Rem Koolhaas, along with his OMA cohort, were hard to miss in October as the month saw the opening of their Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow and a mighty exhibition of work-in-progress at the Barbican, London. With the Rothschild HQ nearing completion in the City of London the Dutch practice has been busy in London since 2007, when it won the competition to breathe life back into the former Commonwealth Institute building..

‘OMA’s relationship with London has been, and is, related to the Sixties,’ says Reinier de Graaf, who acknowledges that this is ‘nicely counterintuitive because it’s a period least liked here’. The OMA partner and director of think tank AMO says OMA has become ‘advocates for a part of London’s orphaned heritage, which the prevailing mood likes to eradicate.’.

The hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof of the Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington exudes the energy of post-Festival of Britain experiments. Designed by RMJM and completed in 1962, it has sat empty for almost 10 years, a lonely figure with a leaking roof, which very nearly met a ghastly end when the government proposed stripping its Grade II* listed status. ‘The quality of modernism [in London] is extreme but the hostility towards it is also extreme,’ observes de Graaf.

OMA’s scheme proposes housing to sit alongside the cultural institution, in the shape of three blocks ranging from six to nine storeys. ‘We have a relationship where the new has the added responsibility to help fund renovation of the old,’ explains de Graaf. The additions appear quiet in a nod to the existing jewel, and were designed so that from the street the smaller ‘cube’ conceals the larger one. Says de Graaf: ‘We designed them in perspective so that you might mistake it for a discrete intervention.’ The architect adds: ‘You can be modern in London provided you don’t show it – the new has an unspoken obligation to make itself invisible.’

The Design Museum recently took two significant strides forward in its bid to move home and, in doing so, cemented its reputation as one of the world’s most ambitious museums of design.

At the end of September it received a first-round pass for major funding from Heritage Lottery Fund, and architect John Pawson submitted an initial planning application for the new interior. The move will see a change of scenery from the breezy but cramped setting at Shad Thames to an altogether more dramatic location at the former Commonwealth Institute in Kensington.

This new location will not only be able to house the Design Museum’s bulging collection, it will breathe life into a building considered to be the second-most important modernist building in London, currently being restored as part of a scheme by Dutch architect OMA.

Rather than being an anomaly, against the recession-odds several major new galleries and museums have opened in quick succession, notably Hepworth Wakefield by David Chipperfield and the Glasgow Riverside Museum by Zaha Hadid (Both projects: Blueprint August 2011).

These two buildings share a certain unabashed courage at a scale not often seen in Britain; they also mark the homecoming for a pair of prolific architects whose work has been distinctly absent on home turf. OMA might also be thrown into this mix. A practice born in London in 1975 it has nevertheless only just completed its first two buildings in the UK. Hepworth Wakefield and Glasgow Riverside do have more in common:  the museums of Chipperfield and Hadid were also funded by HLF (more than £25m between the two).

This year is a big year for Heritage Lottery Fund. In addition to the  aforementioned, old museums have been teased back to life with new lungs (Eric Parry’s extension at the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath), tired galleries dedicated to cherished artists have been saved from disintegration (Watts Gallery in Surrey by ZMMA), and former industrial buildings, which had long-forgotten their original use, have now found a cultural purpose (Bristol harbour’s M-Shed by LAB Architecture). Consequently, 2011 has been big for British architecture too.

These projects have filled the national media and allowed contemporary architecture to quietly step into the public spotlight – and be shown in a positive light, for a change. Even more subtle is that these would not have even been a twinkle in the eye without HLF’s forward-thinking determination. ‘Many people think we just preserve cathedrals and castles,’ says Ian Morrision, head of historic environment conservation at the HLF.‘We’re constantly battling to change that perception.’

There is an inherent problem with the word ‘heritage’ – it appears no one is quite sure exactly how to define it. HLF is all too aware of this, so instead of trying to change its name, it invited official bodies and members of the public to take part in a three-month consultation at the beginning of this year, looking at how it should spend its money. The consultation, called Shaping the Future, can be seen as an acknowledgment that as other sources of public investment become rare there is a pressing need to inspire people to be part of tomorrow’s heritage.

Aside from its work with cathedrals and castles, HLF is keen to point out that there is a considered focus in heritage on the role of contemporary architecture. Since its inception in 1994, HLF has awarded funding totalling £4.6bn, including £2.5bn on the built environment – £1bn of which has gone towards new buildings. That’s enough to make quite an impact on the built environment.

‘It is HLF’s mission to change people’s relationship with heritage from one of passive to active engagement,’ says Morrison. ‘By its very nature a new public building belongs to everyone, whereas there can be a sense that historic buildings belong to someone else.’

Architecture is a crucial tool today in maintaining the relevance of this country’s heritage and culture. During the past 17 years, 14,800 buildings have benefitted from HLF funding. A fair proportion of this number comprises the conservation of listed buildings – Britain’s treasured relics – including the removal of more than 160 buildings from the English Heritage Buildings at Risk Register. These projects have not simply entailed a lick of paint, but have been about adaptation and allowing historic buildings to work in the context of 21st-century society.

An emphasis on accessibility has seen thoughtful investigations into how architecture might solve problems such as how much of a museum collection can be on public display. For example, the Ashmolean Museum doubled its display space following Rick Mather’s extension. Equally, the reinterpretation of entrances

Asif Khan is a young architect in an enviable position. He’s been hailed by Design Miami 2011 as a ‘Designer of the Future’, written up in the New York Times as one of five designers to watch this year, and awarded a prestigious ‘designer in residence’ slot at the Design Museum – the first architect ever to be given that honour. And all within a couple of years of setting up his own practice.

There was a time in our evolving society when the making of things was considered not only honourable but was inextricably linked to their aesthetics. Perhaps, in retrospect, that is why we see integrity and consistency in the work of those individuals who were raised in the craft tradition.

A few months on from the 10th anniversary in March of the Eden Project, Michael Pawlyn, one of its central architectural actors, has published a book on the ecological philosophy at the heart of the strange and exciting plant-filled biomes.

Biomimicry in Architecture is a primer to an all-encompassing way of approaching building culture. It steps outside much of the conventions of architectural thinking, arguing that the current and coming environmental challenges are most effectively met if architects – as much as other designers – look to and learn from the natural world, finding relevant examples of biological and ecological systems that are then imitated.

‘Human-made systems tend to use design to maximise for a single goal,’ states the thoughtful Pawlyn, formerly part of the core team at Grimshaw, ‘while ecosystems have evolved towards an optimised overall system. This is what is needed across the designing of the built environment. It’s absolutely fundamental.’

In his well-illustrated book, many surprising and striking examples of how and where nature can inspire building design are introduced, with examples taken from small and large alike. So for instance, the Namibian fog-basking beetle. Its system of collecting its own water through a matt black outer layer that radiates heat at night, attracting water vapour droplets that it then drinks by tipping up its shell, is an inspiration to a variety of profiled projects. Another example, known as Murray’s Law, describes the mathematical properties of branching in leaves, trees and other natural forms, which Pawlyn envisages architects and engineers building on and developing.

Across eight short chapters Biomimicry in Architecture provides a catalogue of inspiring examples from the natural world that elegantly and efficiently solve key challenges of modern architecture, such as  energy usage, water supply and ventilation. The roots of biomimicry are traced back to the pioneering engineering research of Sixties’ heroes such as Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto, and the influence of the biologist D’Arcy Thompson’s 1917 book On Growth and Form on computer-savvy architects, including the master of skeletal structures Santiago Calatrava. It also clarifies the distinction of biomorphic design, which while it may reflect the natural world’s appearance does not operate and work the same way at all.

Pawlyn acknowledges that biomimicry hasn’t taken root in architecture, compared to industrial design and other aspects of engineering. ‘We need to think through what it means to be truly sustainable, rather than just mitigating the negative impacts, and work out what that implies for our buildings and the systems into which they fit,’ states Pawlyn, apparently confident biomimicry’s day is coming.

This requires the architectural world rethinking how such systems work and knowing what are the important areas that require focusing on. ‘There are three key challenges: radical increases in resource efficiency, a move from a linear to a closed loop approach to materials, and moving from a fossil-fuel economy to a solar economy,’ he writes.

Pawlyn, it seems, happened to be in the right place at the right time, arriving at Grimshaw in 1997 to work on the Eden Project. Although his sustainable architecture thinking was already well developed, it was attending a Schumacher Society course in 2003 run by veteran energy environmentalist Amory Lovins and Janine Benyus that seems to have turned everything upside down. ‘It was a phenomenal week,’  Pawlyn recalls. ‘I learned more in that week than in the previous 10 years of seminars and conferences.’

After developing Grimshaw’s green portfolio further, in 2007 Pawlyn set up his own company, Exploration Architecture, dedicated to biomimicry projects: ‘I wanted to explore a new way of working, one which begins with idealised proposals rather than the general reactive approach of much architecture.’

Of the resulting projects, the highest profile one is the Sahara Forest Project, which seeks to help turn the tide of desertification. Reminding us that ‘for millennia the Sahara was a fertile, heavily forested landscape, until Julius Caesar had the forests cut down as raw material for the empire’, this ancient example of slash and burn may be the mother of extractive human-systems gone awry, turning vegetated land into desert within a few hundred years, a forerunner to present-day woes.

The Sahara Forest Project provides a way of beginning to turn this around, with a starring role for the humble fog basking beetle as its design starting point in the guise of seawater-cooled greenhouses. Together with another, in Pawlyn’s words, ‘proven’ technology – concentrated solar power – the project’s systems approach could  provide not only energy for entire cities in North Africa and Middle East but also restore vegetation and agriculture to the desert.

Some way from conventional green designs’ focus on energy and carbon reduction, biomimicry offers architects a radical systems approach. Pawlyn’s aim has always been for wider architectural take-up; now, with his book there is also a manifesto to spread the biomimicry message of exploration far and wide.

Christopher Marlowe is arguably Canterbury’s most famous son, the Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of William Shakespeare who was stabbed to death in a bar-room brawl in Deptford, south London, at the age of 29.

The Marlowe Theatre has now switched on the lights and opened its  doors following an extensive redesign, almost an entire rebuild, by Keith Williams Architects. At £25m the work on the converted Thirties’ cinema is one of the largest capital-funded arts projects in the South East, is being delivered on time and (whisper it) on budget. It will host touring shows, notably attracting the Glyndebourne Opera in its inaugural season.

