Clapham's New Library Opens

In these austere times it is pleasing to report some positive news: a new modern library building has just opened on Clapham High Street. I went along today to use the fax machine (they don't have one yet) and take some snaps - please forgive my arty hipstamatics. I reported before about the building itself while under construction - the flats above have helped to fund the new public library facilities. The building itself seems to have taken ages to construct - almost as long as the much higher Shard, if my memory serves correctly. Last June they were expecting to be completed in September last year.

The flats tower above the library and the high street.

Builders are still busy completing the streetscaping at ground level - the paving does not appear at this stage to match the superlative standards of the Venn Street development.

A huge mural above the librarians' station maps out the interior space - two spirals curve out from the entrance and the desk - one upwards and the other downwards - around a central atrium rising the full height of the library space. A spiral staircase and a lift link all the levels. Books and other media line the curving spirals; reading areas, computer stations and meeting rooms lead off the spiral. The atrium houses a play space for children. It's like a mini Clapham version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York

the ramp spiralling upwards

A view across the central atrium, with oculi allowing glimpses of the book stacks on the spiralling ramp

The spiral staircase

It all looks new and shiny, and the books have the feel of just having been arranged on their new shelves. Loads of users are already using the spaces - the reading and computer rooms look like they will be very popular.

Overall, the space feels modern and generous. I have some niggles with the finish, which lets the standard down - the exposed concrete ceilings look like they've been demanded by an accountant late in construction rather than originally envisaged by the architect. The librarians' space will probably need to be redesigned - it's way too small and encourages spiralling gaggles of users to besiege the poor duty librarian from all angles - while I was there fights were erupting amongst library clients (over where the queue was) and the librarians themselves appeared stressed.

Noise levels are quite high - the central atrium and hard surfaces throughout create an echoing acoustic, and the children's play area generates a large amount of noise to echo.

Boris's brush with art criticism

Yesterday Boris Johnson wrote such an extraordinarily provoking column in The Telegraph and on his blog that I broke a lifetime’s resolve and left a comment (on the blog). A couple of hours later my comment disappeared, so I thought I may as well vent my reactions more fully on my own blog.
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In his column Boris reacted to two small criticisms made of the AcelorMittal Orbit by the BBC’s arts correspondent Will Gompertz: he felt it was too small and was a pity entry wasn’t free (Anish Kapoor, the Orbit’s sculptor, is on record as being against the entry fee too). Boris’s bile knew no limits and from these minor and entirely reasonable personal comments Boris concluded that the BBC as an organization was biased towards the Labour Party and that the next BBC chief must be a Tory.
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I’m very disappointed in this; I hope his column was flung off two minutes to deadline (apparently a common practice) and doesn’t represent Boris’s considered opinion. I imagine he would have lost a few votes if this had come out before the election.
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The BBC was set up during the last major financial crisis in the 1930s by a political establishment concerned to neutralise extremist views in the UK media. They succeeded brilliantly. However it seems the modern Tory’s attitude to public service broadcasting is far closer to that of Goebbels and Stalin than it is to their own Tory forebears. Today’s Tories are clearly absolutely determined to create a Fox News in the UK – with all the consequent divisive coarsening of public debate that will result. It’s worth noting the BBC had its worst clash ever with the (Labour) Blair Government over Iraq – and despite the Hutton enquiry the public still believed the BBC’s version over Tony Blair’s. To this day the BBC remains the most trusted news source for the British public - vastly more trusted than, say, The Telegraph itself.
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Boris complains the BBC is suspiciously interested in the Leveson enquiry despite the public not being that interested.
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Whether or not the public is interested in the Leveson enquiry, the apparent wholescale corruption of our political classes, the police, and the intimidation of celebrities and members of the public alike are clearly issues which go to the heart of our democracy, as Boris as a senior politician should realise.
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Boris also claims that public funding somehow corrupts the BBC. As Boris’s Mayoral salary is also publicly funded, and he enjoys a generous £250,000 per year from The Telegraph for his journalism, will he abstain from claiming his Mayoral salary? - Mrs Thatcher of course didn’t claim her salary as PM back in the 80s.
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About the Orbit I tend to agree with him that it’s better and more interesting close up – at least as far as I could see from the BBC television pictures. However, you can’t have it both ways – it’s either a monument to the public munificence, advanced aesthetic taste and civic pride of Mr Mittal and Boris Johnson or it’s a commercial fee-paying attraction. As Boris knows, the famous bread and circuses of ancient Rome were free to Roman citizens - that was the entire point. The London Eye was always meant to be a fairground ride – the Orbit is supposed to be public sculpture. And the £15 entry fee is on top of the £10 fee you have to pay to get into the Olympic grounds – so despite what Boris claims it does work out as considerably more expensive than the Eye to go up a not very tall stationery tower. Boris should have insisted on slides!
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Boris’s tiresome diatribe has been dissected brilliantly by Dave Hill in The Guardian, who particularly points out Boris’s dodgy denial of any links to Rupert Murdoch’s News International during his election campaign. Boris’s full-throated diatribe against the BBC will, of course, endear him to the Murdochs père et fils, whose long-term objective is to eliminate their rival media organization in order to maximize their own personal profit and influence.

