Posts Tagged Olympic games 2012
Olympic companies call for end to ban on promoting work on games
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 11, 2012
Architects, engineers and technology companies speak out against protocol enforced by London 2012 organising committee
David Cameron is facing calls to end a ban on companies involved in the London Olympics from publicising their work on the games and has been warned that the gagging order is undermining job creation and economic growth.
Architects, engineers and technology companies have spoken out against a protocol, enforced by the London 2012 organising committee, which has prevented firms from entering projects for awards, publishing photos of completed arenas and even submitting work to exhibitions.
Olympic organisers said the rules were intended to protect the rights of major sponsors, but many suppliers say they clash with ministerial statements that the Olympics will provide British business with an economic boost.
On Monday, Cameron said "all credit" was due "to the people involved in providing these venues, getting them ready on time and on budget".
Ken Shuttleworth, the designer of the handball arena, said his firm has had a tussle with Locog over whether it could feature the venue in his company's own annual report, while Locog shut down attempts by a non-commercial trust to stage an exhibition about the London 2012 venues and suppliers.
Zaha Hadid, the architect of the aquatics centre and Sir Michael Hopkins, the architect of the velodrome, are among those covered by the no marketing rights protocol, but it is the dozens of smaller, less high-profile suppliers who are most concerned.
They have said they are being constrained when pitching for work on events such as the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in Brazil 2016.
"There is a contradiction between what different sides of government are saying," Roger Hawkins, whose firm's £110m redesign of Stratford station was prevented by the Olympic Delivery Authority from being entered for a Civic Trust award, said.
"We would love to promote our work on this complex technical project because we have developed skills that we would like to market into other opportunities. We are not allowed to do that, and there is a level of frustration in the design team about that."
Deborah Saunt, whose DSDHA firm designed the tallest tower in the athletes' village, said the rules "run contrary to common sense".
"We feel we have produced a new model of social housing, but we can't go out and promote it," she said. "Normally we would be publishing this globally, but here we have to wait until we are asked to talk about it. This is a missed opportunity."
STL Communications, an Oxfordshire telecoms firm that won the contract to provide hundreds of phones to be used by organisers to co-ordinate the opening and closing ceremonies, has written to Cameron demanding a rethink.
The firm told the prime minister the gag means it may have to forego 20% business growth.
"It is hard to understand how somebody providing tiles or doors is going to ambush Adidas or BMW by marketing their involvement in the games," Jim Heverin, a partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, which designed the aquatics centre, said.
Locog said a large proportion of the funding for the staging of the games comes from sponsorship by companies purchasing exclusive rights to promote their association with the games.
"Without these sponsors the games simply wouldn't happen, so we require suppliers not to advertise their involvement in order to protect our sponsors' associations with the London 2012," a spokesman said.
"Contractors are able to factually refer to the work they have done on the games when pitching for new business or refer to it on their websites alongside other examples of their work."
Peter Murray, a trustee of the Building Centre Trust, which was refused permission to stage a London 2012 exhibition, urged Locog to "ease up".
He said: "It is in the national interest that we make the best of the Olympics over the next nine months. I can see no problem in people using it from a branding point of view. As long as people do it in a responsible way, it can only enhance the economy."
Olympic Village – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 8, 2012
London's Olympic Village will be home to 17,000 athletes this summer and a new community when the Games are over. They'll find a development of long-distance vision marred by short-sighted flaws
The huge housing estate is something that went out of fashion at about the same time as the Osmonds. Its reputation was as low as a British Leyland car or the Nixon presidency, and it was less likely, it seemed, to come back into favour, especially if it was made of concrete and funded by the government. Examples such as the crescent-shaped blocks in Hulme, Manchester or the slabs of the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, London have been and are being torn down. Yet thanks to the magic of the Olympics, planned, publicly funded concrete housing on a grand scale has made a comeback. The rather important question is whether it will work.
The athletes' village has been built to house the 17,000 competitors and officials in the Olympic Games, after which it will become a new neighbourhood of about 1,400 affordable homes and another 1,400 for profit. Its success is vital to London 2012's hopes of legacy: if it prospers, office blocks are likely to rise around it and dreams of regeneration – the theoretical justification of the whole Olympic exercise – are more likely to come true.
Most housing nowadays consists of expedient, opportunistic developments thrown up with minimal consideration for the larger area of which they will be a part. The athletes' village is almost alone in including such things as a school, a health clinic and shops, and for being built to a plan by the architects Fletcher Priest, Arup and West 8 that envisages generous and well-maintained landscaping. It includes such radical ideas as balconies that are big enough for a table and chairs and it is made of solid, enduring-looking stuff rather than the ticky-tacky cladding favoured by most urban home-builders.
