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Wilkinson Eyre's Crystal sustainability centre in the Royal Docks is worth a visit (or actually I would say **  vaut le détour  rather than *** vaut le voyage ) - especially while you can still get there by the Emirates Air Line cable car over the Thames, also well worth doing in its own right, and worth doing soon before they take it down and relocate it to an Alp - since user numbers are plummeting, and it seems to be used only by tourists. This example of the Architecture of Funny Shapes does however share a difficulty that occurs in many more straight-down-the-line modernist projects - that of making it clear where the front door is.  The newsagent-style sandwich board seen in the photo above, not I think designed by Wilkinson Eyre or included in the original specifications, reads 'Welcome' - a polite way of saying 'Entrance this way'. You don't have this kind of difficulty spotting the front door at the National Gallery.  On the other hand, if you're p...

The quality of architecture is usually all of a piece - the awful-looking bog standard homes available everywhere are usually badly planned as well. A  review by Rowan Moore in yesterday's Observer featured new houses at Harlow by Alison Brooks, which looked interesting and sounded as if they had had more thought put into them than most.  Referring to planning minister Nick Boles' stated wish to improve on the 'pig ugly' housing that homebuyers are normally offered, the review points out that well-designed housing like this is mainly about providing practical, liveable homes, and that architects as much as anyone else prefer to avoid discussions of difficult words like 'beauty' - 'some will find these houses beautiful, some not... but looks are not the main point.' The point, surely, is that while the offerings of many volume housebuilders are indeed pig ugly, good projects such as this one at Harlow, by skilled, prizewinning architects, tend to look int...

This flyer seen on a recent trip Brussels appears to be a protest about some planned new buildings.  Presumably the buildings won’t actually be bright red, though.   The ‘protest montage’ is a now familiar ploy of those who oppose projects. Every effort is made to make schemes look as daft and offensive as possible (equal and opposite, of course, to the efforts of the promoters, which can be equally misleading).  The technique was used in London by opponents of the alleged ‘steel and glass tower blocks’ that Richard Rogers planned for the Chelsea Barracks site (for which read: ten storey buildings much the same height as nearby 1930s mansion blocks, with big windows made of that futuristic material ‘glass’ because even rich people deserve daylight).  I don’t know who started all this, but the architect planner Thomas Sharp was certainly at it in his 1968 book Town and Townscape .   These intriguing images of an abandoned scheme for university buildings in t...

To the Gallery at Cowcross Street for an evening of thought-provoking talks, organised by Farrar Huxley Associates, on ‘The future of cities’.  They brought home just how useless we are at ‘planning’ (in the sense found in the dictionary, rather than the rather different sense we all use when we are down at the council planning department). Ken Webster of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, Kayla Friedman, and ‘rational optimist’ Kelvin Campbell of the Smart Urbanism Alliance presented a series of challenges at difference scales of time and space that all posed questions of ‘top down vs. bottom up’ in planning for the future of the city. Two contrasting big topics that stuck in the memory after the event were: ·          Global energy supplies will run out and no one is getting to grips with it (the scary scenarios are presented in David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air ).  The Ellen MacArthur Foundation promotes the Circular ...

The view towards the City of London from Waterloo Bridge is one of the best in London, which is one reason why it appears in the header to this blog*. The more recent photo above shows the present state of the City's skyline, with cranes as prominent as buildings, most notably on the sites of two of the City's new towers: Rogers Stirk Harbour's 'Cheesegrater' (next to Foster's Gherkin) and Viñoly's 'Walkie Talkie' (on the right), the frame of which now begins to show us the shape of building we will be getting (in case we hadn't quite believed it). If you've spent your adult life involved in putting up buildings, the sight of this forest of cranes should be enough set the pulse racing irrespective of what you think about the buildings.  Colonel W A Starrett, author of 'Skyscrapers and the Men who Build Them' (1928), wrote that 'Building skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war' - if you have witnessed the level ...

This new building just off Curzon Street in Mayfair caught my eye...an elevation composed of brass leaves / tiles - a welcome upping of the game of decorative elevational treatments in recent buildings in Westminster that was discussed here .  This is beautiful and subtle - a long way away from the world of 'Look at us we hired an Artist!'.  Doubly pleasing to find out that this is the work of my own professional  alma mater  Squire and Partners, boldly going off-piste as they do occasionally. Considering that Mayfair is such a posh area, it's surprising how dreary many of the buildings built there in the last hundred years or so are.  Or perhaps not.   Many recent buildings have espoused the anodyne, milk and water architecture that one can't help thinking is put forward by cautious developers and their architects who want to avoid upsetting planning officers or planning committee members, rather than representing anything that anyone actually wants. ...

Depending on your point of view, it's either unfortunate, or possibly appropriate, that as Armistice Day approaches, much of the eastern part of Hyde Park resembles the Somme in 1916. Apart from that particular association, its present condition is entirely regrettable.  2012 has been a special year, and many major public spaces, including this one, have been heavily used, mostly to good and successful effect.  But the underlying trend, noted before in this blog, is for many of London's public spaces to be used more and more for special - and revenue-generating - events.  The mudbath shown above illustrates that as well as rendering these spaces full of unsightly tat and unavailable for quiet public enjoyment while the event is on, and while it is being set up and taken down, there can also be serious long term effects - much of the park continuing to be unsightly and unusable through the autumn and winter months. By the end of November, the delights of 'Winter Wond...