Posts Tagged Zaha Hadid
London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2011
Design Council chief celebrates Prince Charles' lack of involvement as traditionalists complain about 'overt prejudice'
A new skirmish in a long-running and often bitterly fought architectural "style war" between modernists and traditionalists has broken out over the stadiums and arenas of the London Olympics park.
Prince Charles's favourite architects have accused the head of England's national architectural review body of "overt prejudice" after he made a barbed attack on the heir to the throne's love of traditional buildings, and heaped praise on the resolutely modernist designs that will be beamed around the world as the backdrop to next summer's games.
Paul Finch, chairman of the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government-funded design watchdog that vets major planning applications with the help of government funding, applauded the selection of Zaha Hadid, the avant garde Iraqi-born architect who designed the sinuous aquatics centre, and Populous, the designer of the main 80,000-seat stadium.
But, more provocatively, Finch celebrated the fact that the country's leading traditional architects, who are favoured by the Prince of Wales, were not in any way involved. "One of the good things about the London 2012 Olympics is the realisation that we have a set of buildings produced not by Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam, John Simpson, but by Hopkins, Hadid, Populous, Make, Heneghan Peng et al," he said. "None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales, none of it to do with heritage."
The Traditional Architecture Group, whose members include Terry and Adam, both leading exponents of classical buildings inspired by architects from the past, including Sir Christopher Wren and Andrea Palladio, has complained to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and communities secretary, Eric Pickles, that Finch's remarks, made in the Architects' Journal, displayed "significant prejudice against one style or architectural philosophy at the highest level". The group said its members were "dismayed and alarmed".
"His is a fundamentally prejudicial point of view from someone in a senior position," added Adam. "He shouldn't be in the position he is in."
Prince Charles has previously enraged some British architects by speaking out against modernist designs. In 2009 Richard Rogers was dropped as the designer of a £3bn housing development at Chelsea Barracks after the Prince questioned his design in a private letter to the Qatari client. In 1984 he torpedoed a modernist extension to the National Gallery in London by complaining it was "like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend".
Now the prince's architectural allies feel they have found in Finch a lightning rod for their own simmering sense of injustice that a parallel "modernist establishment" is seeking to marginalise them with the result that some traditional architects believe commissions for Olympic projects were effectively closed to them. "It was considered a waste of time to go for the Olympic work," said Adam, a classicist who has designed a new 4,000-home settlement in Wales with the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
Lord Rogers chaired the selection panel for the aquatics centre and Ricky Burdett, professor of urbanism at the London School of Economics and a close ally of Rogers, was hired as chief design adviser to the Olympic Delivery Authority. Finch continues to chair the panel scrutinising designs for stadiums and arenas for the Olympics.
The firm of Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed the Portcullis House MPs' office, was responsible for the velodrome which is favourite to win this year's Stirling prize for the best building designed or built in Britain. Make, a firm led by Ken Shuttleworth who was a lead designer on the gherkin tower in London, has designed the handball arena, while Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based firm, has designed a sinuous complex of footbridges between the main stadium and the aquatics centre.
In his remarks Finch singled out Terry, who provided architectural advice to Prince Charles in his successful attempt to block the modernist redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks, and John Simpson who was hired to carry out alterations to Kensington Palace.
The Traditional Architecture Group has asked Pickles, whose department funds the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, to instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks. "It is the policy of this and recent governments to favour no architectural style in planning decisions," wrote Alireza Sagharchi, the group's chairman. "Yet by contrasting some better-known traditional architects with those working on the Olympics, Mr Finch has expressed his very clear bias against traditional architecture." He asked for assurances that Finch's views would "not be allowed to taint the planning system", according to Building Design magazine.
In response Finch said: "I will respond to them when they show me the courtesy of writing to me and I will be only too happy to point out the many apparent errors in what passes for their analysis."
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "These are opinions expressed in a magazine article, not official advice to central or local government. As such we have no comment to make."
Finch's comments in favour of the modernist appearance of Olympic Park architecture appear to undermine the neutral stance he advocated last year when asked about a proposal by Prince Charles's Foundation for the Built Environment to take on some of the design review role now undertaken by the Design Council.
He said: "The public interest is better served by concentrating on the quality of a piece of architecture rather than style which can come down to superficial visual appearance. It comes down to whether their advice would be independent and disinterested and they obviously have a stylistic preference."
