back up test

Here is a piece that I wrote for last week's AJ .... ..... The promoters of the 2014 Wolfson prize, for new ideas about garden cities – and the winners Urbed – deserve praise.   But it has been criticism of the winning entry from the Government’s housing and planning minister, Brandon Lewis, that has attracted most attention.  The episode is symptomatic of just how hard it is promote large scale development in the UK that is underpinned by anything that looks like an idea or a proposition. At the scale of individual buildings, it can be harder to gain planning approval for something interesting than for something mediocre.  Keep below the radar, don’t frighten the horses and you will stand a chance.  Come up with a bold idea and you are likely to be in trouble.  Sadly, the same applies to solving the country’s housing crisis.  Most of the new housing built by the volume house builders is dire, but as it’s the same all over the country, it’s hard to fin...

Dunkerque - half an hour from Calais, and though a historic port, almost entirely rebuilt after (Allied) bombing in the Second World War - had more going for it than I expected. Just east of the docks (and just west of the sandy beaches from which over 300,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated in 1940) is Lacaton and Vassall's recently completed FRAC gallery.  The south part, a redundant dockyard building on a heroic scale, is a giant shed, made sound but at present left largely empty, enclosing a single interior volume; to the north, its new conjoined twin, to the same profile and dimensions, clad in corrugated polycarbonate, houses a regional contemporary art gallery.  In the foreground in the photo above, under construction, a new pedestrian bridge will connect to the shore on the other side of a canal. Lacaton and Vassall's building is excellent - spatially rich, with great views out to sea and along the coast from the upper levels, and clever in its...