Posts Tagged Richard Rogers
Lloyd’s listed: will it make the Grade?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 12, 2011
The Lloyd's of London building may be awarded Grade I status by English Heritage – an honour this modern marvel deserves
Over the years it's been likened to an oil refinery, a North Sea oil rig and part of the set design of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. But 25 years after it was built, the inside-out structure of the Lloyd's building in the City of London still comes as a shock.
If you have never been inside this hi-tech wonder of the modern world, you will either have to become a member of the venerable insurance marketplace the building serves, or else wait for the next London Open House weekend hoping that the doors of this Richard Rogers tour de force will be thrown open to the public.
At once the most private and the most prominent modern building in central London, Lloyd's may well be listed this month. A report being prepared by English Heritage will soon be in the hands of Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary. It is expected to recommend Grade I status, an honour accorded to very few post-1945 buildings. These include Coventry Cathedral by Sir Basil Spence and Norman Foster's black glass Willis Faber building in Ipswich, completed in 1975 and listed in 1991.
Normally, a building has to be 30 years old before the government can consider listing, although if a building more than 10 years old is threatened with change (as the Foster design was) English Heritage can recommend instant listing.
"This was originally the case with Lloyd's," says Jon Wright of The Twentieth Century Society (who preserve architecture built since 1914) "when changes were threatened to the interior of the great atrium. The threat has since gone, but we've been pushing English Heritage to recommend listing because who knows what might happen to the building in the future, especially if Lloyd's was ever to move out?"
Assuming that listing will go ahead this month, Lloyd's will join the ranks of Britain's medieval cathedrals, its grandest country houses, most daunting castles and enduring museums. Does it live up to the mark? Yes, very much so. Commissioned in 1978, a year after the opening of the Pompidou centre in Paris – the building that made Richard Rogers and his co-architect, Renzo Piano, famous – Lloyd's was an unexpected, bespoke design for an organisation characterised by stuffed-shirted, pinstriped chaps.
Here is a building with glass lifts rising up its steely exterior. Here are stainless steel-clad service towers housing prefabricated kitchen and washroom modules lifted by cranes into place. Here is one of the most impressive of all 1980s atriums, soaring 60 metres up to a barrel-vaulted glass roof and criss-crossed by yellow-edged escalators. Even today, the mesmeric interior seems out of step with the apparently old-fashioned culture of Lloyd's.
Design shocks follow one another up the building. On the 11th floor, doors from the hi-tech interior open into a perfectly preserved and wholly unforeseen committee room designed by Robert Adam, dating from the 1770s. It reminds me of the final scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey when the astronaut, Dr David Bowman, lands – after his mind-bending journey through space – in a semblance of a Louis XVI hotel room: here hi-tech and classicism met face-to-incomprehending-face, just as they do in Lloyd's.
"Listing Lloyd's will be a good thing," says Wright, "although we shouldn't forget that the building was always meant to have been flexible in use, so somehow it has to be granted Grade I status without stopping all future change. That's difficult."
It does seem odd to witness so young and radical a building as Lloyd's joining the ranks of castles and cathedrals, yet this hi-tech interloper is a monument of our times. What's next on the list? Watch out for news of Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1978). If you haven't been here, it might also come as something of a shock: where else will you find one of the finest collections of primitive art housed in a building that resembles the sleekest possible aircraft hangar?
The shape of Britain to come … as designed by Prince Charles
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 25, 2011
Westminster's Chelsea Barracks planning decision is the latest in a series of victories for the heritage school of HRH. And there are signs that his views are falling on friendly ears in government
Not so long ago it seemed that Prince Charles, architecture guru and scourge of modernists, was safely shut up in his box. He seemed finally to have listened to shadowy advisers telling him that it would be inappropriate to get involved in public wrangles. The public and political mood had shifted in favour of the new. Contemporary buildings – the Gherkin, for example – were popular. The Prince's old adversary Lord (Richard) Rogers had the ear first of Tony Blair and then of Ken Livingstone, and some version of his theories influenced the planning system.
Furious letters would still spew from the prince's desk, urging developers to sack architects he did not like, or ministers to save an old building that he did, but these were private, and often ignored. The days when he could have multi-million pound developments ripped up and redesigned were seemingly consigned to the era of Wham! and Brideshead Revisited.
Now, however, he is enjoying his greatest influence in two decades. Last week Westminster city council approved prince-backed plans for redeveloping Chelsea Barracks in London, two years after his intervention led to a previous plan, by Rogers, being abandoned. The classicist architects the prince favours are quietly busy producing new country houses for the rich, "urban extensions" to country towns, and rural and suburban housing developments. The government is paying the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment to advise local groups on planning their neighbourhoods. The government's localism bill, currently winding through parliament, is supposed to empower villages and small communities to draw up their own development plans. If it works as intended, the future built environment of Britain, outside the big cities, could be prince-flavoured.
The first version of the architectural prince was launched in 1984 when, invited to mouth platitudes to a dinner celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he shocked his hosts by denouncing them. He famously called a proposed extension to the National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle", though its architects Ahrends Burton and Koralek were then up-and-coming and, as it happened, noted for their skill with building in historic settings such as Keble College, Oxford. The prince's words dealt them a blow from which they never fully recovered. In further speeches he attacked other projects, and jumpy developers would then install architects, regardless of their ability or experience, blessed by the prince for their use of a classical style.
These architects would not always last the distance, being themselves replaced in due course by practices better able to deliver commercial projects. Often the effect of the Prince's actions was to delay development by many years, while developers worked the planning system to get the most they could out of the site. At Paternoster Square, next to St Paul's Cathedral, he had objected to an initial scheme partly on the grounds that it was too big and greedy. What was eventually built, much later, had a classical look but was even bigger. At London Bridge City, next to Tower Bridge, a prince-friendly, mock-Venetian proposal transmogrified into Norman Foster-designed grey glass blocks around what is now City Hall.
With the National Gallery, however, and some other sites, he got his way, while the mere thought of him could drive developers into a pre-emptive cringe, dressing up their blocks in columns and pediments in case they attracted his displeasure. Not that they were unhappy to do this – the prince captured a common mood, in the Thatcher years, of yearning for past glories and returning to supposedly traditional values. Architects, meanwhile, were still widely reviled for their actual and alleged failures in the 1960s, so their complaints at the prince's highhandedness got short shrift from the press. They objected that his actions were an abuse of his position, that he was ignorant and petulant, and that, while he was only too happy to launch attacks on others, he resolutely refused to engage in any kind of debate himself. But these objections did not get very far.
The prince had an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum, a book, a TV programme. He founded an architecture school based on the premise that there was an untapped hunger for learning architecture in the traditional way, and in 1994 he launched a magazine, Perspectives, promoting his views. In 1988 he commissioned the visionary urban theorist Leon Krier to produce a plan for developing Poundbury, an area of land outside Dorchester, Dorset, belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. Krier had famously declared ,"I am an architect, therefore I do not build", meaning that the modern world was too benighted to produce good architecture. The prince managed to persuade him otherwise.
There were separate strands to his philosophy, not wholly intertwining. One was populist, arguing that most people liked old-looking buildings, so experts should not impose modernism against their wishes. Another was nostalgic, with a preference for English classical architecture of about 300 years ago. Another was mystical, arguing that there are deep harmonies in the universe which are reflected in the sort of buildings he liked.
Perspectives did not thrill the masses, and closed. Nor did students flock to the architecture school, which was restructured as the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, with a reduced emphasis on education. Meanwhile the prince's architectural court was subject to intrigues that would have delighted the Borgias. Fashion changed, architects became less hated, and a few more people than embittered professionals began to see that there was something wrong with the prince using his fame and status to intervene in debates which he possibly did not understand. Apart from Poundbury, the prince's influence seemed to shrink to the area around Buckingham Palace, where one of his pet architects, John Simpson, rebuilt the Queen's Gallery, and another, Liam O'Connor, designed the Commonwealth Memorial Gates as a reduced-scale version of Lutyens's monuments in New Delhi.
