THE ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL, December 2008

HOXTON NEEDS HADID

FOSTER AND ROGERS GRANT ZAHA HADID PERMISSION FOR HER FIRST EVER BUILDING IN LONDON. So it was December 3, 2008, but that would be Sue Foster head Hackney Planning and Ray Rogers, Design and Conservation Manager. In 2004 upon moving to London from New York, I purchased 33-34 Hoxton Square, a small L-shaped building I previously went to planning with a Zaha Hadid mixed use residential and commercial development. Though I received permission to demolish the 1980’s eyesore in 2006, right to light issues rendered the project too risky, as the finesse in the design was the roof. For those without helicopters, the building was missing the pizzazz and flow usually associated with Hadid. In the summer of 2007 I purchased 35 Hoxton Square, a decrepit garment workshop to regularize the site, providing more leeway to push the design. Back to planning I went.

This past summer was a review panel lasting into the night; to say planners are without foresight is a generalization, plainly wrong. Slow maybe, but hardworking, thoughtful and bold in the face of opposition. A member of the panel (formerly of the planning committee) expressed dismay the initial design did not go far enough. English Heritage (EH) was another story. The “strong objection” expressed by EH was to the disruption of the “harmonious visual balance” on the square by the “discordant and alien form of the proposed development”. EH would prefer that the few listed buildings on the square sit in isolation, frozen in the past. What is alien is the idea of change, job creation and innovation. The alleged harmony can more likely be described as an architectural mishmash akin to the throngs congregating in Shoreditch on a Saturday night. The EH report also referred to the harming of the social and economic history of the square, which today can be described as clubs, cars, and crime. The design appears quartz-like with a series of fractals expressed in the façade. If that’s discordant, is discordant bad? Of the letters of dissent the most amusing complained that the building would be too “dazzling” blinding neighboring residents. Building blindness sounds like a new American defense to an inexcusable transgression.

Planning was unanimously granted in spite of the protestations, another being that I intended to flip the project for a tidy profit. This was always as much about public sculpture as profit. Zaha is a treasure in every nation but her own (she’s lived here for 35 years). I have fought consultants from the beginning as they advised the difficulties of constructing such a building, and that was in a good economy. This could be the first building in London and possibly the first finished residential project by Hadid, all in time for her 2012 Olympic swimming pavilion.

Hold off the celebrations. If the reactionary mentality of EH was bad enough, Save Britain’s Heritage (SBH) has weighed in, far overreaching their remit to campaign for endangered historic buildings, urging the communities secretary to call in the scheme and revoke planning. The only thing they are trying to save here, where the buildings to be demolished are admittedly unremarkable, is some quaint notion of the way things were. This situation is beginning to recall the Cardiff Opera House fiasco of the mid 1990’s when the results of two Hadid competition victories were overturned by the myopia of the conservative city council. The fallout from an ostensibly successful planning application: Now I am in need of not only an angel investor but also a cracking solicitor and a Christmas miracle to call in the call in.

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Kenny Schachter

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