Clerkenwell's moo-vers and shakers host London's first architecture biennale

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004 by Rob Gregory

June was a busy month for London's architectural community. Not least due to the staging of the eighth annual Architecture Week, but also because of two new initiatives: the Architecture Foundation's Big Summer, under the direction of Rowan Moore, and Peter Murray's consuming and ambitiously curated London Architecture Biennale (LAB). Supported by over 180 practices and related organizations, LAB offered a tightly packed 10-day programme attended by over 25 000 people. Catering for a broad audience, from interested passers-by to architectural fanatics, events were conceived to entertain as well as inform. Alongside film screenings, walking tours and exhibitions, LAB was launched and concluded by two parties: the inaugural Cattle Drive, Market and Family Picnic, where Clerkenwell's St John Street was closed to traffic and turfed to allow people (and cows) to momentarily reclaim the streets; and the Biennale's finale, Architecture Rocks, featuring performing architects in varying pop-idol guises.

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For the more earnest Biennale attendees, however, there was analysis and (occasionally) debate. Seminars included Gentrification v Regeneration, Creative Industries as Regenerators, Who Makes London? (a seminar on risks associated with large privately financed developments), and two debates--The Tower Builders, and The Prince and the Architects.

While diverse in content, these events high-lighted a number of common issues currently facing the capital (issues pertinent to many other city communities.) Do our cities need increased density, greater height, and more icons? Is it green fields or brown fields that hold the answer to Britain's severe housing shortage? (Places such as Thurrock, in the Thames Gateway greenbelt, feared to be the next sprawling, sub-suburb, Sustainable Community.) And, while we're on the subject, what exactly is a Sustainable Community anyway? Other than the latest development buzzword, as unattainable perhaps as contriving to simulate organic development, happy accidents and community diversity. From these, two issues stood out.

As with the Groundlines v Skylines debate (p28), Tower Builders failed to raise any recognizable form of debate. However, the presentations were enlightening, especially Graham Stirk's description of the Richard Rogers Partnership's scheme: the 48-storey, 225m high, 122 Leadenhall Street. While acknowledging the contribution towers can make to cities as urban landforms, Stirk focused on the specifics of his tower's location: how it will touch the ground; how it will be viewed from below; and most profoundly, how it will be perceived by street-level city dwellers who may never enter the privatized high-rise world above. With a seven-storey foyer raising the building's threshold high above the street level, over 80 per cent of the site will be perceived as public space; an exemplary model for future schemes. Recalling Gordon Cullen's townscape principles, Stirk also considered pedestrian views along Fleet Street, demonstrating the derivation of the building's wedge-shaped silhouette as it yields to views of St Paul's.

While Rogers' consideration of the dome of St Paul's has been successfully integrated into the rationale behind Leadenhall Tower--providing a stack of efficiently serviced diminishing floor plates--the influence of landmarks like St Paul's on future development continues to divide opinion today. Twenty years later, in recognition of his controversial Hampton Court attack on the profession, a debate entitled The Prince and the Architects proposed the motion this house believes Prince Charles is good for architecture. Chaired by Philip Dodd, the Prince's former architectural advisor Jules Lubbock and RIBA president George Ferguson defended the motion against journalist Hugh Pearman and architect Amanda Levete (from Future Systems). While a lively debate was recorded--later broadcast on national radio--many considered the Prince to have little relevance today, due to his proven inability to successfully educate, disseminate and demonstrate the realities of his vision. With his school of architecture the Prince's Foundation, his publication Perspectives on Architecture, and his model sustainable community Poundbury, seen by the majority as right royal failures, the motion was defeated. The Prince was not to thank for the discovery of contextualism, but rather for generating a depressing culture of fear. Seen as a disappointing leader in comparison with his visionary ancestor Prince Albert, the largely architectural audience was (not surprisingly) anti-Prince, and appeared deeply bored by the persistence of discussing his views at all. However, the debate is still continuing in other guises. In the month following the Biennale, Graham Morrison (of Allies & Morrison) confronted the issue of icons head on in his address at the Royal Academy. Promoting a debate that will run for a long time, he referred to Alsop's proposed Fourth Grace in Liverpool as a series of 'doughnuts on sticks', and criticized Libeskind's completed Metropolitan University Building as another example of 'crumpled thinking'. What, he asked, are appropriate icons for our cities today? Aside from presenting his personal view, Morrison's speech raises more questions: Is St Paul's, a monument visited by so few Londoners, really any more appropriate as an icon than the London Eye Ferris wheel, or Foster's 30 St Mary Axe? Or, is it in reality as privatized as the towers conspiring to surround it? Are icons anti-urban, in cities that rely on background buildings to define foreground spaces? Or, as Koolhaas said in his address to Seattle (p52), do cities have to be prepared to accept the splendour and misery of living with metropolitan architecture?