S3 Ep 10 – 66 Portland Place. Reimagining an Icon
Big Design Adventure
Tim Ross and Kevin McCloud tour 66 Portland Place, the historic headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), alongside
Key takeaways
- Jack Pringle, Chair of the RIBA Board of Trustees, guides the tour through the building's current restoration phase.
- RIBA funded much of its redevelopment through the sale of its commercial arm, NBS, netting approximately £172 million.
Main topics
- Restoration of 66 Portland Place
- Sustainability and carbon footprints in architecture
Notable quotes
Architecture increasingly now is about insects.
Conclusion
The episode underscores the value of viewing architectural heritage no
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:06) Well, hello there and welcome to Big Design Adventure. Hello, Kevin. Speaker 4 (0:09) Hey, all right, Tim? Mate, I'm fabulous today. It's Speaker 3 (0:12) good to be seeing you. Speaker 4 (0:13) Yeah, it always is. Lifts my week. I was working last night doing a live show and there was a whole bunch of people who came up Speaker 3 (0:20) to me and wanted to talk about the podcast, which is always a delight. Speaker 4 (0:23) That's always a delight. Yeah, I've been filming this week for Reba, House of the Year for Channel 4, which has been great fun. It always is because there are finished buildings and they're lived in and they've been established and they've been going for a few years. And so, you know, everything's done. There's no mud left. It's Speaker 3 (0:39) a Speaker 4 (0:39) joy. And everybody, bless them, who I've gone to film has wanted to talk to me about the park, which is lovely. It's resonating. Can you play favorites on this? So I'm not going to name names, no list, no names, no pectoral. But I will say that there are quite a few projects this year which take energy conservation. Net zero super low carbon really really seriously I went to see one house this week and I can't tell you the name because actually even the long list is currently secret You went to a house. I went to a house. I just went to a house. It's very nice. Then I left You know the architect I know the architect it's great and in his practice He was telling me that they do a huge amount now in the practice to calculate the full carbon load of a new building In this case, it was a building that was demolished. Everything in the old building was then reused. The new building went up, but it incorporated an old couple of buildings. It's quite complex. And they did a really complex carbon calculation for it in terms of impact. And then across the wider site, which is a few hectares, they're doing stuff like improving... Soil, introducing lots of invertebrate new species, putting in different planting schemes of wildflowers, meadows, trees, grasslands, improving the soil structure so that grasses can root a metre into the ground. And when they can do that, what they can start to do is to sequester carbon, as importantly as trees. So what he's produced is a 50-year plan for the house. It just says, this is the load. And this, by the way, is the remediation. It was sort of super compelling because the land and the trees, the woodland and the grass meadows, and I think for this you need like a donkey or some whatever, there are animals involved as part of it, it yields a return, as it were, 10 times that of the impact of the house. Speaker 3 (2:34) Amazing. Speaker 4 (2:35) Yeah. So you build a house and in five years, therefore, you basically, you built a carbon invisible home. And that kind of stuff, I think, is becoming really interesting both to architects but also excitingly to owners. Because, of course, you go around the country, quite a lot of these houses are quite big. And quite a lot of them are built by business people who've made a fortune out of cogs or rubber grommets or something. I don't know. They've got like big, black, massive cars parked outside the front, which we have to hide. And then suddenly, mid-conversation, they turn to you and they say, yeah, I've got a farm. I've just bought like 200 acres and we're just like rewilding it and just doing, I'm introducing boar and bison and beavers. And we're going to like do amazing. We're doing this amazing carbon stuff. It's like watching Clarkson become effectively a non-paid up member of the Green Party. And it's a beautiful thing to witness. And there's a lovely thing in actually in Jeremy's. latest series at the end where he's just walking through a field or something and this is how interesting it's got with Clarkson because you know he introduced the idea of wildflower meadow stuff and margins and headland stuff and how you kind of create biodiversity in landscape in the first series but it was a big idea and it was kind of like for the birds and the bees and all of a sudden now he's just referring to this kind of amazing kind of 10-metre-wide strip of flowers and saying, yeah, we did that last year. And it's because of this. And it's the birds. Look over here. And you realise it's completely incidental now to the narrative that he's pushing, which is actually, in his case, in the last years, a lot of it was about birds. It was about the other species that occupy land. Speaker 2 (4:10) Yeah, yeah, that's what everybody's doing. I don't know if Speaker 4 (4:12) it's Clarkson that's had this effect, but the architecture increasingly now is about insects. Speaker 3 (4:16) This is an interesting one. I got an email during the week. And I think it speaks to this as well about the environmental concerns with building. And there's a building at Melbourne University, the John Medley building that was a 1960s building by the late Sir Roy Grounds, who was also responsible for the National Gallery in Victoria, a fine Australian modernist. The university is going to knock it down. Speaker 4 (4:42) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 (4:44) Universities are terrible at getting rid of their historical buildings. from the last 70 years. Absolutely hands down sometimes the worst of them. Speaker 4 (4:52) There's something else to say here, which is that they're also really terrible actually at respecting them even when they're brand new. So the point is the building goes up and five years later something else goes up in front of it. In this sense, they are their own worst enemies only because you never really get the long view. You never get the passage of time that gives you an opportunity to reappraise the building without having to kind of reappraise something that's built onto it, under it, next to it, in front of it. which has eclipsed it. And there's a sort of way in which universities kind of, it's like they have this thing called the estates department. Even the word kind of strikes terror, doesn't it? The idea that, you know, basically it's the maintenance team who have been promoted to managers who are responsible for looking after built heritage. And it's a tricky one. When you go to a university, Speaker 3 (5:38) You know, the open day, it's the buildings that young people fall in love with. Speaker 4 (5:43) Yeah. Speaker 3 (5:43) The marriage of the old and the new. So it's unfathomable in some ways to think that on the other side of town in Melbourne, where this building is, the John Medley building, on the other side of town is the Arts Centre and the National Gallery, same architect. The Arts Centre, you know, you've filled that beautiful, beautiful, beautiful concert hall and that's heritage listed. That is the cultural. beating heart of the city and then the educational beating heart of the city alongside the other one, RMIT, is a building that they're just going to knock down. So you say obviously the architectural history is really important, but from an environmental point of view, it's like why would you do it? This is the worst thing you should be doing. Finding a way to make it work is what they should be doing and understanding that there is a romance to university campuses and those layers of history from... All years have to be respected and you need to find another way to make it work like we all do with our own homes. Speaker 4 (6:43) Yeah. Look, there are lots of arguments at play here about use, about practicality, about the carbon impact because you can save between 20 % and 50 % of the carbon by not knocking a building down. And then there's the argument about heritage and contribution and built landscape and memory and all that stuff. And then there's the other argument, which is at the bottom of it all, is it really that good a building? Is it one of the architect's... Better ones or is it not? And there's another question to come out of that, isn't there, which is do we keep everything by one architect? First of all, how much of Roy Grant's stuff is there? Second, is the building good? Speaker 3 (7:19) It appears so, and in some ways, who are we to Speaker 4 (7:22) judge right now? Well, you and I are you and I. We happen to both be interested. Okay, Speaker 2 (7:28) I'm judging. I say yes. We happen to have a Speaker 4 (7:30) podcast, so we can say here and now whether we think it's good, right? Speaker 3 (7:34) The people that I have spoken to at the university here know such things about his career and his buildings. I've reached out and said, can you let people know that we're trying to save this building? So, yeah, they're not saying, look, it's not one of Roy's best ones. Yeah. I think you should bowl it over. Speaker 4 (7:51) Does it have a decent setting? Can you appreciate the building? Yes. It's a good building. Speaker 3 (7:56) You having a little quick look? Speaker 4 (7:58) I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. Yeah. I like that. Speaker 3 (8:02) So there's your answer. Speaker 4 (8:04) That's extraordinary. And it's got gum trees in front of it. It's strikingly good. And I mean, I've not seen a building like that before. Now, on that basis alone, the fact that it's somewhat unique with these sort of projecting, rather like a medieval half-timbered building, it's got these jetted stories. That suggests that you would really want to try and keep it for its contribution to the wider architecture of the place. It's really elegant. Come on. That's just too nice. Speaker 3 (8:32) What are they going Speaker 4 (8:32) to Speaker 3 (8:32) do with the site? Put something else on it? Oh, yeah, they just need more space for more people to come to university one day a year because they do it all from home. So that would be a broader question to me is when you're designing universities for the future, what are they supposed to look like? Oh, that's a good question. Does it look like a USB-C Speaker 1 (8:55) socket? Speaker 4 (8:57) Yeah. Interesting thing is 1,400 signatures it says here that Speaker 3 (9:01) they've collected. Well, you're about to be 1,401 and two or something. Will you sign me up, please? I'll sign it all up. Speaker 4 (9:07) Whatever they say, I'll just say yes. Speaker 3 (9:09) It'll be in the show notes if you would like to sign that petition. Speaking about saving buildings, let's talk about today when we were in London. I've got to say I was eating a sandwich when our guests came to meet us out in front of quite an incredible building. Speaker 4 (9:25) Such is the dedication which we throw at our work that we don't have time for lunch. It's true. It was a hot summer's day. Speaker 3 (9:32) Sounds like a novel. It was a hot summer's day. It Speaker 4 (9:34) was Speaker 1 (9:34) a Speaker 4 (9:34) hot summer's day. Speaker 3 (9:35) Tim was eating a sandwich. The Speaker 4 (9:37) taxi door opened. Speaker 3 (9:39) As Speaker 4 (9:40) we stepped onto the pavement, I suddenly realised that the lunch we'd bought previously in bags was