Welcome To Leeds Society of Architects

Celebrating the best of building sights

Modern architects have learnt to dodge the slings and arrows hurled by an unhappy public.

A rash of towering glass skyscrapers and unapologetically contemporary office blocks may have been given planning approval in recent years, but it takes more than a rubber stamp to convince many of those who live near them they are anything other than a blot on the landscape.

It's not just the hoi polloi who've had a problem with modern design. Prince Charles has carved out a niche as a full-time thorn in the side of those he sees as vandalising the few remaining unspoilt areas of Britain's cities.

It's 25 years ago since he raised hackles by describing one development planned for London as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved old friend" and his references to "pockmarked skylines" and "crumbling eyesores" have kept on coming.

Yet without modern architecture, cities like Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford risk becoming open-air museums to the Victorian age and, if tradition is prized above all else, it will be a missed opportunity for this generation to leave a legacy in bricks and mortar.

It's a problem which has fascinated Leeds-based architect Irena Bauman throughout her long career. A champion of contemporary architecture she is determined to show that as well as the grand 19th-century public buildings and corn exchanges, Yorkshire's towns and cities also have a more modern, but equally interesting story to tell.

"In the past I think there was a fear of contemporary architecture," says a founding director of Bauman Lyons Architects.

"Developers didn't want to rock the boat, but the result was a glut of uninspiring and ugly buildings.

"The truth is that if it's well done, the public are willing to embrace modern design. What they don't want is to be palmed off with second-rate developments.

"Yorkshire has much to be proud about when it comes to architecture and if we are to do justice to its history we have to continue building new iconic developments which not only contribute to civic pride, but which also boost the entrepreneurial spirit of our towns and cities and, ultimately, their economic growth."

While in the last couple of decades, Irena could have been forgiven for feeling like something of a lone voice, she will now get the chance to stand on a much more public platform.

Today sees the official launch of the Regional Design Review Service an organisation of which Irena has been appointed chair. The idea is to provide free independent advice to developers in charge of the county's major schemes and in doing so improve the quality of design and raise the profile of those buildings which already meet the ideal creative blueprint.

Yorkshire is the last region in the country to set up a panel and after a tough 18 months for the property sector when many schemes have been mothballed or abandoned altogether it might not seem like ideal timing for the launch.

Irena admits the last few years have not been kind to many skylines, particularly Leeds, but insists the recession may ultimately lead to a new wave of iconic designs.

"The country needed more housing and the last 20 years have seen an unprecedented boom," she says. "However, quantity doesn't necessarily equate to quality and in some areas there has been a lack of creative thinking.

"When it came to the residential sector, many developers were happy to throw up uninspiring apartment blocks of small studio flats without thinking of the surrounding area and when it came to major development there seemed to be a determination to go down the potentially disastrous route of building identikit cities. It was almost like a return to the 70s when there was a rush to build great big shopping malls.

"The recession forced the pause button to be pressed. A large number of developments didn't go ahead and it means that quite a lot of land has once again become a blank canvas."

As all those involved in the construction industry take stock, Irena says that a quick glance up and down Yorkshire's streets shows just what can be achieved with a little imagination. One of her aims is ultimately to produce a map showcasing the region's best buildings, a 21st-century version of the traditional heritage trail.

"Sheffield is a prime example of how modern architecture can successfully sit alongside the traditional.

"The key was that those who spearheaded the development had a clear strategy as to what the city stood for long before any proposal was given the go ahead. As well as a series of impressive office developments which have turned the city centre into a creative hub, there has also been a lot of investment in the public realm which provides a sense of continuity between the new and the old.

"Crucially there has also been a focus on high quality and everything cheap and nasty has been rejected."

It's the latter that the new Regional Design Service Review has at its core. Backed by Integrate Yorkshire and Yorkshire Forward, the panel will meet monthly to scrutinise details of proposed projects and it hopes to show that investing more money into good and sustainable designs is better value for money in the long term.

"It's about raising people's aspirations and actually when the economy is struggling it is more important than ever to have good design as those buildings tend to be more successful economically and socially. Developers must learn to talk to the public; working in a bubble only leads to problems.

"From my experience when you ask people what improvements they would like to see, they are full of good ideas and most of what they want is very simple to achieve."

