first the cloud and the spiral get the boot
then ushida findlay goes bankrupt
then people start hitting back on PFI schemes.
looks like a bad time for blighty, or maybe not?
dont think its that bad for most, its cyclical and think it is a phenomena happening places around the world
i feel we are witnessing the gradual fall of some of the shortlived starkitect. projects are asking themselves, after the capital campaign and the project is done, was the money worth it? i think a few of the stars have gone way out of their way to consider cost in their projects idea and most clients can take a hit once but thats it. are places like the scottish parlaiment really worth the price? smaller museums here like milwaukee are struggleing because of poor decisions to committ much more addditional funds to the calatrava piece. no doubt, the museum attendance is up because the piece is one of the main reason people visit.
the cctv. done. add it to your list. it is appearing in other forms by other archs....
it would be wonderful to have been a fly on the wall to hear liberskind talk of his value engineering suggestions for the spiral. 'well, if we take 3 factals out....hmm...yes, i certain we can get something to work'.
i wonder wether that might be the signal iof the end of a certain era, maybe post-modernism is dying only just now...looks ike the only people who are avoidng the trouble are the advanced-data driven- syntesis architecs (koolhaas,foa,mvrdv...who are, in my analysis, much more connected to modernism than any other current) and the old modernist guard(nouvel, siza, rogers) maybe modernism is back, with a less dogmatic face...you cant kill bad grass!
This downward spiral in UK architecture has several aspects to it including the Bilbao effect, Grant aid (lottery, European, regional), Political and cultural evolution. Granted that the essence of this process is nothing new in the history of British Architecture, however, we are a long way from the 1950’s and a lot of hard lessons have been learnt by the Profession. Quality is still there and UK architectural export remains strong.
Government procurement and PFI is the political tool of an economist that is being abused, stifling confidence and inflating costs in the short and long term.
As for eras, maybe we have never left modernism? We are now beginning to evolve a modernist style that begins to understand the complex nature of modernism and modernist buildings. The difficulty in defining an era you experience is that any discernable change in epoch or zeitgeist is relative to the position of the viewer on the viewed.
New quality architecture in the capital (not Cardiff)
Laban Centre, London SE8 Herzog and de Meuron
30 St Mary Axe/aka Swiss Re/aka The Gherkin, London EC3 Foster and Partners
Serpentine Pavilion, London W2 Oscar Niemeyer
Hampstead Theatre, London NW2 Bennetts Associates
Dirty House, London E2 David Adjaye
30 Finsbury Square, London EC2 Eric Parry Associates
bigness, do you say data and program architects like Koolhaas are avoiding the troubled bend??? look at CCTV maybe???
dont know where this is heading, but i see a value-engineered shitty alley all the way into the future
the best think to come from the spiral up to now in the is the demise of the royal fine arts commission and recognizing the great uk home grown design[i remember when foster was almost exclusively practicing abroad].
laban center [although not home grown boys] is a great example of great + affordable design. clearly, cheap - but magical in a way. first, its a simple box. the different colors of polygal play as an illusion on the west facade with the west sun over looking your shoulder as you arrive at an evenings dance performance. and the exterior landscape -- well keep the dirt on site to save some bucks and that solution is again bold and aggressive - but cheap.
i would not have been afraid to do the cctv building from a pricing perspective. its a very sound concept from a structural sense. balmonds brilliant. i am not sure of the functional stacking parti of oma's. with of goal of multiplicity in space uses, if you compare the buildings to conventional building efficiecy numbers [like i have seen people do with seattle lib] they appear on the surface to be only about circulation. i think they cant be compared but bureacrats sitting back in their cubicles have nothing else to do and its easier to nix a project based 'on facts'[not efficient] than 'aestetics'
a little laugh:
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahhaahhahahahahaahahahha...
and a bit more:
ahahahahahahahahhhahahahahahaaahah!
sorry, i had no idea, still thinkhe is not getting as much shit as the others.
guess he will be like fosters in 10 years, building skyscrapers with huge golden globes for dubai.
didn't the laban centre get slated by the dancers saying that it was disorientating to dance in?
didnt know the dancers gripe. couldnt get a ticket when i was there. you dont think its a good building?
