My name is Julia Barfield; I'm in practice with my husband David Marks. We started the practice in 1989. At the time I had been working at Foster Associates and he previously had been working for Richard Rogers. We started and were very fortunate to win a competition which was a fantastic springboard for the practice.
It was a competition to design a bridge for the future, it was organised by the National Engineering Magazine and the Institute of Structural Engineers, and the idea was that it was a bridge that was inspired by nature but very much looking to the future. And we worked with Jane Wernick - an engineer who worked with Arup's at the time - and came up with the idea that the biggest bridge probably that nature had designed was a spine of a dinosaur. We actually based the bridge design on the spine of a dinosaur, in the sense that it was built on one side only, it had a series of vertebrae, the bridge was held in place by tension cables like tendons underneath the bridge, and it was actually in a Y shape so that the actual bridge, which was designed to be a passenger bridge, could take a platform in the top part of the Y. And then when the bridge rested on the other side, the tension cables would actually keep it in place. The bridge won the ideas competition.
After that we started working on a number of other projects, notably one for Battlebridge Basin, a basin in the Regent's Canal, this was for a client who wanted office space. And we proposed a building across the entrance to the Basin which became known as the Bridge building. And this we developed again with Arup's - not with Jane - and we had a number of conversations with Peter Rice in developing the structure, because obviously the entrance to the Basin had to be kept free so we were talking about quite a large span and we wanted to express the structure on the outside. So we had literally an arched structure which then supported the building, suspended over the water. This was very interesting because we learned on the project about the power of consultation. We went to see the Royal Fine Art Commission from whom we got a very complimentary report. We went to see the British Waterways Board; we went to see everybody who had anything to do with the site and its surroundings because we knew that one of the chief planners in Islington was not keen on the project. But because we'd done this consultation, we actually gained planning permission without having to go to appeal. We've always, as a result of winning the competition for the Bridge of the Future, and anyway as a general approach, worked very closely with engineers. We tend not to regard them as two, as separate, but actually in any beautiful building the structure and the architecture is combined seamlessly. In any great cathedral the structure is part of the architecture. You can't really separate the two and this is very much the approach we've taken in all of our projects where appropriate.
One of our foreign projects was one for the World Sea Centre. It's the concept that we developed for the Mediterranean. And we had a design for something called the Aquasphere, an aquarium to be built actually in the water. And this had a tree structure from which we hung a dome, a glass dome, but the aquarium basically containing parts of the sea with an outer ring which reflected the fishes and marine life of the area; and then an inner aquarium with a high temperature and more tropical fish. And these were the projects that we developed for quite a long time on a site near La Seine, a docklands site. It was a regeneration project, a very large site. And it was a project, a master plan for elements of leisure and it also contained educational elements and business elements and commercial elements. Sadly this project didn't get built. We also learned a lot on this because we were actually part of the development company that was developing the project. In fact David's father, Mel Marks, who started the development project that were company winners for the Millennium Wheel, were also involved on the client side.
Other projects that we worked on in a lead-up to developing the Wheel were a water sports centre mainly for young people in Liverpool to enable them to learn how to sail and to wind- surf and canoe. It was an existing project, there was an existing facility in containers by the Queen's Docks, one of the big docks on the waterside, and the proposal was by our client a development corporation, to actually provide the water sports centre within the dockside with a small area for car-parking adjacent to it. It wasn't an easy task to build a building within the dock, the dock obviously accommodated very large ships and so the docks actually are very deep, they're about thirteen metres deep before you hit the sandstone underneath Liverpool. So first of all there was a question of whether we were going to have a floating structure or a pile structure. In the end, because we did an appraisal of this with the quantity surveyor, it emerged that a floating structure would take about half of our budget. Our budget was five hundred and thirty one point two million pounds, so a floating structure would have been about six hundred thousand pounds. So we opted for a piled structure with floated pontoons all the way around it to accommodate any change of water level that there was within the dock, although this was controlled and kept to a minimum by various locks and devices like that. We went around, we looked at a number of water sport centres all over the country to see what to do and what not to do, what was best practice, and to understand how they worked. And finally we developed, through conversations with the users, the brief for the project. Really, the building emerged very much from that process as well, obviously, an understanding of the site. Another significant part of that is the fact that there is about a three point five metre difference between the water level and the dock level and this was to our advantage, keeping the boat storage which we had to accommodate, and access to the boats and the workshop which was for working on the boats actually at water level, and then all the other accommodation - which included changing rooms and offices, cafés, the lecture room and staff facilities - were all at the dock level. So people could actually just go across bridges straight into the building at that dock level. So they were able to control access to the water and to the boats. It also meant that the boats were slightly more secure than they would have