Posts Tagged Politics
Is Jeremy Hunt right about the Broadgate centre?| Michael White
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 16, 2011
While there are more important things to worry about than the demolition of this overbearing bully of a building, there is some merit to the view that the best architecture of all periods should be preserved
So the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has overturned English Heritage's advice to list the Broadgate Estate complex in the City. His decision will allow British Land (funded by the Blackstock private equity group) to replace it with a 700,000sq ft "groundscraper" designed by the Gherkin's architect, Ken Shuttleworth.
With George Osborne busy trying to cut a deal to resolve the "British dilemma" – the City v the rest of us – and the eurozone in turmoil again, there are more important things to worry about than the demolition of a building that you can examine on Google Earth.
But buildings matter, both functionally and aesthetically. Good ones can make us all feel better, and vice versa. By coincidence, I was in the City and beyond yesterday – and it was not a pretty sight, especially not when you consider how much money floats around the Square Mile and Canary Wharf.
It was a drizzly night, and the river and landscape looked as if they had been washed in a pale brown. Looking out from the Tate Modern after inspecting its new Miró exhibition, friends and I agreed what a depressing view it offered apart from St Paul's itself, still mighty and magnificent, and possibly – there was disagreement – the Gherkin, a striking building which I rather like.
We also admired the formerly "wobbly bridge" which now links the cathedral (via some fine steps) with its secular rival, Tate Mod, once Bankside power station. "The building we're in is pretty good too," I remembered to point out. You can read about Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's fine 1947 design here.
But from the City of London School on the north bank below St Paul's – there is also a hideous car park-looking building just upstream – past what I think I must describe as apartments built in the postmodern vernacular style (were they meant to be Tudor-ish?) on to the cluster around the Gherkin. Most of it looked very third rate, or worse.
One of our party said they'd once heard the Queen say she had opened one of them, the NatWest Tower, and had to pretend to like it. "Despite my republicanism, I warmed to her."
By chance, I took the Docklands Light Rail to the Excel conference centre earlier in the day – right past Canary Wharf – and the sense of dynamism, so much urban regeneration going on, was badly dented by the chaotic disorder of it all.
Public or private, rich or poor, there wasn't much to admire visually, and it all seemed to bear little relationship to its neighbours. I retain a soft spot for the boldness of the old Millennium Dome, now the O2.
Perhaps that's it – so much restless energy devoted to the business of making money. I remember my first visit to the Isle of Dogs with a German TV crew as the Canary Wharf cluster was emerging in 1989. Freshly back from living in the US, I was being asked to describe how Britain looked to a returning reporter.
If it succeeds as a financial centre – it certainly did – folk won't mind too much, but if it's flop it will also be a dreadful dog's dinner, was my provisional verdict on the new office buildings and self-important riverside flats, which looked rather vulgar – and still do.
Such a shame and, more often than not, it's the story all the way upstream. There's a dubious-looking block currently rising next to Kew Bridge, a sensitive site overlooking Kew Gardens, which will join some serendipitous, mostly ugly neighbours.
It's not all gloom. I haven't made up my mind yet on the Shard, the 1,017ftbuidling that is rising above Southwark opposite the City, but it's designed by Renzo Piano, who is one of the world's top architects, and my hopes are high.
Conservationists and Whitehall are insisting that very tall buildings must now be justified by the quality of design. This particular stipulation came when John Prescott was in charge. In towns and cities all over Britain, we are putting up much better buildings than we did in the 60s and 70s, when the country was even poorer than it felt. But New York or Chicago it ain't.
So where does this leave the proposed Grade II listing for the Broadgate Estate building, now rejected by Hunt? I don't often walk past it (it's by Liverpool Street station), but when I do I don't much care for it, an overbearing bully of a building erected in the "loadsamoney" 80s.
English Heritage and the 20th Century Society think otherwise, and argue that the best architecture of all periods should be preserved. It's always a good point. For its part, the City has long complained – it would, wouldn't it ? – that fuddy-duddy British authorities are too keen to impede the march of progress. That must sometimes be right, too.
Two things to watch out for, then. How much fuss will the heritage lobby make? There isn't as much fuss in today's newspapers as I might have expected. And how good will the new building be when the London staff of the Swiss UBS bank – almost 7,000 of them – move under one roof?