But Poundbury was his lifeline, and his biggest success. Here he was doing what he wanted with his own land rather than meddling in the affairs of others. Although Poundbury got the look – it is a medley of Georgian, Dorset cottage and pointy, Gothicky bits – it also embodied principles which went beyond his stylistic taste, and which were not so different from those of adversaries like Richard Rogers. It mixes uses, putting offices and workshops in among houses, rather than in separate zones. It mixes affordable housing with market housing, such that it is hard to tell the difference. It is built at higher density than typical suburbs, so that it consumes less land and encourages neighbourliness. It promotes pedestrian movement over driving.
Buyers liked it. It achieved above-average values, and properties appreciated. Its periphery is now a whirr of construction, as more and more homes are built to meet the demand to live there. Personally, it makes my flesh creep, with its winsome, confected quality, and with its paranoid insistence on conjuring a bygone world that never existed, which illusion is painfully punctured by the appearance of modern steel frames in the half-built buildings. As even one of the Prince's allies says: "You can't claim it is traditionally Dorset by any stretch of the imagination."
But I wouldn't live in Dorchester anyway, and I can see that it works, and that it is much better than the average housebuilders' wares. I can even see some charm in the winding lanes, now softened by well-established planting.
Similar ideas were applied on other Duchy of Cornwall properties, in places like Shepton Mallet and Midsomer Norton in Somerset. Meanwhile the foundation, repurposed as an advisory, thinktank sort of body, made itself more credible. Its chief executive, Hank Dittmar, was formerly a leading light of the American New Urbanism movement, which has been pumping out walkable, compact residential developments for some time. Its most famous work is Seaside, the holiday town in Florida where The Truman Show was shot. Under Labour the foundation talked the government-approved talk of sustainability, regeneration and public participation. It developed something called Enquiry by Design, where local residents and experts come together in workshops before plans for new development are completed: the idea is that local knowledge and wishes are incorporated into the final designs. The foundation won the attention of John Prescott, and advised on the planning of Upton, an extension of Northampton, on Poundbury-esque principles. Now, in Sunderland, Ayrshire, Swansea, Burnley and elsewhere, there are foundation-led plans in various stages of completion. The foundation has even been hired by the developers First Base, usually known for their use of contemporary design, to advise on a classical-looking development in a conservation area in Highbury, north London.
It has published a book called Tradition and Sustainability, and is building a prototype, called the Natural House, which aims to demonstrate that energy efficiency does not require modern-looking gadgets but can be achieved with something that looks like an approximation of an 1840s villa. The foundation has gone international, with projects in China, the Galapagos, and Haiti, the latter a plan in the heart of Port au Prince, which looks wildly optimistic in its serene orderliness.
The foundation apart, architects from the princely fold are doing well. Robert Adam, of Adam Architecture, has long been the most business-like of traditionalist architects and, having designed some projects for the Duchy of Cornwall, is now masterplanning an extension to Dover with a whopping 5,750 homes, and residential developments in Waterlooville and Aldershot. He also has a nice line in huge, brand new country houses, which he says reflects the fact that "London is a global city". His clients are "Russians, Indians, Middle Eastern: they want the English dream but they want to be able to do what they like with their house, which they can't do if it's old". Adam recently lost a planning inquiry into his enormous £20m Athlone House proposal in Hampstead, but has plenty more opportunities of a similar kind.
At Chelsea Barracks the prince had written a personal letter to the ruler of Qatar, as his family's property company Qatari Diar were owners of the site, urging him to abandon Richard Rogers's plans. His "heart sank" at the sight of what he called "a gigantic experiment with the very soul of our capital city". He punted an alternative scheme by Quinlan Terry, the doyen of modern classicists, and his son Francis. Ultimately the Terrys did not get the job, but Rogers was fired and a collaboration of Squire and Partners, Dixon Jones and the landscape architect Kim Wilkie, produced designs which aim to reproduce the virtues of Georgian and Victorian terraces and squares. This was a turning point, a moment of regime change. Lord Rogers's project would, if built, have been the fulfilment of years of campaigning and building influence with the likes of Ken Livingstone in order to realise his vision of the city. Its dumping, supported by Tories like the deputy mayor Kit Malthouse, marked the end of that particular era.
The Chelsea Barracks Action Group, made up of local residents, were vociferous opponents of the Rogers scheme, and were delighted with the prince's actions. Now, however, they are disappointed that a change of style has not changed the fact that the proposed housing blocks are up to 100 feet high. "They will be regarded in history as the beginning of the end of our gracious English city," says the chair of the group, Georgine Thorburn, using prince-like language. She also says that the Qataris have "duped" the council. Alas for the group, unless Boris Johnson can be persuaded to intervene, her words come too late. In the latest version of prince-ism, the pragmatists have won over the mystics and true believers, which means that, as the prince himself inclines to the latter camp, his own input is diluted. His recent contribution to the mystic cause, a book called Harmony, failed to set the world on fire. Quinlan Terry, always the purest of the classicists, is doing perfectly well with country houses, buildings for Downing College, Cambridge, and occasional commercial work, but he is not shaping whole towns.
The Prince's Foundation, according to Elliot Lipton of developers First Base, "is very flexible. It has no preconceptions, which isn't what you might expect if you listened to their leader. They're very good at understanding real world trade-offs."
The foundation gets into bed with developers such as Wimpey in Westoe, South Shields, with the result that they achieve an arguably better version of usual Wimpey fare, rather than a radical alternative. Upton, the extension to Northampton, as Hank Dittmar acknowledges, is a partly compromised version of the original intentions. By being more pragmatic, the foundation gets less distinctive: plenty of others have put forward energy-efficient houses, and public consultation, and walkable, high-density communities. These ideas are "sort of the norm, mainstream", says Robert Adam. Works outside the princely sphere, like the Greenwich Millennium Village, and the Accordia development in Cambridge, put them into practice.
What remains distinctive is the look, the preference for a randomised variety of traditional styles, with Georgian and Country Cottage foremost among them. This is a source of strength, as a lot of people like this – according to Robert Adam, 70% prefer old-looking buildings to new. The competition, in the form of volume housebuilders' standard product, is largely poor. In combination, these factors are effective when it comes to reducing outrage at controversial plans, which, with continuous pressure of development in town and country, will continue to appear. Poundbury itself is the expansion of Dorchester into green fields, and many locals still object to it on those grounds. The Dover expansion, as Adam recognises, met strong opposition on the grounds of its size. The switch of styles got Chelsea Barracks through the planning system, to Georgine Thorburn's dismay.
Under the localism bill, communities and villages will have the power to draw up their own plans for development, in ways that benefit them. There is scepticism as to whether this will really happen, but if it does, communities will face the central problem of rural planning: how to reconcile the pressures for new development, the high values that housing can yield, the need for affordable new homes, and the preservation of villages. The models offered by the Prince's Foundation, with a combination of public consultation, and a style that tries to disguise that change has happened, will be attractive. Even if localised planning does not work, the palliative effect of traditionalist design will still be in demand.
I have long believed that the prince should keep his mouth shut rather than use his inherited status to give weight to views greater than his wisdom alone would merit. He should not change policies, lives and careers with the force of his name. Sometimes he might be right, sometimes wrong, but that is not the point. In 2009 the RIBA, ever masochists, invited him back for their 175th birthday. Sitting through his talk I felt growing rage at his tendentious nonsense – the demonstrably untrue statement that modernist architects were nature-haters, for example – and at the fact that no one was allowed to challenge him directly. He sallies forth to attack others then immediately takes shelter behind the dignity of his position. I also find depressing the idea that a modern house can be no better than a half-convincing photocopy of an old one, or that, as we live in a time when large windows are easy to achieve, we should build small, mean ones, as in Poundbury, just because they look old.
