The Architectural Review articles from September 2007

The Architectural Review archives from September 2007

The art of urbanism.(view)
September 1, 2007... London was the first great industrialised global city, and it remains at the forefront it helped to create thanks to its pre-eminence as a financial capital and cultural hothouse, its industrial and manufacturing role having vanished quite...

Heavens above! Allies and Morrison make shapes in the Greenwich World Heritage site.(view)
September 1, 2007... The [pounds sterling]17.7m Royal Observatory, Greenwich, completed earlier this year, is the latest in an impressive collection of cultural buildings by London-based architects Allies and Morrison. While the practice has grown to be the UK's...

Peter Cook: Peter Cook wonders whether we need downtown. Wake up and smell the curry.(view)
September 1, 2007... A working summer that has seen contrasting views outside the window: from funky market stalls pitting their wits against the showers in Exmouth Market (London) to early morning mists on Venice Beach (Los Angeles) that always seem to give way to...

London calling: introducing this special issue on London, Terry Farrell considers the dynamic, intricate and rapidly evolving nature of the metropolis and how propositions for urban planning must respond to its unique spirit of place.
September 1, 2007... The concept of 'place as client' puts aside all separate stakeholders and interested parties' claims to be the sole driver of urban planning. It is close to psychoanalysis--the town on the couch--what is 'it' under the surface--and to...

Make London understandable: a unified mental mapping system for the metropolis.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND London has grown organically over a long time, making the city's form very hard to comprehend. Transport systems and land ownership mix the formal with the informal on a flat plain where there are few distinguishing geographic...

Urbanise motorways: reprioritise London's urban highways to create places.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND The great east-west artery of Marylebone/Euston Road was originally constructed in the eighteenth century as a bypass called the New Road. Its function was to take traffic (particularly cattle movement) away from the centre of...

Re-think London's traffic junctions: recognise that behind every major traffic intersection is a place.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND In the 1960s, nodal traffic intersections were improved in an arbitrary but often drastic fashion. One such was the junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, which had been the focus of a specific study by the Buchanan...

More housing in London: meet London's housing growth within London.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND London is growing again. It slowed down and reduced to almost 4.25 million, now it is back to more than 7.6 million and growing. The planning of the Green Belt more than 50 years ago restricted physical growth but compared with...

Lost towns: rediscover London's lost villages and towns.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND From the eighteenth century to the 1950s, villages, towns and mini-cities gradually coalesced to become the London metropolis. Historic maps of London show this gradual evolution over 150 years. Relatively untouched by invasion,...

The Crown lands: recognise new urban roles for London's Royal Parks and palaces.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND The role of the monarch and the Crown, with its privileges, properties and political power, has gradually and inexorably waned as the democratic and secular state has grown. All of this evolutionary change pales when compared...

Reinvent Nash's grand plan: London's best urban set piece--'Nash Ramblas'.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND With John Nash as his architect/planner, the Prince Regent created one of London's few big set pieces of city-making when he drove a linear street connection from his palace (home) at St James's Park to his hunting lands to the...

Aristocracy--the Great Estates: build on the great aristocratic estates' success in urban planning, continuity and stewardship.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND The history of Britain since the Norman Conquest has been one of peaceful continuity, giving rise to long-term patterns of land ownership--originally farms with a tradition of serfs, then tenants on the land. Under the great...

Put pedestrians on top: Eliminate all pedestrian underpasses.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND During the 1960s, because of the extra traffic volume generated by increased car ownership (as posited by the Buchanan Report), the view was that either new wider roads had to be built, or radical re-prioritisation and 'surgery'...

Eliminate London's hidden gyratories: do away with London's complex one-way systems.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Traffic systems designed to increase vehicle flow have a radical effect on orientation and place identity. They also tend to increase density of vehicle use and vehicle speed, thus posing a greater danger to pedestrians....

Social housing: create balanced, integrated communities and add more housing to London's mono-tenancy public estates.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND The poor have always lived in industrial or degraded areas, which tended to be cheapest and within walking distance of places of work (railways, gasworks and canals). The scale of social housing after the 1945 Labour victory...

Civilising suburban shopping centres: make London's 'sub-urban' shopping centres real places.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Beginning with the construction of Brent Cross in 1976, a ring of introverted, mono-cultural shopping centres now encircles metropolitan London. Based on the American model of genuine out-of-town shopping centres, London's...

Oxford Street: reinvent Oxford Street as London and the nation's great high street.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Huge changes have affected the character of the British high street. Princes Street in Edinburgh, Northumberland Street in Newcastle and many others mirror the experience of Oxford Street, in that shopping and entertainment...

Historic markets: transformation of London's markets into vibrant community and cultural buildings.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND British towns and cities revel in many different sorts of markets. Compared with Continental Europe, Britain does not have a history of dense, fortified towns with central market squares, and instead markets tended to grow up...

South bank: consolidate the regeneration of the south bank to become London's third city centre.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Historically, London's development has focused on the north bank of the Thames. Its two ancient cities, Westminster and the City of London, define an arc where the outside bend creates a deep channel for landing and navigation,...

Urbanise Docklands: bridges connect and build communities.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND London's Docklands occupy land beyond the boundaries of the city to the east. Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of the docks epitomised the age of imperial trade, but this was followed by a sharp...

