Housing issue (AJ08.11.12) D

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Better homes

Inner city housing by Mae and PRP  Forgotten Spaces North East

£4.95 THE ARCHITECTS’ JOURNAL THEAJ.CO.UK

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The Architects’ Journal

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40 LEFT: TIM SOAR. LEFT TOP: DEAN KAUFMAN

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: RUBICON HOUSE COVER – TIM CROCKER. THE GUTS COVER – TIM SOAR

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06 09 10 20 32 40 46 51 83

Week in pictures Make unveils Canary Wharf residential tower Front page New data shows huge shortfall in affordable housing UK news More Homes, Better Homes gets taskforce backing News feature Farshid Moussavi on her new MOCA scheme Building study PRP’s brick-clad King’s Cross residential tower Building study Mae’s spacious New Islington affordable homes Technical study BFLS’s Soundforms demountable stage shell Forgotten Spaces Proposals for underused land in the North East Culture A new exhibition by Russian architect Alexander Brodsky This week online Try the new AJ iPad edition, free to subscribers until April and available now in the App Store goo.gl/SLJko

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EUREKA PAVILION BY NEX AND MARCUS BARNETT (PHOTO BY MARCUS PEEL)

AJ Small Projects

deadline 19 November all entries will be featured in the aj buildings library

The AJ Small Projects Awards, in association with Marley Eternit, celebrate completed projects with a contract value of £250,000 and under.

Why you should enter: ■ £2,500 in prizes ■ Dedicated Sustainability Prize ■ Valuable publicity for your practice: all entries featured in AJ Buildings Library and shortlist published in two special issues of the AJ in January; plus all shortlisted entries to be exhibited at the NLA in the Building Centre, London ■ Show your work at a top-level judging crit: last year 24 finalists presented their projects to AJ editor Christine Murray, Stirling Prize winner Keith Bradley and the V&A’s Moira Gemmill ■ More than 50 projects will be published online.

Entry costs £50 + VAT. Deadline is 19 November.

Email Tom Ravenscroft at ajsmallprojects@emap.com for your unique login.

TheAJ.co.uk/SmallProjects

From the editor

More Homes, Better Homes is part of our commitment to campaign on your behalf, writes Christine Murray Last week, Andy von Bradsky, chairman of PRP, was appointed to the fourstrong government task force charged with simplifying and scrapping the Building Regulations. This week, Bradsky said that he will review and consider the AJ’s More Homes, Better Homes campaign before reporting to government next spring.

It was a first note of success for our campaign, which aims to encourage house building while defending design quality. Since its launch last week, we’ve been collecting perspectives on the barriers to house building and opinions on the regulations cull from developers, architects and policy figures (see page 10, with more comments online).

It is too soon for conclusions, but early results suggest that while there may be some slack in the regs, they are not a barrier to development. As Baerbel Schuett, development director at Londonewcastle, said: ‘The Building Regulations have a very small impact on whether or not a project gets realised and built.’ And in the words of Satyen Joshi of Chest Properties, ‘The threat of more banal “shoeboxes” spreading across the UK has more to do with the standards set by volume housebuilders’ than the Building Regs. To share your view, please visit TheAJ.co.uk/Homes As part of the campaign, this week’s building studies focus on two inner-city housing projects; the first residential block in Argent’s King’s Cross development

by PRP, and Urban Splash’s latest addition to New Islington in Manchester by Mae. We’ve featured the schemes on two special-edition covers with two headlines: More Homes and Better Homes. To share your opinion on the quality of the solutions presented by these two bold experiments in contemporary urban housing, visit TheAJ.co.uk More Homes, Better Homes, as well as other AJ campaigns such as Women in Architecture, serve multiple purposes: to inform the profession, and to lobby for change on its behalf. Similarly, rolling coverage of the RIBA – recently, its revision of the Plan of Work – and ..

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More homes

Inner city housing by Mae and PRP  Forgotten Spaces North East

£4.95 THE ARCHITECTS’ JOURNAL THEAJ.CO.UK

..

Better homes

Inner city housing by Mae and PRP  Forgotten Spaces North East

£4.95 THE ARCHITECTS’ JOURNAL THEAJ.CO.UK

Our ambition is to represent your views to government, the RIBA, the ARB, schools, planning authorities, and the industry at large the ARB – its fee hike – hold these organisations to account and inform our subscribers of decisions that will affect them financially and professionally.

Do the AJ’s campaigns make a difference? Since the launch of Women in Architecture, I’ve been approached by several senior partners at architecture firms who said they were unaware of gender pay inequality in the profession and have examined their practice’s salaries in response. Women in Architecture has been shortlisted for the British Society of Magazine Editors’ Campaign of the Year. In fact, in the last 24 months, the AJ team and its work have been shortlisted for a total of 14 awards.

We launched More Homes, Better Homes as part of our renewed commitment to you, our subscribers.

Our ambition is to represent your views to government, the RIBA, the ARB, architecture schools, planning authorities, and the industry at large; to serve the profession and give it a voice, without being beholden or pandering to it. The reach of our digital audience makes it easier than ever to lobby on behalf of architects, with millions of visits to our websites every year. But it’s your continued support that makes it possible. christine.murray@emap.com 

Week in pictures

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4 PICTURE CREDITS: 01 ARMIN TAHA ARCHITECTS 02 THEODORE WOOD 03 MAKE 04 IWAN BAAN 05 STUDIO SH

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 Amin Taha Architects has submitted plans for this office and residential scheme opposite St James church, Clerkenwell. The £3.5 million project replaces an existing commercial block and features a steel plate ‘exoskeleton superstructure, gently varying in plan, section and thickness’ 1

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 Alison Brooks of ABA and Ben Adams of Ben Adams Architects spoke at the AJ Small Projects launch last week. Brooks said small projects were ideal for experimental work.

Adams said practices should ensure lower-budget projects get more media attention. Entries close on 19 November 2

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 Make has unveiled plans for a residential tower close to Canary Wharf. The 281-apartment proposal is next door to Terry Farrell’s Skylines Village, which failed to win planning permission in 2011.

Make’s scheme is part of a council-backed masterplan for Marsh Wall, on the Isle of Dogs 3

 Zaha Hadid Architects’ has completed the Galaxy Soho office, retail and entertainment complex – a 330,000m² development featuring four 67m-tall towers in Chaoyangmen, central Beijing.

This week Zaha Hadid, 62, picked up her damehood from the Queen to add to her CBE 4

  UK firm Studio SH, comprising AA student Seung Hyun Yuh and Se Hyeon Kim, has come second in the UIA-backed competition to design the £4.3 million Daegu Gosan Public Library. Top prize went to Spain’s Gorka Blas, while Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios received an honourable mention 5

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Front page

Government floats £45bn housing fund

Housing crisis: affordable housing drops for first time in 10 years Call on government to commit to ‘clear and realistic’ definition of affordable housing as output in the sector falls housing The desperate state of The new data comes as pressure England’s affordable housing mounts on the government to sector has been exposed in clarify its position on affordable new data showing the first housing. David Cameron was drop in completions in forced to backtrack after nearly a decade. he said local councils Just 52,880 should honour affordable units were More homes Section 106 ‘existing built in 2011-12, Better homes affordable housing compared with 53,080 commitments’ in the year before. ‘Social a press release that rent’ completions fell by was later rewritten.

0.4 per cent to 34,970 homes.

The relaxation of Section The new figures follow 106 rules set out in the Growth official GDP data showing a and Infrastructure Bill will 20 per cent fall in new public exacerbate the shortage of housing construction output in affordable housing. Communities the three months to August. minister Don Foster said it would

result in a drop of 10,000 units.

The government’s definition of affordable housing is also under fire. A report for the London Tenants Federation argued that affordable housing is used as a smokescreen by politicians wishing to appear to address the issues. In his foreword to the report, Birkbeck Urban Studies senior lecturer Paul Watt dubbed it a ‘con’.

According to The Guardian, a housing association in London required a minimum household income of £59,000 to qualify for ‘affordable’ housing.

Merlin Fulcher TheAJ.co.uk/Homes.

New build affordable housing units by year

Source: CLG

55,000

50,000

53,080 52,880

All affordable

45,000

44,180

40,000

48,060 44,220

36,220 35,000

33,260

30,000

26,930 25,000

21,100

23,890

20,000

2002-03

03-04

04-05

05-06

06-07

07-08 Year

08.11.12

08-09

09-10

10-11

11-12

investment The government has proposed doubling the amount of money that local authority pension funds can invest in housing and infrastructure to £45 billion.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has announced plans to allow council pension funds to invest up to 30 per cent of their assets in vital infrastructure, such as housing. Currently the limit is 15 per cent, which amounts to £22.5 billion.

The move comes just days after a major RIBA-backed report claimed 300,000 homes could be completed each year without spending a penny of government money. The Future Homes Commission report outlined a £10 billion local housing development fund which could be created by pooling 15 per cent of the largest local authorities’ pension fund assets.

RIBA chief executive Harry Rich said: ‘I am delighted that the government is following through on this innovative idea.’

Speaking about the government’s plans, Pickles said: ‘Unlocking town hall pension pots so they can be used to invest in vital infrastructure projects is a commonsense decision that will help this country compete on a global scale and get Britain building. By lifting the restrictions controlling local pension investments, councils could pump a further £22 billion directly into job-creating infrastructure projects.

‘This is potentially a huge development and investment opportunity we simply cannot afford to ignore, which also allows us to maintain long-term value for money for the taxpayer.’

09

News feature

More Homes, Better Homes gets taskforce backing Government housing taskforce’s von Bradsky pledges to ‘review and consider’ results of AJ campaign to boost building, as industry leaders tell us what they want from the overhaul, reports Richard Waite  ,     

 A key member He said: ‘[This] standard should of the panel charged with uphold or improve the quality overhauling the ‘complex of housing and it will contest and confusing’ homebuilding proposals that undermine the standards has said he will take delivery of high quality places, on board findings from the buildings and living conditions.’

AJ’s new housing campaign.

Meanwhile the government PRP chair Andy von Bradsky minister leading the review, Don (above) told the AJ he would Foster insisted that, contrary to ‘review and consider’ the some initial fears, essential safety outcomes of the AJ’s More and accessibility protections Homes, Better Homes campaign, would remain untouched in launched last week the shake-up of the in response to the building regulations. government’s review However he said of ‘anti-growth’ that he remained MORE HOMES Building Regulations. BETTER HOMES intent on cutting Announced last ‘the current array of Thursday (1 Nov), von housing standards Bradsky is one of four used in different parts experts on the Challenge of the country,’ describing Panel alongside City of London it as ‘counter-productive and surveyor David Clements, confusing to local residents, planning specialist Paul Watson, councillors and developers’. and developer Kirk Archibald.

The AJ will continue to publish The panel will look at simplifying the industry’s reactions and ‘the mass of rules’ imposed on thoughts on the housing debate. developers and von Bradsky has To contribute to the debate, pledged to protect design quality visit TheAJ.co.uk/Homes or as part of the drive to create a email news editor Richard Waite ‘simple housing standard’. at richard.waite@emap.com  ..

It’s not true that building regulations, in particular those around energy performance and sustainability, are holding back the housing market.

But it is true that they pose challenges to housebuilders.

In a way, that is what they are there for, if the objective is to reduce the carbon output from housing stock. Challenges are not necessarily obstacles. The better housebuilders have good strategies in place to address the Code for Sustainable Homes and meet thermal building regulations, and while the regulations remain to encourage other housebuilders to follow suit, it’s no bad thing.

A conversation could, however, be had about regulating for design quality where there has

PROCTOR AND MATTHEWS

RICHARD NICHOLSON

‘The biggest problem for the industry is finance.

Regulations aren’t the problem and it’s worrying government is looking in the wrong direction ’ been a lack of joined-up thinking between Lifetime Homes and space standards. Here, regulations are a pretty blunt instrument that don’t necessarily produce the desired effect. For instance, an unfortunate side-effect of Lifetime Homes requirements for generous circulation areas is to squeeze space elsewhere, often resulting in smaller living areas or bedrooms. This means developers can then fall foul of space standards regulations.

The biggest problem for the industry is finance, particularly the shortage of mortgages. Buyers are struggling to raise deposits, while developers are having to go to extraordinary lengths to assist people with their finances.

Housebuilders say that planning and Building Regulations aren’t the problem: it’s simple common sense that they shouldn’t be starting schemes that are otherwise ready to go unless there are people out there who can buy.

It’s uncertain whether it’s a case of simply waiting until the clouds pass, or whether more economic intervention and stimulus by the government is required to kickstart house building. What’s clear is that regulations aren’t the problem and it’s worrying that the government is looking in the wrong direction. ..

 ,    

 ,     

‘The government should incentivise the industry ‘We need a streamlined planning process to achieve better design standards, reducing that can provide clarity to developers on opposition to badly designed new housing’ programme and outcome much earlier’

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The Building Regulations have only a very small impact on whether or not a project gets realised and built. Yes, there are potential capital cost burdens arising through ever-tightening energy regulations. However, the key to unlocking projects remains the planning process and funding.

Building Regulations are fairly clear, known factors that can be built into a design and

regulations are a challenge for the very small builders.

Even larger builders are struggling to adapt their designs to the new, higher levels of airtightness and we have seen a number of instances where overheating has been a problem.

There is also the ridiculous situation where builders tape over trickle vents in order to pass airtightness tests (and often know which properties will be ‘randomly’ selected for testing).

The standards review should also consider the Dutch Custom Build model. The Dutch have more detailed building regulations than we do but that also allows them to have much simpler planning regulations. There is much to commend this approach and it would not require a change in the law, just a change in planning practice with outline planning setting parameters and reserved matters permission being a 24 hour turnaround compliance check. This would remove the tendency for some planners to seek to impose their design preferences, but it could only be used in particular situations like Custom Build where you could trust the builder (owner) to seek high quality design.

viability assessment. Building regulations have also led to the industry having to react positively to the requirements [such as new energy saving regulations].

The clarity that regulations offer is, on the other hand, not provided by the planning process.

This remains a huge unknown hurdle for any project, particularly larger scale regeneration projects.

We need a streamlined planning process that can provide clarity to developers on programme and outcome much earlier.

