“All architects long for the defining project, the high-profile plum job that people will remember them by, for good or bad. At 63, that death-or-glory moment has arrived for Sir Richard MacCormac. He has plucked the plum of plums, the rebuilding of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. It comes with a price tag of at least £400m.”

One thing that isn’t mentioned are the new technologies that might be available for use within or without the building’s working and public spaces by the time it’s ready to be occupied (in 2008!)

Putting to one side the advances in pervasive computing that might affect personal working style, there are the advances in technology which will affect building use, building fabric and it’s relationship with the city:

• Building use patterns
  • Ideo/Steelcase p2p wireless meeting room organisers:
    save facilities managers space that can be turned over to other uses as they use communal meeting space more efficiently
  • Wireless tech in general.
• Building fabric
  • Too much to list here for now… but will add some more links (suggest some!) but for now, I’ll just point to Michael McDonough and Bruce Sterling‘s WiReD piece on Biotecture/’bambootekture’: “Newer New York”
• Urban relationships and mediatecture
  Mediatecture – or the use of dynamic digital media as facade of public buildings has a profound effect on public space.
  • Lehman Brothers, Times Sq. New York City:
    saw this last weekend, absolutely incredible, mesmerising facade swept by animating waterfalls, clouds, sunsets… the pastoral/cosmic aesthetic that is ‘so hot right now’ and kind of comically inappropriate to a megacorp such as Lehman’s, but beautifully realised by the architects, engineers and media-artists.
  • Lisa Strausfeld/InformationArt’s amazing, densely-layered media wall for the new Penn Station.
  • And of course, the Nasdaq wall

Will the BBC and their architects embrace these changes between then and now, or in 6 years will we have a landmark built for now – not then?

» Hughpearman.com: Heart of an empire: MacCormac rebuilds the BBC.