Build ECO cities in the Thames Gateway: concentrate urban development--not suburban sprawl.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Much has been made of the housing shortage in London and the need to build new housing in the Thames Gateway. We are adamantly committed to the idea that London's growth should take place within London and that there is enough...

Set a unifying vision for the Thames Gateway; Based not on urban but rural regeneration: Thames Estuary national park.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Historically, the Thames Estuary has always been the centre of British government. Before London, the capital was Colchester, with Essex as its hinterland. The estuary became the centre for exploration and building of empire...

Save London for the UK: a national response to climate change and rising sea levels.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND In the present political culture, big ideas often fail to get support. From an economic point of view, there is a fear that large-scale, ambitious public ventures (such as the Olympics, Channel Tunnel and the Dome) are unpopular...

Politics and planning: London's political boundaries do not relate to place or communities.
September 1, 2007... BACKGROUND Place and community are recognised as real and physically experienced areas of urban geography. They exist as phenomena in their own right. To manage at local level an unstructured, historically layered metropolis like London...

London & the 2012 Olympics: all of the metropolis becomes a World Festival.
September 1, 2007... Martin Birgel led the production of this article assisted by Rory Harmer, Duarte Reino and Damien Sharkey on the visuals and by Emma Davies on text. Farrells are extremely grateful for the invaluable assistance of The Architectural...

100% Design.
September 1, 2007... 100% Design London goes from strength to strength, now with 100% Futures, featuring 50 new young design talents. Rob Gregory previews some highlights that can be seen 20-23 September at London's Earls Court. Go to www.arplus.com/enq. html for...

Specifier's information.
September 1, 2007... Corus Colorcoat HPS200[R] pre-finished steel from Corus has been used on student accommodation in Leicester. The eight-storey block has been clad by Commercial Cladding Services using a Corus Panels and Profile system in Goosewing Grey....

Planning for the future.(Book review)
September 1, 2007... MAN-MADE FUTURE Edited by Iain Boyd Whyte. Abingdon: Routledge. 2007. [pounds sterling]24.99 Immediately after the Second World War there was a general consensus among British politicians and intellectuals that town planning was a...

Modernism's threat?(From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... FROM A CAUSE TO A STYLE: MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE AMERICAN CITY By Nathan Glazer. Woodstock: Princeton University Press. 2007. [pounds sterling]15.95 Glazer comes to architecture as a lifetime New Yorker, academic,...

Architecture in search of an author.(Architecture and Authorship)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... ARCHITECTURE AND AUTHORSHIP Edited by Tim Anstey, Katja Grillner and Rolf Hughes. London: Black Dog Publishing. 2007. [pounds sterling]24.95 We have by now become accustomed to the fact that Richard Rogers and Frank Gehry enjoy...

Ecclesiastical lite.(Contemporary Church Architecture)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... CONTEMPORARY CHURCH ARCHITECTURE By Edwin Heathcote and Laura Moffatt. Chichester: John Wiley 2007. [pounds sterling]45 Gather 28 of the most attractive looking recent churches by architectural names from across the world, print them...

Festival of Britain 1951: Design.(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... Whether you think the Festival of Britain marked the beginning or the end of an era, what cannot be denied is the event's impact on contemporary design (AR January 2000). With herbivores and carnivores engaged in a relatively inconclusive,...

Number nine dream.(reviews)
September 1, 2007... Cecil Balmond's show at Louisiana reveals the inventive engineering power behind the throne of starchitecture. Almost ten years ago Arup structural engineer Cecil Balmond published his first book. Entitled enigmatically Number 9: The Search...

Get a life.(browser)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... I would like to be able to predict a great architectural future for the virtual world, Second Life. It's at http://secondlife.com and, because it's currently a voguish thing for architects to do, you might as well join up, select your avatar's...

Categorical.(browser)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... As you do from time to time, I have been working on a taxonomy of architectural websites. Work-in-progress categories include The Brass Plate, The Cyberbrochure, The Treasure Vault, The Portal, For Your Eyes Only and Playtime. Some are...

Playtime sizzle.(browser)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... It would be irresponsibly frivolous to suggest that Playtime sites can be a lot more interesting. And, may I remind you again about the site of Sydney practice Rice Daubney at www.ricedaubney.com.au. Rice Daubney is a heavy duty commercial...

Less is quite enough.(browser)
September 1, 2007... Rice Daubney is a self confident, well maintained exception. I do think that the least a practice needs is a Brass Plate site: name, address, experience, list of satisfied clients and examples of previous work with basic details. But I suspect...

Summer almost over.(browser)
September 1, 2007... Just a reminder that Burning Man for 2007, www.burningman.com, will have just taken place in the desert outside Black Rock City, Nevada. This is a wonderful annual hippy public arts event in a temporary, week-long city which will have been...

Diary.(Diary entry)
September 1, 2007... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS FROM WWW.ARPLUS.COM AUSTRIA MARGHERITA SPILUTTINI: ATLAS AUSTRIA Architekturzentrum, Vienna Until 24 September Exhibition of work by Austrian architectural photographer Margherita...

Delight.
September 1, 2007... Since 1991, the AR has had its offices in Clerkenwell, crucible of the newspaper print industry and home to London's Sicilian community. Sixteen years ago Clerkenwell was a grim place, its printing industry nearing extinction, its warehouses...