Birmingham, UK / Global City, Local Heart

On a day trip to the city of Birmingham in England, intent on seeing the Bullring shopping centre and Future Systems' Seifridges building, I had discovered a large construction project underway in Centenary Square - the largest public square in the heart of Birmingham. Interestingly, this urban square hosts, or adjoins, numerous performance halls and cultural institutions of the city: The Repertory Theatre, Symphony Hall, International Convention Centre (ICC), Town Hall, Central Library, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Baskerville House (Civic Centre). Originally designed in the early 20th century, the city council envisioned this area as a grand civic scheme - an urban territory for grand buildings and significant institutions. Today, Birmingham has grown to the second largest British city outside the capital London, densifying the urban core and expanding its metropolitan limits. The growing city fabric and condension of the city's cultural institutions has created a lack of cohesion and clear identity on Centenary Square, creating a strip-mall of grand buildings with little connection to the surrounding city.

The library as viewed from Centenary Square / August 2011 — The library as viewed from Centenary Square / August 2011

View towards the East of Centenary Square, Symphony Hall

When the Birmingham Central Library decided on relocating due to physical restraints, the original plan was to build a new library in the emerging Eastside district by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, focused on urban linkages and public activity. However, financial concerns and reservations about the location would sink the project. Years later, a new site would emerge on Centenary Square, between the Repertory Theatre and Baskerville House, as the new home for the library. Shrouded in banners proclaiming "Birmingham: Global City, Local Heart", the project is viewed by council leaders as the "the flagship for the regeneration of Birmingham", hoping to highlight the city's intellectual and cultural credentials and draw more visitors to the city. Nearing completion by 2013, the Library of Birmingham will tower over Centenary Square with capacity to accommodate more than three million visitors a year, making the structure Britain's largest public library and a clear sign of the continuing global renaissance in the construction of grand civic building. The architects of the project, Mecanoo, explains that their design, projecting a delicate glass/filigree skin inspired by the artisan tradition of the industrial city, will "transform the square into one with three distinct realms: monumental, cultural and entertainment."

You can checkout a flythrough video of the project design here.

Case Study / The Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House is an architectural apparatus, a constantly evolving combination of moving parts throughout history, all having a particular function and parti. Formerly referred to as Covent Garden Theatre, the siting of the project goes back to 1732, but the most crucial component of the project goes back even further. London's Covent Garden was thought to originated as a medieval convent garden belonging to Westminster's abbey of St Peters around 1000AD, but the area may have gone back another 400 years as a Saxon port town outside the walls of post-Roman London. However, the true nature of the site would not come until 1536, when the estate was handed over to John Russell (the first Earl of Bedford), beginning a more commercial view of land development and establishing a landlord/tenant relationship that would last until the 1950s. On the twenty acre site, Russell built a perimeter wall and family home, which would later develop into one of London's first planned suburbs.

Francis Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford, was committed to developing the London estate for more wealthy tenants, bringing in acclaimed architect Inigo Jones, known for introducing England to Italian Renaissance architecture. Jones would influence the entire site, as his building scheme called for a large open piazza, informed by his knowledge of urban planning in Italy (particularly Livorno's Piazza Grande in Tuscany). The piazza was unadorned and open to the public, with a rebuilt church of St Pauls to the west side, residences with a lower arcade to the north and east, and the wall of Bedford House to the south. Though the building of urban squares became common thereafter in London, most were smaller private squares, while the infusion of this classical device in Covent Garden became a way of life in which the open square developed into a popular public meeting place. Since the estate was not at a convenient distance to any market facilities in London, the Earl of Bedford permitted a small market in the Piazza, against the garden wall of Bedford House, for the residences of Covent Garden to gain access to fresh food and other materials. By 1666, the Great Fire of London would render the city virtually uninhabitable and its traditional markets were destroyed, establishing the market at Covent Garden as an 'official' market space. Almost a hundred years later, the market would occupy much of the Piazza and become the largest fruit and vegetable market in the country and only privately owned market in the London area.

Above:: Plan of Covent Garden estate within the perimeter wall in 1613; Below:: View of Covent Garden Piazza in 1720

Theatre to Covent Garden

Before the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, theatre activity flourished across the Thames in the far-reaching Southwark area, as such activity was viewed as encouragement for bad behavior in the city of London. However, there were some rogue establishments in the city, including a small venue off Drury Lane called the Cockpit, which brought in much business until Parliamentary troops demolished it years later. The Cockpit would become the seed, which eventually would sprout various performance venues in the Covent Garden area up until today. After the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, the Crown would grant only two licenses for the erection of a playhouse in London, permitting the production of plays in the city, but with no other licenses issued until 1843. This monopoly would prove beneficial for the two recipients, who both would settle near the area (Theatre Royal and Covent Garden Theatre), making the only two theatres in London permitted to stage plays in Covent Garden. The Covent Garden Theatre would establish a strong foothold in the area with such exclusivity until it was destroyed by fire in 1808. Ironically, by the time of the fire, opera and pantomime became a more fashionable performance, making the rebuilt Theatre, modeled on the Temple of Minerva in Athens, more focused on opera configuration. Almost 50 years later, gas lighting would be the catalyst for destroying the theatre once again, only to be rebuilt to its current iteration eight months later, led by the efforts of architect E.M. Barry. After the fire of 1856, the management of Covent Garden Theatre took the opportunity, when planning the new building, to take a lease on some adjoining land. They asked their architect, E.M. Barry, to design a private flower market that would sit on the entirety of the site, next to the new theatre. Barry would take advantage of the new building techniques using iron and glass, demonstrated in the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition, creating a diverse pair of buildings in entirely opposing building styles. The Floral Hall would eventually be an economic failure for the owners, but it would create the first representative connection between the Opera House and the Covent Garden Market.

Diagram : Various historical iterations of the Covent Garden Theatre (which had burnt down twice in under a century) with emphasis on access and entry sequences.

