Ferrari Museum by Future Systems (AJ24.05.12) by The Architects' Journal

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The last Kaplický The late Future Systems founder’s final project, the Enzo Ferrari Museum  BFLS’ Welsh music college

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Week in pictures Emirates’ cable cars; a concrete chapel in Taiwan Front page RIBA report shows cost of bidding on OJEU work UK news Small firms in Olympic legacy pitch Competitions & wins Lochside viewing platform shortlist News feature RIAS convention 2012: full report from Aberdeen People & practice designed2win’s Louise Harrison’s tips to win Building study Jan Kaplický’s last building, the Ferrari Museum Technical study BFLS’ Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama Culture Jay Merrick on consumerism and construction in the 70s This week online Sign up for the AJ daily email: the latest news, building studies and competitions arrive at 8.30am TheAJ.co.uk

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From the editor

As I said in this column last week, architects have been remarkably resilient in the face of recession, diversifying and seeking work abroad to make up for the lack of work at home. This includes picking up a significant number of projects in the European Union. In the AJ100, 71 per cent of practices expect to work in the EU this year, up three per cent from last year. But with the eurozone and its currency looking shaky, with politicians thus far having failed to secure a solution for Greece, now is an important time to assess your practice’s exposure to the euro. Should Greece exit the currency, the value of the euro is likely to wobble. An analysis piece by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times predicts Greece’s departure would lead to the currency’s collapse, provoked by a run on the banks in Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain, in addition to social unrest. Architects owed fees in euros could find their income eroded should the currency devalue rapidly, unless sterling was to fall at the same rate. There may be steps your practice could take now to mitigate any fallout, which is why it’s crucial for practices to examine what fee income, if any, would be threatened by the devaluing of the euro or Greece’s return to the drachma, before it has happened. A few questions to ask around the boardroom table: How many projects are currently on the books in Europe, and in which countries? Is the invoicing up to date? What percentage of the fee is outstanding? In what currency was the fee arranged? If the contract was signed in pounds or American dollars, you may be on safer ground than if your fee was negotiated in euros. You might also discuss whether your practice currently holds any business accounts in euros, and whether these should be transferred and/or converted into pounds. Likewise, if you are negotiating a fee on a new job, consider whether you might quote your fee in American dollars or pounds sterling. If the ..

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With the euro looking shaky, it’s time to assess your practice’s exposure to the currency, says Christine Murray

There may be steps your practice could take now to mitigate any fallout from the devaluing of the euro or a Greek exit currency is severely devalued, at least with a contract in sterling the value of your fee to the UK office will be preserved. Finally, once you’ve assessed your practice’s current level of risk, if deemed significant, you should urgently take financial advice on how best to protect your practice. No one knows for certain what the effect of a Greek exit would be on the euro or the economic union, and whether its exodus would be followed by the departure of other debt-laden countries, such as Spain or Italy. It’s time to count just how many eggs you’ve got in that basket. Should the euro begin to crash, it will be too late. Practices must act now, preemptively, while measures can still be taken. christine.murray@emap.com 

Week in pictures

PICTURE CREDITS: 01 5PLUS ARCHITECTS 02 GIANNI BOTSFORD 03 ABBIE RADFORD 04 PLATFORM 5 ARCHITECTS 05 WILKINSON EYRE

 Manchester and London-based 5plus Architects has won planning permission for this £30 million hotel-led scheme in the south Shoreditch Conservation Area. The project for Seven Capital retains part of the original Victorian facade and revamps Grade II-listed pub The Griffin 1

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.. PICTURE CREDITS: 01 5PLUS ARCHITECTS 02 GIANNI BOTSFORD 03 ABBIE RADFORD 04 PLATFORM 5 ARCHITECTS 05 WILKINSON EYRE

 Gianni Botsford Architects has revealed plans for this chapel in the Jianglang Mountain area of Taiwan. The building, with its curving concrete walls, is part of the Hsinchu Stone Village masterplan the practice is developing with Mole Architects and landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan 2

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 A prefabricated, 170-tonne section of White Arkitekter’s competition-winning scheme for Southend has been lifted into place. The Swedish practice is working with London’s Sprunt Architects on the 350m² structure, which will be clad with an external skin ahead of a planned opening this summer 3

 Platform 5 Architects has won permission for this new scheme to replace a house destroyed by the Buncefield oil depot explosion in December 2005. The four-bedroom family home is set in a woodland clearing on the edge of Hemel Hempstead and St Albans 4

 The 34 gondola cabins on Wilkinson Eyre’s £50.5 million Emirates Air Line cable car have begun testing over the Thames in London. Planned to open in time for the Olympic Games this summer, the 1.1km crossing will carry up to 2,500 people an hour at heights of up to 90 metres 5

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Wilkinson Eyre battle not over yet

WILKINSON EYRE

Wilkinson Eyre has vowed to fight on after the Heritage Lottery Fund rejected a bid for a grant towards its proposed £30 million ‘landmark’ to house the Royal Air Force Museum’s Battle of Britain collection. Co-founder Jim Eyre said: ‘We are incredibly disappointed with the decision but committed to working with the RAF Museum to help them realise this great project.’ The practice won the scheme in May last year following a major contest (AJ 11.05.11). Among the losing finalists was Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, which had previously drawn up a feasibility study for a 116-metre tall ‘twisted beacon’ concept (pictured above) for the site in Hendon, north London. Richard Waite

RIBA report reveals shocking cost of bidding on Official Journal tenders Bidding costs for work advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union eat up 30 per cent of earnings made by UK practices via this route  Public procurement processes are costing UK architectural practices £40 million a year, according to a groundbreaking survey by the RIBA. The bidding costs for work advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union swallow up 30 per cent of all earnings made by UK practices made through this tender process, while the success rate for architects bidding for OJEU jobs is just 15 per cent. The shocking statistics were

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discourage contracts being revealed as the RIBA announced awarded to the lowest bidder and a major new report which presses increase SME access to create a the government to reform its more competitive market. ‘frustrating and wasteful’ According to the public procurement report, the UK system. The report Annual cost to procures more work urges the government UK architects of by value through the to shorten PQQs, bidding for OJEU than any other reduce the number of OJEU jobs EU country but its organisations ‘caught procurement processes up in the bureaucracy’ of are the third slowest in public procurement, provide Europe and cost 20 per cent better project design and delivery more than in other EU countries. guidance for public clients,

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RIBA president Angela Brady said the report would ‘help government ensure that construction procurement reforms can produce a more efficient, more sustainable and more equitable system’. She added: ‘Turnover requirements mean 85 per cent of UK practices are considered too small to tender. This does not encourage a competitive market.’ Foster Lomas director Greg Lomas said the RIBA research made it hard to see how OJEU bids could be financially justifiable. ‘To think that the profession has spent £40m each year trying to win OJEU work is, frankly, staggering. Clients must realise that that money would be better spent on design and delivery.’ Merlin Fulcher 

UK news

Small firms in Olympic legacy bidding Muf architecture/art and Karakusevic Carson among the smaller practices linked with major house builders in Chobham Manor tender race   Muf architecture/ art has joined forces with house building giant Taylor Wimpey to bid for Chobham Manor, the first legacy housing plot on London’s Olympic Park. The small practice, famed for its community-focused work and for designing the British pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale, is one of three studios to have been courted recently to boost the developer’s design team, which already includes Make and PRP. Karakusevic Carson has thrown its weight behind the proposal to develop the Olympic Park’s first 800-home neighbourhood at Chobham Manor, which is scheduled for completion in 2014. Nord is also understood to be in

Artist’s impression of the proposed Chobham Manor development

discussions with Taylor Wimpey over the project. Last month all three practices – Muf, Nord and Karakusevic Carson – were named on a 24-strong London Legacy Development Corporation

framework for the Olympic Park. Taylor Wimpey, with housing association London & Quadrant is one of three shortlisted bidders in a contest run by park owner the London Legacy Development

Scotland consults on architecture policy  The Scottish government is launching an ‘open dialogue’ consultation on its new architecture policy. Starting next week at an International Design Summit event hosted in Glasgow’s Lighthouse Centre for Design and Architecture, the broad-ranging consultation will seek comments to help shape a refreshed policy for architecture in the country. It will focus on four key themes: sustainable growth; shaping Scotland’s future; embedding built environment design into wider policy; and recognising the cultural value of architecture, urbanism and heritage.  ..

policy was ‘a complete waste Reacting to the news, Gordon of time’ unless the government Murray of GMA Ryder urged the reformed procurement. new policy to span government American architect and New departments and take account Urbanist Andrés Duany, who of architecture’s ‘unique has designed a traditionally cross-cultural sweep’. styled village near Prince’s Foundation Aberdeen, added that chief executive Hank the ‘problem’ lay with Dittmar said teaching Scottish architecture local officials about Annual contribution schools. He said: urbanism, heritage of architecture to ‘Planners don’t know and architecture Scotland’s economy how to design or draw was the biggest issue, [and the] architects have adding that economic Continental-envy and can’t growth should not be an stand designing anything Scottish.’ ‘excuse for chasing the next icon’. Fiona Hyslop, Scottish cabinet But Richard Murphy of secretary for culture and external Edinburgh-based Richard affairs said: ‘Our architecture and Murphy Architects said a new

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Corporation for the 9.3 hectare site, which is situated close to Hopkins Architects’ £90 million Olympic Velodrome. Also vying for the job are Barratt with Le Frak, who have enlisted Allies and Morrison; Maccreanor Lavington and Witherford Watson Mann; and East Thames and Countryside, who are fielding Feilden Clegg Bradley, Alison Brooks Architects and S333. A source close to the Taylor Wimpey design team said the appointments signalled a ‘common sense approach’ by the builder, which is keen to engage more companies like Muf with a community focus, particularly in east London. Muf has been hired to look at public realm interim uses and non-residential elements, while Nord could design a standalone health centre and retail gateway building. Merlin Fulcher TheAJ.co.uk/OlympicLegacy design industry generates around £1.3 billion a year for the Scottish economy. The consultation on a new architecture and placemaking policy is aimed at generating a wide-ranging debate on its future direction and priorities for action.’ Expected to be published later this year, the new policy will feature a long-term strategic vision for architecture in Scotland and an action plan for its delivery. The planned document supersedes Scotland’s 2007 architecture policy, which was published under the Scottish Labour Party government before the SNP took control of the country in 2010. Scotland remains the only UK country with such a policy. The Lighthouse exhibition will run until 26 August. Merlin Fulcher TheAJ.co.uk/Scotlandconsults

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News on TheAJ.co.uk

Make replaces PLP on Rathbone Place

THIS WEEK ONLINE

 Make has replaced PLP on the high-profile redevelopment of Royal Mail’s Rathbone Place depot in central London. Ken Shuttleworth’s practice has been appointed to work up a new scheme for the one-hectare West End site less than one year after PLP submitted 56,000 square metre plans for its redevelopment. Great Portland Estates, which bought the land from Royal Mail for £120 million in September, picked Make to work up fresh designs following a design competition. Details of Make’s redesign have yet to emerge but plans are expected to be submitted to local planning authority Westminster City Council by the end of the year.

