Re: Re: libeskind / Manuel Aires Mateus on the docks

[For what it’s worth, I think the present manifestation of the scheme, as illustrated in the published renders, is a giftless shambles, with bits of ‘Libeskind’ mixed in with bits of the Bejing bird cage. My guess is that, when it’s finished and it joins the chequer board hotel (which, in no way, looks like it was ‘carved out of a single block’ of anything, except maybe a crate of mono-tone Battenburg cake) and the slanty red poles on the slanty red carpet, it will be an eloquent statement of exactly how directionless civic architecture has become in the first decade of the 21st century, but I could be completely wrong.[/QUOTE]

I know we can’t go on agreeing like this, but you have put the ‘case against’ very elegantly here. Old cynical me wondered what ‘carved out of a single block’ had to do with a commercial hotel, but I guess that’s just Johnglas…

The danger with this whole civic space now is that it looks like it is being reduced almost to the level of an architectural freak show: no coherence, no dominant design ethos, neither formal open space nor particularly useable ‘play area’, the potential of its relationship to the canal basin wasted. Of the buildings, the office block is decent and well mannered, the hotel is a joke and the DL is… well, what is it? Perhaps you can stand in the middle of it and go ‘Wow!’, but if you can’t, what was the point?