The Market

By 1751, Covent Garden's Piazza would become completely consumed by trading activity, though permanent shed structures would only occupy the southern side. A century later, the market had grown substantially forcing the Bedford estate to include a permanent market presence in the square to create an impression of order and appease the traders. Charles Fowler would be commissioned for the task, designing a neo-classical market building at the center of the square, substantially what we can see today. Later, the market would face another test with the emergence of industrial activity and the railway, which would be the catalyst for a dramatic population explosion in London. The market's urban seclusion in the narrow streets of Covent Garden would eventually hurt the market with no city plans to create a direct connection to a main rail station, meaning that the greater volume of fruit and vegetables coming in to London by rail had to be loaded to wagons for road transportation, creating major traffic congestion and major access problems. By the end of the 19th century, there was growing criticism of the Bedford Estate's ownership and misuse of the market, as well as raising residential voices criticizing the location of the market bringing in too much traffic and noise. It became an inevitable conclusion that the market would one day have to be relocated outside the central area of London and placed in the hands of another authority, like so many other markets in the area. The estate would eventually sell the property in 1918 to the Covent Garden Estate Company, who had considered removing the church and opera house to accommodate a much larger market space and alleviate trader congestion. However, not much would change until 1973 when the London municipal authorities took on the market and established the Covent Garden Market Authority, which would finally move the market to a site at Nine Elms in south-west London. The shift left an urban void in one of London's prized central areas, a subject of much debate for decades between developers, politicians and community leaders. There would eventually be development plans to raze most of the neighborhood to build a large corporate/commercial element, but economic recessions and public outcry would halt that progress until the 1990s.

“All night long on the great main roads the rumble of the heavy wagons seldom ceases and before daylight the market is crowded. The very unloading of these waggons is in itself a wonder, and the wall-like regularity with which cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips are built up to a neight of some 12ft is nothing short of marvelous.”

— Charles Dickens

View of the congestion from Covent Garden Market in 1968

Current view of pedestrian-friendly Covent Garden Market

Opera House Renovation and Expansion

After the market had moved and much debate about the future of the existing context, the Opera House was deemed worthy of conservation and was never in any real trouble from urban redevelopment, but it would lose a strong connection to the commercial vibrance of the surrounding area. Regardless, the building itself needed a major structural and programmatic overhaul. In 1975, the English government gave land adjacent to the Royal Opera House for a long-overdue modernization, refurbishment, and extension. By 1995, the newly-formed National Lottery provided a controversial financial grant, enabling the company to embark upon a major $360 million reconstruction of the building led by architects Dixon Jones BDP, taking five years between 1996 and 2000. Meanwhile, plans were already underway for the restoration of Fowler's market building to become a 'showpiece' of commercial activity.

Dixon Jones approached the redesign of the Royal Opera House in a spirit of connectivity and access; a building that would be deliberately unmonumental, changing the image of a forbidding 19th century building into a welcoming 21st century arts center, inviting a bigger and broader audience into the complex. The reconfigured opera house would neither be seen as bombastic or a patch-up project, but as a collective grouping or an 'urban village' of buildings radiating from E.M. Barry's neo-classical building fronting Bow Street, connecting with the shops, cafes and street theatre of Covent Garden piazza. The glass-laden Floral Hall, once left to decay as an ornate storage room, became the central artery of the project, turned into a vast public foyer that connects visitors from both the Piazza and Bow Street. Though some critics would compare it to an elaborate shopping mall and news of continuous delays, spiraling costs, resignations and threatened walkouts; the project achieved substantial success. Upon completion, the Covent Garden area achieved a sort of Disney/Times Square rejuvenation, with a home-grown urban metamorphosis driven by 'new media' commercial activity of fashion and food, along with positive connections to anchored institutions (ROH). Ironically, Covent Garden now fulfills many of the discarded intentions of the 1980s planners, but without the disadvantages they had in mind of urban gentrification.

“There was talk....of the Opera House being moved out of town, as happened in Paris. We didn’t want that. The fruit and vegetable market had already gone from Covent Garden and we felt that sooner or later central London would be stripped of the very buildings and attractions that gave it a life worth living.”

— Jeremy Dixon, architect

Exploded Axonometric of the renovated Royal Opera House by Stephen Biesty

View of Royal Opera House from Covent Garden Market

Comparison of the Piazza arcades in the north-eastern corner of the square (1700 v. 2011)

Royal Ballet School

After the successful renovation and rejuvenation of Covent Gardens, the Royal Ballet Upper School chose to make the long awaited relocation to Covent Garden. For more than 60 years, the Royal Ballet has been the resident ballet company at the Royal Opera House and finally, in 2003, the school finished a newly constructed 4-storey studio complex on Floral Street, north of the ROH. Three years later, a foot bridge would be constructed between the school and the Opera Ho

use for the Ballet students, faculty, and staff; creating a direct link from the school's studios to the stage of the opera house. Coined the 'Bridge of Aspiration' by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, the bridge was designed as a connection with a simple, but strong architectural statement—one that would provide an integrated link between the buildings while giving Floral Street a prominent identity. The basic concept of the serpentine construction was to project an effect of movement as a physical link, from both the interior and exterior. A sculptural contortion 50ft above the narrow streets in Covent Garden, the Bridge of Aspiration confronts a series of contextual issues, and is legible both as a fully integrated component of the buildings it links, and as an independent architectural element.

Royal Ballet Upper School's 'Bridge of Aspiration'

The relationship between the Royal Opera House and Covent Garden is a symbiotic one, with two unrelated components existing together in an unbiased environment, but still dependent upon each other. Through multiple historical iterations, ROH has learned to adapt to the pedestrian-friendly environment, while still providing that cornerstone anchor that Covent Garden market depends upon. The design of the renovated Royal Opera House is not so much a one-off cultural monument as a city block, criss-crossed with pedestrian walks and access points, but is not an overwhelming feature even though it is built on the scale of a nuclear power station. Furthermore, the Covent Garden neighborhood is really not an ideal site for any prominent public institution, with unrelenting narrow streets (no public bus routes), lack of connectivity to infrastructure and no visual association, but the Royal Opera House and many other theatres seem to work within the context's strict guidelines. You could argue that both the market area and ROH could not flourish without Covent Garden underground station, bringing in the only direct link from greater-London and a point of reference to the area's meandering attitude. The interesting thing is that the Opera House is where it's always been, in the very heart of London and not set on a cultural desert island.

Diagram: Displays the original Covent Garden site parti in the contemporary urban fabric.

“By the time I entered the competition ... English architects were finally caught up in a discussion of how we might build sensitively in old city centres, how we could be ‘contextual’ and how we might marry architectural history with present-day practice.”