Sir Stuart Lipton and Peter Rodgers say it's an "environmental disaster" and the worst big building in the City for 20 years. With so much competition all around, that's a pretty bold claim, and the pair were the developers of the Peter Foggo building (now being pulled down).
Foggo was forced to redesign it and was unhappy with the result, City planners claim. His widow denies it. Lively times, but it will be too late to put it back together again if things go wrong.
Broadgate centre not worth listing, says culture secretary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 15, 2011
Jeremy Hunt refuses to protect 1980s complex in City of London, enabling British Land to build new HQ for investment bank UBS
British Land and the City of London were celebrating on Wednesday after culture secretary Jeremy Hunt brushed aside a recommendation from English Heritage that Broadgate estate in the Square Mile should be listed, paving the way for an £850m European headquarters for UBS.
Hunt's controversial decision not to protect Broadgate, a symbol of the brash 1980s City culture, from demolition came much earlier than expected, after furious lobbying by the City, and angered heritage groups.
A Grade II listing for the 80s complex, designed by Peter Foggo of Arup, would have derailed plans by British Land and private equity group Blackstone to knock down 4 and 6 Broadgate and build a 700,000 sq ft "groundscraper".
The proposed building has pitted financiers against conservationists, architects against developers.
Construction of the UBS headquarters can now start as planned this summer, with the Swiss investment bank due to move in the second half of 2014.
British Land's chief executive, Chris Grigg, said: "I am delighted by [the] decision as it allows Broadgate to continue to evolve as a sustainable and flexible office location that will meet the future needs of occupiers whilst maintaining the sense of space and place for which it is rightly renowned around the globe. With the decision made today by Jeremy Hunt, the government has also sent out a message loud and clear to the world that the UK is open for business."
English Heritage had described Broadgate as a "triumph of urbanism" and argued that it represented "outstanding quality" in terms of its architectural and historical interest. In his first listing decision, Hunt disagreed with his official adviser.
In a letter to English Heritage, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: "[The Secretary of State] has concluded that Broadgate phases 1-4 is not of sufficient architectural or historical interest to merit listing protection under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990." Hunt said the estate was impressive but fell short of the outstanding quality needed to list buildings less than 30 years old.
The City of London Corporation's policy chairman, Stuart Fraser, was jubilant. He said the City was opposed to the listing from the start, "not only on architectural grounds but also because of the impact it would have had on the City's international competitiveness. The City is – and always has been – first and foremost a place of business and it must be allowed to adapt to meet the long-term business needs of current and potential future occupiers.
"Time and again, the government has emphasised the importance of demonstrating that the UK is open for business; by refusing to list Broadgate, Jeremy Hunt has sent a positive message to the international business community. Post big bang, Broadgate helped facilitate the growth of the Square Mile into the world's leading financial centre and, as a result of today's decision, I have no doubt that it will play a leading role in helping the City to retain this status for many years to come."
The culture secretary's decision was a slap in the face for English Heritage, which said: "There has been some suggestion that listing stunts investment or creates 'streetscape museums'. This is to entirely misinterpret the purpose and effect of listing ... Every year, consent is given for change and adaptation to thousands of listed buildings. It would have been entirely possible to consider significant alteration to the inherently flexible Broadgate Square buildings while enabling the original scheme's intrinsic qualities to shine as an exemplar of commercial development in the City."
It added: "Broadgate Square may not be everyone's idea of heritage, but every decade has its architectural high points, and the 1980s are no different."
The Twentieth Century Society heritage group also deplored the decision. The group's Jon Wright said: "We believe that the ongoing vitality of the City rests on it retaining and valuing the best buildings of all periods of its construction. This is the latest in a line of recent cases where the C20 Society believes factors other than those that should be considered in the listing process have decided the fate of an important historic building. Only architectural or historic significance should be taken into account.
"London may be open for business," he said, "but the loss of Broadgate's best buildings will send another clear message, that the process by which we have assessed and designated our collective built heritage since 1945 has broken down."
