London's main roads can accommodate growth and make our city more like itself

London's population, according to the Office for National Statistics, is projected to grow by 13% - over a million people - between 2012 and 2022.  This means there is a need for more of every type of building - offices, factories, schools and hospitals - as well as the homes that are the main subject of discussion when growth is discussed.

There is plenty of room within Greater London to accommodate this growth, and that is what the London Plan proposes to do.  But it's not easy to reconcile this pressing need with the tendency of local authority planning committees to resist it in their decision making.  It seems unlikely that if asked, committee members would support people being accommodated in sheds in the back gardens of TfL's zones 4 to 6, but that is what happens at present - out of sight, out of mind, perhaps.

London is not like New York (hellzapoppin, at least in Manhattan) or Paris (homogeneous, at least until you get out to the banlieues).  Its growth projections are twice those of New York, but it needs to find its own way to expand, not become like somewhere else.  Development areas such as Nine Elms are criticised, with some justification, as appearing to have little to do with the character of London; and even Canary Wharf, accepted by most Londoners for what it is, has little obvious connection with the rest of the city.

One way that London could grow in a more London-like way would be to concentrate incremental growth - extensions and new buildings - along main roads, both in the centre and elsewhere.

Typically, London's main roads are larger in scale, and more varied and changeable than the side streets the run off them.  They were often developed before the side streets, but have been redeveloped more frequently, so there is less that is precious, and less that is homogeneous.   Outside the centre of London, and in places in the centre too, main roads also tend to be more run down and in need of visual improvement.  Camden High Street and Hackney Road are typical examples - visually grotty environments with smart side streets only yards away.

Main roads can accommodate change, variety and increased scale more readily than side streets.  In order to accommodate growth, there should be a presumption in favour of enlarging existing buildings on main roads, or replacing them with large new buildings.  Such a policy should explicitly recognise that these large new buildings will be seen from neighbouring conservation areas and in the backdrop of listed buildings and that this is not inherently harmful.  It is already characteristic of London.   When done well, such contrasts improve the city and do not to harm it.

The upward extension of a building on Euston Road that is illustrated above is an example of what can be done.  Sensibly scaled and neatly executed, doing what is appropriate and no more, it enhances the base building below and is readily accommodated in the varied existing streetscape.  Notably, it shows that it is not compulsory for upwards extensions to be 'roof-like', mimicking mansards from the days before we had lifts, when the top floors contained the least desirable accommodation, not the most desirable as they do now.

Paris is largely homogeneous in the height of its buildings.  New York is the opposite, but its gridded urban block structure is very unlike that of London - all roads have equal, democratic, weight in the urban hierarchy.  A strategy of intensifying built form along the main roads would be in tune with the character of the London that already exists and would have the effect of making London more like itself rather than like somewhere else, such as the Dubai-on-Thames complained of by the moaners.

It could also have the effect of bringing about much needed visual improvement to some of London's most visible signs of the persistence of urban decay in some theoretically desirable parts of the capital, while massive, but not necessarily appropriate, redevelopment takes place elsewhere.

Finsbury Health Centre - not off the critical list yet

The Twentieth Century's Society's small exhibition at the Royal Academy, 100 Buildings 100 Years, (on until 1 February 2015) includes Lubetkin and Tecton's Finsbury Health Centre to represent 1938.

Listed  at Grade 1 and one of the most important modernist buildings in the UK, it has had a troubled recent history, and is on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk register.

Most of the other buildings in the exhibition are illustrated with a photograph, either historic or recent, but this one was shown with a computer-generated image credited to Avanti Architects, who have worked on the restoration of the building over the years, and whose former director John Allan, author of the definitive monograph on Lubetkin, has been instrumental in the campaign to save it.















If you go and look at the real thing you can see why they didn't use a current photograph.  Some aspects of the present state of the building would have been a depressing sight in what was generally an uplifting exhibition...

The building itself is clearly in need of love and money.  It is particularly sad to see the state of the front railings and the ugly and insensitive signage which contribute to the visitor's first impression. Money is no doubt tight, but sorting out the front wouldn't cost that much. (The planting looks better tended, but has always looked as if it belongs somewhere else entirely.)

We don't need castles as much as we used to, but they seem to get plenty of money spent on them. We do still need health centres.  This building should be kept in its present use and restored as a priority case for any national funding that may still be available to restore buildings at risk.  A trust has been formed to secure its future, and it seems there is hope of a positive outcome after years of uncertainty and neglect.

