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A Room for London – review

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:51:31 +0000

A small vessel perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall has become London's most coveted hotel room

The river Thames has a way of defeating plans for its jollification. For decades architects have looked on its great, tempting emptiness and felt an irresistible urge to propose beaches, inhabited bridges, lidos, zones for festivals fluttering with pennants and balloons, places to promenade as if it were the edge of the Mediterranean. In the 1980s Richard Rogers imagined an archipelago of pleasure, with the forms and construction methods of oil rigs remade into towers and pinnacles of fun. Most recently, the architects Gensler proposed the floating hospitality suite they called the London River Park.

Mostly these plans don't happen. The river flows on, lugubrious and imperturbable, which is possibly because, as Joseph Conrad observed, it is not really a fun sort of thing. "And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation. For him it was the "sleepless river" of a "monstrous" and "brooding" city. "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river," he also wrote, "into the mystery of an unknown earth!"

One Thames project that has happened is A Room for London, a boat-like object perched high on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, as if stranded there by a receding deluge. Where many Thames proposals want to put things of land on to water, this puts something riverine – a boat – on to land. It is a temporary structure, a cross between building and sculpture, by the architect David Kohn and the artist Fiona Banner. It contains a single hotel room which anyone can in theory book, if with rather more difficulty than Olympic tickets. When nights for the first six months were made available they sold out in 12 minutes; the next batch goes on sale on Thursday (at £120 a night).

This little space is the production of an impressive array of cultural impresarios: the Southbank Centre, Artangel, and Living Architecture, the organisation set up by the writer Alain de Botton to build beautiful new houses which can be rented for holidays. It comes, like many cultural projects in 2012, with an Olympic tag, being officially part of the cultural Olympiad. As well as paying guests, writers, artists and musicians have been invited to stay there, and be creative.

From the outside the jaunty vessel seems to fall within the "fun" category of Thames projects. It juts perkily into the void, and three little wind turbines, like displaced propellers, whirr on the top of a triangular rig. It is a toy, palpably and deliberately incongruous. It is a folly. But it turns out that its makers also had Conradian ambitions. The boat is called the Roi des Belges, after the vessel in which Conrad himself sailed up the river Congo, in the journey that would inspire Heart of Darkness. Inside there is a cabinet containing old maps of the Thames and the Congo, in reference to the parallels that Conrad made between the two rivers. An octagonal table and a box of dominos echo similar objects described in the master's novels.

There are other inspirations. The intricate house and museum of the architect Sir John Soane is cited by David Kohn as a help in designing the "episodic" sequence of small spaces that are inside the boat, as you progress from a little vestibule to a galley, to a bedroom that opens up to penthouse views of the river, bracketed by the Palace of Westminster to the left, and St Paul's Cathedral to the right. Alongside the river maps there is a copy of a drawing by Soane's collaborator JM Gandy that shows Soane's Bank of England as if it were a Roman ruin, and which might be taken as a comment, if desired, on financial calamity, or on the fragility of civilisation described by Conrad. Kohn also mentions the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as an influence, even though his heavy white stone churches would come top of most lists of Structures Least Likely to Float. The spire-like superstructure of A Room for London refers to these churches, and to the spires of London in general.

The main point, says Kohn, is to combine the intimate and the epic, in a way not unlike the relation of domesticity to vastness that you get in boats. "The interiors feel comfortable and you know what to do there, but it's not just an easy or twee kind of comfort. You are connected to the Thames, to a wider world, also to what one thinks of the world. You have a relationship to disputed, uncertain territory."

In all this the intention was to avoid kitsch and creating a one-line joke. The timber-lined interior, stained in places in rich pinkish-red, is not pushed to the point where it is literally boat-like in every detail, but rather seeks other architectural qualities, which is where the influence of Soane comes in. It was also important to Kohn and Banner that the structure was exactingly well made, by the specialist company Millimetre. "It is solid; it has a kind of earnestness," says Kohn, which keeps it away from being a stage set.

And so the lucky purchasers of nights in the hotel room, the intellectual aesthete's equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, will be able to contemplate the "venerable stream" much as Conrad's characters did in the cruising yawl Nellie. At sunset they will be able to watch the gloom "become more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun". They can, should they want to, think their thoughts about the world and their place in it.

A Room for London is small, and temporary, and will only be fully enjoyed by a few people. It is not a prototype for future Thames-side development, and offers no solutions to the problems of urban regeneration. It may, even, not quite match the fathomless profundity of its inspirations, being rather an enjoyable and well-made jeu d'esprit. But I have a feeling it will give satisfactions that other Olympic projects will not match: it is intelligent, witty, pleasurable, and is based on observing its surroundings as they actually are, rather than imposing a bombastic idea of what they should be.

Rowan Moore

Olympic Village – review

The Sheet — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:06:24 +0000

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.

Rowan Moore

The rise of Aedas is a triumph for efficency

The Sheet — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:32:42 +0000

British giant Aedas is now the world's biggest practice, but is size and adaptability any substitute for vision and flair?

Last week's news from the world of architecture is that there is a new global No 1 practice. It is British in origin, although now spread all over the world, which should inspire a warm glow in these troubled times. The firm in question, Aedas, has deposed the former leader, the American Aecom, in Building Design magazine's World Architecture 100 list of leading practices, which measures a practice's size by the number of architectural employees. Aedas has nearly 1,500 of them.

