Paris and London / A tale of two cities: Paris proves that you don’t need skyscrapers to thrive / Fri 1 Feb 2008: Charles does it again: skyscraper boom a rash of carbuncles, he tells architects

 

A tale of two cities: Paris proves that you don’t need skyscrapers to thrive

Rowan Moore

A ban on high-rise buildings contrasts with Britain’s ever thrusting capital

Sun 11 Jun 2023 09.02 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/feb/01/design.architecture

 

There’s a story that sections of the British commentariat have liked to tell for some time, about the differences between London and Paris. The French capital, it says, is over-regulated and over-taxed, nice to look at, good for weekend mini-breaks, but stagnant, frozen, a museum piece. Its British counterpart, in this reading, is thrusting, dynamic, creative, global, open for business.

 

The contrast plays out on their respective skylines. Paris, after a flirtation with tall buildings that has led to two or three controversial projects scattered about the edge of its centre, last week reimposed old rules that ban buildings above 37 metres (121ft). London’s planning continues to be a free-for-all, with raucous clusters of towers sprouting not only in the City and around Canary Wharf, but also less-central locations such as Vauxhall, Tottenham and Lewisham, even in commuter towns outside the city limits, such as Woking.

 

It would be easy to dismiss the reintroduced height limits as another example of French municipal overreach, except that the narrative of dynamic London v sleepy Paris looks less convincing than it once did – partly thanks to Brexit – given that the French bourse has overtaken the London Stock Exchange as Europe’s leading equities market. A number of financial institutions, in relocating to Paris, have found its insistence on quality of life over growth at all costs increasingly attractive. In which case London – and other cities such as Bristol and Liverpool that to various degrees have embraced tall buildings – would do well to see what they can learn from the French example.

 

Backers of skyscrapers, in Paris as elsewhere, say they are exciting, modern, provide much-needed space for homes and employment, and attract business. “If vertical buildings can enrich the heart of the capital,” says Jean Nouvel, architect of the completed Duo twin tower scheme, which is one of the projects that has prompted the new restrictions, “why deprive ourselves?”

 

The question is whether they really do “enrich” cities. To use the word in its most literal financial sense, they create vehicles for investment that bring money, often from abroad, to their locations. But their contribution to housing needs is debatable – as they are expensive to build and their apartments tend to sell for high prices. And, as shown by the just-announced bankruptcy of Woking council, which went bust investing in skyscrapers, the returns on tall buildings can go down as well as up.

 

Nor are the zones created at the feet of towers convincing evidence that they enrich cities socially, spatially or culturally. If you go to the new multistorey districts in London, you’ll tend to find arid, lifeless places, lacking in specific character, their residents removed from street life by lifts and lobbies, their mood set by could-be-anywhere landscape design and by those chains that can pay the rents for their retail outlets. As for their supposed modernity, skyscrapers are like air travel: they used to be as glamorous as the jet set, but now they’re in a Ryanair phase – generic, dull and predictable, a default option for unimaginative property companies.

 

They’re hard to justify on environmental grounds. Tall buildings require more steel and concrete per square foot for their construction than lower ones, and once built need lifts and (usually) air conditioning. In theory, they can create population densities that sustain public transport, though in practice their residents seem quite keen on using cars. It’s hard to disagree with Émile Meunier, a councillor for the Greens in Paris, when he says that there’s “no such thing as an ecological tower”.

 

For smaller and historic British cities – Norwich, for example, which has toyed with the idea of height – the message of Paris is that it’s possible to just say no. For larger ones it’s more complex. In London and Manchester the skyscraper ship sailed long ago, so blanket bans don’t make much sense. Paris has long been a highly managed and centrally directed city, with a more uniform urban fabric as a result, and big British cities are more chaotic and multifarious, which also argues against single city-wide rules.

 

But boroughs, mayors and national government do have the powers to implement policies that limit the carbon emissions of building construction, which if seriously done would by itself reduce the number of new towers. They also – in theory, but not too often in practice – can require that, when they are permitted, tall buildings and the spaces around them are designed with quality and intelligence. Such things naturally cost money, but the principal power of tall buildings, and the main reason why they get built, is that they unleash land value, which should mean that there are the resources for doing a good job.