 ,     :

‘We are too fearful of development today. Where would we be in 2012 without the legacy of 19th century railways or 20th century motorways?’

IGLOO

Neither planning regulations nor the Building Regulations are currently reducing the number of homes being built so the government review is a ‘niceto-have’ not a ‘must-have’.

There is a degree of political positioning, as there has been with much of the debate around planning. These standards also have very little impact on design quality in its widest sense. Despite the regulations, there are still shockingly badly designed houses being built. The government could do much to incentivise the industry to achieve better design standards, which would then reduce the community opposition to new badly designed housing and help increase housing supply.

However, the last housing minister was against national design standards, despite being told that scrapping national standards would be difficult for larger builders because they would then have to deal with multiple local standards. Some of the leading industry players quite like Building for Life, for example, because it is simple and they can use it as a tool within their organisations.

There are some challenges in the regulations. Fire regulations have made it more difficult to have mixed-use buildings with efficient cores in the UK compared with many other countries. In the future, zero carbon, which we need to achieve, is a viability challenge for 2016 and the incremental increases in building

The government needs to commit to funding, then build the biggest bonfire imaginable. For 20 years successive governments have been in thrall to vociferous special interest groups who have stifled action.

Of course we need Norman Foster’s estuary airport. Just bring in the legislation to do it. Of course we need several hundred thousand affordable new homes, so just do it.

Legislate to make the land available, the government paying no more than a reasonable rate, then selling on to builders given simple health, safety and sustainability criteria that they are contracted to meet. Then let them get on with it. When I was with Barratt, the rule of thumb

allocations were 35 per cent for land and 20 per cent for profit.

Both are far too high, allowing too little for build investment.

Land should be made available at about 15 per cent of total cost and open book tendering should be on about eight per cent margins.

We are far too fearful of development today. What we should encourage, we prevent. Where would we be in 2012 without the legacy of 19th century railways or 20th century motorways, and what is the crowning glory of the Cotswolds? Not the rather bland landscape, but the human settlements; the glorious towns and villages built primarily in a less regulated age. So let’s get our priorities right; our people need houses and our economy needs the kickstart of investment in building and infrastructure.

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UK news

Allies and Morrison to rework Arcadia site Three years after Foster + Partners’ tower proposal was scrapped, new landowner revives prospects for Ealing site, writes Merlin Fulcher   Allies and Morrison has become the latest architect lined up to take on the troubled regeneration of the Arcadia site in Ealing.

The appointment of the Southwark-based studio comes nearly three years after the previous government’s communities secretary, John Denham, rejected Foster + Partners’ and HKR’s skyscraper proposal for the west London town centre in December 2009.

Previous developer Glenkerrin had spent three years in planning and £10 million on fees drawing up the earlier scheme, which won the backing of Ealing Council

and London mayor Boris Johnson, but was later vetoed by Denham for its ‘dominant and overbearing impact’ on the townscape.

New landowner Benson Elliot has now appointed Allies and Morrison to work up a phased development for the site.

The developer purchased the high-profile plot – which includes the Arcadia shopping centre and several high street retail units – from Glenkerrin’s joint administrators last month.

Visualisations of proposals have yet to be revealed.

Benson Elliot partner Phil Irons said: ‘This is a great opportunity to revitalise a key

part of Ealing’s town centre and we look forward to working with Ealing Council and the local community to realise its potential.’

Malcolm Shierson, of administrator Grant Thornton, added: ‘This is a strategically important site for Ealing and we are pleased to have found a purchaser whose aspirations for the asset are aligned with its potential.’

The £500 million scheme initially masterminded by HKR and John Pardey featured a 40-storey, leaf-shaped structure which was redesigned by Foster + Partners following criticism from CABE. Foster’s 26-storey slimline version of the tower (pictured) was unveiled in 2008.

Crossrail is expected to halve commuter times from Ealing to Central London when the new line opens in 2018, adding impetus to the project.

TheAJ.co.uk/Arcadia

Heseltine: planning deadline Zaha in eastenders role  Lord Heseltine has called for a six-month planning deadline on non-complex schemes, and for ‘localised’ funding to bolster economic growth.

In the Downing Streetcommissioned report, No Stone Unturned in the Pursuit of Growth, Heseltine outlines 89 recommendations to help industry and to provide the missing ‘strategy for growth and wealth creation’.

Heseltine said: ‘Planning decisions are still too often lengthy and bureaucratic. There is simply no sense of urgency or any understanding of the economic cost of delays.’

He added: ‘For any application still undecided after three months, the planning authority should publish a clear and unbiased  ..

statement of what the issues are. This will help all parties to understand what is standing in the way of a decision. It will have the positive effect of galvanising both planning authorities and statutory consultees to ensure that the issues are fully explained within three months.

‘Any application still undecided after six months should automatically go before the Planning Inspectorate.’

Elsewhere the report calls for £49 billion of funds to be made available from central government for the regions to help local leaders and businesses.

He argued that local authorities had been ‘relegated to service providers’ and that government had been too centrally focused.

Richard Waite. TheAJ.co.uk/Heseltine

Bus Station secured planning   Zaha Hadid permission in December 2007, Architects is understood to be the land was later sold on to a behind a new housing project on private developer. A neighbouring, the fringe of the City of London. never-published scheme by 3XN The AJ has learned that for Beetham also hit the rocks. the practice will team up with The 200-home proposal Hawkins\Brown on the will see the existing scheme, which will Guinness Trust flats replace the Guinness taken down and Trust Estate’s flats MORE HOMES replaced with social in Mansell Street.

BETTER HOMES housing by Hawkins\ The scheme Brown. Hadid is backed by the will design private, Guinness Partnership higher-end homes on housing association and the southern element. the Beetham Organisation – Neither practice would the property developer bankrolling comment on the project, which is the Foreign Office Architects still at pre-planning stage. But, it is (FOA)-designed Trinity EC3 believed, it has been welcomed by office project north of the City of London planning officers. targeted development plot.

Richard Waite Although FOA’s proposal TheAJ.co.uk/GuinnessTrust on the site next to Aldgate

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24/09/2012 18:01

Competitions & wins

COMPETITIONS FILE

Avanti wins China steelworks revamp AJ100 practice scoops redevelopment of former steelworks into industrial heritage museum, visitor centre and business park

 Avanti Architects has won the contest to design a 22ha heritage-led regeneration project in Chongqing municipality, China.

The AJ100 practice beat an international shortlist, including one other unnamed UK practice, to win the enormous 630,000m² redevelopment of a disused 1930s steelworks into a museum and creative hub.

Under Avanti Architects’ proposals, the sprawling plant in the Dadukou district will be transformed into a new industrial  ..

museum and business park, set in a landscaped ‘industrial garden’.

A series of sheds and brickclad chimneys will remain on the site while industrial cranes, rail tracks, water troughs and floating gantries will be incorporated into the new museum. A new-build element will provide controlled environmental conditions for the storage and display of objects and for the attraction’s main vertical and horizontal circulations.

The workers’ gate will become a main entrance, the former canteen is earmarked for a tea

house and a new axial route is planned, plus a dramatic flight of steps named after the country’s leader during the industrialisation, Mao Zedong.

Commercial offices, retail and residential are also planned for the development while a gasometer on the site will be converted into a business hotel.

Individual buildings are expected to include passive energy measures and the scheme aims to reduce embodied carbon by retaining existing buildings. Merlin Fulcher

THE AJ DOES NOT ORGANISE, ENDORSE OR TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR COMPETITIONS

AVANTI ARCHITECTS

Welsh historic environment service Cadw is looking for architectural services for the conservation of its 128 ancient monuments and the design of visitor facilities. The threeyear framework also requires landscape architects. [Requests to participate by 26 November] The RIBA and developer McCarthy & Stone have launched a design contest for a Hampshire retirement home with a budget of £110/sq ft. The contest seeks a ‘new concept’ for housing people aged over 55 years. The winning team will be expected to take forward its scheme to completion. A shortlist of five will each take home £2,000 with the winner receiving £3,000. [Registration should be completed before 22 January] Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum Development Foundation has launched an international design competition for a new museum and educational centre. International teams with experience in projects over 10,000m² are invited to apply. A shortlist of six will be selected for the second round. [Registration should be completed before 19 November] Sean Kitchen TheAJ.co.uk/competitions ..

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People & practice

Lebbeus Woods 1940-2012 NEW PRACTICES New York-based architect Steven Holl pays tribute to architect, artist and thoretician Lebbeus Woods, who died last week, aged 72 Evacuated last week from New York City due to Hurricane Sandy, I received a 5:45am phone call from Aleksandra Wagner that Lebbeus Woods had just died. She had no electricity and was calling me from a policeman’s phone.

Lebbeus was very excited recently about the completion of the Light Pavilion in Chengdu, China. He and Christoph Kumpusch had a champagne toast on 24 October to celebrate this important moment; his first permanent construction.

The freedom of spirit in architecture that Lebbeus Woods embodied carried with it a rare idealism. Lebbeus had very passionate beliefs and a deep philosophical commitment to architecture. He often spoke of the importance of ideas and an understanding of our world.

The designs he created were politically charged fields of reality.

I met Lebbeus in February 1977. As we began discussing the current state of architecture, I told him how much I appreciated his deeply critical remarks on the Postmodernism of Charles Moore, Robert Stern and others that I read while I was in San Francisco.

Lebbeus and I began to meet every couple of weeks at the Square Diner, as they served all-you-can-eat-for-a-dollar bean soup. Our ongoing philosophical discussions led to our sharing reviews in the design studios we

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were teaching. In late 1977, I began work on a project entitled Bronx Gymnasium-Bridge that would become the first issue of Pamphlet Architecture. Lebbeus made the third issue with his Einstein’s Tomb project. It was an amazing vision of a tomb for Albert Einstein, a strange architecture that would travel on a beam of light around the Earth.

Today I imagine that tomb is occupied by the spirit of Lebbeus.

Leb was a brilliant, charismatic teacher, whose classes at Cooper Union were inspirational. I was always amazed at the original work his students produced.

Leb was still passionate about teaching this year. Due to his illness, he taught his class recently from a wheelchair.

In 2007, when I received the commission to realise a 278,000m² urban project in Chengdu, China, I began studies to shape a public space where ‘buildings within buildings’ are cut into the fabric. I invited Leb to do one, Ai Weiwei to do another, and we did another.

Lebbeus’ Pavilion, constructed of huge beams of light, is a place one enters at several levels.

Walking on sheets of glass suspended by steel rods, the view is multiplied and infinitely extended via polished stainless steel lining the four-storey gap in the building it occupies.

I’m in Chengdu this week.

I’ll walk into the Light Pavilion, stand suspended and imagine Lebbeus’ tomb has been launched on a beam of light.

Steven Holl

Coppin Dockray Architects   Sandra Coppin (left) and Bev Dockray (right)  Highgate, north London  2012  coppindockray.co.uk Where have you come from?

We met at the Bartlett and then both worked for Niall McLaughlin for 10 years.

What work do you have?

We are working on interesting 20th century buildings designed

by Berthold Lubetkin, Philip Dowson and the Smithsons.

As project architects we have seen over 25 jobs through to completion, ranging from a bandstand to student accommodation for an Oxford college. Our shared experience means we can take on institutional or domestic, private or public work.

What are your ambitions?

Relationships are important to us. Our extended family of colleagues and contacts, built up

over many years, will hopefully bring opportunities. You learn so much from the people you work with – craftsmen, colleagues and clients. We are not in it for fame and glory. Our ambition is to win happy clients and produce good architecture.

How optimistic are you?

No one is expecting a miracle economic recovery, though we are cautiously optimistic. Borrowing is finally on the up, suggesting that the domestic market has bottomed out and is likely to improve. Our approach is measured and flexible, which suits today’s economic uncertainties.

How do you market yourselves?

Talking to friends and letting people know that we are looking for work is our current strategy. ..

Lights Camera Action

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News feature

Moussavi: when the means are less, we need to be more creative Farshid Moussavi talks exclusively to the AJ about the newly-opened Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio, the first of her buildings to be completed as Farshid Moussavi Architects

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 How do you feel now MOCA is complete? I’m proud of what we’ve achieved within a very tight budget [£11.7 million]. MOCA’s ambition was to create a flexible home for contemporary art, as well as a ‘living room’ for Cleveland. We’ve managed to produce a building that is flexible enough to cater for the

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diversity of contemporary art and unique to Cleveland, rather than just an outpost of MOMA.

DEAN KAUFMAN

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Does MOCA break any new ground architecturally?

Two elements that might be called ‘groundbreaking’ are the museum’s high flexibility and its use of colour. Typical contemporary art museums comprise a white cube gallery space surrounded by a commercial, public and education programme. But, since contemporary art ranges enormously in medium, scale and size, the sealed, airconditioned and evenly lit

DEAN KAUFMAN

How does working in the US differ to the UK? MOCA is a cultural project in a postindustrial American city. Many similar projects are funded by donations from individuals or private foundations. This culture of patronage has resulted in major museums in small towns and cities, which have been a catalyst for social and cultural change. If the UK followed this model it would mean that cities besides large ones like London would benefit from cultural investment. The retailled regeneration initiatives in cities AJ WOMEN north of London IN ARCHITECTURE have more or less stopped. There is an opportunity to place culture and the arts at the heart of regeneration.

DUANE PROKOP

How has MOCA been received?

Both the public and the art world seem to enjoy the building’s playfulness. I’m in regular dialogue with MOCA’s director on the ways the building will be curated over time.

HARUKO TOMIOKA-KRZESZOWIEC

You started MOCA as Foreign Office Architects. Has your approach changed?

At Foreign Office Architects we gained a lot of experience in turning given constraints into architectural opportunities.

With MOCA, we did not have to deal with a ‘fixed brief ’ or site constraints, so the architecture had to be active, rather than reactive. We had to define the goals as well as the responses.

white cube is often redundant.

MOCA is designed as a flexible configuration with ‘multiple’ spaces that can switch between gallery spaces and social spaces, like the receiving area which doubles as a performance space. This approach presents the museum with a range of volumes and light conditions in which to exhibit different disciplines of contemporary art simultaneously, like a 14th century cabinet of curiosities. It also allows MOCA to explore trans-disciplinary exhibitions, thereby being a place where further types of art could emerge.

