All Opinion articles – Page 364
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Opinion
Blame the builders
My blood boiled when I read the article headed "Architects 'blithe' on safety" (News May 14).The National Audit Office criticised architects for "failing to design out safety risks". MP Edward Leigh supported this view as did other stakeholders.We are all fully aware of our responsibilities. However, I am regularly on ...
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Opinion
Biennale bonanza
The London Architecture Biennale kicked off with real intent on Saturday. The intent seemed to be to puzzle and/or delight the public with juxtaposition.There inside the atmospheric post-industrial Farmiloes building — the centre of the Biennale — were a string of domestic garden sheds, while outside in the street, on ...
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Opinion
Biker bashing
For one reason or another Concrete Boots compared the new-look BD to a Harley Davidson rather than a Triumph, a few weeks ago. This didn't go down well with one or two most valued readers. William Murray of Wordsearch (which organised the London Architecture Biennale, see below) wrote in to ...
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Opinion
Backyards available to good listeners
Most readers will guffaw at the suggestion that the British public's "not in my back yard" mentality is becoming a thing of the past. Surely there are too many militant local campaign groups and retired judges with little better to do than oppose architects' schemes.
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Opinion
Shuttles worth
It’s great to see BD giving its full support to Ken Shuttleworth’s new practice since he split from Foster’s six months ago. Only six months ago I didn’t know (and cared even less) about Norman Foster’s other partners. But thanks to the tireless campaigning of BD, we can read ...
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Opinion
Simplicity reigns
We read with dismay Paul Edwards’ criticism of Malcolm Fraser’s Bo’ness housing. Yes, the scheme is “ordinary”, but ordinary in an unpretentious, beautifully simple and elegant fashion that contrasts with the wilful gimmickry of much contemporary building. Fraser has achieved modern housing rooted in the locality, and one can imagine ...
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Opinion
Mutual respect
Regarding Sarah Wigglesworth's article (In Practice June 4), I recently attended reviews of the first-year final project at the University of Sheffield, and was especially impressed by the peer-led review procedure.At the "Studio Culture — Who Needs It?" conference in Oxford in December, it was noted that the days of ...
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Opinion
Tory multitasker
Caroline Spelman MP is a woman in a hurry. Quite literally. The Tory shadow cabinet member fitted in an interview with BD between two meetings and even ran the length of Whitehall to vote in a House of Commons division halfway through the interview. She returned from the vote out ...
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Opinion
Mark of honesty
While always relishing the more flamboyant cutting-edge designs often featured in BD, I found the article on Malcolm Fraser’s Bo’ness housing refreshing in illustrating a scheme where the architects suppressed any desires to leave their “mark” on an area for the sake of honest, vernacular housing. It would be interesting ...
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Opinion
Happy homes
Yup, it’s plain. There is no architectural interest in how we’ve twiddled over the basic housing box, or delivered the government’s housing agenda; no wow factor, and most decidedly no fashionable, ironic attachment to the dull, British institution that is suburbia.At Bo’ness we set out to recover the good ...
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Opinion
Hailing Holyrood
RMJM recently refused to let the BD-commissioned freelance writer Peter Wilson into the Scottish Parliament building because he had been critical of it in the past. But national press coverage of Holyrood has been more favourable. Observer architecture critic Deyan Sudjic spent a page praising the nearly finished building ...
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Opinion
Farewell photo
How the penny drops. Cabe commissioner Sunand Prasad was unusually keen to take a photo of the throng at Jon Rouse’s leaving do last week. All the commissioners were there in force. It seemed an odd urge at the time, but now with Stuart Lipton’s resignation and the admission of ...
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Opinion
Dont talk, make
I notice that, yet again, you have featured a building/comment by Ken Shuttleworth in your publication — this time a natty wicker stool (News June 11). I think perhaps the time has come to look at other architects, perhaps even some who are actually building rather than just talking ...
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Opinion
Pay and display
Charges for pre-planning consultations should be the other way round; architects should be paid to discuss embryo schemes with planning officers so that the latter may have some influence on the form and content of applications, thus hopefully making them more acceptable to the local authority and so more readily ...
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Opinion
Opposites detract
Last week’s Architecture Foundation debate on the eastern growth of the City of London had all the subtlety of a bulldozer. At one end of the debating table was Mike Bear, the developer behind the controversial demolition of Spitalfields Market, who described the Foster & Partners office block built on ...
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Opinion
The big get bigger; the small hit the wall
What chance of Percy Thomas Partnership building anything like the Wales Millennium Centre again? Swallowed this week by Capita — the £1.1 billion-turnover call-centre-to-property business — the Cardiff practice is about to enter a business where numbers rather than innovation appear to hold sway.
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Opinion
Tsar bidder
Fancy buying a Tsarist palace in St Petersburg? City governor Valentina Matvienko said this week that more than 2,000 listed buildings would be put up for sale to private buyers for the first time in a bid to save the city’s crumbling heritage. The buildings will be sold at half ...
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Opinion
Cut out the bells and whistles
Paul Edwards’ letter (BD June 11) slating the Bo’ness housing scheme as ordinary, ugly and uninspiring misses the point entirely. The scheme is not only a very worthwhile exploration into how one might better this type of housing; it is also a blessed relief. It has none of the tiresome ...
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OpinionAdam Caruso
Caruso St John is one of the nine British practices chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Architecture Biennale this autumn. Details of the exhibits were released this week