Architecture this week

A belated happy new year!

In the UK the news this week suggests that the government is set to approve the Chinese plans for a ‘mega-embassy’ in London (designed by David Chipperfield). There remains some disquiet in the opinion columns about the proximity of the embassy (sited on the old Royal Mint site behind the Tower of London) to the main fibre optic cables linking the City of London with Canary Wharf. As Juliet Samuels notes in The Times “In the basement of the building next to them the unredacted plan shows a thin room about 40m long. It would be built in part by digging out the wall currently next to the cables. And it would be served by cooling facilities that could vent the hot air from, say, a large complex of computers. The distance between the room and the cables? Just 1.7 metres.”- but as she also notes that’s probably a huge coincidence and nothing to do with espionage...

Perhaps also worth considering is her query as to “what exactly the US will do in its current pernicious mood if we allow its main adversary to build a vast operational hub slap-bang in the middle of the western alliance and its critical infrastructure”. Looks like we may soon find out!

Research by building materials manufacturer wienerberger has discovered that the administrative work triggered by the Building Safety Act provisions has increased workloads by 16% on average, equating to a cost of £16,700 per employee per annum. As they’re a materials manufacturer it is not surprising to note that the white paper focuses on the additional burden of checking manufacturer’s claims about their products, but it is calling for wider industry adoption of independent building products assessments.

In the UK we did used to have an independent body for building research that fulfilled this function. Sadly though the BRE was privatised in 1997 when political will decided that independent testing and research into building products was no longer of sufficient value to the UK. The theory was that, left to the market, competition would increase efficiency. Such a pity it also led to dishonesty in salesmanship- who could have predicted that? I will only note in passing here that even recent tragedies do not seem to have changed some sectors of the market. A colleague told me of one product manufacturer last year trying to persuade them to use a cladding product for a high rise tower that, when said colleague dug into the data sheets, turned out to be essentially the same cladding used on Grenfell Tower, which is explicitly not suitable for high rise applications.

If you enjoy a good planning battle it is worth considering the more than 1,000 comments on the application for a new building at One Silk Street - opposite the Barbican Centre in London. The architects (SOM) suggest that their proposal is “rooted in the principles of formal clarity, structural honesty and contextual response”, but Stirling prize winner Amanda Levete suggests it is “completely inappropriate in scale and height for the setting of the Barbican development, damaging the heritage and conservation area... This speculative office building is too big and of average quality”. Adam Caruso, of Caruso St John, notes that the proposal is “generic” and “satisfying the expectations of the current real estate market”.

On a more cheerful note John Martin Robinson has reflected in Country Life on the successful revival of Salts Mill in Saltire, West Yorkshire. An astounding Italianate mills complex built in the late 18th Century built with housing for the workers and embracing the latest in technological comforts with a regard for architectural patronism and concern for the wider society we don’t tend to see so much in industrial developments today. The centre of Salts Mill’s revival today is a permanent home for David Hockey’s work with 45 additional tenants employing 1,000 people locally. A striking comparison perhaps with the contemporary commercial proposal on Silk Street!