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Country diary: Portland: Messages in limestone

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:52:49 +0000

Portland: Behind us, in Portland stone, was the great pile of St George's church, looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here

We were chilled by gusts blowing off a rough sea across a bleak graveyard close to the windswept edge of Portland – the great limestone promontory, almost an island, only tenuously linked to the mainland below Weymouth by the narrow pebble strand of Chesil Bank. Between us and the shingle beach below was a quarry extracting the famous stone, good for carving yet durable, that Wren used for St Paul's Cathedral and that has adorned fine buildings before and since.

All around us were ranks of seemingly numberless tombs and gravestones leaning at varied angles, made of Portland stone, and most fashioned with elaborate carving, a tribute to the tradition and skill of Portland craftsmen. And behind us, also in Portland stone, was the arresting sight of the great pile of St George's church, in its solitary space outside the town, built by a local man, inspired by Wren, and looking like a fanciful creation by Hawksmoor intended for London but transported here. Pevsner's guide to the buildings of Dorset calls it the finest 18th-century church in the county.

On our last trip to these parts, we had kept to the sheltered mainland coast and the wooded Rodwell trail, but now we had been brought to this exposed place by a chance meeting with the granddaughter of a man who had once been sexton and gravedigger here. She told us of the toil and problems involved in his work digging in the shale, and of his care of the graves for families who had moved away. And this stark place at a southern extremity of the country had an elemental feel, emphasised by inscriptions on tombstones near the church door; there is a memorial to Wm Pearce, killed by lightning while on Her Majesty's service "atop Chesil Beach" in 1858, and to Mary Way and William Lano, shot by the press gang in April 1803 (she died of her wounds in May).

• This article was amended on 26 January 2012. The original referred to William Leno instead of Lano.

John Vallins

Leaning tower of Big Ben worries MPs

The Sheet — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:23:28 +0000

House of Commons commission meets to discuss what can be done to shore up crumbling Palace of Westminster

Once again, the splits and misalignments are beginning to show in the mother of all parliaments.

This time, though, it is not a bickering coalition or a cabinet riven with discord that is causing concern but rather the state of the Palace of Westminster itself.

A committee of MPs will meet on Monday to see what can be done to stop the tower that houses Big Ben leaning any further and to shore up Pugin and Barry's neo-gothic edifice.

Subsidence has led to cracks appearing in walls around the Houses of Commons and Lords, with Big Ben's bell tower leaning 46cm (18in) at its peak.

The House of Commons commission – which is responsible for the upkeep of the parliamentary estate – will discuss a surveyor's report that suggests options for dealing with the problems, including repairs which may lead to peers and MPs temporarily moving out.

However, experts have dismissed suggestions that the palace could be reclaimed by the Thames.

According to Prof John Burland of Imperial College London, who designed the five-storey car park underneath the Palace of Westminster, the clock tower's tilt is nothing new.

"[It's] been there for years," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "When I first started work on the car park it was obvious that it was leaning.

"We made measurements on it. It was leaning at one in 250 to the vertical, which is just about visible. That's the break point between looking vertical and looking like a slight lean."

Burland said the lean had probably developed early on as there was no cracking in the cladding.

"We think it probably leant while they were building it and before they put the cladding on," he said. "That was a long time ago and buildings do lean a little bit."

Burland added that the cracking, which he said was not caused by the tube's Jubilee line or the car park, was actually good for the palace.

"They're beneficial because the building moves thermally more than is caused by the Jubilee line and the movements concentrated around the cracks and, if they didn't, there would be cracking elsewhere," he told Today.

He also said the clock tower's lean was visible to the naked eye: "If you stand in Parliament Square and look towards it, you can just see that it moves very slightly to the left – but I wouldn't put any political slant on that."

Sam Jones

Isi Metzstein obituary

The Sheet — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:06:57 +0000

Innovative architect who designed some remarkable postwar British buildings

Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable and distinguished modern architecture in postwar Britain. Under the umbrella of the Glasgow practice of Gillespie Kidd & Coia (GKC), for whom he worked throughout his career, he and his colleague Andrew MacMillan designed a series of striking churches in and around Glasgow, as well as school and university buildings further afield, including Robinson College, Cambridge. They were also the architects of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Argyll and Bute, once widely regarded as the finest modern building in Scotland but now a derelict ruin.

Metzstein was born in Berlin, the son of two Polish Jews, Efraim (who died in 1933) and Rachel. He escaped Germany in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme. The boy, his siblings and their mother were scattered all over Britain until the family was eventually reunited. The young Isi had been taken in initially by a family in Hardgate, Clydebank, and he remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life.

In 1945, having left school, he decided he wanted to become an architect, and a chance connection led to an apprenticeship with Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the firm he had taken on in the late 1920s. At the same time, Metzstein enrolled for evening classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met MacMillan, whom he brought into the firm in 1954. Together, they were to transform the practice and, as "Andy and Isi", became a celebrated double-act, as designers, teachers and talkers.

Coia, the son of Italian immigrants, had reopened the office after the second world war and resumed his association with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Glasgow, having built a number of churches in the 1930s. The archdiocese was about to embark on a programme of churchbuilding. At first, Coia's archi tecture continued in the manner of his prewar work, but soon the influence of his two and open-minded assistants became evident, familiar as they were with avant-garde buildings in continental Europe, in particular the work of the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.