— Jeremy Dixon, architect

Royal Opera House  /  Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement — Royal Opera House / Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement

Case Study / The National Theater

You could say that the marriage of the National Theatre and Southbank London has been a long and rigorous journey. In fact, it had taken over a hundred years for the idea of a subsidized national theatre company to even exist in London, from a proposal by London publisher Effingham Wilson in 1848 to passage of law in 1949 (National Theatre Bill), but to build a theatre expressly planned for the purpose took even longer. To gain interest, the project had been dressed up at different times in the propaganda of imperial grandeur - 'a national shrine in the capital of an empire' - and the rhetoric of social concern - 'a people's theatre'. In the middle of public debates to finance the theatre, the first site was acquired in 1937, located in Kensington by Cromwell Gardens opposite the V&A Museum, ready for construction until the beginning of the Second World War indefinitely delayed the project. In 1942, the London County Council (LCC) negotiated an agreement whereby the Kensington site is exchanged for a new site on the war-devastated industrial land on the South Bank along the River Thames, designated as one of the country’s first comprehensive postwar redevelopment areas designed by architect Charles Holden. The scheme would later receive little attention, as it was almost immediately superseded by plans to develop the area as the site of the Festival of Britain.

“Do the English people want a national theater? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.”

— Bernard Shaw (playwright, served on London County Council)

Views of post-war Waterloo Bridge and South End sites

Map showing bomb-damaged buildings following the Second World War. (Red circle indicates future site of National Theatre) Images from London Metropolitan Archives. — Map showing bomb-damaged buildings following the Second World War. (Red circle indicates future site of National Theatre) Images from London Metropolitan Archives.

Festival of Britain

Conceived as a national exhibition to celebrate Britain’s post-war rejuvenation, the Festival of Britain was the brainchild of British newspaper editor Gerald Barry, referring to it as ‘tonic for the nation’. The layout of the South Bank site, overseen by appointed architect Hugh Casson, was intended to showcase the principles of urban planning that would feature better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities following the war. Predominately, this included buildings in the International Modernist style, with asymmetrical levels of buildings, elevated walkways, expulsion of ornament and avoidance of a street grid. The resulting construction effort of the South Bank site opened up a new public space in the city, including a riverside walkway, where there previously had been industrial warehouses. Opened in 1951, the project seemed to be a success, attracting around 8 million visitors in a five-month period, however there had been some opposition to the project from those who believed that the money would have been better spent on housing. After the Festival’s opening, National Theatre’s proposed new building planned to join the grounds with a foundation stone laid on a site next to Festival Hall; however, by next year it was determined that the theater should occupy a better site and all the festival grounds, excluding the Royal Festival Hall, would later be destroyed by the incoming Churchill government, which believed the Festival’s style too 'socialist'.

Current view of Southbank Centre's River Walk (former site of Festival)

NTOP (National Theatre and Opera House)

While still looking for a permanent home, the National Theatre company negotiated a deal with the Governors of the Old Vic theatre in 1962 to establish a temporary home for operations. By the next year, one of Britain’s leading Modernist architects, Denys Lasdun, was chosen to design the new theater on another South Bank site, just upstream from the Royal Festival grounds, between Hungerford and Westminster Bridges on Jubilee Gardens. Of interviewing Lasdun for the job, Lord Cottesloe, the Chairman of the Arts Council and the South Bank Board, wrote “the committee was particularly impressed when he said he knew nothing about designing theatres and would have to sit down and learn what was needed from our committee.” While focused on client discussions and program experimentation, Lasdun brought his own idea of the ‘urban landscape’ from previous experiences that had fused civic architecture with the public realm, encapsulating his vision of a theatrical space.

When design work commenced, a new National Opera House program was introduced on behalf of the client, and it was agreed they should stand together on a site next to the Thames in front of the recently constructed Shell Tower. Using the new high-profile project as a distillation of Lasdun’s notion of public architecture, he believed rather than being treated as individual objects, the National Theatre and National Opera House (NTOP) should blend together as a continuous horizontal range of urban landscape terraces or ‘strata’, creating a grand metropolitan composition that was conceived on the scale and function of the immediate context (Chamber’s Somerset House, etc.) and promoted human relationships. By creating a rhythmic construction of artificial hills and valleys, it opened up the entire length of the South Bank for public use, while experiencing the magnificent views of both the Thames river and surrounding city. Despite a widespread favorable reception to the design in 1966, the opera house was dropped from the new building scheme on the grounds of budgetary concerns. (the Sadler's Wells Company, due to be housed there, eventually moved to the Coliseum in Trafalgar Square to become the English National Opera). The resulting amputated building would be dwarfed in size by the Shell Tower and surrounding site, unacceptable to Lasdun and the client.

“A horizontal plane or series of horizontal planes is the first essential in any system of formal arrangement intended to embrace the activities of organized or collective life”

— Le Corbusier

Proposal by Denys Lasdun for the National Theatre and Opera House in front of Shell Tower

Waterloo Bridge Site

The situation was quickly redeemed at the beginning of 1967 when a new riverside site, just east of Waterloo Bridge (referred to as Prince’s Meadow), was offered by the Greater London Council. The new site would suit the scale of the new smaller project and Lasdun would carry over his design methodologies from the original proposal, but the new site required new responses, and it presented some difficulties. Among them were the problems of access and orientation. Here the presence of a new object proved decisive: Waterloo Bridge. This was the most prominent feature close to the site and was the link back to the West End and Greater London. Lasdun took advantage of this urban connection and christened it the 'umbilical chord' as if the life of the Theatre depended on it. Not only would Waterloo bridge’s elevated street manifest into a physical connection to one of the theatre’s ‘urban terraces’, establishing a direct pedestrian path of entry, but it also constituted a boundary to define a public courtyard and entry on the ground floor, orienting the project’s axis toward the bridge at a 45 degree angle. With that, the logic of internal functions and external access would remain the same as the NTOP, with production areas to the rear, foyers facing the water for view and auditorium for assembly in between. The focus on Lasdun’s stratification of foyers along the waterfront would prove beneficial not just for views, but for emphasizing a strong linear public passage along the river, composing a walkable boulevard that the Festival of Britain complex once championed along the Thames.

From the moment that he had been offered the site, Lasdun had been immediately impressed by the relationship to the city’s viewscape. Even though the new site was only about a mile up the river, it had a more natural relationship to significant urban conditions, such as St. Paul's Cathedral to the east, Somerset House across the river and Waterloo Bridge, connecting the West End theatre district. Lasdun referred to these perspective relationships as ‘the triangle’, influencing a triangular geometry felt in every facet and angle of the National Theatre. The idea of view was a crucial site component in connecting to nature and urban context, making the aesthetically-dominate horizontal levels such a significant component to the theatre design, as vertical obstruction was kept to a minimum. Urbanistically, the bands are seen as hovering landscapes set aside for the rituals of public life, opening out its contents to the passerby. They extend into the context as they flow down towards the river, connect with Waterloo Bridge or with the upper levels of Southbank Centre, to welcome those who wish to enter the site. The Theatre’s ‘strata’ becomes public property in the full-sense, with the city as a living scene in the background.

