Hugh Pearman
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Bridge aficionados might like to take a look at Wilkinson Eyre’s new “rotating eyelid” bridge in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, courtesy of that city’s webcams:
http://www.tynebridgewebcam.co.uk/webcams.htmIt’s in place (obviously) but not rotating yet.
Thanks Shane: that’s a relief. Or at least,I hope it’s a relief: is this bidding process being conducted according to architectural merit, I wonder, or according to the size of the bank balances of the consortia involved?
It reminds me of all those shopping-centre competitions where architects are yoked with developers, with the consequence that design quality comes a poor second to size of financial inducement being offered. Anyone know how the process works for this project?
Transparently or otherwise?Hmmm, expected something a bit more radical from Behnisch – but they probably have their hands tied by stadium “specialists” who say that things have to be done in a particular way.
Of course we’re going through all this with the English National Stadium at Wembley (N. Foster with a team of aforesaid stadium specialists). Same story: ever-rising costs, huge controversy, problem of incorporating athletics, worries over location etc etc.
The French, of course, know what to do: they took a wrecked post-industrial suburb, built a superb stadium there and two metro stations to serve it, all in double-quick time. Voila: the Stade de France. It all seems so easy when you have a dirigiste regime.
Would this be the death knell for Michael Scott’s Abbey theatre? It was always a bit of a cost-paring brick box, but would it now be demolished?
I read that this man O’Nuallain is now taking his case against the Spire to Europe, on the grounds that Dublin Corp’s environmental impact assessement was flawed and that the glass tip of the spire could be shattered by lightning, fall and kill millions.
Could someone please tell me who O’Nuallain is, exactly, apart from a nutcase?
In all the discussion about the Spire I’ve not seen much about its technology. Note that its architect, Ian Ritchie, has previously designed a series of advanced pylons for Electricite de France which adopt this slender tubular format rather than the more familiar latticework structure.
So far as I can tell, the Spire is a clever example of technology transfer, just as the original inter-war pylon designs borrowed from earlier bridge-building techniques. As, of course, did Eiffel’s tower in Paris…
I think it will be great, by the way.
It all comes down to being aware that there’s more than one mode available – whether it’s the car or something else. And of course, trying not to commute.
We have a great big thirsty people-mover-style car sitting expensively outside the house, because we’re a big family. Yet for weeks at a time it doesn’t get used. This is because we parents work from home, the children’s schools are within walking distance or a short bus ride, and when we need to go further in the city (this being London) we often cycle, or take buses or the Underground. If I need to travel further for work, nine times out of ten I’ll take a train.
I reckon we use every available form of transport available, including the car sometimes – not as a matter of eco-policy, just on the basis of what’s most convenient at any given moment.
But this is because we’re doubly lucky – first in being able to work from home, second in being in a part of the city with a reasonable public transport network. If we lived out in the country, or had different jobs, we’d be totally stuck without a car.
Even so, I’m amazed at the number of people round us who drive a few hundred yards to shops or school. What happened to legs? As our wily Mayor Ken Livingstone observed the other day, people seem to drive their kids to school because they are frightened that if they don’t, their kids will get run over by other people driving their own kids to school. It’s surreally self-perpetuating. Meanwhile all those fumes send the asthma statistics (particularly among children) rocketing.
Even so, I remain psychologically unable to give up my car, even though it’s mostly just standing there mouldering away. This must be because of some stupid notion of freedom of movement that it represents. Which, presumably, is the whole problem.
I’d be interested to know other people’s views on this. In England this year, they’re hoping for a million visitors on heritage open days. London “Open House”, which is run separately, last year had 350,000 visitors to around 500 properties.
Is the feeling that the organisers cannot get the private buildings opened up in Ireland? Because that’s certainly the appeal of it over here – the “through the keyhole” thing. In London, the main problem is overcrowding – you have to queue for hours to get into the most popular venues.
France beats the UK hollow, of course, with colossal numbers of properties (mostly public sector) flung open and huge visitor numbers.
What in the opinion of this forum could best be done to improve the Open Days in Ireland? Or to put it another way, what’s wrong with the set-up at present?
The use of timber for bridge decks – particularly bridges with gradients – has been virtually forbidden over here in Albion since a spate of high-profile new pedestrian bridges proved to be just as slippy as KevMac recalls.
Norman Foster’s infamous Millennium Bridge, for instance, was originally going to be timber-decked, but had to go to ridged aluminium decking instead, which blinds you with sun reflections.
But some architects here now propose a solution to slippy-timber misery: instead of grooving the slats lengthwise as is the norm (which collects water, algae, etc), why not groove them across the grain? It seems nobody had thought of this. Mind you, nobody knows if it will work, either.
Yes, I do feel that Martin (who I know and like, and whose writings I normally greatly admire) has let us down here. If it is true that he is in the pay of the Spencer Dock developers, then he should declare that interest when he writes about the scheme.
The developers spread their net wide. At one point (I think before they signed up Martin, if that is indeed the case) they approached me to speak out on their behalf. I refused on the grounds that the scheme appeared to me to be over-developed: too much floorspace, basically. Also I just didn’t like the look of it.
Their reply was that it was all the city corporation’s fault because of insisting on the convention centre. This would be loss-making, they said, so they had to cram in extra floorspace everywhere else to balance their books. Aesthetics were not mentioned.
Subsequent events have not made me regret my decision to steer well clear of Spencer Dock. And anyway, what are they doing approaching London critics about a Dublin matter?
With regard to Bonzo’s open question about the wave of new office building in Berlin: there seems to me to be an essential difference between, say the Renzo Piano master plan for the Potsdamer Platz area in Berlin, and the Roche proposals (so far revealed)for Spencer Dock in Dublin.
First: Piano worked with several other architects to produce buildings by many hands – Richard Rogers, Arata Isosaki, Helmut Jahn, Hans Kolhoff, Rafael Moneo. He contributed several buildings himself but by no means hogged the lot. So there’s a variety.
Second: the individual buildings are subservient to the ensemble effect. What works for me about Potsdamer Platz is its sense of place. The public realm is thoughtfully considered as an entity in its own right – not just the space left over between buildings.
At first I disliked Piano’s plan because it seemed to consist of largely dull buildings. Then I went there and realised that he is playing a quite different game: making a piece of convivial city rather than competing individual landmarks.
So what do we think of the Roche proposals? Is he involving other architects? Is he doing more than make a one-line landmark statement? Is he making a real piece of city? Does he, in short, pass the Piano test?
Hugh.
Ah yes. The desperate deployment of a Platonic form – here the cylinder – in an attempt to achieve the big urban gesture. I.M. Pei is rather better at this sort of thing.
Actually the tilted glass cylinder engaged with an orthogonal form is no bad idea, and I’m not aware of such an example anywhere else (please enlighten me, everyone). Just a bit of a shame that – to go by the published images – the cylinder is the only possibly good thing about an otherwise largely illiterate and over-scaled building.
Would that tilted glass drum be facing due south, by the way? If so, I suspect they will either have to lose that transparency, or roast.
The trick in such cases, if anyone can be bothered, is to get together and present a viable alternative, as happened all those years ago with Temple Bar. It is not enough just to complain about SOM’s downtown-Dallas scheme (as I did) or this extraordinary piece of 1980s commercial Post-modern revival, dredged up from the depths of the planning drawer.
There are excellent architects in Ireland – where are they all, sitting in a bar somewhere grousing about how they never get any work? If ever there was time for direct action, putting together an alternative scheme, getting the press on your side, forcing the City to browbeat the developers into changing horses, all that excellent campaigning stuff, then this is it.
Incidentally, the scheme is not so much like Canary Wharf (which looks bloody good in comparison) but an earlier, considerably more crap scheme nearby in London docklands called South Quay Plaza by John Seifert, arguably Britain’s worst architect. This was the place the IRA blew up, thus proving that every cloud has a silver lining. Sadly, it was not completely destroyed.
Having seen this type of prefabricated construction going up in London, I eventually coined a term for it: “Bodge-tech”. Or as an architect friend explained when I asked him how one of his buildings was going to fit together: “It’ll be a lot of fat men hitting it and swearing”.
In other words, precision isn’t in it. Medieval master masons, with their millimetre-thin joints, were more high-tech than today’s steel fabricators and erectors.
Interesting that public transport architecture should be getting the best design attention right across europe right now – such as the new Paris metro line, new Berlin railway interchange, the Irish examples you mention and various London projects including the new Jubilee Line and designs for the “Thameslink 2000” north-south link.
Dare we hope to believe that this means public transport is now back on the agenda in a way it hasn’t been for years? Or is that being naively over-optimistic?
You get these pieces occasionally in London, too – the Victorians did them in iron as well as stone, to fill in corners on public stairways etc. They are certainly anti-urination devices, and very effective – perhaps they should be revived.
Examples to be seen as you step down from Tower Bridge towards Conranland on the south bank of the thames.
Strikes me that the real problem around here is the traffic thundering along the quays. Get rid of that somehow and both banks will knit together considerably better, bridges and all.
Seven months after this exchange began, we have a result: sanity has prevailed. Maybe people don’t want Dublin to be like everywhere else after all.
But of course SOM will now come back with a new plan. Could not Dublin’s architects step forward with a good home-grown alternative, or are the days of professional co-operation now over?