Yet he is entitled to do what he likes, within the constraints applied to any landowner, with his own property, and he and his associates have come up with ways of building new rural developments that have a certain logic. The range of alternative models is not abundant, and architects and developers who would do better should study the reasons for the appeal of the prince's way. As things stand, Poundbury is a glimpse of the future.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 17, 2011
A week of high-flying British architecture with the launch of Apple's Norman Foster-designed headquarters, the revised Chelsea Barracks plan and an eyecatching east London folly
While everyone was salivating over the launch of Apple's iCloud last week, Steve Jobs's other product launch garnered less attention. This was Apple's colossal new headquarters building in Cupertino, California – a gigantic white UFO sitting in 150 acres of landscaped parkland, designed for 12,000 workers. For obvious reasons, it has already been dubbed the "mothership". Nor has its designer been widely publicised, but we can reveal it's good old Norman Foster – who else?
Foster's people wouldn't reveal any details, but there are some in this video of Jobs presenting the scheme to Cupertino City Council, where it was received just as rapturously as a new iPad. "We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world," Jobs tells the awestruck councillors. "I really do think architecture students will come here to see this."
So what about the design? Foster has obviously taken a leaf out of Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive's book – sorry, iPad. It looks like the circular trackpad of a giant iPod. If you run around the building very quickly, does a giant playlist light up in the sky? Mind you, by the time it's finished in 2015, it could look out of date.
The purity of the four-storey doughnut's impact on the landscape is also slightly compromised, it emerges, by other buildings on the site, including a four-storey car park. But none of the councillors seem to raise any objections; they're too busy geeking out their celebrity guest. "The word spectacular would be an understatement," grovels one of them, Mr Smithers-style. Just to drive the point home, Jobs mentions that Apple is the largest taxpayer in Cupertino, and hints that if he doesn't get his way, Apple will take their business elsewhere. Presumably the whole building will be able to take off and land in New Mexico, or something.
More good news for Foster and other British architects at this year's spurious but intriguing Best Tall Building awards. Foster's 80-storey Dubai tower, known as The Index – an energy-efficient, Italian futurist-looking affair – won in the Middle East and Africa category. Wilkinson Eyre won the Asia award for their colossal but elegant Guangzhou International Finance Centre – all 103 storeys of it. And Anglo-German architects Sauerbruch Hutton won the Europe award for their tasteful, low-energy Frankfurt office building, KfW Westarkade. The other winner was Frank Gehry's stunning Eight Spruce Street, a shimmering, steel-clad skyscraper that looks better than anything we're likely to find on the nearby World Trade Centre site. Though it does go by the pretentious name New York by Gehry, which makes it sound uncomfortably like a perfume.
Richard Rogers probably wishes he'd had Apple-style planning meetings over the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment in London. Instead, his design was controversially rejected when Prince Charles threw a royal spanner in the works last year, complaining about that vulgar hi-techie stuff to the Qatari royals.
No surprise that the revised design for the £3bn scheme is expected to be approved by Westminster council today, although the Qatari developers are said to be trying to reduce the amount of affordable housing in the scheme. No surprise, either, that the new plan, by Squire and Partners, Dixon Jones and landscape architect Kim Wilkie, is considerably more "traditional", laid out around London squares. Whoever designs the actual buildings will have to adhere to a preordained design code, which insists they "work in sympathy with surrounding character areas and architectural types without resorting to pastiche". Apparently Prince Charles is pleased.
After all this high-flying power architecture, we finally come right down to earth – to a little spot underneath a motorway flyover in east London. Here, a delightful temporary structure is under construction called Folly for a Flyover, as part of this year's Create festival. As designers Assemble explain, it's almost a stage set of a building, with curtain walls of wooden "bricks" made from salvaged timber, hung from scaffolding and held in place by cords running through the bricks. The pitched roof of the folly will poke out between the two roadways, and next to it are steps that serve as an outdoor seating area.
Not only is the folly ingenious and low-impact, it poetically turns a patch of dead urban space into a living venue. As the romantic engraving suggests, it's intended to feel like a forgotten piece of architecture which existed long before they built the A12 over the top of it – a building with a fictional history. Assemble, a collective of young designers and artists, were also behind last year's Cineroleum, a temporary cinema in a disused petrol station in Clerkenwell. This serves a similar function: it'll be a bar/cafe during the day, and in the evening you'll be able to watch films and performances on city themes, while traffic rumbles overhead, the Olympic building site bustles nearby and barges chug past on the canal. Sounds like the quintessential London summer experience.
Las Arenas: Beware of the stampede
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 24, 2011
The people of Barcelona are flocking back to this once cherished bullring – now that Richard Rogers has turned it into a Pompidou-style mall with a stunning view
Federico García Lorca described bullfighting as "probably Spain's greatest poetic and life-sustaining wealth". So what does it mean now that the corrida is giving way to the rituals of metrosexual grooming? This is what has happened at Las Arenas, formerly Barcelona's second bullring and now its newest shopping mall. The ornate, Moorish-looking circular facade of the original remains; but inside, architect Richard Rogers has inserted a colourful circus of leisure, in an atrium criss-crossed by escalators, walkways and giant structural elements. It's like walking into a giant tin of Quality Street, populated by Spanish fashionistas buying designer shades.
To be fair, it's not just the young and hip who come here. Las Arenas had more than 300,000 visitors in its opening week this March: that's around a tenth of the city. The rooftop public viewing terrace has been a huge hit, offering an unrivalled 360-degree view of the city. Families seem to have incorporated the building into their evening stroll. Senior citizens stare in amazement as they ascend the escalators, perhaps recalling great bullfights they saw at Las Arenas, where fearless matadors once struck poses in the face of charging bovine fury; now, the closest contact between man and beast might be the purchase of a leather manbag.
Next January, Catalonia will become the second Spanish state after the Canary Islands to have abolished bullfighting. Barcelona has been the epicentre of the anti-bullfighting movement; but, despite the fact that an estimated 70% of Spaniards are indifferent to the sport, and much of the outside world regards it with horror, the rest of Spain is unlikely to follow just yet. There is a vociferous minority who regard it as an inseparable part of Spain's identity, starting with King Juan Carlos, who once said: "The day the EU bans bullfighting is the day Spain leaves the EU."
Catalonia's rejection of bullfighting could be seen less as a cultural shift than a political one, part of its long-running beef with central government over issues of autonomy – though it has proved a red rag to nationalists. As a riposte, Madrid last year classified bullfighting as a protected part of the region's cultural patrimony. Valencia and Murcia did the same. "It is an art form that deserves to be protected," said Esperanza Aguirre, leader of Madrid's conservative regional government, adding that it "has been part of Mediterranean and Spanish culture since time immemorial".
Few could argue with Aguirre's latter point. No other country has formed such a complex relationship with an animal. The bull has shaped Spain's art and culture, from cave paintings right up to the famous Osborne brandy bull, the giant black billboard silhouette that looms over landscapes across the country. Goya, in particular, was influential in his enthusiasm for the death, drama and symbolism of the corrida; he even designed costumes for matadors. His 1815 work La Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting) features 33 lithographs that recall – or perhaps imagine – a colourful history of the sport. Men pole-vault over bulls and fight them sitting on chairs or standing on tables; often the bulls get the upper hand. Picasso, who sketched fights as a boy, said the bull in Guernica represented "brutality and darkness" against the people. Bullfighting is still reported on the arts pages in Spanish newspapers.
