We are still three years away from the London Olympics and already it looks like the buildings housing the infrastructure will be the best architecture to come out of the event. While the drama of Zaha Hadid’s pool is drained away by continual value engineering, the electricity substation by UK practice Nord will be completed this summer and will start functioning in 2010. It will set an impressive standard. A beautifully textured brick box that hides transformers and coolers; suited both to the semi-industrial context of the Lea Valley and to the architecture of London’s Victorian parks.
Very much in the same family of buildings, John Lyall’s pumping station at Pudding Mill Lane, which will service the new Olympics development, is also on site and will be operational by the end of this year. John Lyall has two, potentially three, other water treatment projects in the locale which must be completed by the zero-hour of August 2012. The Pudding Mill Pumping Station is a fascinating essay in concrete and draws on the historical vernacular of the area. Not to underestimate the taste and judgment of the architects involved, perhaps the reason this architecture of infrastructure is so successful is that in this slither of east London pumping stations and power plants, isolated and frequently redundant, are the vernacular of the Lea Valley and have been for the last hundred years. We should pity Hopkins Architects – there may have been a tarmac cycle track in the area but there just isn’t much precedent or context for a velodrome.
During the Games, John Lyall’s pumping station will be passed by anyone who approaches the site from Pudding Mill Lane. Its circular form is extrapolated from the concrete shaft that has been inserted 15m into the ground in order to house the pumping station’s dry and wet wells. The above-grade structure, which houses the odour-control equipment, is extruded from the well’s pre-cast concrete rings. The perimeter wall and superstructure are made from a similar concrete and topped with a green roof, as stipulated across the site by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). ‘It’s a straightforward, dark-toned presence: simple but beautiful,’ says Lyall. It promises to provide a solid yet texturally rich gatepost to the Olympics.
This etching by John Lyall is an artist representation of his design for the Pudding Mill Lane Pumping Station
Although Lyall has worked on infrastructure projects before – particularly memorable is his fire-fighting pier on the River Thames and his North Greenwich underground station (in partnership with Will Alsop) – the Pudding Mill Pumping Station is a radical departure. A project like the fire station owes a debt to early-Richard Rogers with its exposed steel members and corrugated cladding, but Pudding Mill is dense and made from concrete. It is less High-Tech and more Steam Punk, taking its cue from a decorative Victorian tradition as well as Brutalism. Lyall, of course, has every reason for this approach.
Less than a kilometre away is the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, one of the greatest pieces of architecture ever created to house water treatment. It was designed by the Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette, together with the architect Charles Driver and completed in 1868. By building a Byzantine, brick shrine, rather than a modest envelope, the engineers glorified waste management. In turn, John Lyall has returned the gesture in a clever and subtle way by scoring reliefs of Bazalgette’s beautiful drawings for Abbey Mills into the concrete panelling of his own pumping station. It gently suggests that we too should glorify the civilised way we deal with our waste.
Lyall is also in charge of a cluster of projects which feed into the Northern Outfall Sewer, the major gravity sewer which runs from Wick Lane in Hackney to Beckton Sewage Works in east London. The ODA has made it clear to all involved that although it is overseeing the design for John Lyall’s Stratford Box and Old Ford pumping stations, the projects are outside its catchment area and are not to have the epithet Olympic attached to them.
The fact that they are both within a kilometre of the site, however, gives you some idea about what has prompted their construction, and why their design is so sensitive. These are niche projects, not massive pieces of infrastructure. The Stratford Box station pumps water from underneath the oblong caisson that the Eurostar goes through, thereby preventing it from sinking. Although small, the Stratford Box structure will be visible from the large bridge which will funnel pedestrians from the Olympics site straight into the gaping maw of the planned Westfield shopping centre in Stratford.
On the way, visitors will pass over a series of conjoined boxes made from long, Belgian brick capped by green roofs. Lyall resisted the temptation to house the control buildings, the sample room and the transformer kiosk under one roof, feeling that an array of blocks was more honest. Indeed, he’s kept to that strategy in a conservation area at nearby Old Ford. Here, the pumping facilities have been housed in apparently scattered Cor-Ten steel cubes. This is real legacy architecture: tough objects that will embrace the return of the greenery once the two weeks of fun and running is over.