2012 Retrofit Awards open for entries

PLP

The practice has won a competition to work on a new scheme for the former Royal Mail depot less than a year after PLP submitted plans

PLP’s scheme for Royal Mail featured offices, housing and retail and a new public square and pathway connecting nearby Oxford Street to Fitzrovia (pictured above). PLP partner Ron Bakker said: ‘The ownership changed and we took part in a competition which we did not win. That one left us unfortunately.’ Both

Make and Great Portland Estates declined to comment. Meanwhile, it has emerged Make has won a job to redevelop the 1.1 hectare Leadenhall Triangle in the City of London. Henderson bought the site from administration for £175 million one year ago. Merlin Fulcher TheAJ.co.uk/Rathboneplace

K4 Architects insists fire Adjaye and Aitken to station scheme has legs create Liverpool pavilion

 The AJ has teamed up  K4 Architects has with Arup, ISG and ZBP to said it is ‘fully committed’ to the launch its annual Retrofit Awards. redevelopment of Birmingham’s Now in its third year, the former central fire station after its prestigious awards celebrate latest plans were thrown out. design, engineering and Last week, the city’s planning construction excellence committee rejected that prolongs the life redesigned plans for of buildings and the Grade II-listed Number of storeys infrastructure. site featuring a in K4 Architects’ Last year, the 23-storey block for rejected scheme most coveted prize student flats. – the Best Lower K4 founder Bob Carbon Building Project Ghosh said: ‘We’re – went to 5th Studio’s disappointed, but must Wolfson Building in Cambridge. respect the committee’s decision. This year, categories range from We’re not too disheartened – this small houses to historic buildings is a setback, but it hasn’t and transport infrastructure. dampened our enthusiasm for the project. TheAJ.co.uk/Birmingham retrofitawards.com

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Keep up with the latest innovations and events from east London with the AJ’s Clerkenwell Design Week blog, which covers all the events, products and parties. TheAJ.co.uk/clerkenwell 1

Put your name in the hat for a prize draw to win one of three copies of AJ sustainability editor Hattie Hartman’s book London 2012: Sustainable Design. Last chance to enter. TheAJ.co.uk/Footprint 2

Read the painfully honest diary of an embattled practitioner in our Anonymous Architect series. This week: the election of a new RIBA president causes a stir. TheAJ.co.uk/anonymous 3

Join the 35,000 @ArchitectsJrnal twitter followers to debate the latest news as it breaks. Tweet your thoughts direct to AJ editor Christine Murray @tcmurray and news editor Richard Waite @waitey. Twitter.com/ ArchitectsJrnal 4

 Architect David Adjaye (above) is collaborating with contemporary artist Doug Aitken on a pop-up pavilion for this year’s Liverpool Biennial. Housing Aitken’s first public installation in the UK, it will sit outside Tate Liverpool and will open to the public from 15 September to 13 January 2013. TheAJ.co.uk/Liverpool

Read digital editions of the AJ and AJ Specification: a library of page-turning PDF versions of all this year’s magazines is available free to subscribers. TheAJ.co.uk/AJdigital 5

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Competitions & wins

COMPETITIONS FILE

Lochside viewing platform shortlist Five contenders remain of the 31 small and emerging Scottish practices which entered the competition to build a viewpoint at Larbert Loch small and emerging practices. The permanent structure for patients, staff and visitors to the hospital is to be built from locally sourced Scottish timber, which the scheme’s backers, Forestry Commission Scotland and NHS Forth Valley, hope will be donated by local suppliers. Selected from 31 Scottish hopefuls, the five finalists will work up their proposals over the next month and a winner will be named in July. Richard Waite

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Architecture charity Open-City has invited architects to submit recently completed projects for inclusion in this year’s Open House London weekend on 22 and 23 September. The event throws opens the doors of the capital’s hard-to-access historic buildings and architectural gems, providing a unique opportunity for architects to showcase work. [Deadline for inclusion 31 May]

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   / 

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

 Architecture and Design Scotland has revealed the shortlisted entries in the competition to design a £30,000 viewing platform at Larbert Loch for the Forth Valley Royal Hospital, near Falkirk. George Watt and Stewart Architects, A449, Jamie Hamilton Architect, Cameron Webster Architects with Makar and John Downie Architectural Design are battling it out to win the contest, which is aimed at

The Architecture Foundation with UP Projects is seeking practices to work on a floating cinema project in east London. Launched in 2011 with a preliminary design by Studio Weave (pictured), the project aims to ‘animate’ East London’s waterways. [Deadline for PQQs 26 June] The RIBA has announced a photography competition, ‘Architecture 2012’. Open to all current institute members, the contest seeks images which capture ‘the architecture of today’. Submissions must be made online via Flickr with ‘minimal’ Photoshop-ing permitted. The best will receive an iPad. 10 will be printed as postcards and sold in RIBA bookshops (proceeds to Portland Place’s education fund). [Deadline 6 June] Sean Kitchen TheAJ.co.uk/competitions 

International

April fall for US architecture workloads Five months of growth in billings for design services in the States comes to an end with a contraction last month. Unemployment rate among US architecture graduates at 13.9 per cent in a stalled construction market   US architecture workloads fell last month, dampening hopes of a recovery. The American Institute of Architects, which monitors fees invoiced by the profession, announced last week that its Architecture Billings Index fell from 50.4 in March to 48.4 in April. The drop below the 50 mark effectively means the sector is now contracting. The unwelcome fall comes after five months of billings growth, which had sparked talk of a minor recovery in the battered built environment sector in the States.

Construction spending in the US reached an 18-month high of $807 billion (£512 billion) in November and in February the AJ reported a surge of work in New York and California. AIA chief economist Kermit Baker said: ‘Considering the continued volatility in the overall economy, this decline in demand for design services isn’t terribly surprising. Favourable conditions during the winter may have accelerated billings, producing a pause in projects that have moved ahead faster than expected.’ As always in the US, the picture

varies regionally, with the North East and Mid West recording minor increases in billings, while the South and West posted falls. Commercial and industrial projects were the place to look for work, with a sector index of 53.8 for the three months to April. Mixed-use schemes at the other extreme had a reading of 45.0. David Herd, Buro Happold’s regional director for the US West Coast, agreed that the findings were ‘not surprising’ and further stressed the ‘fragile and volatile nature of the US construction market and economy’.

‘Federal, state and city spending is still very constrained. International projects are highly competitive and the period of time from winning a project to commencement can be highly protracted,’ he said. Speaking at last week’s AIA convention, Baker announced that, since the recession started in December 2007, about 60,000 jobs at American architecture companies had been lost, about 28 per cent of the country’s prerecession architectural workforce. Meanwhile, recent research by Georgetown University found that architecture graduates in the US had the greatest risk of not finding a job of all university leavers. Its report said the unemployment rate for recent architecture graduates was 13.9 per cent in the wake of the collapse of the country’s construction industry. Greg Pitcher TheAJ.co.uk/USA. See graph on p.18

Grimshaw’s Tirana coup

Russian property on a roll

 Grimshaw has beaten fellow finalist Dubai-based DAR to win the competition to masterplan the central boulevard of Albania’s capital, Tirana. The project will extend the capital’s 1930s main street by 3km and its riverside park by 6.7km. Seven international practices were named in the contest, which

 Property investment in Russia is expected to remain above pre-economic crisis levels in 2012, according to new research. The Commercial Real Estate Market Report from professional services firm Jones Lang Lasalle said several large deals were likely to be closed later this year. The report says $547 million (£347 million) was invested in the Russian property sector in the first quarter of this year. While this is down significantly on the same period last year, 2011 saw record levels of investment in property in Russia. ‘Past presidential elections in Russia, continuing uncertainties with the Eurozone and low investment volumes across Europe impacted Russian real estate investment [in Q1],’ states the

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called for a ‘comprehensive strategy building upon the international identity of the city, particularly its waterways and the major boulevard’. Under the proposal, says Grimshaw, ‘a vast system of urban living rooms latch on to the central boulevard and spiral out’. Richard Waite. TheAJ.co.uk/Albania

report. ‘Nevertheless, we are aware of several large deals in progress that are expected to be closed in 2012. Consequently we expect total real estate investment volumes to reach about $6.5 billion (£4.12 billion) in 2012, slightly lower than the record volume in 2011, but higher than pre-crisis levels.’ There was more good news for UK architects in Russia in a separate report from JLL. Its European Office Index found prime office rental rates in Moscow were 20 per cent higher in the first quarter of 2012 than in the same period last year. This was the highest growth of any European city. St Petersburg came joint fourth, with a 10 per cent hike in rental rates. Greg Pitcher TheAJ.co.uk/Russia

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News feature

RIAS convention fails to grasp reality Though big names joined the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland for its international event, the gathering struggled to confront the impact of austerity on the profession, says Penny Lewis  The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) International Convention held earlier this month in Aberdeen was a success. The event was well organised, sessions did not seriously overrun, and though

it was a little under-subscribed and demographically weighted in favour of retired members, there were probably enough paying guests to cover the costs. The carbon footprint of the invited guests was not bad. The big-name international architects

were mostly ‘in town to meet clients’ and, with the exception of a squadron of Londoners who were so highly charged they might have run to Scotland carrying the Olympic torch, the rest of the celebrities were local. There were no faux-pas or Freudian

slips by the incorporation’s senior male members at the expense of the women attendees, nor nationalist outbursts. So by the passionless criteria on which it has become customary to evaluate architecture – the 2012 convention ticked all the boxes – even the end user, ensconced in the comfortable seats of Belmont cinema, enjoyed the entertainment. Kengo Kuma (pictured below), admittedly looking tired, left the event with the distinct impression that things were ‘happening’ in Scotland – unlike Japan, where things were ‘slow’.