It seeks to emulate the much-loved planning of Maida Vale and other parts of Victorian west London, where the interiors of blocks are given over to gardens shared by residents. These gardens are raised above street level to allow concealed parking underneath, which is a clever way of keeping cars out of sight. Around the bottom of the blocks are bands of what are called "town houses" – three-storey units with further floors of flats stacked on top of them. The idea is to create "active frontages", to animate the streets by having the units' front doors on them and also to cater for residents who would like a house or at least something house-like.
All this planning is good, even great, given that it is so unusual in new housing developments. Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration.
But it also has to be said that the look of the village is a tad forbidding, not indeed very villagey at all. It consists of a series of cuboid blocks of eight to 12 storeys, clad in prefabricated concrete panels, laid out on a rigid rectangular grid. They are repetitive in form and colour but varied in detail, as some of the country's better-respected housing architects were given the job of variegating the external treatment. Their construction technology is essentially that of those much-criticised estates of the 1960s and of East German plattenbau, though, it's to be hoped, with higher specifications.
Potentially mitigating features, such as pavilions planned for the open areas, have been sliced out by budget savings and opportunities for intimacy or unforced variety are lost. The bands of "row houses", for example, could have been more clearly expressed; as it is, they are submerged by the mass of flats above them. There are the attempts of different architects to liven up the basic formula – some brightly painted panels on some balconies, reproductions of the Elgin marbles embossed on some walls, explorations of the expressive possibilities of rearranging windows – but they can only go so far.
In a former job I helped to select these architects, and they are all fine people, but they struggle to overcome the relentless order of the grid and the construction. Again, there is nothing wrong with regularity, and architects Fletcher Priest cite John Nash's classical facades around London's Regent's Park as a precedent, but Nash had a lightness of touch that has here gone missing.
Meanwhile, although the original masterplan had the best intentions to join up the village with nearby neighbourhoods, it has a disconnected feel. If you want to walk to the centre of Stratford, and the tube station, you must first cross the giant concrete trench of Stratford International station and then creep round the inhospitable edge of the Westfield shopping centre or else plunge through the middle of its shopathon.
Westfield, meanwhile, presents an unlovely wall and roofscape of car parks to the new housing. All this construction – many billions worth of station, shopping and housing – has been delivered in the past few years, with the help of public money and the close oversight of public planning authorities, yet it does not feel like a work of unified intelligence.
The strengths and weaknesses of the athletes' village reflect the way it was achieved. It started off, in the mid-90s, as a bold plan by the developers Chelsfield for a "new metropolitan centre", with homes, offices and shopping, which was drawn up over six years of planning and consultation. In 2005, London won the bid for the 2012 games, while Chelsfield and its properties were sold and resold. Westfield took over the shopping part while another company, Lend Lease, took over the housing.
When the credit crunch hit, Lend Lease decided it could not raise the money to build the village, so the government took it over. Now it has been sold back to the private sector, in the form of Qatari Diar and the British company Delancey, which will take it over after the games.
This history is reflected in the fabric. Because the shopping and the housing are in separate ownerships, there is not much care given to the way they join up. As there were different owners at different times, original intentions have been imperfectly followed through. Due to the rush to complete in time for the Olympics, and because the International Olympic Committee has exacting standards for athletes' accommodation, standardised plans and prefabricated construction were used.
There was also little time to reflect on and reconsider Fletcher Priest's somewhat schematic and regimented arrangement of blocks. Because the government took over the development, and was nervous about risk, it paid a very large fee to the project manager CLM, which seems to have squeezed out some of the more life-enhancing aspects of the design.
But it is there, a rare example of a planned housing development that, for all its flaws, shows more thought and quality than most things comparable built in Britain in recent decades. Importantly, the plan is to rent rather then sell the homes, which improves its prospects of success. It means that Qatari Diar has an incentive to maintain its open spaces and that the village is likely to fill up more quickly than it would if it relied on thousands of individual homeowners to stake their mortgages and deposits on what is a pioneering location.
Much of London, including Maida Vale, was built on the basis of large landowners putting up developments to rent, and it would be no bad thing if the village sets a precedent for moving away from our fixation with home ownership. It should not, however, require an Olympic Games to achieve it.
