London should learn from PlaNYC

To Lend Lease's London HQ to hear a talk by Adam Freed, Deputy Director of Sustainability in the New York City Mayor's office.

Their city plan, 'PlaNYC' (nice plan, shame about the name) has a lot that London could learn from, in respect of what is planned and how they propose to achieve it:  sustainability-led, progressive, interventionist series of programmes and initiatives concerning development, transport, infrastructure and energy, driven by an ambitious City administration with powers and budgets that London's Mayor can only dream of.

One of the most surprising aspects was the extent to which this felt like 'big Government' - delivered by a Republican Mayor in a country where if you suggest that poor people should be provided with state health care, you are branded a Communist.    Impressively, the programmes seemed designed to benefit disadvantaged outer parts of the city at least as much as Manhattan, where the high profile successes such as the High Line and Times Square are located.

The tone was one of can-do pragmatism rather than ideology or political manouevring.  It was the American architect Daniel Burnham who said 'make no little plans', but while in the UK masterplans and strategies are expected to have an 'overarching vision', in NY there seemed to be a distinct lack of windy rhetoric and a strong desire to actually get on with things.  Our London Plan programme is all about telling other parties what they can or should or can't or shouldn't do - the NY equivalent seems to be more about doing things.  If a developer there builds affordable housing - yes, they have that too - he can put more flats on his site.  A bit like what happens in London in practice in some cases, but our plan doesn't actually say that anywhere.  Americans are be better at cutting to the chase - codifying things to allow progress without endless negotiations.

London's administrative and political structure is dysfunctional, and our Mayor is right to seek more control over infrastructure and other things.  Mayor Bloomberg puts some of his vast personal resources into particular  public programmes - a modern version of the bread and circuses of the Roman Emperors, perhaps. Our Mayor was born in New York City, and appears to know a lot about the Roman Empire - if this summer's circus works out well, expect a stronger push for more control.

Becoming

These new houses under construction in South Kensington looked interesting out of the corner of the eye - something novel, striking, a bit edgy for SW7 perhaps? 

But on getting things into focus, it became clear that the cladding isn't on yet.  In this neck of the woods we can expect something bland and tasteful to cover up the interesting looking and pleasingly arranged array of fixing brackets that can be seen today. 

Buildings often look more interesting under construction than when they are finished.  Berthold Lubetkin complained that Owen Williams' (and Sir Robert 'Concrete Bob' McAlpine's) beautiful in situ concrete frame for the Dorchester Hotel was ruined once William Curtis Green's dreary cladding went on.  And the probably apocryphal story of the exchange between Colonel Seifert and Richard Rogers ('When are they getting the scaffolding off that Lloyds building of yours?' 'When are they going to finish off the top of your Nat West Tower?') concerns two very different buildings that (maybe) have in common a deliberate aesthetic of 'work in progress'.  

The sales strapline on the hoarding here is 'there is a story behind these walls'.  God knows what they mean by that, but probably not the brackets.

City glazing fashions - get the look

The glazing at 125 Old Broad Street in the City of London - the former Stock Exchange building - is undergoing a makeover.   This is presumably something to do with the problems that have been reported about glass falling out (a less abstract threat than a falling FTSE).  

The present look, at first glance, bears quite a close resemblance to one of those fashionable facade treatments with diagonal lines that echo (allegedly) the stress patterns in the glazing, such as OMA's CCTV building - or more purely decorative versions of the same sort of thing by FOA and others.   But on closer examination, the pattern here appears in fact to be no more than protective tape to glass awaiting replacement.  Quite neatly done, though - and if you think about it, the visual resemblance to the stress diagram is probably not accidental. 

Chipperfield on housing

Good to read of David Chipperfield speaking out about affordable housing in the AJ - and the general difficulty of getting decent housing built at all in this country.

Chipperfield complains correctly about greenfield sprawl, but much brownfield housing, which he says is preferable, is poor as well - usually for rather different reasons.  Another high-profile architect whose views are generally worth listening to, Rem Koolhaas, once observed that there are two kinds of airport: too large and too small.  Housing in this country is going that way too: we build pixie f**k-hutches in the middle of nowhere, and we build monster condos, but the middle way - good, ordinary, medium to high density housing comparable with what already exists across most of central London - while not unknown, seems a lot harder to achieve. 