in 1990, foster was doing absolutely zero in the uk[accept the airforce museum up north]. it was overrun by the likes of all those historical rivialist doing schemes like paternoster square, kings cross, etc only because if you got in 5 miles to one of the scared 5 view corridors of st. pauls, broke the roof line with any material but articulated stone, RFAC, sir basil spense and the likes, would give you thumbs down and nothing would get built. a anti-reaction to the modern social movement of camdem housing architects in the 60's with great projects like alexander road.
people like foster should have done the british library and look what the sacred planning process came up with after all those years.
foster buildings are brilliant but very expensive[and with his fees] . so they cant be everywhere. dont know if his urban splash housing is going ahead but its good to see them break into that area although its probably the first and last time.
i think its a great building, very moderate and beautiful in a gentle way. yet the dancers complained about the floors being to hard (dancefloors, much like running tracks, need to be a little "bouncy") and that the irregular shape of the practice rooms, plus the colour schemes, is disorientating.
problem i have with foster is that his practice is run on a fordist system nowadays, you probably see 1/10 of his building on the papers, the rest is much lower quality stuff, burried in some unknown country.
did a theater once, for dance floors really is a very special bounce rubber system else it totaly screw up their bodies. someone really goofed !! practice rooms should match the footprint of the performance stage...can see how the color can screw you up as a dancer. i thought that use of chocolate brown in the lower levels was awful. now you have burst my bubble about the project....at least in half.
last i was at the sir norm corporate head quarters, we were only shown the lovely front studio room, but was denied a visit to the lower dungeon area [where i am told by my friends they run 24hr sweat shop shifts with no windows] ah...the 'profession'
i feel we are at the cusp of being able to build [affordably] complex shapes, i think firms of the likes of alsop [who i admire also - so please trash him too hard], hadid and liberskind [trash him if you wish...i think he is a wind bag] dont put as much effort to connect between how to build and ideas [which in my eyes is why british design is so damn good] and for the most part whose buildings are somewhat 'buildable' proposal but more expensive structural trying forms. foster, shuttleworth and the likes, along with koolhaas[balmond], really i think are far more intrigued by the colloboration on the engineering / arch relationships and there designs are looking to break new boundaries while embracing new notions of modernity [in koolhaas's case]. gehry tries to cadit as a solution, but in some way just because it can be, does it make it good?
alsop, hadid, liberskind wont survive and will be replaced by a yet to arrive group that can do emerging forms and collaborative design.
About the Laban. - Cant believe that a Swiss practice would make a mistake with the technical specs. I blame the british builders. HA HA. Anyhow, the brief for the Laban specified the need for rooms with irregular shapes, I think that it has something to do with the teaching tecnhiques developed by Laban himself. I think that the students are upset because now they have to go to the end of the world to go their lessons and also being british change doesnt come easy, give them some time and they will love it.
About British Architecture. It is a good moment not just for the big names but also small practices of 6 -15 people are getting good commisions and are winning prizes in ENGLAND. For example DSDHA, DRMM, FAT, S333, (half the partners are english but the office is in Holland).
I agree with ludwig, its, all in all, a good time, load of young practices having their share of exposure and work. i just hope that ten years down the line, they wont get as stuck up as th others did before them.
starkitects have bored everyone. if only ii could get a job at fat!
we would be much better off improving the profile of the profession in general, instead of continouslly pumping up a few dickheads...
DSDHA, Well their website I think is not updated very often. Deborah Saunt and David Hills Architecs. They were teaching at Cambridge and now they are in the AA.
balmond is the don, may he forever suspend, contort, fret and rock my world. foster's stuff is horrible! all airports warmed over clumsy structure, the reichstag is blunt and doesn't work (can't look down it), law faculty cambridge is an actual airport and the library isn't shut off properly, the GLA can't sustain it's public space which are over proportioned and underpopulated (how many times is he going to pull this spiral schtick?) - pedestrian spaces bland and overblown.
that's bad news for cctv, but koolhaas is meant to take these sorts of things right? fingers crossed for round whatever, i want my urban loop.
i like your list ludwig. didnt know taylor. would add tim macfarlane and then there is a bigger list if we go for sustainable engineering dudes.
i do like fosters process engaging engineers in the ideas of the project, but completely agree about product. really weak and as ordinary and conventional in concept as any som, hok, gensler or any other big player.
Aug 10, 04 9:52 pm ·
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State of UK Architecture
first the cloud and the spiral get the boot
then ushida findlay goes bankrupt
then people start hitting back on PFI schemes.
looks like a bad time for blighty, or maybe not?
comments welcome...
dont think its that bad for most, its cyclical and think it is a phenomena happening places around the world
i feel we are witnessing the gradual fall of some of the shortlived starkitect. projects are asking themselves, after the capital campaign and the project is done, was the money worth it? i think a few of the stars have gone way out of their way to consider cost in their projects idea and most clients can take a hit once but thats it. are places like the scottish parlaiment really worth the price? smaller museums here like milwaukee are struggleing because of poor decisions to committ much more addditional funds to the calatrava piece. no doubt, the museum attendance is up because the piece is one of the main reason people visit.
the cctv. done. add it to your list. it is appearing in other forms by other archs....
it would be wonderful to have been a fly on the wall to hear liberskind talk of his value engineering suggestions for the spiral. 'well, if we take 3 factals out....hmm...yes, i certain we can get something to work'.
i wonder wether that might be the signal iof the end of a certain era, maybe post-modernism is dying only just now...looks ike the only people who are avoidng the trouble are the advanced-data driven- syntesis architecs (koolhaas,foa,mvrdv...who are, in my analysis, much more connected to modernism than any other current) and the old modernist guard(nouvel, siza, rogers) maybe modernism is back, with a less dogmatic face...you cant kill bad grass!
This downward spiral in UK architecture has several aspects to it including the Bilbao effect, Grant aid (lottery, European, regional), Political and cultural evolution. Granted that the essence of this process is nothing new in the history of British Architecture, however, we are a long way from the 1950’s and a lot of hard lessons have been learnt by the Profession. Quality is still there and UK architectural export remains strong.
Government procurement and PFI is the political tool of an economist that is being abused, stifling confidence and inflating costs in the short and long term.
As for eras, maybe we have never left modernism? We are now beginning to evolve a modernist style that begins to understand the complex nature of modernism and modernist buildings. The difficulty in defining an era you experience is that any discernable change in epoch or zeitgeist is relative to the position of the viewer on the viewed.
New quality architecture in the capital (not Cardiff)
Laban Centre, London SE8 Herzog and de Meuron
30 St Mary Axe/aka Swiss Re/aka The Gherkin, London EC3 Foster and Partners
Serpentine Pavilion, London W2 Oscar Niemeyer
Hampstead Theatre, London NW2 Bennetts Associates
Dirty House, London E2 David Adjaye
30 Finsbury Square, London EC2 Eric Parry Associates
bigness, do you say data and program architects like Koolhaas are avoiding the troubled bend??? look at CCTV maybe???
dont know where this is heading, but i see a value-engineered shitty alley all the way into the future
i admit my lack of knowldge about the cctv...what's happening?
the best think to come from the spiral up to now in the is the demise of the royal fine arts commission and recognizing the great uk home grown design[i remember when foster was almost exclusively practicing abroad].
laban center [although not home grown boys] is a great example of great + affordable design. clearly, cheap - but magical in a way. first, its a simple box. the different colors of polygal play as an illusion on the west facade with the west sun over looking your shoulder as you arrive at an evenings dance performance. and the exterior landscape -- well keep the dirt on site to save some bucks and that solution is again bold and aggressive - but cheap.
i would not have been afraid to do the cctv building from a pricing perspective. its a very sound concept from a structural sense. balmonds brilliant. i am not sure of the functional stacking parti of oma's. with of goal of multiplicity in space uses, if you compare the buildings to conventional building efficiecy numbers [like i have seen people do with seattle lib] they appear on the surface to be only about circulation. i think they cant be compared but bureacrats sitting back in their cubicles have nothing else to do and its easier to nix a project based 'on facts'[not efficient] than 'aestetics'
cctv rip......
ted, thanks.
a little laugh:
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahhaahhahahahahaahahahha...
and a bit more:
ahahahahahahahahhhahahahahahaaahah!
sorry, i had no idea, still thinkhe is not getting as much shit as the others.
guess he will be like fosters in 10 years, building skyscrapers with huge golden globes for dubai.
didn't the laban centre get slated by the dancers saying that it was disorientating to dance in?
didnt know the dancers gripe. couldnt get a ticket when i was there. you dont think its a good building?
in 1990, foster was doing absolutely zero in the uk[accept the airforce museum up north]. it was overrun by the likes of all those historical rivialist doing schemes like paternoster square, kings cross, etc only because if you got in 5 miles to one of the scared 5 view corridors of st. pauls, broke the roof line with any material but articulated stone, RFAC, sir basil spense and the likes, would give you thumbs down and nothing would get built. a anti-reaction to the modern social movement of camdem housing architects in the 60's with great projects like alexander road.
