Posts Tagged Reviews
OMA/Progress – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 8, 2011
An exhaustive survey of the work of Rem Koolhaas's OMA is as intelligent and challenging as the practice itself
Here east meets west, and old meets new, in an intoxicating fusion that assaults the senses. Everywhere you look exotic shapes rise out of the hustle and bustle of the modern city. It is a place of colour and contrasts, of bright lights and glittering glass, of up-to-the-minute technology and ancient wisdom, of chic and stylish fashion, cutting-edge design and exquisite craft, as well as delightful and original gift ideas for the discerning shopper who wants something a little bit different…
It is tempting to write a review of the OMA exhibition at the Barbican as a travelogue, because arrival there is very like entering a foreign city where you are somehow supposed to make sense of a huge and opaque mass of image and information, and of inscrutable objects. In this show, created by the Brussels-based design collective Rotor, there is more stuff – pictures, words, films, things – than anyone could ever absorb, including a 48-hour slideshow that flicks through all 3.5 million images currently stored on OMA's database. Only the exhibition shop, placed at a pivotal point in the show, with desirable objects placed cleanly on tables, offers the security and certainty that comes with buying something. Hah! A vase! I know what that is (even if its shape is based on a concert hall). I'll have that.
In its resistance to comprehension, the show resembles its subject, OMA, or the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the Rotterdam-based architectural practice set up in the 1970s and now an organism too vast and intricate for anyone to know fully, including its leader Rem Koolhaas. I expect other offices – Foster's, say – produce equal or greater quantities of stuff, but they tend to head single-mindedly in the same direction. OMA's interests are many and promiscuous. They don't just design buildings; they also research, publish and speculate, and take on commissions such as redesigning the identity of the European Union, for which kind of work a subsidiary – AMO – was created. Yet a common intelligence runs through it all.
At the press view the thing that Koolhaas really wants me to look at is not the exhibition but a book he has just produced about Japanese architecture of the 1960s. OMA aspires to be a university as well as a design practice. They carry out their own architectural criticism: they once produced a publication revisiting some of their buildings after they had been in use for a while (something professional critics rarely do) and pointing out what did and did not work. Not to the extent, however, that the reader would cease to find them admirable.
An attraction of OMA is that they are less stiff-necked than other practices. They admit mistakes – the exhibition shows a marvellous film of a famous house they designed in Bordeaux seen from the point of view of its housekeeper, who has to lug a vacuum cleaner up a spiral of sharp-edged steps. They try to avoid piety and hypocrisy. They admit that they are subject to the whims of the clients and commercial interests that hire them, but "instead of whining about it, we developed an aesthetic about it". They have a line in self-deprecating humour, and the show features two enigmatic lumps from the firm's archive, reverentially lit as if artworks. "It is unclear to the archivist," says the caption, "whether these are models or just clay leftovers."
Koolhaas once said that "the market economy is considered the final and ultimate logic of not only economic life but also political life and increasingly also of cultural life", not approvingly but as a statement of fact. He and his practice also hold on to the idea that architecture might contribute something to public life, and to experiences that are not pure commodities. Their combination of realism and idealism means that their work is a constant operation of fancy footwork at a global scale, of outsmarting and outmanoeuvring the forces behind their commissions, at the same time that they understand them and harness their energy. They are constantly seeking a route between complicity and impotence.
In the Barbican exhibition their flirtation with the market means that they put the shop – usually treated as an embarrassing but compulsory addendum – in the middle of the show. They have fun with it, curate its contents amusingly and honour it with an impressive space. But they also open up a public route through the galleries through which, free of charge, you can pass, and see some of the exhibits. The show plays games with value, papering the walls with print-outs and the contents of office wastepaper baskets, while fully aware that the drawings and models of famous architects are now precious collectibles.
At a slightly larger scale their play of power and freedom is facing its greatest test with their Beijing headquarters for China Central Television, or CCTV, which is due to open next year. This is described as "the second largest building in the world", though by what measurement I don't quite know, and it houses and celebrates an organisation which, as the main communications arms of a dictatorship, is not exactly benign. OMA's argument is that it is better to engage with such things than ignore them, and their astounding-looking building contains such would-be positives as a public route through the interior. The as yet unanswered question is whether this will be enough to change CCTV in any significant way, or whether it will only add a sheen of sophistication to their operations.
Koolhaas, and OMA, are happiest when poised between different points of a paradox or an opposition. They work with authority, but their ethos is freedom. They are collaborative, and their name implies a kind of anonymity, but Koolhaas is the most distinctive and famous individual in his business, and everything in OMA emanates from him. The scale and global spread of their projects, and of their intellectual ambitions, is enormous, but they have a sort of modesty about what architects can actually achieve.
They continually yearn to be something more than architects – politicians, economists, ecologists, philosophers – but they always end up doing buildings, which is what they are best at. For all their voracious fascination with almost everything, especially things big, challenging and new, they can still produce habitable structures, like CCTV and like the simple but subtle Maggie's cancer centre in Gartnavel, Glasgow which opened last Monday. These buildings would be different, however, without the curiosity and research.
The exhibition shows it all: the searching, the proclamations, mishaps and follies, the achievements, the things of beauty and the detritus. It does not present, as some architecture exhibitions do, a series of projects to be contemplated and understood. Architecture is rather seen sidelong. A problem of architectural exhibitions is that their subject is the background of life, but must become foreground for the purposes of a show. In Rotor's installation it is still background, of a particularly vital kind.
It starts opaque and baffling, but hard work is rewarded by pleasure. It eventually unfolds into a display of fierce energy and intelligence. Just don't expect to understand or even see it all. Nobody will, not even the people who made it.
Marlowe theatre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Fine auditorium, great acoustics, big glass foyer… Canterbury's new Marlowe theatre ticks all the boxes, but where's the drama?
Once, theatre buildings were about make-up, mask and costume. They put opaque layers of ornament between street and stage, through which the paying customer would be ceremoniously conducted. They were solid, stone or of lighter stuff such as stucco made to look like stone. Now, and for at least the past 40 years, exposure is the standard device of new theatres. The big glass foyer wall has taken the place of the Corinthian portico and the spectacle of theatregoers winding up stairs in their anxious smart-casual dress combinations has taken the place of carved putti and gilt. It is one of those changes in architecture which, without being fully debated or discussed, just happens.
