More Comment – Page 361
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Opinion
Change the world
“Streets and squares” beat “pods on sticks” (Letters July 30), but the only reason they beat, say, parks and flats is because they help to control some of the worst features of our unequal and fearful society. Surely we need more vision. All too often designing out crime has designed ...
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Opinion
Get off the ego trip
Ellis Woodman and George Oldham (Soapbox and Letters July 30) neatly put their finger on what is wrong with “landmark” buildings. The fact that Alsop’s Cloud can be touted around for any other site says it all. These are hugely egotistical buildings, too big for their boots and in danger ...
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Opinion
Reality check
Steve Miller’s ill-mannered letter (July 30) may make good reading, but the tired caricature he draws of Alsop masterplans cynically cobbled together over louche lunches is not founded in reality.Read on, Steve, because this is how it really is…Working on a range of major regeneration projects (including Middlesbrough) Tees Valley ...
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Opinion
Joined-up thinking
George Ferguson (Soapbox July 23) writes a great deal of sense. As he says, the professions are far too disjointed and protective of their own roles to make places that inspire, and the institutes’ hands are likely to be forced by the government if they do not act. There is ...
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Opinion
Going it alone
Once again, a major RIBA policy decision is announced without any reference to the RIBA Council (Soapbox July 23). The policy wasn’t in George Ferguson’s election manifesto either. This latest episode reinforces the concern I have always had about the undue concentration of power resulting from the RIBA’s reorganisation ...
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Opinion
The right course of treatment for PFI?
Hospitals and doctors’ surgeries are the public buildings we visit when we are at our most vulnerable and where we experience some of life’s most vital moments. So how does the government’s plan to abolish the body that looks after the quality of these spaces, NHS Estates, fit in with ...
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Opinion
Alsops lost love
Publishing schedules can play wicked tricks when events move fast — and Will Alsop is the latest victim. A new book, The Treasures of Liverpool, hit Boots’ desk this week, featuring Mr Alsop’s ex-project, the Cloud, across a jolly double page spread, and even a little piece by the architect ...
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Opinion
Royal warrant
Oh dear. John Prescott and the Prince of Wales have fallen out. Just months after they shared a platform at a Prince’s Foundation event and had people rolling in the aisles with their witty repartee, Poundbury has come between them.The foundation has submitted proposals for new homes at the Dorset ...
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Opinion
Home guard
An American website is keeping a running tally of how much the war in Iraq is costing US citizens in real terms. One novel way of calculating the cost of the war is the number of homes that could have been built for the same money. The number rises minute ...
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Opinion
Hair-brained?
Daniel Libeskind seems to have taken up residence in the Concrete Boots column of late, though it’s hardly our fault he is so prolifically humorous. The architect has hired architect Alexander Gorlin to design his new pad in New York, just a few blocks from Ground Zero. Asked why he ...
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Opinion
Spanish snips
And still with hair, there’s strange news from the West Country this week, where a popular Bristol hair salon has renamed itself Gaudi Hair Design, apparently in tribute to the celebrated Catalan architect. A bottle of vintage Head & Shoulders to the first reader to request “a Sagrada Família style”. ...
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Opinion
Ian Martin
Say what you like about Trousers, his enthusiasm is infectious. I find myself beaming at the drinks waiter
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Opinion
A slow response risks collapse disaster
You can imagine the baffling letter hitting the resident’s doormat. It’s on government notepaper and states in dauntingly obscure Whitehall language: “The LPS block you live in may not have been investigated in accordance with the MHLG Circular 62/68 (1968) or the BRE guidance published in 1987.”
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Opinion
Dont let ego war destroy our cities
That some emperors are waking up to the fact that their new clothes are not as promised (“End of the iconic age”, July 23) is good news. However, the threat to our towns from ego-architecture remains. A top person in an urban regeneration agency recently told me that he commissioned ...
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Opinion
Human sacrifice
Your reported demise of the icon (News July 23) may not be bad news in all quarters.When RIBA president George Ferguson addressed the Traditional Architects’ Group at the RIBA in February he distinguished between modern and traditional building style and between modern and traditional urbanism. Whereas he said he would ...
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OpinionMadcap madness
Buildings in the shape of toasters and multi-coloured pods on wonky sticks. How original.In this case it is the redevelopment of Middlesbrough waterfront, the latest masterplan by Alsop Architects. Indistinguishable from any of its other recent masterplans, it clearly demonstrates no reference to context or understanding of deep-rooted ...
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Opinion
Get off our land
Has it not occurred to anyone that most people in the countryside don’t want modernist buildings? They resist new buildings only because they are invariably of modernist design. It’s probable that most of them have moved to the country to get away from that great modernist urban experiment of ...
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Opinion
Rural reality
You refer to “country” as a foreign and different place, not the country as a whole (Focus July 23); but you make no reference to predominantly different rural planning regimes and to changes required of them to achieve “modified urban strategies” — or even of rural strategies to respond to ...
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OpinionA damp squib
Far from being futuristic, John McAslan’s circular canopies for the Piccadilly Gardens (News July 23) took me back to the 1970s, when, as a summer-working student, I joined the design office of a well-known oil company.It too used overlapping circular canopies of varying heights — until it found that people ...
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Opinion
Dont shed tears for the lost icons
There were no tears shed in my house at the news that the V&A extension had spiralled into oblivion and that The Cloud had proved to be so much hot air.