back up test

The latest proposals for the disused west end of Smithfield Market have been turned down by the Government after a planning inquiry - six years after an earlier scheme for the same site was also turned down. The buildings continue to decay - buddleia on site continues to flourish. The market hall at the centre does indeed look as if it could be a good space for a new market, as proposed by the project's opponents, but there is need in this area for office space, not market halls.  Of the thousands of people who will be arriving at the new Crossrail station at  Farringdon when it opens, some will be looking for scented candles, but I think rather more will be looking for jobs.  It's hard to get as worked up about the existing buildings as the main objectors Save did, but they must be feeling pleased with themselves.  The self-appointed provos of UK heritage protection, they operate in an system where with more and more of the built environment protected in various way...

Today's Guardian  questions the wisdom of Thomas Heatherwick's garden bridge project, which has now been submitted for planning permission. Though anyone who stands in the way of a project that has Joanna Lumley's support has to think carefully, not least because you may have the gurkhas to contend with, I share the view that the undoubtedly multi-talented Heatherwick is overreaching this time. The proposed location - South Bank to Temple - is not a bad one (the 1944 Abercrombie plan suggested a bridge here).  But does a new bridge need a new design? The Millennium Bridge opposite Tate Modern does the job well, now that the wobbling has been sorted out, and is as elegant a structure as any that emerged from the boom years of lottery projects - its deck structure is almost unbelievably slender from some angles.  The design approach evokes, more evidently than some other Foster projects of recent decades, the pre-peerage Norman Foster's interests in economy of means, and ...

Off to see the Olympic Park, on the weekend that the south part of the park opens to the public on completion of the work that transformed it from 'games mode' to 'legacy mode'. There is plenty to admire and a few things to carp about, but in general terms the two most striking aspects of what has been achieved are (1) the fact that it has happened at all, and (2) the fact that it has been carefully designed and properly funded, with no obvious signs of 'value engineering' (but neither is there pointless extravagance). With London under huge pressure to grow within its borders, it is very hard to find opportunities for new open space of any size, let alone such a large expanse as this - and it only happened here because of the enormous funding made available to clean up a century's worth of pollution, ill considered infrastructure and then neglect over much of this area - which in turn only happened because of the Olympics, but which has delivered a major pu...

'Place' is meant to be important now - so important that it has been promoted to capital letters in the Farrell review. But the endless blethering about 'sense of place' that fills today's planning documents can be tiring, because no one is able go on to explain what on earth it might be - or, for example, how you could hope to provide it in a new social housing scheme. There's no question that it's important, though.  And you know it when you see it. One of the weirdest housing developments in London can be found at Lutyens' Grosvenor Estate housing around Page Street in Westminster, only 500m or so from Parliament.  Weird and wonderful, that is.  Built in 1929-35, well into Lutyens later, more classical / imperial phase, it provides one of the most surreal streetscapes in London.  Long, repetitive, parallel U-shaped blocks, end on to the street, have deck access around the three inner faces. The surreal quality comes from the combination of severe repe...

The dozens of consultants appointed to take part in the design of a major project now include 'facade specialists', but these people don't presume to design the look of the elevations - that is one of the few jobs still left to the architect. However, a quick walk round many new developments suggests that some architects aren't much good at designing elevations. I don't offer any examples, but you can picture your own at this point. Is there a need for a new specialism? The handsome  immeuble Lavirotte (or  immeuble d'Alexandre Bigot ) in Avenue Rapp (two great names there), in Paris near the Eiffel Tower, has a sign explaining that it won 'le prix des facades de la Ville de Paris' in 1903. The design of elevations was also taken seriously as a discipline in its own right in London in the first part of the twentieth century.  In the Survey of London one can find two typical examples of interwar buildings in Mayfair getting facade upgrades at the request...

Saturday's Guardian profile of EH boss Simon 'It's absolute nonsense to say that I'm a fogey!' Thurley notes that his new book The Building of England has been criticised for ending at 1940, and cites The Times's Richard Morrison's claim that 'he stops his survey after 1930...but most of us live and work in an England built since then.' Which made me wonder whether (depending on who the 'us' in 'most of us' might be) the latter claim is in fact true. There must be a date such that half the buildings in the country were built before that year, and half after.  What is that date?  Quite a lot was built during the 1930s - for example major suburban extensions to many towns and cities - and my guess is that the answer lies around 1930-1940 - certainly a significant amount of the country's building stock is from the interwar period. But there are many places where you see very few buildings built since the Second World War; and many s...

A current makeover of Debenhams department store in Oxford Street involves overcladding the very dull 1960s elevations of a building described in the Pevsner guide as 'big and dispiriting' with a 'kinetic facade' of suspended aluminium panels, which are intended to ripple in the breeze. When I walked past, there was drizzle but no breeze, and not much rippling going on - the effect was plain and static, rather than lively as indicated in the publicity  - no doubt it will be better on a day that is both sunny and windy. When a dull building that one has walked past many times has gone, it's hard to remember what it was like. The wonders of Street View (which the idle who use it for virtual site visits should always remember illustrates the recent past, not the present) show the old elevations of windows in vertical strips, alternating with strips of concrete cladding - pretty dispiriting even to a concrete enthusiast, and clearly a candidate for a makeover. But while...