Posts Tagged The Guardian
Country diary: Portland: Messages in limestone
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Portland: Behind us, in Portland stone, was the great pile of St George's church, looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here
We were chilled by gusts blowing off a rough sea across a bleak graveyard close to the windswept edge of Portland – the great limestone promontory, almost an island, only tenuously linked to the mainland below Weymouth by the narrow pebble strand of Chesil Bank. Between us and the shingle beach below was a quarry extracting the famous stone, good for carving yet durable, that Wren used for St Paul's Cathedral and that has adorned fine buildings before and since.
All around us were ranks of seemingly numberless tombs and gravestones leaning at varied angles, made of Portland stone, and most fashioned with elaborate carving, a tribute to the tradition and skill of Portland craftsmen. And behind us, also in Portland stone, was the arresting sight of the great pile of St George's church, in its solitary space outside the town, built by a local man, inspired by Wren, and looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here. Pevsner's guide to the buildings of Dorset calls it the finest 18th-century church in the county.
On our last trip to these parts, we had kept to the sheltered mainland coast and the wooded Rodwell trail, but now we had been brought to this exposed place by a chance meeting with the granddaughter of a man who had once been sexton and gravedigger here. She told us of the toil and problems involved in his work digging in the shale, and of his care of the graves for families who had moved away. And this stark place at a southern extremity of the country had an elemental feel, emphasised by inscriptions on tombstones near the church door; there is a memorial to Wm Pearce, killed by lightning while on Her Majesty's service "atop Chesil Beach" in 1858, and to Mary Way and William Lano, shot by the press gang in April 1803 (she died of her wounds in May).
• This article was amended on 26 January 2012. The original referred to William Leno instead of Lano.
Adrian Cave obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
The architectural career of my friend Adrian Cave, who has died of cancer aged 76, exemplifies the way disability issues have moved to the foreground of our culture. At an age when others consider retiring, Adrian embraced the concept of inclusive design and pioneered the transformation of disabled access to public buildings, so that it became integral to the creative vision rather than an add-on.
Adrian was the UK's first registered access consultant. In the past 10 years, he worked with architects including Norman Foster and Herzog & de Meuron and advised at the formative stages of projects such as Crossrail, the Olympic village, Tate Modern and the revamp of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. His mantra was "access with elegance". At Christopher Wren's Royal hospital, in Chelsea, west London, he concealed a lift behind 18th-century panelling to aid those with difficulties climbing the staircase, satisfying English Heritage in the process.
Adrian worked as a Samaritan and with Emmaus House on behalf of the homeless. He was made OBE for his dogged work in the transformation of a defunct cinema near his home into Ealing Community Resource Centre.
He was born in Great Bromley, Essex, and attended Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire. He adored adventures, such as navigating the canals with his grandchildren and walking with friends in Italy or Spain. He is survived by his wife, Felicity, whom he married in 1964; his son, Ben, and daughter, Zoe; and five grandchildren.
The height of suspense: Hollywood’s love affair with the skyscraper
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Nine of the world's 10 tallest buildings are now in Asia – and Hollywood wants to jump off all of them
Aerial shots over Manhattan's forest of skyscrapers. Yellow cabs crawling like ants through the city grid. The hero stands on a ledge 20 floors up, provoking a street theatre of police cordons, firetrucks, news crews and onlookers. Meanwhile, in a top-floor office, a corporate villain admires an architectural model of another shiny skyscraper. Elsewhere, an acrobatic thief hangs precariously in an elevator shaft, dropping a spanner that goes clanging down innumerable storeys to the ground. The ominous ping of an approaching elevator spells danger. The hero and villain finally meet for a climactic rooftop showdown.
These scenes could be from a hundred Hollywood movies or more, but in fact they're from just one: Man on a Ledge, an enjoyably silly new thriller that at least sets out its stall in the title. You can guess most of its plot from those generic snippets, but Man on a Ledge is just the latest piece of proof that movies love skyscrapers and skyscrapers love movies. They always have. In fact, they're practically twins. The exact date of birth could be disputed, but it's safe to say that while rising land prices and advances in steel were pushing buildings upwards in Chicago and New York at the end of the 19th century, inventors like Edison and the Lumière brothers were realising they might be on to something with their moving-picture machines.
