Category: Architecture

London bridge is falling down

It was the Kevlar-coated vanity project that could survive missiles of common sense fired from every direction. But the Garden Bridge’s aura of invincibility looks as if it might finally be wearing off.

UK transport secretary Chris Grayling is to decide this week whether to extend the £15m central government guarantee for the £175m project, currently due to expire in September, and he is understood to be considering every option. With capital spending coming under increasing scrutiny since the EU referendum, murmurs from Whitehall suggest that former mayor of London Boris Johnson is now the “lone voice” in the cabinet in support of the project.

His mayoral successor, Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, is clearly keen to find an expedient way out. A reluctant supporter of the bridge, based on the odd logic that it would cost more to cancel it, Khan suspended preparatory construction work in early July over fears that it would require more public money.

Before construction has even begun, the Garden Bridge Trust has somehow burned through more than half of the £60m of public funds earmarked for the project, and it still has a funding gap of roughly £32m. There’s little confidence that the bridge boosters have any idea how to fill this gap, let alone how to generate the income needed to cover the estimated £3m annual operating costs.

An independent report on the project’s business plan, published by Dan Anderson of the tourism consultancy Fourth Street, concluded it would have been “unlikely to pass muster for even a small grant from one of the traditional Lottery funds”. It was so flawed, Anderson told the Guardian, he believed the trust was going forward on the assumption that the taxpayer would bail it out if necessary.

Such is the unease surrounding how this costly “tiara” for the Thames got so far, it is now subject to four official inquiries. The National Audit Office has launched an investigation into the £30m given by the Department for Transport, Transport for London has appointed Ernst & Young to carry out an audit of its £30m, Sadiq Khan is scrutinising the procurement process and the Charity Commission has opened an “operational compliance” case into how on earth the trust is managing to spend all the money so quickly.

Whether the saga will grind on, or the £37m be written off in a puff of green-tinged smoke, the Garden Bridge will stand as the disastrous epitaph of an Ozymandian mayor who left the capital strewn with the wreckage of his own self-promotion, a city littered with forlorn relics of his botched backroom deals.

The empty dangleway

The first in a grand series of Boris Johnson’s novelty infrastructure projects that didn’t quite go according to plan, the Thames cable car was to be a “stunning addition to London’s transport network” – a vital link that would also be a thrilling attraction, with its £25m price tag paid for entirely by private sponsorship. Costs ballooned to £60m, £24m of which was picked up by the taxpayer, while the sponsor, Emirates airline, had its name tattooed on the tube map in perpetuity. Only after the dangleway was erected, and its Jestsons’-style cabins were slung across the river in the manner of a 1960s Expo park, did anyone realise there wasn’t actually much demand to travel between the Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks. Just two years after it opened, it didn’t have a single regular user.

The sauna on wheels

As temperatures soared to 33.5C (92F) in parts of the UK last week, the true horror of Thomas Heatherwick’s mobile sweatbox was revealed, forcing customers to flee for fear of suffocating. The project that most encapsulates Johnson’s mayoralty, the New Routemaster was to represent a triumphant return to the glory days of London transport with a nostalgic design that would bring back conductors and a “hop on, hop off” back door, as well as be more fuel efficient – with all costs “borne by the industry”. In reality, Transport for London (TfL) footed the £11m development bill, while the finished bus cost twice as much as a regular double-decker. They lack openable windows, suffer from dodgy air conditioning, and have proved just as polluting as the old buses, while the promised second conductor was too expensive to implement, so the back door remains mostly closed.

Branded biking

Although the cycle hire scheme was the plan of his predecessor Ken Livingstone, “Boris bikes” proved to have a better ring to it than “Ken’s cycles”. Once again, the project was intended to be rolled out “at no cost to the taxpayer”: in return for mountains of cash, Barclays bank would be allowed to transform London’s streets into an endless blue billboard with its branded “cycle superhighways”. In fact, the sponsorship deal, now handed over to Santander, covers a fraction of the running costs, leaving TfL with an £11m annual bill (the equivalent scheme in Paris makes £12m a year for the city).

