| Architect |
Foreign Office
Architect |
| Date
Built |
2015 |
| Location |
New Street
Birmingham |
| Description |
|
| In
many respects the revamped New Street
Station, Birmingham, is an amazing
achievement. The project to bring this
1960s station into the 21st Century has
completely transformed the building and the
experience of the customers using it.
It has brought daylight and style into a
structure that was dark, dingy and
depressing. The builders managed to do
all of this while one of the busiest railway
stations in the UK continued to operate as
"normal". Prior to the refurbishment,
New Street had been nominated as the ugliest
building in Britain and, reflecting the
animosity aimed at the station, there was a
Facebook group named, “All of
the problems in the world are caused by
Birmingham New Street”. The "New Street:New Start" website sums it up like this, "... Network Rail today (20 September) opened Birmingham New Street station after a five-year, £750m transformation. Boasting an iconic new atrium over a huge passenger concourse - five times the size of London Euston's - the station, which opens its doors to the public on Sunday 20 September 2015, has been rebuilt while trains continued to run as normal for the 170,000 passengers a day who use it. With brighter, de-cluttered platforms, improved entrances, a range of new facilities and an abundance of natural light over the new concourse, Birmingham New Street, one of Britain's busiest inter-change stations, is also a retail destination in its own right. The new station features 43 shops at concourse level and above it sits the new Grand Central shopping complex, including one of the UK's largest John Lewis department stores."  In an article published in the Guardian in September 2015, Oliver Wainwright outlined the history of the project that had its origins in the 1980s. It began, he says, "... with a dreamy vision by radical architect Will Alsop. The pied piper of fantasy urbanism, who .... concocted a big purple doughnut for Birmingham New Street in 2002. Spiralling out of control of its £200m budget, ballooning to over £1bn, his psychedelic daydream was swiftly axed."  "In 2006, John
McAslan (architect of the recent
King’s Cross upgrade) and engineers
WSP were appointed to “rigorously
value engineer” the Alsop plan. They
proposed carving out a big atrium
from the existing station and
fitting a canopy held up on slender
steel trees, in a sort of Stansted
airport lite. It was to be wrapped
with an anodyne facade which, as one
Network Rail insider puts it,
“looked like a generic Showcase
Cinema”."
In 2008 a new architectural competition was launched by a city council looking for a "memorable gateway". Wainwright explains that a shortlist of six entries was created representing what he calls, " a roll-call of jazzy cliches", these included, "... an angular silver spaceship by Dutch firm UNStudio, a colourful scaly mountain by Peter Cook’s firm, Crab, while Rafael Viñoly simply proposed covering the building with a gigantic banana-shaped roof." The winning scheme was one proposed by Foreign Office Architects, the designers of the Selfridges store in Birmingham's Bullring Shopping Centre. However, that wasn't the end of the saga because soon after winning the competition the partners Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi ceased working together and the project was led by Zaera-Polo and taken on by his firm AZPML.  Wainwright's article
goes into detail about what he describes
as, "a 'value-engineered' icon of
compromise'", adding
that, "It may be an improvement
on the old station, with a
light-flooded atrium and a huge
concourse, but the Foreign Office
Architects project is a very British
trade-off. ... Compared
to the 1960s box, it is certainly a
breath of fresh air. But is the
result a mould-breaking design
.... Sadly, it is
mould-breaking only in the sense
that it looks like someone dropped
the mould and tried to bodge it back
together. Writhing in tortured
twists around the site, the building
is an ungainly hulk whichever way
you approach it. A tumbling
cliff-face of mirror-polished
stainless steel lurches around the
facade, bulging out above each of
the three major entrances to form a
series of boggle-eyed digital
screens – originally conceived as
giant train departure boards, but
now used to play ads for the shops
inside. .... Concealed behind
the crumpled mirror is not a new
station, but what contractor Mace
describes as “one of the biggest
refurbishments in Europe”, a project
deemed to be the best middle way
between entire demolition and
rebuilding (which would have
entailed closing the busiest station
outside London) and a bare minimum
scrub-up."
  Personally, I'm not
convinced about the cliff-like mirrored
facade and suspect that should the city
be blessed by a summer of bright
sunlight then people will be complaining
about reflections in much the way they
did over Rapheal Vinoly's Walkie
Talkie. I can see people blaming
road accidents in the vicinity on
excessive glare and distracting
reflections. But, having said
that, once inside the transformation is
quite amazing. New Street is now a
station you wouldn't mind being delayed
in rather than one you couldn't wait to
leave.
      **************************** - Inside -          |
|
|
New
Street Station, Birmingham, UK
 |
