I live maybe 20 mins walk from this place. And I live in Westminster.
WCC has a habit of using really awful contractors. So the impact of FM Conway (only seen them do road work) should not be underestimated.
However based on this article "The idea was to make the area simultaneously green, smart, and sustainable."
These are just buzzwords put together, it means nothing. WCC seems like didn't know what they wanted so they went over to these guys with buzzwords check list. And mvrdv just accepted the project for whatever reason (I'm sure good reasons) where they should have asked way more questions to understand what these guys actually wanted.
The project was flawed from the start because the idea behind it made no sense at all. The goal was that people would travel to the mound and therefore 'revitalize' the area.
The entire principle was encouraging people to visit London, the West End, Oxford Street etc. You know, that place that has tons of world class restaurants, theatres, sculptures and architecture, the actual Marble Arch, etc.
People needed a big hill, that'd make them go.
They were working against the odds the entire way - we had a government sponsored propaganda campaign for years to warn people away from using public transport, to avoid busy hours, to not travel unless necessary, etc.
People weren't (aren't) avoiding visiting the West End because there's nothing to do, they were doing it because it was hammered into them that there'll be death on a mass scale if they get on a tube train. That's unwinding, but it's a slow process particularly because whilst the "hide at home" message was hammered in, the same has not been done for the exit strategy.
The whole thing was a boondoggle. Like someone else said, just go to Primrose Hill or the Heath or Crystal Palace or basically anywhere.
>MVRDV had a small budget for the design phase: £10,000 GBP. For us, this implied a significant loss on the project with staff hours alone far exceeding this.
Wut.
>During the virtual presentation in London, both institutions demanded investigations into the effects of the installation.
This is standard for everything built in england. There'll be an extraordinarily expensive investigation into whether you'll disturb something (this is one of the reasons HS2 was a disaster).
>The cost of the whole project would be £1.25 million, of which 0.8 percent, the £10,000 mentioned, was set aside for the design.
I think, on balance looking at this, the mistake MVRDV made was going along with a clearly wrong budget - presumably in the hopes that Westminster would sign off on spiralling costs rather than half-arsing it. Maybe this is a good thing, because it's clearly a modus operandi for some firms to underquote and then explode costs later on. In this case they went with a ridiculous quote in the hopes that once the project started they could push their client into sinking more cash into the project, but instead their client said "We paid you what we said, deliver" and MVRDV (and other contractors) delivered what they could for the money, which unsurprisingly was shit. Because let's face it, The design phase budget was about the same cost you would pay for an architect to draw up plans for an extension to a semi-detatched house in Wimbledon. Insanity.
> I think, on balance looking at this, the mistake MVRDV made was going along with a clearly wrong budget - presumably in the hopes that Westminster would sign off on spiralling costs rather than half-arsing it.
From the sounds of it, they both signed off on spiraling costs, and half-arsed it.
I think if it had been executed better it might have been better received, but by and large people tend to come to these things with skepticism set on stun.
London isn't short of nice hillvews. My favourite is Primrose Hill. I go back for a reprise of the skyline every time I'm in london.
Charging entry kills public art. I was stunned by the poppies installation at the Tower. I suspect if it had pilings around it and they'd charged GBP5 even with 100% going to charity, people would have been more negative.
A "Monte Testaccio" of wrecked Boris Bikes might be truer to the spirit?
tl;dr: don't blame the design, somebody did a crummy job of building it.
Though the real money is in the conclusion:
Perhaps we should not have worked for a fee so low that it allowed the client to sidestep the usual procedures. Perhaps when we were pushed out of the construction process we could have stepped out because we couldn't guarantee the project’s quality. This is certainly our greatest sin: we should have ended our participation precisely at that moment.
That makes sense. The project they designed would need extensive landscaping maintenance, and can't be done on the cheap.
Though I gotta say, they were picked because they'd apparently done a bang-up job on a project in Rotterdamn that doesn't look all that interesting to me. The scaffolding makes it look like it's under construction. Still, somebody liked it, and it's unclear why they went from a similar design to a "mound".
The company commissioned to build it were FM Conway. That should have been a bright red flag. FM Conway do roadworks. They fix infrastructure, and rebuild streets. They're a civil engineering firm at best, not structural engineers, nor gardeners; in other words, a deeply inappropriate choice for the company to make it happen. But I would bet good money that WCC have a great relationship with them for other contracts, and I would bet good money that whoever handed out the contract got some great tea money for their site visits.
The Mound reeks of the kind of bizarre projects that are usually accompanied by significant graft. I have a feeling that somewhere in the WCC there's a person who was planning on getting kickbacks from the construction or demolition company or some such nonsense.
However based on this article "The idea was to make the area simultaneously green, smart, and sustainable." These are just buzzwords put together, it means nothing. WCC seems like didn't know what they wanted so they went over to these guys with buzzwords check list. And mvrdv just accepted the project for whatever reason (I'm sure good reasons) where they should have asked way more questions to understand what these guys actually wanted.