ALL IMAGES JON ROSS

Clockwise from this image Delegates at the RIAS convention; Speaker Gareth Hoskins; David Page; Kengo Kuma

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On the surface, Scotland does appear busy. The three headline international speakers, Kuma-san himself, Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Morten Schmidt of Schmidt Hammer Lassen – which completed the University of Aberdeen’s Library – suggest an emerging nation in which public clients take their architecture seriously. Kuma-san’s client, Philip Long, director of the V&A at Dundee, gave an encouraging talk on the history of Scottish creativity and the place of the V&A in creating a culture

..

worthy of the next generation of architects and fashion designers. In reality, for many Scottish architects (and developers), life is (like in Japan) frustratingly ‘slow’. It seemed surreal that the ‘austerity moment’, as described by Kevin Owens of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) and its impact on the profession was never on this convention’s table. John McAslan’s description of the new King’s Cross station and Hopkins Architects’ Mike Taylor’s compelling exposition of the design, engineering and construction of the Velodrome held the audience spellbound. Kevin Owens’ talk about the temporary beach volleyball stadium in Horse Guards parade and the Greenwich Equestrian arena evoked glorious flashbacks to pre-recession days. In contrast to the tales of contractors in the South-East racing to complete work before the London 2012 Olympics, presentations on the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games highlighted a serious lack of architectural ambition. The Londoners were fast, but even the Scots galloped through their presentations. The old tradition (of which the late Isi Metzstein was a master) of holding a slide until you have exhausted everything there is to say about a drawing is clearly passé. One exception was David Mackay of MBM Architectes, with his story of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Mackay described a situation in which a politically committed client financed a team of engineers and architects to reorganise the infrastructure of the city. In the Q&A, he recalled the most significant lesson from the process was that architects

were interested in products and platform to satisfy a quota. Two engineers engaged with process. female architects from Stonehaven Once the design team understood seemed more insulted by the this, they had managed to work ‘tokenistic’ addition of Pauline very effectively together. Nee and Jasmine Wadia to John Along with the recession, McAslan’s presentation slot the convention was silent on than the initial failure to put two other issues. First, Renfro women in the programme. and David Ross of Keppie were Among the younger women upbeat and diplomatic about the attending, there was more concern Union Terrace Gardens project, over the profession’s failure to despite the fact that the incoming engage with the broader questions Labour/Conservative coalition of the moment than just sexism. has failed to back the project, It’s always positive to see making a mockery of the public good work. As many delegates referendum, the planning process remarked, David Page (below) and the months of lobbying of Page\Park has a fantastic and consultation. ability to bring his Then there was the architectural ambitions male-only platform to life with words Royal Incorporation familiar to readers and images. Reiach of Architects in (AJ 12.05.03). There and Hall’s work, Scotland centenary is something a bit presented on day fusty about aspects of one by Jim Grimley the RIAS. They insist on and on day two by Neil giving flowers to the female Gillespie, is rigorous and event organisers and instruct poetic. But the name ‘convention’ the chairs to give a perfunctory suggests something more than summing-up of each session, excellent show and tells – it has often in the place of questions. a hint of the ‘congress’. When I What appears to be more first started attending the RIAS important is the number of convention in the mid-1990s, women who, having worked their that sense of idealism was still way through a male coordinated there, and the attendees usually profession, resent the idea that included all the most active and there should be women on every talented emerging practices in Scotland. By comparison, at Aberdeen, there wasn’t a sense ‘There wasn’t a sense that this was a gathering at which things of import were being this was a gathering discussed and where innovative of innovative ideas’ ideas were being provoked. In 2016 the RIAS will celebrate its centenary. In the current climate, there is a danger it may go the same way as many long-established membership organisations – to become reduced to an insurance policy. Let’s hope that the preparations for the centenary will allow for a review of the role of the RIAS. This needs to happen if the incorporation is to be relevant to the profession.

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

Statistics

Architects claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, March-April 2012 940 860

March 2012

April 2012

houses Housing starts in England fell by 11 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to official data. Just 24,140 new homes started in the three months to March, compared with 27,240 in the final quarter of 2011. The figure, published by the Office for National Statistics, is 15 per cent below the housing starts in the same quarter last year and half of the December 2005 peak. Completions, however, were up 6 per cent on the previous quarter. RICS chief economist Simon Rubinsohn said housing delivery was ‘falling well short of expectations’.

US Architecture Billings Index Demand for architectural services in the US fell last month, according to the American Institute of Architects Source: American institute of architects

51.3 51.0

50.5

49.3 50

47.8 Architects’ Billing Index

51.0

50.9

50.4 48.4

47.6

45.9

May 11

18 theaj.co.uk

Jun 11

Jul 11

Aug 11

Sep 11

58%

Fall in pre-tax profits at developer Land Securities during the past financial year

10%

Increase in central London residential property prices in the 12 months to May 2012

Council homes that London’s Southwark Council plans to build by 2020

47.3 46.8

Apr 11

Office staff to be made redundant at contractor Balfour Beatty under restructuring plans

1,000

650

Q1 housing starts down 11 per cent in England

Sources:balfour beatty; land securities; hm land registry; southwark council; riba future trends survey

employment The number of architects who are out of work and claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance in the UK has fallen for the third consecutive month. According to the Office for National Statistics’ labour market statistics for April, there are now 860 people signing on and stating their usual occupation as architect, 80 fewer than in March. The latest figure marks the lowest unemployment level among architects since December 2008, when 835 architects were recorded as claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance. Meanwhile, the RIBA Future Trends Survey reported a two point fall in its monthly

Workload Index from +11 to +9. RIBA director of practice Adrian Dobson said there was ‘still no sign’ of firms preparing to recruit, with larger practices particularly cautious.

source: nomis

Fewer unemployed architects in April

Oct 11

Nov 11

Dec 11

Jan 12

Feb 12

Mar 12

Apr 12

The RIBA Future Trends Workload Index for April, down from +11 the previous month 24.05.12

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People & practice

‘Judges love hand-drawing’ NEW PRACTICES Louise Harrison, of new consultancy designed2win, gives tips for winning over competition judges – and how not to annoy them What exactly does designed2win do? I’m one half of a consultancy that offers practical advice to clients wishing to appoint designers, and to designers hoping to win work. How is your new venture different to what you did at the RIBA Competitions office? It is more flexible and is aimed as much at small clients needing short-term support for projects – maybe a helping hand with establishing a brief or a one-off piece of work – as it is at a client needing a full management service. It’s also about supporting the profession more directly, from advice on interview techniques to inputting into EOI documents. Do you think there is still a place for design contests? There will always be an appetite for design contests – competitions of any nature appeal to the human psyche and we all dream that we might get lucky one day. It’s the same for architects – a project pops up that whets the appetite and the creative genes take over. Do you agree that design contests waste resources? Yes I do. Although I’m not sure what you do about it, as it’s not easy to regulate. Because of EU legislation, clients can’t restrict numbers applying for their project at the EOI stage. There can be a lot of wasted time when practices respond to PQQ documents

 ..

that are often more complicated than they need to be. Sometimes the profession is its own worst enemy; applying for projects without looking at the project specification and checking whether they have a chance of being selected or not. As a rule, clients do not reward shortlisted architects as generously as they should. My job is to keep trying to push honoraria up incrementally, keep design work to a reasonable level, and, if needs be, walk away from a client that has no intention of paying for competitors’ design work. What mistakes do architects make when entering contests? Not reading rules thoroughly. Or getting carried away and designing beyond the brief and taking the design to a level of detail not required. This tends to irritate a jury and is a waste of the competitor’s time. Because it is a rarity these days, judges are always delighted when they come across work that has been hand-drawn. What changes would you make to the procurement system? The balance of power needs to shift away from procurement teams that have little or no background in design and yet are responsible for devising and marking PQQ documents upon which designers and their credentials are assessed. Things need to change from the top down and some consistency instilled so that all Local Authorities operate in the same way.

Peter Morris Architects   Peter Morris  London W1  November 2011  petermorrisarchitects.com

Where have you come from? Curl La Tourelle Architects, Penoyre & Prasad, Fluid Design Studio and Land Design Studio What work do you have? We specialise in participatory design and our architectural expertise includes schools, children’s centres, sure start centres, community centres, libraries and sports facilities. We aim to make working with us stimulating and pleasurable, promoting shared ownership design solutions. Our work has included helping Queen’s Park Forum set up the first parish council in London for 50 years (sketch proposal for the area’s community park building, pictured), masterplans for the high street on the Harrow Road, and designing family homes around London.

What are your ambitions? Our aim is to grow at a sustainable rate, with likeminded staff who have gained experience through long-term apprenticeships. This will ensure we maintain quality, enjoyment and the individuality that we have already created. How optimistic are you? The recession will be with us for many more years. Having said that, we are optimistic for the future. In an era of austerity, technological change and global warming, if we are to continue to improve education and create more work opportunities then, as designers, we should be leading the way. Start-up practices can take more risks than more established companies and hard times call for innovation. ..

Astragal

Dining out on success  The great, good and the giddy enjoyed an action-packed AJ100 Members Dinner and Awards at the Grange hotel in London last Wednesday. Opening speaker Peter Murray – a joint stand-in with Terry Farrell for absent Contribution to the Profession victor David Chipperfield – fired off an early salvo at the government for blocking any practices marketing their involvement in the Olympics. Murray slammed the sacrificing of this ‘unrepeatable opportunity’ to publicise London’s creatives and questioned the suppression of a report

allegedly critical of the ban. This was followed by Farrell, who instead of outlining his practice’s succession plan as billed, recalled an incident with Chipperfield who had come into his and then-partner Nicholas Grimshaw’s office asking for help to win planning permission for a home in Maida Vale. Years later, when Grimshaw and Farrell split, the 74-year old remembered the media speculation about who would be next to pick up the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. Neither, as it turned out. Farrell joked: ‘Here we are, 30 years later and it is the architect who couldn’t win planning for a mews house in north London who has the Gold Medal.’ He then went on to suggest his

alternative AJ100 accolades – including the architect with the biggest eyebrows: himself. Next year’s AJ100 awards dinner may involve a new prize, a gong for The Most Difficult Practice to see in the Woods. That award would go to Center Parcs’ favourite architects Holder Mathias

whose Natasha Chibireva and Max Poole came in matching camouflage suit jackets.