Canterbury is a picturesque town, dominated by the imposing cathedral at the centre of its meandering mediaeval streetscape. Now a new landmark has cropped up among the red roof tiles: a grey fin reaches skywards announcing the Marlowe Theatre to the city.

Clad in a stainless-steel mesh that softens its edges and captures the subtle change in hue of the sky, the fin houses the fly tower over the new auditorium.  ‘It is necessarily large,’ says Keith Williams. ‘The existing fly tower was perfunctory but the second tallest building in the city [after the Bell Harry tower at the cathedral]; we wanted to celebrate and sculpt that. ‘It is a pinnacle. The cathedral tower is the pinnacle of spirituality, the fly tower is the pinnacle of culture.’

Beneath this pinnacle sits a building that works tirelessly to ingratiate itself into the fabric of the town without compromising its modernist aesthetic. Through material and spatial layering, it echoes the complexity of the historic city that surrounds it, but abstracts it into a rational and legible building. The monochrome material palette is tight, with the functions of each element of the building expressed through its cladding.

On approach, the building imposes itself with an 8m-high reconstructed stone colonnade. It speaks of a civic architecture, gives a nod to the grand theatres of yesteryear, but is devoid of fussy ornament. Behind is a glazed wall that wraps around the building, allowing light to pour into the foyer and public balconies and bars. The studio theatre, offset from the main entrance 6m below it, is clad in a dark pre-oxidised copper that will delay its greening.

Inside the public is guided through the building by processional, unsupported, scissor stairs rising two floors to the circle and upper circle, with  balconies set back from a glazed wall. Again the materials used are restrained, black and grey carpets meet the brushed-steel balustrades that are used internally and externally. The building presents two beautiful views across the rooftops as incidental set pieces: one looks east to the cathedral, the other looks west to the historic city gates.

The main auditorium provides quite a departure from the austerity that prevails in the rest of the building. Some 1,200 leather seats in bright orange pierce the darkness; a black and white acoustic baffle streaks across the ceiling; the theatre is finished in a warm walnut that curves around the balconies, circle and upper circle.

‘The fly tower and the auditorium are the two “willful” things we designed,’ says Williams. The new theatre retains the stage at the dimensions from the original cinema, but the auditorium has been shortened so that the edge of the stage is 25m away from the furthermost seat – 12m closer than before. From the upper stalls the view arguably is as good, if not better, than from the first row.

The building was funded with £17m from Canterbury County Council, £2m from Kent County Council and £2m from Ceeda. The Marlowe Theatre Development Trust, formed from the private sector, managed to raise £4.5m to complete the funding, quite a remarkable feat considering the dire economic background.

The quality of the materials and finishes, as well as the Vitra furniture in the public concourse, reveal that a tactical nous has been applied where value engineering may have prevailed in similar projects.

There are some criticisms:  the public balconies may feel at little squeezed when the building is at capacity, and a few of the seats, notably the boxes, may have restricted views. But considering the times that the building was redeveloped through, and the restrictions on the architect working within the confines of a heritage city, these are minor gripes.

Its calm exterior acknowledges the character of Canterbury and provides a model of how to build in a contemporary style in the city. It engages in a dialogue with the city, its views and massing where other architects may have created a more introverted building or tried to design something far more contrary.

Its eccentricities are confined to the charming auditorium, which provides a moment of contrast,  eschewing gimmick in favour of  great-quality design. Canterbury now has a venue fit to bear its famous son’s name.

One have might forecast that an exhibition surrounding OMA, the world’s most self-critical architecture practice, was never going to just another homogeneous exhibition. Indeed, at the moment of approaching the Barbican’s illusive west entrance – originally conceived as the entrance to the art gallery but never used – there is a sense that any other preconceptions should be forgotten. The first encounter on entering is with a freely accessible ‘public street’ leading through to the rest of the centre, filled with a fake exhibition and even fake people. Next encounter is with the shop, which forms the centrepiece of the gallery and not shamefully tucked in by the exit.

The ‘real’ exhibition begins in an equally mysterious and disorientating manner. A light shines on a tiny clay sculpture, of which no one knows the story, in a room that lies empty apart from a handwritten note from Rem Koolhaas, a founder in 1975 of OMA, on the importance of preserving work. The second room includes an unfinished display of building site photographs and a working plotter; the third, a collage of the current preoccupations of OMA employees.

Like the Dutch practice, this exhibition continuously rethinks itself. ‘The essence of our work is that it is simultaneously product and explanation,’ says OMA partner Reinier de Graaf. ‘They are entrenched in inextricable relationships.’ To reach the upper level, you must push through the flickering lights of a film showing all the images currently on the OMA server, all 3,454,204 of them.  A more obvious order is revealed on the upper level where each room carries a theme.

Koolhaas wasn’t ready for a retrospective because, as he puts it, OMA occupies an ‘intense state of transformation’; in fact it was too busy to organise the show and decided it was the opportune moment to allow in an outside opinion. Consequently, curatorial control, along with keys to the office, was surrendered to Rotor,a design collective from Brussels.

‘The material fetishisation of Rotor saved us,’ says Koolhaas. It rifled through the archive, the server, and even the wastepaper bins: a feverish quest to ‘pin down the living organism,’ in the words of Maarten Gielen, Rotor’s founder. In rising to the challenge, one can sense the Belgians desperately imagining life inside the minds of OMA, a forensic tracking of its footsteps.

This process has informed how the visitor experiences the exhibition. Explanations are on the floor, so you must observe and analyse the work on your own first before reading the accompanying, clarifying words. Photographs are often hung in relation to the viewpoint of the image itself, which effortlessly offers insight into OMA’s design approach: the trajectory of the Dutch Embassy in Berlin; peering down from Rothschild Bank to St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London; grasping the expanse of air between the ground and CCTV’s cantilever in Beijing.

The Barbican is as much an object in the exhibition; a 1:1 floor plan of Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow clings to the wind-swept, and somewhat forgotten, Sculpture Court. Instead of whitewashed walls, Rotor was handed the previous exhibition as a starting point, which it has picked at to suit its needs.

The walls bear scratches and ambiguous words, as if looking at the other side of a piece of paper; this rawness might startle some purists. The models on show are rough, as if the maker has just stepped away to discuss a new idea with a colleague.

It is important not to deny Rotor its attention to detail, however. The curators have resisted the temptation to regurgitate OMA’s own criticism, of which there is a never-ending and captivating supply: ‘Our books are solidified reasoning: the writing somehow behaves as an unsolidified building’, says de Graaf. Rotor has conjured up new questions to ask the Dutch practice and they are not always kind: in revisiting buildings such as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam from 1992, Rotor analyses how age suits the building, including observations of possible design flaws.

An exhibition at the British School in Rome earlier this year by the name of ‘On Hold’ discussed masterplans forever trapped on paper; OMA/Progress shouts of overwhelming global success: the relentlessness paying off. Yet OMA continues to proactively seek its challenges. ‘Our mission doesn’t determine our dilemma; our dilemmas determine our missions,’ says de Graaf.

Rotor describes the entrance area as a ‘library for OMA geeks’: it is filled with every book and lecture as well as descriptions of all projects, known as the Project Machine. There is a niggling thought that the exhibition in itself is a library for OMA geeks,the bombardment of information and objects tipping over into the esoteric.

Hopefully, the questions asked here at the Barbican, which will constantly update and adapt as the exhibition continues in flux,will rather encourage more to join the geeks.

Filmmaker and artist David Lynch has applied his idiosyncratic vision to designing a Paris nightclub, a departure from film-making that’s not as far-fetched as it first appears. Silencio in Paris, which opened in September, is inspired by the identically named Club Silencio, which is a key location in his critically acclaimed film noir from 2001, Mulholland Drive.

This latest off-kilter experiment from the American auteur follows his exploration into music last year when Lynch released his first vocal single, Good Day Today, through British independent label Sunday Best Recordings. His first vocal single? Lynch has been making music for years through his collaboration with the composer Angelo Badalamenti, most memorably for the series Twin Peaks. But designing a nightclub is a complete departure for the 65-year old.

Six flights of stairs beneath the rue de Montmartre in the 2e arrondissement, Silencio is Lynch’s salon of the surreal and weird. The club was conceived by Arnaud Frisch, the charismatic entrepreneur behind the popular Parisian nightspot the Social Club and music label Savoir Faire, as a 21st-century burrow for artists to mingle and exchange ideas, where things happen. Think Andy Warhol’s Factory in Sixties NYC or the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. But there is a distinctly 21st-century addenda – Silencio is a private members club, with membership starting at €420 a year.

Lynch isn’t the first artist to have ventured beneath 142 rue de Montmartre. Indeed, the playwright Molière is still thought to be here, albeit buried somewhere in the cellar. Emile Zola printed J’Accuse in a press in the basement, while the great socialist Jean Jaurès was assassinated in the cafe just across the road trying to stop the Second World War.

2011 and it is Lynch’s turn to stir up the 2e. ‘There are zillions of ideas out there,’ Lynch explains in his unmistakable drawl from his studio in LA. ‘They are fuel for the artist. You catch some which you fall in love with, and like a very strong dog they will lead you here and there.’

Even by Lynch’s standards Mulholland Drive is enigmatic to the point of utter abstraction. The film follows the increasingly nightmarish adventures of a naïve, would-be Hollywood actress Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring), an amnesiac on the run from the Mob. Their neo-noir trip through Hollywood’s dark underbelly leads them eventually to Club Silencio. Ironically, the film’s meaning, or lack of, is best summed up by the words of the sinister performer on the stage of Club Silencio: ‘It is an illusion.’

Silencio in Paris is very much real and immersed in Lynchian motifs. ‘The space for the club existed underground so the design had to fit the space,’ says Lynch. ‘The ideas, you could say, were similar to cinema ideas in the way sets are designed to create a specific mood.’ The director designed everything in the 195 sq m club from the toilets – suitably crafted in pitch black – to the Fifties retro bar furniture that evokes one of Lynch’s favourite paintings, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. ‘Hopper can catch a dream in these images,’ Lynch says. ‘He makes me dream. I think there is a film in every painting.’

The club is a series of intimate, individually tailored spaces, dedicated to arousing a different atmosphere. ‘As far as I’m concerned this club is not linked really to anything,’ he thinks. ‘It’s meant to be a standalone, unique club with its own mood and experience.’ Despite this, Lynch’s visual style and cinematic flair are unmistakable through the composition of interiors using furniture, lighting and art.

