Olympic Park, 2011

Until the athletes begin winning medals this summer, the venues are taking up the role of representing the London Olympics on screen and in print. Architecture is now central; the completed buildings can be taken as an early sign of success and to show the world that the city is prepared. While construction timetables can be controlled, the idea of ‘legacy’ is much harder to quantify and sustain. The organisers claim that the Olympics’ legacy is already here, even before the games have begun, in the form of all the new infrastructure, green spaces and landmarks built in east London.

Perspective showing visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 viewing stained glass exhibits, Crystal Palace (© RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections)

The Great Exhibition of 1851

Looking at the long-term impact of a major international event is the theme that quietly underlies the V&A + RIBA Architecture Partnership’s latest display of original drawings, models and other material (open 26 November 2011 – 29 April 2012, Victoria and Albert Museum). The creation of Albertopolis is the greatest legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Like the Olympics, the exhibition was held to peacefully bring together people of all nations in one place – but in this case for the purposes of industry, art and commerce. Commercially and critically, it was a success and the event is used as a historical marker: “Historians have made the Great Exhibition the pre-eminent symbol of the Victorian age” (Auerbach, p.1).

Aerial view of Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, 28 May 1851, © V&A Images

Display of examples of Gothic and Medieval style church furnishings as arranged by Augustus Welby Pugin, Crystal Palace (© RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections)

Albertopolis

Albertopolis is made up of the educational institutions of South Kensington, built using the large profit from the exhibition. They were established at different times over the course of nearly a hundred years and each was set up when an opportunity came up or in response to a perceived need in the cultural life of the nation. The impact of the Albert Hall, V&A, Natural History Museum, Imperial Institute and others places of learning nearby can be felt today 150 years later. Prince Albert’s plan to create a cultural hub came together after the 1851 and, as the display at the V&A shows, this idea is alive and continues to develop. Included in the display is a large watercolour from 1851, featuring Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace set in its original home in Hyde Park. This was the venue of the exhibition, which was built on time and was “described in its own day as the Tenth Wonder of the World” (Piggott, p.5). The Crystal Place is the symbol of the Great Exhibition and represents the birth of Albertopolis.

Royal Albert Hall (© RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

Buildings have lifespans

In a similar light, the impressive work of the architects of the Olympic Park and Village, amongst them Zaha Hadid, Populous, Allies & Morrison and HOK Sport, will continue to be seen as the visual representations of the games beyond 2012 – no matter how many sporting medals are won or lost! We can expect these images to be enduring, even if the buildings themselves perish by plan or by other reasons. No doubt, with so many buildings one or two venues will feature more prominently than others in the forefront of popular memory as time elapses.

Crystal Palace, Sydenham, London, in ruins following the devastating fire of 30 November 1936 (© RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

In 1851, Paxton wrote a pamphlet entitled: ‘What is to become of the Crystal Palace?’ (Piggott, p.31). Paxton had wanted his iron and glass structure to be turned into a winter garden after the exhibition.  Despite years of difficulties it became a venue for other exhibitions and various forms of popular entertainment – even serving as the home of the Imperial War Museum for four years until 1924. With temporary stands and future uses considered, there is a clear plan about what will happen to the Olympic venues after this summer. But, like the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition, their fate and what will be the real legacy of the Olympics will be determined by future events. The Crystal Palace was lost in a fire in 1936 and is now just a memory; a few stone balustrades and steps in Sydenham, the palace’s second and last site, are the only physical reminders of the Great Exhibition building. The exhibition’s real legacy is therefore something that grew afterwards over time, Albertopolis, and not an iconic building that fell victim to poor maintenance – 150 years should be enough time to judge what the legacy of the next Olympics will be.

More images of the Crystal Palace can be seen on RIBApix.

References:

• Auerbach, Jaffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display
  Yale: Yale University, 1999
• Piggott, J. R. Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854-1936
  London: Hurst & Company, 2004
• RIBA, Albertopolis online exhibition,  accessed 26 January 2012
  http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/Albertopolis/Albertopolis.aspx

Carolyn Steel is an architect and one of the leading thinkers on issues of food and our urban environments. Her book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, was published in 2008. She has won the Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, been acclaimed by The Ecologist magazine as a ‘21st Century Visionary’, and presented at the TEDGlobal conference in 2009 (see the video here). This is the first of three interview pieces with Steel on food, sustainability, and the future of our cities.