It is likely you haven't heard of either, still less be able to tell these similarly named practices apart. They don't get the same column inches as the Zahas, Rems, Franks and Normans, nor much by way of Stirling prize nominations. Aedas have, however, designed more than 1,000 schools. The West Kowloon Terminus, part of a programme to connect Hong Kong to the largest high-speed rail network in the world, is being built to their designs, and they have done their share of glassy tower projects in Abu Dhabi, Saigon and Chinese cities such as Shenyang and Wuxi that, like the architects, are both big and little known over here. They are working on a performance venue in Singapore that is something like a colossal beetle, and the new Crossrail station at Farringdon in London.

Aedas are part of a phenomenon – the rise of the very big architectural firm – that does more to shape the lives of more people than the work of celebrity designers. The company, what is more, is under 10 years old, albeit made out of the merger of practices founded decades ago, and in one case, the Yorkshire practice of Abbey Hanson Rowe, in the 1830s.

Brian Johnson, chairman of Aedas's European operation, describes its growth in pragmatic terms. They wanted to be able to compete for larger projects, and they wanted to be large enough to have a professionally managed business. They saw a boom coming in commissions for schools and other public buildings under the now infamous private finance initiative, and positioned themselves to take full advantage.

They joined up with a firm in Birmingham, then one in Hong Kong, to increase their geographic spread, and move into new areas of work, such as transport. If they see an opportunity in a particular place or a sector, they move into it. Because "there are only so many dead architects you can have in your practice's name", they chose Aedas, based on the Latin for "to build". They don't seek out glamour: their British offices are spread around the major cities, with quite a modest one in London.

They do well, says Johnson, because they are big. They can summon a large amount of expertise to huge projects at short notice. They can pay for the latest software and good research. They can make sure that they have up-to-date knowledge about technology and sustainability. They can afford to fund themselves when bidding for major contracts, for which architects don't get paid unless they win the job.

They aim to provide, in other words, an efficient, well-oiled, technically efficient service, which is suited to the scale and speed of modern projects, especially in the Far East, and to the demanding contracts under which architects have to work everywhere. They have an advantage in a world where architects can't survive without computing power, because they can afford to invest in it.

They are also the logical outcome of Margaret Thatcher's transformation of the British economy. Johnson points out that in the 1970s there were also large architectural practices, but they were part of the public sector, in the form of architects departments for local authorities and the health service. Thatcher's policies had them closed and privatised to the extent that only one in three local authorities now employ any architects on their staff. The likes of Aedas have soaked up the work that used to be done by employees of the state.

All of which is somewhat threatening to the old idea that architecture is somehow an art, or a craft, and about shaping spaces for inhabitation by the imagination and the body. Most of the strengths Johnson lists are technocratic, and about the processes of business.

Aedas would certainly like to be liked for the architectural quality of their designs, and to attract more attention from awards juries, but it is clear that their systems of delivery are their main selling points.

They have no house style, but allow their architects to choose their own, which also means they can choose the approach that works best in a given situation. For schools they can do the skimpy business-park-plus-bright-colours look – the almost inevitable outcome of the PFI process. In Abu Dhabi they can do big curves with an Islamic flavour, like everyone working else there. With their Kowloon station they channel Zaha Hadid's bunches of energetic curves. They can do Foster-ish, and Koolhaasian, and more sober Netherlandish styles, as the occasion demands.

In this they are neither the best nor the worst of the very big practices. Aedas differ from Aecom and some others in that they focus on architecture, whereas many of their competitors are enormous engineering firms with an architectural wing attached. At times their work does not seem so very different from that of the more esteemed Foster and Partners (sixth in the BD list, with 879 architectural staff): because all these architects are dealing with the same pressures and demands, their projects have a way of ending up quite similar to one another.

Aedas is what you get when you weigh up the way the modern world works, and adapt architecture to suit it. It is not about challenging or criticising, but trying to do a good job in the prevailing circumstances. It is about adaptation, not friction or resistance, because the financial forces to which they are responding can't really be bothered with such things. Architecture, in the place-making sense, is tolerated to the extent that it doesn't get in the way. The results can be more or less pretty, and when it is not it is because the forces behind them are not particularly pretty, either.

Aedas pose an important question, without entirely answering it: if businesses and governments want to make cities where almost everything is shaped by efficiencies and processes, what can architects do to make them better?

Rowan Moore

Stay in your very own Frank Lloyd Wright house

The Sheet — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:08:07 +0000

Three of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic houses can be seen on a day trip from Pittsburgh – and there's even the opportunity to spend the night in one of them

Frank Lloyd Wright was coming towards me in his trademark pork-pie hat and opera-goer's cape, frosty eyebrows raised, when I woke up. As a rule I don't dream of world-famous architects – never, so far as I recall, have I dreamed of Frank Gehry or IM Pei – but there were extenuating factors. I'd nodded off over a biography of Wright, reading about how he'd arrive unannounced at a house of his design to see how its owners were treating it. And the house where I lay, the Duncan House, an hour south-east of Pittsburgh, was an actual FLW, one of only half a dozen where Wright-lovers can stay the night.

Left in sole possession, my wife and I struggled that first evening to make ourselves at home. To begin with, we tried going for a walk. The house is at the end of a mile-long private driveway, set amid a 125-acre wooded estate. In October the trees were in their autumn finery, spanning the spectrum from deep red to palest yellow. Climbing a hill, we looked out over the rolling Laurel Highlands, one of Pennsylvania's prettiest landscapes and a favourite getaway for Pittsburghers, before following a trail to a secluded pond. On our return leg, we looked in on the estate's two other houses, both designed by a pupil of Wright's and bearing his influence.

