Richard Rogers Theories

Flexibility

Today's buildings are more like evolving landscapes than classical temples in which nothing can be added and nothing can be removed. Open ended, adaptable frameworks with large, well-serviced and well-lit floors, on the other hand, offer the possibility for a long life span for the building and a variety of possible uses. For example, Mossbourne Community Academy and Minami School will be able to adapt over time to progressive approaches to education. This concept was developed in earlier buildings such as Lloyd's of London and the Pompidou Centre, solutions that include spaces that can be used for multiple activities in the short term, as well as having many alternative long term uses depending on future requirements.

At Barajas Airport in Madrid the objective was to ensure that the architecture was robust enough to handle the amount of passengers estimated for forthcoming years. The one constant factor with airports is change, and so the essence of this scheme in constructional terms was its use of a single modular segment for the entire 1.2km long structure, allowing ease of expansion whilst disciplined in response to environmental constants such as day-lighting. Repetition of elements as an aid to the construction process can be seen at Chiswick Park, facilitated by design consistency across the individual buildings.

Office occupiers require flexible spaces in order to respond to contingencies in business life; they need to be able to extend and adapt buildings. A concept that incorporates a high level of standardised design will facilitate change.

For functional reasons we always create clear zoning between servant and served spaces within a building. We often separate and juxtapose the services with the mass of the building; in practical terms the part of the building which is inhabited has a long life, whereas the technical services have a short life and therefore need to be accessible for change and maintenance. By separating the mechanical services, lifts, electrics, fluids and air-conditioning from the rest of the building, inevitable technical developments can be incorporated where they are most needed to extend the life of usable core space. The articulation of the services and core building creates a clear three-dimensional language, a dialogue between served and servant spaces and a means of creating flexible floor space. Standardised large floor-plates with services placed on the perimeter have been successful in commercial buildings such as 88 Wood Street and Lloyd's Register, and allow for flexible tenancies that respond to the changing demands of the office market.

Public domain

Public space between buildings influences both the built form and the civic quality of the city, be they streets, squares or parks. A balance between the public and private domain is central to the practice's design approach. Buildings and their surrounding spaces should interrelate and define one another, with external spaces functioning as rooms without roofs.

It is the celebration of public space, and the encouragement of public activities that drives the form of the practice's buildings. It is the building's scale and relationship with the street or square that helps to encourage public activity and create a people-friendly environment. For example, the steps that lead to the Channel 4 Headquarters, the narrow passage that runs around the Lloyd's of London building, the small churchyard in front of Lloyd's Register, the close around the National Assembly for Wales or the square in front of the Bordeaux Law Courts are all examples where the relationship between buildings and public spaces demonstrate how the architect's responsibility can successfully extend beyond the brief to include the public domain.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris, designed by Richard Rogers in collaboration with Renzo Piano and completed in 1977, illustrates how a building can bring life to a rundown area of a city. The design deliberately dedicated over half of the site to a public piazza. The public domain, in this case, extends from the square up the facade of the building in the form of 'a street in the air' , a great diagonal escalator crossing the facade to connect all the floors. The Pompidou Centre, including its piazza has become the most visited building in Europe with spontaneous street theatre and other events in the piazzas complimenting the activities within the building.

City and contex

Cities are the physical framework of our society, the generator of civil values, the engine of our economy and the heart of our culture. In England, one of the three most densely populated countries in the world, 90% of the population live in cities, but many of our urban centres are not sustainable. Large areas of dereliction, poverty and empty quarters, destroy the sense of community and vitality, urban sprawl erodes our countryside.

Today, with the increase in life expectancy, the decrease in birth rate, increase in divorce rate and the potential for less pollution in our post-industrial society, the city has once more become man's natural habitat. Compact polycentric cities are the only sustainable form of development and should be designed to attract people. If we don't get urban regeneration right then all our work on cities - buildings and public spaces, education, health, employment, social inclusion and economic growth - will be undermined.

Sustainable urban development is dependent on three factors; the quality of architecture, social well-being and environmental responsibility. The compact sustainable city is multi-cultural with a hierarchy of density, has a mix of uses and tenures, is well connected with a coherent public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure, is well designed both in terms of public spaces and building, and is environmentally responsive.

The Richard Rogers Partnership has an extensive track record in sustainable urban regeneration - examples include masterplans for the East River Waterfront in Manhattan, a large mixed use development in Seoul, Korea, Convoys Wharf on the banks of the River Thames, the urban context for the new stadium at Wembley in West London, the regeneration of former docklands at Almada, Lisbon, ongoing schemes in Granada, Mallorca and Rome, as well as competition designs for Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Piana di Castello near Florence and the Pudong Peninsula in Shanghai.

