God Can Wait

Can architecture and culture revive coastal towns and make a difference as society gets older? The Towner Gallery has been transforming Eastbourne since 2009 and still has moves to make. Story by Herbert Wright  

Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery with Lothar Götz’s mural Dance Diagonal © Herbert Wright 2024

The developing story of the Towner Gallery tells us a lot about Eastbourne, a town of 100,000 nestled beside the chalk hills of the South Downs on England’s South Coast. In 2009 Towner relaunched in a new building that would alter Eastbourne’s destiny, and now it has the green light to open a new dimension to its future. This story is driven not just by art but by architecture. But first, what’s the backstory of Eastbourne?

Eastbourne Pier and beach – photo © Herbert Wright 2024

After King George III’s children holidayed in Eastbourne in 1780, the village became a health spa and the bourgeoisie came to frolic by the sea. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that a sea wall was built, and soon elegant white stucco terraces with sea views spread above the Grand Promenade. The magnificent 300m-long Eastbourne Pier opened in 1872, with buildings topped by whimsical golden cupolas, possibly influenced by Mughal domes which architect-engineer Eugenius Birch saw in India. (Nowadays, a sign at the entrance says Sheik’s Pier, which sounds like Shakespeare, because it’s owned by Indian-born local hotelier Sheikh Abid Gulzar). In the nineteenth century, the working classes also discovered Eastbourne, bringing mass tourism. They arrived at a handsome Eastbourne Station, rebuilt in 1886 to FD Brick’s design with a brick campanile-like clocktower. The Pier marked the class frontier for visitors – sophisticates to the south-west, the masses to the north-east. The divide is still there, with affluent, quiet streets and private schools on one side, low-rent housing and streets recently energised with ethnic diversity on the other.  

When Mediterranean package holidays were invented in the 1960s, big-volume tourism drained away from more northern seaside resorts. Eastbourne became a retirement destination. There’s many more walking sticks, mobility scooters and Zimmer frames on the streets than you’d find in cities like vibrant Brighton 30 km to the west (which feels like a detached London borough) or hipster-friendly Hastings 20 km to the east. In fact, three quarters of Eastbourne’s population is still under 65 years old.

Even hotels can offer mobility scooters in Eastbourne. Photo ©Herbert Wright 2024

Nevertheless, the town’s reputation as ‘God’s Waiting Room’ screamed for a reboot. That started when the town’s art gallery, the Towner, closed in 2005, re-opened in 2009. 

The new landmark building, connected to the big modernist showcase Congress Theatre (by Bryan and Norman Westwood, 1963) next door, was designed by London-based American architect Rick Mather. The compact concrete structure has upstairs galleries entered from passages ending in two-storey vertical windows, and a restaurant at the top has a balcony looking west towards the South Downs. The building’s almost-square footprint is cut on the south-west corner to create a curving diagonal facade incised by seemingly random rectangular openings and above, the restaurant’s canopy cantilevering out. This white facade created a cool, refined look with an echo of seaside art deco and a hint of le Corbusier’s Ronchamp. 

The architecture got national attention, and Eastbourne had a venue that could host headline art shows to lure the cultural elite. It was ahead of the curve in the coastal contemporary culture game — Margate’s white glass-clad Turner Contemporary, by David Chipperfield, came later in 2011, then Hasting’s black-tiled Jerwood Gallery (designed by Hana Loftus and Tom Grieves, 2012), since re-named the Hastings Contemporary. Young creatives priced out by London had already settled in those hipster-friendly towns, and they have an ecosystem of artists, studios and small galleries. Niamh Pierce, Towner’s deputy director, concedes that Eastbourne is not like that, but it’s ‘a more nuanced place. The (permanent) collection gives us depth’. As for artists, she concedes ‘there is a lack of space… artists are here, but invisible’. And independent from the Towner, the local Devonshire Collective is bringing new art into the town, for example in empty retail premises.  

The Towner Gallery reception designed by Manalo and White. Photo © Herbert Wright 2024

The Towner’s ground floor was transformed just five years later by Manalo and White. The original lobby, as Pierce recalls, had ‘large empty spaces, an awkward L shape and bad acoustics’. When she mentions the modernist leather sofas, it sounds like a Mies van der Rohe office lobby, and in fact it effectively extended the Congress building, to which it connected. The revamp brought two new flexible gallery spaces, and opening the café up. Glass brought transparency, colour brought warmth and green curtains improved acoustics., Upstairs, they revamping the restaurant, and everywhere brought warm colours. The Towner’s original cool monochromatic aesthetic was further blasted away in 2019 by a dynamic, joyful mural of radiating colours by German artist Lothar Götz across the curving facade, called Dance Diagonal. Mather’s apertures for a vertical window and the lift entrance now look like a huge colourful exclamation mark! The mural has rebranded not just Towner, but Eastbourne itself.

Towner façade (L) original and (R) with Lothar Götz mural. Photos Rick Mather Architects and Herbert Wright

The Towner’s big show until 14th April is the four finalists for the last Turner Prize, the UK’s top contemporary art prize. Supporting the show is the Eastbourne ALIVE program, with public art and performances around the city. It includes the Assyrian god Lamassu, who protected Ninevah, Iraq for 2,700 years until ISIS destroyed his statue with a drill in 2015. Artist Michael Rakowitz originally resurrected him using cans of dates for London’s prestigious Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth, but now the old god staying in Eastbourne just outside the Towner. Even the oldest Eastbourne resident is a mere zygote compared to Lamassu. 

‘The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu of Ninevah)’ by Michael Rakowitz at Eastbourne. Photo ©Herbert Wright

Any major art gallery should attract visitor from pensioners to students, but surprisingly, the new art films Towner’s cinema screens also attract the elderly. The Towner has spanned the divide between generations. Now, it has the go-ahead to span another divide —  between urban and rural.

Just inland of Beachy Head, a great sea cliff two kilometres from the edge of town, Black Robin Farm sits in the windswept South Downs landscape. This year, work starts transforming it into a complex with art gallery and facilities for makers, education, eco-awareness and growing food, designed by Fielden Fowles and set to open in 2026. Director Fergus Fielden describes the farm as ’a bricolage of buildings’, some old stone vernacular, others modern steel sheds. All of them will be re-used, and materials will be recycled – ’it’s a very circular project’, he says. “Strocks” – bricks of clay and straw – will create the galleries. There’s a 25m fall over the site, and Fielden explains that ‘ramps will gently cascade, and new buildings will nestle in the slope’.  

Rendering of Black Robin Farm courtesy Fielden Fowles

It seems crazy to build a cultural complex in such a harsh, remote place, but Fielden Fowles’ Weston gallery (2019) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park set a precedent for using more natural materials and ‘more of a connection to the landscape’, as Fielden comments. Pierce points out that in Towner’s permanent collection ‘the focus has always been on landscape’, including paintings by the great local pre-war Eric Ravilous. Black Robin Farm will have a new footpath, nearby busses, and rough-terrain wheelchairs are under consideration. Fielden and Pierce envision many hiking over the hills to reach Towner’s outpost. But isn’t the overlap between hikers and art aficionados pretty slim? ‘I disagree!’ says Pierce. ‘It’s something we want to explore’.    

Maybe Towner’s farm project is an experiment — but a necessary one. For too long, landscape has been abused to maintain urban civilisation, which tends to ignore it. We need to re-engage with it and get out there. And as the digital world erodes reality and perverts our experience, we need to create and engage with creativity. It reinforces our humanity, whatever our age. As for the landscape, but Towner’s new project aims to do all this. Eastbourne is engaging with the future. God can wait.  

This original English text was first adapted and published in French in Chroniques d’Architecture, March 2024. Both versions © Herbert Wright

A New Twist in the DNA of Light Industrial Premises

The helix could transform perhaps the dullest of all architectural typologies – the light industrial facility. I check out the new twist it gives to a building in London called Barking Industria. 