Source - Sarah Freeman - Yorkshire Post - link

posted on: Tuesday 07th February 2012
(0) Comments

Light Neville Street: A New Gateway for the city of Leeds

Neville Street, Leeds has just completed a £4.6 million transformation to create a gateway that the city can be proud of. Owned by Network Rail and developed through a partnership between Leeds City Council and Yorkshire Forward.

The programme of improvements, entitled 'Light Neville Street', aims to upgrade the tunnel using innovative engineering and acoustic techniques, including sound-absorbing wall-panels and a new lighting scheme. The improvements will also widen the current footpaths by  a total of 1.25m (0.75m on the west wall and 0.5m on the east wall) making it a safer environment for people with disabilities to move along the street.

Robust, graffiti-resistant, anodised aluminium wall panels will contain an innovative sound-absorbing material called QuietStone, used in the Channel Tunnel and the London Underground to manage sound-levels.

A new lighting scheme incorporating thousands of LEDs, will improve light levels in the tunnel. Alongside this an audio installation will be created to soften the traffic noise experienced in the tunnel. A complimentary lighting scheme installed on the west wall, will subtly remind drivers to watch their speed, whilst improving security in the tunnel by contributing to a lighter, brighter environment added to existing CCTV cameras at either end of the tunnel.

Image courtesy of the Neville Street website

posted on: Tuesday 07th February 2012
(0) Comments

How to be a happy architect

Architect Irena Bauman takes the Guardian's northern editor, Martin Wainwright, for a stroll around Leeds.

Irena Bauman has a thriving architects' practice, busy order books, and an interesting proposition. Fiddlesticks to fear of the recession, she says. Instead, she welcomes the big pause that hard times are bringing to scores of speculative developments. "It'll give us a breathing space . . . time to think," she argues. And maybe - her greatest hope - it will help her dream of a United Front of British Architects, prepared to tell second-rate, finance-driven schemes: "Sorry, we're not working for you. Get lost."

Pipedream stuff? Well, the Bauman banner has been waving for more than a decade in hard-headed Leeds, where Irena's father, Zygmunt Bauman, taught sociology at Leeds University and passed on his relish for argument to his daughter. It is an idea now being planted nationally with a debut handbook-cum-manifesto from her practice, Bauman Lyons, called How to be a Happy Architect.

The book, a dumpy bundle of lavishly illustrated challenges, is touching a nerve in the profession. Bauman is the keynote speaker at three of this year's nine regional annual meetings of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), and Building Design magazine has given her a regular column about ethical issues.

Along the way, thanks to Yellow Pages, she picked up a home improvement job for cabinet ministers Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper at their constituency base near Wakefield. Balls describes her as "brilliant and creative".

Best of all for someone who targets self-congratulatory awards and honours as one of the diseases of modern architecture, her own city has now asked her to stop talking, sit down, and prove her case. "Sitting down is what the Leeds job involves, literally," she says. "Sitting outside for hours, watching people in the city, what they do, how they behave."

As she clicks through PowerPoint slides of the project's introduction, a doughnut appears with Leeds city centre as the jam. Unlike most architects, however, it's the edge of the bun that interests her - an area that is much less jammy. She calls it "the rim of disconnection". She and her fellow sitters have discovered barriers here - made of habit, fear and assumptions, and therefore invisible on maps - that divide some areas and enclose others.

Did anyone from down-at-heel Richmond Hill use glitzy Clarence Dock as a shortcut to central Leeds? Irena and colleagues sat and watched. No one does.

What did people in Richmond Hill do? The sitters became nosy strollers, and found a micro-economy of home-sewing, and small garages that repair just about every taxi in the city because they are so cheap. Like the barriers, this had evaded economic surveys because each enterprise is so small.

To take just one: how did a transport cafe survive on part of Richmond Hill where there doesn't seem to be any transport any more? The sitters-turned-strollers morphed into inquisitive lunchers. They found that the place had sorted a quiet contract with the residential home for older people just across the road.

Bauman came to this micro-research, and her longer-term aim of sewing disconnected places back together, after being burned by her own award. As Stirling prizes, Riba gold medals and the like all but monopolised the media's view of architecture, Bauman Lyons won Civic Trust and Riba gongs for restyling Bridlington's promenade in 1999.

Oh dear, what a state it's in now. As well as the awards, there were two laudatory reports on the prom by Cabe, the government's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, but Bauman's book doesn't try to hide the flaking paint, vandalised canvas and sealed-off sections that trippers to Brid see today.

