Art and design: Architecture | guardian.co.uk
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Festival House, Blackpool – review
A beautiful new seafront register office is one of the gems of Blackpool's regeneration
Consider Blackpool. It's a town that is hard to mention without a trace of a snigger, one partly snobbish and partly of the kind generally prompted by outdated engines of fun. It has its place in history as the country's largest ever centre of massed bacchanalia. It has grandeur and bathos, a huge, beautiful beach, some extraordinary buildings and some tottering shacks that barely cling to the wind-blown ground. Once, emulating Paris, it built a version of the Eiffel Tower. More recently it wanted to be Las Vegas (with less heat and no desert, but with sea), and was devastated and angry when its bid to host Britain's first super-casino , with all the life-transforming effects that would allegedly have brought, failed.
According to Alex de Rijke, of the architects de Rijke Marsh Morgan, and the new dean of architecture at the Royal College of Art, the town has "a highly developed mix of the familiar and the surreal; it has a great sense of the mock monumental". Sometimes Blackpool wears the forced grin and the heroic doomed upbeatness of a stand-up comedian who has lost his audience but keeps going even as the bottles hit the stage. But its decades of success, which peaked in the middle of the last century, have also left a feeling that there is too much there, in buildings, people and fantasies, for it to fade away.
In the past few years it has been the target of determined attempts at regeneration, including the revamping of the Blackpool Tower and the grandiose old Winter Gardens, and a new tram service. These stabs at improvement include some atrocious public art, such as an avenue of over-scaled shiny parabolas that hold up some street lights, but also the rebuilding of the esplanade as a series of broad terraces and ramps. It is impressively solid and well built (which, at a cost of £200m, it should be) and its shifting, dune-like slopes pleasurably connect the town to the beach.
The esplanade, designed by the landscape architects LDA Design, was also to be scattered with public art and pavilions, but budget restrictions have reduced their number – thankfully so, as Blackpool doesn't really need more bits and pieces. It already has its tower, its Victorian and Edwardian palaces of fun, its sub-Vegas iconography of giant fibreglass skulls and neon signs luring you into more-or-less clapped-out amusement arcades. Some of the art that survived the cuts is of the swooshing kind favoured by regeneration projects, emblems of positivity by official order. More unusual is the Comedy Carpet, a large square of paving decorated with the jokes and names of old performers – it could have been toe-curling but there is something in the quality of its design and making that carry it off.
The most intriguing of the new structures is Festival House, designed by de Rijke Marsh Morgan, where a short but perky gold tower rises above a long, low plinth in pinkish brick. It treads a line between civic pride and Blackpool's heritage of flamboyant trash, what de Rijke calls "B-movie architecture". It has echoes of such serious precedents as Frank Lloyd Wright, but also 1950s motels.
Its uses are a restaurant (currently awaiting appointment of an operator), an information centre and a register office for weddings. This last raises suspicion of yet more Vegas envy and it does indeed include a room where you can get quickies for £40, but the town council is quick to point out that it simply fulfils one of its responsibilities – to provide facilities for civic weddings. Any resemblance to the Nevada chapels where you can get quickly hitched is coincidental.
Most people, says de Rijke, "regard register office weddings as anticlimactic alternatives to churches", but here the aim was to create "a sense of occasion". So, compressed into what is a small building, the design makes a ceremonial route with as much event as possible. First there is a lobby with a window on to the sea; then a lift; then a waiting space with a balcony from which wider views can be had; then the room for the main event that, high and angular and orientated towards an altar-like table, has a churchy feel. Beyond the table a glazed cleft is filled with a view of the Blackpool Tower, which could be seen, if you fancy, as a bit of boy-girl symbolism appropriate to the occasion.
On leaving this room the couple are then presented with a view of the horizon, before descending a generous stair and exiting via a little garden with a luminescent heart in the paving. It flirts with kitsch but de Rijke says he "also wanted to talk about quality". Materials and detail are both considered and pioneering. The structure, visible internally, is of something called cross-laminated timber, out of which it's possible to make walls, beams, cantilevers, floors and stair treads. He calls it the "new concrete", in that it's as versatile as the hard grey stuff but more sustainable, and "people are more likely to like it".
The bricks on the exterior are made of concrete by a company called Lignacite, with glinting fragments of recycled glass thrown into the mix; again it is both sustainable and pretty. It is, says de Rijke, a "really solid building", and what gives him most pride is "the absence of what you usually see in public buildings: ducts and vents everywhere. There is an absence of crap. If it does feel like a noble space that's why."
