Film review: “Rebel Architecture”
Pedro Calmon | 29 August 2014 “The Pedreiro and the Master Planner” “The favela is unplanned, it arises spontaneously, with no help or design from government”, Luis Carlos Toledo, Master Planner. Arbitrariness, especially in urban settlements, is a rare feature. From Berlin’s Wall to the plazas of Spanish cities, the question “why is something where it is” – seems to be fundamental to any analysis of a determined...
Book Review: The Writing on the Wall
by Martin Earnshaw | 7 June 2014 If you’ve ever wondered how much of your life you have wasted on Social Media, Facebook will tell you with its new app. Despite the widespread assertion that time spent on the internet is time wasted, enthusiasts of new technology stress its benefits. What both sides don’t realise, according to Tom Standage’s recent book, is that these debates have raged for longer than most people think. According to...
The Anti-Human Eco-City
By Paul Thomas | 20 April 2014 Before attending this lecture on The Anti-Human Eco-City at Leeds Met, I’d heard of them but was unsure what they were. Apparently, I was not alone. According to the speaker, Austin Williams, Associate Professor of Architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, there is no agreed definition of what an eco-city is; there are very few that have been built; and the most famous one,...
Commodity Creatures
By Charlie Winstanley | 18 April 2014 ‘Tools for Unknown Futures’ was the theme for the latest FutureEverything conference in Manchester Town Hall. The famous Gothic design of the town hall ensured the event took place in a setting of traditional splendour, spliced apart by the smooth white edges of the professional FE façade jutting pristinely across the arched columns and intricate masonry. The juxtaposition provided an interesting...
Critical Subjects
Higher education is in crisis. This summer sees the launch of Critical Subjects, a new architectural Summer School placing the pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking at the core of education. These are troubled times for higher education. In recent years the idea of pursuing knowledge for its own sake has found little support. Instead of creating an atmosphere supportive of open enquiry and free thinking, universities have...
Ordos’ Other Ghost Town
Ordos in Inner Mongolia is synonymous with the phrase ‘Ghost Town’; a term describing cities apparently built on a whim, with no-one to occupy them. With China having already started to fulfil its pledge to build 400 new cities in 20 years, innumerable articles have emerged in the Western press to laugh, pity or gloat at the emergence of such tragi-comical examples of urban desolation. Forbes magazine is typical of many...
The Practical Possibilist
Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It by Danny Dorling; Constable, 2013. 448pp Reviewed by Martin Earnshaw | 14 October 2013 The recent news that the UK is experiencing a mini baby boom was greeted with predictable panic about how Britain’s services would cope. From worries about an ageing population to the familiar refrain (1) about depleted resources, population has long been a lightning rod for...
Europe and China: Strategic Partners or Rivals?
Just half a century after De Gaulle’s vision that Europe (‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’) would decide the destiny of the world, Europe looks anything like a global powerhouse. With the euro falling apart, European authority is regarded by many, with barely concealed disdain. From Britain to Bulgaria, the European Union is seldom mentioned without the suffix ‘crisis’, and the phrase ‘European integration’ is widely held to be an...
The uncivil civility of Richard Rogers
By Richard J Williams | 31 July 2013 The idea of ‘civility’ crops up a lot at Richard Rogers’s exhibition. It’s there right from the start in a room decked out in orange vinyl, with a series of panels laying out Rogers’s ‘ethos’. In practice, it’s most clearly represented in Rogers’s non-architectural work, such as his chairmanship of the New Labour government’s Urban Task Force (1999), his work as London’s architecture ‘tsar’ for...
Dear Chris…
This is a series of letters between Chris Twinn, Arup Fellow & Senior Sustainability Consultant in Shanghai; and Austin Williams of FCP, after the publication of Williams’ article in China Daily (here) Dear Austin Having read your article in the China Daily criticising sustainability and sustainability consultants, I would like to say that I agree there are there are too many Western consultants peddling low level...
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