I photographed the SAGE centre for FM World magazine in late September. It was the first time that I had really paid much attention to the building and I thought that it was pretty cool. I like the fact that internally there are three discreet structures. The two main music halls, One and Two and the smaller Northern Rock Foundation Hall. The three structures are acoustically separated, literally by a few millimetres and the glazed envelope forms an enclosed public space. A path leads through the space and allows people to walk along the Tyne to the Baltic which is not far up river, but also to use the space in much the same way as a street with a cafe, bar and rest areas. Walking through this building I was struck by the very similar experiences I had when visiting London’s City Hall and 30 St Mary’s Axe. There is a definite spatial signature and the attention to detailing was likewise very tight. It is quite surprising that the back of house area is quite small; offices, stores and dressing rooms. One of the key design features at this level seems to be the public bars at the front of the building. These are used by both artists and audience and add to the informal atmosphere of the buidling. Proximity to the Tyne Bridge and the river itself is a reminder of how compact Newcastle is and there is a clear view through to the city. When I was there, an installation of Beat Streuli photographs was also in place. A second highlight of the trip was also the High level Bridge and my walk up, almost straight up, from the river level up to the castle.

The new children’s eye centre at Moorfield’s Eye Hospital, London EC1.
Architects: Penoyre & Prasad LLP

Photo © David Cowlard 2007

At 06:00 on the 12 June 2008 Blueprint magazine and the Office for Subversive Architecture installed a VIEWING PLATFORM to overlook the construction site of the London 2012 Olympics. This was in the spirit of opening up public engagement with architecture. The platform was approx. 400m from the Wick Lane entrance to the Greenway Cycle route, Hackney Wick, London E3.

Unlike Dubai, Abu Dhabi has started the process of transformation at a later stage and there is an existing urban fabric that may well shape future developments. One of the most striking things about the city is that there are both generic and local, or regional, influences at play. The city has a large residential population so mixed use is the pattern. There is also an earlier ‘layer’ of development strongly influenced by a late modernist aesthetic, seen clearly in buildings such as the Abu Dhabi Public Library and Cultural Centre designed by Hisham N. Ashkouri and built in the early 1980s. In a similar way, the strong Muslim outlook of the Emirate influences the urban fabric with a mosque building program that extends from the grand Sheikh Zayed Mosque to much smaller local ones that accompany housing developments. It is likely that over the next 10 -15 years the city will radically transform. What is unique with much of the newly proposed developments is that they are going to be created with an attitude and confidence that does not set upper limits on the imagination.

I spent a few days in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in March. I decided to shoot prolifically on the visit and this is one of my favourite pictures from that series. I was struck by many things in the few days that I was there. First of all is the sheer speed and scale of developments. The next thing that got me was the number of workers involved in the construction process. It seemed that there were so many more than you would see on British sites. Another thing that started to intrigue me was the way that every building site announced the arrival of the new building within with an ‘idealised’ vision of the emerging tower. This always showed the building isolated from its surroundings with clear blue skies surrounding it. This clear view was always interrupted by reality where the neighbouring towers were in competition for every available bit of the skyline.