Pumping iron   If you wanted proof that the profession is shrinking, look no further than this giant picture of ruddy-faced architect Phil Coffey on Upper Street, north London (pictured above). In less than 12 weeks, the 2011 Stephen Lawrence Prize-winner starlet lost an incredible three stone thanks to his personal trainer. Now he has the guns in his leaner, meaner armoury to fight the double-dip recession. Boom Boom, Phil.

Leave it to the pros

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 At a reception honouring RIBA president Angela Brady at the British ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C during the American Institute of Architects convention last week, the ambassador mentioned that he felt close empathy with the architectural profession at the moment because he was trying his hand at refurbishment. The elegant Edwin Lutyens-designed residence suffers from leaky pipes. Ever prompt in her reply, Brady responded with a smile, ‘Best to leave the refurbishment work to the architects.’ ..



Letter from London

Water should be treated as a condition, not simply as a distant threat to our way of life, writes Paul Finch

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the authorities were more interested in the former than the latter, the indirect cause of the disaster. However, as in New Orleans and Bombay/ Mumbai, there is a strong case for saying that socalled ‘natural disasters’ are pretty much man-made. This was the contention, powerfully argued, by two AIA conference speakers, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, both of whom are now teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Their starting point is that ‘water is everywhere before it is somewhere’, and that designers should be working with water, rather than simply trying to contain or control it. That latter attitude is the product of surveyors’ and engineers’ attitudes,

The ‘fair-weather maps’ are at odds with the way water works, a process which needs to be understood in section

ENVIRONMENT AGENCY

One of the few things that worry me about the future of London is the complacency with which we think about flood risk. There is usually a fashionable figure putting the risk of catastrophic flooding at one in 500 years, or one in 1,000 years. The number is always suspiciously precise, and even more suspiciously always has three or four noughts. All of which is evidence of the Department of Guesswork in action. Unfortunately, we seem to imagine that a one-in500-year risk means that the feared event will not happen until the 500 years are up. Then along come something like the Cumbria floods and we all wonder why we did not take more precautions sooner. The answer lies in the all-too-human belief that it isn’t going to happen to us. This is, of course, entirely at odds with another belief ingrained in a large proportion of the population, which is that the unlikely could very well happen in the Lottery draw on Saturday night, where the odds against winning are about 14 million (six noughts) to one, but nevertheless it often happens. So the phrase ‘it could be tonight’ may be cheery in relation to gambling, but very scary indeed in relation to an unanticipated conjunction of tide, wind, rain and, who knows, minor seismic activity. London carries on unabashed, confident that all that lowish-lying land on either side of the River Thames will absorb trouble if it happens, and after all such an event must be a long way off, surely? These thoughts were reinforced at the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) national architecture conference in Brisbane a fortnight ago, not least because the city was subject to nightmare floods in December/ January 2010/11, not dissimilar to what happened in Prague in 2002, and not unlike what nearly happened in Dublin a decade ago (with a taster last year). In Brisbane, the argument about responsibility is ongoing, since the same organisation was responsible both for providing citizens with water and preventing floods. After a two-year drought,

which are usually based on specific sites rather than the ‘ground’ which comprises areas that are situated way beyond a red-marked site line. ‘The view from above’ and the ‘fair-weather maps’ which are their consequence, are at odds with the way water works, a process which needs to be understood in section. ‘Engineers deal with probability, designers should think about possibility’ was the speakers’ nice way of describing it. The task was to hold water rather than to expel it unnecessarily (e.g. by using contour trenches, a form of ground-hugging aqueduct), to work with the monsoon rather than just treating it as an enemy. On this analysis, the estuary condition is far more important than any line on a map, and ‘making peace with the sea’ is an acknowledgement that water is its own ground, to be understood beyond the line of specific ownerships. ..

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Black box

What does space-time look like? An obscure comic published in 1989 has the answer, says Rory Olcayto as well as the distant past, long before the house was built. The 1901 panel shows a moustached man with his hands a windows-width apart, saying, ‘... and this is where I’ll put the living room’. The 2033 panel shows a military ceremony taking part around a monument. (We see the house razed in a previous panel from the year 2030). But mostly the panels show daily life in the living room of an anonymous suburban house and somehow it is utterly compelling, a moving study on the passage of time, of lives lived in ordinary places. An ageing man stands in front of the window and asks, ‘Where did you put today’s paper?’ in 1989. A small child screams ‘Whaaa!’ in 1963, the window behind framing a lightning strike. Segmented panels further increase narrative possibilities by linking similar moments across time. We see a woman dusting, scrubbing, mopping the same space in a panel subdivided into four, each segment separated by years. As Tom Spurgeon writes in The Comics Journal’s list of the 100 best comics of the 20th century, ‘McGuire calls to our attention both the ephemeral nature of life as it is lived and its matter-of-fact beauty, showing us connections – however tenuous – between ourselves, others and the spaces we share.’ Show me the architect who wouldn’t want to achieve the same effect in drawings of the buildings they propose. Read it here: entrecomics.com/?p=9431

OMA

Architects have never been very good at conveying the passing of time in presentations of the buildings they design. Today’s typical moneyshot, say of an urban housing block, is usually centred around a dramatic perspective of the scheme, with an unfeasibly busy forecourt and gardens populated with CADvatars. You know the sort: happy couples walking away from the ‘camera’, a cyclist closer to the ‘frame’ and probably a bit motion-blurred, a businessman on the phone (hand-in-pocket) and maybe a Muslim family having a picnic. But these pictures are soulless. Each group seems blissfully unaware of the other. That scene will never happen. Because time doesn’t look like that. It probably looks something more like Richard McGuire’s Here, the influential six-page comic first published in Art Spiegelman’s RAW anthology in 1989. In comics, each panel literally, pictorially, frames a moment and McGuire’s seminal work explores this to startling effect, breaking down the time-space continuum with mind-bending ease. And it’s very architectural. The first panel of Here shows an unadorned corner of a room in a house. The 35 panels that follow all show the location in space depicted in the first panel at different points in time: from 1929 to 1957 to 1986 and 1901 and sometimes into the near future, 2033,

 ..

Inbox A refreshed Greek theatre in Syracuse, Sicily was inaugurated on the 11 May with a performance of Prometheus Unbound on an OMA-designed stage set (left) featuring three temporary devices – Ring, Machine and Raft - that reinterprets the ancient setting. The Ring is a suspended walkway that completes the semi-circle of the terraced seating, encompasses the stage and backstage, and gives an

alternative stage entrance. The Machine is an adaptable backdrop, a sloping circular platform, seven-metres high that can rotate and split down the middle, framing dramatic events such as Prometheus being swallowed in the bowels of the earth. The Raft, a circular stage for the actors and dancers, reimagines the orchestra space as a modern thymele, the altar that in ancient times was dedicated to Dionysian rites. ..

AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk

Project of the Week Birmingham University multi-storey car park Casson Conder & Partners Birmingham, 1965 This three-storey, 800-vehicle university car park, topped with six tennis courts, is one of seven multi-storey car parks in the library. Search ‘multi-storey’ to see 13 photographs and six drawings on AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk ..

AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk Browse thousands of projects in the AJ Buildings Library, a digital archive of built work, part of your AJ subscription



Letters

Last issue AJ 17.05.12 Established 1895

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Letters should be received by 10am on the Monday before publication. The AJ reserves the right to edit letters. The letter of the week’s author will receive a bone china AJ mug. Post to the address below or email letters@architectsjournal. co.uk

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No race is not good

I agree with Eddie

I supported Hodder’s RIBA nomination paper and think he will make a good president (AJ 17.05.12). But it is a pity that his was an uncontested election. There are, I am sure, others who might have stood, but in the present economic climate were not prepared to commit to the time and energy to do the job as president elect, then president. The length of term has been discussed in the past and I have always supported the two-year term, as you need to have time to make any impact. In my view, the presidential role has been dumbed down so that is not so much of an issue now. Unless you have a prosperous private practice to support you it is probably impossible to be away for two years. That rules out quite a few bright younger candidates. While remuneration would help, it might attract less qualified candidates more interested in the reward. For that reason I am still against payment. Owen Luder, RIBA president 1981–1983 and 1995–1997

You say in your editorial (AJ 10.05.12) that the suggested move by Chelsea FC is ‘the most thrilling, plausible vision’ for Battersea Power Station to date and criticise deputy mayor for planning Eddie Lister for opposing the move. It is true that, as leader of Wandsworth Council, Lister presided over three failed schemes for the site. But in opposing Chelsea’s move, he is right. Far from maintaining the integrity of the building, KPF’s sketches show that the ‘B’ station turbine hall would be demolished, losing the essential symmetry of the building. Still worse is the idea of grafting a 60,000 seat stadium on to the side of a building (currently) famous as a solitary urban monument. This is an unviable and unattractive scheme. The power station was given a much more sober assessment at the recent Twentieth Century Society seminar. One of the key points to emerge was that the building should be passed to a public interest trust, with an endowment to fund repairs.

Editor Christine Murray Deputy editor Rory Olcayto () Acting administrator Rakesh Ramchurn () Digital editor Simon Hogg () News editor Richard Waite ( ) Reporter Merlin Fulcher () Editorial intern Alvaro Menendez Technical editor Felix Mara () Senior editor James Pallister () Sustainability editor Hattie Hartman () Sustainability intern Michelle Price AJ Buildings Library editor Tom Ravenscroft () Art editor Brad Yendle () Designer Ella Mackinnon Production editor Mary Douglas (on leave) Acting production editor Abigail Gliddon () Acting sub-editor Alan Gordon, Nicola Homer 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

The Battersea Power Station Company (a development trust set up by Battersea Power Station Community Group) has offered £1.00 for the freehold of the building by the sale deadline. The remainder of the site (the former South Lambeth Goods Yard to the south, not historically a part of the power station) would be sold to repay creditors and to give an endowment to the trust. Battersea Power Station could be opened in the short-term as a ‘controlled ruin’ in a public park with a riverside path and a phased refurbishment as funds permit. Meanwhile, commercial development could proceed on the land to the south. Well done Chelsea FC for winning the Champions League. But please stay at The Bridge! Keith Garner, architect, London SW1

Correction Archial would like to apologise for failing to credit Clash Architects for the image used in their AJ100 profile (AJ 17.05.12). We also incorrectly stated that Levitt Bernstein were planning to open an office in China.

