UNESCO calls for all new developments around the Houses of Parliament to stop

[london lad]

Unesco to review London architectural landmarks
1 December 2011 | By Mark Wilding

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/news/unesc...028688.article

Tower of London and Palace of Westminster could lose status

Researchers from world heritage organisation Unesco are to visit London next week to review the world architectural wonders status of the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster.

The organisation is concerned about the impact of high-rise developments in the vicinity of the two attractions, including projects such as the Shard.

A report on the Tower of London produced by Unesco this year states that the World Heritage Committee “considers that the incremental developments around the Tower over the past five years have impacted adversely its visual integrity.”

Previous reports have called for a buffer zone to be put in place to protect the tower.

Similar concerns about the Palace of Westminster were also raised earlier this year. Unesco has called for a moratorium on new projects in the area until protection is introduced for the setting of the palace.

[Core Rising]

What developments are encroaching on the Palace of Westminster? I can't think of any. If they are talking about the Shard, that is total BS. The view that matters is from the river, ditto for the Tower of London. In both those views the Shard is behind the viewer.

[Loyalist.]

Just what we need, another heritage body sticking their nose in our affairs.

[DarJoLe]

Originally Posted by Core Rising

What developments are encroaching on the Palace of Westminster? I can't think of any. If they are talking about the Shard, that is total BS. The view that matters is from the river, ditto for the Tower of London. In both those views the Shard is behind the viewer.

Doon Street, Elizabeth House, St George's Wharf Tower and the proposed Vauxhall cluster, Strata and Eileen House are the towers UNESCO have marked as having negative impact on the Palace of Westminster, Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey.

All the City towers, the Shard, Three Sisters and the Quill for the Tower of London.

[Core Rising]

But when viewing from the river all these would not be visible as they would be behind the viewer. From ground level in Parliament Square again I highly doubt any of them would be visible. The Shard and the Three sisters will likely cast a shadow over the Tower of London, that is the only detrimental effect any of these towers would have that I can think of.

[london lad]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/a...deal-city.html

The Tower of London versus the Shard: it takes dynamic changes of architecture to make London an ideal city
The capital doesn’t need any more skyscrapers, but we can’t afford to let it become a museum.
Unesco says the “visual integrity” of the Tower of London is compromised by the Shard being built across the river at London Bridge - Tower versus Shard: it takes dynamic changes of architecture to make London an ideal city
Unesco says the “visual integrity” of the Tower of London is compromised by the Shard being built across the river at London Bridge Photo: REX

By Stephen Bayley

8:51PM GMT 30 Nov 2011

Comments20 Comments

Civilisation and culture are related ideas. And civilisation means life in cities, while culture means change: it suggests continuous, organic evolution. Things which do not change are dead. Who wants to live in a dead place? We have cemeteries for them. The beautiful corpse of Venice never changes. Venetians do not like that: they take the first opportunity to leave for the mainland.

What makes cities attractive is at any time an interesting question, but now that Unesco says London’s dynamic skyline compromises the “visual integrity” of the Tower of London, it is specially pertinent. So vile, Unesco says, is the looming presence of the Shard of London Bridge, as it inches heavenwards to its scary, pagan summit that the Tower’s precious heritage status may be withdrawn. Our regal crown jewels will be emasculated by developer’s steel and glass.

De-listing the Tower would mean a drop in tourism. Never mind that such a thing would bring huge and positive benefits to people actually living in London who have tired of the ugly detritus tourism brings, there are the rudiments of a debate emerging here. As if to confirm this, the sensitive and austere aesthetes on Westminster council have declared the 43-storey Doon Street development on the South Bank to be “cultural vandalism”.

This is because, in the lazy rhetoric of the nimby councillors, it “overshadows” Lambeth Palace. The language is revealing. Instead of “overshadow” you could say “provides an exciting contrast”. It seems like only yesterday when tall buildings were a sign of urban virility. Count the construction cranes to get an accurate index of economic health!

