Posts Tagged Norman Foster
Lloyd’s listed: will it make the Grade?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 12, 2011
The Lloyd's of London building may be awarded Grade I status by English Heritage – an honour this modern marvel deserves
Over the years it's been likened to an oil refinery, a North Sea oil rig and part of the set design of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. But 25 years after it was built, the inside-out structure of the Lloyd's building in the City of London still comes as a shock.
If you have never been inside this hi-tech wonder of the modern world, you will either have to become a member of the venerable insurance marketplace the building serves, or else wait for the next London Open House weekend hoping that the doors of this Richard Rogers tour de force will be thrown open to the public.
At once the most private and the most prominent modern building in central London, Lloyd's may well be listed this month. A report being prepared by English Heritage will soon be in the hands of Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary. It is expected to recommend Grade I status, an honour accorded to very few post-1945 buildings. These include Coventry Cathedral by Sir Basil Spence and Norman Foster's black glass Willis Faber building in Ipswich, completed in 1975 and listed in 1991.
Normally, a building has to be 30 years old before the government can consider listing, although if a building more than 10 years old is threatened with change (as the Foster design was) English Heritage can recommend instant listing.
"This was originally the case with Lloyd's," says Jon Wright of The Twentieth Century Society (who preserve architecture built since 1914) "when changes were threatened to the interior of the great atrium. The threat has since gone, but we've been pushing English Heritage to recommend listing because who knows what might happen to the building in the future, especially if Lloyd's was ever to move out?"
Assuming that listing will go ahead this month, Lloyd's will join the ranks of Britain's medieval cathedrals, its grandest country houses, most daunting castles and enduring museums. Does it live up to the mark? Yes, very much so. Commissioned in 1978, a year after the opening of the Pompidou centre in Paris – the building that made Richard Rogers and his co-architect, Renzo Piano, famous – Lloyd's was an unexpected, bespoke design for an organisation characterised by stuffed-shirted, pinstriped chaps.
Here is a building with glass lifts rising up its steely exterior. Here are stainless steel-clad service towers housing prefabricated kitchen and washroom modules lifted by cranes into place. Here is one of the most impressive of all 1980s atriums, soaring 60 metres up to a barrel-vaulted glass roof and criss-crossed by yellow-edged escalators. Even today, the mesmeric interior seems out of step with the apparently old-fashioned culture of Lloyd's.
Design shocks follow one another up the building. On the 11th floor, doors from the hi-tech interior open into a perfectly preserved and wholly unforeseen committee room designed by Robert Adam, dating from the 1770s. It reminds me of the final scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey when the astronaut, Dr David Bowman, lands – after his mind-bending journey through space – in a semblance of a Louis XVI hotel room: here hi-tech and classicism met face-to-incomprehending-face, just as they do in Lloyd's.
"Listing Lloyd's will be a good thing," says Wright, "although we shouldn't forget that the building was always meant to have been flexible in use, so somehow it has to be granted Grade I status without stopping all future change. That's difficult."
It does seem odd to witness so young and radical a building as Lloyd's joining the ranks of castles and cathedrals, yet this hi-tech interloper is a monument of our times. What's next on the list? Watch out for news of Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1978). If you haven't been here, it might also come as something of a shock: where else will you find one of the finest collections of primitive art housed in a building that resembles the sleekest possible aircraft hangar?
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 17, 2011
A week of high-flying British architecture with the launch of Apple's Norman Foster-designed headquarters, the revised Chelsea Barracks plan and an eyecatching east London folly
While everyone was salivating over the launch of Apple's iCloud last week, Steve Jobs's other product launch garnered less attention. This was Apple's colossal new headquarters building in Cupertino, California – a gigantic white UFO sitting in 150 acres of landscaped parkland, designed for 12,000 workers. For obvious reasons, it has already been dubbed the "mothership". Nor has its designer been widely publicised, but we can reveal it's good old Norman Foster – who else?
Foster's people wouldn't reveal any details, but there are some in this video of Jobs presenting the scheme to Cupertino City Council, where it was received just as rapturously as a new iPad. "We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world," Jobs tells the awestruck councillors. "I really do think architecture students will come here to see this."
