Latest news with #architecture
Daily Mail
16 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE It ends with me: A vanishingly rare genetic mutation means Dean must battle a disease feared by millions - yet a scientific miracle means his daughters will be safe
Dean Kizi set himself a goal: to travel to 30 countries before he turned 30. At the age of 29, he'd completed that mission. By then, the Sydney-based designer was newly engaged to his now-wife Anda, had a master's degree in architecture and was the owner of a thriving business. Life was, as he puts it, 'amazing'.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nathan Silver obituary
My father, Nathan Silver, who has died aged 89, was a distinguished architect, educator and author. His most enduring contribution to architectural history was Lost New York (1967), which was nominated for a US National Book award. It became a cultural phenomenon and helped establish the framework for New York's landmarks law (1965) and similar preservation efforts worldwide. Nathan also co-authored Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (1972) with Charles Jencks, and wrote several other influential texts on architecture, including The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou Paris (1994). Born in New York to Libby (nee Nachimowsky), a teacher, and Isaac Silver, also a teacher who later became an architect, Nathan went to Stuyvesant high school and then studied at the Cooper Union school of architecture and Columbia University. Moving to London in the mid-1960s, Nathan joined the architecture faculty at Cambridge University, and later served as head of the department of architecture at the Polytechnic of East London (now the University of East London). His architectural work included partnerships in national British firms, and his own practice – he designed, among other projects, Prue Leith's restaurant in Notting Hill. Nathan also served as a regular architectural correspondent for the New Statesman, and was a judge for many architectural competitions; he was a professional assessor for applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and was a member of the executive committee of the Westminster Society. Nathan's work bridged the gaps between academic architectural history and popular understanding, making the case for preservation accessible to wider audiences. He set up a theatrical and television production company, Dramatis Personae, with the actor and director Maria Aitken, loved opera and served as a juror for the Olivier awards. In recent years he helped his wife, Roxy Beaujolais, whom he married 1994, run her pub, the Seven Stars, situated behind the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. Following Nathan's respectful but highly idiosyncratic interior redesign of the pub, which is in a listed building from 1602, the Seven Stars won the title of Time Out pub of the year in 2003. Nathan is survived by Roxy, two children, Liberty and me, from an earlier marriage to Helen McNeil, an academic and author, four grandchildren, and his brother, Robert.
The Guardian
a day ago
- General
- The Guardian
‘Excessively wasteful and giving off Swarovski vibes': our critic on the ‘tiara bridge' for the late queen
Is a £46m glass tiara the right way to remember the UK's late queen? The Elizabeth II memorial selection committee certainly think so, in their choice of a glitzy glass bridge designed by Norman Foster for her permanent memorial in St James's Park, announced on Tuesday. As architects go, the 90-year-old Foster is perhaps the closest we have to a national treasure, so he might seem like a fitting choice – an establishment figure and safe pair of hands, who knew the queen personally. It could be an apt final project for the architect lord, although he shows no signs of slowing down. His personal connection might have clinched the deal. Lord Foster of Thames Bank, who quit his seat in the House of Lords in 2010 in order to retain his non-dom tax status, says he met the queen on both formal and informal occasions, and it was this dual acquaintance that informed his design. 'She was wonderfully formal when the occasion demanded,' he recalls, 'and warmly informal when she engaged with people and individuals.' His project attempts to 'combine the formal and the informal', riffing off a similar duality found in the landscape design of St James's Park, laid out by John Nash in the 1820s. In reaching for a suitably regal metaphor to embody the late monarch, Foster landed on her wedding tiara. He has accordingly conjured an ethereal vision of a bridge with a cast glass balustrade, shimmering above the lake. This translucent glass crossing, he says, will be 'symbolic of Her Majesty as a unifying force, bringing together nations, countries, the Commonwealth, charities and the armed forces'. So far, the images give off the vibes of a temporary Swarovski-sponsored installation, and it's hard to imagine how the Royal Parks' maintenance team will keep it looking quite so sparkly. The vision recalls Foster's 'blade of light' idea for the Millennium Bridge, which ended up being a good deal more chunky (and wobbly) than the dashing sketch promised. Foster might have done well to take a closer look at the history of the tiara in question. It was originally designed in 1919 for Queen Mary, Elizabeth's grandmother, a great lover of jewels, who had the headpiece made in the fashionable Russian kokoshnik style, using diamonds from an old necklace gifted to her by her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. It was a model of recycling, which has been passed down the generations ever since – used by the Queen Mother, Elizabeth, Princess Anne, and most recently Princess Beatrice. Not so Foster's bridge. His project, which also includes a series of gardens, will see a perfectly good crossing needlessly destroyed. The existing Blue Bridge was built in 1957, to the designs of the Ministry of Works' youngest ever chief architect, Eric Bedford, who went on to design the startlingly futuristic Post Office Tower (now BT Tower) in Fitzrovia. As it happens, Bedford also played a key role in Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, designing a series of interlocking steel arches on the Mall, topped with lions and adorned with metalwork crowns and fan motifs, that were illuminated by night. In our age of rapid global heating, when the carbon emissions of construction are closely counted by the kilo and architects strive to reuse as much existing fabric as possible, this wasteful act of demolition seems like a strange way to memorialise anyone. In selecting blocks of solid cast glass for his new bridge, Foster has chosen one of the most carbon-intensive materials available, given the furnaces must be heated to over 1,000C. Memorialising more than just the queen, this costly tiara will be an apt bookend to an age of excessive consumption.