“.... The National Theatre must be its own advertisement - must impose itself on public notice, not by posters and column advertisements in the newspaper, but by he very fact of its ample, dignified and liberal existence. It must bulk large in the social and intellectual life of London. It must not even have the air of appealing to a specially literary and cultured class. It must appeal to the whole community.”

— Harley Granville- Barker, ‘A National Theatre’

View of National Theatre after completion in 1977

Theatre Upgrade

Recently, after over 30 years of operation, the National Theatre began investigating opportunities to subtly transform and extend the building’s relationship with its site. The priorities were three-fold: expand participation and education activities, explore ways in which the building could respond to the dramatically changing environment of the South Bank neighborhood, and to develop a more environmentlly sustainable solution for the project. The conservation management plan, led by Haworth Tompkins Architects (also responsible for the recent Young Vic refurbishment), is an incremental process, broken down into different phases to allow for continued building operation. Currently scheduled to begin next year, the plan will look at various problematic areas throughout the building, including the riverfront north façade and rear connection on the south façade, both with great need for improvement. Currently, a small service yard lot (a remnant of Lasdun’s original entry-driveway design) disconnects the highly-active pedestrian waterfront from the theatre; while on the other end, due to Lasdun’s focus on the waterfront and the programmatic needs of theatre’s production spaces, the southern face of the building is without a public connection. The proposed plan calls for the existing service yard to be transformed into a new cafe and bar, with the existing bookshop to be relocated to the south of the site, providing transparency to the river walk and a clearer entrance sequence to the foyers, opening up the north-east corner of the theatre. Along with receiving the bookshop, the southern part of the site will receive a new glass-fronted production section, giving passers-by views of scenery construction and a programmatic connection toward the Southbank community. Other plans include: a new education centre to welcome 50,000 more people, the creation of a public roof garden beside the Lyttleton fly tower, and the refurbishment of Cottesloe theatre. When completed, the renovations should help improve the building's public connection, open its interior, provide facilities for new operations and radically improve its environmental performance.

Service yard on north section of the theatre, disrupting pedestrian flow along the Southbank river walk.

Proposal by Haworth Tompkins architects for the existing service yard to be transformed into a new cafe and bar, allowing transparency and access to the theatre's northern elevation.

Proposal by Haworth Tompkins architects to create a public roof garden beside the Lyttleton fly tower

Doon Street Development

The Doon Street site (South of the National Theatre) has remained largely untouched as a brownfield/temporary car park for over 50 years. Currently, a partnership between Coin Street Community Builders and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands Architects are proposing a controversial new mixed-use development that will potentially introduce numerous new programmatic elements to London’s South Bank and neighboring National Theatre, including an indoor public swimming pool/leisure center, ground floor retail facilities, residential tower, education/office space, and a new headquarters for Rambert Dance Company. Contextually, the new development would seek to improve accessibility and connections to the various pedestrian routes that converge around the site including Waterloo Bridge, the ‘Bullring’, Southbank Centre and the River Walk. Along with provide the community swimming pool and indoor leisure facilities residents have long desired, plus studios for the Rambert Dance Company, one of Britain’s leading contemporary dance companies. However, to make the project stack up economically and subsidise the costs of the public swimming pool - a notoriously expensive enterprise, the scheme will have to incorporate office space and private apartments in a 43-story tower, which has made the project a very controversial topic in the city and continues to remain in limbo.

Rendering of North Elevation, with the proposed residential tower growing between the National Theatre and IBM Building (also designed by Lasdun), a reminder of the original scheme for the NTOP. (Image provided by Coin Street Community Builders)

View of Doon Street Development (before/after) and its affect on the National Theatre's southern elevation.

When visiting the site - at first glance - it was predictable how the exposed concrete structure would be judged by many passersby, with comparisons to bunkers and car parks, and grumbles about public spending and institutionalized culture. Most notoriously, Prince Charles described the building in 1988 as "a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting". Even hearing passing tour guides refer to it as “one of London’s ugliest buildings” was not too shocking, maybe even plausibly right. However, that is a pure aesthetic judgment, but does not justify the theatre’s current success, both economically and urbanistically. In fact, its success constitutes a virtual demonstration of Lasdun’s urban landscape philosophy; a building as a microcosm of the city with strong contextual connections that evokes a sense of time, place and people engaged in creating space and form. These powerful forms generate a recurring theme since antiquity, by reiterating a link between scenography and urbanism, city and platforms with stages and auditoria. The shared ground creates an energetic voice, but the connections to the urban composition – both visually and physically – feed that energy, giving the project a timeless relevance.

Site Diagram  /  Displaying what Lasdun referred to as 'the triangle' - the Theatre's response to other points of monumental intensity in the cityscape. Also reveals previous proposed sites for the National Theatre within th… — Site Diagram / Displaying what Lasdun referred to as 'the triangle' - the Theatre's response to other points of monumental intensity in the cityscape. Also reveals previous proposed sites for the National Theatre within the old grounds of the Festival of Britain (Blue Region).

“One of the fascinating things about the National Theatre is the way it demonstrates how a public building can be designed as a setting for numbers of people; it’s deliberately been made incomplete without people ... I know of no other theatre where the audience are given such a sense of being actors contributing to a festive occasion.”

— J.M. Richards, architecture critic

National Theatre  /  Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement — National Theatre / Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement

Case Study / Tate Modern

Bankside. For centuries, this area south of the Thames River had been synonymous with industry, entertainment (Rose and Globe theaters) and a brimming population living in poor conditions. Yet, once the theaters left and harbor activity moved east of the city, this once bustling district laid dormant. Years after the Great War, new infrastructure was needed and a baffling decision was made to build an oil-fired power station directly opposite St Paul's Cathedral, typical of the casual urbanism you would not find in many European countries except Britain. The outcome was a simply detailed functional brick shed, coined the 'cathedral of pure energy' by architect Giles Gilbert Scott to draw comparison to London's famous cathedral. Towering over the Thames, staring down the city of London, the power station soon became one of the city's most emblematic structures, active for more than thirty years until rising oil prices led it to shutdown in 1981, leaving the perceptible building vacant and slowly decaying. Bankside's urban fabric needed a new catalyst.