So what about the design? Foster has obviously taken a leaf out of Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive's book – sorry, iPad. It looks like the circular trackpad of a giant iPod. If you run around the building very quickly, does a giant playlist light up in the sky? Mind you, by the time it's finished in 2015, it could look out of date.
The purity of the four-storey doughnut's impact on the landscape is also slightly compromised, it emerges, by other buildings on the site, including a four-storey car park. But none of the councillors seem to raise any objections; they're too busy geeking out their celebrity guest. "The word spectacular would be an understatement," grovels one of them, Mr Smithers-style. Just to drive the point home, Jobs mentions that Apple is the largest taxpayer in Cupertino, and hints that if he doesn't get his way, Apple will take their business elsewhere. Presumably the whole building will be able to take off and land in New Mexico, or something.
More good news for Foster and other British architects at this year's spurious but intriguing Best Tall Building awards. Foster's 80-storey Dubai tower, known as The Index – an energy-efficient, Italian futurist-looking affair – won in the Middle East and Africa category. Wilkinson Eyre won the Asia award for their colossal but elegant Guangzhou International Finance Centre – all 103 storeys of it. And Anglo-German architects Sauerbruch Hutton won the Europe award for their tasteful, low-energy Frankfurt office building, KfW Westarkade. The other winner was Frank Gehry's stunning Eight Spruce Street, a shimmering, steel-clad skyscraper that looks better than anything we're likely to find on the nearby World Trade Centre site. Though it does go by the pretentious name New York by Gehry, which makes it sound uncomfortably like a perfume.
Richard Rogers probably wishes he'd had Apple-style planning meetings over the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment in London. Instead, his design was controversially rejected when Prince Charles threw a royal spanner in the works last year, complaining about that vulgar hi-techie stuff to the Qatari royals.
No surprise that the revised design for the £3bn scheme is expected to be approved by Westminster council today, although the Qatari developers are said to be trying to reduce the amount of affordable housing in the scheme. No surprise, either, that the new plan, by Squire and Partners, Dixon Jones and landscape architect Kim Wilkie, is considerably more "traditional", laid out around London squares. Whoever designs the actual buildings will have to adhere to a preordained design code, which insists they "work in sympathy with surrounding character areas and architectural types without resorting to pastiche". Apparently Prince Charles is pleased.
After all this high-flying power architecture, we finally come right down to earth – to a little spot underneath a motorway flyover in east London. Here, a delightful temporary structure is under construction called Folly for a Flyover, as part of this year's Create festival. As designers Assemble explain, it's almost a stage set of a building, with curtain walls of wooden "bricks" made from salvaged timber, hung from scaffolding and held in place by cords running through the bricks. The pitched roof of the folly will poke out between the two roadways, and next to it are steps that serve as an outdoor seating area.
Not only is the folly ingenious and low-impact, it poetically turns a patch of dead urban space into a living venue. As the romantic engraving suggests, it's intended to feel like a forgotten piece of architecture which existed long before they built the A12 over the top of it – a building with a fictional history. Assemble, a collective of young designers and artists, were also behind last year's Cineroleum, a temporary cinema in a disused petrol station in Clerkenwell. This serves a similar function: it'll be a bar/cafe during the day, and in the evening you'll be able to watch films and performances on city themes, while traffic rumbles overhead, the Olympic building site bustles nearby and barges chug past on the canal. Sounds like the quintessential London summer experience.
BBC North – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 21, 2011
MediaCityUK, Salford Quays
The BBC has long been bipolar when it comes to its buildings. The balance of power has long swung between its visionaries and bean-counters, at least since the rising architect Norman Foster designed a dazzling new building for BBC Radio in 1982, only for it to be scrapped in favour of some dim sheds in White City. Early in the last decade the Beeb tried to play Medici again, lining up an array of distinguished and up-and-coming practices: Sir David Chipperfield, Sir Richard MacCormac, Foreign Office Architects. There was much talk of creating buildings equal to the majesty and history of the organisation.
This time the visionaries got further before the bean-counters chopped their legs off. MacCormac's extension of Broadcasting House and Chipperfield's BBC Scotland in Glasgow were both built, but only after both architects had been dumped, in order that their designs could be dumbed down.
