I am always on the look out for new spots, from which to look out over London and take photos. Last week, I discovered another such place, on the roof of something called One New Change, which is a big new shopping centre right next to St Paul's Cathedral. The weather during the last few weeks has mostly been vile but during a brief break in this weather, I journeyed to One New Change to check it out, and in particular to see if I could go up to its roof and take photos. Internet omens seemed good, but you never really know about such things until you get there.

Here is the entrance I used to get inside One New Change:

Click on any of these pictures if you want to see them bigger.

Modernist architects used to be fond of a phrase to the effect that form should follow function. But the truth is that when it comes to architecture, form tends to follow not function but fashion.

To be fair to the architects, fashion tends also to follow what is technologically possible. At any given moment in modern architectural history, architects have asked themselves: what does building technology now enable us to do which we couldn't do half a decade ago, thus enabling us to get passers-by to say: Wow, look at that. Is it fair to call this "fashion"? I think so. After all, that is surely how the fashion business itself tends to operate.

So it is with One New Change. Only if you already knew, as I already knew when I went looking for it, would you have known that this is a shopping centre. It could have been a university, an office block, an "arts" or "community" centre, a library, or any one of half a dozen other things. But, you can tell at once that it was only very recently constructed, because here is a building done in the planes of glass at bizarre angles style. Which is a very recent architectural fashion. (One of the growth service industries of our time is presumably specialist window cleaning, of windows that are not easily reached by the usual methods of simply hanging a platform out over the vertical edge of a building and then just going up and down and side to side.)

Where did this style come from? Much of it, as I say, is a case of "because we can". Glass has got a lot stronger and cleverer in recent years, as have building materials generally. And now that architects have computers to keep track of everything, they can design - and more to the point can build - buildings made in these bizarre shapes.

Another influence at work on modern architecture generally and One New Change in particular is, I surmise, ships. Modernist architects have always been envious of and heavily influenced by ship designers, because with ships, form really does have to follow function, far, far more than is the case with most buildings. Many a nineteen thirties block of flats, with its long horizontal outdoor walkways and curved corners, was designed by an architect with his head full of ocean liner imagery.

More recent ships, of the stealth sort, now offer further "inspiration". My first reaction to One New Change was that here was a building that was trying to avoid being spotted on anyone's radar. Which is a very reasonable thing for a building to want to do if it is only a stone's throw from St Paul's Cathedral.

So anyway, I went in through this entrance, and found both escalators, and a big lift shaft. I decided to try the lift. Early indicators, in the form first of the lift, and then in the form of this very striking view of St Paul's from this lift, were very good:

That's a rather wonkily angled photo, what with the lift being in motion and me having only one go at it. Plus, it looks misleadingly dark, on account of me looking towards the afternoon sun. But I like it anyway, because of the sky and the reflections and St Paul's.

Nobody tried to stop me getting into this lift, as the somewhat warlike appearance of the outside the building was perhaps subconsciously suggesting to me might have happened. I just pushed the usual buttons, just as in any other shopping centre, or for that matter big department store, and up I went.

The lift itself, made from reassuringly solid slabs of that new and clever glass that I have already mentioned, was clearly designed with the viewing experience of those travelling in it very much in mind. It isn't buried in a lift shaft. Rather is it hung out on the inside of the building, as happens in grand American hotel lobbies that you see in movies. And a slice has been cut from top to bottom through the building to enable St Paul's to be visible from this lift, throughout one's ascent. All of which strongly suggested that a similar concern for viewing pleasure might also prevail at the top of the building. The lift rose upwards, and my level of photographic optimism rose with it.

When I got to the top, nobody made me buy a ticket or tried to check my bag or any such thing. And I was right to be photographically optimistic:

Wow.

Again with the misleadingly dark feel, because this is pointing in the same direction as the previous photo from the lift. But, what an amazing place. The roof of One New Change looks even more like a ship trying to avoid having a radar signature than it does near the ground.

Now here's the view looking back the other way. The glass box is the top of the lift.

This next picture reinforces the impression of a building that is, so to speak, ship shape:

My feeling about viewing platforms from which to look out over London is that I am willing to trade vertical height for horizontal length. A spike high into the sky, like the Monument or like the tower of Westminster Cathedral, can be good. But the advantage to me of an elongated platform, even such a thing as a railway platform that merely happens to be at inner suburban roof level, is that I can walk along it, and photographically align those Big Things, seeing this Thing from here, that one from there, and so on. Move twenty yards, and a Big Thing that had been hidden by a smaller, nearer lump (London contains many smaller lumps) can come into view.

The platform at the top of One New Change, or "deck" as I would prefer to call it, what with its maritime feeling, is, as you can already see from above photos, not that high. It is not nearly as high, to take just one very obvious example that you can clearly see from it, as either of the two viewing galleries at the top of St Paul's, around and above the dome. The biggest button number in that lift was a mere six. That's six big shopping centre floors rather than six office floors, but it still isn't very high. All you are really doing is poking your head above the regular height of London's urban architectural vernacular, before the late twentieth century lust for non-ecclesiastical height kicked in. You feel as if you are sailing through the random architectural sea that is London, rather than flying above it.

Personally I loved the views I was able to see from this relatively low level, but these views don't really give you a clear idea of the shape of London (in the way that the views from the top of the Pompidou Centre show you the shape of Paris). In particular, you don't see anything of the river, or its bridges, just the occasional building that, if you know London, you know to be next to the river, on the far side.

Here, for example is a shot of that newthree-eyed tower that I am very fond of:

But see also that ye-olde half-timbered white thing with a thatched roof, hiding in among all the intervening muddle. That's the new-old Globe Theatre, recently mentioned here by Johnathan Pearce.

Or, consider this snap, which I thought at the time was just of the Wheel plus surrounding lumps, plus that big St Paul's Thing at the front of course. But look how the top of Big Ben is to be seen nestling in among it:

I will definitely return to the roof of One New Change, to see what further Big Thing alignments and smaller oddities and amusements I can observe. And when the place is less crowded with unwinding city toilers than it was when I went last week, I will also check out the bar, and find out if anything can be seen of such things as the Gherkin (which you can just see the top of in one of the photos above) and the Docklands towers, to the east. Most of what I saw on my trip was from looking south, and a bit to the West, which is rather less interesting.

In addition to photoing London's Big Things, I like also to photo my fellow digital photographers, doing such things as lining themselves up with Big Things, which is presumably what is happening here:

And then there are the signs. Everywhere in Britain now, there are signs, warning against every sort of danger, from ludicrously obvious to ludicrously far-fetched. I particularly liked this one:

"Beyond barrier please do not climb." Sounds like this guy.

Despite all the excellent views, the thing that most impressed me about my first trip to the roof of One New Change was not so much what you could see from it as the place itself. So my final picture here concentrates on that, and on how beautifully big this viewing deck is:

I can't see such an appealing place remaining this uncrowded for long.

And yes, that is the Shard, again. The more I see of the Shard, the more I like it. The one truly ugly thing about the Shard, I think, is how it draws attention to that hideous Brutalist lump next to it. (Which, I have just learned, is about to get a partial facelift.) There are complaints that a few London views are being spoilt by the Shard, notably that of St Paul's from the hills to the north of London (Parliament and Primrose). Maybe so, although I personally now like these views even more. And I reckon the Shard makes the view in my above snap, as it does many other London views, many times better.

And yes, of course, the Shard was built with foolish boom-bust money, but at least London has some handsome Big Things to show for that foolish time, of which the Shard is, in my opinion, one of the very best.

While finishing this posting, I mentioned to a friend what it is about, and he said Prince Charles had had something to do with the design of One New Change. It seems that he tried to stop it.

Plus: I am not the only one who thinks stealth (see para two there) when encountering this building.

Things seem to be a bit quiet here this weekend, so here's a picture I took earlier this evening:

Click to get it bigger.

This is not Photoshopped. That's exactly what came out of my camera when I got home.

What it is is a picture of the Shard, taken by me from the front seat of a D(ocklands) L(ight) R(ailway) automated train, as the train approached its central London terminus, which is near to the Tower of London.

Taking photos through train windows is, as all photographers know, fraught with peril, because of all those stupid reflections in the glass of the window that you inevitably get, of such things as lights inside the train. But this time, what was reflected in the window was a tower on the other side of the train, namely the Gherkin. And since the train was going very slowly at the time, I was able to line the two towers up with each other.

Well, I like it.

Last week, I read somewhere on the www that the new Kings Cross Station passenger concourse would be open to the general public for the first time on the following Monday, i.e. yesterday. When I got there yesterday afternoon, it was certainly functioning like a regular station concourse. It didn't feel like it had only been open for a few hours, but then again it's not as if an entire railway station opened, from nothing. This was a case merely of lots of people already using the approximate same place no longer having to thread their way through temporary arrangements, but instead having the pleasure of walking through this:

As you can see from my picture, I wasn't the only photographer snapping away, and trust me, she and I were two of many. So maybe this really was the first public day of this new piece of London show-off modernity? The www confirmed it.

I knew roughly what this concourse was going to look like, having seen plenty of images of what the architects hoped it would look like, and, more recently, some photos taken by officially selected snappers before the rest of us were allowed in. But until you actually see things like this in the flesh, so to speak, you never really know what you think of them.

I was most agreeably surprised. Kings Cross, having been for the last decade put severely in the shade by the magnificently reborn St Pancras Railway Station, literally only a few dozen yards away, wasevidently making a huge effort to respond to that new Eurostar Palace. But I had feared something like one of those seemed-cool-but-actually-rather-naff, seventies, "designed" (as in: over-designed) pieces of lighting equipment. Not quite lava lamp, but in that kind of territory. I feared that the place would simply not be big enough to justify all that virtuoso metal patterning.

The reason I thought it would be too small for all that designer steelwork is that I had quite often walked past the outside of it, while they were building it. I photoed it again from the outside yesterday, and compared to how it looks inside, it appears from the outside to be tiny:

I say that St Pancras has upstaged Kings Cross for the last decade, but there are many who would contest this. St Pancras may have been awarded the Eurostar trains, but Kings Cross has … the Hogwart's Express. Many of those visiting the new concourse gave no thought to its ceiling. They just wanted to have themselves photoed next to this sign:

I have a vague recollection of the real entrance to Platform 9¾ being in one of the old brick arches between Platforms 9 and 10, and an even vaguer recollection of waiting on Platform 10 for a train, and seeing some Pottermaniacs cavorting in front of this entrance. If that's right, the sign I photoed yesterday is a fake. A fake, I tell you.

I guess they figure that the platform ticket business they might be doing is not worth all the bother.

The other day Jonathan was worrying about military drones. Well, you definitely want these guys on your side. Still, there are certainly peaceful applications.

For details, see the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, the GRASP lab, and Hack a day.

Yesterday Antoine and I visited the Pompidou Centre. Follow that link for the usual Pompidou Centre pictures. Here's a less usual picture of the thing, in the form of a picture of a model of it that we encountered inside:

I was glad to visit this building, if only to go somewhere out of the cold, which has been extreme (and made much worse by the wind) but which may now be abating a little. Or maybe I'm just getting a little used to it.

I was glad also to get to see, close up, the inside of a much admired, much discussed piece of modern architecture, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano being the man who much more recently has designed London's Shard. I don't love all modern architecture, to put it mildly, but I find it a fascinating story.

The Pompidou Centre is an early example of a much practised style of recent years, namely the “structure and services as decoration” style. See also the London Stock Exchange Lloyds of London, designed by Rogers. In this style, architectural organs that are usually hidden inside the body of the building are instead taken out of the body and turned into visual features. As a result of using this style, Piano and Rogers turned what is basically a big urban slab into something a bit more interesting.

I have noticed that more recent examples in London of this now very common style have started out looking pretty good, but have then started to look … not so good. The trouble with decorative steel work is that it is very hard and very expensive to keep clean and smart, what with it being so very much more complicated than a mere flat surface, and so much harder to get at. And sure enough, there are Pompidou Centre details – details in full view of us visitors – which now look decidedly grubby, or worse.

The big outdoor staircase which is such a feature of the Pompidou Centre is a wonderful place to look out across (approximately speaking) the centre of Paris. The view of Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur is, in particular, spectacular.

