Manser Medal 2012 (AJ 27.09.12) D

27.09.12

Manser Medal

The five best one-off houses of 2012 FOOTPRINT Siemens Crystal’s green glazing £4.95 THE ARCHITECTS’ JOURNAL THEAJ.CO.UK

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The Architects’ Journal

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66 LEFT: CHRIS WRIGHT. LEFT TOP: ROEL PAREDAENS. RIGHT: EDMUND SUMNER

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: GEORGE DUPIN

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09 Front page Bad debt sinks Manchester practice MBLA; plus belt-tightening at Eric Parry: ‘We will be shrinking a little bit’ 10 UK news Parliamentary committee backs ‘design excellence’ 18 High Line for London AJ exclusive: the competition shortlist 22 Competitions & wins Duggan Morris wins floating cinema job 24 UK news SAVE wins Pathfinder legal challenge in High Court 36 Manser Medal The best one-off house designs of 2012 59 Footprint Siemens’ Crystal goes Platinum with bolt-on technology 76 Culture Jay Merrick on the Royal Academy autumn show, Bronze This week online Sign up for the AJ daily email: the latest news, building studies and competitions arrive at 8.30am TheAJ.co.uk

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ABCOLINROWEDE RNSTGOMBRICHF GHIJOSEPHRYKW ERTKLMNIKOLAU SPEVSNEROPQRE YNERBANHAMST UVWXYZ AJ WRITING PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH BERMAN GUEDES STRETTON ARCHITECTS The Brief The competition is for young architects or architecture graduates and students aged 35 or under. Entrants must write an essay that discusses the question ‘Do architects have a duty beyond satisfying the demands of the client?’ Specific references should be made to existing, unbuilt or historic projects. The piece should be written in lucid, jargon-free language. It should inspire, delight and inform AJ readers as well as those who have no design training.

The Prize , will be awarded to the winning writer. The winning piece will be published in full in the AJ and the writer of the piece will be commissioned to write a building study. At the judges’ discretion, a Highly Commended award may be given.

Terms & Conditions Entries should not exceed , words and must be emailed to ajwritingprize@emap.com no later than  October . Where relevant, supporting visual material may be supplied, though the emphasis is on the quality of the text. Authors should be aged  or under on  October . The competition is not open to professional writers or students of architectural history, theory or writing. Pieces should be wholly the work of the person submitting them. TheAJ.co.uk/writingprize

The Judges Alan Berman, David Partridge, Joseph Rykwert & Christine Murray

Deadline  October 

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From the editor

AJ Small Projects: the search is on for this year’s best designs on a budget, writes Christine Murray

It’s that time of year again.

As the leaves turn and summer fades, it’s time to launch our favourite annual event – the AJ Small Projects competition, celebrating design quality and ingenuity accomplished for a total contract value of £250,000 or less. Supported again this year by our friends at Marley Eternit, AJ Small Projects rewards ambitious architects who apply big ideas to small-scale commissions with cash prizes and publicity.

For some, small projects are a specialism; for others, a loss-leading stepping stone to larger commissions.

This is the 18th year of this annual contest and now, perhaps more than ever, small projects are the bread and butter of this profession. If Ian Martin lampoons the ‘Royal Institution for the Pop-Uption of British Architects’, it is because pavilions and pop-ups and the size of their media coverage have become central to architectural practice. These days, great practices fight over small projects. Take the Architecture Foundation’s Floating Cinema competition, won by Duggan Morris architects (see page 22) – competitions of this scale get hundreds of entries, partially because of the guaranteed media buzz. That’s why Duggan Morris, a practice now winning larger projects, clearly sees the value in continuing to compete for the kind of small-scale works that Rory Olcayto has dubbed ‘PRchitecture’.

With the AJ Small Projects competition, even more lucrative than our total prize fund of £2,500 is the chance to get your practice noticed by clients and peers.

Last year, at the AJ Small Projects launch event, Ben Addy of Moxon Architects talked about how getting a small bridge shortlisted for the AJ Small Projects prize led to a string of bridge commissions. This year, every entrant’s project will be included and promoted in the AJ Buildings Library. The 24-strong shortlist will be published in two special issues of the magazine in January – our most popular issues of the year – and, for the first time, on iPad too. They’ll also be exhibited in the Small Projects exhibition: this year’s show was the longest running in the NLA’s history, then went on ..

Above Small Projects Award winner 2012: Jack Woolley’s Old Workshop

to the Architecture Centre in Bristol in an expanded format with live events with the winners.

Like last year, this year’s shortlist will be asked to present their project to our jury panel for a supercrit.

Our jury always includes a prominent architect, client, quantity surveyor and members of the AJ team – great connections to make.

Also at last year’s launch event, Deborah Saunt spoke of how her practice DSDHA grew from designing extensions to their first skyscraper. Saunt admitted they still take on small projects, even if they are unlikely to make a profit, because they are an ideal training ground for young architects working in practice. ‘You get all the problems of a big project, without the same level of risk,’ said Saunt. It isn’t the only big practice taking on small jobs: in 2009, Hopkins was shortlisted for its smallest cinema project, and last year Carmody Groarke was shortlisted for its workshops for Antony Gormley.

Small Projects also gives the AJ the opportunity to discover new talent and fresh approaches to extending, refurbishing, in-filling, overlooking and rights to light.

We had 150 entries last year. Show us what you’ve got.

Entries are now open and the deadline is 19 November.

Visit TheAJ.co.uk/SmallProjects2013 for more details.

Email Tom Ravenscroft at ajsmallprojects@emap.com with any questions. christine.murray@emap.com 

Week in pictures

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 Haworth Tompkins’ £21 million Dyson Building for the Royal College of Art in Battersea has opened. The 3,000m² ‘arts factory’ is the second phase in the Battersea campus masterplan, which started with the practice’s Sackler Building, completed in 2010. TheAJ.co.uk/dyson 1

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 Robin Lee Architects, Studio Weave and Nicholas Kirk Architects – which constructed a tree from thousands of plastic cable ties (pictured) – have transformed a Shanghai shopping centre as part of the RIBA Shanghai Shop Windows project in China.

TheAJ.co.uk/shanghai 2

 Arup with Camlins and Woods Bagot has completed a glass-clad temporary marketing suite close to Kieran Timberlake’s recentlyapproved US Embassy scheme in Nine Elms, south London, part of developer Ballymore’s 6 hectare Embassy Gardens development. TheAJ.co.uk/embassy 3

  Sheffield University has submitted plans for its new £81 million RMJM-designed engineering building. The 19,500m2 block on the Jessop site will accommodate 19 teaching laboratories over six floors. The scheme is expected on site next year and to complete in 2016. TheAJ.co.uk/sheffielduniversity 4

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 Copenhagen-based N55 with architect Anne Romme has completed a £67,000 greenhouse at the City of Bristol College’s Skills Academy. The inspiration for the aluminium and polycarbonate building came from ‘plate structures occurring in natural structures, such as sea urchins’. TheAJ.co.uk/bristolcollege 5

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PICTURE CREDITS: 01 HELENE BINET 02 JAN SIEFKE 03 ARUP 04 RMJM 05 N55

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Speakers include: Lee Polisano, President, PLP Architects Alistair Guthrie, Director Building Design, ARUP Pascal Mittermaier, Head of Sustainability, EMEA Lend Lease

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Angela Brady, RIBA President, August 2012 Image: Heron Tower, London. Supplied by ©Tim Soar / courtesy of KPF

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Bringing together architects, suppliers and independent BIPV experts, the conference enables designers to be confident in the PV products, understanding how to specify and the benefits they offer. Manufacturers will meet potential specifiers face-toface, gaining a clear understanding of how they work and what they need to incorporate BIPV products into their designs.

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Front page

Jobs to go at Eric Parry  Eric Parry Architects has admitted it is consulting over redundancies – just days after winning the AJ Retrofit Award with its Holburne Museum in Bath (pictured below).

The practice, which also landed an RIBA Award for the scheme, admitted it was expecting to shed staff but denied it was to lose a quarter of its 63-strong workforce, as has been rumoured. Parry said: ‘We are having a cyclical breathing in, but there is not a sense of crisis. We will undoubtedly be shrinking a little bit.’

He added: ‘There has been a double-dip recession and we are experiencing the echoes of this.

‘We have a number of projects with planning permission, which have fallen behind by six to nine months, but we are optimistic they will go ahead.’

The practice was recently on the shortlist for the Southbank Centre competition and featured at this year’s Venice biennale as part of the Inhabitable Models exhibition with Haworth Tompkins and Lynch Architects.

Last year the 29-year old practice was appointed to masterplan a 4 hectare former Dairy Crest site in White City, west London, and also landed planning consent for a mixeduse project to redevelop a city block in Soho, London.

Bad debt sinks MBLA as tough trading conditions continue Non-payment of fees forces closure of 24-year-old Manchester practice as number of architects on Jobseeker’s Allowance rises

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in a two-speed country, with conditions. The directors are activity in London not witnessed exploring a number of elsewhere.’ opportunities moving forward to A spokesman for MBLA continue to support our clients confirmed the company, which is and we hope to make an known for a raft of community announcement in the near future.’ housing schemes, health centres, Latest figures from the Office the Lock apartments in of National Statistics reveal that Manchester (AJ 24.11.05) the number of architects and for designing its own claiming Jobseeker’s office (AJ 21.02.08), Allowance rose for the ceased trading last second time in two Rise in number of week. A creditors months, up from 745 architects claiming meeting is scheduled in June to 845 in Jobseeker’s for Monday 8 August. Meanwhile Allowance October 2012. the latest Future Trends The spokesman said: Survey results from the ‘The reason we have taken this RIBA showed that a growing very regrettable decision is number of respondents were primarily related to the nonexpecting to employ fewer payment of one large bad debt, permanent staff over the next which we have been unable to three months – the RIBA Staffing continue to absorb in these Index fell to -3 in August 2012. extremely tough trading Richard Waite



HELENE BINET

 Award-winning Manchester practice MBLA has become the latest outfit to go under as new figures show unemployment among architects is continuing to rise.

The 24-year-old company, which once boasted a staff of 33 and traded under names including Mills Beaumont Leavey Channon, blamed non-payment of fees for its demise.

RIBA president elect Stephen Hodder, of Manchester-based Hodder Associates, described the studio’s closure as a ‘great loss’.

He added: ‘MBLA was a practice that really made contributions to communities. I find it alarming that really good companies are falling by the wayside. [Closures like this] will leave a void in the regions. It is quite distressing and shows we are

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UK news

Profession welcomes parliamentary committee’s Better Deal report Report ‘ensures design quality is key consideration, says RIBA president procurement Architects have welcomed a report by a parliamentary committee calling on the government to protect design quality as it seeks to save 20 per cent on construction costs.

The document, A Better Deal for Public Building, published last week by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Excellence in the Built Environment, featured a 13-point procurement reform plan calling for a ‘cultural shift’ among public sector clients.

The report said: ‘We wholly endorse the government striving to achieve a 20 per cent saving in costs over the course of the parliament, but it is essential it is not achieved at the expense of quality and good design.’

Recommendations included allowing more time to develop briefs, creating an advisory group

to help inexperienced clients and procuring projects on the basis of integrated teams.

It also advocated mandatory construction commitments for projects above £100 million, mandatory post-occupancy evaluation for schemes above £5 million and an annual report on public sector clients’ performance.

RIBA president Angela Brady praised the report’s emphasis on a ‘balanced scorecard’, which she claimed ensured ‘the design quality of buildings is a key consideration from the outset of a project’.

ZBP-retained RIBA client adviser Paul Fletcher called for a ‘much greater understanding of [project] outcome’ in the procurement process and suggested a best practice route, whereby clients ‘get the brief right, define outcomes, make them the delivery outcomes of

the integrated team and then assess emergent design solutions against these outcomes.’

