Rowan Moore
This June, the architects Rogers Stirk Harbour were unceremoniously sacked from a job designing a multi-billion pound housing project on the site of the former Chelsea Barracks. The reasons were not fully explained, and there may have been more than one, but the most obvious was that Prince Charles had written privately to the site’s owners, the Qatari Royal Family, urging them to reject the Rogers design.
That Prince Charles acted shamefully should not be in doubt. He showed arrogance and contempt for others, and abused the prestige of his inherited position. Having intervened decisively in a public arena, he then refused all offers to debate or discuss his action. He showed little understanding of the issues in which he intervened. He was devious and disingenuous.
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Mary Fitzgerald
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
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Alasdair Palmer
Italy is famously the home of great food, glorious art—and lousy politics. I experienced all three a few weeks ago, as some Italian friends took me to see Monticchiello and Porano, two lovely medieval towns, one near Pienza in southern Tuscany, the other just a few minutes’ drive from Orvieto, in Umbria. The fragile beauty of both is now threatened with destruction by speculative building which the relevant political powers have endorsed.
Tuscany and Umbria have so far managed to preserve their beautiful medieval hilltop towns from the kind of disfiguring modern construction which has wrecked most places in Italy south of Rome. New building developments have been rare, and have usually been discreetly hidden: towns such as Arezzo, Siena and Orvieto all have their share of hideous new developments, but they have not damaged the old centres or the wonderful views.
That policy is now about to change. Local councils in Tuscany and Umbria have agreed to a rash of very visible schemes. A housing estate has just gone up outside the walls of Monticchiello. It wrecks one of the most glorious vistas in Tuscany. Initiative Toscane, the company responsible for it, claims the estate will provide much-needed housing for locals, but the prices guarantee that it won’t: the only people who will be able to afford to buy apartments will be rich people from outside the area. Comitati Toscani per la difesa del Territorio, a group formed to try to protect Tuscany’s heritage, has compiled a map of new developments in Tuscany—and there are hundreds of sites under threat from speculative building of the ugliest kind.
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Clementine Cecil
The foyer of Turandot restaurant is full of devchonki—Russian girls in tiny skirts, hair tumbling down their backs, leaning on the arms of powerful men. It is cold outside, but from the restaurant comes a warm smell of oriental spices and the soft thrum of a harp being played by a girl in a teetering white 18th-century style wig. This is Moscow’s latest fashionable restaurant, and the delight of Russia’s ruling classes. My companions and I are placed near the entrance, and seconds after we sit down, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, strolls in with his wife Yelena Baturina, a property tycoon and Russia’s first post-Soviet female billionaire. They are soon joined by several big businessmen and members of the presidential administration. I begin to feel as if I am at Satan’s ball in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
Our waiter bobs over in his white wig. “I saw you looking at the décor,” he oozes. “I just wanted to tell you it’s all genuine.” It is a brazen lie, for besides a few genuine oil paintings on the walls, it is nearly all imitation. Turandot came into existence following one of the most high-profile demolitions in Moscow in recent years. The site, on Tverskoi boulevard, was formerly occupied by a charming set of neoclassical buildings known as the Rimsky-Korsakov quarter, after a lover of Catherine the Great. The ensemble had been listed as a federal monument, but in 2002 the deputy culture minister, Natalya Dementyeva, declared that three of the six buildings on the site were to be removed from the list. Such a decision must be made at cabinet level, making Dementyeva’s action illegal. Nevertheless, soon only façades were left.
The building is one of many replicas that have recently replaced historic constructions in Moscow. In the last five years alone, more than 1,000 historic buildings and some 200 architectural monuments have been demolished. Luzhkov is overseeing a building boom in a city that has been transformed, in the space of 15 years, from a badly lit, dirty Soviet capital into a gleaming monument to the petrodollar. In an increasingly nationalist Russia, Luzhkov is praised for reclaiming Moscow’s history from the communists, but he is rewriting it in the process. These shiny sham re-creations of a glamorous Tsarist past are intended to blot out memories of the poverty of communism and coax us into forgetting the restless chaos of the 1990s. “Look,” they seem to say. “We are a noble nation back on track!”
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Deyan Sudjic
Dear Deyan
26th March 2005
Over the last four years, you and other architectural critics have been regularly announcing the death of the iconic building—that Eiffel Tower for which every declining city yearns. Like Nikolaus Pevsner, who often proclaimed the terminal illness of movements he didn’t like, your description of historical change carries some heavy baggage.
You described in the Observer (26th October 2003) the attention-seeking structures of Will Alsop, Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava, and ended with an ominous prediction: “Perhaps, like art nouveau which flourished briefly at the end of the 19th century, the icon has become ubiquitous just as it is about to vanish.” Then, a year later (8th August 2004), you announced that this had now happened. Alsop’s Fourth Grace for Liverpool was cancelled, as was Daniel Libeskind’s V&A spiral. “The icon is all over,” you wrote, “and the very word has become too embarrassing to use.”