And thank goodness for the glass, because without it the cold would have been unbearable. But, the glass is rather dirty, and a photographer like me, in among whooping with delight at the views, needs to pick his spot carefully.

And it gets worse. I was actually quite shocked to see things like this:

You expect this kind of run-downness in a now-aging provincial railway station, built in the eighties, given its last face-lift in 2000, and now in need of another. But in a prestige project in the middle of Paris, devoted to “culture” (which the French take very seriously indeed), named after a President? How did they let that happen? Answer: it's very difficult and expensive to stop it.

I just read the above to Antoine, and he said: It's the classic problem with a prestige project. There's a huge photo op when it opens, but no photo op for just slapping on some new paint. Indeed. But, photography by just anyone (by which I mean the likes of me) rather changes that, doesn't?

Inside the Pompidou Centre there was Art, which we also looked at. I hope to blog about this later, but promise nothing.

Knowing my fondness for pictures of London's Big Things, taken from irregular places, South African blogger 6k (a scroll down there is recommended) has just emailed me with a link to this Daily Telegraph picture, which is a view from near the top of London's BT Tower, of such things as the Gherkin, the more distant Docklands Towers, and the now nearly completed Shard. Yes indeed, well worth a click and a look. I know I've said it many times before, but I love how, with this new internet thing they've installed recently, people six thousand miles away can email you to tell you about interesting things in your own back yard.

But the real story here is not the view from the BT Tower. It is what the view of the BT Tower is going to look like from now on, and why:

BT Tower press officer Ian Reed said: "The huge dishes are synonymous with the tower and it truly is the end of an era. With the introduction of fibreoptic cable, the satellites have been defunct for many years and have reached the end of their lifetime. People will remember the dishes from when they were children - they were responsible for 90 per cent of the TV shown in the country. They were a landmark and could be seen all over London."

I had no idea this was going to happen. [LATER: And either the DT or Ian Reed has it wrong also. As commenter Roue de Jour explains: "They're not satellite dishes they're microwave dishes. They point to similar dishes on masts on a line-of-sight. Satellites are not involved in any way."]

Here are a couple of before and after shots of the Tower, how it looked and how it now looks. And here are two shots I took of this tower, with its big dishes, in February 2006.

I wonder what will happen next? Will they just fill in the gaps with dreary windows and office space? Or will new and different high tech contraptions be installed? I fear and expect the former, but hope for the latter.

LATER: See also another amazing London tower picture, the very first one of these. Those are the Docklands towers.

At some point last weekend, on a whim, I did some ego-googling, and discovered that maybe I should do this more often. Because, what I got to was a video of me giving a talk, last February, about modern architecture to the Libertarian Alliance, early this year. I of course knew that it was being videoed at the time, but had assumed that they didn't reckon it good enough to see the light of YouTube. But I was mistaken.

I managed to watch the thing all through without too much pain, but there is one glaring contradiction built into it, which is that my account of the emergence of the nineteenth century American skyscraper contradicts what I later said about form in modern architecture never following function. If by "form" is meant how a building looks, then it is indeed the case, as I said, that "form" in modern architecture follows fashion rather than function. And as a general rule, as I go on to say, a building can pretty much be changed from one use to another, depending not on what shape it is but depending on what people want to do in it. Most buildings have floors, walls, roofs, and provided you aren't trying to accommodate a Boeing 747 or a rugby match or some such thing, then for most purposes any old building, plus a bit of indoor rearrangement, will do.

But there is (at least) one huge exception to this generalisation about the tendency of form not to follow function. The function of a skyscraper (the skyscraper and its emergence in late nineteenth century America being central to the entire story of modern architecture) is to fit a lot of people into a small urban area, and the characteristic form of a skyscraper accomplishes precisely that. It is that shape because it has to be. Form follows function. So, bad me.

But then again, part of the reason you give talks is for you yourself to listen to what you said (which is far easier if someone records it for you) and then for you to decide what you think about it.

Chairman David McDonaugh's introduction of me was more an ambush than an introduction, and I floundered about in his trap for a while (be patient please). The title was one thing when I started talking, but they ended up calling it something rather different, and for good reasons. The talk is rather episodic, the episodes towards the end being in a somewhat random order. My attempts to wave drawings in front of the camera were not always as informative as I would have liked. Plus, I refer to my friend Patrick Crozier without making it clear video viewers that he was present, in the front row. (Patrick and I did a recorded conversation about architecture in 2007, which covered similar ground to this talk, and which I listened to again by way of preparation for this talk.)

So, a bit of a muddle. But nevertheless, overall, I am still sufficiently pleased with this performance to want to flag it up here, if only to provoke others who could do better on this topic to go ahead and do so. My belated thanks to the LA both for making the video, and for making it available.

Here is a good collection of some of the strangest looking bits of architecture in the world. Some buildings will be familiar - like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain - others, less so. Click on the link and scroll down. It's a large collection.

In this, which is about some guys from Loughborough who have decided to mark cities (scroll down a bit) like they are undergraduate essays (Alpha+, Beta+, Beta-, etc.), NickM waxes lyrical about Prague:

The coolest city is Prague. Prague is just mental. I’d happily move there tomorrow but for the language which is something else. Just super-cool. On the Charles Bridge there was a rodent balancer. Some bloke in a monk’s cowl was balancing rodents on a labrador for change. And then you just walk past where Kepler lived and customer service is spot-on and it was about a quid a pint for most excellent beer right in the city centre and the food was good quality and good value. Went to a steak house run by former firemen who donned the hats when they put the heat to the meat. Bloody good steak that was. And then down by the river and a load of blokes ride past me in Edwardian garb astride penny-farthings. Prague is just ineffably cool. Just wandering around is wonderful. Just doing that brought me by chance to the church where the killers of Reinhardt Heydrich had holed-up. That was poignant. And then there is the Museum of Communism. This is not a free museum. It makes a point of being a for profit enterprise. It advertised, when I was there, with a Russian doll with fangs. It gives it’s address as, “Above McDonalds and opposite Benetton.”. It didn’t need to add, “And fuck off Lenin”. A joy to behold.

Here endeth the broadcast from the Czech tourism bureau.

But he adds a warning:

But catch it while you can and before EU membership fucks it.

Well, EU membership doesn't seem to have fucked London yet, despite decades of the EU trying everything they can think of to accomplish that. London, according to the Loughborough guys, is equal top (Apha++) with New York. NickM goes further. He reckons New York is overrated and has London top on its own, as the greatest city in the world "bar none". He doesn't say why, however.

Personally, I love London, because I live here and I just do. But I do not know where I think it ranks in the great city stakes because I seldom leave it, and hence can't compare it with other urban greatness contenders.

I have been to Prague, which I thought was pretty good. The middle is amazing, wall-to-wall listed buildings, as we would say in London. As I assume is the case in Prague too, i.e. you may not smash it down and replace it with a concrete blockhouse, just because you "own" it. Which I understand. But the uninterruptedly historic nature of the centre means that nothing new can now be built. In other words, the centre of Prague feels like a film set, and will feel more and more like one as time passes. See also: Paris.

Instapundit (and yes I am reading him a lot just now) has been linking to a book called Gray Lady Down, which is about the downfall of the New York Times, from a persuasive proclaimer of the statist consensus to an unpersuasive proclaimer of the statist ex-consensus. I've not read this book, but it has a big picture of a skyscraper on its front cover. Might there, I wondered, be a brand new, custom-built headquarters involved in this story? There might indeed:

The New York Times Building is a skyscraper on the west side of Midtown Manhattan that was completed in 2007. ...

Previous example of something very similar here. Since writing that earlier posting, I have dug out the original description of this syndrome, by Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, and I note that he sees the causation involved as a bit more complicated than I had previously stated. It is not just that building a new headquarters building causes an enterprise to take its eye off the ball. Its eye already was off the ball, or it would never have decided to build its new headquarters in the first place.

I think that in the light of the recent controversy about the place possibly known as the Cordoba Center near Ground Zero, the real cause for annoyance on the part of any New Yorker, surely, is why it has taken so long to get going with any serious construction down there. This Wikipedia entry on the Empire State Building, for example, suggests that the building in Midtown was erected in a space of only a few years. That was in the early 1930s - what was so radically different then?

I suspect that if we already had an impressive and dignified piece of architecture in the southern tip of Manhattan, the row about what happens to nearby buildings would not have erupted so much. It seems that planning and political issues are at stake here - after all, places such as Dubai and various parts of Asia put up skyscrapers with great speed these days.

Or maybe the intention all along is that Ground Zero should remain a flat, empty space of land, purely in the form of a place for remembrance.

Opinions about new architecture differ a lot, but from where I sit, in London, and when I walk about in London taking photographs, I think that new architecture, having gone through an all-time-worst phase (apart from the BT Tower) between about 1960 and about 1980, has of late been doing rather better. This chap seems to agree, although it's all in Russian and I could be quite wrong about that.

The latest London Big Thing to be completed is this:

It's called the Strata, and that's a view of it from Vauxhall railway station, just across the river from where I live, towering above a concrete stackapleb cluster between it and me with my camera.

The Strata is at that strange south London place known as the Elephant and Castle. Here is a snap I took last November, which makes that location clear:

I took this next Strata snap in the vicinity of London Bridge railway station, which I often visit these days because there they are building another Big Thing there, the Shard. In this, we see a characteristic London sight, which is a Big Thing suddenly and randomly coming into view, in this case at the far end of a street:

It was the undulating River Thames that first encouraged the founding of London, and then gave rise to its complicated street pattern. Paris also had an undulating river as its catalyst, but London's streets have never been tyrannically straightened up in the Paris manner, despite numerous attempts, hence those sudden surprise views of Big Things, rather than more sustained views at the end of wide boulevards. There you are, groping your way home from an unwelcome appointment in an arkward part of town, perhaps trying to find something edible to sustain you on your journey back, and suddenly you look up and you see Big Ben in the distance, or the Wheel, or the Gherkin, or Tower Bridge, or the BT Tower, or (the Daddy of them all) St Paul's Cathedral, at the end of the street whose curve just happened to line up with the Big Thing (as above), or through a gap between a nearby brick warehouse and a nearby and horribly ugly sixties office block with a row of boarded up shops at the bottom. And it cheers you up. Well, it cheers me up. It is partly because of such chance sightings that I am so keen on my camera having a good zoom lens.

Here is another Strata view, again taken when there was still a crane attached above it. It is about to get dark, and Strata has spied a nice juicey little cathedral (Southwark Cathedral in this case), which it has decided to gobble up for its supper. Something about the way the top of Strata is cropped, so to speak, by the building in the foreground turns it into a grinning, three-eyed cartoon monster:

And that's the point about successful new London Things, such as I think the Strata is. They have something about them, a bit of personality. They are different. They are not necessarily that beautiful, but they are instantly recognisable.

Partly this is because they tend to be somewhat isolated, which means that they can typically be seen from a distance. This, I think, is because of the politics of building them. In many of the world's big cities, skyscrapers cluster in a way that is dictated by economic logic. Individually, the average individual skyscraper in such a cluster is pretty anonymous, each one looking much like most of the others. Such buildings are there to get the job done, the job being to cram as much office or dwelling space into as little ground area as possible, in an economically significant part of town, which mostly means the financial services district. London has a couple of places like this, in the form of the City and Docklands, the Docklands towers in particular being individually very banal, apart from the slightly interesting one with a pointy top.

But many Big London Things are as much the product of politics as of economics, like London itself. The first great modern London Big Thing, the BT Tower, is as much an expression of Britain's defence policies of the time as of any merely economic pressures. I recently read that it is circular rather than rectangular in plan because circular towers are better are surviving nuclear blast waves. And the same considerations which got it built surely also keep other Big Things from clustering around it and interrupting its various electronic activities.

Those Docklands towers are a classic mixed economy "regeneration" project, where the remains of an ancient and dying industry (the docks) were swept away or reduced to mere heritage decoration, and a new industry (fiat money basically) was dumped down there by politicians, notably Michael Heseltine, working hand in glove with private developers.

Strata is also very political. The word "regeneration" appears a lot in the sales literature for it. Southwark Council wanted it, to sex up Southwark, to turn that big splurge of splurginess south of the river into Something, instead of just a run-down poor relation place inhabited by Del Boy and his mates.