News24
a day ago
- General
- News24
Renowned UK architect Norman Foster to design memorial to honour Queen Elizabeth II
Renowned UK architect Norman Foster has been chosen to design Britain's national memorial for Queen Elizabeth II. The memorial, which will be in St James' Park near Buckingham Palace, will symbolise unity and commemorate her historic seven-decade reign. Foster, who was personally honoured by the queen in 1997, described the opportunity as an 'honour and a privilege'. Renowned UK architect Norman Foster has won a competition to design Britain's national memorial to the late Queen Elizabeth II. Famed for designs that have fused technology and nature and transformed modern cityscapes, Foster, 90, said the opportunity was an 'honour and a privilege'. The memorial will include a statue of the queen, a keen horsewoman, on horseback and another of her arm in arm with her late husband, Prince Philip. Elizabeth, Britain's longest-serving monarch, died in September 2022 at the age of 96 after more than 70 years on the throne. She was succeeded by her eldest son, King Charles III. The memorial in St James' Park next to Buckingham Palace will also include a glass bridge inspired by the queen's wedding tiara. 'At the heart of our masterplan is a translucent bridge symbolic of her majesty as a unifying force, bringing together nations, countries, the Commonwealth, charities and the armed forces', Foster said in a statement. Foster has been shaping urban landscapes since the 1960s and won the Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in architecture, in 1999. His statement projects include Apple's giant ring-shaped headquarters in California, London's Wembley Stadium and Millennium Bridge, and Berlin's Reichstag. Foster was personally appointed to the Order of Merit by the Queen in 1997, an elite group of no more than 24 people honoured for their contribution to the arts, learning, literature and science. The final plans for the memorial will be unveiled next year.
The Guardian
a day ago
- General
- The Guardian
From Tate Modern to Grimsby docks: the team saving Britain's cherished buildings from the wrecking ball
It's hard to imagine London without the mighty riverside citadels of Tate Modern and Battersea power station, or bereft of the ornate Victorian market halls of Smithfield and Billingsgate. It is equally difficult to picture Yorkshire without its majestic sandstone mills, Grimsby without its fishing docks, or parts of Liverpool without their streets of terrace houses. Yet all these things could have victims of the wrecking ball, if it weren't for one small band of plucky activists. You may not have heard of Save Britain's Heritage, or Save as it likes to style itself. But the tiny charity, which celebrates its 50th birthday this month, has had more influence than any other group in campaigning for the imaginative reuse of buildings at risk, most of which had no legal protections whatsoever from being bulldozed. 'We felt that a much more punchy approach to endangered buildings was really needed,' says Marcus Binney, who founded Save in 1975, with an agile network of likeminded journalists, historians, architects and planners. 'There was too much, 'Oh, we'll write to the minister, and have a word with the chairman of the county council.' The usual channels were not working. We realised that the real battleground was the media.' They were spurred by the surprise success of a 1974 exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, co-curated by Binney, which conveyed the shocking scale of demolition across the country with graphic power. The 'Hall of Destruction', replete with toppling classical columns, displayed more than 1,000 country houses that had been lost in the preceding century, a number that rose to 1,600 by the time the exhibition closed. The scale of the issue struck a chord: more than 1.5m signatures of support were gathered to keep these buildings standing. What set Save apart from other heritage groups at the time was its proactive, propositional approach and energetic, youthful zeal. They had no qualms about calling out the villains, and would admonish greedy developers and lazy local authorities with ferocious glee. Their press releases and campaign pamphlets were a breath of fresh air, emblazoned with bold graphics, punchy headlines and evocative texts written with fierce authority – with a critical media-savviness brought by trustees including Simon Jenkins and Dan Cruickshank. Most crucially of all, theirs was not a call to keep the world in aspic, but to find creative alternative uses for buildings that their owners couldn't see. 'The argument for demolition was always that a building had 'reached the end of its useful life,'' says Binney. 