Posts Tagged Travel
‘London’s British Museum is a map of the world, and a time machine too’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Our architecture correspondent celebrates London's most popular tourist attraction, the British Museum – at once a map of the world, a time machine and a treasure chest
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Simon Jenkins on the Tower of London
My walks to the British Museum as a young boy must have been as much a visual and emotional education as they were an untiring thrill. The time I spent there as a child is probably one of the reasons I came to travel so much to remote spots and folds of the atlas in later years.
The museum itself is a map of the world, a time machine, too, offering mind trips to Mesopotamia, Memphis, Athens in the golden age of Pericles and to an encyclopedia of compelling civilisations, or haunting fragments of them. Here, dreams of exotic places, peoples and buildings were brought to kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional and mesmerising life.
I liked, too, and lapped up, the way in which the tight, regular grid of what remained of Georgian Bloomsbury – streets animated by uniform parades of red double-decker buses and ranks of gleaming black cabs – gave way, all of a sudden, to an enormous courtyard set behind glossy black iron railings.
Beyond – up the most generous flight of steps – lay the museum itself, and its compelling collections veiled by a great Greek Revival pediment at the centre of an ambitious colonnade of no fewer than 44 Ionic columns, their design based, as I learned much later, on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor (now western Turkey).
There was all this to take in even before walking through the doors into the echoing lobby and deciding whether to turn left – into the dark realm of Egyptian mummies and Assyrian gateways guarded by warriors who were half adventurously bearded men and half vigorous blue ceramic bulls – or right into the Corinthian light of the King's Library, with its double-deck rows of gold-embossed leather spines.
Here I could stare at the pencilled pages of Scott's Diary, not knowing that one day I would hold this most moving of documents in my own, white-gloved, hands, turning its heart-rending pages.
I enjoyed the gloom of the Duveen Gallery, built just before the second world war to designs by the American architect John Russell Pope, where the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon frieze – were on display. I was ignorant then of the controversy around these "stolen" sculptures and the desire of many modern Greeks to see them returned.
I learned to love Sydney Smirke's circular Reading Room set under an iron-ribbed dome in a courtyard of his elder brother's Grecian pantechnicon. Robert Smirke had travelled extensively in Greece and Sicily to sketch the ruins of ancient temples before he turned his cool mind and his elegant hand to the design of what is today, in terms of visitor numbers, Britain's most popular tourist attraction.
What has changed since I was a child? Renovations, extensions, and the exodus of the British Library to Colin St John Wilson's red-brick monument alongside the fairytale Gothic of the Midland Grand Hotel and St Pancras station, Norman Foster's roofed-over Great Court and, most of all, the sheer number of people tramping through the museum's halls and galleries, so many that the last time I came to look at collections from ancient Mesopotamia I was all but swept away on a tide of visitors: the gallery I had chosen has become one of many intensely busy thoroughfares in the museum.
It can be too busy for its own good. And yet anyone who is tired of the British Museum is tired not just of tourism or the crush of central London, but of the entire world and the history of its civilisations captured here in untiring architectural splendour.
• Admission to the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1 (020-7323 8299, britishmuseum.org) is free
‘The surrounding modern buildings show no respect for the Tower of London’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
The iconic 11th-century citadel that is the Tower of London, with its ancient walls, streets, steps and turrets, has been let down by a towering failure of City planners, says Simon Jenkins
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum
Bad news. Unesco may soon strip London's two most prominent tourist sites, Westminster's Parliament Square and the Tower of London in the City of their world heritage status. Chief reason is the towering Shard, which will be western Europe's tallest building, now looming over both of them from its launch pad on the south side of London Bridge. Westminster's grouping of Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Whitehall is probably far enough away to survive the shock. The Tower of London is a different matter.
The rough-and-tumble old citadel has become such a London familiar that few people really know it. William the Conqueror's White Tower still sits nobly in the centre of the composition, sadly deprived of the original limewash that gave it its name. Inside are the original apartments, two chambers to each floor, and a Norman chapel. In the basement is a magnificent armoury museum. This remains the finest 11th-century structure in Britain.
On the river side of the Tower is Traitor's Gate and a suite of medieval chambers fitted out for Henry III (who kept a zoo in the grounds). This mini-palace has been recreated, complete with throne room and peaceful oratory looking out over the Thames – a serene view touched by the sadness of those passing to their deaths beneath.
Within this palace runs the last medieval street in London, a maze of ancient walls, steps and turrets. Here are the Bloody Tower, Raleigh's prison chambers, the Crown Jewels and the "leads" where Princess Elizabeth walked and contemplated death or coronation during the reign of her Catholic half-sister, Mary. The Tower enclave as a whole is a remarkable medieval town within a town. When inside, we can just about lose ourselves in Beefeaters, ravens, blood, guts and history.