Lynch collaborated with designer Raphael Navot, architecture agency Enia and lighting designer Thierry Dreyfus to realise his vision. The club contains a concert stage, restaurant, art library and 24-seat private cinema.

Lynch says that Silencio was designed for people to ‘induce and sustain a specific state of alertness and openness to the unknown’. The club certainly stimulates, even confuses, the senses with its gold-leaf-gilded Buddhist mandalas on the sinuously curved walls, a dream forest-like smoking room, and the live performance stage with a reflective dance floor – both of which could have come straight from the sets of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet. ‘The ideas, you could say, were similar to cinema ideas in the way sets are designed to create a specific mood,’ explains Lynch. ‘Design and architecture and furniture are like that. You try to get the space to come alive in a certain way.’

And then there is the furniture – every stick of which has been designed by Lynch, who has in recent years produced various limited edition pieces from abstract pine espresso tables to tar-covered audio speakers. For Silencio Lynch created three designs: Black Birds is a series of asymmetric, faceted, black-leather seats and tables; Wire is a collection of welcoming seats and sofas, while the cinema has an ergonomic seat that enhances the cinematic experience. Lynch even designed the club’s carpets. All furniture and materials were made-to-measure by firms including Domeau & Pérès and Ateliers Gohard. And his control over the project didn’t stop there – Lynch even had a hand choosing the type of peanuts served at the bar.

Lynch’s movie characters would probably feel at home propping up the bar at Silencio. ‘It’s sad to say goodbye to a world,’ Lynch says. ‘The thing that saves you is to fall in love with characters in a new world. But sometimes you drift off and think, what is going on with the characters in Twin Peaks?’

Paris has been good to Lynch for many years. In 2002 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur. Five years later the Fondation Cartier in the city hosted the first major exhibition of his paintings and photographs.

It is now 20 years since Twin Peaks, Lynch’s cult television series. Co-created with Mark Frost, Twin Peaks introduced audiences were introduced into his uniquely surreal world of dancing dwarves and the ‘Log Lady’. ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ was on the lips of everyone.

Lynch’s work inspires veneration as much as bafflement. These days though he seems to have forsaken the screen for a variety of pet projects spanning art, photography, music, paintings and sculptures, not to mention a passion for transcendental meditation through the David Lynch Foundation. ‘When you start something it ignites a flow of ideas,’ he tells me. ‘Action and reaction, it’s so beautiful.’ Lynch’s last major movie feature was Inland Empire in 2006, which he made without a script. Now, after a 40-year film career, there are rumours of retirement from the industry.

Known for unique set designs ever since his first film Eraserhead in 1976, which took four years to complete, design has always fascinated Lynch, who trained as an artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Nightclubs in particular feature prominently in his films, from the Slow Club in Blue Velvet and the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks to Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive.

It is intriguing that a director known for his disturbing psychogenic films has now created an environment that his audience is meant to relax in. Even in Silencio, however, Lynch maintains the odd unsettling touch, such as the wooden speakers that resemble an angry face.

At the club’s opening night Lynch was nowhere to be seen, but he does intend to head over to Paris very soon. ‘I am really looking forward to experiencing it,’ he says.Lynch is buzzing with ideas and is currently putting together his own art, film and music programme for Silencio: ‘At any moment I can get an idea. It’s like “Boom!”. It will strike you anywhere.’

CZWG and Paul Smith have completed their Maggie’s centre in Nottingham after an 11^th month construction period. Maggie’s Nottingham serves the Mid Trent Cancer Network and is situated next to the Breast Institute at Nottingham City Hospital. The Mid Trent Cancer Network covers the populations of Nottingham, North Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire – approximately 1.3 million people. Within this area, there are over 4,000 new cases of cancer a year.

From the architects:
The near symmetrical design and generous height of Maggie’s Nottingham allows the building to have a sense of space and balance. The oval building of green glazed ceramic tiles floats over a smaller basement, with plants and trees surrounding. Balconies extend from the kitchen and sitting rooms and provide places from which to look out onto the surrounding landscape, which is designed to use scent and texture to create a secluded and uplifting area for people to enjoy.

“The light, peaceful and non-institutional design of Maggie’s Nottingham is a sanctuary for all those who walk through the door. From the outside the playful appearance entices people to take a look through the door; once they do the harmony of light and space creates a uniquely welcoming environment. It’s a daytime event. It’s a place for living, rather than sleeping – rather like a super dooper house” – Piers Gough, Partner CZWG Architects

Nottingham-born fashion designer Sir Paul Smith has designed the interior of Maggie’s Nottingham. Each room has carefully selected pieces of furniture and objects from around the world – all with their own story to tell. The upholstery of these pieces include a Paul Smith tartan and floral printed fabric. The upholstery of several chairs within the building make direct reference to the classic Paul Smith stripe.

“I am delighted to have been involved in creating this Centre for people living with cancer and their family and friends. It will be a great resource for everyone and a fantastic new addition to the city. Piers Gough is an incredible architect and it has been a joy to work together on the design.” - Sir Paul Smith

http://www.maggiescentres.org/
http://www.czwg.com/
http://www.paulsmith.co.uk/

This October, one of the principal buildings of the King’s Cross masterplan opens its doors to 4,500 students. Central St Martins is one of the most famous design schools in the world, with an illustrious alumni including artist Sir Peter Blake, fashion designer Stella McCartney and Pulp vocalist Jarvis Cocker. The school is moving nearly all of its operations to the newly restored and extended Granary Building at the heart of the King’s Cross development, employing London-based architect Stanton Williams to design the 40,000sq m scheme.

The architect was initially brought in to design a 12-storey building in Holborn in 2002, to unify the 11 buildings across six disparate locations around the capital that made up CSM. However, the institution seized the opportunity to take the King’s Cross site when it became available, finding £200m to purchase and develop it (construction costs were £92m) and Stanton Williams switched its attentions across town. Planning permission was granted in April 2008.

The new campus will announce itself across Granary Square, its listed facade framed by the boulevard that rises from the station across the canal. Beyond the entrance to the building, the street is internalised, running the length of the building from north to south culminating in a theatre at the northern end. It is flanked by four storeys on each side and covered with an ETFE roof. ‘The project is ultimately about creating an environment that will enhance the student experience; to create a building complex with flexible spaces that allows the college latitude,’ says Paul Williams, co-founder of Stanton Williams. ‘By latitude, I mean interior spaces that can evolve, change over time and respond to changing teaching methods – all, importantly, within an organising architectural framework.’

The appearance of the building is deceptive from the exterior: hemmed in by the listed train sheds on the east and west, the building appears very dense. Yet each space is flooded with light, and the architects have retained the rugged, industrial character of the building and juxtaposed it with assured planar forms. The western flank is given over to lecture theatres and studio spaces; the eastern flank contains workshops and office spaces. The building also contains dance studios, black and white box studios and a theatre. ‘Our aim has been to create a stage for transformation, a sequence of spaces that can be orchestrated differently over time between staff and students, where new interactions, chance and experimentation can create that ‘slipstream’ between disciplines,’ says Williams. This is a building developed to house an institution with a Bauhaus pedagogy.

The internal street avoids monotony as it is asymmetrical, it is crossed on 5m-wide bridges that can be appropriated by students for displays and crit panels. The new pristine white walls are interspersed with plywood boards for the students to adorn with work. Generous openings, ceiling heights and roof lights ensure that the experience of the building never becomes overbearing, not even the massive internal facade of the Granary Building has the chance to dominate the space. The building layers the academic activity both vertically and laterally, echoing the activity of the buildings former use, where material and grain moved around the site using trucks, turntable and hoists. Progressing through the circulation spaces that connect the functions, the architect frames the old Building against the skin of the new intervention, providing a tapestry of uncompromising, scarred brick and iron Victoriana against crisp and powerful concrete, steel and glass.

Stanton Williams has provided a series of spaces with different textures and moods that the staff and students will interpret and use. The character of the building as a whole, while unoccupied, remains as a warehouse or interchange, yet it is primed for activity.  It is less poised than the body of work the architect has previously produced, typified by its museum project at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Williams hopes that the building has a ‘rationality and reason’ that improves over its lifespan.

As the first building to be occupied in this newest piece of London, Stanton Williams has provided a thoroughly convincing building, steeped in character yet pragmatically realised. This will set the rhythm and character of the whole development. The final touches are being added by Pringle Brandon and Overbury who are coordinating the fit-out, but Williams stresses, ‘It’s not complete now, and in my view never should be.’

London is an amorphous organism, spreading and shifting over the landscape, expanding and contracting in waves of development; building up a residual history of material and architectural languages, creating districts of prosperity and pockets of desolation. Architects, planners and developers regularly seize upon parcels of land and even whole districts to insert urban models that exploit the cyclical nature of regeneration, creating new bits of city and a tidy profit in the wreckage of the old, all in an on-going effort to sate our accelerating demand for housing, retail, education and culture.

The past three decades have seen masterplans for a plethora of sites across London: Canary Wharf, Paddington Basin, Poplar, the Olympic Park and Battersea to name but a few. Each has employed a different urban model to provide a mix of use and density to create new city areas. King’s Cross in north London has been masterplanned by Allies and Morrison, Porphyrios Associates and Townshend Landscape Architects for developer Argent. This month sees the completion of the key building in the 64-acre development – Central St Martins – and the initial elements that will come to define the area beginning to fall into place.

King’s Cross sits over the site of the historic River Fleet and was surrounded by fields 250 years ago. In 1834 the Regent’s Canal arrived and was swiftly followed by the railways. By 1864 the area was, in the words of Bob Allies, principal at Allies and Morrison, ‘the Heathrow Airport of its time, supplying the city with coal and grain’. A century or so later, the industry had gone but the stations remained, moving people into the metropolis.

King’s Cross, as it stands today is not a destination, but a terminus, a place that encourages transit. Until recently it was notorious for prostitution and drugs and it remains blighted by the incessant roar of the congested Euston Road, so that passengers to the capital’s principal rail interchange with Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras International as close neighbours, have little reason to linger in the area.

The site is peppered with historic buildings, 13 of which are Grade I or II listed. ‘Masterplanning is not an abstract meaning you bring to a place, a stroke of genius that you use to fix somewhere,’ says Graham Morrison. ‘The spaces that we have identified and created were engrained in the site; the character is inherited, and what you inherit has meaning.’ Argent was also  sympathetic to the existing buildings. ‘The traditional buildings are an asset, not in the way,’ says its chief executive, David Partridge. ‘How can you create character without them unless you “Disneyfy” it?’