The colossus of Stratford

Fearing that a “flat-pack” stadium set in the post-industrial wilds of the East End might not have quite the glamour needed for the global televised spectacle of the Olympic Games, Johnson hatched a plan. “We decided we needed something extra,” he said. “Something to arouse the curiosity and wonder of Londoners and visitors.”

The result, allegedly spawned from a chance meeting in the cloakrooms at Davos, was the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a knotted tangle of steel by Anish Kapoor that looms above the park as a monument to metal magnate Lakshmi Mittal, then the country’s richest man. Following the recurring theme, this privately sponsored “gift” has cost Londoners £10,000 a week to maintain. It was recently adorned with a £3m slide in the hope of recouping costs, finally giving this grotesque white elephant a function of sorts.

A compromised Olympic-scape

A glory hard-won by his predecessor, Johnson nonetheless basked in the success of the 2012 Games, declaring himself chair of the London Legacy Development Corporation and taking credit for the miraculous regeneration of the entire Lower Lea Valley. Yet, under Johnson, the promised legacy plan took on a very different character. The pledge of 10,000 new homes mysteriously dwindled to 6,000 in the park. The athletes’ village, built at a cost of £1.1bn, was sold for about half that price to Qatar. The promise of 50% affordable homes, with sites set aside for community-led housing projects, also evaporated: plots have instead been sold to the usual volume house builders, with affordable levels reaching a maximum of 30%.

A plague of tacky towers

Drab, featureless and phallocratic is how Johnson described the rash of 27 tall buildings that Ken Livingstone had waved through, a pox that was fast threatening to turn London into “Dubai-on-Thames”. His solution? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. At the end of his tenure, there are a further 436 towers in the pipeline, scattered indiscriminately from Bermondsey to Battersea and beyond. Slammed by former City planning chief and tower cheerleader Peter Rees as “piles of safe-deposit boxes”, they are of an architectural quality that plumbs the depths of even the most venal speculative developers’ pattern books. One silver lining of the Brexit doom-cloud: many of them may now be halted.

Unaffordable housing

Johnson boasts that he built more affordable homes in his two terms than Livingstone ever managed – a statistic that conveniently ignores that the definition of “affordable” was utterly transformed during his tenure. Previously linked to local incomes, it now means anything up to 80% of market rate – by no means affordable to the majority of Londoners. Westminster council warned Johnson the new policy would require council tenants in a three-bedroom home in the borough to have an annual income of £109,000, while noting half its social rented households receive an income of less than £12,000 a year. Johnson also abandoned Livingstone’s 50% affordable target, allowing developers to hide behind their confidential viability assessments to justify levels as low as 10%.

Abuse of the planning system

The mayor has the power to “call in” major schemes deemed to be of “strategic importance” to London and overturn decisions made by the local planning authority. Of the 14 schemes Johnson called in, 13 were decided in favour of the developer, betraying a hunger to bolster his figures no matter what the cost to the local area. Almost two-thirds of developments breached the mayor’s own density guidelines. From Convoys Wharf to Mount Pleasant, Johnson ended up using his powers to actively prevent councils from providing low-rented housing where there was urgent local need for it, while setting a dangerous precedent for bypassing the democratic planning process. The result: a city where developers call the tune.

Alongside the trusty Billy bookcase and the Dombås wardrobe, Ikea could soon see the Yeezy bedside table, after Kanye West declared his desire to collaborate with the Swedish furniture giant in no uncertain terms.

“Yo Ikea, allow Kanye to create,” he said in an interview on BBC Radio 1 on Monday. “I have to work with Ikea – make furniture for interior design, for architecture.”

The announcement follows West’s visit to the Ikea headquarters in March, when he tweeted that he was “super inspired”, and that his mind was “racing with the possibilities”, after a behind the scenes peek into the glamorous world of plywood and allen keys.