Where would the movies be without the thrilling cinematic images tall buildings provide, both inside and out? The alone is estimated to have featured in more than 250 movies. Then there's their crashingly unsubtle metaphorical value. It doesn't take a genius to fathom the symbolism at work with, say, the diminutive Tom Cruise scaling the world's tallest building in the latest Mission: Impossible, or a rampant King Kong roaring from the top of the Empire State Building; or San Francisco's TransAmerica tower looming priapically in the background of Basic Instinct as Michael Douglas gets into a lather over Sharon Stone. For most of the 20th century, it was simple: the home of the movies and the home of the skyscraper were the same place. These two distinctly masculine enterprises worked together to broadcast America's virility to the world. But the marriage now has complications. In metaphorical terms, the attacks of 9/11 hit the US where it hurt, and the current financial crisis hasn't helped.
Where the skyscrapers have gone, the movies have had to follow – and nine of the world's 10 tallest buildings are now in Asia. That recent Mission: Impossible benefited greatly from the use of Dubai's 163-storey Burj Khalifa (over $500m at the box office and counting). Dubai hasn't done badly out of it either. When the Burj Khalifa opened two years ago, the emirate had an image problem, what with its economic and architectural bubble bursting. But Mission: Impossible seems to have fixed that. According to the movie's producers, the first time they visited Dubai, they said: "We have to come back here and shoot a movie." But Dubai was also a hefty financial backer of the film, and using the Burj as a major location appears to have been a condition. So the building, designed by US architects SOM, not only featured in loving closeups, inside and out, but Dubai also got to hold the world premiere of this "local" film – bringing Cruise, celebrity special guests and the world's media to the Dubai film festival last month.
Whenever a new Asian skyscraper is completed, it seems, Hollywood rushes to get there and jump off it. In the preceding Mission: Impossible, Cruise also leapt off a tall building, this time in Shanghai. Before that, in an indication of how quickly the gimmick can date, we had Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1999's Entrapment, dangling off Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, then enjoying a brief reign as the world's tallest buildings. You could say the process of America's corporate emasculation began as far back as 1988, with Die Hard (surely a high-point in skyscraper movies): although set in Los Angeles, the film decided to rename its hijacked building the Nakatomi Plaza and make it Japanese-owned (in fact, it was the city's Fox Plaza).
As Die Hard reminds us, skyscrapers are movie shorthand for "faceless corporation", usually going hand in hand with overbearing evil and phallic overcompensation. Man on a Ledge is no different: predictably, the ledge he's on is owned by the chief baddie, the one with a model of a skyscraper (his next one). For good symbolic measure, he also smokes a huge cigar. Yet, for all that they celebrate the manly tumescence of tall architecture, such movies are invariably on the side of the little man (and we're not just talking about Cruise here). The juxtaposition of a lone individual and a gigantic edifice often tells you all you need to know about a movie's intentions.
In the silent era, skyscrapers were something of a fad. There's the much-imitated image of Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock 10 storeys up in 1923's Safety Last! Lloyd made a string of high-rise movies, such as High and Dizzy, Look Out Below and Never Weaken. In most, his little man rises to the summit, overcoming the emasculating forces of urban life. His myriad successors have done the same. In 2008's Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, in which French tightrope walker Philippe Petit conquers the Twin Towers, the little-man thrill is the same, albeit enhanced by such an emotionally loaded location.
Which brings us to the other thing that's changed about skyscrapers. The destruction of the Twin Towers was the final nail in the coffin for America's skyscraper-and-movie marriage. In the immediate aftermath, the towers were digitally removed from up-and-coming movies like Spider-Man, whose scenes of the superhero swinging between skyscrapers suddenly looked very out of date; and now they have to be digitally reinserted into New York movies that are set in the past.
In 2004, the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote: "The skyscraper has become less interesting in inverse proportion to its success. It has not been refined, but corrupted; the promise it once held … has been negated by repetitive banality." You could say the same thing about Hollywood. Just as the high-rise has nowhere to go except upwards, so movies like Man on a Ledge find themselves stuck on a familiar narrative track, running from street level up to the inevitable rooftop showdown.
In the 1960s and 70s, architectural groups like the metabolists and Archigram proposed alternatives to the boom in towers, while Britain's Leslie Martin and Lionel March argued that they don't solve urban density problems. Koolhaas, who was a screenwriter before becoming an architect, presented his own anti-skyscraper in the form of Beijing's CCTV television headquarters, which effectively folds a tower in half and brings it back down to the ground.