London Olympic Village – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 8, 2012
When it opens this summer it will house 17,000 athletes, and after the Games become 2,800 homes
The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 13, 2011
The London River Park is a proposed floating green space on the Thames that could be ready in time for the Olympics. But is it really a 'public' amenity. Our architecture critic charts the stealthy rise of pseudo-public spaces
What could be lovelier? A new park on the river Thames, south-facing to catch the sun, which like something in a fairytale would also float. Here people could bask and stroll, close to the lapping water, or splash in a swimming pool. It would be ready for the blessed summer of 2012, enriched not only by the Olympics, but also by the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's 60-year rule. It would make a perfect viewing point for joyous throngs to watch the 1,000-boat river pageant that is planned for the Queen's Jubilee. It would be like those Venetian paintings of aquatic festivals in La Serenissima, brought to life in the here and now.
The park, invented and designed by the architects Gensler, would run from the Millennium bridge and St Paul's Cathedral to close to the Tower of London and Tower bridge, linking some of London's prime tourist spots. It would serve the City of London, an area short of open space. It would be there for five years, after which it could be taken away if people didn't like it. It would also cost the public nothing. The Singaporean asset-management company Venus will pay the entire £50m cost, and has already put £5m into developing the idea, including building a 35-metre model of a 35km stretch of the Thames, to test the park's hydrographic effects. "We either do it beautifully," says John Naylor of Venus, "or we don't do it at all", to which end Venus doubled the budget that Gensler asked it for.
Boris Johnson is enthused. After an impromptu Sunday morning meeting with Gensler and Venus, he declared: "The sheer beauty and design brilliance of this structure will provide yet another amazing and unique attraction for the capital." Daniel Moylan, of Transport for London, has said of it that "improved connectivity, gracefully designed, can bring pleasure and joy to an area once written off". The outgoing Lord Mayor of London, Michael Bear, was said to favour the scheme, as a legacy of his mayoral year, although the Corporation of London would not confirm this. Gensler and Venus claim "overwhelming backing from Londoners" although this turns out to be based on an unscientific poll of whoever turned up to two exhibitions of the proposals.
But there is, as the economists have taught us, no free lunch. Venus is not putting up all this money out of the pure goodness of its heart nor, entirely, to raise its "brand awareness" in London, as John Naylor puts it, although that is a factor. It is "looking to create a platform for inward investment" and intends to make money renting out pavilions in the park for corporate exhibitions and events, at a handsome rate. It also thinks it can sell space to TV companies, especially during the Olympics, using Tower bridge as a backdrop. It is almost certainly right. This means that the park is not a "public space", as Gensler calls it, but a private space into which the public are allowed to come, subject to certain limitations.
In this it is the latest example of a widespread type of the 21st century, the pseudo-public space, in which the City of London and its satellites are world leaders. The Broadgate development of the 1980s was a pioneer, followed by Canary Wharf, Paternoster Square next to St Paul's, and the More London development where City Hall, the headquarters of the Mayor of London, stands. In each the shapes and attributes of town squares are imitated – an oblong or round shape, outdoor art, cafe tables, fountains – and sometimes real public assets are created, but ultimate control is in the hands of private landowners. As Anna Minton pointed out in her book Ground Control, they control security, access, and rules of entry. Activities and people deemed undesirable, such as photography with a tripod, public displays of affection, picnics, or chaining up a bicycle, are banned. Or public protest, and you don't have to wish to protest yourself to sense the oppressive feeling that things are prohibited. The most extreme example is the "public park" promised for the top of the forthcoming "Walkie Talkie" tower in the City. By no stretch of the imagination is a roofed-over room in a private office tower, reached via security-controlled lifts and lobbies, "public".
These places had their bluff called by the Occupy movement. Anxious to keep out the tented rebels, Broadgate and Canary Wharf reached for the injunctions that asserted their rights as private landowners. Paternoster Square put up barriers, manned by both police and private security, that jarred with its architectural look of traditional civic values: arcades, monuments, streets, stone and brick, a classical style.
It also put up a sign that said: "Paternoster Square is private land. Any licence to the public to enter or cross this land is revoked forthwith. There is no implied or express permission to enter the premises or any part. Any such entry will constitute a trespass." Which is strange, as almost every architectural statement, planning application, and press release, in the protracted redevelopment of Paternoster Square, described this "private land" as "public space".
These spaces (what shall we call them – privlic, publate – let's say publoid) don't always have to be bad things. Cities are made of places with degrees of publicness, including museums, restaurants, theatres, shops, malls and transport systems. Canary Wharf and Broadgate were both built on sites that formerly had limited public access – docks in one case, a railway station and its tracks in the other – and offer more to the public than they did before. The sky garden of the Walkie Talkie might turn out to be a fun place to go. (And, if they try to pressure you into buying expensive drinks at its bars, you will be able to whip out the planning consent that says it is a public space.)