Charles's tastes: rated and hated
• Charles praised Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, for its "underlying intuitive grammar of design", saying it represented a better model for housing populations in the developing world than western architecture
• He backed Quinlan Terry's alternative designs for Chelsea Barracks which were inspired by the work of Sir Christopher Wren, the 17th century architect of St Paul's cathedral
• Poundbury in Dorset is the most complete version of Prince Charles' architectural vision, including the fire station which has been described as "the Parthenon meets Brookside"
• When talking to soldiers destined for service in Afghanistan in 2008 he said the Ivor Crewe building at Essex University "looks like a dustbin from the outside"
• Earlier that year he warned a series of planned skyscrapers in London would be "not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners"
• Charles said the brutalist concrete Birmingham Central Library, designed in 1974 by John Madin, looked like "a place where books are incinerated, not kept"
Olympics Aquatic Centre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 30, 2011
Zaha Hadid's London 2012 Aquatic Centre hasn't come cheap at £269m, but it is the Olympics' most majestic space
From the outside, it's a car crash. Or a UFO crash. Or, to use the watery metaphors that are de rigueur when talking about Zaha Hadid's £269m Aquatic Centre, it is like a vast turtle waving over-sized flippers. A great roof, whose beauty should come from the way its great weight came down to the ground at three points is engulfed with even bigger temporary structures, blown-up, go-faster versions of what might be seen at a county cattle fair, needed to house the 15,000 temporary seats for the Olympic Games. They will be taken away afterwards, leaving a 2,500 capacity, which is the most that any non-Olympic swimming event is likely to attract.
Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, a room big enough for more than 17,500 people. It is impressive because it is big, and purposeful, and will contain large crowds, but also because the architecture rises to the occasion. The architects' moves are confident and equal to the scale of the place. They don't fumble or tinker. More than that, the interior has a feeling of wholeness. It feels moulded or carved, not assembled. It looks like a body more than something constructed out of pieces.
The big thing is the roof, steel-framed and timber-clad, which floats and undulates, but is also palpably substantial. Officially, it's like a wave, but, with its combination of weight and agility, it's very like a whale. At either end a concrete bowl, containing the pools, the permanent seating and support spaces, rises to meet the roof where it descends. Along each side, in the gaps formed between the bowl and the roof, huge glass walls will be installed after the games, opening the space to the sky and the surrounding park. Now these gaps open to steep banks of temporary seats, contained within the great flippers that are so problematic on the outside. Inside, they are continuous with the rest of the space, and add to its drama.
The work focuses on the two pools, for swimming and diving, coming down to a few human bodies in water, small and fragile relative to the whole, a shift in scale that is somehow achieved smoothly. The diving platforms are moulded out of the same concrete as the rest of the lower structure, making them extensions of the architecture rather than additional pieces of concrete.
Another pool, for practice, would be part of the experience too, visible behind a wide glass wall, but International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulations have required an unfortunate temporary partition. It's something to do with keeping athletes and officials apart, which is clearly very important, but it blocks the view. Elsewhere the interplay of architectural and sporting demands is happier. The greys of the structure are offset by strong primary colours: the blue pools, the yellow and red of the lane markers, and an interesting pinkish light filtered from the outside through translucent walls in the temporary extensions.
The Aquatic Centre is the London Olympics' most majestic space: the most potent, the most charged. It is also 2012's most difficult child, the first venue to be designed, the last to be finished. It was accompanied along the way by stories of escalating budgets (nervous builders, and near abandonment of the design). Built, it has compromises, like the view-blocking partition and the flippers, about which Hadid does not even try to pretend to be happy. As originally conceived, the awkward temporary extensions would not have been there, as there was to be a roof big enough to cover both temporary and permanent, but this proved too extravagant.
The obvious comparison is with the £93m, 6,000-seat Velodrome, another wavy-roofed work completed last February, seemingly with the smooth precision of a high-performance bike. The Velodrome's roof required 300 tonnes of steel; the Aquatic Centre's – about the same size but with admittedly more difficult conditions – uses 3,000 tonnes. The Velodrome, trim and taut, is also a handsome building, and promises to be a powerful venue.
Part of the complication comes from the fact that the centre was designed before London won the bid. London was in danger of being seen as the safe-but-boring option, with dull buildings, and Hadid's design could be waved in front of the IOC as evidence of stardust. The problem was that the people who would eventually be the clients for the building, the organisations set up after London won the bid, didn't exist then, and the brief was not as developed as it would be later. When designs come first and clients second, there is often trouble.