"Architects pretend a lot," she says. "The sun is always shining on the pinmen and women in our drawings and models. But Bridlington hasn't had the resources to maintain the scheme. We didn't build that in." Bauman Lyons is now working on a second stage for the prom which allows for the huge disconnection between capital budgets and maintenance ones.

The case gave Bauman a good basis for a project born of the Brid experience, a study of Stirling prizewinners and their subsequent woes. Being a fellow victim drew the fangs of any suggestion that she was sneering at other award winners and being holier-than-thou.

She commissioned a bright young Leeds journalist, Rosa Silverman, to look at icons such as Will Alsop's library in Peckham, south London, and Wilkinson Eyre's Magna science centre in Rotherham. Silverman shared Bauman's disarming attitude of wanting to follow an argument to a successful conclusion, rather than needing to "win" or to damage others, and everyone involved opened their doors.

The results - leaking roofs, dingy rooms, soaring temperatures, unexpected costs - gained national publicity two years ago. It wasn't a new argument: the much-praised Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool - Sir Frederick Gibberd's "Paddy's Wigwam" of 1967 - is already having to raise millions for repairs. But critics latched on to Silverman's findings and concluded that the worship of "icons" is disconnecting architects from real life.

This is Bauman's belief, too, although each of her nettle-sting criticisms comes with a dock leaf compliment. Scrambling along Leeds's "iconic" waterfront, she says: "There has been some stunning architecture in Britain in the last 20 years. Iconic buildings will always be important because they express human achievement, the atmosphere and the ethics of the day. We will always strive to make exciting buildings that inspire and uplift us."

Period of expansion
But, with a sweep of her arm at the clusters of uniform towers, she adds: "We could have done so much with the amazing period of expansion we had. Instead, we've built a huge amount of really bad stuff. We've been driven by commerce, the media, quick wins, one-liners."

It's time to go and sit and watch again on Richmond Hill, which is what Bauman Lyons is now doing, intensively and with more resources through a joint company set up with Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan universities. The registration document has just arrived from Companies House and Bauman unrolls it proudly, fishing out a handful of badges from another package that came in the same post.

These have the new firm's name: Love it, Share it, a take on the official Leeds marketing slogan Live it, Love it, which has focused on the city's Harvey Nicks, Kaiser Chiefs glitz. Sharing it, says Bauman, means finding out two things in "rim" areas such as Richmond Hill. One is old hat, if unchallengeable: ask local people what surroundings they would like to see. The other is the new and promising part: audit local skills and resources, such as who owns what.

City councillors were startled, Bauman says, when she and John Thorp, the council's civic architect - the last surviving post with that name in Britain - showed them an ownership map of the rim. Who owned half of it? They did.

"They have the power to change things," Bauman says. "We know about local authorities being starved of money, but look at how much they own." Then comes the dock leaf: "And look at their wonderful data too." She was staggered to get a map of Leeds covered with dots by the highways department. Each one, compiled by sitters like her own, represents five people from the dot's immediate area who walk to work.

"Architects need to become sociologists as well as researchers," Bauman argues. "We are knowledgeable and good at analysis. Now we must organise." Thus armed, runs the Happy Architect theory, practitioners can bring well-designed buildings that are made of quality materials, into the most modest neighbourhoods, which will no longer be disconnected.

How to prove it? Bauman Lyons would claim that they are doing so, with relatively low-cost but sustainable, high-quality buildings such as the Host media centre and their own new offices in Chapeltown, Leeds, or the SureStart centre in Little London on the opposite hillside of the Meanwood valley.

"Good design can be highly affordable if you stay local," Bauman insists. "We don't accept commissions that involve travelling more than 70 miles. We spend time not on travel but on site, and we build up a bank of local/regional knowledge." The firm also plays Robin Hood, using profits from big, wealthy clients to allow loss-making work into the portfolio.

Freedom to experiment
Is that a weakness in the thesis? Isn't a happy architect really one with the freedom to experiment or preach - a freedom that comes with a full order book?

No, says Bauman, and she can prove it from the last recession, which almost sank her infant practice in 1994. "There were six of us, motivated and excited by the smallest project," she says. "And then we ran out of work." Living off capital, the team plunged into an early example of micro-research, bonding together interested parties, from Leeds city council to artists and musicians, to look at Holbeck, the cradle of Leeds industry.