With MOCA, did you consciously resist the white cube style?

We’ve introduced colour within the galleries. In a typical white cube, art floats in the space and has no weight.

‘There is an opportunity to place culture and the arts at the heart of regeneration in British cities’ Historical museums’ red, green and blue walls also make paintings seem to float, because the intensity of the colour takes weight away from the art. The structure of MOCA’s external envelope is exposed on the interior and painted with a deep blue fireresistant paint. The contrast between this blue surface, which forms the main gallery ceiling, and the light walls and floor creates a sense of orientation and adds weight to the lower end of the room, which hosts the artwork. The dark blue ceiling also creates a sensation of boundlessness.

What was the most challenging part of the project?

MOCA is small [3,159m2] and low-budget. We needed to cater for the social and commercial needs of the museum without the additional space or budget of larger museums.

It was exciting to challenge the convention of a museum as an institution and look for ways that art and social and commercial spaces could cohabit.

Do you think the gallery will open doors for you in the UK? I hope so. Good buildings are neither a matter of scale, nor budget. I’m sceptical of the suggestion that, due to the recession, we have to go back to basics. On the contrary, I think that when the means are less, we need to be more creative – which is not the same thing as basic. 

News feature

AJ Open-City pick top photographers We present the winner and runners-up of the AJ/Open-City photography competition, in which photographers were invited to take an original approach to the ‘changing face of London’ theme, writes Emily Booth

2012

WINNER

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  Lloyd’s Building  ‘This photograph has fantastic layering and each part of it tells a different story. There is compositional assurance,

 Mark Lakomcsik has won the Open-City 2012 photo competition with his image ‘Elevating Experience’, which the judges described as having ‘fantastic layering’ and ‘compositional assurance’.

The picture was chosen from

with an interesting play of inside and outside, and a change of mood among the people, who are in their own worlds but connected by the building. It is a matrix of space.’ ..

more than 300 photographs taken during the Open House event in September, in response to the brief ‘Exploring the changing face of London: people and place.’

The judges included AJ art editor Brad Yendle, Photographers’ Gallery director Brett Rogers,

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architectural photographers Grant Smith and Dennis Gilbert and founder of Open House London, Victoria Thornton.

J Bayliss was awarded first runner-up position with her photograph ‘Playing in the Drum’, taken during an Open

House tour of the Channel 4 building on Horseferry Road.

Second runner-up was Simone Fisher with ‘Rear Window’, which captures the individual worlds of the music rooms in the Barbican, while Studio Octopi’s Chris Romer-

Lee’s ‘Stockwell Studios’ was named third runner-up.

‘The winners all fulfilled the brief very well,’ said Yendle. ‘The multiple reflections in the winning photograph show the hustle and bustle of Open House weekend.’

TheAJ.co.uk/openhouse2012

FIRST RUNNER UP

  Channel 4, Horseferry Road  ‘The entry of the child into the scene, parting the curtain, transforms the architecture in this

image : the space becomes almost playpenlike as a result. There is a decided sense of theatre about it and the photographer has grabbed that moment.’

SECOND RUNNER UP

  Barbican  ‘Great colour combinations plus its off-kilter composition make it feel like a film still.’

THIRD RUNNER UP

 - Stockwell Studios  ‘The quality and depth of light give this image a stillness of time.’ 

Astragal

No project too small   Alison Brooks and Ben Adams disclosed the thrills and spills of working at the diminutive end of the architectural scale at last week’s AJ Small Projects launch event. While Brooks rattled off a string of schemes, each one in some way instrumental to the next bigger achievement, Adams unpacked an armoury of examples showing how minuscule commissions can lead to greater things. Discussing the virtues of attending to the tiniest detail, he drew on the example of an interior project for government adviser and ASBO tsar Louise Casey. ‘Ironically,

she was quite badly behaved herself,’ said Adams, adding that Casey’s fridge contained just two lemons, garlic and some white wine. The architect’s solution was a shelf for its contents.

Bloody builders  Architects might find a new and unconventional admixture for bricks will not be to everyone’s taste. Jack Munroe, a young architect based in London, has developed a ghoulish new method for making them. His bricks use animal blood as an alternative to commonly used binders. Each brick uses 30 litres of fresh cattle blood, which the architect collects

from an abattoir in Sussex. The blood is mixed with sand before being baked in an oven, creating building blocks which are dark red in colour. The bricks are unlikely to become common in UK house building but the architect believes they could be an alternative to mud bricks used in developing countries.

Tsunami of waste  AJ readers will remember the outrage surrounding the government’s High Court confession that £35.5 million of so-called ‘transitional funding’ for Pathfinder zones had gone towards flattening more houses, rather than helping

local authorities exit from the scrapped programme.

Seemingly big sums of money; but this misuse of cash, which may yet be rectified, pales into insignificance compared with the gargantuan sums the Japanese government has misappropriated from funds intended for the country’s reconstruction after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

According to reports, nearly a quarter of the £93 billion cash pot fund went towards a raft of other things, including roads in relatively unaffected Okinawa, an ad campaign for Japan’s tallest building and support for whaling research.

Shapero crucified

WWW.LOUISHELLMAN.CO.UK

 Maurice Shapero’s cruciform skyscraper proposals for Liverpool’s skyline was always going to be contentious.

Yet even Shapero couldn’t have predicted that The Sun would pick up the story about the 199m-tall ‘King Eddy’ tower – potentially the tallest building in the north of England. The red top went with the Gotcha-style headline ‘controversial tower slammed for turning the city into a cemetery’. Shapero told the AJ that he had no regrets about the design nor the ensuing furore, which even kicked off on evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ website. Shapero confessed to being intrigued by how ‘symbolism in architecture’ appeared to be ‘much more powerful, in terms of what people get fired up about, than beauty or concept’. He was preparing for more flak at a lecture he was due to give in Liverpool last week. Unexpectedly, however, the event had to be cancelled after an incident on the motorway.

Divine intervention perhaps.  ..

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Advertorial

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As part of Marley Eternit’s commitment to support architects throughout the full life cycle of a project, campaign manager, Gavin White, explores the dangers specifiers face when it comes to the piracy of roofing products and the simple steps they can take to ensure product selection is not compromised.

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To guard against this, it is important to pay even closer attention to all aspects of specified manufactured products, ensuring peace of mind when it comes to achieving the highest level of product performance, quality and durability and therefore minimising the potential for later claims.

Linked to the safe specification of products is the rise across the construction industry of pirated

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goods. Piracy is common in many areas of life, from DVDs to counterfeit fashion labels. But when it starts to affect the safety of a building envelope it is time to sit up and take notice – or face serious consequences.

In Marley Eternit’s own experience, we have seen increased evidence of the use of pirated or imitation roofingrelated products and accessories such as sub-standard stop end ridges and roof ventilation systems. This has led to concerns that projects could be compromised and issues of performance and safety brought sharply into focus.

The risks The risks for the specifier are obvious. The producers of pirated goods might be skilled at making the products appear to match original manufactured components, but they often offer significantly inferior performance and quality.

Other issues linked to the use of pirated or imitation products could include invalidating any warranty linked to the roof – a serious and potentially costly situation should the specification process be found to have knowingly procured a pirated roof component or accessory.

In addition to compromising a roof ’s long-term performance, more immediate concerns such as the potential for sub-standard

stop end ridges to become loose and fall from structures opens up safety concerns and the pathway to long-running litigation for injury claims and damaged reputations.

Recommended solutions There are a few easy steps specifiers can take to ensure the product selection process is not undermined. Seeking assurances from their contractor partner that only the genuine specified manufacturer’s products are used is a start. They should also note that properly constructed products manufactured by reputable organisations will come complete, often with additional accessories, and all components will be securely assembled, as well as being of uniform appearance.

For example, tile vents produced

by Marley Eternit come with a soaker tray that diverts rainwater away from the vent, which pirated vents do not provide.

It is in the specifiers interest to ensure that only the products you have asked for – regardless of perceived cost savings via the pirated route – are the ones actually used. Ultimately, the safest method is to adopt a holistic approach. This encourages the use of full-system specifications from a single manufacturer, incorporating all the necessary fittings and accessories.

As the market leading roofing manufacturer, Marley

Eternit, has an extensive range of products including slates, clay and concrete tiles alongside a comprehensive selection of fittings and accessories, which can be explored on the new microsite, www.whydryfix.co.uk.

In addition to the reassurance that you are specifying the highest quality products available, our customers benefit from our ‘cradle to grave’ approach to service, ensuring that they feel fully supported at every stage of a build.

Specifiers can access a wealth of technical expertise from across the team, take advantage of a number of added value services such as our site surveys and access a broad range of online technical services and resources. These include the popular roofing product selector tool, designed to assist the selection of roofing accessories and our Specrite tool which enables specifiers to produce instant NBS clauses that meet the recommendations of British Standards and Codes of Practices for the Marley Eternit range of tiles, slates, fittings and accessories.

By taking this partnership approach, not only will worries relating to product performance be eradicated at source, but the potential for any future damaging legal comeback as a result of liability responsibilities on a project will be largely negated by ensuring that crucial areas of construction are safely delivered.

For further information on our fittings and accessories just ask ME at www.marleyeternit.co.uk/ fittings or call ME on 01283 722588. You can also follow ME on Twitter, @MarleyEternit.



Letter from London

There is nothing like a dame – especially Dame Zaha, writes Paul Finch

SIMONE CECCHETTI

Dame Zaha – who would have thought it when Ms Hadid was a feisty AA student, a teacher and painter, famous for supposedly using Perrier water to achieve certain artistic effects (actually, it was plain water in a Perrier bottle), then the winner of both the Hong Kong Peak competition (abandoned) and the Cardiff Bay opera house (shamefully abandoned).

By the mid-1990s you might have taken a bet that Zaha would leave Britain for a teaching job at a US university, giving up trying to run a real office. But she had a passion not just to design, but to build. And when she found clients of like mind, the architecture began to flow, to take on a life of its own, as happens when building becomes a way a maelstrom of drama and tension? Aren’t of life rather than an exceptional occurrence. people fired and re-hired in the same week?

The competition wins were accelerating by Well, Zaha Hadid Architects isn’t the civil the end of the 20th century, with the MAXXI service. But its success over the years is building and major schemes for BMW, based on an extraordinary level of loyalty AJ WOMEN and then the Wolfsburg complex cemented IN ARCHITECTURE between Zaha and staff – a loyalty which her reputation for being able to handle is two-way and which can outlast ordinary big projects, big ideas and big budgets. employer-employee relationships.

Subsequent growth of the office to There is also her long-standing creative several hundred people, with a job list spread partnership with Patrik Schumacher, a throughout the world, may have mystified critics relationship that has conquered the world. who assumed that theory could not be turned into And, of course, there is Zaha herself – actually quite productive practice, or who assumed that an Iraqi vulnerable underneath that super-tough professional woman (now a British citizen) could never make carapace, somebody who at certain stages of her it in the big league of international practice. career has needed support and nurture. Always a The success of the office, and Zaha’s own reputation, pleasure to talk to, knowledgeable, gossipy, generous, have spawned innumerable stories. Example: witty and fun. Time always passes quickly in her competition juror to Zaha: ‘ We told you not to bring company. Above all she is talented; there aren’t too a model.’ Zaha: ‘Our office designs with models many great women architects in the world who have so your instruction was ridiculous’; Gulf client to had to make their life, office and reputation in an Zaha: ‘What will the site plan look like?’ Zaha: ‘Like overseas country – and one with no great track record this.’ (Unfurls scarf and throws it on a map where in supporting male architects, let alone women. it lands in immaculate parametric form). It doesn’t So congratulations, Zaha, on your investiture matter whether the stories are true, the point is that as a Dame this week. You have shown a Zaha is the sort of personality who inspires them. loyalty to Britain which is reciprocated. With But isn’t she difficult to work with? Isn’t the office or without the honour, we love you!  ..

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Black box

Lebbeus Woods’ successful copyright claim was a rare thing in an industry built on copying, says Rory Olcayto

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS / LEBBEUS WOODS

Lebbeus Woods, who died last week in New York, was that rare thing: an architect who successfully sued over copyright infringement. In March 1996 Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum concluded that Universal Studios had ripped off Woods’ 1987 drawing Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber for scenes in Terry Gilliam’s 1995 time travel thriller 12 Monkeys.

Gilliam admitted he’d seen Woods’ image of an elevated chair in an industrial setting and had discussed it with both the film’s producer and production designer.

I remember going to see the film myself and being surprised there was no reference to Woods in the credits. Anyone familiar with his drawings could tell that Gilliam’s set design was a blatant copy (see below).

Others have not been as lucky as Woods. Famously, British architect Gareth Pearce was ridiculed by Mr Justice Jacob in 2001 over his claim that Rem Koolhaas and OMA had copied his 1986 plans for a town hall in London’s Docklands for the Dutch firm’s Rotterdam Kunsthal design. ‘[His claim] has no foundation whatsoever,’ Jacob told the high court, the Guardian reported. ‘It is one of pure fantasy – preposterous fantasy at that. The Kunsthal owes nothing to the claimant.’

At the time Will Alsop, then an AJ columnist, slammed Pearce ‘for seeking notoriety’ despite having the backing of three expert witnesses, including that of dispute resolution stalwart Ian Salisbury. ‘It is my opinion that the design of the Kunsthal was copied from

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Pearce’s drawings,’ Salisbury said in a 119-page report.

Alsop was incensed by Pearce’s action, which failed to gain support among the profession, because it brought back painful memories. A few years earlier Alsop had received a letter from the RIBA disciplinary board alleging his design for a restaurant on a bridge at the Doncaster Earth Centre was stolen from the work of an unsuccessful candidate for a job in his office. ‘I had never met the creature but it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, even though no legal action followed,’ Alsop wrote. While Woods’ grievance was clear to see, Pearce’s was considerably less so.

It was no surprise the law sided with Koolhaas.

In a profession practically built on the art of cribbing, high-profile cases like the Koolhaas-Pearce dispute are rare. According to FAT, duplicating another’s design can even be a cause for celebration.