It's hard to disagree with him. He and his practice have set out to create a rare thing – a place for civic weddings that is celebratory rather than bureaucratic. They have also sought to capture the spirit of Blackpool without being patronising or cliched. In both they have succeeded, and by offering various views – of tower, horizon, front and streets – as you progress through the building, they help you appreciate what is good about the town.
It remains to be seen if the hundreds of millions spent on Blackpool will give it the new future that everyone hopes for. I'd also like it if a strong wind blew away some of the more lame attempts at public art. But at least they've got a nice place for walking by the sea and a nice place to get married.
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10: The long gallery, Chastleton House, Moreton-in-Marsh, 1607-1612
As part of our series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic view of this classic example of the Jacobean long gallery
• Explore the Chastleton House long gallery panoramic hereThe long gallery was the special contribution of Elizabethan and Jacobean society to architecture that deals with the passing of time: it was a place for walking in bad weather, for contemplating and showing off art and ancestral portraits and, therefore, combined the rhythms of exercise, meteorology and genealogy. A smallish but satisfying example is in Chastleton House in the Cotswolds, built by a rich wool merchant (or possibly lawyer), whose family later dissipated his wealth and so were unable to alter the original building. Nikolaus Pevsner called the decoration of Chastleton "blatantly nouveau riche, even barbaric, uninhibited by any consideration of insipid good taste", but it now it looks gentle and charming, softened by wobbles in wood and plaster and the fall of light. It is also more bare than it would have been, in the absence of its original artworks and tapestries. What is particularly pleasurable is the way the stuff of the ceiling – ornamental plaster – descends, while the stuff of the floor – wood – rises in the form of panelling and the two meet at mid-height. It gives a boat-like sense of enclosure and protection.
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Chastleton House – 360º interactive panoramic
Explore Chastleton House using our 360º interactive panoramic tool
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Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Camelot comes to Cockfosters (maybe), Frank Gehry's Signature Theatre opens and the World Trade Centre site struggles with a design flaw
"Camelot!"
"Camelot!"
"Camelot!"
"It's only a model."Monty Python and the Holy Grail might just have got it right. What other explanation can there be for images of a striking crystalline edifice that appeared online this week, purporting to be a new centre for all things Arthurian, built on the newly discovered ruins of the original Camelot – in Cockfosters, north London.
Surely this can't be for real? The Stone is a 36-metre-high shard of mirrored glass intended for Enfield Park, apparently designed by Swedish architects Råk Arkitektur. As the name suggests, it was inspired by the rock from which King Arthur pulled Excalibur. A sword-like shaft of light will pierce the cavernous interior, which will host "a multi-faith meeting place and a cultural centre".
Råk's name (pronounced "rock") and flimsy website aren't entirely convincing. Nor is the foundation behind the project, the spurious-sounding Organisation for the Protection of Mythological Monuments. Their website at least includes a phone number. At the end of the line is a young-sounding "designer" called Tom Gottlieb. He claims there's just as much evidence pointing to King Arthur's seat being at the end of the Piccadilly line as there is for it being at, say, Tintagel, and that Enfield council have been "receptive" to their idea. Come on, it's all a hoax, isn't it? "Well, Camelot is a myth," says Gottlieb cryptically. In other words, this could just be a speculative publicity stunt by some under-employed designers – in which case, well done. It worked.
Less of a laughing matter is New York's World Trade Centre site. Work has ground to a halt on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, which is unlikely to open on 11 September this year as planned. Two World Trade Centre and Three World Trade Centre, the skyscrapers designed by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, have also apparently stalled owing to lack of tenants.
And this week, a "design flaw" emerged in the centrepiece "Freedom Tower", or One World Trade Centre. The problem is that the temporary subway station nearby is in the way, so they can't finish the building's underground loading bays, which means tenants can't fit out their space in the 104-storey building. Five temporary loading bays have had to be built, above ground, at much extra cost (now estimated to have climbed to $3.8bn). "Several years ago there was a design miss," admitted Port Authority director Patrick Foye. "Should it have been caught? The answer is, 'probably'."
Faring considerably better in New York these days is Frank Gehry. His own plan for a performing arts centre for the World Trade Centre site has been on ice for years, but at least he got his rippling Spruce Street skyscraper completed last year, and this week the new Gehry-designed Signature Theatre opened on Pershing Square. It's not distinctively Gehryesque on the outside, but fashionably open and stripped down on the inside, with three new stages among its features.