Back at home base, we tried walking around the single-storey house, considering it from every angle: the horizontal bands of bleached mahogany, the gutterless eaves, the stonework of the chimney, and the carport (Wright hated enclosed spaces like garages, attics and basements). Inside the house was a vintage 1950s American kitchen, like the set of Happy Days, but instead of cooking we made a picnic at the living room table. This was our favourite space, the heart of the house with its cathedral roof and fireplace, and the expansive windows that allowed us to sit warmly inside without missing the magnificent foliage. It wasn't until we were ready for bed that we noticed another typical FLW feature – no curtains or blinds on the windows.

So, up at first light, we made the 40-minute drive south through the Laurel Highlands to Fallingwater. Wright built Fallingwater in the 1930s, when he was pushing 70, and such was its impact that he never again lacked for commissions. People have been visiting, photographing and writing about the place ever since but it still has the power to startle at first sight. The family who commissioned Fallingwater, owners of a Pittsburgh department store, anticipated something more conventional: a weekend cabin with a view of the falls. What they got instead was a bravura exercise in modern architecture and engineering – the core of the house resting on boulders with terraces of reinforced concrete cantilevered out over the falls. To their credit, they were content to foot the bill, which, in true Wright style, never ceased to climb.

Seven miles from Fallingwater and now under the ownership of Lord Palumbo, Kentuck Knob is another FLW favourite. Crowning the brow of a hill and shrouded by trees, Kentuck Knob is built around a hexagonal kitchen and its angles just keep getting odder. Wright hated the dark, Victorian houses of his childhood, calling their rooms boxes within boxes; one of his abiding aims was to break down those boxes and blur the line between inside and out. Built for local ice-cream barons, Kentuck Knob achieves these aims with considerable charm. Adding to its appeal, the house and grounds are dotted with modern art – works by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Serra – from Lord Palumbo's collection.

Having toured these two houses, we returned for a second night at the Duncan House and found ourselves looking on "our" FLW with fresh eyes. Now that we'd learned a little about Wright's methods and motives, certain things made more sense: the absence of decoration (Wright abhorred "inferior desecrators"); the narrow gallery leading to the bedrooms (a mere passing-through space, to be minimized as far as possible); the built-in shelving; and the division of the house between living areas (spacious and open) and private spaces (smaller and darker, places to sleep and take shelter rather than for living).

FLW houses try to teach their inhabitants how their paternalistic designer would you to live: together, around the fireplace; in harmony with nature; simply and without clutter. If Americans have largely ignored his lessons, holding on to their garages and basements, preferring to live in bigger and bigger boxes on sub-divided estates, that isn't Wright's fault.

The Duncan House is no Fallingwater. In common with the other five Wright houses where you can stay the night (all in the Midwest), it's a Usonian. Usonians, designed and built in the last decades of Wright's life, were prefabricated houses that could be assembled according to one of a dozen blueprints. They were meant to be affordable, bringing good design within reach of middle-class America. (Though affordable was always a very relative term with Wright.)

The only way you'll ever get to experience Fallingwater is on a guided tour. Staying at Duncan House felt a bit like being able to take a Rembrandt home from the gallery – not a major work, a sketch, but a Rembrandt all the same.
We certainly got to like the place and were sorry to leave – perhaps, if we'd been allowed to stay, we'd have become better people! Lingering on our last morning, I took time to flick through the comments book. In the couple of years since the Duncan House opened, Wright aficionados from all over the world have stayed there, adding an extra, personal facet to their FLW tour. It's not cheap but very few were complaining. 'The dream of a lifetime' wrote more than one.

• The Duncan House, 187 Evergreen Lane, Acme (+1 877 833 7829) costs $425 per night (two night minimum); the house sleeps up to six – extra $50 per night for fourth, fifth and sixth guests. Fallingwater, 1491 Mill Run Road, Mill Run, (fallingwater.org; book tours several months in advance). Kentuck Knob, 723 Kentuck Road, Dunbar (kentuckknob.com; advance bookings recommended). Flights from London to Pittsburgh with various US airlines start at around £340, if booked via kayak.co.uk.

The best architecture of 2011: Jonathan Glancey’s choice

The Sheet — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:06:22 +0000

Frank Gehry completed his first Manhattan skyscraper and Mattel Toys launched Architect Barbie, but it was very much Zaha Hadid's year

Frank Gehry completed his first Manhattan skyscraper, 8 Spruce Street, and it proved to be a powerful and robust affair – swirling and muscular. Meanwhile, Mattel Toys launched Architect Barbie, an incarnation of the doll that wears those black-framed glasses so beloved of practitioners, as well as a dress embroidered with a city skyline. She has a pink case for drawings and a model of a pink Dream House to show clients. Is this what inspired Justin Bieber to announce that he would like to have been an architect?

It was very much Zaha Hadid's year. She won the Stirling prize for the Evelyn Grace Academy school in Brixton, London; attended the opening of her opera house in Guangzhou, China, with its grotto-like auditorium; and completed the Riverside Museum, Glasgow's charismatic new transport museum on the banks of the Clyde.

Hadid has been much influenced by radical 20th-century Russian architects, many of them little known elsewhere. So Frédéric Chaubin's revelatory book, CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, was a highlight of 2011. Just look at that thrilling Georgian Ministry of Highway Construction, a Jenga-like tower of windowed oblongs from the mid-1970s. Such bravura design shows that radical work has continued to emerge from the time of the Russian revolution. Hadid remains its torchbearer.

The architecture world is a poorer place without the Hungarian Imre Makovecz, who crafted haunting, low-budget timber "building beings" in the days of Communist rule, before shaping the glorious Hungarian pavilion at the 1992 Seville Expo. Makovecz strived to create buildings that connected heaven and earth in a world increasingly given over to the slick and the inane.