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Building study

‘He just liked to draw’ Jan Kaplický’s last building, the Ferrari Museum in Modena, marks the end of good old fashioned Futurism, writes Jay Merrick

 ..

FUTURE SYSTEMS

Right Aerial view from west. The new gallery building enwrap the original Ferrari workshop Below An early Pop Art concept image by Kaplický expresses the basic form of the building and how it relates to the workshop

month contract and fee negotiation, nine months of design, more than 18 months for public fund-raising, and a three-year build complicated by bureaucracy surrounding the building’s unusual form. Morgante’s exquisite design for the Enzo Ferrari ‘life story’ exhibition, in the family’s 19th century metalbashing workshop building alongside the museum, bears no trace of Kaplický’s streamlined, high-tech manner. Nor is there any hint of Ferrari’s technical ruthlessness. He said, famously, that streamlining was for people who couldn’t design >> GABRIELE MELLONI & STEFANO PAOLINI STUDIO CENTO29

an Kaplický’s final building, the Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari in Modena, memorialises an architect for whom the cover-line on the May 1951 edition of Astounding Science Fiction magazine – ‘Galactic Gadgeteers’ – might have been written. The museum distils Kaplický’s obsession with big, big toys for big, big boys. This is a sleek, Modena-yellow obituary to architecture’s charming Mr Awkward, who dropped dead in a Prague street in 2009. We may never again see such a bravura expression of this Flash Gordon Futurism, an essentially retro architectural genre dependent, in Kaplický’s case, on sketches. This zone is now occupied by parametrics, cybernetics and the mutant organic formalism of designers, such as the faintly satirical Hernan Diaz Alonso. Kaplický’s protege, Andrea Morgante and his London-based practice, Shiro Studio, oversaw the museum’s late stage design and completion. The seven-year span of the project, which began after Future Systems won the design competition at the end of 2004, reflects a nine-

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Enzo Ferrari Museum, Modena Future Systems and Shiro Studio

Ferrari house first floor

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Legend 1. Cafeteria/ restaurant 2. Ticket desk 3. Kitchen 4. Bookshop 5. WC 6. Exhibition area 7. Main entrance to house 8. Exhibition room 9. Meeting room 10. Office 11. Plant 12. Storage 13. Conference room 14. Didactic room 15. Staff room 16. Video installation room 17. Technical room 18. Archive room 19. Void

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engines. ‘If Ferrari had been in politics,’ notes the motor racing writer Joseph Dunn, ‘Machiavelli would have been his servant.’ When told that Luigi Musso, his young, highly promising driver, had died in a crash at the 1958 French Grand Prix, Ferrari replied: ‘And the car?’ The dominating feature of Kaplický’s design is the museum’s sculpted, 3,300 square metre aluminium T&G sheeted roof. It was put together by boatbuilders and its double-curve is claimed as a first at this scale. The glass facade is also doublecurved, tilting and swerving deliriously at an angle of 12.5º. Morgante says it was intended to suggest the grille of a sportscar. It doesn’t. Instead, one thinks immediately of Oscar Niemeyer, and of the steep sopraelevata banking at the Monza grand prix circuit in the 1950s. The glazing sections are supported by pre-tensioned steel cables, withstanding 40 tonnes of wind or snow pressure, and the technical specification of this system has  ..

Above Original concept sketch by Kaplický Right Aerial view from east showing glazed scoop on double-curved roof Far top right West facade Far bottom right The Morgantedesigned exhibition on Enzo Ferrari’s life, in the original workshop

maximised transparency. Half of the building’s internal volume is below ground level, making it the first museum in Italy to use geothermal energy. This move also helped keep the museum’s maximum height at 12 metres, the same as the neighbouring Ferrari family’s workshop and home. The roof ’s curve is supported by a concealed grid of narrow eight-part trusses and, at the museum’s ‘receiving’ end, by two massive columns that splay into asymmetrical Y-forms. The result of the building’s envelope construction, devised by Arup’s Sean Billings, is a massive clear volume of light-filled space in which the translucent ceiling membrane spreads an even radiance from the roof ’s 10 partially glazed scoops. The whole of the museum’s open internal volume – the entrance area is connected to the exhibition level by ramp and staircase – is visible the moment you enter the building, as are the 21 historic sports and racing cars, set on slim platforms raised >>

STUDIO CENTO29

FUTURE SYSTEMS

Enzo Ferrari Museum, Modena Future Systems and Shiro Studio

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ANDREA MORGANTE

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ANDREA MORGANTE

Enzo Ferrari Museum, Modena Future Systems and Shiro Studio

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450mm above the floor. At the bottom of the ramp, under the shelf formed by the entrance area, is teaching space, an audiovisual room and a conference hall. Everything, apart from the cars and the yellow pods that contain the shop and lavatories, is white. The interior suggests a vast, high-tech clamshell. And the cars – such as the cream 1948 Ferrari Barchetta, and the agate blue 1955 Maserati Zagato Spyder – are as perfect as pearls, figments from the nacreous grit of automotive ideas transformed into sleekly perfected machines. Kaplický, says Morgante, wanted to create a sensitive dialogue between the two exhibition buildings that showed ..

A yellow building should terrorise this calm part of Modena, but it doesn’t ..

STUDIO CENTO29

ANDREA MORGANTE

consideration for the original Ferrari workshop and the family’s old home. This seems a rather dutiful remark. Kaplický’s original concept illustration shows a purple Pop Art hand reaching for the old barn, in pink. Morgante confirms Kaplický’s pathological disinterest in design briefs: ‘Jan never cared about them. He just liked to draw. He never designed options – the final design was always the evolution of the original sketch.’ Morgante made

Above left Exhibition area with Barrisol ceiling Above right Ferrari memorabilia in purpose-designed display cases in new gallery Left Cafeteria

one significant contribution to the design, suggesting that the building ‘should be as if it was turgid and inflated. He agreed immediately’. Kaplický’s design monomania is broadly successful in Modena compared to, say, Future Systems’ hilariously absurd competition entry for Colchester’s firstsite art gallery, which suggested a sexually aroused amoeba. It is notable that the new museum, and the exhibition in the restored home and workshop, cost the equivalent of £11.8 million, which would barely secure a quarter share in an apartment at One Hyde Park. Equally unexpected is the relationship of the museum’s form

with its urban context. A bright yellow building with streamlined airintakes should terrorise the mixture of architecturally calm 18th, 19th and 20th century buildings in this part of Modena. It doesn’t, perhaps because it possesses, in high-tech terms at least, a very simply expressed form. Morgante is apologetic about some of the building’s details, and speaks wistfully of the kind of refinements seen in high-tech buildings by masters of structural detail such as Nick Grimshaw. His concern obscures an important conceptual imperative: racing cars, certainly in Enzo Ferrari’s lifetime, were pared down machines, always on a knife-edge >> 

Project data

client Fondazione Casa Natale Enzo Ferrari start of project 2004 (concept design) completion 2012 internal floor area 5,200m² (4,200m² gallery/1,000m² Ferrari house) contract value £11.4 million (€14.2 million) architect Future Systems and Shiro Studio project architect Andrea Morgante main contractor Società Consortile Enzo structural and environmental services Arup London (competition stage) project management Politecnica, Modena quantity surveyor Politecnica (design and construction stages) aluminium roofing Pinical Austria

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between innovation and cataclysmic failure. The museum’s architecture approaches that same stripped quality. If the Enzo Ferrari Museum is the new architectural star of Modena, the Morgante-designed exhibition covering Enzo Ferrari’s life, in the former workshop, is a brilliantly contrasting coda. Morgante’s pure white oblong with projecting fins, suggests the pages – some thumbed, some riffled asymmetrically – of a three-dimensional biography of Enzo Ferrari. Screens telling his story are set back in the ‘pages’ so that, experienced as a whole, the installation radiates an almost unearthly stillness. High above this block, two massive new white steel cross-braces – shades of tough, 19th century engineering – hold the barn’s repaired brick walls together. The relationship

ANDREA MORGANTE

Enzo Ferrari Museum, Modena Future Systems and Shiro Studio

Above Vintage racer on purposedesigned pedestal in new gallery

between Morgante’s abstract modern architectural object and the old fabric possesses a fascinating, unexpectedly subtle tension. This is a fine piece of restoration and exhibition design that has given the historical contents an interesting, faintly surreal piquancy. In all this white, sculpted purity, it comes as an amusing shock to gaze down into a small vitrine and behold Enzo Ferrari’s legendary black-framed dark glasses. The man who wore those glasses once said: ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’ The Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari has realised Modena’s dream to sanctify its most famous son – even if some might give precedence to other Modenesi grandees such as the late Luciano Pavarotti, or the Vatican’s senior exorcist, Gabriele Amorth. ■ Jay Merrick is architecture critic at the Independent ..

Working detail

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Shiro Studio Double-curved aluminium sheet roof The sculpted yellow aluminium roof with its 10 incisions – intentionally analogous to the air intake vents on the bonnet of a car – allows for natural ventilation and daylighting. With its 3,300 square metres of double-curved aluminium sheet, the roof is the first application of aluminium in this way on such a large scale. Working with boatbuilders, whose familiarity with organic sculpted forms and waterproofing made them the ideal partner, and cladding specialists, the form was constructed from aluminium sheets fitted together using a patented tongue and groove system. ..