But there may also be a mismatch between the processes of something like the Olympics and architecture as conceived by Hadid. Architecture, for her, is something that should make its presence felt, intervene, change things, perhaps get in the way. Her style seems to be about dynamism and weightless modernity, but her buildings are actually massive. They are slow, not fast. They reflect an old idea, common to Palladio and Le Corbusier, that architects sculpt and shape and compose. Hence her roof, which dips down in the middle to suggest two different spaces within in the overall enclosure, one for swimming and the other for diving.
What London 2012 wants is a great whirring delivery machine, driven by the inexorability of the project's deadline, where as many details as possible are determined in advance by specifications and regulations. They want architects to slip into the machine noiselessly, if possible with a bit of elegance, like Hopkins Architects at the Velodrome. With Hadid there is more of a grinding and crashing of gears, but she set out to achieve "a really great spatial experience", and did so.
I am sure that the Aquatic Centre could have been built more cheaply and easily, and without its crashes of permanent and temporary. It is a building that will be at its best after the games, when the flippers have been replaced by the great glass walls, although it will then face a new risk of being too grand for a public pool. The wavy roof risks being too small for the Olympics and too big for its afterlife. It can only be hoped that, whatever plans are made for its future upkeep, they are equal to the ambitions of the structure.
But, given that the whole £9bn Olympic extravaganza spends money that could have had more prudent and practical uses, it does not seem so terrible that a small fraction of its extravagance should go on a space as magnificent as this. Many hundreds of millions will be flushed away on more boring things, such as consultants' fees and security that may or may not be necessary.
Lastly, a note to the IOC. While the Centre offers 17,500 seats for watching swimming, only 10,000 will be able to watch diving events. This is in accordance with IOC specifications, which seem to assume that people find diving a bit boring. Evidently, the specification writers haven't heard of Tom Daley.
Constructive criticism: Zaha Hadid makes an Olympian splash
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 29, 2011
Zaha Hadid's newly unveiled Aquatics Centre is this week's architectural star, but charming pop-ups on the Olympic periphery also deserve a look
Much excitement this week about a double act of great British icons, Zaha Hadid and Tom Daley, and the aquatics centre designed by the former, which now seems destined to be a temple for the latter's prowess. There was a feeling at the grand unveiling that a trick had been missed in not getting the great architect to put on her Miyake bathers and give interviews to architectural hacks while doing lengths.
Architectural hacks are easily distracted, so there was considerable interest in a row of glossy black hairdryers, each resembling a model of a Hadid concert hall or cultural centre, that had been laid on for the athletes. They are particularly important for synchronised swimmers, apparently. One of the most gorgeous spaces turned out to be the underwater view of the pool seen through the windows provided for TV cameras. It looks like an art installation.
There was less excitement about another just-completed Olympic venue, the media centre designed by Allies and Morrison. It is a very big box, without any of the metaphors of waves or swooping stuff that get newspapers interested. And no Tom Daley. Complaints have been heard from Hackney that they're getting the humdrum end of the 2012 architecture, such as the media centre, while the borough of Newham gets the glamour of the aquatics centre and the now-rising Anish Kapoor tower, the Orbit.
Perhaps the flurry of charming pop-ups on the Olympic periphery in Hackney Wick, each costing a very small fraction of the aquatics centre's £268m, will make Hackney feel better: Folly for a Flyover, the cinema/cafe built under a stretch of elevated road, closes this weekend; but the Yard Theatre, installed in an old warehouse by Practice Architecture, runs until October. It would also help if, after the Games, the media centre fills up with wealth-making creative industry types, as is hoped.
Other complaints have been heard this week from the well-heeled traditionalist architects Alireza Sagharchi and Robert Adam. As Building Design report, they're upset by remarks made by Paul Finch, chairman of Design Council Cabe, the government-appointed arbiter of architectural quality. In his Architects' Journal column, Finch celebrated the fact that none of the Olympic architecture is by the likes of Adam, Quinlan Terry and other architects who like to include classical details in their work. "None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales," crowed Finch.
I happen to agree with Finch that none of the Olympic buildings would be improved by the addition of pilasters, entablatures, dentils or guttae, but he should have kept his trap shut. As Sagharchi and Adam said, his organisation is not supposed to have stylistic prejudices, and his remarks suggests that they do. Worse, they inflame the utterly sterile and boring Prince v architects, traditionalists v modernists controversy, which has done so much to lower the level of architectural debate in this country for 27 years. This month it is 20 years since the Prince-friendly Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery opened. Isn't it time to think about something else?