The site was owned by two landholders (DHL and LCR) which pooled the land in 2000 and appointed Argent as developer. An earlier Foster + Partners scheme, which envisioned the centre of the site preserved as a heritage park, with the listed buildings locked in stasis, was dogged by financial and logistical difficulties and finally scrapped.

At the outset of the current development in 2001, Argent organised a two-day conference with its chosen architects and other stakeholders to discuss what would determine the masterplan, from the history of the site to socio-economic factors. It culminated in an aspirational document called ‘Principles for a Human City’ that listed 10 key areas that would define the ethos of the masterplan, without producing any drawings or schematics about how the development would be composed.

Argent also decided to reappraise the site through four years of consultation with CABE, the GLA, the King’s Cross Partnership, King’s Cross Development Trust, English Heritage, local residents and businesses. Outline planning was approved in 2006, five years after the outset. ‘This masterplan is born of a change in the attitude of developers,’ says Porphyrious principal Demetri Porphyrious. ‘Argent was willing, after working with us and Allies and Morrison in Birmingham [at Brindley Place], to listen to our ideas about how to make a city. It realised that fine buildings alone do not make a city.’

Although politically the site is part of Camden – Bennetts Associates will design the new Camden town hall that will sit north of the canal – geographically it is part of Islington. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link cuts off the site towards the north and west, but the urban grain of Islington has infiltrated the plan from the east.

The site is divided into six blocks for mixed use. These blocks are arranged along a series of public areas that will introduce spaces to draw people north across the site from the train station. Closest to the stations will be office buildings, an area similar to Brindley Place in Birmingham, announced with a trio of buildings by David Chipperfield Architects, Allies and Morrison and Porphyrios Associates . To the east of this block will run the Boulevard, a tree-lined street that will rise 2m steadily from the entrance of King’s Cross Station over the Regent’s Canal, to Granary Square.

Granary Square will be the largest new public square in London, stepping down to  the canal below. The architect has balanced the impact of existing and new architecture with the idea of the public-realm spaces that intersperse it. ‘We have enjoyed working with the industrial toughness of the site, while seeing what we can achieve in making picturesque parts of the city,’ says Morrison.

The public realm is visually connected, the spaces bleeding into one another and providing legible routes across the site that take about 15 minutes to walk. ‘For us the public space was the masterplan, the linkages and major spaces,’ says Morrison. ‘Not like in other places where you get the architects to design buildings and piece them together afterwards. The first move was to link the first two public spaces – the station square and the Granary Building –  then continue this across the site. It’s joining the dots to create the city.’

From Granary Square, the site will link to the Western Coal Drops , a two-storey, listed building that once saw the transfer of coal between rail and cart. This will be transformed into a retail area which will spill out into a generous public space that takes its inspiration from Covent Garden, the Victorian arches used for retail and food outlets. Then to the north will be the Long Park, a simple grass space between the quieter residential and office buildings at the top of the site. ‘Long Park is intended to be unremarkable, this is the point where some people bring in a character like Martha Schwartz to create a magnificent landscape, but we wanted a normal London square,’ says Allies.  ‘It’s not inventing the new city but finding the attributes that make spaces in London. It’s not invention, it is appropriation,’ adds Morrison.

With the public spaces defined, the architects needed to describe how architects would respond to the parameters that they had set, ensuring that the masterplan does not become an architectural zoo or an anonymous landscape. ‘We had to find a way to build in flexibility – not control every facet of design,’ says Porphyrios. ‘We have provided discrete parameters that influence the grain, geometry and volumes of buildings while explaining the benefits of doing so to the culture of the place’.

The building falls in the shadow lines of St Paul’s protected views, so heights are restricted, but by setting fixed maximum volumes for each block, as well as guidelines on setbacks and secondary roads through buildings, the architect has sought to protect the qualities they see in the public realm. ‘It was a careful balance of what to dictate and what not to dictate. A masterplan does is supply surrogate context,’ says Morrison.

Across the site, buildings are being developed by a stable of architects with a distinct pedigree: Wilkinson Eyre, David Chipperfield, Stanton Williams, Glenn Howells, Bennetts Associates and Eric Parry to name but a few. ‘We have learned that masterplanning is like writing a script. It could be performed by an amateur dramatics society and be absolutely killed, or give it to very good actors and it could be fine. This is the nature of materplanning,’ says Allies.

The early signs are promising, as well as Camden moving its offices to the site and Central St Martins opening its campus in the Granary Building later this month, the site has seen the Aga Khan Development Network and property giant BNP Paribas take leases on some of the plots.

King’s Cross has faced, like so many large developments, political and economic uncertainty. In fact it would be suspicious if a scheme such as this had not. However, after its false start in the Nineties, the actions of the developer Argent and the architects have resulted in what promises to be a new piece of city that will be truly open to and occupied by its citizens, not just by banks and large corporations. The architects aspire to plan a part of central London that people will actually live in.

The masterplan has not been designed around square footages of occupancy, but around the needs of the people who will occupy it. At its heart will be one of the most famous design schools in the world and that will give the site character and life as the buildings go up over the next 15 years. Its connectivity not just with London, but the rest of the UK and Europe, will provide a massive audience; it aims to be a fitting gateway to the city.

‘The nature of the development changed; we changed the name from King’s Cross Central, back to King’s Cross. We didn’t want to create a development with a branded name, it is just part of the city,’ says Argent’s Partridge. Allies adds that ‘ultimately the King’s Cross masterplan will be internationally significant because it is a part of London, not because of sensational gimmicks but because the inspiration is places we value highly in the city.’

Edgar Martins’ photography takes us to strange locations and makes them stranger still. His latest project, The Time Machine, is the result of  a ‘topographical survey’ of 20 hydro-electric power stations in Portugal. They penetrate a deserted industrial world, as if frozen in time and chanced upon by a future explorer.

In Martins’ photographs, the built environment takes on an uncanny quality. For example, in his A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings and Dwarf Exoplanets (Blueprint 296), a Potemkin village complete with British high street signs and built as a police training facility, becomes a dark dreamscape under a black sky. His 2009 series, This Is Not A House (at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, until 24 December) catalogues abandonment after the American property crash. In The Time Machine, as in previous projects, there is a sort of super-reality derived from Martins’ long exposure and lighting techniques, and the inference of an unseen human presence.

The Time Machine could refer to the absence of clues such as humans to date the pictures, or the periods when the facilities were built and their own futuristic aspirations. Under dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo (New State) regime, hydro-electric was to power a vast industrialisation of Portugal, but even after his successor, Marcelo Caetano, was swept from power in the 1974  Carnation Revolution, the newly democratic country continued to invest in the renewable resource. Nowadays, local environmental grounds prevent plans for new
dams. Martins says: ‘The reason I photographed newer dams and power stations was to experience the difference between different projects,’ as well as ‘referring… to the failure of [Portugal’s] modernist project as a whole’.

The New State’s project may have failed, but the power stations still operate, upgraded examples of functional efficiency. Its obscure architects’ and engineers’ forms followed function, but were not immune to illusion or allusion. Take the Miranda do Douro power station, built 1957-61. Martins’s shot of the machine hall shows walls of brick, actually a purely superficial surface covering the whole plant, and delicate curving supports reaching to a blue-painted barrel ceiling evoking sky or water. The equivalent but vaster space at Fratel (built 1973) cuts curves in graceful brutalist structural concrete. Unlike Salazar’s strange heroic Lisbon monuments, Martins sees the hydro-electric architecture as ‘more European and progressive’. Elsewhere, designers like Pier Luigi Nervi in Milan were happy to engineer aesthetics into concrete. Martins feels the New State designs show ‘a willingness to mark and celebrate’ the ‘heroic political will’ of the era, bewitched with technology.

Control rooms date these places. At Lindoso, designed in the Sixties, a great grey bank of manual controls sits heavily before a yellow wall of gauges, as if in a sci-fi B-movie. Travel forward in time to when the biggest Portuguese dam at Alto Lindoso was completed in 1993, and big boxy computer monitors and chunky keyboards seem to reflect the retro-futurist early digital period. What’s missing, of course, is the boffins to man this kit. Some facilities were designed for hundreds of staff, but are now run by half a dozen. ‘What can now be considered false expectations,’ says Martins, ‘stem from projects  conceived when man and machine formed part of the same future’, but then machine control was automated, and the images are ‘a testimony of the link that has been broken’.

Despite Martins’ trademark lack of humans, he is fascinated by traces of the human touch: a pot plant at Miranda, a rumpled carpet at Alto Rabagão that seems to be lapping like the sea at an empty chair. Look closely into Fratel’s machine room and you’ll find a suspended nativity scene in neon, almost lost in the vast cavern.

The Time Machine is more than industrial photography that scrupulously documents structures, like the Bernd and Hilla Becher pictures of water towers. It is also an exercise in what Martins calls ‘suspended time’, and it explores ambiguities about built space. His straight-down view of the Pocinho unloading dock, for example, abstracts it into a flat, oblong motif.

There are many things in these images: a nostagia for retro-future, a reverence for technology, a play with scale, and not least a disquieting, mysterious emptiness. The only exterior shot is of a water intake tower at Caldeirão, shot on a foggy morning. A natural optical illusion suggests its shaft contains a field of rocks: another mystery in a mesmerising collection that warrants tranquil contemplation.

Simultaneous exhibitions of The Time Machine run at the Wapping Project, London SE1 and the Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon, until 5 November.

Today, Tigerman McCurry, the practice he shares with Margaret McCurry, is a significant part of what some believe is a re-emergence of post-modernist thinking. For Petit, Tigerman’s archive, which joined work by Eero Saarinen, among others, in Yale’s drawings depository this year, represents Tigerman’s pursuit of a universal truth about architecture. ‘It’s always relevant to remind people of the cultural function of architecture and that it is not simply a business,’ he says.

Petit’s curation of the Tigerman retrospective, Ceci n’est pas une Rêverie (This is Not a Dream), which opened in August, posits Tigerman’s scepticism as important for its critical value, rather than characterising it as cynicism or folly – as post-modernism is often read. Only his conceptual work is on show: texts and drawings of strange animals ‘doing strange things to buildings’ as Petit puts it. ‘There’s obviously an ironic component to my work,’ says Tigerman, ‘but it’s all done in the context of reintroducing complexity into what is otherwise simplistic.’ His satirical cartoons, or ‘architoons’, communicate architecture’s fallibility and the necessity of human presence: aspects that post-modernists’ claim modernism cast aside.