But the Strata is also political in another way, in how it makes use of political fashion to contrive aesthetic appeal.

One of the key skills of the Big Thing architect is to find an excuse to make his Big Thing look striking and interesting rather than merely make it into an ugly old lump. The BT tower man, who I believe contrived little else of nearly such striking easthetic appeal, had his blast wave and his vast gadgetry to make the BT Tower look cool. But the problem is that ugly old lumps are on the whole cheaper and more economically rational than anything more aesthetically individual. But the purposes of "regeneration" are not served by such bland or brutish rationality. Young professionals will not be attracted into your borough to drive up property taxes by a mere big lump, or so you tell yourself. Corporate prestige and/or political grandeur is not achieved by a building which is hardly noticed other than by people saying "Urgh!" Nobody from the telly will come to interview you about the construction of ugly and anonymous and merely serviceable buildings, the way they will interview you if you helped to design the Testicle or the Shard or the Gherkin.

Where did Strata's three eyes come from? Answer, from the idiot enthusiasm that has recently struck rich countries, and will doubtless soon pass as quickly as it struck, for sticking wind propellers on the tops of buildings, or on the sides of mountains or in river estuaries, at vast expense, and with negligible effect on power generation other than to make power bills that much more costly. The somewhat less irrational way to stick wind propellers on buildings is simply to stick them on the top of dreary lump buildings with dreary lump flat roofs, and then when the fashion for wind propellers fades, to take them down and replace them with whatever is the next fashionable or perhaps even economically rational (I have in mind mobile phone aerials) way to stick stuff on top of buildings. But, as I say, London's Big Things do not inhabit the world of mere economic rationality, or not rationality narrowly defined. They are there to get themselves noticed, to be on picture postcards and to be photographed by tourists, and by the likes of me. And what better way could their be to confer an air of permanent grandeur upon this passing alternative energy folly which afflicts our current crop of politicians than to build that folly into the very fabric of a new Big Thing? How else do you find that extra many millions of pounds that you need to make your lump into a true Big Thing? How "innovative"! How "cutting edge"! The politicians are impressed, and allow enough extra money to be made from the Thing to pay for its pretty shape, the shape that they are able to feel that they did so much to influence.

Seeing those propellers in those big circles at the top of the Strata, you may be saying: how ridiculous. But silliness, properly manipulated by architects who can talk the talk (and all successful architects can talk the talk – this is a core architectural skill), can turn a mere London lump into a London Big Thing.

The Gherkin, to take another example, is the shape that it is (a) because they wanted to make it that shape, because they thought that such a shape would be cool; and (b) because they were able to sell this shape to whatever gaggle of self-important and fatuously optimistic financiers were paying for the Gherkin with a lot of crap about energy conservation. The sums for the Gherkin have never added up. It remains a notoriously inconvenient place to rent out in a way that pays the bills. All those curved nothing spaces, in between the curves of the skin and the indoor straight lines. How the hell do you arrange the damn desks? But London as a whole loves the Gherkin. In the broader, quasi-political sense, the Gherkin has been a triumph and the only drawback of that ridiculously beautiful shape as far as us onlookers are concerned is that it is now becoming surrounded not by other Big Things of similar beauty and individuality and political faddishness and environmental idiocy, but by a bunch of mere (mostly) big lumps, a couple of which will be bigger than the Gherkin. Although, to be fair, the biggest of these towers also looks quite cool.

Here is my final Strata snap, which illustrates how the important thing about those silly propellers is not what they do but how they look:

That's the front window of the Building Centre, now known as the NLA [LATER: this is wrong - see correction below], in Store Street, off Tottenham Court Road, which is the best place in London to learn about new London buildings. They have a huge model of London in the foyer, with the old buildings made of gray plastic and the new ones, in far greater detail, done with white plastic. And that's a picture of the top of the Strata on the window there. Just now, they have a Strata exhibition, with big models and lots of guff about how energy efficient it will be. Next year, it will all be Shard. Then the Olympic stuff.

After that, things will probably go a bit quiet on the London Big Thing front.

CORRECTION:

Incoming email, from the Building Centre:

I've just been on your website, reading the Strata article and noticed that you'd claimed that The Building Centre is now known as the NLA, which it is not.

Just to clarify, The Building Centre is still known as such, holds many exhibitions, seminars and debates. NLA is one of the Centre's tenants who also hold exhibitions and talks here.

If you're interested in any of our events, you can find them on our website.

My apologies to both organisations, and to our readers for misinforming them.

One of the interesting exhibits in the pantheon of attempted explanations for the current financial crisis is the Kingdom of Spain. Spain had a massive real estate driven asset bubble, which has since collapsed. There is high unemployment, horrible public sector budget deficits, and lots of abandoned, half built housing projects around the coast. (In January, I struck up a conversation with some Australian engineers at the next table in a restaurant at lunchtime in the business district of Hanoi. Upon asking them how business was, they told me that there are lots of construction projects going on, but they were being undercut on price by Spanish and Italian companies. When domestic demand collapses, you look elsewhere).

And yet, Spain has not had a financial crisis. Spain's banks are generally solvent and in good shape. One explanation of this is that financial crises in other economies are more a symptom of the economic crisis rather than its cause. Asset bubbles end badly. Government overspending has consequences.

One of Spain's banks, Grupo Santander, has been expanding steadily throughout the world for a little over a decade. Unlike certain other banks of an expansionary nature (Royal Bank of Scotland, cough), Santander did not combine the acquisition of foreign banks with stupid lending, and so when the global banking sector fell in a heap a couple of years ago, Santander did what sound companies often do, and went looking for cheap assets. These included the small UK bank Alliance and Leicester, and the branch network and savings business of Bradford and Bingley (after its toxic assets had been nationalised by the UK government). Santander was an attractive buyer from the perspective of the UK government, as its expansionary frame of mind meant that it was unlikely to close branches and shed lots of employees.

My general inclination here is to compliment the management on running a good business. However, there is something disturbing, just the same. I have felt this for a while. Spanish financial institutions (and in truth Spanish organisations of all kinds) have a thing for building office complexes in the suburbs of Madrid that look like something out of a James Bond movie. It would be mean to say something about lingering residues of fascism here, so I will not do this.

However, the new headquarters (er, sorry, I mean the Ciudad Grupo Santander) shown in the above video really does appear to be a doosey. Professor Parkinson would no doubt have something to say here, but I feel oddly positive. However much I sometimes think that people who make corporate videos of this kind are best when placed on the B-Ark, being driven around by bright red Spanish banko-robots is certainly going to make marketing visits to foreign financial institutions a lot more fun. (Do they bring in Lewis Hamilton to race them on AGM day? Jokes about "augmented reality" in banking could go on and on, too).

It's a shame that they have to build this sort of thing in Madrid, though. Building it (perhaps on an artificial island?) next to the private zoo in King Alfonso XIII's weird coastal folly in the actual Ciudad (non-Grupo) Santander would be fitting, in some unexplainable way.

Link via Bruce Sterling.

At my personal blog, I like to write about skyscrapers. Basically, my attitude is: skyscrapers are good.

A particularly choice one is being erected in London just now, the so-called Shard, despite fears all round that the economic meltdown would demand that it be aborted. And of course I have recently also been taking note of that huge tower they've just opened in Dubai. I recently did a posting saying that maybe Dubai is not such a daft place as many are now saying. Maybe all those towers actually make some sense, basing my very tentative optimism on a photograph which included not just the towers but their surroundings.

But Michael Jennings, who has actually been to Dubai (on account of him having been everywhere), recently emailed me to suggest that the Dubai-is-daft tendency is probably right:

Dubai is just about the oddest place I have ever been to. I failed to go up the tallest building in the world because something went wrong and they closed it (a story in itself I would guess). The structure of the whole place is completely wrong though. It is as if someone has taken the most impressive looking bits of all the cities of the world - built new versions two or three times the size in the desert, and then attempted to weld them together into a city, but without any idea whether such things can or should fit together, and if they can, how to make it work. Virtually all the low level structure of a city is missing, and the overall question is simply who is supposed to be doing business in this place? I don't get it at all. However, given the many tens or hundreds of very large structures half built in Dubai (the number of which rather boggles the mind) a few Arab bankers exposure to one little shard in London must be the least of their worries.

More of my speculations on the links between our "little shard" and the towers of Dubai here. But, as that posting says at the end, Michael was wrong about them building the Shard. He said they'd scrap it. Actually he went further than that and said that if they built it, he'd eat his laptop. So maybe he's also wrong about Dubai being daft. I'm sure some of our commentariat, like Michael and unlike me, have been there. What did they make of the place?

Michael tells me that he intends to write again at greater length about Dubai, and also that he is not wrong about it.

In my browsing through the Web I enjoy the site of David Thompson. After getting a pointer from Brian Micklethwait on his own site, I started to check in on Mr Thompson's site pretty regularly. On Fridays, he manages to get his hands on all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, often with fabulous photographs.

Well, if you have thought of living in a tree house (as I did as a young boy on my parents' farm in Suffolk), then check out this.

I am always struck, whenever I take the Eurostar train to Paris, as I did this morning, at how much graffiti there is on the walls near the railway tracks and on the sides of the often ugly buildings that sit next to the tracks near Gare du Nord. Some of the graffiti is in fact rather well done, even rather amusing. Here is a collection of the sort of stuff you can come across in the French capital.

Of course, graffiti is an assault on property - the assault is part of the thrill for those who do it - so beyond issues of whether the daubs are ugly or not, it is something that a liberal respectful of property and boundaries will be interested in. Even if I see a clever piece of graffiti, it makes me angry that someone's property, on which attention might have been lavished, has been defaced. In the case of privately owned property, the offence is clear and obvious: spraying graffiti on the side of your house, say, is the same, in terms of the assault on what is yours, as spraying paint on your face. With public buildings paid for by taxpayers, my view is that taxpayers are entitled to expect that, assuming they have to be forced to pay for buildings at all, that the buildings are respected and kept in good condition, and not disfigured. I suppose some folk of an anarchist type might feel that defacing public buildings is a way of protesting against such things, although I have never seen a piece of graffiti with any slogans on it that might have appealed to an individualist anarchist like Lysander Spooner or Benjamin Tucker, say. If I see an item of graffiti saying that "taxation is theft" or that "the state is not your friend", I'll be sure to try and photograph it.

On a related point, I have to say that the Eurostar terminal at King's Cross St Pancras in London knocks the spots off its Paris counterpart. What a magnificent building. For once, old London town has its French rival beat when it comes to sheer architectural magnificence.

It is a sign of how old this stuff makes me feel that I remember when Prince Charles delivered That Speech when he denounced plans for the extension to the National Gallery off London's Trafalgar Square. I remember the stir that this speech caused, and how it prompted some people to suggest that Prince Chuck had no business opining on such matters and should shut up and focus on trying to make Princess Di happy, etc. But for all its flaws, the speech did highlight the frustrations that many folk felt, and still feel, at the sheer ugliness of some - not all - modern buildings. Being an ardent free marketeer, I object to state - not private - planning laws to enforce a notion of beauty, which after all is in the eye of the beholder; but unlike perhaps some classical liberals, I do get the point that a lot of modern, or even supposedly traditional buildings, are insensitively designed, ugly, and in many cases, they don't actually function as buildings very well. My worry is that the "cure" of planning laws and listed building rules can be sometimes often worse than the disease. A listed building law can prevent a crumbling building from being intelligently refurbished, for example. And it is worth observing that left to itself, urban landscapes can develop, without planning of many kinds, a kind of "spontaneous order" (a la Hayek) that while it may not have the top-down planned elegance of some cities, has its own beauty and vigor. As I say, this stuff is subjective.

My thoughts on these matters were prompted by watching the BBC news this morning. A very angry, bearded guy who apparently speaks for the modern architecture profession is denouncing the Prince for his views, for apparently frightening off architects, for pandering to "public opinion", etc. (I have no idea who this character is, nor greatly care). Even if this guy has a point, every time I watch an obnoxious performance like this, it is easy to see why Prince Charles' views on architecture get so much attention. We live in an ugly world - is it no surprise that so many people would like something a bit nicer?

Related thoughts by Roger Scruton.

Here are some superb photos of those symbols of human civilisation, libraries. As ever, the British Library blows me away.

