The Merry Month : Green buildings
Robert Merry, an independent Stone Consultant and Project Manager who ran his own company for 17 years and now also runs training courses on project management, gives his personal slant on the stone industry.
The lights are on but no-one is at home.
Sunday evening, driving through London we stopped outside One New Change, the recently opened retail and office block designed by Jean Nouvel. The lights were on but the store was closed.
It is a glass-clad steel structure with three storeys of retail and another four storeys of office space above. There is a small amount of very attractive limestone beneath your feet but definitely not enough stone – unlike its neighbour, the 400-year-old St Paul’s Cathedral across the road.
There has to be a question mark over the need for another shopping centre, full of all the usual high street brands, particularly one lit up like a Christmas tree.
Looking on the developer’s website I see the building has superb sustainability credentials. It has an ‘Excellent’ BREEAM rating. There are condensing boilers, heat recovery, variable speed drives and demand-led control. I could go on.
In an age where we are extolled to turn off every unused light, why is a closed shopping centre in the middle of the empty City of London at 9pm on a Sunday evening ablaze with lights?
Is it one rule for us and another for commercial enterprise, just as long as they have all the latest high tech, box ticking sustainability gadgetry?
Does this absolve them from the simple task of turning the lights off? What’s the point of conserving energy if you just go ahead and waste it somewhere else?
Security is not an issue. As we walked around we saw at least three security people and spotted a camera at every turn.
The escalators are still on, as well. They are half speed, until you step on them, when they speed up. Neat. Until I remember European cities travelled through in the early hours. There the escalators don’t appear to be working until you approach them, when suddenly they start up. What happened at New Change?
I rode past this building regularly during its construction and wondered at the time if the developers might be building something with an open space, with fountains or a kindergarten for office workers to leave their children. But there’s no change on New Change, I’m afraid.
In complete contrast to this edifice to modern man and our need to work and shop ’til will drop, is the breathtaking exhibition of landscape photography at Stone Theatre, which opened this month.
A collaboration between The Photographer’s Gallery and Stone Theatre. ‘The Earth Only Endures’ brings three award-winning British and internationally renowned photographers (Mike Perry, Jem Southam and Stephen Vaughan) together under one roof. The photographs, on huge canvasses, challenge us to examine the human impact on natural resources.
The exhibition features a commission by Stone Theatre, who describe themselves as artists in stone, for Mike Perry to photograph the Lasa Marble Quarry in the Southern Tirol of Northern Italy. Waterfall and Rockface are the quite stunning results.
It won’t change the world, but it will change the way you think about it. Stone Theatre has made a really positive contribution to the sustainability debate and they are one of us, so go see the exhibition and support them. It is at Hercules Road, SE1, near Waterloo.
And they do turn the lights off at night.