 

The London v Paris comparison can be seen as one of quantity against quality. Whereas in terms of population and GDP, London has grown more than Paris for most of this century, and created more jobs, the French capital has made much more impressive gains in productivity. More wealth is created, in other words, per citizen. Among the consequences, although Parisian homes are hardly cheap, is a less acute housing crisis.

 

Paris is also striving to make itself into an exceptionally sustainable big city, one more desirable than it already is, by making its public spaces and river banks as attractive as possible to pedestrians and cyclists, reducing car use, and implementing the concept of the “15-minute city”, whereby the essentials of life are close to your home. Its policy on tall buildings is part of that bigger picture. The London way – pile them high and sell them not-so-cheap – cannot, given this competition, continue to take its success for granted.

 

 Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer

Wed 12 Dec 2001 : Prince dumps on high-rise architects who leave 'turd in every plaza'

Fiachra Gibbons

Wed 12 Dec 2001 10.57 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2001/dec/12/urbandesign.architecture

 

Prince Charles yesterday mounted his favourite hobby horse to launch a stinging attack on the inflated egos of architects who inflict skyscrapers on our cities.

 

Tall buildings are often nothing more than "overblown phallic structures and depressingly predictable antennae that say more about an architectural ego than any kind of craftsmanship", the prince told the Building for the 21st Century conference in London, before quoting the American novelist Tom Wolfe's quip that they left "turds in every plaza".

 

With work just started on Sir Norman Foster's controversial 41-storey "erotic gherkin" in the City of London, and an inquiry into the even taller Heron Tower reaching its climax, the prince's intervention in the skyscraper debate could not have come at a more sensitive time.

 

"I can imagine that my presence is about as welcome as a police raid on a brothel," the Prince of Wales told the gathering of engineers and architects, who had earlier heard London's mayor Ken Livingstone rage against what he has termed the "Taliban" of conservationists, like the prince, who want to turn the clock back. Mr Livingstone, who has described English Heritage - opponents of dramatic changes to the city's skyline - as "the greatest risk to London's economy since Adolf Hitler", said the capital needed 15 new tall buildings over the next decade.

 

He accused such conservationists of "feeding on each other's prejudices and wanting to preserve everything. The city is not a museum".

 

In an even more withering rebuke, Mr Livingstone added: "If they themselves had to compete on the open jobs market they might have a different view." For London to remain a major world business centre, he said, it would have to allow a limited number of new tall and landmark buildings in the City and Docklands.

 

The only way was up, he insisted, if cities are not to sprawl out of control.

 

But the prince was unrepentant, arguing that multi-storey office blocks "had no manners", ignoring and overpowering older buildings around them.

 

"New buildings with their heads in the clouds should keep their feet firmly on the ground... Skyscrapers are utilitarian and commercial, so-called statement buildings that are self-referential and fulfil no communal purpose whatsoever... I fear that so much of the modernist aesthetic is based on the notion of standing out rather than fitting in," he added.

 

Comparing himself to a bottle of HP sauce adding "piquancy to the debate", the prince said: "Let's have no more of the leftover spaces that so often masquerade as public amenity - what Tom Wolfe entertainingly described as 'a turd in every plaza'. "

Fri 1 Feb 2008: Charles does it again: skyscraper boom a rash of carbuncles, he tells architects

 

Towers risk vandalising heritage sites across the country, prince says

 

Robert Booth

Fri 1 Feb 2008 01.01 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/feb/01/design.architecture

 

Prince Charles locked horns with Lord Rogers and the architects of Britain's skyscraper boom yesterday, warning that historic cities are at risk of being wrecked by a "rash" of "carbuncles" in the form of office and apartment towers.

 

In a speech backed by a slide show which highlighted Rogers's proposed 44-storey "cheese grater" tower next to Lord Foster's so-called "gherkin" in the City of London, the prince complained that architects were indulging in a "free for all [that] will leave London and our other cities with a pockmarked skyline".

 

The address to heritage activists, architects and developers at St James's Palace put the prince on collision course with the Labour peer, who is also the chief architecture adviser to the London mayor, Ken Livingstone.

