Posts Tagged Richard Rogers
Lloyd’s building joins Grade I elite at tender age of 25
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 20, 2011
Heritage minister's decision puts Richard Rogers's hi-tech design in the top 2.5% of all listed buildings
Richard Rogers's hi-tech, postmodern Lloyd's building, with its pipes, lifts and toilets presented on the outside, has become one of only a few modern buildings to be given Grade I listed status.
The decision, by the heritage minister, John Penrose, puts the building in the top 2.5% of all listed buildings. It now has the sort of protection given to St Paul's Cathedral and Windsor Castle.
The listing was recommended by English Heritage. Its designation director, Roger Bowdler, said it was "fitting recognition of the sheer splendour of Richard Rogers's heroic design. Its dramatic scale and visual dazzle, housing a hyper-efficient commercial complex, is universally recognised as one of the key buildings of the modern epoch."
Bowdler said its listing, which provides substantial protection but did not mean it is "pickled in aspic", had been enthusiastically supported. Penrose said the Lloyd's building "stands the test of time with its awe-inspiring futuristic design, which exemplifies the hi-tech style in Britain. It clearly merits the extra protection against unsuitable alteration or development that listing provides."
The Lloyd's building was opened in 1986, built after the success Rogers, with Renzo Piano, had with that other great inside-outside building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Providing a headquarters for Lloyd's of London, it manages to be both head-turningly futuristic and resolutely traditional. It includes the traditions and fabric of earlier Lloyd's buildings, not least the Adam Room, which was moved from Bowood House in Wiltshire, and the Lutine Bell, which was once rang to indicate an "overdue" ship but is these days is only used for ceremonial occasions.
It is one of only a handful of postwar buildings and structures to be given Grade I listing, joining Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral (listed in 1988) Norman Foster's Willis Corroon Building in Ipswich (listed in 1991) and the Severn Bridge (listed in 1998).
Lloyd's chief executive, Richard Ward, said: "The building remains modern, innovative and unique – it has really stood the test of time just like the market that sits within it. This listing decision will protect the building against unsuitable alteration or development while retaining its flexibility to adapt within the market's needs."
Lord Rogers's practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, said in a statement that the listing was an honour: "It is important to conserve buildings of architectural and historical significance, and the work of English Heritage is central to that. It is also of vital importance for buildings to remain flexible spaces which meet the changing needs of those who live or work in them. English Heritage has recognised this, ensuring the spirit of the original design is retained while the building remains adaptable in the future."
At the other end of the heritage timeline, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport also announced that the early Mesolithic settlement Star Carr, near Scarborough – which contains what may be the earliest building in Britain – is being made a scheduled monument because of its rarity and archeological importance. The status gives the site an extra layer of protection against unauthorised change.
How we learned to love the Lloyds building
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 20, 2011
Richard Rogers' 'bowellist' creation in the heart of London has been Grade-I listed
Twenty-five years young, the Lloyd's building is still shockingly new. Yesterday it was announced that this hi-tech City of London tour-de-force, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership, has been listed Grade I by heritage minister John Penrose. The youngest to be granted that special status, it joins company with a select band of postwar buildings including the Royal Festival Hall and Coventry Cathedral.
Lloyds is also the first Grade I-listed building designed specifically for change. While listing protects historic monuments from insensitive alteration, the whole point of this late 20th-century reworking of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, crossed with a North Sea oil-rig, is the flexible space it offers, and the promise that, one day, it might be re-arranged as easily as if it had been assembled from Meccano.
The inside-out, or "bowellist", look of the 88-metre high concrete structure, with its external wall-climbing glass lifts, exposed pipework and plug-in, stainless steel clad lavatory pods, is graphic evidence of the way this breathtaking ensemble was clipped together like a giant kit of parts.
Naturally, Lloyds has never been to everyone's taste – too much like an oil-refinery thumped down next to Wren's City churches and Neo-Classical banks clad in Portland stone – and its provocative design is all the more remarkable given that it was commissioned by and for apparently conservative, pin-striped City types.
With its soaring central atrium, the radical, open-plan interior is nothing short of sensational. Even then, it abounds in surprises. High up in the building, a door opens to reveal a complete Robert Adam boardroom of the 1760s, representing most people's idea of what Grade I listed buildings look like. Attitudes to modern architecture have clearly changed.
The biggest change of all since then, however, has been among conservationists themselves: in the 1980s, they tended to see Lloyds as a modern monstrosity. Now they love it.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 4, 2011
An octopus rescues an eyesore, shops pop up in shipping containers, and Australia ties me Barangaroo down, sport
The work of British architects spreads around the world like tentacles. And around Chiswick Roundabout, too, where Make has just won planning permission for a controversial 50-metre-high office block shaped rather like a 3D London 2012 Olympics logo wrapped in an LED-studded metal shroud. The west London building is known as the Octopus.