The turning point was the church at Glenrothes, a new town in Fife, which was completed in 1957. With its tapering, open plan, austere aesthetic and white exterior, this was clearly the creation of different hands. Henceforth, Coia's task was to secure the commissions, while the work was carried out by his young and expanding office. Although GKC were responsible for schools and some housing during the late 1950s and 60s, what stood out was the series of bold and inventive churches. It is ironic that, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed the architect to be the almost mythical Coia, the designing was in fact carried out by a Jewish refugee from Berlin and a Glaswegian of Highland Presbyterian ancestry.

Metzstein, who described himself as a "lapsed atheist", had a strong sense of the numinous, achieved in his churches by the dramatic handling of light in dark interiors. Some of the churches were in the tradition of tall and powerful brick boxes, such as those at East Kilbride (1962) and Kilsyth (1964). Others – St Benedict's, Drumchapel (1970), Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun (1965) – had highly inventive plans and unconventional internal spaces.

However, their masterpiece was undoubtedly St Peter's (1966), where neo-Corbusian ranges with a brilliant stepped-section were disposed around an existing Victorian mansion.

The work of GKC stood out from that of their equally modern-minded contemporaries in England. As Metzstein explained: "We got the unique opportunity to design modern buildings that were not modern programmes – churches, convents, seminaries … We were relatively young and more excitable, maybe … We were designing churches, which are one-off buildings with an emotional and religious context."

By good fortune, the firm never jumped aboard the high-rise, system-building juggernaut. Metzstein and MacMillan were also unusual in having a serious interest in history, appreciating the character of Glasgow's urban fabric of stone tenements and extolling the merits of the work of the city's great architects of the past, Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at a time when it was either ignored or under threat.

In 1969, when Coia was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture, he asked that his two partners be associated with the honour. But by then things were beginning to go wrong. The patronage of the archdiocese was coming to an end (although new jobs appeared in England) and problems were emerging with the firm's experimental buildings. As with Frank Lloyd Wright, stories abound about leaking roofs and structural problems. The campanile at the East Kilbride church was taken down and in 1991 the wonderfully dramatic church at Drumchapel was summarily demolished a few days before it was due to be listed. As for St Peter's, which was superbly constructed (unlike some of the churches), it was rendered almost obsolete as soon as it was finished by the new policy, after the Second Vatican Council, of training priests in urban settings. It was abandoned by the archdiocese in 1980 and fell prey to vandals. Despite its grade A listing by Historic Scotland and its inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's list of sites most at risk, the structure remains a ruin.

Metzstein later announced the foundation of the Macallan club (named after his favourite whisky), whose members are the architects of buildings "demolished or mutilated without the involvement of its designer" and who, "the victims of brutal, premature 'scrap-heaping', are witnesses to the fragility of permanence which characterises [the] century". This may have been a joke, but it all hurt – deeply.

The firm's last building was Robinson College, an complex and inventive redbrick response to the growing reaction against the Modern movement, which was completed in 1980. Metzstein then devoted himself to teaching and lecturing, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (of which MacMillan was head), at the University of Edinburgh (where he was professor) and elsewhere.

He was held in great affection and respect by architects all over Britain, and was both revered and feared for his incisive and often devastating criticism of student work. It was annoying that recognition – and a growing admiration for the work of GKC – came so late. When Metzstein and MacMillan were presented with an award by the Royal Institute of British Architects for their teaching in 2008, Metzstein noted that "it would have been even better to receive this while we were still alive".

He remained until the end the conscience of a rational modernity, and was "allergic to 'starchitects' whose work fills the magazines". He much disliked the posturing arbitrariness of such buildings as Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, "which I can't take, both as an architect and as a Jew born in Berlin".

Behind Metzstein's acerbic wit, uttered in his guttural accent – a distinctive combination of German and Glaswegian – was a warm and generous personality. For an architect, he was unusually well-informed, intellectually curious and cosmopolitan in outlook.He lived with his wife, Dany, also of central European Jewish origin, and his family, in Hillhead. At home he created an ideal city made of metal tourist souvenir models of buildings which his many friends would send him from all over the world.

He is survived by Dany, his children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his brother and twin sister.

• Israel Metzstein, architect, born 7 July 1928; died 10 January 2012

Gavin Stamp

John Madin obituary

The Sheet — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:42:36 +0000

Architect who helped transform postwar Birmingham

No single architect changed the face of Birmingham as radically as John Madin between 1950 and 1975. His buildings, however, are subtly different from the concrete hulks surrounding New Street station and lining the inner ringroad, created by the city engineer, Herbert Manzoni, which gave Birmingham its 1960s consumerist image. Madin, who has died aged 87, was the architect to the Calthorpe estate, west of the city centre, which he transformed with sensitive new housing and an office strip, before he progressed to build many of the city's most individual offices and public buildings.

Madin was born in Moseley, Birmingham, the only child of a master builder and cabinetmaker who fostered his interest in architecture from an early age. He began his career in Manzoni's office aged 16, before entering the Birmingham School of Architecture, a training interrupted by second world war service with the Royal Engineers. As with many of his contemporaries, the war encouraged Madin to think big, and to see the answer to the depressed and damaged city he found on his return in 1947 in the Modern movement.