I can see why the “end of the iconic age” has made headlines and don’t doubt the distaste for what you and many British critics call “exhibitionistic iconic design.” It has obvious faults. Among these are the self-cancelling gestures that not only upstage each other but also destroy urban coherence. Moreover, these structures are often absurdly expensive and maladroit one-liners, turning the Thames, as one angry architect has dubbed it, into “the Costa del Icon.” Two other crimes are that it makes architecture a transitory fashion, and architects into celebrity chefs, confectioners who have to whip up ever greater wedding cakes, as did those hacks of Franco and Lenin.
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Paul Barker
Not long after the second world war, ex-sergeant Eric Hobsbawm moved into a flat in an 18th-century house on the north side of Clapham common. “Outside,” he writes in his recent autobiography, “I recall seeing my new colleague at Birkbeck College, Nikolaus Pevsner, perambulating the area for his great Buildings of England like an examiner giving marks to the past.” The Leipzig-born Pevsner, with his newly acquired British citizenship, was working on a classic early volume in his planned Buildings of England series: London Except the City of London and Westminster. It was always known to Pevsner fans simply as London Except.
This book symbolised his love affair with his adopted country. Many people had written architectural, topographical or antiquarian guides to London. With a few picturesque exceptions, such as Hampstead, Richmond or Greenwich, these books had always focused on the usual sights of Westminster and the City. Eventually published in 1952, London Except made the full circuit of all the other boroughs within the old London County Council area: from St Pancras and Islington in the north to Lambeth and Lewisham in the south; from Hammersmith and Wandsworth in the west to Poplar and Woolwich in the east. It was in these places that most Londoners lived. These urban tracts had been built up by the Victorians. Within them lay—then largely unregarded—baroque wonders like Hawksmoor’s great east end churches, or the Georgian terraces of Barnsbury (which was known as Pentonville before the estate agents waded in).
This April, 53 years later, the final updating of Pevsner’s London Except is completed, the keystone in a new arch. The last part is London 5: East. The earlier revisions of Pevsner’s great work, London 2, 3 and 4, reported on, respectively, south, northwest and north London (volumes 1 and 6 cover the City and Westminster). The whole of the original London Except was less than 500 pages; London 5 alone extends to 864. The lead author of London 5, as of all the other London Except revisions, is Bridget Cherry. She began work on the national series in 1968, as Pevsner’s research assistant, and went on to become overall editor of The Buildings of England (now called the Pevsner Architectural Guides), retiring from that role three years ago. As series revisions have gone ahead, Pevsner continues to be listed as a co-author. This is more than posthumous piety: something of what he wrote is retained, though the revisions are often blander and always much bigger. The new London volumes now reach out to the wider boundaries of the Greater London Authority. But the revised volumes’ aggrandisement is largely due to the 50 years of research, amateur and professional, which Pevsner himself stimulated. He inspired thousands of conservation-minded groups and people, who had not realised what was there to conserve.
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Mark Irving
This November, the largest, grandest and richest modern art museum in the world reopens after a two and a half year closure to allow for an architectural expansion expected to cost up to $858m. The project to reshape the Museum of Modern Art, located between 54th and 53rd street in midtown Manhattan, is pharaonic in scale. At the hands of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, it has become twice its former size. The revamped museum offers 50 per cent more gallery space (125,000 sq ft), an enlarged sculpture garden, a new lobby and a set of column-free exhibition spaces specifically designed to accommodate displays of ever vaster works of contemporary art.
Moma (while there are other Museums of Modern Art, this museum has long taken sole ownership of the acronym) possesses the most significant collection of its kind internationally: more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, design objects, architectural models and drawings; 14,000 films and 4m film stills; more than 200,000 books and periodicals. Moma’s magnetic pull over the dreams of donors, curators, artists, dealers and visitors, even before this latest building bonanza, was unrivalled. For some, this alone is cause for suspicion: “Moma’s aura is in direct proportion to its efficiency of manipulation,” the architect Rem Koolhaas has said. For others, the verdict is less sinister: “Moma has long served as an American metonym of modern art, with the history of the one often charted in the other,” the historian Hal Foster has written. Either way, because of the stakes involved, whatever Moma does has repercussions for galleries everywhere else. More than just a museum, it has become the crucible in which the idea of the modern has been formed.
Seventy-five years ago, when Moma was established by a few enthusiastic philanthropists on the 12th floor of the Heckscher building at 730 Fifth Avenue, the idea that the new could be as exciting as the old was itself radical. In 1929, most museum directors believed that the past – a place filled with gilded echoes of long-dead Mediterranean civilisations – was more important and beautiful than the present. Modernity itself was in its infancy. Van Alen’s Chrysler building, that hypodermic shot into the future, was begun the previous year; the Empire State building was still just a dream; neon was tracing out the New York skyline for the first time.