(Hat tip: Stephen Hicks).

I am spending Christmas in a part of the world boasting some pretty fabulous architecture of its own. In the meantime, I want to wish readers a Happy Christmas and hopefully not too stressful 2009, whatever the economic situation brings.

I came across this eye-popping collection of strange building pictures here. Some of them are quite familar to me, such as the Lloyds of London building, but others I have not seen before.

Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. His site is definitely worth a visit.

This fellow, meanwhile, also has regular nifty pictures on architecture, with a strong enthusiasm for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Plans have been unveiled to construct an incredibly tall skyscraper in the Gulf. One has to admire the sheer brio of the project, even if, at a time of global economic worries, such a project smacks of possible financial hubris. The region's oil wealth may last a while yet and Dubai has taken strides in making itself less dependent on the stuff, but I do wonder what will happen in say, 10 or 20 years' time if, for any reason, the oil revenues seriously go into decline.

Even so, it says a lot about how strong modern building materials now are that such a building is even thinkable.

Instapundit:

I remember reading a Robert Heinlein essay from the 1940s on how absurd it would be to have your car hand-built in your driveway by a collection of artisans, and how homebuilding as practiced was equally absurd. I think he was right.

Rather than assume the rightness of this outsider's snap judgement, I consider it more interesting to think about why things haven't developed this way. When I was an architecture student, way back in the seventies, people had already been dreaming for decades of prefab houses. It didn't happen then, and it isn't, on the whole, happening now.

Here are some guesses as to why factory made houses are not happening.

Homes are not in themselves mobile. Cars, which are made in factories, are mobile. Cars have their own means of transport built in. Houses do not. Unless they are campervans or caravans. In other words, the question: Why aren't homes made in factories? is actually a rather similar question to: Why don't most people live in campervans or caravans? Because the engines and wheels mostly do nothing? They're terrible to live in? People can steal them? Regular homes are simply much cheaper to make? To be transportable, whether on wheels or on a lorry, home pods have to be able to hold themselves together when being swung around by cranes, shoved about by fork lifts, etc. This extra structure is wasted, once the pod is in place. All it then has to do is stay up and solid when immobile.

Homes, especially of the more industrial looking ones, often have to do another structural job as well as a life support job. They often have to be able to support more homes on top of them. Therefore they have to be different from the ones above, and they have to be different from the ones above, and so on. Unless you just stick pods into a structure. A really heavy home pod piled on top of lots of other home pods is a shocking waste of structure, because weight at the top demands more structure under it, and so on down to the bottom.

Actually, homes are, more and more, already made in factories, but it's the bits that are made in factories, rather than assembled into homes in factories. After failing as an architecture student I briefly worked in the actual building trade, as an ignorant sub-lieutenant "commanding" ("Carry on sergeant") workers in the trenches. I was struck then, again back in the seventies, by how complicated and intricate and clever lots of the bits were, and how fast they were developing. And this was in suburban mini-stately homes that looked impeccably hand made, once they had been covered up with bricks and tiles. Underneath they were getting more and more like airplanes. From what I now see on building sites, that trend has not stopped. The smaller an object is, the less of a structural problem it has. Ask the insects, and the elephants. Homes are more like elephants. It makes sense to build them, on site. Out of insects. So to speak.

Washing machines, microwaves, toasters, sinks, etc. are, if you think about it, home components. They are all made in factories, because that makes sense.

Besides which, isn't a building site a temporary factory, where it makes sense to have it? And is it really true that workers in regular factories are all morons by comparison? Surely, lots of them, more and more now, are "artisans" also. Having also done jobs at various times in my life that were supposed to be totally "unskilled", I came to believe that, actually, there is no such thing as unskilled labour. The factory made homes proposal is just an argument about where the home assembling artisans should practice their art.

I know, I know, buildings made with shipping containers. But these kinds of buildings are not really catching on, are they? I suspect this is mostly fun/concept architecture, rather than a serious spreadable idea. Like living in a sculpture (which is a trend, I do admit).

The relative cost of land and mere home-building must have something to do with this. Home-building means making the absolute most of each site, and each site is different, unique even, which makes mass production of homes less viable, as opposed to mass producing windows or drainpipes. Roads, on the other hand, are just roads, although even more expensive than mere land. A bit of road is a flat surface the whole point of which is to be just like all the other bits of road. Roads are also assmbled on site, rather than made in factories and then just unrolled on site, for similar reasons to why homes are assembled on site, only more so. Tanks and other tracked vehicles being the exception, because they do unroll the road in front of them wherever they go.

Now this is something I look forward to seeing, at least virtually:

The Mile High Tower will be double the height of its nearest rival, and will be almost seven times the height of the Canary Wharf tower in London. Visitors will be able to see Africa from the top of the tower, the Sunday Times newspaper reports [...] The project will push architecture and engineering to new limits, as the tower must be robust enough to withstand the extremes of temperature and strong desert winds in the region.

What a pity it is going to be in Jeddah as much as I would like to see it up close, not even that marvel could induce me to set foot in that theocratic hell hole.

In my neighbourhood of Pimlico stands one of the ugliest public buildings in the known universe: Pimlico School. Unbearably hot in the summer (all that glass), miserable in the winter, with the sort of cavernous, Stygian style unlikely to suit enquiring young pupils, the place is being demolished for hopefully something rather more attractive. I cannot help but wonder, though, at the resemblance between the school and the main spacecraft in Battlestar Galactica. Mind you, I have not seen any Raptors flying out of the end of it.

Some people actually like Brutalist architecture.

If you buy a new BMW car, you can make a trip to the place near where these fine German machines are built, in southern Germany. These photos of the building where many of the cars are kept for their owners are impressive. One thing that people who criticise some of the horrendous modern architecture used to house people en masse in the 1950s, 60s and 70s tend to forget is that when these buildings are done right and with the needs of clients in mind, they work superbly.

Of course, some stunning cars have been made in very ordinary-looking places indeed. Like Aston Martin.

Brian Micklethwait has dug out some superb pictures of modern buildings via this guy. Amazing stuff.

I say "recorded conversations" because I never know quite what the definition of a 'podcast' truly is. Is it a podcast if you just record it and sling it up at your own blog? So anyway, yes, I have recently done a couple of these.

First, I recorded Antoine Clarke and me having a discussion about the thinkings and writings of Sean Gabb, and person often mentioned here. We are, and accordingly were, somewhat critical. Blog posting by me here.

Second, Patrick Crozier recorded him talking with me about modern architecture, "Modern Movement" architecture, skyscrapers, horrible housing estates etc. Blog posting by Patrick here.

Both last about 40 to 45 minutes. If you have that kind of time to spare, enjoy.

And, Patrick Crozier and I have fixed to do another one of these things next week on the subject of Northern Ireland. Peace (so far, touch wood etc.) may not generate news, but we think it deserves to be at least talked about. I will certainly be re-reading the comments on this posting here before doing that.

I love the Chrysler Building in New York, while the magnificent V&A in London, St Paul's Cathedral, the gorgeous French chateau of Chenonceu come very close in my list. I also have a soft spot for the city centre of Montpellier in France, if that counts.

What are your favourites?

(One commenter, I see, has chosen Britain's Sizewell B power station for its uncompromising purpose. I like the sentiment but am not all that wowed by the design. Here is a photograph of it).

Some of the more innovative and exciting buildings these days are linked to the world of sport. This may not be surprising given the vast sums of money - alas, sometimes taxpayers' money - that swirls around sport these days. Take this picture of the Barcelona FC stadium, for example. Ever since the Roman days, in fact, sports stadia have been among the most impressive buildings in human civilisation (the arena at Arles, in the South of France, has a spooky, imposing quality of its own, for example).

But of course today, if you are a sport-loving Englishman like yours truly, today matters because the FA Cup Final is being held at its traditional home, Wembley (for non-Brits, this is in west London). The new stadium looks pretty damned impressive. The project to build it has not gone at all smoothly (a sign of the possible difficulties we might expect from the London Olympics). But the wait is worth it. It is magnificent.

One of my happiest days as a youngster was in 1978, when my local team, Ipswich Town, beat Arsenal 1-0 to win the FA Cup (the Blues won the European UEFA Cup three years later. Ah, those were the days). Even watching the game on the television, you were struck by the atmosphere. In 2000, when Ipswich were promoted in a playoff, I went with friends to the stadium in the last fully competitive game to be held before the old stadium was pulled down.

Update: a pity the match between Manchester United and Chelsea did not live up to the billing. Chelsea won. Well done to them (I think one or two Samizdata contributors will be rather chuffed about that).

I took this photograph this morning in Gothenburg, Sweden. Is the building in the foreground:

(a) an electrical power station;
(b) a fish market;
(c) a church; or
(d) a sewing machine factory?

The building still performs the function for which it was originally built. Answers on a postcard please.

Swedish globalisation advocate Johan Norberg looks up a picture in a beautiful Italian church, and sees an early sign of where individualism comes from. Nice thoughts, succinctly expressed.

"Spectacular City – Photographing the Future". Photographic exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, until January 7, 2007, and then touring, to the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf and subsequently to further venues.

One of the great things about the internet is that it is possible to start on a familiar blog, and end up not much later at somewhere you would not have imagined being a couple of links before. And sometimes, the virtual world gets left behind, and you end up somewhere in reality you weren't expecting to be.

For instance, on Tuesday of the week before last, I started at the blog of Willam Gibson (the famous William Gibson), and before I knew it I was simultaneously at the delightful Japan Probe and the website of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which was apparently featuring an exhibition entitled "Spectacular City", which was a phtographic exhibition of modern urban buildings, supposedly attempting to reveal things about cities through photographs of their less observed details. The blogged photograph on the immediate link, the Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi in Georgia, made the exhibition look promising, especially given that I enjoy looking at modern uses of Soviet architecture at least as much as the next guy.

As I am also someone who loves few things as much as visiting suburban shopping malls, housing estates, and transport infrastructure in foreign cities, I was intrigued. I checked the location of the architecture institute in question, and was gratified to discover that it was not in Amsterdam but in Rotterdam. This is a fitting place for it. In the sense of modern architecture, Rotterdam is one of the more interesting cities in Western Europe, although one or two Spanish cities have been making a good claims recently. The combination of a city completely flattened by bombing, and a lack of the architectural timidity of London or the pomposity of Paris (and the perhaps not coincidental fact that Rotterdam post war became one of the key points of European transport infrastructure - more on that in my next post) led to a really interesting, experimental, and modern (in the best sense) city being created.

However, the real reason I was gratified was that it meant that the exhibition was relatively easy for me to visit. By a strange coincidence, I was planning on being in Antwerp a few days later, in order to go to the slightly naff Belgian/Dutch/German version of Night of the Proms, which is somewhat less musically rarified and much more poppified than the British version, but is none the less rather good fun. That took me up to Saturday night, and my train ticket back to London was for Sunday evening. My plans had been to spend most of Sunday pottering around in Antwerp - a nice city for it - but Rotterdam is only an hour north by train, and there was nothing stopping me from nipping up to Rotterdam on Sunday and having a look for myself.

(Quick summary of the Belgian Night of the Proms: given that Tears for Fears were a band with two strong vocalists who wrote and performed somewhat overblown songs with a huge instrumental backing, they are never going to be better than accompanied by a full orchestra, a 40 strong choir on the back of the stage, three aesthetically pleasing front of the stage backing singers, and assorted drummers, pianists, and other musicians. Given also that there are a band whose repertoire really only consists of three really good songs and about four or five good ones, not terribly much is lost through their sharing a bill with other performers. On the other hand Texas are a group of slightly more musically sparse Glaswegians, and are probably better by themselves with a full set: more songs, less embellishment, and fewer distractions. Also, when they were performing the three aesthetically pleasing backup singers had changed into the most interesting of their thirty seven different costumes for the evening: outfits consisting of rather tight jeans and red corsety things that were probably illegal in Korea until recently. Male weakness meant that I was distracted. But none the less, it was a fun evening. It may not have been as fun if it had been in London, but Belgium was the right place for it).

In any event, architecture. Rotterdam. If you are a building, being the Netherlands Architecture Institute is probably like being the Vienna Philharmonic if you are an orchestra. Everybody expects you to be the Vienna Philharmonic. This is probably a bit much on an evening when you have been to the pub and have had one too many. And the NAI is a decent building trying a bit hard, but nothing really special.

