At the Crystal

Wilkinson Eyre's Crystal sustainability centre in the Royal Docks is worth a visit (or actually I would say ** vaut le détour rather than *** vaut le voyage) - especially while you can still get there by the Emirates Air Line cable car over the Thames, also well worth doing in its own right, and worth doing soon before they take it down and relocate it to an Alp - since user numbers are plummeting, and it seems to be used only by tourists.

This example of the Architecture of Funny Shapes does however share a difficulty that occurs in many more straight-down-the-line modernist projects - that of making it clear where the front door is.  The newsagent-style sandwich board seen in the photo above, not I think designed by Wilkinson Eyre or included in the original specifications, reads 'Welcome' - a polite way of saying 'Entrance this way'.

You don't have this kind of difficulty spotting the front door at the National Gallery.  On the other hand, if you're pushing a baby buggy, you can't get to the front door of the National Gallery (yes I know there are other ways in, but I like the one in the middle) - whereas at the Crystal there is no problem once you have found it.

So maybe not everything is going to the dogs.

Why buy a well planned home when you can have one that looks normal?

The quality of architecture is usually all of a piece - the awful-looking bog standard homes available everywhere are usually badly planned as well.

A review by Rowan Moore in yesterday's Observer featured new houses at Harlow by Alison Brooks, which looked interesting and sounded as if they had had more thought put into them than most.  Referring to planning minister Nick Boles' stated wish to improve on the 'pig ugly' housing that homebuyers are normally offered, the review points out that well-designed housing like this is mainly about providing practical, liveable homes, and that architects as much as anyone else prefer to avoid discussions of difficult words like 'beauty' - 'some will find these houses beautiful, some not... but looks are not the main point.'

The point, surely, is that while the offerings of many volume housebuilders are indeed pig ugly, good projects such as this one at Harlow, by skilled, prizewinning architects, tend to look interesting rather than beautiful - and they are also quite likely, as these do, to look enigmatically 'different' (or 'Other') -  in a way that the housebuilders' commercial directors are likely to feel will actually put off some of their buyers, depending on the likely demographic.  They know the pig ugly stuff sells (only, in fact, because supply is rationed, but that's another story).

It takes a skillful architect to design a decent house layout within the minimal floor areas offered in this country - and a persuasive one to get the housebuilder to dump the default layouts 'based on something someone designed in 1958' that Alison Brooks rightly bemoans.  But on the whole, an architect worth their salt won't be content with sorting out the practical stuff without also leaving their personal mark on the looks of the thing - it is a complete package that is on offer.  Here at Harlow, the result is definitely a something rather than a nothing - but not one that every Essex buyer would be comfortable with.

Francis Bacon (the seventeenth century one) wrote 'Houses are built to Live in, and not to Looke on; Therefore let Use bee preferred before Uniformitie, Except where both may be had.  Leave the Goodly Fabrickes of Houses for Beautie only to the Enchanted Pallaces of the Poets, Who build them with small Cost.'   This Elizabethan politician's view persists virtually unchanged, four centuries on - albeit expressed today sourly, rather than wittily - in the views held by most politicians (e.g. Mr Gove), civil servants and housebuilders in our new Elizabethan age.

Nick Boles is out on a limb.  His call to arms is made even less likely than one might hope to be effective because today's architects, unlike Bacon's contemporaries, do not for the most part think that beauty is really the aim of architectural design.  The minister might be better advised to complain about the fact that many new homes are badly planned, and take little account of how family life has changed since 1958 (as well as being pig ugly).

Good housing design is the whole package - not Beautie only.  The houses that have been thoughtfully planned - in respect of everyday things like proper provision for multiple recycling bins for example - nearly always look better too.

Is this what you want? - a blunt instrument from the nimby toolkit

This flyer seen on a recent trip Brussels appears to be a protest about some planned new buildings.  Presumably the buildings won’t actually be bright red, though.  

The ‘protest montage’ is a now familiar ploy of those who oppose projects. Every effort is made to make schemes look as daft and offensive as possible (equal and opposite, of course, to the efforts of the promoters, which can be equally misleading).  The technique was used in London by opponents of the alleged ‘steel and glass tower blocks’ that Richard Rogers planned for the Chelsea Barracks site (for which read: ten storey buildings much the same height as nearby 1930s mansion blocks, with big windows made of that futuristic material ‘glass’ because even rich people deserve daylight). 