The creation of BBC North in Salford is the Naseby of the corporation's Roundheads, the decisive triumph of a managerial New Model Army who trounced the Prince Ruperts and their fancy architects, and dispatched them to oblivion. This group of three glass buildings, which now houses 13% of the BBC's public service staff, is so scrupulously practical and self-effacing, so determined to avoid any suggestion of wasting licence fees, that it is hard to know it is there at all. "Nation shall speak peace unto nation" is not carved here in stone, as it is in Broadcasting House, not least because there is little stone in which to carve it, apart from some cheap paving from China.
BBC North is the result of a deal signed with the property developers Peel Holdings, following a bidding process in which other sites, including the centre of Manchester, were considered. The Peel Holdings offer was to make something with the web-friendly brand name of MediaCityUK, which would include huge production studios laid on by the management, the media studies department of Salford University, and other media companies. ITV would later take a building on the site, and the new Coronation Street is being built nearby, in full view of the BBC's offices. Faced with fierce competition from new media and the forces of Murdoch, former rivals now like to huddle together for comfort.
MediaCityUK's avowed inspirations are places like Internet City and Media City in Dubai, enclaves with special rules that allow businesses to prosper. "The driver was to create a cluster with facilities and infrastructure," say Peel, clunkily, by which they mean that the different media companies and institutions would benefit from each other's presence: "students can bump into executive producers". By taking care of the production studios, they would relieve the BBC of the burden of managing them. Located on a brownfield site by the Manchester Ship Canal, at the end of a 20-minute tram ride from the centre of Manchester, it helps that space here is cheap. And with staff now moving in, less than four years after the deal was signed, delivery was fast and efficient.
MediaCityUK stands amid the vast wilderness formed by the devastation of industry under Margaret Thatcher, since filled by chunks of regeneration. It is a land of lumps, of Manchester United's stadium red and angry as Sir Alex Ferguson's face; of the green dome of Peel Holdings' vast Trafford shopping centre; of the convulsed forms, intended to express anguish, of Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum, of blocks of contemporary-lifestyle apartments. There are the shiny shapes of the Lowry Centre, and of the Lowry Outlet Mall, with the name of the grumpy old artist standing for everything that is not here. There is nothing less Lowryesque than this landscape of gloss, in which everything – culture, shopping, the pain of war – achieves a kind of equivalence.
Salford contains some of the most repulsive buildings in Britain, gesticulating monsters designed to lure buy-to-let investors to their doom. It is some relief that MediaCity, apart from a jazzy diamond pattern on ITV's future premises, has gone for plain glass buildings arranged around a piazza. It offers rather what is best called CostaSpace, as in Costa coffee, the by-now standard form of "public" space in Britain. Like the half-competent cappuccinos and soft furnishings of the coffee chain, CostaSpace offers things that are desirable and reasonable, such as good maintenance, open space, trees and access to waterfronts, yet fail absolutely to capture the essence of the continental coffee bar/public piazza which are the supposed models.
What is lacking is a sense of spontaneity, individual enterprise or, ultimately, freedom. Everything is laid on, planned, managed in advance, plotted in powerpoints and business plans. Desire is programmed: a spiritless tower of flats is called the Heart, so that you might know in the absence of other evidence that is where the home is. The Dubai models for MediaCity are gated and controlled, and help sustain an illiberal and divided society, and while the Salford version is less extreme, private security still prevents behaviour thought inappropriate. When I ask BBC people if they won't miss the liveliness of a city centre, they give the same answer: there is a Costa here, and will be a Booths food store, and a Prezzo, and a WHSmith. Really? Is that all there is to life? Do they truly want to spend their days somewhere like the concourse of a medium-sized railway station?
The BBC's departments, including sport, children's, Radio 5 Live and breakfast news, are spread around three buildings whose design was started by Wilkinson Eyre Architects and finished by Chapman Taylor. Inside they are fitted out to designs by ID:SR, with open plan everywhere, and cheerful dabs of colour and patterned wallpaper, and a domestic, sometimes childlike feel that tries to bring some of the vivacity elsewhere lacking. It looks well-organised and sensible. Extravagance is avoided: images of the 1958 classic Artichoke light are printed on the wallpaper, presumably because the real thing was beyond the budget.