On arriving at Carolyn Steel’s home, the first thing she did, “of course”, was to offer me a drink. This simple act is indicative of the way that food offers structure and ritual to our day-to-day lives, yet it was so mundane that it would typically go unnoticed.

Such perceptions of ordinariness have long been of interest to Steel, going back to the mid 90’s when she was a Rome Scholar and wrote an essay titled ‘The Mundane Order of the City’, on 2000 years of everyday life in Rome’s Rione Sant’Angelo. “It goes back to a fascination with the word mundane. We use it to mean ‘boring and everyday’ whereas actually it means ‘of the universe’. It [food] could not be more important, so we call it boring. That tells you a huge amount… Food has to be part of everything. It’s because it is so important that we tend to forget it.”

This social dismissiveness of food is exemplified by an industrialized food system that attempts to render its production invisible. Even at the point of sale food has become sanitized; you probably only need think back to your last trip to the supermarket to recognize this, after all what is it that you remember? The overwhelming scent of fresh clementines? The earthy smell of mud-covered potatoes? Or how about the slight roughness of the skin of a pear, or the crunchy satisfaction of a bunch of kale? Probably not. Supermarkets today are de-sensitized places, the plastic wrapping that engulfs even the humble spud cuts off our senses, rendering touch and smell irrelevant. These over-abundant, artificially-illuminated sheds are an extraordinary culmination of a food industry that has gradually removed food – of rather the experience of its production – from most of our lives.

Even within our  own homes, the endless march of the ready meal, or the just-add-water cake mixes, have further separated us from the processes of making and preparing food. For Steel, it is a cultural question: “Historically if you were rich there was high status in not knowing where your food came from. You paid someone else to grow it, prepare it, do all the nasty stuff, cook it. You just sit there in glorious state, the stuff comes in, you eat it, and it’s taken away, and you don’t need to think about it again… The reason we have accepted this [current] system is that we are all in the cultural position of being rich. Not knowing where our food came from is something we aspire to.”

UK households waste 6.7 million tonnes of food each year. Image: Flickr/Sporkist (CC-BY-2.0)

With this willful ignorance of the origin of our food we have gradually designed it out of our lives, and designed it to be cheap, which “of course it can never be”. The infamous £2 chicken is a case in point. How is it, you have to wonder, that a chicken could possibly be this cheap? Can the cost of rearing the bird, slaughtering it, disposing of the waste, transporting and packaging it, along with profits for farmers and supermarkets, all be included in that price?

With such cheap food, and such detachment from the processes of food production, it is no wonder that so much of the food in this country goes to waste. As Steel notes in Hungry City, “we throw away 6.7 million tonnes of household food a year – one third of all the food we buy.” Such wastage she attributes to a singular reason: “[it] all boils down to the same thing: our disconnected food culture.”

Countering this, and reconnecting people with the food they eat, requires its production to be made visible again. We need to grow more food in our cities. For Steel however, this will never be in the form of the large-scale urban farm much beloved by architecture students, “high-rise vertical urban farming… is just utter fantasy. Smaller scale production, which is just about making food production more visible in the city, is extremely important.”

What form this takes, from allotments and window boxes, to complete hydroponic farms in your living room, will inevitably vary. None of them are going to provide all the food we need, but for Steel that is not the point, it is about making evident the process of cultivation, and making people more aware of the value of food. If it makes cities somewhat more self-sufficient and sustainable in the process, so much the better.

The vegetable garden of the future? The Philips Design 'Biosphere Home Farm' © Philips Design / via Dezeen

© Thomas Stoney Bryans 2012

Discover the history of architecture through the RIBA’s collection of 2,000 periodical titles. A brief look at the evolution of the skyscraper across both sides of the Atlantic 100, 50 and 15 years ago this month:

Woolworth Building, 2009 (© Eric Firley / RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

January 1912: The Woolworth Building, New York

Commissioned to design the headquarters of Woolworth Company, this month a century ago Cass Gilbert’s ornate Neo-Gothic design was on its way to becoming the world’s tallest building and was a year away from completion. With his skill and experience, Architectural Review at the start of 1912 felt confident enough to predict that Gilbert’s new building on Broadway, New York, “will be the most beautiful building as well as the ‘highest building in the world’ ”. In light of this project, The Builder at the same time was discussing the architect’s already considerable achievements across the United States, including his West Street Building, also in New York.