In most cases, ministers accept English Heritage's recommendations, although they recently ignored its advice to list the 1970s Commonwealth War Graves Commission headquarters building in Maidenhead, and in March overruled English Heritage on ABK's 1970s Redcar library.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, had described English Heritage's plans for listing the Broadgate site as "ludicrous". The new UBS building, which has been designed by Ken Shuttleworth, of Make Architects, will include four floors that can each hold 750 traders. At the moment, the Swiss bank's 6,840 workers are spread across five buildings at Broadgate, occupying just over 1m sq ft. UBS declined to comment on whether it would need more space beyond the new building, saying it was too early to say.
Broadgate arena, which houses an ice rink in the winter, sculptures and open spaces, will be retained.
The developers of the original complex, Sir Stuart Lipton and Peter Rogers, have described Shuttleworth's design as "the worst large building in the City for 20 years" and "an environmental disaster". The dispute had turned personal when the City of London's chief planner, Peter Rees, claimed that Foggo was unhappy with the original buildings because he was made to redesign them. This was strongly denied by Foggo's widow, who described the claims as "scurrilous".
The Business podcast: The growth of modern cities
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 17, 2011
More than half of the world's population now live in cities. For many people this means enhanced employment opportunities, free exchanges of ideas, culture, enterprise and wealth. But for millions more it means slums, poverty, crime and disease.
The trend towards urban living in the developed and developing world is set to continue so in this week's podcast we look at the reasons behind this migration and ask whether city life can be made better and more productive.
In the studio we have the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City; the Guardian's architecture critic and author Jonathan Glancey; and our environment editor John Vidal.
And as the government gets ready to announce the creation of 10 enterprise zones in Britain, Andrew Carter, director of policy at the thinktank Centre For Cities, explains why the policy must evolve from a similar one enacted by Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s.
Leave your thoughts below.
Fed up with ‘Legoland’ estates? Then reject plans, says housing minister
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 9, 2011
Grant Shapps praises conservative housebuilders and urges communities to take advantage of bigger say in developments
Local people will be urged on Wednesday to use new powers to vote down housebuilding plans if architects continue to propose identikit "Legoland" estates.
In a signal of the coalition's aesthetic taste, the housing minister, Grant Shapps, will praise a range of developments that use local stone, reflect local architecture and recognise tradition.
Shapps's taste appears to be similar to that of Prince Charles, as he has given his seal of approval to four exemplar developments that are especially conservative.
One is Rostron Brow, in Stockport, where developers reused existing brick, stone and slate as well as redundant timber beams and stone features. Everything from window details, shop fronts and building facades has been designed to replicate previous houses, drawing on historic photographs.
He also highlights the Russells, Broadway, Worcestershire – a mixed use development of 77 homes that fits in with the surrounding 16th-century Broadway village buildings, built using locally sourced Cotswold sandstone.
Shapps will write to the Design Council, which recently merged with the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, encouraging it to help developers think harder about local identity and character. He says too many suburbs are full of identikit homes.
The decision will not necessarily be music to the ears of the business department, which has been urging the Treasury to rip up planning controls as a way of encouraging growth.
The localism bill currently before parliament allows communities to come together to draw up neighbourhood plans to decide what their area should look like. If people vote in favour of these plans in local referendums, councils would have to adopt them.
Ministers sense design will be more important because if houses are not attractive it is more likely that local people will reject developments.
In his letter to the Design Council, Shapps will complain: "We all recognise the bog standard, identikit Legoland homes that typify some new developments – all looking exactly the same on streets that could be anywhere in the country.
"Whilst we are seeing good examples emerging, too often new developments are dominated by the same, identikit designs that bear no resemblance to the character of the local area." He will say developers need to think outside the Legoland box.
Previous housing ministers have railed against uniform design largely driven by developers' lower costs, but ministers hope that the concept of neighbourhood plans, designed and voted on by communities themselves, might drive architects out of their complacency.
Planning and decentralisation minister, Greg Clark, joins Shapps in condemning British household architecture, saying "banal, identikit housing schemes have given development a bad name".
Clark claims: "Experience here and overseas shows that when local people have the chance to influence the function and appearance of developments, opposition can [be] turned into enthusiasm and buildings are constructed that we can be proud of."
Shapps also praises developments at Port Sunlight, Wirral, Merseyside – a conservation area since 1978 where nearly every building in the village is Grade II listed .