London 2012: Olympic flame will be lit in one year’s time, but still much to do
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 26, 2011
IOC hail progress as Tom Daley dives into Aquatics Centre pool, completed on time and budget
With 366 days to go, 2012 being a leap year, until the Olympic flame is lit in east London, organisers, the government and the International Olympic Committee are queuing up to hail progress to date.
Wednesday's events to mark the milestone, which will see the £269m Zaha Hadid designed Aquatics Centre formally handed over to organisers by the Olympic Delivery Authority and Tom Daley diving into the pool, will have an air of celebration.
"Marking one year to go, by diving in the Aquatics Centre is an incredible honour. Only a few years ago, this was a distant dream," said Daley, who finished fifth at the world championships in Shanghai on Sunday. "I can't wait for next year and the honour of representing Team GB." But although world class athletes are beginning to test the venues, there remains much to do.
Venues
The Aquatics Centre is the sixth and final permanent venue to be handed over to organisers by the ODA, which has spent £7.25bn of public money building them. Chairman John Armitt said the successful completion of the venues had helped boost the image of British contractors around the world.
"It's very satisfying to be handing it over on time and keeping within the budget. It's a great tribute to everybody that has played a part in this," he told the Guardian. "It is something that as a country and an industry we should be proud of and we should try to maximise opportunities in other parts of the world while memories are still fresh about what the industry can do."
Some venues, especially the velodrome that has already been nominated for the Stirling Prize, have garnered more plaudits than others. The clean lines and simplicity of the stadium have also been praised but there has been criticism of the ugly temporary "water wings" that have been attached to the aquatics centre to boost the capacity to 17,500 for the Games. When it was designed, the high cost was justified by the signature design, which will be obscured by the temporary stands. "When you're inside it, it's fabulous," says Armitt, diplomatically.
Despite outward appearances, the London organising committee still has a huge task. Each venue must be "fitted out", a task that includes the laying of the track in the main stadium, and several major temporary venues must be built from scratch. They include a 15,000 capacity hockey stadium, a 23,000 capacity arena for the equestrian events at Greenwich Park and a 15,000 seat bowl on Horseguard's Parade for the beach volleyball.
Tickets
London organising committee chief executive Paul Deighton has confirmed the last batch of 1.2m tickets that will go on sale from December will first be made available exclusively to those who took part in the initial ballot in April and have yet to get a ticket. Around 6m tickets have already been sold, considered unprecedented with a year to go, with only around 1.5m for football matches around the country and those final 1.2m across all sports – to be made available when the final seating configurations are decided – remaining. Next year, Locog also plans to sell "non-event tickets" which will allow entry to the park but not the venues.
Later this year, millions of free tickets for the live sites, with big screens and concerts in Hyde Park, Victoria Park and Potter's Fields will also be made available on a first come, first served basis. The mantra from Locog chairman Lord Coe and other organisers has been that while they understand the "disappointment" created by the huge demand, which saw 22m applications in the initial rush for tickets, they stand by the controversial process.
Transport
Ever since London was awarded the Games in 2005, transport has been considered a potential achilles heel. The ODA passed responsibility for operational matters to Transport for London last year, but retains an overall co-ordination role. The first stirrings of a backlash have already been felt about the so-called "Olympic lanes" that will whisk 18,000 athletes and officials around the capital during the Games.
They make up roughly a third of the 109-mile Olympic Route Network and have already sparked loud protests from London's black cab drivers. Meanwhile, much will rest on the ability of organisers to persuade businesses and individuals to modify their behaviour during the Games.
"The message must be business as unusual," said Armitt. They take some comfort from the variety of routes into Stratford, including the Jubilee Line and the new Javelin train from St Pancras, but will be desperate to avoid a millennium eve style meltdown.
On the nine busiest days of the Games there will be more than 1m Olympics-related journeys, with a report earlier this year warning of "extreme" conditions on a system already "creaking at the seams".
Security
Olympics minister Hugh Robertson said that security plans needed rethinking when the coalition came to power. Before she quit, Lady Neville-Jones led a government review that resulted in the government predicting security at Games time could be delivered for £475m, though the overall £600m envelope will be retained.
Ministers and organisers have sought to play down the significance of the resignation of Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, but he said in his own statement that a key reason for it was to allow time to get someone new in place for the Olympics. Locog will spend £282m on security within the venues, chiefly through contractor G4S, but there will also need to call on several thousand non-uniformed military personnel.
'Look and feel'
For all the operational challenges Coe's organising committee will face, in many ways the bigger challenge is building public enthusiasm for the Games to reach a crescendo around 27 July next year when the flame is lit. Coe has talked of Britain being a "slow burn" nation. He hopes the torch relay, which will begin at Land's End on 19 May and visit 74 locations in 70 days via 8,000 runners, will be the point at which cynicism is cast aside and enthusiasm ignites.
