Architectural patronage

There was a certain sort of inevitability about MediaCityUK winning the 2011 Carbuncle Cup, set up by Building Design. The nominations were by readers, but the final judges were Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian, Rowan Moore of the Sunday Times and Hugh Pearman of The Observer.

BD Editor Ellis Woodman sets the context: "What we are presented with ..... is a crazed accumulation of development, in which every aimlessly gesticulating building sports at least three different cladding treatments. The overriding sense is one of extreme anxiety on the part of the architects — an unholy alliance of Wilkinson Eyre, Chapman Taylor and Fairhursts — about the development’s isolation, 20 minutes’ tram ride from the centre of Manchester. The incessant visual excitement reads as a desperate attempt to compensate for an underlying lack of urban vitality".

Rowan Moore lays into the corporate facades of the buildings to be used by Salford University: “One is not looking for the Gate of Honour at Gonville & Caius, but… something !”

And Glancey's key thought: "How uncreative can a “Creative Quarter” be? And which truly creative person would ever want to work in such a place?”

Hugh Pearman must have been outvoted, because he was surprisingly warm about the development as a whole, last November.

The truth is that the scribes of architecture have still not forgiven the BBC for sins against signature designers - and have no love for the developers behind Salford Quays. Here's the scoop from Ellis Woodman....

"No-one can be too surprised that Peel Holdings — responsible for a wretched riverside redevelopment in Glasgow and with another planned for Liverpool — is behind MediaCityUK but quite how the BBC has stooped this low is hard to fathom. In 2003 the corporation published Building the BBC: A Return to Form, which trumpeted its newfound role as a patron of architecture.  'The BBC has found its nerve again and risen to its role as national champion and patron of the arts,' wrote Dan Cruickshank in the book’s foreword. Well, it lost it pretty quickly thereafter. David Chipperfield [Pacific Quay] and Richard MacCormac [Broadcasting House] were ditched from their commissions mid-job, while Foreign Office Architects’ project [A W12 Music Centre] never even got off the drawing board".

Will Broadcasting House make it two in a row in 2012 ?