Until the 1960s Tower Hill, overlooking the tower itself, was surrounded by the buildings, mostly warehouses, of a working Georgian and Victorian city. Most eye-catching of all, Tower Bridge, designed by the City architect, Horace Jones, in 1886, rose downstream in deference to the tower itself. The most famous bascule bridge in the world and still working, it perfectly complements the battlements and vigour of the Conqueror's fortress. Visitors can climb it and look down on river and city beneath, getting a closer and more evocative view than from the big wheel upstream.
That is about it. As Unesco rightly suggests, no city in Europe has shown less concern for the setting of its historic buildings than London. St Katherine's Dock just downstream of the bridge has been partly restored, but its tower facade is wrecked by an overwhelming glass box by Lord Rogers, and by the appalling concrete Tower Hotel. Whoever allowed this to be put up should be shot, and one day I assume it will be taken down.
Across the river lies the benighted site of warehouses cleared in the 1970s and left fallow as planners argue over what to do next. Had the waterfront been restored, as happened downstream in Wapping, this area would have been yielding rent and jobs for a quarter of a century. That is the true cost of so-called redevelopment.
Directly opposite the Tower is the mayor of London's oval building designed by Lord Foster and described by former mayor Ken Livingstone as a "glass testicle". It lurches strangely towards the river with, to its right, the frigid More London development. Meanwhile, on the north bank upstream of the Tower, is a giant atrium block also by Foster, blundering across the contour.
These buildings show not the slightest respect for the Tower or Tower Bridge. They are monuments only to insipid steel and glass.
• Admission to the Tower of London (0844 482 7799, hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon) from £17 adults and £9 children, if booked online
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and chairman of the National Trust
Will Self: why I hate London’s Trafalgar Square
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Controversial novelist Will Self thinks Trafalgar Square is an ultra-naff London landmark that would be improved with market stalls, cafes and Lord Nelson being cut down to size
Simon Jenkins on The Tower of London
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum
Without a shadow of doubt Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. The fact that massed divisions of tourists feel compelled to ritually promenade across its pigeon-shat-upon York stone and head-banging granite is perverse in the extreme, because it's not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger of being hung for treason, such is the discourse of power enshrined in its leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column.
True, the National Gallery makes a pleasing non-event horizon for the square as you enter it from Whitehall or the Mall; a long range of neoclassicism, with its Saracen's helmet dome, it's bare to the point of Moorishness. St Martin-in-the-Fields is also difficult to object to unless you've a perverse inclination against its unexceptionable architecture and illustrious history of beneficence.
However, surrounding the rest of it are tedious Edwardian-club-bore buildings – South Africa House, Canada House and the rest – that underawe with their weighty bombast.
There's this, and there's the perverse cant of the square, which rises south-west to north-east to form a raked stage upon which something ought to happen. What usually happens on it is that organs of the state corral one group of malcontents or other before hitting them with sticks, riding over them on horseback, and on one or two notable occasions – such as the original Bloody Sunday of 1887 – render some of them appropriately stone-dead.
Of course, barring the occasional demonstration, the Square doesn't have much happening in it at all, apart from full-grown Italian men with goatees climbing on to the backs of Landseer's lions, and giant Scandinavian teens rolling up their jeans and wading in the fountains until authority spurts them out.
Yes, yes, I know: mayors of all stripes put on concerts there, and also erect big screens on which events of some sort or other are displayed. I've seen this sort of carry-on when I cross the square – usually bottom-left to top-right – on my way to the opera, Soho and other more interesting destinations.
Trafalgar Square is so compellingly naff that it was the obvious location for that repulsive Olympic countdown clock – as it is annually for that enormous fir tree the Norwegian people insist on sending us – even though we've asked them very politely not to.
Who was it who said, "Corridors have become destinations"? Ah, yes, Rem Koolhaas in his seminal 2002 essay Junkspace – but he could've been talking about Trafalgar Square, at least since the completion of Admiralty Arch in 1912. Prior to that the square was … well, less square for a start. And it also had housing facing directly on to it – some distinctly ducal, such as Northumberland House, but others that were a recognisable part of the old bricky weave of London. It had housing, and even quite modest shops – now all that's left of the commercial activity that once gave the capital its distinctive street life is a Tesco Express, a Waterstone's and, further along towards Pall Mall, the offices of various implausible Central Asian airlines with names like GhengisAir.
Yes, once the Arch was overarching and the Mall came into being (prior to 1912 it was a long row of hedges), Trafalgar Square became a corridor that was a destination, by which I mean it was a site to be visited rather than lived in. Dead and about-to-be-married royals must be dragged through its environs as part of a kissing of the ritual stations of the state's holy cross – winning sports teams ditto.
Almost all attempts to gussy up the Square and make it more user-friendly – think the Fourth Plinth new sculptures, and the pedestrianisation of the northern side – are doomed to failure, precisely because of its bombast and the petrified generals laughing stonily in the face of anything light, frothy or fun.