But one issue is the honest use of language. If a space is private, it should not be called public, and planners should send back any application that makes this false claim. This matters because, if we are kidded into thinking that there is a civic realm that is not actually there, we will suddenly find that there is less space than we had thought for such essential public actions as protest. This is what the Occupy movement found when it looked for a location to make its point in the City of London. It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's. Oddly, the Occupy movement looks like the sort of colourful cultural event that local authorities and even businesses pay good money to subsidise, so as to jolly up their town centres: it is only when they are trying to say something that they officially become a problem.
The bigger issue comes when publoid places occupy areas that were formerly genuinely public. Then they are not conditional gifts, as at Broadgate, but appropriation. The banks of the Thames are largely public – you can walk there unrestricted, and advertising is kept from the waterfront. The view of the water is public property, and one of the great free pleasures of London.
It may, conceivably, be possible to cut deals with the private sector if they are genuinely beneficial, but only when it is completely clear that the public qualities of a place are not being compromised. This is very far from the case with Gensler's designs for the London River Park, in which budget and architectural ambition are lavished on the silvery pods which will house the money-making stuff, while the offer to the public is ordinary-looking, standard-issue publoid design: some trees and benches of reasonably good quality, a stainless steel balustrade, a nondescript deck surface, the promise of some information panels explaining the history of the surroundings.
An obvious comparison, made by Gensler, is with the High Line in New York, the phenomenally successful park made out of an old railway viaduct, which like the River Park is long and thin. But a big part of the High Line's success is its planting and landscaping, which is intelligent, imaginative and well considered, in the way it converts industrial relics into a place of urban pleasure. There is no sign of this level of thought in the Gensler design, even though they have submitted a detailed planning application to the Corporation of London. Nor is there the playfulness of Paris Plage, the annual conversion of the banks of the Seine into a beach, or the floating swimming pool that was installed in Copenhagen. Gensler is a global practice, with more than 3,000 staff, but there is limited evidence in its portfolio that it has the touch and finesse to pull off a project like this.
Instead the park offers a marginal upgrade on the existing riverside walkway. It would be wider, and with a more intimate relationship to the water. On the other hand you would lose the sense of unrestricted wandering and gathering that is currently there. You would be all too aware of the selling going on in the pavilions. You would know you were in a managed and controlled space, with uniformed wardens. This, says John Naylor, would be like Disney World, to the extent that "you know you're protected; you know that you won't be attacked or bothered by vagrants and sellers" (except, of course, for the approved corporate sellers in the pavilions). Is the City of London such a crime zone, financial misdemeanours apart, that people need such protection?
Essentially the London River Park is a gigantic hospitality suite with a fairly nice walkway threaded through it. Meanwhile the design of its silver pods is offensively indifferent to the dignified buildings, such as Old Billingsgate Market, on which they intrude, and actually do not seem well suited to the events that might go on inside them. The only purpose of their look seems to be self-promotion. It is, for good measure, likely that the piles that hold the park in place will, at low tide, be unpleasantly conspicuous.
As it happens, the park idea is not meeting with unanimous approval, despite the support of the mayor. Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, said that "we are not convinced by the description of the project as a 'park'" or that it is "appropriate to the character of the river". They find the design of the pavilions "unimaginative". English Heritage noted that "temporary" constructions like this have a way of becoming permanent. They were "not convinced that the design was worthy of such a sensitive site", and thought that the view towards the dome of St Paul's "would be distracted by the blades of silver", which are "flashy and corporate". The City of London School for boys, which is on this stretch of embankment, is none to happy that these large objects will block its view of the river.
When I meet Gensler and Venus, they assure me that discussions are going well with the Port of London Authority, which manages the river and is notoriously picky about intrusions on it. They also say that the planners of the Diamond Jubilee are very interested in their ideas. The next day, however, it is announced that the PLA has "serious concerns regarding the application scheme's impact on navigational safety", and the Corporation of London is delaying making a decision about the planning application. I also see a letter from the Diamond Jubilee organisers, saying that the park would "have a significant negative impact on the river pageant". It would for example make the tide run faster, with the result that rowed boats would be unable to take part, which would reduce the planned 1,000 boats by a third. Gensler and Venus have now given up on trying to be ready for the Jubilee in June, even though their extraordinarily ambitious timetable – to have everything ready for the Olympics – is still in place.
Buried deep within the London River Park is a good idea. If it were truly an aquatic High Line, it could be wonderful. It might work better if it were funded differently, let's say by a levy on all City businesses, such that it were no longer a promotional and profit opportunity for just one. If there were a longer timescale than the current insane rush to summer 2012, its design and detail could get the attention it deserves. It would also help if Gensler graciously stepped back from the detailed design, having been thanked and rewarded for having the idea, and pushing it thus far with energy and chutzpah, in favour of practices with the ability to think and work like those of the High Line.
