BAApp: Walking Architecture is a searchable archive of buildings and tours from across Birmingham including historic, contemporary or conceptual architecture.
It’s an iPhone app built by Substrakt for the Birmingham Architectural Association in collaboration with RIBA West Midlands and the Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association. It should arrive in the iTunes store any day now.
If you like that kind of thing, check out OpenBuildings and their mobile apps too.
It’s amazing what a sense of progress is given when the facade goes up on a new building. Case in point – I wandered past the new Library of Birmingham the other day and saw panes of glass going on to what was previously a building site-y concrete shell.
Now this from the Birmingham City Centre Neighbourhood Forum:
At 10:15am today the first iron work panel was hoisted into place on the front of the building on Floor 2.
Happy 20th Birthday to Glen Howells Architects. They’ve sent us this nice little book filled with photographs from their many projects over the years, including a few familiar buildings from Birmingham’s iconic skyline, such as the Rotunda, The Custard Factory, and Eleven Brindley Place.
For your consideration:
Project Brutal: Initial Meeting: 20th April 6:30-7:30pm. CiB Shop.
Project Brutal is a plan to bring together people and networks interested in creatively celebrating and capturing Birmingham’s Brutal library before it’s too late. We’re looking to formulate a series of events and projects under the Brutal banner over an extended period of time.
So if you’re passionate about the library’s architecture, space and history and are keen to find out more and get involved in making this a reality then come and join us on April 20th
You can register your attendance on Eventbrite and follow developments on the Project Brutal website. There’s a tag for Twitter too: #projectbrutal.
This week plans for Birmingham’s new ‘super library’ were unveiled at a press conference, making up one of many similar libraries opening throughout the UK. Central library, Birmingham’s public buildings and public money are always big topics for heated debate so I imagine these plans will cause quite a stir in the city. So, before we get ahead of ourselves lets here the facts and figures.
The £193m building will tower over Centenary Square with the capacity to accommodate more than three million visitors a year, according to BCC, which is backing the project with £159m in public funds. The concept has been designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, which has to beg the question why didnt BCC commission a UK based firm to work on the project?
When the building opens in 2013 (which sounds fairly futuristic, but is actually just around the corner) it will be a glass and steel affair containing books, ‘state of the art’ IT facilities and exhibition spaces. The BFI have recently confirmed that the build will be hosting a ‘Mediatheque’, a specific area within the new library complex where members of the public will have free access the BFI’s national moving images archive collection.
Finally, what will happen Central Library? The current 1974 library building was designed by local architect John Madin and based on the design of Boston’s City Hall. Prince Charles described it as “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”.
English Heritage have advised the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport that Central Library meets the criteria for Grade II listing. The Minister for Culture, Creative Industries and Tourism, Margaret Hodge, will now consider all the evidence and decide whether to grant immunity or to list the building.
MADE* is the is the regional Architecture centre for the West Midlands, based in Fazeley Street Birmingham. Their website is really informative about the types of activities and projects they are involved in, such as architecture events, consultation and generally trying to engage the people of the West Mids with public spaces.
On Monday they are holding a talk at Town Hall by Klaus Bondam, the Mayor of the world’s best ranking ciy to live in, Copenhagen.
It has an international reputation for its green profile, high quality architecture and public spaces and its leadership in tackling the environmental challenges of urban development. Klaus Bondam has been working for better urban spaces in Copenhagen throughout his political career. He will talk about his goal for Copenhagen to be the Eco-Metropolis of the world with the best urban environment by 2015. He will discuss his plans to achieve even better conditions for urban life through his Metropolis for People policy, central to which is public participation and dialogue between citizens and experts.
The Visualisation Lab at King’s College London plan to create a “unique, interactive, virtual reality, Cinema History database”
The objective of this first phase was to reconstruct the Kingstanding Odeon, Birmingham, whose 1935 opening represents a key moment in the evolution of purpose-built cinemas
Via Tom Lennon
Some nice pics of the New St revamp have been produced. Sure, it won’t look quite so glossy once the pigeons have had a go at it but it’ll be a damn site better than the current eyesore. Hurrah!
Foreign Office Architects are responsible and there’s all sorts of info (well, corporate-speak and aspirational waffle) on the New Street New Start website.
Here’s another thing to make you go ‘oooh’:
I have no real intention of following the interminable shenanigans surrounding the new library. However, I reckon it’s worth announcing that the contract to design the new building has been given to Mecanoo (whose buildings had better be more attractive and useable than their website).
The new library, which at the rate things seem to be going won’t be built in any of our lifetimes (although 2013 has been mooted), is to be built in Centenary Square and will incorporate The REP, who have been quick to report on the appointment.
There’s more info from The Birmingham Post and Property Week.
In the meantime, here’s one Mecanoo prepared earlier – the National Kaohsiung Performing Arts Center in Taiwan:
The urge to find a picture of a building made out of Meccano was very nearly overwhelming.
A project that has been taking shape for the past year is just coming to completion with a film, book and exhibition. The project
records the personal life of Birmingham’s most iconic building, unveiling the many human stories that have influenced and shaped its existence.
