Architect Piano pushes on with London's Shard of Glass

Mon Jul 11, 2005 2:20 AM BST
By Caroline Brothers

BERN, Switzerland (Reuters) - Italian architect Renzo Piano, designer of some of the world's most iconic landmarks, is forging ahead with a London skyscraper known as the "Shard of Glass" despite criticism and red-tape.

In a recent interview before the opening of another work -- a museum for modernist artist Paul Klee in the shape of three waves in the Swiss city of Bern -- Piano also said architects should not shy from taking risks.

"We have beaten Prince Charles, English Heritage and the nostalgics," Piano, regarded as one of the world's finest architects for his visionary and poetic designs, said of critics of his design for a colossal glass wedge over London's skyline.

"It's taking time, but we are doing it," he said of the much-delayed building that will contain a hotel, restaurants, and a viewing platform 240 metres in the air. The 72-storey building at Tower Bridge, commissioned by developer Irvine Sellar in 2000, is due for completion by 2010.

The Genoa-born Piano, 67, shot to fame in 1977 with Paris's "inside-out" Pompidou Centre co-designed with iconoclastic British architect Richard Rogers. The distinctive building has its pipes on the outside -- air conditioning ducts are blue, its water pipes are green and the electricity lines are yellow.

Piano, however, would not be drawn on his differences with Prince Charles, whose conservationist views have thrust him into headline-grabbing conflict with avant-garde architects such as himself, Rogers and Briton Norman Foster.

THE QUEEN AGREES

"In the analysis he is not bad, but he is very bad in his response -- and I can tell you that his mother agrees with me," Piano said. "You can't be nasty about modern medicine and as a consequence propose returning to the remedies of the 17th century. It's just not possible."

If his futuristic designs have sometimes brought controversy, Piano has never shied from taking artistic risks.

As well as the ground-breaking Pompidou Centre, and an extraordinary cultural centre for the Kanak people in New Caledonia, Piano designed the Kansai International Airport for the Japanese city of Osaka on an artificial island in the sea.

It has been dubbed one of the most extraordinary engineering feats of the 20th century.

"We take risks all the time -- you have to take risks, otherwise you become paralysed," said Piano. "And that is very bad, because then you lose your freedom."

The man who has also designed an experimental car for Fiat and a travelling pavillion for the world's largest computer company, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), says architects must keep reinventing themselves.

"It is true that there is a certain tendancy in architecture to sign things that are always the same," he said.

"That is very bad news. (The design) loses its power and flattens out and the self-referential aspect becomes almost more important, whereas in our field, as in cinema, the essential thing is the freedom with which you interpret a situation."

His Zentrum Paul Klee, which has just opened, is anything but self-referential. The asymmetrical glass and steel waves that emerge from the hillside "like a dinosaur without its spines" constitute something of a unique architectural feat.

The vault of its highest arch is 14 metres high, flattening to a technically challenging 4.5 metres under the hillside. The entire building follows a barely perceptible curve that matches the sweep of the motorway nearby.

"I am quite impatient for the grass to grow, like in a ruin by Piranesi," said Piano, referring to the 18th century artist who depicted the splendours of ancient Rome overgrown by plants.

He was concerned that the still-green wheat and the poppy flowers that surround his Paul Klee complex were not yet tall enough to convey the same merger with nature.

THE DESIGN WAS ALREADY THERE

Though inspired by Klee as a teacher of the interwar Bauhaus school of architecture and design, Piano found the idea for the centre's three waves in the lie of the land itself.

"I remember it perfectly just like it was yesterday, this terrain with the movement of the hills and the tracks from working the land -- all that was already here," he said.

"I've never done a job without walking around the place with my hands in my pockets trying to understand ... even when we did the competition for the Kanaks in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean," he said.

"You have to make sure you listen, and discern the little interior voice, the 'genius loci' -- the genie of the place."

Piano said his understanding of Klee, whose colourful, poetic and abstract works make him one of the pillars of modernism, changed as the building took shape.

"I knew Klee chiefly as a teacher of the Bauhaus ... But (as the project developed) I started to understand a bit better his true career which was in painting. That is where he is deepest, in painting, in his daily work."