Barking Industria, designed by HaworthTompkins. Photo Fred Howarth

London lost 1,310 hectares hectares of industrial land between 2001 and 2015. Light industry is quietly disappearing, usually replaced by high-density residential projects. Even a working-class east London borough like Barking is sprouting chunky brick-clad apartment blocks. Few miss the lost light industrial buildings — most were dismal, and plenty remain. Fenced off from the street, the typically single-storey windowless sheds say: ’Don’t look and keep out!’. The new Barking Industria, completed in September, developed by the local regeneration agency and designed by HaworthTompkins, has very different messages. As associate director Hugo Braddick explains, the practise set out to enhance the quality of industrial space for users and community, and ‘prove the viability of vertical industry’. The giant nineteenth century brick mills of the world’s first industrial city, Manchester, were like a model. They stacked their factory floors as high as eight storeys.

Not hiding in the street – Industria. Photo Fred Howarth

Barking Industria stacks three double-height levels in two parallel volumes with photovoltaic roofs, and a steel structure with an 8m grid. HaworthTompkins considered mass timber, but it would have cost more and sadly UK insurance companies are still reluctant about it. The exterior facades of both Industria’s wings are clad in dark galvanised metal, giving the building a businesslike look, made robust by the brutalist cladding of textured concrete along the ground level’s long street facade. Inside, 11,400m2 floor space offer 45 units ranging from 18m2 to 241m2. They are partitioned by removeable walls of rockwool sandwiched between metal plates, so units can be combined. Windows bring them natural light. On the upper level, the back wing has two single-height floors, and wide corridors between smaller units entered through bright yellow doors. The loading capacity of the concrete floors is 20kN/m2, not as much as heavy industry but four times that of a typical office. Overall, Industria triples normal the ratio of industrial space to ground plot.

Ready for industry at Industria. Photo Herbert Wright

The east facade reveals that the gap between the wings is spanned entirely by a vehicle yard at all three main levels. These open air environments have an optimistic aesthetic, developed with branding consultant DNCO, who also contributed to wayfinding. The metal facades facing the yards have a stretched checkerboard pattern of grey and the bright yellow, playfully referencing the ubiquitous yellow of hazard stripes in vehicular and industrial environments. On the top-level wet western edge, behind screens where creeping plants are taking hold, is a breakout space with benches, tables and a view towards Canary Wharf.

Hold on, you may say – vertical light industry is nothing new. Take Paris, for example. Dominique Perrot’s Hôtel Industriel Berlier (1990), a glass block near Austerlitz, stacked industrial floors up to level 10. But what is crucial to light industry is vehicular access – as Braddick says, ‘tenants have the expectation to drive in and roll up the (roller-door) shutter’. Until 1999, Paris had a stacked precedent for such access too. The Hôtel Industriel de l’Ourcq at Pantin (1989) designed by Paul Chemetov and Huidobro Borja had internal streets and placed heavier industry at ground level, but had ramps allowed vans to access lighter industry above it.  

Spiralling parking at Marina City, Chicago . Photo Herbert Wright

How does Industria deal with vehicular access? It’s time to meet the helix. Next to the back volume, beside the ground floor bike shed and two giant shiny water tanks storing water, is a helical ramp. Car parks across the world are accessed by helical ramps. Bertrand Goldberg designed both access and parking in the epic 17-storey helices of Chicago’s Marina City towers (1964). At Industria, the ramp allows traffic in both directions and vehicles 7.5m long and 3m high. It’s such a distinctive feature, Industria celebrates it in a logo, seen high up on the facade. 

The helix rises to the 3rd level. Photo Herbert Wright

 

Industria has a strong echo of the UK’s ‘High-Tech’ architecture, rooted in the work of Team 4 where Norman Foster and Richard Rogers worked together. The practice’s last project was a small factory for Reliance Controls (1967) in Swindon, where management and workers shared the same space in a metallic structure. Prouvé-type pragmatism, modularity and exposure of structure defined the style, and bright colour often featured — for example, the Renault Distribution Centre (1982), by Foster and also in Swindon, uses yellow. If Cemetov and Borja’s project at Pantin was in the UK, it would have been classified High-Tech. Industria has High-tech hallmarks inside and out, and it’s no coincidence that HaworthTompkins founder Graham Haworth was a fan of High-Tech factories. 

The Woo Building at RCA Battersea Campus. Photo Herbert Wright

Industria is HaworthTompkins’ first purely industrial building, but their numerous award-winning theatre and educational projects needed technical spaces. The Woo Building (2015), their third in the Royal Academy of Arts’ Battersea Campus, London, feels particularly industrial, and its design drew inspiration from Owen Williams’ seminal 1932 Boots D10 pharmaceutical factory (1932) near Nottingham. 

Behind the reception, Industria has a second helical structure. A spiral staircase leads up to a mezzanine balcony lounge where you can sit, and there’s a wall of pods for private conversations, like a line of old payphone booths in a black-and-white film, but wider. With tables and chairs downstairs, this street corner space is set to become a café open to the community.  

This way up to the future at Barking Industria. Photo Herbert Wright

Industria has already let units to businesses from makers of Asian cakes and lift ropes to geotechnical investigators. But what does the future hold for light industry? Evangelist churches are making inroads into light industrial estates, but God often guides them to the dullest buildings with the lowest rents. Light industry itself is changing, with the rise of dark kitchens, artisan workshops and hybrid office/design/fabrication spaces. As Braddick says, ‘the growth of the Internet has allowed such businesses to be scaleable’. 

The elephant in the room is robotics. In 2019, Oxford Economics forecast that 8.5% of factory workers worldwide would be replaced by robots by 2030. Then in 2020 the World Economic Forum predicted that automation would actually increase human jobs, although not necessarily on the factory floor. Last month (January 2024) Elon Musk demonstrated Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus walking through an industrial facility. Soon it may be walking to work. Could light industry simply become workhouses for robots? Alternatively, Industria might become a refuge of human activity, alive with artisan creatives and new-generation loft dwellings — and the helical ramp a gallery for human artistry, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiralling gallery in the Guggenheim, New York (1959). Industria is designed to stand at least 100 years. It will need all the flexibility that was designed in.

February 2024, h© Herbert Wright 2024

This post was published in French in Chroniques d’Architecture as “Une nouvelle twist dans l’ADN des bâtiments industriels légers“

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Report from Neither Spain nor England

How much psychogeography can you squeeze out of a town of 32,000? With an eye for architecture, people and surprise, I went to Gibraltar to find out.

Does the Barbary ape consider the world that humans built? Photo Herbert Wright

The best way to explore an urban environment is walking around without a plan, guided by your emotional reaction to people’s activity and the built environment. This is psychogeography, defined in 1957 by Guy Debord who employed it to map Paris by whim. I applied it to Gibraltar, a peninsular territory that’s mainly a limestone ridge up to 426m high known as ‘The Rock’. It may have been the last hold-out of the Neanderthals, it still hosts Barbary apes, and it has a history written in military architecture left by Berbers, Spanish, and after 1704, the British. Military history doesn’t interest me, but the psychogeography of the town did. Sandwiched between The Rock and a bay busy with big ships, the town, and small enough that a north-south psychogeographical wander (a ‘drift’ or ‘dérive’) will cover the length or width of it. 

Crossing the runway. Photo Herbert Wright

Gibraltar is south of the land border with Spain, across which 15,000 Spanish workers pass in and out daily. To reach town, you need to cross the airport runway that stretches east towards the Mediterranean horizon. It feels like one of Italian radical collective Superstudio’s infinite supersurfaces, but with painted lines for planes and public instead of a grid, and rather a vanishing point, a distant, massive oil tanker may float on the horizon. The Rock looms ahead, and soon you’re navigating roundabouts and passing the social housing of the 1960s Laguna Estate. If you divert through its six-storey blocks, you may spot a bar hidden in plain sight in one of them, and hear the local Spanish dialect embedded with English. From the late 1940s, Gibraltar built housing with the social ideals and modernist styles that would soon become ubiquitous. They seem to have avoided the problems of social and structural decay found elsewhere. 

Casemates Square. Photo Herbert Wright

Fortified walls surround the old town. They block the way when you’re in a hurry to get somewhere on the other side. I found two pedestrian tunnels with a pizza chain squeezed in between them to enter Casemates Square (the name isn’t Spanish but British, and pronounced ‘case-mates’). This is not exactly Leicester Square, but it’s big, busy and effectively the centre of town. British military types drink at a big pub on the corner, locals sit around chatting, outdoor dining extends from the stone arches that make half of the perimeter.

