sandr029

A plaintive cry reaches Nairn's inbox. "Help us BBA , you're our only hope... well nearly. This 'ethical business' has just put in this absolute crock of white box and car parking hell for planning." I'm assuming the ethical business is Sainsbury's , but the architect Hadfield Cawkwell Davidson also has a thrilling 'culture' statement on their website that I urge you do go and read . The hyperventilating rhythm of 159 words of flatulent good intentions goes beyond the normal corporate bollocks and enters the realm of protesting too much. "We believe that good design can make a positive difference to economic and social value [sic]," they pant. "We are good people, please believe us. We just want to make some money before we retire..." - that's me interpreting. The culture statement should come with that spread better's caveat: "while good design can make a positive difference, we also do some bad design, wh...

This might well be a perfectly reasonable, anodyne, mixed-use masterplan. But the images are just so, so depressing. They've bothered to make jaunty colours for the awnings and parasols, complete with a highlight showing the merciless sun beating down on the North Kent coast as if it were the Costa del Sol. But they couldn't really be bothered to make any decisions about materials or detail for the buildings. This is the kind of thing you do when you don't want anyone to think the buildings are going to be too good, because the developer might then actually have to build something of high quality. "Keep it vague lads, and stick a hot air balloon in it - that always makes people feel like we're down with whole seasidey, public space vibe." The fucking wavy roofs are just embarrassing, as is the likely justification for these pointlessly jaunty forms. They look like waves. The sea is nearby. Ergo, the building is contextual. You sorry, sorry bastards. Loving the...

This project is actually a conversion of an old jute factory in Dundee into part of a digital media park. Park, in this context, presumably referring to the car park. I mention that it's a conversion so you understand that Keppie probably had many limits on what they could do, constraints that held them back from really fulfilling their ambitions for the project. The biggest constraint of all is their COMPLETE LACK OF ABILITY TO DRAW A SHAPE THAT ANYONE MIGHT LIKE. Here's a closeup of the facade: It's tricky to know exactly what they were going for with the big viridian panels (solar cells, I think) with their slopey, 1970s-album-cover forms and the equally bizarre lozenge shaped windows. I think they're going for a, you know, dynamic, media, digital, new media kind of thing, which, to Keppie, means some sloping bits. It's just fucking undignified. Like a middle-aged person trying to rap. I think what finally does it is the combination of these pretentious, silly, ...

Wow, check out this bad boy. The supercar in the foreground (how many supercar owners shop at Tesco? In Ipswich?) tells you everything about the fantasy world that Mountford Pigott were living in when they designed this one. I'll cut to the chase. Only a man with a very small penis could design this building. Quite where all the shopping is in this incredible monstrosity is a bit of a mystery to me. But the dynamic roofs and the transparency and all that other jazz must have really got them going around the boardroom table. Perhaps the clients had small penises too. A proper journalist ( here ) has written before about how bad Tesco is at doing buildings, and in that story, he quoted the head of CABE as saying: "From an aesthetic point of view, there is a lot of snobbery surrounding Tesco. In fact, the company works with some highly respected architects." Don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to CABE under Mr Finch leading us into a brave new future...

This is the image that Race Cottam presumably paid someone to create of the hideous new special needs school they have designed in Keighley. They had to pay for an image with dramatic sky and jolly looking children jumping up and down, because their own drawings look like this: I suppose this image really shows how the strange bike-shed structures help the school relate to the landscape/car park that forms the compelling context that Race Cottam created for itself. I also think that orangey brown and blue stripes speak to all of us so clearly of contemporary civic identity and our optimism about British education. They also have yellow and green stripes in some of the internal courtyards. Niiice. I'd be interested to know how Race Cottam came up with the plan for this school. I'm guessing that the design process involved a late night game of Mikado or something. Anyway, Kalzip will be happy. Race Cottam are one of those practices, that seem to appear a lot on BBA ( this one , f...

This is just deadly, isn't it? This is an academy, the pride of Britain's schools system. The academy programme has created a generation of buildings that by and large are made of render, in white and coloured panels, designed by terrible architects like Ryder who treat them like just another developer piece of shit. Like this one, academies often have glassy atrims to try to look less forbidding and more democratic than Victorian schools, but usually end up looking like they should be on a low-rent business park somewhere in, er, Ayrshire. I like to imagine what the conversation in the Ryder office was like when they chose where to put the yellow panels in the wing on the left hand side. 'No, a bit left.' 'Put three yellow bits in that one." "Move that one a bay to the right." "That's it! Perfect." The public realm outside has been comprehensively galvanised, with only the bits of timber on the benches giving a hint of what might have b...