At City University of New York in November, the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art will host the symposium Reconsidering Post-modernism. Meanwhile the V&A’s exhibition Post-modern: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, positions the movement as a ticking time-bomb. ‘We wanted to show how post-modernism collapsed under its own weight,’ says show curator Glenn Adamson, who believes there is a revival going on. ‘In the past five years, post-modernism has gone from being a toxic term to stylish and fashionable,’ he says. Adamson puts it down to a generation shift, the recent recession and post-modernism’s maturity. ‘Post-modernists have moved on to make their own narratives… and the younger generation can discover new things,’ he says.

In his work, Tigerman has railed against the over-simplification of architecture. ‘Part of the yearning for post-modernism in the Seventies was because modernism didn’t allow for idiosyncrasy,’ he says. Tigerman’s buildings – such as the phallic Daisy House, in Porter, Indiana (1978) – direct criticism towards the evolution of modernism that eventually rejected the individual in the design process. But his work isn’t merely reactionary. In his 1978 collage, The Titanic, Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall sinks into Lake Michigan under a surrealist sky; it’s a clarion call for change, the end of modernism, not a criticism of its forefathers.

The continuing deluge of production-line developments is being challenged by a spirited, younger generation re-evaluating the importance of historical reference and vernacular in design. Robert Stern, Dean of Yale University, cites the UK as pivotal in the new post-modernism, and lists practices including FAT and Agents of Change (AOC) as its champions. UK-based architect Post-Works and artist Pablo Bronstein have been reapplying aspects of post-modernism to contemporary spaces. However, Tigerman doubts whether this does, in fact, indicate a shift towards a new post-modernism. He thinks it is a return to engaging with social issues, the users and  clients.

‘Denuding architecture or buildings of the individual and looking at the work itself – producing architecture for its own sake – has reached its limits,’ he says. His Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago (2007) – the USA’s largest centre for the homeless – the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (1982), and  Illinois Holocaust Museum (2000), are all manifestations of Tigerman’s post-modernism. ‘His project really was to remind people architecture wasn’t just about aesthetics but also ethics,’ says Petit.

In some ways his work answers the question about post-modernism’s direction. ‘I think there’s plenty of grist to work with,’ says Tigerman. ‘Sustainable energy, problems connected with capitalism, like homelessness.’ Indeed, much of this is dealt with by his students at the alternative design school, Archeworks in Chicago, which he set up with Eva Maddox in 1993. Its ambition, to make meaningful design that responds to human needs and changeability, is a signpost for any young architect keen to understand where post-modernism went. For Tigerman, ‘architecture has always tried to make what is useful artful, ­­it is not just a useful art.’Following Yale, New Haven, Ceci n’est pas une Reverie will travel to the Graham Foundation, Chicago. Stanley Tigerman’s autobiography, Designing Bridges to Burn (ORO) anda book of essays, Schlepping Through Ambivalence (Yale University Press) are launched later this month.

Ornament vs. Structure! Art vs. Kitsch! Intellectuals vs. Taxi drivers! Tanktops vs. sunrise frocks! These were the vital questions wrestled with at the ICA when they hosted the ‘What is the Use of Ornament in Contemporary Art and Architecture?’ discussion on September 1^st.

Artist Grayson Perry, celebrated for his vases and dress-sense, was the first to walk onstage, face grim but wearing pink shoes, red/pink sunrise top, skirt and a blonde bob. A red handbag completed the ensemble. Post-Modernism guru and landscape artist Charles Jencks followed in a purple tank top over blue shirt, positively sombre by comparison. Sam Jacob, founder of FAT, wore black shirt and jeans- well, he is an architect. Glenn Adamson of the V&A, curator of the Postmodernism show there later this month, chaired the discussion, in attire of no special note.

Everyone’s opening statements were pretty clear. Jencks, admitting that he was a ‘living fossil’, contended that ‘Postmodernist ornament is not kitsch, otherwise it is not postmodernist’. Showing an old boxes-and-arrows diagram of art movements up to 1925 (Cubism, Constructivism, etc), all somehow leading to Modern Architecture, one wondered if he may suggest an updated equivalent for Postmodernism. Instead, Jencks proceeded to take us on a slide tour of key PoMo buildings. He proclaimed the ‘most important’ to be Stirling’s ‘radically eclectic’ Stuttgart Neue Staatgalerie (1984), which he said was not kitsch because everything plays a role in the structure. Even stone blocks that have ‘rhetorically fallen off’ from a wall allow the parking garage behind to be ventilated. On the other hand, Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building (1984, now Sony Building) in Manhattan ‘is closer to kitsch’ because its ornamentation- the celebrated broken pediment (just like Pablo Bronstein’s faux-Regency cabinet on show upstairs), its marble cladding and giant street-level galleria etc, are just a veneer to hide a regular rent-slab office tower. ‘There’s no irony there… it’s in a sense a phoney’, Jencks concluded. He does, however, like Charles Moore’s Piazza Italia (1978) in New Orleans, and he honours FOA’s contemporary facades at the John Lewis store, Leicester with its swirl-patterned glass skin, and the tessellated shapes around the punched windows of Ravensbourne College, North Greenwich.

Over to Mr Perry, who comes alive as soon as he starts to speak. In fact, he instantly commands the stage with the wit and empathetic provocation of the burlesque comedian star he could surely be. ‘I’m more shambolic than Charles’, he declares disarmingly, before proceeding to trash the whole idea of intellectuals musing on aesthetics. ‘When I was at college, decoration was a real swear word’ he tells us, and perhaps a slide of a vase he decorated with drawings of college types tells us what he thinks of that- it’s called Boring Cool People. As for Adolf Loos’ equation of crime and ornament, well, says Perry, ‘that’s why criminals like tattoos’. He’s out to smash preconceived notions, even ones as basic as blue for boys and pink for girls. A slide of a camouflage-surfaced penis holder, apparently a male chastity belt, tells us what decoration boys really want- ‘camo’, as he calls it.  Perry’s thesis is that writers and intellectuals rule the art world- they want art if it has ideas. He, on the other hand, wants to create things with ‘taxi-driver appeal’. Sure, he loves a great building. Examples that ‘buzz’ with him are Rouen Cathedral and the great Mosque of Cordoba, both gloriously decorative. But, he admits, ‘not all very decorative buildings are good’: Neuschwanstein is ‘a poor man’s St Pancras… it’s vile’. And what of Modernism, and it’s contemporary revival with coloured rectangular patches stuck on? He shows a slide of a German art gallery- it’s like ‘a Paul Smith bag’.

Sam Jacob, with a trendy post-trophy era portfolio of stuff like regenerative housing that works in dreary places, seems the perfect speaker for the discussion. His practice is even named for Fashion, Architecture, Taste. Like Perry, he too acknowledged that ‘decoration is seen as effete, useless, redundant, perverted’ etc. But then he gave us a whirl-wind tour of how half-timbering evolved. Brought to Britain by Saxons mercenaries in Roman times as a structural element, it was made increasingly decorative by the Elizabethans, appropriated by the Arts & Crafts movement until in the Inter-War period, it was purely decorative and non-structural, ‘a symbol of history’. Jacob concludes that ‘decoration can be a way of coding’. FAT designed a whole font of half-timber, because as decoration it is a communicative tool, and like Grayson, FAT like communicating with the common people. In Islington Square Manchester, FAT’s row of houses with neo-Dutch brick facades, built in 2006, the design was chosen by the occupants. It’s an example of what Jacobs calls ‘billboard’ facades. Residents in Rotterdam suburb Hoogvlied live in dull houses but their modest back gardens show they want a dash of fantasy, so FAT delivered their most riotously colourful and eclectic design yet, in their community centre, Heerlijkheid Villa (2008). A ‘highly decorative language’ represents nature and industry, simultaneously- flat tree-shaped elements around its entrance almost glow in gold industrial paint. The facade is out like a ’supergraphic which tells the history of the town’.

In the ensuing discussion, it was Jencks’ critical purism vs. Perry’s anti-intellectualism that dominated. Perry continued to attack, talking about ‘the loneliness of the middle class’ and all this constant critical analysis ‘like a CCTV on yourself’. Crowd-pleasing observations included his ‘tidying up a minimalist house is one of the worst nightmares ever!’ As for ‘the symbolic swirl- ooh, it’s feminine time. Fuck off!’ Jencks tries to defend the clever functions of the John Lewis swirls, referencing Indian materials and making private areas opaque, but he’d lost the emotional tide. Grasping for common ground with Perry he argued that Loos’ Crime and Ornament ‘is neo-hysterical rationalism’, but it seemed almost irrelevant.

Jencks’ rich analysis of PoMo certainly doesn’t deserve cavalier dismissal, but there are weaknesses in his position. By his definition, the 198m-high AT&T Building isn’t really PoMo. So what is it- and the host of 80s commercial buildings that at last broke the banal monotony of Miesian glass boxes deadening downtowns across America and beyond? And if it just kitsch, is that a crime? He praises the Piazza Italia, but surely its sort of Piranesi-goes-Las-Vegas neo-classicism uses precisely decoration to make its intended assertion for the downtrodden local Italian community?  As Perry commented, ‘taste is in bubbles’. Everyone has their bubble, so live and let live. The most promising position in the discussion was ultimately Jacob’s- decoration as communication. His FAT architecture escapes the clichés that PoMo sank into with vivid, fresh designs- what’s not to like? And it can claim to have got over the hang-ups of finding use for decoration, by making what people want a use in itself.

Stepping on to the National Memorial at Ground Zero it is hard to feel anything but awestruck by its flatness. The plaza, a plateau 3.2 hectares (8 acres) across downtown Manhattan, is due to open on 11 September to mark the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. It is the only part of the memorial that will be opening that day. The National Museum hidden beneath the immense waterfalls, along with four new WTC towers being built on the other 3.2ha will carry on into next year. Steeped in controversy from the offset, the plaza also tells a story of design by committee.