The studio’s Museum of Copying in the Arsenale at this year’s Venice Biennale ‘explores the idea of the architectural copy as an important, positive and often surreal phenomenon’ and posits Palladio’s Villa Rotonda as the movement’s lodestone.

Yet there will always be some who feel the culture of copying goes too far. ‘No one wants to sue a multinational corporation,’ said architect Thomas Shine when filing a copyright suit against David Childs and his practice, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. As Metropolis magazine reported in 2004, ‘Childs saw a design Shine made at Yale in 1999, praised it, then copied it for the Freedom Tower. Childs’ firm concedes the designs “share common elements,” including the “diagrid” structure, but those things “have been industry standards for years”.’

The dispute was resolved two years later, with both Shine’s claim and SOM’s claim for legal costs withdrawn. Perhaps a cash settlement was made. That, at least, was the good fortune of Woods, whose designs, bar a sculpture in China, remain unbuilt. Instead of insisting upon the injunction granted by Judge Cedarbaum, which would have seen 12 Monkeys pulled worldwide, Woods opted for a six figure payout from Universal, giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘paper architect’. ..

TOM MANLEY

AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk

MORE HOMES BETTER HOMES

Project of the Week Fore Street Hypostyle Architects Glasgow, 2011 This group of 15 affordable dwellings, built within an existing Victorian tenement perimeter block, is one of more than 140 residential housing projects in the AJ Buildings Library. ..

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So long, Building Regs

AJ housing campaign

It is about time (The end of Building Regs as we know them, AJ online).

I have had to provide a steel frame just to support a dormer window on a roof extension because the house was fivestoreys high (the rest of the house was existing and allowed to collapse). A couple of months ago, the gaps in a ramp handrail were rejected because it was 10mm over the 380mm difference allowed, yet I can walk along a clifftop on a public path with a fall of 30m without a fence.

The regulations need to be proportionate to the risk and ensure that buildings are built to the correct standards. There are many builders working directly for clients who have little idea of the current regulations. We have the Building Regulations, approved documents and, in some cases, government guides to the approved documents. I just hope that they do not go the same way as the planning overhaul, which resulted in a much more complex system.

Graham Wright, AJ online

With respect to the editor’s otherwise excellent analysis of the current state of housing (see p.5), there is one single aspect that goes unmentioned.

One critical reason for the lack of private development, and the withdrawal of central funding for social housing under Thatcher’s and every subsequent government, is that of supply and demand. It is not in the interest of developers to build and release an excess of supply and maintain the high levels of profit to which they, and the money-lending fraternity, feel entitled. Local authority social housing at affordable rents undermines the whole system of control in the housing market. The real question to be addressed is how to get out of this downward spiral.

Bryan Scott, Scott Associates

Editor Christine Murray () Deputy editor Rory Olcayto () Acting administrator Rakesh Ramchurn () Digital editor Simon Hogg () News editor Richard Waite ( ) Reporter Merlin Fulcher () Asia correspondent Hyunjoo Lee Technical editor Felix Mara () Technical reporter Laura Mark AJ Publications editor James Pallister () Special projects editor Emily Booth () Sustainability editor Hattie Hartman () Sustainability intern Angeles Hevia AJ Buildings Library editor Tom Ravenscroft () Art editor Brad Yendle () Graphic designer Ella Mackinnon () Designers Tom Carpenter () Production editor Mary Douglas (on leave) Acting production editor Abigail Gliddon () Acting sub-editor Alan Gordon () Contributing editor Ian Martin Editorial director Paul Finch

Chief executive officer Natasha Christie-Miller Managing director of architecture and media Conor Dignam Group commercial director Alison Pitchford Commercial director James MacLeod () Business development managers Nick Roberts (), Ceri Evans () Group advertising manager Amanda Pryde () Account managers Hannah Buckley (), Simon Collingwood (), Steph Atha () Classified and recruitment sales Mark Malone ()

LETTER OFK THE WEE

There are enough empty buildings already, many owned by government, so why don’t we turn these into homes instead of building more? ‘Growth’ is by nature unsustainable and, unfortunately for those in

the built environment, so is a new building. I agree with the motivation to stop design quality being eroded, but I hope some thought can be put towards alternative methods of creating homes in a sustainable world.

Levitt Bernstein’s house-in-agarage is a good precedent.

Joe Giddings, AJ online ‘Better Homes’ is a no-brainer, but not necessarily ‘More Homes’. There are plenty of empty and convertible buildings.

There are also plenty of homes that need to be replaced, although often with those that are too small. Perhaps buyers aren’t buying housebuilders’ output for the simple reason they are too small to live in.

There isn’t really a ‘shortage’ of housing, just a shortage in the south east where companies have been ‘encouraged’ to move, by government policy.

Encouraging businesses to relocate to where the underemployed workforce already lives would be cost-effective in reducing the housing ‘crisis’ in terms of numbers and would save billions in benefits and commuting costs.

John Kellet, AJ online

AJ subscription   Overseas  Back issues and subscriptions Visit subscription.co.uk /aj/akus or call    & quote priority code ‘’ Social media Twitter @ArchitectsJrnal Facebook/TheArchitectsJournal LinkedIn Architects’ Journal group

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Project1_AJ 1/2 page 07/05/2012 21:14 Page 1

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Building study

MORE HOMES BETTER HOMES

Crossing the Rubicon PRP says designing social housing is about choosing the right battles to fight. Rory Olcayto goes ringside. Photography by Tim Crocker R5

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s a residential tower not clad with cheap metal rainscreen panels a cause for celebration? If so, put your hands together for PRP’s Rubicon House in King’s Cross.

And stamp your feet too, because this one’s in… wait for it: brick!

It can feel like that sometimes.

When I first saw Rubicon House, or R5, as it’s called on developer Argent’s masterplan, the first of 10 residential projects planned for the 27ha site, it was from a bus window and that’s what I thought, along with ‘I wonder who did it?’

It looked bold. Purposeful. Honest.

Look – the concrete floorplates are expressed in the elevation, just like that broody Sergison Bates number in Finsbury Park (AJ 28.08.08). And the inset balconies look spacious; they’re not mardy little gob-ons. How about that? Better still, a quick phone Google says it’s social housing, not a Scroogey speculative buy-to-let rip-off. And were those commercial units I saw on the ground floor? (Yes, they were).

From the top deck of a passing bus, PRP’s 15-storey Post-CABEist

tower seemed a worthy neighbour to John McAslan’s King’s Cross Station extension and Stanton Williams’ Granary retrofit for Central Saint Martins, the other main buildings anchoring Argent’s slow-burn megaproject. If first impressions count, Rubicon House counted.

PRP’s design – 117 apartments arranged around three circulation cores – stacks up pretty well: 70 per cent of the flats, which come with one, two three or four bedrooms, have two or more aspects. There is mixed tenure, with 78 general needs social-rent apartments, 24 shared ownership >>

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Right Repetitive patterning and expressed floorplates in the elevations helped speed up the construction of Rubicon House; the Dutch brick stock recalls local masonry

Rubicon House, King’s Cross, London PRP Architects notes -

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apartments and 15 supported housing apartments. There are seven wheelchair-adapted properties. Bravo.

They’re not exactly capacious, however. One-bed flats are 45m2 and two bed flats are 65m2, so both are shy of London Housing Design guidelines. Yet three-bedroom flats stretch to 90m2, which exceeds them.

Strange decision? ‘You’ve got to pick your battles,’ says project director Ziba Adrangi. Here’s one of the victories: all the family units, more than a third of the stock, have fair-sized balconies, accessible from more than one room. And a number of twobedroom flats have balconies as well.

The sudden appearance of Rubicon

‘There is repetition and economy of detailing and space planning’  ..

House on the north London skyline is evidence that Argent’s vision for King’s Cross is beginning to pick up speed. The developer commissioned PRP in May 2008, four months after the housing specialist won an invited competition to design plot R5. Planning approval was given in April 2010. Seven months later, Carillion was on site, piling. In January 2011, the concrete frame was started and, by July this year, Carillion was done. A week after completion, One Housing Group’s first tenants moved in. At one point – ‘for three or four months’ – there were five architects working on Rubicon House, but mostly it was ‘me, Jordan and one other’ says Adrangi. ‘We worked very well together,’ she says of project architect Jordan Perlman. ‘We’ve designed it in a consistent way; there is a lot of repetition; there is economy of detailing, of space planning.’

PRP is also executive architect >>

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of the even bigger block next door, designed by MaccreanorLavington, which is slightly more attractive in terms of its massing and its brickwork details. It also treats the ground floor with a little more aplomb, framing the commercial unit windows with stone portals.

So why brick? Because PRP Architects wanted a building that felt solid and unpretentious.

‘It means the elevation has relief; there are shadows, deep reveals, windows that sit behind brickwork,’ says Perlman. He throws in a reference to tenements in Chicago and says the context, Central Saint Martins’ Granary, the warehouse conversions and bulky new builds on nearby Ice Wharf, also played a part in shaping its look. As did its neighbour to the south, an as-yet unbuilt commercial HQ which has influenced the tower form at the east end and its sliced-off corner.

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Left The roof terrace is reserved for part-ownership residents. Relief areas of red brick were inspired by terracotta cladding on a disused London Underground station opposite

Morrison design for Sainsbury’s HQ seems to have fallen by the wayside, despite eating into R5’s original footprint and causing PRP to shrink its originally bigger scheme).

There is another influence at play, Perlman adds. Hans Kollhoff ’s New York-style tower in Berlin’s Postdamer Platz for DaimlerChrysler.

Delving deeper, Perlman points out that the facade expresses the structural grid behind. ‘The concrete frame lies behind every second brick infill bay,’ he says. Ah yes, honesty.

The expressed floorplate – what’s that all about? Is it still a big deal to the typical British architect?

‘It’s bolted-on precast – but it’s not just an aesthetic thing. It helped take the brickwork off the critical path. We sealed each floor off with the inner lining once the frame went up and then laid the brickwork on the precast transoms from mobile platforms. No scaffold.’

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Rubicon House, King’s Cross, London PRP Architects

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social housing, with mixed tenure and part-ownership homes, slap bang in the middle of London, with masonry walls in place of rainscreen cladding, that actually looks alright. And it was built really quickly. Result?

That’s down to the residents. Put it this way: Would you live there?

Would you want to raise your family there? Are the floor-to-ceiling windows your cup of tea? Despite the precedent set by a large, open-air lobby with enclosed, fairly spacious lift chambers off them, there’s not much communal room elsewhere. There is a roof garden, but it’s reserved for the part-ownership home dwellers.

You’ve got to give them something to set them apart, right? (The architects should have gone to war over this.)

Play areas are minimal. The landscape in the back court is small. In general, the kitchens are too big and the dining rooms are too small (the architect pointed this out). In time, as Argent’s

Clockwise, from far left All the family-sized units in Rubicon House – more than a third of the stock – have fair-sized balconies; View to south through one of the floor-toceiling windows; Earlier affordable housing in the neighbourhood offered greater opportunities for children to play; Lobby areas in Rubicon House are spacious but strictly functional

ambitious plan takes shape, this may well change – at least there should be more space for children to play.

Meanwhile, nearby, Art Deco Cecil Rhodes House on Goldington Street, a soaring brick tower with glass-brick light stairwells and swish stucco lighting details, has two-bedroom flats that, at 70m2, have bigger footprints than the equivalent in Rubicon House.

They have sturdy balconies, too.

And then there’s Somers Town, which mixes five-storey blocks ranged across a grid of tree-lined streets that offers more opportunities for children to play – because it’s a well-planned, street-level neighbourhood. We used to build high-quality ‘affordable’ homes without batting an eyelid.

There’s so much catching-up to do. PRP – Adrandgi and Perlman especially – Carillion and the Argent team as well, deserve praise for making a start. But let’s not get too excited just because it’s brick. ■

Project data

start on site December 2010 date of completion July 2012 gross internal floor area 12,320m2 total cost £23 million (approx, including infrastructure) cost per m2 £1,600 (approx, excluding infrastructure) form of contract or procurement route Design and Build architect PRP Architects client King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership end-user One Housing Group structural engineer and m&e consultant WSP planning consultant RPS landscape architect Townshend Landscape Architects project manager & cost consultant Davis Langdon main contractor Carillion cad software used Autocad

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Building study

£1,000 m

Mae’s spacious affordable homes aren’t radical, but they work. James Pallister visits the latest arrival in New Islington.

Photography by Tim Soar

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ew Islington is set on a 12.5 hectare piece of land in east Manchester, just a brisk walk from Piccadilly train station.

A rural area up until the late 18th century, it became part of Manchester’s expanding industrial heartland in the 19th century. Latterly it was home to Cardroom, a ‘sink’ estate with only half of its 204 homes occupied when it was demolished following its designation in 2002 as a site for the exemplar ‘Millennium Community’ programme. ..

MORE HOMES BETTER HOMES 3 2

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Developer Urban Splash with Will Alsop developed the ambitious masterplan for the area in 2002.

Work has faltered in the economic downturn, but several schemes have completed, each a distinctive hybrid of familiar housing types.

On Guest Street dRMM took a difficult, narrow site and developed a new Victorian back-to-back housing in grey engineering brick. Alsop’s ‘Chips’ (AJ 22.05.09) used bright colours, supergraphics and three >> 

The Guts, New Islington, Manchester Mae Architects

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stacked volumes to mediate the vast massing of his nine-storey apartment block. FAT’s Islington Square souped-up flat-roofed courtyard blocks in white render with a jazzy brickwork facade, expressed sills and Dutch-gable style parapets.

With ‘The Guts’, located just off New Islington’s causeway-like main road, Mae’s contribution has been to create a type of oversized normality. The two-storey homes are all front door, window and gable end; a cartoonish amplification of the platonic home. Perky and peppy, these are houses that want to be houses. ..

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Search for ‘Mae’ on AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk

Mae was appointed in 2009

by Great Places, Urban Splash’s social housing partner on the New Islington scheme. The brief was for 18 units; a mix of houses for social rent and shared ownership with an emphasis on low-density and family housing. The majority of the social rent homes were for Cardoom residents with the right to return.