He set up in independent practice in 1950, designing housing and shops for the council and private developers, before in 1954 he was commissioned to design offices for the Engineering and Allied Employers' Federation. This small block in Edgbaston, realised in the decorative Scandinavian style that he had admired when, as a student, he had hitchhiked round Sweden, led to commissions from the Chamber of Commerce in 1960-61 and the Birmingham Post and Mail, whose offices (opened in 1966) included a 17-storey glazed office tower set over a low podium, in the style of Lever House, New York. Madin's buildings grew to match the ambitions of the 1960s, with glass giving way to heavier concrete finishes later in the decade.

The Engineering Employers' building also led to Madin's appointment by the Calthorpe estate to produce a master plan for its landholdings in Edgbaston, where he designed many important buildings. Low-rise housing in brick was followed by mixed schemes with tall blocks of flats, carefully sited and combined with rich planting. Landscaping also played a part in the offices along the Hagley Road that Madin and his rapidly expanding practice produced into the 1970s, which included his own offices, from 1966, in dark brick, and Neville House, from 1975, clad in mirror glass.

Two other buildings in Egbaston were more monumental still: the BBC's Pebble Mill studios, and the fortress-like Grand Lodge (now Clarendon Suites) for the Warwickshire Lodge of Masons, both completed in 1971. Pebble Mill was demolished in 2005, but the Clarendon Suites exemplify the richness Madin brought to his most prestigious interiors, combining modernism with traditional materials and works of art.

The same contrast between exterior and interior informed Madin's best-known but most controversial buildings, both of them in central Birmingham and under sentence of demolition: the avowedly brutalist National Westminster Bank, opened in 1974, and the Central Library. The latter is the only local authority library in Britain with the scale and stature of a university facility, and its stepped exterior conceals exceptionally calm reference areas, partly of double height.

It was the vigorous campaign to save this building, rejected for listing against the advice of English Heritage and set to be replaced by a new library from the Dutch architects Mecanoo, that led to the work of Madin's practice being re-evaluated, culminating in a monograph by the local architect Alan Clawley. Madin's last public appearance was at the launch of this book in March 2011.

Madin formed a large, multi-disciplinary practice in 1967, the John Madin Design Group, which worked across the West Midlands and in Leeds. It planned the new town of Telford, Shropshire, and extensions to Corby, Northamptonshire. He withdrew through ill-health in 1975 but continued to run its international arm until 1989, working in Europe, the Middle East and the US, mainly for the leisure industry.

A keen sportsman, Madin met his wife, Judith Jackson, on a tennis court. They married in 1956. He was an accomplished water-skier and sailor, and, following a move to Southampton, in 1992 joined the Royal Southern Yacht Club, for which he designed a new clubhouse at his own expense. Sailing holidays with his son and two daughters had earlier led him to the Welsh coast, where in 1965 he acquired a site at Aberdyfi, Gwynedd, to save it from less sensitive development. Over the following 45 years, Aberdovey Hillside Village slowly emerged, with pairs and terraces of flats and houses along the contours. Madin was still working there in 2011.

He is survived by his wife and children.

• John Hardcastle Dalton Madin, architect and planner, born 23 March 1924; died 8 January 2012

Elain Harwood

A high water mark: artists moor holiday houseboat on London roof

The Sheet — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:03:40 +0000

Vessel installed on top of Queen Elizabeth Hall on South Bank is open to the public for overnight stays

There are just a few things missing to complete the scene. Savage dogs, rusting engines from white vans plundered for parts, seagulls squabbling over landfill, scuffed barges laden with gravel and a backdrop peppered with indifferent high-rise housing. Add a slight scent of sewage and the 27-tonne Le Roi des Belges (King of the Belgians) might be berthed on some wind scythed stretch of the Thames Estuary far east of Tower Bridge.

The illusion, conjured on a grey and blustery January morning is not so very whimsical. Le Roi des Belges just happens to be moored on top of the brutalist Queen Elizabeth Hall between the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre. This, though, is no weather beaten Thames trader; it is, rather, an artwork – houseboat, too, which the public can stay in. It was designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, with Artangel for Living Architecture, an organisation set up by the philosopher Alain de Botton to build innovative holiday homes around the shores of Britain.

The shock, having ridden a slow and brutally utilitarian lift up through a jagged concrete interstice between the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, is to find the houseboat anchored to the vast concrete roof of the 1960s concert hall, a terrain as bleak, and as compelling, as any found downriver from Tower Bridge.

Artist and architect say they were inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, set on the Thames and the River Congo, and by Conrad's tales of how he steamed up the Congo in a boat of the same name in 1889. But, where Conrad experienced the all but unspeakable horror of the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State by King Leopold II, what you see spread out before you as you board the artworld Roi des Belges, also known as A Room for London, is the most compelling, and gloriously wide-angled, panorama of central London, framed by the Palace of Westminster on the port side and St Paul's to starboard.

"The idea is that where once ships sailed out from imperial London to the rest of the world, today the world has come willingly to London," explained de Botton. "The boat is here to provoke, stimulate and adjust how people feel about London."

