'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.

To read the full story, click here.

Mayors urged to loosen ties with national governments

Mayors should increasingly look to themselves for ideas and leadership rather than national governments: that was the message from around 80 city mayors gathered in Cannes earlier this month. City leaders, who met at the annual real estate show MIPIM, were told that leadership at city level was becoming increasingly important not just because there was less money coming from deficit-battling central governments, but also because national borders were becoming less relevant.
To read the full story, click here.

Paddington

Today, I attended the inaugural conference of Britain's new regeneration lobby UKR. I'll be writing up the event for City Mayors, so more of that later. For now, I want to talk about the location: Paddington, a project which UKR CEO Jackie Sadek has been involbed with since 1997. As a non-Londoner I didn't know how badly this central London location was viewed: for me it was just the home of Paddington Bear. But now I've seen the pre-1998 photos: run-down, brownfield sites lying idle because the famously inaccurate tube map makes it look further out and less well connected than it actually is, and the retail offering is poor. But then the Heathrow Express was mooted and prospects started looking up.
The Paddington Waterside Partnership was set up in 1998 to coordinate development among a myriad of 14 different schemes across 80 acres, all in different land ownership, which had to negotiate hurdles such as ancient convenants and rights of way. Westminister City Council designated the area as the Paddington Special Policy Area, allowing commercial and larger scale development. In 2008, tha Myor of London identified Paddington as an Opportunity Area.
It's working, slowly, but even one of the conference attendees who lives around the corner had no idea that a pleasant waterside location was taking shape there. More than 1.9 million square feet has already been delivered, and there's almost as much to come. It's a mainly office development for the moment - with M&S a notable customer - but cafes are opening, and the developers are making real steps to create a sense of place and community (inviting a weekly farmers market for example).
The photo is from the top of 5 Merchant Square, a 15-storey commercial scheme designed by architect Michel Mossessian, who showed us around. His building is next to ones by Richard Rogers and Terry Farrell.

My first MIPIM

I spent my first two days at MIPIM in the Northern Caucasus (see photograph). Well, I was actually in Cannes, but as I was representing the Northern Caucasus Resorts Company, who were promoting a $15 billion ski tourism project, I spent a lot of time lapping up the mountain atmosphere on our stand, voted by Estates Magazine as one of the most innovative at MIPIM this year. It's an exciting and ambitious project, attracting lots of press and hopefully soon, investors.

Day job aside, I also had the chance to check out who was promoting what in London, Paris (my home until September 2010), and elsewhere.

Boris Johnson was in fine form, hailing London as the best city in the world (citing a CitiGroup study). Certainly the London tent always seemed livelier than its Paris rival, but that may have been due to the free bar with sea views. Inside the tent, Lend Lease were revealing their 371,600 square ft Olympic legacy development - The International Quarter, Stratford City. The bidding process was also opened for further development opportunities on the site. Plans were shown off for a series of urban villages at Earls Court to replace the exhibition centre. And teams from the LDA and Newham showed that the log-jam over development at the Royal Docks may be ended, with excitement about potential new tenants such as Google or Facebook.

Coming back to the UK I was rather disheartened (but not in the least surprised) by the short-sightedness of the local press, slamming the French Riviera champagne-swilling in a time of crisis. Britain needs to reach monied investors as it competes in the global market place, and there's plenty of other countries much better at networking than us, so if anything we should be doing more champagne pouring (although we could perhaps tone down the actual drinking ourselves!). If MIPIM ever recovers to its boom-time size (when people told me it was difficult to move), how about a MIPIM 2 in Birmingham?

But I digress. I only had time for a whistle stop tour round some of the other exhibits. In the Paris tent I was intrigued about plans for a new Champs Elysee near Le Bourget airport ("well, not exactly the Champs Elysee," said the promoter when I raised an eyebrow, "but a strong retail offering."). I stopped to see the Barcelona stand, hailed by ULI as an example of how to thrive despite spending cuts. And, because it was nearby, I studied the bold plans to make Kigali the key commercial business centre in East Africa. They have spent $7 million on masterplanning since 2006 and are certainly ambitious, but just like their coffee (which smelt great but was served very watery) you'd have to check how it looks on the ground to really feel what is going on. The sausages at the Munich tent attracted a consistently large crowd, showing the important synergies between cultural delicacies and real estate.

Sadly I didn't get an invite to the party aboard the Veni, Vidi, Vici (the Tchenguiz' brothers yacht: apparently the party did go ahead despite their shock arrest). Next year, perhaps.....

MIPIM Preview

I have a few articles in the MIPIM Preview magazine. I'm hoping to find a better way to display them, but while I get to grips with Issuu (the virtual publisher), you can read about the Barcelona Economic Triangle on p. 32 and pp 60-66 for new ways of city financing (with a special focus on the Italians). Looking forward to Cannes on Tuesday! Will report back......

The ugly side of planning

At the Bartlett today, we had two visitors from the Olympic Delivery Authority: Jessica Gavaghan, Senior Development Planning, and Ben Olney, Town Planning and Regeneration Manager. This is their photo of all the planning application documents required for permission to build on the Olympic site.