But those hoping to get their hands on a range of pimped-up flat-packs will be sorely disappointed: West described his vision as “a minimalist apartment inside of a college dorm”.

A glimpse of what the budding hip-hop furniture designer’s range might look like can be gleaned from Twitter, where West has already posted his sketchy scheme for a bed for the master bedroom at his and Kim Kardashian’s $20m Hidden Hills mansion.

It is less MTV Cribs than, well, Ikea. In fact it bears more than a passing resemblance to the company’s spartan Malm range, yours from £165 ($220).

The millionaire rapper is no stranger to design collaborations, having already put his name to trainers for Nike and Adidas, and launched his own Yeezy label. “I’m going to be the first hip-hop designer,” he declared, “and because of that I’mma be bigger than Walmart.”

Clearly sincere in his ambition to conquer the design world, he even dropped by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to share his passion with the students. “I really do believe that the world can be saved through design,” he told the assembled crowd, “and everything needs to actually be ‘architected’.”

West’s outing into the world of interior decor follows a rich and hapless tradition of celebrities turning their hands to home furnishings, a sector which appears to be the last resort when the sportswear and perfume deals have all fallen through.

Who could forget Justin Timberlake’s folksy homeware range, Home Mint, launched in 2012 and discontinued shortly thereafter, which came complete with daily online design tips? “Lend timeless elegance to any bedroom with French crochet,” he suggested. Nor was he afraid of tackling the controversial topics head on: “Red walls: love them or not for me?”

“I like very clean, almost modern architecture, and the obstacle with something like that is making it extremely warm, because it doesn’t naturally lend itself to that,” Timberlake told Elle Decor. “With everything we do together, we try to get the juxtaposition right. To make pieces and rooms that are multifaceted, that blend different genres of architecture and design.”

West could also learn a thing or two from Cindy Crawford, who has long presided over a vast range of sofas and bedroom sets for furniture megastore Rooms to Go. An accomplished domestic goddess, she has managed to turn her hand to everything from faux-antique timber-panelled four poster beds to wipe-clean beige sofas that would add a touch of functional style to any old people’s home.

Or perhaps he’ll go the full Brad Pitt and develop a learned interest in architecture and design, cultivating friends such as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, and applying his talents to the design of disaster relief housing. Pitt’s so into design he even went on a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house for his birthday.

“I found Wright in college, when looking for a lazy two-point credit to get out of French,” he told Architectural Digest. “It forever changed my life.”

You might wish French had captured his imagination a little more. Beyond his collaborations with Frank Gehry, Pitt has also penned his own furniture range with designer Frank Pollaro, which looks like he’s taken every one of his eclectic influences – “from Arts and Crafts to Bauhaus and Tiffany lamps” – and pulverized them in a blender. Anyone for a white patent leather sofa, or a spiralling gold-plated coffee table?

So what about Kanye’s guiding aesthetic influences, and the key design touchstones that will define his collection?

“My No 1 design rule of anything I do,” he tweeted, “is that Kim has to like it.”

The collapsed sailing ramp has been hauled out of the water, a Russian diplomat has heroically killed a carjacker (or maybe not), and 450,000 condoms await action in the leaky athletes village. Beset by construction problems and delays and with preparations decreed the “worst ever” by the International Olympic Committee, how is the architecture and design of the XXXI Olympiad shaping up so far?

The park

Masterplanned by Aecom, the go-to architecture conglomerate for global mega-events, the Barra Olympic park is the primary campus for the games, and is home to nine major arenas – from the velodrome and the aquatics stadium, to handball, basketball, wrestling and taekwondo venues. Covering a 120 hectare (297 acre) triangle in the high-end district of Barra da Tijuca southwest of Rio, on the former site of a racetrack, the venues are arranged either side of a snaking, stripy pathway inspired by the wavy paving along Copacabana beach.