If all these ifs were sorted out, the lovely floating park might just happen, subject to the satisfaction of the PLA. But there are an awful lot of ifs, and not much sign of the will to address them. If they are not addressed, the London River Park is simply an Occupy London event carried out by big business, rather than harmless folk in woolly hats and funny masks. The corporation's planners, when they finally get to consider it, should just say no.
Stirling prize: Zaha Hadid’s Brixton school beats Olympic velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Evelyn Grace Academy wins the 16th RIBA Stirling prize, giving Hadid top award for second year running
Architect Zaha Hadid's Z-shaped school in Brixton, south London, has beaten the hot favourite, the Olympic velodrome, to win the 16th annual RIBA Stirling prize for architecture.
Victory for Evelyn Grace academy gives Hadid's practice a Stirling prize for the second year running, although it is the architect's first major building project in Britain. Last year her practice won for the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
"Schools are among the first examples of architecture that everyone experiences and have a profound impact on all children as they grow up," said Hadid. "I am delighted that the Evelyn Grace academy has been so well received by all its students and staff."
The prestigious £20,000 award, handed over by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects' Journal and construction products manufacturer Benchmark at a ceremony in Rotherham, is intended to celebrate the best new European building "built or designed in Britain". It was expected to go to Michael Hopkins's eye-catching east London Olympic venue, popularly known as "the Pringle". But Hadid's school triumphed with its bold approach to solving a difficult problem: how to bring four schools together on a small site under one "academy" umbrella. Evelyn Grace had to be squeezed into 1.4 hectares, while the average secondary school takes up more like 8ha. The school is also situated in the area of the capital with the highest crime rate in western Europe.
Rather than building the sort of glass atrium that has been adopted by many new schools, Hadid's team opted to spend the money on better-lit classrooms and corridors with more space. But her design does have one remarkable, central feature: a bright-red 100m sprint track running right through the site. There is also a multiuse Astroturf pitch, while another quiet corner is home to a wildflower garden.
RIBA president Angela Brady, who chaired the judges, said: "The Evelyn Grace academy is an exceptional example of what can be achieved when we invest carefully in a well-designed new school building. The result – a highly imaginative, exciting academy that shows the students, staff and local residents that they are valued – is what every school should and could be."
The school is run by the Ark (Absolute Return for Kids) Academy organisation, a charity set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, the hedge-fund multimillionaire.
The final shortlist of the six rival structures competing for this year's award included not just Hopkins's velodrome, but Rab Bennetts's careful remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-on-Avon, an innovative cultural centre in Derry, the re-facing and transforming of a 1980s office building in north London, and the extension of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, by David Chipperfield Architects, who have also won the Stirling prize before. This was the first year previous entrants were eligible for consideration and all six shortlisted practices had been shortlisted before.
Full coverage of the prizegiving ceremony will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC2's Culture Show on Sunday.
Stirling prize: Zaha Hadid’s Brixton school beats Olympic velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Evelyn Grace Academy wins the 16th RIBA Stirling prize, giving Hadid top award for second year running
Architect Zaha Hadid's Z-shaped school in Brixton, south London, has beaten the hot favourite, the Olympic velodrome, to win the 16th annual RIBA Stirling prize for architecture.
Victory for Evelyn Grace academy gives Hadid's practice a Stirling prize for the second year running, although it is the architect's first major building project in Britain. Last year her practice won for the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
"Schools are among the first examples of architecture that everyone experiences and have a profound impact on all children as they grow up," said Hadid. "I am delighted that the Evelyn Grace academy has been so well received by all its students and staff."
The prestigious £20,000 award, handed over by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects' Journal and construction products manufacturer Benchmark at a ceremony in Rotherham, is intended to celebrate the best new European building "built or designed in Britain". It was expected to go to Michael Hopkins's eye-catching east London Olympic venue, popularly known as "the Pringle". But Hadid's school triumphed with its bold approach to solving a difficult problem: how to bring four schools together on a small site under one "academy" umbrella. Evelyn Grace had to be squeezed into 1.4 hectares, while the average secondary school takes up more like 8ha. The school is also situated in the area of the capital with the highest crime rate in western Europe.
Rather than building the sort of glass atrium that has been adopted by many new schools, Hadid's team opted to spend the money on better-lit classrooms and corridors with more space. But her design does have one remarkable, central feature: a bright-red 100m sprint track running right through the site. There is also a multiuse Astroturf pitch, while another quiet corner is home to a wildflower garden.
