Former ArchDaily's Managing Editor. BA in Architecture from Newcastle University, and interested in how overlooked elements of architectural culture —from the media to competitions to procurement processes can alter the designs we end up with.
In response to the UK Airports Commission's call for evidence, Foster + Partners has released a detailed feasibility study supporting their plans for a new airport on the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary. Their plan proposes a four-runway airport built on a 35 square kilometre platform constructed partially in the mouth of the Thames. The scheme is popularly called "Boris Island" thanks to its most prominent supporter, Mayor of London Boris Johnson.
Norman Foster said "Since the Airports Commission submission a year ago, the need for increased airport capacity has become even more urgent. It is time to get serious about the issue of airport capacity. Britain needs an effective long-term solution, not the usual short-term fix that is Heathrow’s proposed third runway. London today needs to follow in the footsteps of its nineteenth-century forebears and invest boldly in infrastructure. Only long-term thinking will properly serve the demands of our future generations."
Read on for a breakdown of the information contained in the report
Mecanoo has been selected to design the new Engineering campus at the University of Manchester. At a value of £200 million, the project will be the largest ever completed by the Dutch Practice in the UK - slightly larger than the popular Library of Birmingham which they completed last year - and will involve both new build elements and a renovation of the University's Grade-II Listed Oddfellows Hall. The new technology building is part of a larger £1 billion overhaul which the university aims to complete by 2020. You can find out more details at the Architects' Journal.
Steven Holl's design for Maggie's Centre St Bart's. Image Courtesy of Steven Holl Architects
Michael Hopkins has added his thoughts to the row over Steven Holl's plans for the New Maggie's Centre at St Bart's Hospital in London, with a letter to London City Planners saying that the design is in the wrong place and would ruin the setting of the 18th Century Great Hall. Hopkins, whose rival scheme received planning permission last month, says that the construction of the Maggie's Centre represented a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to restore the great hall to its original design which was only met by his plans to build the Maggie's centre in a different part of the St Bart's site.
A plan to build 4,700 homes on the site of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport was blocked by voters this weekend. The airport, which was built in the 1920s and has a long history as a key site during World War Two and the Cold War, was closed in 2008 and there has since been a debate over what to with the vast site, including a 2011 competition to transform it into a park and other facilities, and an outlandish unofficial plan in 2009 to create a 1km high mountain on the site.
However perhaps the the most popular idea has also been the simplest: in 2010, the airport was opened to the public without any changes, and become an impromptu urban park popular with kite-flyers and roller-bladers who circle the site's runways.
Tokyo-based architect Edward Suzuki has launched another petition against Zaha Hadid's design for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, claiming it is "overwhelmingly large for the context" and "will desecrate the 'sacred grounds' of Meiji Shrine Outer Gardens". This is the second petition against the design and is intended to support the earlier petition by Toyo Ito and Fumihiko Maki by providing an equivalent targeted primarily at English speakers, aiming to "pressure our government not only from within but also from outside of our country." You can see the petition in full here.
In 1994, a routine construction technique that has been practiced in Hong Kong for over 100 years caught the attention of photographer Peter Steinhauer - and led him to put almost a decade of work into capturing this unique urban phenomenon. The bamboo scaffolding and fabric wrappings he photographs serve the simple purpose of catching construction debris, but at a glance they look more like works by Christo and Jeanne Claude, the artists that have made their name wrapping buildings like the Reichstag in Berlin.
The resulting photos showcase the colossal towers of Hong Kong wrapped in brightly-colored fabric; their usually varied facades are made monolithic, like a plastic massing model rendered full-size. Steinhauer named his photo series "Cocoons" due to the effect they create over time: the buildings metamorphose under cover and emerge transformed.
The results of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Future Trends Survey for April show that confidence among UK practices remains high at a Workload Index of +35, the same as in March. The positive figures came from across the board, with practices of all sizes and from all regions of the UK predicting increased workloads in the near future. However, after last months' survey showed Scotland as the region with the brightest outlook, the balance of power has shifted back to London, where architects reported the highest index of +45.
UPDATE: The Glasgow School of Art Media Centre reports "With the incident under control indications are the firefighters' efforts have ensured more than 90 per cent of the structure is viable and protected up to 70 per cent of the contents - including many students' work."
A serious fire has broken out at the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's 1909 masterpiece. The extent of the damage is unclear at the moment, but BBC News is reporting that the fire is believed to have started in the basement, and has spread to the upper floors, where it is breaking windows and smoke is billowing from the building. Images, reactions and updates from twitter after the break.
Foster + Partners has been named the UK's biggest architecture practice for the third year running in the annual AJ100 run by the Architects' Journal. The list of the top 100 architecture practices in the UK, based on the number of fully qualified architects employed, was announced at an awards ceremony last night in London.
In the past year Foster + Partners has almost doubled its lead at the top of the list, with its 290 architects putting it 87 ahead of second-place rival BDP, showing how the practice dominates the architecture world not just culturally, but also in terms of business size.