Of the recent Fourth Plinth sculptures only Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant has gone any way towards bending the square's rectilinear rigidity. With its subversion of the conventionally standardised representations of the body the square specialises in, and its bright white marble – the albedo of which attracted a good proportion of the flying rats – Quinn's statue made a stab at the flinty heart of the Brit establishment.
Unfortunately it couldn't possibly penetrate far enough. What's needed are cafes all over the gaff, open-air and serving excellent espresso; top-notch strolling and – unlicensed – buskers; Horatio's nob chopped off halfway down; at least one of the lions upended; an open-air market; some good ethnic food stalls; and possibly a snake charmer or 20 …
Overall, think Marrakech's Djemaa el-Fna and you wouldn't be far wrong. Oh, and did I mention the weather?
Will Self's novel Umbrella will be published by Bloomsbury in August
A Room for London: a new installation and hotel on the South Bank
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
Liz Bird was one of the first guests to spend the night at A Room for London, a 'holiday houseboat' architectural installation on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall overlooking the Thames. It will be open for bookings to the rest of us this Thursday
Ship's log, Roi des Belges: Sunday 15 January, 2012. Time: 4pm. Weather: fine. Wind: south-westerly.
Crew safely on board and feeling very pleased with themselves, standing on the top deck sipping prosecco and waving at promenaders on the South Bank as they admire the Thames river views from Big Ben round to St Paul's. It has been an unusual embarkation, via a backstage door at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and up a specially installed lift to the roof.
Resembling a 1920s steamer and designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, the Roi des Belges interior is red-stained plywood with not a nautical blue and white stripe in sight. The spacious main deck's bow is lined with windows and a wraparound wool banquette. There's a massive bed, which cleverly converts into twin beds by sliding on runners built into the floor.
Behind is a table and chairs next to a kitchenette. A shower room and toilet – with portholes giving views of St Paul's or the London Eye – straddle the entrance hall at the back of the boat, or "stern".
The pièce de resistance is the snug upper deck, filled with London-themed books, which we quickly rename "The Bridge" and where we write up the ship's log. This weighty tome is where guests who managed to secure a night's stay when bookings went live last September (six months' worth of bookings snapped up in 12 minutes) are expected to chart their experience. Fountain pen provided.
Alain de Botton is the philosopher behind Living Architecture, the foundation which rents out unusual holiday homes and came up with the idea for the project. He put "demons", as his 3am log entry under the heading "sightings" when he stayed earlier this month. Our entry for the same hour reads: "Man, singing loudly, zig-zags across Waterloo Bridge".
Later this month, the boat will host its first "artist in residence", the multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird who will play a one-off gig via live webcast (28 January). Other musicians such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson will also perform, and writers including Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson will take part in A London Address there, a series of monthly writings and recordings .
We use our binoculars to study the faces of those beneath us on the South Bank: lovers, strollers, joggers. We are constantly drawn to the "vessel" opposite. As night falls, the opulent Savoy hotel lights up like a jewelled beacon, its crystal interiors shining out over the inky Thames.
Ship's log: 5pm. A police launch, its sirens blaring, speeds along the water, dodging the packed tourist boats. Trains rattle over Hungerford Bridge, snatches of conversation drift upwards, a saxophone wails plaintively.
Ship's log: 11.26pm. Crew retires for the night. Blinds are left untouched, but sleep doesn't come quickly. We keep sitting up and looking out at London's multi-coloured riverside.
Monday, 16 January. Ship's log: 7am. the sun has just risen. On the starboard side, The Shard pierces a pinky red sky.
Ship's log: 11am. Binoculars stowed, log up to date, crew disembarks, wishing their "trip" could have been longer.
• Be warned, the first sale of nights in the boat, for between January and June, sold out in just 12 minutes. Bookings for July to December will go on sale online this Thursday, 19 January, at midday GMT. A Room for London (aroomforlondon.co.uk, living–architecture.co.uk) sleeps two and costs £300 for a night, one night maximum
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.
Stay in your very own Frank Lloyd Wright house
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 17, 2011
Three of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic houses can be seen on a day trip from Pittsburgh – and there's even the opportunity to spend the night in one of them
Frank Lloyd Wright was coming towards me in his trademark pork-pie hat and opera-goer's cape, frosty eyebrows raised, when I woke up. As a rule I don't dream of world-famous architects – never, so far as I recall, have I dreamed of Frank Gehry or IM Pei – but there were extenuating factors. I'd nodded off over a biography of Wright, reading about how he'd arrive unannounced at a house of his design to see how its owners were treating it. And the house where I lay, the Duncan House, an hour south-east of Pittsburgh, was an actual FLW, one of only half a dozen where Wright-lovers can stay the night.
