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A visit to St Paul's Cathedral on a weekday lunchtime to see the anti-capitalist protest camp - protestors, sightseeing workers and sightseeing tourists all very well behaved - prompts some thoughts about public space and private space in the city.  The protestors' original target was said to be nearby Paternoster Square, home of the Stock Exchange, but what is called a square, and one might think is 'public' space, turns out to be private land.  Normally full at lunchtime, today it is empty, fenced off behind temporary barriers guarded by the police. But as I understand it, the protestors only get to stay where they are now because they are on a different bit of private land, but owned by the C of E rather than a (secular) property company - presumably if they were in the middle of the road they would be moved on.  The landowners'  'control' of the Paternoster Square turns out to offer them less control than they might have thought, since the protestors...

A trip to the north of England took in two recent projects, one from each side of the Pennines - each an excellent and widely published building: David Chipperfield's Hepworth gallery at Wakefield, and Adam Khan's Brockholes visitor centre next to junction 31 of the M6. Le Corbusier called architecture the 'masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light'.  Many projects don't offer much opportunity for that kind of thing, and nor are most clients necessarily seeking it, but here, in both cases, the opportunity has been taken for 'shapemaking' on an impressive scale. Wakefield and Brockholes both bring together assemblies of variations on a single form - an implied 'house' - to form a powerful and memorable composition. Each has a watery site that is both difficult (gritty regeneration context at Wakefield, reclaimed gravel pits at Brockholes), and also full of promise in the dramatic opportunities offered. It was particula...

From the edge of the recently opened Westfield development at Stratford, there is a good view west over the Olympic Park - this will be the direction from which most visitors to the Games will approach it. As the major structures in the park get close to completion, you'd hope that the visual clutter of the construction site would be starting to resolve itself into a beautiful series of set-piece elements in the landscape. But that's not what is happening in this view (you can click on the image to enlarge): 1. The original clean lines of the stadium roof are lost below the ill-judged visual clutter of the lighting pylons.  You'd think the lights could be in the main part of the roof as has been done elsewhere (e.g. at Arsenal) but apparently this was not possible. If the lights had to stick up above the roof, it would have been better to make them more clearly independent structures, rather than a confusing continuation of the visual logic of the main structure. 2. The ori...

Triumph of the City by urban economist Edward Glaeser (Macmillan, 2011) is highly recommended.  Although the son of an architect, he is not a fan of solving cities' problems by building things:  'help poor people, not poor places' is a recurring theme of the book.  A perceptive outsider's take on one's own field is often refreshing, and while this stat-fuelled account of why cities are the key to progress, growth, enlightenment etc. concerns itself for the most part with people and economic activity rather than buildings and infrastructure, the parts of his arguments that relate to the built environment are filled with useful iconoclastic observations of the kind that fall flat when one tries them oneself but command attention when delivered by a Harvard prof.  For example, he suggests that if conservationists were a bit more logical (a bit more like economists, I think he means) they would argue for buildings not in conservation areas (I'm translating from Ame...

The Mersey, like most rivers as they approach the sea, is relentlessly horizontal; but the architects of two major recent projects next to the 'Three Graces' on Liverpool's waterfront haven't taken the hint, and both schemes - the new Museum of Liverpool (featured in this week's AJ) and the adjacent 'Three Black Coffins' of Mann Island - have espoused the Architecture of Funny Shapes for their inspiration. One can't help wondering how much of the visual confusion and discord that has resulted would go away if they could just have straightened the things out.  It is common for 'look at me' architecture to try to be different in as many different ways as possible, but the loss of the prevailing Cartesian order of horizontals and verticals seems like one degree of difference too far.  In the future, when the style war debates have been forgotten, the funny shapes may be the things that above all else result in a disagreeable degree of disharmony. P...

To the RIBA for the launch of the Institute's ' Homewise ' campaign, which majors on the fact that new homes aren't big enough, but clearly should also branch out into the question of whether the square metres (or more pertinently, cubic metres) of space being offered in new homes are laid out sensibly or not.  They have been pretty astute in appointing a Future Homes Commission with members who are (a) very eminent and (b) not architects, and in fact not even very architect-ey. One member, Which editor Martyn Hocking, made the point that as a consumer, he would buy a  new TV or car in preference to a second hand one, but would only buy a second hand home and would not expect to find a new home on offer that he would want to buy.  At the Q&A, an aggrieved representative of the Home Builders Federation asked why they should be expected to take part, since it appeared that everyone had decided to gang up on them- and attributed the profession's downer on the house...

To the RIBA last Friday, for an event to mark the handover from the first ever female RIBA President Ruth Reed to the second, Angela Brady. Much talk, amongst those I spoke with, about the increasing demands of the job.  The two-year Presidency is unpaid, and the demands on the President's time have increased to the point where there are few who are in a position to be able to commit to it if they wanted to. One has to admire those who are prepared to take it on. The leading figures in the profession - for example, to be objective, UK-based RIBA Gold medal winners from recent decades - have not (with some honourable exceptions) chosen to have much to do with their institute, and have generally not served as President - though most of them are in a position to do it if they chose to.  But who better to put forward the case for the importance of architecture and architects than the architects with the most admired track record of projects? Perhaps the Presidency needs to be shar...