UK: The Latest Architecture and News

Scotland, a country within the United Kingdom, will be showcasing a projected entitled Prospect North at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Curated collaboratively between the Scottish Government, Architecture and Design Scotland, Creative Scotland,and the British Council Scotland, the installation will be designed by Lateral North, Dualchas Architects, and Soluis. As reported by the Architects' Journal, the show is set to examine "Scotland’s relationship with its northern neighbours" by focusing "on people and place, [and] looking at how communities from the Northern Isles of Orkney to the central belt of Scotland are using grassroot action."

English Heritage has announced that a team of Ney & Partners and UK-based William Matthews Associates has won the Tintagel Castle Bridge Design Competition. Chosen from a shortlist of 6 proposals, from among 136 entries, the winning design was selected by the majority of the jury.

The site of Tintagel Castle is one of English Heritage’s most spectacular, attracting over 200,000 visitors annually. It is “inextricably linked to the legend of King Arthur and has been prized throughout history for its elemental qualities and spirit of place within this area of outstanding natural beauty.” The new bridge is commissioned for approximately £4 million and will stand 28m higher than the current crossing.

This edition of Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, is dedicated to plants and gardens and specifically their role in architecture, urban life, and the design of the workplace. The episode considers the history of London’s urban greenery and the role of plants in landscape architecture touching upon, in conversation with Sam Jacob, the latest in London's green infrastructure: Heatherwick Studio's proposed Garden Bridge across the River Thames. It also traces the lineage of semi-private squares in Georgian London to Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – all approaches discussing how best to unite the built environment with the natural world.

Temporary architecture is often misrepresented as a flimsy trend or photo-ready quick fix: easy, entertaining and often, mistakenly, cheap. This is Temporary concerns itself with a group of young, emerging, socially minded group of architects and designers who are taking the city back into their own hands and creating experimental sites for interaction and engagement. These architects, collectives, students and artists are designing transient structures, situations and events that invest and embed themselves in a community, public space or set of ideas.

Read an excerpt from the book This is Temporary after the break.

For this edition of The Urbanist, Monocle 24's weekly "guide to making better cities," the team head back in time to explore London in 1891, examining some of the city’s achievements to get a glimpse of what life was like in the British capital. They investigate the architectural legacy of Victorian London, see how the introduction of the railway changed the city, and chat about Charles Booth’s pioneering study into Victorian Londoners’ quality of life. They also take a tour around the country’s first council estate.

London-based firm Carmody Groarke has been selected to design a standalone hotel suite on Burgh Island, a tidal island on the South Devon coast. Commissioned by Burgh Island Ltd, the owners of the site's eponymous Grade-II listed art deco hotel, the new standalone "Pool House" suite sits atop the island's cliffs offering customers generous views of the Bantham Estuary and the hotel’s Mermaid Pool, an outdoor seawater pool and private beach for hotel guests.

Damien Hirst has outgrown his 14-bedroom, nineteenth century London home. As reported by Hyperallergic, Hirst is in the process of enlarging his villa – downwards. In the spirit of the London 'super-basement' trend, for which the Royal Boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea first took opposition to in 2014, the Turner Prize-winning artist's plans appear to be some of the most ambitious yet. The proposed subterranean warren of rooms—including a sauna, a steam room, a cargo elevator leading to a double height "art room", and an 82-foot long swimming pool—will all be excavated from his half-acre back garden. Although the plans have faced local opposition the artist's "lair", designed by Purcell, is now set for construction.

Following the news in 2015 that Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens was committed to demolition, Stirling-Prize winning practice Haworth Tompkins have been selected to work on the buildings' replacement. Alongside Metropolitan Workshop Architects existing master plan—entitled the Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project—the second phase of the regeneration will see the west block razed to make way for approximately 200 homes. The east wing will not be demolished until the third phase of the regeneration begins.

A new type of greenery has arrived in central London. Placed along the western façade of Westminster City Hall (known as Kingsgate Walk), a sprawling concrete frieze in relief depicts shimmering nocturnal birch trees photographed in forests from Beijing to London. Created using emerging technology, the relief was rendered through the concrete casting of a photograph by artist Rut Blees Luxemburg, a photographic artist and a reader in Urban Aesthetics at London's Royal College of Art. The textured surface of the frieze changes according to ambient light, creating a perplexing effect in the image from day to night.

Realized through a unique collaboration between artist Blees Luxemburg, London-based Lynch Architects and developer Land Securities as a part of Kingsgate, Silver Forest completes the major urban regeneration project for London Victoria in its new home in a public square adjacent to Westminster City Hall.

Find out more about the interdisciplinary partnership formed for Silver Forest after the break.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)’s Future Trends Survey for December 2015 showed a dip in UK architects’ confidence, reflecting the low number of new inquiries received by practices at the end of the year. The Future Trends workload index dropped substantially to +15 in December from +27 in November, showing a decrease in expected new projects. However, all regions in the UK, with the exception of Wales and the West (balance figure -3) and Scotland (balance figure -50), showed positive balance figures, with Scotland’s low numbers possibly related to the impact of oil price changes. The South of England was the most optimistic region with a balance figure of +30.

Zaha Hadid, who was named as the the first sole woman to be awarded the UK's highest honour for architects in her own right in 2015, received the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 2016 Royal Gold Medal at a ceremony in London yesterday. Hadid, who was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 2012, received the Pritzker Prize in 2004. Her practice also took both the 2010 and 2011 RIBA Stirling Prizes.

Stuttgart experimental architect Achim Menges has been commissioned to kickstart the V&A's first ever Engineering Season with a site specific, nature-inspired installation fabricated by robots. Complemented by Ove Arup's first major retrospective, Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, the Elytra Filament Pavilion will be Menges' first public commission in the UK. He will work with Moritz Dörstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate engineer Thomas Auer to complete the project.

"Elytra Filament Pavilion will explore the impact of emerging robotic technologies on architectural design, engineering and making," says the V&A. "Inspired by a lightweight construction principle found in nature, the fibrous structures of the forewing shells of flying beetles known as elytra, the Pavilion will be an undulating canopy of tightly-woven carbon fibre cells created using a novel robotic production process."