Gabion is the site of Hugh Pearman, London-based architecture and design critic. Hugh has been attached to The Sunday Times, London, since 1986, writes for a wide range of other design and consumer titles, is the author of several books, and frequently teaches and lectures. What you find here is a selection - by no means exhaustive - of his writings in various media, including the full, uncut versions of articles previously published in The Sunday Times. http://www.hughpearman.com http://www.hughpearman.com/images/banner_rss.jpg http://www.hughpearman.com 100 43 The redesigned extension to the Tate Modern contemporary art museum in London, launched today, shows Jacques Herzog moving from what would effectively have been a built diagram of stacked boxes - his first attempt of two years ago - into something considerably more smoothly sculpted. It's turning into architecture. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/11.html 2008-07-18 I'm sitting opposite Frank Gehry over breakfast in an impossibly pretty sunlit town square in Arles, Provence. He's here to launch the plans for his "Parc des Ateliers" project, described as a cultural Utopia. But I'm staring at a set of squiggles he's just drawn in my notebook, and wondering if I should ask him to sign them. He'd reached for a pen, as architects in conversation do, and started sketching away. "I'm doing these pop-up stores for Bono," he explains. "They're for his Product Red company. I'm really excited by them. They're like pieces of jigsaw." http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/10.html 2008-07-15 Nobody ever says - hey, let's go to the Hayward Gallery, the way they do of the Tate or the National Gallery or any museum. Apart from having no permanent display, the Hayward is strangely invisible, considering how powerful its Brutalist 1960s South Bank architecture is. It is not a marketable brand. So is it an insanely rash move for director/curator Ralph Rugoff to ask artists to respond to this gritty building in celebration of the Hayward Gallery's 40th birthday? No, it is not. Artists being alchemists, they have turned the weird concrete monolith into a palace of intriguing follies. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/09.html 2008-06-11 You just can't get rid of some architects. If they're successful, everyone wants to use them. The older they get, the more in demand they are. It was true in the past of America's Frank Lloyd Wright and France's Le Corbusier, it's true today of America's Frank Gehry, Italy's Renzo Piano, Britain's Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. This has always been an art where wide acceptance comes relatively late in life - though the current crop of septuagenarians are striplings compared with Oscar Niemeyer, creator of Brasilia, who is incredibly still working at 100. Even so, we're now at a pause moment. What on earth comes next? http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/08.html 2008-05-11 How tragically apt. London's Victoria and Albert Museum mounts an exhibition on Chinese design culture, and Tibet erupts in flames. In a further irony, the crowds of protestors gather outside the Royal Institute of British Architects, which happens to be across the road from the Chinese embassy. But the architects are having a heated debate, too: the international big names are arguing whether it is ethical to take fat fees from China. It's a bit late for that, really. Western architecture long ago made its Faustian pact with the Eastern Empire. Now comes the payback. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/06.html 2008-03-30 The big draw in Liverpool until recently was the photo-realist artist Ben Johnson who you would find in the Walker art gallery, six days a week, completing his giant aerial view of the city. As Johnson did his stuff with airbrush and stencils, he chatted with the fluctuating crowd of fascinated onlookers, most of whom wanted to know if their home was somewhere on the 16 foot by 8 foot canvas. That was easy: more difficult was that he also had to forecast the future. Johnson is painting a city (he's still at it, now on webcam only) with big gaps missing. He has to refer to architects' drawings. He is finishing their buildings before they can. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/06.html 2008-03-18 Talk to any dogmatic modernist architect - there are still plenty to be found - and you will quickly find the inner functionalist. Questions of style, of beauty, are brushed aside as irrelevant or tangential. Everything has to answer to a remorseless logic, carried through in every detail. We are led to believe that the end product - the finished building - is the best possible, indeed the only possible, outcome of a rigorously thorough design procedure. This is arrant nonsense, of course, as evidenced by today's multi-millionaire breed of random shape-generating "icon" architects. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/05.html 2008-03-10 You could argue that Sir Colin Alexander ("Sandy") St. John Wilson, who died late last year aged 85, was just a little too intellectual for his own good. That as an architect and academic, he was over-referential, particularly to his Scandinavian-modern heroes. Theory does tend to drag at the heels of the practising architect. With rare exceptions such as Le Corbusier who could write a manifesto before lunch, design a masterpiece building such as the Villa Savoie or Ronchamp chapel in the afternoon, and then get down to some serious skirt-chasing in the evening, I'd say that it is better to design first, and let others do the theorising on your behalf. Luckily Sandy had another life - some would say the life that was most important to him. He was one of the most important modern art collectors of his generation. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/04.html 2008-02-27 Airports are about rather more than the design of check-in desks and departure lounges. They are about the design of whole cities, whole nations. So let's get one thing straight. Any new building at Heathrow - even one that is effectively a complete new airport in itself, namely the massive new Terminal Five, opening in March - can only ever be a temporary fix. Everybody knows that the airport is in the wrong place, that it is too small, and that the noise, pollution and danger of forcing planes to fly low right over the capital will get steadily more unacceptable. Eventually, Heathrow will have to close. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/03.html 2008-02-05 We are getting close, tantalisingly close, to the Holy Grail of human habitation. Since the future for all of us is urban - more, bigger, taller, denser cities - the challenge is this: can we make those cities self-sustaining - able to generate all their own carbon-neutral power, harvest and conserve all their water, produce good food efficiently, recycle all their own waste, all in all have a neutral or even beneficial impact on the global environment? Can the 21st century city be the salvation of the planet, relieving pressure on natural resources as environmentalist James Lovelock has suggested? The good news is that it can be. The bad news is that we're not quite there yet. However, it's just a matter of time. Oh, and money. http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/02.html 2008-01-22 As improbable outcomes go, beat this: an unpromising commercial development in Kingston, south-west London just happens, miraculously, to contain a near-perfect theatre auditorium, based on the plan of the Rose from Elizabethan times. It opens for business in mid January with theatrical eminence grise Sir Peter Hall's new touring production of Uncle Vanya. But can it become more - become, in fact, Britain's first true university-linked performing arts academy? http://www.hughpearman.com/2008/01.html 2008-01-04