And what is even harder, and really matters even more - when most sites allocated for housing are not very suitable for housing, but are the only ones where there are no nimbies will moan about it - is joining up the new bits to the old bits.  If it's not near anyone's back yard, it will probably be hard to get to and get from - since we don't plan for infrastructure any better than we plan for housing. 

Building affordable housing, as Chipperfield suggests, 'not as an adjunct to unaffordable housing, but as an aim in itself', sounds like something we should all agitate for. 

The Shard - the architect was right

Renzo Piano has spoken of his design for the Shard as reflecting the sky, disappearing into the background, and at the top, tapering away to nothingness.

Sceptics pointed out that the glass buildings on London's skyline generally look black - it is the stone ones that look white - and that talk of the visual 'lightness' of glass cladding often turns out to be nonsense when the thing is built.

But now we can see for ourselves and Piano was right - at least in respect of some weather conditions and some hours of the day (this picture was taken yesterday evening, from Centrepoint).

A lot of discussion about how realistic or reliable computer-generated images are misses the simple point that buildings, particularly glassy buildings, vary very greatly in their appearance at different times of day and different times of year.  The honest answer to the criticism that 'it won't look like that really' is 'sometimes it will, sometimes it won't'.

Piano always acknowledged this, saying that the Shard would change with the weather and that that would be part of its appeal.

Pop up stairs at the South Bank

At the back of the South Bank Centre this rather handsome flight of stairs provides a new way up to the terraces around the Hayward Gallery.  Pop-ups, temporary installations, meanwhile uses etc etc seem to be all the rage and this stair, supported on standard metal containers, feeds off that zeitgeisty, recession-friendly aesthetic, though I've no idea if it's planned to be temporary or not. 

Sadly, there is a history of rather unsatisfactory temporary solutions lasting several decades at the boondoggle that is the SBC's estate - this one is far superior to many of the the various lash-ups that have come and gone, often outstaying their welcome, over the years.

A previous post discussed the variable quality standards applied when structures are envisaged as temporary - and we can expect plenty of that this summer, with Trafalgar Square already filling up with unsightly tat, and a giant upside-down purple plastic cow occupying the car park on the other side of the rail tracks from the Hayward (which may cause some puzzlement to visitors when the lavish new Jubilee Gardens open shortly).

What the SBC stair suggests, as have some other recent pop up projects, is that a willingness to treat a modest intervention as a proper commission, and the application of a lively design intelligence, can enhance the city and lift the spirits without the need for big budgets, or the intention to build for posterity - and that there's no need for the ephemeral to be tatty and thoughtless.

Moscow Modern / Москва современная

To Moscow to see masterpieces of post-revolution Constructivist architecture - much of which is neglected and in poor condition - as part of a group shown round by the estimable Clementine Cecil, former Moscow correspondent of The Times and instigator of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS).

In a packed couple of days, our visit (inspired by the recent Royal Academy exhibition) took in, among other things, Konstantin Melnikov's Workers' Club, with those canted auditorium elements copied by many architects over the years; Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin housing block; and Melnikov's own house.  The Melnikov buildings were not in brilliant nick but it didn't look too hard to bring them up to scratch given the will and the money (MAPS has the former, but not much use without the latter); whereas the Narkomfin building is in a bad state, and its future looks uncertain, in spite of the efforts of the grandson of its architect (who met us on site) to rescue it.

Most of the important buildings are recognised with very smart cast bronze plaques, but apart from that not well looked after.  In the case of Melnikov's house, which is still occupied by his granddaughter (whom we also met), there is a dispute about its future that appears still to be continuing along the lines reported by Rowan Moore last year.







An unexpected highlight of the trip was a visit to the All Russia Exhibition Centre, now mainly a very popular park, but populated by a weird collection of Socialist Realist inspired pavilions and monuments, mainly from the 1950s, including this one dedicated to agricultural productivity, its sparkliness a rather poignant contrast to the decay of the (mostly badly built) Constructivist buildings of the 20s and 30s.  




Early Modern, one suspects, is a minority interest there as here.  In London, the Grade 1 listed 1930s Finsbury Health Centre - designed by the Moscow-trained, Constructivist-inpired Lubetkin, and as idealistic in its social programme as its Russian cousins - languishes in just as unloved a state.