letter from london

This is a good time for architectural awards. I have just had the pleasure of being a juror on the Singapore President’s Design Awards, which was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, not least because of the variety of judges and the good organization.
Soon we will know the results of the Aga Khan Awards, a programme which [...]

On deadline day for WAF awards entries we were heading for well over 500 entries from more than 50 countries at the last count. In fact we had so many electronic entries coming in that for a bit our systems overloaded. So don’t despair if you missed the deadline: just email Joanna Pocock (joanna.pocock@emap.com), our [...]

For many years PAL Meat for Dogs marketed itself under the slogan ‘Prolongs Active Life’. The same might be applied to ‘retrofit’, an increasingly important sector for built environment professionals. Retrofit as a word has overtones of those ‘retro’ cars, where the newest technology is dressed up in classic car clothing. But in the case [...]

Ian Martin recently satirised, hilariously Jean Nouvel (‘Claude Videur’)  and Jean’s stream-of-consciousness description of what had inspired one of his designs. It has always been enjoyable experiencing the cutting edge of cruel English wit slicing through the crème fraiche of French pretension (think Shakespeare’s Henry V). But it does leave us with the question of [...]

‘A time of severe recession is a good time to take sock of resources. Our existing buildings should be regarded as a valuable resource to be more fully used. We should design our new buildings so that they add to this resource.’ As the AJ co-launches the new ‘Retrofit’ awards with New Civil Engineer, it [...]

With the award season truly upon us, those of us privileged to undertake judging duties (and it really is a privilege) can expect the usual mixture of wonderful, okay and disappointing entries.
What is not often discussed is the wide variation in quality of presentations themselves, irrespective of the merits of the design. And while [...]

At last year’s World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, our thematic exhibition was called ‘ Less Does More’. Curated by Jeremy Melvin, it featured case studies from around the globe, looking at everything from Masdar to the London Olympic stadium, and from the financing of  housing in East Africa to a university project in the Congo. [...]

For decades, UK legislators have used the planning system as a way of taxing development, via ‘Section 106’ or its predecessors, essentially a planning condition which constitutes a tax. From one point of view, these payments are a useful way of providing community benefit, which recognises the increase in land values that planning permissions often [...]

There has been a spectrum of opinion and a spectrum of people (if you can have such a thing) involved in the great environmental debates at the Copenhagen climate summit. At one end you have the devout climate-change believers, for whom everything is simple: this is the situation and this is what we must all [...]

One of the consequences of endless fiddling with geographical boundaries in Britain over the past 50 years has been a huge loss of local, regional and national identity. Almost everything has been subject to phoney ‘efficiency changes’ with postcodes cast to the winds, counties smashed, big cities drifting in and out of county structures, and [...]