This particular Octopus, comprising a showroom and rooftop garden with viewing platform, as well as offices, will light up at night in a blaze of kinetic advertising and public art. Kim Gottlieb, managing director of London and Bath Estates, joint developer of the Octopus with Galliard Homes, has told Building Design magazine: "When one of the [local] councillors said: 'It's bold, it's brash, it's in your face,' I thought thank goodness someone's got it. This [London] is meant to be a 24-hour, modern, vibrant, top-three world capital city. Let's give it the architecture it deserves."
Not everyone will agree with Gottlieb. Who knows what drivers heading along the busy A4 to and from Heathrow will make of this dazzling apparition. Some – with long memories – may even refer Make, Gottlieb and the London Borough of Hounslow to Clough Williams-Ellis's spirited attack on brash new architecture, development and planning. Written in 1928 and still far from out of date, its title is England and the Octopus.
You can fish for octopuses in Sydney harbour, where work has started on the massive and highly controversial $6bn [Australian] Barangaroo development on the site of former container wharves. The sprawling area has been masterplanned by Britain's Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, and this week the Barangaroo Delivery Authority held a public meeting for local people to find out what the development, due for completion in 2020, means for Sydney. A gamut of new offices, shops and homes will fan out towards the waterfront, with a striking hotel standing above the water on a pier. The plan is for a pedestrian-friendly new quarter of Sydney, although its commercial tentacles spread far and wide.
Rogers aside, the British are clearly determined to make their mark in Australia. Whether or not this was sparked by the Queen's recent visit, now the Design Council's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment is to advise the country on how to design buildings. Some mistake, surely?
British architects, meanwhile, have been concerned by what's been going on in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a pop-up shopping centre opened last weekend. The idea of this instant mall, made from recycled shipping containers, is said to be a copy of the Boxpark mall designed by Waugh Thistleton architects and due to open any day now in Shoreditch in London. Wherever the idea came from, Boxpark and its kin are in marked contrast to developments such as Barangaroo; if and when the global economy slips into deeper recession, perhaps there will be a thrifty Boxpark lookalike near you.
In many parts of the world, where even a Boxpark mall can seem a luxury, architects need to think all the harder to make intelligent and attractive uses of scarce resources. So it is good to see the first architecture journal edited and produced in East Africa making its mark. Anza has emerged from a group of students and young architects at Tanzania's Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam.
"The printed magazine was launched at the symposium hosted by the Goethe Institute in Dar es Salaam called Global City – Local Identity?," artist and writer Leila Peacock, who is involved with the project, tells me. "The whole thing was electric. The situation there is made particularly difficult as a result of high-level corruption, but there is this strong idealistic thrust amongst the students – the first generation to be educated on home ground as opposed to going abroad, who are determined to change things."
The first issue was printed in a run of 5,000 and distributed free all over the city. At one point, the students wandered through a typical traffic jam handing out copies to people stuck in their cars. Perhaps we should try the same thing on the Chiswick Roundabout.
Lord Rogers’ son dies in bath
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 4, 2011
No foul play suspected in drowning of Bo Rogers, 27-year-old son of architect Richard
The son of the architect Lord Rogers and chef Ruth Rogers has drowned in a bath while on holiday in Tuscany.
No foul play is suspected in the death of Bo Rogers, 27, but police have taken toxicology tests because of the circumstances. The results are expected at the end of next week.
Richard Rogers, whose buildings include Lloyd's of London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Heathrow's Terminal 5, was awarded the Pritzker architecture prize for more than 40 years of designs and the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) Stirling Prize for Maggie's Centre, a unit for cancer patients in Hammersmith, west London.
Ruth Rogers is the owner of the The River Café and has written cookbooks and presented The Italian Kitchen on Channel 4.