Other news:

Architectural Record reports on the continuing work on building Giles Gilbert Scott’s Liverpool Cathedral: “At the present rate of progress, provided the money is forthcoming, another twenty years will see the Cathedral completed”.

Birmingham Post and Mail building, 1968 (© RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

January 1962: Post-war developments

Fifty years later, some of the earlier skyscrapers were being replaced. Progressive Architecture reported that one of the first skyscrapers in Detroit, Daniel Burnham’s Beaux Arts-style Majestic Building, was being demolished to make way for a pair of 22-storey towers by Smith Hickman & Grylls Associates. With their reinforced concrete frame, smooth marble or concrete cladding and glass skin walling, these were less ornamented than the first generation of skyscrapers. Their ubiquity was confirmed after the Second World War when many British cities followed the American example by building upwards. Architectural Review in the same month looked at a proposed development in Birmingham, next to the city’s new ring road system. Clearly inspired by American architecture through the use of the podium and slab block, the Birmingham Post and Mail building, designed by John H. D. Madin & Partners, was to house the complete production of a daily newspaper.

Other news:

Architectural Design notes that the Commonwealth Institute’s new building was structurally complete and had celebrated its topping out ceremony: “this building is going to be a lively addition to London’s generally drab modern architecture.”

30 St Mary Axe, 2008 (© Luke Palmer/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

January 1997: 30 St Mary Axe

Fifteen years ago this month the news was registering the reaction to new tall buildings in the capital. According to the Architects’ Journal, the size and impact of the proposed Millennium Tower made English Heritage withdraw their support for the 435-metre-high scheme at 30 St Mary Axe, London. There were concerns about its potential to disrupt protected views and the project was eventually abandoned. The London Planning Advisory Committee was quoted as saying: “London does not need it to maintain its position as the strongest European world city”. Of course, today we can look back and see that Foster + Partners were able to successfully put forward an alternative design for the former site of the Baltic Exchange.

Other news:

In Building it was predicted that the economy would improve. House prices would rise: “12% this year, followed by increases of 15% and 18% in 1998 and 1999, respectively”.

All the journals and articles in the RIBA’s collections are available to the public for reference and research at the British Architectural Library. More images from the RIBA can be seen online via RIBApix.

Decorative detail, Natural History Museum, London ( © Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection)

A new image every month celebrating architecture, chosen from RIBApix, where you will discover over 60,000 images on architecture, landscape and the decorative arts.

It’s a façade with many faces. On the Natural History Museum, looking out onto South Kensington’s Cromwell Road, are life-like terracotta figures and reliefs depicting many species of creatures – both living and extinct. This month’s image also shows the plant forms incorporated into the terracotta façade and the patterning applied to the columns and arcades. These natural forms extend into the interior and together they help to tell the story of how the Victorians saw the natural world and the origin of mankind.

Nearby, the RIBA is celebrating the recent opening of the Albertopolis exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This new display explores the history of the local area and the legacy of Prince Albert. The NHM itself was made possible by the funds raised by the Great Exhibition of 1851, organised by the prince, and his desire to see the establishment of a centre of learning in South Kensington for the advancement of the arts and sciences. The design of the building by architect Alfred Waterhouse was overseen by Sir Richard Owen, the first director of the museum and the first person to use the word ‘dinosaur’. Waterhouse went on to win the Royal Gold Medal in 1878 and was President of the RIBA from 1888 until 1891. His detailed original drawings for the museum and other buildings are part of the architectural collections of the RIBA which are held in the British Architectural Library.

Discover more about the NHM and the institutions of the area before your visit, through the RIBA’s online counterpart to Albertopolis.  More images of the museum can be seen on RIBApix.

It has been a hectic run up to Christmas and yesterday went to the RIBA staff party which was great fun (see winning ‘steam train’ dessert on Twitter link). In the past six weeks I have visited Nottingham East Midlands and spoken at the Maggie Centre with Piers Gough.

Hosted student Presidents Medals evening was a real treat with some fantastic projects which will be on show at RIBA until end of Jan.

I spoke at the Bartlett and presented the Donaldson medal to student Charlotte Reynolds, and also spoke to students in Manchester school of architecture.

Went to Bristol’s new revamped architecture centre and spoke on diversity at Disabled architects seminar and next day spoke at CIC Constructive women’s conference and spoke at the Hertforshire annual dinner.

Introduced Tuesday evening talks of Thomas Heatherwick, and Eric Owen Moss Jencks award evening.