Critics will say it is not the quality but the quantity of homes being built that should exercise ministers. According to the Housebuilders Federation, across Britain just 33,000 homes were approved for construction in the last three months of 2010 – 9% down on the previous quarter and 22% down on a year ago. Social housing was hardest hit with only 5,500 approvals – a new low for the survey and particularly concerning with 5 million people already languishing on local authority housing waiting lists.
The number of new homes completed in England in 2010 fell 13% on the previous year – itself the lowest peacetime number since 1923.
Ray of sunlight
Port Sunlight, a purpose-built village planned in 1888 by William Hesketh Lever for the employees of the Lever Brothers soap factory, was an unprecedented combination of model industrial housing. It was created on the basis of the architectural and landscape values of the garden suburb, influenced by the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. The stated aims of Lever were "to socialise and Christianise business relations and get back to that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour". Nearly 30 architects were employed by Lever to create the unique style of the village, where each block of houses was designed by a different person and each house is unique. Lever named his creation after his company's Sunlight Soap. Containing 900 Grade II listed buildings, it was declared a conservation area in 1978.
Ben Quinn
• This article was amended on 9 March 2011. The original headline read: "Fed up of 'Legoland' estates?". This has been corrected in accordance with the Guardian's Style guide.
Architects do matter, Mr Gove
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 6, 2011
The education secretary claims architects have 'creamed off' money that could have gone to teachers. It's time he opened his eyes to the far-reaching benefits of a beautifully designed school
If Michael Gove were a building, he would leak. He would crack and crumble on faulty foundations. He would be windy, but also overheat. Behind a pretentious facade, he would be shoddy in design and execution.
So far, the secretary of state for education has had to apologise for the hasty and inaccurate way he announced the cancellation of school building projects, and been told by a judge that his failure to consult was "so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power". He keeps giving not-quite-true information to Parliament, for example that a college in Doncaster, a pilot project of the government, took an impressively short 10 weeks to procure. It actually took 22 weeks.
On 14 February he told the House of Commons that "it's a scandal… millions of pounds were spent on consultants" on the design of new schools. "One individual, in one year, made more than £1m as a result of his endeavours." This might be an impressive fact, were it not that he is referring to a case in Birmingham in which the sum was £700,000, was paid over four years and covered the work of five advisers at different times, as part of a programme of more than 80 schools, costing more than £1 billion.
Yet Gove presses on, seemingly untroubled by evidence, common sense or decency, with his campaign to lower the quality of the buildings in which the nation's children are taught. He has repeatedly attacked architects for "creaming off" money that could be better spent on teaching. He recently smirked to a conference that "we won't be getting any award-winning architects" to design new schools, "because no one in this room is here to make architects richer". The message is that a well-designed environment is an irrelevance: teaching is all that matters.
There has been talk that schools can be churned out in bulk, the way Tesco builds its supermarket or McDonald's its outlets. To dot the country with standardised McSchools is not obviously consistent with the government's localism agenda, or its interest in a "happiness index", but never mind. One contractor, Willmott Dixon, has punted some suggestions as to what such schools might look like. These look plausible, if drab, on unencumbered, level sites. But, like Daleks encountering a staircase, they need help when they hit a slope, or a constrained urban site, or the individual needs of particular schools. Standardisation has its uses, but it needs design to do well.
To Gove's rejection of design, Phil Blinston, executive head of the Minster School in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, says: "It's bizarre. I just don't get it. Why wouldn't we want to factor in everything architects have learned from other buildings? Youngsters are growing up visually articulate. Why would they not expect to see that in school? Why would you expect them to lower their standards?"
The Minster School has been using an award-winning building for four years, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad. Blinston says: "Our results were good and continued to rise with the new building. Our behaviour has improved." It has good acoustics and natural light, which "have a profound effect on the emotional state of children, which helps their learning".
Its circulation works smoothly, without "one-way systems, keep left signs or massive numbers of rules". Hidden spaces "where vulnerable kids fear to tread" are designed out, so you don't need "people standing guard". It is designed so that locals can use the building in evenings and school holidays, so this public asset is used to the full.
