Urban Renaissance?

It was nice to get letter of the week in BD, even if it made me sound a bit grumpy.  I also agree with the next guy's letter: Rogers has designed some outstanding buildings: the Lloyds building is still an Architectural milestone.

My point was that cities are very complicated things and the readily digestible urbanism promoted by Rogers missed many opportunities during a period when there was a lot of money thrown at cities.  He's not the first great Architect to falter at urbanism.  I also didn't mean to say, as the picture of Gillet square suggests, that the Mayor's 100 spaces are a bad thing.  Some are good, some ok, some not so good; my point was that the programme as a whole has done little to tackle the more difficult problems of London and much of the better work carried out by Design for London has been less noticeable, like the Green Grid programme, which did really take on the complexities of London's spaces.

Mike Raco and Rob Imrie's book Urban Renaissance? Does a good job of getting under the skin of the matter.  Of course these are not just architectural issues, but that's exactly my point.  I met Mike Raco at a discussion group invited by the LLDC to discuss the challenges of the redevelopment of the Queen Elizabeth park (the former Olympic park).  This kind of cross-disciplinary approach is what is needed to properly inform urban proposals and its something that Architects are not conventionally good at.

To end on a less grumpy note, my favourite example of a new public space that does work properly in its London context is Windrush Square, Brixton.  

Legacy?

It is at least good to see a proper, claws-out debate in BD about the Olympic legacy question.  Oppidan Design's response (a property developer) is a little more sophisticated than simple PR, but it is disappointing to see the first developments being designed by the usual suspects, in the usual style.  Originally panned by CABE, the Chobham Manor scheme is now supported after changes, but it hardly sets the bar high (to borrow a sporting metaphor).

Michael Edwards is right to draw attention to the other side of the picture and his metaphor is more to the point: "We lay on our backs with our legs apart for the IOC and sponsors".

Generally in this debate there is more heat than light, however; of course there will be some positive benefits and of course a £10bn global, commercial festival will have its downsides; but to hope that a project even on this scale will affect the long-term economic trends that have driven wedges between different parts of society in London and between the southeast and the rest of the country is of course ridiculous.  The problem with the debate about the legacy is that the PR surrounding the Olympic bid and the preparations was utterly fantastic (in the unreal sense of the word) and anyone who really believed that such a project would 'regenerate' East London was surely credulous.  The problem for the politicians involved is that its hard to backtrack from this position and so pointing out individual pieces of legacy as examples of this fantasy merely highlights the gap with reality.  We have been trying to 'regenerate'  London since the 1890's when Booth's amazing social survey maps first made the geographic effects of poverty evident.  120 years later, it still hasn't sunk in that whilst the effects of poverty may be geographic, the causes are not and after the same period of 'regeneration' programmes, today's deprivation maps of London look remarkably similar to Booth's.  Suddenly £10bn no longer sounds like a lot of money.  

This is not to say that there won't be a positive legacy.  The London Legacy Development Corporation has a unique opportunity as both landowner and planning authority to create a park, surrounded by modern development.  They have no option but to use the market to do this and the trick for them is in how they can bring a sense of coherence to what would otherwise be a free-for-all.  The land is going to be developed, so the challenge is to manage that process to create a place that is attractive and inclusive.  That will mean changes in the population of the area: pretending otherwise is disingenuous, but these new people will bring money and will be followed by jobs and services.  The trick is in spreading these as widely as possible, but that can't be achieved through urban design alone, which is the LLDC's remit.  

Next year we're going to be working with the LLDC as part of our ongoing LEED ND research work on the MAASD course.  The intention is to provide some additional metrics to help them do their job better.  The bigger 'legacy' debate is simply a proxy for a much older and longer debate about inequality, as has become apparent in Brazil.  This is a real and increasing problem in this country, but we've had the Olympics and they didn't and won't fix it.  Let's just hope for a nice park and a more integrated urban area in East London. 

discussion on China

I was recently interviewed by TCA thinktank about architecture in China.  I'm by no means an expert, so I tried to relate it to what I know about.  Short extract below, full interview here 

TCA: Do you think Chinese architects have more or less the same responsibilities as the western ones?If we want to describe the Chinese architecture, which are the main characteristics of you and your colleagues architectural production of the last generation?

RK: In a postmodern world, responsibility is a difficult professional concept.  We can no longer connect cause and effect with the same certainty as before and yet the global superstar Architects that I complain about are using this condition as an excuse to avoid their responsibilities.  When the Shard – London’s new tallest building – was completed by Renzo Piano, a well-known London Architect, Jeremy Dixon said that Piano should be locked in the Tower of London to contemplate his mistake (the Tower is opposite the Shard and is where traitors were imprisoned in the past).  It was quite shocking for us (in a good way) because nobody really complains about these kind of buildings in public.  I think the problem is a lack of general knowledge of how to critique contemporary Architecture: it is only if we can hold Architects to account in some way that a form of responsibility develops.  I think this relates to the last question: if people are more engaged with the shaping of their own environment it is obvious that it will respond better to their needs.  Although China does not have the same freedoms of expression that we have in the UK, strangely this situation can create stronger debates because it matters more to people.  It is a deep irony that our freedoms in the west have disempowered us in many ways.  Chinese people have to struggle a lot more to be heard, but I think there are more possibilities open to them in the future to shape their own environment.  Architects should be facilitators in this process, rather than pure artists producing rhetorical forms. 

Live-work. Victorian-style.

The Pullens estate in Walworth.  Victorian Tenements built in the 1880s, with 2-storey workshops for artisans built in mews-like courtyards behind the 4-storey terraces.

The pattern has a distinctly Georgian feel to it, though its much tighter of course.  From the air, the intricate, dense, mixed-use structure is clearly apparent as an urban typology, making everything built since look dumb and wasteful.

the wrong shade of green

It seems amazing that it has taken this long for people to begin to realise that sustainable architecture isn't working (see article link below from archdaily)

http://www.archdaily.com/396263/why-green-architecture-hardly-ever-deserves-the-name/

 Nikos Salingaros

Almost no-one was saying this a few years ago and now there are more and more similar articles.  This is what we have been saying on our Masters course for 5 years now: sustainability is the radical, social challenge of modernity; but somehow that's been watered down to a (partial) science of individual buildings.

This article highlights the failings of the USGBC, though of course its a much wider problem than that and in fact the work we've been doing with the USGBC's LEED ND standard shows an alternative approach.  ND looks at the urban scale of the built environment and combines qualitative dimensions with quantitative, so it considers how people use space, not just thinking of buildings as machines.

Climate change is only one of about ten major, global risks that threaten our survival and not even the most imminent (take your pick from desertification, species extinction, eutrophication, antibiotic resistance etc.).  Any one of these can destroy us, but of course these risks are interconnected (as we and our built environment are), so cherry-picking one problem, sticking a gizmo to tackle it on some buildings and saying we're on our way to solving our problems is the equivalent of putting fingers in your ears and singing 'la la la'.  But this is exactly what we've all been happily doing for the last three decades or so.  Time to stop kidding ourselves and start seeing the bigger picture. 

on the outside

Great week of engagement with local residents, employers, public and third sector people on the RSA Transitions project.  We used three conceptual 'models' to illustrate the different ways the site could grow and bring in a mixture of revenue to support the provision of services to the client base: category D prisoners (who are allowed out on licence) and ex-offenders, whilst also providing employment opportunities for local people.

Of course that's a difficult and potentially controversial balance, but there was almost total support for the project from people and almost too many ideas about how to develop it.  Over the summer we now have to turn this huge amount of information into a preferred option that can be mapped out on the site as a masterplan.  Watch this space...

MAASD 2013_14

Preparing the ground for our sustainability MA next academic year with Anna Minton now joining us in an official capacity.

Big discounts available for UEL graduates who have done elements of the course as part of your diploma.  Applications open now - get in touch if you want to know more.