Will all our cities have a Taksim Square?

It seems that Istanbul's Taksim Square has been saved, at least for now, from development. The AJ reports this, along with an eye-witness report on recent developments from one of its team, who happened to be there last weekend. The battle may be over, but the fight goes on, with the park shutting just after opening because of further riots, as Al Jazeera reports.
So was the riot in Taksim Square just a flashpoint for generalised unrest? To an extent, yes. But as Rory Olcayto wrote in the AJ just over a month ago, the park is important for simple health reasons as well. Istanbul has grown incredibly fast, and for it to lose its green space is almost unbearable. If we want to learn this lesson we need look no further than China, where reports today say that air pollution in the north is cutting average lifespans by more than five years.
There is enormous pressure on development around the world. It is worth remembering that open spaces and clean air are not some old-fashioned luxury that we can dispense with in our progressive, money-driven age. Their absence can threaten lives, and governments.

A salty story

There was an item on the radio last night looking at the desalination plants that China is building on its east coast. Its fast-growing cities are hungry for water, springs are drying up - so what to do? The answer, for China, is to throw technology at the problem.
There was an interview with the manager of a desalination plant, still only one-fifth built. As such plants go it is, apparently, fairly green. It uses the waste heat from electricity production (mark however that it is electricity from coal, the most polluting and greenhouse-intensive fuel source) in the desalination process. And rather than throwing away intensely salty water as a byproduct, it dries it out and sells the salt for industrial use.
So at least good points there. But they also interviewed an environmentalist. (I suspect that criticising such a policy is a brave thing to do in China). He talked about the energy consumption of such plants, which is likely to be an issue - I cannot imagine that with huge expansion it can all  come from CHP), and the cost of pumping the water. That, I suppose, depends how far it has to go, since all water has to be pumped unless you live on top of a spring.
And he said the answer is to learn to use water more wisely. Wise nods. But I am sure that our per capita consumption is way higher than China's. Of course installing massive desalination plants is a bad idea. But if we want to condemn it, we need to think more seriously about how we are dealing with water in this country. It's time to get a water butt.

Beware of bearing gifts

A long discussion has been running on The Architects' Journal's LinkedIn page about the Yunnan Kunming Wenhua Technology Co in China. The thread started six months ago, and is still active.
This is a company that is scamming aspirant architects by dangling potential contracts in front of them, and then asking for presents - cigarettes, mainly, but a lot of them - and also asking for money up front to defray bank charges before transferring funds.
The sums seem relatively small for the effort that goes into them - for instance the company has laid on lavish banquets - and gulled architects' seem mostly to suffer lost time and travel costs rather than having their accounts plundered in a serious way. Which makes it all a bit mysterious.
This is at another level from those international lottery wins and transfers of inheritances to which we have all become wise on the internet. China is a promising market, and architects know that it does not operate in the same way as the UK, so are ready for things to seem a little strange. They may not have suffered much financially, but pride must be dented at the very least, and it is not nice to see hopes of work evaporate.
Let's hope this scam dies out in 2013.

Unlocking China with a team of five

There was some inspiring content at the RIBA's Guerilla Tactics conference this week, particularly in the session on working overseas. Guerilla Tactics is a conference on small practices, and those participating in the session were not the international behemoths from which one expects to hear. Instead they were representatives from surprisingly small practices that have found a niche.
Sybarite, for example, has become a specialist in high-end retail design and does much of its travelling with its clients as they open stores in new spaces. It overcomes the problem of local contractors wanting to dumb down its fine finishes by prefabricating as much as possible. And, very intelligently, it warns potential clients how much its jobs are likely to cost before embarking on them. It also wherever possible (which seems to be everywhere but China) insists on working with UK contracts.
China is the country where the real star of the show Ibbotson Architects is working. Founder Helen Ibbotson set up the practice just a few years ago. It is based in the Peak District just outside Sheffield and carries out a range of smallish and sensitive work here - plus massive masterplans in China.


Yet its core team is only five people (including a Mandarin-speaking architectural assistant who can make vital phone calls to China). The practice has done this by seeing opportunities as they came along, originally being introduced to the country by a developer who then decided not to proceed further. It has seized opportunities while taking care to have top legal advice. Ibbotson now speaks a little Mandarin, enough to make opening remarks in meetings, and her website is bilingual. She has been wondering about exploring opportunities in Brazil...
An inspirational story for any small practice.

Hooray for PV

According to a report by the European Commission, two thirds of the new PV panels installed in 2011 were in Europe. Enough, in fact, to power the whole of Austria, although spread around the continent the effect is rather less impressive.
Still, it is good news. China is apparently the fastest growing manufacturer of PV, but European countries are at least exporting manufacturing equipment there. And growth rates of between 40 and 90 per cent a year worldwide since 2000 are encouraging. We may not be doing much that is right in relation to the environment, and PV may not be the best solution all the time,but at least we are taking it seriously.

Don't forget the drainage

Congratulations to Wilkinson Eyre, whose Guangzhou International Finance Centre is one of the projects to make it onto the shortlist for the Lubetkin Prize, the RIBA's award for buildings outside the EU.
Not only is the tower the tallest building by a British architect, but it is also a proper, decent piece of architecture - otherwise it would never have been shortlisted. It is however representative of much of the architecture in China's biggest cities, in that it reflects a desire to be bigger, newer, taller and smarter than its neighbours.

This attitude may have implications for the overall urban design of cities, but today journalist and China specialist Isabel Hilton spoke on the Today programme about a much more immediate concern. This interest in bling, she said, may be at the expense of vital infrastructure. She was talking about the recent dreadful floods in Beijing, to which official figures attribute more than 60 deaths. While most of her report was about the way that social media are allowing citizens to contradict the official line, she mentioned that a contributing cause is believed to be a simple lack of drainage. Much of Beijing has been paved over to accommodate the rush to develop, and no new flood drains have been built to compensate. Victorian London, famously, became livable through the attention to water supply, drainage and sewage. Beijing's experience is a timely reminder that we neglect infrastructure at our peril, especially in our increasingly volatile climate.

Celebrating houses from around the world

There was an extraordinarily international gathering at the Grange Hotel in the City of London yesterday, as 10 out of 12 of the winners of the Architectural Review's House awards attended the awards ceremony - quite an achievement as they came from as far afield as New Zealand, Australia, China and Borneo. It is always fascinating to see the best of house design, an area that has traditionally been a testing ground for the best of architectural talents, and for the production of new ideas.

The overall winner, John Lin from Hong Kong, was certainly in this tradition, with a prototypical rural house for China that addresses not only issues of sustainability but the changing nature of the Chinese countryside as it becomes increasingly dependent on handouts from family members emigrating to the cities. Lin is proposing a type of rural self-sufficiency which, he believes, is not isolationist but offers hope for the future. Quite a burden for one house to bear, but a well-deserved winner.
As AR editor Catherine Slessor pointed out, many of the winning houses take the form of objects in the landscape. While this allows the most creative sculptural expression, and also enables the design to frame views beautifully, it does seem as if this is the ideal condition, and in some ways the easiest, for the architects to address. But the selection does also include two houses from Japan, which, as is so often the case with great Japanese houses, create an oasis of calm and make the best of a chaotic urban environment.
We need perhaps a happy medium - great urban houses which address and enhance their environment. Too often though this is beyond the control of the humble architect of a single house. And there is certainly much to admire in the work of this prize-winning dozen - not least their determination to travel so far to pick up their awards.