Kosmograd

Graphics versus architecture at Exhibition Road

These great images come from a billboard I snapped just up from South Kensington tube, and the website www.exhibitionroad.com.

In one of the most interesting developments in London's streetscape, Exhibition Road is to become a 'shared street' or 'woonerf', a continuous urban carpet stretching between South Kensington tube and up to Hyde Park. This takes in the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victorial and Albert Museum, the Albert Hall, and Imperial College to name a few of the landmarks along this historic route.

"South Kensington is one of the foremost centres of public education in the world and London's most important single museum destination. Free admission to the national museums has nearly doubled the number of people visiting the three major museums,and the area currently attracts a third more visitors than any other heritage zone in London. Taken as a whole, Exhibition Road is Britain’s most significant intellectual highway."

Obviously with so many visitor attractions and public buildings along the route, there are a lot of pedestrians, which leads to congested pavements, while the road itself is a reasonably busy north-south connector.

So it's a bold move turning this into a living street where cars will have to coexist with people, and one that will either be a talisman for more streetscapes like this in the UK, or if it fails, put road traffic management back 20 years into the realm of segregation, barricades, underpasses and urban motorways.

But it such a disappointment to contrast the vibrant, lively designs of the graphics with the lumpen, uninspired streetscape designs by Dixon Jones. A uniform checkerboard of diagonal flagstones straight from the 'will this do' pattern book, trying to evoke an Italianate piazza but failing miserably, Heck, even Farrell would have added a bit of colour. I may not particularly like Alsop's architecture, but the playfulness of one of his technicolor yawns would have been preferable.

In creating a memorable design for this new spatial archetype, I want the architecture to be more like the graphics.

Guinea airport car park is seat of learning

In a syndicated news story by Rukmini Callimachi, (viewable here), we learn that each night, children in Conkary, Guinea head to the car park at G'bessi International airport to study under the floodlights.

It's a tale that illustrates strongly how a dream-myth of globalisation, with an international airport bringing empty promises of prosperity, contrasts with a poverty stricken nation, "ranked 160th out of 177 on the United Nations' development index", where only a fifth of Guineans have access to electricity, and power cuts are frequent. But the counterpoint is the resourcefulness of the children, desperate to gain an education, and what William Gibson would call "the street finds its own use for things". A concrete bollard becomes literally a seat of learning, a floodlit car park transformed into a vast study hall, with it's own spatial hierachy:

"They sit by age group with 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds on a curb in a traffic island and teenagers on the concrete pilings flanking the national and international terminals. There are few cars to disturb their studies."

Elsewhere across Guinea, students have to study at gas stations, or crouch on the curbs outside the homes of wealthy families.

"'We have an edge because we live near the airport,' says 22-year-old Ismael Diallo, a university student."

Meanwhile the precious, fragile nature of electricity in Guinea highlights the ubiquitous excess of energy that is consumed in the West.

"According to U.N. data, the average Guinean consumes 89 kilowatt-hours per year — the equivalent to keeping a 60-watt light bulb burning for two months — while the typical American burns up about 158 times that much."

Recent power outages in San Francisco in the US or water shortages in Gloucestershire in the UK are seen as outrageous affronts to our civility. Taking electricity and other utilities for granted makes us forget how privileged we are.

CJ Lim homage to Heath Robinson

CJ Lim, experimental architect and Director of International Development at the Bartlett School of Architectre, has created ‘Sky Transport for London’, commissioned by BBC Radio 4, in homage to the work of Heath Robinson, and to coincide with an exhibition about Robinson at the Cartoon Museum in London.

“ ‘Sky Transport for London’ seeks to reconfigure London Underground’s Circle Line, by lifting the footprint of its tracks eighty metres above ground as a continuous ‘sky-river’ flowing through the great metropolis,” he explains. “In this scenario, long, narrow boats, usually with a crew of twenty-two, would traverse the urban sky-river. It would alleviate some of the ground-level traffic congestion, while offering a low-carbon, environmentally efficient way for employees to get to and from work as well as catch up on some much needed exercise. Apart from the daily commute, this system would play host to an annual race in the tradition of the dragon boat festival, pitting teams taken from London’s boroughs in races across the city on the fifth day of the fifth month.”

Lim compare the experimental nature of the Bartlett to Heath Robinson's work:

"Heath Robinson’s wildly inventive propositions – that do not always quite go to plan – also summarise for CJ the spirit of the Bartlett: “We are architectural inventors at the Bartlett. Sometimes our bold avant-garde proposals share a similar fate to Robinson’s but they are always powerful enough to spark off other ideas and creative conversations.” "

The exhibition Heath Robinson's Helpful Solutions is on until 7th October at the Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London.

More on the CJ Lim and Heath Robinson to follow, inevitably.

The spectacular city

"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

Photo by Flickr user Will Rose

As I stood in Hyde Park on Saturday, among an estimated 1 million people that turned out to witness the Tour de France coming to London for the first time ever, I had the rather surreal sensation that I was participating in some kind of mass consensual hallucination.

Elsewhere this weekend, London hosted a Live Earth concert at Wembley and tennis finals at Wimbledon. Just one week after a failed car bomb explosion and 2 years after the 07/07 tube bombings, London was reaffirming it's identity through a series of grand spectacles.

With the beautiful weather, the garish skinsuits and sleek machines of the riders, set against the backdrop of landmarks such as the House of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, while helicopter shots of the Thames and the London Eye beamed around the world, London never looked more spectacular, in the true sense of the word.