The surface of the memorial plaza is simple, focusing on three main elements: the plaza plane, the trees and the waterfalls. The process of memorialising such recent history, however, has been complex as America struggled to balance a sensitive response with an urgency to demonstrate its bow-fingers. Preceding Michael Arad’s winning scheme in 2003 were soulless iterations of commercial developments that sought to compensate the exact square footage of office space lost in the attacks. In a moment of Athenian democracy that would come to define the design process, the public spoke out and the plans were scrapped.

The second round of proposals were released in 2002, again to public outcry, and again because the memorial grounds played second fiddle to towering corporate ambitions. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable writing in the Wall Street Journal at the time called them ‘cookie-cutter losers’ of ‘conceptual poverty’. Responding to the demand for a meaningful memorial on the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC); the land-owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and developer Larry Silverstein (who had leased theWTC only months before the attacks) launched an international competition and in February 2003 Daniel Libeskind’s masterplan was selected.

In the phases of development that followed, Libeskind’s plan was scaled back, and his ideas for regeneration at street-level, to build a cultural and a performance space and draw enterprise and community to the pallid Downtown, were abandoned. Arad’s plan (which the judges called ’sparse’ at the time) beat 5,200 other entrants despite violating Libeskind’s vision for a submerged park, instead raising the plaza to street level and paving over the crater. ‘I wanted to give the space back to the city,’ says Arad. Indeed, accessibility and procession are fundamental to the final design. Open on all sides, hemmed in by West and Liberty Streets to the west and the south, Libeskind’s plan has reinstated Greenwich Street, which runs north-south to the east and Vesey Street running east-west along the north of the site. While Santiago Calatrava’s PATH railway station, due for completion in 2015, will connect New Jersey once more and bring an estimated 10 million people through the site annually.

The plaza is also envisioned as a break-out space for the local office workers. The challenge, therefore, was to create a sanctuary in the centre to allow for peaceful contemplation and remembrance. In some ways the one-acre voids set in the footprint of the original towers act as a vacuum, drawing one’s attention to the site of the atrocity. Here, the focus is on depth – all 10 metres of it – rather than height; the inverse of the twin towers’ significance and symbolism.

Here, too the names of victims from both attacks on the WTC (in 2001 and the 1993 bombing) are incised into the tilted bronze wings skirting the waterfalls’ edge. It is a powerful expression of the scale of devastation, the magnitude of the architecture that was so fallible as well as the number of people who died within them. The inscriptions marry spatial and emotional relationships and names are grouped according to affiliation: in 2009, the 9/11 National Memorial Foundation asked all the victims’ families to list who they would like to see their loved ones listed next to. Arad and his team created a constellation of names in rows of three and five that answered all 1,200 requests.

The plaza allows one to peel away from the city. The green-grey stone plane will be pierced with 415 white oak trees arranged along abacus bands of varying widths. Transplanted from the states where the victims lived, the uniform trees form a forest landscape looking north to south, offering a place to be enveloped and buffered from the city. Looking east-west they align as a colonnade, eventually they will arch to form a canopy and a parkland for the memorial district. The soft landscaping was a request from the jury who thought Arad’s design too austere. In response, he partnered with Peter Walker landscape architects. ‘I particularly liked Michael’s proposal because it reminded me of[sculptor] Michael Heizer,’ says Walker. ‘Heizer digs holes in the ground. There are two elements crucial to it – the hole and the ground plane it is dug into. So the more perfect, more constant the plane the more amazing the hole would be.’

In initial plans the plane was more constant. Arad had sunk a ramp between the waterfalls to where the names of the victims were etched around pools below the waterfalls. It was a powerful gesture, and would, like the 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington by Maya Lin, focus on descending and being enveloped in the ground. However, the subterranean commemorative space was vetoed as too expensive and for fear that the ramp would be a target for potential bomb attacks. When it opens next year, the Snohetta-designed Museum pavilion will act as the gateway, and security measure, leading to the galleries 10m below ground.

Designed by Aedas with the National Memorial Foundation’s support, the cavernous museum will house artefacts including a crushed yellow taxi, fire-fighters’ suits and remnants of Minoru Yamasaki’s Twin Towers such as the concrete tridents from its base. And 10m  down, visitors will encounter the surviving slurry wall, which featured so strongly in Libeskind’s presentation eight years ago for being ‘as eloquent as The Constitution itself, asserting the durability of democracy and the value of individual life’.

The conversation in the lead-up to the tenth anniversary has centred around how to commemorate recent history. The National Building Centre in Washington held a lecture in July with representatives from the three memorial sites where the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11; Pennsylvania, at the Pentagon in Washington and New York. It is rare for a memorial to be built so soon after the event says Paul Murdoch, the architect behind the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, where passengers on the hijacked flight brought the plane down before it reached its supposed target, the Capitol building in Washington. Here the site has implicit solitude, a field of 890ha and a crater from the crash. Maintaining this was important to the victims’ families, says Murdoch. ‘You want to be clear about setting up certain opportunities to visitors without programming what they’re going to get from that,’ he says. Meanwhile, the Pentagon Memorial by KBAS Studio directly references the age range of those killed in the highjacking. Here under-lit benches peel up from the ground, organised by a timeline based on the ages of the individuals and dedicated to each one.

The designs share a lack of signature or the notion of unity, though in the case of the National Memorial in New York, it is yet to be seen whether this will be so. Unlike in Central Park where the 341ha feel as much a part of the urban fabric as the buildings that hem it in and the city that frames it, the National Memorial feels like a crater in a thicket of buildings.
The sense of flatness is heightened by the surrounding half-completed developments that make up the rest of the site, many of which have had to be put on hold during the financial crisis. While Libeskind’s plan has been taken as a guideline, in trying to deliver a memorial to individuals as well as a collective and still maintain its market value, the ground zero may suffer a classic New York urban planning condition of disjunction. For now, though, the plaza is a feat of city reclamation, as Walker puts it,of ‘making nothing something.’

Since the completion of the Jewish Museum Berlin in 1999, Studio Daniel Libeskind has been globally positioned as the prevalent practice with an intrinsic ability to design in response to history or trauma for a specific need of memorialisation. Libeskind’s ability to recount tales of loss and tragedy through the built environment creates powerful emblems of memory which often resist or repel conventional methods or ideology. His most recognisable contributions include the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (2001); Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2008); and, the Military History Museum, Dresden (scheduled completion- 2011). The Jewish Museum Berlin, his first full commission, remains a pivotal moment; not only did he glean an opportunity to put academic theory into professional practice, it continues to enable him to orient his own career and its subsequent trajectory. This self-orientation allows for references to the museum in direct relation to his most prescient projects, most notably the Ground Zero, World Trade Center masterplan. In conversation with Daniel Libeskind in his Lower Manhattan office, within walking distance of the World Trade Center site, what becomes apparent is that the architect is a fervent believer in the possibilities of architecture– not simply in regenerative terms but in emotive, historiographical, communicative and symbolic expression – and the profession’s inherent ability to call upon its own heritage to speculate, experiment and invent.

‘Why do we build in the first place?’ Libeskind asks. ‘It is about an idea. It is about human beings. It isn’t just about containers. Very often, the discussion in architecture from the Sixties right through to the Nineties has been more about typologies, forms, cladding, shimmering surfaces or fashions. But, the eternal question is how do people live, how do they orient themselves to where they are in the world?’

In 2003, just 18 months after the terrorist attacks, Libeskind’s Memory Foundations proposal was selected as winner for the Ground Zero redevelopment. It accommodates 10 million sq ft (930,0000 sq m) of office space, a memorial area, and ground-level retail units and designates a significantly large area to public space. The overall project has an estimated completion date of 2014, however, certain elements such as Michael Arad’s 9/11 Memorial are to be completed imminently as part of the commemoration of the tenth anniversary.

Libeskind claims: ‘All the abstractions of urban planning and architecture come to the fact that at the centre more than half of the 16 acre space is public space, which is not easy to achieve when you have 10 million sq ft of density, more millions of square feet of infrastructure, or cultural elements. I often say it is a whole city.’

In among the 20 or so governing bodies claiming stakehold on the World Trade Center redevelopment site lies the rebirth of the monument to American capitalism. In a singular monumental icon, Libeskind’s Freedom Tower amalgamates the hyper-politicised construction process with a building that ultimately produces a political symbol of Western democracy. Libeskind states: ‘I believe democracy is not easy, you have to divide consensus.’ In this double-bind of politics, the Freedom Tower included the representation of the capitalist and democratic system through its iconological referencing; particularly, the asymmetrical form as reference to the Statue of Liberty and the Tower’s height (1,776ft) alluding to the date of the American Declaration of Independence – references that have stoutly remained.

When undertaking a project on the political and economic scale of Ground Zero, it is not surprising that it is littered with difficult decisions and negotiation. Similarly, the Jewish Museum Berlin had to endure political and social uneasiness and questioning, just as both projects carried with them a deep responsibility of reinterpreting trauma. His reliance was on a strategy; based on inventing a programme – describing the oxymoron of attempting to understand an event that seems entirely implausible, and implementing and incorporating cultural edifice – he manifested a project that managed to make physical meaning from a historical tragedy.
‘Sure, you can define 1776 as a building height, but those symbols that very often people think are trivial are not,’ Libeskind opines. ‘In everything there is a symbolic value: an inch is symbolic; a metre is symbolic; a second or an hour is symbolic. There is nothing in our world that is not already weighted in human experience. It is how to connect those deeper realities to a human experience. This can only be done through multiple ways. Ground Zero has a very important, if not very obvious, significance. But there is symbolic value in the Jewish Museum – will people ever understand the Jewish Museum? People said that it should not be built because there’s nothing Jewish about it. “Where is the Star of David?” or this or that. But, the true symbols, which are not superficial or done as a cartoon, have a profoundly informed sense of connectivity at all levels or dimensions of the human soul or intellect and do communicate’.

At Ground Zero, a prescient example, akin to the voids’ insinuating presence through absence at the Jewish Museum Berlin or Imperial War Museum North, is the foundation Slurry Wall which tries to infuse the idea that an entity has disappeared and reappears ephemerally: ‘To construct something that is also hidden. We wanted to expose the foundations at Ground Zero. This act is very new – to show what the building is sitting on. It is not sitting on something hidden; it is sitting on the Slurry Wall. There is a truth in what remains and is exposed,’ he explains. ‘It will be an incredible experience for people to be in the bedrock of New York and to see how buildings relate to the emptiness of underground or the solidity of the ground. It is about disclosing something, that isn’t just more of the same. It shows something that may be even more important: survival.’