The entire system is based on a single extrusion, 120mm-wide and 6,000mm-long, which is able to bend and accommodate the curve. Where the geometry of the surface becomes more deformed, the extrusions are pre-bent off site using a purpose-made stretch-bending machine. The aluminium skin is structurally connected to a metal sub-structure. Between the sub-structure and the main structure a 200mm-thick rigid insulation foam guarantees a very high R-value. The roof package is completed with the internal roof membrane, stretching the entire internal width of the building. The Barrisol membrane is translucent, allowing the natural daylight coming from the skylights to spread evenly across the entire ceiling. Andrea Morgante, founding director, Shiro Studio

Legend 1. 2mm double curvature aluminium sheet 2. Secondary extrusion 3. Transverse extrusion 4. 30mm-diameter Aluminium profiles at 1,200mm centres 5. 150 x 150mm aluminium connecting clip 6. 200mm-thick rigid foam insulation 7. Glazing

STUDIO CENTO29

Enzo Ferrari Museum

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Technical study

Sound resolution

BFLS and Arup skilfully tackled tricky questions of acoustic design in their extension to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, reports Felix Mara 7

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6. North Road 7. Bute Park 8. Terrace 9. Main drop-off 10. Dock feeder canal 11. Plant and biomass

he orthodox holistic notion of pulling together every aspect of a design in one stroke is a valid methodology and goes hand in hand with the pursuit of a unifying concept, although it often follows a series of iterations. But the design of some projects is more sequential. BFLS’ concept for an extension to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) in Cardiff, which opened last November, tackled the trickiest elements – the performance spaces and the urban context – before addressing other requirements. ‘The starting point was the interior of the concert hall and theatre,’ says BFLS director Jason Flannigan. The new construction comprises performance and rehearsal spaces, teaching studios and exhibition facilities, added to the college’s existing accommodation in a converted stables block and drab 1970s building, forming a new public face for RWCMD. Prior to this, the college orchestra rehearsed and performed in a local church and occasionally in Cardiff ’s St David’s Hall. Acoustic design The principal challenge in the design of the performance space was the acoustics of the 450-seat Dora Stoutzker Hall, Wales’ first purposebuilt chamber recital hall. It was >> ..

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NICK GUTTERIDGE

1. Deliveries 2. Linbury Gallery 3. Changing rooms and showers 4. Fly tower 5. Richard Burton Theatre 6. Foyer 7. Attic 8. Dora Stoutzker Hall

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Left Portland stone-faced facade to Cathays Park

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essential to minimise noise from the adjacent A470 trunk road and building services, as well as breakout to the training theatre and drama studios. ‘A low “noise floor” enhances the drama of music performance, with increased awareness of reverberant sound,’ explains Arup acoustics team associate director Ian Knowles. The hall’s 400mm-thick reinforced concrete drum and perimeter buffer space, together with its 300mm-thick concrete lid, which is independent of the weathering roof above, achieved the specified NR-15, and its air displacement system maximises ventilation efficiency and minimises potentially noisy air velocity. ‘When it’s completely silent, you can hear the blood in your ears,’ says Flannigan. Beyond this, it was vital to resolve the knotty cluster of variables controlling the acoustics quality of the room. This involved using geometry and absorption to balance direct and reverberant sound and loudness, taking into account the different uses of the hall. ‘It’s an unusual mix,’ says Knowles. ‘You start with a precedent study and we looked at overlays of the auditorium of Dixon Jones’ Kings Place and the Wigmore Hall in London.’ The Dora Stoutzker Hall’s modulated geometry, with many different reflective surfaces and finishes, provides a richly populated impulse response, which is more rewarding for the audience. The damped, suspended timber platform is resonant for cellos and bases, and the upper room surface, which is concrete with vertical timber fins, is the hall’s main source of accumulated reverberations. Smallscale diffusion here is minimised to avoid dulling reverberation and reduce duration. The ceiling’s three layers of plasterboard, weighing 40kg/m2,

It was vital to resolve the knotty cluster of variables controlling the acoustics  ..

NICK GUTTERIDGE

Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Cardiff BFLS

Above Dora Stoutzker Hall at gallery level This image Fine tuning the auditorium involved comparisons with precedents such as this overlay of Dora Stoutzker Hall on Dixon Jones’ Kings Place (RWCMD in Magenta)

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minimise excessive low frequency absorption, and its glazed apertures for production lighting define the boundary volume and insulate the hall from the attic, where the walkways and gantries are situated. Diffusion is quite shallow in the stalls (25-50mm) and bay ‘columns’ create large-scale diffusion. The balcony fronts are angled upwards to reflect lateral energy into the upper part of the hall in order to enhance the sound development of reverberations. As part of the variable acoustic system, banners that drop out of the ‘top-hat’, modify the reverberations in the upper hall. The ceiling is formed of a series of overlapping profiles, with a maximum recess depth of 300mm, optimising lighting angles to the stage from the lighting bridges, and providing acoustic diffusion without obstructing energy transmission from platform to audience. Arup modelled the hall using Odeon proprietary acoustic software, drawing from scratch rather than importing elements from architectural drawings, since its model needed to be precise and include only key elements. Superfluous detail would have caused problems. ‘It was the acoustic equivalent of a CGI,’ says Flannigan. Urban design and layout Situated on the site of a former car park, the BFLS extension adds to a formal arrangement of civic buildings grouped around the Grade I-listed rectangle of Cathays Park that lies to the north of the College’s original home in Cardiff Castle. ‘It’s the first building you see after the civic centre,’ says Flannigan. Taking the form of the performance spaces, which had already been established, and the height restriction set by the planners as a starting point, BFLS used the maximum height as a horizontal datum, which set the roof ’s level and shuffled around the volumes below. It floats above the elliptical volume of the concert hall, separated from the adjacent blocks by a triple-height entrance foyer, fully glazed on its >> ..

Typical section through centre of concert hall wall panel

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Cladding legend 1. Ply cap fixed to steel frame at balcony level 2. Slotted sound absorbing, perforated birch plywood panel 3. Balcony upper front panel: hardwood surface screwed and glued to backing board 4. Front panel modulation: timber grooves 18/25mm in depth 5. 150mm-thick glass fibre 6. Lighting enclosure 7. Birch plywood kick strip 8. Single cold cathode 9. Translucent Perspex inlay 10. First floor concrete slab 11. Lower wall panelling/leg 12. 10mm joint 13. Sound diffusing wall panel of 25mm thick plywood bonded together with routed slots of varying width and depth 14. Shelf above skirting panel, width varies 15. Lower wall panelling/leg 16. 10mm joint 17. Skirting panel: height varies 18. Matt black laminate kick strip

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Emulating the great chamber rooms, our starting point for the hall’s design was the shoebox model. Narrow width encourages strong, early lateral reflections and a sense of being enveloped, whereas excessive narrowness generates a harsh sound. A width of 14m was chosen so that the space would be suitable for a variety of functions. Since the hall will be used for medium-sized chamber orchestras and the school orchestra, we emulated Japanese chamber rooms and made the volume 10m3/seat (7-8m3 is usual). This reduced loudness, increased the distance of some reflective surfaces from the audience, and allowed us to strategically place absorption, so that the hall could be tuned to control excessive reverberations and reverberant sound levels, eliminating harshness and stridency. The height of 13m was the maximum that we could achieve without requiring orchestral reflectors and the rake was as shallow as we could make it without compromising sightlines and losing direct sound impact. The perimeter ‘top hat’ section reflects sound towards the audience before the main ceiling can do so, a phenomenon which is known as ‘cue-ball reflection’, which uses an additional reflection in the impulse response to provide a richer sound. The radiused fibrous plaster coving between the top hat and the ceiling creates a spacious sound. Ian Knowles, associate director, Arup acoustics team 

Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Cardiff BFLS

Preliminary design

Geometry agreed, priciples fixed

Detailed design

Parametric modelling of roof shape using conjoined ellipses and a swept roof edge - Inventor

Geometric information exchanged and developed between models

Visual modelling and 3D simulation - 3D Studiomax

Architectural model in Microstation Generative Components including detailed parametric studies of roof profile

Model exported to Finite Element modelling (staad) for concrete frame and all steelwork design

Generic data exchanged with iterative design process

Structure fully modelled in Revit, providing structural design drawings

MEP plantroom and key distribution routes modelled (Sketch-up)

MEP plant and distribution clashdetected with structural model; designs updated to remove conflicts

Design co-ordinated Structural steel model exported to Autocad and issued as a supplemental part of tender, providing potential subcontractors with additional detailed information

Tender & construction

  RWCMD was not set up as a BIM project. At concept design stage, we used Inventor to rationalise the double curvature roof profile. Then, at stage D, we started modelling the structure in Revit. We made a SketchUp MEP model at this stage and brought it in to Navisworks to detect plant room clashes. MEP Revit was not available at that time. We owned the Revit model, though we sent it out to project team members in geometrical form. They then asked questions such as, ‘Can you move this?’. The steelworks and piling contractors worked from our Revit geometric model. Although the details are in the Revit file, we did not model every instance. The model was not applied for costing, but we used it to take off volumes and quantities of steel for internal use and for presentations to the contractor. A lot more could have been done if we had all worked in BIM and the general contractor could have made more use of it for planning. Although this was a Revit learning project for us, BIM made our work easier. Nick Dobson, project manager, Mott MacDonald  ..

Above left Autodesk Navisworks clash detection model Above right Mott MacDonald BIM flow chart

Pile schedules produced automatically from model, including toe levels, cut-off levels and location co-ordinates

east and west sides, visually linking Cathays Park and Bute Park to the west. The roof overhang provides shading and its GRP soffit panels reflect light and colour into the college, tapering in section to 50mm at its edge. The roof, which is syphonically drained, also tapers on plan towards its south end, where it cantilevers 10m and picks up an axis from the castle. The addition’s scale builds up as ground level falls from south to north, and the largest space, the concert hall, is situated at the north end, enabling its height to be maximised. The concert hall’s inclined Western Red Cedar slatted cladding follows its stepped section profile. ‘The fins have concealed, spigoted connections, and they twist on plan to confuse the aging process,’ says Flannigan. From certain angles, these twists create the effect of deep bands, which are alternately solid and perforated. Internally, the 160-seat Richard Burton Theatre has a full fly tower with a tension wire grid, and an auditorium, which works with a proscenium arrangement. The space known as the Linbury Gallery, between the extension and the 1970s building, was glazed over and inspired by Cardiff ’s city

Visual modelling inclined cones investigated for concert hall timber - 3D Studiomax

Structure fully modelled in Revit

MM in-house steelwork connection design software used to collate member and forces from Finite Element model for subcontractor connection design

Final steel frame design issued as 3D model to subcontractors, to assist with understanding, interpretation and fabrication drawings

centre arcades, forming RWCMD’s principal circulation space, which connects to the Bute Theatre. Music from the open windows of practice rooms on the upper floors filters into this gallery, which, like all the other spaces, apart from the concert hall and the theatre, is naturally ventilated, helping RWCMD to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating. BIM software While BFLS worked in MicroStation, Generative Components parametric software and Rhino, multi-disciplinary engineering consultant Mott MacDonald used Revit BIM software to model the structural steelwork. Given RWCMD’s complexity, with large structural steelwork spans that needed to be coordinated with elaborate ventilation services, it helped to model the project in 3D. Mott imported the BIM model into Navisworks to detect and resolve clashes with services, eliminating the need for any redesign. Mott’s BIM model was also exported to the 3D structural analysis package STADD for concrete frame and steelwork design, and used in conjunction with in-house steelwork connection design software to collate member end ..