Left in sole possession, my wife and I struggled that first evening to make ourselves at home. To begin with, we tried going for a walk. The house is at the end of a mile-long private driveway, set amid a 125-acre wooded estate. In October the trees were in their autumn finery, spanning the spectrum from deep red to palest yellow. Climbing a hill, we looked out over the rolling Laurel Highlands, one of Pennsylvania's prettiest landscapes and a favourite getaway for Pittsburghers, before following a trail to a secluded pond. On our return leg, we looked in on the estate's two other houses, both designed by a pupil of Wright's and bearing his influence.
Back at home base, we tried walking around the single-storey house, considering it from every angle: the horizontal bands of bleached mahogany, the gutterless eaves, the stonework of the chimney, and the carport (Wright hated enclosed spaces like garages, attics and basements). Inside the house was a vintage 1950s American kitchen, like the set of Happy Days, but instead of cooking we made a picnic at the living room table. This was our favourite space, the heart of the house with its cathedral roof and fireplace, and the expansive windows that allowed us to sit warmly inside without missing the magnificent foliage. It wasn't until we were ready for bed that we noticed another typical FLW feature – no curtains or blinds on the windows.
So, up at first light, we made the 40-minute drive south through the Laurel Highlands to Fallingwater. Wright built Fallingwater in the 1930s, when he was pushing 70, and such was its impact that he never again lacked for commissions. People have been visiting, photographing and writing about the place ever since but it still has the power to startle at first sight. The family who commissioned Fallingwater, owners of a Pittsburgh department store, anticipated something more conventional: a weekend cabin with a view of the falls. What they got instead was a bravura exercise in modern architecture and engineering – the core of the house resting on boulders with terraces of reinforced concrete cantilevered out over the falls. To their credit, they were content to foot the bill, which, in true Wright style, never ceased to climb.
Seven miles from Fallingwater and now under the ownership of Lord Palumbo, Kentuck Knob is another FLW favourite. Crowning the brow of a hill and shrouded by trees, Kentuck Knob is built around a hexagonal kitchen and its angles just keep getting odder. Wright hated the dark, Victorian houses of his childhood, calling their rooms boxes within boxes; one of his abiding aims was to break down those boxes and blur the line between inside and out. Built for local ice-cream barons, Kentuck Knob achieves these aims with considerable charm. Adding to its appeal, the house and grounds are dotted with modern art – works by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Serra – from Lord Palumbo's collection.
Having toured these two houses, we returned for a second night at the Duncan House and found ourselves looking on "our" FLW with fresh eyes. Now that we'd learned a little about Wright's methods and motives, certain things made more sense: the absence of decoration (Wright abhorred "inferior desecrators"); the narrow gallery leading to the bedrooms (a mere passing-through space, to be minimized as far as possible); the built-in shelving; and the division of the house between living areas (spacious and open) and private spaces (smaller and darker, places to sleep and take shelter rather than for living).
FLW houses try to teach their inhabitants how their paternalistic designer would you to live: together, around the fireplace; in harmony with nature; simply and without clutter. If Americans have largely ignored his lessons, holding on to their garages and basements, preferring to live in bigger and bigger boxes on sub-divided estates, that isn't Wright's fault.
The Duncan House is no Fallingwater. In common with the other five Wright houses where you can stay the night (all in the Midwest), it's a Usonian. Usonians, designed and built in the last decades of Wright's life, were prefabricated houses that could be assembled according to one of a dozen blueprints. They were meant to be affordable, bringing good design within reach of middle-class America. (Though affordable was always a very relative term with Wright.)
The only way you'll ever get to experience Fallingwater is on a guided tour. Staying at Duncan House felt a bit like being able to take a Rembrandt home from the gallery – not a major work, a sketch, but a Rembrandt all the same.
We certainly got to like the place and were sorry to leave – perhaps, if we'd been allowed to stay, we'd have become better people! Lingering on our last morning, I took time to flick through the comments book. In the couple of years since the Duncan House opened, Wright aficionados from all over the world have stayed there, adding an extra, personal facet to their FLW tour. It's not cheap but very few were complaining. 'The dream of a lifetime' wrote more than one.
• The Duncan House, 187 Evergreen Lane, Acme (+1 877 833 7829) costs $425 per night (two night minimum); the house sleeps up to six – extra $50 per night for fourth, fifth and sixth guests. Fallingwater, 1491 Mill Run Road, Mill Run, (fallingwater.org; book tours several months in advance). Kentuck Knob, 723 Kentuck Road, Dunbar (kentuckknob.com; advance bookings recommended). Flights from London to Pittsburgh with various US airlines start at around £340, if booked via kayak.co.uk.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 16, 2011
Finland gets a newfangled mountain motel, northern lights come to a ceiling near you, and London's new Routemaster rides out
If I were the Lapland town of Levi, 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle, what would I like for Christmas? Snow? No, I have heaps. Santa? He lives here. Northern lights could be pretty. You mean aurora borealis? Tell me something new. How about a modern ski-resort hotel? Because you haven't seen a ski-resort hotel quite like this one before …
Designed by Big Architects (Bjarke Ingels Group) from Copenhagen, the proposed Koutalaki Ski Village at Levi, Finland's biggest ski resort, was revealed in detail this week. It has been designed neither to fight the sub-zero temperatures nor as a foil to the slopes, but to be part of them. Its cluster of buildings – hotel, restaurants, bars, shops – will flank a central square, and the village will be crowned with its very own slopes. These will connect to the local pistes, so you'll be able to ski from your room, up, down and across the hotel roofs and out into the wide white yonder.
