The RIBA Stirling Prize

Last night I watched BBC2 The RIBA Stirling Prize 2010: A Culture Show Special.

Highlights:

Architect Amanda Levete on the Lords Media Centre which she helped design and which won the RIBA Stirling prize in 1999.She said she wants that "people wil be able to grasp hold of the idea without ther need for us to say it in words."Hah! I thought, architects cannot communicate for toffee. There will be work for me!

The Director of the Ashmolean, Dr. Christopher Brown, on design by Rick Mather Architects."We started from the collection and worked outwards."

Pio Baldi, director of the MAXXI Museum in Rome by Zaha Hadid Architects (which won this year's prize): "Rome needs a building like this."

David Chipperfield on the Neues Museum he designed in Berlin"You can't do a project like this without dealing with the sentiment of a country. I was not just dealing with a historical conservation I felt responsibility for something much bigger than that. This was the most amotional, symbolic project in Germany."

Human landscapes in SW Florida

Interesting story on development in Florida.

BANANAs

NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard), the Little Englanders hell bent on not sharing their land/ views/ breathing space with newcomers, er I mean opposed to big development, have been replaced. Fear of the new has given rise to the BANANAs of those folks who would Build Absolutely Nothin Anywhere near Anything. Term coined (or at least used) by one of my lecturers, Prof. Mark Tewdwr-Jones, at a workshop on "The Big Society, a Reflection upon its Implications for Urban Futures in the UK." (Part of the Cities Group in the Department of Geography at King's College London with Prof. Rob Imrie, Cities and Dr. Mike Raco).

Turn left at the horn.....

I was recently in Lagos, and if ever a town needs planning, it is this one. Statistics I came across in LSE and Deutsche Bank's Urban Age Project suggest that Lagos will grow faster than anywhere else on the planet - with a predicted 58 extra people added every hour by 2015 (compared to 32 for Shanghai or 42 for Mumbai). There, the big project is sadly not concerned with address the horrendous traffic jams faced by the majority of residents, but instead focussed on building a city within a city. The N416.5 billion Eko Atlantic project aims to claw back over eight square kilometres of land from the sea on Victoria Island for a luxury resort comprising mixed use residential, commercial, financial and tourist accomodation. According to the BBC it will offer the luxury of constant power and water, good roads and a light rail system to whisk them around a financial centre for a gated community of up to 400,000 people.
Meanwhile, in Southern Sudan, planners are mulling rebuilding their two biggest cities in the shape of a Rhino and a Giraffe.......

Toronto waterfront

A thought for the funky boardwalk of Toronto, from which we are taking much inspiration for our Urban Design project. How lucky I have been to see so many of the world's great cities in my career as a journalism. Funny to think I was only there recently for the G20.... it feels like another life!