Category: Architecture

Mick Hartley on Hadid’s new Antwerp Port House

Yes, favorite blogger-of-mine Mick Hartley has been checking out, and photoing, the now finished Havenhuis, and has this to say about it:

I noted earlier – before I’d seen it in situ – that “it looks like it’s just plonked imperiously on top of the original building, with no attempt at a sympathetic conversation between the two”. Having now had the chance to look around and check it out for myself, I think that’s still a fair summary.

There follow several excellent photos of the building, of the sort that amateurs like Mick Hartley (and I) have a habit of doing better than the hired gun Real Photographers, because we tell the truth about how the new Thing in question looks, and in particular about how it looks alongside the surroundings it has inserted itself into. Real Photographers know that their job is to lie about such things, to glamorise rather than to describe accurately. Their job is to force you to like the Thing. Amateurs like me and like Mick Hartley take photos that enable you to hate the new Thing even more eloquently, if that’s already your inclination.

And of all the photos Hartley shows, this one most perfectly illustrates that “disrespect” that he writes of. “Conversation”? Fornication, more like, inflicted by one of those annoyingly oversexed dogs:

I still like this Thing, though. I mean, time was when any disrespect felt by the architect towards that older building would have resulted in the old building being demolished. Which is worse? Disrespect? Or oblivion? Perhaps the latter would have been more dignified. Execution has a certain grandeur, when compared to a further lifetime of potential ridicule. But I still prefer what happened.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Nova diagonals revealed

Nova, the building that this year triumphed in that infallible guide to architectural interestingness, the Carbuncle Cup, is a new London building that I am already very fond of. And this despite the apparent unrelatedness of the red bits and the other bits, as photoed in this recent photo that I photoed:

However, even more recently, I came upon Nova from an angle and at a time of day that told me more:

You can probably already see what I am getting at, just from that photo. And you can click on that photo to get an even bigger photo. But, if you do that, you will find it even harder to see what I am getting at.

Because, this is one of those instances where, in order to see what I am getting at, you need to see this same photo smaller, as shown on the right of this verbiage. Yes indeed, there you see it even more clearly. Diagonals galore. Here is another example of the same thing. Again, you have to make it smaller to see it clearly.

None of which will persuade Nova-haters that they should become Nova-lovers. But it seemed worth noting here nevertheless, given that I had noted it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A better photo of One Kemble Street

Recently I went out looking for another good shot of Richard Seifert’s One Kemble Street, of which I am very fond, having already posted some fun photos of it as seen from the ROH Bar and two more rather so-so photos of it, along with a photo of another circular Seifert edifice, also with an anarchic hairdo.

But here is a better photo of One Kemble Street, that I took over a year ago, from the top of the Tate Modern Extension:

The thing is, when I’m out on one of my photo-wanders, the pattern is: Photo, forget. Photo, forget. Photo, forget. I hardly think at all about what I have just photoed. Almost all my thinking concerns the next photo.

When, usually about one day later, I look back at what I got, even then I don’t pay attention to anything like everything I got. Just some of it. Which means that when I look back at some directory or other a longish time later, I notice more photos, basically for the first time since just before I took them.

It’s tempting to assume that this is the result of me getting old. But I suspect that if I had had a digital camera when I was thirty, I would probably have forgotten most of the photos I took then, much as I do now. But, I do think that age probably reinforces this effect.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoers last Sunday

Last Sunday, in among photoing leaning tower cranes and Twentytwo.

I also photoed photoers. I could probably do blog postings for the next fortnight based on nothing but the photos I took that day. Don’t worry, I won’t. But I probably could.

Maybe I am not as keen on photoing photoers as I was a decade ago. Or maybe it is just that there are now lots of other things that I am also keen on photoing, and so my fellow photoers loom smaller in my thoughts when I am now out and about. But they still loom. I still like to photo photoers, whenever the opportunity presents itself:

It was such a lovely day (3.3), and all the better for being a bit misty (3.1 (a lot of zoom in that one, I think)). There was lots of interesting hair (1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 3.1, and best of all 3.2). There was even a very old-school small dedicated digital camera (1.2), of the kind that has been totally replaced by the mobile phone (unless, like this old guy, you have your old-school digital camera and you like to keep using it – this makes a lot of sense to old guy me.)

