Posts Tagged The Observer
A Room for London – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 20, 2012
A small vessel perched on top of the Southbank Centre has become London's most coveted hotel room
A Room for London – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
A small vessel perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall has become London's most coveted hotel room
The river Thames has a way of defeating plans for its jollification. For decades architects have looked on its great, tempting emptiness and felt an irresistible urge to propose beaches, inhabited bridges, lidos, zones for festivals fluttering with pennants and balloons, places to promenade as if it were the edge of the Mediterranean. In the 1980s Richard Rogers imagined an archipelago of pleasure, with the forms and construction methods of oil rigs remade into towers and pinnacles of fun. Most recently, the architects Gensler proposed the floating hospitality suite they called the London River Park.
Mostly these plans don't happen. The river flows on, lugubrious and imperturbable, which is possibly because, as Joseph Conrad observed, it is not really a fun sort of thing. "And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation. For him it was the "sleepless river" of a "monstrous" and "brooding" city. "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river," he also wrote, "into the mystery of an unknown earth!"
One Thames project that has happened is A Room for London, a boat-like object perched high on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, as if stranded there by a receding deluge. Where many Thames proposals want to put things of land on to water, this puts something riverine – a boat – on to land. It is a temporary structure, a cross between building and sculpture, by the architect David Kohn and the artist Fiona Banner. It contains a single hotel room which anyone can in theory book, if with rather more difficulty than Olympic tickets. When nights for the first six months were made available they sold out in 12 minutes; the next batch goes on sale on Thursday (at £120 a night).
This little space is the production of an impressive array of cultural impresarios: the Southbank Centre, Artangel, and Living Architecture, the organisation set up by the writer Alain de Botton to build beautiful new houses which can be rented for holidays. It comes, like many cultural projects in 2012, with an Olympic tag, being officially part of the cultural Olympiad. As well as paying guests, writers, artists and musicians have been invited to stay there, and be creative.
From the outside the jaunty vessel seems to fall within the "fun" category of Thames projects. It juts perkily into the void, and three little wind turbines, like displaced propellers, whirr on the top of a triangular rig. It is a toy, palpably and deliberately incongruous. It is a folly. But it turns out that its makers also had Conradian ambitions. The boat is called the Roi des Belges, after the vessel in which Conrad himself sailed up the river Congo, in the journey that would inspire Heart of Darkness. Inside there is a cabinet containing old maps of the Thames and the Congo, in reference to the parallels that Conrad made between the two rivers. An octagonal table and a box of dominos echo similar objects described in the master's novels.
There are other inspirations. The intricate house and museum of the architect Sir John Soane is cited by David Kohn as a help in designing the "episodic" sequence of small spaces that are inside the boat, as you progress from a little vestibule to a galley, to a bedroom that opens up to penthouse views of the river, bracketed by the Palace of Westminster to the left, and St Paul's Cathedral to the right. Alongside the river maps there is a copy of a drawing by Soane's collaborator JM Gandy that shows Soane's Bank of England as if it were a Roman ruin, and which might be taken as a comment, if desired, on financial calamity, or on the fragility of civilisation described by Conrad. Kohn also mentions the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as an influence, even though his heavy white stone churches would come top of most lists of Structures Least Likely to Float. The spire-like superstructure of A Room for London refers to these churches, and to the spires of London in general.
The main point, says Kohn, is to combine the intimate and the epic, in a way not unlike the relation of domesticity to vastness that you get in boats. "The interiors feel comfortable and you know what to do there, but it's not just an easy or twee kind of comfort. You are connected to the Thames, to a wider world, also to what one thinks of the world. You have a relationship to disputed, uncertain territory."
In all this the intention was to avoid kitsch and creating a one-line joke. The timber-lined interior, stained in places in rich pinkish-red, is not pushed to the point where it is literally boat-like in every detail, but rather seeks other architectural qualities, which is where the influence of Soane comes in. It was also important to Kohn and Banner that the structure was exactingly well made, by the specialist company Millimetre. "It is solid; it has a kind of earnestness," says Kohn, which keeps it away from being a stage set.
And so the lucky purchasers of nights in the hotel room, the intellectual aesthete's equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, will be able to contemplate the "venerable stream" much as Conrad's characters did in the cruising yawl Nellie. At sunset they will be able to watch the gloom "become more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun". They can, should they want to, think their thoughts about the world and their place in it.
