WAIT A MINUTE, NO, YOU CAN'T DO THAT. YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED FUCKING DESIGNING IT YET. YOU CAN'T JUST SEND OUT AN IMAGE OF A LOAD OF GREY WALLS IN SKETCHUP. OH, IT'S ALREADY GOT PLANNING PERMISSION? OH. OKAY THEN. FUCK IT. JUST PUT SOME TREES ON IT AND SEND IT OUT.
Friday, 1 May 2009
ST MARY'S ROAD HOUSING, PECKHAM BY ALAN CAMP ARCHITECTS FOR L&Q
WAIT A MINUTE, NO, YOU CAN'T DO THAT. YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED FUCKING DESIGNING IT YET. YOU CAN'T JUST SEND OUT AN IMAGE OF A LOAD OF GREY WALLS IN SKETCHUP. OH, IT'S ALREADY GOT PLANNING PERMISSION? OH. OKAY THEN. FUCK IT. JUST PUT SOME TREES ON IT AND SEND IT OUT.
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I love this blog. Please keep up the good work - we need you.
ReplyDeleteActually I quite like the look of this building. However if you don't there are plenty of opportunities for you to actually do something about it by following the planning process rather than just whining on your blog
ReplyDeleteYou have to cover the ongoing Prince VS the Designers (Rogers, Fosters, Herzog) controversy man! (Chelsea Barracks)...
ReplyDeleteCaroline, you're wrong.
ReplyDeleteWe need more people to whine about this garbage. The planning process doesn't seem to stop it.
Fantastic blog.
ReplyDeleteNotice the person walking the dog in the foreground. What are they holding in their hand? Looks like a paper bag which they're about to fling at this building to show their appreciation for it (contents of bag provided by dog).
Can you do something on the hideous practice of "artist's impressions", and the identikit people they always contain? A "before/after" contrast of artist's impression vs reality would be highly amusing.
It's amazing the amount of hypocrisy there is in the building industry. Architects will very easily snipe at a 1960s block across the road labelling it as 'awful' - and yet decades after the post-war era they are still producing buildings that aren't that much different.
ReplyDeleteIf those clients from Peckham came to me to design the thing, I would give the same approach to proportion, form, scale, materials and ornament there as I would to a house built in a high-importance Conservation Area…or anywhere else for that matter. The result would be more modest, but at least it would not be built in that grim-looking brick with those weirdly placed and sized windows.
How that Caroline person can 'quite like the look of this building' is beyond me.
i'm with the caroline person - don't think this one's too bad
ReplyDeletei don't understand how you're judging how well designed this is - somewhere in between the superficial 'what it looks like' (you don't like grey bricks and rectiliniear shapes?), how far the design has progressed in detail (understandably not a lot of detail as you point out, it's just after planning permission) and 'how it's been represented in this drawing'. if you don't like grey boxy buildings then as one of the comments say, you have every right to object and influence a planning decision. i won't go down the path of trying to work out why you dond't ike grey boxy buildings... i think it looks good. but hey that's just me. this building may well look like the 60s buildng across the street but who said that 60s building was actually badly designed? it was probably badly built - that's the more accurate complaint.
ReplyDeleteIt's not superficial to say that an image of a building looks bad because the image is the first impression one gets of a building before it is committed to reality. It is important to get it right. If you can't get a 500 pound image right, how can you get a half million pound building right?
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree, 'grey boxxy' can look good if done well. But, as with any building, care needs to be taken over the concept, proportion, material, features, volume etc etc. However what has happened here is that a weak concept of 'how can we hide this lump of shoe-horned over-dense flats' has been pasted over with 'lets randomise the windows to make it look a bit funky' until they got to the most critical point, the corner, and they thought 'fuck we can't do anything with this because we'll then have to redraw the plan so lets just cover up the shite with a tree'. It is self-conscious shiteness. A generous smattering of fudging it, if you will. And the fact that the designers know it makes it even worse.
And as for the planning process being an open forum for debate on the aesthetic aspects of our soon-to-be built environment... Well its not. You cannot object because you think the design quality of a building is poor. You can object over mass, density, parking, rights to light etc etc. But the only way to object to the design of the building is to say it is 'out of context'. And in this case it would be a difficult argument to win given what is over the road (i assume it is over the road, but there is nothing in this image which tells me). Well why can't we have buildings that are bold enough to be different and thought through enough to fit the area?