Coinciding with the power station shutdown, the Tate Gallery was working with architect James Stirling on a new master plan focusing on expansion of the overburdened facilities around their Millbank location. Following review of the proposal, the Tate trustees agreed the current site would not provide sufficient new exhibition space for present and anticipated needs of the gallery, concluding that a second site in London would have to be found. Luckily, Bankside had some available property. As Tate Trustee, Michael Craig-Martin explains, "The new site (the old power station) answered all the criteria governing the search: an unparalleled large-scale central London location, excellent transport facilities, the possibility of a riverboat connection with the gallery at Millbank, and immediate availability for development". An open international competition proceeded, particularly questioning how to deal with the existing building and it's position in the urban context. Nearly 150 architects entered the competition, but the eventual architect (H&dM) would have the only proposal that completely accepted the existing building - it's form, it's materials and it's industrial characteristics. By re-using the existing power station, the architects argued that the Tate was free from the need to create the memorable, signature form that is deemed essential in contemporary cultural design. They simply borrow it from the old building - with adaptations - and concentrate on the qualities and connections of public spaces.

Millennium Bridge and St Pauls Cathedral

Completed in 2000, the $208 million dollar project was the first new national museum built within Britain in the last hundred years and the first in London devoted solely to modern art. Tate Modern would be the cornerstone to an urban regeneration strategy, created by the Southwark Council, aimed at improving the accessibility of the area and its immediate environment as well as pulling investment into the area. Developments, such as the Bankside Pier (with ferry service) and Bankside Riverwalk manifested the area into an accessibility nexus, the center of a linear sweep along the Thames connecting destinations East (Tower Bridge, Tower of London) and West (South Bank, Westminster) of the site. Perhaps the most important connection would come months later, as the highly publicized Millennium Bridge (the first new central London river crossing in over a hundred years) opened, physically bringing together ideas of old and new, north and south, art and commerce, and the two visual landmarks of St. Paul's Cathedral in the city and Bankside's Tate Modern. Two days later, the steel suspension structure would shut down due to instability caused by heavy pedestrian traffic and not reopen for another year and a half.

Entry to Turbine Hall from the West, slipping below the building

Regardless of the bad news, Tate Modern surpassed expectations with more than five million visitors in the first year, making it one of the most visited modern art galleries in the world (note: museum offers free admission) and one of London's top destinations, basically overnight. However, a year later, attendance numbers would begin to slump after the initial first-year rush by 32%, despite popularity of the big-name temporary exhibits. A Tate spokeswoman would say the figures from 2002 signaled a "natural leveling-off", but it's coincidental those numbers coincided with the bridge closure, showing the significance of this crucial connection. After the bridge was reopened, visitor numbers would rebound to the current high levels the museum enjoys today. The key component in the project's success has been the potential of the redundant Turbine Hall itself, transformed into a covered street, like a city square, within the museum. I hesitate to use the phrase 'public space' to describe such a programmatic force, as it still is governed by Tate's rules and regulations. However, it is still an uniquely important urban space, drawing visitors in with the idea of an accessible place of refuge that can change character according to the time of day, the quality of light and the number of visitors. It's appeal is it's welcoming nature and easy access, offering the community a place for congregation and performance, including the popular Unilever Series, an annual commission to make interactive art specifically for the Turbine Hall. However, although hugely popular within the community, some critics would have reservations with the Turbine Hall embodying a place of art and performance:

“You feel very small in the face of the magnitude of this cathedral. It sends messages for miles: This is important, this is a sacred place, everything here is sacred. Things that are sacred aren’t questioned, and that’s the problem.”

— Jake Chapman, artist

Like all great modern successes, there is always a bigger, bolder sequel on the horizon. With a rocky world economy and ongoing government cutbacks in arts financing, the Tate Modern is ready to grow. What was once part of the museum's original plan in 2000, the extension realizes the further potential of the site and of the existing building itself. New plans (coined the Tate Modern Project) are being developed to take over the subterranean oil tanks of the former power station from which the new building will rise to the south of the Turbine Hall, as EDF Energy (operators of the electric substation) completed work to modernize the station's equipment, allowing them to use a smaller amount of space in the building and freeing up vital space for Tate Modern to expand. Breaking ground this past Spring, the 11-story addition will create new gallery and social spaces to relieve the overcrowded existing building and respond to the changing nature of art, with facilities for new media and raw spaces where special installations by artists and performances will take place. The proposal, putting all of the new development south of the original building, begins to structure a duality, defining the boundary of Tate's public center. To the north, the articulation of the landscape is much more expansive and public, with vast views of the city and river edge, occupied by movement of thousands of people from the bridge, ferry and riverwalk. To the south, a new development aimed at developing a dramatic change in scale and character, creating an 'external room' with a natural canopy and smaller, humanistic spaces to be shared between the surrounding local community.

“It is a cultural landmark and global icon and I’m delighted to support its much-needed expansion. Not only will it add to the excitement around the 2012 Games, it will extend the potential benefits of this great temple of art even further south into the Bankside area.”

— Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

New Commercial Development and Pedestrian Access South of Tate Modern

With the redeployment of the power station as a modern museum and an eagerly-awaited significant addition, along with developing vital connections along and across the Thames, Bankside's office and residential developments have begun to transform, as evidence in the improvements to both the public and private developments immediately South of Tate Modern that have successfully considered architect Richard Roger's urban study schemes for the area. However, a broader plan was needed to determine a smart-growth strategy for the entire Bankside Triangle area. Commissioned by 'Better Bankside' in collaboration with other broad groups in the area, architects Witherford Watson Mann developed Bankside Urban Forest, a coordinated urban design framework consisting of an evolutionary and fragmentary process that resists over-inscription of public space and focuses on investment in pocket parks, cultivating good relations with small businesses, changing the balance between vehicles and pedestrians, bringing scale and humanity to harsh areas, and offering continuing discoveries in it's street patterns. Inspired by the strengths of Bankside's labyrinthine set of streets and built structures, the idea of 'Forest Space' has always had an association with a sense of freedom and permeability, a place that can be entered and exited at any point, offering a diverse set of paths and activities. Considered as 'clearing' in the forest, Tate Modern was the ideal location to plant the first seeds of the forest, already projecting influence on the planning of the new southern addition and surrounding area.