"I'm not talking about fancy architecture," he says – and a limited budget means the school has a simple-going-on-basic look – "but it's about enabling people to feel good. Good design produces a relaxed community. If we say education is important, we can demonstrate that by putting children in decent environments." Buildings cannot do a teacher's job, in other words, but they can make good teaching better and bad teaching less so.
To which it might be added that, if environment were irrelevant to learning, then Eton College, the alma mater of many of the present government, would sell its agreeable slab of Berkshire real estate and move to low-cost units in a business park in Slough.
Gove is very much right about one thing, which is that the last government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme, which aimed to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary school in the country, was a monstrously wasteful and cumbersome process, which often led to very poorly designed schools. The "creaming off", however, was not being done by architects, who were, instead, among the first to point out the faults of the programme.
The main beneficiaries were the financial institutions and their advisers who funded the programme, who will earn handsome returns and bonuses for years to come at the taxpayers' expense. They are followed by the big construction companies, several of which were fined in 2008 by the Office of Fair Trading for breach of competition law – ie price-fixing – on a range of project types. They were, to coin a phrase, creaming off the funds of clients, including local authorities.
This unfortunate blemish has not impeded the same companies from securing huge education contracts, and it would be stretching credulity to think that price-fixing never now happens in school building. Yet there has been no ministerial slap. Rather, Gove's architect-free vision of the future places ever-greater reliance on the men with the hard hats, the handshakes and the plausible paperwork.
There are also the lawyers who expensively write and rewrite the byzantine contracts, at hourly rates several times greater than architects', and project managers, who do less, and less useful work than architects for a similar total cost. Worst of all was the waste inherent in BSF's processes: it cost contractors up to £3m to bid for a package of schools. They would expect to win one in three, meaning that they would want to recover £9m from successful bids just to cover their bidding costs.
Gove's department is unable to produce the figures on which he makes his assertions, saying that "detailed data on individual projects was held locally to minimise the regulatory burden on projects and project reporting". It is, however, possible to find out that architects' fees have been between 2.5% and 5% of construction cost. If capital costs other than construction are included, this can drop to well under 2% of the total. If, as happened under BSF, future running costs are included in the contract, architects' fees become a tiny proportion. Most architects working on schools will tell you that it pays less well than almost any other kind of work and is sometimes loss-making. One says that schools work "is threatening to put us out of business".
In other words, in the torrents of waste surrounding school building, good architects are value for money. If budgets get tighter, we will need their skills to make the most of them. If, as seems likely, future work is more about refurbishment rather than glamorous new buildings, architects' adaptability will help. If there is more standardisation of new buildings, it needs design intelligence to do it well. Gove seems to think that architects are all bow-tied ponces longing only to inflict their fantasies on the public. They could be his greatest allies.
Largest postwar prefab estate to be demolished
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 3, 2011
Campaigners say key piece of history will be lost after only six of 187 houses built by German and Italian PoWs listed
The UK's largest surviving estate of postwar prefab houses, described by conservationists as a unique slice of 20th-century social history, is set to be bulldozed and replaced by modern housing.
Only six of the 187 compact bungalows, erected from factory-built panels by German and Italian prisoners of war in 1945 and 1946, will be saved, after they received Grade-II listing last year. The remainder of the Excalibur estate in Catford, south-east London, will be demolished, along with its tin-roofed prefab church, St Mark's, believed to be one of a kind.
Campaigners say the planned redevelopment, formally approved by Lewisham council in September, will destroy a key piece of history from the aftermath of the second world war. The estate is the biggest surviving remnant of an ambitious project which saw 160,000 prefabs hurriedly erected during an acute housing shortage. Keeping just six, surrounded by hundreds of brand new houses and flats, would be pointless, they argue.
"This case shows a real gap in the historic protection legislation for 20th-century buildings," said Jon Wright from the Twentieth Century Society, which is urging English Heritage to step in and declare the entire estate a conservation area. "The overall planning and layout is far more important than just a few individual buildings. This is the only place in the country where you can still see an estate like this. It is very significant."
The local authority has long argued that the 55 sq metre (600 sq ft) houses, originally intended to last no more than a decade, are so basic it would be virtually impossible to bring them up to modern standards, a view shared by a number of residents, who are mainly council tenants.