RIBA president Angela Brady, who chaired the judges, said: "The Evelyn Grace academy is an exceptional example of what can be achieved when we invest carefully in a well-designed new school building. The result – a highly imaginative, exciting academy that shows the students, staff and local residents that they are valued – is what every school should and could be."
The school is run by the Ark (Absolute Return for Kids) Academy organisation, a charity set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, the hedge-fund multimillionaire.
The final shortlist of the six rival structures competing for this year's award included not just Hopkins's velodrome, but Rab Bennetts's careful remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-on-Avon, an innovative cultural centre in Derry, the re-facing and transforming of a 1980s office building in north London, and the extension of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, by David Chipperfield Architects, who have also won the Stirling prize before. This was the first year previous entrants were eligible for consideration and all six shortlisted practices had been shortlisted before.
Full coverage of the prizegiving ceremony will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC2's Culture Show on Sunday.
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.
London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2011
Design Council chief celebrates Prince Charles' lack of involvement as traditionalists complain about 'overt prejudice'
A new skirmish in a long-running and often bitterly fought architectural "style war" between modernists and traditionalists has broken out over the stadiums and arenas of the London Olympics park.
Prince Charles's favourite architects have accused the head of England's national architectural review body of "overt prejudice" after he made a barbed attack on the heir to the throne's love of traditional buildings, and heaped praise on the resolutely modernist designs that will be beamed around the world as the backdrop to next summer's games.
Paul Finch, chairman of the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government-funded design watchdog that vets major planning applications with the help of government funding, applauded the selection of Zaha Hadid, the avant garde Iraqi-born architect who designed the sinuous aquatics centre, and Populous, the designer of the main 80,000-seat stadium.
But, more provocatively, Finch celebrated the fact that the country's leading traditional architects, who are favoured by the Prince of Wales, were not in any way involved. "One of the good things about the London 2012 Olympics is the realisation that we have a set of buildings produced not by Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam, John Simpson, but by Hopkins, Hadid, Populous, Make, Heneghan Peng et al," he said. "None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales, none of it to do with heritage."
The Traditional Architecture Group, whose members include Terry and Adam, both leading exponents of classical buildings inspired by architects from the past, including Sir Christopher Wren and Andrea Palladio, has complained to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and communities secretary, Eric Pickles, that Finch's remarks, made in the Architects' Journal, displayed "significant prejudice against one style or architectural philosophy at the highest level". The group said its members were "dismayed and alarmed".
"His is a fundamentally prejudicial point of view from someone in a senior position," added Adam. "He shouldn't be in the position he is in."
Prince Charles has previously enraged some British architects by speaking out against modernist designs. In 2009 Richard Rogers was dropped as the designer of a £3bn housing development at Chelsea Barracks after the Prince questioned his design in a private letter to the Qatari client. In 1984 he torpedoed a modernist extension to the National Gallery in London by complaining it was "like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend".
Now the prince's architectural allies feel they have found in Finch a lightning rod for their own simmering sense of injustice that a parallel "modernist establishment" is seeking to marginalise them with the result that some traditional architects believe commissions for Olympic projects were effectively closed to them. "It was considered a waste of time to go for the Olympic work," said Adam, a classicist who has designed a new 4,000-home settlement in Wales with the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
Lord Rogers chaired the selection panel for the aquatics centre and Ricky Burdett, professor of urbanism at the London School of Economics and a close ally of Rogers, was hired as chief design adviser to the Olympic Delivery Authority. Finch continues to chair the panel scrutinising designs for stadiums and arenas for the Olympics.
The firm of Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed the Portcullis House MPs' office, was responsible for the velodrome which is favourite to win this year's Stirling prize for the best building designed or built in Britain. Make, a firm led by Ken Shuttleworth who was a lead designer on the gherkin tower in London, has designed the handball arena, while Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based firm, has designed a sinuous complex of footbridges between the main stadium and the aquatics centre.
In his remarks Finch singled out Terry, who provided architectural advice to Prince Charles in his successful attempt to block the modernist redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks, and John Simpson who was hired to carry out alterations to Kensington Palace.
The Traditional Architecture Group has asked Pickles, whose department funds the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, to instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks. "It is the policy of this and recent governments to favour no architectural style in planning decisions," wrote Alireza Sagharchi, the group's chairman. "Yet by contrasting some better-known traditional architects with those working on the Olympics, Mr Finch has expressed his very clear bias against traditional architecture." He asked for assurances that Finch's views would "not be allowed to taint the planning system", according to Building Design magazine.