I meet the BBC people who have organised the installation of the BBC in their new buildings, and I have every reason to think they have done a good job. You can't blame the BBC for wanting to be efficient and economical. It's also good that they use their economic might to bring employment to deprived places, even if the supposed beneficiaries, the people of the ordinary streets of Salford, are nearly invisible. But is there really no third way between the pomp of expensive architecture and this place, stripped of ceremony and liveliness and surprise? And should a public body in pursuit of a good idea surrender itself so completely to the priorities of a private development company? Should the Beeb be in a wannabe Dubai?
The 10 best tall buildings – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 16, 2011
The Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore's choice of man's towering achievements
Roger Scruton is on shaky ground slating modern architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 14, 2011
The philosopher should heed his admired Wittgenstein and keep schtum on subjects he knows little about
Philosophers through the ages have rarely had much to say about architecture. Perhaps they've been wise to keep quiet, for architecture can only truly be understood by experiencing its physicality, rather than whatever theory might underpin it.
In an opinion piece in the Times, the philosopher Roger Scruton launched a rabble-rousing attack on celebrity architects – such as Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas – who build monuments for themselves, and indulge in overblown discourse to justify buildings that will be torn down in 20 years' time.
These "stars", thundered Scruton, author of The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism and I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine, "have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledegook with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it". Scruton continued: "New architecture ... is designed to stand out as the work of some inspired artist who does not build for people but sculpts space for his own expressive needs." Such buildings called to the philosopher's mind "vegetables, vehicles, hairdryers, washing machines or backyard junk". All this "is designed as a waste: throwaway architecture, involving vast quantities of energy-intensive materials, which will be demolished within 20 years".
This is amusing stuff, but neither truthful – truth being the goal of the philosopher – nor helpful. Professor Scruton has presumably never heard Foster speak, nor conversed with Hadid. The former is a lucid and analytical mind and Hadid – for all her scintillating and voluptuous buildings – is, like Foster, remarkably down to earth. This is their great strength as architects: again, their trade is as physical and commonsensical as philosophy can be metaphysical and arcane.
The point – one that Ludwig Wittgenstein, a thinker admired by Scruton, understood well – is that certain ideas, such as aesthetics, cannot be put adequately into words and are best expressed through demonstration, which is exactly what architects do. Equally, Scruton is on very shaky foundations when he accuses contemporary architects of sculpting space for their own expressive needs. What of Borromini, Guarini, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor and any number of baroque masters? Their magnificent, theatrical creations were no less expressive than those of Gehry and Hadid. And they too were curbed by the demands of clients, budgets and other practical considerations: neither now nor then have architects been free to let rip in the way Scruton imagines.
As for endurance, Scruton might like to tour any number of Foster buildings – some 40 years old – that have stood the test of time. Yes, architects may make mistakes, but many contemporary buildings are built just as well and even better than those dating from Scruton's beloved 18th century, when shoddy workmanship and fast-buck building was common.
If modern architecture is so very bad, what would Scruton prefer we build instead? The philosopher proposes that new works should be by contemporary classical architects such as Robert Adam from Winchester and Quinlan Terry of Dedham, who "have learned how to construct buildings that fit so well into their surroundings that you notice them only in the way you notice friendly people in the street". While this is certainly not true of works such as Adam's outlandish neo-Egyptian 198-202 Piccadilly, it is also a flimsy recommendation in general. Did the Greeks intend the Parthenon to fit all but unnoticed into its surroundings? Was the dome of St Paul's the shrinking violet of 17th-century English architecture?
Architecture is a continuum – an art and science that has developed, sometimes in fits and starts, since it emerged in monumental form in Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago. Its underlying philosophy is expressed in the design, making and experience of buildings themselves. Perhaps this is why it has attracted the thoughts of so few professional philosophers. Roger Scruton is a perceptive thinker and can write beautifully, but faced with buildings he finds incomprehensible he sounds like the Alf Garnett of architectural theory. In this case he might best learn from Wittgenstein, who helped design a house in Vienna in the late 1920s that was impossible to live in, and who famously said: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence."
Norman Foster to oversee development of cultural space in West Kowloon
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 7, 2011
British architect's firm announced as masterplanners for waterfront site that will become a major hub for the arts
Norman Foster's magnificent HSBC HQ, which looks out from central Hong Kong to the shores of Kowloon, is one of the great buildings of the 20th century, a brilliantly crafted structure standing 180 metres tall. Costing £500m in 1986, the bank is also one of the most expensive buildings ever created.