The Marlowe theatre in Canterbury is designed by the architect Keith Williams, author of the Unicorn children's theatre in London, and a team of consultants, including the theatre experts Charcoalblue. Being a decent, considered building in the modern tradition, it has a big glass wall. It encloses a foyer wrapped around a composition of volumes that rises towards a fly tower which, in this generally restrained building's gothic moment, ends in a point.
The glass wall allows external spaces – a piazza, a terrace facing the drowsy river Stour – to flow into the internal. It enables people to see, as they ascend a quietly ceremonial stair, a view unfold of the city, its rooftops and, eventually, its cathedral and some surrounding countryside. As they do so, they become seen, crowd as decoration, in the modern way.
Then, unless they are visiting a smaller experimental studio, they enter the auditorium, a 1,200-seater horseshoe form, designed to receive visiting productions of drama, opera (Glyndebourne will tour here), concerts, dance and musicals. Here, the last century has found it hard to improve fundamentally on the century before, and the shape and concept is essentially that of Frank Matcham's many theatres at the turn of the 19th century. It is high and enclosing, with curving balconies that keep the audience reasonably close to the actors and encourage a rapport between them. It is warm-hued, red-orange and dark brown. The main contributions of modernity are the now extensive sciences of acoustics, stage lighting and air handling, which achieve a little more comfort than Victorian theatres, and arguably better sound, or at least the removal of the anxiety at the design stage that these crucial aspects won't work.
Modernity also brings abstract rather than figurative decoration. At the Marlowe this means many vertical strips of timber, in irregular rhythms that are good for the sound, and a zigzagging prismatic shape in the ceiling which conceals equipment and also helps the sound. It has been decided to place some of the audience in slips lining the side walls, both because these are seen as more "democratic" versions of boxes and because "having faces on the side rather than building materials really helps the performer". The overall effect is unified in a way not always achieved in new auditoriums; designed as they are by an army of consultants (on structure, heating and ventilating, acoustics, staging and audience experience), the parts can overwhelm the whole.
The Marlowe follows closely on another cultural construction in an ancient south-eastern city, the Firstsite visual arts centre in Colchester, by Rafael Viñoly, and is its opposite. Colchester went for dazzle; Canterbury went for getting the job done. The Marlowe unified the factions on its city council; Firstsite became an instrument of war between Tories and Liberal Democrats. Firstsite was funded by the Arts Council; the Marlowe, coming along just after the Olympics had hoovered up all spare lottery cash, received no such blessing. The visual arts centre had a disastrous construction history, leading to overruns of cost and time, while the theatre kept to its £25.6m total project budget. It ended up cheaper than Firstsite, even though the scale and technical demands of theatres usually make them expensive.
The Marlowe's smoother ride is partly due to the fact that it was already a well-supported institution, having run since the 1980s in a converted cinema which was demolished to make way for the new building. As the long rake of the cinema made it a poor theatre, and its limited seating precluded many touring shows, the case for the new building was relatively simple and uncontroversial. It may have helped that it was spared the giddiness that sometimes seems to go with Arts Council largesse.
It is also less glamorous than Firstsite's glittering gold curves. It prompts adjectives – sensible, thoughtful, competent – about which a "but" hovers: faint praise in anticipation of a put-down. The praise should not in fact be faint as its qualities and achievements are both fundamental and rare, but there is a but. It does all the right things – effective auditorium, open foyers, considered relationship to the historic city – without quite cohering. There's a lack of touch in the way the dark auditorium, the bright glassy foyers and the old streets of brick and tile come together. There is too much of the office block in the detail of the building, not enough of the theatrical.
The recent Lyric theatre in Belfast manages these transitions better, in part because it is follows less devotedly the idea of the transparent foyer. It is great to see people, and for them to see out, but it is no bad thing to frame and orchestrate their appearances and disappearances. It's part of what theatre is about, whereas a great glass wall tends more to widescreen TV.
The alternation of silly and sensible, as between Colchester and Canterbury, is getting familiar. It was there in the crazed plan for razing and rebuilding the Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, and the eventual realisation of a much more careful part-renovation. Given the choice, it is clearly good to have a building that does its job, as the Marlowe does, with intelligence and care in its design, and without horrible traumas in the making of it. But it would be nice if this were not the only choice, if building could not only work, but also sing.
Marlowe theatre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Fine auditorium, great acoustics, big glass foyer… Canterbury's new Marlowe theatre ticks all the boxes, but where's the drama?
Once, theatre buildings were about make-up, mask and costume. They put opaque layers of ornament between street and stage, through which the paying customer would be ceremoniously conducted. They were solid, stone or of lighter stuff such as stucco made to look like stone. Now, and for at least the past 40 years, exposure is the standard device of new theatres. The big glass foyer wall has taken the place of the Corinthian portico and the spectacle of theatregoers winding up stairs in their anxious smart-casual dress combinations has taken the place of carved putti and gilt. It is one of those changes in architecture which, without being fully debated or discussed, just happens.
The Marlowe theatre in Canterbury is designed by the architect Keith Williams, author of the Unicorn children's theatre in London, and a team of consultants, including the theatre experts Charcoalblue. Being a decent, considered building in the modern tradition, it has a big glass wall. It encloses a foyer wrapped around a composition of volumes that rises towards a fly tower which, in this generally restrained building's gothic moment, ends in a point.
The glass wall allows external spaces – a piazza, a terrace facing the drowsy river Stour – to flow into the internal. It enables people to see, as they ascend a quietly ceremonial stair, a view unfold of the city, its rooftops and, eventually, its cathedral and some surrounding countryside. As they do so, they become seen, crowd as decoration, in the modern way.
Then, unless they are visiting a smaller experimental studio, they enter the auditorium, a 1,200-seater horseshoe form, designed to receive visiting productions of drama, opera (Glyndebourne will tour here), concerts, dance and musicals. Here, the last century has found it hard to improve fundamentally on the century before, and the shape and concept is essentially that of Frank Matcham's many theatres at the turn of the 19th century. It is high and enclosing, with curving balconies that keep the audience reasonably close to the actors and encourage a rapport between them. It is warm-hued, red-orange and dark brown. The main contributions of modernity are the now extensive sciences of acoustics, stage lighting and air handling, which achieve a little more comfort than Victorian theatres, and arguably better sound, or at least the removal of the anxiety at the design stage that these crucial aspects won't work.