What's more, at the opening, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg spontaneously pledged to get 10 more Gehry projects off the ground in New York before he leaves office in two years' time. That's the kind of news every architect wants to hear, though it'll take some doing. "If my math is any good, Frank, that is one every 70 days," Bloomberg pointed out to his starchitect buddy. "So we should meet some time later today to get going." Perhaps he could knock out some loading bays?
A good week also for Zaha Hadid, who yesterday announced that she is to build the new Central Bank of Iraq headquarters in Baghdad – her first project back in her home country. No details as yet, though it's some way from the European culture palaces she's used to designing. The existing Central Bank came under heavy attack in June, in an audacious attempted robbery by armed militants and suicide bombers.
And finally, the most cheering news for architecture fans must be the restoration and reopening of Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat, in Brno, Czech Republic. One of the most pioneering designs of modernism, whose opulent onyx walls, iconic furniture and free-flowing spaces still look state-of-the-art today – if not the spartan bathroom fittings. Destined to become an architectural pilgrimage site, it opens to the public in a month's time.
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Another 'old north' landmark comes crashing down
Vast and brutal, the 'Dunston rocket' didn't even do its basic job of housing that well. Gateshead eyes will mostly remain dry
Another Brutalist landmark by the Owen Luder partnership is biting the dust in Gateshead, which recently disposed of his famous, or alternatively notorious, 'Get Carter' car park.
There have been fewer palpitations about the fate of the 'Dunston Rocket' than there were about the car park, which did have a curious grace in addition to its role in the cult film starring Michael Caine.
The 'rocket' is a 30-storey tower block of uncompromising, well, ugliness, commissioned in a rather remarkable feat of localism by the long defunct Whickham town council. The intentions were admirable but the execution and subsequent maintenance apparently less so, down to the revolutionary caisson foundations which doubled as a car park.
Not for long. They were so revolutionary and the geology was so treacherous that they flooded repeatedly and were soon abandoned as none of the tenants owned a submarine.
The 'rocket' had a downmarket version of Get Carter through starring in a TV commercial for Tudo crisps, but that failed to endear it to anyone much over the years beyond diehard fans of Brutalism. Certainly Gateshead's Labour council leader Mick Henry isn't too upset to be losing it. He's been up to the top floor to give a brief initial hand to two radio-controlled robot demolition machines which are nibbling at floors 30 to 19 because conventional methods of dismantling would be too dangerous.
Henry says:
I'm aware that some people find the building architecturally interesting. But, the fact is, people did not want to live here and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone.
Indeed, there are mixed views about its architectural merit and many people in the area have longed to see a skyline without this building. They feel it represents a Gateshead of the past, with long outdated misconceptions about what the modern North East is like.
It's good to celebrate the past, but it's also important to build the future. And that means housing and facilities that are fit for the future of Gateshead and its residents. We've already waved goodbye to the 'Get Carter' car park and, now that the 'rocket' is coming down, we can move forward with new confidence, reflecting our firm ambitions to become a city.
Gateshead is very bullish about its chances in that department, with the Queen expected to name at least one new city as part of her diamond jubilee. Sunderland has done nicely out of its elevation in 1992, as has Preston, which became a city ten years later. It gives a place added confidence.
Gateshead has an unusual combination of distinctions in its shorthand argument for joining the select category. It calls itself:
the location of the world-famous Angel of the North, birthplace of the electric light bulb and one-time home of the family of the Queen Mother.
It also has some very fine red kites.Whatever your views on the council's choice of structures to remove, no one can argue with its record of putting new ones up. The four great glories of modern Tyneside – the Angel, the Baltic, the Sage and the Winking Bridge – are Gateshead projects, every one.
The 'rocket' – officially known as Derwent Tower – will be replaced with new, mostly family homes, along with a doctor's surgery, chemist, supermarket, other shops and accommodation for the elderly. It should have disappeared fully by the autumn, 44 years after the first bucket of concrete was poured.