However, Holder Mathias partner Carolyn Merrifield said: ‘The biggest issue with procurement continues to be the complex and costly public rules which favour large, engineerled integrated teams, and it is difficult to see how this paper will improve things for the SMEs.’ ADP chair Roger FitzGerald called for more leadership from the top. He said: ‘It is precisely through good, intelligent design that the industry can rationalise and simplify construction and reduce cost. That’s one area where architects can benefit: by adding value to contractors, helping them come up with clever, cost-effective solutions that achieve what the client needs within set costs.’ Merlin Fulcher

Minister Prisk vows to boost housing homes Housing minister Mark Prisk has pledged a ‘continuing dialogue’ with homebuilding experts as he tackles financial obstacles in the sector.

The minister told the AJ’s sister publication Construction News he would draw on his experience as a professional chartered surveyor to tackle the problems of regulation and credit availability currently plaguing the industry, adding: ‘We want to see [developers] building more’.

The Conservative MP for Hertford and Stortford vowed to work with industry to solve the 10 theaj.co.uk

month to reduce regulatory housing crisis and explained his burdens. However, a RIBApriority was to build ‘more decent backed survey which found 54 homes for more people’. per cent feared allowing Prisk said: ‘It’s about home extensions to bank loans to help the proceed without builders and the planning permission developers, it’s also would risk design about mortgages’, Number of people quality. and he hailed the Prisk says the ‘A bit of regulation, government’s NewBuy scheme will assist in the form of s106 Funding for Lending agreements, made this scheme as ‘a really site unviable’, he said of the important step’ in freeing up Berkeley and Rolfe Judd’s the flow of credit, by providing 45-storey Saffron Square cheap credit access to banks. development in Croydon, south He also championed the London. ‘The business and the government’s moves earlier this

25,000

recommendations

1. Allow more time for briefs 2. Public bodies to follow BS 8534 on procurement 3. Government to set up an advisory group to help inexperienced clients 4. Projects to be procured on the basis of integrated teams 5. Encourage client-design team dialogue at design stage 6. Integrated team must be selected on basis of a balanced scorecard, not lowest price 7. Projects more than £100m should have mandatory construction commitments 8. Buildings to be procured on the basis of both capital and operating costs 9. Better guidance on EU procurement to avoid disproportionate demands on bidders 10. PQQs should be sensible in scope and not exclude SMEs 11. BIM mandatory from 2016 12. Mandatory post occupancy evaluation for buildings above £5 million 13. Annual government report on clients’ performance

council were flexible and now you see 750 homes happening because that’s made the site viable.’

He called the government’s driveto encourage the renegotiation of onerous s106 agreements ‘a radical step’, saying: ‘Sometimes, quite understandably, people ask too much of the developer.’

Prisk also spoke of the importance of enabling first time buyers to purchase homes, saying the benefits would be felt through ‘the chains they unlock’, and said the NewBuy scheme was ‘picking up pace’.

He added that the initiative would help 25,000 people.

Chris Berkin 27.09.12

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News on TheAJ.co.uk

Bradford Odeon plans are ‘a blank sheet’

THIS WEEK ONLINE

Proposals to demolish building for commercial scheme are torn up as council seeks to resolve uncertainty around the landmark’s future  New plans are being sought for Bradford’s Odeon cinema site after controversial proposals to demolish the landmark were scrapped last week.

David Green, leader of Bradford Council, has said there was ‘a blank sheet of paper’ for new plans following the decision by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), the building’s owner, to tear up the development agreement with developer Langtree Artisan.

The 1930s landmark was due to be flattened for a £35 million commercial scheme by Carey Jones – a contentious development that finally secured planning in 2009, three years after the firm won the design contest to overhaul

the plot (AJ 15.08.2006).

However, due to uncertainty about the proposed project and the failure by Langtree Artisan to sign the section 106 agreement, the HCA terminated the deal and said it would be looking at ‘other means of securing a commercially viable outcome for the site that meets the regeneration objectives of the council and the people of Bradford’. It is understood Langtree Artisan wanted more time to market the scheme to potential occupants.

David Curtis, the HCA’s executive director for the North-East, Yorkshire and The Humber, said: ‘Since assuming ownership of the building a year ago, we’ve been working

hard to look after it and resolve the complex legal issues surrounding plans for its future.

‘We know the public has been frustrated – we’ve been frustrated too. We haven’t taken this decision lightly and it won’t be a simple task to resolve the building’s future.’

The move has been welcomed by local groups that have been battling to save the building since the Odeon’s closure in 2000. George Galloway, MP for Bradford West, has asked community secretary Eric Pickles to investigate the policy failures which led to the iconic building becoming a ‘shrink-wrapped…scar’.

TheAJ.co.uk/Bradford

AJ Small Projects prize now open for entries

Student advertises herself on eBay

Architect to appeal after losing fight in tribunal

 It’s AJ Small Projects time again and readers need to send in their small-scale gems by 19 November to be considered for the £2,500 prize.

Run in association with Marley Eternit, AJ Small Projects celebrates projects with a total contract value of £250,000 or less.

Schemes need to have been completed between 1 January 2011 and 1 November 2012, and must not have had substantial coverage in the architecture press.

Entries should be submitted via the AJ Buildings Library uploader. Email Tom Ravenscroft on ajsmallprojects@emap.com for your unique login. Good luck!

TheAJ.co.uk/smallprojects

 Student Elaine  RMJM landscape Grimes has advertised herself architect Kirstin Taylor has on eBay in a desperate bid to vowed to appeal after losing find work. a constructive dismissal case She said after ‘constant against the firm at an rejections’ she decided to list Edinburgh tribunal. herself on the auction Taylor, now of site in a ‘try before you Glasgow-based City buy’ attempt to find a Design, left RMJM job. ‘If it helps find a in February after Starting bid for placement and allegedly failing to architecture student highlight the receive her salary Elaine Grimes problems students since December 2011. on eBay face it can only be She said: ‘The good,’ she said.

Tribunal accepted RMJM The Part I student at the Hull had breached my contract of School of Art and Design said employment but did not consider she had been recruited for a job this to be the cause of my which fell through due to the resignation so did not find in my recession. The AJ.co.uk/students favour.’ TheAJ.co.uk/Birmingham

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Win £1,000 and have your work published in the AJ by entering this year’s AJ Writing Prize for the best young architecture critic under 35. The deadline for entries is 1 October.

TheAJ.co.uk/WritingPrize 1

Enter the Open-City 2012 photography competition by submitting an image inspired by last weekend’s Open House London event. Winning photographs will be published in the AJ. TheAJ.co.uk/culture/ open-house-2012/ 2

Read The Diary of an Anonymous Architect, the latest in an ongoing series about the day-to-day travails of an experienced and embattled practitioner. TheAJ.co.uk/ anonymous 3

Enter the 2013 Small Projects award using the AJ Buildings Library.

Contact Tom Ravenscroft on ajsmallprojects@emap.com or 020 7728 4644 for a unique login to enter. TheAJ.co.uk/ SmallProjects 4

Gain half an hour of CPD by completing the second CPD from the Lead Sheet Association on the design and specification of lead sheet cladding. TheAJ.co.uk/CPD 5

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News feature

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ARB 23% fee hike provokes anger A storm of protest has blown up after the Architects Registration Board voted unanimously to approve the £18.50 rise in the retention fees it levies on architects to remain on its mandatory register

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  Architects have reacted angrily after the Architects Registration Board approved a 23 per cent retention fee hike last week.

The dramatic escalation followed a ‘significant increase’ in costs relating to misuse of title and complaints referred to the Professional Conduct Committee which threatened to breach the organisation’s minimum cash reserves level.

The fee increase from £80 to £98.50 for next year kicked up a storm of protest from architects, who complained others should pay for policing misuse of title.

John Kellet of KR.eativ: Architects said: ‘It is rather a poor deal if the increased ARB registration fee is for architects to finance the criminal prosecution of fraudsters. Criminal prosecutions should be paid for by the Crown Prosecution Service and from fines imposed.’

Nick Willson, of Nick Willson Architects, asked whether the increase would see practices which currently pay their staff ’s retention fees shift the burden to workers, and whether ARBregistered architects would find it harder to secure employment.

Joe Morris, of Duggan Morris Architects, blasted the move as ‘extremely inappropriate’ in an ‘era of austerity and spending cuts where the very viability of successful practice lies in the balance for so many architects’.

Last year’s Manser Medal winner and a finalist this year, Morris said it raised ‘serious questions’ about

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Norman Webber of Cound Webber Architects ‘I don’t think £20 is a cause for mass resignation, but it is beholden upon the ARB to look very carefully at its costs. Both [ARB and RIBA] need to recognise the particular pressures placed upon small practices and their principals at the moment.’

Michael Spicer of Read Spicer Architecture ‘Prosecutions for persistent misuse of title are rare and ARB has a very high success rate of curtailing wrongful use by correspondence.

Prosecutions may or may not be falling, but what is certain is the success of dealing with an increasing number of reported breaches. Increased reporting, particularly of the use of meta-tags in websites, has undoubtedly involved more ARB resource in investigating those reports.’

Alan Warren of Architectural and Landscape Design Associates ‘On one hand we want the title protected and on the other moan about the cost. £20 is a pittance. More worrying is rising complaints.

Many architects are not being paid enough to do the work properly in the first place. It may also involve low morale.’

ARB’s purpose, particularly with regards to the RIBA’s ‘diminishing role’ and ‘extortionate’ rates.

A heated debate erupted on the AJ LinkedIn forum, with architects criticising the way the surge in misuse of title prosecutions, which went up 36 per cent in 2011,

had influenced the fee hike.

ARB chairwoman Beatrice Fraenkel said failing to increase the retention fee would have a ‘severely detrimental effect on our ability to deliver our statutory duties under the Architects Act.’ Merlin Fulcher

Linaka Greensword of Ramboll ‘Perhaps with the government’s boost to self-build housing the ARB is predicting an increase in abusers of titles?’ ..

DN 552 AJ HP September_Layout 1 20/09/2012 14:49 Page 1

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Competition

20-strong shortlist in High Line for London contest From vertical gardens to book exchanges, judges were impressed by the diversity and vision of the 170 entries from around the world to the competition to enhance the capital’s green infrastructure, inspired by New York’s High Line (pictured below)

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 /   A scheme to transform flyovers into productive and beautiful green arteries that would reduce the heat effect, encourage biodiversity and negate traffic noise. The flyover at Bricklayers Arms in Southwark was used as an example

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  From opening up and the Garden Museum, with canals as a commuter route for the AJ as media partner, the swimmers to bus stop roof contest received 170 entries orchards, the High from around the world Line for London including proposals competition attracted from the USA, Prize money the an extraordinary China, Brazil, Egypt, competition winner India and Israel. range of concepts to will receive ‘enrich the capital’s The open ideas green infrastructure’. contest was inspired Run by the Landscape by the regeneration of Institute, the mayor of London New York’s High Line – a public

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, , , /   A series of schemes, including making use of disused railway sidings next to the new Shoreditch High Street

We were encouraged by the diversity of the proposed solutions Ian Houlston park created on a 1.45-milelong elevated rail structure in the heart of Manhattan.

Featuring known names such as Fletcher Priest and Hassell

and a gaggle of newcomers, the 20-strong shortlist was selected by a panel of experts including Ian Houlston of LDA Design, Robin Buckle of Transport for London and Jamie Dean from Design for London at the Greater London Authority.

The winner will receive £2,500 and the runner-up £500.

Houlston said: ‘The judges were impressed by the quality of >>

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   /  A new strategy of water management to address water scarcity. A ‘rain farm’ in the Lea Valley would collect run-off and rainwater that would be stored in new local reservoirs and used for local neighbourhoods 3

  - ’      /  Plans to transform London’s network of arterial routes into new green spaces.