If there is a crisis, both industries are in denial. The genre-movie production line churns on, and the skyscrapers keep going up. There are a few more security measures beneath the skin of the Freedom Tower, which stands where the Twin Towers once stood, but externally its generic-looking design says: "Nothing's changed." Upcoming movies like the rebooted Spider-Man also seek to reassert the primacy of the New York skyline in the face of all this competition: Norman Foster's Hearst Tower is a key location in the movie.
And some of that competition is now coming from London, thanks to its belated stab at high-rise kudos with the Shard. Looming large over the city, Renzo Piano's 87-storey tower seems destined to figure in the new era of "more commercial" British movies the government is calling for. According to the Shard's marketing agent, they've been receiving filming requests at the rate of about one a week. So far they've turned them all down, they say, but you can just picture Colin Firth struggling to express himself to Keira Knightley in its lift, or Daniel Craig and Tom Cruise fighting it out on the rooftop to see who gets to use it first, James Bond or Mission: Impossible. Meanwhile, back in real life, details of the next 007 novel have just been released. It's set in Dubai.
Leaning tower of Big Ben worries MPs
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 23, 2012
House of Commons commission meets to discuss what can be done to shore up crumbling Palace of Westminster
Once again, the splits and misalignments are beginning to show in the mother of all parliaments.
This time, though, it is not a bickering coalition or a cabinet riven with discord that is causing concern but rather the state of the Palace of Westminster itself.
A committee of MPs will meet on Monday to see what can be done to stop the tower that houses Big Ben leaning any further and to shore up Pugin and Barry's neo-gothic edifice.
Subsidence has led to cracks appearing in walls around the Houses of Commons and Lords, with Big Ben's bell tower leaning 46cm (18in) at its peak.
The House of Commons commission – which is responsible for the upkeep of the parliamentary estate – will discuss a surveyor's report that suggests options for dealing with the problems, including repairs which may lead to peers and MPs temporarily moving out.
However, experts have dismissed suggestions that the palace could be reclaimed by the Thames.
According to Prof John Burland of Imperial College London, who designed the five-storey car park underneath the Palace of Westminster, the clock tower's tilt is nothing new.
"[It's] been there for years," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "When I first started work on the car park it was obvious that it was leaning.
"We made measurements on it. It was leaning at one in 250 to the vertical, which is just about visible. That's the break point between looking vertical and looking like a slight lean."
Burland said the lean had probably developed early on as there was no cracking in the cladding.
"We think it probably leant while they were building it and before they put the cladding on," he said. "That was a long time ago and buildings do lean a little bit."
Burland added that the cracking, which he said was not caused by the tube's Jubilee line or the car park, was actually good for the palace.
"They're beneficial because the building moves thermally more than is caused by the Jubilee line and the movements concentrated around the cracks and, if they didn't, there would be cracking elsewhere," he told Today.
He also said the clock tower's lean was visible to the naked eye: "If you stand in Parliament Square and look towards it, you can just see that it moves very slightly to the left – but I wouldn't put any political slant on that."
Isi Metzstein obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 23, 2012
Innovative architect who designed some remarkable postwar British buildings
Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable and distinguished modern architecture in postwar Britain. Under the umbrella of the Glasgow practice of Gillespie Kidd & Coia (GKC), for whom he worked throughout his career, he and his colleague Andrew MacMillan designed a series of striking churches in and around Glasgow, as well as school and university buildings further afield, including Robinson College, Cambridge. They were also the architects of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Argyll and Bute, once widely regarded as the finest modern building in Scotland but now a derelict ruin.
Metzstein was born in Berlin, the son of two Polish Jews, Efraim (who died in 1933) and Rachel. He escaped Germany in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme. The boy, his siblings and their mother were scattered all over Britain until the family was eventually reunited. The young Isi had been taken in initially by a family in Hardgate, Clydebank, and he remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life.
In 1945, having left school, he decided he wanted to become an architect, and a chance connection led to an apprenticeship with Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the firm he had taken on in the late 1920s. At the same time, Metzstein enrolled for evening classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met MacMillan, whom he brought into the firm in 1954. Together, they were to transform the practice and, as "Andy and Isi", became a celebrated double-act, as designers, teachers and talkers.
Coia, the son of Italian immigrants, had reopened the office after the second world war and resumed his association with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Glasgow, having built a number of churches in the 1930s. The archdiocese was about to embark on a programme of churchbuilding. At first, Coia's archi tecture continued in the manner of his prewar work, but soon the influence of his two and open-minded assistants became evident, familiar as they were with avant-garde buildings in continental Europe, in particular the work of the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.