On Alsop’s masterplan, adjacent towers were planned for the vacant lot and Mae was desperate to get some height into the scheme, says practice founder Alex Ely. Accordingly, the two four-bedroom houses that >> 

The Guts, New Islington, Manchester Mae Architects

bookend the scheme at its southern edge have a third storey. Their gables are rotated 90 degrees, on axis with the street, helping to reinforce a taller, slimmer version of the dramatic gable repeated throughout the scheme. As it happens, the masterplan looks like it may develop into a much more low-rise affair.

Mae’s initial plan for the block on Weybridge road – two narrow terrace blocks – relied on having a road down the middle. This was dispensed with when a demanding budget kicked in; losing the road halved the project’s infrastructure costs. So two terraces of 10 houses were split into 10 semis, then rotated 90 degrees with the gables running perpendicular instead  ..

of parallel to the street. This gave more room for on-plot car parking and what Ely describes as the ‘slightly unusual but expedient typology’ of the side-byside, back-to-back semis that emerged.

One of the downsides of the backto-back arrangement is that the living rooms of the two-bedroom houses are single aspect and can get gloomy.

The kitchen/dining areas, however, also look on to the street as well as the parking space, which most residents seem to use as a patio, comfortable enough with security to park their cars on the ‘kerbs’ of the shared surface roads. The window units throughout are generously sized at 0.9m per bay, though their shallow reveals make for a distinctively ‘flat’ elevation that

may not be to everyone’s taste.

Ely says that Mae ‘wanted to create something which was robust enough to take a degree of personalisation’.

This is evident already, even though residents have only been in three months, with clocks, planting and outdoor seating accessorising the balconies’ grey balustrades.

Not that there would be much budget for fanatical detailing. The houses were built to £1,000/m2 and the social rent units are priced at £135 per week (two-bed, threeperson) and the shared ownership equivalent is at £135,000, for 2.4m ceiling heights and 94m2 – 10 per cent bigger than required by the London Housing Design Guide.

Resident Georgina, 38, is happy with her new place: ‘I love it, you can’t hear anyone next door and it’s spacious with nice big windows. It’s like I’m on holiday.’

‘We put the money where the value was; in coming up with a very efficient layout which has good circulation and maximises useable rooms, albeit with a good lobby,’ says Ely. The structure is traditional timber frame, with load-bearing brick in one colour on the ground storey and – in a nod to Fat’s and dRMM’s schemes – alternating between grey, ivory and red on the second storey.

All the houses meet Code for Sustainable Homes Level 3. Sadly the covers for the ground source heat pumps were omitted in the Design and Build process, so visitors to some houses can see the beige Mitsubishilogoed apparatus in the front garden.

Inside, the plan is partly dictated by the Manchester Accessibility rules DFA2, with each room accounting for the turning circle of a wheelchair.

Thus, the downstairs bathroom

Above Each of the houses has a small strip of garden in front of it

Perky and peppy, these are houses that want to be houses ..

PW_CR_07 PW _CR_08 PW _CR_09 PW _CR_10 PW _CR_11

Due to levels on site, boundary walls may need to be stepped to suit and gardens graded to ensure level thresholds to units

Levels shown are not typical of floor levels throughout. Refer to 0924-T-102 and 103 for individual units' ground floor FFL 1 hour fire rated compartment 1/2 hour fire rated compartment

Section

Project data

CC

BB

6 5 4 3

2 1

AA 6 5 4 3 2 1

Key plan 1:500

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3 1

Rev.

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Date

Description

/

04.10.10 Drawing updated to tender status. Drawing updated to show agreed VE items and general amendments. DFA2 Layouts and information not shown

A

15.10.10 Gutter detail adjusted to inset detail / garden boundary walls shown with brick plinth and railing

B

26.10.10 SBD Light position moved to wall/ Fire rated compartments shown/ Brick and insulation shown/ Loft hatch shown

C

01.11.10 Gas membrane note added

Job No.

0924

Job Name

The Guts, New Islington

Title

House Type B - 3 Bed 4 Person House (Patchwork)

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1. External porch 2. Hall 3. Living room 4. Bathroom 5. Bedroom 6. Storage 7. Landing 8. Kitchen 9. WC and cloakroom 0

1m

Above Kitchen/ dining areas look out on the parking space, which most residents use as a patio

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is slightly bigger than you might expect, and there’s something afoot with the proportions of the rooms. It may be that so many dimensions in the rooms and corridors are derived from a turning circle of a particular radius, giving a subconscious, slightly jarring unity to the proportions. It’s worth noting that while minimum space standards are desirable, so is a framework that allows the architect some give in applying them, to guard against the occasional odd, unintended spatial consequence of the application of codes in a cost-sensitive project. In Building Dwelling Thinking, Martin Heidegger worried whether ‘even [when] well-planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light

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1

and sun… do the houses hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?’ Mae’s project certainly ticks off the first list, an unfortunately rare achievement in new housing and it has squeezed in enough flair within the design code requirements. As for the dwelling, the reassuring size of the porch gives needed depth to the elevations. It looks like a good place to pull off mucky shoes, prop up a bike or bring a seat from inside for a sit down in the sun. Prosaic, but important. It’s the sort of detail that raises the dayto-day quality of our lives, whether we realise it or not. Hopefully this type of cheap, compact, yet grand scheme will become ever more unremarkable over the next decade. ■

Status

Scale

Tender

1:50 @ A1

Drawing No.

Date.

0924 - T - 211 C

04.10.10

Sheet No.

start on site February 2011 date of completion August 2012 gross internal area 5 x two-bedroom house: 94m2 5 x three-bedroom house: 108m2 2 x four-bedroom house: 129m2 6 x three-bedroom terraced house: 106m2 type of procurement Design & Build total cost £2.2 million cost per square metre £1,000/m2 (excl. externals) total cost £2.5 million client Great Places Housing Group/Urban Splash architect Mae Architects structural engineer Stockley Associates cdm co-ordinator Arcus approved building inspector Manchester City Council quantity surveyor Simon Fenton Partnership main contractor Mansell Partnership Housing m&e consultant Arc Electrical, Parker Plumbing and Heating cad software used Vectorworks on-site energy generation 10% from air source heat pumps annual mains water consumption 38m3 per occupant airtightness at 50 pa 3.83m3/h/m2 (average over all properties) annual co2 emissions 19kg/m2 (average per property)

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Technical study

Peak performance

BFLS’s demountable stage shell is shaped by precise acoustic engineering, writes Felix Mara. Photography by David Grand

M

ost of us are prone to take good or, at least, audible acoustics for granted, being accustomed to spending time indoors listening to amplified sound.

It’s when we’re outside that we become more aware that satisfactory sound transfer isn’t something that just happens as a matter of course.

The problems are particularly acute when high-quality unamplified sound is a priority. Accepting this challenge, Soundforms, billed as the world’s first ever mobile acoustic performance shell, has been developed to bring indoor quality and acoustics to outdoor venues. Originally conceived by

BFLS director Jason Flanagan with conductor and music producer Mark Stephenson, who formed a consortium specifically for this project with BFLS associate director Paul Bavister, Arup Acoustics associate Ian Knowles and Olly Watts of ES Global, its prototype was completed in March this year and Soundforms, which made an appearance at the London 2012 Olympic Park, hit the headlines in July (AJ 12.07.12) when a version of it won Littlehampton Council’s Stage by the Sea competition for a £40,000 shelter and performance space. Rival contestants were incensed that the resources they had

Now part of your AJ subscription

Images. Drawings. Data.

Search for ‘Soundforms’ on AJBuildingsLibrary. co.uk

Left Unlike traditional canvas performance canopies, Soundforms does not allow sound to escape evenly around the stage Right The inner cheeks of the shell are manufactured from white joelastic, a stretch spandexlycra fabric

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invested in working up site-specific submissions were wasted when what one described as ‘a modified version of a standard product’ won.

The 18-month Soundforms design and fabrication programme benefited from £500,000 of Enterprise Investment Scheme funding, which helped the consortium to pursue its target of a format for visually striking venues, capable of being installed in three days and demounted in one, with enhanced broadcast quality and, with a range of three sizes, suitable for festival audiences of up to 40,000 or able to provide exceptional acoustic sound quality for audiences of 500-750.

‘The shell aims to create the onstage acoustic of a concert hall, and is radically different to the acoustic performance of a typical openair concert fabric enclosure,’ says Flanagan. ‘Musicians will be able to hear each other with much greater clarity, thereby ensuring higher standards of performance.’ Optimised acoustic reflectors installed onto the fixed overhead and vertical side stage wing trusses create an inner surface delivering a dynamic on-stage acoustic, enhancing the degree of ensemble between different sections of a band or orchestra. The strength and clarity of the acoustics at Soundforms’ launch concert in March was so good it was almost impossible to believe the >> ..

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Soundforms BFLS

Clockwise from left Plan; section; the inflated sections of the structure are connected and sealed with airtight zips as used in Nasa space suits; the shell reflects sound towards the audience; all fabric used in the structure is rated class 0 for surface spread of flames; lightweight aluminium trusses are solution treated and artificially aged to increase proof stress, tensile stress and hardness

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2 1. Structural node 2. Stage 3. Backstage area 4. Acoustically transparent internal fabric 5. Acoustic panel 6. External fabric skin

music was unamplified. To increase the sound levels projected towards the audience, a ‘peak’ projects overhead, beyond the conductor, reflecting as much sound as possible down towards the audience.

‘Our starting point was the model of an indoor concert hall, similar to the one at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (AJ 24.05.12), which I worked on with Jason,’ says Knowles. ‘We avoided directing too much energy back at the performers and bounced it towards the audience using geometry and a mixture of visible 18mm plywood reflecting panels, painted white, and acoustically transparent lycra screens with additional plywood panels behind.

Grasshopper software, used as a parametric plug-in to Rhino, helped to optimise the form of the peak and Arup used Odeon acoustic software to fine-tune the acoustic design. But, despite the use of software as a >> ..

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PHOTO BFLS

Soundforms BFLS

form-finding tool, Soundforms is a dead ringer for a gaping shark.

‘The Inflated fabric skin is supported on a lightweight aluminium frame, which rotates into position around an articulated pin joint, locked to a steel stage grid and weighed down with 26 tonnes of ballast to resist wind load,’ says Bavister. ‘The trusses are rotated and simultaneously pull the external fabric into position, rather like a pram lid, and the skin is then inflated and the acoustic panels flown into position.’ Alternatives to ballast, with enhanced wind uplift resistance are also available. The skin comprises eight white PVC-coated polyester cushions inflated to various depths by hoses connected to a low-noise AHU, which are attached to the frame with belts and buckles before being connected together with waterproof, airtight zips. The outer skin was designed and manufactured by Architen Landrell and Tensys who worked on Snell Associates’ demountable Garsington Opera pavilion (AJ 08.09.11) and have been involved in the NASA space programme.

To return to the Littlehampton saga, the apologia for Soundforms  ..

might argue that BFLS’s submission was, after all, a modified version of the product, which is marketed as being customisable; that the council had a strong case for choosing a submission with such exceptional acoustic credentials; and that it is unlikely it would have invested its own resources in the competition if it had all but pre-selected the winner. Would the reaction have been the same if the winner had been a practice which time after time makes almost identical proposals for very different sites?

There is also a long-standing debate around whether architects should work on buildings which are products or prototypes for mass production.

The case for would argue that these benefit from architectural input and generous levels of design time, whereas the case against might say it undermines the demand for architects and the supply of buildings which are sensitive to the genius loci. Regarding the case for, it would certainly be hard to deny the positive contribution of BFLS’s architectural expertise to the Soundforms enterprise. ■ View films showing Soundforms’ acoustic concept at TheAJ.co.uk/Soundforms

Project data

Above left Aluminium truss arch sections are built on the ground, starting with the front of the structure, and are pulled into position Above right The shell’s components are precisely fabricated and set out to form a smooth surface

completion of prototype March 2012 installation at olympic park July 2012 construction period Three days platform area 75m2 procurement Partnering total cost| £350,000 cost per m2 £3,500 client Soundforms architect BFLS structural engineer Total Solutions Group with Malcolm Richards (aluminium frame) and Architen Landrell and Tensys (skin) acoustic consultant Arup Acoustics project manager and main contractor ES Global cdm co-ordinator ES Global acoustic panels Fineline aluminium trusses Total Solutions Group

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Proposals for underused areas of land in Sunderland, Whitley Bay, Newcastle, Gateshead and South Shields.

CONTENTS

1ST PLACE 2ND PLACE A19 3RD PLACE COMMENDATIONS SHORTLIST JURY ENTRANTS

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Newcastle upon Tyne

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Washing

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The North East is a sprawling region full of potential for development. Despite successive waves of economic booms, there still remain pockets of obscure leftover land and neglected plots that could – with imagination and new thinking – accommodate a host of functions and respond to local needs.

Greater local engagement and active participation in the developmentA193 of our urban realm is one of the central themes of the coalition government’s current planning reforms. As a result, in the coming years A186 we are likely to see an expanded role for neighbourhood and community groups in what gets built, and where.

Whitley Bay

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Forgotten Spaces 2012 is an opportunity for testing ideas and a chance to put locally inspired proposals out there. On the following pages, The Architects’ Journal presents the 2012 winners and shortlisted entries, which range from the smallest of urban chares through to Dunston Staithes – reputed to be the largest wooden structure in Europe. The shortlisted schemes are exhibited at the Newgate Shopping Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne from 8 November until 14 December 2012. Why not head there to take a closer look?

Amanda McManus Regional director, RIBA North East

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Editor James Pallister Designers Steve Fenn, Tom Pollard – Design by St Sub editors Cecilia Thom, Nicola Homer AJ editor Christine Murray Acting production editor Abigail Gliddon Editorial director Paul Finch Commercial director James MacLeod Managing director of architecture and media Conor Dignam Chief executive officer Natasha Christie-Miller

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Sunderland

Washington

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MAP 1 Symphonic Backwater NE15 2 Tyne Tee NE8 2BF 3 Pink Plaza NE1 4HF 4 St James’ Park NE1 4ST 5 City Wall Circuit NE1 6 Augmented Distillery NE1 1UF 7 Angular Flight NE1 5DH 8 Lost Icons NE1 1RQ 9 online_ontyne NE1 3AE 10 Rethink Replay, new sounds from an old chare NE1 3DE 11 Behind the Side NE1 3UF 12 Pilgrim’s Rest NE1 6SQ 13 Home Surveillance NE1 6BF 14 My Eggcellent Idea NE1 6PA 15 Urban Sculpture Park NE1 8AG 16 Forgotten River, Revealing– Connecting–Celebrating NE6 5AQ 17 Forgotten Relics NE2 2PN 18 The Hailing Station, North Shields NE30 1JE 19 Longsands Theatre NE30 4ER 20 The Lime Kilns Industrial Museum SR6 7NG 21 New City Industries SR1 1UF

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Issued with The Architects’ Journal. For reprints, call James MacLeod on 020 3033 2939. Published November 2012 by EMAP, powered by Top Right Group.