Modernity also brings abstract rather than figurative decoration. At the Marlowe this means many vertical strips of timber, in irregular rhythms that are good for the sound, and a zigzagging prismatic shape in the ceiling which conceals equipment and also helps the sound. It has been decided to place some of the audience in slips lining the side walls, both because these are seen as more "democratic" versions of boxes and because "having faces on the side rather than building materials really helps the performer". The overall effect is unified in a way not always achieved in new auditoriums; designed as they are by an army of consultants (on structure, heating and ventilating, acoustics, staging and audience experience), the parts can overwhelm the whole.
The Marlowe follows closely on another cultural construction in an ancient south-eastern city, the Firstsite visual arts centre in Colchester, by Rafael Viñoly, and is its opposite. Colchester went for dazzle; Canterbury went for getting the job done. The Marlowe unified the factions on its city council; Firstsite became an instrument of war between Tories and Liberal Democrats. Firstsite was funded by the Arts Council; the Marlowe, coming along just after the Olympics had hoovered up all spare lottery cash, received no such blessing. The visual arts centre had a disastrous construction history, leading to overruns of cost and time, while the theatre kept to its £25.6m total project budget. It ended up cheaper than Firstsite, even though the scale and technical demands of theatres usually make them expensive.
The Marlowe's smoother ride is partly due to the fact that it was already a well-supported institution, having run since the 1980s in a converted cinema which was demolished to make way for the new building. As the long rake of the cinema made it a poor theatre, and its limited seating precluded many touring shows, the case for the new building was relatively simple and uncontroversial. It may have helped that it was spared the giddiness that sometimes seems to go with Arts Council largesse.
It is also less glamorous than Firstsite's glittering gold curves. It prompts adjectives – sensible, thoughtful, competent – about which a "but" hovers: faint praise in anticipation of a put-down. The praise should not in fact be faint as its qualities and achievements are both fundamental and rare, but there is a but. It does all the right things – effective auditorium, open foyers, considered relationship to the historic city – without quite cohering. There's a lack of touch in the way the dark auditorium, the bright glassy foyers and the old streets of brick and tile come together. There is too much of the office block in the detail of the building, not enough of the theatrical.
The recent Lyric theatre in Belfast manages these transitions better, in part because it is follows less devotedly the idea of the transparent foyer. It is great to see people, and for them to see out, but it is no bad thing to frame and orchestrate their appearances and disappearances. It's part of what theatre is about, whereas a great glass wall tends more to widescreen TV.
The alternation of silly and sensible, as between Colchester and Canterbury, is getting familiar. It was there in the crazed plan for razing and rebuilding the Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, and the eventual realisation of a much more careful part-renovation. Given the choice, it is clearly good to have a building that does its job, as the Marlowe does, with intelligence and care in its design, and without horrible traumas in the making of it. But it would be nice if this were not the only choice, if building could not only work, but also sing.
All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities by Michael Sorkin – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 24, 2011
The thoughts of America's most outspoken architect
Michael Sorkin is an American architect, a professor of architecture at City College in New York and easily one of the best architecture critics around. His collection of Village Voice columns, Exquisite Corpse (a title taken from the surrealists), which was published in 1991, confirmed Robert Hughes's opinion that "he is unique in America – brave, principled, highly informed and fiercely funny".
With All Over the Map, a collection of articles from the Architectural Record, Sorkin continues to focus on New York but, as ever, his critical thinking has wider implications. His pieces often start with an arresting, polemical opening ("All architecture is political"), to be followed by a tangential wander around a topic before a more focused two-paragraph summation and an equally strong final sentence ("The only answer to terror is an excess of democracy", "Good cities are a bulwark"). Sorkin is a flâneur with a sense of public purpose.
The book begins in 2001 with the destruction of the World Trade Center and ends with his own architectural manifesto – one that owes a great debt to Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He argues for sustainable, bounded, polycentric and diverse cities, and is most interested, as someone who has long specialised in city planning, on "work at a scale that can genuinely be judged for its public arrangements and effects" rather than on individual buildings.
Sorkin argues convincingly that the Ground Zero site in Lower Manhtattan should be open, public space that encourages "peaceable assembly" (with its first amendment echoes) as its most important activity – something in short supply there. (He is horrified that Manhattan has become the world's largest gated community.) He rails against Larry Silverstein, the "philistine leaseholder", and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. When Daniel Libeskind, who is now masterplanning the site, first produced his design for the so-called Freedom Tower, Sorkin wrote that "with its bellicose iconography of strength, its giganticism, and its emphasis on heroism – [it] seems to commemorate victory". The One World Trade Center tower, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's skyscraper, is due to open in 2013: Sorkin's criticism still pertains.
He is undistracted by the false debate about which was the best design in the Ground Zero competition, questioning the very idea that there must be buildings to replace those lost and looking at the wider context of the ecology of Lower Manhattan and beyond. "We do not hallow this ground simply by filling it with buildings," he writes. It is "disaster triumphalised", and he asks "why must the world's tallest office building be built on this hallowed ground?" He dismisses Libeskind's "treacly recitations of his immigrant sagas" and is disgusted by a fashion piece that compares the eyewear of the design competition finalists. "Never was vision so conflated with sight or sore eyes," he writes scathingly.
All Over the Map seeks to redress what Sorkin calls the "crisis in the public realm" from "car bombs in Kabul to CCTV cameras in London, from defensive 'street furniture' in Manhattan to the rampant privatisation of everything" and especially urban sprawl. I'm not so sure that sprawl is, as he claims, America's special contribution to urbanism, but it's easy to agree with his ringing conclusion: "Sprawl is unsustainable. Cities are the cure."
Sorkin doesn't pull punches – he writes a devastating obituary of architect Philip Johnson, a bête noire, whose body of work is merely "mediocre" and who was "clarifyingly emblematic of everything revolting about architectural culture, from his long love of the Nazis and his unspeakable anti-semitism, to his club-house conduct of architectural patronage ... his fey irony, his upper-crust superficiality ... Basta! Good riddance!".