The turning point was the church at Glenrothes, a new town in Fife, which was completed in 1957. With its tapering, open plan, austere aesthetic and white exterior, this was clearly the creation of different hands. Henceforth, Coia's task was to secure the commissions, while the work was carried out by his young and expanding office. Although GKC were responsible for schools and some housing during the late 1950s and 60s, what stood out was the series of bold and inventive churches. It is ironic that, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed the architect to be the almost mythical Coia, the designing was in fact carried out by a Jewish refugee from Berlin and a Glaswegian of Highland Presbyterian ancestry.
Metzstein, who described himself as a "lapsed atheist", had a strong sense of the numinous, achieved in his churches by the dramatic handling of light in dark interiors. Some of the churches were in the tradition of tall and powerful brick boxes, such as those at East Kilbride (1962) and Kilsyth (1964). Others – St Benedict's, Drumchapel (1970), Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun (1965) – had highly inventive plans and unconventional internal spaces.
However, their masterpiece was undoubtedly St Peter's (1966), where neo-Corbusian ranges with a brilliant stepped-section were disposed around an existing Victorian mansion.
The work of GKC stood out from that of their equally modern-minded contemporaries in England. As Metzstein explained: "We got the unique opportunity to design modern buildings that were not modern programmes – churches, convents, seminaries … We were relatively young and more excitable, maybe … We were designing churches, which are one-off buildings with an emotional and religious context."
By good fortune, the firm never jumped aboard the high-rise, system-building juggernaut. Metzstein and MacMillan were also unusual in having a serious interest in history, appreciating the character of Glasgow's urban fabric of stone tenements and extolling the merits of the work of the city's great architects of the past, Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at a time when it was either ignored or under threat.
In 1969, when Coia was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture, he asked that his two partners be associated with the honour. But by then things were beginning to go wrong. The patronage of the archdiocese was coming to an end (although new jobs appeared in England) and problems were emerging with the firm's experimental buildings. As with Frank Lloyd Wright, stories abound about leaking roofs and structural problems. The campanile at the East Kilbride church was taken down and in 1991 the wonderfully dramatic church at Drumchapel was summarily demolished a few days before it was due to be listed. As for St Peter's, which was superbly constructed (unlike some of the churches), it was rendered almost obsolete as soon as it was finished by the new policy, after the Second Vatican Council, of training priests in urban settings. It was abandoned by the archdiocese in 1980 and fell prey to vandals. Despite its grade A listing by Historic Scotland and its inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's list of sites most at risk, the structure remains a ruin.
Metzstein later announced the foundation of the Macallan club (named after his favourite whisky), whose members are the architects of buildings "demolished or mutilated without the involvement of its designer" and who, "the victims of brutal, premature 'scrap-heaping', are witnesses to the fragility of permanence which characterises [the] century". This may have been a joke, but it all hurt – deeply.
The firm's last building was Robinson College, an complex and inventive redbrick response to the growing reaction against the Modern movement, which was completed in 1980. Metzstein then devoted himself to teaching and lecturing, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (of which MacMillan was head), at the University of Edinburgh (where he was professor) and elsewhere.
He was held in great affection and respect by architects all over Britain, and was both revered and feared for his incisive and often devastating criticism of student work. It was annoying that recognition – and a growing admiration for the work of GKC – came so late. When Metzstein and MacMillan were presented with an award by the Royal Institute of British Architects for their teaching in 2008, Metzstein noted that "it would have been even better to receive this while we were still alive".
He remained until the end the conscience of a rational modernity, and was "allergic to 'starchitects' whose work fills the magazines". He much disliked the posturing arbitrariness of such buildings as Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, "which I can't take, both as an architect and as a Jew born in Berlin".
Behind Metzstein's acerbic wit, uttered in his guttural accent – a distinctive combination of German and Glaswegian – was a warm and generous personality. For an architect, he was unusually well-informed, intellectually curious and cosmopolitan in outlook.He lived with his wife, Dany, also of central European Jewish origin, and his family, in Hillhead. At home he created an ideal city made of metal tourist souvenir models of buildings which his many friends would send him from all over the world.
He is survived by Dany, his children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his brother and twin sister.
• Israel Metzstein, architect, born 7 July 1928; died 10 January 2012
‘London’s British Museum is a map of the world, and a time machine too’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Our architecture correspondent celebrates London's most popular tourist attraction, the British Museum – at once a map of the world, a time machine and a treasure chest
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Simon Jenkins on the Tower of London
My walks to the British Museum as a young boy must have been as much a visual and emotional education as they were an untiring thrill. The time I spent there as a child is probably one of the reasons I came to travel so much to remote spots and folds of the atlas in later years.