““It shows that among the botched public works, overruns and administrative failures, things can be made on time, to cost, and can be popular without being crass””

— Andrew Marr, BBC News reporter

Tate Modern Museum  /  Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement — Tate Modern Museum / Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement

Transformation of urban districts - from industry to culture - is a commonality in today’s city redevelopment strategies. However, Tate’s successful development and appeal has come from accepting past contextual assignments inherent in the Tate’s projection, appealing not to the eternity of the Ages, but to the continually shifting present. The architects and planners took the old power station site, recalling the fate of the grimy industrial area and - instead of throwing it away - enhanced crucial urban connectivity, embracing it as a past projection onto a modern city, organizing a region with meandering streets, clusters of diverse spaces, and overlapping development patterns. Now, with a proposed addition underway and focus on Urban Forest’s micro-development strategies, a new direct North/South route will develop from crossing the Millennium Bridge, through the Turbine Hall, and into the heart of Southwark. This improvement will assist in creating a spine of human experiences and connectivity – helping to link the South Bank region and the city beyond, providing a catalyst for the further regeneration of the entire area.

Case Study / London

Three Projects :: Tate Modern, National Theatre, and the Royal Opera House

In a city over-saturated with noteworthy cultural institutions and theatrical palaces, three organizations stand above the rest in terms of national prominence and cultural significance; each representing a different time and medium of performance. Although not identical in action and form, these groups separately manifested and evolved into an edifice that symbolize a city that is world renown for cultural performances, making major contributions to the urban psyche of an area with unprecedented historical value, each growing out of the time, place and culture in which it was conceived. Research will look at numerous aspects of each projects including: historical conception and contextual development, urban access, architectural relationships, cultural activity, and proposed future modifications.

The Serpentine Pavilion / Peter Zumthor

The 2011 Serpentine Gallery`s Pavilion in Hyde Park is the 11th installment in the Gallery's annual summer series, seen as one of the world's most ambitious architectural programs of its kind, even with some concern, as it relies on established architects/designers as an invitation-only commission. The Serpentine's Pavilion, conceived in 2000 by Gallery Director Julia Peyton-Jones, is sited on the Gallery's lawn for three months and the immediacy of the commission - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a unique model worldwide. This years installation was designed by Pritzker Prize award-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, which will be the architect's first completed building in the UK and includes a specially created garden by the influential Dutch designer Piet Oudolf (High Line, Millennium Park, among others). Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion will operate as a public space and as a venue for Park Nights, the Gallery's program of public talks and events. Park Nights will culminate in the annual Serpentine Gallery Marathon in October.

The concept of this year's pavilion is the Hortus Conclusus, a Latin term literally meaning 'enclosed garden', or as Zumthor puts it, "a contemplative room, a garden within a garden". The building's design acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise, traffic and smells of London.

With this Pavilion, as with previous structures such as the famous Thermal Baths (Vals, Switzerland) or the Bruder Klaus Chapel (Mechernich, Germany), Zumthor has emphasised the role the senses and emotions play in the architectural experience, from the precise yet simple composition and presence of the materials, to the handling of scale and the effect of light, creating contemplative spaces that evoke a spiritual dimension of our physical environment. The construction is made of a lightweight timber frame wrapped with scrim and coated with Idenden. Exterior and interior walls have staggered doorways that offer multiple paths for visitors to follow, gently guiding them to a central inner garden, the heart and focus of the intervention. The covered walkways and seating surrounding this central space create a serene, contemplative environment from which visitors look onto the richly planted sunlit garden with a patch of sky gloriously framed like a giant oil painting above your head.

In creating the central garden, Piet Oudolf emphasized the natural architecture of plants, using expressive drifts of grasses and herbaceous perennials to create gardens that evolve in form throughout the lives of the plants. These are chosen for their structure, form, texture and color, showcasing many different varieties in his compositions. He has pioneered an approach to gardening that embraces the full life-cycle of plants. He states, "My work aims to bring nature back into human surroundings and this pavilion provides the opportunity for people to reflect and relax in a contemplative garden away from the busy metropolis".

“A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.”

— Peter Zumthor

V&A / Architecture Gallery

When traveling, there is always a place or event that far exceeds expectations and makes a trip far more noteworthy. Overshadowed by so many other museums and attractions in the culturally-packed city, V&A is that place. The Victoria and Albert Museum (named after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, abbreviated as the V&A), located in the London borough of Kensington, is said to be the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects in 145 galleries. Founded in 1852, its collection spans 5,000 years of design, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa. The holdings of ceramics, glass, textiles, costumes, silver, ironwork, jewellery, furniture, medieval objects, sculpture, prints and printmaking, drawings and photographs are among the largest and most comprehensive in the world.

The Architecture gallery in the V&A Museum is especially important (well, maybe just to me) because it is the UK's only permanent Architecture gallery, including a major partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The gallery is divided on three principles: moments of conception, idea of function and use, and exploration into style and aesthetics. What makes this gallery so unique to me is the focus on process and 'conception' in architecture, which display those early stages of development that are so crucial and unique in the design practice. The gallery includes process sketches and drawings accessed through pullout drawers, plus accompanied study models, along with their finalized counterparts, to numerous significant projects in the last few centuries. You can see a video of the Curator of Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Abraham Thomas, discuss the Architecture gallery here.

The partnership with RIBA allows the gallery to produce temporary exhibits that deal with contemporary culture and ideas in London and throughout the world, along with lectures and conversations with current leading scholars and designers. What caught my eye was a symposium held at the V&A Museum in 2009, entitled "Sustaining Identity: Symposium II", which focused on the resistance to the icon and incorporation of local identity in architectural design. A review of the symposium was published in the V&A Online Journal (Issue no.3, spring 2011), entitled "Not quite Vegemite: An architectural resistance to the icon" by Ian Tocher.

“Is there an architecture of resistance that stands in the face of commercial globalisation: that rejects the iconic image; that celebrates the spirit of individual place?”

— Ian Tocher

The event was centered around what cultural organization UNESCO coined as ‘whole life sustainability', or architecture to ‘incorporate local identity into the design process'. UNESCO argues that the idea of sustainable architecture should be widened to include the way a building relates to its social, cultural and geographic situation. Major architects from around the world - the USA, Chile, South Africa, Australia, Finland, the UK, Spain, India - provided case studies of architecture that related to their local contexts. The key-note speaker, Finish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, criticized much of today’s architecture as ‘mere representation' with no substance to relate to the local context.

