Page 10 of 10
London, England
What do you make of the cool set in London, you're constantly updating your hit parade of your ten biggest wanks
The driving force behind this trip was to return to Open House London, a weekend where all sorts of buildings that are normally closed suddenly become open to the public. I have done this before and I am just as likely to go back again in the future. They have hundreds and hundreds of sites open to visit, and each year they add new ones. 2014 was no exception, with Open House London weekend being chosen as the public premiere for the Leadenhall Building, Richard Rogers’ great big crowd pleasing glass Cheesegrater and the newest city skyscraper.
If you give me an open house weekend, chances are that I’ll come, or at least I’ll try to. This year (as always), I made it to Open House New York, Open House Chicago and Open Doors Toronto. All of those cities host wonderful open house weekend events with all sorts of amazing once a year and once a lifetime experiences. But as amazing as New York, Chicago and Toronto’s open houses are, nothing beats the one in London. While New York might have almost two hundred sites every year, London’s count is pushing a thousand. And all of them are worth seeing on at least some level.
Londoners love their Open House Weekend and come out full force to support it, meaning that all of the sites are busy and any of the big five star sites will have lines longer than you probably think. The Cheesegrater was no exception. It opened at 10am on Sunday and I was in line an hour and a half early, with still hundreds of people in front of me and thousands more behind. The visit was regimented- after a quick security tent, visitors were herded onto an escalator and up to the lobby, then onto one of the spectacular glass lifts, then up to a single high floor where you could walk along the perimeter and gawk at the views as volunteers remind you to keep moving. The floors get smaller as you go up, and this one was pretty small- really just one big empty room with a large conference table and amazing views over the city.
I keep writing about the views but instead decided to include a picture from the side of the building in the slideshow. There is a continuous notch that separates the service wing (elevators and WCs) with the office floors, and in between the views bounce off the glass every which way. Here you can see Norman Foster’s Gherkin (building) on the right even though its really on the left, and the distant towers of Canary Wharf and the Thames are on the left even though they’re really on the right. The view straight ahead remains the same.
Four more pictures of the Leadenhall Building from my Open House London self guided walk through (hard to call it a tour to be honest). These pictures include a straight shot up the clear elevator shaft, a view from the top of the distant Shard, the view the other way of the Gherkin and coming back to the City, with the view across the street of Richard Rogers’ own Lloyds of London Building.
Open House London has a very useful app, something that all of those other open houses haven’t gotten around to doing yet. It allows you to browse all of the available sites, mark buildings as favorites and see what else is nearby. This site falls into that last category.
I had at least thirty buildings on my shortlist but barely made it to ten over the weekend- London is physically huge and really seeing these sites takes time. But even ones that you just happen to walk by can be wonderful. The Royal Albert Hall is normally open for self guided tours but is free only on Open House London weekend and is always worth the time to visit. You can visit all of the levels, sit in (or near) the Queen’s box and spend as much time as you want counting how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. What more could you ask for?
Coinciding with Open House London is the last weekend of the London Design Festival, an event which drew me to the always wonderful (and crazy busy) Victoria and Albert Museum. I went primarily to see an installation by Zaha Hadid but found myself far more impressed by this. The installation here is called “Double Space” by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, and it consisted of two reflective airplane wings that slowly rotated above the heads of people in the museum’s Raphael Gallery. It was most certainly distracting but also most certainly interesting, doing its job in making you look at the galleries and the Raphaels in a way that you otherwise wouldn’t.
Much like New York’s own Warm Up canopy at PS1, every summer for just a few months, the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens opens up a temporary pavilion at its front door for the city to enjoy. As always it includes a café and a few places to sit, but otherwise it’s architecture for architecture’s sake, and that’s not a bad thing at all. The 2014 pavilion was designed by a Chilean architect named Smiljan Radic and he follows in the footsteps of previous pavilion architects including Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Toyo Ito, SANAA, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas, among others. Radic’s approach seemed kind of boring- from the pictures I had seen before I arrived, it looked like a collection of rocks and not much more. In person it was a revelation. That big rock was really a hollow donut with a partially translucent fiberglass skin and all sorts of torn and punctured windows that framed the gardens beyond.
So to close out the slideshow here is one last picture (or four) of the pavilion and one last picture (or four) of London, where the light and the skin and the gardens and the rain are all now nothing but a fading memory lost in time.