Went to Prince Philips Design Council award, the launch of new Central St Martins at KX I have met with English Heritage, British Property Federation, Seb Coe, Richard Rogers, David Chipperfield and others. I am part of a new ‘Women’s Green Deal’ panel at DECC planning ways to engage the public to deliver energy saving buildings.

Hosted and spoke at the ‘Build off Site’ conference at the RIBA, been interviewed by Gleeds TV, Radio 4 Women’s Hour, and was featured in Guardian and Irish Times newspapers. Plus all the in house meetings.

Council and Board and committee meetings…and managed a class reunion in Dublin last weekend.

I have taken part in ‘Article 25′ art charity auction where my piece of glass sat among some of top artists and architects art raising money for a great cause. I continue to support our students and remember you can buy a limited edition student print from www.zaparchitecture.com.

Looking forward to 2012 as there are lots of new challenges and opportunities for RIBA members as well as tough times where we have to fight hard for business and education and our role in society.

I will continue with my teams of experts pursuing better procurement for architects and seeking international opportunities for our members.

Now looking forward to a break!

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year

Angela

Angela Brady PRIBA

twitter.com/angelabradyRIBA

Cover of the new book, featuring a night-time photograph of the Stewart and Ardern Limited car showroom and service station, Morris House, Staines, 1934.

Later today the last of the Art Deco exhibitions will come down from public display. The material for Art Deco Triumphant will be collected by curators from the RIBA Library Photographs Collection and returned to their climate-controlled stores. The end of the Art Deco season coincides with the publication of an accompanying book from its curators. ‘Puttin’ on the Glitz: The Golden Years of Art Deco Architecture in Britain’ explores Art Deco architecture at its peak during the inter-war years in Britain and uses many of the photographs and drawings from the RIBA’s collections not used in the displays. The book not only reveals Art Deco classics such as Odeon cinemas but also a host of lesser-known buildings such as Conchita Supervia’s flat in Lowndes Square, London, and a fish and chip shop in Sunderland.

The book is available now from blurb.com

Bethany Winning talking to Murray Fraser, Chair of the RIBA Research and Innovation Group, at a reception celebrating the President

Wednesday the 7th December saw 66 Portland Place buzzing with some of the most exciting talent in the field of architecture, as the RIBA celebrated the winners of this year’s President’s Medals. You can find out more about the winners here, and do make sure you check out the Silver Medalist’s entry (a video project). The exhibition is open at 66 Portland Place until the 28th January 2011.

But it wasn’t just student work that was being recognised; the winners of the RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2011 were also here at RIBA HQ to collect their certificates. These awards are given in three categories: to PhDs, to University-located Research and to Practice-located Research. This year there was one winner in each category, as well as two commendations in the University category and one commendation in the Practice category.

The awards process takes up the whole year. In January we make a call for entries, writing to RIBA Chartered Practices that we know do research, as well as to our validated schools in the UK and overseas. Entries are received in May and shortly afterwards our judges meet to draw up a shortlist of up to five entrants in each category. This is quite a time-consuming, but stimulating task, with increasing numbers of entries each year. Then throughout the summer, each shortlisted entry is read by two judges, before they meet in October for the final time to pick the winners and award commendations. December sees the culmination of the programme, with the President’s Medals ceremony, where we take time to celebrate the exciting, accomplished and innovative work being carried out by professional researchers in practice and academia.

Watch this space for details of the RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2012, where we will be introducing a new award – more news in January!

Chris Halligan and Joanne Denison from Stephen George & Partners, winners of the RIBA President's Award for Outstanding Practice-located Research 2011

Milinda Pathiraja, winner of the RIBA President's Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis 2011Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider, winners of the RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research 2011

Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider, winners of the RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research 2011

Open to architecture students, recent graduates and emerging practices from across London, unique ideas are now being sought for public seating in a new competition launched by RIBA London and London’s Pleasure Gardens. The winners of Pews & Perches will receive funding to build their designs which will be showcased around the Royal Docks in East London in time for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The deadline for submissions is 30 January 2012.