My keenness to photo architecture just grows and grows. I notice, and like, a new building, and from then on want to photo it from all angles and distances, basically from wherever I can see it, and aligned with whatever else I can find that is aligned with it.

I also delight in photoing architecture which is on the screens of my fellow photoers. The guy in 1.2, in addition to having interesting hair, is photoing the Boomerang.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Twentytwo

Last Sunday, I photoed those wonky looking cranes. I also took this photo:

That’s not at all what I think, but lots of people do think that those City of London Big Things are indeed follies. Follies being a show that the National Theatre, that concrete thing on the right, was advertising when I walked past it.

I find the Big Things of the City hard to keep track of, given that I do try. Let’s have a closer look at those vertical concrete lumps, that look they will turn into something very big:

There you go. Once you have a name like that, the gates of the Internet open.

So, what’s the City of London about to look like next? The most useful answer I got was this:

That being the picture at the top of a Londonist posting from last July.

Quote:

Based on the visuals, these projects are a mixed bag of ho-hum and coo-wow. Taken together, they make for a crowded cluster that’ll almost entirely obscure the much-loved Gherkin building, once so dominant on the skyline.

A particularly coo-wow part of the story being the Scalpel. See above.

The rather ungainly 22 Bishopsgate, which is going up where the Helter Skelter would have gone until the financing for it collapsed, is going to be the tallest Big Thing in London, for a short while, just until that big boxy tower (“1 Undershaft”) with the diagonals on it goes even higher.

22 Bishopsgate will have a free viewing platform, according to this report from two years ago:

At the top of the building will be a double-height public viewing gallery, which will have dedicated lifts, be free to the public and sit alongside a two-storey public restaurant and bar.

I can’t wait, as people say when they’re just going to have to wait and are actually quite capable of waiting, in a state of impeccable mental equanimity.

This is the kind of building of which it will be said: The view from 22 Bishopsgate is magnificent. From 22 Bishopsgate, you will not see 22 Bishopsgate. They used to say this about the National Theatre.

I sseem to recall taking some closer-up photos of all this activity a few months back. I must take another look at those. And … I just did. June 3rd, earlier this year.

I particularly like this one:

Very stylish.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The leaning tower cranes of London

I love cranes, especially those big tower cranes they use to build Big Things. So tall. But so thin. But they do trouble me. How do they stay up? Why don’t they ever fall over? Well, they do, sometimes. But mostly they don’t.

And, as I couldn’t help noticing when I was out and about last Sunday, these tower cranes often lean over, in a way that looks like it is asking for headline-making trouble.

Consider one of these cranes, the one on the right, that’s leaning over, about four degrees off of the vertical. How does that not fall over? (Thank you vertical lamp post for telling us what vertical is.)

Well, I’m guessing these people know what they’re doing. No, scrub that, I’d be amazed if they didn’t know what they’re doing. This kind of thing just has to be business as usual, no matter how crazy it may look to mere passers-by. As I discovered when I went looking for other leaning cranes in my photo-archives, and I found one that I had photoed just an hour earlier, on the same walkabout:

I think we may assume that the BT Tower is the very definition of vertical.

In each case, the crane is bent backwards by the big concrete blocks that compensate them for the lifting job they do with the other end of their tops. But when no lifting is happening, the compensating weight has no weight to compensate … it. And the result can look very scary.

No London cranes have been reported collapsing during the last few days. So, like I say, no problem.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Pavlova is back

I had a nice surprise today. As time passes, the number of places I can buy the Gramophone and the BBC Music Mag keeps on diminishing, one of the few that remains being W.H.Smith in Victoria Station. It was once again a beautifully lit late afternoon, and when I stepped outside the station concourse, I encountered this beautiful sight:

Yes, the wraps have come off Pavlova. And far sooner than I had been expecting.