It is not hard to imagine a scheme whereby the owners would get rid of it and it would be lavishly restored to its former architectural glory, but as the HQ of a design company or whatever.  For a building whose social and historic importance matches its architectural importance, that could be a fate worse than death.  Lubetkin, I can't help thinking, would rather have seen it crumble to dust.

As with many early welfare state projects, the story of Finsbury Health Centre can be read as one of faith in the future.  There are plenty of people - professionals and lay people - who care deeply about this building, so one should be optimistic about its chances.  When it was shiny and new it was a beacon of hope serving a inner city working class population many of whom who lived in slums and suffered from poverty and poor health.  Today it sits looking tatty, at the heart of a now wealthy area with possibly more design professionals per square metre than anywhere else in the planet.  If this building can't be sorted out, what hope for buildings at risk in more benighted places?

Ciao Biennale di Venezia 2014

The Biennale - Venice's international architecture festival, which takes place every two years - ends this weekend after five months in situ.

As trips to the Mediterranean coast go, for London architects, MIPIM (where architecture is a sideshow to the world of commercial property) might get you more work - but the Biennale offers a lot more inspiration and food for thought.  Quite apart from the relative merits of Venice and Cannes as places to visit.

This year's Biennale - the best I have been to - was directed by Rem Koolhaas under the rubric 'Fundamentals'.  The Central Pavilion in the Giardini was divided up according to the 'Elements of Architecture' - subject headings related to elements or components of which buildings are made - stairs, facades, roofs and so on.

Unfairly satirised as 'a bit like being at B&Q', what each of the different sections offered - admittedly in a slightly random way, since each was curated by a different group - was constant stimulation and provocation.  What they had in common was an understanding that the present can learn from the past, and that architecture, though to succeed it needs to be more than the sum of its parts, will not emerge without an understanding of the parts, considered individually at the practical level of craft and science as well as at the level of culture and history.  Some examples of what stuck in the mind:

In a hidebound culture, deciding how to deal with new needs that have no obvious precedent is a challenge.  The architectural fantasist Piranesi (1720-1778) was excited in his day by the design of fireplaces - a 3D print of one of his designs, above, shows also his drawing of the fire in the grate - precisely because there were no classical precedents and therefore invention rather than conformity to a pattern was called for.   He might have sympathised with the problems that environmentally sound projects today may have in gaining acceptance if they don't fit with the established (energy-profligate) look of a place.

In the section on stairs - where one learnt of Prof Mielke who, if in fact he has not been made up by Rem Koolhaas, was founder of the Institute of Scalology in Regensburg, has written 31 books on stairs and, if one is allowed to say this, could not possibly be anything other than German.  Typical of the exhibitions thought provoking approach was a section that considered the slope of stairs - a technical /geometrical / ergonomic consideration that all architects have had to deal with on a daily basis - in relation to the social status of those who would be using stairs, through the course of history.  As with a lot of research of this kind, you can guess the results, but it's still worth doing the exercise.

The entirely separate 'Monditalia' section in the Arsenale was terrific as well - one of many highlights was the story of the 60s new town of Zingonia, brainchild of Renzo Zingone - with superb contemporary accounts of its conception and partial realisation.  On reflection, it also looked suspiciously as if it the whole story could be completely made up - but then most of the 60s does now.

Venice will be even better next time if the Comune di Venezia ( the city council) brings in its proposed ban on luggage on wheels.  That is a relatively easy one, though - will they be brave enough to tackle the blight of the giant cruise ships as well?

Thiepval and Vimy Ridge

Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in France is one of the great works of interwar British architecture, and along with other sites such as the Menin Gate at Ypres (by the less highly regarded Blomfield, but here as good as Lutyens) and Herbert Baker’s Tyne Cot cemetery, makes a tour of the Great War battlefields of France and Belgium a worthwhile architectural pilgrimage, whatever other reasons one might have to visit. 

The architect Adolf Loos claimed that 'Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.'  Loos was an interesting architect and writer but I suspect Lutyens, a man of fewer public words, was smarter.  At first glance one might think of Thiepval, a sort of fractal version of a triumphal arch, as an example of what Loos meant.  But when one sees the extent of the panels with the names of the 72,000 missing dead recorded, one can see it quite another way, the multiple piers at the lowest level of the memorial maximising the wall surface to provide the necessary surface area – a practical response to a brief, raised to a higher plane.  In architecture, that is the domain of art.

The Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, designed by Walter Seymour Allward, is mentioned less often (and harder to convey in an amateur photograph) but it is more prominent and better sited, and arguably as great a work of memorial design.  This memorial and Lutyens’ at Thiepval share one of the qualities often found in the greatest works of art: strangeness.   Neither is really quite like anything else.