"It didn't bring commissions at the time, but it involved a lot of real architectural thinking," Bauman says. Ten years later, that bore fruit as Holbeck was regenerated and developers turned to Bauman Lyons. What price Richmond Hill, 2018?

• How to be a Happy Architect, by Bauman Lyons Architects, is published by Black Dog Publishing, £24.95 (blackdogonline.com). To order a copy for £22.95 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875

· This article was amended on Friday November 21 2008. Professor Zygmunt Bauman taught sociology, not philosophy as we said in the article above, at Leeds University and is still emeritus professor of sociology there. This has been corrected.

Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/nov/19/communities-irena-bauman-uk-architecture

posted on: Tuesday 07th February 2012
(0) Comments

Leeds architect fulfils her towering ambition

A LEEDS architect fulfilled a lifelong ambition when her company won the contract to redesign the iconic Tower Works site.

The £48 million project is Bauman Lyons Architects' biggest to date and the groundbreaking scheme will set new standards not only in Leeds but across the country

It's a challenge those involved clearly relish.

Irena Bauman, director of Bauman Lyons, Chapeltown, said: "There are less than a handful of mixed-use, city centre, commercial projects in historic areas in the UK that have aimed for such a low impact on the environment whilst at the same time aspiring to be socially and economically sustainable."

She added: "I used to walk around there (Holbeck) looking at Tower Works and thought, 'the lucky architect who will be working on there', so I can't tell you how it feels to be working on something like this.

"It's a huge lifetime achievement for us. I'm very, very proud to be associated with it."

As reported in last week's YEP, developer ISIS Waterside Regeneration has left the project as difficult economic conditions mean it can't guarantee they can deliver.

But Irena said: "We had a great relationship with ISIS. We would love it if ISIS came back in 18 months time or whatever it takes."

She said landowner Yorkshire Forward, who are leading the project, was now looking into other options.

They could include ISIS teaming up with another developer or even a number of small, local developers tackling different parts of the site which she said would tie in well with the sustainability theme.

The scheme forms part of extensive plans to regenerate Holbeck Urban Village, which Irena feels 'emotionally attached' to after taking members of Leeds Architecture and Design Initiative round the area 14 years ago, highlighting its potential.

"Most people didn't know it existed and everyone was gobsmacked as it's such an amazing area," Irena said.

During the Industrial Revolution Holbeck's foundries and mills manufactured machinery, steam engines and cloth for companies across the world.

Tower Works was built as a factory by Colonel Thomas Harding and features three towers.

One is modelled on the Giotto tower in Florence, another the Lamberti tower in Verona, the third is thought to represent a Tuscan tower house.

They are all listed, along with two other buildings on the site.

Far from being constrained by this the aim is to embrace and enhance the historic element of the site while contrasting it with ultra-modern additions.

The development will retain more of the original structure than it is obliged to and make a feature of the boundary walls.

The old Engine House will form a central hub to attract people on-site, with proposed uses including a micro-brewery for existing operators in the city to use, an Italian artisan bakery or a coffee grinding and roasting shop.

And there will be an area for small-scale food growing.

A long, thin building on Globe Road will be adapted to incubate around 16 new creative businesses in low-cost start-up units.

The 77,000 sq ft new-build on the west side will house larger creative firms and is likely to be the first part of the scheme to be built.

Despite creating numerous offices and around 135 homes, including three-bedroom units and townhouses, there will be no car park.

Instead there will be secure, covered parking spaces for more than 200 bicycles and an on-site car-share scheme.

Gadgets

Green roofs will encourage biodiversity as well as insulating properties and everything will be separated for recycling on site, aside from those items which can be exchanged with neighbours in the free swap-shop.

While making use of all the latest hi-tech eco-friendly gadgets the scheme will also hark back to tried and tested techniques.

Irena said thin buildings, closely spaced, will face east so they shouldn’t need lights on during the day, they will shade each other and old fashioned shutters will help keep them cool.

She said: “It’s back to very old principles... how to design for the climate.

“The narrow streets, narrow buildings and shutters, that’s what gives it character.

“It’s part European, part medieval, compact and full of surprises.”

The planning application has now been submitted to Leeds City Council.

Source
debbie.leigh@ypn.co.uk
Yorkshire Evening Post

posted on: Tuesday 07th February 2012
(0) Comments