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 /  +  -  The creation of a linear park, farm and wetland on barges anchored at the edge of West India Dockyard 5

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   / A network of ‘Indus-tree-ous’ community woodlands across London, created in the in-between spaces such as parking lots and derelict land 6

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Competition

 /   A box of resources for community groups to improve local places 8

-/  +   The transformation of buses and DLR trains into living walls using biocentric ‘mats’ and ‘sleeves’ 9

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 /  Makes use of hidden ‘mail rail’ tunnels beneath Oxford Street to create an underground experience – a mushroom farm with daylight via glass-fibre mushrooms at street level

 /  +   A natural intervention around bus stops so they become shared cultivation areas 13

  / +  An idea to set up book exchanges in parks. A record card in each book would tell the story of the invisible network and movement of people through parks 10

  /    A vertical garden in the Square Mile – a concept for Tower 42 but could be applied across the City 12

   -      /  +  This scheme will transform the landscape with a series of interventions to reconnect a forgotten waterway 11

 ..

 ’ ’ /  +   A scheme to rediscover ancient routes used to take livestock to market 14

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and improving the capacity for urban areas to respond to the challenges of a changing climate.

‘The shortlist represents what the judges felt were the boldest and most inspiring ideas, although the competition was fierce and the standard high.’

Dean said: ‘The range of submissions was impressive, many standing out for their inherent simplicity, their clarity

of communications or their scientific underpinning.

‘For me, they were at their most successful when considered alongside the cultures of a given place.’

The winners will be announced

by London mayor Boris Johnson as part of a High Line Symposium at the Garden Museum from 5-8 October.

Richard Waite

the entries which ranged from low-key interventions that can be rolled out across the city to high-impact projects addressing a specific site-based issue. Several entrants tackled similar problems.

‘However, we were encouraged by the diversity of the proposed solutions, as well as the creative and high-quality methods by which ideas were presented.’

He added: ‘Entrants had

clearly thought carefully about how green infrastructure can be used to address challenges and enhance life in London, while creating space for nature

  /   An idea to liberate the lost Fleet river as a low-line park between Farringdon Road and Blackfriars station

 / A project to unlock inaccessible transport corridors while retaining their active use as an essential transport network – a series of green linear parks built over, under and beside railway lines.

A scheme to open up cycling and walking networks to linking communities, parks and transport hubs

Submissions were impressive, many standing out for their simplicity Jamie Dean

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 /   A scheme to transform the empty spaces of bus shelter roofs into raised gardens, including sparrow colonies, insect hotels and wildflowers 18

  /  An idea to insert a clean, safe ‘basin’ in which to swim the Lido Line along the Regents Canal 19

  /  A concept to transform the Silicone Roundabout above Old Street into a place of green beauty – re-engaging the underground space with exterior street space 17

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   /  +   Plan to transform riverbank from Blackfriars Bridge to Lambeth Bridge into a linear green space 20

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Competitions & wins

Duggan Morris wins floating cinema job COMPETITIONS FILE Practice wins Olympic legacy competition for floating cinema to ply London’s waterways with screenings, tours, talks and workshops   Duggan Morris Architects has won the contest run by the Architecture Foundation and UP Projects to design a floating cinema in east London.

Last year’s Manser Medal winner beat vPPR, New York’s OBRA and Berlin-based Nilsson Pflugfelder to win the high-profile commission to animate waterways close to the Olympic Park.

Supported by Legacy List and Bloomberg, the competition was based on UP Project’s pilot floating cinema project last year

designed by Studio Weave with filmmakers Somewhere.

Joe Morris, of Duggan Morris, said: ‘The floating cinema has the potential to be a wondrous addition to London’s network of waterways. We very much look forward to delivering this unique structure and creating a legacy for visitors to the Lea Valley.’

The competition judges were Patty Hopkins of Hopkins Architects, Legacy List’s Sarah Weir, Sarah Ichioka of the Architecture Foundation,

Somewhere’s Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie and Emma Underhill from UP Projects.

Underhill praised the winning practice for its ‘exceptional’ commitment and enthusiasm. ‘I’m sure the final result will provide a really unique and special resource for the waterways,’ she said.

The studio’s proposal – named A Strange Cargo of Extra-Ordinary Objects – is planned to launch in June 2013 and will feature screenings, canal tours, talks and workshops. Merlin Fulcher

In Ireland, Waterford City Council is on the hunt for an architect-led design team to deliver a €1.2 million (£950,000) regeneration project within its Viking Triangle area. The 525m² scheme will create six dwellings and ground-floor retail units.

The winner will also investigate the potential redevelopment of three further properties.

[Completed tenders to be returned by 5 October]

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   ..

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THE AJ DOES NOT ORGANISE, ENDORSE OR TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR COMPETITIONS

WINNER

The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland is seeking an architect, engineer and other design professionals for the £3.6 million refurbishment of Schomberg House in Belfast and Sloan’s House in County Armagh. A team will be appointed in January and the project is planned to complete by May 2015 [Requests to participate by 25 October] The United States Institute for Theatre Technology has opened an international student contest to design an ideal theatre. Teams should include an architecture and drama student.

Three shortlisted teams will receive £600 each and the chance to present their schemes in Milwaukee. [Applications due by 7 December] Sean Kitchen TheAJ.co.uk/competitions ..

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Pathfinder renovation funds used for more demolitions  The government has conceded in court that money earmarked for renovating homes in Pathfinder areas has instead been used for further demolitions.

The admission came last week (18 September) at the High Court in response to claims by SAVE Britain’s Heritage that £35.5 million of so-called ‘transitional funding’ had gone towards flattening more houses, rather than helping local authorities exit from the scrapped controversial programme.

In late 2011 former housing minister Grant Shapps branded the Pathfinder housing market renewal initiative – a £2.2 billion programme which would have seen about 400,000 mainly Victorian homes and local landmarks in the North West flattened – an ‘abject failure’.

He subsequently unveiled a £35.5 million pot of capital grants, which was to be shared between the 13 local authorities to fund renovation work and assist families ‘trapped in half-empty ghost streets’.

However, a Freedom of Information request by SAVE revealed this money was being channelled towards further demolitions and the organisation was granted leave by Justice  ..

Lang to bring full judicial review proceedings against the government.

SAVE wants the money that has been already spent to be repaid to the government and the remaining cash ring-fenced to refurbish thousands of empty homes, including swathes of empty terraces in Liverpool (pictured).

Although the government conceded that the money had been used contrary to Shapps’ policy statement, its counsel argued that it would be ‘legally extremely problematic, if possible at all’ to unravel all the payments.

Earlier this month SAVE won another victory against secretary of state Eric Pickles over his refusal to conduct an environmental impact assessment in the case of a historic Welsh Presbyterian Chapel in Bootle on Merseyside.

The organisation argued that the chapel, partially demolished

by Sefton Council in January this year, fell under a larger area-wide Pathfinder scheme for demolition of some 480 homes in the Klondyke neighbourhood and that alternatives to being bulldozed should have been considered.

The government refused to comment further. Richard Waite

SAVE BRITAIN’S HERITAGE

UK news

    SAVE Britain’s Heritage has been fighting the destruction of 400,000 houses due for demolition under John Prescott’s ‘bulldoze the North, concrete the South’ Pathfinder programme for nearly 10 years. Many of these homes may look plain outside, but inside they contain well-proportioned rooms which make attractive homes. Our biggest battleground centres on the 480 houses in Liverpool’s Welsh Streets, built by the Welsh artisans who created the city’s golden age of architecture. Justice Lang’s recent High Court decision gives the government and local authorities a chance to ensure that the £35 million allocated to bring Pathfinder to an end is not just used to finance more destruction, but to create homes. In the Welsh Streets, SAVE has secured 16 houses for refurbishment.

Liverpool surveyor and estate agent Paul Sutton has shown that revamping these homes (which include Ringo Starr’s birthplace) is viable commercially without subsidy if blight is removed from surrounding streets. And, if just a fraction of Liverpool’s £9 million allocation of £35 million transition funding (still unspent according to the council’s affidavit) is allocated for repairs, these houses would be ready within months. So far

SAVE has mounted several legal challenges to stop Pathfinder’s blight. Thanks to environmental lawyer Susan Ring and courtroom advocacy by Richard Harwood QC, we have had great success.

Yet the demolition goes on. If the government can stand up to the Homes and Communities Agency’s juggernaut of demolition, a programme of refurbishment can begin. In Liverpool, the housing waiting list has doubled to 22,000 over the decade, while up to 15,000 houses have been left empty. In contrast to continental Europe, where many live in flats, the English like to live in houses and the standard terrace makes the best use of scarce land. New homes can be created more quickly through refurbishment than by adding to the vast landbank of planning permissions hoarded by developers, who are not interested in building now.

The government likes to talk of the green shoots of recovery and nowhere can these grow quicker than in Liverpool. Grant Shapps and his fellow ministers have conceded in court that they were wrong. The question is whether they are men enough to stand up to bullying local councils and demand that refurbishment begins. Marcus Binney is president of SAVE Britain’s Heritage

..

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21/09/2012 11:58

People & practice

‘Keen to find young talent’

NEW PRACTICES

Brian Norton, executive chairman of new development company Cleanslate, on forging links with the next generation of architects Why is now a good time to set up a new development company?

The economic outlook is still uncertain but there appear to be signs of growth in the South East, where we focus. Funding constraints also appear to be easing. Given recent devaluation, house price drops and pent-up demand, we believe prices should remain stable in the short term and start modestly growing in the medium term, offering a good platform for our business.

Where do you see the most growth over the coming decade?

We expect residential in London and the South East to be a key driver over the next five years but we would then expect more widespread growth across the country. Institutional investment in large-scale apartment blocks is likely, given the demand, particularly in London. We are also watching for industrial development opportunities and assessing the renewables market.

What schemes do you currently have planned?

A diverse range of projects.

We have recently advertised a design competition in the AJ for the Fort Albert project, which offers a one-off chance for some inspiring architecture at the gateway to the Solent. We have also invested in an exciting new venture, Mermaid Maternity

 ..

Services, which will provide a five star retreat and spa for expectant and recent mothers. We are working with architect Charles Leon Associates and interior designer on a high-quality fit-out in the King’s Road for the new business. We are also planning a low-density mixed housing project on a rarely available site in the countryside and are looking at several large-scale apartment blocks that would be suitable for institutional investment.

What do you want from your architects?

We want architects with design flair who work well in a team.

We don’t aim to have a single ‘Cleanslate’ look but would rather be known for highquality designs appropriate to their circumstances. As a new company ourselves, we understand you have to start somewhere and we are keen to give young teams a chance to succeed.

How do you plan to find your architects?

My partners and I have been working in property for over 30 years and have built up a network of contacts that we draw on.

But we are always keen to find new talent that will suit specific projects. We follow annual awards and will contact architects directly for specific projects or we may undertake open design competitions where appropriate.

We would also encourage your readers to contact us if they are interested in working with us.

Hoffice   Stephane Hof  London  April 2011  www.hoffice.net

Where have you come from?

I came to London in 1997 to learn English, having it in mind to move to New York. But I started working for Zaha Hadid and stayed. Initially the office had less than 10 people. It was a very interesting experience to see it grow to 400 people. I was the project architect for the design and realisation of the Terminus and Car Park Hoenheim North in Strasbourg (2002) and the Pierres Vives Archive and Library building, Montpellier.

What work do you have?

We’ve been commissioned to design our first large residential project in London. There are also smaller residential projects such as a beach house in Garopaba, Brazil. In Los Angeles, we are inserting a ‘Japanese

garden’ through a house in the Hollywood Hills. We’ve just completed the Alphabet Library within the Pierres Vives building in Montpellier (pictured).

What are your ambitions?

We would like to grow to medium size, allowing us to work on large-scale structures. With technology you do not need a very large team on a project to produce the required results.

How optimistic are you as a start-up practice?

We have been very lucky in winning work since we started.