been on land or even by the water. This is a building that we again worked with Jane Wernick, and developed a very simple structure which came from the piles and then branched out to a finer grid at the upper level. We were fortunate that we got an award for this, in fact a number of awards. It was considered a very successful project. Another project at the time, we won a competition for designing a local centre for a developer of a business park called the Thames Valley Park. It was a project for a large exhibition centre on the subject of IT [Information Technology], because the park was designed to attract IT business. So the Science Museum was involved in the development of this museum or centre of IT. Then there was a one hundred and fifty bed hotel, there were also leisure facilities and local shops. It was meant to be the local centre, like a town centre within this business park. There were restaurants and a conference centre. It was actually a very substantial project. At that time we were working out of a shed on the side of our house, and the practice actually rose in number very rapidly when we started practice. At the time of winning the competition it rose to about sixteen and it was gradually taking over the house. And it was a requirement of this client that we actually move out of the house and get a proper office; which we did, and we bought an office in 1990 fairly close to our house, and six months later the project disappeared and the recession was upon us and we had a very, very difficult few years where we had to reduce right back down to David and myself and a part-time book-keeper and secretary. It was really out of this dreadful time that the Wheel was born, because in December 1993 we were looking for something to cheer us up. We had some success in competitions and the prize money kept the practice going for six - nine months.
But it was a difficult time and when we saw a competition advertised in the Sunday Times for designing a landmark for the Millennium, we decided to have a go and came up with the idea of the Wheel. We were very disappointed to learn that actually no-one won that competition. The judge felt that none of the ideas were good enough. But we actually decided to pursue it because we thought the idea was good, and we did a back- of-an-envelope business plan which showed us that it could actually pay for itself based on the costs that we had. We had actually identified the site by that time in Jubilee Garden - the site ownership was very complex but we made an initial approach to the site owners who were not, I should say, entirely positive but they weren't exclusively negative either. So we set up a development company with David's father, Mel Marks, which we called the Millennium Wheel Company and from then on we pursued the idea of developing this, as it was then, this five hundred foot wheel, because we thought that this landmark shouldn't be something to be looked at, it should be something that people could participate in, and it should be celebratory, it should be something that would be uplifting. David came up with the idea for the Wheel on the walk between the office and the house. There's a little bridge you go over where you actually have quite a spectacular View towards the City on the one hand and Crystal Palace on the other, and that was the initial start for the idea, something that would enable one to see something from a height which, until the Wheel came, there wasn't anywhere except perhaps the dome of St. Paul's, and that of course is not accessible to everyone, and you have to walk up five hundred and something steps. And the view from there is not sufficiently high to be able to see London as a whole as we know it now. So that was how the idea was born, of having this Wheel, which is actually a very efficient way to get a large number of people up high. We pursued the project and applied for planning permission in May 1994. One quite amusing story is a conversation I had with one of the planning officers to establish what the placing position should be, and I phoned him up and explained we were planning to put in an application for a five hundred foot Wheel in Jubilee Garden. He didn't immediately put the phone down. We had quite a long conversation about whether the fee should be based on the amount of land it took up in Jubilee Gardens, should it be based on the area of a capsule, and in the end he said "just send in sixty seven pounds". We began talking to a wider group of people who had an interest in the site and Geoff Mann who was the architect for County Hall, we talked to him and he was encouraging and he told Mira Bar Hillel about the project, a journalist on the Evening Standard. She came to the office, saw the project, liked it and took it to her editor who was Stuart Stephens at the time, and he fell in love with the project and decided to run a "back the Wheel" campaign and during the summer of 1994 we ran a series of articles about the Wheel and about how good it would be for London and for the South Bank, and he talked to various eminent people about the idea, and I think he probably only printed the positive responses. People like Conran and Melvyn Bragg and Richard Rogers were all quite positive about the project very early on. So consequently we got quite a lot of exposure about the project. And at that time we were going around looking for seed funding to actually develop it. We were putting all of our own time and money into it. We had no external funding at that time. And then in December 1994 we had a lucky break, we met Bob Ayling who had just been made Managing Director, or Chief Executive rather, of British Airways and he was looking for a Millennium project at the time - the Dome hadn't even been thought about - and he was looking for a Millennium project that would really expand the appeal of BA in a fun way. And he shared the vision for the project from then on. And it has to be said that without that commitment, from Bob Ayling particularly, there is no doubt that the project would not have succeeded. There then followed a period of six months in negotiation with BA for seed funding. They loaned the Company six hundred thousand pounds and became fifty percent of the company that we had set up. It then became the British Airways Millennium Wheel and we were then able to start doing all the detailed studies that we needed to do. We started doing serious structural work with Arup's, and in fact we were involved in every part of Arup's, to the various parts of the study, both