Yet the HSBC building is now surrounded by enormous, brash neo-art deco skyscrapers erected in recent years; today, it seems almost toy-like in scale, demonstrating just how big, in every way, Hong Kong (and by extension China) has grown since the British handed back the former crown colony to Beijing in 1999.
But now Foster and his team are back in Hong Kong in a big way. It emerged this weekend that the firm has won a tightly contested international competition to masterplan the ambitious new West Kowloon cultural district, a 40-hectare site of reclaimed land on the Kowloon waterfront that will host no fewer than 17 major cultural venues, including an opera house (watch out, Guangzhou), a museum of modern art known as M+, a 15,000-seat arena and an art school. China is taking cultural development increasingly seriously, as if telling the world that while the country might be best known at the moment for manufacturing on an unprecedented scale, it believes in the arts, too.
The plans make allowance for 19 of the 40 hectares to be dedicated to parkland – much-needed in densely packed Hong Kong – and the entire area will be connected by a planted avenue stretching all the way west to Harbour Tunnel, the lifeline between the two major districts of the city. Traffic will go underground. Every effort will be made to ensure this is a showcase of "green" as well as eye-catching design. The scheme will also include housing and shops; it is meant as a proper, fully integrated piece of the city rather than a vast urban redevelopment project parachuted down on the hem of Hong Kong. As Foster says: "Hong Kong is a great city and this project captures what is important about its DNA: the civic spaces, the squares, the parks, the greenery, the avenues and the small side streets."
With more than 30 years' experience in Hong Kong – along with the HSBC headquarters, the practice also designed the city's Chek Lap Kok airport – Foster and Partners were always on fairly strong ground here, although the firm's earlier masterplan for a West Kowloon cultural district, announced in 2002, was cancelled three years later.
This year, the choice of masterplanner for this enormous project was made from three practices: Foster and Partners, Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and the Hong Kong and Guangzhou-based Rocco Design Associates. But Henry Tang, chief secretary of Hong Kong, admits that elements of all three are likely to appear in the scheme as it develops over the years. The first buildings should emerge from the old docklands in 2015, while the last will not be completed until 2031. Foster says that the masterplan is highly flexible in terms of exactly where individual buildings are placed; the idea is to be neither prescriptive nor simplistic, but holistic.
Fosters will now work with the Hong Kong authorities on the choice of architects for individual buildings. Meanwhile, the great challenge for Foster and Partners will be working out ways to make their parkland scheme meet the rest of Kowloon. It is a densely occupied yet seemingly unplanned part of the city that needs drawing together across extremely busy arterial roads and railway tracks. If the West Kowloon cultural district is to be an island it will prove a failure in decades to come; it has to work as a vast, green, vital and cultured junction box linking disparate parts of Kowloon and Hong Kong as a whole.
Will it work? Yes, with time, some degree of patience (Hong Kong and China like to move quickly) and the involvement, wherever possible, of local people. This, in itself, would be a major step forward for China and will set a precedent for its rapidly expanding cities. Quite how it will all look in the end is open to question – the illustration shown here is only indicative of what might happen. But, as this is Hong Kong, expect some tall towers somewhere in the mix of parks, avenues and a new generation of busy commercial alleyways, towers that will make Foster's bank – just 25 years old – seem increasingly like a prized architectural jewel from a different era.
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster? – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 30, 2011
This admiring, hugely enjoyable, largely uncritical documentary on Norman Foster follows the career of Britain's most successful living architect, from Manchester, where he was born quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks (a railway line separated his parents' working-class home from a prosperous middle-class area), via Yale to international renown.
Foster is an eloquent speaker with a touch of Lancashire in his voice, a likable man, who uses a sketch pad as a way of thinking, and we get to see stunningly photographed images of his work from Manhattan to Beijing, including his breathtaking Millau Viaduct over the Gorges du Tarn.
The commentary is written and spoken by the architecture critic and director of the Design Museum Deyan Sudjic, and the question in the title was posed by Buckminster Fuller when he flew with Foster over the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia.