Design Museum Heads West

The Design Museum is in the news because of its annual Design Awards (Designs of the Year 2012 exhibition now on at the Museum) and because the museum itself is on the move across London from Shad Thames to the old Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park - its best frenemy the V&A will be a near neighbour in South Kensington (target date 2014).

While part of me is thrilled that someone is giving this mad 50s folly a new lease of life (Grade II listed, no less, and apparently regarded as second only to the incomparable Royal Festival Hall in post-war British Modernist importance), the bigger part of me is sad the Design Museum will be leaving Shad Thames, which it has graced since the 1980s. I imagine it will be replaced with more expensive flats with river views, impoverishing the cultural life and diversity of this stretch of the Thames immeasurably.

Also worrying is what they intend doing to the old Commonwealth Institute building (Sir Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners, 1960-2) , an architect’s flight of fancy if ever there was one, a triumph of form over function or even reason:

“Regarded by English Heritage as the second most important modern building in London, after the Royal Festival Hall, the building has a low brickwork plinth clad in blue-grey glazing. Above this swoops the most striking feature of the building, the complex hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof, made with 25 tonnes of copper donated by the Northern Rhodesia Chamber of Mines. The shape of the roof reflects the architects' desire to create a "tent in the park" . . . The interior of the building consists of a dramatic open space, covered in a tent-like concrete shell, with tiered exhibition spaces linked by walkways. “

Those links include swooping stairs down to a floating mezzanine level beneath the immense expanse of that magnificent roof. This grand flourish is extravagantly wasteful of space, which no doubt the Design Museum covets. The proposed remodeled interior designs I have seen sweep away the stairs, walkways, floating mezzanine, etc, and close up that central block of empty space. The original complex and delightful spatial interplay is completely annihilated in favour of a grim heavy concrete platform with a rather mingy oculus allowing a partial view of the roof. My criticisms are purely aesthetic here - no doubt in practical ways the redesign will make the space function far more efficiently as a gallery, as well as generating more usable floor space. It’s just sad that something so intrinsic to the building will apparently vanish in the process. John Pawson has a lot riding on this - a very modish architect, most of his projects so far have been either commercial or private commissions by the super rich; this will be his first major public project. His brand of highly aesthetic minimalism seems a refinement of 60’s Brutalism - the movement which reacted forcefully against the effete and almost rococo modernism represented by the Commonwealth Institute. We shall see whether the styles can harmoniously cohabit.

Dream Home

The Boycott Pavilions at Stowe - named after the vanished hamlet of Boycott (hopefully it wasn't disappeared to make the Pavilions, but one has to assume this is likely) and designed and constructed by James Gibbs in 1728-9 - flank the Oxford drive to the house. The original stone pyramidal roofs were altered in 1758 by Giovanni Battista Borra to the lead domes visible today. The Eastern Pavilion was converted into a three-storey house in the 1950s. How wonderful!

Stowe was praised in Alexander Pope's poem Epistle to Lord Burlington:

"...Still follow Sense, of ev'ry Art the Soul,
Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start ev'n from Difficulty, strike from Chance;
Nature shall join you, Time shall make it grow
A Work to wonder at--perhaps a STOWE.''

New in Clapham

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The new Library Building on Clapham High Street is shooting up and is due for completion in September this year. Very exciting, as we'll have a brand new library and swimming pool here in SW4. The developers get 136 new apartments to flog, to help pay for the public amenities.