He laments the decline in the standards of the architect Rem Koolhaas, demonstrated especially in his Prada buildings – how "Rem becomes Rem©", as he puts it. Koolhaas's non-committal view of the city, he argues, is often nothing more than "a series of laminations that serve its shopping subjects by smoothing the flow of traffic". (Though perhaps Sorkin shouldn't shout too loudly about these capitulations to the market – his own studio's Seven Star Hotel project in Tianjin, China, appears little different.) A chapter entitled "Entering the Building" is an Orwellian satirical riff on security, crowning Sorkin's belief that "we are moving toward a national security city, with its architecture of manufactured fear". The final directive is a bitter "Have a nice day."
Sorkin repeatedly urges us not to be blinded by form. "Halliburton headquarters (or Saddam's palazzi) may be gorgeous," he writes, "but that isn't exactly the point." As he says in a chapter entitled "Advice to Critics", "Style ... often conceals more than it expresses." His most important admonition, however, is never to be "a conduit for someone else's delusions" – something no one could ever accuse him of being.
Firstsite – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 17, 2011
Colchester
I'm puzzled. I am standing in Firstsite, a new building in Colchester, designed by a celebrated architect, and achieved mostly with public money, plus a certain amount of blood, sweat and tears. Its purpose is to display and communicate visual art, and educate about it, yet the more I look, the more it seems designed to make it unusually difficult to mount an exhibition.
A great wall, which might be a nice place to put pictures, not only curves but also slopes outwards as it rises. Other gallery walls also curve or are made of glass. Some spaces are very high, to no purpose. On the rare occasions when a plain, blank piece of wall presents itself, it usually gets punctured by doors. Firstsite will show temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, and say that "art practice has changed so much in recent years; artists are creating work in so many different media", so the idea seems to be that flat surfaces for fuddy-duddy paintings would not be needed as much and there would be installations and sculptures instead. Except the slope of the walls narrows the space at ground level, precisely where you would most want room to circulate around large objects. Oh well, perhaps they can project some video pieces. Or would, if a profusion of windows at many levels did not make much of it almost impossible to black out.
The art gallery that is tough on art is not a wholly new experience. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim in New York demands that you view art from a continuously sloping, curving and none-too-wide ramp. Zaha Hadid's Maxxi in Rome has its share of tricky angles and hard-to-fill spaces. But both these museums have a splendour and conviction which might, and do, inspire curators to rise to the creative challenge of animating the spaces. Firstsite's curves and slopes and variegated volumes have a certain intrigue, but it's hard to see them working like the Guggenheim, not least because Colchester is neither New York nor Rome, and so will find it hard to mount the big-budget productions that could transform these spaces. From time to time, curators will find interesting things to do with a slope or a curve. Their problem will be that the building requires that they do it every time.
My puzzlement is a cousin of a mystification prompted by the extraordinary success of its architect, Rafael Viñoly, especially in this country, over the last decade. He has masterplanned the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter in Oxford, the largest single building project the university has undertaken, plus the design of the Mathematical Institute.
He has created the masterplan for the eternally deferred development around Battersea power station and he seduced Peter Rees, chief planner of the City of London, into enthusiastic support for his "Walkie Talkie" skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street, which is now under construction. He has designed Curve, a theatre in Leicester, and Firstsite, and was commissioned to produce an unrealised plan for the South Bank.
This impressive portfolio – more than Zaha Hadid or David Chipperfield, much more than the perennially shunned Frank Gehry has achieved over here – suggests a truly exceptional talent or great powers of organisation and delivery. If you speak to his clients, a tone of awe comes into their voices, as if they are truly privileged to have secured his services, and it is their honour and delight to clear up such technical glitches as have accompanied his projects. The RIBA's awards panel called Curve "genuinely iconic… a new level of ambition in theatre design" and his practice has been called "blazingly successful". Yet, although he has flair, skill and energy, and an international array of completed works, I don't quite understand the extent of his popularity with commercial and cultural clients.
Viñoly was born in Uruguay, then built a successful practice in Argentina in the 1970s, before moving to New York, where he built up a portfolio of substantial, well-received projects. His big break came with the Tokyo International Forum, a $1.5bn complex of auditoriums and exhibitions, completed in 1997. He also led the team chosen to masterplan the rebuilding of Ground Zero, until Governor Pataki overruled his advisory committee and chose Daniel Libeskind instead. It was probably a job it was good not to win.
He is charming and charismatic, and a talented musician whose Steingraeber und Söhne, one of several grand pianos he owns, sits prominently in his New York office. His homepage opens with a film of a magical hand producing a fluent sketch of a tower, to reinforce his creative aura. He makes no claim, as some architects do, that his practice is about teamwork: he is the one and only designer of his buildings. He passionately advocates the importance of spending an extra "20-25%" over a basic building budget to achieve good architecture: "25% is what you need… people don't understand how important good architecture is."
His projects have had blips, although precise responsibility for these, as always in building projects, is a complex subject. Curve cost £61m against an original budget of £26m, opened late, and was roundly condemned as poor value for money by the Audit Commission. Viñoly was sued by the Kimmel Centre in Philadelphia over cost overruns and delays, and by the Boston Convention and Exhibition Centre over technical defects, both cases being settled out of court.
At Battersea, he proposed a 1,000ft-high glass funnel, claiming that it was fundamental to achieving a zero-carbon development, when in fact it would have required an immense amount of energy to build, and taken decades to get payback.
In Colchester, the complexity of Firstsite's curves and angles proved too much for its contractor to handle. Building work ground to a halt, creating an embarrassment to the then Tory-run borough council. The Liberal Democrats, with the help of pictures of the half-finished shell on their election literature, then won control of the council. They now say that, "with realigned baselines", the project is on time and budget, which means that it has cost £28m against an original target of £18m and taken five years to build.
There is a pattern to his projects. They have whoosh and sparkle and make direct appeal to the glitter-loving magpie inside us. The exterior of Firstsite is a long, gold-clad crescent, which has inevitably had it nicknamed "the golden banana". When asked to explain his choice of colour, Viñoly shrugs winningly and says: "Why not?" And it is no bad thing if the first view of a building cheers you up.
