Cornerhouse

[Mike]

Cornerhouse has featured on the Manchester Evening News Website. This is the project I am currently working on! Yay!

[Mike]

The Architect's Journal has featured a small online article about Cornerhouse, it has not quite made it into the paper publication, however, it is quite exciting to see it online. I will have to hope that the wonderful photographs we will get will convince them to publish it properly. Yay twice.

[Mike]

I will publish some images on my website soon!

[Mike]

The images are on the site on the Architecture section. In addition Al let me know that the project has just received planning permission. That is good news and I am pleased with that (despite not being an Arca employee anymore) and class it as a smooth going victory! Yay to the Team!

[Mike]

I believe that the tenders came back pretty much on budget which is good news. Obviously our hard work was worth! Hope the Client will eventually be happy with their efforts.

[mr_e]

Damn, took me a while to realise what side the street-angle stuff was from. James Leigh Street, right? Can't really tell that much about the redevelopment from the images, so can't really comment on that aspect of it.

[Mike]

Cornerhouse has been re-approved by Manchester City Council using a design by Greenhalgh and Williams (a company that is so small that I can't actually find a website for them using either Google or the RIBA website).

This makes me very sad as they have blatantly hacked Arca's design, documents and drawings to create what can only be described politely as a poorly executed 'design'. They have gone to the extent of actually having an Arca drawing, scanned and pasted their logo in one corner and drawing in red pen the extent of the site, not only that but they have missed off the blue line around the adjacent building to indicate the building owner has an interest in adjacent land / building.

The real biscuit comes when you see that they submitted Arca's Design and Access Statement as part of their application.

A disappointing end to a project that was published in the Manchester Evening News and The Architect's Journal. I am embarrassed to see my drawings bastardised in this fashion so I wonder how Arca feels, especially since their design was superior and came in on budget.

[BarcelonAl]

Is there a legal angle to this maybe? Sounds like plagarism to me...

[mr_e]

I would've thought there were legal issues, seeing as you get copyright on pretty much anything you create. It would be fairly easy to prove in this case, but I can imagine it could be counter-productive to persue it in the courts (in terms of reputation).

Unless the rights to the drawings were signed over to the clients?

[Mike]

I suppose the difficulty is proving financial loss. Difficult and I don't know what the answer is but I think it is rather grey in a moral sense!

[Mike]

Work has started on the rather confusing design at Cornerhouse. Shame really that Arca design did not work.