Why the Future Won’t Need Today’s Architects

by James P. Cramer

What’s next for successful architecture, engineering, and design practices? We believe that firms will not only be faster and smarter but also wiser and more independent. This much is known: the best firms always move forward. Fundamentally, that is why future clients won’t need today’s design firms.

We expect to see significant new processes that will break away from the linear project management processes most firms use today. Contract documents will be overhauled to reflect simultaneous multiphasing and nonlinear productivity. Powerful parametric technology will deploy artificial intelligence using voice command. We expect 3-D and 4-D smart BIM (Building Information Modelling). Firms will integrate virtually in models, not vertically in service silos.

Changing demographics will alter the marketplace significantly requiring foresight—the client’s world will be changing even more radically than in the past. Some firms will change at a speed calibrated to the client’s changes. Others will wonder where the clients have gone.

Foresight and innovation will be first on the agenda of the most successful firms. Architects and designers will get serious about the business of running professional practices. They will understand that design firms are run for clients, not for firm employees. Their new agenda will create new scientific order from complexity. Increasing complexity will create new relevancy and new satisfying fee parameters.

Higher performance is made possible by technical and human creativity, and both will be systematized.

State and national governments will enact new laws to improve health safety and welfare and vastly improved social well-being. NCARB (National Council of Architecture Registration Boards) - the design licensing authority of the U.S.A. - and other design licensing authorities will take on new relevancy as the power of place comes to be better understood. The experience of well designed spaces will be credited with better learning and increasing brain functionality. Architectural spaces will be credited with healing and emotional rejuvenation. Architecture, engineering, interior design, landscape architecture, and industrial design will shape social experiences and become forces to better the human experience. Design firms will create a blueprint for survival one project at a time.

Does this all sound a bit beyond your present and future strengths? Do you know what’s coming next? Are you the voice of opportunity in your firm? Do you know how to break through the cynicism and worn out excuses? Are you a well of strategic optimism? Are you designing alternatives to the status quo?

We believe that much that will happen in the future is knowable and that we can even plan for both pitfalls and windfalls. How likely is it that your new vision will become a reality? Time will tell. But this much is certain, the future won’t need today’s design firms.

Why the US could turn green

By Stephen Evans
BBC North America business correspondent

The US administration has long opposed a Kyoto-style deal on climate change which would force the country to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. But economic factors could end up driving the country towards greener policies.

I have just driven down from Salt Lake City, through the desert of Utah and Nevada.

It is a magnificent sublime wilderness where horizons are wide when they are not broken by the craggy splendour of an ancient volcanic landscape.

As the sun sinks here, the rocks glow red and it is hard to imagine a threat to the environment where space seems limitless.

And yet, many of these escarpments hide sites where humans dispose of all sorts of waste.

Just beyond the beauty is a land being violated. This is where America throws its trash over the back wall.

I have just been to Yucca Mountain in Nevada where tunnels are being dug deep inside to bury spent nuclear fuel. Engineers tell me it will be there for 10,000 years.

Around here there are dumps for every toxic waste. Dumps that feature on maps but not in the public consciousness.

The city of Salt Lake has a big rubbish dump in Skull Valley.

But none of this is evident. Where people on other continents feel the pressure of the crowd, Americans take in what seems deceptively like limitless, virgin territory.

It is also a country, a continent, of extreme climates.

This land freezes in winter and is scorching now - even with snow on the peaks around. That, too affects the American perception of climate change.

'Natural' extremes

In Europe, insurance premiums rise as homes get built on flood plains by people in a search for every inch of exploitable space.

In America, there is not this connection between wallets and weather. Extremes of climate seem natural.

Only on the crowded coasts is the environment an issue. California and New York have tough regulations.

In between, they often cannot see what the fuss is about.

"It's a big country," a taxi driver in Texas tell me. His view that global warming is hokum is not a lone voice. Some of the big oil companies that lobby Mr Bush are also loath to concede a link between their product and climate change.

And even where there is concern, it can seem unfocused.

I went to a shop in Santa Fe in New Mexico. It was a trendy shop for concerned people, where there was a lot of Hessian and earthenware pots and posters with slogans about the earth.