But after a campaign by other locals to preserve the Excalibur, so called as the roads were named after characters from Arthurian legend, English Heritage recommended 21 homes be listed. The Department for Culture granted protection to six. Under current rules for 20th century properties, listing is reserved for buildings with few modifications while most Excalibur homes have – at the very least – replacement doors and windows.
English Heritage argued that the whole estate should be preserved by being named a conservation area. Officially, the organisation has the power to do this but is extremely wary of doing so against the wishes of the local council.
"It's a difficult situation," said a English Heritage spokeswoman. "Any conservation area would be administered by Lewisham and imposing our view from above would be quite drastic, particularly given the split of opinion among the residents."
But English Heritage was uncomfortable with the redevelopment, she added: "The estate is of huge historical significance overall, it's not just the individual listed properties. It will feel quite odd to just have a small group remaining, surrounded by modern houses. It would not be particularly rosy from a conservation point of view."
The Department for Culture said it could do no more. A spokesman said: "Apart from the listed houses, if it's the decision of the local authority to demolish the estate, that's pretty well it. It's local democracy and there's only so much central interference you can do."
Lewisham polled Excalibur residents earlier this year and 56% of them favoured redevelopment. The issue has polarised local opinion, with pro-conservation householders claiming a "yes" vote was inevitable as there was no prospect of the council spending money on modernising the prefabs, leaving tenants with a choice of accepting demolition or remaining in a damp, cold, outdated home.
For English Heritage the situation is reminiscent of the 60s and 70s when thousands of Victorian homes were demolished, dismissed as impossible to renovate for modern life.
"The difference is, there were still lots of Victorian buildings left but there are not many prefabs. It's possible that in 20 years' time people will think differently about them. But that's going to be too late for the Excalibur," said the spokeswoman.
Spice up the suburbs with the help of the localism bill | Jonathan Glancey
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 7, 2010
Dull cul-de-sacs may benefit from local people making planning decisions. But such power requires education too
In 1986, Bill Heine, a local radio presenter, stuck a giant fibreglass shark through the roof of his 19th-century terraced house in Headington, Oxfordshire. Designed by the artist John Buckley, the 25ft sculpture caused as much fuss locally as the great white shark in Jaws had done in cinemas around the world a decade earlier. The local authority wanted it removed – to a swimming pool. But residents – although there was a lively debate – came to like the audacity of the shark at No 2 New High Street, and became its champions. The issue was taken up at government level. Finally, in 1992, the Tory government decreed that "any system of local [planning] control must make some small space for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky." The shark had been reprieved. Local residents had won the day.
Bill Heine still lives in the house and the shark, getting a bit long in its several rows of teeth, has since been restored. I wonder what might happen to such houses and streets up and down the country now that the government has announced that homeowners in England and Wales will be able to build extensions, extra storeys and conservatories without the need for traditional planning permission?
Will we see a school of shark roofs in Oxfordshire? Might someone in Yorkshire want to add an extension in the guise of a giant batter pudding? Will there be attics shaped like bottles of Newcastle Brown in Washington New Town? Could entire suburbs end up looking like scenes from Dr Seuss drawings, or from images drawn from Noddy, Mon Oncle, Mad Max or In the Night Garden? Why not? It might be fun.
Many of our new suburbs and cul-de-sac estates are so relentlessly dull that a bit of cheering up is surely in order. Why shouldn't your neighbour have a fibreglass shark crashing through his roof; why can't the people over the fence build an extension in the guise of a miniature Taj Mahal? If Frank Gehry can get away with the gloriously outrageous forms of the Bilbao Guggenheim, why shouldn't Mr and Mrs Jones at No 94 erect a pint-sized replica of Norman Foster's Gherkin as a granny annexe in their patch of garden?
Inevitably, there are also drawbacks to allowing local people to decide on local planning issues. The question of heritage is an obvious one, although there is no reason to doubt that conservation areas will stay just that, and that in the future it will be just as difficult to add a new chimney pot to your Grade II*-listed house as to win permission to stick a stainless steel killer whale through the thatched roof of your venerable timber-framed cottage. No, the real problems might come when neighbours have axes to grind with one another. Or, when the local consensus is to ensure that absolutely no development whatsoever gets the green light.