This symposium seems to have addressed an important issue in contemporary architecture, but a clear definition of what exactly 'sustaining identities' means in architectural practice is still far from clear. Tocher states, "It was noticeable that while many speakers criticised the proliferation of computer-designed, so-called ‘iconic’ buildings throughout the world, plonked down in our cities without any thought to their context, no-one seemed prepared to give any specific examples. Sean Godsell made a useful point - anything has got the potential to become iconic – he gave the example of the Australian savoury spread, Vegemite – but, he argued, architects should not deliberately set out to create an icon, that will only lead to stupid buildings".

“Today’s fashionable architecture seeks to seduce our eye but it rarely contributes to the integrity and meaning of its setting”

— Juhani Pallasmaa

CCTV / Surveillance for All

One of the common stories throughout London is the massive extent the city relies on surveillance equipment on a daily basis. Walking around the city, you do notice a larger than usual amount of video cameras watching silently from so many London street corners. The common statistic that gets thrown around in many discussions is a quote from The Sunday Times from almost two years ago and is referred “to the results of a study by the Government's privacy watchdog” (the Office of the Information Commissioner), which “found that a single person can be caught on a national network of 4.2 million CCTV cameras an average 300 times a day”. This statistic has been praised by activists in the campaign against surveillance and what they see as the erosion of liberty. But this seems like a highly dubious estimate, based on a count on two London streets nearly a decade ago. There are no official statistics on the numbers of cameras operated by homeowners and shopkeepers, cameras the 4.2 million figure purports to include. All that can be known with any degree of certainty is the number of cameras used by the 428 local borough authorities throughout the country, which operates nearly 60,000 cameras in 2009. In addition to those cameras, the observation centers of many boroughs also monitor the footage of cameras owned by private citizens, who pay the boroughs a fee for the monitoring service.

The only thing that is known is that video surveillance is widely accepted in Britain, viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion. Britain has enthusiastically embraced video surveillance over the last two decades in an effort to reduce crime. It has approved more cameras per capita than any other European country and is widely reported to have the most of any country in the world, though that comparison is not based on reliable data. After the riots that tore through the UK weeks ago, CCTV showed its power to capture public unrest, but will be tested to bring prosecution to an unprecedented percentage of rioters. Arrests resulting from the CCTV footage were applauded by many Britons, but the cost of each arrest is high. Big Brother Watch estimates that the more than 600 million pounds spent on installing and operating CCTV cameras between 1996 and 2010 could have paid the salaries of some 4,500 extra cops per year. Boots on the street could have been more effective than cameras in staunching the violence of the last few weeks before it had spun out of control. Plus, according to an internal Metropolitan Police report, less than 1 crime was solved per year for every 1000 CCTV cameras in London.

As stated earlier, the exact number of CCTV cameras in the UK is not known for certain because there is no requirement to register CCTV cameras. However, research published in CCTV Image magazine estimates that the number of cameras in the UK is 1.85 million. This works out as an average of one camera for every 32 people in the UK, although the density of cameras varies from place to place to such a degree as to make this figure almost meaningless. The report also claims that the average person on a typical day would be seen by 70 CCTV cameras, although many of these sightings would be brief glimpses from cameras in shops. The City of London, the central business district, has the highest rate per resident, at 86.2 cameras per person, but it is not technically a borough, and the ratio is distorted because so few people live there. Of the residential districts in Greater London, the borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of cameras per person, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras (1,113) is more than the police departments of Boston, Johannesburg and Dublin City Council COMBINED. One of the most dramatic revelations is that both the Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council - among the smallest local authorities in the UK - have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department. False sense of security or crime fighters?

London / Preparing for the 2012 Olympics

The 500 acre Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford (July 2011)

In 2005, the International Olympic Committee decided that London will serve as the host city for the Games of the XXX Olympiad, the Summer Olympic Games of 2012, defeating proposals from Moscow, New York City, Madrid and Paris after four rounds of voting. The successful bid, which focused on sustainability and reuse, was headed by former Olympic champion Sebastian Coe. This will make London the first city to hold the modern Olympic Games three times, having hosted the games previously in 1908 and 1948. The Olympic win prompted a redevelopment of many of the areas of London in which the games are to be held (the vast majority of events will be held in a regenerated area in East London), while the budgetary considerations have generated some criticism.

The 2012 Olympic Games will use a mixture of new venues, existing and historic facilities, and temporary facilities, some of them in well-known locations such as Hyde Park and Horse Guards Parade. In the wake of the problems that plagued the Millennium Dome, the organisers' intention is that there will be no problems after the Games and instead that a "2012 legacy" will be delivered. Some of the new facilities will be reused in their Olympic form, while others, including the 80,000 seat main stadium, will be reduced in size or relocated elsewhere in the UK. The plans are part of the regeneration of Stratford in east London which will be the site of the Olympic Park, and of the neighbouring Lower Lea Valley.

The Olympic Zone will encompass all of the facilities within the 500 acre Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. This park is being developed on existing waste and industrial land and will be an estimated seven minutes by the new Olympic Javelin train from central London. This new development in Eastern London has required the compulsory purchase of some business properties, which are being demolished to make way for Olympic venues and infrastructure improvements. This has caused some controversy, with some of the affected proprietors claiming that the compensation offered is inadequate. In addition, concerns about the development's potential impact on the future of the century-old Manor Garden Allotments have inspired a community campaign, and the demolition of the Clays Lane housing estate was opposed by tenants, as is that of Carpenters Estate.

As many are unaware, the costs of hosting the Games are separate from those for building the venues and infrastructure, and redeveloping the land for the Olympic Park. While the Games are privately funded, the venues and Park costs are met largely by public money. In Spring of 2007, the government announced to thea budget of £5.3 billion ($8.7 billion) to cover building the venues and infrastructure for the Games. On top of this, various other costs including an overall additional contingency fund of £2.7 billion, security and policing costs of £600 million, VAT of £800 million and elite sport and Paralympic funding of nearly £400 million. According to these figures, the total for the Games and the regeneration of the East London area, is £9.345 billion ($15.3 billion). The costs for staging the Games are funded from the private sector by a combination of sponsorship, merchandising, ticketing and broadcast rights. This budget is raised and managed by the London 2012 Organising Committee. According to Games organisers.

