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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.)

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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.