Two people can stay here for a single night during the course of this year. Snuggled into their cabin – complete with neat galley, dining a pair of room, bunks that can be slid together, a shower with a view of the dome of St Paul's and a library. Those stowing their jib aboard this happily unexpected houseboat, are offered shelves stacked with books on London, peerless views and the strangest sense of being marooned alone in the heart, not of darkness, but of a neon, fluorescent and sodium-lit city and with the sound of Thames water lapping the South Bank shore overlain with the noise of night buses and emergency service sirens.

A Room for London is a year-long arts venue. A programme of visiting writers includes Swedish author and cultural historian Sven Lindqvist and novelist Jeanette Winterson. Among the musicians staying on board will be Andrew Bird, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist, German composer Heiner Goebbels and Laurie Anderson. Video and installation artist, Jeremy Deller, and Talking Heads' David Byrne will also be part of the crew. Somewhere between July and December you might want to book yourself on board, too, before, Le Roi des Belges is lifted off the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall and packed off to her next port of cultural call.

Le Roi des Belges is the sixth of the adventurous new rental houses commissioned by Living Architecture. These include the Balancing Barn on the Suffolk coast between Aldeburgh and Walberswick by Dutch architects, MVRDV, the Shingle House on the extreme south-easterly point of England at Dungeness, by the Glaswegian team NORD Architecture, and the Dune House on the fringe of Thorpeness,Suffolk, by Norway's Jarmund/Vigsnaes architects. All are moored by the sea, yet none is as literal in form as the shipshape Roi des Belges.

• This article was amended on 17 January 2012. The original referred to atrocities committed in the Congo Free State by King Alphonso II. This has been corrected.

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:36:17 +0000

Blackpool gets its very own Vegas-style register office, a Scottish giant goes to the great studio in the sky, and the sad demise of two close-knit London housing estates

A week of happy beginnings and sad departures. On Thursday, Simon Garrick and Kelly Goudie from the Fylde, Lancashire, were the first couple to get married at Festival House, a dazzling new gold register office on Blackpool's Golden Mile. The £2.7m building, designed by dRMM, is one glittering part of the seaside town's £250m improvement plan that has already seen the refurbishment of the 158m (518ft) Blackpool tower and the extension of Blackpool Central Library by Bisset Adams architects.

Blackpool's "Tower of Love" register office is a British take on the kitsch wedding chapels of Las Vegas. The structure is clad in gold stainless steel shingles – it's very hard to miss when the sun's out – and boasts a tall window framing pretty much the entire length of Blackpool tower. There is quite possibly some Freudian symbolism at play here.

The chapel of the once-beautiful seminary of St Peter's at Cardross near Glasgow, consecrated in 1966 and abandoned in the early 1980s, is sadly a ruin today. This week saw the death of Isi Metzstein, co-designer of St Peter's and one of Scotland's greatest modern architects. Born in Berlin in 1928, Metzstein came to Scotland not a moment too soon: just before the outbreak of the second world war. He joined Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the long-established Glaswegian firm he was to run with Andy MacMillan; together, Metzstein and MacMillan designed some of the most challenging and profound churches in Europe.

Saddam Hussein's "super mosque" is a religious ruin in a very different mould. Work began on this vast 11-acre complex close to Baghdad airport not long before the Iraqi dictator was toppled in 2003. The convoluted story of the three huge mosques Saddam was building at the time of his fall can be found online. Here is a telling chunk:

"The Umm al-Mahare ['Mother of All Battles'] mosque on the outskirts of Baghdad has four outer minarets shaped like Kalashnikov assault rifles, and four inner minarets shaped like Scud missiles. The surrounding reflecting pool is shaped like the Arab world. The mosque also featured a Qur'an written in Saddam's blood (28 litres, said to have been donated over two years) … Al-Rahman ['the most merciful'] mosque featured no fewer than 14 domes and was scheduled to be completed in 2004. The Saddam the Great mosque was a construction site with skeletal columns, and was schedule[d] to be completed in 2015."

The site of the last of these is to be the home of the new $100m Iraqi parliament building. A shortlist of designers has been drawn up. This includes architects Assemblage, with Buro Happold and Al Khan as engineers – though Assemblage's Peter Besley tells me he has no idea who else is in the running as "the ministries [in Baghdad] are notoriously hard to get this kind of information from".

Isi Metzstein's finest buildings have often been labelled "brutalist", a term coined by the critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1950s. Now, one of the most famous – or infamous – brutalist monuments, the long-threatened Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, is finally on the verge of demolition. While some might cheer, the replacement housing is not exactly a cause for celebration.

Home Sweet Home, meanwhile, is an exhibition opening tomorrow that tells the story of the 1960s-era prefabricated concrete Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke, south London. Now that its denizens have been moved out in the name of "regeneration", and 4,398 new homes are moving in, what happens to former residents' sense of community? To their hopes, fears and memories? It was home to thousands of people – even though, as the curators point out, the Ferrier estate "came to be seen as the problem it was designed to solve". The curators of this moving show are photographer Anna Batchelor and designer Sarah Colson.