Main Street Gibraltar. Photo Herbert Wright

Main Street starts here and much of it is touristy. It is car-free, fairly narrow, and not quite straight. It could be a small English high street, but the white stucco buildings facades and coloured window shutters suggest Italy. In 1784, the British hired Italian stonemason Giovanni Maria Boschetti to build military facilities, and he then built up the town, incorporating British Regency ironwork balconies into his architectual style mash-up. Divert into the steep lanes that climb towards the Rock on one side, and stone staircases push up into an even more Mediterranean townscape. Like such places when they slope to the sea, the town can become a collage of terracotta roofs, something the local Cubist-influenced painter Mario Finlayson captured in his paintings which can be seen in the City Hall Art Gallery, situated at John Macintosh Square (known as La Piazza) just off Main Street. Post-war housing blocks mounted on the steepest hillsides have become part of the warm, timeless jumbled hillside cityscape. 

Back on Main Street, churches and government buildings appear as you continue south. Nothing tells you that the Court Building is where John Lennon and Yoko Ono married in 1969, but the security staff know and can even point to the room’s window. Beyond Main Street and the South Gate is an archetypal British pub with football on its screens and retired Brits on their beers. A massive art deco building with curving corners rises above it – Trafalgar House, designed by Gibraltan architect Lewis Francis. Another local artist on show at the City Hall Art Gallery, Rudesindo Mannia, includes it in a 1960s painting, capturing a gentle time as locals chat in the shade of trees outside it.

Further south, beyond The Rock’s cable car terminus in a car park, Europa Road slopes upwards past the swanky, gleaming white art deco Rock Hotel (designed by John Crichton Stewart, 1932). It continues between houses, stone walls and new care homes with a veneer of neo-classical, but without the playfulness of postmodernism. Eventually, the road meanders down, with spectacular views of the Bay far below, and ahead the Ibrahim al-Ibrahim Mosque. It was built in 1997 by Saudi Arabia when it was exporting fundamentalist Sunni Islam, but now serves Gibraltar’s mild-mannered, hard-working Moroccan community. Its 71m-tall minaret dwarfs the nearby old British lighthouse at Europa Point, Gibraltar’s southern tip, where Chinese tourists spill out of a minibus and lean back making Vs with their fingers for social media feed. Beyond the ships and sea, you can see African mountains and the sliver of land of another disputed territory, Spanish Ceuta.

Colonial architecture may be invasive, but every architectural style start as an intrusion, and adapted to the territory, it can become vernacular. Gibraltar absorbed a Mediterranean vernacular until the twentieth century, then went with global trends from art deco to condo towers. We see more them if we take another dérive, from west to east. 

Modernity rises beyond Mediterranean vernacular in Gibraltar. Photo Herbert Wright

Just as Monaco has expanded territory by reclaiming land, so has Gibraltar. It’s been spreading west into the Bay since the war. I visited the neat promenade of Westside Park, where my view was dominated by the Norwegian Viva, a 294m-long cruise liner built in 2023 with 10 storeys stacked long above the hull. Carrying 4,500 passengers and crew, it was boosting Gibraltar’s population, including the Spanish workers, by one tenth. But that boost is just for a few hours. By day, you can spot the cruise ship day-trippers on Main Street by their baseball caps and body shape, but by evening they’re gone. Gibraltar’s restaurants don’t even get the dinner trade because dinner is served onboard. Cruise ships are self-contained mini-cities, or an urban typology that is on the move, like Archigram’s Walking City concept (1964). We all know the damage these floating monsters cause to cities like Venice, but Gibraltar is sturdier.

The Norwegian Viva boosted Gibraltar’s population by a tenth… for a few hours. Photo Herbert Wright

Looking east, the typologies are more familiar. The repetitious, plain 8- and 10-storey affordable housing blocks of the 1980s Harbour View Estate march inland, but it’s now bordered by generic private residential developments. To the north, tower blocks sport blue glass balconies, a sub-vernacular feature. Ocean Village is one of Gibraltar’s marinas for private boats, with waterside restaurants, a Polynesian bar and a casino facing them. The living is easy if you’ve got the money, but you could be anywhere. 

Avoiding the old fortifications, you’ll find Devil’s Tower Road besides the Laguna Estate. It’s a four-lane highway with heavy traffic heading to the road tunnel to Spain, and it runs east through the shadow of The Rock’s north face. Businesses like car garages operate in adjacent industrial estates just metres from The Rock. The road is changing fast, with a Holiday Inn, a couple of roadside bijou cafés, and big new apartment projects. Beyond the town’s most eastern roundabout, and beside the sandy but forlorn East Beach, Hassan Centenary Terraces by local form WSRM Architects is under construction. Elliptical towers up to 110m high with four apartments per floor get not just views over the airport runway or as far as Marbella, but also close-ups on rugged Jurassic limestone. Here could be a dream homes for geologists.

Hassan Centenary Towers, East Beach and The Rock. Photo Herbert Wright

Catalan Bay, a village of pretty coloured holiday houses and a friendly pub, is not far down the east coast. It could be a town suburb soon enough.  

Gibraltar has yet more to offer the flâneur. They may chance across Bollywood dance film playing in a neon-and-plastic restaurant hidden behind a high-up Lewis Francis building, or a cannabis coffee shop open but asleep near a magical cemetery, or a Scottish church from 1854, or chickens who have strayed into a sloping botanical garden. For such a small place, amazing impressions and hidden treasures await discovery.

Falling onto a Bouncy Castle

What can architecture do as society gets older? In London, a 900-year-old housing solution just got updated.

Senior residents enjoy chatting at Appleby Blue Almshouse – photo Philipp Ebeling

In a successful society, older people engage with the wider community and live happy, healthy lives. But unless they are wealthy, it’s almost impossible for the elderly to stay in cities like London, and if they do, many become isolated and ignored in retirement homes or care centres. With less young population and average lifespans longer than ever, the elderly are gradually dominating demographics in developed countries. To address the issue, architecture needs fresh ideas. In the UK, they are coming up.

England created a typology called the ‘almshouse’ which provides charitable housing for the elderly. Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan is said to have initiated one in York in the 1130s. The Knights of St Saviour built another in Southwark, near London Bridge, in 1588. Nowadays, they no longer have horses, armour or military zeal, and their name is United St. Saviour’s Charity — but they still have a mission of providing support in Southwark. Their new Appleby Blue Almshouse, designed by Witherford Watson Mann, could be a game-changer for how we accommodate the elderly in twenty-first century cities. Their secret is a holistic, research-backed approach. 

Street facade of Appleby Blue by architects Witherford Watson Mann. Photo Philip Vile

Appleby Blue, opened this year, provides 57 subsidised apartments for Southwark locals who are 65 years old or older. Each would be a worth a fortune on the London’s crazy open property market, even today when its half-dead. The building has a big presence on the street – five floors stretching the length of a block. That’s quite different to most English almshouses, which have a garden facing the street, surrounding on three sides by the building. Nevertheless, the main volume is still a U-shape around a garden, but a second volume, just two storeys high, stretches across the back of the site, making the garden an internal courtyard. As we shall see, it’s not the only place where plants grow at Appleby Blue.

Appleby Blue’s big calm hall – photo Philip Vile

The street facade is brick of different sorts, with a long two-storey glazed bay framed in wood. There’s a lot of timber at Appleby Blue, woven into a four-storey concrete frame with steel higher up and in the back volume. Internal facades are wood. Oak-lined corridors connect the apartments, which have seating (and sometimes plant boxes too), so they become social spaces. Stephen Witherford, a founding partner of the architects, says that ‘more organised sociability’ is designed in. The biggest internal social space is a two-storey communal hall lined with wood, with oak beams and sliding screens which open to the courtyard on one side. A dining area served by an open kitchen is on another side. The meals are prepared with healthy eating in mind, and include ingredients actually grown on the building. 

Rooftop agriculture at Appleby Blue – photo Philip Vile

Yes, Appleby Blue is also an urban farm, producing vegetables, fruit and herbs in large planters on the roof of the smaller volume. There’s still room for enough photovoltaics to generate 35% of electricity needs. The roof is yet another social space, floating between a screen of old trees at the back of the site and that garden courtyard, which harvests rain and includes gingko trees and a calming water feature. Witherford describes the courtyard as ‘a time-pice’, because it reveals the movement of the sun, the seasons, bird migrations, ‘thus engendering a relationship between nature and humans’. 

