No d’anger, he d’idn’t mean it
Earlier this month, we reported that Grosvenor staff have been referring to Antony Gormley’s £1m habitable structure – part of Grosvenor’s proposed new 50,000 sq ft boutique hotel at 8 Balderton Street in Mayfair, W1 – as “Bob” (17 July, p114).
It seems that the affectionate moniker was not plucked from thin air by Grosvenor staff but bestowed in homage to Cllr Robert Davis, Westminster council’s deputy leader.
Davis seems to have been thinking along the same lines. We hear he was so taken with the hotel plans that, when signing off a consent to redevelop a building occupied by car hire firm Avis as a hotel, he suggested that the new venue might be called the “D’Avis Hotel” – after himself.
Diary can only imagine the developers’ polite demurrals before they got the joke.
As quango dominoes start to fall, what takes their place?
The quangos have started to tumble in the West Midlands. With Advantage West Midlands crippled by funding slashes, it was almost inevitable that dependent groups Walsall Regeneration Company and Wolverhampton Development Company would not survive. A current player in the West Midlands market echoes the views of many when he says: “They’ve been scrapped without any understanding of what fills the void. We’re in for a bumpy ride.”
Time for an office sweepstake, perhaps.
Budget launch lures rock star
News last week that Land Securities is pressing ahead with its 1m sq ft Trinity Leeds shopping centre, after a hiatus of 15 months, is giving the retail market something to cheer about (In Depth, p40).
However, in this age of austerity, shopping centre openings are not the lavish events they used to be. Hammerson set the tone two weeks ago, when it opted to mark the opening of The Rock in Bury not with the usual razzmatazz, but by trying to stage the world’s largest air-guitar ensemble – a record held by an Australian school, which managed 1,883 air guitarists.
Sadly, the attempt failed. However, it did attract the attention of a local star – former Hollyoaks actress Gemma Atkinson (right).
Tasteless title
It seems that the run of food-related nicknames for new developments in the City of London (the Gherkin, the Can of Ham, etc) has come to a slippery end.
Mulling over the first major building application to go before them this year, the City’s planning committee this week gave the go-ahead for Heatherfield’s Will Alsop-designed, £250m, 290,500 sq ft, six-star Puddle Dock hotel – nicknamed the Spaceship by some (News, p20).
But pondering the scheme’s alias, one City planner remarked that “Spaceship” seemed a strange nickname given the building’s elongated shape. “Perhaps,” he suggested helpfully, “the Slug would be more appropriate.”
Not another CGI This week, try LEGO
It was only a matter of time before LEGO made an appearance in Diary’s campaign to showcase alternatives to unimaginative computer-generated building images. We now bring you Shelbourne Development Group’s 150-storey Chicago Spire scheme – made of everyone’s favourite bricks.
The plastic model is the work of architectural artist Adam Reed Tucker, who has built 15 LEGO models of US landmarks, each using as many as 450,000 bricks, as part of an exhibition currently running at Washington’s National Building Museum.
However, while Tucker’s replica is available to view until September 2011, you’ll be waiting a bit longer to see the real thing – which has stalled as a result of the recession.