JOE CLARK

Project data

Practical completion At £3,300 per square metre, BFLS’ extension is good value, considering the height of some of its volumes. There are places where the budget wears thin, however, especially on the west elevation where the addition adjoins the 1970s building. This is very much the rear elevation. It’s also disappointing to pass through the new entrance foyer to the terrace, which overhangs the canal, and not to be able to proceed further. Nevertheless, the project is well worked through and practical, with some clever details, ..

such as concealed lights in balcony fronts and in the shadow gaps below the overhanging roof. As Flannigan notes, ‘the form changed quite a lot’. BIM played an essential role in the structural design and procurement, helping the project team to meet its time and cost constraints on a tight site and allowing the college to continue to operate during the construction phase. Tackling the most challenging problems first and starting as it intended to go on also helped. ■

Above First floor rehearsal studio Below View from Bute Park

JOE CLARK

forces for subcontractor connection design. Mott also exported the BIM model to AutoCAD documents, issued as a tender supplement. The BIM model was issued to steelworks and roofing and piling contractors in geometric form. Pile schedules, including toe levels, cut-off levels and location coordinates, were produced automatically from the BIM model.

start on site October 2009 completion July 2011 internal floor area 4,400m2 procurement Develop and Construct construction cost £14.5 million cost per metre square £3,300 architect and landscape architect BFLS client Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama structural, mechanical and civil engineer Mott MacDonald acoustician Arup Acoustics specification consultant Schumann Smith cost consultant and project manager Davis Langdon main contractor Willmott Dixon theatre consultant Theatre Project Consultants lighting consultant GIA Equation Specification consultant Schumann Smith estimated annual co2 emissions 26.1(BER) glass CareyGlass facade Kawneer revolving door system GEZE roofing insulation Kingspan timber facade Levolux external paving Marshalls sanitaryware Grohe timber flooring Junckers underfloor heating Warmafloor grp roofing specialist Torclad roofing membrane Fatra metal doors Safe Door lifts Cardiff Lifts metal louvres Colt and Naco café fit out Catering Academy turnstiles/access Gunnebo lighting supplier Whitecroft stone supplier Albion Stone

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Practice

The Regs Practices must review aggregate material usage in light of new European standards, says Geoff Wilkinson

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including a radon sump and a gas extraction system. For the installation to be effective, radon must be able to migrate freely to the sump, ie the hardcore must be gas permeable, but should not contain excessive fines’. The choice of hardcore requires some consideration. The most often used materials are Type 1 and Type 2, which contain a substantial proportion of fines and may fail to offer sufficient permeability when well compacted. Type 3 may be specified as an alternative, but this is coarser than Type 1 and Type 2 so it is not as readily compacted in 100–150mm placement layers. The digest recommends that Type 1 and Type 2 are specified for the lower layers while the topmost layer uses a crushed rock coarse aggregate, graded 4/20 Gc 85/15 to the new BS EN 13242.

Ensure adequate compaction of hardcore material by use of an appropriate specification

HANNA MELIN

This week I am discussing hardcore – a subject that is rarely covered in the technical press, but can often cause problems for contractors, and not just if they have tried googling it on the office laptop. The problems include chemical reaction between the hardcore and the concrete, settlement due to poor compaction, and swelling or consolidation due to changes in water content. Because of these past failures, Approved Document C requires ‘wellcompacted hardcore, no greater than 600mm deep, of clean, broken brick or similar inert material, free from materials including water-soluble sulphates in quantities that could damage the concrete’. The use of oversite concrete and hardcore developed soon after the War as timber was in short supply and builders needed to find an alternative method of forming floors. In the early days of its development, inappropriate materials (typically colliery spoil/slag) were selected, and as a result there were structural failures of the slabs. These problems have for the most part been eradicated. Readers should be aware that BRE has issued guidance on the selection of materials following the introduction of new European standards on the specification of aggregate materials. The guide BRE digest 522 is divided into two parts – part 1 concentrates on the new standards and part 2 focuses on more recent problems. These issues arise from the fact that the hardcore will tend to compress with time if it has been inadequately compacted. One reason for this compression is the wetting of previously dry material from groundwater, which can weaken particles in the hardcore. As a result the floor slab loses support over part or all of its area and settlement may occur, if it is not adequately reinforced. Typically, gaps appear between the floor and skirting board, the slab starts to crack and any embedded services fracture. Another typical flaw is that the hardcore is specified as the layer on which the thermal insulation, DPM or radon barrier are placed. To prevent damage to this membrane the top of the hardcore must be given a level and smooth finish by ‘blinding’ it with a thin layer of fine sand. In high risk areas ‘full radon protection’ is needed,

The new standard has complicated methods of grading hardcore so most practices should review the guidance and update their standard specification notes accordingly. Here is a summary of BRE Digest recommendations: • Ensure adequate compaction of hardcore material by use of an appropriate specification, including the maximum thickness of layers and the type of compaction plant. • Total compacted hardcore thickness should generally be in the range of 100–600 mm. For greater thickness specify a suspended floor or seek expert advice. • If you use Type 2 as a hardcore material, ensure the supplier declares the density and optimum water content. • If using Type 1, you can compact the material adequately for use as hardcore without reference to its optimum water content as long as the material is visibly damp but not wet. Geoff Wilkinson is managing director of approved inspectors Wilkinson Construction 

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Culture

PODSNAPPING TOWARDS A NEW JERUSALEM The BBC’s recent focus on the 1970s has coincided with the dismantling and relocating of a Walter Segal self-build of the period. Jay Merrick picks his way through construction in an era of consumerism  ..

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JOHN DONAT / RIBA LIBRARY PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION

BBC2’s recent unearthing of the 1970s, most notably through Dominic Sandbrook’s series The 70s, have coincided with the dismantling of the Walter Segal post-and-beam building at Upper Ground on London’s South Bank. Its re-erection and extension at the Oasis children’s adventure playground in Stockwell is led by Matthew Atkins and Benjamin Barfield Marks. Is there a lesson for 21st century architects in Segal’s deliberately modest approach to sustainable design and habitation? Or, are his buildings merely incidental, idealistic gewgaws amid the commercially servile expressions of high-tech and PoMo design that have so remorselessly denatured the architectural manifestoes of the 70s? ..

Top right Walter Segal meets selfbuilders on site at Segal Close, Lewisham, London Top Norman Foster’s Willis Faber and Dumas building in Ipswich Above Drawing by Colin St John Wilson of the British Library

Segal’s original South Bank structure went up in 1988, but its design was demonstrated in 1977, the same year that Colin St John Wilson delivered his design for the British Library. Seven Segal-system houses began to be erected by self-builders on a sloping site in Lewisham (the council passed the scheme by one vote) and I visited Segal Close not long afterwards. It seemed a thoroughly civil demonstration of anticonsumerist anarchy only a year after the Sex Pistols’ spittled declaration that Britain’s ‘future dream is a shopping scheme’. Norman Foster had already delivered the hightech Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in 1975, an architectural expression of the transformational >> 

Culture Jay Merrick on the 1970s

white heat of technology that Harold Wilson had heralded at the Labour Party conference 11 years earlier. But there were more complex kinds of heat, and technology, at work. The IRA bombed the Houses of Parliament in 1974; genuinely provocative social and political critiques were prime-time television material, as were re-runs of The Prisoner, which dramatised an hallucinatory existential crisis set in that proto-Poundbury, Portmeirion. Many of those who worked in the Willis building – no doubt piquant with Brut or Hai Karate aftershave, or the citrus scent of Aqua Manda – will have watched Mike Leigh’s televised Play for Today, Abigail’s Party, which portrayed the burgeoning white collar lower-middle class (‘Have you tried pilchard curry? It’s a very economical dish!’). A month earlier in 1977, Tom Stoppard’s television play, Professional Foul, was also broadcast. Set in Prague, it was a conflation of football, philosophy, and a protest against Czechoslovakia’s communist government. At almost precisely that moment, incidentally, a teenager called Simon Cowell was dropping out of a minor public school, rather like a PoMo version of WB Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come at last, slouching

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Top left The Sex Pistols predicted in 1977 that ‘Your future dream is a shopping scheme’ Above An AJ from 1975, titled with the words of a Suffolk school teacher, who had built a house following Segal’s instructions Left Photography from Learning from Las Vegas, which would go on to influence 1980s and ’90s architecture

towards an X-Factored Bethlehem to be born. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form was published in the same year as Segal Close was built. The treatise presaged both informed Postmodernist architectural mannerism, and its shadowy, necrotic Nosferatu, PoMo. In the 70s, as Scott Brown told Adam Marcus of Museo magazine, her ideas were informed by ‘popular culture, the humanities and theology, and was concerned with diversities, values, and loss of innocence since the Holocaust.’ Are subjects like these discussed thoroughly in schools of architecture? Do individuals (including architects) think of the future in terms of anything other than commercial products? Is doubt or sustained objection even theoretically respectable in our zeitgeist of hyper-communicative, digitally anointed, OMG/LOL/wtf self-entitlement, even as Guangzhou confirms 19th century Manchester, and the 50 million cotton spindles of Lancashire, as the eternally fundamental model of life on earth? It is hard not to think of the 1970s as a last hurrah, trapped in the amber of a decade when small-group agitprop activities, vigorous public protests, politics, design, and consumerism formed a bolus that felt distinctly and unpredictably fertile, rather than seamlessly corporatised. Segal, for example, had only designed small buildings in Hackney for the Premium Pickle Company, an office for insulation firm Tretol, and a few self-generated housing projects, before his self-build system made him into a counter-cultural deity. Today, an architect working for the equivalent of the Premium Pickle Company’s redeveloper is pinioned by spreadsheets, value engineering, and the NPPF’s Big Society swipe-card sustainability. There is also the matter of the architect’s loyalty ..