You won't find any information on the website about the new civic facilities, just a rather crass commercial hard sell. However, the relentless, hysterical grip on its target demographic is rather amusing:

[Edit: video now removed as too annoying!}

No grannies need apply!

I suppose the target punters will be shocked to find such an archaic insitution as a library in the basement. They may enjoy the swimming pool, however. It will be interesting to see how public and private interact as the building comes to life.


'The New" is actually so old - such a watered-down, pale pastiche of Frank Gehry's oeurvre, an architect whose style, so amazing in the 90s, is already slipping into the past. Do we deserve better public buildings? I suppose the rather magnificent Battersea Library extension was also architecturally retrogressive when it was built in the 1920s. It was however proud to be a library.

Quote London

“I love that London is a city on the run - I think if you want to see a little bit of all the world, London is the best place for it; everything that's impossible becomes possible in London.”

~ Simona Visinskyte, worker on the Shard. (Quoted in Evening Standard 4/3/2011)

Palladio at the Royal Academy

S. Giorgio Maggiore is the only building by Palladio I've been in, I think - although he did design other buildings in Venice. Its an extraordinary church, I was deeply impressed with his architectural usage of entasis - subtle curving - which enlivens the space. Working as he did from ancient Roman sources, I did not expect to see such an advanced grasp of the classical Greek aproach.

My friend Karen and I have planned for the longest time a trip to view the Palladian villas in the Veneto - I', very glad t=for the recent RA exhibition, which has re-ignited this ambition. I really enjoyed the mix of portraits and paitings, architectural models, artifacts, photographs and original plans and drawings. They even had digital constructions of Palladio's unrealised projects. Completely fascinating.

a trip to St Peter's, Cambridge

St Peter's, Cambridge has been around for a very long time, but the local community was slightly too ambitious when they came to build it: almost from the start it seems it was too large for the community to afford upkeep. The church was downsized (literally) in the 18th-century, but still fell into decay and neglect. When Jim Ede created Kettle's Yard, he also set about renovating and saving this church. It is now deconsecrated.

The doorway is Norman (11th, early 12th century). The inner column on the left is an 18th-century wooden replacement for the lost original. The church walls were built out of reclaimed rubble - the red bricks visible in the lower right are actually reclaimed roof tiles from ancient Roman buildings in the vicinity - the Roman fortress is nearby.



One can borrow the key to the church from the desk at Kettle's Yard and enter the tiny church.



St Peter's 11th/early 12th--century font has 'mermen' carved in each corner. Not a classic Christian motif; unless perhaps they are referring to fish imagery.

This is apparently the oldest surviving baptismal font in Cambridge.



Close-ups of the font carvings - these have seen almost 1000 years of babies being christened . . .





Jim Ede was a 20th-century aesthete, apparently the first modern art curator at the Tate, and the creator of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge: he transformed four cottages into an extraordinary space; a showcase for his modern art collection. He donated the whole thing to the University of Cambridge, and to this day it remains a remarkable ensemble of classic English craftsmanship and high modernist aesthetics. There is a memorial tablet to him in the church he helped save.



"It is salutary that in a world rocked by greed, misunderstanding and fear, with the imminence of collapse into unbelievable horrors, it is still possible and justifiable to find important the exact placement of two pebbles."

~ Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, 1984

The Ghosts of Craven Street

Craven Street was described by Henry James as an “inscrutable riverward street, packed to bleakness with accumulations of suffered experience”.

It’s right next to Charing Cross Station, and just a few weeks ago on a whim I turned down it to see what was there. A street of rather gloomy early 18th-century terraces. It was the London Open House Weekend, and some of the houses were open to the public.

The first one I popped in to see was the College of Optometrists (41-42 Craven Street) – which has been gutted and the interior rebuilt. Their conference room is a magnificent, eccentrically-shaped space with a specially designed-to-fit curved conference table.

The College has a fantastic collection of paintings of people wearing spectacles of all descriptions. In an early example of product placement, a Renaissance painting of St Jerome prominently displays his specs, despite the fact the saint’s bible translation work happened many hundreds of years before spectacles were invented. Notwithstanding, the opticians adopted St Jerome as their patron saint. Another wonderful portrait is of a Regency dandy – very Beau Brummel – wearing radical square-frame specs with side panels on the arms in blue-tinted glass. They would work as a really contemporary designer frame. Apparently, these specs were an early form of protective eye-wear for steam engine drivers. What Mr Dandy was doing wearing them for his portrait is a mystery.