Appleby Blue’s garden courtyard – photo Philip Vile

Appleby Blue is accessible to the public, so it brings different generations together. Key to the design was research, covering matters from built environment to mental health, and aimed to quantify social return. Continuing research by the University of Bournemouth monitors the health and activity of residents, and confirms that good food makes a massive difference. So does an environment where every resident has so much to share with their next-door neighbour. When I asked a resident how he felt when he moved in, his reply was: ‘It’s like falling out of a plane without a parachute and landing on a bouncy castle’.

Almshouse designs are innovating elsewhere, too. Just as England pioneered the high-rise student residence, it could lead the way into vertical almshouses too. Coincidentally in Southwark, Fathom Architects have designed a 15-storey block called Blackfriars Almshouses for Southwark Charities, with 62 residences for elderly on upper levels. If it goes ahead, it will be tucked behind a 21-storey office block, also designed by Fathom, on a street that’s become an almost New York-like canyon. Like Appleby, the Blackfriars project is highly sustainable (meeting Passivhaus standards), connects to nature and is designed to promote interaction between residents on every floor and in communal spaces. It includes a roof garden with kitchen and a garden at street level which residents and public share. 

Blackfriars Almshouses, courtesy Fathom Architects

New almshouses can retain and integrate the elderly in the life of the city, but what about those in the countryside? This autumn, Dovehouse Court Almshouses, designed by Mole Architects for the Girton Town Charity, opened in a village outside Cambridge. It lines three sides of a communal garden, just like the traditional almshouse, but with three white low-rise volumes that provide 15 homes. Again, it encourages interaction, meets high sustainability standards, and connects with nature in its planting strategy. It grows food too, with a vegetable garden and orchard. 

Dovehouse Court by Mole Architects – photo David Butler

We could have a future where the old are relegated to homes where they are served microwaved plastic-wrapped meals, and the communal television is switched on and off to a strict timetable. AI-driven robots could gradually replace dedicated care staff in controlling space and activity. And loneliness and dementia constantly stalk the elderly. 

But science is telling us that our gut biome is key to health and longevity. That links the elderly to food, and it doesn’t come fresher than if it’s grown where they live. The calming proximity of nature boosts mental wellbeing, so bring that in too. Let social interaction bloom, between and beyond the elderly. And let it happen in buildings with a light touch on our planet. 

All that can be delivered by architecture. It must get on the case.

© Herbert Wright 2023

This article is also published in French at Chroniques d’architecture

London’s High Pavilions

The view from Horizon 22 over the River Thames, including the Walkie-Talkie (left), The Shard (crossing the horizon) and St Paul’s Cathedral (right). Image courtesy 22 Bishopsgate

Boxes of steel and glass are sucking people up into the sky. No, it’s not alien abduction. A proliferation of top-level viewing galleries are fighting to whisk the public up tall London buildings. Three new high platforms have opened in the last year alone. And the battle has taken an extraordinary turn, as the Renzo Piano-designed Shard no longer offers the highest public observation point (although with its hollow, pointy apex spire at 305m, it remains the UK’s tallest building). Now, a new platform called Horizon 22 offers a view from a quarter of a kilometre over London’s historic financial quarter, The City. And the battle for top position may not be over. 

The Monument, in a 1750 drawing. Source Guildhall Library

London’s history of opening high observation decks above the city streets started in 1677 with The Monument. Robert Hooke, England’s second greatest scientific genius after his bitter rival Isaac Newton, collaborated with St Paul’s Cathedral architect Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire of London and also make a vertical telescope inside a doric column. It would have measured star parallax by looking straight up at a star (through a hole in the golden crown representing fire) to see its position change from across Earth’s orbit, but street vibration was too disruptive. Nevertheless, you can still climb the spiral stairs around the telescope shaft to a square platform over 50m above The City. It’s a good place to look over the roofscape and see the nearby cluster of skyscrapers, the highest and tightest in Western Europe. It is also the first marker of the broad axis of high viewing platforms, which now rise up from the Shard south of the river, and reach up through The City along Bishopsgate. 

The rotunda of BT Tower (originally Post Office Tower). Photo Herbert Wright

Viewing platforms over London returned as modernity started shaping the skyline. The first was to the west on the South Bank. The top floor of the 107m-high Shell Centre (1962), a solid stone building, had an open public gallery that overlooked the river and Westminster. More thrilling was the Telecom Tower (1965) designed by boffins at the Ministry of Public Works. It looked like a backdrop from a low-budget sci-fi production (which it soon became). 1.5 million people in the first year visited its three levels of viewing public galleries, starting at 145m, and above them was the world’s first rotating restaurant. The food was awful, although that’s not why the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombed it in 1971. Public access never re-opened. After the IRA bombed Bishopsgate in 1982, shattering Tower 42 (designed by Seifert and Partners and at 183m, London’s then-tallest tower). Strangely, when it was restored, a public restaurant opened on level 42. 

Everything changed in 2012, when The Shard opened. This tower has a different entrance each side for its offices, hotel, apartments. The fourth entrance is for The View from the Shard, a three-storey viewing gallery with simply amazing views and a top level of 243m. The View now costs £28 to visit. 

Skyscrapers can’t go higher than The Shard in London because of air traffic control rules, but that didn’t stop Norman Foster proposing something the same height in 2018. The design had several circular viewing galleries higher than The Shard’s, which would also function as classrooms. The Tulip would have been next to the Foster-designed Gherkin (2004), and rise as a pure column widening into an elliptical spheroid, like a spermatozoa. Visitors would also ride spherical gondolas on the outside. It wasn’t built.

Meanwhile, The City’s skyline had been accelerating upwards. In 2014, the looming ‘Walkie Talkie’ at 20 Fenchurch Street, designed by Rafael Viñoly, soon found fame for how its curvy concave south face focused sunlight to cause combustion at street level (the problem was fixed with louvres). It also has the ‘Sky Garden’, a vast terraced greenhouse with plantings, bar restaurant, and free public access to heights of around 150m, bookable in advance. Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright described the space as ‘like being in an air terminal’.  

Why give free access? Isn’t that a waste of lettable office space, a security hazard and needs separate access, increasing construction costs? Well, catering is a revenue stream, but a spectacular public amenity in the sky can be good PR for any building. Not least, it wows planning committees. 

22 Bishopsgate rises behind 8 Bishopsgate, and the Cheesegrater beside it. Photo Herbert Wright

The three newest observation platforms don’t even include any catering. In 2022, at the iconic Battersea Power Station, repurposed for shopping and luxury living by Wilkinson Eyre, a glass lift rises up one of its four iconic chimneys to pop out at a height of 109m. The ride on Lift 109 costs from £15.90. In The City, another Wilkinson Eyre project is a skyscraper of stacked boxes completed in 2023 called 8 Bishopsgate. Its viewing galley at 200m, called The Lookout, is an L-shaped room in a glass box. No bar, no garden, just a few seats and a loo. It’s simple, calm, free to access, and the views on three sides present such vistas over London, it is mesmerising. But to the north, as well as Tower 42 now overlooked from above, the view also reveals the lives of office workers — at their desks, in meeting rooms and even exercising in the gym — behind a wall of glass rising even further into the sky.

That glass cliff-face is just metres away and belongs to 22 Bishopsgate, a 273m-high icy behemoth designed by PLP that stands amongst The City’s other skyscrapers. They huddle around it like little people around a giant. In September 2023 it opened yet another free public platform, Horizon 22, just behind and above The Lookout. On the ground, the two have entrances with security separated by just an alley. The Lookout’s entrance is modest, but Horizon 22 welcomes you from the street with a flashy two-storey lobby. Up at the top it also has two levels, the upper mezzanine situated at 254m. Under an 8.54m-heigh ceiling, the sky is vast. This outpost of heaven is booked up for months ahead.

Surely, that must be the end of the story? Not necessarily. Just beside 22 Bishopsgate is the site of 1 Undershaft, where a revised planning application from Eric Parry Architects is in for an even taller tower. In 2029, it could take the crown for London’s highest public viewing gallery, which the Museum of London would also make an educational resource. 

