An end to glass buildings?

According to the Sunday Times, The Shard could be the last of its kind. The great monuments of glass and steel are an endangered species, to be hunted into architectural history by the green movement. Building regulations require buildings to be 25 percent more efficient - and that says the Sunday Times is difficult with glass. They need air conditioned in summer to combat the greenhouse effect and extra heated in winter.

The tower, designed by Renzo Piano, is made up from 11,200 panes of glass, each shaped differently and slotted together in nine sections of a facade that is supposed to look like they are propping each other up. Apparently. I'll tell you when I've visited (press trip scheduled for June). It uses enough glass to cover eight football pitches and complies with the old buildings regs.

Greening the city

Greening the City (my translation of La Ville Fertile - Fertile City sounds a bit weird in English) at Paris' Cite de l'architecture is a wonderful exhibition. They've really gone to town to show that nature has a place - and a growing recognition - in cities with a beautifully named 'imaginarium' of real tropical plants. Among the leaves shine out projects of how cities could be, or how parts of cities are. From the raised city park Washington Grasslands to the fabulous promenade along the Quai de la Garonne in Bordeaux to MAD Architects' Urban Forest, there is lots to get exited about. I particularly liked the MAK T6 jungle architecture, an extension of the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. An imitation the vegetal structure of the forest, it is designed to become gradually overgrown, like a real forest.

The exhibition was heavy of French projects, with a nod to the U.S.. The most innovative and 22nd century-like projects (which speak to the exhibition poster) however, were in Asia. I like the idea of building gardens on rooftops and balconys, or even walls (my pictures of some fertile walls being made on Sugarloaf mountain in Rio).




And I LOVE the growing trend for urban gardens. I used to be a member of a collective one near my appartment in Paris' 20th district. It was a wonderful way to use a small neglected patch of land. We kept in pretty and opened it to the public for a few hours a week, and in exchange had a wonderfully peaceful place to go think about the world. Not that I ever went there (even I'm ashamed to say, to garden) but it was nice to know I could.

Robert Burle Marx

A botanist friend told me just before leaving for Rio that there was some botanist, landscape gardenist dude who I should check out if I had the time. Turned out to be Roberto Burle Marx, whose beautiful streetscape makes Copacabana look fantastic from above. This picture was taken from the roof of our hotel. He was known for using native tropical vegetation in design, and the palm trees along the beach are planted naturally in groups, rather than the symmetrical placing favoured on the Costa del Sol.

Turns out this Burle Marx fella is pretty famous, and he seems to be following me. I flew to Brazil from Paris and before heading home I visited the Cite de l'Architecture for an exhibition on greening the city. Turns out they were having a Burle Marx exhibition too.I got to see his sketches for Copacabana, which was pretty exciting seeing as I'd been there only a few days previously. I also learnt that his landscape gardens beautify presitigious buildings around the world, including UNESCO headquarters in Paris (must check that out next time I'm there).

'Never use the word fenestration when window will do'

Deyan Sudjic currently director of the Design Museum in London, was peddling his book 'Norman Foster, a Life in architecture' - an authorised biography - at the Oxford Literary Festival. Last time I met Sudjic was in 1999, when he was heading up Glasgow's year as City of Architecture. He is one of the few people architects seem to listen to when it comes to the importance of the verbal and not just visual communication. A former architecture critic, he said one of his first lessons was "never use the word fenestration when window will do."

"Architects tend to speak just to each other," he explained. But buildings belong to more than the people who designed them. Sudjic got involved in the business of reaching out to the wider world because "architecture is too important to be left to architects."

But this was not what the crowd of - I suspect - mostly retired Oxford architects had come to hear. They wanted to hear how Norman Foster, a child of a modest home in Levenshulme, Manchester, grew his practise into an architectural mega-firm. Or perhaps they came to hear Sudjic wax lyrical about some of his buildings.

The earliest were so good, we were told, because Foster was never satisfied. The Reichstag, originally a much grander project before reunification costs forced a scaling down, would have been one of the world's greatest buildings if it had been built to the original spec.... although the scaled down version is still magical. Duds include the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham which shows the pitfalls of slackening off on the checks and balances when running a massive architectural firm....

Other interesting snippets:

Before he built the Hongkong and Shanghai bank headquarters, Foster has never built anything anything above four storeys.

Foster's first practise - with Richard Rogers - was called Team 4 because apparently both men were against the cult of personality. How things change.....

Private developers urged to engage in regeneration

London, 4 April 2011: It was billed as delivering regeneration through localism. But the recent inaugural conference of the UK’s new regeneration lobby could also have been called the privatisation of regeneration: how to deliver change in spite of a lack of government cash.

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