But, while the corrida might have cemented feelings of Spanish identity elsewhere, the same cannot be said of Catalonia, where it is often seen as the "foreign" sport of the Castilian oppressors. Post-Franco, Spain has successfully settled regional differences using another cultural medium: architecture. The shining example is Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, which not only put the Basque city on the cultural map, but helped bring a precarious peace between the separatist region and the rest of Spain. Now, in Barcelona, the architecture of Las Arenas is doing the opposite: sending out a message of regionalist defiance.
Las Arenas had not hosted a bullfight since 1977. It was built in 1900, on what was then the city's south-western edge. One of three bullrings in Barcelona, it had been a local landmark; but when the architects took possession of it, the building was covered in graffiti, trees were growing in it, and homeless people sheltered in its stalls. "It might have been easier to completely rebuild it," Rogers tells me. "It was a very weak structure with very thin walls. We had to shore the facade, then almost completely rebuild it inside. But the thing they insisted on, and I think they were proven right, was keeping the circular form, the historic form. It's not just a building – it's a piece of Barcelona."
The exterior is in a style known as neo-mudéjar, a 19th-century revival of Moorish architecture, characterised by striped stone arches and ornate tile and brickwork. This style was adopted by many bullrings of the era, including Madrid's Las Ventas, Lisbon's Campo Pequeno (which now has an underground shopping centre), and La Monumental, Barcelona's other surviving bullring, currently holding its final season. After that, chances are it will also undergo a Las Arenas-style transformation.
Having been built before the road outside, Las Arenas sits several metres above street level, a fact that Rogers exploits. A ring of steel supports around the base seems to hold the entire facade up in the air, and one enters the building by walking beneath it. The shopping and cinema levels within are an independent structure, organised around a central atrium, while the top two floors and the roof deck, which jut out over the old facade, are held up by four giant structural arms rising dramatically through the atrium. Where once the area around the bullring was taken up with its facilities – pens for the bulls, plus those two essentials, a chapel and a hospital – now it is all accessible public space, making it once again a piece of the city. "I have to say," says Rogers, "it's turned out better than I ever expected."
The term "hi-tech" now seems a quaint way to describe Rogers's style, especially in a historic refit like this; but, as with his breakthrough design for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the structural and service systems within the building are openly expressed in bright colours, and the joins between old and new are treated with similar honesty. Each service element here is coloured according to function: red for the structural steel; yellow for the giant structure supporting the roof; orange for the toilet cubicles; purple and pink for the fire escape and ventilation. The colours bring to mind the capes and costumes of the matadors, though now we humans are the cattle being coaxed by them.
If bullfighting was never Barcelona's thing, architecture very much is. This is surely the most architecturally exciting and forward-looking city in Europe. Looking out across the city from Las Arenas, it's an enviable spread of enlightened city-making. Ildefons Cerdà's visionary street plan of the 1860s laid the foundations for Catalonia's distinctive modernista movement of the early 20th century, which peppered the city grid with sensuous, organic structures, not least the works of local hero Antoni Gaudì, whose Sagrada Familia is the city's stunning centrepiece.
Back from the dead
There has always been room for foreign architects in Barcelona, too. A stone's throw from Las Arenas, Mies van der Rohe's cool, minimal German pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition has been reconstructed, a true jewel of Modern architecture. Today, the city is dotted with works by virtually every great architect of our age. Rogers himself has something of a special relationship with Barcelona. He designed the Hesperia hotel, a little further out, in 2006, but he has also served as an adviser on architecture and urbanism to two Barcelona mayors, Pasqual Maragall and Joan Clos, who are credited with turning the city around.
"Barcelona has had the most amazing success, in terms of urban regeneration, probably in Europe," says Rogers. "They said it would take them 20 years to make a difference, and that's what they did. They connected up the city: it had been terribly cut off from the sea by the old port, which had died and was a no-go area. Now it's five kilometres of beach and city. It's made Barcelona what it is."
Rogers also notes that Barcelona is the only city that has successfully exploited its hosting of the Olympics, in 1992, to improve the city. It was the template for London's 2012 Olympic plans, says Rogers, who was Ken Livingstone's urban adviser. "You can't just spend x billion pounds for 17 days of sport. You must use it as a catalyst to improve the life of the city, and to lever the poorest areas of the city on to a better economic and social footing – which is exactly what we plan to do in London."
Maggie’s centres: how one woman’s vision is changing cancer treatment
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 20, 2011
Maggie Keswick Jencks was a designer with a passion for gardens. As she was dying of cancer, she created the blueprint for cancer care centres that recognise how design can help recovery. Here friends and family recall a remarkable woman
When Maggie Keswick Jencks was 47 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Five years later she started to have severe back pain and, after two misdiagnoses, went to her local GP's surgery in Dumfries where she was told the cancer had spread to her bones, liver and bone marrow. In a home video, made for her mother, she described what happened next. She and her husband were told to see a visiting Edinburgh consultant. They waited in an "awful interior space" with neon lighting and then the nurse told them to come in. They asked: "How long have we got?" To which the doctor said: "Do you really want to know?" "Yes we really want to know."
"Two to three months."
"Oh…!"
And then the nurse explained. "I'm very sorry, dear, but we'll have to move you out into the corridor, we have so many people waiting." They sat in a "windowless corridor trying to deal with this business, having two to three months to live. And as we sat there, various nurses who I knew came up and said, very cheerfully, 'Hello dear, how are you?' 'Well,' managing a laugh, 'I'm fine!'"
This was the story that became Maggie's spur – the NHS corridor that would lead to her big idea. There might be no cure for Maggie's cancer but here was something that could be changed. Why shunt people with cancer into miserable surroundings? Didn't people need respect, time and space? With the support of her young nurse, Laura Lee, Maggie would devote the rest of her life to planning a cancer caring centre. She had a feel for what was needed and the drive and money, as daughter of the director of the Scottish trading company Jardine Matheson, to do something about it. She understood the need to feel in charge (not a helpless passenger in a hospital production line). She realised people might want to find out more about their treatment options. And she knew a beautiful space was needed in which to digest even the worst of news. She envisaged a room with a view – and a library. And she argued for an "old-fashioned ladies' room – not a partitioned toilet in a row". This would supply "privacy for crying, water for washing the face, and a mirror for getting ready to deal with the world outside again". She knew that, in a crisis, everything counts, even – or especially – the little things.
"Little" does not describe what has happened in the 15 years since her death: her idea has taken off. Today, there are 15 centres – seven up and running, seven in the pipeline (opening before 2012) and one online (a V&A display this month celebrates the achievement). Yet Maggie's centres are anything but pushy: they are only ever built at the invitation of NHS Trusts and, usually, in the grounds of hospitals with oncology departments. Unsurprisingly, hospitals recognise they need them and architects are queuing up to build them. And the existing centres have tremendous architectural prestige (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Page and Park have all designed one). But they are about far more than architecture for architecture's sake. Above all, they remind us that it is not frivolous to care about design. And this year the British Medical Association is also, at last, acknowledging architecture's importance as an ingredient in recovery. It is calling on healthcare organisations to "prioritise design in future building projects" after a new report showed that "architectural environment can significantly affect patients' recovery times." We are – to some extent – what we see.
I visited London's Maggie's centre for the first time last summer. Designed by architects Richard Rogers and Ivan Harbour of Rogers Stirk Harbour, it is audaciously beautiful. When you approach it from Fulham Palace Road, you notice it has turned its back on the ugly facade of Charing Cross hospital. It is painted orange in defiance of London's greyness and bad news in all its forms. And its extraordinary roof looks as though it has levitated. The whole building is serenely irrepressible. What is so winning is that it feels like home (although more elegant than any I know) and yet is an in-between space. It is not a retreat or a hospice or a clinic – it is a drop-in centre and it is free. It offers information, advice on nutrition, relaxation classes and a psychologist for anyone needing to talk about the most intractable subjects (depression, fear of dying, dread of cancer returning and other issues not easy to address in a hospital environment).
On the day I visited, the building was full of sunlight. I loved its attention to detail: the bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, the sunhats on pegs in the hall, the lack of signs bossily telling you where to go. And this is the key: you decide what to make of a Maggie's centre. You can walk in and out unnoticed if that is what you prefer. It is perfect for company – or contemplation. I visited at a time when one of my friends was dying of cancer in another country and kept thinking what it would mean to her to have such a place on her doorstep. While I was there, I also found myself thinking about Maggie, as anyone with even a scrap of curiosity visiting her centres must. I wanted to know more about her.
Photographs show a slender, vivid woman with dark curly hair and a dreamer's face when not smiling to camera. One can see the pluck in Maggie, especially in a picture taken at a Scottish picnic, just after her diagnosis – a blaze of a smile on her face, no shadow in sight. I had four people in mind to help me bring her into view: her husband, the writer and landscape architect Charles Jencks, her former nurse, Laura Lee, one of her many friends, Anne Chisholm, and her daughter, Lily. But what I could not predict was that meeting Lily would turn out to be as close to encountering Maggie as could be imagined. Friends exclaim at the likeness between them. And this pleases Lily. She is also following in both her parents' footsteps in having taken up landscape architecture as a career. She designed the garden for Frank Gehry's Hong Kong Maggie's centre and is now working, with Rotterdam architect Rem Koolhaas on the garden for Glasgow's second centre.
Whenever she pictures her mother, she recalls her wearing a green velvet floppy hat "like one of Jamiroquai's". She has the hat but never wears it. "My friends try it on all the time." She ought, she says, laughing, to share it with her elder brother, John (who runs a film production company), as it is "iconic". When I ask about the last two years of her mother's life, she remembers how hard it was to talk about cancer. In some ways, it still is. Lily is 30 now but was 13 then – a "nightmarish" age: "You can't hide anything from a 13-year-old." No one told her what had been said in that Dumfries surgery. But she knew. "Yet, as you know, my mother went on to live for another two years."
She is gentle and unjudgmental about her mother and herself. She understands how hard it was for Maggie to know what to say. Lily remembers her coming into her bedroom to show her hair falling out in clumps. She tried to be honest. She wanted Lily to understand. Yet the need for reassurance was mutual. Lily remembers a car journey to family friends during which Maggie asked her daughter how she looked. Lily said "healthy and full of life". It was only when she heard her mother repeating this verdict, with obvious pleasure, that "I realised how sick she actually was". And there was no Maggie's centre to help them navigate (let alone what is now being piloted in Maggie's Dundee – a support programme specifically directed at teenagers).
As a mother, Maggie was "sensitive" and "careful to spend special time with us alone and was always trying to be aware of our feelings – in case that space got lost in everyday life". Lily remembers cycling with her mother at a time when the effort to be on a bike must have been great but she gave no sign of it. She also remembers how Maggie's bed was often strewn with papers when she was very sick. It is only now she realises they were her precious blueprints for the first centre. "She was very concerned about them," Lily recalls.
It is a tribute to Maggie that her family, her nurse and many friends (some of them architects) have all, after her death, become involved in the centres, as if to keep faith with her. Laura Lee was a young nurse working at the breast chemotherapy suite at the Western General in Edinburgh when they met. She is now CEO of the centres. She is warm and engaging. It is easy to see why Maggie loved her. She does her job impressively too. "The landscape of cancer is changing," she explains, "because more people are surviving. Those with a recurrence live longer. The need for these centres has never been greater because people are living with cancer as a part of life." Laura explains that the centres are funded by investors and public fundraising and tells me about the many and inventive initiatives (such as an annual, sponsored 20-mile night hike through London). Everyone says that Lee is a dynamo without whom the centres could not flourish as they do. Laura remembers the moment at which her friendship with Maggie became "professional" and a shared mission: they travelled the UK and USA researching cancer care centres.
Looking back, Laura had no idea of the scale of what they were starting. Her first impression of Maggie and Charles as a couple was that they had tremendous presence. She found Maggie gentle, polite and "not at all passive". She wanted to know whether she should "go with the sense that her body was deteriorating and weak". She took an intense interest in her treatment. Understandably, her first reaction after the grim Dumfries prognosis had been to give up. But while she was retreating, her husband was in fast-forward, combing the world for cures. In her gallant essay "A view from the front line" (required reading for anyone interested in Maggie or in arming themselves against cancer), she describes the effort of will it took to fight on, and why it was hard: "deciding to give up the certainty of death for the uncertain prospect of a stay of execution: if I got into the fighting mode, and it failed, would I ever get back to this precariously balanced acceptance?" But there came a moment for Maggie and Charles when they, simultaneously, realised they would do everything they could to prolong her life. And Maggie wanted to win more time for her young children's sake as well as for her own.
The breakthrough was discovering that Dr Robert Leonard, at the Western General, was conducting a trial in advanced metastatic breast cancer (high-dose chemo and stem-cell replacement), for which Maggie was suitable. This – and her whole-hearted and intelligent involvement in diet and complementary treatment alongside it – would win her almost two more years. Maggie tended to be positive. She once wrote that the goal for people in her situation – not easy to achieve – was to try not to "lose the joy of living in the fear of dying" – words that have become a catchphrase at her centres. Laura thinks that her focus was always on the luck she had in life. When first diagnosed with breast cancer, she saw the cancer almost as a paying of dues for her privileged life.
Maggie was born in 1941. Her background was not only privileged, it was exotic – divided between Scotland, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Her father was a remarkable tycoon who, during the communist takeover of Shanghai, unlike most Europeans stayed on to help feed a starving population. He was rich but also philanthropic. And he spoke fluent Chinese. Maggie was an adored only child and might easily have been spoilt. But she never was. She was raised a Catholic (becoming, according to her husband, more of a Buddhist/Catholic later in life). She was educated at Woldingham in Surrey and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read English. Anne Chisholm met her at university and remembers her as "light on her feet, buoyant, vividly alive. While the rest of us were creeping around in various stages of lumpishness, here was this dazzling creature – much more stylish than any of us, she could lift a room." Maggie would cook Chinese delicacies in the pantry at her college. The oriental drifted into her dress sense too. She would train a Chinese scarf across her chin, securing it with a knot (in the rum fashion of the time). She was clever, funny, a good listener and a performer (acting in student productions with Esther Rantzen as co-thespian). She sang well and could quote yards of poetry by heart. She was an attractive mixture: an empathetic extrovert.
In 1965, after leaving university, she and a friend launched a boutique, Annacat (named after their dogs). The look, according to Chisholm, was "daughter of Mary Quant". Jencks remembers it more as "Victorian freestyle" (like some outlandish swimming stroke). At that time, Maggie became "a celebrity with the smallest of cs" (in a photograph by David Bailey, she looks the embodiment of the Swinging 60s). But fashion would prove too insubstantial for her. In 1970, she joined the Architectural Association and met Charles Jencks, an American architectural writer and landscape architect teaching there. He remembers how vivacious she was. But he adds: "The thing about Maggie is that she was vulnerable." She was insecure about her looks, did not believe in the beauty others saw in her. She'd spend ages trying to get her clothes right – and be late for dinner. She tended to be late generally. But people warmed to her because as her husband says: 'More than almost anyone I've met, she had a liking for people and they felt that in her."