It is harder – it seems – to do memorials well today.  Commissions exist, but most designers lack the skill or the will, and the mood of the times may be different.   Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam memorial at Washington DC shares the power of the best of the First World War memorials but done with a modernist, more abstract sensibility, and is also popular; but it seems to be harder to reach these heights as the years go by, as evidenced, for example, by London's ludicrous ‘Animals in War’ memorial in Park Lane (inscribed, mawkishly, ‘they had no choice’ – true, but what about the human conscripts?).

In an age when the ephemeral and the pop-up seem to reflect uncertain times, it is good to be reminded by the memorials of Lutyens and his generation of the virtues of solidity and permanence in design – and artistic quality.  If a monument has that quality – as we can see from all chapters of architectural histories, starting at the beginning - then it will last beyond the time when its purpose and those it commemorates have been forgotten – ars longa vita brevis. 

London's skyline debate - lessons from New York

A trip to New York last month to meet fellow professionals was a fascinating chance to find out about attitudes to tall buildings in their spiritual home. 

What was surprising, perhaps, was the extent to which most of the questions raised by tall buildings in London are also debated in similar terms over there (as are other questions such as how to provide 'affordable' housing for the less well off; and how to provide affordable housing, not in quotation marks, for middle income groups).

NY's Muncipal Arts Society's Accidental Skyline report concerns the effects of a wave of very slender, very tall new towers under construction and planned, mostly near Central Park, which will change the views from the park dramatically, and, the report suggests, overshadow it unacceptably.  Generally these new towers are as built 'as of right', the planning parameters - including the transfer of developable area from one site to another to allow ever taller and thinner towers - being established by the zoning system.  There are opponents of tall buildings over there as there are over here - but there is no way to prevent the schemes being built.  There as here, the fact that the accommodation is for the super-rich seems to exacerbate the opposition.  One example, 432 Park Avenue, designed by Rafael Vinoly of Walkie-Talkie fame, is under construction and appears to have reached its full height (that is the whole tower in the photo below, not just the lift and stair core) - and there was plenty of unfavourable comment from New Yorkers that we met. To build a tower in one world city that no one seems to like, though, may be regarded as unfortunate - to be responsible for two...

I didn't entirely buy the objections - it's no more out of scale with its surroundings than the Empire State building, and there are far worse architects than Vinoly - but the objectors may have a point about the cumulative effect of the many towers that are planned.  

The quality of new architecture over there varies from terrific to dire, just like in London. And just as in London, one can't help feeling that at least part of the opposition to new tall buildings is because many of them are not much good - although New York, perhaps because of the discipline of the grid, has not suffered quite as much as we have from the Architecture of Funny Shapes.  And unlike us, they have world class and world famous exemplars that they are proud of, from the Woolworth Building to the Seagram Building, to compare the new ones with.  

One of those, the Rockefeller Centre, may just fail to make the cut of world class architecture, but it represents world class urban design, and that - together with the fact that you can now admire the city from its top level - is undoubtedly one reason why it remains popular.  Recent attempts to do 'towers as placemaking', such as the planned Hudson Yards development, struggle to add up to more than the sum of their parts, and fail to come anywhere near the coherence and quality of the Rockefeller Centre.  

It was a surprise to me to learn that there is at least one protected view in New York. Their approach is different from ours, though, and arguably more sensible.   The  Brooklyn Heights Promenade, laid out in the 1940s for pedestrians at an elevated level above the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which runs along the shoreline, has views out across the water towards Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.  The protected view - put in place when the promenade was built - controls development of the land immediately in front it at the lower level next to the water - now being laid out as the Brooklyn Bridge Park.  The protected view doesn't affect the way Manhattan on the other side of the water can develop, but it ensures you will still be able to see it from a place that was designed to take advantage of a view.  Protecting foreground rather than background was the original idea of protected views in London too, but as so often with UK planning, there has been mission creep.  

No garden cities please, we're British (and scared of UKIP)

Here is a piece that I wrote for last week's AJ ....

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The promoters of the 2014 Wolfson prize, for new ideas about garden cities – and the winners Urbed – deserve praise.   But it has been criticism of the winning entry from the Government’s housing and planning minister, Brandon Lewis, that has attracted most attention. 

The episode is symptomatic of just how hard it is promote large scale development in the UK that is underpinned by anything that looks like an idea or a proposition.

At the scale of individual buildings, it can be harder to gain planning approval for something interesting than for something mediocre.  Keep below the radar, don’t frighten the horses and you will stand a chance.  Come up with a bold idea and you are likely to be in trouble.  Sadly, the same applies to solving the country’s housing crisis.  Most of the new housing built by the volume house builders is dire, but as it’s the same all over the country, it’s hard to find a convincing reason to resist any particular example, and schemes are waved through with little discussion about their quality.

