Post by gw on Mar 9, 2007 12:09:22 GMT -1
The new Wembley has been worth the wait, and stands now as a Colosseum for our times.
Jonathan Glancey
March 9, 2007.
This year's FA Cup final will take place at the world's most ambitious, expensive and very possibly finest stadium. The crowd will chant its name in time-honoured fashion: "Wem-ber-ley!" - three roaring syllables evoking the boisterous spirit of our national football ground, and the Anglo-Saxon settlement from which it rises.
And, how it rises: a vast, saucer-shaped, 90,000-seat arena, twice the size and four times as high as the old Wembley, and crowned (although its principal architect, Norman Foster, describes this as a "tiara") with an eye-boggling steel arch, so high that the London Eye could be bowled through it with room to spare, and so substantial that a Eurostar train might just run up, through and down its great length. These expresses disappear off to Paris; for the record, the new Wembley stadium is twice the size of the Stade de France.
The incoming crowd might be surprised to learn that there is a historical precedent to their chant. When this settlement in northwest London was first recorded, in around 825AD, its name was Wembalea. When did it become polite, clipped, two-syllable Wembley? Perhaps when this was the home of Wembley Park, a handsome 18th-century pile with landscaped gardens laid out, from 1793, by Humphrey Repton. The Wem-ber-ley of popular culture, though, was shaped from the late 1880s when this neo-classical demesne was snapped up by Sir Edward Watkin, the heroically ambitious chairman of the Metropolitan Railway. Here, at the centre of what we would call a "theme park" today, Sir Edward set out to build a bigger and better version of the Eiffel tower, designed by British architects and engineers. It was to have drawn huge crowds from across the country, who would come by rail to Wembley, a Wonder of the Modern World.
Things did not go quite as planned for Sir Edward. His tower never reached further than its first stage - 155ft - and "Watkin's Folly" was demolished in 1907 after a decade of neglect. Nor did the Metropolitan magnate ever manage to build his dream railway from Manchester to Paris via Wembley Park, the City and a Channel tunnel.
Things, though, have a way of working out. Watkin may have over-reached himself financially, but his Wembley leisure park became home to both the hugely successful British Empire Exhibition of 1924-5 (more than 27 million visitors) and the first Wembley Stadium, designed by the brilliant young structural engineer Owen Williams (1890-1969) with architects John Simpson and Maxwell Ayerton. Completed in just 300 days at a cost of £750,000, the stadium was a bravura achievement by any standards, although after a long, hard life, it was way past its sell-by date as the end of the 20th century approached.
The new stadium has been, to put it politely, a bit of a struggle to complete, and rather more expensive than it was ever meant to be. When the Australian contractor Multiplex bid for the job of building the stadium in 2000, the total construction cost was put at £326.5m; by the time the bid had been signed, it had risen to £445m. The stadium was to have opened in 2003, but as work only began in September 2002, this was clearly an impossible goal. The next completion date was to have been in time for the May 2006 FA Cup final, by which time the price of the stadium had risen to £757m. A year later, and ready for the 2007 FA Cup final, the final figure is £798m. (As we went to press, what construction firms call "practical completion" was imminent but had not yet taken place.)
And yet, when the first crowds come here, to football matches, to rock concerts, and to at least some of the events planned for the 2012 Olympics, they are unlikely to think much about how long the stadium took to build or how much it has cost. The final bill is no more than that of the Millennium Experience, that dim, furtively managed, aggressively spun load of codswallop housed in the still empty Millennium Dome on the wind-scythed North Greenwich peninsula.
No, what they will see, and experience, is a "Wem-ber-ley" of sporting dreams, although nothing like its predecessor. The swooping, smooth concrete arena is wrapped around with five levels of atriums, walkways, cafes, bars, shops and restaurants. These wide and lofty interiors feel more like some stupendous airport - Foster's Chep Lak Kok at Hong Kong, perhaps - than the inside of a sports stadium. Although subdued in terms of colour, corridors, walkways, escalator shafts and restaurants are fitted out and finished to a high standard. Colour, by the way, has been deliberately spurned; the idea here is for the events and crowds themselves to add all the light, life and colour needed to bring this stately, steely-grey building to hugely animated life. Inside and outside, walls and ceilings have been designed so that banners, flags and pennants can hang from them. By night, the stadium will light up - a sporting coat of many colours - while the great arch, visible from many miles, will shine above all.