Greenest: Piers Gough's Maggie's Centre in Nottingham, all playful facades and as green as Robin Hood's tights.

Shiniest: Gehry's New York skyscraper, a gleaming prong of stainless steel.

Reddest: The catchily named ArcelorMittal Orbit, Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's tower for the 2012 Olympics.

Finest: Durham Cathedral, more 1111 than 2011, but recently voted Britain's best building by Guardian readers.

Jonathan Glancey

Canada Water library – review

The Sheet — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:06:19 +0000

Southwark's new library is a bold venture at a time when similar institutions are being shut by the dozen

OMG! It's a library! An absolutely new one, with books in it, too! Aren't such things supposed to be dinosaurs, driven to extinction by the cuts of George Osborne and the inventions of the late Steve Jobs?

Not in the London Borough of Southwark, apparently, where they have decided to keep all 12 of their existing libraries, as well as build this new one. And not, according to its architect, Piers Gough, for whom "books haven't gone away. Libraries still hold these magic realms of invention, realms of ideas. They're places where you're not told what to think; they're also places where you can stay and stop and spend as long as you like."

And so he has designed a celebratory building. On the outside, it is an inverted pyramid, clad in bronzed aluminium, so as to "look civic and grand without being pompous".

Inside, he has placed a big, wooden spiral stair at the centre, which rises from a constrained ground floor up to a bright, expansive top floor ringed with a gallery. Below is mostly cafe; above is where the books are, with staff offices sandwiched unobtrusively between them. "I was keen that people would really walk up," says Gough, "from the noisy downstairs to the quieter, more relaxed place above."

The location is Canada Water, in the old Surrey Commercial Docks, on a big bulge into the Thames that was once so excavated by docks that it was more liquid than land. The land that remained was occupied by wharves and warehouses for the timber trade until, as in the rest of London's docklands, all the business disappeared. Ever since the 1980s, the intention has been to regenerate it, both to bring business and create something like a town centre.

Creating town centres is not that easy, especially in a place where there has never been such a thing, and especially when this is done in the British way, whereby the private sector is nudged and enticed to achieve the thing officially desired by public bodies, which lack the resources and authority to lead and plan. Whatever might be called civic or public has to emerge as a byproduct of property development, at such time and in such a way as it suits the market.

For these reasons, Canada Water is what can most charitably be described as a work in progress. The things that have settled most naturally here are more out-of-town than town-centre uses: a shopping centre with big car parks, a Decathlon shop in a large shed, the print works of the Daily Mail. There is an oblong of water left from the old docks, softened at the edges with environmentally responsible-looking reed beds, and coots and ducks floating about. There are blocks of flats of different vintages, 1960s brutalist, 1980s aspirational, 00s "urban renaissance". A stylish bus and tube station, completed in 1999, long stood here almost alone, awaiting a neighbourhood for it to serve.

The quality most obviously lacking, apart from charm or delight, is coherence. You go from car park to reed bed to tin shed to a wooden bridge redolent of old Holland, without apparent logic. A regeneration plan led by the developers British Land, more ambitious than previous ones, promises to unify these oddments, but even this plan has its strangenesses. A reasonably handsome block of flats, with balconies designed to take advantage of the water view, finds itself parked behind a huge ventilator for the underground such that some of the balconies in fact have a close-up view of large, dusty louvres.

The library is placed next to the tube station – indeed, a new exit rises within the fabric of the library itself – and alongside a new public square, which is not quite ready yet. And at first sight this goldish crystal looks perilously like another of those random gesticulations which are felt to be substitutes for thought or planning in, regeneration projects up and down the country. What sets it apart is that there is actually a sense to its shape.

The best form for a reading room is wide and horizontal, but there was not enough space for this at ground level, squeezed between the tube exit and the waterside. So the reading room is at the top, with the building widening as it ascends to make space for it, with the added benefit that the most important part of the building is placed high up – if not in the clouds, at least sufficiently far from the ground to feel removed and a little dreamy, as a library should.

Raised, it makes occasion for the spiral staircase, which in turn makes the business of going somewhere for a book into a little event or ceremony, rather than a sideways drift such as you might make into a supermarket.

From a practical question – how to put a library on a site too small for it – comes the pleasure of the architecture. Within the ample volume of the reading room, zigzagging shelves create more intimate places in a way almost reminiscent of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

Gough's practice, CZWG, is not often compared with the careful and subtle Aalto, having made its name at the more playful and enjoyable end of 1980s postmodernism – Docklands apartment blocks built around a great cylindrical courtyard in blue-glazed bricks; a house for Janet Street-Porter as raucous as their client's voice; a public lavatory cum flower shop with touches of art nouveau – but then it has not had the chance to do something like a library before. "I am in my sixties, and this is our first big public building," exclaims Gough.

Aalto fans will also be quick to point out that the Canada Water library does not achieve Scandinavian levels of craftsmanship. There's an awkward crunch where a revolving door meets cladding panels, for example, and things don't always align and join up as well as you might want them to. The consultant who placed the radiators and air-conditioning units seems to have set out to do so as clumsily and obtrusively as possible. Budget constraints mean that an auditorium has to rely for its architectural expression on large quantities of maroon paint.

But the important thing about the Canada Water library is that a new public place has been created, where the architecture contributes to and expands the experience of using it. It's worth mentioning that here private/public partnership has had some good effects – CZWG was appointed by British Land which, unlike local authorities, does not have to follow European rules for choosing architects. These rules make it difficult for architects to design something such as a library if they have not done so before, which would have ruled out Gough and CZWG.

