In April, we posted about a scathing review of the Cutty Sark restoration by Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph‘s London Editor. He referred to the restoration as “a clucking, Grade A … turkey.” I have not seen the ship but I share many of Gilligan’s concerns. (I will be visiting the composite clipper ship in a few weeks when I attend the Historical Novel Society Conference in London, so I will have the opportunity to see for myself.) Mr. Gilligan is not alone in his dislike of the Cutty Sark restoration. The British architectural trade journal, Building Design, has announced that the restoration of the historic tea clipper is the 2012 winner of the Carbuncle Cup for the worst new building design in Britain.
Carbuncle Cup winner 2012: Ship in a throttle
Grimshaw’s disastrously conceived restoration of the Cutty Sark is winner of this year’s BD Carbuncle Cup, tragically defiling the very thing it sets out to save.
As a naval architect, I couldn’t help but grimace when I saw the photos of the ship suspended from the gunnels with no support whatsoever along the keel. The keel is integral to the ship’s structure, which wasn’t designed to hang in the air without support from the keel, like the fiberglass blue whale at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Ellis Woodman, Building Design executive editor and Carbuncle Cup judge, apparently agrees.
The scheme’s myriad failings stem from one calamitous choice: the decision to hoick the 154-year-old clipper close to three metres into the air on canted steel props. The Cutty Sark Trust assures us that this very invasive surgery was crucial to the ship’s long-term conservation. Its former dry-docked situation had caused the hull to distort but now, elevated and protected from the elements within a fully air-conditioned glass enclosure, it will supposedly maintain its shape. Historic ship experts have, however, been all but united in their disdain for the strategy. Even the Cutty Sark’s own former chief engineer, Peter Mason, resigned from the project in 2009 after seeing computer simulations that suggested the act of lifting would put a dangerous level of stress on the fabric. (Emphasis added) So why do it?
One reason is surely that the project’s architect, Grimshaw, found it exciting. It is notable that the practice’s Spine House, completed in Oberkülheim in Germany in 2000, features a remarkably similar section: a timber-clad, boat-like vessel is held aloft on steel legs, while high-level glazing to either side admits toplight to the undercroft. The architect clearly found the chance to restage this drama using an actual boat irresistible.
The arrangement also presented a powerful commercial appeal. With the £12 price of admission fresh in their memory, the visitor entering the volume created beneath the ship’s hull can’t help but be struck by how little it contains. A café huddles at one end, a display of figureheads at the other, but a game of five-a-side football could comfortably be staged in between. The opportunity to inspect the underside of the hull is welcome enough, but the room’s real raison d’être is the lucrative corporate function trade. As the trust has acknowledged, a key ambition was always to create “a corporate hospitality venue to rival Tate Modern”.
From street level, the once thrilling lines of the ship’s stern and prow have now been obscured behind the new glass enclosure. Misdirected as the strategy was from the start, the early renderings — undertaken when the original concept architect youmeheshe was still involved — did at least suggest a degree of delicacy. Along the way, however, the promised soap-bubble of frameless, double-curved glass has been abandoned in favour of a gawky paraphrase of the roof of Foster’s British Museum Great Court. The issues of how such a thing might meet the ground or how an entrance might be made in it do not appear to have detained the architect for long.
Having found their way past an expansive retail opportunity, visitors are taken into the ship by way of a hole bashed through the side of the hull, before circulating from deck to deck past an exhibition pitched squarely at eight-year-old enthusiasts for Pirates of the Caribbean. On reaching the top, they are taken across a gangway to a huge and startlingly banal lift, stair and air-conditioning tower from which they can access the undercroft.
While the neatness of the circulation diagram can’t be faulted, one is left bewildered by the idea that this jewel of British maritime history should have been subjected to such dramatic adjustment in order to equip it for an age of mass tourism.
The ship demanded the sensitivity afforded to other great small London museums like the Soane, but instead it has been comprehensively reimagined as a theme-park attraction.
The Cutty Sark Trust’s chairman, Maldwin Drummond, has said that the aim was to present the ship “as though for some unexplained reason the crew had gone ashore” — a worthy goal but one that this tragically ill-conceived project singularly fails to meet.
Waa, waa, waa. While the decision to lift Cutty Sark into the air involved some risk, the ship was sure to be lost if nothing was done. Personally, I welcome the opportunity to view the underside of the ship as well as her topsides. It’s not like her “delicate” bow line was anymore visible in the previous arrangement of the ship. Now we also get to see the hidden part of the ship, the part that is the reason she was so fast at sea. It’ll be interesting to see the what you have to say after you see the ship, Rick.
Rick, I look forward to hearing your opinion after you have visited Cutty Sark in her new environment. I’m more likely to take notice of it than of stuff written by the architecture trade’s journalists.
I believe that most of the famous modern architects are at heart sculptors with a love of doing things on a gigantic scale. They create mockups of a piece of art, then ask an engineer to work out how to construct it. The answer usually costs a multiple of the client’s budget, so they then dumb down the idea until it can be built.
I’m not sure that I’d have liked the moulded glass enclosure that was probably the original design, but what we have is clearly a solution that costs much less to build and to maintain (imagine fixing a fracture in a huge moulding a few years down the line). I think it could have looked better if the architect had understood the engineering limitations and designed to accommodate them, but everyone has his own aesthetic prejudices.
Rather more worrying is the suggestion that the client and the architect were shown finite element models that showed that the method of supporting the hull was unsound, but I’d like to hear the whole story. There was an incentive to avoid putting pillars under the keel – maybe there is a steel spaceframe inside the hull to cope with this.
If anything takes a prize for bad work, it must be the videos of the shortlist…