A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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of design input from, and very close collaboration with, the future users or residents of their buildings, pointedly refusing to discard their ideas or suggestions for reasons of metropolitan ‘good taste’. They show an interest in researching the patterns of life, collectivity, privacy and interaction in working-class and suburban areas without judgement or condemnation. Their accompanying embrace of spectacle and jokiness, with trompe l’œil effects, nostalgic motifs and an épater les bourgeois approach to decoration and ornament, might seem to put them closer to Blairite styles; in short, unlike Chipperfield or Haworth Tompkins they still produce the sort of architecture that looks great on the cover of a regeneration brochure. That’s deceptive, maybe, as there is a sophistication and intelligence in the new postmodernism which marks it out from the vacuous iconists and solutionists of the ’90s and 2000s. Nonetheless, the most obvious architectural development of the Great Recession has been the ‘pop-up’, the temporary, often developer-sponsored use of a dormant development site, a way of papering over the cracks and pretending everything’s ok, of bellowing ‘Move along now, nothing to see here’. Architects can’t work without clients, after all.
Alternatives in EUtopia
British architects and urbanists, at least the more ‘off-message’ ones, are keen to contrast the difficulties of working in the UK with the very different approach to planning in Old Europe, especially Northern Europe – the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia – where these things are taken more seriously. Is it possible that we could find there a way of rebuilding cities that is not just aesthetically superior, but also more equitable? One scheme I visited in summer 2010 seemed at first to be absolutely everything that British urban redevelopment is not. I was invited there by one of its local critics, mostly because I had published some harsh criticism of the gentrified new modernism of British cities, but at first all I could see were the differences – the ways in which a different planning system and building industry were obviously far more capable of creating viable, attractive, enjoyable and architecturally convincing pieces of city than the British were. The similarities became more visible only later.
This was in Germany, a useful example, given that during the boom the Federal Republic was regarded as a retrograde Keynesian dinosaur, what with its large welfare state, industrial base and reluctance to reform and deregulate. Accordingly, German commentators have been justifiably smug as they watch their Anglo-Saxon antagonists fall into chaos and collapse. ‘HafenCity Hamburg’ is Germany’s largest regeneration scheme, although mercifully they don’t use that word. It comprises a huge swathe of former wharfs, but the differences with Anglo-Saxon dockland schemes are as interesting as their similarities. Both basically serve the same constituency – an urban middle class. HafenCity is not particularly concerned with being hip or ‘vibrant’, as it houses a disproportionate percentage of Hamburg’s affluent pensioners. This isn’t as odd as it sounds, as it’s the only clean, safe, and perhaps more importantly, quiet space in the centre of Hamburg. In planning terms it’s certainly not a chaotic Thatcherite free-for-all, but something very careful. It is centred around a public landscaping project – here by Benedetta Tagliabue’s firm EMBT – which weaves together a series of small plots each given to a separate architectural firm for houses or flats, along strips of dockside. These form the ‘background’ to some more wilful stand-alone architecture around the edges.
EMBT’s landscaping is far and away the most original part of HafenCity. Especially choice are the lamp-posts, which swing around tracing peculiar metallic waves, perhaps so as not to have any bourgeois strung from them (Hamburg has more millionaires than any other German city, as well as a very active and disputatious anarchist left). The seating in particular, moulded, concrete and Gaudiesque, is very well-used, and any fears that the place might be desolate or depopulated because of its class homogeneity are patently groundless – even unfinished, HafenCity is a massive tourist draw, with open-top buses passing over a steel dock bridge that was formerly closed to the public.
I’ve been told that buyers at the Glasgow Harbour development, a comparable scheme, complained about the view of the Govan Shipyards. HafenCity, however, is practically built around a working harbour, and glories in it – each expensive apartment has a view of the container cranes, refinery and passing ships. It’s as if it wants to encourage you to see as spectacle something usually hidden away from view. Accordingly, the office blocks which are mixed in with the flats are sometimes occupied by the shipping companies – to see a name like China Shipping, usually emblazoned upon a container, emblazoned upon a building, is a jolt. The building itself, designed like much of HafenCity by mild modernists Bothe Richter Tehrani, is a typical part of the complex, a piece of sleek, unromantic modernism, modelled like all of these blocks with sharp overhangs, presumably as a gesture against the North German climate. Each block is self-contained, but all are of a similar height, rectitude and expense, achieving the rare thing of a city that emerged all at once while being both coherent and diverse, at least to the eye. The individual structures are detailed in a variety of styles, with vaguely Hanseatic/expressionist clinker, Miesian steel, bright render and so forth, in order to give the effect of variety within carefully controlled parameters. It’s all very Teutonic.
The foreground buildings are less careful, and make clear how mistaken it would be to think this a purely social democratic piece of urbanism. Each row ends with a tower. One is ‘Coffee Plaza’, by American architect Richard Meier, another is a building for Unilever by Behnisch Architekten, evocative not so much of a robust Hanseatic modernism but more of Brazilian maestro Oscar Niemeyer, with flowing, feminine biomorphic curves. It consists of both offices and penthouses, and is advertised here as ‘Marco Polo Tower – design for Millionaires’. By far the most expensive and controversial project in HafenCity is Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie. It is a large swooping thing at the end of one of these rectilinear streets, completely ignoring their context of neatness and self-effacement. It is, respectively, a hotel, a car park, luxury penthouses and a concert hall, this last a preposterous Caspar David Friedrich thing billowing and crashing atop a 1960s warehouse. It was not initially part of the HafenCity plan at all; it was the private project of two local ‘business leaders’ who personally commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to draw up a ‘landmark’ scheme for the site, claiming that they would pay for the execution, holding many fundraising dinners among Hamburg millionaires in order to do so. Needless to say it soon went over budget, and the bill was offloaded onto Hamburg city council. The cost has risen over fivefold, and is hence a matter of some controversy. When I looked at the construction site of the Elbphilharmonie, rather than high-rent high-spec apartments for millionaires, I could see ads for bedsits, aimed at the building workers who are erecting this enormously complex edifice. They are at least going cheap, although the rate ‘per person/night’ implies that they aren’t supposed to stay there very long. Many are in both German and Polish, so readable by the workers from New Europe who are actually building the place.
As a town planning project, it forms a chastening contrast with the sort of schemes you will find in this book. Hamburg is not much richer than Edinburgh, yet it’s hard to believe HafenCity was designed by the same species that redeveloped Leith Docks. The place is a thumping indictment of the Birmingham Canalside, Bristol Harbourside, Belfast Laganside, London Docklands, all of which were trudged through for the purposes of the book you hold in your hand. As enjoyable public space, as urbanism contiguous with the existing city, as architecture, their equivalent in Hamburg is immeasurably superior, and any British councillor, planner or architect visiting the North German city would be well within their rights to fall to their knees and weep. All this masks the fact that HafenCity is the exact same place as Bristol Harbourside et al. It is a place which caters for, as the slogan goes, the ‘1%’. It has been commissioned by and for the ruling class. In order to get planning permission for such a project in a Social Democrat city, there are sops: a small percentage of ‘affordable’ units, public access, a University expansion and a U-Bahn extension, but these are minor differences, some of which you could find in the UK anyway. It’s the precise same typology – mixed-use redevelopment of a former industrial area, with only the most insecure, casual labour left for the former industrial classes. I dare say there’s less buy-to-let speculating and more renting, and suspect it is all much more carefully managed, but the basic ideology