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10 of Tokyo's best works of architecture
Tokyo's skyline is a diverse jumble of modern architecture, from soaring shards of glass to eccentric 1970s living capsules. Ashley Rawlings picks 10 of the most distinctive buildings
• As featured in our Tokyo city guideReversible Destiny Lofts
"We have decided not to die," declared architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeleine Gins in the title of the book they published in 1997, arguing that lopsided, physically challenging spaces would awaken residents' instincts and allow them to live better, longer – even forever. Head out to Tokyo's leafy suburb of Mitaka and see their rainbow-coloured Reversible Destiny Lofts. The nine apartments in this complex have uneven floors and rounded walls, awkward light switches, power sockets in the ceilings, and no cupboards. Some of the units are available for short-term rent, but watch your step!
• 2-2-8 Osawa, Mitaka-shi, +81 4 2226 4966, reversibledestiny.orgSt Mary's Cathedral
Kenzo Tange has built many impressive buildings in Tokyo, but St Mary's Cathedral is arguably his finest work. Built in 1964, it is a soaring vision of stainless-steel-clad abstraction. Seen from the air, the apex of its roof forms a cross made of glass. The interior is equally dramatic: a cavern of sloping walls at times lit up in red or blue. All this austerity is counterbalanced by a tall, narrow strip of stained glass behind the altar, which provides the hall with a focus and a crucial, serene touch of warmth.
• 3-15-16 Sekiguchi, Bunkyo-ku, +81 3 3943 2301Prada flagship store
Tokyo's Omotesando boulevard is a stunning catwalk for high-end contemporary fashion and dramatic architecture. Just when you think the setting can't get any more impressive, the Prada flagship store manages to make its neighbours look like they're trying too hard. Built in 2003 by Herzog and DeMeuron (renowned for the the bird's nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing; their extension to London's Tate Modern art gallery will open in time for this year's Olympics), the Prada store is an irregular construction of green, diamond-shaped glass panels. While many flagship stores intimidate with their austere interiors, Prada's aims to seduce with plush white carpets and rounded plastic walls. It's the epitome of refined but unpretentious allure.
• 5-2-6 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-kuNakagin Capsule Tower
Completed in 1972 by Kisho Kurokawa, this eccentric residential/office building – which looks like a stack of washing machines – is an icon of the postwar Metabolist movement. The cramped capsules were originally designed for single businessmen, and each unit contains a built-in shower, bed, TV and phone. These were supposed to be replaced every 25 years, but never were, so the building is now in a sorry state of disrepair. Bought up by an unsentimental hedge fund, it is due for demolition and redevelopment. Get there in the next few months for a last chance to see this hallmark of flawed but visionary idealism.
• 16-10, Ginza 8-chome, Chuo-kuFumiko Hayashi Memorial Hall
With the widespread firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 and the postwar reconstruction, there's not a lot of traditional architecture left to see in the city – with one great exception. In 1941, novelist Fumiko Hayashi (1903–1951) built her home here in Edo-era architectural style. Now a museum, this elegant house displays artefacts relating to her life and work, and the tranquil, walled garden where Hayashi wrote her acclaimed novels Ukigumo and Meshi. Spend an hour here and let the clock wind back.
• 2-20-1 Nakai, Shinjuku-ku, +81 3 5996 920721_21 Design Sight
In the park behind the high-end Tokyo Midtown shopping centre, two sleek, triangular shards of concrete and glass rise from the ground. 21_21 Design Sight is a signature work by Tadao Ando, and Japan's first design museum. Once you venture beyond the trapezoid lobby, you discover that 70% of the building is underground, but the exhibits still look great thanks to a large light-well and clever spotlighting. Directed by three of Japan's most famous designers – Issey Miyake, Taku Satoh, and Naoto Fukusawa – 21_21 Design Sight's exhibitions present the most artistic examples of international design, from Shiro Kuramata's classic resin "Miss Blanche" chairs to images of Christo's wrapped public monuments.
• Tokyo Midtown, 9-7-6 Akasaka, Minato-ku, +81 3 3475 2121, 2121designsight.jp. Open daily 11am-8pm except TuesReiyukai Shakaden Temple
Nothing looms more ominously on the Tokyo skyline than this dark, oblique pyramid clad in black granite and crowned by two rings of gold. Inside, the gloomy, red-felt-lined elevators seem better suited to a David Lynch movie than a temple. Reiyukai Shakaden was built in 1925 for a Buddhist lay sect and houses a large meditation room with a giant Buddha statue. But visitors are welcome, and free Japanese lessons are on offer. The temple also houses a reservoir with 400 tonnes of drinking water for use in the event that Tokyo is struck by a major disaster.