From such galleries, we can watch the grand dramas of city and sky play out, and see how insignificant we are in the scale of things. At giddy heights, we can feel like gods — but is this the pinnacle of urban spectacle? We know that proximity to nature is good for our wellbeing, and a closer relationship with it is key to the survival of humanity – and our home planet as we know it. Public skyscraper terraces at intermediate heights, designed as biodiverse gardens which clean the city’s air and moderate climate, are coming. They offer festivity, tranquillity, and views. We already have The Garden at 120, landscaped by Latz und Partner on the roof of an Eric Parry-designed block at 120 Fenchurch St (2018). It’s only 69m above The City’s streets, but there, anyone can sit out in the open and savour the multi-sensory feast of both views and nature. We can find wonder outside the box.

The Garden at 120 – photo Eric Parry Architects

London, October 2023. © Herbert Wright

(Adapted from my new column in Chroniques d’architecture and published as ‘À Londres, des platformes panoramiques, proche du ciel, loin du paradis‘)

The UK Housing Crisis – Do We Need a Revolution?

Southmere Lake and Southmere Towers, Thamesmead, London (GLC Dept of Architecture & Civic Design). Photo RIBA2666-15 by Tony Ray-Jones, 1970 *

After World War II destroyed or damaged four million homes in the UK, a great wave of social housing construction began, reaching 300,000 new homes a year in the 1950s. But by the 1990s, local authorities weren’t building any at all. In 2022, 1.2 million were waiting for homes on local authority lists. Like many countries, the UK has a housing crisis caused by shortage of social housing, not enough house building and unaffordable house prices. It’s not helped by a planning system that is drastically under-resourced and lacks strategic vision. The British like owning their own homes, and home ownership is around 60%. But you need to earn big money to get a mortgage, and it is simply impossible for most young people. While the homeless are ever-more visible in the streets, a Dubai-style frenzy of building ‘lifestyle’ luxury towers has been underway, luring overseas buyers and creating a booming ‘buy-to-let’ market. Banks even offer special ‘buy-to-let’ mortgages. 

It’s a crazy situation, but this year the shit has really hit the fan as interest rates have jumped. Mortgages have become monsters. They are strangling home owners, and for the ‘buy-to-rent’ profiteers, their properties are no longer cash machines but financial black holes. So they raise rents. That effects not just tenants with private landlords, but those with community-based not-for-profit ‘housing associations’, who are major home builders. Their rents are ‘social’, up to 50% of the local market average, or ‘affordable’ meaning 80% of the local average. With market rents sky-high, ‘affordable’ becomes a bad joke, and even ‘social’ rents may start looking antisocial. 

The desperate need for more homes remains. The government target is 300,000 annually. In 2022, 204,000 were built. That raise three questions — where to build, how to build, and what to build. Answer these, and the UK might make progress on its deep fault-lines of entrenched inequality, generational schism and the city-countryside divide. It could also help save the planet.

First, where to build? The best place is within a structure that already exists, thus saving embodied carbon from becoming greenhouse gases. Covid boosted the trend to home working, which by coincidence coincided with a wave of repurposing offices into apartments, for example the 2018 conversion of the sublime Seifert-designed Centre Point (1965) in London. But the Conran-designed apartments are far from affordable.

Locating new buildings is another matter. Major cities in England are surrounded by a ‘Green Belt’ where development is restricted to protect the countryside. Architects have to satisfy strict guidelines (‘Paragraph 80’) just to design a new rural house. Developers want to concrete over the Green Belt and the Conservative government is listening. But why? Cities are densifying but can go much further. Yes, brownfield sites are a finite resource, including the margins of railway land that have seen a boom in recent UK construction. But we can create new territory, for example on the flat roofs of modernist buildings, including post-war housing estates, or over urban motorways.  

And there are vast territories in the city that are occupied wastefully. For example, Simon Hunt in the Evening Standard newspaper found that 131 golf clubs occupy a staggering 44.5 km2 of land in London. He proposed a mix of re-wilding these biodiversity deserts, and high-density housing. And then there are the sprawling suburbs themselves, which in the UK have endless streets of dull detached houses. I’ll return to this crucial issue later.

Crofts Street, Cardiff – modular housing designed by RSHP. Photo © Joas Souza

Obviously, the UK needs to build fast, sustainably, economically and in high quantity. That calls for modular construction using manufactured off-site components. RSHP’s Crofts Street housing in Cardiff (2021) is a brilliant example that ticks all the boxes and delivered a terrace of nine townhouses with carbon-positive performance. The UK needs homes like these, but even more it needs new apartment blocks built to similar standards. For that, we need to downsize our idea of what is comfortable living space.   

Government statistics show average living area in the UK dropped steeply from 105m2 in 2016 to 88m2 in 2021. Families are shrinking and single people are on the rise, but in Hong Kong, families of three live in apartments averaging 45m2, and single people in 15m2. Their ‘nano-flats’ are not quite as small as 20th-century ‘bed-sits’ (so-called because you sat on the bed) in London and elsewhere, where single people lived in a room with a bed, a sink and a ‘baby Belling’ mini-cooker. Nor are they as grim as the tight accommodation offered to prisoners or refugees in the UK. There was an outcry about the conditions for 500 refugees housed by the anti-immigration government in a repurposed barge called the Bibby Stockholm – another example of modular build, but a complete contrast to Crofts Street. Last month (August 2023) the Bibby Stockholm was evacuated because of fears of Legionella spreading. 

The Bibby Stockholm at Falmouth, new homes for refugees.Photo-Ashley-Smith, CC BY_SA-4.0 via Wikimedia

And yet there are typologies that offer small, safe places to inhabit which are far nicer. Hotel accommodation is temporary, but student halls of residence are places for living in. The high-rise student dormitory, invented in the UK, is springing up in cities across the country, and in London and Manchester such towers reach over 100m in height. Students expect privacy and en-suite bathrooms, and get them in rooms sometimes as small as 12.5m2. ’Studio rooms’ are twice the size and include kitchen facilities. The new buildings offer communal kitchens anyway, and facilities from laundries to swimming pools. There’s still a shortage of UK student housing, but the Chinese-led overseas student boom in the UK won’t last forever, and they’ll likely be a lot of empty student rooms. If put into the housing market, the demand for these micro-flats with a city view and facilities could be hot. At least they serve as a model for new urban lifestyle homes that should be genuinely affordable. Building them flexibly so that adjacent units can merge brings families into the mix. 

New mass housing also brings a fantastic opportunity to expand rooftop urban farming, bringing the source of food into the city and engaging residents in growing it, just like people who have allotments (small rented plots, popular in the UK). Trees and meadows should also be planted wherever possible. Overall, the planted or farmed area of a building could equal its footprint. 

The UK could reform its property market and re-instate social housing as top priority, but ultimately it meets the brick wall of inequality. Even people on good salaries struggle in the city. But there’s a class with no money worries, much of it an entrenched, conservative constituency for whom golf and big houses are entitlements. This smug, comfortable, SUV-driving, Brexiteering old guard spreads into outer suburbs. They don’t give a damn about the planet or people. They have trashed the world for younger generations, and now they are denying them the right to have a place to call home. It would probably take a revolution to divest them of their land.

London, September 2023. © Herbert Wright 2023

This article was published in chroniques d’architecture as L’avenir, une kitchenette et un cagibi perchés dans le ciel? This is the original English text, with minor modifications

*The photo of Thamesmead by Tony Ray Jones is part of the exhibition Wide-Angle View: architecture as social space in the Manplan series 1969-1970 at RIBA Architectural Gallery, London, until 24th February 2024

New Solidifications of Collective Memory in the City

Sandwich (2010-2020) by Sarah Lucas, photo © Herbert Wright 2020

A concrete sandwich lies deep in a chasm between London skyscrapers. An angry Bristol crowd drag a statue through the streets. De Chirico seems to have left something at Cambridge station. The life of sculpture in public space…

by Herbert Wright

In London, there’s a concrete sandwich that is the size of a double bed. Three skyscrapers – the 118m-high Miesian-style St Helen’s tower (GMW, 1969), the iconic 225m-high Cheesegrater (RSHP, 2014) and the overwhelming 278m-high glass behemoth 22 Bishopsgate (PLP, 2020) – crowd over the spot where it lies, to make it shady even in the brightest summer sunshine. The British artist Sarah Lucas chose the location so that office workers could sit on it and eat their lunch. It forms part of the annual trail of contemporary sculptures called Sculpture In The City in the heart of London’s prime financial quarter. 