In a similar gesture, Libeskind evokes the human memory condition as a device to orient the viewer in both space and time. ‘I think [at the World Trade Center] people will see something that connects a memory with the future; something that connects the tragic, which will forever be inscribed into the site because it will always be a place where people died, but also it will show not only a resilience but the potential of the city to reinvent itself, to move forward and to do something meaningful which is not just some buildings in a grid, it is something that shapes the imagination. The mind is just the tip of it. It is based on so many things, particularly in architecture that we take for granted but can hardly fathom. Certainly that goes for memory because memory is an orientation. Memory is not a symbol.’

It is interesting to consider that even in the singular Jewish Museums of San Francisco and Berlin; and the war museums in Manchester and Dresden; memorialisation seems continually to differ  in meaning. Is this through a stylistic shift, an aesthetic treatment or subtle, contextual juxtaposition? For instance, it could be said that the Jewish Museum Berlin is a decentralised form of memorialisation in the sense that it brought together disparate elements of history and accounts of the Holocaust for a number of separate, yet entirely entwined, tragedies. The Berlin or San Francisco Jewish Museums archive and collect memories from an array of locations. In contrast, the World Trade Center represents the precise locale of devastation: a centralised memorialisation, a rebuilding of the monument that once stood before. How, then, does Ground Zero mediate between the totality of oppressive, but possibly implicit, forces of memorialisation on the immediate site as opposed to memorialising genocidal regimes from disparate sites across a breadth of time? Does this question reveal a methodology of memorialisation?

‘A valid question,’ says Libeskind. ‘On the Lindenstrasse, where the Jewish Museum is, was the place from where Jews were taken to concentration camps or deported or murdered. The analogy of memory is overwhelming. But, these projects are so different. Their scale of building and programme make them different. We speak about architecture in the long term. That is the true scale of architecture. It is to orient us, really, in history. It is not to orient us just in terms of uptown or downtown… It is just to make sense. Does it make any sense, or is there any meaning that six million Jews were murdered? A chaotic fact has just happened. Does Ground Zero have a meaning? Well, I believe that Ground Zero does have a meaning. I believe that the attacks, all of it, have meaning. We might not fully know what it is but we can intuit how we can respond in a positive sense.’

The idea that architecture orients you in history is a fascinating thought: to consider architecture as a signifier, a point or place in time – whether that is something celebratory like a Gothic cathedral or a building steeped in trauma like the World Trade Center – the building will always account for an historical act. It almost lays testimony to the fact through its physical manifestation. Libeskind, commendable not least for being the eternal optimist, has crafted a career based around an ideology that moves beyond the fetishistic and strives to subliminally charge architecture with inherent meaning. His body of work exemplifies a sense of balance between diplomacy and pragmatism, whether it is in the thematising of programme or in the actuality of the building process. He invokes a plurality for ways of seeing, just as his early drawings intricately displayed obtuse angles and impossible geometry, they ultimately become a coherent composition; the World Trade Center alongside the plethora of memorialisation projects aims at promoting a positive response to inhumane travesties: ‘You cannot be a pessimist in architecture; it goes against the grain of construction because it is an act of affirming something. It is not a negation,’ Libeskind says. Yet, concurrently, he observes that through the process of affirmation: ‘We still have to build in such a way that means we have to dig the ground, lay a ground stone, somebody has to do something violent.’

Sitting at the intersection of high speed rail linking the capital cities of France, Britain and Belgium, Lille is a city of ambition. The growth of Rem Koolhaas’ imposing ‘Euralille’ business district over the last 15 years is a conspicuous reminder of this city’s new found place in Europe and the heady days before the global economic downturn. Now a less obvious, though equally ambitious project, is under way in districts right across the city, which involves investment in small and medium scale regeneration projects in some of Lille’s most neglected areas. This Grand Projet Urbain is led by Lille’s forward-facing Socialist mayor, Martine Aubry, who recently announced her presidential candidacy and readiness to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy.

One area receiving investment under this plan is Arbrisseau in South Lille. Isolated from the city centre by a major motorway, it has a disparate mix of pre-war housing, Sixties social housing and industrial buildings scattered across a wasteland. Hidden underground, a series of bottle-shaped chalk quarries from the 18th century, known as catiches, are a forgotten reminder of the area’s industrial importance to the historical development of the city.

The Nouveau Centre Social de l’Arbrisseau, by Colboc Franzen Associés represents the beginnings of the regeneration of this particular neighbourhood. Its crystalline form sits on the surface of the derelict landscape as if the architect scraped just below the surface to unearth a gem of potential within the site. Though currently sitting in isolation, it represents the city’s commitment to the people of Arbrisseau and is in itself evidence of the fact that the surrounding area will soon be filled with new housing and roads connecting the existing isolated pockets of housing across the landscape. The social centre will form the focal point of this newly unified neighbourhood, its non-hierarchical facades addressing residents in every direction.

It was the first major public commission of the young practice when it won the competition back in 2007 at just two years old, after completing a number of successful private projects. Not subscribing to any particular school of thought, founding associate Manuela Franzen describes the practitioners’ skills as complementary. Also a qualified engineer, Franzen’s German architectural education placed emphasis on the technical, practical side of construction before others, whereas fellow founder Benjamin Colboc’s Paris education was more geared towards the emotional side of architecture. What results is a young practice of three associates and a dozen architects striking a confident balance between the artistic and the scientific, producing an architecture of both emotion and technology. The Nouveau Centre Social de l’Arbrisseau is an embodiment of that symbiotic relationship.

Colboc Franzen won the commission for the Arbrisseau project by sticking rigorously to the brief, which required various social and educational spaces for all the demographic groups in the surrounding community. These included everything from nurseries and teaching support spaces for children, to bookable function rooms and cookery schools for teenagers and adults. Each set of users also had to have direct access to the external landscape – not an easy task given both the relatively large programme and the fact that a significant portion of the site was unsuitable for construction due to the existence of the catiches.

The response was to simply stack the functions upon one another on the only usable land on the site. With parking concealed underground, the youngest children are accommodated on the ground floor, with the programme ascending up through the first floor for primary school aged children, to teenagers and adults on the second floor. Finally, on the third floor there is an apartment for the building’s caretaker, as well as admin spaces and an IT suite. A series of external terraces linked by a helical staircase are then carved into the solid volume, connecting these different user groups to the ground plane. Full-height glazing behind this carved-out stair offers a tantalising glimpse of the building’s use internally, which is otherwise concealed behind the aluminium facade. This aluminium cladding extends over the windows where it is perforated to allow the light to filter through, save for a few carefully selected fully transparent windows framing views out of the building. The effect is a building of privacy and solidity by day, but with the facade dissolving by night to reveal both the hidden structural trusses and the spaces behind.

Though the building’s client hopes the centre will rejuvenate a neglected area, the location creates some unavoidable problems. The hostile character of the site has led to the most disappointing part of the building, a 2m-high steel and glass fence and gate system around the site. Though the fence is visually unobtrusive, its alignment with the edge of the overhanging building above leads to a slightly unsettling feeling in the narrow area between the fence and the building’s main entrance, as if one were trapped under an overhanging coastal rock, fearing the rising tide. Ideally, the fence could have been set back further from the building though if the architecture of the overall regeneration has the desired social impact, such security features may be removed in future, in line with the architect’s initial vision.

Any concerns with access are immediately forgotten after passing through a discreet entrance beneath an overhang, where visitors emerge into an atrium space the entire height of the building, creating a  hollow core. The top of the space is roofed over so that the shadowy volume (an allusion to the catiches?) is punctuated only by the shafts of light that slice through openings in the concrete walls creating the illusion of an unknown force blasting its way out of the building’s core. These openings in the beautifully smooth blue-grey concrete walls are lined with a deep, rich timber, reflecting the practice’s penchant for ‘authenticity’. This refined pallet of rich materials, combined with the complex interplay between light and shade in the towering volume of the space, evokes an almost spiritual feeling redolent of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel.

The openings in the core are not arbitrary, but a reflection of the balance between technology and art that the practice embodies. The driving force behind the shape and location of the cuts is structural, with concrete being removed from the parts of the core that bear no stress, reflecting the authentic architecture for which the office strives. This approach is further evident where the steel trusses supporting the building are selectively exposed to the users, both in the libraries and behind the perforated facade at night. In most cases, this authenticity does not come at the expense of practicality, for instance, use of acoustic panels allowed the practice to keep the exposed, smooth, hard concrete finish of the core without compromising functionality. Another slightly less successful ‘authentic’ move is the provision of auditoriums supplementary to the brief, which expand the libraries by using the slopes in the floor above the external stairs. Though these
are an interesting, honest and efficient use of the leftover spaces in the cross-section of the building, in the largest amphitheatre it is difficult to imagine how easily anyone could actually deliver a lecture from the tight floor space between the exposed truss and the amphitheatre steps. Dramatic hand gestures and floor pacing might have to be ruled out.

The rest of the building is defined by a simple diagram anchored by the core. Users can ascend the building via an internal staircase sandwiched within the double walls of the concrete hollow core, spiralling up in the opposite direction to the outer staircase. On each level services are also accommodated between the core walls, along with breakout spaces from the adjacent circulation route, some of which open up into double height adding drama to the space. Beyond the circulation routes lie the functional spaces themselves, as well as the external terraces. Despite this simple diagram, there is a quite beautiful complexity that emerges within, from the auditoriums nestled above the external staircase, to the way toddlers sleeping in the ground floor nap rooms can be checked on by staff in the level above. Most excitingly, the structurally authentic cuts in the core walls allow for visual connections between the different parts of the building across the hollow core, leading to joyful encounters where users in one part of the building can see, wave and gesture to friends in another, but cannot hear them.

This is a great deal of skill in the way that this young practice has integrated the key elements of architecture; structure, function and aesthetics. Right across the building, its comprehensive and complementary understanding of these areas and, most importantly, the relationship between them has created a piece of quality architecture, greater than the sum of its parts. If the Grand Projet Urbain progresses with the same ambition and skill, the various developments might unite to do the same for the city.