He also aims to achieve what he calls "the idea that justifies the extra 25%". At Firstsite, this idea is his decision to relocate the building away from the smaller plot set by the brief, so that it could spread over the site and enable interconnection between the education, exhibition and other functions of the building. With the Walkie Talkie, the idea is to bulge outwards at the top – although the alleged beauty of the resulting shape eludes me – so as to maximise floor space where it is most valuable.
But the closer you look at his projects, the less sense they tend to make. At Oxford, he chose a radiating plan of straight avenues, like Parisian boulevards, which have nothing much to do with the existing patterns of the city and the university. At Firstsite, the galleries feel like leftover spaces in a conversion of an existing building, which is quite an achievement when it is a single-storey new structure on an open plot. These designs typify what another architect calls "the view from 30,000ft", by which glamorous gesture triumphs over detail.
This article might seem unduly personal, about an architect who is very far from being the worst. The reason for writing it is not any animus against Viñoly, but for what his rise reveals about the culture of recent British architecture. There has been too much faith in the idea of "iconic" or "world-class" architecture and too much fascination with the big name that will excite funders into giving money, or planners into granting planning permission and too little with the things, such as vertical walls in a gallery, that actually make spaces successful. The result is Firstsite, whose slightly grating name now makes sense: great at first sight, but then less so.
The Art-Architecture complex by Hal Foster – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 17, 2011
Is it a good idea if architects start seeing themselves as artists? Rowan Moore salutes a refreshingly rigorous argument
Ours is a time when art looks more and more like architecture, and architecture looks quite like art. Now rising at the 2012 Olympic Park is the Orbit, a pile of steel composed by the artist Anish Kapoor, which has things like lifts and stairs, serious engineering, and the scale of a building. Olafur Eliasson has just finished a spectacular glass wrapping to the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik which has attracted a lot more attention than the parts by the actual architects of the project, Henning Larsen.
The Serpentine Gallery in London, a place dedicated to visual art, presents an annual pavilion, designed by an architect, as if it were the work of an artist, which is then sold to collectors. Architects themselves profess to be inspired, with varying degrees of credibility, by the likes of the American artist James Turrell. "Minimalism" has turned from an artistic movement to an architectural style to an interior design option. Office towers purport to be "sculptural", or else use tricks of perception borrowed from conceptual art. This co-mingling is the subject of The Art-Architecture Complex and, according to the book's author Hal Foster, it is "now a primary site of image-making and space-shaping in our cultural economy". As the half-sinister title suggests, with its echoes of Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex, and the suggestion of complexes in the psychological sense, the merging of art and architecture is not necessarily a good thing. It can become, suggests Foster, a means of blurring our consciousness, a new opiate of the people supplied by corporations and governments as they use "iconic" artworks and buildings to sell cities and property to investors.
He starts by taking us through major architectural movements of the last half-century, including the way pop art influenced both postmodernism and what became the hi-tech architecture of Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, which then led to a "global style" of steel and glass, more or less the same everywhere. In the case of Rogers, this global style takes the form of "pop civics" – law courts and assembly buildings and our beloved Millennium Dome, which profess accessibility and public engagement. In the case of Renzo Piano the result is "light modernity": elegant, refined structures that might be a Hermès store in Tokyo or a cultural centre in New Caledonia.
Foster describes the influence of Russian suprematist and constructivist art on Zaha Hadid, and the effect of conceptual art on the Americans Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the creators of New York's High Line park. Also, the use of both minimalism and pop by the Swiss Herzog & de Meuron, creators of Tate Modern and the Beijing Bird's Nest stadium. He then examines the question from the other side, looking at the spaces and constructions of artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Irwin and (especially) Richard Serra, before concluding with an extensive interview with Serra.
For him the stuggle is between the "imagistic" (bad) and "embodiment and emplacement" (good), or between "stunned subjectivity and arrested sociality supported by spectacle" and "sensuous particularity of experience in the here-and-now". One supports our sense of who we are, in relation to ourselves and other people; the other is a ruse of globalised capitalism to induce numb passivity, "in the guise of our activation". This is performed through something called the "experience economy", a modern version of the ancient Roman panem et circenses, only without the bread. All pretence that the cultural is separate from the economic, says Foster, is finished.
Of course, one of the features of building-sized artworks, and of artistic buildings, is that they require a lot of money to make, which implies a compelling economic argument to pay for them. (Hal Foster, a native of Seattle, and now a professor at Princeton, was a classmate of Bill Gates, which may or may not give him special insight into big money.) All the architects he describes succumb, one way or another, to the curse of the imagistic, as do many of the artists. Richard Serra emerges as a hero of the embodied and emplaced, with his large, physical sculptures where you can see the marks of their making, and which require you to walk round and into them.
There are, nevertheless, consolations: Foster is appreciative of, for example, "the mixed condition" in the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, by which he means their combinations of art, video and architecture, and of the new park of the High Line with the old viaduct on which it is formed. Despite worrying that they "might be a front for capitalist modernity", he sees the possibility that they might "not simply smoothen".
As an architecture writer reading Foster, who comes from the direction of art theory, I find it refreshing to encounter a degree of intellectual rigour (if also, sometimes, opacity) you don't find too often on my side of the fence. Indeed, it requires a certain gentleness on his part, when dealing with the artistic pretentions of architects, to stop them collapsing too quickly under his probing. On the other hand, he sometimes treats buildings too much as artworks – as things to be looked at and walked around, that stand or fall by their inherent conceptual strength – rather than as things of use, to be inhabited, which are enmeshed in function and finance.
I'd also question his polarity: is image always such a bad thing, and can it in any case be avoided? But his basic premise is compelling – and he uses it to powerful effect – to reveal the gap between the reported effects of buildings and art pieces, and their actual ones.
All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities by Michael Sorkin – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 27, 2011
America's most invigorating writer on architecture is at his best when defending the importance of uncompromised public space
Michael Sorkin has long been America's most invigorating writer on architecture. His preferred medium is the medium-sized article, journalistic not academic, and his standpoint that of an enraged but forever hopeful liberal, rooted in the dense, diverse streets of lower Manhattan. His targets are the corporate powers that, as he sees it, would crush the freedoms that make cities – especially his own – what they are. Also, or more so, the architects who go along with such powers, and obligingly ornament their monuments and instruments with distracting shapes. Also the critics who applaud the architects who dress the works that crush the freedoms.