Actually, it will glow more than shine: there has been much concern about light and sound pollution at Wembley. The stadium itself is designed to swallow its own roar during matches, while floodlights and other lighting have been designed to keep what stars can be seen above London shining.
To get to the arena - which will be much easier than it used to be now that Wembley Park Underground station has been completely, and generously, rebuilt - ticket-holders will pass through a great wrap of places to meet, eat and greet. And drink. Infamously, the old Wembley had fewer than 400 lavatories; the new Wembley, although decidedly warmer and thus kinder to the bladder, sports no fewer than 2,618. A world record. They are decently designed, too - as least as good as you'd expect to find in a well-managed airport.
Throughout, the stadium exudes a robust confidence and easy grandeur. Those huge sums of money have evidently been well spent, although what Multiplex has delivered is definitely not a cultural centre. There are no artworks on display, no plaques, nor cups, nor even signed and framed photographs (as yet); there is absolutely nothing to get in the way of the building's primary purpose, that of watching games in what is surely one of the world's finest arenas, and of handling a huge volume of people out for a good time.
The arena itself is truly breathtaking. A vast undulating wave of sculpted concrete, set about with 90,000 red plastic seats, each with plenty of leg room and uninterrupted views, it shelters beneath a gigantic yet unobtrusive roof, all 11 acres and 7,000 tonnes of it supported by Foster's 133-metre high, 315-metre long "tiara" of steel. If rain is predicted before an event, the roof, in three sections, can be closed over the banks of seats, leaving just the lovingly tended grass pitch exposed.
Despite its size, the arena feels as intimate as any 90,000 seater that has to double up as a venue for rock concerts and athletics events could. The sheer scale of the place, however, can be judged when you discover that players will need to mount 107 steps from the pitch to the Royal Box to receive cups and plaudits; at the old stadium, were there more than a dozen? The happy relationship between the way in which the arena works and its consistent, graceful architectural flow is very much the result of the close collaboration of Foster and Partners and HOK Sport, Wembley's joint designers.
To keep profits up and the price of popular tickets down, much of the gleaming new architecture is inevitably given over to VIP boxes, venues to rent and the culture of corporate hospitality. So two of the five floors, or rings, of accommodation around the arena are given over to executive-style boxes, each boasting kitchen, bar, TV screen, yet more lavatories and wide seats with generous leg-room outside in the arena itself. The Wembley crowds will be kept away from these two floors - each with a circumference of one kilometre - as they will from the Royal Box and its purple-walled restaurant. The division of people here, though, is not about social class, but about money, pure and simple.
Equally, the whole point of the "tiara" is to ensure that Wembley is instantly recognised, not just from the skyline of central London, but on TV and computer screens worldwide. The arch is a giant advertisement for Wembley 2007, just as Watkin's "Eiffel tower" was to have been for Wembley 1907. To make sure it is seen and recognised, camera plinths have been set up inside the arena so that the arch will be in view at various points in every match broadcast.
This is 2007, so, of course, the new Wembley is a great machine for corporate sponsorship, and, on one level, it might be read as a gigantic restaurant, bar and nightclub complex. And, just as gladiators, and wild beasts, were housed and caged in the ample depths of the Roman Colosseum, so players at Wembley exist, except when they come out for air, exercise and applause in the arena, in the vaults of this immense structure. This said, the standard of changing rooms, early baths, banks of hair-dryers and all, seems gym-club high.
Wembley is truly a Colosseum for today. Has it been worth the wait, and the expense? I think so. The ticket-holding public will be treated well by this building, and although it might be hard to fall in love with such a colossus, the new stadium will surely come to be seen as a worthy successor to its hugely familiar, twin-domed predecessor.
Ultimately, though, what will make it work as well as it should is its setting. Currently, the stadium rises like some giant mushroom from an urban field that, for all its history, still seems a little detached from its surroundings. And there is much third- and fourth-rate building here - the worst of the 1960s-80s - that really ought to go the way of the old stadium. A new development is beginning to wrap its way around the new venue. Ideally, this should offer plenty of scope for small, local enterprises as well as big business and hotel chains, because it is they, most of all, that could bring life and warmth to this battered and bruised London suburb, especially on days when the stadium itself is merely ticking over and the great shout "Wem-ber-ley!" is another day away.
Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic
Jonathan Glancey
March 9, 2007.
This year's FA Cup final will take place at the world's most ambitious, expensive and very possibly finest stadium. The crowd will chant its name in time-honoured fashion: "Wem-ber-ley!" - three roaring syllables evoking the boisterous spirit of our national football ground, and the Anglo-Saxon settlement from which it rises.
And, how it rises: a vast, saucer-shaped, 90,000-seat arena, twice the size and four times as high as the old Wembley, and crowned (although its principal architect, Norman Foster, describes this as a "tiara") with an eye-boggling steel arch, so high that the London Eye could be bowled through it with room to spare, and so substantial that a Eurostar train might just run up, through and down its great length. These expresses disappear off to Paris; for the record, the new Wembley stadium is twice the size of the Stade de France.
The incoming crowd might be surprised to learn that there is a historical precedent to their chant. When this settlement in northwest London was first recorded, in around 825AD, its name was Wembalea. When did it become polite, clipped, two-syllable Wembley? Perhaps when this was the home of Wembley Park, a handsome 18th-century pile with landscaped gardens laid out, from 1793, by Humphrey Repton. The Wem-ber-ley of popular culture, though, was shaped from the late 1880s when this neo-classical demesne was snapped up by Sir Edward Watkin, the heroically ambitious chairman of the Metropolitan Railway. Here, at the centre of what we would call a "theme park" today, Sir Edward set out to build a bigger and better version of the Eiffel tower, designed by British architects and engineers. It was to have drawn huge crowds from across the country, who would come by rail to Wembley, a Wonder of the Modern World.
Things did not go quite as planned for Sir Edward. His tower never reached further than its first stage - 155ft - and "Watkin's Folly" was demolished in 1907 after a decade of neglect. Nor did the Metropolitan magnate ever manage to build his dream railway from Manchester to Paris via Wembley Park, the City and a Channel tunnel.
Things, though, have a way of working out. Watkin may have over-reached himself financially, but his Wembley leisure park became home to both the hugely successful British Empire Exhibition of 1924-5 (more than 27 million visitors) and the first Wembley Stadium, designed by the brilliant young structural engineer Owen Williams (1890-1969) with architects John Simpson and Maxwell Ayerton. Completed in just 300 days at a cost of £750,000, the stadium was a bravura achievement by any standards, although after a long, hard life, it was way past its sell-by date as the end of the 20th century approached.
The new stadium has been, to put it politely, a bit of a struggle to complete, and rather more expensive than it was ever meant to be. When the Australian contractor Multiplex bid for the job of building the stadium in 2000, the total construction cost was put at £326.5m; by the time the bid had been signed, it had risen to £445m. The stadium was to have opened in 2003, but as work only began in September 2002, this was clearly an impossible goal. The next completion date was to have been in time for the May 2006 FA Cup final, by which time the price of the stadium had risen to £757m. A year later, and ready for the 2007 FA Cup final, the final figure is £798m. (As we went to press, what construction firms call "practical completion" was imminent but had not yet taken place.)
And yet, when the first crowds come here, to football matches, to rock concerts, and to at least some of the events planned for the 2012 Olympics, they are unlikely to think much about how long the stadium took to build or how much it has cost. The final bill is no more than that of the Millennium Experience, that dim, furtively managed, aggressively spun load of codswallop housed in the still empty Millennium Dome on the wind-scythed North Greenwich peninsula.
No, what they will see, and experience, is a "Wem-ber-ley" of sporting dreams, although nothing like its predecessor. The swooping, smooth concrete arena is wrapped around with five levels of atriums, walkways, cafes, bars, shops and restaurants. These wide and lofty interiors feel more like some stupendous airport - Foster's Chep Lak Kok at Hong Kong, perhaps - than the inside of a sports stadium. Although subdued in terms of colour, corridors, walkways, escalator shafts and restaurants are fitted out and finished to a high standard. Colour, by the way, has been deliberately spurned; the idea here is for the events and crowds themselves to add all the light, life and colour needed to bring this stately, steely-grey building to hugely animated life. Inside and outside, walls and ceilings have been designed so that banners, flags and pennants can hang from them. By night, the stadium will light up - a sporting coat of many colours - while the great arch, visible from many miles, will shine above all.
