For the love of landmarks

Few architects can claim to have brought such true pleasure to the people as David Marks and Julia Barfield. As the inventors and designers of the London Eye, they have given delight to millions; creating a fresh landmark for the capital’s skyline but also offering a thrilling experience in itself. The completion of the London Eye was a miracle of sorts, given the scale of the challenges and obstacles the pair faced to get it built.

Now husband-and-wife team David and Julia are offering their audience a second miracle, founded on exactly the same pleasure principles, but in a very different location and with a very different solution. Marks Barfield Architects have, quite literally, reinvented the wheel and have created the i360, a vertical cable car with a sculpted viewing pod, perching lightly upon Brighton’s seafront.

“A few years ago we went on a balloon flight over the River Dordogne for my daughter’s birthday,” says David, “and it was stunning to be floating in the air and taken along by the wind. There’s something about that feeling of floating above the earth that is so calming but so exciting at the same time. I suppose the idea of being above everything is inherent in us all.”

High above the ground

Like the London Eye, Brighton’s i360 offers a unique perspective upon the world below. It takes the form of a slender mast that will be 568ft high (when the spire is added), which supports a sculpted, doughnut-shaped pod, with glass windows and a reflective mirrored underside. The pod takes up to 200 people at a time skyward over a flight time of 20 (daytime) or 30 minutes (evening). The views from the top, in clear conditions, stretch for 26 miles, taking in the sea, the coastline and the Sussex Downs.
“After the London Eye, we did have lots of people phoning us up saying, ‘We’ll have one of those,”’ says Julia. “But you can’t just replicate it anywhere. The Eye cost £86 million back in 2000 and so you need the right circumstances, the right number of visitors, the right location and a fantastic view to look at to make it work.”

The new landmark is a slight and slender presence upon Brighton’s seafront, yet i360 is already having a big impact. It sits within the context of a gradual but marked revival in seaside resorts, which has also seen the arrival of David Chipperfield’s Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate and HAT Projects’ Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, which has also just celebrated the reopening of its pier. The i360 itself has been described as a ‘vertical pier’, which sits on the landward side of Brighton’s derelict West Pier, designed by the masterful Victorian architect-engineer Eugenius Birch.

The West Pier opened 150 years ago, in 1866. At the opening ceremony — as David  tells me — it was poetically described as a ‘kind of butterfly upon the ocean to carry visitors upon its wings’. It was one of many elegant Victorian pleasure piers designed by Birch and his contemporaries that fed the growing appetite for seaside pleasure trips, encouraged by the growth of the railways. During its heyday, it attracted as many as two million visitors a year, but began to spiral into decline in the 1950s and ’60s and could not compete with the Palace Pier close by. Despite its beauty, Grade I listed status and numerous attempts to save it by the West Pier Trust, it began to collapse into the sea and its death sentence was written in fire after two arson attacks in 2003. Today, just a fragmented ghost shell remains, floating out to sea.

“What happened to the West Pier is so sad, but the fact that we are building on the heritage of the original pier is very fitting, along with the idea of a 21st-century vertical pier. The parallels with Eugenius Birch are certainly there with the use of innovative technology and engineering,” says Julia.

Julia and David, both 63, first met at the Architectural Association (AA) in central London where one of their most inspirational tutors, Keith Critchlow, had been a student of their architectural hero, Richard Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome. David and Julia spent their working year out from the AA together in South America, helping to design a community centre and housing systems for a squatter settlement in Lima, Peru. Back at the AA, they helped build a few Fuller-style domes and other structures as part of the school’s lightweight-structures research unit.

When the two of them graduated, David and Julia found that there wasn’t much real work to be had. They eventually found themselves making architectural models for Richard Rogers. After a while, they were invited to join the architecture team and Marks began working on the Lloyd’s Building, while Barfield served in the unit working on the design of the Inmos Microprocessor Factory in Wales. In all, Marks worked with Rogers for seven years and Barfield for two, then six in Norman Foster’s office.

“They were really formative years,” says Julia. “When we joined Rogers, it was quite a small practice and we were there at a period of phenomenal growth and innovation and it was a great time; Richard and Ruthie Rogers were so generous and constantly inviting people over to dinner.”

“There are many things that we learnt at Rogers: working as a team; the importance of analysis and really thinking through problems and solving them with a minimum of means and resources. It’s about touching the ground lightly and minimising the environmental impact while maximising the benefits of a building for the user.”

Marks and Barfield married in 1981 while they were still at Richard Rogers’ office. They have lived in Stockwell ever since they were students and now have three grown-up children. The story of Marks and Barfield’s own practice, rather like the Eye and i360, has been a rollercoaster. They started the company in 1989, with a home office, focusing on house extensions. A few years later, they won a major competition for a £35 million technology centre and were encouraged to set up a full professional office, with all of its overheads, only to watch the project become the victim of recession.

Catalytic potential

“Architecture is like that — ups and downs,” says Julia. “We went into a competition to design a London landmark for the millennium as a way of cheering ourselves up. There was a definite feeling that we were in a deep hole and that we needed to get out of it somehow. We had mortgaged the house and, yes, it was tough.” With the support of Bob Ayling, then head of British Airways, they managed to pull off the miracle, forming a company to build and manage the London Eye.

The i360 has also been a tale of ups and downs. The project began back in 2006 after David and Julia sold their own stake in the London Eye, which is now owned and run by The Tussauds Group. They decided to reinvest much of their profits from the London Eye into i360 — a total of £6 million of Marks Barfield Architects’ money and practice time — yet still needed to secure funding for the rest of the £46 million budget in the face of a new recession. Eventually, Brighton & Hove City Council — seeing the catalytic potential of the project for tourism — arranged a loan for the bulk of the budget. The West Pier Trust agreed to lease i360 its site on the beachfront.

Construction began in 2014 and i360 opens this summer. The construction company Hollandia landed a series of 17 steel cans on the beach by barge and jacked them up one by one to create the slender mast. A counterweight and winding cables support the pod, which is protected by a whole series of safety measures. The base building holds a 400-cover restaurant, The Belle Vue ,with an emphasis on local Sussex produce, while two booths from the original West Pier have been reconstructed to serve as a ticket office and a cafe.

Along with the effects on tourism and local development, both Marks Barfield and the West Pier Trust hope that i360 could help make the prospect of a new 21st-century sea pier more likely one day in the future. “It is a lovely idea,” says David. “The challenge is how to make it viable. If there is a way of creating something light and delicate, floating above the waves, then that would be a wonderful thing to do.”

For Marks Barfield, there are also many other projects to attend to. There’s a £17 million new mosque in Cambridge underway, as well as the University of Cambridge Primary School — a flagship university training facility and free school. Then there are fresh plans for a new Aerial Cable Car in Chicago. In the city that played host to the very first big wheel back in 1893 — designed by another architect-engineer, George Ferris — the Aerial Cable Car would connect the city’s Navy Pier to downtown Chicago.

For the future, there could also be i360s in other parts of the world. Marks Barfield — who are the majority shareholders of i360 with around 80% of the equity — have been careful, this time around, to patent the design, although they promise that there won’t be ‘a cookie-cutter approach’. Theirs is a uniquely entrepreneurial attitude, full of educated risks, that has now resulted in two of Britain’s most innovative and delightful buildings. They are both modest about the level of courage involved to generate such projects, but surely there is a degree of bravery to the model, combined with the possibility of extraordinary rewards.

“They are calculated risks that we take, not silly risks,” says David. “We work with a lot of very skilled professionals in a whole range of different fields on these projects. If it means that we can add to the environment and create something that people enjoy — getting back to the pleasure principle — then why not? What else would we do with the money? Buy a chateau or a yacht? That’s not us. We were lucky enough to benefit from the London Eye and now we are ploughing it back and the time does feel right for i360.”

“There have been plenty of times over the last 10 years where people have said, don’t you think you should walk away? But we stuck with it and every time we thought about it and looked at all the people who have supported us and who were looking forward to it happening, then there was no way that we were going to let them down. Every time we looked at it, then it still made sense, so we never let it go.”