Part of the task will be to keep those without tickets engaged, through the big screens planned for cities throughout the country and cultural events that will culminate in Festival 2012. London mayor Boris Johnson has a budget to "dress" key areas of the city, including placing Olympic rings on the capital's landmarks. The BBC, which has promised to broadcast every event from every venue live, will also have a big role to play.
Legacy
Given the relatively smooth progress of organisers to date, much of the controversy has centred on the legacy claims that helped secure the Games in the first place. The Olympic Park Legacy Company has taken on responsibility for the park after the Games and must prove it can make a commercial success of it while meeting the needs of local residents.
The fate of the stadium, the object of a furious row between Spurs and West Ham, is mired in high court litigation and it will face searching scrutiny over the affordability of thousands of homes that will be left behind, partly the athletes village.
One of the biggest challenges for the OPLC will be finding a tenant for the cavernous media centre, although there are renewed hopes that a major broadcaster may take an interest.
But even more of a challenge is the "soft legacy", with figures showing that the number of people playing sport is resolutely refusing to budge and ongoing debate about whether the predicted opportunity to get more young people engaged in sport, build links between clubs and schools and raise the profile and quality of coaching, is really being seized. They were famously planting the trees in Athens the day before the opening ceremony, but the landscaping on the Olympic Park is starting to take shape.
More than 4,000 new trees are planned, with 1,500 already planted. Over 300,000 wetland plants have been planted and there are bold claims for the Park that will be left behind. Eventually, there will be up to 11,000 new homes on the site, in the heart of an area that the Olympic Park Legacy Company hopes will be resurgent. Westfield, the giant shopping mall at the entrance to the Park and on which politicians are relying for many of their legacy claims about jobs and regeneration, opens for business in September.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 22, 2011
The Balancing Barn would have livened up the rather drab Stirling shortlist. Oh well, at least there's the Carbuncle Cup to look forward to
The Olympic Velodrome, by Hopkins Architects, is a handsome building, taut and intelligent in its detail. Delivered on time and on budget, it has lightness, flair and a sense of contained drama, beneath a doubly-curving roof that some irresponsible critics have compared to a giant Pringle. It stands out from a drab-ish list of contenders for this year's Stirling prize, and is the bookmakers' favourite. There's just one problem: it has yet to perform the task for which it was designed, which is to hold Olympic cycling events before capacity crowds. So it's hard to say that it is a truly successful piece of architecture. It's a bit like a bike that's never been ridden.
The Stirling list would be less drab had it included MVRDV's Balancing Barn, a silver beam of a house projected into mid-air and built for Alain de Botton's Living Architecture holiday homes project. Then there's the Wales Institute of Sustainable Education by Pat Borer and David Lea, a work of ingenuity and rammed earth in an old slate quarry. Its inclusion would have been an opportunity to recognise architects outside the London orbit of fashion and schmoozery.
Instead, the list includes works by Zaha Hadid and David Chipperfield – both once slighted by the Stirling but now regulars – and Bennetts Associates' efficient but not very exciting Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. There is also AHMM's remodelling of an old office building in Islington. All are decent buildings, but the balance, as too often with the Stirling, is conservative and predictable.
If the velodrome is up for the prize a year too early, then a deserving winner might be O'Donnell and Tuomey's An Gaeláras cultural centre in Derry, which (though I confess it is the one work on the list I haven't seen) looks to be a robust, well-wrought and fitting sequence of spaces. Then again, the same architects might be contenders for next year's prize with their more substantial Lyric Theatre in Belfast; it might seem excessive if they won it two years running. Then again (again), they never worried about Norman Foster winning more than once, and maybe architecture, like golf, is something at which Northern Ireland is getting good.
Meanwhile, the Stirling prize's evil twin, Building Design magazine's Carbuncle Cup, is also announcing its shortlist. This award honours the country's worst building and there are some who say that it is unduly negative to pillory individual works in this way. Arguably so, but it is not half so negative to point out bad architecture as it is to put it up in the first place.
I am uninfluenced in this judgment by the fact that, with other critics, I will be an (unpaid) juror for the cup this year. I cannot possibly give an advance indication of our deliberations – mostly because I don't know what they will be – but I am struck by the poignant fact that one of this year's contenders, 3XN's new Museum of Liverpool, is a short distance from the 2009 winner, the Pier Head Terminal, and that both are in the middle of a Unesco World Heritage Site (you can read more about all this in Sunday's Observer). Equally poignant is the inclusion of Rogers Stirk Harbour's One Hyde Park, given that the practice was supported by London's former mayor on the grounds of its supposedly world-class design.