Walking into the building and into the exhibition the first thing I saw was an aerial photograph of Paris inside the Periphique: the Eiffel Tower, the wide Boulevards designed by Baron von Haussman, practically picture postcard stuff
.

I steeled myself for disappointment with respect to the exhibit. Paris inside the Periphique is not a city that has grown from its lesser observed pieces. Paris inside the Periphique is a city in a corset, almost literally, although in this instance of a kind legal (and probably fairly common) in Korea. The city is full of legally protected buildings, height restrictions, prohibitions on selling newspapers in cafes, and worst of all, buildings owned and designed by governments. There is modern architecture, but it is monumental and government sanctioned. The city boundary corresponds with the aforementioned Periphique, an elevated motorway that surrounds the city, seemingly holding the picture postcard Paris within. The City is just a museum - it is full of governent but does not seem to have any sort of functional wealth generating economy within. It is beautiful, but it isn't interesting.

Paris outside the Periphique is much more interesting.

It is fashionable to decry the ugliness of Paris' suburbs. They are of course notorious for their ghastly housing estates, and for the riots of last year that took place in some of them. The French word for suburb, banlieu, has almost become a dirty word. But the situation is vastly more complex than that. It is indeed true that some suburbs are unspeakable centrally planned and now practically ungovernable housing estates. But the first impression one gets when walking under the Periphique is that here is where the actual economy starts. One finds budget hotels, car repair stores, markets selling African masks, retail parks, Asian supermarkets, working class neighbourhoods full of ordinary people who can't afford to live in Pairs proper, all kinds of things that are discouraged in Paris itself. There is unbridled capitalism here.

There is also bridled capitalism here. There are planned, gated, fearesomely rich suburbs. There are factories, low rent office spaces, medium rent office spaces, high rent office spaces. Of all the places on Earth, the one that most resembles a William Gibson novel may well be Paris.

But walking into the exhibition in Rotterdam, I didn't see this. I saw the pretty, ordered Paris of von Hausmann. It surely wasn't going to be this big a yawn? As I walked in I saw another identically sized portrait of some other city beside Paris. Okay, the plan was to present Paris beside some other, less ordered city, was it. I walked to the label at the side of the pictures and read the descriptions. 1. Paris, 1998. 2. Paris 1998.

So the point being made was the one I had just made in my head and have just made on this blog. Ordered Paris versus its unruly suburbs. And it was presented in such a way that the unruly suburbs were being obscured when you first walked in, probably intending to inspire the precise double take it inspired in me.

So, the main pont is that this may be an exhibition by and for architects (who as a rule are keener on the centrally planned than am I), but it is from smart architects. Having got to that point, there is perhaps relatively little left to say. With a title "Spectacular CIty", a surprisingly large amount of the exhibition was not in truth about cities. There are a few slightly pretentious things of things like the inside of CERN or agricultural land in South America, presumably because the curators like the look of them (or something). I will forgive this, but in a few instances a sin was committed that I consider to be almost unforgivable for this sort of exhibition: a photograph of an urban environment was presented without stating where in the world the city in question was. Cities are places. All of them have their own unique personalities and signatures and feelings and moods, and the built environment is only part of that. Putting the buildings above the place is wrong, and leads to artistic folly. It also makes it hard from those of us whose response to being particularly taken by a photograph of a place in an exhibition like this is to go and look at the place. Where is this, for instance? I have no idea. But there I can conceive of cicumstances in which I might want to go and look at it.

I think there was possibly a little too many photographs of things in the former Soviet Union for an exhibition about the modern and explicitely spectacular city. I agree completely that there are lots of weirdly photogenic and even occasionally wonderful things in that part of the world, and even that the question of what happens when you build on top of them with modern materials, design, and architectural techniques can be at best fascinating (and I have a few photographs that I have taken myself of things weirder even than anything in this exhibition) but this is in most ways a dead end. The former Soviet Union is not the spectacular future of the city. Moscow today is apparently a boom town filled with cranes, but that is a chimera. The oil and gas boom will at some point end. There isn't a self-sustaining economy at there, and the best case scenario for the next couple of decades is a horrendous cycle of boom and bust. More interesting stories are to be found in Asia, which although covered, was I think underdone.



Get used to this kind of picture. (New Fengdu, Chongqinq Municipality, China). This kind of urban environment is going to exemplify China in the decades ahead. Cities and countries develop a certain character based on what is "modern" at the moment a certain bulk of the built environment is built. (London is defined by the Victorian era. New York is defined by the years between the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. One of my favourite European cities, Porto, is defined by the Art Deco era). China's moment has been the last ten years, and it is full of cityscapes like this. At the moment, western movies and television programs filmed or set in China are focusted on the modernistically glam parts of the country or of some vision of the bast. The mundane has not yet become the Chinese mundane in non-Chinese popular consciousness, but it will. And this is the mundane. India's built environment has not yet reached that crucial moment. When it does what is modern will have changed, and India will have a quite different look from China. What it will be remains to be seen.

Oddly, when I left the "Spectacular City" exhibition, and visited the NAI's normal galleries upstairs, most of one whole floor was devoted to a discussion of Neither town nor country in the Netherlands. The point was that prior to about 1950, the Netherlands had been divided between obviously urban places, and obviously rural places. The observation that such things as large retail, associated leisure industries, light manufacturing and dirtier or more space intensive services than are tolerated in explicitely defined cities However, with the inevitable decline in the importance of agriculture, many parts of the country could be described as neither urban nor rural. In truth, in these displays the words are rather more interesting than the pictures.

That's a favourite rhetorical trick of politicians in my native Australia, to be truth. "<Something or other>is "un-Australian", and therefore being in favour of it is against everything that we in this country hold dear. As if that was in itself an argument. And heaven forbid degeneration into a collection of leisure industries. (How do the people participating in leisure activities feel about this?)

Well, three cheers for the local authorities that welcome private enterprise. Though please, oh Lord, no hard boundaries between the urban and the "Green". That way lies London, and while my love of London goes deep into my soul, the "Green Belt" around the city is the worst piece of planning in the city's history. Almost alone, it is responsible for London being probably the most expensive city in the world. London is the great white collar services city of the world, but the green belt almost by iteself prevents the economy from being more diverse than that and ensures that teachers and policemen practically starve. The green belt is almost sacrosanct if you talk to a Londoner about it. You suggest it should be abolished and they are generally appalled. You then ask them what it consists or when they last visited it, and you generally get incomprehension.

And of course a hard boundary is what the Periphique surrounding Paris is.

Actually, some of us might find something to cherish in it. (Perhaps the people participating in leisure activities).

I could make fun of statist architecture speak for hours, but that would actually not be fair. In truth, the observation and reflection found here are rather more positive than would be found in an equivalent exhibition in such an institute in Britain. The bookshop in the institute was full of an interesting (and extremely international) selection of eclectic architecture and design books. And the exhibitions upstairs and downstairs were ultimately about the same thing - how urban and semi-urbal environments are now forming out of market forces and rather clumsy attempts to direct them. I don't know if they connection was intended. But together upstairs and downstairs made for an interesting afternoon.

I think that this building (the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral in Tallinn) is every bit as assertively a statement that the Russians are in charge as is the Palace of Culture in Warsaw I wrote about earlier this year. It comes from a different Russian era (the Cathedral is a Czarist structure, completed in 1900), but I think the motives for building the two structures were not too different . Certainly the Cathedral is in every bit as prominent a location as the Palace of Culture - it is on the top of the Toompea hill in Tallin's Old Town, directly opposite Tallin castle (now the Estonian national parliament). Certainly, also, it is every but as architecturally out of character from the historical city, which in style is a typical Baltic Hanseatic League city, although the people of the city are clearly very proud of the medieval town hall

It is only six years since I was last in Tallinn, but the city certainly seems to have come a long way since then. At that point the Old Town was beautiful, but the rest of the city felt grimy when I left it. No longer. It's not a terribly large city (half a million?) and it is not as frenetic as some larger cities, but it has the air of a place becoming, well, comfortable. Modern office buildings going up. Suburban tracts of nice, large houses being built on the waterfront to the west of town. That kind of thing. There are lots of Soviet housing estates between the old centre and the nice suburbs, but in truth I have seen worse in London. And Paris. And Amsterdam. It is difficult to believe that this was part of the Soviet Union only fifteen years ago. But it was.

And it was certainly a nice touch to be able to talk to friends in Australia using a software product that was developed here. The computer markets of China are full of people attempting to sell you cheap Skype handsets. However, Tallinn gave us Skype itself. That is worth more.

Most of us are familiar with Parkinson's Law, the one that says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

However, a TV news report last night, discussing one of the recent travails of Britain's Home Office in front of its recently constructed and newly occupied headquarters reminded me of another Parkinson's Law - same Parkinson but different law - which says that whenever an organisation moves into a new, custom-built headquarters, it is likely to be not just heading for disaster but already there. Parkinson's Law of Custom Built Head Offices alludes to the way that the process, first of deciding about the new building and then of getting settled into it, takes the attention of the people who matter away from the real job that they are supposed to be doing, and towards their own, as it were, domestic arrangements. They are celebrating past successes instead of contriving further success.

Contrariwise, people who are busy doing important and productive work that they are determined to press ahead with have no time to be fussing excessively about furniture and fittings, and they make do with whatever they have or can easily obtain from a catalog.

Once again, this law would appear to vindicated, and I can only apologise for not noticing this sooner. I've long known of this law. I often walk past the new Home Office, designed by star architect Sir Terry Farrell, on my way from my home to Free Market Think Tank Land, which is just the other side of the new Home Office from me. The Home Office's very public difficulties in recent months have not escaped me. But the penny did not drop until last night.

The new Home Office was moved into in the Spring of 2005.

Interesting how these things get around. The word of these amazing photos of Mexico City got to me from him, who got it from him, who got it from him, who apparently found them here, which is where, for me, the trail went cold.

The picture Patrick Crozier chose to reproduce is particularly extraordinary. Talk about 'fake but real'. Something to do with how the guy photoshops the pictures to make things clearer, I am guessing. I often do the same with shots I take from airplanes.

Architecturally, I think this is particularly bizarre. There are times, may the God Who Does Not Exist forgive me, when I yearn for a violent revolution in sleepy little Britain, just so that the planning permission (i.e. non-permission for almost anything remotely interesting except when the government wants it) system collapses, and people could build, in Britain's still overwhelmingly green and pleasant land, whatever crazy thing they liked. Just as a for instance, why are there not more castles built nowadays, with cylindrical and pointy towers?

Mind you, extraordinary things are still being built in Britain, by the sort of people who are still allowed to do such things.

If anyone (or thing) is looking for a heaquarters from which to run the centuries old war between Vampires and Lycan, I do think the building is perfect, however.

(For people who are wondering, the building is the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, built in 1953-5 as a gift from the people of the Soviet Union to the people of Poland).

While trying to sort out my thoughts concerning the mayhem engulfing the huge public housing projects ringing Paris for the last week or more (11 days' running) it struck me that one of the basic problems is just how dreadful is the style and character of the architecture of such places. Among the many contributory factors to the present dismal mood in poorer parts of France, it seems to me, is the relentlessly cheerless atmosphere of such places. Many of the buildings are vast tower blocks, without gardens or private enclosed spaces. Long walkways - ideal for muggers and drug dealers - connect the blocks. Without an organic sense of place, there is also a lack of spontaneous neighbourliness that is much easier to create in a terraced street.

I am not going to push this point too far. The terraced housing areas of north-west England were scenes of violence involving young Britons from different ethnic groups only a few years ago. If the French government were to demolish the greying monoliths tomorrow and replace them with low-rise homes, it would hardly represent a major advance towards solving the problems of that country. But I think it would have an effect. Perhaps someone should send a copy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities to Jacques Chirac and his cabinet as a matter of urgency. Compared to some of the advice the French administration may be getting, they could do a lot worse.