The College is very proud of ghostly apparitions in its basement and has consulted all sorts of psychics, ghost researchers, etc to find out more. It seems Craven Street was a very bad neighbourhood before the Georgian attempt at gentrification; all sorts of prostitution, murder and mayhem happened here.

Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, and the College has a portrait of him wearing them. All very appropriate, as the other house on Craven Street I looked at was Franklin’s London home, 36 Craven Street.


This one hasn’t been modernized and feels wonderfully old and spooky – far better for ghosts than 41-42. The house is now the Benjamin Franklin museum. Very excitingly, they discovered human bones buried in the yard – Franklin’s landlady’s son-in-law ran an anatomical school and presumably he must have buried the remains. Obtaining the bodies for dissection was a bit of a grey area in those days, so possibly crimes were being committed.

Hadrian at the British Museum

Many years ago, in York, I bought a silver denarius (or sestertius, can’t remember which) featuring the visage of this august Roman emperor. My plan was to buy two and turn them into cufflinks. But the second has not been bought (finances; worries about desecrating heritage) and the coin lurks to this day in my cuff-link box.

Hadrian made a bit of an impact on Britain, with his wall, of course. But he seems to have been very fond of building projects all over the empire, and with the Pantheon in Rome achieved a whole new category of architecture.


The British Museum’s exhibition brings together wonderful sculptures of Hadrian from across the empire (making our bronze head dredged out of the Thames look of decidedly provincial manufacture). The most exciting of these is also the most recent – fragments of a giant sculpture recently discovered in Turkey in Sagalassos and now standing at the entrance to the exhibition.



There are also fantastic architectural models of the Pantheon and Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli – as big as a small town. The Tivoli model was made in the 1930s and lacks the recent discovery of a massive shrine to Antinous, erected prominently next to the villa’s main entrance (and where a highly eroticized massive marble Antinous in the guise of the Egyptian god Osiris was discovered back in the 18th century). Hadrian famously had his boyfriend declared a god – clearly, this is archeological proof. One wonders what Hadrian’s wife must have made of it. Also, why did the shrine remain ‘undiscovered’ for so long, when the pretty amazing sculpture had been found there hundreds of years before? Clearly, classical scholars felt more comfortable not unearthing evidence of Hadrian’s passion. I’m sensing homophobia at work.

The exhibition interestingly had a section on ancient Roman amphorae (Hadrian’s family was big in olive oil). The Romans were pretty organized – each amphora had information enough about weight, origin, packaging etc to satisfy the modern Brussels bureaucrat.

The most emotive section was one containing personal belongings of Jewish rebels found in the cave they hid from [genocidal] Roman troops.

I’m not sure about the reading Room as a temporary exhibition space. The circular ground plan fragments into awkward spaces and bottlenecks occur everywhere. The dramatic lighting plan casts your fellow visitors’ shadows onto the information labels, making progress really difficult. On the plus side, Panozzi’s wonderful dome pays appropriate homage to Hadrian’s prototype, its ancestor, in this interesting and worthwhile exhibition.

Hadrian Empire and Conflict
British Museum
until 26th October 2008

Gehry in London

Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine pavilion is a masterful answer to his recent archi-critics, who can’t stand his popularity and have accused him of being a ‘one-trick pony’.

The pavilion is wildly different to Gehry’s recent buildings – not a curve or titanium tile in sight.

It is still wildly modernist, yet pleasingly references history (Gehry said on tv he was intrigued by the Roman invasion of England; hence the catapult-like form) and pays flattering homage to the Serpentine Gallery. Looked at frontally, the pavilion forms a delicious, wildly eccentric frame for the classicizing older building.

Some of the initial drawings show the shattered roof line was going to made up of curved panels – the built version has flat panels; by far the better aesthetic option.

It is also the first pavilion to have a lift!


Great stuff. A really wonderful addition to London summer ’08.

oily adventures

Tate Modern opened its oil tanks to Tate members this weekend – yippee! Power Stations are a bit of a thing with me, ever since my work placement as a student at the HQ of a power company in South Africa. Bless her, my boss didn’t have a clue what to do with an art history student, so she sent me out on field visits to the power stations, leaving me with very fond memories of the “dark Satanic mills” kind. Actually, they are very exciting, even sublime places – the furnaces, the turbines, the cooling towers, etc etc etc.