Lloyd’s Building, London – 360 interactive panoramic
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Explore the Lloyd's Building using our 360 degree interactive panoramic tool
Lloyd’s Building, London – 360 interactive panoramic
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Explore the Lloyd's Building using our 360 degree interactive panoramic tool
7: The Lloyd’s building, London, built 1978-1986
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
As part of our series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic photograph of Richard Rogers's Lloyd's building
• Explore the Lloyd's building panoramic here
The Lloyd's building is a case of a venerable institution trying to update its image by hiring an exciting modern architect. In the 1980s Lloyd's of London, then aged 300 or so, commissioned Richard Rogers to design their new headquarters. They were sold on his idea that, by putting pipes, lifts, stairs and toilets on the outside, in theoretically removable capsules, the building could be reconfigured at will. It didn't work out like that: the external shape has barely changed, and it is now likely to be listed as a historic building, which makes it as much a fixed monument as a Wren church. But as an excuse for visual dazzle, for a structure of gothic intricacy variously compared to a motorcycle engine and a coffee percolator, Rogers's concept worked brilliantly. Inside the building is more sober than the outside, but still grand, with an atrium plunging down from a glass barrel vault, criss-crossed by escalators, to a double height trading floor at the bottom. Here, in its incongruous dark wood baldachin, hangs the Lutine Bell, historically rung when a ship went missing.
7: The Lloyd’s building, London, built 1978-1986
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
As part of our series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic photograph of Richard Rogers's Lloyd's building
• Explore the Lloyd's building panoramic here
The Lloyd's building is a case of a venerable institution trying to update its image by hiring an exciting modern architect. In the 1980s Lloyd's of London, then aged 300 or so, commissioned Richard Rogers to design their new headquarters. They were sold on his idea that, by putting pipes, lifts, stairs and toilets on the outside, in theoretically removable capsules, the building could be reconfigured at will. It didn't work out like that: the external shape has barely changed, and it is now likely to be listed as a historic building, which makes it as much a fixed monument as a Wren church. But as an excuse for visual dazzle, for a structure of gothic intricacy variously compared to a motorcycle engine and a coffee percolator, Rogers's concept worked brilliantly. Inside the building is more sober than the outside, but still grand, with an atrium plunging down from a glass barrel vault, criss-crossed by escalators, to a double height trading floor at the bottom. Here, in its incongruous dark wood baldachin, hangs the Lutine Bell, historically rung when a ship went missing.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 9, 2011
The best-laid plans ... Amanda Levete's Wapping great designs are thwarted by Murdoch, and Richard Rogers's WTC tower teeters. But the search for Britain's best new house rolls on
Mies van der Rohe famously described architecture as "the will of an epoch translated into space". But as the great architect knew full well, sometimes the will is lacking, or simply evaporates. Architecture has always been a rollercoaster, with even the best projects appearing and vanishing before a brick is laid. This week Amanda Levete's practice AL_A has had to give up the ghost on its fine new headquarters for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation at Wapping in London; News Corp has announced that they are selling the site.
Levete's design featured new offices for the Murdoch companies News International, Harper Collins, MySpace, Dow Jones and Fox, to be clustered around an eye-catching 18-metre high atrium. With a gleaming restaurant, a museum, shops and public walkways, the new complex was to have replaced the grim compound of media buildings known as Fortress Wapping. From an architectural point of view, it would have been one of the finest media headquarters of all. Since the project was submitted for planning permission in November 2009, however, events have undermined the credibility of Levete's client, and the scheme has gone the way of Mies's beautiful glass skyscrapers, planned for Berlin 90 years ago.
"Working on News London [as the building was to be called] was a fantastic experience, and I'm proud of what we did there," Levete tells me. "Obviously, it's always disappointing when a project doesn't come to fruition, but our unbuilt projects form an important part of our body of work."
In New York, slow progress on the redevelopment of the World Trade Centre site is underpinned by news that the Richard Rogers-designed WTC3 tower at 175 Greenwich Street for Silverstein Properties has been put on hold again. The UBS Investment Bank, a company that was to have rented a considerable amount of space in the 80-storey tower, has decided to stay in Stamford, Connecticut, where it operates the world's largest trading floor. The Rogers tower is intended as a neighbour to the 1,776ft Freedom Tower by SOM, currently climbing steadily skywards.
The architect of the World Trade Centre's twin towers was Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese American whose first major work – the Pruitt-Igoe urban housing project in St Louis, Missouri – was also blown up, on 16 March 1972, though by the city authorities and not terrorists. The 33 concrete blocks, containing 2,870 apartments, were widely thought of as the most notorious modern slums in the US. Of the twin towers, Yamasaki said: "World trade means world peace ... the World Trade Centre is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace." Few modern architects have suffered such misfortune.
In London, the International Press Centre in Shoe Lane may well be demolished, as the 60-metre concrete-and-glass tower designed by Colonel Richard Seifert is set to be replaced by a new steel-and-glass tower by Robin Partington, one of the key designers of The Gherkin, or 30 St Mary Axe. In the 1960s and 70s, Seifert was very much the leading developers' architect in England. He would have been 100 next month [he died in 2001], but while his work has become fashionable it is now his turn to face redevelopment. (His best-known building, Centre Point, was much despised in the 60s but is considered chic today; its top floor is home to the glamorous Paramount Club.) But as events at Wapping this week proved, commerce can be ruthless where architecture is concerned.