Let's not forget that one of the high priests of Modern Architecture, Le Courbusier, was Swiss (born just over the border from France), and had a huge impact on thinking about mass public housing for much of the 20th Century, and also influenced thinking in other parts of the world, including Britain. To be fair, though, I resist the fogeyish habit of damning big modern buildings across the board. I agree with fellow contributor Brian Micklethwait that there is good modern architecture that can work brilliantly and crappy modern architecture that does not. When it comes to mass housing, though, Modernism seems to be seriously unnattractive in every sense of the word.

(Correction: I originally said that Corbusier was French. He was not - by a matter of a few miles. Thanks to a commenter for setting me straight).

Meanwhile, here is a grim update on developments.

Last Monday, England won the Ashes. (If I tell myself this often enough, I will eventually believe it.) And when I mentioned this fact (for fact it is) here, I mentioned also the rather fine new stand that they have just built at the Oval, where that final clinching game of the series was played.

Today I walked across the river to the Oval and took some photos of this new stand. And I have done a posting about how it looks at my personal blog, together with some pictures snapped from the TV coverage. And then I found this really great picture of it that someone else took:

Last Tuesday, London celebrated England winning the Ashes, and I also went along and took photos of that. They are not perfect photos, if only because I had such a lousy view of the proceedings. I ended up taking a lot of snaps of the giant TV screen they had behind everything, just as if I had been at home. But, this giant screen yielded some fine imagery, with no interference patterns or surprise black horizontal splodges of the kind that I get when I photo my TV at home, and I am very happy with the photos I did manage to take. You can see my favourites ones here.

Some of favourite pictures were of the words they stuck up for us all to sing:

So there you have it. England won the Ashes because God was on our side.

Long ago, when I was "reading architecture" at Cambridge University (it turned out that you had to do more to architecture than merely read it if you wanted to become an architect), I remember noting the name of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. The majority of the architectural gods we students were then offered as objects of worship turned out to be deluded fools, but Tange was, I believe, the genuine article.

And now he has died, at the age of 91. I had no idea that he had lived this long.

I think he deserved to, and that if for some reason he did not look back on his work with a sense of pride and accomplishment, he should have and was entitled to.

I know that many readers here loathe the architectural modernism that is being done now, just as they loathe the architectural modernism that was done in the sixties and seventies. But for me, there has been a sea change. Style is back. Expressiveness is back. The Great Lump style is being abandoned, and often dynamited.

If they look at these pictures, I think that at least some readers here may agree that this man was way ahead of his time. Now, modernistic buildings which look interesting rather than deadly dull, which celebrate the expressive possibilities of modern building technology instead of merely using it to erect giant blocks of boredom, are all the rage.

Tange did perpetrate quite a few concrete lumps, but on the whole, he did better than that.

How many other architects were making buildings as interesting and dramatic looking as this, in the nineteen sixties? Not many.

The big news in the London architecture scene just now is the fact that Ken Shuttleworth has left Norman Foster and is branching out on his own, with a new practice called simply: Make. And Make are making a huge public splash already, with this:

The Vortex, it is already being called.

"Ken Shuttleworth", I realise, sounds like one of the barmier characters in The League of Gentlemen - but believe me, if you know who this guy is you soon forget that. He was the creative brain behind the Erotic Gherkin. He was also the creative brain behind the Millenium Bridge, the one which so famously wobbled when it was first opened. But the wobbles have been long fixed, and that, like the Gherkin, is now an instant London landmark, with the view of it from Tate Modern with St Pauls in the background now being a favourite London picture postcard.

Just as the Gherkin could have, the Vortex could end up looking horribly kitsch, like a giant lamp fit only for a car boot sale. But I hope and trust that, if Shuttleworth does get it built, he executes it as well as he executed the Gherkin, which all of London (that I know of) reckons is superb.

The design rationale of The Vortex is twofold. First, although the shape is beautifully curvy, it is a shape made entirely out of straight lines, which makes it a whole lot easier to build than it looks. Not easy mind, just easier. And second, the big rents in buildings like this are charged at the bottom and at the top, apparently, so the logical shape for such a beast to be is thick and bottom, thick and the top and thinner in the middle. The Vortex obliges perfectly, and as an intrinsic result of its shape.

But the most interesting thing of all about this building, to my way of thinking, is the fact that Shuttleworth has designed it, and announced it, before he knows where it will go.

This is fascinating. Design the building, in rough outline. Then advertise it. Then get the money together and get the politicians excited, and sort out where to put the thing. This makes perfect sense. It also flies in the face of much architectural orthodoxy about how the building has to blend into its surroundings, which I rather like. Because this thing will, if done well (Shuttleworth style), blend in with anything.

No doubt there will be Americans commenting here to the effect that edifices like this spoil Disneyland-London, which exists entirely for their amusement by being the opposite of New York and Chicago. They should know that I vehemently disagree. The business of London is business and it always has been, and you can't do business only in cutesy little historical type buildings. London is a living city, and plans like this are all part of why it is living particularly vivaciously just now.

The idea is, of course, that the Vortex should be built in London. But since they haven't fixed on a particular place for it yet, there is no reason why it couldn't be built in Shanghai instead, or in Shanghai as well, and bigger. I could live with that.

The evening sun that illuminated one of my favourite views near where I live was especially dramatic this evening. And this little photo of how things looked is surprisingly effective I think. Even the little thumbnails I got I scrolled through all the pictures in Photoshop to choose a good one looked rather impressive.

But if you would like to see this rather bigger, then click on it.

I suppose there are some readers of this blog who will say, when confronted by images like this: what has this got to do with blah-blah-blah-ism (or whatever word they choose to give to the political assumptions and axioms we tend to favour here)? But, even though many readers may be puzzled, the fact is that our standing orders here are to write about what is on our minds. And what was on my mind when I went shopping earlier this evening was not the EU or the level of taxation or the importance of consenting relationships. It was how beautiful that usually quite mundane building over towards the river can look when it catches the evening sun just so, and especially when the sky behind it is also doing dramatic things of its own.

This kind of thing does make me want to have a more expensive camera, though, plus some lessons in how to use it. Because what my cheap little camera shows you is only a pale shadow of what I myself saw.

We have a posting category called "How very odd!". Now I want one for "How very beautiful!" Meanwhile, "Architecture" will have to do.

Not everyone who reads this blog will be particularly keen to know what the new EUropean Parliament building in Brussels looks like. But if you would like to know about this, I have a posting up at my Culture Blog which starts with a huge aerial photo of the place taken by someone else, and then has twenty four thumbnail photos you can click on to get to bigger photos that I took myself of this vast building when I was myself in Brussels not long ago.

It has taken me more than two months to get around to exhibiting these photos, for which apologies, but I presumably things have not changed that much since I took them. Partly this was because until recently I had much to learn about how to do this � "thumbnails" etc. (merci Monsieur) � and partly it was that, even if you do know how to stick up a mass of these thumbnails, it is still (for me anyway) a very unwieldy process to actually do, and to actually arrange them in a semi-coherent order, especially since this was the first blog posting effort along these lines that I have attempted.

The building is a scarily impressive edifice, or rather, agglomeration of edifices. I really missed not having a wide angle lens. As it was, it was like trying to photograph an elephant in a crowd. All I could do was assemble lots of details (hence the need for lots of pictures), with only occasional views that got the bigger picture, and none of the whole thing.

Which is only appropriate, considering that this is the EU, and that this entire building is itself only a relatively minor part of the big EU picture, which is itself utterly impossible to get in one snap.

This posting would normally be on my Culture Blog, but trade seems to have been somewhat thin here today, so I will put this here.

For some time now I've been wondering about this newly completed building, a new Selfridges in Birmingham. (Selfridges is a department store chain.) Some of the images at the other end of this link were faked up beforehand, others were photos of the real thing. It is the one that looks as if it is covered in giant white Smarties, or maybe frisbees.

I have not seen this building in the flesh, if that is the right word, and with architecture, no matter how good the photos, you can never really be sure unless you see it for real. But, based on what I have seen in photos, these and others, I dislike this thing a lot. It looks like the architectural equivalent of something you would find in a seriously tacky gift shop, the kind of shopt that is full of the kind of gifts that you really would not want to be given. Only the inside view of the covered-over footbridge rises above the worst sort of kitsch.

Here is what I think. It is the kind of building which needs to be surrounded by really stylish other buildings, old or new, but preferably old. This is because it makes you look very carefully at all the buildings around it, much more carefully than you normally would. For although not itself in any way beautiful, this is a building that definitely draws attention to itself. (In this respect it is not the only piece of new architecture which behaves like this. You see lots of new buildings which have this kind of effect.)

But the trouble with this Selfridges Birmingham is that it seems to be surrounded by utterly undistinguished buildings. The last thing you want is a building which draws attention to all these dreary structures. There is one church not that far away with a bit of style to it. But one semi-stylish church semi-nearby is not enough.

Let me rephrase all of the above. I think this is what I think about this thing. I am truly open to persuasion, especially of course from anyone who has actually set eyes on the real thing. It could be that if I actually saw the giant Smarties, I would be truly impressed.

The good news is that architects in Britain are now, and actually have been for some years now, at least trying to create stylish and exciting buildings. This one certainly gets A for effort. It certainly puts its head above the aesthetic parapet.

But personally, I just do not like it.

What does anyone else think?

The other day, in connection with my soon-to-end duties as the Libertarian Alliance Phone Owner, I got a call from a householder who is having a run-in with his local politicos. I gave him the same answer I give to all such persons. Write down your story, and send it in. If it is a story worth telling, we will spread it around. Here is an email to send it to. Oh, all right then, here is an address. (No email is a very bad sign. You can't do any sort of politics these days without email.) Sometimes I then have to add that we are a (heavy emphasis) publishing organisation and not a "campaigning organisation", i.e. zero expense lawyers and PR experts who will do all your fighting for you. Generally that is the last we ever hear from such persons.

But this latest call was different, because today I received an email, exactly as was promised, and these people have clearly taken the trouble to be easy people to help (a very important art if you want to get ahead in the world, I think):

Dear Brian,

As per our discussion please find below some information on my fight against overarching government Please let me know if you have any questions and if you list the story at one of your blogs. Please let me know if you have any other ideas of how I can drum up support or highlight this excess of regulation, loss of property rights and waste of taxpayer's money.

Thanks for your help

Christian
____________________________________________________________

Government spending £100,000+ to have our skirtings lowered by less than an inch!

This is a personal call for support. Hammersmith and Fulham Council has taken issue with the internal renovation of our home of a Grade II listed building (a detailed description of the dispute is on www.stpaulsstudios.com). The council asserts that the skirtings we inserted are 0.8 inch too high and has pursued us in court three times over the matter and losing each time. We have recently won again in the Court of Appeal. During the proceedings Lord Justice Longmore called the council's conduct vexatious. Despite having already spent more than £100,000 of tax payer's funds, some council officers want to continue this extremely wasteful activity.

This is the right time to have your view heard. There is a meeting by the Planning Application Committee on March 8. We would like to ask you to either get in touch with one of the councillors on the committee (preferred solution) or to express your support to us. Despite it going on for 4 years none of the committee members have asked for a site visit!

Colin Aherne, Labour, Tel: 020 8753 2192
email colin.aherne@lbhf.gov.uk

Will Bethell, Conservative, Tel: 07980 017 569
email will.bethell@lbhf.gov.uk*

Michael Cartwright, Labour, Tel 020 8741 5238
email michael.cartwright@lbhf.gov.uk

Caroline Donald, Conservative, Tel 020 8749 3859
email caroline.donald@lbhf.gov.uk*

Greg Hands, Conservative, Tel 020 7381 2593
email mail@greghands.com*

Wesley Harcourt, Labour, Tel 020 8749 3298
email wesley.harcourt@lbhf.gov.uk

Jafar Khaled, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2020
email jafar.khaled@lbhf.gov.uk

Dame Sally Powell, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2021
email sally.powell@lbhf.gov.uk

Frances Stainton, Conservative, Tel 020 7385 3672
email frances.stainton@lbhf.gov.uk

Charlie Treloggan, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2013
email charlie.treloggan@lbhf.gov.uk

The councillors with an asterix are new to the committee.

Your action can rescue us from this futile and erroneous legal interpretation and save all of us from our tax money being wasted (the rates already high enough as they are).

Yours Sincerely,
Christian and Katya Braun
137 Talgarth Road - London W14 9DA
020 8563 0612 - Fax 020 7691 7185
support@stpaulsstudios.com

Now that is how to campaign. That is how to get other people to help you. And if you follow the link in the paragraph under their subheading, you'll find further details of the dispute, just as it says, and you will be even more impressed.

This listed building thing has really got out of hand. It has got so that if they list a building no one wants to own it and it collapses into a ruin.

In our ceaseless quest to track down fine examples of modern capitalism, I lift my hat and salute blogger Andrew David Chamberlain , who has recently returned to blogging after a haitus, for pointing out a stupendous example of modern factory design in Dresden, Germany. The new Volkswagen plant is amazing, and if you follow the Car & Driver site he links to, you can see just how far things have come.

At one stage, car factories, like factories generally, were grim, smoky and frankly ugly buildings. We all know the images from old school textbooks about the Industrial Revolution, with rows of workers grinding away in massive structures belching out smoke. (Of course the same textbooks were often written by historians hostile to free enterprise, such as R.H. Tawney and Stalinist apologist Eric Hobsbawm but that is another topic on its own).

Well, for a variety of reasons, not least the massive rise in working condition standards, the quality of surroundings in a modern manufacturing plant has moved a light-year away from the Dark Satanic Mill cliched image of old.

I find it rather amusing that Germany, not a country which gets the credit it perhaps deserves for its futuristic design skills, should have come up with this terrific building. And of course the building also prompts thoughts about how styling of buildings, even supposedly very utilitarian ones like a car plant, is now a perfectly normal feature of life, as libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has already pointed out in her recently published book, The Substance of Style.

This is an thoughtful posting:

The weekend was spent in Manchester, via Oxford. On Sunday morning a friend and I visited the Imperial War Museum North, which forms part of the dramatic redevelopment of the quaysides around the ship canal on the Salford/Trafford border.

I was brought up on school trips to the Imperial War Museum in Kennington. The huge naval guns at the entrance, the trench experience, the endless tanks, artillery pieces and bombers' cockpits you can climb over, the uniforms, guns and bayonettes in cases. Regardless of your attitude towards war, you can't deny it is a fascinating collection.

So we expected something similar in Manchester, but were surprised. There are very few physical exhibits: one T34 tank, a field gun, a fire engine, and for reasons I still don't understand, a Trabant car. The cases are sparsely filled. The emphasis is not on weapons or uniforms or battles, but on the effect of war on people - refugees, children, prisoners, asylum-seekers, and peace protestors. So there were more letters and diaries than rifles and grenades. There was even a case filled with cultural items which reflect Britons' obsession with WWII: Warlord comics, action man, and Dad's Army.

There are frequent films projected on the vast walls - we saw one about children in war, and one about the 'causes of war' (it's all about oil and money).

This is not a place for a military historian or one who wants to see the development of the machine gun, but perhaps that's not what people want anymore. Does the new type of musuem reflect changing social attitudes, or is it trying to mould them?

At least the architecture of the building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is stunning, and you can buy Airfix models in the giftshop (very tempting!).

"Stunning" means, from the outside, looking like this:

Normally, I do not dislike buildings of this sort. For modern art something along these (curvey) lines is very appropriate. But put it like this, if the people who fought and died in the wars being propagandised about inside this edifice were asked what they thought of it, what do you think they would say? Or is it that I now associate such buildings with harmless trivialities, that therefore it really does not matter what they look like, and that therefore the architect might as well have some fun � but this is a museum about war?

By the way, to add some other design-related facts, the genius who did the recent redesign of Samizdata.net, and who designed this and this, and also, not surprisingly, this, also did this.

Running your own business is a pretty good way of disabusing yourself of any lingering enthusiasm for state regulation and mandatory collective provision. That those in business tend to be capitalists is an obvious, platitudinous assertion but there remains one profession which is perversely immune to free-market reason and where public sector boosterism persists, my own: architecture.

If you take the most prominent prosperous 'progressives' subtract the entertainers and journalists, those cosseted in extravagant public sector sinecures and those endowed with a generous inheritance, you can be sure that there is a preponderance of architects among the 'productive' remainder. Take George Galloway's podium partner and erstwhile Blair buddy: Richard Rogers. He is arguably one of Britain's most celebrated architects and certainly one of its wealthiest, yet his political beliefs are barely more developed than the average student union firebrand.

The architectural media shares the same core assumptions about society, economics and the public sector as the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC and if you are unfortunate enough to wade through a turgidly worded missive from the Architect's professional institutes - in Ireland we have the RIAI, in the UK, the RIBA - you will find little from which a Guardian-reading career bureaucrat would demur. Sustainability, Public Realm, Social Justice etc. etc.

Leaving aside the obvious fact that architects in the public sector or benefitting significantly from public sector work tend to favour an expanded public sector, there are a number of factors which explain why architects in general are often prone to left-leaning politics.

1. Architects are romantics. What I mean is not so much that they will conjure up fantastical confections out of the most prosaic brief but that they romanticise their role as designers. Even the most talentless hack, plugging away in an overlit identikit box on an industrial estate churning out designs for yet more identikit boxes on industrial estates, secretly dreams of his life's work being compiled into an Oeuvre Complete. Where everybody else sees his bland grey carpeted The Office, he sees a Corbusian atelier. One of the pre-requisites for the socialist mindset is the ability to post-rationalise, explain away or otherwise redefine the dogged refusal of real life to conform to marxist dogma. Architects have a head-start on everyone else in that they apply this process to the gap between their own self image and reality.
2. Architects think in soft pencil. In the initial stages of any design, the most merciless, withering critic of an architect's ideas is a finely sharpened 3H pencil lead. There is no room for ambiguity and no possible alternatives are suggested by a line which starkly delineates all the flaws and infelicities of your designs. A soft pencil flatters your proposals and elides - for the moment - the flaws. This is crucial for the design process but inculcates a propensity to fudge or avoid difficult questions, theoretically for later resolution. This way of thinking is excellently suited to designers and to subscribers of simplistic political philosophies.
3. While most architects work in businesses which are subject to the same market forces as every other business there are two specific features of architectural practice which act to negate or at least deprecate the information the market is trying to impart. The first is the cherished notion that architectural practice is a vocation. This is drilled into students at architecture school and can be reinforced by the fact that, for many architects, architecture is a hobby as much as a career. Many architects hate to sully their relationship with a client by issuing a fee account and will often favour the client who offers them interesting schemes to design but consistently dodges payment over a stolid well paying but less imaginative client. The other is professional solidarity. In practice the world of architecture is no less prone to backstabbing than any other but in theory we imagine ourselves as "colleagues" and our professional code of conduct does not only apply to our relationship with our clients but also with each other.
4. Architects are planners. Forgive me yet another obvious assertion but the point is that there is little that the architect imagines cannot be planned. If you can design a house, you can design furniture for that house or the city in which that house is located, so goes the thinking. If a chair, a house, a city, why not an economy?

I feel about skyscrapers the way lots of other libertarians feel about space travel. I may have all kinds of doubts about the purity of the capitalism that gives rise to them, but� wow! And I want now to mention here a particularly impressive one, soon to be built in London.

I'm talking about London Bridge Tower.

I have already commented on this tower as a mere plan on my Culture Blog, here, and before that here. But what I later missed was that last November, the building received planning permission and is now definitely going to be built.

My first reaction to the first faked photos I saw of this immense spike was that it looked like a paper dart that had already been thrown a few times and had had its spike somewhat damaged. Now, I find myself looking forward to its construction immensely. Expect photos here of it as it takes shape in the years to come. Building starts in 2005 and will be complete, or such is the plan, in 2009.

It is to be built in one of my favourite London places, namely on the south bank of the River Thames, which just gets better and better with every year that passes. Recently they have added the Wheel, and the undeniably impressive if decidedly fascist looking Bankside Power Station has metamorphosed into Tate Modern, the interior of which is very fine even if it does not seem to contain much else that is much good most of the time. Eventually they may even sort out that nothing space next to the Wheel. You can already walk all the way along the river on the southerly side through the centre of London, and this tower will only add to the fun.

The reason why London Bridge Tower will be such a draw is that we will not just be able to walk past it and gawp up at it; we will also be allowed to ascend within it and gaze out upon London, from a viewing gallery half way up, and from another public spot near the top. What this will cost I do not know, but I will be doing one of those trips at least once, I can tell you. Quite how all this public participation was contrived, I don not know, and no doubt some of the politics involved was of the sort we here might not approve of, but personally I am delighted about all this.

This tower is the work of Renzo Piano, who co-designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Of this massive object he has this to say:

I don�t believe it is possible to build a tall building in London by extruding the same shape from bottom to top. It would be too small at the bottom and too big at the top.

Likewise, symbols are dangerous. Often tall buildings are aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and ego, selfish and hermetic. The tower is designed to be a sharp and light presence in the London skyline. Architecture is about telling stories and expressing visions, and memory is part of it.

Our memory is permeated by history.

How nuanced. How European. He even manages to turn the tallest building in Europe into an anti-American statement. Well, if that is what it takes to get a thing like this built, then well said Renzo, I say.

And even if you disapprove, it can not possibly end up being as big an embarrassment as this. Although I find that I like the look of that also, more and more, however totally useless it may be. It is the Space Shuttle of skyscrapers, you might say. Concorde pointing upwards.

Some are real trainspotters, and seek them out in all their literal dullness. I am a virtual skyscraperspotter, and surf the net looking for photos and descriptions. And I have just discovered a new one, the amazing Ryugyong Hotel, in Pyongyang, North Korea. When I say "new", all I mean is I've only just heard about it. The thing has been in existence for well over a decade. I only encountered it because it is on the left here. Good grief, what the upper case top row of my keyboard is that? � I expostulated.

I have my answer. Says Wikipedia:

The Ryugyong Hotel is a towering, 105-story, 1,083 foot empty concrete shell in Pyongyang, North Korea. If the building ever was completed it would be considered the world's largest hotel, and one of the tallest buildings in the world. Today however, the building remains uninhabited and unfinished.

The North Koreans began constructing the pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel in 1987, reportedly aiming for 105 stories to beat out a structure the South Koreans were building in Singapore. The building was to contain 3,000 rooms and 7 revolving restaurants. The estimated cost of building it ran upwards of $750 million, which is 2% of North Korea's GDP. It's generally assumed construction came to a halt in 1991 because North Korea was suffering from famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding. The basic structure is complete, but no windows, fixtures or fittings have been installed. According to http://www.skyscrapers.com, the concrete used in building the Ryugyong Hotel is of unsuitable quality and therefore is unsafe � it cannot therefore be completed as currently built. With annual tourism numbering less than a hundred, some question the logic of building such a massive hotel. Pyongyang's few existing hotels remain to this day, virtually empty. The 3.9-million-square-foot concrete structure continues to dominate Pyongyang's skyline.

In other words, this building is going to supply the world with the second most dramatic demolition video ever (I am afraid it will not be the winner), and nothing else. I love that bit about how "some question the logic" of this ludicrous structure. In general, anti-collectivist propaganda does not come any more damning, and is all the more damning here because it is done so delicately. "Some question the logic �" in a country "suffering" (like it just happened to turn out that way) from "famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding". Yeah, I had heard about that.

I was going to put that this makes our little Dome look like very small potatoes, public-spending-wise. But actually our Dome seems to have wasted about three times as much as the Ryugyong Hotel. (Hah!! You call that wasting public money?) The difference is that we could afford our Dome without very much mass starvation, and even now our electricity supplies are hardly ever interrupted.

Until just now, as I say, I had no idea about this ridiculous edifice, no idea at all. I guess they are not that eager to advertise it, what with it being made of cheese and having no windows and being unliveable in and liable to collapse at any moment.

The sooner President Bush finds a way of shutting down this evil joke of a country and merging it into the sensible one to the south of it, the better.

A recent (these things are relative in London) addition to the London New Building Collection has been the already world famous (thanks to the James Bond movies) MI6 Building, designed by Terry Farrell.

That's a recent photo I took of it, looking suitably sinister and omnipotent. However, I live only just across the river from this edifice, and in the flesh, so to speak, I find it less impressive than in the many other photographs of it that you see. Even I can't help making it look impressive in the photos I take, yet I find that the real and everyday look of it is that it is a small and an increasingly drab looking disappointment. Part of it is the colour. There's something irretrievably un-cool about yellow and green as a colour combination. A for effort. At least they tried. But for me, not A for actual achievement.

The feeling of smallness and unimpressivenes that the MI6 Building gives off has recently been greatly intensified by the, I think, wonderfully good building that has recently arisen next to it, just up river, and just the other side of Vauxhall Bridge.

This is St George's Wharf, an apartment "cluster" building. The sign outside has a graphic of St George slaying a dragon, and you can't help thinking that all kinds of exciting and dangerous people occupy the place, and that in addition to the little public pedestrian tunnel under the bridge from the place there must be other more secret and subterranean journeys being constantly made from St George's Wharf to the MI6 Building, and to all the other mysterious places and operations that are rumoured to exist and operate all the way along the river downstream, in all those various dull office blocks full of organisations with names like "Global Trading Company" that you've never heard of.

This is a picture of St George's Wharf taken by me a few days ago, from upstream, when I was walking from my place to Samizdata HQ in Chelsea, but taking a slight detour along the river.

I love it. Fellow Samizdatista Alex Singleton says it looked like a trashy hotel in Ibiza, but I've never been to Ibiza, and anyway, London's not had a trashy Ibiza hotel before, and in London, there should be at least one of everything. The view of those towers from directly across Vauxhall Bridge, which is how I most often see them (looking towards the river straight along Vauxhall Bridge Road), is obscured by an intervening tower, but is still very impressive, I think.

As I say, St George's Wharf makes the MI6 Building look, to me, drab and second rate. It's something to do with the individual elements that go to make up each building. Each is done as a cluster of elements, rather than as a single object (like, say, the Erotic Gherkin that I have earlier rhapsodised about here). And in St George's Wharf, the constituent elements � the Leggo bricks it's made of, as it were � look smaller, and that makes the total effect bigger and grander. The eye is tricked into thinking that each Leggo brick is bigger than it really is, and accordingly the combined effect is truly impressive. MI6, with its bigger Leggo bits, ends up looking small and rather silly by comparison. Well, that's how the contrast looks to me.

St George's Wharf has what for me is another equally hard to describe quality, and about this, when I showed him photos I'd taken like this one, Alex agreed with me.

All of this is, as I say, totally subjective, but I reckon that St George's Wharf is, especially when viewed close up, a fine example of � and I mean no disparagement by this term, quite the opposite if you can make it work � the 'pseudo-vernacular' style. What I mean by this is a way of doing a big building which is of course all done at once, yet which somehow contrives to look as if it had been more slowly assembled than that, over a period of years or even decades, by many different hands and guiding intelligences, but in a nice and harmonious and picturesque way, rather than a chaotic way. Yes, you can obviously tell pretty quickly that it was all done at once, yet the variety of the various shapes is such as to make it seen like a pleasingly disparate aggregate of buildings, rather than just the one.

Sometimes this style can go wrong by having individual elements that are too similar, and having them joined together in too militaristic a fashion, in which case all sense of aggregation is lost. It's just a different kind of architectural military parade to the usual one big box style. And, this style can also go wrong through the different bits involved being too different from each other, despite all having been designed by the one person. It can look chaotic. I feel that the Channel 4 Headquarters Building in Horseferry Road (which Alex singled out for praise when we were talking of these matters) suffers from this defect. If you take a close look at it, you can tell that the roofscape of the Channel Four Building has been "designed" with immense care. Yet from a distance it looks like just another chaotic London roof, with random techno-junk dumped on the top by non-communicating techies.

Terry Farrell, the designer of MI6, Richard Rogers, who did the C4 Building (and the Lloyds Building), and Gherkin man Norman Foster, are all prime examples of what David Sucher of City Comforts calls "starchitects".

And unlike David Sucher, I'm a fan of starchitecture. Yet interestingly, although St George's Wharf looks decidedly starchitectural, its designers do not seem quite to be starchitects themselves, or not starchitects that I've ever heard of before. St George's Wharf is the work of Broadway Malyan. No, me neither. Broadway Malyan have (has?) been so busy building profitable buildings for their capitalist customers that they've had no time to turn themselves into celebs and to win awards and to go on the six o'clock news demanding a coherent government inner city housing policy. They seem like a British version of the USA's Skidmore Owings and Merrill, that is to say expert craftsmen in the mega-capitalist vernacular style (and I mean real vernacular now). If you google for St George's Wharf what you mostly get is adverts from estate agents trying to sell you an apartment, and snazzy indoor photos rather than outdoor ones. I really had to dig for the outdoor photos I found for the link above.

Maybe St George's Wharf will change that, and Broadway Malyan will be up there with Farrell, Rogers, Foster, and co, and jabbering away about the need for increased public spending on schools and hospitals, to be designed by Broadway Malyan. But starchitects or not, and for the time being, I'm impressed.

And what's more, Broadway Malyan are also trying to put a (by London standards) very tall residential skyscraper just next to and up river from St George's Wharf.

London just gets better and better.

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport.'"

--- Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988).

My esteemed colleague Brian Micklethwait yesterday made another post about the architecture of car parks: why are they so ugly and beneath contempt from an architectural point of view, and does this always have to be so? I left a comment saying that airport terminals had been similarly regarded about 15 years ago (as the Adams quote indicates) but were now plumb jobs for architects and perhaps carparks could go the same way, and Brian followed up further in his culture blog.

But the focus was still mainly on carparks, and there is lots more to say about airport terminals. I can think of two reasons why the attitudes to their architecture might have changed in the last decade or two. The first probably does not also apply to carparks. The second probably does.

One reason is the nature in which airports have changed. Large scale airports did not really exist before the second world war. After it, however, it was clear that every city needed one. Few cities had any idea how large they would ultimately end up being, and in most cities they kind of grew organically. You had a large patch of dirt on which aeroplanes landed, and you built a tin shed next to it to use as a terminal. As planes got bigger and passenger numbers got greater, the runways were paved and got longer, and the tin sheds were demolished and replaced with larger tin sheds, or (worse) they were slowly extended into larger, higgledy piggledy style buildings. Airports expanded physically, nearby houses were demolished, and airports just kind of grew, without much coherent planning. Because airport architecture was held in such low regard, and because what existed already was so awful, little effort was made to make the buildings any more than functional. Also, because in many cases nobody had any idea how big the airport was going to be when it was originally established, in many cases space was at a premium. This led to cramped, constrained buildings.

Most airports are still like that, and are in fact still the same airports, only bigger. London Heathrow and Sydney (Kingsford Smith) are two classic examples of this sort. It is questionable whether they are in sensible locations, there is no space and any attempt to further expand them is highly controversial, and they are not noted for their architecture.

However, new airports do not have to be like this. In the last couple of decades a new way of building a really large airport has come into being, which has been to build an airport with very large capacity (designed for 20 million passenger throughput a year or more) from scratch, on a large greenfield site. (Yes, there have always been new airports built on greenfield sites, this kind of large scale new project appears to be becoming more common). This has either been because the old airport was to be closed (as in Hong Kong or Denver), because the capacity of the existing airport was woefully inadequate (as in Osaka) or because it was understood that there would be a lot of expansion in the future (as at London Stansted). In each case a whole new airport has been built from scratch, the physical area for the airport has been larger (even if an artificial island had to be built to make the area, as in the case of Osaka and (sort of) Hong Kong), and a team of world class architects and designers has been put together to design the airport. This has led to airport terminals that have won architectural awards, such as Norman Foster's terminals at Stansted and Hong Kong, and Renzo Piano's at Osaka. (Of the last three links, the "Osaka" one leads to the best pictures). These airports are aesthetically pleasing.

Building a giant airport from scratch is perhaps akin to building a 19th century railway terminal from scratch. You look at the whole picture, build something monumental in style, and some of the results (St Pancras station in London, for instance) are beautiful as a consequence. On the other hand, build one platform, and then add new lines and sheds to cover them nearby, and what you end up with is less likely to be pretty.

And this seems to have changed the whole attitude to the building of airport terminals. People seem to be trying to build something nice, even when expanding an old, functional and ugly airport. The new terminal five at Heathrow is going to be a lovely spiffy building designed by Richard Rogers. Certainly the extension to the international terminal in Sydney that was completed prior to the Olympics was better than what was there before.

Despite the opposition of my other esteemed colleague Natalie Solent, London Stansted is going to get a new runway and a new terminal in the next few years. This will be the first instance I can think of in which a new airport with an architecturally acclaimed terminal being massively expanded. The question is what the new terminal will look like, and what the whole airport will look like with it. One possibility is that Norman Foster could be hired again to produce another terminal in keeping with the first one, or it could be possible to hire another architect to produce something nice but from a slightly later architectural era. In time, we might end up with something architecturally akin to an Oxbridge college, with architecture from different periods and movements, most but not all of it of considerable merit, sitting together and interoperating. This would be interesting. (You could argue that something a little like this has happend at O'Hare in Chicago already, where each new terminal seems to be architecturally better than the ones that preceded it).

However, the second issue is simply that large scale building of airports and carparks coincided with the moment when concrete and other "modern" materials started being used in large quantities in architecture, and architecture started producing concrete monstrosities in response to any commission. The improvement in airport architecture also corresponds to an improvement in the architecture of museums, skyscrapers, and buildings of most other kinds. We haven't perhaps got there yet on carparks, but if this is the explanation, we might. We are definitely getting there on shopping malls, and carparks are fairly integrally linked to those.

Of course the other possibility is that new airports are being built by a secret conspiracy of the Germans, the Queen of England, the Freemasons, the Skull and Bones secret society, the CIA, Darth Vader, the IRS, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and no doubt others, who are all working together as the New World Order, and the architecture is some part of their sinister plot to take over the world. But that would perhaps be farfetched. (Sorry, I found that when I was googling to research this post, and couldn't help but link to it. And by the way, is the owner of that site aware that "DIA" also stands for "Defence Intelligence Agency"? That's a dead giveaway, surely. I'm not sure of quite what, but it must be something.)

It is now an established Samizdatista hobby whenever we gather: taking the piss out of Brian for his unhealthy interest in car parks.

Well, you're all completely wrong, and you're all missing the point completely, or rather, getting hold of the right stick, but at completely the wrong end. Don't you get it? The very thing that makes my fascination with car parks so laughable to all you idiots is my exact point. Car parks, now, are, almost all of them, crap. So, obviously, a car park spotter is ridiculous. Ho, ho, ho. But the crapness of car parks now is my exact point, and I am only a car park spotter if the car park in question, unlike almost all car parks nowadays, is worth spotting.

Like this one, linked to about a month ago by David Sucher of City Comforts Blog, but which I've only just noticed his posting about, in Staunton Virginia.

Said ArchNewsNow.com all those weeks ago:

Staunton, Virginia, has worked hard to preserve and enhance its historic neighborhoods and to keep its downtown vital and attractive. The city�s ongoing attention to streetscape, underground power, and building preservation is creating a vibrant, resurgent, and energetic community.

One of the �stars� of the downtown regeneration is, of all things, the New Street Parking Garage. The design for the garage, by Staunton-based Frazier Associates, came out of an inclusive team approach: the designers worked closely with government officials and local citizens (in a city known for its resistance to change) through an intensive public design process.

The result is a new �landmark� building at the entrance to downtown Staunton. �In the past, architects designed beautiful buildings for visitors to arrive in,� says design lead Kathy Frazier, AIA. �Somehow that didn�t get translated to parking garages, and people grew accustomed to parking in these ugly utilitarian buildings. The question we asked ourselves is �Why can�t we make a parking garage beautiful and celebrate the arrival sequence like we used to with train stations?��

The idea of an ye olde looking car park doesn't really appeal to me. Why can't it look snazzy? Like, say, a snazzy car? But the reality of the thing seems actually to be rather handsome. And if a railway station can look ye olde, why can't a car park? Thinking about it, all manner of high tech structures actually used to be done up in Greek Temple or Roman Villa style, such as water pumping stations, power stations, railway signal boxes, railway tunnel entrances, railway bridge towers. It isn't just the grand city terminuses. So why not car parks?

But don't let the argument about style deflect from the important thing about this, or any other such design, which is that concentrating parked cars in a heap rather than letting them sprawl all over the landscape doesn't just rescue the aesthetics of car parking, but the aesthetics of the entire surrounding neighbourhood.