My field of expertise is coal-fired stations, so seeing the remaining innards of an oil-fired station intrigued me. Also, I missed the tours of Bankside before the deplanting, which I have always regretted.

Anyway, I have to say the oil tanks were a slight disappointment. I’m not a driver, so I don’t really have a feel for how fast oil is burnt in a combustion engine. I was anticipating the tanks for a power station to be absolutely vast (at least 5 stories high) – so although these are big, they definitely are smaller than I was thinking.

The Tate was planning to convert the spaces into auditoria, but artists who saw them persuaded the authorities to leave them as ‘found spaces’ for artists to play in. So think circular versions of the turbine hall, not as high.

All very exciting, and the Tate is apparently going to announce Herzog and de Meuron’s developed plans for the new Tate Modern extension this week. It is planned for completion in time for the 2012 London Olympics. Yay!

P.S – I know I’m being retrogressive in insisting on ‘The’ Tate, but I really hate the branding company’s arrogance in attempting to annihilate the definite article. It’s an act of foreclosure on the English Language, no less, and imperial overstretch by ‘Tate’. Nicholas Serota will have to threaten to discontinue my membership before I submit to the ugliness of the naked Tate.

V&A update

Yesterday I popped into the V&A’s Blood on Paper exhibition again – it ends this weekend. It’s quite terrific, on a subject I would have thought potentially could be quite dull:

“This exhibition examines what happens when major artists of today and the recent past consider the meaning of books.

Books do more than transmit texts and images. They proclaim authority, permanence or ‘culture’. They give out messages as we approach them, and as we open or hold them. Their physical presence alone has the power to stimulate memories, to reveal a particular universe of thought or to provoke a dialogue.”

The exhibition is a work of art in itself – lighting, projection, space and wall colour are used to amazing effect but never overwhelming the artworks on display, which are clearly and informatively laid out. Most are traditional artist’s limited edition books, but the likes of Anselm Kiefer, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst have created quite monumental, sculptural presences, and the Estate of Francis Bacon has produced a limited-edition facsimile of a suitcase containing items from the deceased artist’s studio. It’s a completely absorbing, fascinating show and well worth catching.


Also beautifully designed and mounted, China Design Now gives a handy introduction to the design work emanating from the rapidly developing new China. The confidence and aesthetic daring of China’s patrons are well attested by the spectacular architectural commissions in Beijing for the up-coming Olympics; however a quiet little building “Father’s House” by Ma Quinyun was quite outstanding in its happy assimilation of traditional and international modernist styles and its use of local river-washed pebbles.

Graphically, I enjoyed Lam Hung’s “Peace of Mind” poster which portrayed the Chinese ‘xin’ character in pop-art dots which only coalesced at a certain viewing distance from the poster. I would have loved to buy a copy in the shop; however they didn’t have any.

They did have t-shirts marked down to £10 – however, at the till I was told the shirt I had chosen wasn’t marked down, even though the sign was on top of it. Very naughty of the V&A to pull this hoariest of old retail tricks.

weekend

Back from a weekend in the country – hiked in the rain with Lesley over a Civil War battlefield, and met a funny man whose facial hair growth was suspiciously 17th-century: methinks he’s a cavalier in the reconstructed Royalist army.

Liz flew back to Cape Town last night from Terminal Five and ‘phoned in a glowing report – it’s absolutely gorgeous, and she had no problems at all. Let’s hope her luggage arrives.

Clapham Junction

Commuting again through Clapham Junction brings home just how awful this station – the busiest in Britain and apparently Europe – actually is. It was constructed as a joint venture between competing train companies in 1863 and their conflicting requirements (and joint enthusiasm for cutting costs) must have informed the appalling design of the station – for something this busy, space for passenger orientation is simply inadequate.

Access to all 16 working platforms is through a leaky underpass barely 15 feet wide, with not a single lift or escalator anywhere. Imagine what it is like in rush hour, with people beginning their journeys to work or changing trains. Not to mention, Clapham Junction is a major hub for people making their way to Gatwick Airport.

