movie is an eerie train ride through the deserted city, now depopulated thanks to its dying car industry.
There we have the full spectrum of the problem: some cities are bursting at the seams while others are becoming ghost towns. Who has the answer? Is it Norman Foster with his Masdar eco-city in Abu Dhabi? Is it Rem Koolhaas with his behemoth of a headquarters for Chinese state television in Beijing? To its credit, the film is unequivocal that architects – especially starchitects – are not the solution. What happened when Brad Pitt rallied a group of well-meaning architect friends to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? The city got an odd assortment of houses that look like they were parachuted in from Malibu sitting amid a sea of devastation. Not all that effective.
If there is a new orthodoxy in urban design, it is citizen participation. And Urbanized revels in this so-called "bottom up" approach. It depicts several cases of community engagement, from an energy measurement scheme in Brighton to a new pedestrian area in the South African township of Khayelitsha. It devotes a good chunk of time to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, whose system of half-houses that residents complete themselves is often cited as a paragon of "participatory design". The idea is that citizens, not god-like architects and planners, are the solution to the urban question. And Hustwit knows just how effective people power can be: his movie was partly paid for through the crowd-funding site Kickstarter.
This aspect of the movie is very much in tune with the zeitgeist. 2011 is the year of people power after all, the year when across the world, from Tahrir Square to the streets of Santiago to Wall Street, citizens have been making themselves heard. Indeed, there are several protests featured in the film. The message is undoubtedly a positive one, and the focus on small-scale, tangible solutions is at pains to be uplifting. The only caveat is that at times this borders on the naive. Watching people plant community gardens in the abandoned lots of Detroit, or plaster New Orleans with stickers that let citizens have their say, creates a cosy feel-good factor, but the problem is scale. On one hand, favelas and shanty towns are emblematic of the tremendous capacity of people to look after themselves. But no amount of self-organisation is going to introduce running water and sewage to the favelas. That kind of infrastructure requires politicians, not just residents.
Perhaps that's where a film such as Urbanized can be useful. Undoubtedly there are limits to what can be said about cities in a one-and-a-half-hour documentary – for instance, maybe this notion that 75% of us will live in cities by 2050 is bogus, and that as the global economy falters so will urbanisation. But this is not the purview of films like Urbanized. Whatever the drawbacks of a mass medium when it comes to nuance, it is redeemed by its ability to reach a mass audience. The more people who see this movie the better. And the more politicians who see it – and are persuaded to look beyond the vested interests in front of them – the more powerful a tool Urbanized will be.
Constructive criticism: architecture blasts off into space
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 21, 2011
Richard Branson reaches for the stars and Zaha Hadid goes down the toilet
Our dreams of blasting off for a lunar mini-break took another small step towards reality this week (even if the advent of space tourism has been announced and postponed about every six months since, ooh, 1961). In a blaze of publicity that was probably visible from Jupiter, Richard Branson held a "dedication ceremony" for the Virgin Galactic Spaceport, the world's first purpose-built space-tourism launch facility, in the New Mexico desert.
After abseiling down the glass facade spraying champagne, Branson admitted commercial flights were still more than a year away, but guests could at least marvel at the building, designed by Norman Foster in association with local firms URS and SMPC Architects.
The no-frills terminal looks something like the prow of the Starship Enterprise emerging from the desert sands, though the guiding principles were less to do with science fiction than environmental impact. By being half-buried, the terminal blends into the landscape more, and the subterranean section contains 100-metre-long tubes to passively cool air for the building. Recycled materials were used where possible and everything was sourced within a 500-mile radius of the site, Foster says.
How much this will offset the whopping carbon footprint of space tourism remains to be seen. But what architect would pass up the chance to design a building requiring "astronaut changing rooms"?