Clients are approaching us, because they know my work.

A recession is always a great time to start a practice – it gives you the opportunity to be prepared for the next wave. ..

SPANISH CERAMICS FACE THE FUTURE Join a free professional seminar on the use on ceramics for ventilated facades, organized by the voice of the Spanish tile industry - Tile of Spain After a series of successful architectural talks around the world including USA, Russia and Germany, Tile of Spain brings together two leading international specialists – Maurits van der Staay (Renzo Piano Building Workshop) and Ignacio Fernández Solla (ARUP) for an architectural seminar in Liverpool on ceramics as a forward-thinking material for ventilated facades. The seminar, titled “Facade: Ceramics Face the Future” will take place on the 25th October in the Bluecoat, Liverpool and will be chaired by architect, materials expert and writer Annabelle Filer of The SCIN Gallery. The event will feature showcases by renowned Spanish brands in architectural tiles: Vives, Saloni, Gayafores, Ceracasa and Ceramica Elias. Architects and specifiers are welcome to register at rsvp@qspr.com .

At the forefront of innovation: Combining a rich heritage of skill and creativity with the latest hi-tech developments, the Spanish tile industry is a global leader in high performance ceramics for ventilated facades. The latest manufacturing technologies employed by Spanish tile producers allow for the creative

application of 3D effects, special colours and completely bespoke solutions. Additional advances that maintain the position of Spanish tile producers at the forefront of the industry include the introduction of porcelain tiles in large formats (up to 3 m long) and in slim profiles (up to 3 mm thick) which allow for easier installation, together with streamlined aesthetics. Spanish tile manufacturers also have a longstanding commitment to sustainability. From brands achieving key eco accreditation to tiles designed to absorb pollutants from the atmosphere, the initiative is on-going and includes tile collections made with up to 95% recycled content.

Spanish leaders in tiles for ventilated facades: Alcalagres www.alcalagres.es Apavisa www.apavisa.com Ceracasa www.ceracasa.com Ceramica Mayor www.ceramicamayor.com Colorker www.colorker.com Grespania www.grespania.com Inalco www. Inalco.es Keraben www.keraben.com Pamesa www.pamesa.com Porcelanosa www.porcelanosa.com Roca www.rocatile.com Saloni www.saloni.com Tau www.tauceramica.com Vives www.vivesceramica.com For UK supplier info, contact: Tile of Spain 020 7467 2385 www.spaintiles.info Above: Porcelain stoneware facade cladding

by Saloni Left: Ceracasa’s Bionic tile, which absorbs air pollutants. Both showcased in Liverpool on the 25th October.

Facade: Ceramics Face the Future Professional Seminar for Architects presented by Tile of Spain 25th October, the Bluecoat, Liverpool For more information: info@qspr.com

Astragal

Eastern adventure  RIBA president Angela Brady was in Hong Kong last week as part of her end-of-term tour of Asian provinces, where the institute’s first branch is being set up. She announced plans for five more regional branches, including several in China itself. Brady went on to visit Shanghai where, doorstepped by a Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University student, she said it was ‘inspiring’ that a UK university was aiming to be the first with a RIBA validation in China. Brady was joined by a number of UK architects as part of the RIBA Shanghai Shop Window project (see page 7). The

lavish event opened with Brady stepping out from an animation of a London bus. Describing her arrival, one attendee said: ‘Emerging through the projector screen might have been a good idea on paper, but it looked like she was fighting to get out from behind a shower curtain while trying to keep her hair intact.’

The Danes are back  Who can forget the debacle surrounding the design team merry-go-round on the Museum of Liverpool project which involved lawyers, public accusations and Manchester’s AEW replacing Danish star and originally architect 3XN? Well

apparently 3XN can. Not put off by a litigious client and raft of press headlines, the Danes, headed by Beatles-loving Kim Nielsen, are set to return to the city on another major scheme. All is hush-hush, but watch this space.

Explosive dilemma  Of the potential obstacles to Gensler’s floating island airport proposal, the most explosive is the SS Richard Montgomery. The ship, which sank in the Thames Estuary in August 1944 a couple of miles from Southend, is loaded with 1,500 tons of munitions that can significantly damage the Kent coast and any airport in

the estuary. A public meeting, entitled ‘A disaster waiting to happen’, in Chatham tonight (27 September) will discuss the wreck’s effect on Kent and the airport proposals. The event is free to attend. Details at SSRichardMontgomery.com

Swim against elitism  Architecture activist and This Is Not A Gateway co-founder Trenton Oldfield has appeared in Isleworth Crown Court to face accusations that he caused a public nuisance by obstructing the OxfordCambridge Boat Race earlier this year. The 36 year old, who halted the race eight minutes after the start by swimming close to the boats, has pleaded not guilty. Oldfield, who spent four years working for Thames Strategy Kew to Chelsea on planning policy for the riverside area, previously said his action was a protest against elitism.

WWW.LOUISHELLMAN.CO.UK

Self-help Shapps

The Hellman Files #78 A trawl through Hellman’s archives, in which we uncover gems as relevant now as then. Hellman writes: Like most of its ‘radical’ proposals, the government’s new non-planning ideas have been met

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with opposition. Allowing large domestic extensions without planning consent will mean design standards fall as jobbing builders and po-faced surveyors exclude architects. This cartoon is from AJ 02.10.74.

 As architects bid farewell to former housing minister Grant Shapps, they may wish to spare a thought for his alleged alter ego. The new Tory chairman has been captured in a photograph posing as a self-help guru called Michael Green in Las Vegas eight years ago.

The pseudonym was allegedly used in his early years as an opposition MP. Green gave advice on earning money from the internet and beating the recession, according to the Daily Mail. Lamentably, these skills were not translated into benefits for the housing sector, which has seen affordable housing starts fall 65 per cent this year. ..

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22/09/2011 11:40

Letter from London

Design is the tribute art pays to industry, you might say, writes Paul Finch Between 1932 and 1947, Carlo Scarpa was the chief designer for the Murano glassmaker, Venini. Under his designer’s eye (he never qualified formally as an architect), the company produced a pantheon of glass objects/products/artworks exploiting traditional and new manufacturing techniques. The work was of extraordinary quality, both in terms of design and making, and was frequently exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale. A superb exhibition of Scarpa’s glass is currently on show at the Cini Foundation on San Giorgio as part of this year’s architecture biennale; if you are going to Venice be sure to see these masterworks.

All this set me thinking about the relationship between art, design and architecture, especially as we have just enjoyed the 10th London Design Festival, the best we have yet seen. The headline to this column, that design is the tribute art pays to industry, is a definition of my own devising, and was a response to a question by the Design Council many years ago to provide concise definitions of design. I adapted one of my favourite aphorisms, by the French essayist La Rochefoucauld, who observed that ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue’, a timeless observation that seems relevant every time you open a paper and start reading about politics.

There have been times when art, architecture and design have seemed closer than perhaps they do today, particularly during the Renaissance. One thinks of the great artists of the period as being universal geniuses, capable of turning their hand to any activity. But when you try to identify true artist architects who produced whole buildings that have passed the test of time, they are quite hard to find. Michelangelo of course; Bernini; Giulio Romano; Tiepolo – and after that not easy to think of others. In our own era it is not so easy, either.

Le Corbusier considered himself to be an artist as much as an architect, and his painting and sculpture was certainly produced on a prodigious scale, though never achieving the quality of his built work. Scarpa’s work as a glass sculptor and maker, as well as his design  ..

sensibility and brilliant architecture (pictured: Olivetti Showroom, Venice, 1958, detail), make him perhaps the nearest thing to a Renaissance figure in the 20th century.

In the UK one might expect to find artist architects in the Royal Academy, but I can’t think of an artist academician who has built much. As for the limited number of architect academicians, only Will Alsop could properly be described as bridging the two activities, with his splodgy, colourful, lifeenhancing paintings still very much part of his working method in the creation of buildings.

Of course many architects paint and draw, but few would claim to be artists in their own right.

Gene Kohn, founder partner in KPF, currently has an exhibition of watercolours in the firm’s London

Scarpa’s glass works, design sensibility and architecture make him the nearest thing to a Renaissance figure in the 20th century office: seascapes, landscapes, skyline vistas and, in the more recent part of his painting life, abstraction.

And there are artists who take architecture as major subject matter for their work: Brendan Neiland or Ben Johnson, for examples. I don’t think either would describe himself as a designer, though most architects think of themselves that way and, as this column has remarked before, the silos of ‘design’ and ‘architecture’ are melting as we realise the foolishness of definitions that make no acknowledgement of the way artists, designers and architects work now.

If you want the best example of someone crossing the barriers, think of Thomas Heatherwick, whose Olympic ‘cauldron’ brought an artist’s temperament to a design which had to work at both functional and theatrical levels of the highest order. Probably indefinable. ..

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24/09/2012 14:31

Black box

The New Aesthetic viral manifesto articulates the digital impetus in the shaping of the world, writes Rory Olcayto The New Aesthetic is a term coined by Londoner James Bridle for a Tumblr blog he started lasted May collating images that chart ‘the network’s irruption into physical space’. That means surveillance camera footage, QR codes, low-res mobile video, and pixelated building facades. Anything, in fact, that looks like the space where virtual space and reality overlap. Here are some more things that are very New Aesthetic (or perhaps Smart Nouveau?): fabrics with 8 bit-style sprites printed or woven into them; oil paintings based on satellite map shots; a Hawk-Eye replay at Wimbledon.

Bridle is a designer with Silicon Roundabout firm The Really Interesting Group (RIG), which focuses on ‘the digital and the analogue interact – particularly the way digital stuff can be transformed into objects’.

The RIG guys are smart. They fuse high and low-brow ideas with humour and style. One of their products is The Big Red Button, a shiny round plastic red button, which, if pressed, triggers the pressing of a spacebar on a nearby laptop. ‘Very useful for presentations and other digital shenanigans. On sale now!’ says RIG. It looks like a mushroom from 80s arcade classic Centipede.

Bridle’s blog, a manifesto of sorts, has struck a chord.

Serious figures in digital design have twigged Bridle is on to something. To some, his modest website and the nascent culture it reports on and fosters is the first important visual arts movement of the 21st Century.

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Architects, mired in a post-iconic depression, have yet to engage with the New Aesthetic, bar an excellent essay by FAT’s Sam Jacob. In a column for AA free sheet Commonplace, Jacob urges the movement to embrace the very nostalgia it has been accused of succumbing to. (Fairly in my view: the focus on pixels does suggest a certain Shoreditch-influenced retro-chic).

But Jacob’s suggestion is a good one: ‘Real newness,’ he says, ‘might emerge out of radical nostalgia at the uncomfortable intersection of technology and history.’

Jacob’s essay is a response to Bruce Sterling’s An Essay on the New Aesthetic, published in April, a snarky, brain-tickling endorsement of Bridle’s idea, which rudely highlights its weak points. Here’s Stirling on the New Aesthetic’s fondness for retro 80s graphics: ‘Sentimental fluff for modern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-console machines. Eight-bit graphics are pretty easy to carve out of styrofoam.

There’s a low barrier to entry in making sculpture from 8-bit, so that you can “rupture the interface between the digital and the physical”. However, 8-bit sculptures are a cute, backward-looking rupture.’ And here he is saying something nice: ‘The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.” It’s diffuse, crowd-sourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined. It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs. It’s like its logo, a bright cluster of balloons tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight.’

So others are giving new meaning to Bridle’s concept, which is how a network-inspired ‘manifesto’ should be.

Architects, too, have a role to play. In fact, Bridle says the idea came to him while contemplating the pixelated facades of YRM’s Telehouse West data centre in East London (pictured). To Bridle, the bulky aluminium clad box is ‘…the skin of the network. This is what the network looks like, as made physical in the world. And there’s something incredibly powerful in that. There’s something that we haven’t yet figured out and we’re still playing with.’ Buffalo’s grain elevators, ‘the first fruits of the new age’, according to Corb, had the same effect on Modernists. But that was a hundred years ago. The New Aesthetic is your reminder that it’s time to move on. ..