The entire complex will blur into the landscape, especially in heavy snow. As Bjarke Ingels told a press conference in Levi, "the Ski Village is conceived as an extension of both the summit and the resort. Grown from the natural topography rather than dropped from the sky, the architecture … creates a new hybrid integrating distinct identities such as village and resort, shelter and openness, cosy intimacy and natural majesty, unique character and careful continuity, or simply, architecture and landscape."
In summer the green roofs will blossom with flowers and be used for picnics and for walkers to wander over into the surrounding hills. To date, much ski-resort architecture – in Finland as elsewhere in the world – looks as if it has been designed without a thought for aesthetics or the effects of snow. Big's is a small move in the right direction, making architecture work with snow rather than pretending to be apart from it.
To recreate the effect of the northern lights in your home, how about asking Santa for a brand new "el Masterpiece" chandelier designed by Daniel Libeskind? Nine foot high and weighing 159kgs (350lbs), this striking object – shaped in the architect's trademark zig-zag, or lightning-bolt, motif – is sheathed in polished stainless steel. Inside, it is coated with 23-carat gold leaf. The clever bit is the lighting. "Illumination is provided by 1,680 specially designed LED modules," say the architects in a press release on behalf of lighting suppliers Zumtobel. "These can be called up wirelessly via a special iPad app that activates individual, built-in mechanisms attached to each module. The variety of colour scenarios and the quality of light emitted by each mimic the cosmic light that fills the universe."
One better than aurora borealis? The effects should be spectacular – they are the result of an algorithm developed by the architect's son Dr Noam Libeskind, an astrophysicist expert in dark matter at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam. And it's enough to make architects take off their designer glasses and rub their eyes in amazement.
I can imagine quite a few Londoners rubbing their eyes when the first of Transport for London's new Routemaster buses makes it debut in Trafalgar Square on 16 December. Whether this is a Christmas present from Boris Johnson to Londoners or to himself is open for debate. In any event, the new double-decker, designed by Thomas Heatherwick working with Wrightbus of Northern Ireland, is a striking machine – a London bus as imagined, perhaps, by set designers for the Batman movies. But it also re-establishes the idea that a London bus should be designed especially for the streets it serves. Traditionally, London buses were considered an integral part of the streetscape, and by the 1930s as a form of mobile architecture. Charles Holden, architect of the best Underground stations of the time, was called in to work on the look of new buses. And big red buses really do have a big effect on the character of the city.
City streets of the future, meanwhile, might resemble the new-look Exhibition Road in South Kensington, which reopened this week with no pavements, no pedestian crossings and very few traffic lights. Cars, cyclists and pedestrians will now all share the same stripped-back road space. The architects are Dixon Jones, who remodelled the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden, designed the Guardian's offices at Kings Cross and have just transformed the old Regent Palace Hotel at Piccadilly Circus into a svelte combination of modern offices and restored art deco restaurants. Although removing pavements and integrating roads for all users has been a success in Scandinavia, we will all be watching closely as the great, tail-gating British motorist tangles with pedestrians in the shadows of the Victorian museums of Albertopolis.
Finally, a thought for the New Year. Pantone has revealed that the colour of the year for 2012 is … Pantone 17-1463, or Tangerine Tango. Pantone, the self-proclaimed "global authority on colour and provider of professional colour standards to the design industries", says Tangerine Tango will provide "the energy boost we need to recharge and move forward" next year. I must check to see whether this colour can be found in el Masterpiece. And you might find it in the northern lights, but not – ever – as the colour of a London bus, at Christmas or at any other time of this year or next.
Thoroughly modern Miami: art and architecture tours
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 19, 2011
Two ways of getting under the skin of Miami's creative scene: a Vespa tour of off-beat arts venues, and a limo ride around the best MiMo (Miami Modernist) architecture
'Do you guys want soup? It's very good – vegetable. I just finished making it ..." It's not the first thing you expect to hear when meeting a cutting-edge collector of American contemporary art, but there's something maternal and unpretentious about Mera Rubell, co-director of the Rubell Family Collection.
I accept, partly to calm my nerves. I've just ridden here on a Vespa – a cool powder-blue one, no less – with Roam Rides, which offers art tours of Miami by Vespa.
There are numerous art galleries and museums in the city, and 2013 will see the opening of the Miami Art Museum (miamiartmuseum.org), designed by Herzog and de Meuron (of Beijing Olympics fame). Next month it will host the 10th Art Basel Miami Beach (1-4 December, artbasel.com).
The Vespa tour is a brilliant way to explore the city's less obvious art scene. Our guide and instructor for the morning is Kit Sullivan, an amateur artist and graffiti fan who aims to show guests off-the-radar galleries and street art projects. The Rubell rarely appears on tourist maps, has very little marketing and attracts just 200 people a week, but it is a personal collection, where the owners often act as guides.
The building was once a holding facility for the Drug Enforcement Administration (storing tonnes of seized cocaine and cash). It's accessed by a huge, caged doorway. Kit points out bullet holes in the wall.
Mera and her husband Donald began their influential collection in the 1960s. It has now grown to almost 6,500 pieces, with 200 on loan across the world. "We were lucky, I guess," smiles Mera. "We had an eye for it. We bought pieces from Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat long before anyone had heard of them."
As we wander round the gallery I'm drawn to some privately commissioned Sterling Ruby canvases. With dark nods to American abstract expressionism, Russian constructivism, graffiti and tribal markings, they're powerful and overwhelming. It's hard to believe the beach is just minutes away.
Then we're on the road again. Riding on Miami's wide open roads is pleasurably sedate, and with the sun on my back I gain confidence and speed. Over the engine noise Kit shouts: "I'm going to take you somewhere we're really proud of in Miami. A few years ago, this area was in decline but wait until you see it. We've got something really cool going on."
Wynwood Walls, a once-derelict warehouse district, is being reborn as an arts neighbourhood. Vast grey walls are being transformed by international street artists including Shepard Fairey (the name behind those iconic 2008 Obama images), Os Gemeos from Brazil, Futura from New York and Lady Aiko of Japan. Musicians, painters, actors and poets are all setting up studios here.
On each corner, a piece of street art is taking shape. The artists don't mind us taking photographs but many refuse to speak to visitors and cover their faces. Hawaiian-born Estria, a pioneer of street art and a respected social historian, is more approachable: "A lot of my friends were b-boys and I used to go watch them breakdancing. I kind of fell into it. With hip-hop arts, it's all connected."
He's too modest to mention the Estria Foundation (estria.org), set up with Jeremy LaTrasse, co-founder of Twitter. The organisation was conceived to effect "social change through art" by fundraising and art events.
As he paints, he talks me through some terminology. A "bomb" is an illegal work, "thrown up" fast, often at night. "Slashing" (when an artist "throws up" his tag over a legal piece) is one of the most disrespectful things that can happen in graffiti.
On the way back to the hotel I gawp at the stunning art deco facades of Ocean Drive, and am keen to learn more about the city's architecture. So I book a MiMo (Miami Modernist) tour with Charles J Kropke, an architectural historian who has written a book on MiMo (between overseeing 20 companies and his single-parent family of eight adopted kids).
We will be touring the classics of the future, not this time by Vespa, but like rap-stars – in a limousine with drinks cabinet, leather seats, tinted windows and mirrored ceilings.
Our first stop is the International Inn on the Miami Beach side of 79th Street Causeway. In the unrestored 1956 building, Charles leads us to a shimmering pool: "Just look at those blue opaque tiles. I can see this as an incredible boutique hotel – the way those doors all open on to the pool, that crisp, easy symmetry. It's so Miami."
The Formica counter is a little chipped, but I can picture a vacationing Don Draper in the vintage lounge chair, louchely raising a Martini glass through swirls of cigarette smoke.
Down the road is another off-beat jewel, the New Yorker hotel on Biscayne Boulevard, with pastel bath suites and vintage ceiling fans in every room. "The owners spent 18 months sourcing the original-font nameplates for the bedroom doors," says the receptionist.
We take in motels, garages, diners, ice-cream parlours. The tour is so new that one or two of the owners seem pleasantly surprised to see us.
The Biltmore Hotel is not strictly MiMo, but we make an exception. The 1920s Spanish Revivalist resort with its Moorish tower and sweeping driveway oozes Miami glamour. The enormous, U-shaped pool was groundbreaking in its day and hosted beauty pageants and synchronised swimming displays. We learn that Johnny Weissmuller worked here as a lifeguard and had a penchant for streaking on the job.
There's one more building to see – the Pan Am terminal at Dinner Key, one of the earliest international seaplane airports and a reminder of the glamour of the golden years of aviation, portrayed in the new TV series Pan Am, which started on BBC2 this week. The clattering heels have long fallen silent but the magnificent winged clock stands as a timely reminder of one of Miami's brightest eras.
• The Rubell Family Collection's American Exuberance exhibition runs from 30 November until July 2012 (rfc.museum). Street art scooter tours cost $75pp plus $50 for a two-person scooter (+1 888 760 7626, roamrides.com). Charles J Kropke's tailormade architecture tours from $65-$85pp (+1 305 774 9019, dragonflyexpeditions.com). KLM (klm.com) flies Heathrow-Miami from £401 return. The Morgan Mondrian (+1 305 514 1500, mondrian-miami.com), on South Beach has doubles from $270. Doubles at the New Yorker (hotelnewyorkermiami.com) from $125
Alternative uses for Buckingham Palace
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 24, 2011
Apparently Prince Charles would prefer to be based at Windsor Castle when he becomes King. So what could we do with the old palace?