I don’t know who started all this, but the architect planner Thomas Sharp was certainly at it in his 1968 book Town and Townscape.  

These intriguing images of an abandoned scheme for university buildings in the centre of Cambridge, images which Sharp prepared and described as not showing ‘any actually proposed architectural treatment’, can be compared with the real designs of Lasdun (whom Sharp, oddly, cannot bring himself to name in his book).  A provocative photomontage provided by Lasdun himself can be found in William Curtis’s monograph.  While the his scheme for the New Museums site (where the buildings by Arup Associates are today) is pretty shocking to today’s sensibilities, they look absolutely nothing like the banal blocks in Sharp’s drawing, being highly articulated into vertical components, like a compressed and over-energetic version of Kahn’s Philadelphia laboratories, to achieve a rich skyline which clearly echoes the older buildings in the foreground – an approach more explicitly responsive to context than many similar projects of that period – including some of Lasdun’s that were built.

Protests of this kind call to mind the catchphrase of one of Harry Enfield’s Middle England moaners: ‘Is that what you want? – because that’s what you’re going to get…’  Usually, what the nimby flier show you is not what you’re going to get. The detail matters – and the difference between a dumb box and a complex, articulated building proposal is a lot more than a matter of detail. 

The future of cities

To the Gallery at Cowcross Street for an evening of thought-provoking talks, organised by Farrar Huxley Associates, on ‘The future of cities’. 

They brought home just how useless we are at ‘planning’ (in the sense found in the dictionary, rather than the rather different sense we all use when we are down at the council planning department).

Ken Webster of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, Kayla Friedman, and ‘rational optimist’ Kelvin Campbell of the Smart Urbanism Alliance presented a series of challenges at difference scales of time and space that all posed questions of ‘top down vs. bottom up’ in planning for the future of the city.

Two contrasting big topics that stuck in the memory after the event were:

·         Global energy supplies will run out and no one is getting to grips with it (the scary scenarios are presented in David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air).  The Ellen MacArthur Foundation promotes the Circular Economy as one way out.

·         Big urban design /masterplanning is dead and incremental, bottom up intervention is the answer for the age of austerity.  

While I might just buy buy Kelvin Campbell’s examples of self-organising squatter settlements as good bottom-up models (though Prince Charles’ support for them makes me suspicious), I don’t buy the extension of this line of thought closer to home to suggest that the unplanned, unregulated ‘beds in sheds’ bottom-of-garden homes that have sprung up in tens of thousands in outer London locations far from the chattering classes such as Barking and Southall, might be just as admirable a model.

Planning in its origins was meant to address basic needs and problems – public health, sanitation, decent homes, not living next to a glue factory or a car breakers etc.  Once those basic problems were more or less sorted, we got mission creep, and ended up with a system that opines on what your windows will look like.  Similarly, since no one knocks down nice old buildings any more, conservationists move on to stopping people building new things near nice old buildings.

The effort put in to ‘planning’ (starting with the Government, who are the really important planning authority) is inversely proportional to how much things actually matter. Very little effort into securing future energy supplies so that our grandchildren do not end up like extras in ‘The Road’; middling effort into checking whether people are being housed in homes fit to live in; and lots of effort into stopping developers building (at a time of housing shortage) new homes that are a few metres higher than the neighbours would like to see.

I did, however, very much buy Kelvin Campbell’s maxim ‘incentivise the fine grain’ – that really would be a useful task for the planners. 

New towers of London: Cheesegrater, Walkie Talkie and the rest

The view towards the City of London from Waterloo Bridge is one of the best in London, which is one reason why it appears in the header to this blog*.

The more recent photo above shows the present state of the City's skyline, with cranes as prominent as buildings, most notably on the sites of two of the City's new towers: Rogers Stirk Harbour's 'Cheesegrater' (next to Foster's Gherkin) and Viñoly's 'Walkie Talkie' (on the right), the frame of which now begins to show us the shape of building we will be getting (in case we hadn't quite believed it).

If you've spent your adult life involved in putting up buildings, the sight of this forest of cranes should be enough set the pulse racing irrespective of what you think about the buildings.  Colonel W A Starrett, author of 'Skyscrapers and the Men who Build Them' (1928), wrote that 'Building skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war' - if you have witnessed the level of activity at the foot of one of these sites, or at that of the nearby Shard until recently, you can see what he meant.

But the tall buildings that the cranes are putting up are even more effective at eliciting a reaction.