Pews and Perches flyer

Download Pews & Perches flyer as a PDF (488 kb)

When the Department of Energy and Climate Change published its ‘Commitment to Renewables’ last month, it did so in the wake of David Cameron and Chris Huhne’s summit with the ‘big six’ energy suppliers, organised in an attempt to reverse the trend of ever-increasing energy costs. The massive cuts in subsidies ushered in by the deceptively titled policy – particularly the much-publicised slashing of feed-in tariffs – are intended to play their own part in reducing energy bills, by cutting the small surcharge that is added to our bills to pay for them. The reduction of such ‘green taxes’ however, despite what those in certain sections of the media may claim, will make barely any difference. The reality is that Renewable Obligation support payments, as they are known, add only £20 per year to the average annual bill, and by 2016 the proposed cuts will save only £2 per household. By contrast, the recent price rises by the big six – who supply 99% of all consumers - have added an average of £134, reflecting the rising cost of whole-sale gas prices.

The truth, if we all dare to admit it, is that fossil-fuel based energy costs are going in only one direction, and no amount of corporate arm twisting is going to change that. If the government wants to take truly progressive action then it is clear that we need not just short-term sticking-platers, but a long-term vision, and a well-defined road map for how we are going to get there.

By the middle of this century the vast majority of our energy demand is going to need to come from low-carbon, and largely renewable sources. This of course requires a careful assessment and balancing of the multiple options, including nuclear and carbon-capture-and-storage, as well as a long-term consideration of the necessary levels of subsidies to achieve the significant investment that will be required.

It would be deeply naïve however to imagine that investment in renewables is all we need. The development of a renewable energy infrastructure in the UK is not going to happen overnight, and in the short and medium-term we are still faced with the the spectre of rapidly rising fuel costs.

For now the obvious, and hypothetically easy answer, is to use less fuel. For many this is a tragic necessity, as the increasing numbers of households in fuel poverty makes clear, but it is also a reality that all of us at some point are going to have to face up to. The fact of this long-term inevitability must surely demand greater action on the challenge of energy efficiency.

Installing solar panels alone will make little difference if the building to which they are attached have an energy inefficient fabric. CC Flickr user: CoCreatr

The economic argument for this is fairly clear cut – it is far cheaper to save a watt of energy than produce one. It is far more effective therefore to invest in upgrading the energy efficiency of our building stock, than in a large-scale installation of solar panels across the country. As I have written before, such renewable technologies, where installed on inefficient buildings, will simply offset the energy losses that can be saved more economically though other means. Where buildings already meet a minimum standard of efficiency then solar and other renewables should of course be encouraged, but for the rest, there should be greater priorities.

In this light we can only welcome the official launch of the ‘Green Deal’ consultation document last week (the summary can be found here), which proposes a £14 billion private-sector investment over the next decade. Only those properties were the savings would be greater than or equal to the total cost of the work will be eligible, and with repayments being added to customers’ bills, the deal ensures that the cost is paid by those that ultimately benefit – the debt is attached to the property, and is the liability of the bill payer, rather than any one person.

'Green Deal' flow chart from the Green Deal Summary Document © Department of Energy and Climate Change

There are of course concerns: a need to ensure consumer acceptance and take up of the scheme is one, a point that Which? magazine has already raised doubts over due to estimated savings being based on averages rather than individual assessment. Convincing industry of the Government’s long-term commitment to the policy is another, and based on the massive u-turn over renewables, particularly on solar power, such long-term certainty over the coalition’s environmental policy commitments may be hard to come by. With the announcement of further details about the Green Investment Bank however, with Green Deal financing identified as one of five priority sectors, there can at least be confidence of some Government support through to 2016 at the very least.

The slashing of renewable subsidies was both cynical and short-sighted, a clear failure of the Government’s obligation to encourage a weaning-off of fossil fuels and the development of a more sustainable energy infrastructure. The Green Deal does not make up for this, but for what it is setting out to do it should be supported. We can only hope that this time the commitment is genuine, and that industry succeeds in making it reality.

© Thomas Stoney Bryans 2011

Early next year the RIBA’s new outstore will be open. As noted in previous posts, along with facilities at 66 Portland Place and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this new site will offer visitors improved access to the unique collections of architectural items from the RIBA. Here are some recent images taken by RIBA curator Fiona Orsini during a last look at the old RIBA outstore in Battersea – now empty after the successful move of all its material to Fulham – and the dramatic local riverscape.

Battersea Power Station and the south bank of the River Thames (Photograph by Fiona Orsini)

More images of Battersea Power Station, including of the original design
drawings and photographs of its construction, can be seen on RIBApix.

Battersea outstore: Interior

Battersea outstore: Interior