So I’m pretty thrilled to hear that there are plans to upgrade this station – it’s desperately needed. Hopefully these will go ahead – however, a major plank of the funding is going to be two tower blocks of luxury flats built up over the station. One wonders how commercial these will turn out to be – would you like living over a station with a through-put of 119 trains per hour off-peak? That is, of course, if complaints from locals don’t scupper the development at the planning stage. Also, it has to be said, in this post sub-prime economic apocalypse, it would be a very brave developer who actually went ahead with this!

From the drawings released, the development doesn’t look architecturally distinguished – not anywhere near the standard of the Waterloo or St Pancras Eurostar terminals or the stations on the Jubilee Line extension. However, I suppose this is sarf London and we must be grateful for what we can get!

Hedgie's First Law of Croissants

The more difficult crumb-control, the better the pastry. So, if your black cashmere polo neck is festooned in golden crispy flakes, the pastry is very good indeed.

I am enjoying a quick pitstop in the V&A's new cafe, an ambitiously large space opened last November - fairly quietly, I think. I don't recall much press notice at the time.

This is possibly because the poor old V&A was the innocent victim of a grotesquely philistine ad campaign back in the benighted 80s – “An ace café with quite a nice museum attached”. Thatcherite values gazumped the Victorian ones that inspired the museum’s foundation, and suddenly it had to raise money – fast. Cafes and shops were the way forward. The museum is still trying to live this down.

But the truth is the café then was actually dire - a greasily pine-clad, unclean health-hazard situated beneath ground level. The corridor leading to it was dubbed ‘broccoli court’ by V&A staff in honour of the overwhelming smell of boiled brassica that thickly fogged the air.

The new café is a brilliant success. It has moved back to the three original Victorian café rooms – one of which was the first public commission of William Morris & Co. The whole cafe complex now forms the climax to a splendid axis through the centre of the museum: from entrance hall to shop to courtyard garden to café.

The Victorian café rooms are magnificently over the top but at the same time oddly and charmingly practical – Gamble designed his grandiose neo-baroque hall with ‘wipe clean’ tiles ceiling to floor.

For the refurb, the V&A has spread the café into the three galleries between the Victorian rooms and the courtyard – these have been renamed the garden rooms. The centre one serves the food; the two flanking rooms are cleanly minimalist (so restful after the Victorians): all slick lines, white stools and dove-grey banquettes. Gorgeous. The V&A commissioned McInnes Usher McKnight Architects for this project.

The coffee and pastries are excellent too (handled by Benugo), so for me the whole thing has definitely become a place to go in its own right, as well as being a stylish adjunct to a museum visit.

Serpentine Pavilion

My lack of a camera inhibited me from going to see the Serpentine’s 2007 Pavilion: I really like photographing the structures. This is one that is better in real life than in photos – strangely, photographs don’t really show how it fits together or works spatially. The Serpentine’s description is pretty good:

“The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007 is designed by the internationally acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson and the award-winning Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, of the architectural practice Snøhetta. This timberclad structure resembles a spinning top and brings a dramatic vertical dimension to the traditional single-level pavilion. A wide spiralling ramp makes two complete turns, allowing visitors to ascend from the Gallery lawn to the highest point for views across Kensington Gardens as well as a bird’s eye view of the chamber below.”

While very modern, the building seems to foster a ritualistic approach: the spiral is quite processional, and affords great views over Hyde Park as one slowly progresses to the top. Near the bottom, the walkway dramatically opens out into the internal space, which while large feels cosy and cave-like, with amphitheatre-style seating curving around an oval space and a large uneven conical dome opening up overhead with an oculus at the top lighting a balcony precipitously jutting out over the space. This balcomy is definitely calculated to bring out your inner shaman. The pavilion's colouring is uniformly a dark bronzy brown which adds to a sense of mystery.

Even though the building shows you where the processonal spiral terminates as you ascend, when you get there it is still a surprise – the disjuncture between walking gently up in open space in natural light and suddenly entering a dark, enclosed, high space artifically lit is quite pronounced. The balcony suddenly feels quite vulnerable and dangerous. One has an amazing view of the crowds seated in the amphitheatre. Some balcony visitors couldn’t resist giving fascist salutes – it is that type of space.

I worried this wasn’t going to be as spectacular as Olafur Eliasson’s last gig at Tate Modern; that it wouldn’t stand up to Rem Koolhaas’s astonishing 2006 Pavilion - but was completly swept away. Much recommended.

Save Battersea Power Station

It's sheer hell to be so cynical yet so correct.

