Look at this!
This is an artist’s impression of a plan to convert Battersea Power Station into a source of renewable energy – read the full story at inhabitat.com. It’s all very commendable, and the new structure itself is elegant and interesting, but the old power station’s dominance over the skyline of that corner of London, which is the best thing about it, will be markedly diminished if they do go ahead and build it. I’m not convinced.
I’ve got today – a Monday – off work, and I’ve spent more of the day than is strictly useful looking out of the window. And I’ve made a discovery, which is that unless in some massively unlikely coincidence all my neighbours have also taken the day off, I am the only person on the estate who goes to work. Everyone else has stayed in all day, doing exactly what they do in the evenings and at weekends (I have a good view into several flats from mine; of course, this also means they have a good view of me, but I rarely do anything interesting, so it doesn’t matter).
So if you’re a burglar, don’t bother with my estate. Nobody ever goes out.
I spent this morning at TfL’s newest home, the Palestra building on Blackfriars Road. When construction began several years ago I used to pass the site every day on my way to work and wonder whether it was ever going to be anything other than an enormous hole, until one day it seemed to emerge from the ground fully formed, dwarfing everything around it.
Some local residents opposed its construction, and it’s not hard to see why: there’s nothing context-friendly about the design, and apart from anything else it blocks the river views of the buildings immediately opposite. But once you’re inside there’s a lot that’s good about it: it’s open-plan without being blandly corporate, the communal areas look like some actual thought went into how and when they would be used, and I only heard good things about the canteen. Plus, they gave me free tea and cake.
More importantly, though, everything that can be done to reduce a building’s emissions is done here. I’m told it’s 100% carbon neutral, although I can’t find any official confirmation of that. But certainly a significant amount of the energy it uses comes from solar panels and wind turbines on the roof (you can see them from the nearby railway line, if you happen to be travelling into Waterloo East). This is all good.
Even better is the view from the eleventh floor, but I’m afraid I didn’t have the guts to ask if anyone minded if I took a photo, so you’ll just have to trust me on that.
This is tower two of the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong. Doesn’t it look just like a razor? I took the photo because the helicopter scudding past it makes it look like an advert for something hi-tech, though I’m not sure what.
It’s 415 metres tall, which makes it the tallest building in HK, but I can’t tell you where it ranks among the world’s tallest buildings, because it keeps changing and it depends on whether you count things like a spike on top as part of a building. Anyway, it’s tall – but you can’t go up it, which I think is a great loss. In Tokyo and New York the top floors of skyscrapers are opened up as public spaces, with viewing galleries, bars and exhibitions, which is just about the most civilised thing I can think of and I wish more places did it. But it doesn’t happen in London, and it seems it doesn’t happen in Hong Kong either.
Although I think the glory of Hong Kong is in looking up at it from ground- (or sea-) level, so perhaps it’s not such a loss.
Look!
(Photo: Chris Mitchell)
It’s a sink on top of a toilet, in which you wash your hands with the water that then refills the cistern. This is the smartest piece of design I’ve seen for weeks.
For more Japanese (of course) space-boosting cleverness, see the full article – A Very Short Walk Around a Tokyo Apartment.
My main concern about Boris – aside from the embarrassment of living in a city that has Boris Johnson as its mayor – is not that he’ll introduce madcap, ill-considered transport policies, but simply that his essential lack of interest in public transport means we’ll lose momentum on what has been, for the last eight years, a quite incredible series of improvements and innovations. The mayor has a lot of power – more than almost any other civic leader – and it’s because of that power that Ken’s been able to introduce so many changes in such a short time. What he’s done here has been visionary, and it looks as though we’re about to lose that for the sake of a weak punchline, which as far as I can judge is the main reason people have voted for Boris (staunch Tories aside). It’s just like the population census we had a few years ago, when everybody thought it would be hysterically funny to declare themselves Jedis. Only worse, because at least then people didn’t have their lame laugh at the expense of something worthwhile.
Latest estimates show Boris in the lead in the first count of the votes for mayor of London. This is incomprehensible; the man is a first-class idiot. I’m crossing all my fingers, toes and everything else I can think of for an eventual Ken victory after the second-preference count. It hurts a bit.
Yesterday was National Walk to Work Day. I didn’t manage to walk to work (I barely managed to get out of bed), but I did walk home, through some of the unloveliest parts of south London. And yet. There’s so much more you see when you’re at ground level – much more, even, than you see from the bus, which I have always thought of as a fairly intimate means of travel. But I had never really noticed the war memorial at Stockwell, much less the lists of names engraved on it of Stockwell residents who died in the two world wars; including what looked like a whole family whose surname was “Burnley”, who I only noticed because Palace are playing Burney next weekend so the word jumped out at me. But there’s a story behind every name, and they’re probably all worth hearing.
Anyway, including a brief stop at the war memorial, two even briefer stops to smell lilac growing in people’s front gardens (lilac coming second in my list of smells that make me think of childhood summers, the first being hyacinths) and ten minutes in MK One buying wedding outfit accessories (not my wedding, someone else’s), the whole thing took an hour and a half. Which is…manageable. I might even do it again. But not today.
I’ve just come across this design for an eco-efficient but super sexy new skyscraper on the Dubai waterfront. If it’s genuinely possible to build green skyscrapers, and to make them look this good (though it may lose something in the translation from paper to stone) then all kinds of possibilities open up, especially in housing, where before long we are going to be forced to have some new ideas.
Edit: having spent five minutes investigating, I see there are lots of designs for green skyscrapers out there. If I get a chance I’ll link to some of them later on.
Last week b3ta.com linked to a video of a horrifyingly steep and desperately unsafe-looking mountain path in Spain. Now Lloyd’s posted the videos, as well as some related pictures which are equally disturbing. Inspired by this, and by my successful posting of a video clip, which also made me think of Tokyo, I went looking for footage of the two rollercoasters that my intrepid siblings went on at Fuji-Q, the theme park outside Tokyo in the shadow of Mount Fuji.
The first, Dodonpa, is the world’s fastest-accelerating rollercoaster, taking you up to 107mph in two seconds. Apparently the moment it shoots out of the tunnel causes physical pain (there are so, so many reasons I don’t go on these things):
And then there’s Fujiyama, which when it was built was the world’s tallest roller coaster, and the POV footage genuinely makes me feel sick, and it’s definitely nothing to do with the amount of wine I drank last night, although the fact that I can’t embed the video may be. I’ll go old-tech and link to it.
If I’d seen that video in advance, I would have forbidden the whole thing. As it was, I let them go off to almost-certain death unknowingly, and spent a happy day by myself in Tokyo, climbing the Mori Tower, which is also quite tall, but which, happily, stays still:
Glad All Over 