• 1-7-8 Azabudai, Minato-ku, reiyukai.orgGolden Gai Bar District
This compact cluster of more than 200 tiny, ramshackle bars in Shinjuku is the antithesis of planned, efficient architecture. In the 1950s it was a den of black-market trade and vice, but later became a hangout for artists and intellectuals. The chaotic street scenes in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner were apparently inspired by this dingy Tokyo district. Each bar has its own theme, ranging from photography to horse racing. While many of them only serve locals, a few will let you in if you ask nicely. Beware, drinks and accompanying snacks are expensive.
• Kabukicho 1-chome, Shinjuku-kuYuzo Saeki's Studio
Yuzo Saeki (1898-1928) was one of Japan's early adopters of western-style oil painting. Late in life, he spent several years in Paris, where he painted self-portraits and landscapes in the Fauvist style. His studio, nestled in a small park in Mejiro, is a very rare find in Tokyo. This intimate, wooden building – reminiscent of an American parish chapel – is flooded with natural light that pours in through a large set of windows at one end, while at the other there's a quirky, irregular row of three doors. Since 2010, the studio has become a museum of Saeki's work.
• 2-4-21 Nakaochiai, Shinjuku-ku, +81 3 5988 0091, free admission. Open Tues-Sun May-Sept 10am-4.30pm, Oct-Apr 10am-4pmSonorium
The lopsided white block of Jun Aoki's Sonorium rises up from behind the dark, tiled roofs of a residential street in Eifukucho. The intimate concert hall is a serene place to be on an overcast or rainy day: the sloping walls punctuated by two rectangular windows which become gleaming expanses of bright white. Aoki – known as an artist as much as an architect – has succeeded in creating a building that feels like a three-dimensional work of minimalist geometric abstraction.
• 3-53-16 Izumi, Suginami-ku, +81 3 6768 3000, sonorium.jpFor more information go to the Japan National Tourism Organisation's website: jnto.go.jp/eng
• Ashley Rawlings is the editor of Art Space Tokyo, a guide to the city's most architecturally distinctive museums and galleries
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The tower and the glory: Terry Farrell's KK100
Looming over the sprawling Chinese city of Shenzhen, this building is the tallest skyscraper ever designed by a British architect. Terry Farrell tells Jonathan Glancey how he did it
'I've never thought of myself as a skyscraper man," says Terry Farrell, sitting in his richly decorated London flat. Above our heads hang models of historic aircraft. Across the room, amid lots of exotic plants, goldfish circle each other in huge bowls. "Many of the world's most famous skyscrapers are designed by architects few people in the profession can name." I ask him if he can remember who designed the Empire State Building and he gets it wrong. "Well," he says, "you've made my point."
But Farrell – perhaps best known in this country for the MI6 building, that hulking, postmodern fortress on the banks of the Thames – has just become a skyscraper man, thanks to KK100. This gleaming, 442-metre high colossus that shoots up, pencil-thin, from the business district of Shenzhen in China isn't just his first skyscraper, though. It's also the tallest building ever realised by a British architect.
With a chuckle, Farrell explains that the tower is for a group of developers known as Kingkey, who were keen to show China and the world how far they, and Shenzhen, had come in the past few decades. "So they asked for a 100-storey design and wanted to call it the Kingkey Tower. I told them that, in English, this sounds like 'kinky' and might not be a good idea." But these giant high-rises are all a bit phallic, aren't they? "Machismo, yes," says Farrell. "It's the characteristic that drives China's skyscrapers."
In fact, if anything, KK100 looms like an improbably tall blade of glass over Shenzhen, a city on the border with Hong Kong that has indeed come a long way at breakneck speed. In May 1980, Deng Xiaoping, then chairman of the Communist party, declared the former fishing village a Special Economic Zone. In a little over 30 years, its population has exploded from 20,000 to over 10m; its container port on the Pearl River is, after Shanghai and Hong Kong, now the third largest in China.
"I find it astonishing," says Farrell, who founded his practice, Terry Farrell and Partners, in London the very year the Shenzhen boom began. "It changes so fast. I first came – well, to Hong Kong, actually – in 1964. I was on a travelling scholarship. I had a Chinese pal, a friend from Newcastle University, in Hong Kong and went to see him. I took a photograph over the Chinese border towards Shenzhen. Here it is."
Farrell turns the pages of one of the monographs he keeps of all his work. The colour photo of Shenzhen sits within a full-page shot of KK100. The low mountain backdrop appears the same in both images, but where one shows paddy fields and junks moored to thin strips of land, the other is dominated by a forest of skyscrapers, with KK100 reaching into the tropical cloudscape.
Farrell is not one of those architects who has rushed to cash in on the recent boom in foreign-led design in China, but someone who has built up a long and increasingly rich relationship with the country. His Hong Kong office, opened in 1990, is the same size as the London one he opened a decade earlier; last month, he opened a third, in Shanghai. This is understandable, given the sheer number and the scale of the stations, airports, hotels and public buildings he has created across Guangzhou, Kowloon, Hong Kong and Beijing, not to mention the vast urban masterplans he has developed around the country.
Farrell is clearly proud of KK100. "I can't quite believe it's real. As an architect, you get asked to do design after design, competition after competition, and you're used to ambitious projects coming to nothing. I was amazed, really, when we started to build a real skyscraper." Sheathed in glass and steel, KK100 boasts floor after floor of offices that taper up to a 250-bedroom hotel. This is all rounded off with a delightful sky lobby, rather like a vast and ultra-modern birdcage, with a bar and terrace open to the public. The space inside this glass tip is taken up by an egg-shaped pod several storeys high containing small private spaces, some perched on balconies, where guests can sit, drink and take in jaw-dropping views of Shenzhen and beyond. By night, the tower is lit from top to bottom by LED lights.
Can a developer like Kingkey simply stride into central Shenzhen with a pile of cash and build what it likes? "Far from it," says Farrell. "The city does have planning regulations – you can't just do what you want." The site of KK100, he says, used to be Caiwuwei village, a poor and rundown area. Kingkey had to build seven towers to rehouse local people and a further seven for other locals to own and rent out, so that they might share in the boom. It's an extraordinary idea: even as China hurtles into capitalism, it does still show remnants of old socialist ideals.
Because all of these new towers took up a lot of space, the only way Kingkey could make the kind of money it was looking for – lots – was to build its showcase tower as high as possible. The company, notes Farrell, was "founded by a bricklayer". He clearly approves – but then he is one of the few British working-class boys (Norman Foster is the best known) who have risen to the top in architecture. Farrell was born in Sale, Manchester, in 1938, his father a messenger for the Post Office. His devoutly Catholic family moved to Newcastle upon Tyne. Farrell wanted to be a painter, but his parents wanted him to be a civil servant; they thought artists were immoral.
He got to university – architecture at Newcastle – and since those days this unpretentious, highly intelligent and likable man has kept his feet firmly on the ground, even as his buildings began to soar skywards. Between designing the bright and colourful, low-cost HQ for TV-am – one of the best British buildings of the postmodern era – and setting up shop in Hong Kong in 1990, Farrell produced one memorable and controversial work after another, not least One Embankment Place, a monumental office block built around a great arch over the platforms of London's Charing Cross station.
There are other ambitious buildings in the pipeline. Farrell shows me designs for the 520-metre, 123-floor Z15 Tower, which will be the centrepiece of Beijing's Chaoyong business district when it opens in 2015, as well as a taller neighbour to Rem Koolhaas's mighty CCTV HQ. Continuum, a book cataloguing his practice's work, explains that Z15's elegant concave shape was inspired by traditional Chinese wine vessels, bamboo-weaving and sky lanterns, not to mention "the freshness and beauty of flourishing lotus flowers". A very Chinese skyscraper, in other words.
In fact, sitting talking with Farrell in his flat – with its Chinese pottery, low lighting and sliding screens – the ways in which his life and work have become entwined with China is richly apparent. And when his wife Mei Xin Wang, a volunteer for the British Museum's Department of Asia, comes home, the picture is complete. Farrell is wedded to China.
He is still, though, very much the young man brought up in the north, with a love of British buildings, aircraft, paintings and railways. He has even had a train – a First Hull Trains high-speed number – named after him, following the success of The Deep, his thrillingly angular aquarium on the Hull waterfront completed in 2002. "The train's been moved to another line since then," says Farrell, "and they've taken my name off it." But then he has been an architect for long enough to know that reputations, fame, fortune – and even one's name – come and go as fashions change and economies swing from boom to bust.
While his firm continues to pick up more commissions in China, rivals are getting in on the act, racing up ever higher buildings. Farrell seems to welcome the competition, shrugging it off and saying in his matter-of-fact way: "We won't have the tallest building in Shenzhen for long."