Before sushi, superfood-salads, bean enchiladas and other healthy take-aways, the sandwich was the standard lunch for millions in the UK. Especially popular was bacon and ketchup in thick flat white bread. We still eat sandwiches, but less than before, and likely to be vegetarian. Lucas’ bread is unseeded. So, her sandwich is also a monument to what is gradually becoming a collective memory. 

That brilliantly illustrates Aldo Rossi’s proposition, in his book L’architettura della Città (1966), of the city as a repository for collective memory. Monuments played a key role, encoding memory in stone. What is sculpture’s relationship with collective memory? And because we now recognise that the built environment has a responsibility to activate city life, let us also ask: What is the relationship between public sculpture and city life?

Most historical statues are ignored, but their collective memories can be re-activated. When George Floyd was publicly murdered by Minneapolis police in 2020, it created international outrage. Bristol, England was already soul-searching about its history as a slave-trade port. The two came together when an angry crowd gathered around the statue of slave trader Edward Colsten, long considered a great man of the city. They splattered him red, pulled him down, dragged him through the streets and dumped him in the harbour. Local police made no intervention. Like Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, toppled in 2003, or Lenin statues brought down across the ex-Soviet Union, collective memory was exorcised. It was a fantastic eruption of emotion and people power, but should we erase the memory of evil? Perhaps cities need Museums of Shame, where statues and other records of past evil are displayed, explained and serve as educational resources. Holocaust museums serve as a good model.

Three Figures (2012) by Neil French. Photos Herbert Wright 2022

Sculpture can store nicer historical memories of the city. In a quiet mews in London’s swank Mayfair, Neil French’s Three Figures (2012) captures fashion photographer Terence Donovan photographing 60s super-fab model Twiggy while a shopper looks on. It freezes an intimate, magical moment in an unexpected place. Why can’t architects think like this when they are busy ‘place-making’?

Five kilometres to the east, in a dull nook by the 180m-high Gherkin (Foster+Partners, 2004), another of the 20 sculptures on Sculpture in the City trail, The Granary (2021) by Jesse Pollock, actually has an architectural subject. A shiny orange metal form is an almost Jeff Koons-style representation of a historic English grain store. We forget that without the countryside to feed it, the city would not exist. Its bright orange colour not only transforms a dull corporate nook in the cityscape, but also alerts us, like a collective reminder, to the lost memory of the relationship between city and countryside.

The Granary by Jesse Pollock, photo Herbert Wright

Contemporary sculpture often aspires to be seen by use of provocative colour and form, and calls the citizen to record it on social media, especially Instagram. This shared digital memory is a new sort of collective memory, and has global reach. Rossi would have understood this – his floating Teatro del Mondo, the highlight of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, was a pre-digital harbinger of projecting the instant architectural image. Sculpture has now become an advertisement for its location, financed by corporate sponsorship. We are in the realm of the Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (the 1967 book which offered the radical perspective of capitalism as immersing us in imagery that serve its own ends). Digital media is the mediator of the contemporary spectacle. The urban sophisticate’s idea of city life is constantly refined by ideas from Carlos Moreno’s 15-Minute City to ‘street food’ re-marketed as hip at five times the price as when it was on the street. Sculpture neatly takes its place in this contemporary spectacle that is rooted in capitalism and consumerism.

Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo for the 1980 Venice Biennale. Photo Biennale di Venezia

I mention various London skyscrapers because each is a sculptural form, so these corporate buildings are also sculptures. Even the square rectilinear black form of St Helen’s is an example of the high modernism’s minimalism which both art and architecture expressed. Modernism was blind to its pre-exiting urban context, including community life, and the new ‘city’ it created didn’t always work. Sculptural architecture later turned into ‘starchitecture’, with the same indifference to human scale and history. Now it is yesterday’s architecture. 

Future architecture must become organic – buildings of natural materials that host plant life and generate civic life. Public sculpture is also seeking this path. Thomas Heatherington has designed a ‘Tree of Trees’ for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. It will hold 350 trees on a tree-like steel structure outside Buckingham Palace. This may not be the way to go. The trees will be isolated in pots, lonely because they cannot network via any mycelium web, and the structure has been compared to a mobile network mast. 

Rossi made drawings conveying collective memory in an imaginary, metaphysical city of classically-inspired buildings and surrealist objects. They were influenced by the surrealist de Chirico. Interestingly, a new sculpture outside Cambridge station, Ariadne Unwrapped by Gavin Turk, is exactly like a Rossi-de Chirico statue, except that it is wrapped and bound as if by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Gavin Turk with his sculpture Ariadne Wrapped at Cambridg CB1, photo © Phil Mynott

On 23rd June, Sculpture In The City hosted a night of live performance called Nocturnal Creatures. One of its many events, repeated from last year, was scheduled to be roller skaters gliding around the madly colourful shapes of the sculptural ensemble Bloom Paradise by Taiwanese artist Jun T. Lai. She also designed the skater’s inflatable costume to be contemporary Alice in Wonderland. It would have been a joyful update on collective memory. Like the Bristol protestors, Lai’s sculpture would have animated the city. Unfortunately, the performance was cancelled, but Bloom Paradise remains, bringing magic to the City – a different sort of metaphysical magic to de Chirico, but also like a dream nevertheless.

Alice in Wonderland performance at Bloom Paradise by Jun T. Lai, photo Cena Latif, courtesy Sculpture in the City

Dreams themselves are free-form imagination which incorporates and reconfigures memories. If sculptural imagination brings dreams to the city, they can become collective memories. The collective memory stored in sculpture is not just history, but of dreams too.

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture in early July 2022, entitled: Du devenir les sculptures dans l’espace public. It has been updated in connection with Aldo Rossi and with June T Lai’s sculpture-centric performance.

© Herbert Wright, July 2022

Elizabeth’s fantastic architectural voyage

From Malawi to Montreal, and from cosmic domes to buried passages of light, architecture proclaims her name. The woman is not an architect, but she’s had the same job for 70 years. This is the architectural voyage of the most famous woman in the world – Queen Elizabeth II.

by Herbert Wright

The Queen by Banksy (2012) at Bristol (image via Google Maps)

June 2022 will be purple in the UK. The colour will splashed across media and in the streets, it will be impossible to escape. Even the Thames will go purple — at least in Central London, thanks to the Illuminated River project. Purple signifies the ‘platinum jubilee’ of Elizabeth being crowned Queen. A super-modern underground railway called the Elizabeth line has opened, and on the London Tube map, it is purple. Elizabethan architecture is a sixteenth century English vernacular, but Elizabeth II’s architecture is global, and reaches back to mid-century modernism.

Before setting out on the epic journey of Queen Elizabeth buildings, let me declare that this is not some sycophantic nationalist romp with a pro-royalist message. Royalty is a crazy system, turning nations and peoples into inheritable assets for a lucky family. Thankfully the Queen is no despot, but an intelligent, socially-aware woman who’s actively played her part in transforming the UK from an exploitative but faltering colonial power into a fairly open, liberal, multi-ethnic society. Politics is embedded in all architecture, and the buildings named after her start with some colonial paternalism (or maternalism?), mixed with the pervading western post-war optimism that rational design could create a bright future for the people.

Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre – source Malawi Nyasaland historical

Princess Elizabeth was on holiday in Kenya when she was told her father had died in 1952. One of the first buildings named after her was also in Africa – The Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, opened in 1958. Rectilinear Miesian aesthetics were rising fast in modernist architecture, but this building is not unlike a big pre-war English suburban house, with its pitched roof and a big pediment over its entrance. No-one then would have thought of applying African vernacular to a hospital – not until the 1990s would the Italian eco-architect Fabrizio Carola use traditional construction techniques and form for a hospital in Mauritania. 