economic, environmental, structural, impact to the services like the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]; I think we did over twenty reports on all the various aspects of the report. Our strategy was that we were really trying to answer every possible question that would come up, from whatever quarter. And at that time we had also started a series of consultations. Over one hundred bodies of various sorts were consulted about the Wheel, all of the London boroughs and of course all of the statutory organisations, the PLA [Port of London Authority] was crucial, the immediate local authorities - Westminster, the City, Southwark were statutory consultees - of course English Heritage was very crucial, and then there were many local groups that we became involved with, and on the London-wide scene there was LPAC [London Planning Advisory Committee]. We did, it must have been, over fifty presentations. We actually with the help of some very, at that time, sophisticated visuals which were computer generated photo- montages, we were actually able to explain the project in such a way that, at the end of two years and this consultation period, we had, of over one hundred consultations that were done by Lambeth, over eighty percent of them had, by that time, coming either positive to the project, supporting the project or not objecting. By October 1996 we then went to Committee. We didn't go to Committee until we were reasonably confident that we had a good chance of succeeding, and in fact we did succeed. At that time the Lambeth Flaming Committee was hung. They had a rotating Chair of each of the three political parties and they had a particular meeting they all attended, and all had a prepared speech about how good the project would be for Lambeth and for the regeneration of the South Bank. There then followed a very nail-biting three weeks which was the period within which John Gummer, who was Secretary of State for the Environment, could have called the project in for public enquiry. This would have killed the project if he had done that. We heard at the last possible moment that he had decided not to call it in for public enquiry, and indeed he had made a very positive statement about how it had caught the public imagination by that time and how positive it would be for the regeneration for the South Bank. The Cross River Partnership was set up in order to try to make a better link between the North and South, actually pull some of the wealth and indeed congestion of the North, in particular areas like Covent Garden, pull that wealth across the River and then down into the south where it was so badly needed. And the Wheel is a project that fits into that criterion very well. I'd just like to talk a little bit about what we were trying to achieve in terms of the design. Of course we realised that this was a massive structure, and we were very sensitive to the fact that we were proposing to put it next to a World Heritage site, right in the centre of London. We chose this site for a number of reasons. If you draw a circle round London, you find its centre, it's virtually there on the South Bank. It was the site of the Festival of Britain so had a history of celebratory structures; and also we were very keen to centre it on the River because too often, I think, the River has been a barrier within the city rather than a focus in the city rather than providing a lifeblood to the city, which is what it potentially can.
Part of the reason for cantilevering the structure out over the River was because we wanted to really focus attention on the site. Of course that site is between the two original centres of London, the City and Westminster, so you can very easily understand the development of the city from that point.
So, coming back to the design, we were in a very sensitive area and, although we knew the structure was going to be massive, we were all the time trying to design something that was not only physically light but also visually very light. We wanted something that would sit lightly on the ground and also be light on the skyline because there was no doubt it was going to have an impact on the skyline and we wanted to ensure that that impact was positive. After all London is a very rectilinear city, there are very few circles or domes. Of course, the great dome of St. Paul's is the major exception for that. As a counterpoint to this very rectilinear city, I think that a circle, this constantly moving circle, has actually proved to be a very pointed counterpoise.
As I said, all of our studies, and we did more than one hundred studies looking at different configurations of the cables...
...the different heights of truss arrangements and depths of the truss in relation to the number of cables; we did more than one hundred studies all of which were trying to make the structure as efficient and light and beautiful as possible. These were later developed by the contractors who eventually built the project. At the end of 1996 we thought we were there with the project. We had planning permission which we thought was the hardest thing to have done. We thought we'd climbed the mountain. What little did we realise that the hardest part was yet to come, and yet was the part where we were getting the full financing. Although British Airways had provided seed funding, they didn't want to provide the full funding for the project. It wasn't their core business. So there followed a very difficult period of two years and we went into the open market place to get the funding for the project. We must have gone to one hundred banks with unsuccessful result. We actually managed to succeed in getting two banks, who turned out to be West German and Japanese, to actually sign the dotted line for the main project. Because British Airways at that time insisted on non-resource funding, we were obliged to go to a turnkey contractor who could guarantee to deliver the project for a particular price and to this deadline that of course was immovable, the deadline of the Millennium. We went out to tender for this and the successful company was Mitsubishi, and this was in December 1997. They convinced us they could build the project for a particular cost and build it in time. They then had two years to build it. However, by April 1998 it was clear that they were experiencing difficulties. There had been a very serious slump in South East Asia which may have affected them. In April they came back to us saying they couldn't build the Wheel to our design, but they could build it to a different design.