A Room for London is small, and temporary, and will only be fully enjoyed by a few people. It is not a prototype for future Thames-side development, and offers no solutions to the problems of urban regeneration. It may, even, not quite match the fathomless profundity of its inspirations, being rather an enjoyable and well-made jeu d'esprit. But I have a feeling it will give satisfactions that other Olympic projects will not match: it is intelligent, witty, pleasurable, and is based on observing its surroundings as they actually are, rather than imposing a bombastic idea of what they should be.
Olympic Village – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 8, 2012
London's Olympic Village will be home to 17,000 athletes this summer and a new community when the Games are over. They'll find a development of long-distance vision marred by short-sighted flaws
The huge housing estate is something that went out of fashion at about the same time as the Osmonds. Its reputation was as low as a British Leyland car or the Nixon presidency, and it was less likely, it seemed, to come back into favour, especially if it was made of concrete and funded by the government. Examples such as the crescent-shaped blocks in Hulme, Manchester or the slabs of the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, London have been and are being torn down. Yet thanks to the magic of the Olympics, planned, publicly funded concrete housing on a grand scale has made a comeback. The rather important question is whether it will work.
The athletes' village has been built to house the 17,000 competitors and officials in the Olympic Games, after which it will become a new neighbourhood of about 1,400 affordable homes and another 1,400 for profit. Its success is vital to London 2012's hopes of legacy: if it prospers, office blocks are likely to rise around it and dreams of regeneration – the theoretical justification of the whole Olympic exercise – are more likely to come true.
Most housing nowadays consists of expedient, opportunistic developments thrown up with minimal consideration for the larger area of which they will be a part. The athletes' village is almost alone in including such things as a school, a health clinic and shops, and for being built to a plan by the architects Fletcher Priest, Arup and West 8 that envisages generous and well-maintained landscaping. It includes such radical ideas as balconies that are big enough for a table and chairs and it is made of solid, enduring-looking stuff rather than the ticky-tacky cladding favoured by most urban home-builders.
It seeks to emulate the much-loved planning of Maida Vale and other parts of Victorian west London, where the interiors of blocks are given over to gardens shared by residents. These gardens are raised above street level to allow concealed parking underneath, which is a clever way of keeping cars out of sight. Around the bottom of the blocks are bands of what are called "town houses" – three-storey units with further floors of flats stacked on top of them. The idea is to create "active frontages", to animate the streets by having the units' front doors on them and also to cater for residents who would like a house or at least something house-like.
All this planning is good, even great, given that it is so unusual in new housing developments. Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration.
But it also has to be said that the look of the village is a tad forbidding, not indeed very villagey at all. It consists of a series of cuboid blocks of eight to 12 storeys, clad in prefabricated concrete panels, laid out on a rigid rectangular grid. They are repetitive in form and colour but varied in detail, as some of the country's better-respected housing architects were given the job of variegating the external treatment. Their construction technology is essentially that of those much-criticised estates of the 1960s and of East German plattenbau, though, it's to be hoped, with higher specifications.
Potentially mitigating features, such as pavilions planned for the open areas, have been sliced out by budget savings and opportunities for intimacy or unforced variety are lost. The bands of "row houses", for example, could have been more clearly expressed; as it is, they are submerged by the mass of flats above them. There are the attempts of different architects to liven up the basic formula – some brightly painted panels on some balconies, reproductions of the Elgin marbles embossed on some walls, explorations of the expressive possibilities of rearranging windows – but they can only go so far.
In a former job I helped to select these architects, and they are all fine people, but they struggle to overcome the relentless order of the grid and the construction. Again, there is nothing wrong with regularity, and architects Fletcher Priest cite John Nash's classical facades around London's Regent's Park as a precedent, but Nash had a lightness of touch that has here gone missing.
Meanwhile, although the original masterplan had the best intentions to join up the village with nearby neighbourhoods, it has a disconnected feel. If you want to walk to the centre of Stratford, and the tube station, you must first cross the giant concrete trench of Stratford International station and then creep round the inhospitable edge of the Westfield shopping centre or else plunge through the middle of its shopathon.
Westfield, meanwhile, presents an unlovely wall and roofscape of car parks to the new housing. All this construction – many billions worth of station, shopping and housing – has been delivered in the past few years, with the help of public money and the close oversight of public planning authorities, yet it does not feel like a work of unified intelligence.
The strengths and weaknesses of the athletes' village reflect the way it was achieved. It started off, in the mid-90s, as a bold plan by the developers Chelsfield for a "new metropolitan centre", with homes, offices and shopping, which was drawn up over six years of planning and consultation. In 2005, London won the bid for the 2012 games, while Chelsfield and its properties were sold and resold. Westfield took over the shopping part while another company, Lend Lease, took over the housing.
When the credit crunch hit, Lend Lease decided it could not raise the money to build the village, so the government took it over. Now it has been sold back to the private sector, in the form of Qatari Diar and the British company Delancey, which will take it over after the games.
This history is reflected in the fabric. Because the shopping and the housing are in separate ownerships, there is not much care given to the way they join up. As there were different owners at different times, original intentions have been imperfectly followed through. Due to the rush to complete in time for the Olympics, and because the International Olympic Committee has exacting standards for athletes' accommodation, standardised plans and prefabricated construction were used.
There was also little time to reflect on and reconsider Fletcher Priest's somewhat schematic and regimented arrangement of blocks. Because the government took over the development, and was nervous about risk, it paid a very large fee to the project manager CLM, which seems to have squeezed out some of the more life-enhancing aspects of the design.
But it is there, a rare example of a planned housing development that, for all its flaws, shows more thought and quality than most things comparable built in Britain in recent decades. Importantly, the plan is to rent rather then sell the homes, which improves its prospects of success. It means that Qatari Diar has an incentive to maintain its open spaces and that the village is likely to fill up more quickly than it would if it relied on thousands of individual homeowners to stake their mortgages and deposits on what is a pioneering location.
Much of London, including Maida Vale, was built on the basis of large landowners putting up developments to rent, and it would be no bad thing if the village sets a precedent for moving away from our fixation with home ownership. It should not, however, require an Olympic Games to achieve it.
London Olympic Village – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 8, 2012
When it opens this summer it will house 17,000 athletes, and after the Games become 2,800 homes
Art and design: the ones to watch in 2012
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 1, 2012
Cage fighters, Olympic cushions and novel uses for crude oil distinguish our people to watch in the world of art and design
Bedwyr Williams
As 37-year-old Bedwyr Williams flicks through images of his work on his laptop you can see why some people classify him as a stand-up comedian as much as an artist. There's the 26ft-tall skyscraper beehive, a bicycle covered in wool with sheep horns for handlebars and a piece inspired by two cross-dressing cage fighters in Swansea's city centre – all described in a laconic and often hilarious deadpan. "He's marvellously talented and – unusually for contemporary art – very funny," says Laura Cumming, the Observer's art critic. "I caught sight of him in the 2006 Beck's Futures and he has never made anything that didn't fascinate ever since."
Williams is not unduly concerned that his light-hearted approach will mean his work is taken less seriously. "Is it comedy? Is it art?" he muses. "Call it what you like, it's either good or bad in the end. I like that moment when I do a performance in a gallery setting when the audience doesn't know if it's going to be serious or funny. It's a bit like coaxing a constipated well."
If anything, Williams is relieved to make pieces at all. After studying at Central Saint Martins in London, he moved back to his native north Wales in the early 2000s. He was close to giving up art, but then won a Hamlyn Foundation award in 2004: "It was like being refuelled in midair when I was considering making an emergency landing," he says. In May, he will have his largest solo show to date, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. "My work is darker now and, I think, stronger. I live in the arse-end of nowhere, so I'm always having to trade on the last thing I did, but I've definitely got more of an idea of what I'm up to now."
Chloe Dewe Mathews
The 29-year-old documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews was a few months into an overland trip from China to the UK in 2010 when she stopped in Naftalan, Azerbaijan. She had heard about a sanatorium where locals – since the days of Marco Polo in the 13th century – have sworn by the therapeutic benefits of bathing in sludgy crude oil heated to 37C and she thought it might make a diverting subject for a portfolio of pictures. Dewe Mathews says, "I remember thinking, 'Would this interest anyone at all? Well, I might as well just do it anyway.'"
Validation was not long in coming: in June last year, she was signed to the photo agency Panos Pictures; then, in November, her series Caspian, including images from Naftalan, won the 2011 international photography award run by the British Journal of Photography. More enduringly, she now had a blueprint for a lifetime's work: "I was away for nine months, but I realised it could be a long-term thing, almost a recce for my career."
Dewe Mathews is smart and assured, and her approach is fearlessly single-minded: for example, she crossed Asia and Europe entirely by hitchhiking. "If you're on a bus the whole time, you have that lovely staring-out-of-the-window thing," she says, "but it's not the same as going from one person's car with all sorts of funny things hanging from the mirror and them telling you their stories. It makes for a much more fertile atmosphere."
She returns to Russia this month to continue the Caspian series and will exhibit the new photographs next October at the 1508 Gallery in London. This time, however, she has been forced to make arrangements for the transport. "It will be too cold to stand out on the road," she sighs, genuinely disappointed. "But I'm going to do couch surfing, so hopefully I will hear stories that way."
Pernilla & Asif
They officially launched only last month but already it's clear that Pernilla & Asif is no ordinary design company. Pernilla Ohrstedt, 31, and Asif Khan, 32, met in their first year at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. After distinguishing themselves individually (Ohrstedt curated the Canadian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale; Khan designed the award-winning West Beach Cafe in Littlehampton), they decided to work together. Their first collaboration, a Design Museum commission called Harvest – described by Khan as "furniture made from flowers" – set out their ambitions: "We wanted to test the limits of people's imaginations and introduce new ways of seeing things."
The work that followed also made striking use of offbeat materials. The pavilion for a Singapore architecture festival consisted of two cones made of ropes and steel filled with ice and sand. A performance piece called Cloud, for Design Miami/Basel 2011, created a sort of canopy by sending puffs of helium-filled soap clouds into an overhead net. (They used a larger-scale version to launch their practice at York Hall in east London last November.)
Now they're working on a major commission for the Olympic Park called the Beatbox. Described by Ohrstedt as "a building that people can interact with like it's a musical instrument", it contains 200 cushions which activate sounds of athletes in action, recorded by DJ Mark Ronson. "Mark turned these sounds into an anthem for 2012," says Khan, "and our building deconstructs them again."
Unusually, for a young company with such experimental projects, they have had support from the likes of the British Council and Coca-Cola. Ohrstedt says they want to keep their company "slim and agile" and Khan says their ambition is to do "things we don't expect to be doing. It'd be interesting to do a music video, or a set design, or a bridge or a road. Anything that challenges us."
The rise of Aedas is a triumph for efficency
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 19, 2011
British giant Aedas is now the world's biggest practice, but is size and adaptability any substitute for vision and flair?
Last week's news from the world of architecture is that there is a new global No 1 practice. It is British in origin, although now spread all over the world, which should inspire a warm glow in these troubled times. The firm in question, Aedas, has deposed the former leader, the American Aecom, in Building Design magazine's World Architecture 100 list of leading practices, which measures a practice's size by the number of architectural employees. Aedas has nearly 1,500 of them.
It is likely you haven't heard of either, still less be able to tell these similarly named practices apart. They don't get the same column inches as the Zahas, Rems, Franks and Normans, nor much by way of Stirling prize nominations. Aedas have, however, designed more than 1,000 schools. The West Kowloon Terminus, part of a programme to connect Hong Kong to the largest high-speed rail network in the world, is being built to their designs, and they have done their share of glassy tower projects in Abu Dhabi, Saigon and Chinese cities such as Shenyang and Wuxi that, like the architects, are both big and little known over here. They are working on a performance venue in Singapore that is something like a colossal beetle, and the new Crossrail station at Farringdon in London.
Aedas are part of a phenomenon – the rise of the very big architectural firm – that does more to shape the lives of more people than the work of celebrity designers. The company, what is more, is under 10 years old, albeit made out of the merger of practices founded decades ago, and in one case, the Yorkshire practice of Abbey Hanson Rowe, in the 1830s.
Brian Johnson, chairman of Aedas's European operation, describes its growth in pragmatic terms. They wanted to be able to compete for larger projects, and they wanted to be large enough to have a professionally managed business. They saw a boom coming in commissions for schools and other public buildings under the now infamous private finance initiative, and positioned themselves to take full advantage.
They joined up with a firm in Birmingham, then one in Hong Kong, to increase their geographic spread, and move into new areas of work, such as transport. If they see an opportunity in a particular place or a sector, they move into it. Because "there are only so many dead architects you can have in your practice's name", they chose Aedas, based on the Latin for "to build". They don't seek out glamour: their British offices are spread around the major cities, with quite a modest one in London.
They do well, says Johnson, because they are big. They can summon a large amount of expertise to huge projects at short notice. They can pay for the latest software and good research. They can make sure that they have up-to-date knowledge about technology and sustainability. They can afford to fund themselves when bidding for major contracts, for which architects don't get paid unless they win the job.
They aim to provide, in other words, an efficient, well-oiled, technically efficient service, which is suited to the scale and speed of modern projects, especially in the Far East, and to the demanding contracts under which architects have to work everywhere. They have an advantage in a world where architects can't survive without computing power, because they can afford to invest in it.
They are also the logical outcome of Margaret Thatcher's transformation of the British economy. Johnson points out that in the 1970s there were also large architectural practices, but they were part of the public sector, in the form of architects departments for local authorities and the health service. Thatcher's policies had them closed and privatised to the extent that only one in three local authorities now employ any architects on their staff. The likes of Aedas have soaked up the work that used to be done by employees of the state.
All of which is somewhat threatening to the old idea that architecture is somehow an art, or a craft, and about shaping spaces for inhabitation by the imagination and the body. Most of the strengths Johnson lists are technocratic, and about the processes of business.
Aedas would certainly like to be liked for the architectural quality of their designs, and to attract more attention from awards juries, but it is clear that their systems of delivery are their main selling points.
They have no house style, but allow their architects to choose their own, which also means they can choose the approach that works best in a given situation. For schools they can do the skimpy business-park-plus-bright-colours look – the almost inevitable outcome of the PFI process. In Abu Dhabi they can do big curves with an Islamic flavour, like everyone working else there. With their Kowloon station they channel Zaha Hadid's bunches of energetic curves. They can do Foster-ish, and Koolhaasian, and more sober Netherlandish styles, as the occasion demands.
In this they are neither the best nor the worst of the very big practices. Aedas differ from Aecom and some others in that they focus on architecture, whereas many of their competitors are enormous engineering firms with an architectural wing attached. At times their work does not seem so very different from that of the more esteemed Foster and Partners (sixth in the BD list, with 879 architectural staff): because all these architects are dealing with the same pressures and demands, their projects have a way of ending up quite similar to one another.
Aedas is what you get when you weigh up the way the modern world works, and adapt architecture to suit it. It is not about challenging or criticising, but trying to do a good job in the prevailing circumstances. It is about adaptation, not friction or resistance, because the financial forces to which they are responding can't really be bothered with such things. Architecture, in the place-making sense, is tolerated to the extent that it doesn't get in the way. The results can be more or less pretty, and when it is not it is because the forces behind them are not particularly pretty, either.
Aedas pose an important question, without entirely answering it: if businesses and governments want to make cities where almost everything is shaped by efficiencies and processes, what can architects do to make them better?
The best architecture of 2011: Rowan Moore’s choice
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 11, 2011
It was the year of pop-ups and postmodernism – and the playful Frank Gehry went sky high
In New York they managed to complete the vast 9/11 memorial fountains in time for the 10th anniversary of the events of 2001, while around them rises the strange spectacle of commercial skyscrapers sponsored at huge expense from the public purse. Also in New York, Frank Gehry completed his tower of flats in Spruce Street with a playful beauty that has not been seen in skyscraper design for a while. These days, it's fashionable to knock Gehry for being the father of iconic building, but this tower, and his New World Symphony in Miami, shows that he is what has always been: a proper architect who likes to enjoy himself.
Last year the Serpentine Gallery got the turkey award in this space with its pavilion by Jean Nouvel; now it gets into the top 10 with Peter Zumthor's version of its annual commission. Pop-ups, identified as craze of the year in 2010, are still popping up, with Assemble's Folly for a Flyover leading the field. Olympic projects, such as the stadium and the aquatic centre, are getting their final buff and polish. Both are looking good, if you overlook the temporary add-ons on the latter, and the pointless plastic wrapper planned for the former, supplied courtesy of the Bhopal-implicated Dow Chemical Company.
In other news, postmodernism continued its inevitable revival. The magnificent James Stirling was honoured with a show at Tate Britain, and the V&A is currently revisiting the age of Grace Jones and leopard-skin Formica.
In a strong field of turkeys, the catastrophic Museum of Liverpool breasts the tape ahead of Rafael Viñoly's Firstsite in Colchester, the underwhelming new home of the BBC in Salford Quays and the anti-urban Westfield Stratford City.
TOP 10
8 Spruce Street, New York
Dazzling, elegant fun from Frank Gehry.
The Hepworth Wakefield
David Chipperfield completed two of his sober, considered, light-filled art galleries in 2011, in Margate and Wakefield. The one in Wakefield is the more convincing of the two.
New Court, London
Financial prestige meets cultural super-sophistication in Rem Koolhaas's headquarters for Rothschild.
Brockholes Visitor Village, Preston
A very nice place for looking at nature, on the edge of Preston, by Adam Khan. It floats.
Folly for a Flyover, London
Assemble, maker of the 2010 hit Cineroleum, maintained its form with this temporary cinema/bar/performance space under an elevated section of the A12.
Aquatic Centre, London
Breathtaking inside. Will look good outside, after the Olympics, when they have removed the giant water-wings that contain temporary seating.
Olympic Stadium, London
Handsome in its simplicity, until they wreck it with a festive wrapper for the Games.
Lyric theatre, Belfast
Just plain good, by the Dublin practice O'Donnell and Tuomey.
Maggie's Centres
Three more in the series of high-design cancer centres. The one in Glasgow, by OMA, and the one in Nottingham, by Piers Gough and Paul Smith, stand out.
Serpentine Gallery pavilion, London
An arena for watching plants grow, by Peter Zumthor.
TURKEY
Museum of Liverpool
Confused, expensive, misguided and offensive to the adjoining "Three Graces". Otherwise OK.
Canada Water library – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 4, 2011
Southwark's new library is a bold venture at a time when similar institutions are being shut by the dozen
OMG! It's a library! An absolutely new one, with books in it, too! Aren't such things supposed to be dinosaurs, driven to extinction by the cuts of George Osborne and the inventions of the late Steve Jobs?
Not in the London Borough of Southwark, apparently, where they have decided to keep all 12 of their existing libraries, as well as build this new one. And not, according to its architect, Piers Gough, for whom "books haven't gone away. Libraries still hold these magic realms of invention, realms of ideas. They're places where you're not told what to think; they're also places where you can stay and stop and spend as long as you like."
And so he has designed a celebratory building. On the outside, it is an inverted pyramid, clad in bronzed aluminium, so as to "look civic and grand without being pompous".
Inside, he has placed a big, wooden spiral stair at the centre, which rises from a constrained ground floor up to a bright, expansive top floor ringed with a gallery. Below is mostly cafe; above is where the books are, with staff offices sandwiched unobtrusively between them. "I was keen that people would really walk up," says Gough, "from the noisy downstairs to the quieter, more relaxed place above."
The location is Canada Water, in the old Surrey Commercial Docks, on a big bulge into the Thames that was once so excavated by docks that it was more liquid than land. The land that remained was occupied by wharves and warehouses for the timber trade until, as in the rest of London's docklands, all the business disappeared. Ever since the 1980s, the intention has been to regenerate it, both to bring business and create something like a town centre.
Creating town centres is not that easy, especially in a place where there has never been such a thing, and especially when this is done in the British way, whereby the private sector is nudged and enticed to achieve the thing officially desired by public bodies, which lack the resources and authority to lead and plan. Whatever might be called civic or public has to emerge as a byproduct of property development, at such time and in such a way as it suits the market.