The museum itself is a map of the world, a time machine, too, offering mind trips to Mesopotamia, Memphis, Athens in the golden age of Pericles and to an encyclopedia of compelling civilisations, or haunting fragments of them. Here, dreams of exotic places, peoples and buildings were brought to kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional and mesmerising life.
I liked, too, and lapped up, the way in which the tight, regular grid of what remained of Georgian Bloomsbury – streets animated by uniform parades of red double-decker buses and ranks of gleaming black cabs – gave way, all of a sudden, to an enormous courtyard set behind glossy black iron railings.
Beyond – up the most generous flight of steps – lay the museum itself, and its compelling collections veiled by a great Greek Revival pediment at the centre of an ambitious colonnade of no fewer than 44 Ionic columns, their design based, as I learned much later, on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor (now western Turkey).
There was all this to take in even before walking through the doors into the echoing lobby and deciding whether to turn left – into the dark realm of Egyptian mummies and Assyrian gateways guarded by warriors who were half adventurously bearded men and half vigorous blue ceramic bulls – or right into the Corinthian light of the King's Library, with its double-deck rows of gold-embossed leather spines.
Here I could stare at the pencilled pages of Scott's Diary, not knowing that one day I would hold this most moving of documents in my own, white-gloved, hands, turning its heart-rending pages.
I enjoyed the gloom of the Duveen Gallery, built just before the second world war to designs by the American architect John Russell Pope, where the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon frieze – were on display. I was ignorant then of the controversy around these "stolen" sculptures and the desire of many modern Greeks to see them returned.
I learned to love Sydney Smirke's circular Reading Room set under an iron-ribbed dome in a courtyard of his elder brother's Grecian pantechnicon. Robert Smirke had travelled extensively in Greece and Sicily to sketch the ruins of ancient temples before he turned his cool mind and his elegant hand to the design of what is today, in terms of visitor numbers, Britain's most popular tourist attraction.
What has changed since I was a child? Renovations, extensions, and the exodus of the British Library to Colin St John Wilson's red-brick monument alongside the fairytale Gothic of the Midland Grand Hotel and St Pancras station, Norman Foster's roofed-over Great Court and, most of all, the sheer number of people tramping through the museum's halls and galleries, so many that the last time I came to look at collections from ancient Mesopotamia I was all but swept away on a tide of visitors: the gallery I had chosen has become one of many intensely busy thoroughfares in the museum.
It can be too busy for its own good. And yet anyone who is tired of the British Museum is tired not just of tourism or the crush of central London, but of the entire world and the history of its civilisations captured here in untiring architectural splendour.
• Admission to the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1 (020-7323 8299, britishmuseum.org) is free
‘The surrounding modern buildings show no respect for the Tower of London’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
The iconic 11th-century citadel that is the Tower of London, with its ancient walls, streets, steps and turrets, has been let down by a towering failure of City planners, says Simon Jenkins
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum
Bad news. Unesco may soon strip London's two most prominent tourist sites, Westminster's Parliament Square and the Tower of London in the City of their world heritage status. Chief reason is the towering Shard, which will be western Europe's tallest building, now looming over both of them from its launch pad on the south side of London Bridge. Westminster's grouping of Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Whitehall is probably far enough away to survive the shock. The Tower of London is a different matter.
The rough-and-tumble old citadel has become such a London familiar that few people really know it. William the Conqueror's White Tower still sits nobly in the centre of the composition, sadly deprived of the original limewash that gave it its name. Inside are the original apartments, two chambers to each floor, and a Norman chapel. In the basement is a magnificent armoury museum. This remains the finest 11th-century structure in Britain.
On the river side of the Tower is Traitor's Gate and a suite of medieval chambers fitted out for Henry III (who kept a zoo in the grounds). This mini-palace has been recreated, complete with throne room and peaceful oratory looking out over the Thames – a serene view touched by the sadness of those passing to their deaths beneath.
Within this palace runs the last medieval street in London, a maze of ancient walls, steps and turrets. Here are the Bloody Tower, Raleigh's prison chambers, the Crown Jewels and the "leads" where Princess Elizabeth walked and contemplated death or coronation during the reign of her Catholic half-sister, Mary. The Tower enclave as a whole is a remarkable medieval town within a town. When inside, we can just about lose ourselves in Beefeaters, ravens, blood, guts and history.