people like foster should have done the british library and look what the sacred planning process came up with after all those years.
foster buildings are brilliant but very expensive[and with his fees] . so they cant be everywhere. dont know if his urban splash housing is going ahead but its good to see them break into that area although its probably the first and last time.
i think its a great building, very moderate and beautiful in a gentle way. yet the dancers complained about the floors being to hard (dancefloors, much like running tracks, need to be a little "bouncy") and that the irregular shape of the practice rooms, plus the colour schemes, is disorientating.
problem i have with foster is that his practice is run on a fordist system nowadays, you probably see 1/10 of his building on the papers, the rest is much lower quality stuff, burried in some unknown country.
did a theater once, for dance floors really is a very special bounce rubber system else it totaly screw up their bodies. someone really goofed !! practice rooms should match the footprint of the performance stage...can see how the color can screw you up as a dancer. i thought that use of chocolate brown in the lower levels was awful. now you have burst my bubble about the project....at least in half.
last i was at the sir norm corporate head quarters, we were only shown the lovely front studio room, but was denied a visit to the lower dungeon area [where i am told by my friends they run 24hr sweat shop shifts with no windows] ah...the 'profession'
i feel we are at the cusp of being able to build [affordably] complex shapes, i think firms of the likes of alsop [who i admire also - so please trash him too hard], hadid and liberskind [trash him if you wish...i think he is a wind bag] dont put as much effort to connect between how to build and ideas [which in my eyes is why british design is so damn good] and for the most part whose buildings are somewhat 'buildable' proposal but more expensive structural trying forms. foster, shuttleworth and the likes, along with koolhaas[balmond], really i think are far more intrigued by the colloboration on the engineering / arch relationships and there designs are looking to break new boundaries while embracing new notions of modernity [in koolhaas's case]. gehry tries to cadit as a solution, but in some way just because it can be, does it make it good?
alsop, hadid, liberskind wont survive and will be replaced by a yet to arrive group that can do emerging forms and collaborative design.
About the Laban. - Cant believe that a Swiss practice would make a mistake with the technical specs. I blame the british builders. HA HA. Anyhow, the brief for the Laban specified the need for rooms with irregular shapes, I think that it has something to do with the teaching tecnhiques developed by Laban himself. I think that the students are upset because now they have to go to the end of the world to go their lessons and also being british change doesnt come easy, give them some time and they will love it.
About British Architecture. It is a good moment not just for the big names but also small practices of 6 -15 people are getting good commisions and are winning prizes in ENGLAND. For example DSDHA, DRMM, FAT, S333, (half the partners are english but the office is in Holland).
ted: no more thrashing for tonight!
ah, s333, i love those thugs!
I agree with ludwig, its, all in all, a good time, load of young practices having their share of exposure and work. i just hope that ten years down the line, they wont get as stuck up as th others did before them.
starkitects have bored everyone. if only ii could get a job at fat!
we would be much better off improving the profile of the profession in general, instead of continouslly pumping up a few dickheads...
hey ludwig,who's dsdha? the link is broken...
no it aint, my browser sucks.sorry.
DSDHA, Well their website I think is not updated very often. Deborah Saunt and David Hills Architecs. They were teaching at Cambridge and now they are in the AA.
balmond is the don, may he forever suspend, contort, fret and rock my world. foster's stuff is horrible! all airports warmed over clumsy structure, the reichstag is blunt and doesn't work (can't look down it), law faculty cambridge is an actual airport and the library isn't shut off properly, the GLA can't sustain it's public space which are over proportioned and underpopulated (how many times is he going to pull this spiral schtick?) - pedestrian spaces bland and overblown.
that's bad news for cctv, but koolhaas is meant to take these sorts of things right? fingers crossed for round whatever, i want my urban loop.
I guess we could even have a Thread about
'The State of UK Engineering'
with Balmond, Adams Kara Taylor, Jane Wernick, Atelier One, its looking even better than the architecture.
i like your list ludwig. didnt know taylor. would add tim macfarlane and then there is a bigger list if we go for sustainable engineering dudes.
i do like fosters process engaging engineers in the ideas of the project, but completely agree about product. really weak and as ordinary and conventional in concept as any som, hok, gensler or any other big player.
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