Pitched roofs also characterise Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Building (1957), an exhibition hall designed by Page and Steel, but they run parallel as an engineered continuous  folded plate, and the look is modernist. The heavily-massed 21-storey Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel (1958) in Montreal by Canadian National Railway architects is big-city American-style modernism. John Lennon recorded Give Peace A Chance there, with a live crowd in 1969 (the same year he returned a medal of honour to the Queen).

Queen Elizabeth Planetarium (L) 1960, photo – Edmonton City Archives (R) 2020, after restoration, photo – Steven Hope, Zebra Society

Still in Canada, the Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium (1960) by City of Edmonton by architects Walter Tefler and RF Duke – now meticulously restored by David Murray Architects – evokes a flying saucer, an echo of modernism’s Space Age-inspired Googie architecture in the US. Meanwhile, the long 12-storey slab of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (1960) in Hong Kong looks like a block from Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.

 

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Hong Kong in 1969, source Wiki Commons

In the UK, major buildings named after the Queen had to wait for Brutalism. The GLC (Greater London Council) architect’s department embraced it as they expanded the South Bank cultural centre, and led by Hubert Bennett, the Queen Elizabeth Hall (1967) was a showcase element they designed. This is the building where skateboarders later colonised the lowest level. Despite recent yellow paint on exterior stairs and a wacky Mexican restaurant add-on, the deeply-stained concrete looks depressing. Brutalism is now a trendy fetish cult in architectural circles, but so much of it is just ominous lumps of doom in the public eye. Suspended concrete shafts in a striking entrance canopy at the Queen Elizabeth II Hall (1977) in Oldham, Lancashire feel so heavy, you want to rush inside before they crush you. The Queen Elizabeth II Law Courts, Liverpool (Farmer and Dark, 1984) is like a Brutalist interpretation of a medieval castle. Big exposed concrete was then already in retreat, and at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre (1986) in Westminster by Powell and Moya (Powell co-designed the Barbican), glass and metal dominate its stacked concrete floorplates. 

Queen Elizabeth Hall (GLC architects, 1967) now – photo © Herbert Wright 2022

Architecture went quiet about the Queen until 2002 when her own London base Buckingham Palace got an extension to show her art collection, called the Queen’s Gallery. Architect John Simpson’s pedimented entrance simultaneously manages to be safely neo-classical and whimsically post-modernist. Another royal jubilee in 2012 generated hospitals and sports centres in the UK, and a big Law Court with jumbled blocks of glass and concrete in Brisbane, Australia. Spanish architects Luis Vidal designed the Queen’s Terminal, Heathrow (2014), an airy 220,000m2 mega-building under curving roofs. Sustainability was high on his design agenda, but plane travel remains a planet-killer.

Queen’s Terminal by Luis Vidal – photo © Herbert Wright 2016

That brings us to the Elizabeth line, which should have opened in 2017 as the EU’s largest urban construction project. Since then, the shadow of Brexit has descended on the UK, and the line’s cost has expanded to £18.8 billion (not too bad – only 18% higher than the 2005 budget). The delay has brought a much better public name than the original ‘Crossrail’ (which is still the name of the delivery agency). 

Paddington Station, architecture by Weston Williamson + Partners. Photo © Herbert Wright 2022

And the Elizabeth line is magnificent. 21km length of twin tunnels (so, 42km of tunnel) with seven central giant underground stations (all but Bond Street opened on 20th May) where trains 200m long stop. When the separate long-distance branches are connected in autumn, the Elizabeth line will have an east-west spread of over 100km. It will boost London’s rail capacity by 10% at a stroke. It’s like London’s getting a Paris RER line! (Yes, Grand Express Paris is bigger, but it’s lots of lines, and unless you’re near the Périphérique around Saint-Ouen, you’ll wait years for a train. And anyway, that line 14 extension north is on a smaller scale, like the Tube extension London already opened earlier in 2022 to Battersea Power Station)  

There’s so much great new architecture in the Elizabeth line that I will return to it another time. All the stations by different architects have their own characteristics, but architects Grimshaw have designed a line-wide identity. The tubular labyrinths of underground passages and escalators are lined with white GRFC (glass-fibre reinforced concrete) panels that create a curving grid, like a representation of space in Einstein’s general relativity which has been bent into cosmic worm-holes. Elizabeth’s worm-holes, however, are under London and filled with light. 

Elizabeth line passages by Grimshaw, photo Crossrail

In the Sex Pistols’ 1977 anthem God Save the Queen, Jonny Rotten sang ‘there is no future in England’s dreaming’. Brilliant words… but wrong!  

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture in early May 2022, entitled: L’épique voyage architectural de la femme la plus célèbre du monde. It has been updated to reflect that the Elizabeth line has opened in the meantime.

© Herbert Wright, May 2022

Big Digital Boxes Emerge from Hiding

The Cloud in London. Photo ©Herbert Wright 2021

The most important new architectural typology, without which our civilisation would collapse, is the data centre. In the grotto-like Zaha Hadid-designed Roca Gallery in West London, an exhibition entitled ‘Power House: The Architecture of Data Centres’ explores the subject. Its curator Clare Dowdy told me that she had ‘thought of them as big grey windowless boxes’, but she changed her mind. Let’s see why.  

Most data centres are so mundane you don’t see them, unlike the headquarters of tech giants who rule the world wide web. Apple’s 462m-diameter ring in Cupertino, California by Foster+Partners, or Chinese internet titan Tencent’s bridged towers reaching 248m above Shenzhen by NBBJ (both completed 2018) look like artefacts left by giant alien visitors to whom we are almost ants. Google’s almost-finished London building by Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels’ BIG is less sci-fi but still stretches like a cliff of glass and columns for 330m through busy Kings Cross. But what about the architecture of data centres, where the servers live that store the data and applications of the internet? 

In 1991, the World Wide Web (www) had just one site, for CERN (the Centre European de Recherche Nucléaire) but by 2000 it hosted 17 million websites. Data centres soon outgrew the rooms they lived in and needed dedicated buildings, but the new architectural typology of the 1990s was invisible. Security became paramount, so why attract attention? Data centres looked like curiously quiet offices with reflective windows (usually not cleaned) and numerous CCTV cameras. Others looked like light industrial buildings, and even in 2021, a major facility called IP House in London’s Docklands data centre cluster still disguises itself as a distribution depot. Data centres became bigger and evolved into plain, blank boxes. Dowdy describes ‘Hyperscale’ data centres (defined as with over 5,000 servers) as having ‘their own weird grandeur’. Their design was functional, driven purely by the needs of the servers – floor space, power, connection to data networks, and the need to dump the vast amounts of heat they generate. At least a third of a data centre’s energy demand is just to cool the IT equipment.

These are the sort of design challenges that engineers rather than architects solve. Who cares about architectural aesthetics if there’s only a marginal need to design space for human presence? As Iain Macdonald, professor of the Instance of Uncertain Spaces unit at ArtEZ University and director of design agency Instance in Amsterdam, told me, ‘what we have now is buildings for automation — the Amazon warehouses, the car plants that are robotic’. These ‘semi-autonomous zones occupied by machines’ create a different agenda to ‘urban design (which) is about place-making’.

Telehouse TN2, London by Nicholas Webb Architects – photo Google

But of course, there are people around, not least those outside who see the buildings. Why not come clean, and let the building say ‘I’m a data centre’? London Docklands’ advanced, 73,400m2 Telehouse TN2 (2018) by Nicholas Webb Architects is clad with a circuitboard-inspired motif six stories high, mounted in a distinctly high-tech style structure. This is architecture, which has always known the art of appearance. Now it is mastering – or at least selling the idea of – sustainability. The proposed Belvedere Data Centre in East London, which Macdonald worked on when he was director at architects Scott Brownrigg, has twin floating boxes with horizontal cladding strips promising an almost SANAA-like etherealness, incorporating green walls and roofs, and powered by a waste incineration. It’s also next to a nature reserve and campaigners say it will drive away the rare birds that flock there. 

Belvedere Data Centre by Scott Brownrigg

Elsewhere, data centres are cropping up in madly diverse forms, as the Power House exhibition reveals. Old buildings, such as a Macy’s department store in New Jersey and a Cold War bunker in Sweden are getting repurposed as data centres. The typolgy is  going high-rise – German architects Schneider + Schumacher designed a 110m-high data centre, the Qianhai Telecommunications Center now under construction in Shenzhen. Looking further ahead, Macdonald had already imagined a tower where we co-exist with machines, sharing the first 8 levels with robots, then servers occupying higher levels to 20 or more. It’s a startling vision of our future built environment.