Until the 1960s Tower Hill, overlooking the tower itself, was surrounded by the buildings, mostly warehouses, of a working Georgian and Victorian city. Most eye-catching of all, Tower Bridge, designed by the City architect, Horace Jones, in 1886, rose downstream in deference to the tower itself. The most famous bascule bridge in the world and still working, it perfectly complements the battlements and vigour of the Conqueror's fortress. Visitors can climb it and look down on river and city beneath, getting a closer and more evocative view than from the big wheel upstream.
That is about it. As Unesco rightly suggests, no city in Europe has shown less concern for the setting of its historic buildings than London. St Katherine's Dock just downstream of the bridge has been partly restored, but its tower facade is wrecked by an overwhelming glass box by Lord Rogers, and by the appalling concrete Tower Hotel. Whoever allowed this to be put up should be shot, and one day I assume it will be taken down.
Across the river lies the benighted site of warehouses cleared in the 1970s and left fallow as planners argue over what to do next. Had the waterfront been restored, as happened downstream in Wapping, this area would have been yielding rent and jobs for a quarter of a century. That is the true cost of so-called redevelopment.
Directly opposite the Tower is the mayor of London's oval building designed by Lord Foster and described by former mayor Ken Livingstone as a "glass testicle". It lurches strangely towards the river with, to its right, the frigid More London development. Meanwhile, on the north bank upstream of the Tower, is a giant atrium block also by Foster, blundering across the contour.
These buildings show not the slightest respect for the Tower or Tower Bridge. They are monuments only to insipid steel and glass.
• Admission to the Tower of London (0844 482 7799, hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon) from £17 adults and £9 children, if booked online
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and chairman of the National Trust
Will Self: why I hate London’s Trafalgar Square
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Controversial novelist Will Self thinks Trafalgar Square is an ultra-naff London landmark that would be improved with market stalls, cafes and Lord Nelson being cut down to size
Simon Jenkins on The Tower of London
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum
Without a shadow of doubt Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. The fact that massed divisions of tourists feel compelled to ritually promenade across its pigeon-shat-upon York stone and head-banging granite is perverse in the extreme, because it's not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger of being hung for treason, such is the discourse of power enshrined in its leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column.
True, the National Gallery makes a pleasing non-event horizon for the square as you enter it from Whitehall or the Mall; a long range of neoclassicism, with its Saracen's helmet dome, it's bare to the point of Moorishness. St Martin-in-the-Fields is also difficult to object to unless you've a perverse inclination against its unexceptionable architecture and illustrious history of beneficence.
However, surrounding the rest of it are tedious Edwardian-club-bore buildings – South Africa House, Canada House and the rest – that underawe with their weighty bombast.
There's this, and there's the perverse cant of the square, which rises south-west to north-east to form a raked stage upon which something ought to happen. What usually happens on it is that organs of the state corral one group of malcontents or other before hitting them with sticks, riding over them on horseback, and on one or two notable occasions – such as the original Bloody Sunday of 1887 – render some of them appropriately stone-dead.
Of course, barring the occasional demonstration, the Square doesn't have much happening in it at all, apart from full-grown Italian men with goatees climbing on to the backs of Landseer's lions, and giant Scandinavian teens rolling up their jeans and wading in the fountains until authority spurts them out.
Yes, yes, I know: mayors of all stripes put on concerts there, and also erect big screens on which events of some sort or other are displayed. I've seen this sort of carry-on when I cross the square – usually bottom-left to top-right – on my way to the opera, Soho and other more interesting destinations.
Trafalgar Square is so compellingly naff that it was the obvious location for that repulsive Olympic countdown clock – as it is annually for that enormous fir tree the Norwegian people insist on sending us – even though we've asked them very politely not to.
Who was it who said, "Corridors have become destinations"? Ah, yes, Rem Koolhaas in his seminal 2002 essay Junkspace – but he could've been talking about Trafalgar Square, at least since the completion of Admiralty Arch in 1912. Prior to that the square was … well, less square for a start. And it also had housing facing directly on to it – some distinctly ducal, such as Northumberland House, but others that were a recognisable part of the old bricky weave of London. It had housing, and even quite modest shops – now all that's left of the commercial activity that once gave the capital its distinctive street life is a Tesco Express, a Waterstone's and, further along towards Pall Mall, the offices of various implausible Central Asian airlines with names like GhengisAir.
