Page 4 of 5
London, England
Dogs wearing hats and dresses, rich apartments, old punk posters, tartan garments
The architecture continues at SANAA's wonderful temporary pavilion out in front of the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park (or possibly Kensington Gardens, it's hard to tell where the border between the two really is). Every year the Serpentine Gallery commissions an architect who has yet to build in England to design a temporary folly out in front of their suspiciously small gallery. SANAA's answer was a crowd pleasing floating mirrored plane, one that is fun to visit, fun to see and even more fun to photograph.
The reason (or more accurately one of the reasons) that I stopped in London was to enjoy the normally closed buildings that were open for the mammoth annual London Open House weekend event. With such success comes some obvious problems, most notably having to deal with large crowds and long lines all over the city at all of the good sites. The first one up (long line and all) is 85 Swain's Lane, a fun modern house located on a great, creepy site overlooking Highgate Cemetery (where an actual non hunchbacked gravedigger toiled during the tours). Located four underground stops past Mornington Crescent (where the possibilities suggest themselves to me), the house was on a quiet street and, unlike many things in this life, actually worth the 90 minute wait to get in.
Another Open House London site, another interesting one as well. A local church which had seen its congregation drop to just a handful of members took the drastic step of gutting its building and rethinking its mission. First of all they cut the actual useable part in half and added a coffee shop in the street side half. Between the two (and effectively dividing the space) was a large, non denominational room for reflection, located inside a great big skylit white cone that's hard to miss from both inside and outside the church. An interesting programmatic solution and an interesting design by local architects Theis and Khan. Hard not to like.
You might not have heard of Wilkinson Eyre Architects, but they sure can put on a show. After their iconic and really fun design for the London Eye, they followed up with the Bridge of Aspiration, an otherwise simple skybridge that connects the Royal Ballet School with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. The bridge is hard to miss from the street and wonderful to walk through, a fantastic space connecting to some rather utilitarian back office spaces- the heroic name applies more to the idea of leaving the ballet school to go to the opera house than it does to leaving the banal copy room and going to the equally banal lunchroom across the street. A great Open House experience and easily worth yet another 90 minute wait.
This is a quite small piece of Richard Rogers brand new Terminal 5 which, unfortunately, I did not fly into.
First a long and pointless back story. This (non work related) trip stemmed from a fear about the upcoming Northwest and Delta merger. I have been sitting on a reasonable amount of Northwest frequent flier miles, primarily from my Hong Kong- Japan-Hawaii-Los Angeles trip way back in 1998 and a few KLM Newark-Amsterdam flights years ago. Fearing that the upcoming merger with Delta (where miles expire) would spell eventual trouble, I started to investigate what I could do with my miles and was pleasantly surprised. If I flew out and back only on very limited days (and had a six hour layover in Detroit) and flew back from a different city, I had enough miles for a first/business class round trip to Europe. I also really lucked out with the flight to Heathrow, which was now operated by Delta and included flat bed seats, easily the best and most comfortable transatlantic flight I have ever taken. The only downside was arriving at Heathrow Terminal 4, which is now really hard to get around and no longer a stop on the Heathrow Express trains to Paddington. A real shame, although it did at least provide a nice built in excuse to wander over to Terminal 5 and to see the almost incomprehensibly large pre-security areas of the new terminal.