This week also saw the opening in Boston of the latest design by Renzo Piano – yes, the Shard guy. This is the $118m extension to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The modest, low-lying new building provides space for temporary exhibitions, concerts and education programmes. The original building, dating from 1903, was designed by Willard T Sears in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, for the collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner. It's awash with art of all kinds, from Botticelli to John Singer Sargent. Although this is prohibited, both the old and new buildings would make glamorous wedding venues, if not quite in the inimitable style of Las Vegas ... or Blackpool.

• This article was amended on 16 January 2012. The original used the term registry office. This has been corrected.

Jonathan Glancey

Olympic companies call for end to ban on promoting work on games

The Sheet — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:20:42 +0000

Architects, engineers and technology companies speak out against protocol enforced by London 2012 organising committee

David Cameron is facing calls to end a ban on companies involved in the London Olympics from publicising their work on the games and has been warned that the gagging order is undermining job creation and economic growth.

Architects, engineers and technology companies have spoken out against a protocol, enforced by the London 2012 organising committee, which has prevented firms from entering projects for awards, publishing photos of completed arenas and even submitting work to exhibitions.

Olympic organisers said the rules were intended to protect the rights of major sponsors, but many suppliers say they clash with ministerial statements that the Olympics will provide British business with an economic boost.

On Monday, Cameron said "all credit" was due "to the people involved in providing these venues, getting them ready on time and on budget".

Ken Shuttleworth, the designer of the handball arena, said his firm has had a tussle with Locog over whether it could feature the venue in his company's own annual report, while Locog shut down attempts by a non-commercial trust to stage an exhibition about the London 2012 venues and suppliers.

Zaha Hadid, the architect of the aquatics centre and Sir Michael Hopkins, the architect of the velodrome, are among those covered by the no marketing rights protocol, but it is the dozens of smaller, less high-profile suppliers who are most concerned.

They have said they are being constrained when pitching for work on events such as the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in Brazil 2016.

"There is a contradiction between what different sides of government are saying," Roger Hawkins, whose firm's £110m redesign of Stratford station was prevented by the Olympic Delivery Authority from being entered for a Civic Trust award, said.

"We would love to promote our work on this complex technical project because we have developed skills that we would like to market into other opportunities. We are not allowed to do that, and there is a level of frustration in the design team about that."

Deborah Saunt, whose DSDHA firm designed the tallest tower in the athletes' village, said the rules "run contrary to common sense".

"We feel we have produced a new model of social housing, but we can't go out and promote it," she said. "Normally we would be publishing this globally, but here we have to wait until we are asked to talk about it. This is a missed opportunity."

STL Communications, an Oxfordshire telecoms firm that won the contract to provide hundreds of phones to be used by organisers to co-ordinate the opening and closing ceremonies, has written to Cameron demanding a rethink.

The firm told the prime minister the gag means it may have to forego 20% business growth.

"It is hard to understand how somebody providing tiles or doors is going to ambush Adidas or BMW by marketing their involvement in the games," Jim Heverin, a partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, which designed the aquatics centre, said.

Locog said a large proportion of the funding for the staging of the games comes from sponsorship by companies purchasing exclusive rights to promote their association with the games.

"Without these sponsors the games simply wouldn't happen, so we require suppliers not to advertise their involvement in order to protect our sponsors' associations with the London 2012," a spokesman said.

"Contractors are able to factually refer to the work they have done on the games when pitching for new business or refer to it on their websites alongside other examples of their work."

Peter Murray, a trustee of the Building Centre Trust, which was refused permission to stage a London 2012 exhibition, urged Locog to "ease up".

He said: "It is in the national interest that we make the best of the Olympics over the next nine months. I can see no problem in people using it from a branding point of view. As long as people do it in a responsible way, it can only enhance the economy."

Robert Booth

London’s Shard: a ‘tower of power and riches’ looking down on poverty

The Sheet — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:04:08 +0000

Renzo Piano's skyscraper, which will be Europe's tallest building, may provide a shot in the arm for London – or be merely a symbol of Qatari financial muscle

Slicing through the air above the dank and dripping Victorian tunnels by London Bridge is a new symbol of extraordinary confidence.

The glinting Shard of Glass has become the tallest building in Europe, rising higher than Canary Wharf's main tower, Frankfurt's Commerzbank and the Ostankino television tower in Moscow.

The 310-metre-high (1,017ft) building is scheduled to open in June, in what is forecast to be a continuing economic slump. But, experienced from the highest apartment on the 66th floor, thoughts of Britain's stagnation are obliterated by the mind-boggling views.

From the cavernous double-height living room more than 200 metres up in the air, the city of eight million people looks like a toy town. The London Eye becomes a fairground attraction and HMS Belfast a model boat. The twin stadiums – Olympic and Wembley – feel within touching distance. Trains inch along like millipedes into London Bridge station, while to the east the Thames curves out to the sea.

In certain weather all this is above the cloud deck. The spectacular views will next year go on sale to the highest bidder when apartments could fetch tens of millions of pounds each.

In all, there will be 27 floors of offices, three floors of fine dining restaurants, an 18-floor, five-star Shangri-La hotel with a spa, and 10 palatial apartments, each on average seven times bigger than a semi-detached home. A four-storey public viewing area is being built starting on the 68th floor which is likely to cost around £20 to access. The developer is even considering renting out the very highest room on the 78th floor for high powered conferences and political talks – summits at the summit.