NICK KANE

AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk

Project of the Week Gap House Pitman Tozer London, 2007 Pitman Tozer’s Gap House won the Manser Medal in 2009. The AJ Buildings Library includes 23 houses that were shortlisted for the award in 2010 and 2011. ..

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Letters

Last issue AJ 20.09.12 Established 1895

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Olympic cauldron How Heatherwick Studio set London alight  Piers Taylor’s Stillpoint centre in Bath

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Letters should be received by 10am on the Monday before publication. The AJ reserves the right to edit letters.

The letter of the week’s author will receive a bone china AJ mug.

Post your letters to the address below or email letters@ architectsjournal.co.uk

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Misleading monopoly

FAT’s role in BBC job

The item reporting Stephen Hodder’s suggestion for a pay-as-you-go CAD software licensing illustrates (no pun intended) an on-going dilemma (AJ 06.09.12). Most practices are not going to get on to any central government project lists and BIM is therefore, mostly, an irrelevance.

However, the cost and licensing arrangements for AutoCAD are not. You don’t have to buy a Hoover to vacuum the floor, and the perception of a monopoly can lead to the delusion that a manufacturer can charge beyond an economic price for its products.

It would perhaps be helpful if the AJ could find space for a full appraisal of all the CAD and related software programmes available that meet the needs of the profession at various levels and compare their relative performances.

Some of us have already voted with our chequebooks in this debate.

Bryan Scott, Scott Associates, Hertfordshire

I wanted to correct a couple of misconceptions as related in Rory Olcayto’s article ‘Moving to PRrchitecture’ (AJ 20.09.12) regarding FAT’s involvement in the BBC building, Cardiff.

Firstly, it is not true to say that FAT ‘conjured the project’s basic idea but had nothing to do on site’ and that Holder Mathias ‘did the bulk of the work’. The relationship was that FAT was the concept architect leading the project to RIBA stage D and through the planning process.

That part alone constitutes a considerable proportion of the ‘bulk of the work’. Holder Mathias acted as delivery architects from RIBA stage E onwards, working closely and harmoniously with FAT and making a fine job of that part of the project. This is not an uncommon arrangement in the modern construction industry.

Secondly, it is incorrect to suggest that FAT’s role was to invent an idea that could be used by the developer, Igloo Regeneration, to ‘sell the bigger story’. The project was subject to extremely challenging budgetary and programme constraints,

Editor Christine Murray Deputy editor Rory Olcayto () Acting administrator Rakesh Ramchurn () Digital editor Simon Hogg () News editor Richard Waite ( ) Reporter Merlin Fulcher () Asia correspondent Hyunjoo Lee Technical editor Felix Mara () Technical reporter Laura Mark AJ Publications editor James Pallister () Special projects editor Emily Booth Sustainability editor Hattie Hartman () Sustainability intern Angeles Hevia AJ Buildings Library editor Tom Ravenscroft () Art editor Brad Yendle () Graphic designer Ella Mackinnon Designers Sosuke Sugiura, Tom Carpenter Production editor Mary Douglas (on leave) Acting production editor Abigail Gliddon () Sub-editors Alan Gordon, Tara Srinivasan Contributing editor Ian Martin Editorial director Paul Finch

Chief executive officer Natasha Christie-Miller Managing director of architecture and media Conor Dignam () Group commercial director Alison Pitchford () Commercial director James MacLeod () Business development managers Nick Roberts (), Ceri Evans () Group advertising manager Amanda Pryde () Account managers Hannah Buckley (), Simon Collingwood (), Steph Atha () Classified and recruitment sales Mark Malone ()

LETTER OFK THE WEE

which were key drivers of the ‘decorated shed’ approach.

FAT was appointed because the client thought that the practice would be best able to deliver a project with architectural merit while working under these constraints. For the same reasons, (and for the entirely noble desire that a local practice benefit from the project) the client wanted a Cardiff-based delivery architect who could work closely with the contractor under the Design and Build contract employed. In the circumstances, this was an eminently sensible approach that was not in any way chosen as a means of reducing FAT’s role to that of PR consultants, as the article seems to imply.

Sean Griffiths, director, FAT (Building study: AJ 01.12.11)

Correction In the Retrofit Awards supplement (AJ 13.09.12) Allen Construction Consultancy was listed as architect for The Old Fire Station, Oxford. They were actually project manager.

The architect was Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios.

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Manser Medal 2012

manser medal 2012

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Chosen from the winners of the RIBA Awards and Regional Awards, these five houses represent the best one-off house designs for 2012

Over the next 20 pages we present the RIBA 2012 Manser Medal shortlist with a focus on drawings: the plans and sections of the best one-off house designs in the country. The text alongside each project, drawn from the RIBA’s citations, gives a sense why each house struck a chord with the assessors. Unusually this year, each project selected is rural: these are countryside retreats.

The shortlist has been chosen from winning schemes honoured with RIBA Awards in the UK and EU and the RIBA Regional Awards. The winner will be announced on 13 October 2012 at the RIBA Stirling Prize dinner in Manchester, with the winning architect and client receiving trophies designed by the artist Petr Weigl.

Previous winners include Duggan Morris for their house in Hampstead Lane (2011), Acme for Hunsett Mill (2010), Pitman Tozer Architects for The Gap House (2009), Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners for Oxley Woods (2008) and Alison Brooks Architects for the Salt House (2007). This year’s judges include architect Michael Manser, arts patron Jill Ritblat and RIBA head of awards, Tony Chapman.

We wish the shortlisted architects the very best of luck.

Citations provided by the RIBA

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Manser Medal 2012

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Christian Pottgiesser, Architecturespossibles

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‘ The architect has buried two metres of the linking building under the sloping site’

GEORGE DUPIN

On an undulating site of a former château, close to Versaille is a restored orangery whose origins can be traced to the late 18th century. Home to a couple with four children, the architect Christian Pottgiesser was called upon to extend it. The brief required an extension that affected the views from the orangery, and the mature landscape in which it is set, as little as possible. The result is a little bit of San Gimignano in this corner of the Île de France.

The local building code sets an eight metre height limit. Since the orangery itself is seven, the architect has buried two metres of the linking building under the sloping site. The code also calls for a gabled, or hipped, roof but it does allow, in exceptional cases, flat roofs as long as they do not exceed 25 square metres.

Five three-storeyed tower-like structures were designed, one room per floor with the circulation winding up through them to provide dressing/storage, bathroom and bedroom. One tower is exclusively for the children. The parents’ tower is topped with a planted a roof terrace with great views across the garden and the skyscrapers of La Défense district of Paris.

RIBA Award, EU

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Manser Medal 2012

old bearhurst Duggan Morris Architects

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‘A conflict between the needs of the client and the demands of conservation officials has been resolved by breaking up and partly burying the new building’

JAMES BRITTAIN

This project aimed to create a unified series of flowing, contemporary spaces linked to the rolling landscape setting, respecting the existing oast house, and taking advantage of the views.

The original building was given a thorough but sensitive makeover, removing the garage, study and kitchen wing to make way for the new annex.

What remained was carefully analysed and repaired appropriately so the 200-year-old building is easily discernible against the new interventions. The annex itself is an altogether more sculptural and dynamic form of interconnecting volumes, entirely clad in a durable engineered timber boarding, orientated vertically, in contrast to the rough-sawn horizontal lapped timber cladding of the barn. The external massing expresses the internal function of each room.

A conflict between the needs of the client and the demands of conservation officials, who wanted the replication of a traditional farm building aesthetic, has been resolved by breaking up and partly burying the new building, so it appears to be a collection of cellular timber outbuildings dominated by the bulk of the two oast houses. Yet internally these ‘barns’ form a beautiful continuous flowing open plan living area, linking into bedrooms in the restored oast houses.

RIBA Regional Award, South

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Technical Manser Medal study2012

ladlecombe Found Associates

Follow through

With its temporary Games overlay destined to be swept away for very different legacy uses, Eton Manor Sports Complex called for a sophisticated design strategy writes Felix Mara. Photography by Name Here

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‘ The house is formed of dry stone walls, a modern interpretation of the local vernacular’ This house has an idyllic setting overlooking a lake, concealed in a secret valley on the edge of the Cotswolds. It is a project of great simplicity, in terms of materials and strategy. At the same time, it has considerable sophistication due to its theatrical approach to space and light, with both framed and expansive views and contrasting spatial events.

Externally, the house is formed of dry stone walls, a modern interpretation of the local vernacular, with sloping grass roofs that bury the house into the hillside. Internally, the house is almost entirely of one material: floors, walls and ceilings are all formed out of a beautiful concrete. The warm tone of the local aggregates and sands creates a material that harmonises with the stone of the cottage and the new dry stone walls.

This project demonstrates a deep understanding of the site, with the retention and immaculate restoration of the cottage adding to the richness of the overall project. Throughout, the strong and elegant diagram is reinforced with a disciplined and considered approach to each component. The use of materials, detailing and construction is flawless.

This is architecture that will only improve as the landscape matures and the dry stone weathers.

RIBA Award, South West

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Manser Medal 2012

dune house

Jarmund / Vigsnæs Arkitekter and Mole Architects

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‘ These rooms maintain their links to the landscape with stunning views framed by picture windows’ This is a conceptually bold project that is also well detailed and constructed. An open-plan living space hunkered into its land is topped by four tent-like bedrooms above. Architecturally, the roof form plays on the local vernacular gables and sheds, but is also an exploration in geometry.

A beach holiday is about being with friends and family and connected to nature. The living room is a big, openplan space with sliding doors in three corners onto sunken external areas set into the grassy dunes, protected from the wind. The four bedrooms above, likened by the architect to sleeping in attic rooms on holidays, are playful, evoking exciting spaces under canvas. These rooms maintain their links to the landscape with stunning views framed by both picture and smaller windows.

A concrete core on a raft foundation housing stairs and services enables the open plan, column-free span on the ground level, with the upper concrete floor spanning as far as the delicate external perimeter steel posts.

Environmental features include wellinsulated roofs, a 7,500-litre grey water tank and a heat recovery system. The client mandated a house that achieves a 20 per cent improvement in energy efficiency over building regulations.

RIBA Award, East S IT E B OUN AR Y

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Dune House, Thorpeness, Suffolk Jarmund/Vigsnæs Arkitekter and Mole Architects

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CHRIS WRIGHT

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legend 1. Living room 2. Sunken fireplace 3. Dining area 4. Kitchen 5. En suite 6. Day bed 7. WC 8. Plant room 9. Bedroom 10. Library 11. Roof terrace 12. En suite

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credits location Thorpeness, Suffolk architect Jarmund/Vigsnæs Arkitekter and Mole Architects client Living Architecture structural engineer Jane Wernick Associates contractor Willow Builders contract value Confidential date of completion December 2010 gross internal area 243m2

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Manser Medal 2012

two passive solar gain houses Simon Conder Associates

 ..

..

‘A skillful manipulation of plan and section ensures expansive views’

These houses – one a family home, the other an artist’s studio at upper ground floor level with a guest apartment below – are surrounded by a suburban estate of 1950s bungalows, yet they overlook the beach in the village of Porthtowan on the north Cornish coast, with views down the coast to St Ives. Clad entirely in timber, including the flat roofs, and immaculately detailed, they are created out of a strong, simple and confident diagram, which exploits the location and the enviable views. Built into a 1 in 7 slope, the project is respectful of its neighbours, nestling into the ground so as not to obstruct sea views. This also establishes a simple passive sustainable approach, exploiting thermal mass, solar gain and natural ventilation.