The exhibition can be seen at:
The book includes a DVD of the film and is available at The Art Lounge in the Mailbox and at the RIBA Book Shop.
Jon Bounds has covered this in more depth than I could both on BiNS and on his Birmingham Post blog, both of which deserve your attention.
Birmingham: Shaping the City is a new book published by RIBA about our fair city written by Ben Flatman after years of research. The photographic editor was Craig Holmes who took photos at the launch night. Here’s the blurb:
“Birmingham: Shaping the City” is an authoritative and objective assessment of the redevelopment and regeneration of Birmingham. It tells the story of how Joseph Chamberlain’s grand Victorian city was almost obliterated due to an infatuation with the car and how a belated but vital reassessment took place at his home, Highbury in 1988, leading to arguably the most dramatic transformation of any city in the country. It is also the story of hugely ambitious projects, often implemented in the face of great opposition, driven by a rediscovery of Chamberlain’s unique brand of city entrepreneurialism.The book seeks to identify the drivers for change in the renaissance of contemporary Birmingham following its evolution from Victorian times and explores the depth and complexity of the public-private partnerships involved in the delivery structures and their achievements. Using unique case studies that illustrate the processes involved in the major physical change of the city, it assesses their influence on planned future projects. The book articulates and stresses the importance of urban design for successful regeneration in this ever-changing city.
“Birmingham: Shaping the City” will make a lasting contribution to city’s collective consciousness and make available, for the first time, a coherent narrative of where the city has come from and where it may be going in both a written and visual form.
While the credentials of the contributors are impeccable I’d be interested to hear what others think of it. Available soon from Amazon and presumably in the RIBA bookshop on Margaret St.
Andy at Substrakt wonders, what’s up with Eastiside? Considering he works there and has friends who live there he’s surprised to realise he doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen with the redevelopment. So he digs around online and finds… not much really.
On the one hand this isn’t too surprising. The Eastside development is a pretty massive project with loads of companies and government departments involved so tying it all together at a granular level would be a nightmare. But if you’re just interested in the broader strokes it would be handy to have some kind of website that brings together all the developer sketches and so on into one place.
Something like, say, Manchester’s New Islington site, as suggested by Andy. Only a little less c-r-a-z-y please.
I can’t think of anything for Eastside. Does it exist? Should the council (or whatever body is overseeing the whole project) do one? Is that an unreasonable request? If it is, does anyone want to start a blog on it? I suspect the AdSense revenue would be pretty good on something like that… Let me know if you need a hand setting it up.
Photo by Dr King Bertt. Click on it for details.
[Update: My mistake - it's running until Feb 29th.]
Model Cities was a neat sounding exhibition currently on at M.A.D.E. of photos from the Model Buildings project run by Stans Cafe at St Albans School last year before it was rebuilt. The children were encouraged to imagine “that small details of the old school were architectural features of the new school” using tiny people.
The exhibition finished yesterday (oops) but is on until Feb 29th (Here’s the flyer) and you can find out more about the Delicate Balance collection of seventeen projects here.
I also love this little film they made at the end, so much so I uploaded it to YouTube on their behalf. ;)
The Birmingham Architecture Association are running a monthly series of six talks at the Old Joint Stock Theatre on the theme of “What does it mean to be a Second City?”
Is it important to be second? The BAA lecture series seeks to explore the different aspects of ‘second city’ and how this affects the built environment, and the role that architects can play in shaping it.
Speakers are asked to present their views about, and experiences of, working in and with second cities – and the influence this may have on their work approach. Do second cities have a different attitude to design? Is it seen to be more or less important?
The first is with Julian Weyer of C F Moller who come out of Arhus, Denmark’s second city, on January 29th. This starts a trend with speakers from Wroclaw (Poland’s second city) and Milan (Italy’s second city) along with our own Glenn Howells and others following over the months.
The big premise – that we’re in competition with Manchester for a crown the use of which is debatable – has been somewhat done to death but as a gateway to exploring how cities like Birmingham, which are certainly “second tier” to the Londons and New Yorks of the world, can find an identity I think this could be very interesting. I’m particularly interested in what we can learn from Milan, for example.
Here’s the PDF with details of all the talks, and by golly, their Events Page has an RSS feed! How progressive!
via the Conservation Trust blog who got it from no2self, an architect’s blog I’ll be keeping tabs on.
I’ve written about Silent UK on my own blog but coming across his/their Deviant Art profile (courtesy, as ever, of D’log) made me realise I’d not brought him/them to your attention.
What’s going on here is urban exploration where folks gain entry, usually illegally, into abandoned buildings, underground tunnels and other areas not usually visited and make a record. Silent UK in particular takes the most wonderful photos and a fair few of them are in Birmingham. Like this one.
At some point I’m going to get off my arse, get a pair of waders and start doing this myself, but in the meanwhile it’s great to see others recording our hidden architectural heritage (though, unlike that above ground, it’s unlikely to suffer the trials of regeneration.)