"We could send Europe's top politicians up there and not let them down until they solve the euro crisis," said Irvine Sellar, the building's developer.

The architect, Renzo Piano, has mooted an alternative use as a meditation suite and is said to be keen the space should not become a playground only for the super-rich and powerful.

But how does all this, rising beside some of the poorest wards in the country, add up in Britain's listing economy? It is notable that so far no office tenants have signed up, although the developers say they are in talks with several and are being selective. The answer may lie in its ownership - the Shard owes its existence to a power play by a gas-rich kingdom more than 4,000 miles away.

From spring 2009, when construction began, Qatari wealth poured into the project. As the global economic crisis forced builders to down tools on sites across the UK, around £1.5bn – mostly from the Gulf – bankrolled the Shard.

Two of the apartments span two entire floors each and are expected to become London homes for members of the Qatari royal family. The Shard – 80% owned through the country's central bank – is now the jewel in the crown of the emirate's growing London estate, which also includes Harrods, the American embassy building in Grosvenor Square, and Chelsea Barracks.

The Qataris insist they are simply diversifying their investment holdings. But observers of Gulf politics believe there is a diplomatic purpose and regional one-upmanship at play. For example, some Kuwaitis and Emiratis are said to be jealous that Harrods, their favourite London shop, is owned by Qatar.

It was not meant to be like this. In 2000, when the Shard's silhouette was first sketched on the back of a Berlin restaurant menu by Piano, the project was wholly in the hands of Sellar, a former Carnaby Street trader, and his business partners. London's skyline was rising on a tide of easy credit and buoyant property prices. Lord Foster's gherkin-shaped tower for Swiss Re was about to be built in the City and plans for a cluster of taller towers – the "cheesegrater", the "walkie talkie", the "helterskelter" – were being drafted.

A planning inquiry followed the unveiling of Piano's design, which he charmingly said was inspired by the spires of London's old churches, and John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, gave his approval in 2003. But when it came to erecting the building, Sellar and his partners could not raise the construction finance because of the global financial crisis.

Qatari investors bought 80% of the project in January 2008, when it was valued at £2bn.

"The UK is a dear country to us," said the Qatar ambassador to London, Khalid bin Rashid bin Salim al-Hamoudi al-Mansouri. "We have been investing in this country before and after the crash. Our investment is a long-term investment. We don't need cash money now. This comes from a strategy of diversifying our economy over 10, 20, 30 years. We think the UK is the right place to put our investment. The UK is a strategic partner with our country."

The governor of Qatar's central bank, Sheikh Abdullah bin Saud al-Thani, has been more explicit about the diplomatic potential of the acquisition. He said he was confident the Shard would become "a symbol of the close ties between Qatar and the UK".

Dr Christopher Davidson, an expert in the politics of the Gulf at Durham University, said the Shard played a part in Qatar's programme of "soft diplomacy" with countries such as the UK and US that provide it with security guarantees.

"The invasion of Kuwait is still fresh in the memory of rulers in the Gulf and being invaded for your petrochemical wealth remains a nightmare," he said. "Qatar is in a tight spot between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its very survival rests on the west's guarantee. The thinking goes that if someone invades a country that has the highest skyscraper in London, then surely the UK should come to the rescue."

For Davidson, the Shard is in the same category as Abu Dhabi's purchase of Manchester City Football Club. "It is high-profile and won't necessarily turn a profit, but the benefits are non-pecuniary," he said.

Such talk about hidden agendas for the building makes Piano uncomfortable.

"This is not about money," he said. "It is about surprise and joy. This is about the way cities should go. They should stop and we should not go beyond the green belt. If you do this by going vertical that sends a message about conserving land. The building is not about arrogance and power but about increasing the intensity of city life."

He compared the project to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which he designed with Richard Rogers in the mid-1970s. It turned the model of the fine art gallery inside out, placing the building's innards – its ducts, pipes and structure – on the facade.

"Architecture is not neutral, it celebrates something," he said. "When we built the Pompidou Centre it celebrated rebellion against the idea that culture should be intimidating. The Shard will celebrate community, the sense of the city, the sense of exchange. I think the building will become loved in London because it is not arrogant. Normally towers are not loved because they shut down at 6pm and you have a black glass block. This is not about money or power. It is about surprise and joy."

While many Londoners have already taken the building to their hearts, some locals are puzzled by their new neighbour and are struggling to understand its economic rationale.

"None of it hangs together and to me it seems commercially absurd," said Russell Gray, owner of the Tanneries, a small business complex created from restored Victorian warehouses close by. "But that doesn't matter if what you are after is a latter-day pyramid celebrating the arrival of the Qataris on the world stage."

Sellar couldn't disagree more and believes the building is the kind of counter-cyclical investment the UK economy needs. "If we want to get out of this malaise then this is the sort of project that should be done," he said. "We think it is a great image. It says, 'This is London, this is the Shard and we can kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower.'"

More than 2,000 16- to 24-year-olds in Southwark not only have no work, but are also not in education or training. The council is hoping to use £4.4m obtained from the developer in the £15m planning gain agreement to transform this small army and others into "a supply of enthusiastic, job-ready, local young people and adult jobseekers".