In 1978, the year in which she married, she published a scholarly book on Chinese gardens. Scotland was always important to her – but China was to be the defining influence. Jencks remembers she made several solo research trips to China, once bringing back for him memorably inconvenient souvenirs: Chinese bullet-hole rocks (called "Scholars Rocks") and "according to ancient custom" a pet cricket in a tiny wooden box which she kept in her blouse and which, during its brief life, drove him crazy. Charles and Maggie understood each other well. Anne Chisholm says Maggie "adored Charlie and his ideas". And she acknowledged that she would not have produced her book without his help. She described herself as a "creative ditherer" – a perfectionist. As she wrote in her acknowledgements, "without his constant badgering and insistence, I should still be on Chapter One." Chinese gardens are seldom written about (Japanese gardens tend to steal the show) but Maggie put these gardens firmly on the map and lectured about them around the world. She described Chinese gardens as "cosmic diagrams, revealing a profound and ancient view of the world, and of man's place in it".
And, strange as it might seem, the passion for Chinese gardens has influenced the Maggie's centres. The sense of the cosmic diagram, the belief that architecture – and gardens – have meaning is essential to understanding Maggie, her husband and the way the centres have evolved. Charles Jencks is a man of tremendous charm and playful erudition (he has dubbed the game of looking round the house he shared with Maggie in London's Notting Hill as "hunt the symbol".) He describes the home, which has become a postmodern landmark, as cosmic. And it is extraordinary to visit it because nothing in it is idly itself. The stairs are an "abstract realisation of the solar year". Maggie's kitchen represents Indian summer. Even the loo has its story. It is wonderful in a way. But it must be exhaustingly inexhaustible to live in it. Apparently, Maggie once said: "I understand, Charles, everything has to symbolise something but symbolism stops at my door." He followed her prohibition to the letter – literally. We inspect Maggie's door – with a carved letter M and open book. And then he shows me her desk which, to his delight, shows her breaking her own rule. She painted it in Johnston tartan: greens and blues with a yellow stripe – as symbolic as could be.
Maggie's centres have their "meaning" too – but of a more instantly graspable sort. "They are," Jencks says, "to do with the way living and dying are part of one thing." There is, he goes on, nothing new about the overlap between health and culture. He cites Hospices de Beaunes and Stonehenge (now thought by some to have been a healing centre) in the sweep of his argument. And in his delightful new book The Architecture of Hope, you can see that each Maggie's centre is different – it is up to visitors to settle on individual meanings. Maggie would have loved unravelling the thinking behind each centre: Frank Gehry's homely centre in Dundee looks as if a child made its roof out of folded foil (you want to pat it); Zaha Hadid's in Fife, with its shark-like exterior made of sparkling silicone carbide grit, allows its visitors to move, in a boldly metaphorical way, from darkness to light; Page and Park's ingenious Inverness centre has a green copper roof and a design based on the idea of a dividing cell. And six new centres are planned to be built before 2012 – Wilkinson Eyre's tree house, which goes on site in Oxford next year, is my favourite: leafily escapist.
But the place that is perhaps Maggie's most personal memorial is not one of her centres at all. It is Portrack, the 18th-century country house in Dumfriesshire she inherited from her parents where, with Charles, she designed a garden now dedicated to her memory. It is a most awe-inspiring place with 60ft manmade mounds and vast lakes, a dramatic discourse between water and land and a swirling exchange of shapes (the lakes were Maggie's design). And it is this place that keeps coming up in conversation. Anne recalls seeing Maggie at Portrack, in her last year and watching her "running up one of the mounds as if she was 20 years old, with nothing wrong with her". Lily can still picture her mother, out in the garden, sketching. And Laura remembers sitting with Maggie at the top of one of the hills, with the sun on their faces. They didn't talk about death, she says, they did not need to, it was understood.
Maggie died on 8 July, 1995. "I remember running away from the hospital," Lily says. "I couldn't believe birds were still singing, the world turning. I remember watching, in disbelief, as someone crossed the road as if nothing had happened." Every morning, she would wake and, for a second, not know her mother had gone – and then the news would hit her again. Even now, she gets upset about it – although she never can predict when she will be ambushed. She would like to be able to ask her mother's advice about the big decisions in her life. She minds that, when she has children herself, they will not have a grandmother. She remembers now how tiring grief was. And, although that has lifted: "I don't think the pain goes away, you just get used to it. There is a hole inside of me but I know it is part of me."
It is winter when I return to the London centre. I walk through Dan Pearson's garden which is planted with 100 birches and runs parallel to one of London's most polluted roads – it seems an act of faith in itself. Some shy hellebores are flowering and Hannah Bennett's smooth sculptures stand out like polished melons – not stepping but sitting stones. Inside, there is a fire in a wood-burning stove and waiting logs, stacked neatly behind glass, are a heartening sight. It is marvellously peaceful. Lily tells me she is often asked, by visitors at the centres, about her mother. "People are really happy to meet me which is so touching. They want to know what Maggie was like." And oddly enough, one of the visitors, while I am there, looks up from the computer – she must have heard me talking – and asks whether I knew Maggie. I hesitate. I am tempted to say: "Yes."
One Hyde Park – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 23, 2011
The best penthouse suite in One Hyde Park will reportedly set you back £140m. But is it worth it?
It is a silo for oligarchs, a warehouse for sheikhs. It has grown up, like a Beckham sprog, in the glare of publicity. The prices of its flats have become, thanks to carefully planted and unverifiable news stories, the stuff of legend: £15m for three bedrooms, £140m for a 3,000sq m triplex penthouse – reportedly the most expensive apartment ever.
This is One Hyde Park, the £500m development of 86 flats in Knightsbridge, west London. It is the brainchild of Nick and Christian Candy, who were to the dizzy world of 00s property what the Gallagher brothers were to 90s music. They were stars, feted in magazine profiles, celebrated for their stylishness and wizardry.
They are now comparatively cash-lite and, although they have managed the development of the project, they do not actually own the building – it belongs to a consortium that includes the prime minister of Qatar. Instead, Candy and Candy are credited for their "exclusive interior design", a shimmering, silvery cream, leather and silk art decoish affair.
They are part of an array of brands intended to lure buyers: design by Candy and Candy, "legendary service" by the Mandarin Oriental hotel, "acclaimed art" by James Turrell, Rolex and McLaren shops, and security by the SAS or, at least, SAS-trained personnel. It is the self-declared "best project in the world" at the "world's most glamorous address".
It is planned so that residents need never put their feet on a pavement or jostle with the general public. Cars can sweep them into the complex and an underground tunnel connects to the neighbouring Mandarin Oriental hotel, enabling its exquisite room service to get to the apartments. There is a 21 metre swimming pool, spa, cinema and golf simulator. It assuages anxieties, including some you never knew you had: there are iris-recognition scanners, while an optional extra is a camera that films your back and plays it out with time delay on a mirror, so that you know you look as immaculate behind as before.
The project's big brands are its architects, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the practice founded by Lord Rogers of Riverside. Rogers has long proselytised for the "compact city". He argues for high-density development, tempered with "good design" and "high-quality public space", leading to "vibrant" cities. He wants "cohesion". "Unless cities," he wrote, "work constantly to prevent social, racial, physical and economic divisions, their communities will fall apart and the city will not work."
In his day job, as an architect following a brief set by clients, in a climate made by economics and planners, he does not find it easy to achieve everything that, as a seer, he would wish. One Hyde Park, rising to 14 storeys on a narrow site, certainly ticks the density box. Its contribution to social cohesion is less obvious, although its developers have paid for 70 affordable homes in the posh-ish district of Pimlico, as part of the deal necessary to secure planning permission.
One Hyde Park's contribution to public space is to improve a nasty 1960s road layout that came with Bowater House, a big office block formerly on the site. There are routes to Hyde Park on either side of the site, with slightly meagre pavements. Also, in response to some scruples of the planners, some shrubberies facing the street are encased in glass. These are nice enough, a little odd, and don't amount to much, but the architects reasonably point out that they are more than most buildings in the area give to the public. They might have added that, with the 250 hectares of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens close by, creating more open space is not the most pressing need.