Actually, it will glow more than shine: there has been much concern about light and sound pollution at Wembley. The stadium itself is designed to swallow its own roar during matches, while floodlights and other lighting have been designed to keep what stars can be seen above London shining.
To get to the arena - which will be much easier than it used to be now that Wembley Park Underground station has been completely, and generously, rebuilt - ticket-holders will pass through a great wrap of places to meet, eat and greet. And drink. Infamously, the old Wembley had fewer than 400 lavatories; the new Wembley, although decidedly warmer and thus kinder to the bladder, sports no fewer than 2,618. A world record. They are decently designed, too - as least as good as you'd expect to find in a well-managed airport.
Throughout, the stadium exudes a robust confidence and easy grandeur. Those huge sums of money have evidently been well spent, although what Multiplex has delivered is definitely not a cultural centre. There are no artworks on display, no plaques, nor cups, nor even signed and framed photographs (as yet); there is absolutely nothing to get in the way of the building's primary purpose, that of watching games in what is surely one of the world's finest arenas, and of handling a huge volume of people out for a good time.
The arena itself is truly breathtaking. A vast undulating wave of sculpted concrete, set about with 90,000 red plastic seats, each with plenty of leg room and uninterrupted views, it shelters beneath a gigantic yet unobtrusive roof, all 11 acres and 7,000 tonnes of it supported by Foster's 133-metre high, 315-metre long "tiara" of steel. If rain is predicted before an event, the roof, in three sections, can be closed over the banks of seats, leaving just the lovingly tended grass pitch exposed.
Despite its size, the arena feels as intimate as any 90,000 seater that has to double up as a venue for rock concerts and athletics events could. The sheer scale of the place, however, can be judged when you discover that players will need to mount 107 steps from the pitch to the Royal Box to receive cups and plaudits; at the old stadium, were there more than a dozen? The happy relationship between the way in which the arena works and its consistent, graceful architectural flow is very much the result of the close collaboration of Foster and Partners and HOK Sport, Wembley's joint designers.
To keep profits up and the price of popular tickets down, much of the gleaming new architecture is inevitably given over to VIP boxes, venues to rent and the culture of corporate hospitality. So two of the five floors, or rings, of accommodation around the arena are given over to executive-style boxes, each boasting kitchen, bar, TV screen, yet more lavatories and wide seats with generous leg-room outside in the arena itself. The Wembley crowds will be kept away from these two floors - each with a circumference of one kilometre - as they will from the Royal Box and its purple-walled restaurant. The division of people here, though, is not about social class, but about money, pure and simple.
Equally, the whole point of the "tiara" is to ensure that Wembley is instantly recognised, not just from the skyline of central London, but on TV and computer screens worldwide. The arch is a giant advertisement for Wembley 2007, just as Watkin's "Eiffel tower" was to have been for Wembley 1907. To make sure it is seen and recognised, camera plinths have been set up inside the arena so that the arch will be in view at various points in every match broadcast.
This is 2007, so, of course, the new Wembley is a great machine for corporate sponsorship, and, on one level, it might be read as a gigantic restaurant, bar and nightclub complex. And, just as gladiators, and wild beasts, were housed and caged in the ample depths of the Roman Colosseum, so players at Wembley exist, except when they come out for air, exercise and applause in the arena, in the vaults of this immense structure. This said, the standard of changing rooms, early baths, banks of hair-dryers and all, seems gym-club high.
Wembley is truly a Colosseum for today. Has it been worth the wait, and the expense? I think so. The ticket-holding public will be treated well by this building, and although it might be hard to fall in love with such a colossus, the new stadium will surely come to be seen as a worthy successor to its hugely familiar, twin-domed predecessor.
Ultimately, though, what will make it work as well as it should is its setting. Currently, the stadium rises like some giant mushroom from an urban field that, for all its history, still seems a little detached from its surroundings. And there is much third- and fourth-rate building here - the worst of the 1960s-80s - that really ought to go the way of the old stadium. A new development is beginning to wrap its way around the new venue. Ideally, this should offer plenty of scope for small, local enterprises as well as big business and hotel chains, because it is they, most of all, that could bring life and warmth to this battered and bruised London suburb, especially on days when the stadium itself is merely ticking over and the great shout "Wem-ber-ley!" is another day away.
Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic
