HEAVENS ABOVE!

摘要

The £ 17.7m Royal Observatory, Greenwich, completed earlier this year, is the latest in an impressive collection of cultural buildings by London-based architects Allies and Morrison. While the practice has grown to be the UK's 12th largest firm (in the Architects' Journal's AJ100 survey), extending its range to include city-scale masterplans and large commercial developments, A&M continue to produce exemplary bespoke buildings for culture and the arts. Seen alongside projects such as The Place (AR June 2001) and the Horniman Museum (AR July 2002), this scheme demonstrates the architect's sustainedrnability to get things just right; or rather as described by Joseph Rykwert in his postscript to the 1996 Michigan Architectural Paper: Two, to produce work where 'everything seems to be in the right place'. Fittingly in this location, on the Greenwich Meridian at 51.5 degrees north, on a site where astronomers pioneered in mapping the stars, physical position is everything. This scheme responds with equal accuracy.