All Over the Map is a collection of his writings from the first decade of this century, and several pieces reveal his fine line in satirical contempt and bleak humour. In "Entering the Building", he riffs a 62-point hallucination of security measures gone mad – "allow the Sniffer-Dog (green camouflage uniform) to sniff you wherever he or she pleases" – which, needless to say, is not so far from a possible reality.
The antihero who helps Sorkin to define himself is the late Philip Johnson, the godfather (in the Marlon Brando sense) of American architecture from the 1930s until his death aged 98 in 2005. Early in his career Sorkin outed Johnson as a committed Nazi sympathiser considerably less repentant than he ought to be, as well as a cynical player of power games, which latter characteristic Johnson himself did not try too hard to hide.
There is a note of regret when Johnson's death, in the time span of this book, obliges him to write "My Last Philippic". Except it isn't: Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh becomes a pro-Nazi president in 1940, inspires Sorkin to imagine Johnson embracing the regime, and designing for it remote themed towns for black people and Jews. The features of "New Plantation, Alabama", privately called "Coontown" by Johnson, included the "'Tar Baby Caryatids' which held up the front porch of 'De Gen'ral Sto' on Main Street".
Sorkin's first book of essays, Exquisite Corpse, appeared 20 years ago, and as he now wryly notes: "My introduction bid a stirring farewell to critical writing, promising that I'd devote myself exclusively to architectural practice henceforth." He couldn't stay away, but his pursuit of work as an architect makes his latest book more complicated. Exquisite Corpse had the greater clarity and certainty of someone less enmeshed. In All Over the Map he struggles with the compromises that go with trying to get work from the same political-economic complex that he likes to attack. He flies a lot, which is not very ecological, and accepts commissions in China, which is not a very liberal place.
He can also be a lot less fun and agile when he tries to say what he thinks is good architecture. In praising one of his heroes he talks of "closely identifying the prosody of detail and organisation of building to clear social and environmental agendas". There must be a better way of saying it. For readers unversed in current architectural jargon, appreciation of this book requires some judicious skipping over the muddier parts.
His own designs, featured in the book as drawings rather than completed buildings, don't completely convince that they will unlock the answers to the social issues he raises. He is too much in love with form, favouring grandiose, quasi-natural shapes, like rock formations. There seems no guarantee that they would not end up as the same gross sculptures that you get in Dubai, and which Sorkin excoriates.
The most persistent theme is the architectural response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, which happened in Sorkin's neighbourhood, early in the time span of All Over the Map. He combines his usual astute analysis of the politics with his own ideas of what might be built there – "A World Peace Dome" for example. These, it seems to me, contribute to the extremity of the debate that took place at Ground Zero, between vision and commerce, which helped make it inevitable that commerce would win.
Then again, he comes up with real eloquence and precision in defending his dearest subject, the importance of true, uncompromised public space. He defines essential freedoms – of assembly, access, and of "use and expression" – together with the importance of the "stimulating accident". This pretty much nails what we want from the open places of our cities.
Park Hill estate, Sheffield – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 20, 2011
This refreshing renovation promises to bathe the 'streets in the sky' in a bold new light – but at what cost to council tenants?
When English Heritage decided, in 1998, to make the 1,000-flat Park Hill estate in Sheffield the largest listed building in Europe, it seemed to many a monumental joke. Or else a case of wonkery gone mad, of tweed-clad boffins so immersed in their criteria and research that they could not take the commonsense view that the place was a "drab, grey, dilapidated thing", as a leading Sheffield city councillor once put it.
Now the first parts of the first phase of its makeover by the Mancunian developers Urban Splash, to whom the nounjective "hipster" tends to attach itself, is nearly complete. Its northern blocks are sealed from the elements, and show flats are furnished with jaunty, funky, upbeat, witty interiors. The estate's most famous graffito – "I love you will u marry me", sprayed on a high bridge – has been memorialised in neon. The redevelopment has only just got this far, having barely scraped through the credit crunch, but Park Hill has not been doused in so much optimism since its opening in 1961, when grainy TV footage commemorated the delight of steel workers and their families at having central heating and indoor baths.
"Hate" and "Love" are tattooed into Park Hill, as they were on to Robert Mitchum's serial-killer knuckles in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter. For the many who call it a "jail", there are many who love it, albeit for differing reasons. Architectural buffs cite its "innovative" design, by the twentysomething architects Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn, of Sheffield city council's architects' department. They like the fact that the (then big) idea of "streets in the sky" – long walkways wide enough for milk floats – was realised more completely and successfully at Park Hill than anywhere else.
The early residents were thrilled more by the plumbing than the bold concrete exterior and by the walkways, which meant they could get from one end to the other without getting wet. People now remember the community spirit of Park Hill's first two decades, before the devastation of the steel industry and council housing policies that turned it into a sink estate. There are also the views, from its perch above Sheffield, of the city draped over the fringes of the Peaks. The Park Hill boosters like to quote a woman who said: "You think I live in council housing. I've got a penthouse."
The architects of the restoration, Hawkins/Brown and Egret West, say: "Every time you go there you discover something intelligent." There are clever things about the way the estate adapts to its hilly landscape. The roof line is level but the ground floor varies with the terrain, such that the blocks vary in height from four to 13 storeys, and the streets in the sky at some point connect with the ground. Apartments interlock and overlap in three dimensions, so that each has two aspects.
The power of Park Hill is a combination of all these things. It lies in its unrepeatable, crazy-heroic size, and the romantic force of its geological scale and cliff-like flanks. It is the idea that council housing could be as grand as a castle or stately home. It is this, combined with thoughtfulness and intimacy – evident in well-placed balconies and the plans of flats – and with the fact that it seems that really, truly, there was a sense of community here.
The question is whether whatever is important about Park Hill will remain after its doing-up, which is both drastic and pernickety. On the one hand, everything has been removed except the concrete frame. On the other, that concrete was restored in 5,500 places, following debates between English Heritage and Urban Splash. Pursuing principles once proposed by William Morris for the repair of ancient stone churches, the mends are made such that you can see them, but not too easily.