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Akzidenz-Grotesk BQ.

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1ST

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Project: Tyne Tee Designer: Mawson Kerr Architects – Will Mawson, Daniel Kerr Location: Dunston Staithes, Tyne and Wear Tyne Tee is an iconic driving range at Dunston Staithes, which transforms a timber structure thought to be the largest in Europe

08.11.12

Dunston Staithes is a listed structure, a scheduled ancient monument, which is considered to be the largest timber structure in Europe. However, this iconic structure is a forgotten space, disused and slowly eroding into the River Tyne.

The Tyne Tee proposal combines two passions of the North East – heritage and sport – to create an inventive and dynamic use for the Staithes as an iconic eco-driving range. This proposal is a light-touch, low-cost and sustainable solution designed to bring the Staithes back into use and back into the public psyche.

With a new-found attention and revenue stream, the proposal would act as a catalyst for a long-term strategy for the Staithes’ future use. The double-decker structure lends itself perfectly to the modern-day driving range and with the ‘48-hour’ biodegradable golf balls with fish food at their core, you can ‘hit some balls and feed the fish’.

55

Dunston Staithes lends itself to the idea of an ecofriendly driving range where you can hit biodegradable golf balls and feed the fish

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A listed structure, and scheduled ancient monument, Dunston Staithes’ doubledecker structure is perfect for the modern day driving range

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Project: New City Industries Designer: John Robinson Beattie Location: 178-185 High Street West, Sunderland

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An adaptable architectural system is proposed to inhabit a redundant steel frame. It aims to question the generic masterplanning present in areas of potential regeneration

08.11.12

To this day, the site of New City Industries has remained a forgotten space where a redundant steel frame stands as a monument to the boom-and-bust culture of pre-recession development. This opportunity allowed the architect to question the type of real-estate development that has proved to be nonsustainable. The proposal is underpinned by a new type of architectural system, allowing adaptability, fewer restrictions, efficient extensions and no vacant spaces. The system would inhabit the redundant frame and change to meet market demand and satisfy multiple uses for buying and renting.

The system is based on flexible units that cater to the client’s requirements using a standard kit of parts. If additional floor space were required in the future, new units could be connected vertically or horizontally across the frame. This is made possible through an interchangeable panelling system, which tackles the problem of adaptability that is inherent in other modular construction.

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The system is based on a series of flexible units that can cater to a client’s requirements through use of a standard kit of parts

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3RD Project: Augmented Distillery Designer: Matt Drury Location: 4–10 St John’s Street, Newcastle upon Tyne

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With the use of extensive historical and cultural research, the thesis is derived from the collective memory of the site, recollecting forgotten memories from the site’s past to inform a new narrative through re-interpretation and adaptation.

Selected memories of former architecture, inhabitants and events are remembered and relayered, to reinstate a nexus of forgotten spaces that have become lost among the city’s dense urban fabric. The distillery reprises the role of a former spirit merchant and distiller, Mr Samuel Stokoe, whose premises occupied the site during the 19th century.

A reinterpretation of Stokoe’s spirit cellar uncovers the forgotten and culverted Pow Dene, which runs below the street’s course to provide fresh water for the production of the whisky. Through adaptation, the distillery recollects the former architecture of St John’s Street and architect John Johnstone – its facade is a mnemonic facsimile, reminiscent of the streets of former ancestors, recollecting past memories of the site.

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During the 19th Century the site was home to a spirit merchant and distiller

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The architecture recalls forgotten collective memories to inform an illuminating narrative through reinterpretation and adaptation

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COMMENDATIONS The Hailing Station references an important cultural heritage, while providing the community with an opportunity to reclaim and reuse a site in North Shields for cultural rather than commercial use

Project: The Hailing Station, North Shields Designer: Daniel Burn, Lorna Burn Location: The former Lloyds Hailing Station, North Shields This proposal utilises the site of the former Lloyds Hailing Station to the east of the main North Shields Fish Quay. The site was used until the 1960s as a hailing station to determine the nature of the cargo and destinations of ships using the River Tyne.

Since then it has become more and more forgotten, with the former station finally being demolished in 2003.

The Hailing Station seeks to rediscover the site not only as an important element of the quay’s fishing heritage, but also as a new cultural focal point for the local community.

Positioned confidently within the River Tyne itself, it is designed as a flexible space that could equally be used as a viewpoint to the North Sea, a refreshments shack, a beacon or concert platform. It would not be dependent on any one of these activities for its success, however, it simply creates a people focus to a site that has been left unused for more than 40 years.

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Project: online_ontyne Designer: Greg Walton, Simon Bumstead Location: Tyne Bridge Towers, Quayside, Newcastle upon Tyne The Tyne Bridge is a potent and evocative symbol of the North East and, since opening in 1928, it has allowed commuters to pass freely between Gateshead and Newcastle.

However, despite its success at connecting the upper strata of Tyneside, it disregards the bottom layer. The online_ontyne idea is to create circulation space and a cultural radio/media hub within the forgotten towers of the Tyne Bridge to reconnect the disjointed urban fabric and create conversation between Newcastle and Gateshead. As well as this physical connection, the scheme attempts to create a cultural link with both sides of the River Tyne.

Through studies of the history of the Tyne Bridge towers – which were originally designed to be warehouses, although floors were never allocated for this use – online_ ontyne attempts to revisit this original function by creating a warehouse with an inverted function – a ‘cultural warehouse’.

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The online_ontyne idea is to create circulation space and a cultural radio/ media hub within the forgotten towers of the Tyne Bridge. This space will reconnect the disjointed urban fabric and create conversation between Newcastle and Gateshead

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SHORTLIST Project: Behind the Side Designer: Ryder Architecture Location: Akenside Hill, Newcastle upon Tyne Behind the Side provides affordable studio space for the user to live, work, exhibit and trade in the heart of Newcastle. Detached from the bustling activity of the historic Quayside, the iconic Tyne Bridge and the busy routes into Newcastle city centre, our site is hidden, forgotten and dormant – a permanent reminder of an ambitious architectural vision terminated.

The open nature of the studios enables the public to engage with the ever-changing, live talents on display. Visitors can participate in imaginative workshops hosted by creative professionals; the programme provides the opportunity for daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms to exist within this once-forgotten space. Behind the Side embraces the main lines of force across the site, dematerialising the linear planes with dispersed and transparent forms.

LEFT: Behind the Side transforms a redundant route into an enterprising workspace and a creative destination with which the local community can engage

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TOP: Depicting the angular flight, this revering installation serves to deconstruct the operation of a museum and also reconnect the fragmented areas to the north and south of Newcastle Central Station

BOTTOM: A segment of 1960s utopian planning has left a cinematic series of beautiful but abrasive public spaces on the first-floor level.

Project: Angular Flight Designer: Atelier 35 – Matt Nicholl, William Mackey Location: Newcastle Central Station, Newcastle upon Tyne An open-air museum gangway is the catalyst to reconcile the fragmented areas that lie to the north and south of Newcastle Central Station. The works of famous and inspirational figures from the North East, Thomas Bewick and George Stephenson, are used as an inspiration to create a truly exceptional hybrid, counterpointing natural and industrial architectural forms. Bridging the gap in a poetic way, the project intends to inspire and captivate the imagination with its exhibits and shimmering bird-like roof, encouraging dialogue between those travellers passing through and paving the way for the current and future redevelopment of the area to the south of the station.

Project: Urban Sculpture Park Designer: Nicola Ibbotson Location: Newcastle City Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne In 1963, a new road was cut through Newcastle’s Central Library and Laing Art Gallery, including plans for a large cultural hub featuring a sculpture gallery extension that would span the road. Fragments of this were constructed and mostly torn down, but a small network of concrete public spaces remains. These remaining places, curated as a response to the dramatic spaces, present views over the city and confront its different ages. Built in 1904, the Gallery’s collection grew from only one painting into a large and varied body of work; one piece will seed this project’s new collection, and perhaps it will grow too. Looking up from ground level, unfamiliar silhouettes emerge from the concrete mass, beckoning you to investigate, and thereby strengthening the network. ..

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Project: Home Surveillance Designer: Archigrad – Daniel Pearce, Gabriel Hobby, Callum Louch Location: Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne CCTV is directed mainly at the prevention of property crime and its effect can be to push the homeless outside of city centres to increase the appeal of a particular place.

Starting from this perspective, we hope to address this forced social migration by placing the homeless behind the camera, instead of being victimised by its lens, in a social enterprise. To this end, we reintroduce the homeless to the city centre – enforcing the diversity of social classes and right of the homeless to exist in a public space. In choosing a cinema, we look to commandeer the vacant building. The relationship between the stage (the CCTV control tower site) and stalls (homeless accommodation site) highlights the idiosyncrasy of being under surveillance in a contemporary urban centre.

Project: Forgotten River, Revealing – Connecting – Celebrating Designer: Kelly Mackinnon, Stephen Roberts Location: Ouseburn Stadium Site, Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle’s industrial revolution began along the banks of the Ouseburn. The city’s fortune, decline and rebirth are linked to the water. This once-lush valley was transformed to heavy industry, which, in turn, became polluted dereliction. Parts of the valley have been reborn, whereas others remain lost.

We propose a ‘green corridor’ that will reveal the latent history embedded in this space.

This will restore a ravished landscape and reconnect once disparate parts of the city.

TOP: The proposal seeks to counter the marginalisation brought through CCTV surveillance, and to create a homeless community in a disused cinema in the heart of Newcastle

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RIGHT: Concept axonometric illustrating key strategies and routes of connection across the site

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Project: My Eggcellent Idea Designer: Nick Simpson Location: Beneath New Bridge Street, Newcastle upon Tyne Like much of our urban infrastructure, Newcastle’s central motorway has left many awkward, unappealing sites sitting empty close to the city centre. This proposal utilises the quiet, bypassed isolation and physical boundaries to the site’s advantage. A small number of lightweight timber buildings, designed to place minimal load on the rail tunnel under the site, provides the hub for a free-range chicken farm.

The walled site, beneath the on/off ramps of the neighbouring motorway, creates a natural enclosure for the hens and is far enough away from other buildings to offer no disturbance. The result is an urban farm that can provide a source of education for local people and a model for how we can make our food supply a more sustainable and fun addition to our cities.

Project: St James’ Park Designer: Ali Abbas, Neal Tanna Location: Strawberry Place, Newcastle upon Tyne From the expansion of Newcastle United’s stadium to the closure of the Tyne Brewery, the use of the surroundings of Gallowgate has changed dramatically. A countermeasure to this rapid growth, St James’ Park provides a communal space tucked inside advertising hoardings outside the Sports Direct Arena.

The scheme displays the virtues of progressive development as a holding space for market stalls, a theatre stand and a five-a-side pitch. This hub of activity seeks to improve the relationship between the football club and local community through sport and social enterprise.

LEFT: Tucked within the advertising hoardings outside the Sports Direct Arena, this vertical park can strengthen links between the community and Newcastle United Football Club

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TOP: There are many sites in our cities that are too isolated and awkward to appeal to human use.

However, through urban agriculture, ‘worthless’ land can still be of immense public benefit

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LEFT: Pilgrim’s Rest looks to re-install a sense of place and purpose into an urban landscape dominated by the constant act of just passing through

Project: Pilgrim’s Rest Designer: Philip Miller Location: Land adjacent to 118 Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne Pilgrim Street was once the chosen path to and from the relics of St Francis. Today, it carries different types of pilgrims: shoppers, office workers and students, all on their way to their own places of homage. Pilgrim’s Rest aims to develop a focal point for residents and commuters alike. In providing a place of rest, the proposal draws together different demographics to create an oasis of calm set against an otherwise harsh landscape.

The concept was developed as a reaction to the loss of the Golden Tiger Inn (on the site of which the project would stand) and the rest of lower Pilgrim Street, demolished to make way for the Newcastle City Centre bypass – which defines this area as a necessary detour, not a destination.

Project: Lost Icons Designer: Ian Murphy, Ollie Currie, James Peat, Katherine Pimblott Location: Land adjacent to the Bridge Hotel car park, Castle Garth, Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle can be considered identifiable and famous for its industrial history but, over the course of time, this is being replaced with a cultural heritage. Slowly, Newcastle’s industrial landmarks are being forgotten and what now puts the city on the map  ..

is its rich and diverse culture. This proposal for an alternative sightseeing tour of Newcastle draws inspiration from its cultural legacy.

A route is created across the city, transporting visitors to locations of forgotten spaces; at these sites, people are reminded about Newcastle’s historical or cultural past, and the importance of the sense of location in forming the city’s distinct identity.

The sightseeing tour will be carried out using modern technologies to juxtapose images of past and present, providing users with a unique perspective of lost icons of the North East.

ABOVE: At each stop on the route, an intervention is placed, which allows the viewer to witness the location in its current form before being taken back to a previous time

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Project: Pink Plaza Designer: Kay Glendinning, Brigitte Griffiths Location: Churchill Street, Newcastle upon Tyne The Pink Plaza transforms Churchill Street – a grey short rut in Newcastle’s gay area – into an inviting pedestrian route to the city and an oasis for local people and visitors to meet and relax. The Plaza’s concept derives from the area’s local name, the ‘Pink Triangle’. The kerb-free triangular ..

paving gives pedestrians priority, enhancing the feeling of space and interrupting linear movement. The design responds to the land through a triangular oasis containing a water cascade and steps for seating. New, attractive open frontages onto the plaza transform the rear aspects of the bars, promoting European-style outdoor cafes. Public art brings fun and function to the space. Relax in the funky curved seat, rest awhile on the ‘leaners’, or engage with the interactive boulevard wall during special events.