 

Rogers built Lloyd's of London, one of the most eye-catching towers on the capital's skyline, and made high-rise living a plank of government urban policy with his Urban Taskforce report to the Blair government. He has spoken out in favour of clusters of towers and is constructing tall buildings on the World Trade Centre site in New York and at Canary Wharf.

 

The prince said Bath and Edinburgh were also under threat from such towers and suggested skyscrapers in London should be confined to Canary Wharf, "rather than overshadowing Wren's and Hawksmoor's churches". Rogers, who has clashed with the prince in the past, was on business in Korea yesterday and declined to comment.

 

The prince's comments echoed his famous 1984 speech when he described a planned extension to the National Gallery as "a monstrous carbuncle" - shredding confidence in modern architecture - and said the skyscraper boom would result in "not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners".

 

Yesterday he showed an image of a 160 metre tower by the Uruguayan architect Raphael Viñoly close to the Tower of London as an example of a scheme that could "deliberately desecrate" a World Heritage site.

 

The speech also represented an attack on Livingstone's liberal policy towards buildings in the capital where at least a dozen skyscrapers are planned. They include the 64-storey "Helter-Skelter" in the City designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, Ian Simpson's 52-storey Jumeirah tower on the South Bank and Renzo Piano's 66-storey Shard of Glass, also known as the London Bridge Tower. Even the prince's own views are threatened. A pair of proposed towers at Victoria station could loom over his mother's garden and sprout from behind Buckingham Palace when seen from outside Clarence House, his London residence.

 

Leading architects rebutted the prince's claims and claimed Britain was leading the world in skyscraper design.

 

"He's wrong," said Ken Shuttleworth, lead designer of 30 St Mary Axe, also known as the Gherkin. "London is not a museum. It has to be renewed for the next generation, especially as it attempts to become the world's leading city. We can't leave it as it is in medieval times."

 

"It's emotive language," said Sunand Prasad, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. "We need to get away from the idea that there is a plague of towers sweeping across London, because there isn't."

 

The prince questioned why society was willing to "vandalise" historic sites. "Corporate and residential towers are being proposed across London, and overshadowing World Heritage sites from Edinburgh to Bath," he said. "For some unaccountable reason we seem to be determined to vandalise these few remaining sites which retain the kind of human scale and timeless character that so attract people to them."

 

The prince's remarks generated sympathy among some architects who have grown quietly concerned that tower proposals have spread beyond the square mile to the traditionally low-rise South Bank and even to suburbs, breaking the unwritten rule that towers should be built in clusters to limit their impact.

 

"There is no great clarity about where we build towers and where we don't," said Prasad. "What we need is a policy that supports principles like building towers in clusters and next to major transport interchanges."

 

The last time the prince used the carbuncle image, projects were cancelled and planners ran scared of contemporary design. Now the impact is likely to be less seismic, predicted Prasad.

 

"He now seems to know more of what he is talking about and the general public has become far more design-savvy, which means people are better placed to judge what he is saying. I don't think he will get the same reflexive obedience this time."

 

Clash of cultures

 

Prince Charles

 

Construction began in 1993 of Poundbury, a traditional village on Duchy of Cornwall land. It was drawn up the Prince's favoured planner, Leon Krier and includes traditional pubs, greens and a village hall. The Prince's Foundation for Architecture and Urbanism is planning a new settlement of 1,000 homes on the edge of Newquay, Cornwall, dubbed Surfbury. It will use renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, and local and reclaimed materials. The prince commissioned architect Craig Hamilton to design a six-bedroom mansion in Wales. It is widely expected to be a "starter palace" for Prince William, with solar panels on the roof and sheep's wool insulation. It will use recycled bricks.

 

Richard Rogers

 

The Lloyds of London office tower in the Square Mile made Rogers' name in the UK. It had its pipes and ducts on the outside and became the best example of the British "hi-tech" movement. The Millennium Dome, built in 1999, was designed by Richard Rogers and Partners just as Rogers himself became a powerful member of the New Labour hierarchy advising John Prescott on urban policy. In 2006 he won the Stirling prize for the first time for Barajas airport in Madrid. His practice also designed Terminal 5 at Heathrow which is scheduled to open next month.

 

· This article was amended on Thursday August 14 2008. We mistakenly said that the architect Raphael Viñoly was Argentinian when, in fact, he is Uruguayan. This has been corrected.