In response Finch said: "I will respond to them when they show me the courtesy of writing to me and I will be only too happy to point out the many apparent errors in what passes for their analysis."
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "These are opinions expressed in a magazine article, not official advice to central or local government. As such we have no comment to make."
Finch's comments in favour of the modernist appearance of Olympic Park architecture appear to undermine the neutral stance he advocated last year when asked about a proposal by Prince Charles's Foundation for the Built Environment to take on some of the design review role now undertaken by the Design Council.
He said: "The public interest is better served by concentrating on the quality of a piece of architecture rather than style which can come down to superficial visual appearance. It comes down to whether their advice would be independent and disinterested and they obviously have a stylistic preference."
Charles's tastes: rated and hated
• Charles praised Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, for its "underlying intuitive grammar of design", saying it represented a better model for housing populations in the developing world than western architecture
• He backed Quinlan Terry's alternative designs for Chelsea Barracks which were inspired by the work of Sir Christopher Wren, the 17th century architect of St Paul's cathedral
• Poundbury in Dorset is the most complete version of Prince Charles' architectural vision, including the fire station which has been described as "the Parthenon meets Brookside"
• When talking to soldiers destined for service in Afghanistan in 2008 he said the Ivor Crewe building at Essex University "looks like a dustbin from the outside"
• Earlier that year he warned a series of planned skyscrapers in London would be "not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners"
• Charles said the brutalist concrete Birmingham Central Library, designed in 1974 by John Madin, looked like "a place where books are incinerated, not kept"
Olympics Aquatic Centre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 30, 2011
Zaha Hadid's London 2012 Aquatic Centre hasn't come cheap at £269m, but it is the Olympics' most majestic space
From the outside, it's a car crash. Or a UFO crash. Or, to use the watery metaphors that are de rigueur when talking about Zaha Hadid's £269m Aquatic Centre, it is like a vast turtle waving over-sized flippers. A great roof, whose beauty should come from the way its great weight came down to the ground at three points is engulfed with even bigger temporary structures, blown-up, go-faster versions of what might be seen at a county cattle fair, needed to house the 15,000 temporary seats for the Olympic Games. They will be taken away afterwards, leaving a 2,500 capacity, which is the most that any non-Olympic swimming event is likely to attract.
Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, a room big enough for more than 17,500 people. It is impressive because it is big, and purposeful, and will contain large crowds, but also because the architecture rises to the occasion. The architects' moves are confident and equal to the scale of the place. They don't fumble or tinker. More than that, the interior has a feeling of wholeness. It feels moulded or carved, not assembled. It looks like a body more than something constructed out of pieces.
The big thing is the roof, steel-framed and timber-clad, which floats and undulates, but is also palpably substantial. Officially, it's like a wave, but, with its combination of weight and agility, it's very like a whale. At either end a concrete bowl, containing the pools, the permanent seating and support spaces, rises to meet the roof where it descends. Along each side, in the gaps formed between the bowl and the roof, huge glass walls will be installed after the games, opening the space to the sky and the surrounding park. Now these gaps open to steep banks of temporary seats, contained within the great flippers that are so problematic on the outside. Inside, they are continuous with the rest of the space, and add to its drama.
The work focuses on the two pools, for swimming and diving, coming down to a few human bodies in water, small and fragile relative to the whole, a shift in scale that is somehow achieved smoothly. The diving platforms are moulded out of the same concrete as the rest of the lower structure, making them extensions of the architecture rather than additional pieces of concrete.
Another pool, for practice, would be part of the experience too, visible behind a wide glass wall, but International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulations have required an unfortunate temporary partition. It's something to do with keeping athletes and officials apart, which is clearly very important, but it blocks the view. Elsewhere the interplay of architectural and sporting demands is happier. The greys of the structure are offset by strong primary colours: the blue pools, the yellow and red of the lane markers, and an interesting pinkish light filtered from the outside through translucent walls in the temporary extensions.
The Aquatic Centre is the London Olympics' most majestic space: the most potent, the most charged. It is also 2012's most difficult child, the first venue to be designed, the last to be finished. It was accompanied along the way by stories of escalating budgets (nervous builders, and near abandonment of the design). Built, it has compromises, like the view-blocking partition and the flippers, about which Hadid does not even try to pretend to be happy. As originally conceived, the awkward temporary extensions would not have been there, as there was to be a roof big enough to cover both temporary and permanent, but this proved too extravagant.
The obvious comparison is with the £93m, 6,000-seat Velodrome, another wavy-roofed work completed last February, seemingly with the smooth precision of a high-performance bike. The Velodrome's roof required 300 tonnes of steel; the Aquatic Centre's – about the same size but with admittedly more difficult conditions – uses 3,000 tonnes. The Velodrome, trim and taut, is also a handsome building, and promises to be a powerful venue.