Call me an optimist, but I have a feeling that if people find ways of sitting around together and talking intelligently through local planning proposals, something good might come out of this latest government initiative. Planning matters do require mature discussion, so perhaps this is one sensible way of getting people together to work through local initiatives and, yes, to play a part in a wider society, to think of others' needs and desires as well as their own.
My concern is less that local communities lack the will to compromise over building matters, but that we lack the expertise to do so. We need to learn a lot more, collectively, about architecture, design, planning and conservation before we can be sure that we are talking sensibly, generously and imaginatively. If only these subjects, or areas of interest, were taught at school.
There is no question that our planning system needs to be overhauled. To make it work effectively, it would be good to have a new breed of small, purposeful local authority architect and planning offices replacing what we have at the moment. These offices could act as guides to local neighbourhoods ensuring local people were as well-informed as they might be before taking decisions that could have a major impact on their homes and where they live.
There is a long way to go before our planning system begins to work as well as it should, and a shift to local control must be accompanied by a commitment to raise the standards of architectural and planning debate at both national and local level. A few more sharks, or other shocks, along the way, though, will be just fine, so long that is, as your neighbours are happy to swim in the same artistic waters as you.
Prince Charles offers to take on key architectural planning role
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 3, 2010
Prince Charles's offer to take on architectural planning role means he could extend influence over UK's skyline
Prince Charles is poised to extend his influence over the skyline with an offer to arbitrate Britain's most significant planning applications, a role previously executed by a quango that had its funding axed in the comprehensive spending review.
The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, a charity of which he is president, is considering stepping into the breach left by the decision to withdraw funding from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which leaves its design review role for new developments in serious doubt.
The move to offer the foundation's own design advice means the prince's favourite architects could soon be providing verdicts on plans for landmark developments, potentially altering how they are built. Cabe had steered the design of 3,000 plans including London's Olympic stadium and Shard skyscraper, as well as dozens of schools and the £1bn redevelopment of Liverpool's central shopping area. Cabe's influence has been such that local authority planners have heeded its advice seven times out of 10.
The possible move, announced by the foundation's chief executive, Hank Dittmar, has been met with dismay by leading modernist architects who fear Prince Charles may use the charity to further his preference for traditional styles of architecture and that the charity could not be held accountable for its advice. Others accepted the foundation could bring its expertise to town planning and supporters of traditional architecture said it could correct what some see as a modernist bias in the architectural establishment.
The foundation is not seeking public funding but is considering offering design reviews for a fee, using a panel of architects and other design professionals.
Paul Finch, chairman of Cabe, said the foundation's interest appeared "predatory" coming only a week after the axe fell on his funding, and as the quango's leadership prepares a bid to salvage its design review role in a slimmed down form.
Finch warned the foundation would not able to serve the wider public interest owing to its bias towards traditional forms of architecture and urban planning.
"Stylistic preferences will make it more difficult for certain building types to win planning approval," 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."
The prince's charity has increasingly pressed for greater influence over Britain's towns and cities. Under Labour it tried to persuade cabinet ministers to use Poundbury, the prince's mock Georgian village in Dorset, as a model for ecotowns; advised the Department of Health on the design of hospitals; and lobbied the Treasury, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department of Culture on design matters.
Dittmar says the foundation's design review panels would reflect a range of views on architectural style to fend off accusations that only traditional architecture would get the thumbs-up.
"To be credible, it would have to have democratic, independent judgment," he told Building Design magazine. "We would have to have a panel that was balanced and not exclusively traditional architects. We'd have to talk to our network and assess the market. It would need to pay for itself but we wouldn't be doing it to make money."
He told the magazine it will make a decision on whether to start bidding for design review work by Christmas.
Jim Eyre, a member of Cabe's current design review panel and the designer of the Stirling prize-winning Millennium Bridge in Gateshead, said the public and planners would struggle to feel that the foundation's advice was independent of the prince's own views.
"The prince has such a skewed and particular view of architecture it would colour their assessment of every scheme," he said.
Prince Charles enraged many architects last year when he complained directly to the Emir of Qatar about a design by the modernist architect Richard Rogers for the £3bn redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks. The Qatari development company scrapped the plan and appointed the foundation to advise on a more traditional approach instead. A high court judge described the intervention as "unexpected and unwelcome", while Rogers labelled it "totally unconstitutional".