There, they sold wooden pens - ballpoint pens but with a casing made of wood.

I asked the woman behind the counter why on earth they sold wooden pens.

She replied as though I was a bit stupid - wood was more natural - as though that somehow meant it was kinder on the world's resources.

And at some of the fancier supermarkets, now in trendy areas, the checkout person asks what kind of bag you want: "Paper or plastic?"

I usually ask which one is better for the environment, to which the reply is invariably: "I don't know".

The environment sometimes seems like the fashionable issue of the moment, the right badge to wear, the current political designer label.

A hostage to oil

Things are changing though. Some Christians argue that gas-guzzling cars are a waste of the bountiful creation of their and the President's God.

And neo-conservatives are worried that importing oil means relying on hostile regimes, which moreover, might funnel some of the dollars to anti-American causes. The is what the neo-cons call a "terrorism tax on the American people".

The former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, for example, drives a Toyota Prius, powered partly by a battery rather than the notorious internal combustion engine which burns gasoline and emits the smoke that many scientists believe causes global warming.

Mr Woolsey, no tree-hugging liberal he, drives this cleaner car for what he calls "national security reasons".

Further from the chattering elites in Washington, concern about the environment usually translates as concern about the price of fuel.

The last time I was in the Six Pack Diner in Detroit, the car-workers guzzling their cholesterol were not opining about the melting polar ice-caps.

They are worried though, that their employers, Ford and General Motors, have failed to catch a new appetite for cars that consume less.

More clean Japanese cars means fewer jobs in Detroit.

So there is pressure on Mr Bush over the environment but not as a grand cause.

It is a concern rather about importing an expensive fuel from hostile places.

And Mr Bush may respond with tax incentives for cleaner technology that the US market seems increasingly to want.

Not so spectacular, of course, as grand declarations of global good intent but maybe effective nonetheless.

-lifted from bbc news

'Earth bag technology' proposed for building schools

Deficiency in school infrastructure has been one of the economic consequences of widespread poverty in the Philippines. The problem is further aggravated by lack of government support and subsidy. An inadequate portion of the national budget is allocated to the education sector. Although the Department of Education receives the biggest chunk off our annual budget that is 12.5%, it is still the smallest in the region. Other countries in the region allocate 20% of their budget for education. Also, the education budget has not increased significantly for the past ten years to match the ever-increasing student population.

An estimate of 12,000 classrooms have to be built in order to hold all public school students in the country. This does not consider those classrooms that are in constant need of repair because of the building materials that depreciate rapidly in tropical weather. If government funds and traditional means of construction will be relied on to solve this problem, it will may take forever.

My Shelter Foundation headed by Illac Diaz as executive director proposes a revolutionary yet inexpensive technology of building structures to respond to the growing need for classrooms in the rural areas. This new architecture is for people who need educational facilities but cannot afford an architect, cannot afford manufactured materials, cannot afford electricity to cool their facilities, cannot afford anything but their own hands and the earth beneath their feet. It is an architecture for all such that any community should be able to construct a classroom for educating their children with the simplest material available to all; earth. It is also a good option for areas in the Philippines affected by natural calamities to rebuild houses and schools faster and more economically.

Classrooms-in-a-Box is an easy to transport integrated system to build a 120 square meter facility with chairs that will be put into a 3 x 1.5 meter container that is intended to be a complete self build-system designed to enable people to construct their own classrooms with simple machines and locally available materials. These contain 2,000 meters of polypropylene elongated tubular sacks, instruction materials and tested building plans, tamping rods, soil sifters, shovels, a guides, and barbed wire. Once on site, these classrooms will be built using rice bags filled with earth, sand, a small portion of cement or bagasse ash and lime, piled on top of each other and fastened by tensile barbed wires. Structures are plastered with a similar mix after the foundation and sandbags are in place.

This earth bag technology is 40%-60% cheaper than traditional building techniques. Moreover, these classrooms have specially-designed wind-catchers that traps the breeze from the outside and circulates the cooler air within the rooms, reversing the current trend of classrooms to be like ovens during hot summer months or dependant on electrical appliances to lower the ambient temperatures. It is also faster to build, taking only a matter of three to four weeks. Citizens in the community are encouraged to actively participate in the building to provide a school structure for their children for a fraction of the cost of building using traditional means.