5 Broadgate, London – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 2, 2011
The proposed new HQ of Swiss bank UBS is an aloof fortress that ignores its responsibilities to the wider community
Good architects should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. That is, meet their clients' needs, design well-made and sustainable buildings, and also add something to their building's setting, such as work with their surroundings to create a place more harmonious/ fascinating/ humane/ pleasurable than it was before. 5 Broadgate, a mighty money factory proposed for the City of London, fails to do this, even though its architect is Ken Shuttleworth of Make, who has been lavishly praised by all three of the chairmen, to date, of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe). "He is one of the best hidden talents in the UK," said one. The second said he was one of the top five architects in the world. The third called his work "extraordinary". Could an architect so brilliant not masticate while ambulating?
5 Broadgate meets every wish of its future occupier, the Swiss bank UBS. It offers 700,000 sq feet of office space, including a stack of dealer floors the size of football pitches. It aims to set high standards of sustainability. It will be, Shuttleworth says, "an expression of the stability of the bank".
To achieve all this requires something big, consuming the sites of two existing buildings. A pedestrian route across the site will be closed, forcing people to squeeze round the edges of the new building's bulk. A covered arcade through the block might have been possible, but this is banned for security reasons, as are shops or cafes at the building's base. The ban is a deal-breaker, apparently: if the City's planners insisted on these humanising touches, UBS would up and go – to Canary Wharf or, worse, Frankfurt.
You might think that UBS is being unduly touchy – it could surely hire enough security to keep al-Qaida or student rioters out of an arcade or coffee shop – but it is not surprising that the planners would want to avert a Swiss flounce. Given that the shaky edifice of the British economy is in thrall to financial services, they would not want to bring down such a heavy blow for the sake of a bit of permeability for pedestrians. There is not much Shuttleworth can do with these macroeconomic forces, and it could be argued that the accommodation of brute finance is what the special enclave of the City of London is about. He can't pretend his building is not big. But he could try to reconcile the scale of the new building with its surroundings.
The site is in Broadgate, the 1980s development highly praised for the unity of its design, for the ways it makes a whole greater than the sum of its parts and its open spaces more important than individual buildings. There have been calls for Broadgate to be listed, which would be overly precious, but one might hope that a new building respects its principles. It shouldn't try to mimic its neighbours, but its rhythms, proportions and materials could create resonances or rapport between the new and the old.
Instead, Make's design announces with maximum force that it is an aloof fortress. Bankers, it says, are people apart from the rest of us. Its windows are defensive horizontal strips in a cliff-like wall. There are terraces high up for the use of UBS staff, but this glimmer of life is suppressed by the hard geometry. It is armour-plated in aluminium (an energy-ravenous material, by the way, although Shuttleworth says he will work with manufacturers to make this the greenest possible aluminium). There is no softening: not a curve or a piece of greenery. The existing buildings, which have layers of stone screens in contrast to the new one's sheer metal, are ignored. We are invited to admire it as a vast piece of sculpture, where the bank's wish for an expression of power perfectly aligns with the architect's desire for a singular artistic statement.
One of the best things that ever happened to Shuttleworth was when Make, now seven years old, was newly founded. His former employer, Norman Foster, had him erased from a group photograph like a victim of Stalin's purges, which supported the image of him as the suppressed creative genius behind Foster projects such as the Gherkin. With the help of some fervent press, a legend was created of "Ken the Pen", a dazzling whiz of a draftsman. He also combined his radical reputation with securing positions of influence. He became a Cabe commissioner and a member of its Design Review Committee, which judges the quality of significant projects. He became Cabe's "champion for schools and the East Midlands".
Commissions flooded in, for significant commercial developments, for private homes for property developers, for the Olympic handball arena, for schools. Make's reputation rode high, even when its completed buildings consisted mostly of a judo hall in Dartford, and the Jubilee Campus at Nottingham University, a set of wedges mottled with a psoriasis of red cladding. The campus was nominated for Building Design magazine's Carbuncle Cup, for the worst building of the year, albeit also for the prime minister's Better Public Building award, sponsored by Cabe.
Make presents itself as everything Foster and Partners are not: collegiate, open to ideas from even its most junior staff, and with no house style. Publications about the practice include pictures of staff weddings and holiday snaps. Profits and credit are shared. It calls itself a "studio", stressing its creative side. Shuttleworth says he wants to create "the best buildings in the world" and above all be sustainable. "I want to save the planet," he says.