The buildings are as cheap and not-so-cheerful as you would expect for this shoestring games, mostly designed to be dismantled after the Olympics to make way for luxury residential development – just as a favela community of 600 families on the site was swept away to make space for the games. Those hoping for a refreshing dip in the neighbouring lagoon, meanwhile, can think again: it has been declared too polluted to swim in.

The handball arena

The good-news architecture story of the games, the handball arena has been designed to be dismantled and transformed into a series of schools once the events are over. Created by local studio Lopes, Santos & Ferreira Gomes, with UK firm AndArchitects, sections of the 12,000-seat building will be used to form the basic structural elements for four state schools, each accommodating about 500 pupils.

From the slatted wooden cladding to the concrete circulation cores and the steel frame, all will make their way into the new structures. A similar plan in London 2012 never quite happened. The inflatable pillows from the Coca-Cola Beatbox pavilion were intended to be recycled into a canopy for a local school, but the cost of dismantling the structure intact proved prohibitive, so the whole thing was scrapped.

The accommodation

The flats have been designed “at a level that only kings have previously had”, according to developer Carlos Carvalho, the 92-year-old property tycoon behind the 31 tower blocks of the athletes’ village. He must have been referring to those hard-up kings who lived in rundown palaces with flooded floors, broken elevators, mouldy walls and holes in the ceiling, judging by the conditions that teams of athletes have been greeted with in the past few weeks.

The near billion-dollar project, known as Ilha Pura, has been built by Carvalho Hosken and Brazil’s biggest construction firm, Odebrecht, who planned to recoup their investment by selling the luxury flats for 1.5m reais (£361,000) each. The property market has since plunged by 20% and just 240 of the 3,604 apartments have been sold. Meanwhile, as the teams moved in, more than half the buildings had yet to pass the safety tests.

The mascots

Those moving into the crumbling, leaky accommodation blocks might at least be cheered by the presence of the beaming yellow cat-cum-monkey, whose constant grin is guaranteed to wipe away those mouldy apartment blues. Developed by Birdo, a São Paulo-based animation company, the official Rio mascot apparently “possesses the agility of a cat, the balancing skills of a monkey and the grace of a bird”.

Named Vinicius in honour of Brazilian poet and lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, who penned The Girl from Ipanema, this hybrid Pokémon creature was “born out of the explosion of joy that followed the announcement that Rio would host the Olympic Games”. He is never far from Tom, his trusty shrub-headed friend, with whom he shares a treehouse in the Tijuca forest, from where they can see the whole city and marvel at the tidal wave of public money being pumped into private real-estate speculation.

The torch

“Inspired by the warmth of the Brazilian people,” the Rio torch features movable segments, allowing it to expand when you run your hands up and down its sculpted shaft. Oo-er. As it grows, each segment opens to reveal a coloured resin section beneath, in shades of blue and green designed to represent the sea, mountains and sky, while the roaring flame stands for the sun – a palette that’s conveniently the same as the Brazilian flag. The wavy contours, meanwhile, were derived from the sinuous strokes of the Rio 2016 brand identity, itself inspired by Brazil’s curvy assets: mountains, waves and bodies on the beach.

The outfits

The two-week fashion parade kicks into action once again, with Giorgio Armani behind the look of the Italian team, Ralph Lauren dressing Team USA, and Sweden clothed in cheap and cheerful H&M, while Team GB are dressed by Stella McCartney – who has surpassed herself once again by crafting the tiniest trunks in the world for Tom Daley. Confirming that the 90s are well and truly back, her outfits favour bold graphic prints that employ a redrawn British coat of arms. Three lions hold flaming Olympic batons, while the national flowers of leek, rose, flax and thistle appear in the centre shield and a crown composed of medals sits up top, “symbolising continuity, teamwork and shared responsibility”.

The collection has been hailed by Vogue as sporting a “‘renaissance varsity’ edge that wouldn’t have looked amiss on a Gucci catwalk”. And you can dress up like your idols, too, because it’s all for sale: Jessica Ennis’s pants can be yours for £25.