Fluctuating vital sign measurements are not always a good thing - a recent rant in print from Simon Jenkins about the ruination of London's skyline, along much the same lines as we have heard from him rather too often before, being a case in point.

On the other hand, you can find websites dedicated to the slightly anorakish musings of skyscrapers enthusiasts, the antimatter opposite of Simon Jenkins, who enthuse about heights above Ordnance Datum, cladding systems and all sorts.

Ruskin wrote (in the 1850s)  'Have not these words, Pinnacle, Turret, Belfry, Spire, Tower, a pleasant sound in all your ears? ….can you really suppose that what has so much power over you in words has no power over you in reality?'  It seems unlikely that he would have approved of skyscrapers, but we can trace a path from this statement of the emotive power of verticality through Louis Sullivan's exhortation (in the 1890s) that a tall office building should be 'every inch a proud and soaring thing', to the clear intention of many of today's skyscraper architects to amaze us rather than follow the more sober route of Mies van der Rohe's towers.

It is permissible, though, to take a more sober view.  London needs to grow within its borders.  Paul Finch pointed out in last week's Property Week that there is no shortage of land in Greater London to allow it to do so without needing to expand into the green belt - there are oven-ready sites, which have been sitting there for a decade or two, for tens of thousands of new homes in the Royal Docks and Greenwich Peninsula.  Closer to the centre, however, it is a very different story - there is the strongest demand to build, and the least room to build, partly because nearly everything is now a 'heritage asset'.  I don't like the look of the Walkie Talkie at all - but even if, as I suspect, I am not alone, that's not much of a reason not to build it, when compared with the arguments in favour of doing so.  The only way is up - a case that was made convincingly at this summer's excellent exhibition 'The Developing City'.  Otherwise London will end up like the Paris that the tall-poppy-loppers would like it be - but not in a good way.


*(it did when I wrote this post - it was updated in 2015)

Autumn in leafy Mayfair

This new building just off Curzon Street in Mayfair caught my eye...an elevation composed of brass leaves / tiles - a welcome upping of the game of decorative elevational treatments in recent buildings in Westminster that was discussed here.  This is beautiful and subtle - a long way away from the world of 'Look at us we hired an Artist!'.  Doubly pleasing to find out that this is the work of my own professional alma mater Squire and Partners, boldly going off-piste as they do occasionally.

Considering that Mayfair is such a posh area, it's surprising how dreary many of the buildings built there in the last hundred years or so are.  Or perhaps not.   Many recent buildings have espoused the anodyne, milk and water architecture that one can't help thinking is put forward by cautious developers and their architects who want to avoid upsetting planning officers or planning committee members, rather than representing anything that anyone actually wants.

Westminster City Council sponsored an exhibition at New London Architecture a few years ago, Contemporary Westminster, to show that they are not the fuddy-duddies you might have thought and that plenty of fine new buildings do in fact get built there - which is true.  They need to keep it up though, because  buildings as good as the one shown here are the exception rather than the rule - there are still some horrors, plenty of mediocrities, and a few that manage to be both mediocre and horrible.

An annual design award scheme could help raise the game.  They can be problematic, though - some other boroughs that run them have found that prizes mostly go to schemes turned down by the council and given planning consent at appeal.

Flanders Fields in Hyde Park

Depending on your point of view, it's either unfortunate, or possibly appropriate, that as Armistice Day approaches, much of the eastern part of Hyde Park resembles the Somme in 1916.

Apart from that particular association, its present condition is entirely regrettable.  2012 has been a special year, and many major public spaces, including this one, have been heavily used, mostly to good and successful effect.  But the underlying trend, noted before in this blog, is for many of London's public spaces to be used more and more for special - and revenue-generating - events.  The mudbath shown above illustrates that as well as rendering these spaces full of unsightly tat and unavailable for quiet public enjoyment while the event is on, and while it is being set up and taken down, there can also be serious long term effects - much of the park continuing to be unsightly and unusable through the autumn and winter months.

By the end of November, the delights of 'Winter Wonderland' are due to reappear here.  Bring your wellies.

Perhaps it has been decided by The Royal Parks - who run Hyde Park and who are under pressure from their masters in the Government to make their estate pay its way - that this part of the park is in fact now a showground, and that anyone who wants grass and trees will find plenty of that in the west half of what is admittedly a very large park, in Kensington Gardens.

But it would have been nice to have been asked if we thought this was a good idea.

(Guest contributor: Ebenezer Scrooge)