Make stress how important clients are, how each one is special, and how its buildings respond to each unique set of needs. Clients of Make praise the company as responsive and professional, and these virtues are obviously important ones. What is lacking is a core of principles: a Make building tends to be as good as its brief, with Ken the Pen's flourishes giving a dressing of art. If UBS wants a defensive-aggressive citadel, it gets it. On another site in the City of London, called London Wall Place, where the planners are being more demanding, it has produced a more subtle design. In Birmingham they have built the Cube, a block of shops, offices and flats, which brings a bit of flash and sparkle to a site that probably needed it.
Make is a perfect distillation of 00s architecture, where genuine professionalism, slick stylishness, and a real if well-advertised commitment to the environment are boosted by hype and infinite adaptability to the demands of the market. This combination makes it an above-average commercial practice. It does not make its employees the hidden geniuses, or the world-top-five architects that their mates at Cabe or some excitable journalists claimed them to be. It says much for the poverty of architectural discourse that anyone could have imagined that they were.
Inside Masdar City: a modern mirage
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 10, 2011
The first phase of this zero-carbon Gulf city is up and running. But behind the futuristic facade of driverless pods, medieval streets twist and turn back the clock to traditional design
Masdar City is like a mirage: a walled city growing out of the desert sands in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Yet it is real, and remarkably so; for this intriguing city not only exists but is also one of the most unexpected in the Gulf region or anywhere in the world. Behind those walls and wind towers is one of the world's first zero-carbon cities. I went to see it recently, just shortly before families from across Abu Dhabi turned up in their thousands for The Market @ Masdar City, the first one-day fair designed to showcase the architecture and planning of this brave attempt at shaping a truly sustainable city of the future.
Designed by Foster and Partners for the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and set in the desert 17km from the skyscrapers of Abu Dhabi, Masdar is an intriguing experiment in urban design and living. The six square kilometre city – powered by solar energy and other renewable resources – is an attempt to show what kind of future might lie ahead for urban development in the Gulf now that the high-rise city of gas-guzzling towers, that has characterised the region in recent decades, has been increasingly discredited.
Although unlikely to be completed much before 2025, when 50,000 people are expected to live here, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (the anchor of the first phase of the city) is up and running. Its buildings, streets and squares give a good idea of how Masdar will be.
Getting to the showcase streets of the new institute is an unusual experience. Arriving by road from Abu Dhabi – there will be a train in years to come – you swap your car for a ride in a Personal Rapid Transit pod, an experience that combines the cartoon aesthetic of The Jetsons with the comedy of Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle, the 1958 French satire that lampoons the excesses of an overdesigned futuristic world.
The driverless sci-fi pods bumble around the undercrofts of the first phase of Masdar City and it is a wonder that none of them bump into each other. But they move so slowly it may well be quicker to walk. The original idea was for these comic pods to criss-cross the entire city underground so that residents, commuters and visitors could reach any part of it without having to drive, and in the welcome shade. There would have been hundreds of pods. In the event, they have been seen as an all too complex way of getting about. Future phases of Masdar will be pod-free, although cars and lorries will be directed underground, leaving the streets above for pedestrians only.
Walking here is a pleasure. Streets and squares are shielded from the sun, desert winds, sandstorms and heat by thick-walled buildings that provide shade and funnel the breeze between them. Although modern in appearance, these streets and buildings are essentially old-fashioned. With its narrow alleys, deep shadows and wind towers, Masdar follows in the tried and tested footsteps of traditional Arabic towns, where keeping the sun at bay was both a science and an art practised over many generations.
Eventually, there will be homes, businesses, parks and mosques here and Masdar City will relax into its role as an urban sustainability frontrunner. At the moment, it can seem like a theme park aimed at attracting day-trippers, yet these are early days. Gradually, the Jetson-like novelty side of the city – especially those driverless pods – will take a back seat as Masdar matures. The true success of Masdar turns on the recognition that the very old ways of designing and building cities in hot climates are the ones that make most sense: thick walls and carefully directed breezes rather than pods and wind turbines. It's the determinedly ultra-modern aspects of Masdar that prove to be a mirage.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Norman Foster, United Arab Emirates
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