Posts Tagged Public sector cuts
Bramley baths campaigners prepare to make takeover bid
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 10, 2011
Russian steam room will be run by people power if Leeds city council accepts local residents' business plan
The campaign to save Bramley's historic but cosy public baths in Leeds, complete with their exotic Russian steam room, has moved up another step.
John reported tirelessly on this in the days of Guardian Leeds and we swam together at a Tweet-in memorable for the excellence of the cake supplied by supporters.
I am very biased on this issue because I learned to swim at Bramley, helped by the strange diet of Wagon Wheel biscuits and Horlicks tablets served up in the mid-1950s by Leeds Corporation. But there is a problem in the gap between delight in the interest and pleasure of both the building and the baths, and the actual number of people who use the place.
Now a band of Bramlegians and local groups have got together under the umbrella of the Friends of Bramley Baths to prepare a business plan for a local management takeover. This takes up Leeds city council's request earlier this year for expressions of interest in such a 'community asset transfer' for the baths, whose opening hours were cut earlier this year from 80 hours a week to 49.
The Friends believe their plan has the makings of a new regime which would "restore the Baths into a thriving centre for health, socialising and fitness", presenting the case to the council before the end of the year and taking over management during 2012 if all goes well. There will be a public meeting with a film about the baths and a contribution from the local West Leeds MP Rachel Reeves from 6-30 – 7.30pm on 20 October at Bramley St Peter's Primary School in Hough Lane.
John Battle, Reeves' predecessor and chair of the Friends who want to restore full opening times and have national support from the Victorian Society, says Put your cozzies where your campaigning is:
We are asking people in Leeds who use or love this beautiful place, to support our efforts by continuing to use it as much as possible in the coming months. We are delighted that Leeds City Council has accepted our initial plan and is supporting us to prepare a full proposal that will show how this asset could be successfully run by a community group as a socially-minded enterprise. Bramley Baths is important to local residents; it is also an architectural gem of wider interest and historical significance. We are not seeking simply to save a building, but to ensure that Bramley Baths serves its local community well; an affordable place where young children can continue to take their first strokes and a place for relaxation, health, fitness and fun for young and old alike.
Rebecca Whittington, 30 and a Friends member, says:
This issue has united a lot of people in the local area who are focused on keeping this useful and important place open. Bramley Baths is a place for people to get fit and stay healthy, but it's also a valuable community hub. We represent a group of people with a wide set of skills and experience, in running businesses, charities and community groups. With the support of the local community and schools, and the expertise of established organisations like Barca, Bramley Elderly Action and West Leeds Academy, we believe we can turn Bramley Baths around in the near future.
The baths opened 107 years ago and are one of only 13 Victorian and Edwardian examples still on the go - their plight has parallels elsewhere, including many more modern public baths which are targets of the public spending cuts.
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".
Britain ‘will be scarred as cuts end a golden age of architecture’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 17, 2010
The designer of the new Shakespeare theatre in Stratford says it could be the last great public project for years
The man behind the design of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon has predicted a long period of stagnation for architecture that will scar both the British landscape and the national economy. After the boom in the early years of the millennium, an era of paralysis lies ahead, according to Rab Bennetts.
"I am pessimistic about the way cutbacks in building will affect the country," he said. "I think the government has underestimated the impact on the economy."
Bennetts suspects that the £100m redevelopment of the RST, which is due for completion in the autumn, may prove to be the last great public project in a "golden age" of lottery funding.
"Lottery grants for this scale of work are disappearing because the private sector is no longer in a position to match the funding," he explained. "So this theatre at Stratford may well be the last of its kind. Even the planned expansion of Tate Modern has a question mark over it and other similar projects are being wound up."
The biggest blow to the profession will come from the withdrawal of funding for school improvements, Bennetts believes, but the additional freeze on new cultural centres and public spaces will stop modern Britain in its tracks.
