Posts Tagged The Observer
New Court – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 27, 2011
Rothschild is one of the world's most august financial institutions, reflected in its discreet yet opulent new City HQ designed by Rem Koolhaas's OMA
The City of London is, in its own special way, surprisingly fond of architecture. You might have thought that niceties of design would get in the way of its relentless contest with other financial centres to be the most fearsome money machine in the world, but no. The rulers of the City permit themselves the incredible luxury, inconceivable in Singapore, Shenzhen or even Canary Wharf, of weighing and deliberating every tweak of its fabric.
There are the historic buildings, the monuments of Wren, Hawksmoor and Lutyens, that are reverentially coddled. There are also the monuments of the masters of our own time, as recognised by the biggest architecture award in the world, the Pritzker prize. There are works by no fewer than five winners of the prize (Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Jean Nouvel, James Stirling and Rem Koolhaas's practice OMA) within the Square Mile. A sixth, Renzo Piano's Shard, makes its presence felt from just outside its boundaries. Such concentrations are hard to find outside places such as Saadiyat Island, the instant cultural district under construction in Abu Dhabi, or the 1980s tea services designed for the Italian company Alessi, by the biggest stars of the time.
The latest addition to the collection, OMA's whitish tower for the financial advisory group Rothschild, has ghosted its way on to the skyline with a surprising degree of discretion. Usually every sneeze of Rem Koolhaas and his team is the object of global fascination by architects and followers of architecture, but this not-small building has been sitting there for some time, its exterior more or less finished, without anyone paying much attention. Now the interior fit-out is also complete, bar a few details.
The discretion is part of Rothschild's corporate personality. As a distinguished 200-year-old institution, it doesn't feel the need to shout. It doesn't put its name on the door, and while it hangs a coat of arms outside, reused from former buildings, this is not very communicative to non-students of heraldry. It is located in a lane of extraordinary narrowness a short distance from the Bank of England, a narrow strip of pitted tarmac that seems one remove from being a cart track. You are supposed just to know that it is there and if you don't, you are not someone who needs to know or whom it needs to know.
You do, however, know that you are in the presence of something with a high degree of self-confidence. From the lane you rise through a steel colonnade to an ample podium of perfect emptiness, the main body of the building overhead, which then opens on to an also ample reception area. You are treated to the luxury of sheer space, precisely delineated with the oblong architecture. The floor is of travertine, also the ceiling, which creates a vertiginous blurring of up and down. Off to one side is an oak-shelved library that will house the Rothschild archive.
Should you be allowed past the security barriers you can then rise through the building, past the gym and cafe, and floors of close-packed desks, to the top levels of meeting rooms, dining rooms and events suites. There is a quasi-Soviet collectivism about the way the place is organised; as in the 1920s Narkomfin housing project in Moscow, the space allotted to individuals is modest, but the shared spaces of exercise, eating and meeting are generous.
In these spaces, an ever more magnificent panorama unfolds. In one direction St Paul's Cathedral sits in mighty repose, placed in the middle of a glass wall as if it were put there for the special benefit of Rothschild. In another there are the Gherkin and other towers of the City, which somehow look more impressive and serene than they do from ground level. These are celestial, Olympian spaces that convey the certainty that this – here, at this elevation, in this part of London – is where Rothschild belongs.
It is not all about sheer pomp and prestige. This is not OMA's way, and running through the building are touches of wit, irony and teasing. There is a play of small and big, which starts with the transition from lane to podium and continues with such things as extra-heavy or extra-light handrails. There are very thick walls ("Like castles and palaces," say OMA) and very thin ones made of glass.
There is also a play with the history of which Rothschild is so proud. In the meeting rooms are ancestral portraits, of well-mounted men riding to hounds and such like, and antique furniture. These are placed, with a touch of the eclecticism of a boutique hotel, alongside glass and aluminium, the latter embossed, in another moment of old/new overlay, with woodgrain patterns from the old oak panelling.
In Richard Rogers's Lloyd's Building a Robert Adam interior, imported from the institution's earlier premises, was recreated. There, it is a touch embarrassing in relation to the high-techery around it. In Rothschild the interplay of oak, oil paint, silk and aluminium is where all the fun is to be had. It delivers the required message that the institution is both ancient and modern. More than that, it is shown to be cultured, sophisticated, self-aware and sufficiently self-assured to allow a little humour. Rothschild advises but doesn't lend, which sets it apart from the casino banks of ill-repute, and its architecture reminds you of this fact.
OMA also likes to squeeze whatever public value there might be in a commission, even out of a discreet private bank. The colonnade along the lane can be used by anyone, in effect widening the street, and on the far side of the podium a view opens up to the churchyard of Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. It is clear that the podium is privately owned space, but the building still offers more than the many City blocks which rise sheer and opaque from the pavement. Next door, for example, one of Foster's least good works has been squelched on to the ground, an assertive, ribbed, over-inflated blob that is oblivious to its surroundings. OMA's building interacts with its neighbours, enriching itself and them in the process.
The City's fondness for architecture has, in fact, its limits. Often it runs as far as licensing a big name to sculpt the external form of a block, but not to such architectural qualities as the play of volumes and scale, the interconnection of outside and in or the creation of three-dimensional settings for the lives that go on in and around a building. Rothschild does all these things, with skill and subtlety. The only shame is that some of the best bits are on the far side of the security barriers. Come the revolution, though, it will make a great collectivist housing scheme.
Kevin McCloud’s grand design for British housing | feature
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 23, 2011
The Channel 4 presenter turned enlightened property developer just wants to make people happy, he says
A former editor of mine was fond of saying, as he watched his eminent colleagues accept toxic invitations to advise on projects such as the Millennium Dome, that "journalists can't do things". We might spend our lives telling others how to save the euro, or select an England team, or design a skyscraper, but when it comes to organising people to achieve a shared aim, we tend to lack patience or the ability to work towards a deadline months rather than days away. Writers tend to be individualists, looking for new discoveries, not methodical team players.
The same could be true, with knobs on, for TV presenters. So it is striking that Kevin McCloud, presenter of Grand Designs, should now be trying his hand as an enlightened property developer. For years, he has cast his eye over the hopes, follies and struggles of people trying to build beautiful homes for themselves. Now he is daring to show how it should, or could, be done. "I would get on a train to go from one location to another," he says, "and pass another 5,000 houses in Ilfracombe or Norwich or Aberdeen and they would all look the same. I thought, 'Is this the best we can do?' "
Five years ago, he set up a company called Hab (Happiness Architecture Beauty) in order to "build houses that make people happy". The recession has slowed its progress, but its first creation, a 42-home development in Swindon called the Triangle, is now complete. Next month, Channel 4 is screening Kevin's Grand Design, a two-part documentary about the project, which was achieved in partnership with the housing association, GreenSquare Group. When it is suggested that the attention these programmes will attract will be a double-edged sword, he says: "It will be a one-edged sword with the blade laid across my throat."
He is addressing the great British housing problem. For decades, it has been plain that new houses are unimaginative, overpriced, undersized and resistant to the kind of technical improvement that is standard in industries such as car making. Changes in planning law, to improve design or make housing more accessible, are forever tried and forever failing. The rather daunting task he has set himself is to deflect the glacial flow of change, to make "a very significant difference from conventional development".
With his trademark energetic enthusiasm, he reels off technical details about attenuation tanks and swales. He wants to create a truly sustainable development. So the Triangle's open spaces are designed to soak up rainwater, so that the risk of flooding is lowered, the pressure on Swindon's drainage is reduced and the planting remains lush in hot weather. It has what Hab's design director, Isabel Allen, calls a "muddy, soggy landscape" which has the added benefit that it is fun for children to play in it.
The external walls of the houses are made out of hempcrete, a material that is not only highly insulating but, being made out of a plant – hemp – takes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it puts in. The houses also have chimney-like objects on their roofs, which are actually ventilators, that help the houses to cool naturally.
"Anyone can build an eco-home," he says, "but it doesn't solve anything. There is nothing to stop them turning up the thermostat. What's more interesting is the way people live and behave." So the Triangle has allotments and polytunnels where people can grow their own food, and a car club and a scooter club that make their use of transport less wasteful. He sees such things as more important than the design features of individual houses.
Most of all, McCloud wants to create a community. The houses of the Triangle are arranged in traditional terraces, enclosing a kind of village green. Here, children can play on slopes and interestingly arranged logs and splash in water. Conventional swings and slides are avoided, however, on the grounds that these would mark the place as only for children and alienate the adults and teenagers who, it is hoped, will also enjoy the green.
Part of the point of the allotments and polytunnels is to bring people together and such things as barbecues and Halloween parties are encouraged. Irrigation is achieved with old-fashioned water pumps – more fun than standpipes – around which residents might gather. Each house is fitted with a "shimmy" – a touch-screen computer that McCloud calls a cross between "an iPad and a parish magazine". This enables residents to exchange information, help and advice and tells them about upcoming events.
Of the 42 homes, 21 are what is called "social rented", which is for people on the local authority's list of people in need of new homes. Eleven are "intermediate rented", which is at 80% of the market rent. Ten are "rent to buy", which means people rent them at below-market rates, with a view to saving for a deposit and ultimately buying their homes. There is therefore a mixture of people: teachers, retirees, single mothers formerly in council hostels, families who were in accommodation for the homeless.
The Triangle is so designed that no distinction is made between the house types. This, says McCloud, is "unlike schemes, including one that won the Stirling prize" – he means the Accordia development in Cambridge – "where the houses for sale are lovely and the social stuff is behind a wall".
It is striking, with all this ingenuity in the design, how very plain-looking the houses are. Any Grand Designs fan expecting another of the exotic creations featured in the programme will be disappointed. They are pitched-roofed, in straight rows, partly inspired by the railway workers' cottages that Brunel built in Swindon. Their elevations are in shades of cream and grey that echo the existing terraces and semi-detacheds of this part of town.
Glenn Howells, the architect of the Triangle, says that "the conversation we had was, 'Do we have the nerve to do something very, very normal?' With Kevin, everyone was expecting it to be more eye-catching, more televisual. People go there and say, 'Blimey, it looks normal.' That's the point." The idea of the terrace, he says, "started a long time ago and it will go on for another 500 or 600 years. It is such a good form". The only problem is that "there is a perception in the housing market that it won't sell, so developers have to make things convoluted, even though those to-die-for streets of Islington, where Boris Johnson lives, are all repetitive".
The aim, says Howells, is to "prove you can do excellent ordinary housing that sells and that people want to live in". It is about little things achieved within the standard budget for housing association developments – apart from a little additional support for some of the more adventurous environmental features. Bedroom doors are placed away from corners, so it is possible to place wardrobes behind them, and windows are larger than in most new housing. Ceilings are higher than standard on the ground floor (which means, to stay within budget, they are lower upstairs). The porches include space for bike racks, so that they don't have to be lugged through houses from the back garden, which makes it more likely they will be used.
On the outside, architectural expression is sought in such things as oversize rainwater pipes, which, together with change of hue from one house to the next, and vertically proportioned windows, help to define individual houses. In front of each house are gabion walls, gabion being the form of construction used in road embankments, where loose stones are placed in wire cages. Here, they screen parking spaces, so that cars do not dominate the appearance of the space.
McCloud says that "the design of spoons and the design of cities is one process" and it is the totality of the Triangle's inventions that matters. He is particularly keen on the importance of landscape design. Usually, says the Triangle's landscape architect, Luke Engleback, his role is to "decorate masterplans by others". Here, Engleback was involved from the outset in shaping the concept and form of the development.
McCloud keeps saying that "it's about the residents – it's their happiness that will determine the success of scheme". It will take years to find out if it really works but, meanwhile, I am introduced to 64-year-old Maggie Lowton, who was forced out of her home of 38 years by negative equity. "Since I started my affair with Kevin," she says, she has bought into his dream. "We love the house and feel privileged and proud. It's lighter, airier and easier to clean. It feels too nice and too new." The architectural aesthetics are of secondary importance. "People say, 'What are those stones for?'" she says of the gabions.
She says you can see a community forming, even if there are some points of friction – "you do hear snippets, like someone parking in someone else's space". As a Christian, she is wrestling with the problem of other people's faiths, including paganism. "Perhaps we can have a multi-faith Christmas tree," she says, "but I don't know how to do that… maybe we can have a pagan log." She wants "it to work for everyone. I want Kevin's dream to come true. What a waste if it didn't".
For McCloud, the dream seems to originate in a love of the organic. "I grew up in the countryside – Bedfordshire. I was interested in birds and bees and flowers and mushrooms." He says there is "a spiritual dimension" to living with nature that he wants to give to the residents of Hab's developments. The village where he lived was also the kind of place where "kids played in the street on their bikes, and if a car came round the corner, it had to slow down".
Realising this dream requires a great deal of technical grind, of dealing with planners, highways authorities, water suppliers. It requires responding patiently to officials such as the one who, Engleback says, objected to fruit trees on the grounds that "someone might slip on a berry". McCloud's celebrity means that "doors are opened a little more quickly", but also that "it is very important for local authorities not to be seen to be granting us the smallest favour. We can't cheat or push or cut corners".
The Triangle has required an exceptional amount of effort by Hab, GreenSquare, their architects, engineers and other consultants, all to achieve a simple array of row houses which – albeit without such high environmental performance – would once knocked have been knocked up almost without thinking by builders. Larger developments are now on the way in Oxford and Stroud, but McCloud is not expecting these to be much easier. The hope is that others will follow the example.
He acknowledges that the Triangle is not as advanced as some of the continental schemes in Tubingen, Stockholm and elsewhere which were his inspirations. They "emerged from a culture of planning and construction that is far more evolved, and far more sophisticated, than in Britain," he says. "But," he adds, "I feel we have hit on the grail. We have made a very significant difference from conventional development… we're 90% there, and to do it in Swindon in a difficult economic climate – I'm happy."
He thinks he is doing better than the Prince of Wales's Poundbury. "One positive thing about Poundbury was the way perceived ownership of the public realm meant the residents adopted it," he says. But "one of the failings is the way the external appearance is at the expense of internal architecture". In order to achieve the look of old cottages, "you get low ceilings and tiny windows".
The Triangle is in a tradition of model villages beloved of aristocrats, princes, of Brad Pitt in New Orleans and the Bordeaux sugar-cube manufacturer who commissioned workers' housing from Le Corbusier. Such places can be over-scripted, too much about fulfilling their makers' picture-book fantasies about contented communities. There is a whiff of this with Hab's gooey talk about "making people happy", although they are conscious of the need not to over-control. "If they decide they don't want to grow food and just want to park cars, we'd be a bit upset," says Isabel Allen, but in the end it will be up to the residents.
Maggie Lowton sounds a note of caution by citing other communities in Swindon that started well but went downhill. No amount of forethought and attention to detail can guarantee the success of the Triangle. But at the very least it is an imaginative and well-designed project, which achieves about as much as can be done with its budget. It focuses on what matters most and gives itself the best chance of success. Which is far more rare than it should be in British house building and a much better application of celebrity philanthropy than most.
The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 13, 2011
The London River Park is a proposed floating green space on the Thames that could be ready in time for the Olympics. But is it really a 'public' amenity. Our architecture critic charts the stealthy rise of pseudo-public spaces
What could be lovelier? A new park on the river Thames, south-facing to catch the sun, which like something in a fairytale would also float. Here people could bask and stroll, close to the lapping water, or splash in a swimming pool. It would be ready for the blessed summer of 2012, enriched not only by the Olympics, but also by the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's 60-year rule. It would make a perfect viewing point for joyous throngs to watch the 1,000-boat river pageant that is planned for the Queen's Jubilee. It would be like those Venetian paintings of aquatic festivals in La Serenissima, brought to life in the here and now.
The park, invented and designed by the architects Gensler, would run from the Millennium bridge and St Paul's Cathedral to close to the Tower of London and Tower bridge, linking some of London's prime tourist spots. It would serve the City of London, an area short of open space. It would be there for five years, after which it could be taken away if people didn't like it. It would also cost the public nothing. The Singaporean asset-management company Venus will pay the entire £50m cost, and has already put £5m into developing the idea, including building a 35-metre model of a 35km stretch of the Thames, to test the park's hydrographic effects. "We either do it beautifully," says John Naylor of Venus, "or we don't do it at all", to which end Venus doubled the budget that Gensler asked it for.
Boris Johnson is enthused. After an impromptu Sunday morning meeting with Gensler and Venus, he declared: "The sheer beauty and design brilliance of this structure will provide yet another amazing and unique attraction for the capital." Daniel Moylan, of Transport for London, has said of it that "improved connectivity, gracefully designed, can bring pleasure and joy to an area once written off". The outgoing Lord Mayor of London, Michael Bear, was said to favour the scheme, as a legacy of his mayoral year, although the Corporation of London would not confirm this. Gensler and Venus claim "overwhelming backing from Londoners" although this turns out to be based on an unscientific poll of whoever turned up to two exhibitions of the proposals.
But there is, as the economists have taught us, no free lunch. Venus is not putting up all this money out of the pure goodness of its heart nor, entirely, to raise its "brand awareness" in London, as John Naylor puts it, although that is a factor. It is "looking to create a platform for inward investment" and intends to make money renting out pavilions in the park for corporate exhibitions and events, at a handsome rate. It also thinks it can sell space to TV companies, especially during the Olympics, using Tower bridge as a backdrop. It is almost certainly right. This means that the park is not a "public space", as Gensler calls it, but a private space into which the public are allowed to come, subject to certain limitations.
In this it is the latest example of a widespread type of the 21st century, the pseudo-public space, in which the City of London and its satellites are world leaders. The Broadgate development of the 1980s was a pioneer, followed by Canary Wharf, Paternoster Square next to St Paul's, and the More London development where City Hall, the headquarters of the Mayor of London, stands. In each the shapes and attributes of town squares are imitated – an oblong or round shape, outdoor art, cafe tables, fountains – and sometimes real public assets are created, but ultimate control is in the hands of private landowners. As Anna Minton pointed out in her book Ground Control, they control security, access, and rules of entry. Activities and people deemed undesirable, such as photography with a tripod, public displays of affection, picnics, or chaining up a bicycle, are banned. Or public protest, and you don't have to wish to protest yourself to sense the oppressive feeling that things are prohibited. The most extreme example is the "public park" promised for the top of the forthcoming "Walkie Talkie" tower in the City. By no stretch of the imagination is a roofed-over room in a private office tower, reached via security-controlled lifts and lobbies, "public".
These places had their bluff called by the Occupy movement. Anxious to keep out the tented rebels, Broadgate and Canary Wharf reached for the injunctions that asserted their rights as private landowners. Paternoster Square put up barriers, manned by both police and private security, that jarred with its architectural look of traditional civic values: arcades, monuments, streets, stone and brick, a classical style.
It also put up a sign that said: "Paternoster Square is private land. Any licence to the public to enter or cross this land is revoked forthwith. There is no implied or express permission to enter the premises or any part. Any such entry will constitute a trespass." Which is strange, as almost every architectural statement, planning application, and press release, in the protracted redevelopment of Paternoster Square, described this "private land" as "public space".
These spaces (what shall we call them – privlic, publate – let's say publoid) don't always have to be bad things. Cities are made of places with degrees of publicness, including museums, restaurants, theatres, shops, malls and transport systems. Canary Wharf and Broadgate were both built on sites that formerly had limited public access – docks in one case, a railway station and its tracks in the other – and offer more to the public than they did before. The sky garden of the Walkie Talkie might turn out to be a fun place to go. (And, if they try to pressure you into buying expensive drinks at its bars, you will be able to whip out the planning consent that says it is a public space.)
But one issue is the honest use of language. If a space is private, it should not be called public, and planners should send back any application that makes this false claim. This matters because, if we are kidded into thinking that there is a civic realm that is not actually there, we will suddenly find that there is less space than we had thought for such essential public actions as protest. This is what the Occupy movement found when it looked for a location to make its point in the City of London. It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's. Oddly, the Occupy movement looks like the sort of colourful cultural event that local authorities and even businesses pay good money to subsidise, so as to jolly up their town centres: it is only when they are trying to say something that they officially become a problem.
The bigger issue comes when publoid places occupy areas that were formerly genuinely public. Then they are not conditional gifts, as at Broadgate, but appropriation. The banks of the Thames are largely public – you can walk there unrestricted, and advertising is kept from the waterfront. The view of the water is public property, and one of the great free pleasures of London.
It may, conceivably, be possible to cut deals with the private sector if they are genuinely beneficial, but only when it is completely clear that the public qualities of a place are not being compromised. This is very far from the case with Gensler's designs for the London River Park, in which budget and architectural ambition are lavished on the silvery pods which will house the money-making stuff, while the offer to the public is ordinary-looking, standard-issue publoid design: some trees and benches of reasonably good quality, a stainless steel balustrade, a nondescript deck surface, the promise of some information panels explaining the history of the surroundings.
An obvious comparison, made by Gensler, is with the High Line in New York, the phenomenally successful park made out of an old railway viaduct, which like the River Park is long and thin. But a big part of the High Line's success is its planting and landscaping, which is intelligent, imaginative and well considered, in the way it converts industrial relics into a place of urban pleasure. There is no sign of this level of thought in the Gensler design, even though they have submitted a detailed planning application to the Corporation of London. Nor is there the playfulness of Paris Plage, the annual conversion of the banks of the Seine into a beach, or the floating swimming pool that was installed in Copenhagen. Gensler is a global practice, with more than 3,000 staff, but there is limited evidence in its portfolio that it has the touch and finesse to pull off a project like this.
Instead the park offers a marginal upgrade on the existing riverside walkway. It would be wider, and with a more intimate relationship to the water. On the other hand you would lose the sense of unrestricted wandering and gathering that is currently there. You would be all too aware of the selling going on in the pavilions. You would know you were in a managed and controlled space, with uniformed wardens. This, says John Naylor, would be like Disney World, to the extent that "you know you're protected; you know that you won't be attacked or bothered by vagrants and sellers" (except, of course, for the approved corporate sellers in the pavilions). Is the City of London such a crime zone, financial misdemeanours apart, that people need such protection?
Essentially the London River Park is a gigantic hospitality suite with a fairly nice walkway threaded through it. Meanwhile the design of its silver pods is offensively indifferent to the dignified buildings, such as Old Billingsgate Market, on which they intrude, and actually do not seem well suited to the events that might go on inside them. The only purpose of their look seems to be self-promotion. It is, for good measure, likely that the piles that hold the park in place will, at low tide, be unpleasantly conspicuous.
As it happens, the park idea is not meeting with unanimous approval, despite the support of the mayor. Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, said that "we are not convinced by the description of the project as a 'park'" or that it is "appropriate to the character of the river". They find the design of the pavilions "unimaginative". English Heritage noted that "temporary" constructions like this have a way of becoming permanent. They were "not convinced that the design was worthy of such a sensitive site", and thought that the view towards the dome of St Paul's "would be distracted by the blades of silver", which are "flashy and corporate". The City of London School for boys, which is on this stretch of embankment, is none to happy that these large objects will block its view of the river.
When I meet Gensler and Venus, they assure me that discussions are going well with the Port of London Authority, which manages the river and is notoriously picky about intrusions on it. They also say that the planners of the Diamond Jubilee are very interested in their ideas. The next day, however, it is announced that the PLA has "serious concerns regarding the application scheme's impact on navigational safety", and the Corporation of London is delaying making a decision about the planning application. I also see a letter from the Diamond Jubilee organisers, saying that the park would "have a significant negative impact on the river pageant". It would for example make the tide run faster, with the result that rowed boats would be unable to take part, which would reduce the planned 1,000 boats by a third. Gensler and Venus have now given up on trying to be ready for the Jubilee in June, even though their extraordinarily ambitious timetable – to have everything ready for the Olympics – is still in place.
Buried deep within the London River Park is a good idea. If it were truly an aquatic High Line, it could be wonderful. It might work better if it were funded differently, let's say by a levy on all City businesses, such that it were no longer a promotional and profit opportunity for just one. If there were a longer timescale than the current insane rush to summer 2012, its design and detail could get the attention it deserves. It would also help if Gensler graciously stepped back from the detailed design, having been thanked and rewarded for having the idea, and pushing it thus far with energy and chutzpah, in favour of practices with the ability to think and work like those of the High Line.
If all these ifs were sorted out, the lovely floating park might just happen, subject to the satisfaction of the PLA. But there are an awful lot of ifs, and not much sign of the will to address them. If they are not addressed, the London River Park is simply an Occupy London event carried out by big business, rather than harmless folk in woolly hats and funny masks. The corporation's planners, when they finally get to consider it, should just say no.
Seaton Delaval Hall – 360º panoramic
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 7, 2011
Explore Seaton Delaval Hall using our 360º interactive panoramic tool
London’s new airport: should Beijing be a blueprint for the Isle of Grain?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 6, 2011
Architect Norman Foster says a Thames estuary hub is essential for Britain's economy; critics warn of a £50bn white elephant that could harm the environment
What is at stake, according to all sides of the argument, is nothing less than the economic and spiritual future of the nation. We are in danger of "denying future generations to come", says architect Lord Foster. It is about the importance of our "world-class natural environment", says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It could be a "white elephant" that would deal a near-fatal blow to our economy, says Sir Terry Farrell, another leading architect. Also at stake is national identity: how much Britain should try to match growing countries such as China, and how much we should do our own thing.
They are talking about airports, more particularly the idea of the "hub", the place where airlines choose to have interchanging flights, which is not only good for the airport business but also any business that relies on the best possible air connections. Heathrow is such an airport now, but its two runways are at 99% of their capacity, and air travel keeps growing, so it is in danger of losing ground to Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris. A third runway, deeply unpopular with people living under its flight path, has been ruled out by the government, the opposition, and the mayor of London.
So last week Foster, in partnership with engineers Halcrow and economic consultancy Volterra, unveiled a plan for Thames Hub, a four-runway airport to be built on the Isle of Grain in north Kent, on the Thames estuary.
Building anew would achieve the best possible integration of planes and trains, the best provision for logistics, and the most modern, efficient terminals. Planes would mostly approach over water rather than densely populated areas. It would connect to the high-speed rail link built for the Channel tunnel and provide tens of thousands of jobs for the never-quite-achieved revitalisation of the area known as the Thames Gateway.
It is not the first plan to build an airport in the estuary. An attempt to build one at Foulness in Essex was scuppered by the 1973 oil crisis, and more recently Cliffe, near the Isle of Grain, has been mooted, but the Foster plan is the most ambitious. It is not just for an airport, but a new tidal barrier to protect London from flooding, a high-speed orbital railway that would roughly follow the path of the M25, and railway connections to seaports and northern cities. The total cost is put at £50bn, with benefits to the economy put at £150bn. Backers say that they are attracting interest from private investors.
Foster's inspiration is China. In the 1990s he designed Hong Kong's new airport, which required the levelling and reshaping of a bumpy island. He also designed the gigantic Terminal 3 in Beijing, which took four years to realise and opened in time for the 2008 Olympics. Now an even bigger airport is already being planned for the city. Foster has long admired the speed with which these were built, and laments how Britain has dithered about London's airports. Heathrow's Terminal Five took 26 years from conception to completion, including the longest planning inquiry in history.
Britain wasn't like this, says Foster, in the age of the great engineering projects. He urges that we "recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears", which means action to speed up and simplify the process of planning and public inquiries, and dealing less tenderly with the many objections projects like this provoke. He raises the spectre of Bric, the growing nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. If Britain does not match their investment in infrastructure, "we are rolling over and saying we are no longer competitive – and this is a competitive world. So I do not believe we have a choice."
There are certainly objections. The Isle of Grain is not an abstract piece of nothing, but a rare wilderness surprisingly close to London. It is part of the atmospheric flat lands where Dickens set the opening of Great Expectations, and the airport would not so much be built on it as completely annihilate it. In the Thames estuary there are, says the RSPB, up to 200,000 birds, and another 30,000 in the nearby Medway, a population "of global importance" which is unlikely to mix well with an airport. Huw Thomas, a director of Foster & Partners, says replacement habitats could be created elsewhere, but the RSPB is unconvinced. Neither will it be easy to run high-speed trains through the green belt unopposed.
Farrell questions whether Foster's infrastructural wonderland would really work. The airport is "on the wrong side of London for growth – the heart of Britain is clearly on the other side". If Heathrow were shrunk or closed, he says, the investment that has gone into the airport would be squandered. More than that, the huge array of businesses that have grown up around Heathrow, from corporate headquarters in the Thames valley to hotels and warehouses and the UK's biggest food distribution centre, would have to relocate. Heathrow currently creates nearly 80,000 airport-related jobs, and many more in associated businesses. Homes for all these workers, with their schools, hospitals and shops, would have to be recreated in the east. No one planned that Heathrow would be what it is now, but for all its faults it is an extraordinary success, which should not be lightly discarded.
"Can we afford to flip London over?" Farrell asks, and cites Montreal-Mirabel airport, which opened in 1975 as the biggest in the world, misjudged its market and ceased passenger flights in 2004. Its main problems were its distance from the city and the introduction of longer-range aircraft, making them less likely to stop over in Montreal. The Foster plan carries some of the same risks, such as having a less convenient location than the existing airport and requiring a long-term bet on patterns of flying that may change.
Farrell argues instead for "consolidation of what we've got", for better train connections between existing airports, for example, so that they can work better together. "Foster is right to propose his hub," he says, as a contribution to debate, but we should not be dazzled into accepting it uncritically. Such solutions are "tremendously glamorous and sexy", but "you can't just take the say-so" of people such as architects and engineers, with a vested interest. Nor that of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, an enthusiast for estuary airport plans, given that relocation would shift the environmental problems "from thousands of his voters, and dump them on someone else's".
Farrell argues that what works in China may not work here: "They have a growth economy and can afford to make mistakes." And China, not being a democracy, doesn't have to worry too much about opposing voices. "We can't emulate the Chinese. We've got to find our own position, which could be very clever and very smart, but different."
This debate assumes that endless growth in air traffic is desirable and inevitable, although it contributes significantly to climate change. It also enjoys the remarkable tax break of exemption from VAT on fuel. Should this ever end, people will fly less.
Meanwhile, engines are becoming quieter, which alters the discussions about noise pollution, and with the Airbus A380 aircraft are becoming bigger. John Stewart of HACAN Clear Skies, which campaigns to control the effects of aviation over London, thinks Heathrow could expand by handling larger planes for long-range flights, while high-speed trains would take over much of the short-range traffic. If he is right, it may not be necessary to build a new super-hub.
What is most striking is that no one knows for sure which option is best. This may be the most critical decision on infrastructure, environment and planning that this country has to take, but the implications and complexities are too big for anyone to have mastered them yet. The Foster hub could be as successful as Hong Kong, or a new Montreal-Mirabel. Confident though they are, the Foster camp acknowledge that their hub is partly speculative. Farrell isn't saying for sure that his idea of consolidation is the best one, but only that it deserves full investigation.
Whether either, or something else, is the best option is for the moment almost pure guesswork.
Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer
Conran retrospective, New Review page 36
Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, 1719-1732
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 6, 2011
As part of our series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic photograph of the last of Sir John Vanbrugh's houses
● Explore the panoramic image of Seaton Delaval
Seaton Delaval Hall, built between 1719 and 1732, is the last of Sir John Vanbrugh's houses and the most satisfying. Recently acquired by the National Trust, it is a punchy, pithy work, less verbose than Blenheim Palace, more daring than Castle Howard, the architect's most famous works. It is stony both inside and out, stands on an exposed spot, designed so that its owner, an admiral, could look out to sea. In theory it's classical, but the former playwright Vanbrugh gave it a drama of advancing and receding forms that can best be called romantic, long before the romantic movement had been invented. Both admiral and architect died before it was completed and it was later damaged by fire. It was never completely restored, leaving it partly blackened and with some of the aspect of a ruin. The ceiling in the hall never returned, leaving a view into the rafters, and some statues are limbless – in keeping with the brooding, elemental atmosphere of the original design.
Explore our interactive revolving image of Seaton Delaval at: guardian.co.uk/360buildings
Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 29, 2011
Royal Academy, London
In the courtyard of the Royal Academy stands a spiral tower, dynamic and asymmetric, telescoping out of itself like a cannon in the moment before recoil, with a diagonal line thrusting from top to bottom. Close inspection reveals tiny human figures added to give it scale: this is a 1:40 model of something which, if built, would have been 400m high. Inside the academy a photomontage shows what its effect would have been on its intended location of St Petersburg. It would have overwhelmed the low-lying city of Peter the Great, like the colossal figure of a worker sometimes used to represent Bolshevism in revolutionary posters. It is a thing of all scales and none, echoing both Bruegel's Babel and bottles in the still lifes that its artist-architect creator liked to paint.
The model is of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, of 1920, a celebration of communism that was intended to outdo the Eiffel Tower but also include huge, crystalline slowly moving blocks hung within its frame, which would house lecture halls, conference rooms and a media centre. It is one of the most famous unbuilt projects in architectural history, an emblem of the fervid decade that followed the Russian Revolution.
There is obvious irony that this project for the affirmation of the new should now be appearing, like a captured rhinoceros in a doge's menagerie, in an institution with both "royal" and "academy" in its name.
It announces two exhibitions inside. There is a small one about the tower, and a larger one, Building the Revolution, which focuses on the structures of the time that were actually built, such as workers' clubs, communal housing, an industrialised bakery, a bus garage, headquarters for Izvestia and other organs of propaganda, and bureaucratic cities for the new administration. There is the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow of 1922, the nearest thing to Tatlin's fantasy actually realised. A tall, tapering cone of steel lattice, it combines creative freedom with a practical function which it is still performing.
The Narkomfin development is there, an experiment in communal housing that resembled a machine-age monastery, now rotted by Russian winters to almost total ruin. Konstantin Melnikov, who eventually proved too brilliantly individual for the regime, is represented by his Rusakov workers' clubs, his own house, and his Gosplan garage. The latter, dominated by a large disc in its elevation, draws on visionary designs from the French revolutionary era, while also evoking the wheels and radiators of motor vehicles. It was a time when Russian architects were realising the dreams of modernism more fully than anyone else, but also felt free to plunder and recombine ideas from the past.
The buildings are represented by two kinds of photograph. One is the big images of the architectural photographer Richard Pare, taken since the fall of communism, radiant but also unsparing in their depiction of the decay that has befallen almost all of them. The other kind are small monochrome images from the 600,000 in the Schusev State Museum of Architecture's archive in Moscow, still attached to the standard forms with which they were filed. Through a brown fog of ageing photographic chemicals you can make out the structures when still new and raw. You are offered a choice of new images of decayed buildings or old images of new buildings. The new-new is not available. The show is prophecy and elegy at once.
The photographs are supported by works of art, mostly drawings and paintings, from the same period, from the Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, by the likes of El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Rodchenko and Malevich. They make the point that architecture and art were closely linked. Architects such as Tatlin were often also artists, while artists produced works whose abstract geometry aspired to resemble buildings. The revolution was not only to be achieved – it also had to be symbolised. The crane would be a tool for magnifying the motions of an artist's hand to an immense scale.
It is a strange idea, both arrogant and naive, that compositions in oil paint might shape cities, and the results could be oxymoronic. Factories were also works of art. Instruments of the collective were also monuments of a single artist's vision. Images of mass production were hand-crafted in studios, and a striking feature of this exhibition is the tactility of the artworks and the basic construction, often in timber, of the buildings. Creative freedom and the dictatorship of the proletariat were joined in a way that could not last.
The exhibition ends with a gloomy room showing Lenin's mausoleum. Its architect, Aleksei Shchusev, was willing to bend with the political wind and so produced an effective symbol of a dubious concept. If the near-deification of Lenin was a corruption of revolutionary principles, the brooding mass of his tomb turned away from the dynamic spirit of the 1920s. In a few years Stalin would, in order to create "art as stunningly simple as the heroism we find today in the Soviet Union", crush this spirit completely under the weight of the classicising style called socialist realism.
As either prophecy or politics, the architecture on show at the Royal Academy largely fails. It served an ideal of communism that fatally ignored its reality. The modern progeny of Tatlin's tower includes the Okhta Centre, a proposed tower for the Russian oil giant Gazprom of similar height – 400m – which, until its planned location was moved, would have had a comparable impact on St Petersburg. Yet this crude pinnacle has none of Tatlin's imaginative brilliance, and celebrates gangster capitalism rather than revolution. Meanwhile, big metal thingies have become a cliche of wannabe cities and expo sites and Anish Kapoor is making another contribution to this pointless genre with his Orbit tower on the London Olympic site. Ninety years after Tatlin it is still in his shadow.
Those buildings that were built are now the subjects of heroic preservation campaigns which stress their value as artworks over their social intent. There was talk, pre-crash, of making Narkomfin into a boutique hotel, and the Red Banner textile factory in St Petersburg may become a cultural centre. And the buildings and paintings of the 1920s are presented to the Academy's bourgeois crowds as an interesting alternative to Degas' ballet dancers.
As art the buildings are indeed wonderful, and for this reason alone the preservation campaigns deserve every success. Whatever attention can be drawn to these works, as the RA is doing, is welcome. Their creators' lack of political realism is also a saving grace, as it makes distance between them and the monstrosities of Soviet government. But their effect is not just as romantic divertissements, and it would not be the same if the architects had put their skills into villas for industrialists as their contemporaries did in Paris and Vienna. They carry the idea that art and design can have a social purpose, which the best of them, such as Melnikov's clubs, actually achieved
Fury grows over Burlington Arcade renovation as shopkeeper faces eviction
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 22, 2011
West End stars and Michael Winner join campaign to stop £5m 'mutilation' of Regency shopping arcade by new owners
Actors from the West End musical Mamma Mia! and film director Michael Winner have joined protests against plans to "vandalise" one of Britain's most architecturally beautiful shopping arcades.
The Burlington Arcade, which runs behind Bond Street from Piccadilly, opened in 1819 "for the sale of jewellery and fancy articles of fashionable demand, for the gratification of the public". Its legions of modern admirers are furious that new owners are planning a £5m renovation which includes refusing to renew the lease of Daniel Bexfield, an independent antique silverware specialist, because he "no longer fits the look". Campaigners claim the arcade's quaint, privately run shops are to be replaced with global brands such as Jimmy Choo and Prada.
American retail expert Peter Marino is coming up with a design that protesters dismiss as brash and out of character after seeing plans submitted to Westminster city council. Marino has said: "I like that my stores aren't built to last."
Kim Ismay, who plays Tanya in Mamma Mia!, said the plans meant one of Britain's most famous Regency landmarks was threatened by the "same-ification of everywhere". She expressed despair at the planned renovation, which includes a coloured marble floor and large sculptures by Antony Gormley. She told the Observer: "I love Gormley's work, but it doesn't go with the arcade."
Built by the architect Samuel Ware, the arcade was described by him as "a piazza for all hardware, wearing apparel and articles not offensive in appearance nor smell". Shopkeepers once lived above their shops. Prostitutes could also be found in upper rooms, entertaining men while the ladies shopped.
There are now only 20 single-unit shops in an arcade originally intended for 72. Protesters fear that this contraction is likely to increase as exorbitant rent rises gradually ensure only big chains and brands such as Prada and Gucci can afford space. One arcade shopkeeper, who declined to be named, said a Russian had just offered £1m up front, simply to secure a lease.
A European retail investment company, Meyer Bergman, bought the arcade with US property investor Joseph Sitt last year, and has said that a £5m refurbishment would turn it into a "worldclass destination". Campaigners argue that it already is one.
A spokesman for the owners said they did not intend to ruin the arcade, and added that many of its features were no longer original. "Their intention is to restore and preserve it," he said. "They acquired it precisely because of its heritage and architecture and any suggestion that they intend to destroy its uniqueness is simply wrong."
Winner told the Observer the planned changes amounted to "disgraceful mutilation" and said it was "absolutely typical of how beautiful areas of London are going to be vandalised".
Bexfield described the prospect of an arcade of designer shops as soulless. Campaigning tweets against the renovation are said to number more than a million.
Susannah Lovis, who has had a jewellery shop in the arcade for 13 years, said: "I'm really concerned about this planning application. The arcade is unique. To alter shops to multinational brand names removes the charm and history. They've been saying they want big global brand names, which is such a tragedy."
Ivan Macquisten, editor of the Antiques Trade Gazette, said: "Developers seem to be gradually ripping the heart out of London's traditional antiques enclaves." He argued that the uniqueness of places such as Burlington Arcade is boosted by small independents, but "this can be overlooked in the glare of big-name luxury brands".
An English Heritage spokeswoman said: "We are going to be talking to the people involved in the proposals to see if they're going to impact on the special interest of the arcade. Ultimately, neither we nor Westminster can do anything about the nature of the retailers."
Commenting on Bexfield's ousting, the owner's spokesman said: "He's got a prime store right on the corner. When you've got an arcade such as this, you want something to attract more customers."
Referring to the accusation of inappropriate Gormley sculptures, Markus Meijer, chief executive of Meyer Bergman, said that the Royal Academy houses a lot of modern art which "doesn't necessarily make it a less attractive museum".
Michael Blair, an architect involved in the renovation, said they were going back to the original designs. Referring to criticism of the marble floor, which was originally stone, he said: "I'm sure if [Ware] was alive today, he would have preferred marble."
Military History Museum – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 22, 2011
Daniel Libeskind's visceral redesign for Dresden's Military History Museum has as striking an effect on the exhibits inside as on the facade itself
"You cannot put German military history into a box," says Daniel Libeskind. No, indeed you can't. He wants, moreover, to achieve a "paradigm shift away from the celebration of wars". And so, in creating a new Military History Museum in an 1870s barracks building in Dresden, he has chosen to make the least box-like thing he can think of – a steel-framed, half-transparent pointy thing – and crash it like a meteorite into the barracks' facade of drill-ground neoclassical symmetry. "It's about catastrophe," he says, and his design makes the point. Here be violence, it says, as plainly as a Las Vegas casino tells you there is gambling inside.
No one who knows the work of Libeskind will be very surprised, as he has always shown faith in the power of acute angles to convey pain (even if, confusingly, he also employs pointy things on shopping malls and museums of quite nice stuff, such as art). But the Dresden museum offers a particularly pure form of the anguished angle and tests its effectiveness to destruction.
Some architects specialise in hotels, some skyscrapers; Daniel Libeskind's niche is ministering to sites of disaster and loss. His first architectural commission, apart from an unrealised apartment block, was the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which strove to represent both the intertwining of the city with its Jewish culture and the tearing of the two apart. He has also completed the Imperial War Museum North in Salford, in the shape of a "shattered globe", and a museum of the painter and Holocaust victim Felix Nussbaum, and was chosen as the masterplanner for the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in New York.
He won the commission to design the Military History Museum a decade ago, when his much acclaimed Jewish Museum was new. The Dresden building, which if you include large parts of it not yet reopened, is the biggest museum in Germany, already had plenty of history by then. Founded in 1897 as an unqualified celebration of armed might, it then went through Nazi and communist variations on the theme until the fall of the Berlin Wall made its message plainly inappropriate and it closed.
Deliberations followed as to what sort of institution it should now be, or if it should exist at all, out of which emerged the idea that it should have an "anthropological" as well as a historical purpose. It should show the human causes and effects of war rather than be a parade of materiel. Deliberations continued after Libeskind won the job: "It takes a long time to get to grips with history," he says. His client was the Bundeswehr, the military, which here had to take on the role of cultural curator.
The outcome is an intensely and minutely considered representation of modern Germany's complicated feelings about war. It is unsparing in its depiction of horrors, including the skull, the front part blown away, of a soldier who shot himself in the mouth. There is a wall of shoes of Holocaust victims. A line of stuffed animals, from an elephant to a goose, at first looks like a cheerful contingent from Noah's ark, until closer inspection reveals such things as a cat being killed in a laboratory to test poison gas, or a sheep, three-legged after it had been used for clearing mines. Sections are called "War and Memory", "War and Music" or "War and Theatre". "War and Games" shows children's toys, including a metal tank found in the rubble of Dresden, melted by the heat of the bombing, the fate of its owner unknown.
Every effort is made to avoid fetishising equipment. A V-2 rocket is in a constricted space such that you can only see it close up, in "fractured" views, as Libeskind puts it, "otherwise it just looks like a big skyscraper". You are shown such things as the drugs given to the pilots of tiny submarines, so that they could withstand the fear of their all-but-suicidal missions.
A jeep blasted in which three German soldiers were seriously injured in Afghanistan is shown alongside voting cards showing the support of chancellors Schröder and Merkel for involvement in the conflict, to make a point about the connection of politics to war. Installations were commissioned from artists, with various degrees of success, to give their interpretations of the themes. At times it gets mawkish, as when the words "love" and "hate" are projected in splatters on the walls, but mostly the displays make good use of telling detail and direct information. They go beyond the obvious point – that war is hell – to unravel its human ramifications.
All this takes place within an exhibition design by HG Merz and Barbara Holzer, which fits within the architecture of Libeskind, which internally consists of jagged, sloping planes thrust into the regular, spacious grid of the old barracks, with voids pierced from one floor to another. The old central staircase, broad enough for battalions to ascend, fragments at its edges into compressed spaces, crevices and fissures winding through concrete geology. You are oppressed and released, disorientated and reorientated.
At times, as happens with this kind of geometry, it gets embarrassed by necessary verticals and horizontals – by lifts, for example. Its energy also dissipates rather too rapidly when you are returned to the world of the right angle, in flanking galleries dedicated to more conventional chronological displays. It gets better the more enmeshed it is with the exhibits and with the old building, where the strange shapes are not spectacles in themselves, but means for affecting your perception of the things on show.
At the top you are discharged into a space about bombed cities, and then on to a platform for viewing Dresden, the fantastical city of rococo and gothic that was splintered like porcelain in two nights of bombing in 1945 (splinters of which are still being stuck back together in the heroic but impossible attempt to recover what was lost). This viewing platform, it turns out, is within the meteorite you saw from the outside and the view can only be seen through its mesh.
The platform is in fact the only thing that happens inside the five-storey-high steel structure, which otherwise contains inaccessible void. This discovery is disappointing, as something so large and conspicuous should surely be more than a gesture. As it is, it resembles an immense statue or redundant cupola on a 19th-century building, something pompous and somewhat empty. It is also irritating, as the panorama would be better enjoyed if it were not from inside the meteorite. It must mean something to put so much metal between you and the view, in this architecture where everything seems to have a meaning, but it's not obvious what. This thing is at once breathtaking, verging on the wonderful, and breathtakingly dumb.
The design's weakness is its belief that sheer shape can speak on its own. There are not enough notes or else too many of the same kind. Too often you find yourself peering at a form or space that is not as fascinating as it ought to be. Sometimes the spaces feel underpopulated by exhibits, as if the architecture had not left them enough room. Perhaps in future decades the steel meteorite will be retro-fitted in such a way that it makes more sense. I hope so, as the rest of the museum – the power of the exhibits, the thoughtfulness of their selection and the more complex and intricate of Libeskind's interior spaces – deserves it.
Dresden Military History Museum – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 22, 2011
Images from Daniel Libeskind's visceral redesign for Dresden's Military History Museum