Back on earth, in a small London gallery, a new exhibition has opened showing the work of Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, called The Abolition of War. This industrial designer turned art provocateur regularly engages with architecture and the city in ingenious, sometimes hilarious ways. He literally brings buildings to life by projecting eyes, ears, hands and other features on to their facades, but there's always a political point. In 1985, for example, he fooled London authorities into allowing him to project images of Pershing missiles on to Nelson's Column and tank tracks on the surrounding lions (he had been given permission to project hands); then, for good measure, he directed a swastika at the South African embassy.
Wodiczko also designed mobile shelters for homeless people (which look like live-in shopping trolleys or props from Doctor Who), and repurposed military vehicles as anti-war propaganda machines, one of which is in the exhibition: War Veteran Vehicle, a Land Rover that projects statements ("Have killed") from British Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on to surfaces, to the sound of cannon fire. Among his more ambitious projects is a fabulous World Institute for the Abolition of War which, he proposes, would be built over and around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Anyone want to buy a museum? Now that the Design Museum is moving to the Commonwealth Institute, with a new fit-out by Rem Koolhaas, its old Thameside building is surplus to requirements, and on the market. It was converted from a 1950s banana warehouse in 1989 and remains a crisp, white modernist presence on the waterfront, ripe for another incarnation. But what should we do with it now? Anyone with a bright idea and a few million quid to spare should contact global estate agents Cushman & Wakefield.
Further proof that Britain has finally learned to love Zaha Hadid: the opening of a new gallery designed by her. This is Hadid's third building in England, following the pool (the London 2012 Aquatic Centre) and the school (the Evelyn Grace Academy, which won the Stirling prize earlier this month). But Roca London Gallery, in Chelsea Harbour, doesn't actually display art; it's, er, a bathroom showroom. Not that you'd guess it from the promotional video.
As showrooms go, it's admittedly outstanding. Zaha's fluid curves fit right in with the watery theme, and the ground-floor space is reminiscent of a riverbed. A smooth, canyon-like corridor winds through irregular spaces with curvy openings, and globules of lighting hang overhead like water droplets. There's barely a straight line in the place, and the palette of pale concrete, glass and white fittings is fittingly futuristic.
When Richard Branson finally gets round to building that lunar hotel, he should give Hadid a call. She could at least help him source a space-age bidet.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 7, 2011
Foster and Partners unveil a natty new airport and winsome winery, France builds a museum for lost soldiers, and Camden Town says farewell to the TV-am building
At its best, architecture should set our sights high and lift the spirit. It can do this physically as well as metaphorically, as projects announced this week demonstrate. Foster and Partners has unveiled designs for the new Kuwait airport. This is centred on an elegant terminal in the guise of a giant trefoil, with each of its three curving facades measuring three-quarters of a mile long. Imagine looking down on it from an aircraft window through azure desert skies: it will seem rather like a three-winged Frisbee – you could almost pick it up and send it spinning across the dunes.
From the ground, the new terminal has echoes of the soaring TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy airport, designed by Eero Saarinen. Its great single roof will be both a huge parasol and a bed for solar panels. Inside, daylight will be filtered through slits, chutes and slants, while cascades of water will keep passengers cool. With few changes in floor level, soaring concrete vaults and shady arcades, and with a spirit of flight encoded in its architectural DNA, this should be one of the world's most convincing new airport buildings.
In France, the spirit of thousands of Australian soldiers killed in what was their first major engagement on the Western Front during the first world war is to be honoured with the creation of the Museum of the Battle of Fromelles. Announced this week, the competition-winning designs by Paris and New York-based Serero Architects reveal a shrine-like, octagonal concrete building dug into the hill where the soldiers fought, and alongside the cemetery where they lie.
The mass graves of the soldiers, machine-gunned down in this spot by German troops on 19-20 July 1916, were discovered in 2008. The cemetery was opened last year, and now this thoughtful museum will tell the story of a largely forgotten episode in the first world war. Adolf Hitler, serving with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, took part in the battle, as did WH "Jimmy" Downing who, some years ago, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, crisscrossed lattice of death, and hundreds were mown down in a flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb." There were 1,500 British and more than 5,000 Australian casualties. The architect's aim is to take visitors on a journey through darkness and death to light and life.