According to a new book by Andrew Marr, Prince Charles has considered abandoning Buckingham Palace for Windsor Castle when he becomes king, leaving the former to be converted into a hotel and event space. Surely there are more innovative uses for this property?
HMP Buck House If there's one thing Britain lacks, it's sufficient four-star penal accommodation to imprison an entire financial industry. The palace's 240-bed capacity could be extended by installing cages in some state rooms, and the viewing balcony is ideal for public floggings.
Downton Abbey Experience Guests at this new "reality hotel" will get a taste of below-stairs living, by cooking, cleaning and running a makeshift first world war-era hospital in the service of a wealthy family played by the winners of a special National Lottery draw.
SW1 Garden Centre The palace has a first-rate garden of a size unheard of in central London, with plenty of room to display plants, plus space for a cafe and a petting zoo. The building itself, once reconfigured, will provide ample parking.
Buckingham Mountain Listing may prevent alteration to the outside of the palace, but once it's been gutted it could easily serve as an indoor ski slope. Lift queues will take visitors past various treasures, and special blue runs will allow guests to ski directly on to the Victoria line.
Top 10 reasons to love Switzerland
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 11, 2011
From lofty mountains to high-end hotels and cutting-edge architecture – 10 reasons for falling for Switzerland, your Favourite European Country in our Travel Awards 2011
Zermatt rebooted
This Matterhorn-cuddling meta-village has such a standing among skiers and mountain climbers that it could have rested on its laurels till the end of time. But Zermatt has added a cool, contemporary edge to its chocolate-box charms. Last December saw the opening of the Backstage Hotel (+41 27 966 6970, backstagehotel.ch, rooms from €250), a boutique inn with rich-kitsch suites designed to within an inch of their lives – beds are on transparent boxes in the centre of the rooms. It has a super-stylish little cinema (with chandeliers) and bar, and the spa is themed not on Buddhism like so many, but on the Christian story of creation. All over town, ultra-luxury designer chalets – fronted with glass and chrome rather than pine and cutesy balconies – are springing up, while the traditional Hotel Europe (+41 27 966 2700, europe-zermatt.ch, rooms from €225) has unveiled an airy new modern wing, complete with bijou spa. Come dinnertime in the resort, the big story is Restaurant Heimberg (+41 27 967 8484, heimberg-zermatt.ch, three-course dinner from CHF74 – £52), a menu-free high-end restaurant where supermodel-esque staff interview guests about their tastes before serving personalised multiple-course feasts. Or opt for gourmet mountain hut Chez Vrony (+41 27 967 2552, chezvrony.ch).
Fresh Basel
The oldest and most important contemporary art fair in the world, Art Basel (artbasel.com, 13-17 June 2012) is the tip of the iceberg in Switzerland's third-largest city. The permanent collection at Fondation Beyeler (fondationbeyeler.ch) bristles with Giacomettis, Picassos, Monets and Bacons, while the Kunstmuseum (kunstmuseumbasel.ch) houses the world's oldest public art collection, and its largest collection of Holbeins. A 30-minute bus ride takes you across the German border to Riehen and the Vitra Design Museum (design-museum.de) home to buildings by Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando, or take a tram to the Gotheanum (goetheanum.org) in neighbouring Dornach. The centre of Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy movement, this vast, visionary 1928 structure in cast concrete is built without a single right angle and is rich in sculptural forms, murals and stained glass.
Master strokes
You're never more than 20km from a lake or river in Switzerland, and the Swiss keep their H2O extraordinarily clean, so even in the centre of its busiest cities, pretty much any river or lake is ripe for the dipping. Zurich tops the lido tables, with 18 outdoor bathing areas (zuerich.com), many of which morph into funky, artsy bars by night, but Geneva also has its posh pontoons, complete with sauna and hammams, in the form of Bains des Paquis (bains-des-paquis.ch). And both Basel's Rhine and Bern's Aare rivers throng with paddling punters in summer, some even commute to work this way.
Oases with oomph
There's nothing much you can teach the Swiss about water-based wellness. They have a 2,000-year history of tapping the country's abundant thermal springs, but never stop reinventing the idea. Among the most sumptuous spas are those of Hotel Therme in Vals (+41 81 926 8961, therme-vals.ch, admission €31), an austere-glam grotto carved into the rock by Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect behind this year's Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, and Tschuggen Bergoase (+41 81 378 9999, tschuggen.ch, half-day £46) in Arosa, whose spooky glass spinnakers shooting from the mountainside flood the space with light. New kid on the block since last spring is the huge spa at the Eden Roc (+41 91 785 7171, edenroc.ch, half-day £35) in Ascona, whose mosaic- and stone-covered walls in shades of blue and grey reflect the colours of Lake Maggiore, a loofah's throw away.