Rowan Moore

New Court – review

The Sheet — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:06:49 +0000

Rothschild is one of the world's most august financial institutions, reflected in its discreet yet opulent new City HQ designed by Rem Koolhaas's OMA

The City of London is, in its own special way, surprisingly fond of architecture. You might have thought that niceties of design would get in the way of its relentless contest with other financial centres to be the most fearsome money machine in the world, but no. The rulers of the City permit themselves the incredible luxury, inconceivable in Singapore, Shenzhen or even Canary Wharf, of weighing and deliberating every tweak of its fabric.

There are the historic buildings, the monuments of Wren, Hawksmoor and Lutyens, that are reverentially coddled. There are also the monuments of the masters of our own time, as recognised by the biggest architecture award in the world, the Pritzker prize. There are works by no fewer than five winners of the prize (Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Jean Nouvel, James Stirling and Rem Koolhaas's practice OMA) within the Square Mile. A sixth, Renzo Piano's Shard, makes its presence felt from just outside its boundaries. Such concentrations are hard to find outside places such as Saadiyat Island, the instant cultural district under construction in Abu Dhabi, or the 1980s tea services designed for the Italian company Alessi, by the biggest stars of the time.

The latest addition to the collection, OMA's whitish tower for the financial advisory group Rothschild, has ghosted its way on to the skyline with a surprising degree of discretion. Usually every sneeze of Rem Koolhaas and his team is the object of global fascination by architects and followers of architecture, but this not-small building has been sitting there for some time, its exterior more or less finished, without anyone paying much attention. Now the interior fit-out is also complete, bar a few details.

The discretion is part of Rothschild's corporate personality. As a distinguished 200-year-old institution, it doesn't feel the need to shout. It doesn't put its name on the door, and while it hangs a coat of arms outside, reused from former buildings, this is not very communicative to non-students of heraldry. It is located in a lane of extraordinary narrowness a short distance from the Bank of England, a narrow strip of pitted tarmac that seems one remove from being a cart track. You are supposed just to know that it is there and if you don't, you are not someone who needs to know or whom it needs to know.

You do, however, know that you are in the presence of something with a high degree of self-confidence. From the lane you rise through a steel colonnade to an ample podium of perfect emptiness, the main body of the building overhead, which then opens on to an also ample reception area. You are treated to the luxury of sheer space, precisely delineated with the oblong architecture. The floor is of travertine, also the ceiling, which creates a vertiginous blurring of up and down. Off to one side is an oak-shelved library that will house the Rothschild archive.

Should you be allowed past the security barriers you can then rise through the building, past the gym and cafe, and floors of close-packed desks, to the top levels of meeting rooms, dining rooms and events suites. There is a quasi-Soviet collectivism about the way the place is organised; as in the 1920s Narkomfin housing project in Moscow, the space allotted to individuals is modest, but the shared spaces of exercise, eating and meeting are generous.

In these spaces, an ever more magnificent panorama unfolds. In one direction St Paul's Cathedral sits in mighty repose, placed in the middle of a glass wall as if it were put there for the special benefit of Rothschild. In another there are the Gherkin and other towers of the City, which somehow look more impressive and serene than they do from ground level. These are celestial, Olympian spaces that convey the certainty that this – here, at this elevation, in this part of London – is where Rothschild belongs.

It is not all about sheer pomp and prestige. This is not OMA's way, and running through the building are touches of wit, irony and teasing. There is a play of small and big, which starts with the transition from lane to podium and continues with such things as extra-heavy or extra-light handrails. There are very thick walls ("Like castles and palaces," say OMA) and very thin ones made of glass.

There is also a play with the history of which Rothschild is so proud. In the meeting rooms are ancestral portraits, of well-mounted men riding to hounds and such like, and antique furniture. These are placed, with a touch of the eclecticism of a boutique hotel, alongside glass and aluminium, the latter embossed, in another moment of old/new overlay, with woodgrain patterns from the old oak panelling.

In Richard Rogers's Lloyd's Building a Robert Adam interior, imported from the institution's earlier premises, was recreated. There, it is a touch embarrassing in relation to the high-techery around it. In Rothschild the interplay of oak, oil paint, silk and aluminium is where all the fun is to be had. It delivers the required message that the institution is both ancient and modern. More than that, it is shown to be cultured, sophisticated, self-aware and sufficiently self-assured to allow a little humour. Rothschild advises but doesn't lend, which sets it apart from the casino banks of ill-repute, and its architecture reminds you of this fact.

OMA also likes to squeeze whatever public value there might be in a commission, even out of a discreet private bank. The colonnade along the lane can be used by anyone, in effect widening the street, and on the far side of the podium a view opens up to the churchyard of Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. It is clear that the podium is privately owned space, but the building still offers more than the many City blocks which rise sheer and opaque from the pavement. Next door, for example, one of Foster's least good works has been squelched on to the ground, an assertive, ribbed, over-inflated blob that is oblivious to its surroundings. OMA's building interacts with its neighbours, enriching itself and them in the process.

The City's fondness for architecture has, in fact, its limits. Often it runs as far as licensing a big name to sculpt the external form of a block, but not to such architectural qualities as the play of volumes and scale, the interconnection of outside and in or the creation of three-dimensional settings for the lives that go on in and around a building. Rothschild does all these things, with skill and subtlety. The only shame is that some of the best bits are on the far side of the security barriers. Come the revolution, though, it will make a great collectivist housing scheme.