Stirling prize shortlist reflects new austerity in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
Two buildings on the Riba shortlist have been retrofitted to save money and energy, rather than built from scratch
A 1980s office block and a 1930s theatre are in the running to be named best new building of the year, as architects turn to retrofitting to save money and energy.
The Angel building in Islington, London, which BT vacated before the financial crash, has been shortlisted for the Stirling prize after a £72m refit. The 1932 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which has been overhauled at a cost of £60m, has also been nominated.
The Royal Institute of British Architects' (Riba) annual £20,000 award has never been won by a refurbished building but the presence on the shortlist of two refit projects represents the emergence of austerity architecture.
New buildings commissioned before the public spending squeeze also made the shortlist, including the sweeping velodrome for the 2012 Olympics designed by Hopkins Architects, and one of the most expensive city academy schools ever built, the £38m Evelyn Grace Academy in Lambeth by Zaha Hadid Architects.
The velodrome is the first major Olympic venue to be completed and is favourite to win with odds of 2/1 at William Hill.
The Royal Shakespeare Company originally planned to demolish its 1932 listed home in Stratford-upon-Avon, designed by Elisabeth Scott, and replace it with a futuristic building by the Dutch architect Erick van Egerat.
The plan was revised amid cost concerns and local objections. Instead the RSC hired Bennetts Associates to slot a new thrust stage into the main auditorium, redesign the public areas and erect a viewing tower.
As well as saving money and reducing emissions, the refurb "captured the spirits and ghosts of the theatre", said Rab Bennetts, the architect.
The Angel building was stripped back to its concrete frame and reclad as a speculative office block, shaving almost 15% off the cost of a new building and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about a third, the designer said.
"Refurbishment saves money and reduces the environmental impact of construction," said Simon Allford. "It also shows that we should be paying more attention when we design new buildings to ensuring they are capable of being adapted for future uses which we can't yet imagine."
This month Peter Rees, chief planner for the City of London, claimed there would be fewer new skyscrapers in the current economic climate and that applications to refurbish existing office blocks had increased. He said refurbishment projects were often cheaper, more environmentally friendly and provoked fewer objections than new buildings.
"My prognosis is there will be fewer towers and that's no bad thing," he told Building magazine. "There's a lot of late- [19]80s buildings that we shouldn't be throwing away."
Also on the Stirling shortlist is An Gaelaras, an Irish language arts and cultural centre in Derry, designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey Architects. It is the first publicly funded facility of its kind since the Anglo-Irish agreement.
The Folkwang art gallery in Essen, Germany, designed by former Stirling prize winner David Chipperfield, completes the line-up."Creative redevelopment is a strong theme in this year's list, with a major museum extension, a remodelled theatre complex and the innovative retrofit of an old office building featured, showing how even with tight planning and building constraints, talent and imagination can totally transform existing structures and sites," said Ruth Reed, president of the RIBA.
The selection of Hadid's academy highlights an ongoing row between architects and the education secretary, Michael Gove, who scrapped a major schools building programme and complained that architects were "creaming off cash" from contracts.
Architects reacted angrily to the claim, saying the high cost of the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was down to wasteful procurement rather than their fees. In February Gove renewed his attack, telling a conference on free schools: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school, we won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer."
In June the Conservatives claimed architects and landscape architects had received £98m in fees to build 113 schools under BSF, with the biggest single fee being £2.7m. The Department for Education said it wanted to see more standardisation in school design to cut costs, sparking fresh concern at Riba.
The winner of the Stirling prize will be announced on 2 October.
Stirling prize 2011 shortlist – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
From a 1980s office block to Zaha Hadid's bank-busting academy, we take a look at the six spectacular buildings competing for RIBA's annual award
Stirling prize shortlist: big names stop the judges in their tracks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
The six architects on the Stirling prize shortlist 2011 have all been there before. But could a political dark horse say 'on your bike' to the bookies' Olympic favourite?
It's never worthwhile to reduce the Stirling prize shortlist to some overriding theme, but having said that, there is one thing that unites this year's six architects: they've all been shortlisted before. Some of them several times – this is Zaha Hadid's fourth building, and David Chipperfield's seventh, which puts him in joint second place in the Stirling prize league table alongside Richard Rogers, with Norman Foster just one ahead. Does this suggest there were clear frontrunners in the Stirling race, or that a big name counts for more and smaller practices don't get a look-in?
