My point of view:
on Promoting Architecture

Interview Date: 23-03-2011

VIEW the entire interview on VIDEO!

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What is the importance of architectural tourism?

The importance of architectural tourism is that it’s a way of attracting people to cities, iconic buildings attract people whether they are cathedrals or maybe new tall buildings and it’s a way of creating an image for a city and it’s something that actually makes people want to go to a place.

In somewhere like London tourism is a very important part of the economy and also the identity of London as a city has the important part of its global positioning so tourism here is very important as long as it doesn’t become too crowded and get in the way of everyone doing their daily job.

The importance of traveling for architects is that it’s essential that you find out how buildings are made, how buildings are created for other cultures. As they say in English, “travel broadens the mind” and it’s essential that we see how other cultures deal with problems and deal with architectural solutions so that we can learn from them and it’s a really essential part of learning about how architecture works and why buildings are important and how they relate to society.

What do you think is the added value that architecture creates within a city?

Architecture, in the way cities are designed, really determined very much the way we live and cities that work do respond very much to the DNA of places. I always think that London is a very good example of a city that responds and reflects to the way that it’s managed, the way it’s run and the way that the commercial drivers of the city generate the architectural form and the architectural shape.

From an architectural point of view, major events are essential as a part of the global discussion about architecture and architecture should be a global discussion. We can talk to architects around the world; we can exchange ideas and learn from each other.

So, major events are places where cultures from all parts of the world can come together and exchange ideas and hopefully live with better ideas about how they can solve their own solutions.

What exactly is the mission of Centre for London’s built environment and what kind of services and actions does it make?

We are a public space here where everyone is welcome from tourists who come to look at the model through to planners, professionals and politicians where we have a series of seminars and debates and discussions about what is happening in London.

So, we see our role here as being a key focus for the whole debate about what is happening in London in terms of planning, development and architecture and where members of the general public, of the community can come and find out what’s happening, they can get information here but also they can take part in the debate of how London should develop over the next twenty to fifty years.

The Pipers Central London model forms the centerpiece of the NLA galleries and is built to a scale of 1:1500. How important is the aerial view of a city?

London is very different to many European cities because it’s relatively unplanned. It doesn’t have the ground, formal streets of Berlin or Paris or Rome.  The reason for that is that London has evolved over a period of time where various villages around the central London area have grown until they formed a single metropolis.

That means that there is no grand planning but it is grown on a much more pragmatic basis. That very much creates the character of London and the model is very helpful to give a feeling of what that is like as a city, it helps people get their bearings as to where the various, new developments are, it also gives a you a picture of where things are happening within the city, where it becomes more dense and gives you an idea of the close grain of the central area.

How would you characterize contemporary architecture in London and UK nowadays?

Partly in relationship to the lack of planning in London, London has always been a city which has been driven by commerce and the needs of commerce. It’s a trading city and the architecture today really reflects that. Everything operates in relationship within the public and private sector which develops land and provides solutions which are reflect the businesses and the scale of businesses that is going on there.

So, you can see on the model the differences between the central CBD area of the city of London which was first developed when the Romans came here two thousand years ago, but it is still organized on a medieval street plan, because it has never been re-planned; since the great far of London it didn’t change to a more European style of planning.

There is a medieval street plan which houses one of the world’s financial centers. You compare that to something like Canary Wharf which is a much newer development, designed on a rectangular grid in the way of a lot of American cities and that has a very different style in form of architecture, the one that responds to the needs of the global financial trading companies.

At the end, can you please provide your personal proposal for 10 buildings (constructed and visitable) which you think as the most important worldwide that someone must visit anyway?

- The Sydney Opera house

- The Duomo in Florence

- Piazza Del Campo in Siena

- The Ponte Vecchio in Venice

- The Seagram Building in New York by Mies Van de Rohe

- The Neues Museum inBerlin by David Chipperfield

- The Alhambra in Granada

- The Church of the Light in Osaka by Tadao Ando

- Three buildings by Le Corbusier:
Ronchamp,
the Unite Marseille
and the Villa Savoye

- And another one by Mies van de Rohe, the Barcelona Pavilion

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