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Thomas Demand: Model Studies – review
Nottingham Contemporary
Shadowy stairwells, frangible corners where dust and rubble collects, concrete ramps and mezzanines, a close-up tangle of foliage, an arching roof that looks both brutal and organic. The camera closes in on detail after detail. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what I am looking at; there's no human presence or coherent sense of scale. A huge scarp fills the frame – it could be the desert or a cliff. It might be cardboard.
There is some mystery here, in these places where time and decay have had their way with the world. Here's a snaggle of vegetation, there a bush, designated by a patch of childish scribble of green crayon on a bit of grubby card. An outdoor pool is just an oval of blue paper. Scissor marks fringe its rim. In another photo, a surface sweeps away at an odd angle. I know it's the floor because a pencilled word is written there: Floor, it says. Buildings, stepped hillsides, elevations – they're all made of card, aluminium sheets, Perspex and bits of this and that, sandpaper and glue.
"The image is the reality, therefore there is no reality", American architect John Lautner once wrote. There's a nice correspondence between this thought and the work of German artist Thomas Demand, who has been photographing Lautner's own architectural models, which now languish in the archival gloom of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where Demand came across them during a residency. Lautner's centenary was 2011.
Demand himself typically makes lifesize paper and card models of buildings, rooms and places, some real, some re-imagined, then photographs them, later destroying the models themselves. Lautner's own models are in a miserable state. No draughtsman, Lautner mocked-up his buildings in his dingy office and left the details for his assistants to work out. Working with cardboard, aluminium, Perspex, sticky tape and all sorts of found materials, Lautner thought with his hands, like a sculptor. The details look like fragments of cubist bricolage.
Demand has photographed Lautner's bent and battered models, with their burst laminates, glue and coffee-stained planes, their crumbly sandwiches of card and polystyrene infill, their chewed corners and dinked, friable edges. Demand's own models, and the photographs that record them, are curiously unembellished; his is an art without adverbs, of carefully calibrated degrees of description. Lautner's models have lost their plainness, and somehow gained character and history. Demand's photographs of them are, as much as anything, records of shadows and dust, and time's havoc, as they are of the architect's vision. Some photographs might be documentation of an earthquake or a bombing.
The Getty's archival restrictions meant Demand was not allowed to use a tripod or bring lighting, or to touch Lautner's models. Working with a small hand-held digital camera, he homed in on the details, avoiding photographing the architecture itself. He had to work with what light there was. Some images veer towards the abstract, while others present forensic views of sticky-taped junctions of floor and wall, or rippled sheets of distressed card, a confusion of levels, collapsing planes and scuffed textures.
Demand's own models sometimes recreate scenes of disaster or historically laden motifs – Saddam Hussein's bolt-hole kitchen, or the room where plotters tried to blow up Hitler, but he'll just as often build a card model of a sink filled with washing up. His procedure has remained essentially the same for almost 20 years. If Demand wants to show a piece of A4 paper on a desk, he'll cut the paper to size rather than taking a sheet of office stationery. Things happen in Demand's own work, while things have happened to Lautner's models. They show what happens when modernity gets old.
Lautner built homes for film stars such as Bob Hope, and his arresting, eccentric architecture has itself featured in movies, including Diamonds are Forever and The Big Lebowski. Demand's photographs take Lautner somewhere else. Lautner's ad-hoc approach to model-making now looks like a summary of aesthetic choices, and Demand's photos also make us imagine narratives. Sometimes the photographs look like stills from unmade movies, or scenes from a battle or a natural disaster. More than a side project, Demand's Model Studies say as much about his own work as about Lautner's. They are a meeting of minds, and evidence of entropy.
Rating: 4/5
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Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat restored in Czech Republic
Mies van der Rohe masterpiece in Brno, seen as an exemplar of modernist architecture, to reopen after £5.7m restoration
It was completed in 1930, a Modernist masterpiece by the legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
But Villa Tugendhat suffered badly during the turbulence of the second world war.. The Nazis seized it, bombardments smashed its windows, and when Soviet troops liberated Czechoslovakia it was used as a stable. It has languished in disrepair ever since.
Now, a two-year renovation that cost £5.7m is almost complete. In March, the glass-fronted building that features a thick, honey-coloured onyx wall, floor-to-ceiling windows, winter garden and clean white lines throughout, will be open to the public. Czech officials are confident it will become one of the most popular tourism venues in the region.
"It's been a huge challenge," said Michal Malasek, whose construction company was given the daunting challenge of refurbishing the villa while staying faithful to its design. "I have never worked on anything of such prestige."