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card, pertaining to the developer’s desire to resolve, as cost-effectively as possible, the local planning and public consultation processes that will transform Premium Pickle’s site into an iconic mixed-use entity that supports the government’s World Class Places urban development strategy. Is Segal Close a World Class Place? Certainly not. It is a particular, and simplified, demonstration of communal self-help: the houses were originally built by those who would occupy them. They were a pragmatic alternative to council house waiting lists or mortgaged properties in more desirable locations; and they also expressed an idea about community – an acceptance, in effect, of experiment. Today, the creation of housing, if not mixed-use schemes, too often recalls the production of cloned babies in Brave New World, using what Aldous Huxley called Bokanovsky’s Process; a system that could be accelerated using Podsnap’s Technique to rapidly ripen eggs. In the 1932 novel’s opening chapter, the director of Hatcheries and Conditioning for central London declares: ‘“96 identical twins working 96 identical machines!” The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. “You really know where you are. For the first time in history.” He quoted the planetary motto. “Community, Identity, Stability.” Grand words. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely, the whole problem would be solved.”’ Only time will tell if planning minister Greg Clark bears some relationship to Huxley’s hatcheries and conditioning supremo, and whether the new NPPF is simply a Podsnap Technique that produces architecturally narrow bands of replicant development. The Podsnapian speed of regeneration has become a central policy issue, already the spur of at least one utterly depressing remark. Referring to the public consultation exercise that produced 2,000 ..

Top left The ‘Podsnap technique’, the term Aldous Huxley used to describe an artificial reproductive process is a play on words recalling the complacent philistinism of Mr Podsnap in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend Above Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner Top right Mike Leigh’s classic Abigail’s Party portrays the awkward tensions of shifting class relations

suggestions for naming neighbourhoods on the Olympic site, Andrew Altman, head of the Olympic Park Legacy Company, said the selected names had ‘given a new piece of London its identity’. You don’t produce socio-urban identity simply by calling new neighbourhoods Chobham Manor, Sweetwater, East Wick, Marshgate Wharf, or Pudding Mill. This name-game reveals how tritely those in important positions think about the potential qualities of places and the people and architecture in them. The government’s desire to develop British tourism is equally disturbing in its potential to satirise culture and identity: what world class architectural and placemaking travesties might be needed to bolster a Craven New World informed by a national, if not effectively nationalised, eat-shop-fuck-tweet-leave ethos? In Stockwell, section by bolted section, the transplanted Segal building goes up. For the children who eventually use it, it will be a rackety, innocent playhouse. Others might think of it as a symbol of lost innocence, and that the Sex Pistols were prophets, not of anarchy but of shopping schemes. There remains an eerie sense that even today’s most interestingly designed buildings and places are sports of nature, accidental curios lost in desperately accelerating urban and existential change: Chipperfield’s beautifully arranged spatial narrative at Hepworth Wakefield; the monochrome clarity of AHMM’s Angel Building; muf’s delicate remodelling of Altab Ali park to form an historically witty cicatrice >>

Segal Close was a civil demonstration of anticonsumerist anarchy 

Culture Jay Merrick on the 1970s

on the urban skin of Whitechapel; Marsh View, Patrick Lynch’s unearthly, pyre-like take on rural domestic typology; Cullinan’s beautifully wrought British Film Institute Archive. But perhaps they are already as retro as Segal Close, or pilchard curry. Or even the forthcoming Festival Number 6 in Portmeirion in September. The ‘beat combos’ taking part will include Primal Scream (see Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy, circa 1970) and New Order (see Mein Kampf author, A Hitler). Are we looking back because the future seems intellectually and emotionally inconceivable? As a Postmodern, AJ-reading James Joyce might have written: ‘Architecture became generalised all over Britain. It was falling on every part of the dark, CCTV’d  ..

Above Midway through Matthew Atkins’ and Benjamin Barfield-Marks’ reconstruction at Stockwell

central plain, on the mixed-use hills, falling softly on the Bog of Poundbury and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous parametric waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely mall on the hill where Modernism lay buried.’ The original version of those lines are from the final paragraph of Joyce’s magnificent short story, The Dead. Today, as we assiduously mine the past (including Avantgardism) in order to avoid the very idea of the future, our commercially iconised towns and cities begin to suggest an ambiguous undeadness, a panoptic formal drama that is acting out a therapeutically passive condition of déjà vu which, actually and eerily, has very little to do with history, let alone personal memory. ■ Jay Merrick is architecture critic of the Independent ..

Avery Associates’ new book is a welcome reflection on wild city spaces, says James Pallister

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Left A Hellman cartoon from 1984 lampooning the architecture world’s attitude to self-build Below Walter Segal with a self-builder at Honor Oak Park, Lewisham, London, in 1988

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As the days tick by to 27 July, and images of the Olympic Park looking ever-pristine continue to slip into our collective consciousness, it’s important to remember that one of the processes of the Olympic Endeavour was the wholesale cleaning of a large, contaminated brownfield site. Now the soil hospitals have gone and the muddy puddles replaced with new turf – its fresh, rectilinear sculpting perhaps just as unheimlich as the industrial verdure it supplanted – it’s interesting to re-read some of the literature from before the great clean-up. In architect William Mann’s (of WWMA) 2005 essay, written pre-Olympic bid success, he borrowed Victor Hugo’s phrase ‘Bastard Countryside’ to describe the area next to what is now the Olympic Park, as classic edge condition, colonised by both industry and nature. The interplay between city and countryside is rich pickings for writers, architects and artists, particularly when they delve deeper than this simple dichotomy. In Bryan Avery’s book of the same name, alongside pieces by Edwin Heathcote, Richard Weston, Matthew Teague and Joseph Rykwert, there’s a poetically-titled essay ‘Fragments of Wilderness City’, in which Avery argues for an urban arrangement where towns – ‘the real problem’ – are reconceived to contain the wild areas that humans seem to need. Aside from chapters on civic space, workplace and climate, Avery’s romp though the problems of the UK countryside, where the net worth of farming has sunk to half that of the ready-made sandwich industry, is worth the cover price. In his prognosis, the countryside should be dangerous and smelly: a road network should be separated into limited access expressways and smaller, potholed types would require the skill formerly required of driving. And perhaps bears and wolves should be reintroduced to lowland England. As Avery says, ‘that would spice things up a little’.

read Fragments of Wilderness City, Bryan Avery (ed), Black Dog Press, July 2011, £25

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Ian Martin

The infinite possibilities of Metropolis 3000 and the importance of harvesting ‘sunfall’ WEDNESDAY. Ha ha! Beansy sent Metropolis 3000 off to a certain high-profile client looking for a ‘contemporary pavilion of the arts’ and they bloody LOVE it.

MONDAY. Spending a few days with my old mate Beansy the nanofuturologist. He’s invited me to the twinkling thought-laboratory he calls his ‘lair’ – essentially a housing association flat in Wandsworth with cables everywhere. It’s good to be friends again. We had a falling-out over the marketing of ‘hard air’, the technique we invented using ‘lumpening hydrates’ etc. to convert ordinary air into a flexible yet robust construction material. In retrospect it was a mistake to sell the manufacturing licence to a major materials consortium. They acquired the rights simply to stop anyone else developing hard air. Of course. They know it will revolutionise the design and construction industries and they’re perfectly happy making a fortune the old, conservative way. Still, only another two years and all hard air rights revert to us. ‘We’ll be laughing, man. Laughing like pissed hyenas...’ He takes a massive toke of helium and does his pissed hyena impression. It’s pretty good. Yeah, I caution, we’ll be fine unless the squares and breadheads have hacked the lumpening hydrates code and cloned our hard air formula. Beansy looks extravagantly sceptical. ‘The global construction industry is regulated by strict ethical codes. Intellectual copyright is inviolable. Don’t you READ the magazines? Everyone’s cool these days. Moral imperative. Responsible design. Chill…’ We both take a hit of helium and laugh, highly.

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FRIDAY. Beansy’s decided the best way to make his mark in a world full of ambitious nanofuturologists is to be a contrarian. With that in mind he aims to provoke a major schism in the worldwide hot weather communion. While everyone else clamours for increased ‘albedo’ or solar reflectivity to combat the heat island effect, Beansy will now campaign for the opposite, ‘nigredo’. Beansy’s argument runs as follows: ‘The wind blows, apples and kindling fall. Do we let windfall go to waste? No. Likewise with sunfall. Instead of reflecting stuff back into space we should harvest it and turn it into whatever, heat and radiation. Maybe big storage heaters and improve my mobile signal for a start…’ In a way, he’s at his most incisive when he’s vague and tiddly.

HANNA MELIN

TUESDAY. In the morning, Beansy psycho-engineers a ‘beta batch’ of smart opiates. After lunch, in the interests of science, we ingest half a batch each and wait. In the evening we design Metropolis 3000, a postMaterial Age city in which buildings, telecommunications, biological reproduction, coffee shops and transport have been superseded by an omni-neural network, personal ionised overmantles and much faster wi-fi. It looks AMAZING. A bit sketchy, but that’s how the future’s supposed to look. The vivid colours of our sky are based on a combination of guessed atmospheric changes over a millennium and the liberating effect of a full-spectrum colourwheel. The built environment of Metropolis 3000 has a similarly casual theme: enigmatic architectural squigglings in crayon. They suggest volume without form, and mass without shape. God, is that the time?

THURSDAY. We have invented a social auditing algorithm app for today’s on-trend designer of epic urban space. Algopops™ converts any smartphone into a trope scanner, harvesting cultural data about who wants what, where, and at what level of conspicuous private ownership. We take the beta model out to test it in the ‘field’, or ‘pub’. A cursory social audit yields the following trope data: • People in the pub like being there but wouldn’t mind if the TV was switched over from Sky News occasionally. • Sense of community greatly valued, as long as it’s not clustered around the bar. • Wandsworth OK but could do with being 10 times bigger so people could afford to live there and/or find somewhere to park. • Tenfold Wandsworth should be contextualised within a Tenfold London; retain rest of country as organic farm with pop-up reservoirs. • People uncomfortable with ads covering every surface but fine with the occasional Nando’s flyer. We text the results to a thinktank and let Radio 4’s Today know that we’re up for an interview.

SATURDAY. Can’t get Johnny Cash singing The Streets of Albedo out of my head. SUNDAY. Retire to the recliner, where I achieve volume without form, and mass without shape. ..

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