There is hope that people could train at Southwark College as beauticians to work in the spa at the hotel, as fitness instructors for the gym, and as florists, shop assistants, security guards, secretaries and office managers, although council papers reveal that "there is no obligation on the tenants and businesses in the completed development to provide job opportunities".

So far the council can boast that "up to the end of September, the key output is 40 local people into jobs in the building".

"There has been a failure of imagination," said Nick Stanton, a Liberal Democrat and former leader of Southwark council. "There should be something in this building that the community uses on a daily basis instead of just walking around it. There should be something like a library in it … one of the frustrations I had as leader was the inability to link a big project like this to local outcomes."

Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, said it was a "tower of power and riches" in a poor borough. "It points to the paradoxical nature of property development in cities such as London. In order to bring about transformation it is necessary to accept gentrification. It is inevitable the arrival of a sharp piece of global capitalism is an odd incursion into a borough that is still authentic old Victorian London."

The appearance of the building has created what Travers calls a "new mental geography" of the capital. For example the presence of the Shard makes suddenly obvious what every London taxi driver already knew: that the quickest way from Westminster to the City is via the South Bank.

Lord Prescott, who approved the tower in the face of stern opposition from English Heritage, has watched it "growing all the time" from his flat in the Parliament View complex by Westminster bridge.

"It was a difficult decision that I was faced with about high-rise buildings along the Thames," said the former deputy PM. "I thought this one was interesting. The Shard was in a part of London on the South Bank that needed to be developed as well. From what I have seen of it, it will achieve that. I thought its design was very striking and significant and part of modern cities and on the South Bank, whereas before the thinking was that high-rise buildings would be in Canary Wharf. Were we simply going to locate them there or would there be a regeneration argument for locating them on the South Bank?"

Over the river in the City, the Corporation of London appears miffed by the Southwark upstart. It has urged the London mayor, Boris Johnson, to prevent the Shard being used as a precedent by other developers to disregard protected viewing corridors that restrict development around St Paul's, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey.

Piano is unperturbed by criticism it is too dominant on the horizon and says "the building disappears into the sky".

"This is the most important moment when you realise what the building will be like in the city," he said. "I think it is what I wanted. It is going to be sharp. It is not going to take away light. It is a building that will reflect the humour of the weather because the shards are not vertical, they are inclined. It will reflect the ever-changing process and colours of the sky."

Sellar, for his part, is sure the building will become a new icon. "People will feel proud," he said. "This is London. This is the Shard."

Robert Booth

Summits at the summit: the Shard could host talks for world leaders

The Sheet — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:48:50 +0000

Europe's tallest building could include exclusive space on 78th floor for top-level meetings, says building's developer

It would be the summit at the summit. The top floor of the Shard, Europe's tallest skyscraper, could be made available for high powered conferences and political talks, the building's developer has told the Guardian.

Irvine Sellar said he is considering making the 78th floor, which is so elevated it is sometimes above the clouds, an exclusive meeting space which would allow political leaders to hold talks with an unrivalled bird's eye view above London Bridge.

"We could send Europe's top politicians up there and not let them down until they solve the Euro crisis," he said

The highest room anywhere in Europe has space for up to 60 people and would be accessed by a dedicator elevator off the public viewing galleries.

The plan is being debated by Sellar and his architect, Renzo Piano. Already a four-storey public viewing area is being built starting on the 68th floor which is likely to cost around £20 to access.

But the developer, keen to recoup investment of around £2bn in the building, is aware of the revenue-generating potential for the even-higher space.

Piano, who said he believes the building "celebrates life and in some measure, poetry", has mooted an alternative use as a meditation suite and is said to be keen the space should not become a playground only for the super-rich and powerful.

At the Shard's upper levels, helicopters and planes coming into land at City airport fly along at eye level and on a clear day the view stretches 40 miles. Construction workers said it sometimes snows at the top while it is raining at ground level.

The idea has echoes of the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan's capital Astana. That Norman-Foster-designed building has a 200-seat chamber at the apex for meetings of the leaders of the world's religions.

The 310m-tall Shard is due to be fully built next June and looks likely to open in the depths of Britain's economic slump. So far no tenants have signed up for the 27 floors of office space, although the developers said they are in talks with several and are being selective. It is 80% owned by the Gulf emirate of Qatar and has been described by critics as "a sharp piece of global capitalism" and "a latter-day pyramid celebrating the arrival of the Qataris on the world stage". But many Londoners have taken the building to their hearts.

Piano insisted that the building was not an out-of-date monument to "arrogance and power", and pointed out it could help save the countryside from sprawl. "This is not about money," he said. "It is about surprise and joy. This is about the way cities should go. They should stop and we should not go beyond the green belt. If you do this by going vertical that sends a message about conserving land. The building is not about arrogance and power but about increasing the intensity of city life."

Works have begun on fitting out an 18-storey five-star Shangri-La hotel within the Shard and ten huge apartments at its top, which are likely to sell for tens of millions of pounds each.

Sellar, whose company owns 20% of the tower, insisted the building was not out of sync with the era of austerity.

