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. [...]
Letters from London
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 [...]
Coping with Copenhagen
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 [...]
What does it mean to be English?
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 [...]
Does building change city futures?
The after-dinner discussion addressed the following question: ‘Can building change the destiny of world cities?’ Like most such debating-style propositions, this one was full of ambiguities and subsidiary points for discussion, not least the question of what defines a world city. Moreover, the concept of destiny excludes a fundamental change of direction or outcome; as [...]
Prioritise and tell it how it is
London’s popular mayor, Boris Johnson, has been taking advice from many quarters on his policies in respect of design quality. The elephant in the room when design is discussed by politicians is the cost, or additional cost, of commissioning excellent design as opposed to whatever the construction sector chooses to give you. Since politicians are [...]
Faster should mean better
News that the UK government is to ‘fast-track’ planning applications for nuclear power stations follows shortly after a New Labour commitment that communities would be given a greater say over what is built in their areas. The Conservative opposition has also indicated that it intends to give local people more of a say on planning, [...]
Letter from London
Our attitude to the past is a good guide to what we think about the present, hence the continuing interest in (and controversy over) what buildings do or do not get listed. And having been listed, what we then find acceptable in terms of alteration or even demolition, for it needs to be remembered that [...]
Injecting certainty into fees
Any discussion about how architects charge fees brings into sharp focus the perspectives of supplier and customer. For while architecture, as a profession, is about serving the interests of society in general and clients in particular, that does not mean it is a charitable activity. George Bernard Shaw’s cynical description of any profession as being [...]
Counting the cost of competition
One of British architecture’s more piquant moments of recent years took place at the Stirling Prize ceremony on Saturday night. Marco Goldschmied handed over a cheque for £20,000 to Richard Rogers, following the announcement that the Maggie’s Centre in Hammersmith had won the 2009 award. There wasn’t too much eye contact.
Readers may recall that Marco [...]