Part of the complication comes from the fact that the centre was designed before London won the bid. London was in danger of being seen as the safe-but-boring option, with dull buildings, and Hadid's design could be waved in front of the IOC as evidence of stardust. The problem was that the people who would eventually be the clients for the building, the organisations set up after London won the bid, didn't exist then, and the brief was not as developed as it would be later. When designs come first and clients second, there is often trouble.
But there may also be a mismatch between the processes of something like the Olympics and architecture as conceived by Hadid. Architecture, for her, is something that should make its presence felt, intervene, change things, perhaps get in the way. Her style seems to be about dynamism and weightless modernity, but her buildings are actually massive. They are slow, not fast. They reflect an old idea, common to Palladio and Le Corbusier, that architects sculpt and shape and compose. Hence her roof, which dips down in the middle to suggest two different spaces within in the overall enclosure, one for swimming and the other for diving.
What London 2012 wants is a great whirring delivery machine, driven by the inexorability of the project's deadline, where as many details as possible are determined in advance by specifications and regulations. They want architects to slip into the machine noiselessly, if possible with a bit of elegance, like Hopkins Architects at the Velodrome. With Hadid there is more of a grinding and crashing of gears, but she set out to achieve "a really great spatial experience", and did so.
I am sure that the Aquatic Centre could have been built more cheaply and easily, and without its crashes of permanent and temporary. It is a building that will be at its best after the games, when the flippers have been replaced by the great glass walls, although it will then face a new risk of being too grand for a public pool. The wavy roof risks being too small for the Olympics and too big for its afterlife. It can only be hoped that, whatever plans are made for its future upkeep, they are equal to the ambitions of the structure.
But, given that the whole £9bn Olympic extravaganza spends money that could have had more prudent and practical uses, it does not seem so terrible that a small fraction of its extravagance should go on a space as magnificent as this. Many hundreds of millions will be flushed away on more boring things, such as consultants' fees and security that may or may not be necessary.
Lastly, a note to the IOC. While the Centre offers 17,500 seats for watching swimming, only 10,000 will be able to watch diving events. This is in accordance with IOC specifications, which seem to assume that people find diving a bit boring. Evidently, the specification writers haven't heard of Tom Daley.
Response: There is no modernist conspiracy in how we judge architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 4, 2011
Getting ready for London 2012 is about focusing on the buildings, not heritage politics
Robert Booth's article (London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names, 31 July) implicates the newly merged Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) charity, by association, with its chairman Paul Finch's recent article in the Architects' Journal written in a personal capacity. Surely Finch is able to express his admiration for the architecture for the 2012 games without it being seen as the official position of "England's national architectural review body"?
I am a trustee of Design Council Cabe, but I write this primarily as an architect who has presented schemes at Cabe that have been praised – and others that have been criticised. I have also chaired reviews and am confident that the process shows the necessary impartiality.
The request referred to in Booth's article that the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, should "instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks" would be extraordinarily counterproductive if implemented.
The whole intention behind the arrangements for design review is that a group of reviewers – only some of whom might be architects – use their knowledge and experience to discuss and comment on design proposals. It is the varied viewpoints that are on offer that validate the process.
There is no conspiracy-peddling modernist dogma, so readers need not be concerned with the inference that "Prince Charles's favourite architects" would never get a good Cabe review. They should know, however, that very little "traditional architecture" or classical design actually appears before us.
With the motto for the Olympic Games being "Faster, Higher, Stronger", you can forgive progressive architects getting a bit excited. What we all want is better-quality architecture, and the focus of Finch's article decries the problems brought on by a clumsy procurement process, making good architecture – of whatever style – a rarity.
It is indeed refreshing to see the London 2012 Olympics producing a set of exciting schemes built with confidence and without the need for any kind of heritage lobby intervening to force a late change in direction. How members of the Traditional Architecture Group might have approached these projects is an interesting but hypothetical question.
Not all of the venues involve "resolutely modernist designs" – let's not forget that some celebrate historic sites, such as the equestrian arena at Greenwich and beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade. Design review of these stadia actively encouraged them to integrate architectural heritage – hardly the "significant prejudice" claimed by the Traditional Architecture Group.
Design review, in my experience, is much more focused on the important issue of the spatial relationships that proposed new buildings will create with their surroundings, and raising their sustainability credentials. This has nothing to do with questions of architectural style.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Comment is free, Communities, Olympic games 2012, Prince Charles, Society, Sport, The Guardian, UK news, Zaha Hadid
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