In order to sell flats to people who might not like the idea of council estates, the developers wanted what the architects call "shimmer". So the brick infill panels of the old building, in shades of plum and ochre, were not afforded the same respect as the precious concrete, but were replaced by shiny aluminium panels (guaranteed against fading) in red, orange and yellow.
The cleverly planned, well-dimensioned flats have been reinstated, but with bigger windows and greater openness than before. The streets in the sky are back and now overlooked with windows from the flats, to make them more sociable. Access is controlled and there will be concierges: it will be gated, to put it negatively, or, if you prefer, have the degree of security you would find in a Parisian apartment block.
At the bottom of the blocks will be workshops and glass-clad shops, to mix up the uses and make the approach look less forbidding. Earlier proposals (pre-crash) showed a dazzling new landscape, rendered in the pop colours of an acid-induced LP cover. There is not much of this to be seen yet, except for some annoying lampposts, but useful changes, such as improving the path to the railway station, have been made.
The architects for Park Hill are still alive and Ivor Smith can and does give his views, a little as if John Vanbrugh could be consulted on a restoration of Castle Howard. He likes the renovation. "The care taken to repair a derelict structure is impressive," he says. The journey up some new glass lifts is "a delight". It "represents a new beginning, a new vitality". Smith also finds it refreshing that "the whole design is free of gimmicks and there is a consistency and inevitability to each part".
And so, mostly, it's refreshing. If Urban Splash can be too flash for their own good, the seriousness of Park Hill, and the difficulties of restoring it, have focused the mind. The original building was never supposed to be frozen, but open to accident and circumstance, and it now registers both its original intentions and its recent changes. Those aluminium panels are, as Ivor Smith says, "a bit bright", uncomfortably out-staring the original work, and could perhaps be modified in later phases, when the developers are less nervous about the estate's image. They might even find that the original brick is not so bad, with its ability to weather and age.
The decision to list the building now looks brave and right. Had it gone, nothing would now be there but the nothing housing you see all over the country, with meaner dimensions, shoddier building and an absence of spirit. Nor is the rescue of Park Hill a grotesque extravagance: demolition and rebuilding would not necessarily have been more cost-effective and it would have been environmentally profligate.
There is one – large – detail. Two-thirds of the original 1,000 council flats will, with the help of public subsidy to the development, now be for private sale. The council says that it's better to have a mixture of tenures than to remake a "ghetto" of council tenants. This follows the current orthodoxy and might be entirely reasonable if the homes were being replaced elsewhere in the city. Instead, there has been a demolition derby of council flats, leaving cleared sites which "haven't been built on as fast as we would like". This problem is not the size of Park Hill, it's the size of Sheffield.
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life by Susie Harries – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 6, 2011
A towering account of the German-born scholar who chronicled England's most significant buildings is no more than he deserves
"It takes earnestness to make a man and diligence to make a genius," Pevsner noted at 20, and he had plenty of both. He'd started writing historical dramas at seven, and a diary begun in his teens recorded the lifelong anxieties and emotional insecurities that tend to come with precocity of this order.
A Protestant convert, like many of his kind in the early 20th century (his father was a prosperous Russian-Jewish fur trader), he developed an intense patriotism, and in his case quasi-spiritual convictions about the Germanness of German art. For Pevsner, a kind of instinctual, apolitical socialist, national feeling was coupled with a sense of social responsibility, and dislike of the unhealthy values he saw in Weimar Germany.
So it was that in its early days National Socialism held no terrors for him, and he was slow to perceive the devilry of the Nazi creed.
Only when threatened with dismissal from his academic post did he join the flood of émigrés to England, though even then he was still sending his children on German holidays on the brink of war in 1939, and in touch with leading pro-Nazi art historians. His apparent obtuseness, Harries suggests in subtly analytical pages on his supposed fascistic inclinations, was due less to wilful blindness than to a lifelong political innocence and reluctance to cut ties with his homeland.
England proved a shock and, in social terms, a puzzle. Like Soviet Jewish pianists or violinists in Israel in later years, art historical refugees from Hitler were two a penny, and Pevsner endured years of penury and humble work, including as an adviser on household design ("the more art is applied to an article the worse its appearance becomes"), before his ascent to panjandrum status ("Is it in Pevsner?"), and eventual knighthood.
His success came not by social contacts – on the contrary, he was accused of having too few aristocratic acquaintances and of omitting grand country houses from his work for leftwing reasons – but by the manic diligence he was to show in the 23 years it took to compile the 46 volumes of The Buildings of England. He was most at home in churches, which he would root about tirelessly, "capital by bloody capital", though not entirely for spiritual reasons: "Really, the uses some people put these places to," he was heard to say when a service in progress obliged him to wait.
Culture clashes with the locals are entertainingly documented. In England art history was often an amateur affair, carried on with nonchalance, effortless superiority and class pretension, a place where folk such as John Betjeman (a modestly born social alpinist aware that his own name was of German origin) smirked about "Herr Doktor Professor", and where the very term Kunstforschung – art research – was thought frightfully amusing. "It was partly banter," Pevsner noted, "but not all banter." He was getting to understand the English.
Impressed nonetheless by innovative forms of popularising the arts in museums and lectures, under pressure from the BBC and others, he did his best to lighten the tone of his talks and articles, without succumbing to the personalised approach he found tiresome. Gradually his style, accent and all, found an audience, and numerous outlets, the Reith lectures included.
The feuds that assailed him, chiefly about his early book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, were one-sided affairs, in which he rarely hit back. Gropius was always his hero, which brought suspicions of continental theorising, inhuman functionalism and dangerous doctrines about the moral responsibilities of artists. He had definite, though unpredictable tastes, hating both brutalism and the flamboyant art deco of the Hoover building, and preferring more humdrum, workaday modern styles.
At the same time he involved himself in conservation battles, as postwar reconstruction, then 60s insouciance, conspired to obliterate outstanding Victorian buildings, and pulling down Covent Garden was seriously considered.
In the Nazi years it was better to be dépaysé abroad than in your own country, yet despite his English successes all his professional life you sense in Pevsner a certain homesickness. For us at least the conflict of national intellectual styles he represented was hugely beneficial. The irony of a "Prussian pedant" lecturing the English on Englishness, for which he was mocked, resolves itself in the fact that, together with Gombrich in art history and Weidenfeld in publishing, Pevsner was one of a golden generation of German/Austrian Jewish refugees who did much to give their adopted country the bottom it prided itself on already possessing.