A skilful manipulation of plan and section ensures that all main spaces benefit from the expansive views. On this hillside location, a successful balance is achieved between feeling exposed and contained, allowing occupants to enjoy a strong relationship with what, at times, must be extreme weather conditions, Two Passive Solar Gain Houses, Porthtowan, Cornwall while feeling secure and protected.

Site Location Plan With low energy consumption and consistent, elegant detailing and construction, these two hillside houses are great examples of how thoughtful, modest and economical architecture can create a passive, sustainable living environment.

RIBA Regional Award, South West

PAUL SMOOTHY

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credits location Porthtowan, Cornwall architect Simon Conder Associates client Private structural engineer Fluid Structures contractor T&D Carter contract value £928,158 date of completion February 2012 gross internal area 327m2

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NINGBO HISTORY MUSEUM, AMATEUR ARCHITECTURE STUDIO © LV HENGZHONG

SUSTAINING IDENTITY SYMPOSIUM III VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM 29 November 2012 — 10h00 – 17h30

CURATED BY JUHANI PALLASMAA AND PAUL BRISLIN

DRUK WHITE LOTUS SCHOOL, ARUP ASSOCIATES © ROB BALDOCK

‘Sustaining Identity III unites visionaries and practitioners from different generations, cultures and geographies - from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas - to prove that the creation of uniquely localised, people-centred space is still possible.’

Speakers include: Wang Shu 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Francis Kéré 2012 Global Holcim Award winner Li Xiaodong Aga Khan Award winner Anna Heringer Aga Khan Award winner Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai) Rick Joy (Rick Joy Architects) Christopher Lee (Serie Architects) Josep Lluís Mateo (Mateo Arquitectura) Declan O’Carroll (Arup Associates)

Juhani Pallasmaa Kongjian Yu (Turenscape)

Moderators: Helen Castle, Architectural Design (AD), Juhani Pallasmaa and Paul Brislin

For tickets please visit www.vam.ac.uk/tickets

FOOTPRINT

Siemens’ gleaming East End Crystal is a showcase for high-tech sustainability

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From the sustainability editor

The London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics have come and gone, and some immediate legacies are already apparent. One of the most welcome is decent maps, both printed and via the wayfinding kiosks rolled out by Transport for London under the banner of Legible London. Clear graphics highlight local landmarks and include five to 15-minute walking radiuses. I had seen the maps in the West End, but was surprised to find them at the Royal Docks when visiting the Siemens Crystal last week. The Olympics have put east London on the map.

The Games also mark a defining moment in British horticulture by highlighting the impact of beautiful planting in the public realm.

As Landscape Institute president Sue Illman writes this month (p.74), green infrastructure blurs the distinction between city and park, and engages people with the city in a different way. The shortlisted schemes for the High Line for London competition (p.18) suggest how this approach might be implemented elsewhere in the capital.

Townsend Landscape Architects has orchestrated just such a blur at the Siemens Crystal. Designed and delivered in just 29 months by a team led by Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will with Wilkinson Eyre as architect, the Crystal presents a vision of a future whose environmental challenges are solved with technology, much of it the kind Siemens makes. But this intelligent corporate branding – not dissimilar to Coca Cola’s approach in the Olympic Park – does not undermine the building’s merits. Along with the Emirates Air Line, it introduces drama to the western end of the dock, a welcome contrast to the nondescript housing either side. If the Crystal attracts the diverse audiences Siemens envisions, it will restore some of the activity that enlivened the Royal Docks when they were built. The nearby ExCel Center and The O2 regularly attract thousands so the potential for urban synergy exists.

Last week also marked Open-City’s Green Sky Thinking initiative, which highlighted many issues facing the capital. Of note is the challenge of sustainable energy provision by decarbonising the grid and potentially through district heating if the complexities of financing and phasing can be resolved. Meanwhile, further greening of London was unanimously endorsed by all. AJFootprint.com  ..

EDMUND SUMNER

Increased awareness of green infrastructure is an immediate Olympic legacy, says Hattie Hartman

17km Underground geothermal pipes at the Crystal (see above and p.66)

0.891kg

Global warming potential (CO2 equivalent) of Norie Matsumoto’s Folded Chair (see opposite)

50m Height of supertree with two-storey bar at Singapore’s Gardens of the Bay

EUK-GBC’s rating of the government’s zero carbon homes policy

18 Baulks from under the cranes that built the Velodrome reclaimed at Canning Town Caravanserai ..

The month on AJFootprint.com

LCA brought to life in timber by RCA students If the construction experience of the London 2012 Olympics has taught us one thing, it is that measuring impacts early can inform design decisions. Life cycle analysis (LCA) is one of those essential tools that can inform design but too often there is a disconnect between those with the quantitative skills for measuring and those doing the designing.

So putting the designers and the measurers together in a collaborative working environment should be a win-win, especially when it’s on a farm in Berkshire in July. That’s exactly what led to Out of the Woods, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the London Design Festival. Led by the American Hardwood Export

Council (AHEC) in collaboration with furniture maker Benchmark, 12 RCA product design students have designed and made a chair using American hardwoods.

Lectures on life cycle impacts at the outset of the project set the issues in context for the students.

Each student recorded the precise amount of material and energy used to fabricate the chair.

Then sustainability consultancy PE International combined the students’ data with LCA information on the different hardwoods supplied by AHEC to produce an LCA report for each chair. Clever graphics in the excellent accompanying catalogue make the relative impacts of different design choices immediately clear. A must-read.

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RCA student Norie Matsumoto’s Folded Chair

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BOOKS RECEIVED

Green:House Sustainable Design at Gardens by the Bay, Singapore by Patrick Bellew, Meredith Davey, Paul Baker, Andrew Grant, ORO Editions, paperback, £15.95

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CRAIG SHEPPARD

To be launched next week at the World Architecture Festival, this book, assembled by the design team, tells the design and technical story behind Singapore’s answer to the Eden Project.



concorde draft2 - outlined.pdf 1 24/09/2012 15:30:21

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Specialist metal fabricators and consultants

The month on AJFootprint.com

What if: projects turns north London green In a quiet but determined way typical of avid gardeners, Islington-based What if: projects is spearheading a green transformation of vacant lots across north London. Its first project in Hoxton in 2007 used biobags to create a garden in just four weeks – it’s still going strong.

With 20 more vacant lots transformed into community green spaces in partnership with Groundwork, What if: projects’ Gareth Morris and Ulrike Steven now know what it takes for a garden to be self-sustaining. Each garden has its own bank account, a simple management structure and as many as nine training sessions with local residents before it is officially handed over to the community. With the exception of the initial site, the Vacant Lot projects have been funded through a combination of Big Lottery funding matched by local housing association grants.

Steven says the cost of a garden averages £4,000, excluding donations in kind.

One garden has now spawned some building works and improvements to a community centre and adjacent play area are currently on site at the Samuel Lewis Trust Estate in Charterhouse Road, Hackney (pictured). A monitoring project is also underway to review the health and vitality of the existing gardens. What-if.info

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Above What if: projects’ Charterhouse Road scheme (phase 2) completed last week Left Planters at vacant lot 20, Stamford Hill Estates, London N16

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Barfield Architects) or a school and community park in Islington (at Penoyre & Prasad, pictured).

The important role of landscape With more than 1,000 attendees is emerging as a key driver at all at seminars ranging from scales, from the linear park masterplanning in Nine Elms to a proposed to link Vauxhall with the vacant lot programme in north new American Embassy in London, Green Sky Wandsworth to Thinking is now firmly SustainablebyDesign’s established under the education centre for umbrella of OpenAttendees at Green the Phoenix Garden City’s wide-ranging in Covent Garden.

Sky Thinking activities. With hosts District heating was seminars ranging from developers also a subject of to small design practices, recurring debate. the seminars put the spotlight The announcement that on how sustainable design is Green Sky Thinking 2013 will shaping practice. The need for take place in the spring after collaboration and integration Ecobuild shows the strength of surfaced repeatedly in the the initiative, which will now fly workshops, be it for a Victorian solo without the support of Open retrofit in Stockwell (at Marks House weekend.

Stimulating debates at Green Sky Thinking

1,000+

Penoyre & Prasad’s Ashmount Primary School, Crouch Hill community park

advertorial

KONE wins Red Dot award The new, easily customised interiors and accessories of the KONE Design Collection helped scoop the prestigious accolade KONE has won an award in the world-class Red Dot design competition for the design solutions of its new state of the art elevator range launched earlier in the summer.

The Red Dot design award is one of the world’s largest and most distinguished design competitions.

The user experience and appearance of KONE elevator interiors have been enhanced with trendy colours, materials and patterns. The new KONE Design Collection regionally offers more than 50 car interiors, created by design professionals ..

for both new construction and modernisation projects.

The wide range of ceilings, wall materials, floors, handrails, mirrors and other accessories allows each elevator to be easily customised.

According to KONE’s design philosophy, a good elevator user experience is more than just a ride – it’s an emotional journey that combines aesthetics, accessibility, comfort, safety and reliability. This philosophy

springs from KONE’s vision for delivering the best user experience in the industry.

Simon Dow, business development director for KONE, confirmed that the company was honoured to have received the award for its latest innovations. The new design solutions offer unique elevator car interiors, as well as user friendly components and accessories.

For more information, visit www.kone.com



Sustainability feature

The bolt-on flagship

The Crystal has been turned into a low-carbon exemplar project with add-on technologies, writes Hattie Hartman. Photography by Edmund Sumner

L

ocated on a spectacular site at the west end of the Royal Victoria Dock in Newham, east London, the Siemens Crystal contradicts all the fundamental tenets of green building design. It’s lightweight and all glass. Wilkinson Eyre initially conceived its crystalline form – an adaptation of two parallelograms – for a different site without a clearly defined brief. This is not ‘fabric first’ site-specific passive design. The Crystal’s environmental credentials result primarily from active bolt-on systems, supported by a ruthless agenda of passive

 ..

design applied to the building once the original concept was in place.

Nonetheless, it is a highly performative building with an ambitious change-making agenda: thought leadership in urban sustainability. It’s also all-electric: no fossil fuels are burned on site.

A clear progeny of the Olympic effect, the Crystal is a flagship building for Newham. Clive Dutton, executive director for regeneration, planning and property at the London Borough of Newham, describes Siemens’ commitment to the borough as a ‘game changer’. Part of an arc of high-tech

Below View of main entrance from the docks overlooked by the Emirates Air Line Right Context site plan

industries stretching from Old Street through the Olympic media complex to the Royal Docks, it paves the way for the 20-hectare Silvertown Quays and further development on Royal Albert Dock. Wilkinson Eyre director Sebastien Ricard describes Newham as a ‘very progressive and positive borough’, which streamlined all the approvals for the Crystal. The programme from inception to practical completion was just 29 months.

The building, which is part exhibition-cum-conference centre and part corporate pavilion, is on target to achieve both BREEAM Outstanding and LEED Platinum ratings. Interestingly, Siemens ramped up its aspirations for the top environmental ratings once the building was on site, according to Chris Brandon of Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will, lead designers on the project, who invited Wilkinson Eyre to collaborate at competition stage.

As the brief for the 7,300m2 building became clear, Siemens resolved that it should also be an >> ..

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1. The O2 2. Canning Town 3. Emirates Air Line 4. Royal Victoria DLR station 5. Custom House DLR station (2018) 6. Existing footbridge 7. Royal Victoria Dock 8. ExCeL 9. ExCeL Phase 2 (proposed extension) 10. Prince Regent DLR station 11. Royal Albert Dock (14-hectare development site) 12. Royal Albert Dock 13. City Airport 14. Silvertown Quays (20-hectare development site) 15. Pontoon Dock DLR station 16. River Thames 17. Thames Barrier 18. Green Enterprise Zone boundary

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Left The insulated glazed panels and raking of the facade are used to maximise efficiency Far right PV panels on the roof and the community gardens seen from the Emirates cable car

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exemplar of sustainable design, showcasing the latest technologies, many manufactured by Siemens.