Article: Boom town
Monday February 13, 2006
The Guardian

The fastest-growing city on earth, Dubai is spending mind-boggling sums on construction and is about to swallow up P&O in its bid to be a global maritime power. Given the scale of its ambition, could it become the most important place on the planet? Adam Nicolson reports from 'Mushroom City'

It looks like a hot Grozny. On the vast invented islands offshore and in the even vaster building sites that stretch in a wide band the whole length of Dubai's now famous riviera, acre on acre of grey-faced, concrete, hollow-eyed buildings, fenced in with scaffolding and overhung by tower cranes, stare at each other across the sands. Tower blocks look abandoned rather than half-made. It is said that a fifth of the world's cranes are now at work here. An army of some 250,000 men, largely from India and Pakistan, are labouring to create the new glimmer fantasy, earning on average £150 a month, and living in camps, four to a room, 12ft by 12ft, hidden away in the industrial quarters of al Quoz. One night in one of the luxury hotels would cost six months' wages of one of the men who built it. Below and around their work sites, the new streets are chaotic with rubble and piles of steel.

The traffic is already as bad as Los Angeles. The city authorities are now giving priority to new roads, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on bridges across the Dubai Creek, five lanes in each direction, but still a taxi ride that might take 10 minutes at midday lasts an hour at either end of it. If you ask a driver to take you to some places, he laughs. "Do you want to have a very long talk?" he says.

Dubai is growing faster than any city on earth. "Mushroom City", Ravi Piyush, a plumply content dealer in the Gold Souk, said to me. "Nothing today, everything tomorrow." The World Bank reckons that the reconstruction of Iraq is going to cost $53bn. Here, along the strip of footballer-friendly sand that stretches 25 miles or so along the shores of the Persian Gulf, there is, at a rough estimate, about $100bn worth of projects either underway or planned for the near future. That is a numbing figure, ungraspable. It is the equivalent of every single dollar invested in the United States from abroad last year; almost twice the foreign investment in China.

There are the three famous offshore "palms", man-made peninsulas laden with more hotels and more "signature villas" than the entire Premiership might ever dream of. The 7,000-man workforce on one of them is too large to get on to the palm each morning without creating its own traffic jam: they are shipped in by sea from further along the coast. There's to be a Giorgio Armani Hotel and a Palazzo Versace. There's the tallest building in the world under construction, Burj Dubai, costing $800m and expected to be 800m tall when complete, but the precise figure is being kept secret in case New York's new Freedom Tower tries to top it. A billboard the size of Piccadilly Circus stands out in the desert showing the pencil-thin rocket of a tower alongside a simple rubric: "History Rising." The biggest shopping mall in the world is already here. Another, bigger, the world's largest retail development, is under construction.

There's to be an underwater hotel ($500m). One indoor ski resort, with real snow and its own black run, exists already, a weird, looming presence on the city's southern skyline. There is to be a second, with a revolving mountain. Plans are mooted for a Chess City, with 32 tower blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess piece. There's to be a 60-floor apartment block in the shape of Big Ben. One company selling flats is giving away a free Jag with each one. There will be a pyramid and a building called Atlantis that will cost $600m and include a "swim-with-the-dolphins encounter programme". An Aviation City and a Cargo Village, an Aid City and a Humanitarian Free Zone, an Exhibition City and a Festival City, a Healthcare City and a Flower City, a $4bn extension to the airport and another entirely new airport along the coast towards Abu Dhabi, for which no figures are available but you can take a guess at a few billion: six runways, annual capacity 120 million passengers, 12 million tonnes of cargo.

Next to it, as the Dubai government's Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing puts it, "There will be several smaller cities that will cater to the financial, industrial, service and tourism industries." To fill these airports, Emirates, the national airline, has just placed the biggest order that Boeing has ever had: $9.7bn for 42 777s, each capable of carrying 300 passengers non-stop more than 9,000 miles across the world. They have also ordered a fleet of the biggest Airbuses on offer, each capable of carrying 555 people.

The Middle East's answer to Disneyland, called Dubailand, which is far larger than Monaco, is costing $4.5bn. It will employ 300,000 people in the various joylands, servicing 15 million visitors. A new urban railway, with 37 stops, begins construction soon. Dubai is to have its own Silicon Oasis ($1.7bn) for computer companies. A mixed development called Dubai Waterfront/Arabian Canal covers an area larger than Barbados and will house, when completed ($6bn), more people than Paris.

There's another side to Dubai. Drive south along the Gulf, away from the glamour zone of the great hotels, past the giant malls and the huge gas-fired power stations, almost to the western border of Dubai, and you come to the largest man-made harbour in the world. The unapproachably vast quays of the modern port at Jebel Ali were dredged out of the desert sands in 1979 at a place where the present emir's father, Sheikh Rashid, used to come for evenings camping with his friends. Abdulla bin Damithan, one of the port managers, showed me around in his red Audi. (This was a replacement; the BMW was in for service.) The 1.5 mile-long quays are so enormous that to look the length of them is to stare into a desert haze. Halfway along, the metal bodies of the ships and cranes disappear like mirages.