"The loss of around 715 school projects in one hit, with lots more to come, will have a lasting impact. Although I am sure there is truth in claims there was too much bureaucracy involved, there was a lot of dilapidation and the work was needed."
After the high-profile projects that redefined the urban landscape under New Labour, such as the London Eye, Tate Modern and the redevelopment of Gateshead, Bennetts says architects fear a blight on their profession that will be followed by the collapse of many construction firms as private and government schemes are shelved.
"When we had the last deep recesssion, the building and construction industry lost half a million people and I don't think they ever came back. We are talking about a permanent loss of jobs and skills. And construction is the second biggest industry in the country, so of course it can depress the whole economy."
Bennetts, who rebuilt the Hampstead Theatre in north London and designed Brighton Library, runs an architectural practice based in London and Edinburgh with his wife and partner, Denise. In 2005 they won the contract to redesign Elisabeth Scott's 1932 theatre in Stratford, the home of the RSC. Theatre-goers are due to take their seats for the first time in the new, more intimate auditorium in November, but Bennetts fears that it will be the last such opening for several years.
"I wish there could be some kind of flywheel that could stabilise the extremes of building in times of both boom and bust. Clearly, some of the buildings that went up over the last 10 years weren't necessary and were just monuments to their creators. But although there were excesses, it will look like a golden age," he added.
Like the threatened Tate extension, a hoped-for transformation of Piece Hall in Halifax is the kind of public scheme described by Bennetts that may suffer. Last week the people of the Yorkshire town learned that plans to turn one of their most historic buildings into a £16m European-style piazza could be scaled back due to lack of funds. In March the local council was awarded £239,700 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to draw up blueprints before a further £7m was committed. Now there are fears that a promise of an extra £3m from Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency, may not be honoured as the agency is replaced in a government shake-up.
In the 1980s, when the post-war programme of public works had well and truly finished, the only high-profile modern project to be built was Richard Rogers's London headquarters for Lloyd's of London. Private enterprise eventually signalled the future with the development of the tower at Canary Wharf. When the annual Stirling Prize for architecture was set up in 1996, the contenders on the shortlist were a modest selection of office buildings, humble house conversions and small-scale university facilities.
Money began to flow again when New Labour began to make liberal use of the key Conservative legacy: the National Lottery. The London Eye, Tate Modern, the redeveloped Royal Opera House and the covering of the Great Court of the British Museum all changed the look and the mood of the capital before private entreprise weighed in with glamorous projects such as the Swiss Re tower, popularly known as the Gherkin.
Similarly bold schemes went forward across the country – Scotland finally got its expensive new parliament building and Glasgow was given the Clyde Auditorium, known as the Armadillo.
RIBA awards gold stars to educational buildings
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 24, 2010
Fifth of RIBA's annual architecture plaudits go to education projects – but now cuts will bite
In what may be the last hurrah for public buildings before government spending cuts bite, prizes for architectural quality were awarded to 17 new school and university buildings by the Royal Institute of British Architects today.
From a £27m art and design academy at Liverpool John Moores University to a multicoloured glass extension at Clapham Manor primary school, education buildings won almost a fifth of the RIBA's 93 awards in a feat that may not be repeated for a generation after the government ordered a moratorium on new plans for school buildings.
The new education secretary, Michael Gove, recently clashed with architects when he accused them of "creaming off cash" that should have been going to the frontline.
The RIBA roll of honour also reveals the damaging effect of recession on architectural opportunity: instead of the stadium, airport and museum projects of previous years, the 2010 list features more modest projects, including a bus drivers' toilet in Dagenham and a black-clad electricity sub-station on a 2012 Olympic site in east London. And, with house building falling to an 87-year low, just three housing schemes were granted awards.
Many of the country's leading designers, including Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield and Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, won accolades for buildings elsewhere in the EU rather than at home. Hadid's expressionist angles and curves were reserved for Rome's museum of 21st-century art, MAXXI, while Lord Rogers, widely regarded as one of the world's leading modernists, designed a new headquarters campus for a Spanish technology company in Seville.
"The RIBA awards reflect not only the state of British architecture but also that of its economy," said Ruth Reed, the institute's president. "In the midst of the deepest recession in the awards' 45-year history, this year demonstrates that, although times might be hard for architects, there are still great buildings being built throughout the country and overseas. The RIBA awards always give an opportunity for gem-like small projects and less established practices to shine through, and this year is no exception. Far from being a size prize, the RIBA awards are for buildings that offer value to people's lives."
The memorial in Hyde Park to the victims of the 7 July 2005 bomb attacks on the London transport network, by Carmody Groarke, also won and is considered by some as a possible contender for the shortlist for the £20,000 Stirling prize for building of the year, which is drawn from the RIBA award winners.
Ellis Woodman, architecture critic at the newspaper Building Design, said that other strong Stirling prize contenders included the Nottingham contemporary arts centre, the new British embassy in Warsaw, the Neues Museum in Berlin, Christ's College school in Guildford and Hadid's MAXXI museum.
The Oregon-born architect Rick Mather won most awards, gaining four. Other winning buildings included a new home in Bristol for Wallace and Gromit's creators, Aardman Animations, and a cluster of foil-clad small-business units, which look like cybermen helmets, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, in Wales.
The fading genius of the US post office | Gray Brechin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 2, 2011
The superb post offices of the New Deal era are a monument to America's democratic ethos. Now we're selling off FDR's legacy
On 9 June, the General Services Administration threw Modesto's downtown post office onto the auction block. Like so many other postal facilities, the Renaissance-style palazzo had long served as an anchor for downtown stores of the California town, a public space where citizens met to exchange news as well as transact business in an ennobling lobby of polished travertine and marble beneath murals of local farming activities.
The federal government once designed its post offices to elevate and inspire the public whose assets it is now selling. An architectural journal in 1918 spoke of the tutelary value of post offices:
President Hoover's administration built facilities such as Modesto's in a last-ditch effort to end the Depression, before Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal unleashed a far greater torrent of public works that succeeded where Hoover had failed (pdf). In less than a decade, the Roosevelt administration built over 1,100 post offices, distinguished by fine architecture, materials and detailing, as well as by a lavish programme of public art that, for the first time, reflected back to patrons and workers their regional identity.
Mandated by the US constitution as a service vital to democracy, the post office has fallen victim to structural adjustment as well as to electronic communication. Congress has successively demanded that the US Postal Service run itself more like a business since making it a quasi-corporation in 1971. Required to provide universal service, even as the internet and private carriers cut into its profit centres, the USPS has spun into a death spiral, raising its rates as it slashes employment and service. It's now stripping its assets, as well.
Since January, the US Postal Service has closed 280 post offices, despite community resistance and the objections of local business people horrified to watch downtown magnets decamp for peripheral strip malls and trailers. Those closures were only a warmup for what was coming. On 26 July, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe listed nearly 3,700 more, saying "The Postal Service of the future will be smaller, leaner, and more competitive." Those facilities constitute well over a tenth of the nation's post offices, buildings that once physically embodied government honesty, efficiency and even culture. Perhaps, that is why they must go.
The distinguished Modesto building, like many other New Deal post offices, has earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places, but a buyer could still demolish it to utilise the real estate beneath it. In that case, law requires the developer to donate its murals to the federal government. But as Congress and the White House hack ever deeper into the services that Americans until recently took for granted, no one may be at home in Washington to find lodging for such art other than that for which it was made.
New Deal critic Amity Shlaes has claimed that "It's not really the government's business, art, is it?" Roosevelt shared with other New Dealers a considerably more expansive notion of what the US could achieve. He forecast that "one hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not for its relief." The New Dealers envisioned a new Renaissance. Its successors are knocking that legacy down to the highest bidder, and with it goes what we once were and might yet be.
Architecture, Art, Comment, Comment is free, guardian.co.uk, Public sector cuts, United States
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