Coop Himmelblau, the blue-sky-thinking Austrian architects, have just completed a vast cinema complex in Busan, the South Korean port city, home to Asia's biggest cinema event, the Busan international film festival which opened yesterday. The underside of the cinema's wave-like cantilevered roof – the world's largest – can be used like a vast public screen. Hopefully no director will ever be tempted to remake Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but if they were to, Coop Himmelblau's mind-blowing complex would make a suitably mesmerising backdrop.
Winners of RIBA's Forgotten Spaces 2011 competition, an initiative to raise the design stakes of overlooked corners of Greater London, will be announced at the launch of an exhibition at Somerset House on 19 October. Meanwhile, you can take a peep at the shortlisted entries here. Ideas from architects, designers and local groups include artist-inhabited church spires across London, a city farm alongside Croydon's mainline railway station and event spaces on the rooftops of Bethnal Green tower blocks.
The former TV-am studios, designed by Terry Farrell and opened in 1983, did much to brighten a shadowy canalside corner of Camden Town. Sadly, this playful PoMo building is currently being torn apart and remodelled in the dullest possible corporate manner, especially at a time when PoMo is being celebrated at the V&A. While TV-am was never great architecture and was never intended to last long, it was a cheery creation with an entertaining stage-set interior. It was too young to have been listed, but if a building has to go – for whatever reason – it should be replaced by something better. This hasn't happened here.
And finally, while teetotallers will tut, RIBA has announced a "sociable night with a difference": Drink Architecture. I don't think the idea is to see architecture through the wrong end of a wine bottle, but the first event in London (with Foster and Partners's Jaime Valle discussing the three-winged design of the Faustino winery in Spain's Ribero del Duro region, followed by an explanation of the wines stored there as you taste them) sounds appealing. And if your spirits are suitably raised, visits to the winery, 90 or so miles north of Madrid, can be arranged. And no, Fosters haven't designed Madrid airport.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 12, 2011
A first glimpse of the soaring new concourse at King's Cross, Norman Foster defects to China, and architects wonder if they are to blame for the UK riots
In a week dominated by images of buildings burning to the ground, there have been at least a few people out there still building the things. The press was granted a preview of King's Cross station's new concourse, ahead of its opening in time for the Olympics next year. Designed by architect John McAslan, it is a majestically conceived space which stands alongside the Grade 1-listed sheds and replaces the cramped and grotty 1960s extension that currently serves as the station's entrance. We will have to wait until after the Games to see it demolished, at which point the ground it occupies is set to be given over to a new public square.
Its steel diagrid roof design owes more than a small debt to the one with which Norman Foster enclosed the British Museum's Great Court a decade ago. Since then, Foster's practice has grown at an extraordinary rate. That growth has been fuelled by its pursuit of work in emerging economies, particularly China. It established a team in Beijing in 2003, having won the competition for the city's new airport. This week, Foster revealed that he is planning to consolidate his presence there by building his own office on a site neighbouring the Ai Weiwei-designed Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. Talking to Building Design magazine, Foster explained: "It will in part be public, in the sense that it will have galleries, it will have a cafe. It will host exhibitions by young artists and architects in China. It will have an apartment for an artist in residence. It will also be a centre for ourselves. It will have all the facilities for designers. We'll have workshops and model shops."
Another British architect who has been pursuing work in China is Will Alsop, architect of the Stirling prize-winning Peckham library, and rather less happily of West Bromwich's widely reviled digital arts centre, the Public. Alsop was in China this week when news broke that he had escaped the clutches of his employers for the past two years – the Edinburgh-based mega-practice RMJM – and set up a new partnership. This, it has to be said, came as no surprise. Thirty years ago, Alsop set up a practice called Alsop & Lyall before jumping ship to Alsop & Stormer, which became Alsop Architects, before financial calamity prompted a string of relationships with dead-eyed multinationals – SMC Alsop Architects, Alsop Sparch and finally Will Alsop at RMJM. An exuberant painter, Alsop presents himself as the artist/architect par excellence. But as his peripatetic history suggests, business management skills aren't necessarily part of the package.