Alternative Transportation / Barclays Cycle Hire

One of the common sights you see throughout the city of London are the frequent use of rental bikes with blue logos. These bikes, referred to as Barclays Cycle Hire, are part of a program that is a public bicycle sharing scheme, launched in 2010 within Greater London. The scheme's bicycles are informally referred to as Boris bikes, after Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London. The cycle hire opened operations in July 2010 with 5,000 bicycles and 315 docking stations distributed across the City of London and parts of eight London boroughs, with a coverage zone spanning approximately 17 square miles. Currently, there are some 6,000 bikes and 400 docking stations throughout the city in the BCH scheme, which has been used for more than 4 million journeys to date and has drastically changed the way Londeners move around the city.

Initially, BCH required initial payment of registration and membership fees to be paid in exchange for an electronic access key, but in December 2010 this was changed to allow casual cycle hires by non-members who have a valid credit card. The project is expected to cost the city £140 million ($231 million) for planning and implementation over six years, and is hoped to be the only Transport for London system to fully fund its annual cost of operation, a goal originally estimated to take two to three years. As you can see, the scheme is sponsored by Barclays bank, which is contributing £25 million (18% of the scheme's total cost) over five years to the project's funding, along with launching a free mobile app called Barclays Bikes. All the bikes and the docking stations are built in Canada and are based on the Bixi cycle rental system that operates in Montreal.

Like most successful projects, credit for developing and enacting the Barclays bicycle share scheme has been a source of controversy. London mayor Boris Johnson claimed credits for the plan, although the initial concept was announced by Johnson's predecessor Ken Livingstone, during the latter's term in office. Johnson has said that he "hoped the bikes would become as common as black cabs and red buses in the capital". Recently, more criticism made some news, as Johnson decided to extend Barclays' sponsorship of London's bike hire scheme without fresh corporate competition. The mayor announced that Barclays would sponsor the bikes for a further three years up to 2018. But some are questioning whether the bank is paying enough and says the sponsorship should be put out to a new competitive tender process in 2015 as originally planned. Added in the new deal was sponsorship of a new cycle superhighway (a costly project that will connect outer boroughs of London) and a guaranteed expansion of the scheme to East london in time for the Olympics. Barclays bank will contribute another £25 million for the deal.

Context / London, England

Aerial of London - toward Westminster — Aerial of London - toward Westminster

Alongside New York and Tokyo, the city of London is a multifaceted global entity, producing one of the world's most influential financial and cultural centers, while commanding governmental decisions as the capital city and largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom. With an official population of around 8 million (14 million in metropolitan area) and hosting the most international visitors of any city in the world, Greater London is considered the largest city in Western Europe and the European Union, making it crowded, vibrant and truly a multicultural city.

While visiting the city, someone had described to me that London was a giant anthill, which I thought was fairly sarcastic, but would later find to be somewhat true. At first glance, the city is not 'tall' by any means compared to other large metropolitan cities, but given the population and infrastructure in the area, it is a very dense and diverse city in terms of living and working in the city. With that, you add the foundation of the urban fabric based on a system setup centuries ago with no grid in sight, the streets become winding and cramped throughout the region, almost giving a claustrophobic feeling in some areas. Finally, the amount of urban strata throughout the more than a millennia of the city's existence, layering and combining the past with the present (including a whole city of tunnels underneath the surface), creates an interesting hybridization of urban development. Add to that, the incredible amount of commuter and visitor population (6 million) with the immediate city population all swarming and navigating throughout the urban framework in shoes, cars, buses or trains. London can be described as an urban ant farm.

History

Located on the River Thames in Southeast England for more than two millennia, London's long history goes back to its founding by the Roman Empire, originally referring to it as Londinium. After the battle of Hastings in 1066, William the conqueror ordered the construction of the White Tower (core of today's Tower of London) and the city's urban sprawl radiated from that point. With this foundation and geographic location, London prospered and increased in global importance throughout the medieval period, surviving devastating challenges like the plagues and the 1666 Great Fire. By 1720 London had 750,000 inhabitants and was the centre of a growing world empire, and it only continued to flourish during the Victorian era of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution. By the time WWII had began, the population of London had reached around 4 million.

Ruined Roman Wall in London`s Financial District

During World War II, London, as many other British cities, suffered severe damage, being bombed extensively by the Luftwaffe as a part of The Blitz. Using large landmarks, like St. Paul's Cathedral as location devices, German pilots navigated numerous raids, unloading tons of high explosive all over the city. The city suffered severe damage with tens of thousands of buildings destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by war's end. At the end of the war in 1945 planners and politicians eagerly seized the opportunity to reconstruct and modernize London as a city which provided decent standards of living for all, even to demolish buildings that were not deemed unsafe. During the 1950s and 1960s the skyline of London altered dramatically as tower blocks were erected throughout the city, although these later proved unpopular. In a bid to reduce the number of people living in overcrowded housing, a policy was introduced of encouraging people to move into newly built towns surrounding London.

Orientation

The M25 circular motorway encompasses the area broadly regarded as Greater London. Cutting the circle in two is the city's main geographical feature - the River Thames. Within the center of the circle contains a two-centre city, Westminster and The City (historic London). East of Westminster, The City is the capital's financial district, covering roughly the square mile of the original settlement bordered by the ruined roman city walls, with St. Paul's Cathedral at the center. The areas east of the City are collectively known as the East End (home of the new Olympics). The West End, on the city's other flank, is effectively the centre of London currently, and where you'll find iconic landmarks such as Parliament and Trafalgar Square. Historically, The land to the west of the City (part of the parish of Westminster) was prime farming land and made good area for building elaborate structures. The land to the east was flat, marshy and cheap, good for cheap housing and industry, and later for docks. Also the wind blows from west to east, and the Thames (into which the sewage went) flows from west to east, so the West End was up-wind and up-market, the East End was where people worked for a living.

Construction Heavy: One of the many new projects throughout London

On a much larger meaning, London has absorbed numerous surrounding towns and villages over the centuries, including large portions of the surrounding "home counties". The term Greater London embraces Central London together with all the outlying suburbs that lie in one continuous urban sprawl within the lower Thames valley. Today, numerious construction projects litter Greater London, especially in the city centre and East End. Mostly focused on infastructure modernization and expansion, the city is in preperation for the world stage when it hosts the 2012 Summer Olympics. Notable areas of construction include the Bankside area, with new high-end residential buildings and the new Shard London Bridge (to be the tallest structure in the EU), and Stratford City (home of the new Olympic Park).