But it is no dreamy place: every minute, every towering gantry crane lifts another container off the high-stacked decks of the bulbous ships alongside, lowers it to a waiting truck that delivers it to another part of the site, or transfers it from the unimaginably huge motherships, which travel the world oceans, to the slightly less huge feeder ships that service the Gulf, the Indian trade and the Mediterranean. Nothing interrupts the movements, day and night, 365 days a year, even in July at 90% humidity, an air temperature usually over 49C and when even the seawater in the docks approaches 38C. No one works outside. More than seven million containers are moved here in the course of the year, a figure that grew 23% last year, and is set to triple within the next six years, serving a market of two billion people. It's like looking at the guts of the world, the usually hidden machinery by which things actually happen. Over on the other side of the harbour, two diminutive destroyers are tied up, the stars and stripes hanging off their sterns. This is where the American carrier battle groups patrolling the Gulf come for service - and shopping. It's the port most visited by the US navy outside the United States.

Like almost everything of any significance in Dubai, the port system belongs to the state, or to the Maktoums, the ruling family. The two are indistinguishable, and in some ways, Dubai is like Poundbury writ large - and rich: a princely vision of how the world might be. The Maktoums came here as Bedouin chieftains in the 1820s, to a small, palm-fringed trading creek, where political control was in the hands of the British. Only in 1971 did DubaiUnited Arab Emirates. It was already known that Abu Dhabi, by far the biggest and richest of the Emirates, was sitting on a vast mineral reserve. At current rates of production, Abu Dhabi has more than 120 years' supply of oil and gas still untapped. Dubai is nothing like so well endowed, and so from the 1960s onwards, the Maktoums have been consciously shaping Dubai as the trading and financial motor of the Emirates, and the Dubai ports system is central to their vision.

Dubai sits on the all-important strategic routeway of the modern world: China, India, Middle East, Europe and the US. That is where the money is going to be. China has just become the third biggest economy in the world and it is the fastest growing. India is set for its own acceleration. The Maktoum plan is to make Dubai the centre of a global strategic network of port facilities to rival Singapore and the huge Hong Kong-based conglomerate of Hutchison-Whampoa. They have been acquiring hard and fast and now control massive facilities in China, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, India, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Romania, Germany and Latin America. In a profoundly symbolic move, Dubai Ports are now manoeuvring to make a bid for the great harbours in southern Iraq.

They want more, and that desire for global control is what lies behind their bidding war for P&O, the British ports and shipping combine, which has a powerful European presence (including the giant London Gateway, planned to be Britain's biggest container port at Thurrock on the Thames), exactly what Dubai wants. Singapore wanted it too and the two commercial city states' rival bids drove up the price, adding 80% to the value of P&O's shares and valuing the company at a reported $6.8bn (just short of £4bn), an unprecedented 40 times P&O's profits last year. At the weekend, Singapore pulled out and all the signs are that when P&O's shareholders vote today, they will accept Dubai's offer. This bid alone is a measure of the hunger, the money and the drive of what is happening in the emirate. And the Arab world has backed the bid. When Dubai Ports issued a bond for $2.8bn last month to help it buy P&O, it found itself drowning in $11.4bn of subscriptions.

Westfield Redevelopment
Builder: Westfield Construction

This project is using precast panels, concrete flooring and steel for an extension of the shopping centre, and parking lot. The redevelopment is tying in the new structure with the existing concrete structures.

The falsework (the braced steel structure) supporting the cement floor

Pier Footing with Reinforced Steel



Precast Concrete Walls

National Gallery of Victoria


The National Gallery of Victoria is a beautiful building with many qualities which pleases both architects and builders. The National Gallery of Victoria from the outside is concrete blocks and therefore gives the building a monumental ambiance and symmetry. With the clean finish with a render over the concrete blocks the building stands out from its soundings.

The entrance is quite special as it appears to have just been cut out of the building to create an opening. This is done by the thickness of the concrete block wall to produce a depth which tricks the eye into believing that the opening should collapse. But it is with clever construction techniques that this opening is able to be produce. The clever placement of lintels and supports are the most important thing in being able to produce the effect that is created at The National Gallery of Victoria



Internally also the National Gallery of Victoria is inspiring. The different use of materials allow the architects to be able to produce some spectacular effects.



The highlight of the building though is the stain glass window roof which is held up with only 8 supports. Some what like a portable frame the architects designed the room so that the minimal amount of support would be required. By using this technique the architect create the effect that the roof is floating above you.

Melbourne Central

Melbourne Central is a very fascinating and engaging building in the heart of Melbourne. It’s primary use is a shopping centre which gaiters for individuals by offering numerus different and unusual shops. The most captivating aspect of the building is a massive dome structures which reaches into the sky to 40m

The dome it self is created by the use of steel and glass. With the use of these light weight materials the architects were able to achieve a transparent dome which seems to almost hover above you. The dome it self is about 40m wide by 40m high which in respect to other buildings in Australia is by far the largest dome structure.



The structure from the outside is also very palatable and pleasing to the eye. By the use of the dome the architects were able to make the building have a separate identity to the other high-rises which surrounds it.



Another internal view looking up into the dome which seems to stretch towards the skies



The building itself is not a one feature design; the overall design of the space is just as spectacular as the dome. The interior uses many different materials, exposed steel, exposed columns and so on. It was the use of the steel and the glass that was the main focus point of this outstanding building in the middle of the city of Melbourne.