Less so when it comes to the down-to-earth world of housing. Today, a shortlist of six new designs competing for the 2011 RIBA Manser Medal for Britain's best new house is announced. Reassuringly, the judges have been looking for "a sense of timelessness" and fully expect these houses not to be replaced in the near future. The six are: Balancing Barn, Suffolk by MVRDV with Mole Architects; a house in Epsom, Surrey by Eldridge Smerin; a house in London by Duggan Morris Architects; the New Mission Hall, West Sussex by Adam Richards Architects; Ty Hedfan, Brecon, Powys by Featherstone Young; and the Watson House in the New Forest by John Pardey Architects. All six are resolutely modern, and two – the Balancing Barn and Ty Hedfan – display bravura geometry and sensational structure. The winner, to be declared on 10 November, will receive a prize of £10,000 sponsored by HSBC Private Bank; they will also have made their mark. What next? A London media headquarters? A Manhattan skyscraper? In the world of architecture, no one can be sure; buildings are rarely as safe as houses.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 26, 2011
A mix of models and houses this week ... with Kate Moss's big basement plans for her historic new home, while you can make your own Frank Lloyd Wright house with a little help from Lego
It is some house Kate Moss has bought in Highgate. A late-17th-century, Grade II-listed London townhouse, it has become the focus of media attention – and concern from locals this week – because Moss wants to give it the celeb treatment, with a steam room in the basement along with a new kitchen (to add to the existing two) and an MI5's-worth of CCTV cameras. What I like best about the story is that the house is said, repeatedly, to have been designed by the poet and visionary William Blake.
Poor Blake rarely had two pennies to rub together and could never have afforded to live here: the house was, in fact, built by a London merchant of the same name. But another poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, did live and die here, and the house was owned by the writer JB Priestley, too. Camden Council says it has received just one lone objection to Moss's underground plan, although Maya de Souza, a Green Party councillor for Highgate, has serious concerns about the basement works, which she believes could cause flooding in many other Highgate houses.
One property man who knows all about basement conversions is Jon Hunt, founder of the estate agent giant Foxtons. He's spending far more than Kate Moss paid for her house to excavate a four-storey hole in the back garden of his Grade II-listed house to build a sports hall and a museum for his Ferrari collection. His latest development, however, is very much above ground. The plan is for a new tower, replacing the Texaco garage on London's Albert Embankment, to be designed by Rogers Stirk and Harbour. This will be a challenge even for the property magnate: five proposals for towers here have been rejected in recent years; the last, in 2008, was for a 23-storey steel and glass tower by Make architects. Only time will tell if the Richard Rogers tower will rise up.
Meanwhile, what looks to be a very modest proposal by the Bowker Sadler Partnership – to build four two-bedroom houses and two two-bedroom bungalows for the Cheshire Peaks and Plains Housing Trust at Lower Withington – is causing distress among Manchester University scientists working at Jodrell Bank. That number of houses might seem insignificant, but the problem is one of location. Jodrell Bank, founded in 1945, remains a thing of ethereal beauty and globally esteemed research – its magnificent Lovell telescope, opened in 1957, is still the world's third largest steerable radio telescope.
As Professor ST Carrington, head of astronomy and astrophysics, has written to Cheshire East Council: "The potential electrical interference generated from this development is of considerable concern." This week, a spokesman for the University of Manchester said: "The University fully appreciates the need for affordable housing, but also wishes to protect Jodrell Bank ... many electronic devices used at home and elsewhere produce radio frequency emissions, intentionally or otherwise, and the radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank are extremely sensitive in order to detect extremely faint emissions from distant stars and galaxies."
Up in Scotland, a modest proposal has gone down so well that it might become a design template for a whole region. Konishi Gaffney architects' competition-winning design for the regeneration of the Clydeside village of Kilcreggan on the Roseneath Peninsula, 40 miles west of Glasgow, is an attempt to show that, by reimagining their neglected waterfronts, Clydeside villages can become not just more attractive to locals – top priority – but compelling places for visitors. So, here are new quays, waterside walkways and promenades, aimed at making Kilcreggan and other Clydeside villages newly proud of themselves.
Finally, here's a house you can make at home. The latest model in the Lego Architecture series is a 2,276-piece replica of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House in Chicago, launched on 27 August. With its low lines and free-flowing interiors, the 1908 house is often cited as one of the first truly Modern homes. I'm not sure if a child of five could make it alone, but at least you won't need planning permission or historic building consent for this one.