Drawing of Lyall's Old Ford pumping facility, clad in Cor-Ten and scattered through a conservation area
The architecture of infrastructure emerging from the Olympic Park is being widely used as evidence in an argument for design-architects to play a part in other infrastructure projects. In particular, CABE has recognised this as an area where it can make its mark. The advisory body’s recent review of Architecture and Design Solutions’ plan for the Ardley Energy From Waste facility in Oxfordshire cited the Olympics infrastructure projects as exemplary models.
The review panel criticised the design of the Ardley facility for turning household waste into electrical power as an unnecessarily complex form. ‘We suggest that referring to well-designed examples of infrastructure schemes of a comparable nature would be useful in identifying aspirations for the standard of development on this site. The energy centre or the primary substation in the Olympic Park, east London by John McAslan and Nord respectively may be good starting points,’ concluded the panel.
For those who have been working in infrastructure design for many years, this new missionary zeal on behalf of the architectural tastemakers is frustrating. David Butterworth of Architecture and Design Solutions has designed several energy-from-waste centres. Each one is effectively a series of furnaces, topped off by a turbine and sitting above a pan in which ash is cooled and treated. He shaped the design of Ardley to the rolling Oxfordshire landscape rather than the industrial typology. ‘The buildings that CABE recommends… are carefully detailed, straightforward examples of rectilinear architecture that might be appropriate for London but do not form a suitable basis for a rural Oxfordshire landscape setting,’ says Butterworth. In his opinion, CABE is motivated by an overly metropolitan approach to infrastructure.
Given that CABE is a non-statutory body, it seems unlikely that Architecture and Design Solutions will be changing their designs any time soon. Butterworth points out that the local council likes the proposal and that the practice has 12 projects of a similar size and scope on its drawing boards, a number of which are already at planning stage. Energy from waste is going to be an increasingly important part of the country’s electricity supply. Due to the introduction of a system of European fines, designed to decrease the amount of landfill, it is estimated that around 20 per cent will come from this source by 2020. This change in legislation has led to a huge building programme. In addition, it is likely that when the government publishes its National Policy Statement on nuclear power in the autumn, at least five new power stations will have been commissioned.
Nord’s substation is a great success and to give the ODA its dues, it is an inspired piece of commissioning. It is successful because it is a great contextual design, rather than somehow being more authentic and honest due to its dark-brick, rectlinear form. Nord’s director, Alan Pert, is an architect with a brilliant eye for the insistent beauty as well as the versatility of hard, dark materials. The Bell-Simpson House, in the Scottish town of Milton of Campsie, for example, is a fantastic, literal interpretation of a conventional housing form in brick. The Glaswegian architect is also behind an attempt to convert the Victorian conveniences of his home city and the only architect in the country who is designing a sawmill.
The substation is 80m long and made from ebony black brick. Legible at first as one uninterrupted surface, the envelope is in fact more of a lattice than it appears. In lower sections, the brick operates as a load-bearing structure, in other areas it is simply a skin and in the upper sections it also permits ventilation for the transformers that sit at either side of the building.
Due to security issues, the ODA and EDF Energy company are incredibly coy on the subject, but it is believed that elements of the facade can be easily removed. Crushed brick, taken from the demolition of buildings on site, covers the roof. No doubt it will be colonised by plant life in time.
Although it is a piece of unabashedly industrial architecture, it is also legible as a pavilion in a Victorian park; the latest in a long line of unapologetic, incidental pieces of architecture which stand in the green spaces of London. One does sympathise with Architecture and Design Solutions, which had Nord’s project thrust in its face by way of criticism. It is hard to imagine a building, which is 250m long as opposed to 80m long, as incidental. CABE should be wary of promoting this type of architecture in the Olympics Park as a model for infrastructure design across the country.
There is nothing wrong with design in infrastructure but let us not be fooled into thinking that brick is the be all and end all. There are good examples in the UK of very similar projects to Ardley. Marchwood Waste Plant in Hampshire, for example, sits beneath a galvanised steel space frame dome. Providing 16,000sq m of space for an energy-from-waste facility, it is the largest self-supporting dome in Europe. Surely it is a better case study than a series of Victorian-influenced set pieces in an east London park. Welcome as they are, given the larger architectural gestures around them, the Olympics infrastructure buildings are unique, urban forms.