La dolce Helvetia
Switzerland's Italian-speaking region is its sunniest, and the cantons that border Lake Maggiore in the south-east boast balmy climes, lush sub-tropical flora and a laid-back riviera lifestyle fuelled by Italia-tinged cuisine. Home to lotus blossoms and giant sequoias, the stunning botanical garden on San Pancrazio, one of the lake's two Brissago Islands (isolebrissago.ch) is a must-see, as is the vibrant city of Lugano (lugano-tourism.ch). And while no self-respecting adrenalinista would miss the chance to recreate 007's Goldeneye bungee jump at the Verzasca dam, the tranquil, hamlet-studded and largely hotel-free valleys of Verzasca (verzasca.ch) and Maggia (vallemaggia.ch) are the real finds here. There is just a sprinkling of unpretentious, reasonably priced lodgings in villages such as Brione and Gerra – you may just be the only visitors in the valley.
Ski crowd-free
If you like your pistes crowd-free and your powder plentiful, the undercelebrated resorts of Adelboden (adelboden.ch), Andermatt (andermatt.ch) and Val D'Anniviers (sierre-anniviers.ch) are where you should point your ski tips. Quaint weathered chalets and barns are the norm here, rather than shiny hotels and busy bars, and while the marked runs are mainly in the intermediate range, there's a wealth of off-piste action in trees, powder fields and long, north-facing valleys which hold their snow beautifully. Andermatt – where Elvis learned to ski, fact fans – recently caught the eye of Egyptian tycoon Samih Sawiris. He has very commercial plans for its future, so don't delay – get there while it's, er, cold.
Arty architecture
For all their yodelling, alpenhorns and cowbells, the Swiss are no slouches when it comes to pushing the boundaries of design and architecture. Barely a year has passed of late without some ultramodern landmark building springing up – whether on an idyllic mountainside, as in the case of Mario Botta's tiny but striking 1996 church of San Giovanni Battistta in Mogno, or in the heart of a city, such as Frank Gehry's Novartis Campus building, which opened in Basel in 2009, and Renzo Piano's seductively undulating Zentrum Paul Klee (paulkleezentrum.ch) of 2005 in Bern. Most recently, the Rolex Learning Centre (rolexlearningcenter.ch) in Lausanne, a spaceship of a building by Japanese architects SANAA won Wallpaper* magazine's Best New Public Building award 2011.
Diamond digs
Switzerland's diversity is reflected as much in the range of accommodation as anywhere else. Where do you fancy hanging your hat? In Lausanne's 19th-century Château d'Ouchy (+41 21 331 3232, chateaudouchy.ch, rooms from £235), in a Mongolian yurt high above Lake Geneva on the edge of Rochers de Naye (goldenpass.ch) 2,000m above sea level, or in the unique La Claustra, (+41 91 880 5055, schau-mal.com), a luxury hotel in a converted artillery bunker bored deep into the San Gottardo mountain. At the other end of the scale, and a comfort to those fearing the all-slaying power of today's Swiss franc, the country's hostels are among the world's best – take a bow Grindelwald (youthhostel.ch), recently voted the world's cleanest. And stays in the haylofts of working farms (bauernhof-ferien.ch), starting at as little as £7 a night, are proof that for all its banking muscle and corporate polish, Switzerland is still more than happy to share its rustic roots.
Life in the slow lane
While tour operators such as Black Tomato (blacktomato.co.uk) and Swiss Safari (swisssafari.com) offer sports cars to rent if you want to cruise some great driving roads in millionaire style, those who prefer their transport low-carbon also qualify for superstar treatment. SwitzerlandMobility (schweizmobil.ch), an organisation promoting non-motorised traffic, has created local, regional and national networks of signposted routes for hikers, cyclists, mountain bikers, roller skaters and canoeists. Many routes are integrated with public transport so you can cover plenty of ground, there are options for bike rental, overnight accommodation and transport of luggage, and you can plan your next move on the go with an iPhone app.
Express yourself
"Sorry I'm late – my train was delayed," is a not an excuse you tend to hear in Switzerland. And apart from being the centrepiece of the country's mind-bogglingly efficient integrated transport system, the Swiss rail network includes some of the most dazzling routes on the planet. Linking Chur with Tirano, just over the border in Italy, and fitted with panoramic windows, the Bernina Express (rhb.ch/Bernina-Express) rises on an old stone viaduct to pass forests, plunging cliffs and the Morteratsch glacier, taking in 55 tunnels, 196 bridges and a peak altitude of 2253m. It's only the third railway route in the world to have Unesco world heritage status.
• This article was amended on 11 October 2011 to correct the original version which stated the ski resort of Val d'Anniviers was in the Bernese Oberland. It is in Valais