With over 13,000 employees and a £4.4 billion annual turnover in 2010/11 in the UK alone, Siemens, unlike many clients, was determined to hold fast on all the sustainable technologies even at tender stage when value engineering often strips out the non-essentials.

The 2.2 hectare site was not without its challenges. A 40m-wide utility corridor fronting the dock meant the building had to be set back from the water and ruled out using the dock as a source of heating and cooling. A flight corridor for a proposed expansion to City Airport dictated a no-build ..

students. Visitors will receive a key to view the exhibition according to their profile – all rather high-tech.

This is precisely what Siemens was after in the building too – a hightech landmark. Wilkinson supports Siemens’ approach. ‘I believe we can only solve the world’s problems through technology,’ he says. ‘We won’t solve it with straw houses.’

The building is essentially a glazed shed. A three-storey atrium separates the exhibition centre to the north and the conference centre to the south, and links to a vehicular corporate entrance to the rear of the building.

The exhibition crystal is a full-height void while the conference crystal encloses a gigantic red auditorium pod with 300 seats, and meeting rooms and office space on the upper floors.

The exterior comprises three types of double-glazed units. Transparent panels, positioned to capture desirable views and daylight, make up 39 per cent of the envelope. Translucent panels are used where light is desirable but solar gain must be controlled and opaque insulated panels make up the remainder. Further efficiencies are achieved by raking the facade to reflect solar gain and self-shade parts of the building. Parallel-opening panels – 1m x 3m – are the most unusual >>

across the southern end of the site.

Chris Wilkinson of Wilkinson Eyre notes that these constraints made the site ideal for a ‘cultural’ building.

Indeed the messaging of the exhibition is more science museum than corporate marketing and Siemens anticipates an annual footfall of 100,000. According to Roland Busch, chief executive officer for infrastructure and cities at Siemens, the Crystal is intended ‘to help find solutions for making the world’s cities more sustainable. It will serve as a centre for dialogue, learning and discovery.’

The projected audience ranges from mayors and other city decision-makers to planners and architects, as well as school children and post-graduate 

The Crystal, Newham Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will/Wilkinson Eyre

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1. Solar thermal panels 2. Raked facade reduces solar gain in predominantly cooled areas (office) and increases solar gain in predominantly heated areas (cafe) 3. Opaque insulated panels (61% of facade). High performance solar glazing (39% of facade) 4. Transparent glazing minimised on south and west facades to reduce solar gain 5. Motorised parallel facade openings for maximum area of natural ventilation 6. Bike shed 7. 1,585m2 of high-efficiency photovoltaic panels 8. Energy centre storing heat pump for space heating, cooling and domestic water, served by over 17km of underground pipes 9. Battery storage for future smart grid connection 10. Transformer and electrical switchgear to serve ‘all electric’ building 11. 36 x 150 deep bores serving heat pumps 12. Underfloor heating 13. Public display ‘green screens’ to show live energy use and generation 14. 160 x 21 deep energy piles serving heat pumps

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element of the mixed-mode ventilation system. This was considered optimal because it allows the maximum amount of air volume per opening.

Full natural ventilation is possible when outdoor temperatures permit.

An impressive array of renewable technologies sit above (photovoltaics and solar thermal), below (almost 200 geothermal pipes) and behind the building (an energy centre with heat pumps that convert the geothermal energy for heating and cooling and a backwater recycling plant). With all this technology, the building should operate efficiently, increasingly so as the UK grid is decarbonised. Real-time energy and water monitoring inside the exhibition is a promising move towards transparency of reporting operational loads. However, it is worth pointing out that no whole life embodied carbon analysis was performed on the building. You can’t help but query the embodied carbon inherent in this high-tech approach.

The faceted form of the interlocking crystals sits comfortably at the dockside, defining a welcoming public entrance. Equally impressive and perhaps most revealing about Siemens’ commitment to the Crystal ..

and Newham is the landscaping by Townshend Landscape Architects, which includes an extensive area for community gardening south of the building. The overall effect is a building which reflects varying weather conditions, though the dark palette of the glazing lends the exterior a Darth Vader quality. This vanishes inside, where the combination of rooflights and carefully positioned vision glass results in well-lit interiors.

A big plus for the Crystal is its location – just five minutes from the DLR and three minutes from the Emirates Air Line, also by Wilkinson Eyre. The day I visited, picnickers lounged on the grass mounds (irrigated by harvested rain water) in front of the building and the cable car had a considerable queue. It looked like it was all meant to be. The Crystal is also less than 15 minutes from two of London’s most frequented venues – the ExCel Centre and The O2. It doesn’t require much of a leap to imagine visitors to Excel popping out to see the exhibition or even The O2 concertgoers allowing time to check out the Crystal. Meanwhile, anyone who rides the cable car has a crystal clear view of the pavilion, especially the PVs. ■

PROJECT DATA

Above Reflections on the faceted extension vary with the weather

client Siemens start on site November 2010 contract duration 22 months gross internal floor area 7,300m2 GEA total cost Confidential lead design consultant and interior fit-out Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will architect Wilkinson Eyre structural and services engineer Arup landscape architect Townshend Landscape Architects exhibition designer Event Communications project manager and quantity surveyor Turner & Townshend Project Management main contractor ISG Plc estimated annual co2 emissions Whole building: 91 kgCo2/m2/year Office: 23 kgCo2/m²/year design epc rating A heating and hot water load 14kwh/m² (not including reduction due to renewables) on-site energy generation (predicted) 17.5% generation from PV panels overall area-weighted u-values Façade: 1W/m²/k See AJFootprint.com for further environmental data

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The Crystal, Newham Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will/ Wilkinson Eyre Environmental section While externally it is all glass, only 39 per cent of the Crystal’s envelope is transparent. The remainder consists of glazed insulated metal cassettes with the DGU bonded to its carrier frame.

All panels use high-performance glass.  ..

The envelope comprises structural steel mullions and transoms of varying cross-sections. Toggled-fixed DGU cladding panels are mounted on the steel sections. The design focused on the DGU joint as a potential weak spot. The joint has a high-performance gasket and quadruple cavity external silicon band-mounted outside the toggle to maintain air barriers. The facade is expected to achieve 1W/m²K and airtightness of 3m³/hr/m² @50pa.

Alex Kyriakides, project architect

1. Rooflights for daylight and natural ventilation 2. Stack effect ventilation through atrium 3. BMS weather station to control natural ventilation and heating 4. Integrated high-efficiency photovoltaic panel array (19%) 5. Efficient use of steel in parametricallydesigned structure 6. Solar thermal panels 7. High ceiling allows stratification of heat and less air conditioning for a comfortable occupied zone 8. Multi-service passive chilled beams with: · LED lighting · DALI controls for lighting · PIR sensor · WIFI · Photosensor for daylight dimming 9. Opaque insulated panels 10. Raked facade reflects unwanted solar gain 11. Passive chilled beams 12. LED lighting 13. Upward angled facade captures solar gain in predominantly heated spaces such as the cafe and restaurant, supplementing underfloor heating 14. Automated parallel ventilation openings (150 in total) 15. Energy piles for heating and cooling 16. Underfloor heating 17. Air displacement system supplies air at 20˚C to benefit from free cooling 18. Variable air volume dampers supply fresh air with volume controlled

by CO2 sensors in each room 19. Room user control

..

LIGHTING

AWARDS

enTry DeADLIne Friday 5 October

Wednesday 27 March London Hilton, Park Lane

LIGHTIN

Let the natural light in Proud of your light pipes?

Delighted with your daylight factor?

If you have been involved in a project that makes innovative use of natural light, then the Lighting Design Awards would like to hear from you.

The world’s most prestigious architectural lighting competition has introduced a daylight design category.

“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.” Le Corbusier.

AWARD

enter online today

If you have any questions about the entry process, please contact Katherine Taylor on 020 7728 3583 or email katherine.taylor@emap.com and mention VIP code LDAJ

The Sainsbury Laboratory, winner of the inaugural daylight award.

To discuss the sponsorship opportunities available please contact Hannah Buckley on 020 7728 3762 or email hannah.buckley@emap.com

BrougHT To you By:

Follow us at @LDA_2013 SPonSoreD By:

2352LightingAwds13_FPDaylight2_AJ.indd 1

SuPPorTeD By:

14/09/2012 16:54

Sustainability in practice

The effective use of green infrastructure in our cities is creeping up the design agenda, writes Sue Illman

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It promotes multifunctionality and connectivity, and can be integrated with our environment. While architecture is demonstrating its committment to the sustainability agenda, it is not engaging with it holistically because the way it is assessed has been reduced to a tick-box exercise.

How to address flood attentuation, food shortages, sustainable transport and biodiversity are not part of the standard sustainability test. In GI’s multifunctional approach, all these challenges can be taken into consideration, but it has to be planned and managed.

And to be successful, GI needs to permeate every level of the design process. That doesn’t mean putting a stranglehold on creativity but it requires the whole team to drive GI principles through the chain from day one.

Peter Sheard noted in the AJ last month (AJ 30.08.12)

Architecture is not engaging with GI holistically because the way it is assessed has been reduced to a tick-box exercise

HANNA MELIN

There’s no doubt that James Corner Field Operations’ High Line has helped raise landscape’s profile since it opened in 2009. Its success as an urban park and a catalyst for regeneration can be seen in the thousands of visitors who flock to it each year and in the gentrification of New York’s West Chelsea. But the reason for its iconic status – like Paris’ Promenade Plantée before it – is that Corner and Co breathed life into a space usually reserved for buildings; the city skyline. In reinventing a mile and a half of old freight railway, the High Line re-drew for our collective imagination the boundaries of what green infrastructure (GI) can do for cities. Architects have tended to lead the way when it comes to engaging the imagination about the future cityscape and it’s time we flexed our muscles too. With our ‘High Line for London’ ideas competition (see p18), run in conjunction with the mayor’s office and the Garden Museum, we were looking for urban design projects that transcend the commonly accepted role of parks and engage communities with GI. London’s brownfield sites offer plenty of candidates for innovative reuse, as do some existing examples of green infrastructure, and this competition has given people the chance to reinvent something that’s not doing a good job. We’ve been amazed by the response. The winner will be announced on 8 October, but with entries from around the world and a range of disciplines, it’s clear that how we use GI in our cities is now an important topic.

It has been a welcome salve to the lazy policy-making seen in the government’s recent attack on the green belt.

Gone is the appetite for ingenuity we have witnessed in east London, where a significant brownfield site was developed for an Olympic Park and Athletes Village.

Writing in The Huffington Post in June, Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, said ‘the ‘High Line effect should be viewed more broadly as a holistic approach to urban design that suggests how to transform existing urban landscapes to meet contemporary needs’. Few concepts are more holistic than GI. The Landscape Institute defines it as the networks of green spaces, rivers and woodlands that intersperse and connect our villages, towns and cities.

that ‘there is momentum behind GI but there must be more success stories to make the process more credible and its benefits legible’. As with sustainable drainage systems, political awareness of GI has increased in recent years and landscape architects are seeing a growing appetite for it among clients, not least because it is about creating efficient landscapes by making the most of what’s already there. With the Olympic Park legacy, which can be credited with an approach that chose to heal – rather than steal from – the Lower Lea Valley, we have our most high-profile example of GI yet.

Sue Illman is president of the Landscape Institute. On 8 October the institute is hosting a day of events at the Garden Museum which will include talks on some of the most significant new GI projects happening in the capital.

Visit landscapeinstitute.org for more details ..

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19/09/2012 12:36

Culture

THE WAX AND THE FIRE At its best, the Royal Academy’s autumn show, Bronze, has an alchemy that conjures the luminous and sublime out of dense surfaces and forms, writes Jay Merrick  ..

..

LEFT: PHOTO © TATE, LONDON 2012. FAR LEFT: PHOTO SCALA, FLORENCE

‘The past,’ as LP Hartley wrote in his 1953 bestseller, The Go-Between, ‘is another country: they do things differently there.’ Differently, but still implicitly part of our sensual, emotional and imaginatively charged present. Bronze, the Royal Academy’s new show, allows us to experience the past not as if it were in a vitrine, but as an alchemy of form, materiality, light, time – and human presence.

The exhibition opens with a Grecian showstopper: the damaged, almost limbless Dancing Satyr from 400BC, his cranium trepanned, his body covered in an exquisite psoriasis of stippled verdigris and darker, smoother patinations. Raised, beautifully lit and alone in the first ..

exhibition Bronze, Royal Academy, London W1, until 9 December, £14

Above left Dancing Satyr, Greek, 400BC Above Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Umberto Boccioni, 1913

room, we have everything: formal poise, temporal and emotional tensions, death and, most significantly, a life force that transcends this wonderfully crafted figure.

How many artfully surfaced and detailed modern buildings achieve anything like this sense of presence and communication? How many seem merely virtuosic, or cleverly referential, or expressing dutifully murmured ‘haptic qualities’? Why only those qualities? The Bronze show, mounted with restrained clarity by Stanton Williams, may offer some answers and consolations.

The translated Latin inscription on a 13th century German bronze door-knocker reads: ‘The wax gives what should be, the fire takes it away, the bronze gives it back to you.’

And here’s Louis Kahn’s flipside: ‘A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable.’ The exhibition gives us a sense of both ideas. Craft and the human touch at this level of imagination, execution and range are instructive to any kind of designer.

Yet the figuration of these bronzes is not always their most compelling aspect, despite the brilliantly arranged formal dynamics in pieces such as Barye and Gonon’s 1832 Tiger Devouring a Gavial, and Girardon’s Laocoön and his Sons from 1690.

The essential magic of most of the pieces lies in qualities of light: not the light that their surfaces reflect, but the light their forms seem to possess in some inherent way. And the most sublime proof is found in one of the show’s darkest pieces, Rodin’s The Age of Bronze, whose nominally black surface throws out tones of darkest red and toffee that seem to be lit from within, as if the bronze was about to return to its molten state.

There can seem to be too much light. The abstract bird form of Brancusi’s Maiastra, with its polished, high brass-content gleam, creates a brilliant graphic punch that is mute. But the bronze stands on a faux ancient, fragmented stone column-head of variable texture that is etched with carved lines and shadow.

Presto: a small but potent object-lesson in the tensions of starkly contrasting forms and materials.

Sometimes – just as in crudely illuminated architecture – light is a destroyer. Rustici’s otherwise superbly impressive 16th century ensemble, St John Preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee, is rendered as Las Vegas baroque by the way it’s lit. We experience little more than a sense of surface, as if the trio had been made of plaster and rescued from a Hollywood props museum.

No such ambiguities in Tony Cragg’s 2007 sculpture, Points of View – a fascinating study of the dynamics of light, profile and surface quality. The wobbly whirls of Cragg’s asymmetrical bronze spindles morph into distorted facial profiles; sharp edges >> 

Culture Bronze, Royal Academy

melt into softness; cold gleams into darkened calm.

Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist piece, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, dating from 1913, seems uniquely and discontinuously turgid by comparison.

The bronzes at this exhibition give us more than protean riddles of surface, light and texture; they can also possess dense concentrations of stillness – a stillness that somehow seems alive, as in the 14th century shamanistic Seated Figure from Nigeria, whose tranced gaze is eerily hypnotic. There is a similar gnomic power in the 600BC Winged Feline from Spain, a beautifully poised, intensely concentrated Ur-Art Deco figure.  ..

Above Back III (1916) and Back IV (c1931) by Henri Matisse

Matisse’s massive series of bronzes, Back, generates the same degree of concentration, yet also a wild sense of freedom. His abstracted figures seem half-sunk into bronzed rectangles of earth, their surfaces scarified with brusque scrape-marks and cylindrical indentations. Two of the bronzes, Back III and Back IV, are Corbusian or, rather, what Corb might have dreamed of achieving.

The show’s art-historical gravitas is not entirely overwhelming – Benzi’s 17th century head, Damned Soul, is a screaming Thomas Heatherwick; Adriaen de Vries’s Seated Christ from 1607 gives us an oleaginous Blairite dissembler, desperately trying to hold back a seismic fart; da Firenze’s conjoined Satyr and Satyress, ..

circa 1540, is pure twistys.com penetrative porn; the Pop Art bronzes by Jasper Johns and Jeff Koons are turdishly witless; and, though one should admire the 12th century Krodo Altar from Saxony for itself, it does have the look of an architectural satire by Hans Hollein.

No matter. In the penumbral, living glow of that 2,400-year-old Dancing Satyr, we have the complex pleasure of standing on the edge of other times and other places where, as Hartley said, they did things differently. But the go-betweens – the eye, hand, touch, light – are proof against such pat thresholds: they’re always with us, vividly, in the here and now. ■ Jay Merrick is architecture critic at the Independent ..

Above Untitled (2012), by Anish Kapoor

NICK CUNARD

LEFT: DAVE MORGAN / ANISH KAPOOR. FAR LEFT: PHOTO © TATE, LONDON 2012 / © SUCCESSION H. MATISSE / DACS 2012

The alternative to bread and circuses is on London’s fringe, writes Merlin Fulcher

Bread and circuses may have marked the decline of the Roman Empire with shallow spectacle, but today the demise of free cultural events in our cities threatens an eternal dullness. This is particularly clear in the Olympic Games’ wake, as the subsidised arts resume their ragged shuffle to fiscal rectitude.

As memories fade of the Cultural Olympiad, which saw £55 million spent on the London 2012 Festival alone, identikit ticketed music ‘experiences’, such as LoveBox, Get Loaded in the Park and South West Four, re-join the ghastly pop-ups on London’s South Bank in an unconvincing bid to persuade the capital it has a thriving public arts scene.

For London-based arts and architecture collective Post Works, however, there is a way out. Duo Matthew Butcher and Mellissa Appleton’s £40,000 Writtle Calling installation – a pop-up stage and radio station in Essex – used its fringe location to critique the capital’s cultural offering with a series of free and richly imaginative live performances.

On scrubland and hay bales on a remote agricultural college campus, the audience – transported by coach from the metropolis – were haunted by performance artist Edwin Burdis’s atmospheric weaving of agriculture and space travel and enlivened by psychedelic funk group Clout!’s homemade instruments.

Constructed from scaffolding, bitumen shingles, weatherboarding and gate posts, the ‘agricultural, semisuburban’ architecture (pictured) was, according to Butcher, inspired by studies of buildings along the A12 and A414 route of our voyage past Olympic arenas and executive boxes. The journey, and plans to reconstruct the stage for future performances, is one reason why the immediate future for public arts might not be so bad.

installation / events / temporary radio station Writtle Calling (culminated on 15 September), conceived and created by Post Works



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Candidates should have a minimum of 5 years architectural and urban design experience preferably both in the UK and China. The successful candidate is required to work at the interface of our London and Shanghai offices on large urban design, masterplanning and mixed use projects in China. They must also possess strong design, presentation and report writing skills and be able to read, write and speak Mandarin to a very good level.

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Our London based, international award winning practice, is looking for an exceptionally talented and experienced Architect to join our Infrastructure Team, at a senior level. Applicants must be able to demonstrate relevant organisational, management and job running skills appropriate to bridge and infrastructure projects and special structures.

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81

Ian Martin

Thinking beyond pop-uption to metarchitecture, and then beyond that…

There’s an awkward silence. I try to lighten things by asking what metarchitecture is. Everyone looks a bit disappointed in me. ‘Metarchitecture,’ sighs Nicky, or Nicki, ‘is about shifting the grammar and syntax of placemaking from the continuous present to the future imperfect…’ ‘Yes,’ adds Nicki, or Nicky, ‘we need to embrace the new uncertainties if we are to know that which is unknowable…’

Another awkward silence. So, I say, are you two married?

‘We are partners in both business and life,’ says Nicky, or Nicki, glumly. ‘Our commitment to one another, and to our art, is total. We shun the conventions of society’s square cats. That’s why we chose to change both our surnames to something that speaks to the triangulation of us all…’

Nicki or Nicky interrupts. ‘Yes, then we spelled it backwards and put a hyphen in the middle. It looks really good in this font we designed: Querulous Pantomime…’

Coffees and a tray of little architectural cakes arrive at last, rupturing the taut meniscus of bullshit.

An uncomfortable silence. Then I ask, through my second ‘baked nanotype’ – a miniature crofter’s cottage – what exactly they want me to do. ‘Just, you know. Put the word out!’ chirps Molly, tackling a thin biscuit version of Fallingwater.

That’s it? ‘Yes’ confirms Nicky, or Nicki. ‘We’re talking to several people, see what ideas they have for troping this. Thank you very much for coming in. We have someone else to see now…’

Suddenly everyone looks steely. For some reason I hear pizzicato violins. It’s at that moment I realise there’s a film crew in the room.

MONDAY. Sign petition calling for an end to topless shots of women in newspapers. For too long, soft porn and popular journalism have appropriated the language of architecture to peddle their sordid drivel.

‘Well-built’. ‘Luscious curves’. ‘Sinuous form’. ‘Elegantly sexy’. ‘Scantily-clad’. In the Telegraph, it could be a sanitaryware showroom by Zaha Hadid or an authorised photograph of the Duchess of Cambridge.

TUESDAY. Redesign autumn, giving it a ‘Game of Thrones trailer’ vibe.

WEDNESDAY. Assemble items for the time capsule we’re burying in the foundations of my Tamworth Museum of The High Street: Direct debit mandate in favour of major charity. Car park overstay fine in buff envelope. Three pairs of socks from Poundland. A dozen different brands of skinny latte. Shop rental agreement in Hedge Fund Esperanto. XL security guard’s hat. Alcopop bottle. Expired library card. Laptop with browser open at Amazon.

 ..

FRIDAY. Obviously I didn’t get the metarchitecture gig.

SATURDAY. Whoever DID get the metarchitecture gig is doing very well. Bollocks. It’s trending. It’s hot. I ring my old friend, architecture critic Darcy Farquear’say, on the offchance he’s heard anything. Straight to voicemail.

HANNA MELIN

THURSDAY. Meeting with Molly Bismuth, president of the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects, and her new thinking unit.

I say unit; there are only two of them. But what a hot-ticket couple: Nicky and Nicki Odessa-Assedo, the celebrated form-makers and paradigm-shifters. Nicky and Nicki are dressed casually but expensively, like Scandinavian therapists. The Odessa-Assedo meteor has certainly blazed across our cultural firmament recently. Their breakthrough ‘being human kiosk’ at the Olympic Park was followed by an award-winning tree house for smokers in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. They imagined a ‘perpetual water park’ for the Institute of Plasmic Arts. They gave a lecture, upside down, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall and curated the much talked-about Exhibition of Ephemera in a lift at the Shard (opened at the ground floor, dismantled at the top).

In the last fortnight alone they have rebranded Whitby, designed a Vorticist Artichoke for Borough Market’s New Vegetable Week and Started The Week with Andrew Marr.

Molly explains that Nicky and Nicki’s new Metarchitecture Unit will be a self-contained ‘memepod’ on the third floor. ‘See, this is a chance to push forward the agenda of the RIPBA, beyond pop-up to metarchitecture, and then beyond that…’

SUNDAY. Practically fall out of the recliner. There, in the Creative on Sunday, a huge picture of a dachshund – Darcy’s former companion – is WINKING at me.

‘METARCHITECTURE – a new way of looking at our built environment! Over the next few months Bauhau The Dachshund, our adorable metarchitecture correspondent, will…’ Oh God, there’s a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall, too.

Memo To Self: Kill Bauhau. ..

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