The architects' greatest influence on the project comes under the heading of "good design". They have put considerable effort into shaping the new building's volume, which is twice that of Bowater House, so that it doesn't crowd and loom as much as it might. One Hyde Park is broken up into four blocks that are tapered and staggered in plan, which allows views forwards, to the park or across Knightsbridge, but not sideways into neighbours' flats. Glass lift towers are placed between each block, to make the development less fortress-like and monolithic, and allow fragments of sunlight to pierce from the south side to the north. Full-scale mock-ups were made of pieces of the building to see how this would work.
Graham Stirk, the RSHP partner in charge of the design, says that it is "highly crafted", to an extent not matched by the practice since its Lloyd's building of 1986. By this, he means the attention given to each detail and choice of material, from the pristine white concrete frame to the sharp lifts to the pre-patinated copper alloy privacy screens.
He also means that, in the tradition of modernist and arts and crafts architecture, there is nothing cosmetic: everything you see is performing a purpose, as well as trying to look good. He says that One Hyde Park's reddish and off-white colours are designed to echo but not mimic its stone and brick neighbours. Its irregular skyline is intended to be less brutal to views from Hyde Park than Bowater House, which was higher and blunter.
It is still somewhat stark, made tough by its untempered repetitiousness, but it has a quality of conception, proportion and detail that is streets ahead of almost any other new luxury apartment block. The bigger question is whether we should be outraged by this defensive enclave for the super-rich. Or that leftie architects should take modernist architecture, once seen as a tool of social progress, and use it to make such development look respectable.
Actually, I'm not outraged. This is Knightsbridge, a place long made of monuments to exclusivity, and it's better that One Hyde Park should be part of London than behind a fortified fence in some suburb, as it would be in many cities. Last week, I saw an ostentatious, two-tone Bugatti parked nearby, absurdly penile in its folds and curves, supervised by two heavies in a Porsche while its owner went shopping. It was striking, nauseous and funny, but not something to be banned. One Hyde Park is similar, with the difference that its clean-lined design is much better than the Bugatti's.
Bricks, mortar and mateyness
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 13, 2010
Britain might have better-designed buildings if key establishment figures stopped cosying up with each other
Here's a saying you don't hear so much these days: "British architecture is the best in the world." Which is striking, as until not so long ago it was a favourite incantation of government ministers, and of planners and developers, taking their lead from architects themselves, and critics and magazines, who had been making such claims since the 1980s.
Its fall from fashion might be because people got bored with saying it, or it might be – if your faith in human nature is strong enough to allow this view – because it is not true, and even politicians find it hard to say things that are untrue for ever. For the fact is that, despite 13 years of boosterism by the last government, and policies and initiatives ostensibly to raise the quality of design, and despite an urban task force and an urban white paper and promises of an urban renaissance, it is hard to survey Britain's cities and say, yes, this is a golden age of the mother of the arts.
The issue is relevant now because the coalition government has to decide what to do with the old regime's architecture and design policies. In particular it has to determine the fate of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), the Labour-created body charged with encouraging better public buildings and, through its design review panel, helping raise the quality of significant planning applications. Like all quangos it currently stands shaking outside the headmaster's office, waiting to hear if it will get an axing – for this is a Robespierrean headmaster – or just a good caning.
Several lines of evidence suggest that British architecture is not the best in the world. You could look at the fact that the bookmakers' favourites for the Stirling prize for the best British building are in Rome and Berlin, albeit designed by London architects. You could, if you live in a city, think of your nearest buy-to-let cereal packet. Or you could consult the hilarious Bad British Architecture website, with its array of schools, housing, colleges, supermarkets and office blocks which, despite their range of uses, merge into a single dull mud of oblongs, cladding systems and exhausted fiddlings with colourways and pointy bits.
Most compelling is the 147-metre Strata Tower in Elephant and Castle, London. Last month this was the deserving winner, out of a strong field, of the Carbuncle Cup, an anti-Stirling prize awarded each year for the worst building in Britain, by Building Design magazine. I can describe it no better than the judges, who spoke of its "Philishave stylings" and "grim stridency exacerbated by its sporty livery of alternating black and white stripes, configured in voguish barcode distribution." They pointed out that the conspicuous wind turbines at its top contribute at best 8% of the tower's energy needs. The justification for the Strata is that it is a "beacon" which will "kickstart" the regeneration of Elephant and Castle, but this is no excuse for what the judges called its "breakfast-extracting ugliness".
One question is how this conspicuous building, or others on the Carbuncle Cup shortlist, could have occurred in this era of supposed architectural sophistication, when planning processes have never been more elaborate and when learned committees like Cabe's design review panel pore over their every detail. The other question is how the great public building boom of the last decade produced so many schools and hospitals that look like escapees from a business park, Prestwick Academy in South Ayrshire being but one example.
The first and most important answer is to do with the ways public buildings and public spaces have been built, in which risk, responsibility and therefore power are handed as much as possible to the private sector. Schools and hospitals have mostly been built under the infamous private finance initiative (PFI); the London borough of Southwark has had to call in private developers to get things started in Elephant and Castle.
As Cabe loves to say, good architecture comes from good clients and good briefs, and it comes from communication between clients, users and architects. Yet under PFI it is hard for teachers and pupils to meet the architects who design their places of work, as the big contractors who handle PFI deals stand between them.
Bad briefs are also generated by the desperation to attract private money to public projects. In Hove, Sussex, it was planned to rebuild a swimming pool with funds raised from building flats on the same site. The number of flats needed turned out to be many, requiring large towers. No less than Frank Gehry was called in to make them look nice (with, it was rumoured, the architecture-mad Brad Pitt lending a hand), but the choice of architect and actor friend was not really the point. Not even an Andrea Palladio-Humphrey Bogart combo could have got round the fact that it was the wrong brief for the site and it was abandoned. There is little Cabe can do to change these fundamentals. It eventually produced a design quality test, which could improve but transform the standard of PFI schools. It boasts of its positive influence on the PFI-built City Library in Newcastle, but this steel and glass building still resembles a repurposed office block. It also boasts of helping to get a better developer and better architects to create the immense Liverpool ONE retail development, in which a large chunk of the city centre was "shrunk down to a monoculture of shopping and spending," according to the writer Anna Minton.
Cabe's design review panel did have some criticisms of the Strata Tower. While calling it an "appropriate proposition", and a "strong" concept, it was felt that "the cladding and energy strategy have not yet come together into a successful whole". Unfortunately they were not able to express themselves with the same force and clarity as the Carbuncle Cup judges would later, and their gentle nudges did little to address the project's flaws.
Nor was their position helped by their enthusiasm for other projects not fundamentally different from the Strata Tower, in that they were overscaled developers' totems dressed in mannered architecture. The proposed Vauxhall Tower in south London had a "well-worked-out, clear and attractive plan"; the 288-metre Pinnacle in the City of London could be "a world-class product"; the Cube in Birmingham, another Carbuncle Cup contender, had "an interesting mix of uses, good permeability and a striking form". History may find these are indeed fine buildings, but I suspect that most people would find it hard to see their greatness.
Too often Cabe has found itself in the business of ameliorating bad situations, with the result that it has come to look, or be, complicit with them. Worse, it has looked too matey with the people it is trying to oversee and influence. The architects Ian Simpson and Ken Shuttleworth, for example, were both members of the design review panel at the time that it endorsed controversial tower designs by each of them. Proper procedures were followed, with due declarations of interest, but such closeness between reviewers and reviewed can only make true robustness difficult.
Such cosiness goes wider in British architecture than Cabe. Richard Rogers was adviser to Ken Livingstone when he was mayor of London, promoting dense and tall development at the same time as his practice became leading designers of dense and tall developments in London. A very small number of architectural advisers recurs on the panels and committees advising on major regeneration schemes and design awards. Visitors to the New London Architecture galleries, apparently a neutral information centre, will have seen this summer an enthusiastic exhibition on the Strata Tower. Only if they were paying close attention will they have seen that the show was sponsored by the tower's architects BFLS.