"Battersea Power Station’s future remains in doubt as the fantastic hulk of the art-deco building itself remains in sorry dereliction.
Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the new owners of the £400m prime 36+ acre riverside site, Treasury Holdings, had scrapped development plans approved by Wandsworth Council in November last year and speculated whether London might be about to lose the four iconic chimneys altogether to yet another bland, luxury, residential development if the Power Station is allowed to further deteriorate beyond the realms of renovation." (Londonist)

Wandsworth Council and previous owners, Parkview, refused to even consider an alternative report by a team of three companies of concrete experts brought together by the World Monuments Fund & Twentieth Century Society, who have revealed that the chimneys can be repaired for half the cost of demolition and rebuilding.

The independent report also revealed there is no sign of structural distress in the chimneys. When Parkview bought the site thirteen years ago, they promised to restore it, but instead sat on it and did nothing, merely hanging onto it as property speculators. They pushed through planning permission to demolish the chimneys, full of promises to restore the building, but instead immediately flogged it for a £240m profit, since the value of the site had increased hugely as a result of planning permission to demolish the chimneys. Profit not renovation was evidently their aim.

UK voters can sign the government petition here.

The Guardian article can be read here.

Tower Bridge

London without Tower Bridge would be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower or New York without the Chrysler Building. They all transcend considerations of architectural taste or value to become symbols: totems drawing the tourists inexorably - for once you have seen them, been there, taken the photo and got the t-shirt, you can truly say you have visited the great city; inbibed its essence.

Tower Bridge is great because it's so naff. That Gothic revivalism - surely even in its time it was meant with a sense of fun?

It's a sympathetic partner for its neighbour, the Tower of London, but also references the most spectacular Gothic bridge of all - the medieval London Bridge, destroyed in the Georgian Enlightenment, and a ghost which still haunts this stretch of the river. Not for nothing is Tower Bridge still frequently mistaken for "London" Bridge.



But the cod-medievalism doesn't just cloak the robust Victorian engineering. Form does follow function - in an allusive sense. For what are those massive bascules if not oversized, paired drawbidges? Seeing them raised is a perfectly satisfying visual joke, and far more entertaining than a strictly functionalist version of the bridge would have allowed.

Opened in 1894, Tower Bridge is a good 11 years younger than Brooklyn Bridge in New York, another bridge with Gothic detailing allied with stupendous engineering achievement.



Tower Bridge Official website
Bridge lifting/opening dates and times

A Happy Ending for Battersea?

Parkview International deserves thanks for opening Battersea Power Station to the public (for the first time ever).

It is currently hosting the “China Power Station: Part 1”(until 5 November).

Go see it at all costs. It may be a last chance.

The artworks are completely overshadowed by the grandeur and pathos of the building itself. A vast and austere Art Deco concoction, it is clearly in very bad shape indeed, far far worse than one would anticipate from the usual long-distance views. Being inside is like being inside some fabulous wreck (the Titanic springs to mind): rusting riveted girders dimly emerge through the dripping gloom; imaginations can run riot on the crackled antique paint textures and ancient, cryptic signs in ancient fonts. This whole place is on the cusp of history: an anachronistic, discredited technology housed in a huge, stricken and seemingly hopeless brick and steel temple. Can one imagine Angkor Wat being redeveloped for contemporary use? Pompeii?


The very beauty of the building, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1929, was inspired by public concern the new station would be an eyesore. Now that its function is lost, the beauty remains as a poison chalice. So seductive and demanding, yet it has already finished one developer. And now Parkview International is drinking – or appears to be drinking – deep.

Battersea Power Station is as important to London as the Chrysler Building or Brooklyn Bridge is to New York, the Colisseum to Rome or the Eiffel tower to Paris. And yet Battersea is more vulnerable than all of these, as apart from vacant urban symbolism its fabric is compromised and it has yet to find a new reason to be.

It is shocking indeed that given this vulnerability, Wandsworth Council and English Heritage have foolishly, rashly given Parkview permission to demolish and rebuild the four chimneys, despite an engineering report saying they are repairable. Parkview is headquartered in Hong Kong and registered in the British Virgin Islands – pretty much impossible legally to make them rebuild four useless chimneys if they decide they can’t afford it. And without the chimneys the station is one step closer to total demolition. The empty site would be worth many, many, many millions.



Go see it before 5th November.

For more, check out the Wikipedia article.