Some 80% of the villa's original features have been preserved, making it "the most authentic Mies van der Rohe building on the European continent," said Iveta Cerna, an architect from Brno's municipal museum who has looked after the villa since 2002.
Good fortune played its part in the refurbishment. An original bathtub, missing since the 1940s, was found in a nearby house; and a curved wall of Macassar ebony was discovered in a dining hall at Brno's law school, where it had been taken to spruce up a bar built for Nazi officers.
Brno experienced a building boom in the late 1920s that reflected the growing confidence of the city in the independent Czechoslovakia, created in 1918. Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, co-owners of wool factories and part of a large German-speaking Jewish community in the city, were able to commission the home of their dreams from van der Rohe.
"I truly longed for a modern spacious house with clear, simple shapes," Grete said in a 1969 lecture in Brno. But the family fled Czechoslovakia in 1938, a year before the Nazis took power.
Fritz died in 1958, but from 1967 Grete came back from her home in Switzerland to visit the house several times before her death in 1970. Efforts by the family to reclaim their former property after the collapse of communism in 1989 failed.
After the war, the building hosted a private dance school. Under communism it served as a rehabilitation centre for children with spinal problems until the end of 1960s. The city of Brno has owned it since 1980.
On a recent sunny day, workers were polishing the staircase of Italian white travertine that leads from the terrace to the garden. In the living space, the curved ebony wall was wrapped in cloth to prevent any damage. In winter months, when the sun is low and its beams are penetrating the onyx wall at the right angle, it changes its colour in some parts to shine in orange and dark red hues.
"We know from Grete that Mies himself was surprised by this unique effect," said Cerna. "It changes with weather, it looks different each season of the year.
"I am always surprised by the light condition here."
Combining a design of pure geometric forms with advanced technologies and exotic materials, van der Rohe satisfied the owners' wish for innovation and originality.
The three-storey building with a flat roof sits at the top of a steep garden that faces south-west. It is carried by a network of 29 steel, cruciform columns anchored in concrete.
The south and east walls of the villa's living space are made of huge steel-frame windows that allow a magnificent view of Brno's historical monuments and connect rather than separate the building with the garden.
Mies van der Rohe also designed the furniture, including his famed chairs, and equipped the building with air conditioning and security systems.
During the refurbishment, huge 1cm-thick glass panes were made in Belgium while the white linoleum that originally covered the floor was provided by the same German company that made it more than 80 years ago.
Fritz and Grete lived in the villa with their three children for eight years in the 1930s. Grete said she fell in love with it from the first moment.
In 1938, the Tugendhats fled the country to escape the Nazis, first for Switzerland and later for Venezuela.
Mies van der Rohe, whose work did not meet Hitler's taste for monumental architecture, also fled, purportedly using his brother's passport to get out of Germany. He settled in Chicago to work for the Illinois Institute of Technology and designed a number of significant buildings, including the Seagram building in New York and Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington. He died in 1969.
During the second world war, the Gestapo seized the building after invading Czechoslovakia and all but one of its windows were smashed by Allied bombings.
During the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, the living space was used as a stable for Red Army officers' horses and all but one of the shelves of a huge ebony bookcase were burned.
The communists, who took power in 1948, tried their hand at renovating the villa in the 1980s but did more harm than good. The original bathroom equipment and the sole remaining pane of the wall of glass were destroyed because they didn't fit their plan.
The deal that split Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992 was signed in the villa, adding to its historical significance.
The idea of restoring the villa dates back to 2001 when Unesco declared it a world heritage site. Copies of the original plans from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and documents from the family and the Brno archives, including pictures taken by Fritz Tugendhat, were used to inform the restoration.
City officials are trying to buy the original pieces of furniture from the families that own them.
"It would be something extraordinary to get them all," said Brno mayor Roman Onderka.
A grand opening is scheduled for 29 February and the villa will be reopen to the public on 6 March. Officials said they had already been flooded by requests from potential visitors.
One of the Tugendhats' daughters, Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, works as a professor of art history at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
"For me, this is actually the most beautiful interior room in modern architecture," she said. "Usually, it's only in old churches that a room has such a meditative effect."
Hammer-Tugendhat and her husband are leading members of an international committee of experts overseeing the villa's reconstruction, co-financed by the city, EU funds and the state.
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Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat - in pictures
Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat Villa in Brno, Czech Republic is to reopen after a £5.7m restoration.
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