"If we want to get out of this malaise then this is the sort of project that should be done," he said. "We think it is a great image. It says, 'This is London, this is the Shard and we can kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower.'"

Unesco will next year consider whether to downgrade or even remove the World Heritage status of the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey in part because of the Shard's looming silhouette.

This month inspectors from the United Nations world heritage committee paid a four day visit to London to consider the effectiveness of measures to protect the World Heritage status of the sites.

"We are concerned that the sites might lose their outstanding universal value by being dwarfed by inappropriate development," said Patricia Alberth, programme specialist for the Europe area at Unesco in Paris. "They could decide to remove their status or decide whether they should be placed on a list of danger which means they could be delisted."

Robert Booth

At this time of year, let’s thank God for churches | Simon Jenkins

The Sheet — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:06:57 +0000

Believer or not, Christmas is a reminder of what these places of worship do so well – maintaining and expressing community

God has blessings, even for atheists. Chief among them is the British Christmas. Cleared of its commercial and religious clutter it has become the nation's collective version of a Buddhist sabbatical, an increasingly extended retreat into family and self almost devoid of externalities. It is a time when Britons behave quite unlike they do for the rest of the year. In other words, they behave quite well.

The preliminary clutter is ever more dire. Compared with any other city in Europe, London's decoration is tatty and hideous. The archbishop of Canterbury contributes a platitudinous musing on riots and St Paul's protesters, with no hint of meaningful conclusion. The prime minister declares desperately that "the United Kingdom is a Christian country" and that "we should not be afraid to say so", as if we were. His seasonal intervention recalls HL Mencken's maxim that "people say we need religion when what they mean is we need police".

Even Christmas shopping, once deplored as an irreligious commercialisation, has morphed into a public service duty, a dig for victory. "Hopes of Christmas boost for economy," cry the headlines. Analysts examine the returns from M&S and John Lewis like priests round sacred geese. Will Christmas save us from double-dip recession? The din of collective misery is insufferable.

Suddenly all goes quiet. Britain now stretches what in the US is one day off into 10. There seems nothing else to do. The volume of public life is silenced. Family is acknowledged before colleagues and friends. Duty is paid to household gods in an annual census of filial piety. Family quarrels are supposedly suppressed, while children and old people acquire a brief moment in the spotlight. We know of the strains and stresses of Christmas, but I wonder how many families have been repaired and rescued through its ritual kindnesses. What if there were no such moment?

Throughout history, church charity boards record the gifts to be made to the poor at Christmas time. They record the communal services to be performed, the visits to be made and donations acknowledged. Christmas is more than just a much-needed rest, it is a ceremony of domestic and communal pleasantry.

The festival may have replaced Easter in pre-eminence largely thanks to the Victorians, but it is none the worse for that. Charles Dickens' demolition of Scrooge's cynicism – A Christmas Carol is a harder-edged novel than any of its dramatised versions – captured popular imagination the world over. Like the Muslim obligation to hospitality, the Christian obligation to generosity at Christmas is near universal. It is not enforced or even formalised, but it is, and deep in Britain's cultural gene.

Millions of Britons do at Christmas what they never do at other times in the year. They become "pray-for-a-day" worshippers. They see in their church a repository of good neighbourliness without which the community would be poorer. The Anglican church has a genuine talent for sustaining this communal centrality through thick and mostly thin. This role in the local "establishment" is far more plausible than the state version.

Going to church at Christmas keeps alive a sense of what the Germans call heimat, an attachment to home and place of birth, a refreshment of roots, an acknowledgement of continuity and tradition. This Christmas is deeply conservative. As Roger Scruton argues in his forthcoming book Green Philosophy, it reflects a "desire to live among things that endure" that should, in his case, be harnessed to the challenge of climate change.

I constantly find myself in churches. I find them aesthetically appealing, a constant source of pleasure (or sometimes pain). They were designed for a liturgy of contemplation and repose. They are good places to sit and think, in a landscape where such places are in short supply. As Philip Larkin wrote, they are temples where our "compulsions are recognised and robed as destinies/ And that much never can be obsolete". This may have nothing to do with religion, but it is undeniably a religious legacy and I do not mind thanking someone's god for it. The world is full of unintended consequences.

As government continues to enervate and disempower communal life in Britain, churches retain their physical and emotional centrality. In most settlements, rural and urban, churches are hopelessly oversized for their congregations. Yet the great medieval buildings remain a dominant presence in the community, the architectural expression not just of its ageless faith, but of its ceremony, its history, its family life, its arts and crafts, its tithes and taxes. They are increasingly reborn as theatre and concert halls. Where else would one want to hear The Messiah?

The parish church is thus the one building in any neighbourhood that is worth saving, together with God's acre, the churchyard. Since there will for sure arise a movement within the church to abandon such monuments – under the cry "we are a church, not a museum" – there will be a corresponding need to champion their survival. I have no trouble with the German system of taxing parishes for the upkeep of the church (with a voluntary opt-out). The Germans, like the French and Scandinavians, enjoy a civic tradition that permits them to keep their mayors and town halls. In Britain an increasingly faithless land finds itself ironically turning to faith institutions as symbols of local cohesion. Long may such places survive. At Christmas we salute them.

Simon Jenkins