Paul Finch
Paul Finch is a programme director of the World Architecture Festival
InsightPlanning refusals on the rise
I recently took part in a public inquiry, giving evidence about the very obvious design qualities of a modestly scaled scheme. It massively enhances what is laughingly categorised as a ‘conservation area’ because it contains a 19th-century railway station.
- Insight
Are we going back to the 1970s?
It is tempting to start claiming that we are reverting to the 1970s because of current energy price increases and global political instability.
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Can the definition of beauty be built?
Twenty years ago, the late, lamented Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment published a document on design review, including a section on “what makes a good project”.
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Designs for a sustainable life
As a prequel to COP26, and to coincide with the current architectural biennale, the US-based Design Intelligence group hosted a two-city event in Rome, then Venice discussing sustainability and its implications for architecture and architects.
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Procrastination can be beneficial
It is a decade since the Tottenham riots took place, prompting the report by a task force led by Sir Stuart Lipton, which secured substantial public investment in the neglected, once-proud London borough.
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We need green-belt housing too
Guess which London borough we are talking about. “The largest number of units delivered in any one year (357) equates to 25% of the annual average needed.
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A weird twist to Khan’s London plan
During these strange times, you sometimes read something in an official document and assume you must be suffering from some sort of lockdown fever.
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Lessons of the Grenfell inquiry
The evidence given at the Grenfell Tower inquiry has become more shocking by the day, especially in relation to the behaviour of certain manufacturers.
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Creating the offices of tomorrow
”As the office sector faces seas of change, we challenge you to imagine a better future. Entrants are encouraged to think outside the box to present innovative and thought-provoking solutions that bring to life how workspace may change over the next five years.”
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A healthy focus on space
One effect of the current health crisis has been to focus on how we can redesign or rethink the places we live, work and play in to deal with this and future pandemics. That should mean new workstreams.
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Happy Helical celebrates the City
As we await publication of yet another government review of the planning system, the world of property, architecture and construction can only marvel at the profound belief of politicians that by changing things, they really make a difference.
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An opportunity to revive old ideas
Political certainty, in the sense of a government with a substantial working majority, is not the same thing as policy certainty.
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Simple buildings, complex uses
An intriguing insight into the relationship between architecture, development and investment comes from Yolande Barnes, formerly global research director at Savills, now a professor at, and chair of, the Bartlett Real Estate Institute, University College London.
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Planning miracles can happen
Developer Iain Hutchinson has shown what determination, ruthless analysis and inspired architecture can do when it comes to winning planning permission on difficult sites.
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Should new genuflect to the old?
There are different sorts of fire and different sorts of response. Wartime destruction often triggers a desire to rebuild what has been lost (Hamburg, Warsaw); terrorist destruction can inspire a defiant new response (Ground Zero). Accidental fire is rather different, as the tragic destruction of significant parts of Notre-Dame is ...
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Architecture, planning and heritage are not always a happy mix
At a ceremony earlier this month in Lawn Road, Hampstead, an English Heritage ‘blue plaque’ was unveiled on the Isokon building, a 1934 modernist apartment block designed by Wells Coates. This now includes a museum devoted to the architecture of the period, created from garages as part of a retrofit ...
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Khan is as pro property as a Labour London mayor can get
The last Labour London mayor, Ken Livingstone, had an ambivalent attitude to commercial property. On the face of it he was a supporter of key projects, such as The Shard. But did he ever really like developers?
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Five decades on and the world of property hasn’t changed much
I was lucky enough to receive the president’s special award at the British Council for Offices dinner earlier this month, which of course got me thinking about the world of property since I started writing about it 45 years ago, as a trainee reporter on Estates Times (which eventually morphed ...
- Insight
The Garden Bridge project was a sad victim of miserable negativity
In the 1940s, one of the visionary plans for London by the town planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie contained a proposal for a bridge across the Thames with crossing points pretty much where the Garden Bridge was supposed to have been constructed.
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Clarity of thought and purpose will be crucial for the Grenfell inquiry
From the point of view of broad public protection, it will be important that the official inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster is allowed to focus on the critical issues - that is to say the cause of the initial fire, why it spread so rapidly and why a complex ...