Yes, once the Arch was overarching and the Mall came into being (prior to 1912 it was a long row of hedges), Trafalgar Square became a corridor that was a destination, by which I mean it was a site to be visited rather than lived in. Dead and about-to-be-married royals must be dragged through its environs as part of a kissing of the ritual stations of the state's holy cross – winning sports teams ditto.
Almost all attempts to gussy up the Square and make it more user-friendly – think the Fourth Plinth new sculptures, and the pedestrianisation of the northern side – are doomed to failure, precisely because of its bombast and the petrified generals laughing stonily in the face of anything light, frothy or fun.
Of the recent Fourth Plinth sculptures only Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant has gone any way towards bending the square's rectilinear rigidity. With its subversion of the conventionally standardised representations of the body the square specialises in, and its bright white marble – the albedo of which attracted a good proportion of the flying rats – Quinn's statue made a stab at the flinty heart of the Brit establishment.
Unfortunately it couldn't possibly penetrate far enough. What's needed are cafes all over the gaff, open-air and serving excellent espresso; top-notch strolling and – unlicensed – buskers; Horatio's nob chopped off halfway down; at least one of the lions upended; an open-air market; some good ethnic food stalls; and possibly a snake charmer or 20 …
Overall, think Marrakech's Djemaa el-Fna and you wouldn't be far wrong. Oh, and did I mention the weather?
Will Self's novel Umbrella will be published by Bloomsbury in August
John Madin obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 19, 2012
Architect who helped transform postwar Birmingham
No single architect changed the face of Birmingham as radically as John Madin between 1950 and 1975. His buildings, however, are subtly different from the concrete hulks surrounding New Street station and lining the inner ringroad, created by the city engineer, Herbert Manzoni, which gave Birmingham its 1960s consumerist image. Madin, who has died aged 87, was the architect to the Calthorpe estate, west of the city centre, which he transformed with sensitive new housing and an office strip, before he progressed to build many of the city's most individual offices and public buildings.
Madin was born in Moseley, Birmingham, the only child of a master builder and cabinetmaker who fostered his interest in architecture from an early age. He began his career in Manzoni's office aged 16, before entering the Birmingham School of Architecture, a training interrupted by second world war service with the Royal Engineers. As with many of his contemporaries, the war encouraged Madin to think big, and to see the answer to the depressed and damaged city he found on his return in 1947 in the Modern movement.
He set up in independent practice in 1950, designing housing and shops for the council and private developers, before in 1954 he was commissioned to design offices for the Engineering and Allied Employers' Federation. This small block in Edgbaston, realised in the decorative Scandinavian style that he had admired when, as a student, he had hitchhiked round Sweden, led to commissions from the Chamber of Commerce in 1960-61 and the Birmingham Post and Mail, whose offices (opened in 1966) included a 17-storey glazed office tower set over a low podium, in the style of Lever House, New York. Madin's buildings grew to match the ambitions of the 1960s, with glass giving way to heavier concrete finishes later in the decade.
The Engineering Employers' building also led to Madin's appointment by the Calthorpe estate to produce a master plan for its landholdings in Edgbaston, where he designed many important buildings. Low-rise housing in brick was followed by mixed schemes with tall blocks of flats, carefully sited and combined with rich planting. Landscaping also played a part in the offices along the Hagley Road that Madin and his rapidly expanding practice produced into the 1970s, which included his own offices, from 1966, in dark brick, and Neville House, from 1975, clad in mirror glass.
Two other buildings in Egbaston were more monumental still: the BBC's Pebble Mill studios, and the fortress-like Grand Lodge (now Clarendon Suites) for the Warwickshire Lodge of Masons, both completed in 1971. Pebble Mill was demolished in 2005, but the Clarendon Suites exemplify the richness Madin brought to his most prestigious interiors, combining modernism with traditional materials and works of art.
The same contrast between exterior and interior informed Madin's best-known but most controversial buildings, both of them in central Birmingham and under sentence of demolition: the avowedly brutalist National Westminster Bank, opened in 1974, and the Central Library. The latter is the only local authority library in Britain with the scale and stature of a university facility, and its stepped exterior conceals exceptionally calm reference areas, partly of double height.
It was the vigorous campaign to save this building, rejected for listing against the advice of English Heritage and set to be replaced by a new library from the Dutch architects Mecanoo, that led to the work of Madin's practice being re-evaluated, culminating in a monograph by the local architect Alan Clawley. Madin's last public appearance was at the launch of this book in March 2011.