Cabe chief executive Richard Simmons says that the commission's auditors praise its procedures for dealing with conflicts of interest, and I believe him, but the organisation's chairman, Paul Finch, is also an executive of the publishers Emap, whose titles include the Architectural Review and the Architects' Journal. Finch is in charge of a business-to-business conference in Barcelona called the World Architecture Festival and is a prolific appearer on committees for things like the Stirling prize shortlist. He has many qualities, but is it really in the interests of open discussion and fresh thinking that one man should have influence over so many aspects of architectural culture? Can Emap's titles be as sharp and independent as they might be when they are closely linked to Cabe? It's not corrupt, this multiple overlapping of public service, publishing and business, but it is mushy. It means that Cabe is more about arms round shoulders than kicks up backsides. It contributes to the complacent acceptance of the average, which is Cabe's style. Given the junk that has gone through on its watch, this style doesn't seem to be working.
Unlike "Piloti" in Private Eye, I don't think Cabe should be axed. The main culprit for the state of British architecture is not them, but the atrophy of civic government over decades. Things would be worse if Cabe weren't there and I believe it's a good thing, just, that the last government started saying good design is important. But Cabe needs to be much less obliging.
Gateshead car park: in praise of Brutalism | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 27, 2010
The Gateshead car park is being demolished this week. It's a tragedy, and not just for its architect
Owen Luder, twice president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, is Britain's unluckiest architect. In the 60s his firm designed several once-celebrated, subsequently reviled Brutalist buildings – all now either demolished, defaced or derelict.
The latest casualty is Trinity Square in Gateshead, a combined car park and shopping centre most famous for its malevolent, melodramatic presence in Mike Hodges' Get Carter. It's one of a series of commissions that bankrupted their developer, E Alec Colman Investments – along with the (mutilated, clad in white plastic) Eros House in Catford and the (demolished, replaced by a surface car park) Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth.
Though Luder's name was on the contracts and blueprints, the lead designer was Rodney Gordon, a former social architect with the London county council seduced into shopping centres. Trinity Square promised the realisation of his dreams – a metropolis architecture of dramatic skylines, multiple levels and striking forms, on a parsimonious budget. He died last year, entirely unrepentant.
And why should he have been? These are – or rather, were – wrenchingly powerful, physical buildings, in a tradition of dark, looming, twisted architecture that stretches from Newcastle Cathedral to John Vanbrugh. Unfortunately, we have collectively decided that architecture must be either Heritage – only Baroque is allowed to be bulging and overwhelming, only Gothic can be freakish and discordant – or Regeneration, in which case all must be glassy, shiny and colourful. Luder and Gordon's generation were too modern for the former, not patronising enough for the latter.
Luder didn't descend from Hampstead to foist his gigantic concrete buildings on the benighted proletariat, but from the Old Kent Road. "Growing up as I did in rented rooms in tightly built Victorian terrace houses with no inside loo," he said, "I went along with Le Corbusier's vision of beautifully appointed multistorey houses set in big landscaped open spaces." Yet Eros House, the Tricorn and Trinity Square were cranky, strange things, doomed to commercial failure because of their architectural caprices. The Tricorn never had enough retail space to entice an "anchor", was not sufficiently freeze-dried and air-conditioned. Proles for Modernism, a mysterious south-coast group who picketed the Tricorn's redevelopers, praised it for exactly this reason.
The Tricorn's demolition inspired protests, artworks and graffiti ("WARNING – THIS BUILDING MAY PROVOKE INTEREST"). As if to neuter this, Gateshead council has sponsored both Trinity Square's demolition and its commemoration in various art events.
When he was Riba president, Luder famously hailed Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building – essentially a more expensive Tricorn in steel – as "sod you" architecture. But at the same time, he is rare in architectural circles for actually trying to explain his buildings – when Trinity Square popped up on Channel 4's Zhdanovite Demolition, Luder managed to sway some of its haters.
Trinity Square failed to be sufficiently boring. That's not the case with its mooted replacement – a Tesco store with student flats on top, clad in as many materials as possible so as not to offend, concrete-framed but avoiding the dreaded faux pas of showing the material. Rodney Gordon claimed "architecture should appeal to the emotions. It should give you that feeling from your balls to your throat". With this demolition, we're exchanging architecture as a physical experience for buildings as a mute, grinning, lobotomised accompaniment to consumerism. We should lament it, not cheer it on.
Stirling prize shortlist: big names stop the judges in their tracks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
The six architects on the Stirling prize shortlist 2011 have all been there before. But could a political dark horse say 'on your bike' to the bookies' Olympic favourite?
It's never worthwhile to reduce the Stirling prize shortlist to some overriding theme, but having said that, there is one thing that unites this year's six architects: they've all been shortlisted before. Some of them several times – this is Zaha Hadid's fourth building, and David Chipperfield's seventh, which puts him in joint second place in the Stirling prize league table alongside Richard Rogers, with Norman Foster just one ahead. Does this suggest there were clear frontrunners in the Stirling race, or that a big name counts for more and smaller practices don't get a look-in?
Anyway, on with the reckless speculation. The traditional Stirling winner is a large public building, but in the current cash-strapped construction environment, there have been few of these to trumpet.
Which makes the absence of two of the main buildings on the London Olympics site conspicuous. No plaudits for the main stadium by US-based architects Populous – understandable in a way since its brief was practically to be as bog standard as possible – at which it succeeds (having a silly name for your practice doesn't help either).
And nothing for Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre – also understandable given its troubled history of redesigns, budget increases, temporary "water wings" imposed on it, and the fact that, er, it still isn't finished.
That leaves Michael Hopkins's Velodrome with the podium all to itself. As expected, it's currently the bookies' favourite and deservedly so. It's a handsome, unfussy building, quietly distinctive (enough to earn it a nickname: "the Pringle") and engineered as efficiently as a track bicycle. It's already had the thumbs-up from the Team GB cyclists, too, who described it as "the best in the world".
Looking at the other contenders, laudable though they are, they're not necessarily game-changing. AHMM's Angel Building reconfigures a 1980s office building with Louis Kahn-style barefaced concrete and a sheen of Mad Men mid-century glamour – very nice but perhaps too conventional to win. Bennetts Associates' Royal Shakespeare Theatre makes new sense of a messy accumulation of older buildings, but it's not a scene-stealer like the Tate Modern. Zaha's Evelyn Grace Academy is a consolation for the Aquatics Centre, and proof that her swooshing parametricism can work within tight budgets and design guidelines (is that Z-shape a touch of covert branding?). The fact that Zaha won the prize last year could hamper her chances, though. Likewise David Chipperfield's Museum Folkwang extension in Essen, another refined, sharp-edged German culture house for his collection.
Chipperfield already won with one of these in 2007, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, and was shortlisted for another, the Neues Museum, last year. Perhaps he should design a Museum of German Museum Designs.
That leaves a dark horse: An Gaeláras by Dublin-based O'Donnell & Tuomey in Derry, Northern Ireland. It is the first purpose-built Irish-language cultural centre in the UK, a product of the Good Friday agreement, and thus freighted with political relevance (there hasn't been much of that in Stirling world since the Scottish parliament won in 2005). But it's also a beautiful design on a hostile site. Despite being walled in on three sides, it boasts a sculptural four-storey atrium criss-crossed by stairs and galleries, smartly mixing colours and materials – the type of space that stops you in your tracks. Uplifting and finely crafted, it could well tick all the boxes.
Architecture, Art, Art and design, Awards and prizes, Comment, Culture, David Chipperfield, guardian.co.uk, Norman Foster, Olympic games 2012, Richard Rogers, Stirling prize, Zaha Hadid
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