Harries guides us through treacherous territory, of race, class, politics and artistic and intellectual intrigue, in a sure-footed manner. There is empathy with her subject, who had a kindly side (a "benign spider" someone called him), but her judgments are balanced by a cool and compendious intelligence, together with rare explanatory powers.
Intellectual movements, art politics, wartime history, a great man's unsteady emotional life – there is too much in this 800-page book even to evoke here. It is long because it is rich with things to tell and to say. A perfect blend of events, ideas and personal narrative, it is a masterpiece of the biographical genre 20 years in the making. As with much of Pevsner himself, no one, you feel, could have done it better.
Olympics Aquatic Centre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 30, 2011
Zaha Hadid's London 2012 Aquatic Centre hasn't come cheap at £269m, but it is the Olympics' most majestic space
From the outside, it's a car crash. Or a UFO crash. Or, to use the watery metaphors that are de rigueur when talking about Zaha Hadid's £269m Aquatic Centre, it is like a vast turtle waving over-sized flippers. A great roof, whose beauty should come from the way its great weight came down to the ground at three points is engulfed with even bigger temporary structures, blown-up, go-faster versions of what might be seen at a county cattle fair, needed to house the 15,000 temporary seats for the Olympic Games. They will be taken away afterwards, leaving a 2,500 capacity, which is the most that any non-Olympic swimming event is likely to attract.
Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, a room big enough for more than 17,500 people. It is impressive because it is big, and purposeful, and will contain large crowds, but also because the architecture rises to the occasion. The architects' moves are confident and equal to the scale of the place. They don't fumble or tinker. More than that, the interior has a feeling of wholeness. It feels moulded or carved, not assembled. It looks like a body more than something constructed out of pieces.
The big thing is the roof, steel-framed and timber-clad, which floats and undulates, but is also palpably substantial. Officially, it's like a wave, but, with its combination of weight and agility, it's very like a whale. At either end a concrete bowl, containing the pools, the permanent seating and support spaces, rises to meet the roof where it descends. Along each side, in the gaps formed between the bowl and the roof, huge glass walls will be installed after the games, opening the space to the sky and the surrounding park. Now these gaps open to steep banks of temporary seats, contained within the great flippers that are so problematic on the outside. Inside, they are continuous with the rest of the space, and add to its drama.
The work focuses on the two pools, for swimming and diving, coming down to a few human bodies in water, small and fragile relative to the whole, a shift in scale that is somehow achieved smoothly. The diving platforms are moulded out of the same concrete as the rest of the lower structure, making them extensions of the architecture rather than additional pieces of concrete.
Another pool, for practice, would be part of the experience too, visible behind a wide glass wall, but International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulations have required an unfortunate temporary partition. It's something to do with keeping athletes and officials apart, which is clearly very important, but it blocks the view. Elsewhere the interplay of architectural and sporting demands is happier. The greys of the structure are offset by strong primary colours: the blue pools, the yellow and red of the lane markers, and an interesting pinkish light filtered from the outside through translucent walls in the temporary extensions.
The Aquatic Centre is the London Olympics' most majestic space: the most potent, the most charged. It is also 2012's most difficult child, the first venue to be designed, the last to be finished. It was accompanied along the way by stories of escalating budgets (nervous builders, and near abandonment of the design). Built, it has compromises, like the view-blocking partition and the flippers, about which Hadid does not even try to pretend to be happy. As originally conceived, the awkward temporary extensions would not have been there, as there was to be a roof big enough to cover both temporary and permanent, but this proved too extravagant.
The obvious comparison is with the £93m, 6,000-seat Velodrome, another wavy-roofed work completed last February, seemingly with the smooth precision of a high-performance bike. The Velodrome's roof required 300 tonnes of steel; the Aquatic Centre's – about the same size but with admittedly more difficult conditions – uses 3,000 tonnes. The Velodrome, trim and taut, is also a handsome building, and promises to be a powerful venue.
Part of the complication comes from the fact that the centre was designed before London won the bid. London was in danger of being seen as the safe-but-boring option, with dull buildings, and Hadid's design could be waved in front of the IOC as evidence of stardust. The problem was that the people who would eventually be the clients for the building, the organisations set up after London won the bid, didn't exist then, and the brief was not as developed as it would be later. When designs come first and clients second, there is often trouble.
But there may also be a mismatch between the processes of something like the Olympics and architecture as conceived by Hadid. Architecture, for her, is something that should make its presence felt, intervene, change things, perhaps get in the way. Her style seems to be about dynamism and weightless modernity, but her buildings are actually massive. They are slow, not fast. They reflect an old idea, common to Palladio and Le Corbusier, that architects sculpt and shape and compose. Hence her roof, which dips down in the middle to suggest two different spaces within in the overall enclosure, one for swimming and the other for diving.
What London 2012 wants is a great whirring delivery machine, driven by the inexorability of the project's deadline, where as many details as possible are determined in advance by specifications and regulations. They want architects to slip into the machine noiselessly, if possible with a bit of elegance, like Hopkins Architects at the Velodrome. With Hadid there is more of a grinding and crashing of gears, but she set out to achieve "a really great spatial experience", and did so.
I am sure that the Aquatic Centre could have been built more cheaply and easily, and without its crashes of permanent and temporary. It is a building that will be at its best after the games, when the flippers have been replaced by the great glass walls, although it will then face a new risk of being too grand for a public pool. The wavy roof risks being too small for the Olympics and too big for its afterlife. It can only be hoped that, whatever plans are made for its future upkeep, they are equal to the ambitions of the structure.
But, given that the whole £9bn Olympic extravaganza spends money that could have had more prudent and practical uses, it does not seem so terrible that a small fraction of its extravagance should go on a space as magnificent as this. Many hundreds of millions will be flushed away on more boring things, such as consultants' fees and security that may or may not be necessary.
Lastly, a note to the IOC. While the Centre offers 17,500 seats for watching swimming, only 10,000 will be able to watch diving events. This is in accordance with IOC specifications, which seem to assume that people find diving a bit boring. Evidently, the specification writers haven't heard of Tom Daley.