This month Prince Charles published a book in which he attacked modernist architecture for "deliberately abandoning the grammar of harmony" which he believes "lies within us".
Letters: Prince’s plans
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 29, 2010
Your focus on allegations of a style bias (Prince offers to take on key planning role, 29 November) prompts me to disclose the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment' underlying principles. Unlike the critical elite, with its allegiance to often vain statement buildings by famous architects, our bias is toward design in service of walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods, linked by streets and squares and landscape. A design review panel would be slanted in favour of buildings and communities for people, rather than designers, and for modernity and innovation as a means to building natural and social capital, delight and local distinctiveness. Surely there is room for this kind of vision, alongside the "shock and awe" approach of the past few decades?
Hank Dittmar
Chief executive, The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment
A flat festival tonic for Britain | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2011
The celebration of 1951's Festival of Britain this year won't revive the original's uplifting socialist spirit
The Skylon, the slender steel tower that formed the centre of the Festival of Britain, had no visible means of support. Neither did the British economy, or so the joke went in 1951. Sixty years later, that seems far more true than it was then, with the economy staked on two radically invisible economic confidence tricks: the property market, where mundane housing becomes magical investments; and the immaterial, money-generating-money world of "financial services". Both are hugely destructive but both, seemingly, politically impregnable, no matter how much damage they cause. So it's ironic that a campaign to re-erect the Skylon lumbers on, and will be given extra impetus this summer by a strange Festival of Britain Festival on its former site, London's South Bank.
The Festival of Britain was a "tonic for the nation" in the last age of austerity, a series of events in London (with a touring exhibition), intended to usher in a new world of modernity and abundance – often with a socialist slant. The Skylon and its demolished nearby structures – the Dome of Discovery, Sea and Ships, Power and Production or the Telekinema – or the Royal Festival Hall, the survivor, symbolised the embattled optimism of the postwar Labour government; a road not travelled politically as much as architecturally. Its buildings, influenced by Swedish Modernism, imagined Britain as a northern European social democratic country, not a mid-Atlantic one. A place comfortable with modern architecture, modernity and material production, rather than the Americanised, deindustrialised mess we put up with. It was as much a monument of the era as the NHS, universal benefits or nationalised industries, and faced a similar fate.
It is ironic that the festival is being revived under the coalition, as the original buildings – save for the more permanent Festival Hall – were wantonly smashed when the Tories miraculously won the 1951 election, despite Labour winning a still unprecedented 49% of the popular vote. Churchill called it "three-dimensional socialist propaganda" – and it was. Yet there's a deeper reason for the two to coincide.
In their rhetoric of belt-tightening, in the ludicrous notion that "we're all in this together", the millionaires' austerity government is tapping into something that predates it, but which accompanied the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Since then, an austerity nostalgia has been rife among the middle class: in the wartime aesthetics of Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food; in retro-modernist CCTV posters; most of all in the phenomenal success of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. At the Festival Hall's shop, it can sometimes seem like you're in a 1940s theme park, with all manner of austere rationing-era ephemera for sale. It hinges on the somewhat gross analogy between our predicament and the blitz, or the rationing that lasted well into the 50s – the "blitz spirit" attendant on every transport disruption or tube strike. Cameron's government has consciously appealed to this trend.
By contrast with the original festival's socialist optimism, the new festival – sponsored by Mastercard – will feature a show by Tracey Emin, who threatened to emigrate in response to Labour's mild income tax rise. Similarly, our new austerity is based on destroying the things the earlier austerity had created – the NHS, free education, non-means-tested benefits, council housing. The latter, now an emergency refuge, was an intrinsic part of the Festival.
A few miles east of the main site was the festival's Living Architecture Exhibition, an estate of mildly modernist terraces and low-rise flats in Poplar, an example of the new Britain which Labour aimed to create. By contrast, neither the coalition nor the South Bank organisers seem to have any notion of a viable future. The new festival – especially if it gives in and rebuilds the Skylon – will be an exercise in nostalgia, in morbid and wildly inaccurate historical analogy, at a time when we desperately need an infusion of the original festival's socialist, futuristic spirit.
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