All Opinion articles – Page 359
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Opinion
China’s crisis of conscience
Rem Koolhaas had a choice to make in early 2002 and ordered a Chinese meal to give him the strength to make it. Should he bid for the Ground Zero project in Manhattan or the China Central Television building in Beijing?
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Opinion
Slaves to detail must not win urban battle
We have wound ourselves into a Gordian knot. We allow a cynical builder to construct 14 units in mock heritage style shoehorned inelegantly onto a site appropriate for half that amount; while an ambitious, daring and modern interpretation that challenges the site and tries in its own way to contribute ...
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OpinionArchitects dogme
Aran Chadwick (Technicalities July 23) makes an interesting connection between the restrictions of the “Dogme” films and those imposed on the making of buildings. The connection could be taken further with a highly selective and restrictive set of rules based on Dogme’s “vow of chastity”. The goal would be to ...
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Opinion
Arch conventional
Ronald McDonald has spurned some of the hottest architectural talent in Chicago for some of his own in-house architects. Proposals by Helmut Jahn for a new burger outlet in Chicago, featuring a pair of 100ft golden arches, were spurned by McDonald’s in favour of a more conventional scheme. But, when ...
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Modernists hide behind glass facade
I am alarmed by the misplaced energy expended over the topic of “iconic” architecture. Some of this opprobrium should be reserved for the nondescript, mediocre buildings that clutter our cities, and that have become the acceptable benchmark by which we judge anything remotely out of the ordinary.Future Systems’ scheme for ...
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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
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
A £1 billion tragedy waiting to happen
Don’t say they didn’t warn you. Britain is about to make a £1 billion building blunder — the government’s own advisers say so. The plans for a new hospital in east London are so bad, according to Cabe, they wouldn’t even win planning permission if they were applied to a ...
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Opinion
Water torture
The reaction to the latest big publicly funded architectural project to go wrong is more sighs of resignation than public outcry. After the Millennium Dome and the Millennium Bridge before it, the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, designed by Kathryn Gustafson, looks set for a lengthy closure. The natural spring water ...
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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 ...