Rejuvenating the Pink Plaza helps to contribute to the council’s redevelopment plan in the south-west area of the city.

ABOVE: An ordinary street is transformed into a lively pedestrian area with outdoor cafes, an elegant raised oasis with curved seats, water spouts, spiral lighting, ‘leaners’ and an interactive wall for special events

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Project: The Lime Kilns Industrial Museum Designer: IMA, Ian McArdle, Jonathan Rixon, Tink Wilkinson, Kindred Form Location: Marsden Lime Kilns, Coast Road, Tyne and Wear The architect’s proposals involve the preservation of the 19th-century Marsden Lime Kilns and the creation of an industrial museum and regional heritage centre facing the powerful North Sea coastline near the mouth of the River Tyne. The existing kiln structures are sensitively integrated into the building’s west facade, providing a unique backdrop for permanent and touring shows as well as a local archive and visitors’ centre.

The focal point of the museum will be the kilns themselves and the story of lime  ..

production in the North East. Consolidated and refurbished, they become a powerful backdrop for the gallery’s programme of exhibitions and events.

Conceived as an elegant industrial envelope, the building is constructed from modular steel frames and clad in state-ofthe-art glass panels, which utilise both solar control and photovoltaic technologies.

The building integrates GeoSolar technology and rainwater harvesting in combination with an array of sophisticated control systems.

ABOVE: The Marsden Lime Kilns have been integrated into a new industrial museum and heritage centre in a stunning coastal landscape and protected wildlife habitat

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Project: Longsands Theatre Designer: K4 Architects Location: Longsands Beach, Tynemouth The proposal intends to exploit the natural features of Tynemouth Lido and its headland setting, with the aim of bringing this once-glorious structure back into use by the considered addition of some new facilities.

The additions will allow the space to be fully utilised as a performance, arts and events space; a tourist-information facility, bar and cafe will also be included.

A small cinema/black-box theatre will ensure the venue is usable throughout the year and in different weather conditions.

Accessibility will be addressed through the inclusion of an inclined elevator, which will also act as a tourist attraction, similar to the funicular railways of the past.

Project: Symphonic Backwater Designer: Otis Murdoch Location: The Lemington Gut, Newcastle upon Tyne The Lemington Gut is a forgotten backland, formed and manipulated over time through the dredging of the River Tyne and left over as a result of carving out a new route for boats. An interactive sculptural boardwalk connects a series of places along the Lemington Gut out into the Tyne, where it meets a boat converted into a sheltered seating area suitable for contemplation – these spaces are referred to as ‘sitooteries’.

The boardwalk criss-crosses the Lemington Gut, connecting to an urban farm, restaurant and accommodation for the homeless. The project aims to provide opportunities that can support people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in order to overcome some of the issues that can perpetuate their dependence.

An enhanced landscape brings interest and tourism to the area while providing employment and a means of getting the homeless back on their feet.

LEFT: The site is the former Tynemouth Lido adjacent to Longsands Beach. It is currently neglected, but was once the focal point of Tynemouth’s glorious past

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BELOW: A sculptural boardwalk connects a different places along the Lemington Gut, including a restaurant and visitor centre

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Project: Rethink Replay, new sounds from an old chare Designer: Rumen Dimov, Sarah Rozelaar, Theodora Kyrtata, Fatima Afzal, Mary Cooke-Fox, James Houston Location: Plummer Chare, Newcastle upon Tyne Plummer Chare provoked our imagination with its industrial past, eroding volumes and vintage mechanics. The desire for human presence conveyed by the place inspired our attempt to bring it to life with an installation to host a small music festival. Two principal tensions of linearity and verticality were identified; therefore, the installation consists of two parts forming a complete whole.

The platforms for the musicians are entirely suspended from the ground, thereby leaving the flow undisrupted.

The series of curved timber sections temporarily ‘heals’ the gap and completes the chare, rebuilding the strong feeling of complete enclosure with this unique ‘bench’.

Its flexibility allows an atmosphere of sliding into relations, which results in permeable gaps, mimicking the local urban erosion.

Provocative and playful, the installation aims to build upon lost opportunities to create an enjoyable environment for experimental music performances.

 ..

RIGHT: A repository of memory – Forgotten Relics offers a visitor centre, archive and place of restoration BOTTOM: A temporary installation designed to host an experimental music festival in an old Newcastle chare, Rethink Replay aims to restore a sense of human presence, celebrating the forgotten feeling of the past BOTTOM RIGHT: The circuit maps the town walls and offers accessible interaction, celebrating the infrastructure and development that once destroyed the walls, acknowledging their importance in the 21st century

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Project: Forgotten Relics Designer: Paul Jones, Will Campbell Location: St Mary’s Chapel, Jesmond Dene, Newcastle upon Tyne The holy relics of St Mary’s Chapel and the neighbouring Lady Well were two of the most important in Christendom during the medieval period. They were part of the Pilgrimage route between Canterbury (in the south) and Lindisfarne (in the north).

The city of Newcastle owes its existence to the location and popularity of these relics.

They have long been forgotten and are in a ruinous state, situated in a coppice of trees on the edge of Jesmond Dene, Newcastle.

The programme of work is conceived as a means of elevating the importance of these structures nationally and internationally, as well as complementing the existing facilities within the Dene. The scheme comprises two interventions. The first is a repository of memory located within the ruins of St Mary’s Chapel; it houses a visitor centre exhibiting the history of the relics, and serves as an archive for Newcastle’s medieval documents and a place of remembrance.

The second intervention is for restoration of the body and mind, and is located around the Lady Well. This building houses bathing facilities and a well to take in the waters.

Project: City Wall Circuit Designer: Ollie Currie Location: Old Town Wall, Newcastle upon Tyne The concept behind this forgotten space identifies a method of responding to the importance and demise of the city walls.

By creating an ‘entire unit’ as the walls once were, we can retrace as near as possible the line of the walls. The circuit aims to achieve numerous goals through a sensitive integration programme. LED installations guide cars and allow visitors to see the route.

At points of interest around the wall, a contrasting colour beam is fired and stays on to identify to the spectators the location of an existing section. The City Wall Circuit offers huge scale and small costs, and provides a cost-effective means to generate tourism, sustainable motorsport and a map of the city walls. It reminds us of the forgotten space within the old fortress. ..



JURY

Geoff Alsop

Chris Brown

Eric Carter

At the very least, the Forgotten Spaces ideas competition has provided the opportunity for architects, designers and students to look afresh at some of the North East’s backwaters – the perfect antidote to ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Several of the entries go much further however, illustrating real regeneration opportunities to visitors of the Forgotten Spaces Exhibition and underlining the potential for design-led redevelopment.

Forgotten Spaces is a stimulus to guerrilla urbanism. Competitions like this help us all to stop asking ‘Why doesn’t someone do something about it?’ and, instead, actually start doing something about it without asking ‘the authorities’ for permission.

Communities can take the initiative in improving our neighbourhoods and the excellent creativity of the ideas in Forgotten Spaces helps us to imagine the possibilities.

It’s always a pleasure to be involved in judging architectural ideas competitions and the RIBA’s Forgotten Spaces was no exception. The quality of thought, innovation and presentation was striking and the judges had a difficult time picking out the schemes that will be recognised at the award ceremony. The North East has its fair share of forgotten spaces and the competitors, both student and professional, rose to the challenge of addressing them with both skill and wit.

80 theaj.co.uk

08.11.12

Biographies Geoff Alsop Geoff Alsop is a director of Buttress Fuller Alsop Williams Ltd, where he focuses on public sector work. In 2010 he was elected chair of the RIBA North West Regional Council. He is also a member of the Design Review Panel at Places Matter! and the Design and Conservation Panel at Manchester City Council.

Chris Brown Tamsie Thomson

Richard Waite

I’m delighted that the RIBA’s Forgotten Spaces competition is being run in the North East. We’ve seen an amazingly high standard of entries this year, with some really impressive and imaginative ideas from across the region. It’s really encouraging to see such a huge public interest in our built environment and the spaces around us.

The successful reinvention of neglected spaces doesn’t always need buckets of cash or ‘iconic’ archi-bling thrown at it. The winner, as well as many of the shortlisted proposals, was ingenious, cost-effective and easily achievable. In fact somebody should do it. Architects have again shown that, given the opportunity, they can come up with the solutions to mend our cities creatively and with a relevance to context and a changed economic environment.

Chris Brown is chief executive of Igloo Regeneration’s development team and director of Isis Waterside Regeneration and Blueprint. He has been chair of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ regeneration panel, a CABE regional design ambassador and a witness to the House of Commons select committee on regeneration.

Eric Carter Until retirement in 2008, Eric Carter was a practising architect and chairman of Napper Architects in Newcastle upon Tyne, with expertise in education, major public sector projects and historic buildings. He was also immediate past chair of RIBA North East.

Tamsie Thomson Tamsie Thomson is director of the RIBA’s London region and previously led the RIBA’s thinktank, Building Futures. Previously, she worked at the Civic Trust and at Shelter, and taught architectural design at Brighton University for three years.

Richard Waite Richard Waite has been with The Architects’ Journal since 2004. He started as a reporter, before becoming the title’s dedicated northern correspondent. He is now news editor.

08.11.12

81

ENTRANTS PROPOSAL

DESIGNER

Angular Flight Asbestos Recycling Plant Augmented Distillery Behind the Side Bulman Place City Wall Circuit Civic Centre-Diffusion Dunston Staithes Adventure Island

Atelier 35 – Matt Nicholl, William Mackey Joe Crinion Matt Drury Ryder Architecture David Davies Ollie Currie Daniel Celeya Miranda Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust, The Cloud Commision Paul Jones, Will Campbell

Forgotten Relics Forgotten River, Revealing–Connecting–Celebrating Green Movement The Hailing Station, North Shields Home Surveillance The Lime Kilns Industrial Museum Longsands Theatre The Lost Generation Lost Icons Meet Me at Bandstand MISTiCAL Musical Chare My Eggcellent Idea New City Industries online_ontyne Pilgrim’s Rest Pink Plaza REA re-CREATE Rethink Replay, new sounds from an old chare Songs of the City St James’ Park Symphonic Backwater The Tyne E-Mitter Tee Unity Urban Play Urban Sculpture Park The View 82 theaj.co.uk

Kelly Mackinnon, Stephen Roberts TGP Landscape Architects, Claire Stokoe Daniel Burn, Lorna Burn Archigrad – Daniel Pearce, Gabriel Hobby, Callum Louch IMA, Ian McArdle, Jonathan Rixon, Tink Wilkinson, Kindred Form Ltd K4 Architects Matthew van Geffen Ian Murphy, Ollie Currie, James Peat, Katherine Pimblott Lina Gronskyte-Puodziuniene Robert Moxon Anastasia Ananieva, Ruta Austrina, Alexander Hart, Jessica Riddell, Edward Watkiss Nick Simpson John Robinson Beattie Greg Walton, Simon Bumstead Philip Miller Kay Glendinning, Brigitte Griffiths Newcastle City Council, Friends of Jesmond Cemetery Carol Moran Rumen Dimov, Sarah Rozelaar, Theodora Kyrtata, Fatima Afzal, Mary Cooke-Fox, James Houston Joseph Shepherd Ali Abbas, Neal Tanna Otis Murdoch Ed Mapplebeck, Adam Graham Mawson Kerr Architects – Will Mawson, Daniel Kerr Joe Ecob Richard MacCowan, Anzir Boodoo Nicola Ibbotson Ross Sanderson Photoline

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08.11.12

Practice

Legalese If you take on new types of work, insurance and warranties will keep you covered, says Mark Klimt

..

an insurance policy to exclude claims brought under warranties that have been assigned more than, say, twice – at least unless insurers have specifically consented.

Insurers should also be informed if you embark on a project significantly larger than those reported when the insurance was proposed. Similarly, if the architect is undertaking work of a new type, or if the percentage apportionments between existing work types alter significantly, this too should be reported. Insurers will have rated the risk based on information supplied to them, and you don’t want to face accusations that the risk was misrepresented.

As jobs become more bureaucratic, you may be asked to sign collateral warranties for the first time

HANNA MELIN

One of the concerns raised in connection with Building Information Modelling (BIM) and generally with the pooling of design disciplines is that it may encourage a consultant to enter areas for which they are not properly qualified. However, BIM and other modern manifestations, not least a client’s wish for a one-stop shop and the relentless pressure on fees, offer incentives for architects to stretch beyond their ‘comfort zone’.

This must be approached carefully and where relevant, following proper consultation and clearance.

A contract obliging an architect to use the skill, care and diligence reasonably to be expected of a consultant of that discipline, experienced in comparable projects, will mean that the architect will be judged by the somewhat enhanced standards of such an experienced relevant consultant. It will not be a defence to liability that the architect was chancing their arm.

They will need, therefore, either to have the relevant skills or to know where to go to acquire them.

If sub-consultants are engaged, it needs to be on terms that leave no gap between what is being asked of the architect, and what is being passed on to the relevant consultant. The architect will remain primarily responsible for the work that has been transferred on to the sub-consultant, so such sub-consultant needs to be chosen carefully, having received reasonable proof of their ability, solvency and insurance arrangements.

As projects become more bureaucratic, you may be asked to sign collateral warranties or duty of care deeds for the first time. These need to be reviewed to see that they are not imposing obligations on top of those agreed on the architect’s initial appointment. Insurers should be consulted, particularly if warranties have never been signed before, and/or if there is no obligation under the appointment to provide such warranties, in case insurers object to these effectively being ‘volunteered’. Insurers will generally accept that there may be valid commercial considerations why an architect would wish to placate a client and provide a warranty, even when not obliged to do so, but those insurers may wish to impose conditions on their consent. It is not uncommon, for example, for

The push for expanding into new areas or to respond to new challenges may have arisen from a willingness to meet the demands of clients and provide them with the single point of responsibility they seek. However, it is at least as important to make clear what your services do not include and to advise which other specialisms need to be engaged. A traditional bone of contention between architect and client is the need for a separate quantity surveyor. More recently, architects have faced battles over the client’s willingness or otherwise to engage CDM co-ordinators. It is of course common sense for anyone providing their services to clarify its borders, but it is particularly incumbent on an architect to do so, because the architect is generally relied upon to make sure that a project is set up on a sound footing and that there are no gaps in the contracted responsibilities. The chances are that, by default, the client will otherwise look to its architect to fill those gaps anyway!