For these reasons, Canada Water is what can most charitably be described as a work in progress. The things that have settled most naturally here are more out-of-town than town-centre uses: a shopping centre with big car parks, a Decathlon shop in a large shed, the print works of the Daily Mail. There is an oblong of water left from the old docks, softened at the edges with environmentally responsible-looking reed beds, and coots and ducks floating about. There are blocks of flats of different vintages, 1960s brutalist, 1980s aspirational, 00s "urban renaissance". A stylish bus and tube station, completed in 1999, long stood here almost alone, awaiting a neighbourhood for it to serve.
The quality most obviously lacking, apart from charm or delight, is coherence. You go from car park to reed bed to tin shed to a wooden bridge redolent of old Holland, without apparent logic. A regeneration plan led by the developers British Land, more ambitious than previous ones, promises to unify these oddments, but even this plan has its strangenesses. A reasonably handsome block of flats, with balconies designed to take advantage of the water view, finds itself parked behind a huge ventilator for the underground such that some of the balconies in fact have a close-up view of large, dusty louvres.
The library is placed next to the tube station – indeed, a new exit rises within the fabric of the library itself – and alongside a new public square, which is not quite ready yet. And at first sight this goldish crystal looks perilously like another of those random gesticulations which are felt to be substitutes for thought or planning in, regeneration projects up and down the country. What sets it apart is that there is actually a sense to its shape.
The best form for a reading room is wide and horizontal, but there was not enough space for this at ground level, squeezed between the tube exit and the waterside. So the reading room is at the top, with the building widening as it ascends to make space for it, with the added benefit that the most important part of the building is placed high up – if not in the clouds, at least sufficiently far from the ground to feel removed and a little dreamy, as a library should.
Raised, it makes occasion for the spiral staircase, which in turn makes the business of going somewhere for a book into a little event or ceremony, rather than a sideways drift such as you might make into a supermarket.
From a practical question – how to put a library on a site too small for it – comes the pleasure of the architecture. Within the ample volume of the reading room, zigzagging shelves create more intimate places in a way almost reminiscent of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.
Gough's practice, CZWG, is not often compared with the careful and subtle Aalto, having made its name at the more playful and enjoyable end of 1980s postmodernism – Docklands apartment blocks built around a great cylindrical courtyard in blue-glazed bricks; a house for Janet Street-Porter as raucous as their client's voice; a public lavatory cum flower shop with touches of art nouveau – but then it has not had the chance to do something like a library before. "I am in my sixties, and this is our first big public building," exclaims Gough.
Aalto fans will also be quick to point out that the Canada Water library does not achieve Scandinavian levels of craftsmanship. There's an awkward crunch where a revolving door meets cladding panels, for example, and things don't always align and join up as well as you might want them to. The consultant who placed the radiators and air-conditioning units seems to have set out to do so as clumsily and obtrusively as possible. Budget constraints mean that an auditorium has to rely for its architectural expression on large quantities of maroon paint.
But the important thing about the Canada Water library is that a new public place has been created, where the architecture contributes to and expands the experience of using it. It's worth mentioning that here private/public partnership has had some good effects – CZWG was appointed by British Land which, unlike local authorities, does not have to follow European rules for choosing architects. These rules make it difficult for architects to design something such as a library if they have not done so before, which would have ruled out Gough and CZWG.
9: Lincoln Cathedral
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 4, 2011
The Observer's architecture critic introduces a spectacular, interactive 360-degree photograph of the cathedral so admired by Nikolaus Pevsner
• Explore the panoramic image of Lincoln Cathedral
"A bicycle shed is a building," wrote Nikolaus Pevsner. "Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture", a statement so begging to be contradicted as to send one searching for the nation's most beautiful bicycle sheds. As for his choice of Lincoln as an ultimate exemplar, out of the whole wealth of European architecture, it's an intriguing one. It is not the most famous, glamorous, biggest or most perfect of gothic cathedrals, although it was possibly the tallest building in the world until its spire collapsed in the 16th century. Its appeal is something to do with its balance: French cathedrals of the same period – the 12th and 13th centuries – pursued the greatest possible height and the most logical possible structure, whereas Lincoln has more ribs in the vaults than structurally necessary and enriches its clean lines with decoration. It is also, if not the biggest, big enough to be impressive. In any case, Pevsner had company in his admiration: John Ruskin called it "the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles".
Lincoln Cathedral – 360 interactive panoramic
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 4, 2011
Explore Lincoln Cathedral using our 360 degree interactive panoramic tool