The ‘no ideas please, we’re British’ problem is not specific to garden cities – a similar reaction is likely to greet anyone who promotes a coherent, organised way of expanding a settlement - as opposed to just throwing up more boxes in whatever fields have been made available.  

Yet just as we will only have enough energy to meet our needs in future if we use a bit of everything available to us, so we would improve the chances of building new homes in the numbers needed, and providing a variety of solutions to what is not a uniform demand, if we welcomed specific, well-considered proposals – premiated by a well-informed judging panel – rather than indulging in grandstanding criticisms.

‘Choice’ is something the present administration promotes in health and education – but judging from the minister’s reaction to the Urbed scheme, not in how new housing is brought forward – although his government’s NPPF specifically calls for a ‘wide choice’ in housing provision, and says that large settlements including garden cities may be part of the answer. 

The Tories’ line is that the days of the top-down, ‘imposed’ solution are over – with the likes of Urbed cast as the heirs of the amateur Ebenezer Howard or the statist technocrats of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation. 

Holding on to the rhetoric of localism, the minister wants to see instead the bottom-up, locally generated plans that were meant to emerge from neighbourhood planning.  Schemes promoted by local people do exist, but they are rare, and typically involve small numbers of homes – of little use in meeting the nationwide need.  The bulk of what actually gets built has nothing at all to do with localism.  What Urbed offer, characterised by Lewis as sprawl, is in fact specifically conceived as an alternative to the sprawl that is happening everywhere now.

The timeframes of big projects are a problem for politicians.  Lewis has a small majority in one of UKIP’s top target seats, and there’s a general election next spring.  Objections to any big proposals typically arrive before there is even a scheme to object to, and the benefits of big ideas such as Urbed’s wouldn’t materialise for a decade at least.

Meanwhile the planning system churns out dreary documents that no one reads in the name of ‘managing development’.  There is no appetite, and few mechanisms, for the public sector to put forward big, positive, sophisticated propositions such as Rudlin’s.  The private sector, also plagued by short-termism, has learnt that doing the same thing as last time is best for this year’s balance sheet.

A constant stream of UK practitioners undertake study tours to admire exemplar developments such as Hammarby Sjöstad in Sweden or Vauban in Germany, and return depressed at our inability to match what is done in such places – not because of lack of talent, but because of stultifying institutional and administrative arrangements.

The brief for the Wolfson prize was “How would you deliver a new Garden City which is visionary, economically viable, and popular?”.   The first part of my answer would be: go abroad.

At Dunkerque: Lacaton and Vassall's FRAC and the 'quartier excentric'

Dunkerque - half an hour from Calais, and though a historic port, almost entirely rebuilt after (Allied) bombing in the Second World War - had more going for it than I expected.

Just east of the docks (and just west of the sandy beaches from which over 300,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated in 1940) is Lacaton and Vassall's recently completed FRAC gallery.  The south part, a redundant dockyard building on a heroic scale, is a giant shed, made sound but at present left largely empty, enclosing a single interior volume; to the north, its new conjoined twin, to the same profile and dimensions, clad in corrugated polycarbonate, houses a regional contemporary art gallery.  In the foreground in the photo above, under construction, a new pedestrian bridge will connect to the shore on the other side of a canal.

Lacaton and Vassall's building is excellent - spatially rich, with great views out to sea and along the coast from the upper levels, and clever in its deployment of cheap materials and simple details to make something strange and memorable. 

Not far away was some new  housing in a docklands regeneration area that, at least as seen from the outside on a brief visit, put most of our equivalents to shame...

A bit eccentric, perhaps - but not as much as the 'quartier excentric', an area of 1920s housing in Dunkerque's southern suburbs, the brainchild of local 'maçon, artiste décorateur, inventeur', François Reynaert, a peculiar collection of terraced houses each 'pimped' in an individual manner, many vaguely moderne or art deco, with varying degrees of skill and success; adding up to a sort of amateur league Weissenhofsiedlung. Parts of the area are now gently decaying, but with enough evidence of gentrification for it to seem that the houses, which I think are listed, have a viable future; and indeed some empty corner plots have been filled recently with fancy modern villas. 

The catering offer at FRAC is rudimentary - the icing on the cake in Dunkerque came in the form of a great menu-express lunch at the jolly and friendly La Cambuse bar-restaurant, in an unprepossessing and hard to find spot behind the Port Museum.

Dunkerque, close to Calais, is well worth a detour if you have any spare time on a trip via the Channel Tunnel.