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Deyan Sudjic
It is still an open question whose judgement will be heard first on the new Scottish parliament building. The Queen, it can safely be assumed, will be politely enthusiastic in October when she opens the new building on its astonishingly beautiful parkland site under the sheer rock walls of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh; Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, it can equally safely be assumed, will not be. Fraser, the thick-set former Scottish lord advocate with the jowly demeanour of a gangland enforcer, says it will take as long as it takes for him to finish his report after a year-long public inquiry into what he describes with studied but unconvincing impartiality as its “apparent” cost overrun.
How, in any case, do you begin to judge Scotland’s new parliament? On one level, as the scaffolding comes down and the cranes move on, it is emerging as one of the finest pieces of new architecture in Britain for 50 years. On another, and especially in the eyes of Scotland’s newspapers, it is a shocking case of the mismanagement of public money by the young Scottish government. A project first budgeted at £40m could now cost around £400m.
These are such incompatible perspectives that making sense of the project becomes especially difficult. How can you talk about the architecture without mentioning the money, and vice versa? Fraser promises to avoid any consideration of aesthetics in his report. And, perhaps because people have seen his taste in purple ties, nobody complains. But it isn’t possible to divorce what the parliament looks and feels like in use from what it has cost. It would be as pointless as writing a Michelin guide based on the cost of ingredients, leaving out whether the cooking is good.
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Robin Banerji
Book: The Alhambra
Author: Robert Irwin
Price: Profile, ?15.99
Early on in his investigation of the Alhambra, the greatest work of Islamic architecture in Europe, I was pleased to realise that Robert Irwin is not worried about being speciously relevant. Irwin pursues his own interests – Ibn Khaldun on the link between oranges and politics, the influence of irrational numbers on Islamic architecture, 19th-century orientalist painting – and in doing so, he undermines the pseudo-certainties of that epic we’ve heard too much about recently: the clash of civilisations. The responses to the death of Edward Said, and the flood of books on the Arab world, Islam, and al Qaeda have all seemed to reinforce the idea that orientalism, the western study of the Arab world and Islam, is fundamentally concerned with power. Journalists, scholars and the inhabitants of think tanks propagate the notion that the study of the history and languages of the Arab and Muslim peoples will help the west in a fight against radical Islam. This orientalism as Kremlinology is not limited to books published in the last couple of years.
There is, however, an alternative to orientalism as power: histories of the Arab world or the middle east designed to be read for pleasure. Robert Irwin is a historian of the medieval Arab world and of Islamic art; he also writes novels. He’s an orientalist but of a different kind to that of his teacher Bernard Lewis. At the beginning of The Arabian Nightmare, Irwin’s slightly silly but hugely enjoyable pulp thriller set in medieval Cairo, we’re told that his story is for reading in bed, as a stimulant for dreams. And even in his more ambitious non-fiction, Irwin always has a sense of humour about what he is doing, and always writes as if reading should be enjoyable, a stimulant to the imagination. In his history of The Middle East in the Middle Ages: the Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250-1382 Irwin wrote, "it is tempting to… argue that the mamluk institution was a response to Islam’s failure to legitimate other, more satisfactory, ways of distributing political and military power." But he is not really tempted by the seeming clarity of this single timeless cause. He points out that the history of the Islamic lands from the 800s to the 1800s cannot be so easily tidied up: like other places at other times, politics, economics, geography and climate have all shaped events. In any case, his heart is elsewhere. In Night and Horses and the Desert: an Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, Irwin writes, "I am not indifferent to easy pleasure in literature, so sex and comedy do find their place in this anthology. However, I am more interested in giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness."
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Deyan Sudjic
Yung Ho Chang’s studio in Beijing looks just like any other aspiring architect’s office. The walls are white, the floor is bare concrete, and there are rows of twentysomethings sitting hunched over their computers. There are cardboard models everywhere and an avalanche of magazines in the corner. But as the California-educated Yung Ho points out, Beijing isn’t like anywhere else.
Cruise round Beijing’s first ring road and you pass the chrome-trimmed glass of the Grand Hyatt hotel, its forecourt fluttering with red flags – a vision of Canary Wharf after the revolution. You pass high- rise banks topped with pagoda roofs and gold balls; and you pass rows of olive army tents, pitched along the pavements as temporary homes for construction workers. Building sites spill out of every gash in the city’s old grey walls. You drive and drive and see no end to the cranes and the clusters of new apartment buildings interspersed with fields of bricks – the remains of demolished suburbs. At street level, the most ubiquitous new building type is the marketing suite; stainless steel boxes and glass blobs, decked with balloons to tempt in customers, who are sold a concept that only reached China in 1999: the residential mortgage. People are being offered the chance to buy apartments “off plan,” in a gamble that they will double in price before the builders have finished.
Yung Ho works on what are, by Beijing standards, tiny projects. He has done a house, a couple of galleries, a bookshop, some offices for a publishing company. In a city in which the basic unit of architectural scale has become the skyscraper, erected a dozen at a time, Yung Ho’s buildings are so small that they threaten to disappear from view. Yet he struggles to make architecture that offers some respite from the relentless pace of change; to maintain some of Beijing’s urban character before it vanishes. He doesn’t say so, but you feel an overwhelming sense of his powerlessness in the face of the turmoil all around him.
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