The “Ideal City” has been a preoccupation of philosophers since Aristotle. He tells us: “A city is a perfect and absolute assembly or communion of many towns or streets in one.” Quite so. The big question is: what makes a good communion of towns and streets? There’s a lot of counter-intuition involved here. Even borrowing insights from Aristotle, it’s apparent that the road to perfection is not straight and true.
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One thing is clear. You never, ever want to live in a city where it is easy to park. Mönchengladbach and Pittsburgh? New York? Paris? Work it out. Cities are the biggest consumer products of them all. And the only unarguable truth about consumer psychology is that it is irrational. What makes London so hateful (noise, expense, mess, Westminster council, sheer difficulty) are the very things that make it so exciting and stimulating. Discomfort is not a deterrent to human progress.

There are two sorts of reactionary attitude in the nascent debate about the Ideal City. On the one hand, the heritage herbivores who muddle stagnation with dignity and cannot determine quality unless it is ancient. Or, like the Prince of Wales’s comatose Poundbury, looks ancient. Then, on the other hand, there are the gobby, thrusting skyscrapers, drunk with sterile bombast and mouthing loud, but flat, one liners from the last century. Each faction is out of date.

Even among the shiny-headed, sharp-elbowed brand names of the architectural profession, there is some acknowledgement that super-tall buildings are the last of the old and not the first of the new. Ken Shuttleworth was, at least by his own account, the designer of the organo-phallic Swiss Re Building. It is scarcely a decade old, but Shuttleworth says he would never do it that way again. All that eco-hostile glass! Shuttleworth also cannot understand how the Shard can be environmentally responsible. Let me explain: it isn’t. The only function the form of the Shard follows is a calculation about rentals.

To get an approximate idea of infinity’s dimensions, consider the vanity of architects. Yet we are living in a strange moment when the status of the architect and his role in the creation of cityscape is diminishing. This is made wonderfully clear in a recondite, but accessible, new book: The Heights (Penguin) is by Kate Ascher, an American infrastructure consultant with academic foundations as deep as a megastructure’s piling.

The reality of super-tall buildings is that they are money machines. You buy land, make space, then sell it. Ever wondered about lifts? Too few and people get cross so that you lose custom, too many and you lose rental area. The developer’s art is to finesse the gap between plenitude and parsimony in the matter of vertical transportation. Oh, you’ll need a geoseismic consultant, too. Windows? We have them because EU rules demand workers should not be more than 25 metres from natural light. Besides, windows come in convenient pre-fabricated units so the contractor can slot them into the frame. And this frame was designed by a structural engineer. Interiors? That’s a specialist job. Where does the architect come in, you might well ask?

The Ideal City remains an enigma. Should it be Haussmann’s Paris, with its restrictions on height ? Or the 1811 Manhattan grid, with its strictly determined plots plus a let-it-rip agenda? Certainly, it’s not a city of committee-preserved Unesco heritage, nor of developers’ follies. It should be designed on a human scale and make the most of contemporary possibilities. Aristotle understood this… even if architects have recently not.

[london lad]

Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are gripped by a phallic obsession that is destroying London's skyline
Simon Jenkins
29 Nov 2011

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...ons-skyline.do


Bad news. The United Nations's cultural arm, Unesco, is visiting London next week to decide whether the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey and Palace should no longer be "world heritage sites". The reason is the overshadowing, actual or proposed, of these hallowed spots by bleak glass boxes and soaring towers. Unesco is more used to the serene and guarded townscapes of Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, where city fathers care about history, sight-lines and horizon, and where they practise a craft long extinct in London called planning.

I admit to not caring what Unesco thinks. If ever there were a tax-free job-creation scheme for a vagrant bourgeoisie, this is it. Unesco staff cruise the world, living it up at some hapless taxpayers' expense, handing out bouquets and brickbats like a cultural Sepp Blatter. Their judgments are without accountability.

For all that, the organisation stands almost alone in speaking up for qualities that philistine city governments have abandoned.

Unesco's list of 23 heritage sites in Britain is eccentric - a half-interesting Welsh pit and a Derwent valley mill are hardly "world sites" - but it has put a shot across Liverpool's bows for seeking to replicate Dubai on its majestic waterfront.

Giving London a yellow card is unlikely to have much impact. The capital's governors regard culture as an activity to be confined strictly to stage and museum. Town planning is for wimps and weirdos. Even London's agitprop would happily deface St Paul's but would not dare to lie down in front of a capitalist developer's bulldozer. As for horizons, no one in the cities of London or Westminster has time to lift their eyes from the money trough to notice them.