They presented us with some capsules which were traditional hanging capsules which were basically boxes, semi-glazed and hanging controlled by gravity. And this was the point in the project where we thought we had come across an insurmountable problem because our partners wanted to accept this drastic redesign and we had to say "No". And thankfully we were in a position within the Company, being part of the client, to be able to do this. And we killed the project off for about a day. The construction manager, Mace, who was advising us at that time, were able to patch it up with Mitsubishi for a few months, but by the summer of 1998 it was clear that it wasn't going to last, and there were a number of crucial meetings at a very high level with British Airways and with the people who were eventually going to be our main contractor, that is Hollandia for structure and POMA in France for the capsules. Dave and Mace had these crucial meetings with them at which Hollandia and POMA tentatively agreed that they could actually become principal contractors under a management contract organised by Mace. In fact at the meeting with the Chief Executive of Hollandia, a very memorable meeting, he actually phoned up his immediate rivals asking whether they had the required man hours that he would need to be able to meet the program. And of course by that time we had a two-year project and only fifteen months to complete it because of all the various delays. Thankfully Hollandia and POMA agreed to do the project within the time scale. And then we were off. One of the aspects of the project that I think in the end, turned out to be the most successful, was that it was a very trans-European project. As I say, the main structure - the detailed design and the construction - was being done by Hollandia. There were a number of reasons for choosing Hollandia one of which was that their work by the water, because right from the beginning we had identified that we wanted to do as much work off-site as possible, and bring the very large pieces up the river, and they had work that was perfectly located in the water in Holland. They also had this unique experience of building very large scale structures that moved. They built the barriers that go across the mouth of the Rhine which are two curved barriers, each the length of the Eiffel Tower, that move into place and prevent Holland from flooding. So they had this unique experience. Going to Hollandia, they also had this unique experience of building ski capsules that had this constant movement of carrying people up with their skis to ski slopes.
And although they had never designed or built capsules as sophisticated as we were asking them to do, they had this unique combination of skills that made them the perfect choice. Although it has to be said, we looked at many, many different kinds of manufacturers from coach builders to boat builders to car builders, before we found that right combination. It took a long time to come to that point. So we had the main parts of the Wheel being built in Holland and France. The main hub and spindle was manufactured in the Czech Republic; this was a very large cast item, it was built out of seven pieces each of which, in the casting, had to be poured Within two minutes and then these huge elements of steel then had a month to cool down. Quite an extraordinary place, the Skoda works the Skoda foundry. Each of the main foundries in Europe, they have their own recipes, their own combinations of steel which they guard very strongly. It's almost like alchemy the way that these specifications for these different types of poured steel are made. So the spindle came from the Czech Republic, the capsules from France, the cables came from Italy - Tensoteci - they were woven cables, lock-core cables, which had a special feature incorporated into them where one particular spiral of the cable was set in to prevent the vibrations on the cables was something that they hadn't done before. And another important part of the picture, the story, the jigsaw puzzle if you like, comes also from Italy, from near Venice, where we made the glass.
The capsules are probably the most innovative element on the project overall. They required a lot of development because, although the technology of each of the pieces was fairly well known, the combination of these elements and the way they were used was quite innovative, because we wanted to have the capsules on the outside of the Wheel so that the view was completely unimpeded, and this meant that we needed a stability system which kept the capsules absolutely horizontal. We didn't want a situation where you would get the hanging capsules, where if everybody went to one side, could actually start rocking. So this stability system was developed with POMA and involved a motor and gears underneath the floor, which are then connected to an encoder in the middle of the Wheel, which then positions each capsule relative to the Wheel as a whole and actually determines the speed at which the capsule is turning, and ensures that the floors of the capsules are kept horizontal. There's also an inclinometer in the Wheel so that if any local increase in load, with everyone going to one side, then it will pick that up and adjust for it.