'But the question is: 'Useful for whom?'' When the Central Electricity Generating Board planned to demolish its (then unlisted) Bankside power station in Southwark and replace it with offices, Save conjured a proposal in 1979, in a moment of wildly improbable blue-sky thinking, to turn it into an art gallery instead. A decade later, Tate announced that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's great brick colossus would become the home of its modern art collection. It is now one of the most visited museums in the world. Twenty years on, when a developer wanted to scoop out the elegant innards of Smithfield market and replace them with a bloated office block and shops, Save commissioned an alternative vision, fought two crowdfunded public inquiries, and won. The London Museum is set to open there next year, breathing fresh new life into the atmospheric warren of cast-iron domes and brick vaults, that would otherwise be dust. It is hard to appreciate now, but Save's early activities fundamentally transformed the perception of heritage, and expanded the scope of what was deemed worth keeping. The conservation movement tended to focus on churches, country houses and town halls, but Save was the first to suggest that industrial buildings were equally worthy of attention. Its 1979 exhibition and publication, Satanic Mills, highlighted the threatened textile factories of the Pennines, and led to campaigns to protect places such as Salts Mill in Saltaire – now a Unesco world heritage site – and Lister Mills in Manningham. 'The building itself is an icon for Bradford,' says Mollie, who now lives in a flat in Lister Mills, once the largest silk mill in the world, which was transformed by architect David Morley for Urban Splash in 2006. 'When it was becoming derelict it gave the community a real down feeling – you felt everything was bad and going wrong. When it was done up it really raised people's hearts.' Save has long argued that communities' emotional attachment to buildings is just as powerful an argument for their retention as their place in the architectural canon. But that's not a factor that planners can consider. 'The planning system is heavily focused on historic fabric and architectural significance,' says Henrietta Billings, Save's current director. 'But what about emotional attachment and embodied memory? What about the feelings of loss when these buildings are ripped out of communities, and what about the unlisted buildings that people really care about?' The development industry may not speak the language of loss, but it certainly understands the 'value uplift' that a 'heritage asset' can bring. At Capital and Centric's recent development of a Manchester textile mill, Crusader Works, the sales team received four times as many inquiries for flats in the 19th-century mill buildings than in the new-build blocks. And they sold them for 10% more, inviting buyers into a fantasy of 'exposed beams and red brick dreams'. Another office developer says it favours renovating postwar blocks in order to attract the gen Z workforce, who prefer working in 'distinctive, characterful buildings' with low carbon credentials over generic 'grade A' glass boxes. Alongside financial value, Save is increasingly raising the environmental benefits of keeping buildings – something which can be more precisely measured than emotions, and fought over at public inquiries with the help of expert witnesses. The Oxford Street branch of Marks & Spencer recently became a lighting rod for this new frontier of the heritage debate, when the carbon emissions of demolishing the 1920s department store and replacing it with a 10-storey behemoth were raised as one of the key reasons for keeping it. The M&S plans, Save argued, with the help of carbon expert Simon Sturgis, would release 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – the equivalent of almost 20,000 flights from London to Sydney. 'It was a watershed,' says Billings, 'aligning heritage and sustainability at the heart of a public inquiry for the first time. Although we lost the battle, we were able to show how, by avoiding demolition, you are not chucking out all the embodied carbon in the existing building, as well as not expending more carbon on producing all the steel, glass and concrete for a brand new building.' Save may have lost the case but the inquiry highlighted its next crucial battleground. The then secretary of state Michael Gove's decision to quash M&S's permission to demolish the building was ultimately overturned, because he had misinterpreted the national planning policy framework (NPPF). He suggested that there was a 'strong presumption in favour of reusing buildings' in the rules – which there is not. At present, the NPPF merely tries to 'encourage the reuse of existing resources, including the conversion of existing buildings'. There is a legal ocean of difference between a 'strong presumption' and a mere 'encouragement', as M&S's barrister successfully pointed out. The devil is in the semantic detail, and it is exactly that detail that Save is now campaigning to see changed. 'The current government's rhetoric is all about 'build, build, build' and 'bulldozing the planning system',' says Billings. 'But planning is not the obstacle. It just needs to be properly funded and tightened up. There are plenty of planning applications that we know local councillors and planners are uncomfortable with, but they are often forced to approve them because of the costs involved in defending refusals.' Entirely funded by donations, Save's team of six is currently juggling numerous campaigns, from trying to close legal loopholes in Scotland's heritage protection rules, to saving a Georgian seaside hotel on the edge of Snowdonia, to contesting several controversial plans to butcher Liverpool Street station. As it celebrates five decades of such David and Goliath battles, against a bleak backdrop of rapid global heating, missed emissions targets and a government intent on building at any cost, the work of this gutsy little group is more critical than ever.