Mark Klimt is a partner at Fishburns. He is legal adviser to the RIBA and operates the RIBA Helpline 

Culture

BLACK AND WHITE AND DREAD ALL OVER Alexander Brodsky’s latest work presents an unsettling vision of imagination and memory, writes Emily Booth  ..

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ALL PICTURES BY STEVE WHITE

exhibition White Room/Black Room by Alexander Brodsky is at the Calvert 22 gallery until 25 November. Free www.calvert22.org

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Left and above Installation shot, White Room/Black Room, 2012

What is a room? A contained space, where your mind can run free? Virginia Woolf thought it was rather a good idea to have one all to yourself.

Alexander Brodsky, slight, softly-spoken, who leaves a smoke trail of half-finished sentences, has created two: one white, one black.

There is the obvious contrast between light and darkness, waking and sleeping, life and death. If, on the surface, it seems straightforward, that’s because it is, says Brodsky: ‘It’s the simple things about life: the bedroom and the fire.’

Push through a white curtain and walk into bright light, blinking, and you’ll see drapes on the two long sides of the room, mirrors at either end, and a neat row of empty beds in-between, doll-sized, precisely spaced.

The urge is to count them, but it’s harder than it sounds.

It’s easy to get lost halfway down the line and they are reflected ad infinitum in the mirrors. There are 21.

The next thought: where have all the people gone? And then, even if they were here, they couldn’t sleep in this glare. Certainly it’s not a place that screams sex. It feels sterile.

Push through a black curtain and stumble through the gloom to an unsettling centrepiece. Here are the people then, tiered ranks of them, squatting around a blue flickering fabric flame, stark against shadow. Try and count these figures, and you’ll probably give up.

‘There are fewer beds than people,’ says Brodsky.

You might want to touch the figures: they are scratchy, hollow-sounding. The original model was cast in clay. These ones are Styrofoam copies.

It is the shape of the heads that interests most.

Square headdresses, hinting at a far-off civilisation, or an imagined population of imagined ritual.

The figures haven’t just appeared. They have been with Brodsky for ‘maybe 30 years… they are >> 

Culture White Room/Black Room, Alexander Brodsky

something of a self-portrait’. And then: ‘They sleep in the bright room. And in the dark room they are watching.’

You can only enter the dark room by travelling through the light, and you cannot leave the darkness without re-entering the light room.

‘Everything comes from me, from my childhood,’ Brodsky says. ‘The white space reminds me of a hospital or sanitarium. I wanted to create some working contrast, where you suddenly find yourself in the dark with something mysterious going on…

Drawings are fantastical, surreal: dark architectural doodles given life  ..

Above Series of pencil drawings, White Room/Black Room, 2012 Right Unfired clay sculpture, White Room/Black Room, 2012

They are at the edge of the mind, these thoughts.’

Brodsky was one of the leading Paper Architects in Russia in the 80s, working in collaboration with Ilya Utkin. Constrained by state-sanctioned dreariness, the Paper Architects entered plans and designs to foreign ‘forbidden competitions’ for others to judge: an architecture of dreams.

The dream-like quality runs through his other works on display. To get to this part of the exhibition you have to leave the two rooms, walk through the gallery lobby and go down a flight of stairs. Here, the work is politely and properly pinned on walls and presented in cases.

But it is not polite work. There are a series of pencil drawings on beige paper. Factories with smoke pluming from chimneys. Curved pyramids. Binoculars through which no one could ever see. And birds. Birds with talons curled around branches and around other, smaller ..

We need to be ever mindful of what makes a house a home, writes James Pallister

birds. Birds that could never sing or fly or strut; beaks, tail feathers and feet part of the branches. Birds with cruel beaks, blank eyes and human ears, wearing the same caps as the figures upstairs. The drawings are fantastical, surreal: dark architectural doodles given life.

In the centre of the basement is a sculpture made of unfired clay. It is a crumbling recreation of a converted factory where Brodsky once lived in Moscow. Bits keep dropping off it each time it is moved. They don’t move it much. You have to peer into it, like looking in through the windows of a dolls’ house into a miniature world. There are corridors and grills on windows, and circular industrial towers.

There are echoes of Brodsky’s earlier work. In Coma, he recreated the centre of Moscow to scale, and flooded it with crude oil, a critique of the industry’s effect on the city. In The Trip, a twist on a train carriage, he used the curtain motif, and the benches look like bunk beds for attenuated people. In his Rotunda in the Kaluga region of Russia, the fire is central.

The impermanence of the clay, the impact of industry, the starkness of the regimented beds, the underlying threat and unease: Brodsky’s work captures something of late Soviet Russia and subsequent changes in the country. But more than that, it is a space of imagination and memory.

Does he feel free when he creates? ‘There are levels of freedom…I’m trying to feel free.’ ■ ..

I’ve never been fully convinced of the notion of a ‘memory of a place’, but two recent trips to the North West made me reconsider.

In Manchester, at Mae’s new housing project (see page 40), I knocked on a door at random and Georgina McDonagh, a 38-year-old beautician and businesswoman showed me round her flat. McDonagh had waited 12 years to get back to a neighbourhood in which her and her family had grown up. She chose her new flat because it looks onto the site where her late father used to live. After the houses on the estate were knocked down, she remembers coming across distinctive pieces of crockery in the rubble and dirt. No one else on the estate had that dinner set.

She tells me how her and her dad, an Irish gypsy, used to go travelling in the summertime. Her mum, who didn’t enjoy it, stayed at home and, when he was ill with cancer, her father decided to make a grand carriage for his granddaughter’s first holy communion. She is now 16, and McDonagh has made a little business renting out the spectacular, Cinderella-style carriage for weddings and events. Jordan and Peter Andre used it to travel to their wedding and the whole cast of Hollyoaks have been in it. Fellow traveller and Celebrity Big Brother winner Paddy Doherty has helped her out it – a nice guy, she says – here he is MORE HOMES promoting in a snap on her phone, her and him standing BETTER HOMES outside her new, architect-designed house.

Much of our enthusiasm for improving our housing stock is articulated in talk of units, habitations per hectare and cost per square metre. We must give room for, and remain mindful of, the stuff of life: the memories, hopes, joys and heartbreak which make a house a home. I’ll pick up the second story in next week’s column.



Classified

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Belfast is a vibrant European city and the University has embarked on a substantial £250m development project to extend the existing provision alongside the art, architecture and design building in Belfast city centre. This will create an exciting state of the art teaching and research setting and will bring the School of the Built Environment to Belfast to afford new cutting edge teaching and research opportunities.

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Base: Belfast The University wishes to appoint a Professor of Architecture to be based in the School of Architecture and Design at its Belfast city centre campus. The School is unique on the Island of Ireland in gathering together architecture, architectural technology, interior design, furniture and product design. It is likewise ideally positioned in the centre of a Faculty with civil engineering and planning in the School of the Built Environment on one side, and the School of Art and Design on the other, both of which have an outstanding national and international reputation.

Candidates for the Professor of Architecture will be expected to demonstrate extensive experience of teaching and scholarship, along with an impressive external profile within their chosen academic area.

Expressions of Interest sought for two development phases of the Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project, London E14.

Swan Housing Group, with our development partners, Tower Hamlets Council and the Greater London Authority are working together to regenerate the Blackwall Reach area of Tower Hamlets including the Robin Hood Gardens Estate. Outline consent is in place for 1575 homes, commercial and community facilities as well as significant public open spaces. The Reserved Matters application for Phase 1A has been submitted.

We now need to appoint practices to develop the master plan and detail the next two phases.

If you have: 1. Experience of reviewing large urban residential led regeneration schemes within the context of an outline consent 2. Excellent communication skills to enable effective engagement with the existing community and a wide range of stakeholders 3. A track record of delivering viable, high quality design proposals for mixed use schemes with private and affordable housing 4. Experience of working within inner London or other similar urban environments 5. Distinctive place making expertise, connecting new development with its surrounding area and using landscaping to link together development phases

Please express your interest to: blackwallreachregeneration@swan.org.uk by the end of November

88 theaj.co.uk

The University is looking for innovative and ambitious individuals with integrity, energy and a passion for their work, who are able to contribute to both lecture and studio based teaching in architecture.

Candidates should also demonstrate the experience and ability to contribute to course management, together with an understanding of professionally accredited courses.

We are particularly interested in people who can provide inspirational and dynamic leadership to research and scholarship activity within the school, with an outstanding research record in an area of architecture and an ability to secure funding for collaborative research and development activity.

The University offers an attractive reward package including a competitive starting salary, access to a pension scheme and financial assistance with relocation expenses where appropriate.

Closing date is 10 December 2012.

We prefer to issue and receive applications via our on-line recruitment website at www.ulster.ac.uk/jobs Hard copy applications can be obtained by telephoning 028 7012 4072 The University is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applicants from all sections of the community. Appointment will be made on merit.

08.11.12

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Ian Martin

The deserving and the undeserving moderately well-off their circs, eg Middlesbrough, stat. But peeps gonna hate.

That’s why we need new rhetty infro…’ New WHAT? ‘New rhetorical infrastructure. Laters…’

MONDAY. Sketch out some ideas for the redesign of Japan’s national stadium, using the latest thought-to-shape app, ‘Fast Mental’. It’s incredibly responsive. By lunchtime I’ve shape-thought a fossilised dolphin, a melting pocket-watch, a landscaped vulva, an unplumbed jacuzzi, a ball of glittering yarn, half a spermatazoon, a discus of light, cupped giant hands made of digital carbon and a translucent pancake filled with brightly coloured metaphors. Retire for an afternoon nap with huge sense of achievement and a terrible headache.

THURSDAY. Work up new rhetty infro for Megaborough Deathstar. It’s a matter of balance, I think.

I agree ‘council housing’ sounds as old-fashioned as ‘National Health Service’. But there’s a reversible principle at stake here. Gentrification is a good thing. It accounts for roughly 92 per cent of architects’ fee income, architects are morally beyond reproach, end of story. It’s what Tish would call ‘no-brains’. Alas, in the sneery corners of our social networks, gentrification is simply a long and ugly word. The challenge here is to yoke the gilded carriage of gentrification to the sturdy ox of compassion. Yes. Turn the whole thing into a righteous CAMPAIGN. The rich are OK, they own several homes. The poor are OK, they’re the ones hogging all the council housing. The hard-working middle earners, they’re the real victims here. That’s it! A campaign to build DECENT HARDWORKING CLASS HOUSING.

TUESDAY. In the morning I moot a transcendent footbridge. In the afternoon I dream up a zero-helium mosque based on colour-coded sexy mathematics. Memo To Self: turn off thought-to-shape software after lunch.

 ..

FRIDAY. Tish ‘v pleased’ with the hard-working class homes idea. A mega-borough marketing committee has already agreed to replace the corporate mission statement ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ with ‘HardWorking For You’.

SATURDAY. Non-hard-working day.

HANNA MELIN

WEDNESDAY. I’m impressed with the ambition of my latest architectural remodelling commission. I will be architecturally remodelling The Entire Notion Of Social Housing for a consortium of Tory councils. Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham have formed a terrifying mega-borough of compassionate conservatism, and now it means business. This might be unwelcome news for anyone affected by issues of compassionate conservatism, but there are great opportunities for others.

My client contact Tish briefs me. ‘Yah, imagine us as a totes new like municipal hipster-fogey developer collective?

We are keen as moutarde to revive the notion of council housing but sans that boring old baggage all held together with builder’s tape and string. I mean really: poor people?

Flat caps and cigarettes, tripe and onions and whatnot?

Merci, non!’

This new Transformer mega-borough certainly sounds powerful. A political ‘Optimus Prime’ representing the middle class, a community demonstrably marginalised by decades of derision and income tax. Now it’s payback time: the middle class getting council homes built for THEM. My task is to make this proposition seem somehow unridiculous.

Tish isn’t helping. ‘Thing is, the housing we own’s worth two and a half BILL. Sadly, the inhabitants aren’t. At all.

Look, we’re doing our best to create a culch of ambish in our boroughs. Mixed and vibrant communities, absolument.

People with interesting jobs and spendy clothes willkommen, bienvenue, welcome. The homelesses clogging up the system need to be disappeared somewhere more in keeps with

SUNDAY. Newspaper review in the recliner. Gratifyingly, class warfare is polarising opinion. This makes it easier to identify those in favour of luxury apartments for the deserving middle, as they’re all on one side of the argument.

For instance, a group of Liberal Democrat MPs is calling for a 21st century successor to the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1885. Echoing Lord Salisbury, they talk of ‘thousands of families living on the artisan bread line in nonluxury dwellings where they sleep, eat, multitask and die...

‘It is difficult to exaggerate the misery which such conditions of life must cause, particularly with all the luxury lifestyles on television and elsewhere. The depression of body and mind which they create is an almost insuperable obstacle to the action of any elevating or refining agencies. That’s why we need a Housing of the Hard-Working Classes Act 2013, thanks for listening, means a lot, yeah?’ ..

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DANPALON

®

Tested to current non-fragility standard ACR[M] 001:2011 Class B

TRANSLUCENT

WALLING AND ROOFING SYSTEMS Create and specify with confidence using the Danpalon® range of day-lighting systems. Utilise the fully accredited, technically superior Danpalon® systems for any part of the building envelope and even internal applications.

©photography David Coppieters

Roubaix Velodrome - Architect: ANAA Architects

FACADE RAINSCREEN ROOFING CANOPY INTERNAL MODULAR SYSTEMS

There are a choice of system thicknesses and widths available, including the new 900mm suite, which complements the 600mm and 1040mm wide systems. Also boasting an impressive range of colours and finishes such as the Softlite™ anti-glare panel, Danpalon® can meet all aesthetical and technical design requirements.

Danpalon® is ‘Light architecture’

Danpalon® - 4e St Mary’s Road, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE16 7DU T: 01858 468323 - E: info@danpalon.co.uk

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