Other systems incorporated in the capsules are the heating and ventilation systems which are also under the floor, and the capsules are comfort-cooled and the same heat-pump elements, packaged heat pump elements, heat it as well as cool it. There's also a communication system, there's two CCTV [Closed Circuit Television] cameras and there's communication systems between the capsules and the control room on the boarding platform to ensure that if anything does happen, people can be kept calm and informed as to what is going on. The whole construction period was testament to the ability of all the contractors and all the people involved in the project to co-operate. Even though they came from different cultures, different languages, there was this overwhelming vision and goal which was shared by everybody, to succeed to have this Wheel built by December 1999. And I have to say that, by and large, we succeeded.
We had some difficult periods when we were trying to lift the Wheel. Because Hollandia, in November 1998, came up with this brilliant construction method whereby, instead of building it vertically, which was what we had been working on up to that point, they proposed that it was build horizontally in the River...
...and then it should be lifted in one piece. They did this for two reasons, one of which was site safety - it's clearly much safer for men to be welding and working at lower levels, at river level, than at one hundred and thirty five feet in the air - and they proposed this was actually a quicker way to build it, as by that time our program was very, very tight.
However, this was, we think, the biggest single object of that weight that had been lifted. It was almost like a piece of theatre when it was lifted. Hundreds of people turned out to watch this thing happening in the middle of their city. Sadly, the first time we didn't succeed. But I think what it did do was actually to make people aware what an engineering feat was being attempted here. There was a kind of spirit of "phoenix rising from the flame".
The press were very forgiving and actually wanted us to succeed and a month later we did. The capsules, when they were eventually put on, were put on in eight days, in record time, and the Wheel was up and turning by New Year's Eve 1999. We didn't succeed in having people in it but, to my mind, that was not important. We got the Wheel up and turning and we had a fabulous celebration.
So the Wheel was up at the end of 1999. We had an amazing year following that. I think the significance of the response to the Wheel was how many people changed their mind completely when it went up, when it actually rose onto the London skyline. The reaction has been quite overwhelming. I don't think we could really predict it at all, what a positive reaction we could have got from such a wide variety of people. It seems to have an almost universal appeal which has been very heartening. Predicted figures for the first year were two point two million. Well, we had three and a half million in the first ten months. It is a very hard act to follow.
We of course have now moved on. The project was so overwhelming, just completely dominating our lives for six years in developing it, that when we turned around after we had finished it was almost like starting again. We'd been spending the last year redirecting and redefining the office, but we have worked on other things as well. But now we're really trying to identify where we want to go and how we're going to get there.
One of the most significant projects that we're working on at the moment, I think, is something that we call the Skyhouse project. We identify that London has of course many problems, but the two major problems are transport around the city and housing. This project that we're proposing is really building on the kind of thoughts that have been expressed in the Urban Strategy Plan developed by Richard Rogers where the whole strategy is one for an intense kind of city, saying that the densities could be raised. We're proposing a very high-rise housing block. In the past high-rise housing has had a very bad name for a number of reasons, one of which is that the people that went into them have no choice about going into them. They were built to very low specification and the maintenance was also of very poor quality. So high rise housing in this country developed a very bad name, but now people are re-evaluating it.
Our proposal is one which combines commercial housing with key-worker housing. We don't have a site yet but we're looking at various sites in the south and east of London which have the property of being near a transport interchange which we think is very important for something like this. And the height, we are talking about a building between forty and fifty storeys, which is every twelve floors has communal spaces, either park spaces, or conservatory spaces, or health clubs, or possibly crèches or schools. This will be determined when we have a site, determined by what is absent in the area. The proportion of key-worker housing will probably be between twenty five to thirty percent and the rest will be commercial housing which will have as its starting point fabulous views which we know from the Wheel are very successful.
We're also working on a conservatory for Regent's Park which has yet to be confirmed but it's a very exciting project. Originally when Queen Mary's Garden was laid out there was a very beautiful conservatory by Decimus Burton at the end of the principal avenue which still exists but the conservatory doesn't. We were approached by Regent's Park to restore the lost focus and rebuild a conservatory, but a contemporary conservatory, one of our time. That is a project that we're working on at the moment, also with Jane Wernick.
We're also working on a pier for Tate Britain which will be a starting point for a round-river trip to a number of locations, but possibly one that might be successful is one going to the Wheel and then on to Tate Modern and back again, a kind of "Tate a Tate" trip. And we're working on a number of smaller projects, for schools in the South Bank area, and a cycle activity and adventure playground in Lambeth which is small but a very nice little project. Those are the main projects that we're working on at the moment.
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