A community should be able to learn the techniques, find the appropriate piece of land, and then with some water, affordable binders and simple tools build themselves a school using earth beneath their feet. This simple yet profound technology exists today.

These design pass building codes of the (ICBO) International Conference of Building Officials, are earthquake, fire, weather resistant. The designs are eco-friendly by requiring less transportation, manufacture, energy usage than conventional construction methods. This system also impacts the communities positively by increasing the supply of money by sourcing cheaper materials and paying labor locally rather than more externally sourced manufactured materials and contractors.

The technology has applied in building school structures in Escalante City, Negros Occidental. At the moment, the My Shelter Foundation is building more classrooms in Surigao del Norte that are set to be finished this middle of July.

--

*This is the official press release from My Shelter Foundation. The technology will be launched on July 13, 11:30am in the Asian School of Management.

Former University of the Philippines Professors Found Guilty of Graft

First posted 10:36pm (Manila time) June 30, 2005
By Nelson Flores
Inquirer News Service


THE SANDIGANBAYAN sentenced to 17 years imprisonment early this week two former University of the Philippines officials after finding them guilty of graft and unethical conduct.

Found "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" of violating Section 3(e) of Republic Act No. 3019 (Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act) and Section 7(b) of RA 6713 (Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees) were former UP Diliman Chancellor and faculty member Roger Posadas, and Vice-Chancellor and Officer-in-Charge of the Office of the Chancellor Rolando Dayco.

The 23-page decision, penned by Fourth Division Associate Justice Jose Hernandez, also "perpetually disqualified" Posadas and Dayco from holding public office. The accused were also directed to "jointly and severally indemnify" the government in the amount of P336,000.

Other members of the fourth division, Justices Gregory Ong, chair, and Rodolfo Ponferrada, concurred with Hernandez's decision.

Posadas and Dayco were charged before the Office of the Ombudsman by University of the Philippines general-counsel Carmelita Yadao-Guno on behalf of the university. Finding probable cause, the Ombudsman submitted the cases to the Sandiganbayan.

Court records showed that on or about Nov. 7, 1995, Dayco was appointed OIC chancellor by Posadas, who was to go on leave. Upon his appointment, Dayco selected Posadas as project director of Institutionalization of the Management of Technology at the Technology Management Center of the Office of the Chancellor in UP Diliman.

For the 12-month project, Posadas received a monthly salary of P30,000, while continuing to receive his salary as chancellor and faculty member. It was alleged that both officials knew Dayco could not make the appointment as he was only the OIC.

The records further showed that Posadas also engaged in unauthorized private practice when Dayco appointed him as consultant of the project for an additional P100,000 consultancy fee.

The Inquirer tried, but failed, to get a reaction from Posadas and Dayco.

In its decision, the antigraft court said, "There is evidence... to support the finding that there is... bad faith on the part of both accused. Being the highest officials of UP Diliman, they knew very well the limitations of Dayco's authority as OIC chancellor."

The court noted, "Posadas' authority to appoint directors and consultants is merely a delegated authority to the chancellor, which he used to occupy during the material dates alleged in the information.

"This authority was delegated to him by the Board of Regents of the UP System. Being a delegated authority, he could not validly delegate it to the accused, Dayco," the court said.

The court dismissed the contention of Posadas and Dayco that their acts were not disadvantageous to the government since the pay they received did not come from the government but from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), a foreign funding agency.

The court said while it was true that funding for the project originally came from the CIDA, the money was received by the UP and, thus, was in its custody and control. From then onwards, "they ceased to be private funds."

As for Posadas' engaging in unauthorized private practice, the court said, "There is nothing in the records to show that he had prior permission to engage in the private practice of his profession."

It added, "Dayco, as OIC, did not possess the power to appoint employees, including Posadas."

On the charge that Posadas and Dayco conspired to cause undue injury to the government, the court said, "Without Dayco's (appointment of) Posadas, the latter could not have... occupied said positions and, more importantly, could not have... obtained compensations for both positions.

"Worse, Dayco did not have the power to make Posadas' twin appointments," the court added.