Madin formed a large, multi-disciplinary practice in 1967, the John Madin Design Group, which worked across the West Midlands and in Leeds. It planned the new town of Telford, Shropshire, and extensions to Corby, Northamptonshire. He withdrew through ill-health in 1975 but continued to run its international arm until 1989, working in Europe, the Middle East and the US, mainly for the leisure industry.
A keen sportsman, Madin met his wife, Judith Jackson, on a tennis court. They married in 1956. He was an accomplished water-skier and sailor, and, following a move to Southampton, in 1992 joined the Royal Southern Yacht Club, for which he designed a new clubhouse at his own expense. Sailing holidays with his son and two daughters had earlier led him to the Welsh coast, where in 1965 he acquired a site at Aberdyfi, Gwynedd, to save it from less sensitive development. Over the following 45 years, Aberdovey Hillside Village slowly emerged, with pairs and terraces of flats and houses along the contours. Madin was still working there in 2011.
He is survived by his wife and children.
• John Hardcastle Dalton Madin, architect and planner, born 23 March 1924; died 8 January 2012
A high water mark: artists moor holiday houseboat on London roof
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 17, 2012
Vessel installed on top of Queen Elizabeth Hall on South Bank is open to the public for overnight stays
There are just a few things missing to complete the scene. Savage dogs, rusting engines from white vans plundered for parts, seagulls squabbling over landfill, scuffed barges laden with gravel and a backdrop peppered with indifferent high-rise housing. Add a slight scent of sewage and the 27-tonne Le Roi des Belges (King of the Belgians) might be berthed on some wind scythed stretch of the Thames Estuary far east of Tower Bridge.
The illusion, conjured on a grey and blustery January morning is not so very whimsical. Le Roi des Belges just happens to be moored on top of the brutalist Queen Elizabeth Hall between the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre. This, though, is no weather beaten Thames trader; it is, rather, an artwork – houseboat, too, which the public can stay in. It was designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, with Artangel for Living Architecture, an organisation set up by the philosopher Alain de Botton to build innovative holiday homes around the shores of Britain.
The shock, having ridden a slow and brutally utilitarian lift up through a jagged concrete interstice between the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, is to find the houseboat anchored to the vast concrete roof of the 1960s concert hall, a terrain as bleak, and as compelling, as any found downriver from Tower Bridge.
Artist and architect say they were inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, set on the Thames and the River Congo, and by Conrad's tales of how he steamed up the Congo in a boat of the same name in 1889. But, where Conrad experienced the all but unspeakable horror of the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State by King Leopold II, what you see spread out before you as you board the artworld Roi des Belges, also known as A Room for London, is the most compelling, and gloriously wide-angled, panorama of central London, framed by the Palace of Westminster on the port side and St Paul's to starboard.
"The idea is that where once ships sailed out from imperial London to the rest of the world, today the world has come willingly to London," explained de Botton. "The boat is here to provoke, stimulate and adjust how people feel about London."
Two people can stay here for a single night during the course of this year. Snuggled into their cabin – complete with neat galley, dining a pair of room, bunks that can be slid together, a shower with a view of the dome of St Paul's and a library. Those stowing their jib aboard this happily unexpected houseboat, are offered shelves stacked with books on London, peerless views and the strangest sense of being marooned alone in the heart, not of darkness, but of a neon, fluorescent and sodium-lit city and with the sound of Thames water lapping the South Bank shore overlain with the noise of night buses and emergency service sirens.
A Room for London is a year-long arts venue. A programme of visiting writers includes Swedish author and cultural historian Sven Lindqvist and novelist Jeanette Winterson. Among the musicians staying on board will be Andrew Bird, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist, German composer Heiner Goebbels and Laurie Anderson. Video and installation artist, Jeremy Deller, and Talking Heads' David Byrne will also be part of the crew. Somewhere between July and December you might want to book yourself on board, too, before, Le Roi des Belges is lifted off the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall and packed off to her next port of cultural call.
Le Roi des Belges is the sixth of the adventurous new rental houses commissioned by Living Architecture. These include the Balancing Barn on the Suffolk coast between Aldeburgh and Walberswick by Dutch architects, MVRDV, the Shingle House on the extreme south-easterly point of England at Dungeness, by the Glaswegian team NORD Architecture, and the Dune House on the fringe of Thorpeness,Suffolk, by Norway's Jarmund/Vigsnaes architects. All are moored by the sea, yet none is as literal in form as the shipshape Roi des Belges.
• This article was amended on 17 January 2012. The original referred to atrocities committed in the Congo Free State by King Alphonso II. This has been corrected.