Several of the above photos feature the new Nova building. This fine edifice was awarded this year’s Carbuncle Cup. The dreary grumblers who award this award think that it’s a badge of shame, but I generally find it, and its accompanying runner-up collections, to be a great source of information about interesting and often excellent new buildings. Nova is wonderful, I think. I intend (although I promise nothing), to say more about this enjoyably showy yet elegant addition to Victoria’s mostly rather lumpish architecture.

In 3.2, I got lucky with an airplane.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A good day

Today was mostly a dull day, unsuited to photoing, by me at any rate. But late in the afternoon, I realised I needed to get out there to purchase a new SD card reader, what with the existing one having become too undependable. I could usually get it working, eventually, but who needs that? I needed a card reader that didn’t need any juggling and wiggling and mucking about with, but just worked first time. And now I have it. I also took a detour to Sloane Square to meet up with a friend, before journeying to Curry’sPCWorldCarphoneWarehouse in Tottenham Court Road.

Equally good, the late in the afternoon today turned out to be very photogenic. The light was beautiful. Always it’s the light. The sky was in that cold clear state where every vapour trail hangs about, and it looked like someone had been scribbling on it with a big box of white chalks of different sizes.

I took photos, of course, and here are a few of the ones I liked best. The first three were on the way to Sloane Square. The last one, the sunset, was taken outside Warren Street tube.

Not much happens in the sky in 1.2, but I like it anyway. There’s something about those little ladders that you see on roofs. I see that, in the case of this particular ladder, there are birds that agree with me about this.

AndI love that fake building in 2.1, on the outside of the real building that I think they’re refurbishing or rebuilding or cleaning something, just off Sloane Square.

What makes the sunset worthy of inclusion is the low cloud that joins in, making it look like something’s on fire. Plus, there are cranes.

All the photos I took transferred themselves to my mainframe, first time, clean as a whistle. No juggling or wiggling. Just plug in the reader. Shove in the card. Done.

And earlier in the day I got some other stuff done too. A good day.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Frollicking outside the Abbey (a decade ago)

This blog having been in business for well over a decade, an obvious blog post genre is ten-years-ago-today. This one’s actually more like ten-years-ago-plus-about-a-fortnight, but who, apart from me, is counting?:

What I think this clutch of photos captures rather well is the sheer fun that digital photography unleashed, around that time. I was a photoer-having-fun and so were all the other photoers.

Digital photography wasn’t completely new at that moment. It had already been around for several years. But what my photo-archives tell me is that this is about when it started getting seriously good. This was when the rubbish-to-okay success rate (simply from the point of view of things like blurriness) of the average mostly-automatic-setting photoer like me, or of the photoer in the above photos, started climbing from something like ten percent to more like fifty percent. We weren’t yet at the fifty percent and still climbing rate. Or, we only were if the light was very strong and there was no moving. (That came around five years later.) But these kids frollicking about outside Westminster Abbey were keeping still for their camera and therefore also for mine, and as you can see, there was plenty of bright sunlight sloshing about that day. So their pictures were probably okay, just as mine of them were.

Also, ten years ago was well before the face recognition problem kicked in. Then, I had no problem about posting recognisable photos of people. I also have no problem with the recognisable faces above, because these kids were making a rather undignified spectacle of themselves outside a major place of worship. Which is fine. God loves fun, or why would He have created so much of it? But: the above recognisable faces, all those years ago, are fair game for my blog, I say.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Quota dragon

By which I mean an urban dragon, like this one …:

… which I photoed this afternoon, stuffing a few of the remains of the old New Scotland Yard, now deceased, into a skip, for a lorry to take away.

There is something very primitive and savage about machines like this one, destroying reinforced concrete, i.e. destroying just the sort of concrete that is designed to be indestructible.

I had a busy day today, by which I do not mean that I accomplished anything. Merely that I did a lot of pleasurable things, out there in Real World.

And then, BMdotcom was misbehaving, when I first tried to post this. But it seems now to be back working again, albeit – alas – with its customary lethargy.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog