The Architectural Review articles from January 2008

The Architectural Review archives from January 2008

Liverpool still needs vision.(view)(State overview)
January 1, 2008... Liverpool's year as European City of Culture follows its 800th city anniversary in 2007; the celebrations, therefore, have already begun. It is not so much the past which is encouraging, however, but the future emerging from the forest of...

Adding to Asplund: Swedish critic Rasmus Waern takes a sceptical look at the winner of a major competition to extend Erik Gunnar Asplund's city library in Stockholm.(view)
January 1, 2008... The outcome of the international competition for the extension of Asplund's famous city library in Stockholm was remarkably unspectacular. The winner--Heike Hanada from Weimar in Germany--made it all the way with a surprisingly conventional...

Tile of Spain Awards.(view)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... Now in their sixth year, the Tile of Spain Awards promote the creative use of ceramic tiles in architecture and interior design. Led by Eduardo Souto de Moura, the jury awarded first prize in the architecture category to Jose Duran Fernandez's...

Cat Vinton's images of the lives of central Asian nomads, shown here dismantling the family yurt, won her first prize in the Travel Photographer of the Year competition.(view)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... Cat Vinton's images of the lives of central Asian nomads, shown here dismantling the family yurt, won her first prize in the Travel Photographer of the Year competition. Her prize includes the opportunity to photograph the Dalai Lama in India....

Peter Cook; Compare and contrast: Suffolk and Dubai.(view)
January 1, 2008... Some time ago I found myself returning to a well inhabited dining room in a pub in Suffolk, England. I realised that not only did it serve some of the best fish and chips on the East Coast, but that the room was filled with a bevy of familiar...

Whither now? Liverpool's confident past is a rebuke to the present and a challenge to how it will square up to the future.(comment)
January 1, 2008... Why Liverpool, and why now? Why devote a journal of architectural review to a city which has, for six decades, produced little architecture worth reviewing in the literal sense of rewarding a second view? An answer might begin by reminding...

Empire state: local boy made good Sean Griffiths recalls his life in Liverpool and how the city marks its inhabitants.(City overview)
January 1, 2008... Liverpool is a maverick city. It produces maverick talents; think John Lennon, George Melly, Beryl Bainbridge, Alexei Sayle, Ken Dodd, Roger McGough, even Wayne Rooney. In the world of architecture, it produced James Stirling, the best British...

Mapping Liverpool: the story of Liverpool's turbulent evolution can be vividly read in the city's cartography.(State overview)
January 1, 2008... A city's evolution can be read in its cartography and Liverpool is no exception. From the earliest medieval times, when the city began as a modest cluster of seven streets, through its Georgian and Victorian mercantile heyday, to a modern port...

Future visions.
January 1, 2008... AS REPRESENTED BY THIS PLETHORA OF SCHEMES CURRENTLY IN THE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT PIPELINES, THE FUTURE OF LIVERPOOL WILL BE NOTHING FANCY--A TRIUMPH OF COMMERCIAL VIGOUR OVER CIVIC AND ARCHITECTURAL SUBTLETY, BUT PERHAPS IT WAS EVER THUS....

Shifted tideways: Liverpool's changing fortunes.(City overview)
January 1, 2008... Regarding Liverpool, all must commence with the Mersey. On the primacy of the river, all are agreed. So Henry James' English Hours began in a smoky dawn of arrival at the Mersey bar, and so do all the best books on Liverpool. In 1907, Walter...

The Bluecoat: a brief history of the Bluecoat, Liverpool's great survivor, now being recast for the twenty-first century.
January 1, 2008... Despite its long history, Liverpool has kept few of its early buildings. The city's development was driven by commerce, from the opening of the Old Dock in 1715 until the mid twentieth century, and it has always been unsentimental about...

Dutch courage: the Bluecoat's reinvention extols principles of formal restraint and poetic austerity.
January 1, 2008... Though you have to admire the grit and guts of Liverpool's current transformation, it's fair to say that there are few notable set piece buildings, so in this respect, Biq's remodelling of the Bluecoat stands out. In a series of carefully...

On the waterfront: Wilkinson Eyre's convention centre adds modern muscle to a historic waterfront.
January 1, 2008... Poised imposingly on the King's Waterfront next to Albert Dock, Wilkinson Eyre's new Arena and Convention Centre (ACC) is a major element, in both the physical warp and economic weft of Liverpool's ongoing regeneration. The city desperately...

Serpentine academy: Rick Mather Architects' new building for John Moores University nears completion.(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... As the new Art & Design Academy for Liverpool John Moores University nears completion in anticipation of the next academic year, Rick Mather Architects are adding another significant project to an impressive portfolio of academic buildings. As...

Paradise found: Liverpool's declining city centre is being ambitiously recast as a retail paradise.
January 1, 2008... It is a telling indicator of Liverpool's sense of economic and civic worth that when the city dropped to 15th in the UK retail ranking league, the frisson among local worthies was palpable. However, the problems of Liverpool's city centre were...

Urban myth: David Dunster examines Liverpool's powerful urban mythography and civic pride.
January 1, 2008... Liverpool may well be the most regenerated city in Europe. Some hold that it was already in decline before the end of the nineteenth century; yet in the past 60 years grand plans have been proposed with great confidence, flamboyance, and dreams...

Waters world: logistics and economics fuse in Peel Holdings' ambitious plans for Liverpool's redundant docks and waterfronts.
January 1, 2008... When Peel Holdings recently bought the Mersey Docks & Harbour Company, it not only took over the Port of Liverpool but acquired hundreds of acres of estate, just as property values in Liverpool, especially near the river, were suddenly...

Birkenhead: faith in the future; Across the Mersey lies Birkenhead, a Victorian 'city of the future', with the potential for an urban renaissance.
January 1, 2008... I failed my driving test in Birkenhead 40 years ago. Its gridiron of broad granite streets stretched into the distance, thinly populated with buildings that didn't match the grandeur of the plan. At each wide-open unmarked crossroad, I offered...

Too Grim or True Grit? To achieve its potential as an evolved modern city, Liverpool needs to raise its game in architecture and urban design.
January 1, 2008... When, with either my students or with clients, we realise the absence of significant buildings and urban design place-making in Liverpool during the past half century or more, with the sole exception, perhaps, of the Catholic Cathedral, there...

Art city: among the myriad delights of Liverpool's year of Culture, the city's biennial, now in its fifth cycle, still stands out.
January 1, 2008... 'Liverpool has an artistic streak', observed Alan Bowness, Tate Gallery director, at the 1985 press launch of the renewed Albert Dock. Around us, work had begun on Stirling's conversion of the west warehouse to a branch of the national museum...

Specifier's information.(Hafele Inc.)(Aircrete Products Association)(Oxford Brookes University to complete construction of research building)
January 1, 2008... Hafele Hafele have published a 224 page Electronic Security and Access Control catalogue. This covers security systems for furniture applications; stand alone access controls; on-line access systems; keys and tags; locking hardware; door...

Design Miami: Marcus Fairs reports from the trenches of design experimentation at Design Miami.
January 1, 2008... When and why did architecture and design head off down different paths? During much of the last century, the two disciplines were united under a common purpose and a shared aesthetic, but in recent years these former partners in crime have been...

Devil in the detail.(Details in Contemporary Architecture)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... DETAILS IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE By Christine Killory and Rene Davids. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. 2007. $55 Three decades ago, Learning from Las Vegas espoused the virtues of the decorated shed over the dead ducks of...

Myopic doyen.(The Evolution of Twentieth-Century Architecture, a Synoptic Account)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... THE EVOLUTION OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE, A SYNOPTIC ACCOUNT By Kenneth Frampton. Vienna: Springer. 2007, [euro]29.95 Kenneth Frampton wrote the long-awaited Modern Architecture--A Critical History in 1980, an overview of...

Sienese Chronicles.(Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... SIENA: CONSTRUCTING THE RENAISSANCE CITY By Fabrizio Nevola, London: Yale University Press. 2007. [pounds sterling]40 The concept of a city as a work of art, as a stage-set for civic display and public show, has died in the British...

Social life.(Peter Hubner-Buildings As a Social Process)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... PETER HUBNER--BUILDINGS AS A SOCIAL PROCESS By Peter Blundell Jones. Stuttgart-Fellbach: Edition Axel Menges. 2007. [pounds sterling]49 Peter Hubner is not a name that leaps immediately to mind when thinking of contemporary German...

Mersey--The River That Changed The World.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Sculpture by Antony Gormley on Crosby beach, from Mersey--The River That Changed The World, edited by Ian Wray with photographs by Colin McPherson, Liverpool, Bluecoat Press, 2007, [pounds sterling]17.99. The industrial civilisation that took...

Rigour meisters: Baumschlager-Eberle prove masters of alpine rigour at Munich's Pinakothek.(reviews)
January 1, 2008... Vorarlberg is an Austrian alpine province bordering onto Switzerland and it was here during the late '80s that Baumschlager-Eberle first came to prominence through a series of house projects. In 2000, Wallpaper magazine unanimously declared...

Krug's first law of usability.(browser)
January 1, 2008... A mate who makes his money from interactive stuff said I should read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think! So I did. And you should too. And then you should make your website designers read it too. Give them a couple of weeks. Refuse to listen to...

Rockfall.(browser)
January 1, 2008... Just to show we're not as doctrinal as all that, here's a site which breaks all of the rules. It's that of Anton Garcia-Abril & Ensamble Studio at www.ensamble.info. You click on 'ENTER' and up comes a rock flying around beneath what looks...

Class system act.(browser)
January 1, 2008... Over the break I've been having a reasonably pleasant scamper through the blogosphere. I had reckoned on there being maybe a couple of dozen or so architectural and sort-of design blogs of interest. But, and this may be merely a sign of a lot...

Blogs are for beginners.(browser)
January 1, 2008... One of the blogs in Norman B's list is at http://alicethearchitect.blogspot.com aka RIBA, aka Remember I'm the Bloody Architect. A mix of student and rural practice notes, one topical report runs: 'Tutors and students gathered. I started my...

Writing on the wall.(browser)
January 1, 2008... And if you were wondering how to cheer up those tired old elevations here's a nice one from the brilliant Eric Moorhouse at http://tinyurl.com/2nfhos. Enjoy this and the rest of the year. Sutherland Lyall is at...

Liverpool 2008.(Calendar)
January 1, 2008... 11-13 Jan Opening Weekend Liverpool Echo Arena & St George's Plateau 25 Jan-16 Feb 3 Sisters On Hope Street Liverpool Everyman 1 Feb-5 May Niki de Saint Phalle Tate Liverpool 10 Feb Chinese New Year Chinese Arch 28 Feb John...

Delight.(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... One of the more (literally) moving highlights of Liverpool's year as European City of Culture will be sculptor Richard Wilson's kinetic piece Turning the Place Over. With its mischievous overtones of Gordon Matta-Clark, Wilson's installation...