Rowan Moore

Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 – review

The Sheet — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:08:30 +0000

Royal Academy, London

In the courtyard of the Royal Academy stands a spiral tower, dynamic and asymmetric, telescoping out of itself like a cannon in the moment before recoil, with a diagonal line thrusting from top to bottom. Close inspection reveals tiny human figures added to give it scale: this is a 1:40 model of something which, if built, would have been 400m high. Inside the academy a photomontage shows what its effect would have been on its intended location of St Petersburg. It would have overwhelmed the low-lying city of Peter the Great, like the colossal figure of a worker sometimes used to represent Bolshevism in revolutionary posters. It is a thing of all scales and none, echoing both Bruegel's Babel and bottles in the still lifes that its artist-architect creator liked to paint.

The model is of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, of 1920, a celebration of communism that was intended to outdo the Eiffel Tower but also include huge, crystalline slowly moving blocks hung within its frame, which would house lecture halls, conference rooms and a media centre. It is one of the most famous unbuilt projects in architectural history, an emblem of the fervid decade that followed the Russian Revolution.

There is obvious irony that this project for the affirmation of the new should now be appearing, like a captured rhinoceros in a doge's menagerie, in an institution with both "royal" and "academy" in its name.

It announces two exhibitions inside. There is a small one about the tower, and a larger one, Building the Revolution, which focuses on the structures of the time that were actually built, such as workers' clubs, communal housing, an industrialised bakery, a bus garage, headquarters for Izvestia and other organs of propaganda, and bureaucratic cities for the new administration. There is the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow of 1922, the nearest thing to Tatlin's fantasy actually realised. A tall, tapering cone of steel lattice, it combines creative freedom with a practical function which it is still performing.

The Narkomfin development is there, an experiment in communal housing that resembled a machine-age monastery, now rotted by Russian winters to almost total ruin. Konstantin Melnikov, who eventually proved too brilliantly individual for the regime, is represented by his Rusakov workers' clubs, his own house, and his Gosplan garage. The latter, dominated by a large disc in its elevation, draws on visionary designs from the French revolutionary era, while also evoking the wheels and radiators of motor vehicles. It was a time when Russian architects were realising the dreams of modernism more fully than anyone else, but also felt free to plunder and recombine ideas from the past.

The buildings are represented by two kinds of photograph. One is the big images of the architectural photographer Richard Pare, taken since the fall of communism, radiant but also unsparing in their depiction of the decay that has befallen almost all of them. The other kind are small monochrome images from the 600,000 in the Schusev State Museum of Architecture's archive in Moscow, still attached to the standard forms with which they were filed. Through a brown fog of ageing photographic chemicals you can make out the structures when still new and raw. You are offered a choice of new images of decayed buildings or old images of new buildings. The new-new is not available. The show is prophecy and elegy at once.

The photographs are supported by works of art, mostly drawings and paintings, from the same period, from the Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, by the likes of El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Rodchenko and Malevich. They make the point that architecture and art were closely linked. Architects such as Tatlin were often also artists, while artists produced works whose abstract geometry aspired to resemble buildings. The revolution was not only to be achieved – it also had to be symbolised. The crane would be a tool for magnifying the motions of an artist's hand to an immense scale.

It is a strange idea, both arrogant and naive, that compositions in oil paint might shape cities, and the results could be oxymoronic. Factories were also works of art. Instruments of the collective were also monuments of a single artist's vision. Images of mass production were hand-crafted in studios, and a striking feature of this exhibition is the tactility of the artworks and the basic construction, often in timber, of the buildings. Creative freedom and the dictatorship of the proletariat were joined in a way that could not last.

The exhibition ends with a gloomy room showing Lenin's mausoleum. Its architect, Aleksei Shchusev, was willing to bend with the political wind and so produced an effective symbol of a dubious concept. If the near-deification of Lenin was a corruption of revolutionary principles, the brooding mass of his tomb turned away from the dynamic spirit of the 1920s. In a few years Stalin would, in order to create "art as stunningly simple as the heroism we find today in the Soviet Union", crush this spirit completely under the weight of the classicising style called socialist realism.

As either prophecy or politics, the architecture on show at the Royal Academy largely fails. It served an ideal of communism that fatally ignored its reality. The modern progeny of Tatlin's tower includes the Okhta Centre, a proposed tower for the Russian oil giant Gazprom of similar height – 400m – which, until its planned location was moved, would have had a comparable impact on St Petersburg. Yet this crude pinnacle has none of Tatlin's imaginative brilliance, and celebrates gangster capitalism rather than revolution. Meanwhile, big metal thingies have become a cliche of wannabe cities and expo sites and Anish Kapoor is making another contribution to this pointless genre with his Orbit tower on the London Olympic site. Ninety years after Tatlin it is still in his shadow.

Those buildings that were built are now the subjects of heroic preservation campaigns which stress their value as artworks over their social intent. There was talk, pre-crash, of making Narkomfin into a boutique hotel, and the Red Banner textile factory in St Petersburg may become a cultural centre. And the buildings and paintings of the 1920s are presented to the Academy's bourgeois crowds as an interesting alternative to Degas' ballet dancers.

As art the buildings are indeed wonderful, and for this reason alone the preservation campaigns deserve every success. Whatever attention can be drawn to these works, as the RA is doing, is welcome. Their creators' lack of political realism is also a saving grace, as it makes distance between them and the monstrosities of Soviet government. But their effect is not just as romantic divertissements, and it would not be the same if the architects had put their skills into villas for industrialists as their contemporaries did in Paris and Vienna. They carry the idea that art and design can have a social purpose, which the best of them, such as Melnikov's clubs, actually achieved

Rowan Moore

Military History Museum – review

The Sheet — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:08:28 +0000

Daniel Libeskind's visceral redesign for Dresden's Military History Museum has as striking an effect on the exhibits inside as on the facade itself

"You cannot put German military history into a box," says Daniel Libeskind. No, indeed you can't. He wants, moreover, to achieve a "paradigm shift away from the celebration of wars". And so, in creating a new Military History Museum in an 1870s barracks building in Dresden, he has chosen to make the least box-like thing he can think of – a steel-framed, half-transparent pointy thing – and crash it like a meteorite into the barracks' facade of drill-ground neoclassical symmetry. "It's about catastrophe," he says, and his design makes the point. Here be violence, it says, as plainly as a Las Vegas casino tells you there is gambling inside.

No one who knows the work of Libeskind will be very surprised, as he has always shown faith in the power of acute angles to convey pain (even if, confusingly, he also employs pointy things on shopping malls and museums of quite nice stuff, such as art). But the Dresden museum offers a particularly pure form of the anguished angle and tests its effectiveness to destruction.

Some architects specialise in hotels, some skyscrapers; Daniel Libeskind's niche is ministering to sites of disaster and loss. His first architectural commission, apart from an unrealised apartment block, was the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which strove to represent both the intertwining of the city with its Jewish culture and the tearing of the two apart. He has also completed the Imperial War Museum North in Salford, in the shape of a "shattered globe", and a museum of the painter and Holocaust victim Felix Nussbaum, and was chosen as the masterplanner for the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in New York.

He won the commission to design the Military History Museum a decade ago, when his much acclaimed Jewish Museum was new. The Dresden building, which if you include large parts of it not yet reopened, is the biggest museum in Germany, already had plenty of history by then. Founded in 1897 as an unqualified celebration of armed might, it then went through Nazi and communist variations on the theme until the fall of the Berlin Wall made its message plainly inappropriate and it closed.

Deliberations followed as to what sort of institution it should now be, or if it should exist at all, out of which emerged the idea that it should have an "anthropological" as well as a historical purpose. It should show the human causes and effects of war rather than be a parade of materiel. Deliberations continued after Libeskind won the job: "It takes a long time to get to grips with history," he says. His client was the Bundeswehr, the military, which here had to take on the role of cultural curator.

The outcome is an intensely and minutely considered representation of modern Germany's complicated feelings about war. It is unsparing in its depiction of horrors, including the skull, the front part blown away, of a soldier who shot himself in the mouth. There is a wall of shoes of Holocaust victims. A line of stuffed animals, from an elephant to a goose, at first looks like a cheerful contingent from Noah's ark, until closer inspection reveals such things as a cat being killed in a laboratory to test poison gas, or a sheep, three-legged after it had been used for clearing mines. Sections are called "War and Memory", "War and Music" or "War and Theatre". "War and Games" shows children's toys, including a metal tank found in the rubble of Dresden, melted by the heat of the bombing, the fate of its owner unknown.

Every effort is made to avoid fetishising equipment. A V-2 rocket is in a constricted space such that you can only see it close up, in "fractured" views, as Libeskind puts it, "otherwise it just looks like a big skyscraper". You are shown such things as the drugs given to the pilots of tiny submarines, so that they could withstand the fear of their all-but-suicidal missions.

A jeep blasted in which three German soldiers were seriously injured in Afghanistan is shown alongside voting cards showing the support of chancellors Schröder and Merkel for involvement in the conflict, to make a point about the connection of politics to war. Installations were commissioned from artists, with various degrees of success, to give their interpretations of the themes. At times it gets mawkish, as when the words "love" and "hate" are projected in splatters on the walls, but mostly the displays make good use of telling detail and direct information. They go beyond the obvious point – that war is hell – to unravel its human ramifications.

All this takes place within an exhibition design by HG Merz and Barbara Holzer, which fits within the architecture of Libeskind, which internally consists of jagged, sloping planes thrust into the regular, spacious grid of the old barracks, with voids pierced from one floor to another. The old central staircase, broad enough for battalions to ascend, fragments at its edges into compressed spaces, crevices and fissures winding through concrete geology. You are oppressed and released, disorientated and reorientated.

At times, as happens with this kind of geometry, it gets embarrassed by necessary verticals and horizontals – by lifts, for example. Its energy also dissipates rather too rapidly when you are returned to the world of the right angle, in flanking galleries dedicated to more conventional chronological displays. It gets better the more enmeshed it is with the exhibits and with the old building, where the strange shapes are not spectacles in themselves, but means for affecting your perception of the things on show.

At the top you are discharged into a space about bombed cities, and then on to a platform for viewing Dresden, the fantastical city of rococo and gothic that was splintered like porcelain in two nights of bombing in 1945 (splinters of which are still being stuck back together in the heroic but impossible attempt to recover what was lost). This viewing platform, it turns out, is within the meteorite you saw from the outside and the view can only be seen through its mesh.

The platform is in fact the only thing that happens inside the five-storey-high steel structure, which otherwise contains inaccessible void. This discovery is disappointing, as something so large and conspicuous should surely be more than a gesture. As it is, it resembles an immense statue or redundant cupola on a 19th-century building, something pompous and somewhat empty. It is also irritating, as the panorama would be better enjoyed if it were not from inside the meteorite. It must mean something to put so much metal between you and the view, in this architecture where everything seems to have a meaning, but it's not obvious what. This thing is at once breathtaking, verging on the wonderful, and breathtakingly dumb.

The design's weakness is its belief that sheer shape can speak on its own. There are not enough notes or else too many of the same kind. Too often you find yourself peering at a form or space that is not as fascinating as it ought to be. Sometimes the spaces feel underpopulated by exhibits, as if the architecture had not left them enough room. Perhaps in future decades the steel meteorite will be retro-fitted in such a way that it makes more sense. I hope so, as the rest of the museum – the power of the exhibits, the thoughtfulness of their selection and the more complex and intricate of Libeskind's interior spaces – deserves it.

Rowan Moore

Two Temple Place; University of the Arts London – review

The Sheet — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 23:08:23 +0000

Viscount Astor's stately old HQ – lavish, ornate and stuffed with cultural trophies – is to be opened as a new gallery space

Britain's newest art venue has none of the trappings you usually expect. There are no sheets of planar glass and no crisp white plaster and stainless steel handrails. Its duties of creating the right environmental conditions for artworks are discharged by humidifiers freestanding on the floor, not expensively integrated into the structure. It will open in two weeks with minimal fanfare. It has received no public money and is credited to no architect, at least none since John Loughborough Pearson, who died in 1897. The White Cube it is not.

This is Two Temple Place, once Astor House, a late Victorian building in the style of a miniaturised Tudor mansion. Outside, it is stony and respectable. Inside, it is one of those secret universes, lavish, ornate and slightly crazed, in which London specialises. In its various incarnations, as the Incorporated Accountants' Hall, as the offices of the medical devices company Smith & Nephew, and as a venue for corporate parties, it has never been open to the casual visitor. Now, like Leighton House or Sir John Soane's museum, it is being added to the list of visitable internal curiosities.

Facing the Thames, a little upstream from Somerset House, it was built by the fabulously wealthy 1st Viscount Astor, who emigrated to Britain from America because of fears that his children would be kidnapped. He seems to have suffered from the plutocratic paranoia that now has iris-recognition systems and SAS-trained security at One Hyde Park. One of his homes, Hever Castle, had a drawbridge that was raised every night.

Astor House was built as the office from which he ran his estates. Compressed within its walls is the cultural booty of a man who felt able and entitled to appropriate whatever he wanted. Its mahogany and oak stair rises from a floor, similar to one in Westminster Abbey, in marble, jasper, porphyry and onyx, up towards a gallery ringed by columns of solid ebony. It is encrusted with carving and statues taken randomly from literature, from The Three Musketeers, The Last of the Mohicans, Othello, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII.

Off the gallery is Astor's study, a nest of decorated wood, and a great hall, where he used to conduct his business meetings, with a high, hammer-beam roof in Spanish mahogany, a commanding river view and outbreaks of gilt and bronze. It is panelled in pencil cedar, chosen for its fragrance as well as its grain. And there is more eclectic iconography. There are Pocahontas, Diane de Poitiers, Machiavelli, Ignatius Loyola, Bismarck and a clutch of decapitated queens: Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette and Mary, Queen of Scots. There are nine Arthurian heroines, all looking comely in much the same way. At the east and west ends, large stained-glass windows depict Swiss landscapes at sunrise and sunset.

Big beasts of history and art are captured and mounted as a game hunter might gazelle heads and tiger rugs. Rare timbers and stones are extracted from distant places, and mastered with exacting craftsmanship. It is an extraordinary statement of power, ownership and wealth, although also of dislocation. Astor's greediness for culture feels like an over-eager attempt to root himself. The weird choices put him everywhere and nowhere. Outside, the Tudor manor sits oddly among the office blocks in what property promoters now call "Midtown", the borderlands of the cities of London and Westminster.

Now, thanks to a newer generation of wealth, it is opening up. Richard Hoare, of a leading banking family, bought it for the charitable foundation the Bulldog Trust, so it could earn revenue from hiring it out. But a public use was also sought and it eventually decided to make it a London showcase for the collections of regional museums. The trust is starting, somewhat cautiously, with works from the William Morris gallery in the outer London district of Walthamstow which, if not technically "regional", evidently feels like it from the perspective of the city's centre.

The University of the Arts London, the £200m new campus for six London art colleges including Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, uses the more usual repertoire of contemporary cultural architecture – glass, concrete, plywood and the distressed brickwork of re-purposed industrial relics, rather than onyx, ebony and fragrant cedar. It consists of the 1852 Granary Building, a brick cuboid that was once the organ by which grain from the north was gulped into London, and a new block, long and oblong, behind it.

It stands at the centre of the long-awaited, still-ongoing redevelopment of King's Cross and it is a work of enlightened self-interest. From the developer's point of view, it is a clever way of animating the site, to fill the place with thousands of arts and design students, whose energy, stylishness and looks are somewhat above the national average. From the colleges' point of view, it allows all their departments to be placed under one roof.

The architects Stanton Williams have decided to make a robust, straightforward building that can take the battering art students will give it, but also be a background for whatever they want to put on there – exhibitions, catwalk shows, installation, performance. Down the middle runs a central covered "street", broad and bright, which is intended as a social centre, animated with the help of galleries and stairs. The architects hold back from expressing themselves too much, leaving that to the students.

As of last week the students had not yet taken full command of the building and a highly unscientific poll revealed instead some grumbles about insufficient space, but it is early days. It is possible also that the design is too aloof: greater use of bashable stuff like timber would have been nice, instead of corporate glass, and the building has dead-straight galleries which could usefully have warped and bulged in places, to vary the rhythm of use.

But to do too little with such a place is better than doing too much and it gets the main moves right. It is powerful and direct, in the spirit of the old industrial buildings, but also habitable. To have so much aspiration and making going on in one place is phenomenal and the architecture allows this phenomenon to do its stuff and speak for itself.

Rowan Moore