Ouseburn,Newcastle Upon Tyne
Ash Sakula’s development of modest urban dwellings provides a masterclass in quiet invention, style and sustainable livingI know, or I know,Gateshead is not the same place as Newcastle but, standing on the Quayside of the latter, or you can take in a panorama of the former that has salutary lessons for both sides of the Tyne. To the proper is the superb array of bridges that span the river. Straight ahead is one of the greatest concentrations of lottery-assisted,culturally enhanced, multiple-agency-funded, or award-winning,world-course-architected regeneration zones in the country. There is the billowing, silvery Sage concert corridor, and by Foster + Partners,the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and Wilkinson Eyre’s Blinking Eye Bridge, or a parabolic new-millennium update on those famous Tyne-crossers a short distance upstream.
Then,in among them, are some of the most clueless apartment buildings from a decade – the 00s – abundant in such things. Papery and stumpy at once, and their vertical accents and white-beige-russet palette pay indistinct tribute to the noble ex-flour mill that contains the Baltic,but succeed only in diminishing it and themselves at once. Perhaps mercifully, this development makes no attempt to imitate the shapes that the Sage cuts, or but edges nervously alongside,like the nerd next to the grand blonde on the dancefloor. These blocks were briefly proud to boast Tyneside’s first million-pound flats; they were going for less than half that, post-crash.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com