Long live the straight line

On Monday I was at the Building Centre for the judging of the IBP Awards. The judging was in the basement, which is now pretty hard to get too, because the front staircase has been shut. You have to go to the back of the building, down a kind of processional stair and then work your way forward again.
The reason is not hard to guess. Following that route takes you past many of the exhibitors' displays, and doubtless they were complaining before that they were not getting enough footfall.

So I can grasp the commercial argument, but it is really wrong. Buildings are meant to work - you are not meant to be directed off in a direction you did not want. Where else does this happen? At airports of course. When I was at Heathrow Terminal 3 recently, it was necessary to walk through an enormous maze of duty free before reaching a spot where you could sit down or have a cup of coffee. Again, the commercial imperative is overriding common sense. Terminal 3 is also interesting because half of the shops have ceased to be useful stuff (somewhere to buy a cheap holiday top, top up on sunscreen, buy a paperback) and become designer outlets. I guess this is a representation of the global trade in high end shopping.

When I got to Singapore a friend pointed out that the low-end visitor who has a few meals and drinks and maybe buys a present from the family is neither common nor the target audience. Instead most people are there to do SERIOUS shopping - thousands and thousands of pounds worth.
So we are not only in the kind of world we want, but we are not allowed to travel in straight lines either? It was good to see though that even in law-abiding Singapore, outside Marina Bay Sands people had created a 'desire line' through the vegetation to cross the road more directly. It had been fenced off but the damage had been done.

Buildings and landscapes need to serve the needs of users. We should not be manipulated either into travelling in ways we don't want, or to spending money we don't need to or can't afford. Long live the straight line.

Stirling, Lubetkin and Singapore

There is always something nice about confounding expectations, and presumably a few lucky punters cleaned up when Astley Castle, unexpectedly, won the Stirling Prize. It is, by all accounts, a superb project and in a sense relatively democratic, since anybody who wants to stay there can rent it - if, of course, they can afford it, which seems to be pretty much our government's definition of democratic.

What Astley Castle does not have is an obvious social agenda. It was not a way for the judges to make, as they have been accused of doing before, a political point about the importance of public funding.Neither this, nor Niall McLaughlin's chapel, which was the bookies' favourite, is in any sense a social project. Which is fine - this is a prize for architecture, not for social impact. Astley Castle does, however, address the romantic feelings that the British have about old, and particularly ruined, buildings, while doing so in an innovative manner.

Witherford Watson Mann, the architect for Astley Castle,  was on the shortlist for Stirling for the first time. A lot of its work is strongly about place - for example, it developed the idea of the Bankside Forest, a kind of virtual - but not entirely - forest around Tate Modern, the former Bankside power station. This sense of place-making is visible most strongly in Gardens by the Bay, the project by Wilkinson Eyre and Grant Associates that has won the Lubetkin Prize, the equivalent to Stirling for projects beyond Europe.One of the many extraordinary things about this project, which is actually the creation of a new piece of city land, is that, with the exception of the greenhouses themselves, it is free to visit.

Last year it won first prize at the World Architecture Festival set, appropriately enough, in Singapore. This year's festival is in Singapore again, starting on Wednesday. I will be heading there, revisiting the wonderful Gardens by the Bay and, with luck, seeing a little more of a place that is fascinating, both loveable and loathable in equal measure, and doubtless with lessons for the UK, but ones that are very difficult to translate because of the difference in size, governance and climate.

Singapore provides a different angle on liveable design

The World Architecture Festival has been taking place in Singapore this week and it has been eye-opener in terms how a country with limited space deals with housing and the desire for greenery. At half the size of London and two-thirds of the population, Singapore sounds as if it should be denser - but not that dense. The difference though is that there is no hinterland - no wider country to which to escape.
So Singapore has to provide all its greenery and open space within its boundaries. And it has done this remarkably successfully.Between 1986 and 2007 the population grew by 70 per cent yet across the same period the proportion of green space actually increased from 35.7 per cent to 46.6 per cent.

A small amount of this growth was the result of land reclamation - the fabulous Gardens by the Bay are in one such recent area. But mostly it has come from a deliberate densification of construction. The brief for the recent Pinnacle@Duxton for example asked for the amount of accommodation to be trebled. In the UK we would be horrified to see families living in a 50-storey building. But the residents love it. Great attention has been given to the ground plane and there are also 'flying gardens' - communal spaces at upper levels. Other projects are even more radical, and there is an increasing trend to green the exteriors of buildings.
Designing for a tropical climate, where you usually want shade and designing to increase wind flow is crucial, is evidently very different to more temperate environments. But Singapore evidently feels that it has no choice but to build upwards. The approach it takes to it is surprising, stimulating and admirable.