Rather inevitably, discussion among the architectural community this week has focused on the UK riots and the question of whether the cities we have been building have contributed to social breakdown. The past two decades have seen an extraordinary revival of urban centres, after years of post-industrial decline. In the early 1990s, Manchester city centre was home to a mere 90 people. Today, that figure stands in excess of 25,000 – a story echoed in scarcely less dramatic form in urban centres across the country. The events of the past week have made painfully clear that the fruits of this urban renaissance haven't been extended to all. The fear is that many cities' efforts at regeneration may have exacerbated social divisions.
So what now? A particularly incisive commentary on the relationship between social unrest and urban transformation was provided this week by the Dutch architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout, who is currently researching a book on the subject. His description of the wholly misguided response by the French government to the 2005 riots in the banlieues should be essential reading for UK politicians. He writes: "It is much too soon to say anything about the relationship between the gentrification of Brixton, or the coming of the Olympics to London, and the current explosion of violent alienation. But if we imagine another kind of urban politics, one that does not take into account a marketable image of the city, but the reality of the entire community, it would probably have entirely different priorities."
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 5, 2011
The Olympic stadium wrapper is saved from the rubbish heap, there's silicon spaghetti on Ron Arad's menu and Norman Foster's wife reconstructs his life for television
Oh no, please no. One of the best things that has happened to the great Olympic construction project was the removal of the wholly pointless wrapper that was going to envelop the stadium. It was omitted to save money, but it will now be put back again thanks to the Dow chemical company, who have unfortunate historical links with such things as napalm and the Bhopal disaster. Wrapperless, the stadium was direct and to the point: you could see what it was for and how it was built. It was simple, even if it was a monument to New Austerity that came in at a non-austere half a billion pounds. It doesn't need a frilly plastic skirt.
Also this week, a plaintive statement was issued by a section of society not usually regarded as sensitive little flowers – building contractors. "Where are the plaudits?" asks the Chartered Institute of Building, for the people who actually got out in the cold and wet and built the Olympic projects which are marvellously on time, on budget and beautiful. "The closest praise so far," says the institute's chief executive, Chris Blythe, "have been backhanded compliments that 'at least it's not another Wembley', with only the architecture drawing any sort of recognition. Yet it's the people of UK construction who have turned those five-ringed dreams into reality." I'm tempted to ask if the high cost of the stadium is anything to do with contractors, but it could take months of quasi-legal questioning to find out. So I'm happy to concur that the Olympics definitely could not have happened without contractors, and that they deserve their share of the credit.
Meanwhile, the world of architecture is not exactly rocked, but mildly vibrated, by Tom Dyckhoff's series for Channel 4, The Secret Life of Buildings. Dyckhoff points out, with the help of scientists using terms such as "pain inhibitory pathways", that too little space and daylight is bad for you. He refers to such revelations as "quite incredible".
The bleeding obvious reaction, expressed in a debate in Building Design, is that he is stating the bleeding obvious, and you don't need neuroscientists in San Diego to prove it. Well yes, but this bleeding-obviousness hasn't yet impinged on the developers who build tiny, lightless homes, nor on the government that might stop them from doing so. The more people like Dyckhoff that bang on about it, the better.
I don't know what would happen if neurosensors were attached to visitors at Curtain Call, Ron Arad's forthcoming installation at the Roundhouse in London, but I imagine the needles would be jumping all over the place. They will enter a giant cylinder made of eight-metre-long silicon spaghetti hanging from above like – to switch metaphors and cultures with some violence – the beaded curtains in a 1970s Greek taverna. 360-degree projections of rotting flowers, giant piano keys, bullfight crowds and more will be projected on to the cylinder. See Sunday's Observer for Arad's thoughts on Curtain Call before it opens to the public next Tuesday.
Lastly, another televisual outing for the mother of the arts: on 15 August, Sky Arts will kick off its architecture season with How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, the impressive story of a septuagenarian cancer survivor who manages to take part in ski marathons and cycle races, while also designing buildings and cities according to principles that might possibly save the world. That said, its objectivity might be more believable if the film was not produced by the wife of Norman Foster, Elena Ochoa.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 15, 2011
Yuri Gagarin touches down in Britain, the Gherkin paternity battle finally ends, and typhoons strike Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House
Made from an alloy used in rockets, a statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was unveiled outside the British Council in London this week. Elena Gagarina, daughter of the Russian cosmonaut, did the honours. The casting of the sculpture, a recreation of an original made in 1984, was supervised by the architect Pavel Medvedev, whose statue of Laika the space dog, the first animal to orbit Earth, was erected in Moscow three years ago. Laika died up there.
The Gagarin sculpture is not just a memorial to a brave pioneer. It is also a reminder of a fabulous idea – the notion that space-race technology, both Soviet and American, would transform buildings, everyday goods and machinery, and ways of life. However, although Gagarin's 1961 leap into the unknown did advance design, hopes for a space-age future were nothing new. Science-fiction books, comics and films predate rocket flight, after all.
The space-age look found its way into Soviet buildings of the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, much of Britain's futuristic architecture of recent years – the "high-tech " movement championed by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers – has been underpinned by a delight in the sort of space-age design that surfaced when Gagarin made world headlines 50 years ago. Foster's 2004 "Gherkin" is a very modern building that also just happens to look like an old-fashioned space rocket.
Arguments over the authorship of the Gherkin appear to have come an end this week with Ken Shuttleworth of Make architects insisting it was a team effort. In countless articles since 2003, when Shuttleworth left Foster and Partners to set up his own practice, he's been credited as the designer of the London tower. "It's the desire for a figurehead or a single name attached to an individual building that still causes problems," says a spokesperson for Foster and Partners. "Norman has always insisted that his greatest creation is the team around him, and the Gherkin was – once and for all – very definitely designed by a team." Got that everyone?
The idea of a "future memory" in architecture, so dear to Foster, is to be debated in a specially commissioned pavilion for the 2011 Singapore ArchiFest in October. Asif Khan, a young London architect whose work also includes craft, furniture and product design, has been commissioned to create the Future Memory Pavilion on behalf of the British Council, in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Preservation of Monuments Board, Singapore.
Khan's sketch reveals an elemental design made of ice and sand that will morph during the course of the festival. It captures the spirit of a fascinating line of architectural enquiry, and a contradiction inherent to futuristic design: no matter how apparently innovative they are, buildings retain powerful memories of past. Even as architects try to construct the future, it slips away and becomes the past – just as Khan's pavilion will slowly dissolve back into the Earth and a state of timelessness.
Zaha Hadid's futuristic buildings, such as the flamboyant new Guangzhou Opera House, are as informed by her love of 1920s Russian constructivism as they are with the future. Sadly, the opera house has been in the news this week because of reports that it's already heading the way of Khan's pavilion and falling to bits.
Simon Yu, project architect of the opera house, called me from China. "I've just been to inspect the building. It's typhoon season and its been pouring with rain, but rain isn't 'seeping relentlessly into the building' as has been reported. Glass panels haven't fallen from windows and no large cracks have appeared. I'm not sure what all this is about. Yes, there's still a lot of snagging to be done; we've demanded a high standard of work from what is often seasonal labour, but the flaws are superficial."
Gas holders, meanwhile, were among the most futuristic structures of the 19th century. If the Victorians had invented space rockets, they would have lifted off from structures like these. Some of the most elegant, including Hornsey No 1 in London (described by English Heritage as "probably the world's first geodesic design"), remain under threat. "This is not just any gas holder," says Heloise Brown, conservation adviser for the Victorian Society. "Hornsey No 1 will soon be the last surviving example of a highly innovative design and it must not be lost." Sadly this particular gas holder, designed by Samuel Cutler, is not listed and may be demolished soon.
Gas, in the form of air, will be used to inflate the giant bags that will hopefully save the stepped pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, near Cairo, from collapse. Cintec, the international engineering firm based in Newport, Wales, has revealed a plan to prop up the central chamber with inflated bags and anchors. Damaged by an earthquake in 1992, this 4,700-year-old structure is the world's first large-scale stone monument. Its revolutionary design was the work of the very first architect we know by name, Imhotep. Because of his visionary work, Imhotep took one giant leap way before Gagarin: he became a god.
Stirling prize shortlist: big names stop the judges in their tracks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
The six architects on the Stirling prize shortlist 2011 have all been there before. But could a political dark horse say 'on your bike' to the bookies' Olympic favourite?
It's never worthwhile to reduce the Stirling prize shortlist to some overriding theme, but having said that, there is one thing that unites this year's six architects: they've all been shortlisted before. Some of them several times – this is Zaha Hadid's fourth building, and David Chipperfield's seventh, which puts him in joint second place in the Stirling prize league table alongside Richard Rogers, with Norman Foster just one ahead. Does this suggest there were clear frontrunners in the Stirling race, or that a big name counts for more and smaller practices don't get a look-in?
Anyway, on with the reckless speculation. The traditional Stirling winner is a large public building, but in the current cash-strapped construction environment, there have been few of these to trumpet.
Which makes the absence of two of the main buildings on the London Olympics site conspicuous. No plaudits for the main stadium by US-based architects Populous – understandable in a way since its brief was practically to be as bog standard as possible – at which it succeeds (having a silly name for your practice doesn't help either).
And nothing for Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre – also understandable given its troubled history of redesigns, budget increases, temporary "water wings" imposed on it, and the fact that, er, it still isn't finished.
That leaves Michael Hopkins's Velodrome with the podium all to itself. As expected, it's currently the bookies' favourite and deservedly so. It's a handsome, unfussy building, quietly distinctive (enough to earn it a nickname: "the Pringle") and engineered as efficiently as a track bicycle. It's already had the thumbs-up from the Team GB cyclists, too, who described it as "the best in the world".
Looking at the other contenders, laudable though they are, they're not necessarily game-changing. AHMM's Angel Building reconfigures a 1980s office building with Louis Kahn-style barefaced concrete and a sheen of Mad Men mid-century glamour – very nice but perhaps too conventional to win. Bennetts Associates' Royal Shakespeare Theatre makes new sense of a messy accumulation of older buildings, but it's not a scene-stealer like the Tate Modern. Zaha's Evelyn Grace Academy is a consolation for the Aquatics Centre, and proof that her swooshing parametricism can work within tight budgets and design guidelines (is that Z-shape a touch of covert branding?). The fact that Zaha won the prize last year could hamper her chances, though. Likewise David Chipperfield's Museum Folkwang extension in Essen, another refined, sharp-edged German culture house for his collection.
Chipperfield already won with one of these in 2007, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, and was shortlisted for another, the Neues Museum, last year. Perhaps he should design a Museum of German Museum Designs.
That leaves a dark horse: An Gaeláras by Dublin-based O'Donnell & Tuomey in Derry, Northern Ireland. It is the first purpose-built Irish-language cultural centre in the UK, a product of the Good Friday agreement, and thus freighted with political relevance (there hasn't been much of that in Stirling world since the Scottish parliament won in 2005). But it's also a beautiful design on a hostile site. Despite being walled in on three sides, it boasts a sculptural four-storey atrium criss-crossed by stairs and galleries, smartly mixing colours and materials – the type of space that stops you in your tracks. Uplifting and finely crafted, it could well tick all the boxes.
Architecture, Art, Art and design, Awards and prizes, Comment, Culture, David Chipperfield, guardian.co.uk, Norman Foster, Olympic games 2012, Richard Rogers, Stirling prize, Zaha Hadid
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