Anyway, on with the reckless speculation. The traditional Stirling winner is a large public building, but in the current cash-strapped construction environment, there have been few of these to trumpet.
Which makes the absence of two of the main buildings on the London Olympics site conspicuous. No plaudits for the main stadium by US-based architects Populous – understandable in a way since its brief was practically to be as bog standard as possible – at which it succeeds (having a silly name for your practice doesn't help either).
And nothing for Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre – also understandable given its troubled history of redesigns, budget increases, temporary "water wings" imposed on it, and the fact that, er, it still isn't finished.
That leaves Michael Hopkins's Velodrome with the podium all to itself. As expected, it's currently the bookies' favourite and deservedly so. It's a handsome, unfussy building, quietly distinctive (enough to earn it a nickname: "the Pringle") and engineered as efficiently as a track bicycle. It's already had the thumbs-up from the Team GB cyclists, too, who described it as "the best in the world".
Looking at the other contenders, laudable though they are, they're not necessarily game-changing. AHMM's Angel Building reconfigures a 1980s office building with Louis Kahn-style barefaced concrete and a sheen of Mad Men mid-century glamour – very nice but perhaps too conventional to win. Bennetts Associates' Royal Shakespeare Theatre makes new sense of a messy accumulation of older buildings, but it's not a scene-stealer like the Tate Modern. Zaha's Evelyn Grace Academy is a consolation for the Aquatics Centre, and proof that her swooshing parametricism can work within tight budgets and design guidelines (is that Z-shape a touch of covert branding?). The fact that Zaha won the prize last year could hamper her chances, though. Likewise David Chipperfield's Museum Folkwang extension in Essen, another refined, sharp-edged German culture house for his collection.
Chipperfield already won with one of these in 2007, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, and was shortlisted for another, the Neues Museum, last year. Perhaps he should design a Museum of German Museum Designs.
That leaves a dark horse: An Gaeláras by Dublin-based O'Donnell & Tuomey in Derry, Northern Ireland. It is the first purpose-built Irish-language cultural centre in the UK, a product of the Good Friday agreement, and thus freighted with political relevance (there hasn't been much of that in Stirling world since the Scottish parliament won in 2005). But it's also a beautiful design on a hostile site. Despite being walled in on three sides, it boasts a sculptural four-storey atrium criss-crossed by stairs and galleries, smartly mixing colours and materials – the type of space that stops you in your tracks. Uplifting and finely crafted, it could well tick all the boxes.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 15, 2011
Yuri Gagarin touches down in Britain, the Gherkin paternity battle finally ends, and typhoons strike Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House
Made from an alloy used in rockets, a statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was unveiled outside the British Council in London this week. Elena Gagarina, daughter of the Russian cosmonaut, did the honours. The casting of the sculpture, a recreation of an original made in 1984, was supervised by the architect Pavel Medvedev, whose statue of Laika the space dog, the first animal to orbit Earth, was erected in Moscow three years ago. Laika died up there.
The Gagarin sculpture is not just a memorial to a brave pioneer. It is also a reminder of a fabulous idea – the notion that space-race technology, both Soviet and American, would transform buildings, everyday goods and machinery, and ways of life. However, although Gagarin's 1961 leap into the unknown did advance design, hopes for a space-age future were nothing new. Science-fiction books, comics and films predate rocket flight, after all.
The space-age look found its way into Soviet buildings of the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, much of Britain's futuristic architecture of recent years – the "high-tech " movement championed by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers – has been underpinned by a delight in the sort of space-age design that surfaced when Gagarin made world headlines 50 years ago. Foster's 2004 "Gherkin" is a very modern building that also just happens to look like an old-fashioned space rocket.
Arguments over the authorship of the Gherkin appear to have come an end this week with Ken Shuttleworth of Make architects insisting it was a team effort. In countless articles since 2003, when Shuttleworth left Foster and Partners to set up his own practice, he's been credited as the designer of the London tower. "It's the desire for a figurehead or a single name attached to an individual building that still causes problems," says a spokesperson for Foster and Partners. "Norman has always insisted that his greatest creation is the team around him, and the Gherkin was – once and for all – very definitely designed by a team." Got that everyone?
The idea of a "future memory" in architecture, so dear to Foster, is to be debated in a specially commissioned pavilion for the 2011 Singapore ArchiFest in October. Asif Khan, a young London architect whose work also includes craft, furniture and product design, has been commissioned to create the Future Memory Pavilion on behalf of the British Council, in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Preservation of Monuments Board, Singapore.