The cauldron

It’s the one award no architect wants to win, the trophy that won’t be taking pride of place on the mantelpiece. While buildings are daily showered with prizes for the best use of bricks and wood, for finely poured concrete and the most elegant windows, the accolade that haunts them all is rearing its ugly head once again.

Holding up a dark mirror to the Stirling prize, the Carbuncle Cup singles out the worst offenders of the year, the abominations that blight our skylines and bully our streets, the mean-minded developer tat that clutters cities up and down the country. From botched renovations to bloated towers, it awards the most heinous “crimes against architecture” – or crimes against the public.

Buildings are one of the few things you can’t escape. You don’t have to watch a bad play. You’re not forced to go and look at an ugly painting, or sit through a terrible piece of music. But architecture is here, there and everywhere, from the dingy station entrance you were made to shuffle through this morning to the low-ceilinged, deep-plan office you might be sitting in while you’re reading this.

In 2015, the hated gong was bestowed on one of the most visible eyesores around, a building that stands as both a diagram of greed and the whims of the City of London’s planning system. Swelling as it rises, London’s Walkie Talkie is the ultimate symbol of a city where developers call the shots.

But it’s everyday bodging that can be more damaging, from the prefab schools-disguised-as-sheds to the badly planned apartment blocks shooting up on urban peripheries and stacked hutches of fast-buck student flats. These buildings don’t grab the headlines, but they make all our lives immeasurably worse.

Once again, this year’s shortlist is a wretched crop. From psychedelic chequerboards to sci-fi hulks, feast your eyes on these magnificent monstrosities.

Saffron Square, Croydon, by Rolfe Judd

Marketed as “a dominant focal point for the new Croydon skyline”, this Berkeley Homes development is certainly hard to miss, standing as one of the first of new-look Croydon’s novelty lineup, only to be trumped by the forthcoming Odalisk. Clad with a pixelated bruise of bright purples and reds, it looks as if it has already suffered a vicious beating at the hands of disgruntled residents.

One Smithfield, Stoke on Trent, by RHWL Architects

Promised a “dynamic new city centre business and leisure destination designed for people and the modern occupier”, poor old Stoke ended up with a miserable box dressed in a cheap harlequin costume, a so-bad-it-might-almost-be-fashionable fusion of 80s classics Blockbusters and Connect 4. Or was it inspired by the pattern on the architect’s homepage?

The Diamond, University of Sheffield, by Twelve Architects

The diamond-cladding craze continues with this £81m undergraduate engineering facility for the University of Sheffield, built to house 20,000 sq m of laboratories, lecture theatres and workshops inside its garish latticework garb. In one of the most tenuous justifications in the history of planning applications, the designers claim the pattern “references the stone tracery of an adjacent church”.

Poole Methodist Church extension by Intelligent Design Centre

Another building allegedly inspired by its ecclesiastical neighbour, the extension to Poole’s Methodist church sadly looks more like a pile of site Portakabins they forgot to remove. Its designers, the optimistically-named Intelligent Design Centre, might do well to think about a rebrand.

5 Broadgate, City of London, by Make Architects

Rearing above the braying bankers’ den of Broadgate Circle like a silvery mothership from Tron, this gargantuan grey shed is the work of Ken “the Pen” Shuttleworth, designer of the Gherkin while at Foster’s, whose catalogue of carbuncles since leaving Norman’s side suggests the magic pen may well have belonged to someone else. A mute groundscraper slashed with gun-emplacement windows, you can’t help feeling 5 Broadgate is what the City deserves.

Lincoln Plaza, Isle of Dogs, by BUJ Architects

Perhaps the most representative building on the list of the kind of lumpen, crazy-paving-clad dross that accounts for much modern residential development, Lincoln Plaza is Galliard Homes’ latest gift to the Isle of Dogs, proving that it’s not just banks that know how to desecrate the skyline. With jutting cantilevers, random voids and a frenzy of bolt-on balconies, it is yet more proof that busy isn’t always best.