See the top 10 UK practices, as well as the results of the accompanying AJ100 Awards, after the break
Produced by The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, this somewhat hypnotic video charts the development of London from its origins as the Roman settlement of Londinium to the present day. It maps the changes in the city's road network and built environment, and catalogs the thousands of historic structures which are now protected by either listing or scheduling. Among the fascinating thing revealed by the video is how historic events continue to have a profound effect on the city's built environment: for example a law passed after the Great Fire of London determined that new buildings had to be built from brick, resulting in the large number of Georgian buildings that have survived to the present day.
To mark the 30th anniversary of Prince Charles' famous "Carbuncle Speech", last week the RIBA held a discussion focusing on the speech's impact on British architecture. The speech in which the prince protested the design of a proposed extension to the National Gallery has been seen by some as expanding the debate around architectural quality, but the panelists on the night disagreed with this view: Owen Hatherley said "The idea he broadened the debate is curious. He shut it down." Similarly, Charlie Luxton commented "He turned the debate from one of quality to one of style – and architecture suffered." You can read more of the panelists' views on BD Online.
The Scottish arts charity NVA is looking for an architect to carry out the restoration of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1966. The building is an icon of post war brutalism; the Grade-A listed structure was voted as the best modern building in Scotland by readers of Prospect Magazine in 2005, and is likely to feature heavily in Scotland's show at the 2014 Venice Biennale. However despite this adoration, the building had a very short functional life and has been in a state of ruin ever since it was abandoned in the 1980s.
NVA is looking for an architect "highly skilled in the conservation of modernist buildings" to take on the £8 million restoration, which will see the sanctuary and refectory preserved in a "semi-ruinous state", and a nearby 19th-century greenhouse converted into a visitor centre.
Read on after the break for more on the restoration
The Shard has been awarded this year's Emporis Skyscraper Award, bringing the award back to Europe after two consecutive wins in North America - by Absolute Towers in 2013 and New York by Gehry in 2012. Each year, the award honours the world's best new building over 100m tall.
The award's jury praised the Shard's "unique glass fragment-shaped form and its sophisticated architectural implementation", resulting in "a skyscraper that is recognized immediately and which is already considered London's new emblem."
Read on to find out the remaining 10 buildings to take home awards
A report uncovered by the Architects' Journal has revealed that an experimental housing project by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has developed major problems just seven years after construction. The low cost factory-built Oxley Woods scheme won the RIBA Manser Medal for housing in 2008 but a report commissioned by the scheme's developer has shown faults in the detailing are causing some parts of the construction to rot. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners have distanced themselves from the defects insisting that it was "Taylor Wimpey and Wood Newton responsible for the final detailed design". You can find out more about the controversy at the Architects' Journal and the Financial Times.
The Science Museum in London has announced plans to expand with three new galleries, launching three competitions to find designers. Two of the new galleries will house new permanent exhibitions about medicine and mathematics, while the third will host an interactive gallery. The three extensions combined will more than double the museum's current size.
The museum hopes to complete the mathematics and interactive galleries in 2016, with the larger medicine wing scheduled for a 2018 completion date.
Read on after the break for more on the competitions
Set to open to the public on Wednesday after a highly controversial and contested journey from idea to reality, the September 11 Memorial Museum has inevitably been a talking point among critics this week. The museum by Davis Brody Bond occupies the space between the Memorial Plaza at ground level and the bedrock below, with an angular glass pavilion by Snøhetta providing an entrance from above. A long ramp, designed to recall the access ramp with which tons of twisted metal was excavated from the site, descends to the exhibits which sit within the perimeter boundaries of the twin towers' foundations, underneath the suspended volumes of Michael Arad's memorial fountains.
The content of the museum is obviously fraught with painful memories, and the entrance pavilion occupies a privileged position as the only surface level structure ground zero, in opposition to the great voids of the memorial itself. The discussion at the opening of the museum was therefore always going to center on whether the design of the museum - both its built form and the exhibitions contained - were sensitive and appropriate enough for this challenging brief. Read the critics' takes on the results after the break.
Work to alter Rafael Viñoly Architects' 20 Fenchurch Street - dubbed the Walkie Talkie due to its unusual shape and then the "Walkie Scorchie" after it created a heat-focusing ray strong enough to melt cars last summer - is due to start later this month, after planning permission for the additions was granted in April. The alterations, also designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, will see horizontal aluminium louvres added to the glass facade between the 3rd and the 34th floor to ensure that the reflective "death ray" effect is not repeated.
The AJ100, the annual survey of the UK's 100 largest architecture firms by the Architect's Journal, has shown a noticeable rise in the number of women in the top practices over the past year. The proportion of women in the surveyed practices rose from 25% in 2013 to 28% this year, with an even more marked increase in the top 10 firms: from 22.7% to 27.5%. Though there is still a significant discrepancy in the ratio of men to women, this marked increase is a positive step. Find out more about which practices are leading the way, and what methods they are using to encourage gender diversity at the Architects' Journal.