Khan's sketch reveals an elemental design made of ice and sand that will morph during the course of the festival. It captures the spirit of a fascinating line of architectural enquiry, and a contradiction inherent to futuristic design: no matter how apparently innovative they are, buildings retain powerful memories of past. Even as architects try to construct the future, it slips away and becomes the past – just as Khan's pavilion will slowly dissolve back into the Earth and a state of timelessness.
Zaha Hadid's futuristic buildings, such as the flamboyant new Guangzhou Opera House, are as informed by her love of 1920s Russian constructivism as they are with the future. Sadly, the opera house has been in the news this week because of reports that it's already heading the way of Khan's pavilion and falling to bits.
Simon Yu, project architect of the opera house, called me from China. "I've just been to inspect the building. It's typhoon season and its been pouring with rain, but rain isn't 'seeping relentlessly into the building' as has been reported. Glass panels haven't fallen from windows and no large cracks have appeared. I'm not sure what all this is about. Yes, there's still a lot of snagging to be done; we've demanded a high standard of work from what is often seasonal labour, but the flaws are superficial."
Gas holders, meanwhile, were among the most futuristic structures of the 19th century. If the Victorians had invented space rockets, they would have lifted off from structures like these. Some of the most elegant, including Hornsey No 1 in London (described by English Heritage as "probably the world's first geodesic design"), remain under threat. "This is not just any gas holder," says Heloise Brown, conservation adviser for the Victorian Society. "Hornsey No 1 will soon be the last surviving example of a highly innovative design and it must not be lost." Sadly this particular gas holder, designed by Samuel Cutler, is not listed and may be demolished soon.
Gas, in the form of air, will be used to inflate the giant bags that will hopefully save the stepped pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, near Cairo, from collapse. Cintec, the international engineering firm based in Newport, Wales, has revealed a plan to prop up the central chamber with inflated bags and anchors. Damaged by an earthquake in 1992, this 4,700-year-old structure is the world's first large-scale stone monument. Its revolutionary design was the work of the very first architect we know by name, Imhotep. Because of his visionary work, Imhotep took one giant leap way before Gagarin: he became a god.
Response: There is no modernist conspiracy in how we judge architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 4, 2011
Getting ready for London 2012 is about focusing on the buildings, not heritage politics
Robert Booth's article (London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names, 31 July) implicates the newly merged Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) charity, by association, with its chairman Paul Finch's recent article in the Architects' Journal written in a personal capacity. Surely Finch is able to express his admiration for the architecture for the 2012 games without it being seen as the official position of "England's national architectural review body"?
I am a trustee of Design Council Cabe, but I write this primarily as an architect who has presented schemes at Cabe that have been praised – and others that have been criticised. I have also chaired reviews and am confident that the process shows the necessary impartiality.
The request referred to in Booth's article that the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, should "instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks" would be extraordinarily counterproductive if implemented.
The whole intention behind the arrangements for design review is that a group of reviewers – only some of whom might be architects – use their knowledge and experience to discuss and comment on design proposals. It is the varied viewpoints that are on offer that validate the process.
There is no conspiracy-peddling modernist dogma, so readers need not be concerned with the inference that "Prince Charles's favourite architects" would never get a good Cabe review. They should know, however, that very little "traditional architecture" or classical design actually appears before us.
With the motto for the Olympic Games being "Faster, Higher, Stronger", you can forgive progressive architects getting a bit excited. What we all want is better-quality architecture, and the focus of Finch's article decries the problems brought on by a clumsy procurement process, making good architecture – of whatever style – a rarity.
It is indeed refreshing to see the London 2012 Olympics producing a set of exciting schemes built with confidence and without the need for any kind of heritage lobby intervening to force a late change in direction. How members of the Traditional Architecture Group might have approached these projects is an interesting but hypothetical question.
Not all of the venues involve "resolutely modernist designs" – let's not forget that some celebrate historic sites, such as the equestrian arena at Greenwich and beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade. Design review of these stadia actively encouraged them to integrate architectural heritage – hardly the "significant prejudice" claimed by the Traditional Architecture Group.
Design review, in my experience, is much more focused on the important issue of the spatial relationships that proposed new buildings will create with their surroundings, and raising their sustainability credentials. This has nothing to do with questions of architectural style.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Comment is free, Communities, Olympic games 2012, Prince Charles, Society, Sport, The Guardian, UK news, Zaha Hadid
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