back up test

London's population, according to the Office for National Statistics, is projected to grow by 13% - over a million people - between 2012 and 2022.  This means there is a need for more of every type of building - offices, factories, schools and hospitals - as well as the homes that are the main subject of discussion when growth is discussed. There is plenty of room within Greater London to accommodate this growth, and that is what the London Plan proposes to do.  But it's not easy to reconcile this pressing need with the tendency of local authority planning committees to resist it in their decision making.  It seems unlikely that if asked, committee members would support people being accommodated in sheds in the back gardens of TfL's zones 4 to 6, but that is what happens at present - out of sight, out of mind, perhaps. London is not like New York (hellzapoppin, at least in Manhattan) or Paris (homogeneous, at least until you get out to the banlieues).  Its growth pro...

The Twentieth Century's Society's small exhibition at the Royal Academy, 100 Buildings 100 Years, (on until 1 February 2015) includes Lubetkin and Tecton's Finsbury Health Centre to represent 1938. Listed  at Grade 1 and one of the most important modernist buildings in the UK, it has had a troubled recent history, and is on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk register. Most of the other buildings in the exhibition are illustrated with a photograph, either historic or recent, but this one was shown with a computer-generated image credited to Avanti Architects, who have worked on the restoration of the building over the years, and whose former director John Allan, author of the definitive monograph on Lubetkin, has been instrumental in the campaign to save it. If you go and look at the real thing you can see why they didn't use a current photograph.  Some aspects of the present state of the building would have been a depressing sight in what was generally an upliftin...

The Biennale - Venice's international architecture festival, which takes place every two years - ends this weekend after five months in situ. As trips to the Mediterranean coast go, for London architects, MIPIM (where architecture is a sideshow to the world of commercial property) might get you more work - but the Biennale offers a lot more inspiration and food for thought.  Quite apart from the relative merits of Venice and Cannes as places to visit. This year's Biennale - the best I have been to - was directed by Rem Koolhaas under the rubric 'Fundamentals'.  The Central Pavilion in the Giardini was divided up according to the 'Elements of Architecture' - subject headings related to elements or components of which buildings are made - stairs, facades, roofs and so on. Unfairly satirised as 'a bit like being at B&Q', what each of the different sections offered - admittedly in a slightly random way, since each was curated by a different group - was c...

Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in France is one of the great works of interwar British architecture, and along with other sites such as the Menin Gate at Ypres (by the less highly regarded Blomfield, but here as good as Lutyens) and Herbert Baker’s Tyne Cot cemetery, makes a tour of the Great War battlefields of France and Belgium a worthwhile architectural pilgrimage, whatever other reasons one might have to visit.  The architect Adolf Loos claimed that 'Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.'   Loos was an interesting architect and writer but I suspect Lutyens, a man of fewer public words, was smarter.  At first glance one might think of Thiepval, a sort of fractal version of a triumphal arch, as an example of what Loos meant.  But when one sees the extent of the panels with the names of the 72,000 missing dead reco...

A trip to New York last month to meet fellow professionals was a fascinating chance to find out about attitudes to tall buildings in their spiritual home.  What was surprising, perhaps, was the extent to which most of the questions raised by tall buildings in London are also debated in similar terms over there (as are other questions such as how to provide 'affordable' housing for the less well off; and how to provide affordable housing, not in quotation marks, for middle income groups). NY's Muncipal Arts Society's   Accidental Skyline   report concerns the effects of a wave of very slender, very tall new towers under construction and planned, mostly near Central Park, which will change the views from the park dramatically, and, the report suggests, overshadow it unacceptably.  Generally these new towers are as built 'as of right', the planning parameters - including the transfer of developable area from one site to another to allow ever taller and thinner towe...

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...