Well, we all know about the various delays that have beset that project, not helped by the continuing illness of the South Bank’s chairman, Elliott Bernard, and the departure of its chief executive, Karsten Witt, last month. The upshot is that, as usual, things have unravelled. Now the tentative plan is to build a new concert hall by demolishing and rebuilding the existing smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall alongside the RFH. There will be yet another architectural competition for that. Meanwhile the increasingly impatient British Film Institute has signed up its own architect, David Chipperfield, for the upstream film centre.
Vinoly describes the situation as a “fiasco”, and remarks: “They’re going to miss the opportunity again, as they did with Terry (Farrell), Richard (Rogers) and everyone else before. There’s a confusion between masterplanning and architecture. Isn’t it a problem of defining exactly what it is you want?”
Vinoly however has a high regard for Chipperfield, and applauds that appointment, at least. As for the new concert hall, few would fancy its chances. Plenty of people would protest against the demolition of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, even if there was the money to pay for its replacement. It’s the classic British scenario - we are paralyzed, transfixed by old buildings.
Right back in the early 1960s the architect Sir Denys Lasdun proposed a new South Bank opera house here, alongside his National Theatre. In the end, nobody could bear the thought of a new opera house, the National was built further downriver, and eventually the Royal Opera was very expensively done up on its existing site in Covent Garden. One suspects that much the same thing is now going to happen with regard to the Royal Festival Hall. But there is another way. It is not impossible, even in indecisive Britain, to start afresh.
New concert halls have been built in Birmingham and Manchester in recent years. Although neither is architecturally distinguished, inside both are ahead of anything London can offer the concert-goer at present. Symphony Hall in Birmingham was acoustically designed by Russell Johnson, who is also responsible for Verizon Hall, the main venue in Philadelphia’s Kimmel. And for his impressive glass roof, Vinoly called upon London-based structural engineers Dewhurst Macfarlane, who have done some very un-American things with it. The two glass ends of the Kimmel, for instance, are hung from cables held taut by giant steel weights - effectively glass curtains, which ripple slightly in the wind. That is a world first and it’s the kind of go-for-it design expertise that the South Bank could do with.