Barca Data Tower, powered by four nuclear batteries, envisioned by Iain Macdonald – courtesy Iain Macdonald

In the meantime, the Internet continues to expand like a supernova. It now has over 4.7 billion human users, maybe four million active websites (and four times that which are inactive), and carries almost 12 exabytes of data traffic daily. That’s equivalent to a video call lasting over 2 million years*. Traffic has grown 4,000 times bigger than it was in 2000, and telecommunication bandwidth is doubling every 18 months. This the age of Big Data and online leisure, revved up by streaming, gaming, the ‘Internet of Things’ (where devices talk to each other), the nefarious, ever-churning cryptocurrencies, and the incoming spectacles of the Metaverse. 

Data centres currently contribute 2% of humanity’s carbon footprint. We need to cut that back big-time. Big names are addressed the issue – a Kengo Kuma-designed data centre in Korea is cooled by mountain winds, and Snøhetta have a circular energy concept in which a data centre heats a city.  MacDonald proposes nuclear batteries, and has developed the concept with MIT and Westinghouse. ‘You don’t need the grid’, he says. ‘It gives you a flexible source’.

Somewhere out there, something’s cooking in the dark kitchens. Photo ©Herbert Wright

It is not just data centres that architects can bring imagination to. Cruder typologies are morphing half-blind into the light of reality right now. The next biggie may be one that feeds us something even more essential than data — food. Consider the ‘dark kitchen’. It prepares food for delivery companies, cruelly but profitably cutting the physical restaurant or take-away premises from the supply chain that leads to your mouth. Yes, they are another step in our sleepwalk from civic life to digitally-immersed hikikomori-style isolation, but they’re happening. Deliveroo recently applied to transform an entire industrial shed in East London into dark kitchens. Such buildings are anonymous, hidden and plain. Sounds familiar?

Power House: The Architecture of Data Centres is at the London Roca Gallery until 28 February 2022

*Worked out from  https://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band  and https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-is-an-exabyte/ 

© Herbert Wright, December 2021

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture in December 2021. It was entitled ‘De l’évolution architecturale des monstrueux centres de données’

Manchester’s Urbanism: from Valette to Vertical City with Visions for the Future

Manchester loves a great French Impressionist painter who is strangely obscure in France. The search results for ‘Adolphe Valette’ in the French language Wikipedia rank his modest entry just above a re-direct to Adolph Hitler. Born in Saint Étienne, Valette moved to Manchester in 1907. His dream-like paintings recorded the built environment and life of the the world’s first industrial metropolis, and captured the eternal twilight of the damp, dirty atmosphere.

Adolphe Valette, Oxford Road – 1910 ; York Street To Charles Street – 1913. Courtesy Manchester Art Gallery

He returned to France in 1928, long before Manchester become a broken post-war city, an expanse of wastelands sandwiched between closed down red brick factories and grim modular social housing. For decades, only football, then bands such as The Smiths or Oasis, continued to remind the world of Manchester. 

Nowadays Manchester’s air is clear (although it rains a lot), and the city has bounced back from post-industrial decline to become England’s most vibrant after London. Its inner city, at the heart of a conurbation of 2.5 million, is young and expanding, and business and creatives are migrating from the south. Manchester University’s science and technology is world-class, and the city is landing on the international cultural map. All these factors drive new architecture. So, what are architects designing in Manchester? 

Deansgate Square from First Street photo @Herbert Wright

Most visible, like in many cities, is an explosion of high-rise residential towers. Sadly, most are generic orthogonal boxes. There are many more under construction, and proposed parliamentary legislation favouring developers at the cost of public consultation mean more will follow. Manchester seems to be following London, driven by the buy-to-let market and failing on affordable housing. But speaking to random Mancunians (as the natives are called) reveals that many are excited by the rise of mini-Dubai clusters on their skyline, especially Deansgate Square, four new towers designed by SimpsonHaugh. The highest is 201m, far higher than anywhere else in the UK except London. At least these towers have cool shapes, their square-plan corners extending out so that their shiny facades are concave. Architect Ian Simpson also points out there is no ‘poor door’, or separate entrance for cheaper flats. Deansgate Square brings a new terraced granite plaza, dotted with decorative Corten steel screens and served by chic designer catering, all overlooking a stream that has been cleared of trash and now attracts biodiversity. Other car-free refuges are emerging across Manchester. Yet, as in curated, upmarket developments anywhere, a certain sterility haunts such places. 

Manchester’s unplanned, bohemian Northern Quarter is the opposite to all that. A dense low-rent district of old buildings, some still abandoned, and car parks, it is gritty and edgy and packed with so much street life that the rents are rising and independent businesses now feel the pressure. Nevertheless, such urban villages, with their human scale, texture, diversity and surprise, have a vibrancy and emotionalism that eludes architects and planners. At least repurposing old buildings incorporates the city’s memory, as well as saving a lot of carbon emissions. Manchester has plenty of solid old industrial building to repurpose into loft apartments, and already has revived an entire neighbourhood called Ancoats as an über-trendy loft-lifestyle hotspot. Even more central in the city, Dutch architects Mecanoo mix old and new in their design of Kampus. Massive mid-rise apartment blocks under zig-zag skylines cluster up against old warehouses and alleys, and a public garden and bar faces Manchester’s thriving Gay Village across a canal. 

The University of Manchester has a student population of over 40,000, and with other universities in the city, it drives demand for architecture to house them. Manchester was quick to build student residence towers, a recent architectural typology, with a 2012 107m-high tower by Hodder and Partners (led by ex-RIBA president Stephen Hodder). It stands at the downtown end of the Oxford Road academic corridor, where SimpsonHaugh have added a second student tower. They will be joined by highest yet, the super-slim Hulme Street tower by Glenn Howells, 168m high but just 14.8m wide. Detractors call it ‘the tombstone’, which is unfair because it will be clad in brick, Manchester’s vernacular material.

From Oxford Road, the Great Marlborough Street and Liberty Heights student accommodation towers. Image: Glenn Howells

Height stands out but some enjoy the thrills of length. That brings us to academic buildings and Manchester’s longest new project, the Manchester Engineering Campus Development, another Mecanoo project completing this year. In an ensemble which includes repurposed historic buildings. The main building is the publicly-accessible 238m-long MEC Hall, an eight-storey box of Miesian dark glass and steel. It’s the longest building built in Manchester since industrial times. Yet, running behind old buildings, it is virtually invisible from Oxford Road and is packed with atria, classrooms, high-tech labs and two great auditoria. Manchester’s engineering changed the world, and here, it should do so again.

MECD and Manchester’s southern skyline courtesy Andy Haslam Photography/Balfour

What of Manchester’s cultural revival? So far it has already produced Hallé St Peters by Stephenson Hamilton Risley Studio, a substantial concert venue extension to an old church in Ancoats, and First Street, a colourful creative zone including HOME (another by Mecanoo) and a statue of Friedrich Engels, who researched Manchester’s working class conditions and then wrote the Communist manifesto with Karl Marx. First Street is just metres away from the tragically demolished Hacienda club (1982) in which Ben Kelly created the urban-industrial interior aesthetic that would spread to Berlin clubs and the world. Manchester’s next cultural addition will be the OMA-designed Factory, a flagship venue under construction. A riverside angular volume like an amplified version of their Casa de Musica in Porto adjoins an even bigger box-shaped volume. It’s too early to judge, but one young radio journalist I talked to already dismissed it as ‘alien’. Maybe – but not as much as OMA’s  Performing Arts Center in Taipei! 

What does Manchester’s new cityscape tell us? Saving old buildings can generate future urban environments as dynamic as any high rise, and investment in the architecture of education and research is crucial. The confidence of Manchester’s architecture tells us that despite Brexit, this city’s future is big. Valette would find contemporary Manchester staggering, but he may not be entirely surprised. He painted a city that never stopped to rest.

@Herbert Wright, July 2021

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture in July 2021. It was entitled: Manchester, pour les architectes, un théâtre des reves