I love this new building

Wow, That building is going to look fantastic when done.I had a search for Beetham tower on google and saw the rendering of the complete tower.Love that blade thing on top. Its great to see real skyscrapers being built in the uk intead of the usual shitty council blocks...and you say there is more to come for Manchester? Its going to look very 'international' in a few years.

 

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Look at the cranes on that.

 

I have a lot more pictres on my photo site (I was lazy and used an already existing engine).

http://musicinmanchester.co.uk/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=1

The problem is once this building is complete I have got to start photographing the Eastgate tower construction.

 

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To answer your question - in the case of the current England captain you'd play for Yorkshire!

 

With regard to the county issue I have both asked two people one 23 and the other 22 what county they considered they were from and they both said Greater Manchester. One is from Rochdale and the other from Hyde.

 

The finished article,its going to absoloutly dominate Manc.

 

That building is just the tip of the ice berg though, at the moment its impressive because its the tallest building outside of London but Manchester will have many buildings that size soon.

There is a big race on between Manchester and Bimirmingham to win the sky scraper fame but, Manchester is winning but Brummy is catching up.

The eastgate tower will be taller and also be bigger in terms of land space.

http://www.skyscrapernews.com/bdbsearch.php?city=Manchester

That render does look impressive though and its only 6 months until the building opens.

 

Those pics certainly make those towers look impressive in a kind of 2000AD sort of way (esp. that last pic). I like quite a fair bit of modern design, including the more radical stuff, but a race between two cities to see who can build the tallest sky scraper sounds like a recipe to lose sight of balance. The tower looks great in comparison to all the lower level buildings surrounding it because of the contrast. If you stick another dozen of increasing height next to it over the next 20 or so years it'll just look a mess. Anyway I'm not particularly in favour of an 'international' look; I like cuddly old Blighty with it's big fat mess of buildings all of similar size from the last 800 years or so.

The other thing is this: all these new buildings look great for about 5 years max, then they rapidly begin to accumulate filth and will end up looking as tired and unpleasant as all those 70's office blocks.

I saw a huge amount of building going on in Bristol in the Temple Meads area (whilst I was working on a beautiful 12th Century church), and my overriding feeling was 'these are going to look crap in 10 years time'. They were pretty much the same designs as the 70's concrete and glass office blocks that are standing around idle and empty, the new ones simply have a different skin, be it glass or brick or whatever.

Just my personal thoughts and taste of course.

 

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I dissagree,this other scraper in Manchester is over 40 years old and still looks clean and fresh especially with the sun reflecting off it,although the concrete part was showing its age thats been reclad with solar panels,the largest solar generator in Europe I believe!It was even given grade 2 listed status a few years ago.

 

Cue the jokes about Manchester having no sun

 

Yeah it's all personal taste and I know there's no right or wrong really, and if maintained and improved etc and are good designs in the first place then it's all good.

That said, the 40 year old building, although it looks well maintained and updated, still looks like a super-size lego block to me....but then I am a stonemason; the simplest medieval village church is still a million times more appealing and impressive then the tallest sky scraper in the world to me. The great cathedrals of Europe are engineering feats far greater than those attempted today - the architects and builders of the day were reaching for God, not their wallets, and it shows (and I might point out that I'm not the slightest bit religious, but you get the point).

I've also drunk a bottle of wine, so there....

 

This is the original cladding of the CIS building. I took this picture in 2002 and the building was 40 years old at the time.



However the design was based on the tower blocks of Chicargo.

In constrast with the Midland Hotel it is quite a horrible sight though.



This is some luxery appartments designed by Ian Simpson and is starting so show its age already in my opinion.



This building is about 3-4 years old now, again designed by Ian Simpson I think it is still amazingly fresh and I think this building will always look good no matter what.



This tower block here (The Arndale Tower) is awful, it is probably the worst building in Manchester.

 

There is something about that brutal repetition of the windows on that pic of the CIS building that is strangely appealing, dunno why though...?! I think with that style of building that they tend to look worse the further away you are from them though.

I quite like the contrast of old and new, it's only when there's too much new stuff and it begins to dominate or oppress all the surrounding buildings that I don't like it, or if it's a crap design or the finish is low quality. I like that curvy one though, very nice.

Your pics are good and you clearly have a better camera than me.....and a better eye for a picture. I've taken loads of pics of buildings and almost without exception I fail to capture the essence of the place. Hmph.

 

Its only a cheap Fuji A210 I paid £90 for it 18 months ago. It does have optical zoom though which means I can be creative. I am hoping to get a prosumer camera by the end of the year but they cost about £500.

I don't think I am ready for a fully blown digital SLR yet. The CIS was taken with an ancient digital camera designed in around 2000. It is massive and takes four AA batteries which last 5 minutes.

 

Your right about contrast between old and new. I like this shot of the new glass scrapers in Manchester with the beautiful victoriana that is Albert sq. in the foreground, an eccectic mix that adds interest to cityscapes.Manchester is a big working city and not a pickled museum like places such as Bath,it needs to build upwards to prevent urban sprawl and preservasion of greenbelt land ...as long as they dont make the same mistakes of the 60's and 70's. They need to make sure the new towers are positioned correctly as are the Beethan tower and GN tower in the pic.This is why I think Manchester has one of the most interesting city centres, an ecclectic mix of old and new and it works.To be honest cities like Bath and Edinburgh may be beautiful but their uniformity bores me after a while.

 

That picture is great, I have not seen it from that view before. What is the smaller tower block next to it?

Yeah Edinburgh seemd quite dull in that sense, Dublin seems to be a bit more modern in that sense.

I think the Thames Bank in London is good for that, there is a real mixture of old and new.

 

The smaller block is the Great Northern tower named after the old preserved railway warehouse nearby.Beetham tower looks close but is about 1/4 mile setback from it.I think GN tower will be 72m tall but Beetham is a huge 171m tall.