THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW CONFERENCE
Speakers included Renzo Piano, David Mackay, Meinhard von Gerkan, Nicholas Grimshaw, Gert Wingårdh, Louisa Hutton, Niels Torp, Adriaan Geuze, John McAslan, David Chipperfield
Sutherland Lyall reviewed the morning of the conference
The Architectural Review’s mid-March one-day conference, Revitalizing the European City, packed the RIBA’s 250-seat lecture hall. Among an impressive list of names the morning platform was made up of Renzo Piano, Meinhard von Gerkan, paying a flying visit between conferences with the mayor of Moscow (where Piano had also been several months before), Norwegian Niels Torp, who was working in Shanghai, among other places – where the opening speaker, Anglo-Spaniard David Mackay, also had a master planning interest. None of these connections was coincidental. These are fully paid-up members of the master planning and architectural inner circle, which operates worldwide and, as they discovered, often in the same cities.
One observer at the lunch break casually summed up the collective message: ‘We have serious reservations about very big/tall buildings in cities – providing they aren’t by us.’ Piano has a very tall ‘shard’ up for discussion for a site over London Bridge and he was plainly bemused by the ferocity of the local conservative nay-sayers. Why, he asked, ‘has London such a fear of modernity? Sure, modernity has been responsible for disasters. But if we give up we commit suicide. We have to survive. The only place we have left to develop our cities is internally. Now the implosion starts.’
Piano was referring in part to the creative deployment in Germany by von Gerkan of inner city land which until recently had been occupied by railway stations, marshalling yards, power stations and warehouses. Coincidentally the practice is also redesigning the immensely complicated Lehrter railway station in Berlin. The von Gerkan & Marg practice offices in Hamburg are located in a former riverside beer garden and restaurant, an example of one of his main themes: converting existing structures. Others included the combination of different uses rather than the mono-functionalism of conventional zoning – and the notion of what he called ‘urban attraction’ best illustrated by the dramatic leisure complex for the middle of Moscow, which he had been discussing in the Russian city the day before.
Niels Torp posed a number of relatively conventional questions, not all of them with answers: Who owns the town? Who has the right to build? and so on – and he warned against making facile judgments about a city from its plan.
He pointed out that on paper Barcelona (Mackay’s home town) is a tight-packed and apparently boring grid – but the reality is that it’s a vibrant place. Here he introduced his notion of the urban section in which an understanding of the grain and texture of a city, its cross section, is crucial. As in the case of his annular master plan for a satellite city outside Shanghai, the cross section is much more important than the formal layout of the plan. Torp kept his largely architectural audience on side by reminding them that they were engaged in a profession – and also in an adventure.
You might expect David Mackay to have settled down to grand-old-manhood. Yet he was the only speaker to offer anything like a revolutionary master planning methodology. He embraces the reality that planning is a political activity which architects cannot wish out of existence. He is also deeply suspicious of the conventional notion that it is inevitable that you must first develop a plan and then guide and nurture it into existence. Those sorts of plans take 20 years to develop and are never implemented. What the master planner needs to do, as Mackay’s practice has done in Barcelona with the Hundred Projects in collaboration with the Barcelona mayor (as well as in a number of Italian cities), is to start with the small issues which can be dealt with immediately by whatever professional team is to hand. When enough of these have been completed you put them together as a strategic plan for a zone of the city and do the same elsewhere. By the time someone has produced the big master plan it has, if you have been following Mackay, already been implemented. He is comfortable with the fact that he may have little control over the architecture – the really important thing is that something gets done.
At the back we searched the attendance lists to see if someone from the new London mayor’s office might have heard this. Ominously, no one had come.
Timothy Brittain-Catlin reviewed the afternoon of the conference
Nicholas Grimshaw kicked off the afternoon’s proceedings. Before presenting his office’s latest projects he cast an eye back over some of his work from the late 1980s, showing how he had attempted to weave new ideas into ‘the tapestry of the cities’: the Sainsbury’s complex at Camden Town was a demonstration of the ‘warmth and interest’ that an architect can generate. An architect’s perspective of 10 or 15 years is an unusual one and it gave Grimshaw a magnificent opportunity to demonstrate a canon of principles which on the one hand is almost Puginian yet on the other is engaged with the challenge of the diminishing resources of the planet.
David Chipperfield has worked in some of the most sensitive sites in the built world; he suggested that the fashionable polemic of the free market city, which is about movement and change, can become a fig leaf for architects’ own submission to market forces. The direction a city goes in is by no means clear, and the way in which decisions are taken neither predictable nor efficient. In recent American projects, he has sought to re-establish historic centres through public schemes, essentially a reinvention of the modern downtown through an intriguing investigation of scale and association.
John McAslan is doing remarkable things with inherited space, coping with old fabric in a robust way and yet with respect, at the Peter Jones department store in London, within the confines not only of Crabtree’s 1930s facade but also those of a number of highly irregular neighbours; a commission which owes something perhaps to the success of his practice’s successful refurbishment of Mendelsohn and Chermayeff’s Bexhill Pavilion. Other recent projects included the complex reworking of part of the Greenwich Hospital for Trinity College, as well as the vast new-build project for the MaxMara cosmetics company in Bologna.
Peter Davey introduced Gert Wingårdh by saying that more than any other Swedish architect, he is already reclaiming for Sweden its ‘wonderful’ preeminence of the early 1950s. Wingårdh began by presenting two schemes in Gothenburg, demonstrating his ‘eco-urbanism’ expressed through a witty, expressive, simplistic structure, with natural ventilation and negligible energy consumption, vast windows and generous canopies. He also related how his somewhat ironic scheme for Sergel Square in Stockholm so caught the public imagination that he was asked to compete in the second round in spite of not having been an official competitor in the first place.
Louisa Hutton prefaced her presentation of Sauerbruch & Hutton’s GSW building in Berlin with a thoughtful and critical historical survey of the development of the city, particularly along the site of the Wall, which had led her to retain the existing late 1950s tower on the site, both to commemorate the Cold War and to signify the changes that have come through the end of East Germany. The ecological lessons learnt on this project are being elaborated at the partnership’s new Federal Ministry of the Environment at Dessau.
Finally, landscape architect Adriaan Geuze presented Moscow as ‘the European City’; his version of Red Square encompasses references to technology, celebrity, society and context, a highly enjoyable and unpredictable tilt at the themes of the conference.
Cities are in crisis, some collapsing, others exploding. The AR's conference on Revitalizing The European City will provide a wide range of ideas and projects from some of today's most creative and provocative urban thinkers: architects, planners and landscape designers. Distinguished speakers will come from both the Continent and the UK to focus on the crises that face almost all European cities: pollution, deracination, decay, congestion, disintegration, destruction. Discussion will reveal the remarkable variety of built and unbuilt proposals for healing urban sores and scars and how to make the city a wondrous place to live in again. As Europeans (the people who invented the modern city) we can share experiences and ideas, and learn from the masters.The transformation of our cities will need huge resources, both physical and imaginative. Cities are (by definition) the sources of civilization. Where are the forms and spaces for the civilizations of the twenty-first century? Should cities be tall or broad, condensed or dispersed, resonate with the past or with imagined futures, be concerned with locality or the global economy? We shall try to find out.
Renzo Piano (Genoa and Paris)
The most amazing and popular (among architects) architect of our times, Piano has designed an astonishing range of buildings from Kansai, the vast airport in Osaka Bay, Japan, to small and sensitive interventions in Italian cities, housing in Paris, the multi-use Cité Internationale in Lyons and Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, the landmark development of the reunited city.
David Mackay (Barcelona)
David Mackay is partner of MBM, Barcelona, the practice that showed how, with imagination, persistence and the involvement of the citizens and local authorities, a run-down city could become an example of urban regeneration to all of Europe.
Meinhard von GERKAN (Hamburg)
Partner in von Gerkan & Marg, one of the best practices in Germany, with great experience in inner-city building, commercial and ceremonial, large and small. At the moment, the firm is working on the mighty Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin, the crossing of the main east-west and north-south European rail routes.
Nicholas Grimshaw (London)
Grimshaw has a most distinguished record of innovative urban building, ranging from Sainsbury's in Camden Town, London, where a supermarket was made to be part of the urban fabric for the first time, to the Berlin stock exchange building, in which a huge and diverse business building has been inserted into one of the city’s most delicate streets. He is the architect for the controversial high-rise Paddington Basin scheme in central London.
Gert Wingårdh (Stockholm)
Wingårdh is perhaps the most brilliant of the young Swedes who are trying to lead the country's architecture out of the terrible dark pit into which it had been forced for quarter of a century by the domination of bureaucrats and contractors. Among his urban works are the Swedish Embassy in Berlin, the Universum Science Centre in Gothenburg and the best housing block in the residential expo Bo01 which took place at Malmö this year.
Louisa Hutton (Berlin and London)
A partner in Sauerbruch & Hutton, Louisa Hutton is one of the most dynamic architects of her generation in Europe. The practice has been hailed for its innovation and imaginative contributions to the centre of Berlin, and to other major German cities.
Niels Torp (Oslo)
Torp's work ranges from sensitive housing, through the huge new airport for Oslo to the reconstruction of a major city centre quarter, Akerbrygge, perhaps the most successful and complex mixed-use urban development of the last quarter century.
Adriaan Geuze (Rotterdam)
Geuze is a partner in West 8, a remarkable urban design and landscape practice that has already made a major impact on the townscapes of Rotterdam and other European cities. Their Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam, and their new square in Tiborg, show new and exciting ways of creating urban space in European cities.
John Mcaslan (London)
Principal of John McAslan + Partners, McAslan combines considerable experience of working with historic structures, such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, with a body of new work both in the UK and abroad. Projects such as the Yapi Kredi Bank in Turkey are underpinned by technological invention and a sensitivity to place.
David Chipperfield (London)
David Chipperfield Architects is an international practice which has worked on urban schemes, large and small, in Germany, Italy Japan, Spain and the USA as well as the UK. Among their most prestigious projects are the Neues Museum on Berlin's Museumsinsel, and the regional headquarters for the Bundesbank in former East Germany. They won competitions for the extension to Venice's San Michele Cemetery and the Palace of Justice in Salerno, and have been appointed as architects for the Davenport Museum of Art in Iowa.
These distinguished speakers talked about their work in relation to the key issues in urban regeneration:
o Architecture of democracy – parliamentary buildings, courts, civic centres
o New environmentalism – green architecture
o The evolving workplace – offices, mixed home/work spaces, remote working, adaptable buildings
o Representing culture – museums, galleries
o Homes and housing – exemplar projects
o Transport – railroutes, airports, docks
P.S : extract from a fellow architect