The visual setting of the Tower and the Abbey, to which Unesco is taking exception, are manifestations of the phallic obsession that gripped both Ken Livingtone and Boris Johnson on taking office. Returning from Manhattan and eager for bigger erections in London, Livingstone demanded a dozen storeys be added to towers proposed at Hopton Street, Fenchurch Street and next to County Hall. Johnson initially opposed them, but in office took sudden comfort in their exhibitionism. Indeed he once described his London as a "phallocracy". To both men, towers are symbols of a city's financial fertility, as if London were a Gulf statelet or a banana republic.

Why Unesco ever listed the Tower of London is a mystery. Heavily Victorianised, it has long been surrounded by intrusive buildings, from Tower Bridge to St Katharine Docks and Trinity House. True, their setting and materials did no insult to the medieval tower, but it now sits as if dropped off the back of a lorry on its way to the V&A. North and south river banks are littered with dishevelled shapes from the computer desks of their lordships, Foster and Rogers. The Bermondsey Shard already lowers over the southern aspect, and other structures are to follow. William the Conqueror's old fortress has as much to do with world heritage as a Horse Guards sentry box. I would strike it off the list tomorrow.

Westminster Abbey's setting is more controversial, if only because the real damage has yet to be done. The Shard is already visible in the distance and, from St James's Park, rises even over the London Eye. It is soon to be joined by the 170-metre Doon Street tower immediately behind the National Theatre, higher than the Eye, and even taller structures at Vauxhall. These buildings will be colossal, visible from everywhere in west London and transforming the environs and character of the Thames at Westminster. I have no doubt there will one day be a public outcry over their presence, but by then it will be too late.

These buildings are not even intended for jobs but mostly for luxury flats and hotels. None has any civic significance or planning coherence. None makes any contribution to its immediate surroundings or is designed in some context, merely crashing to the ground as if plonked by a child from outer space. Totems of the deregulated money economy of the 1990s and 2000s, the towers are rising as random obelisks, littering the London skyline in perpetuity. Even the new Lord Mayor, David Wootton, is quoted as calling the Shard "an ostentation … out of spirit with these times". It would look fine in Abu Dhabi but Bermondsey is not the Gulf.

Those of us who have long argued that London could be a thriving economy within a dignified civic environment lost this battle. But then we lost the battle to keep towers from the periphery of the royal parks. We lost the battle to stop the Thames being flanked by advertisements, with the National Theatre and British Film Institute the worst offenders of all. We lost the battle to keep taxis black and Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park empty. When politics gets into bed with money, public or private, you can forget aesthetics.

The Tower of London is a goner. I am amazed the City Corporation has not already flogged it off already to an American theme park, as it did old London Bridge, for no reason but to prove itself "modern". The heart of Westminster is still a precious spot, with a Victorian setting deferential to its medieval core. Why Johnson (and Livingstone before him) thought it would be improved by having a thousand luxury residents staring down at it from above is beyond me.
Future generations should be in no doubt who it was reduced London to this state. The forthcoming London horizon is due to the macho cravings of Livingstone and Johnson, pure and simple. "Ken and Boris built me" should be blazoned on every one. So come on, Unesco, and do your worst.

[Jaeger]

I couldn't care less if the Tower of London or Houses of Parliament are on UNESCO's list or not. Who actually looks at UNESCO's list any way. I am also fairly sure tourists will still flock to theses sites whether they are included in UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites or not.

UNESCO have tried to stop development in major UK Cities such as Liverpool and London in the past. Perhaps it's time someone told the UN that this country is not one big massive museum but a nation that relies on investment to create jobs and prosperity at a time of economic downturn. Furthermore our cities are already some of the most protected in the world in terms of heritage preservation and site lines, and we are more than capable of making our own decisions in regard to such issues.

Apparently Liverpool is also to lose its World Heritage Site status if a £5.5bn skyscraper plan goes ahead without “radical” changes, Unesco inspectors have warned.

Read More http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liver...#ixzz1fICRGExe

What next strip Hadrians Wall of it's status because of new buildings at the nearby Newcastle Science City or strip Edinburgh of UNESCO status because of new building work near it's old quarter. Perhaps it's time to stop building any new buildings in the south west in case they can be seen in the distance from Stonehenge and isn't it time we stopped all new skyscrapers in Manchester in case they can be seen from the Pennines. I am really surprised they haven's stripped Greenwich of it's UNESCO status given the new skyscrapers constructed at Canary Wharf.

I also hope they are going to strip Paris of any UNESCO accolades due to it's large skyscraper building programme and of course Moscow, and numerous other cities. Perhaps it's time they realised that London is a major trading city, and is not some kind of crumbing museum like Rome.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2...scrapers_N.htm

UNESCO is not an elected body and like other similar organisations is not democratically accountable.

[ismail]

You really must have a very small mind if you think that taking the tower of London of UNESCO's pointless list will have an impact on it's tourist trade.
I seriously doubt if more than 1% of the people who visit London know anything about the World heritage status.
UNESCO is a bunch of free loading twats similar to the IOC, who swan around the world at tax payers expense and stay in the 5star hotels they complain about.

UNESCO ....F*** OFF

[Jaeger]

Originally Posted by ismail

You really must have a very small mind if you think that taking the tower of London of UNESCO's pointless list will have an impact on it's tourist trade.
I seriously doubt if more than 1% of the people who visit London know anything about the World heritage status.
UNESCO is a bunch of free loading twats similar to the IOC, who swan around the world at tax payers expense and stay in the 5star hotels they complain about.

UNESCO ....F*** OFF

LOL - They are the FIFA of Architecture.

[NCT]

Tourists come to London to see the Houses of Parliamen and the Tower of London because they have read about them in a little book of UNESCO, without which they would have had no clue what they were whatsoever. And London would become so fantastic onced turned into a giant tourist museum with nobody allowed anywhere to live and work.

[siberian dreamer]

Lol... oh no, like it will make one bit of difference other than giving EH more fuel for their fire. I wish these big noses would piss off.

[I am he]

Skyscrapers and bold, modern architecture enhance the older historic architecture IMO.
I actually think the shard compliments the Tower of London, and Tower bridge.

St Georges wharf tower is very interesting, it has no visual impact on the Palace of westminster, but it actually makes the city centre appear to continue even further west down stream - a new cluster there would do exactly that, which makes London even more exiting for tourists. The City cluster looks amazing, UNESCO just hate skyscrapers, hate deveopment in general, and want to kill any plan made to destroy the 60's crap and replace it with nice looking architecture.

What UNESCO should be doing is stopping the rows of victorian buildings from being destroyed and replaced with dull, concrete crap.

[DarJoLe]

How have other cities dealings with UNESCO gone?

[JimB]

Have to say, that Telegraph article is a very well written piece. Bravo.

[El_Greco]

Originally Posted by DarJoLe

How have other cities dealings with UNESCO gone?

Didnt Dresden lose it?

[london lad]

Originally Posted by DarJoLe

How have other cities dealings with UNESCO gone?

Dresden was stripped of its World heritage status in 2009. At this point tourism dropped to zero and not long after that communication ceased and there has been no contact with the outside world since.

Let that be a lesson to you London. You should have done as EH and Westminster demanded and not have them send Jim'll fix it letters to us.



Its just a last ditch ploy by the usual mob to stop some large applications that are about to go in at Vauxhall and Waterloo and having been trounced at so many public Inquiries this is there last gasp chance to try and stop anymore high rises hopping the toffs at the top will be so embarrassed by UNESCO that they do whatever it takes to stop these national treasures from being obliterated.

[buggedboy]

Not you guys too. Were getting it in the neck from UNSECO in Liverpool. There's a petition running to save our Liverpool Waters scheme that should be getting some publicity soon. Only just opened but if you are pro development and anti UNESCO please sign.

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by london lad

Dresden was stripped of its World heritage status in 2009. At this point tourism dropped to zero and not long after that communication ceased and there has been no contact with the outside world since.

Chilling. It could happen to us.

[Borromini's Ghost]

Originally Posted by london lad

Its just a last ditch ploy by the usual mob to stop some large applications that are about to go in at Vauxhall and Waterloo and having been trounced at so many public Inquiries this is there last gasp chance to try and stop anymore high rises hopping the toffs at the top will be so embarrassed by UNESCO that they do whatever it takes to stop these national treasures from being obliterated.

This.

The Tower backs on to some really poor architecture that does take away from its status, and yet if one looks in a different direction one can see the magnificent Shard looming on the horizon, it spoils the view? Jokers