The received wisdom embodied in Victorian materials and 20th century ways of doing things is tyrannous. Architecture students need to be taught in a different way, to help them free themselves and seize opportunities says Neil Spiller

I have often said ‘it is a good time to be an architect / designer’. The world is our lobster as us Surrealists say! Change is good and currently changes are happening in the creative arts at a pace. Technology is changing, objects and buildings must transverse the schizophrenic boundaries between the actual and the virtual. Media culture and social media are pushing at the envelope of what constitutes decency and privacy. We walk the tightrope between liberation and subservience. Finally, the design world has no modernist compass any more, with which to navigate the waves and often the pretty but deadly sirens of fashion deploy their seductive but ultimately vacuous charms on us simple matelots as they sing their refrain.

Storm clouds gathering
Schools of design are buffeted in storms of league tables, fluctuating reputations and uncharted waters; here be dragons. Many architecture schools, for example, cling to an old model of architectural education already established and concretised by 1915 – that of the master, the rows of drawing boards, the crit as key teaching method, the shelter of the fledgling designer from the vagaries of capitalism, red in tooth and claw. Designs are honed in a make-believe world of imaginary clients who act like popes or doges in a landscape of cultured and aesthetically aware users who have yet to be blighted by the contemporary psychosis caused by man’s consumption, media immersion and greedy, short-sighted stupidity. The ocean is deeper than it seems.

Lead me to a distant shore
So the old model does not work. It produces turkeys voting for Christmas. What of a new model? Students should see design and the act of design as political, social, cultural and proactive. Cedric Price always said the first big design question is what to design. Simply receiving the endless sophist wisdom of what is around has got the world in the mess it is in. I don’t need to run through the litany of global ecological, social and community damage we have fostered with this view of economic ubiquity. A new vision is required that is predicated on specialness, exceptions and peculiarity. We need to encourage students to look at the received wisdom embodied in ubiquitous Victorian materials and 20th-century ways of doing things and see them for what they are: tyrannous. We need to encourage students to rejoice in the new spaces that are created by the virtual infiltrating the actual and the vital. We need to encourage students to fully understand and enjoy the differences in it all whether that is sites, objects, contexts, people and cultures.

Seven Seas of creative life
Architectural education in the future will be inter- and pan-disciplinary. It will not make a distinction between learning, teaching and research and will encourage students to have the mental and creative dexterity for the many changes that are to come. My own school, Greenwich, must creatively position itself at the centre of the Earth again. We must be critical personally, creatively, corporally and societally.

You control your destiny
Architectural education will encourage students to see opportunity everywhere, whether formal, ethically entrepreneurial, professional or personal. We will not let students drift alone, all hope gone in the morning tide. A tide mourning for a lost mythical time. We will encourage students to fill their pockets full of dreams, so they can spread their wings across the sky.

Professor Neil Spiller is the head of the University of Greenwich’s School of Architecture, Design and Construction

New York, New York, so good they made it twice. This time, the city is being reinvented as the Big Green Apple, with ‘liveability’ at its core, writes Greg Clark.

For New York City, the challenge to stay ahead and keep its lead in the world league of cities is not solely about regaining its economic prowess. It is much more about re-establishing its lead as the locus of city-making, lifestyle, and urban design.

The role it held as the first city of the skyscrapers, the city of the first Guggenheim Museum, and the city of exuberant pulsating street life must be nurtured anew and reborn, with urban innovations for modern times.

The city that ‘won the 20th century’ has faced substantial and unnatural challenges in the present. Terrorist attacks; the dot.com crash; global restructuring; competitive offers from lesser-known centres for film shoots, stock exchanges, and luxury lifestyles and the end of hegemonic positioning as capital of the world. If that wasn’t enough then came the financial crash of 2007-2010, striking not just at the financial engine of the city but at its identity and reputation as first Lehman Brothers and then a host of other iconic New York
firms were beaten up, and the idea of a ‘global financial centre’ was beginning to be mocked in the media.

Lesser cities might have crumbled and sunk like Atlantis. Predictions of New York’s ‘inevitable demise’, along with the nation of which it was the first capital, were loudly whispered in many corridors outside North America. But this city, which showed remarkable ability to solve its own problems in the previous century – whether in sanitation, infrastructure or crime ­– appears to be doing so once again.

First, the economy is running strong again and not just in finance. In the aftermath of the 2008-9 global recession, the Big Apple remains the second wealthiest city in the world by GDP, only beaten by Tokyo, and is forecast to stay in that position for at least the next decade and a half. The five major comprehensive global city indexes in 2010-11 all place New York first in the global league table, just ahead of London, and in most cases some way clear of a chasing pack that includes Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong.

There are reasons for caution, however. The city’s lead in economic vitality and business density shrank in 2010, with Tokyo now on a par. Its advantage as a financial centre over Hong Kong and Singapore has diminished considerably in the Global Financial Centres Index, from over 90 points in 2007 to just 10 points in 2011. But, despite the growth of the competition and the narrowing of the margins between the world leading cities, no one now doubts New York’s ability to win as a business city and to use competition to drive its own innovations harder.

New York’s major challenges have never been about whether it can be a place to engage in trade or to make money, though. These are locked firmly into the DNA of the former Dutch settlement. NYC’s quest is to demonstrate its liveability and build a place in the intellectual and cultural life of the 21st century.  The system of city indexes that rank the city so highly for financial muscle and economic dynamism also criticise the city for being uninhabitable and inhuman.

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, following the 2001 tragedy, he set about remaking the city’s image. ‘The Big Green Apple’ was born. The popular and emphatic leader understood that putting life back into the city is about creating
a city that works for people, not just for business. His many initiatives – including the award-winning PlaNYC, a blueprint
for the greening all of the city, its energy systems and public spaces – provide a fresh prospectus for success in the city that
used just to breathe money.

And he’s right. New York must upgrade its infrastructure and environmental performance. Its core building and transport provision was never viewed as world-class. Mercer’s 2009 study of global city infrastructure ranks New York a moderate 32nd out of 215 cities, well down on London (8th), Tokyo (12th) and Paris (13th). New York’s next phase of reinvention is rooted in liveability. So encouraging the regeneration of the High Line urban park and walkway on the Lower West Side (pictured above) is one means to show that old infrastructure and industrial cityscape can be greened in pursuit of urban lifestyle. The new Festival of Ideas (see page 80) is not just a means to engage New Yorkers in a conversation and expression of fascination with culture and design, but it helps to reveal the thoughtfulness of New York that has always existed behind the corporate facade, and to foster a new network of distinctive destinations within the old city.

There are many other new initiatives too: more parks and squares, regeneration of public space, improved walkways, festivals and public celebrations. All people in New York now party, not just those on six-figure bonuses. After tackling the crime – the key cause of low liveability that blighted public space in the 1990s – New York now remakes the space itself, and is, once again, a place to mingle, take recreation, and dream of new futures.

Greg Clark is an international advisor on city and metropolitan development, a senior fellow of the Urban Land Institute and chairman of the OECD Development and Investment Forum

When the first part of High Line opened in 2009 it was greeted as a triumph of urban salvage. Variously named the hanging gardens of New York, park in the sky and the green ribbon, the story of how the 1.45 miles of decommissioned elevated railway was transformed into a vibrant public park has captivated the entire city from the offset. For locals and visitors alike the paved promenade 10m above street level and enclosed in an iron railway bed is an oasis in Manhattan’s West side. Meanwhile, for other US cities the High Line represents a formula for economic growth and a template for their own urban renewal. With the opening of Phase II
this month, however, the measure of the High Line’s unequivocal success may be judged not as an export but as a site-specific phenomenon.

The High Line’s creation began with a grass-roots campaign in 1999 set up by two local residents – Joshua David and Richard Hammond – keen to preserve the relic of post-industrial New York. Overgrown with weeds and plants, seeded naturally by birds resting on the tracks, the High Line’s autonomy/wilderness was captured in the 2002 book Walking the High Line, in which photographs by Joel Sternfeld and text by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker turned its dereliction into a haunting wonderland. In 2003 landscape architects Field Operations, headed up by James Corner, and architects Diller Scofidio and Renfro won the competition to design the elevated park.

For the same reason that Sternfeld and Gopnik felt compelled to narrate the High Line, so too did Corner approach it as more than a singular object. ‘We had such a reverence and respect for the High Line as the High Line,’ he says. ‘Rather than just using it as a site to do a project, we actually used the site as something to try to amplify or concentrate the High Line’s charm; the aura.’

Others observing the structure arching above the fray of 10th Avenue – where flurries of taxis seemingly aim for pedestrians – considered the High Line an eyesore; its bulky, uncultivated presence among the gallery-strewn streets of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. In 2003, David and Hammond’s organisation Friends of the High Line (FHL) convinced the City’s Department of Parks and Recreation under Mayor Bloomberg to reverse a policy to demolish the structure – devised under the previous administration – and the City filed for railbanking, preserving railroad rights-of-way for later, making it City policy to preserve and reuse the High Line. Later the area’s zoning was changed to enforce a height restriction on buildings along the High Line.

The dedication to protecting the High Line’s vistas (and the sunlight access to its plants) not only ensures its continued development but also demonstrated a shared vision between city and public. While places such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Jersey City have plans to repurpose their left-over infrastructure based on the High Line model, Corner is cautious about transposing the project: ‘These cities need to be realistic about what the key ingredients were,’ he says. ‘An economic strategy and some kind of organisation with the wherewithal to make things happen, to build momentum, raise money and push for design excellence. The temptation is to design to the lowest common denominator.’

Developed during the peak of the recession, the High Line proved that there was a place for high-end design in the public realm. Its success as a public-private partnership between the non-profit organisation FHL and New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation demonstrated the positive outcomes of developing an area; keeping it in line with codes and regulations while retaining the soul of the place.

As part of Bloomberg’s Five Boroughs Economic Opportunity Plan, a long-term strategy set out in 2009 to stimulate New York’s economy through ‘creating attractive communities’, the High Line became an example of the Mayor’s city-wide economic reforms. The High Line delivered on its promise of fiscal growth. Its projected return is $900m in tax revenue over the next 30 years. It is no surprise, therefore, that the park benefitted from being centrepiece for a broader economic stimulus package.

Though public-private partnerships are common among parks – many have conservancies that raise funds to maintain the land – FHL’s well-oiled machine canvassed support from the cultural elite and wealthy. Its media-savvy organisers brought actor Ed Norton, billionaire businessman Barry Diller and his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg on board to help raise the annual day-to-day operating costs of between $3.5m and $4.5m dollars. ‘The celebrity brought a certain spot-light to the project,’ says Corner. As Malcolm Gladwell, writer and West Side resident noted in a recent panel discussion at City University of New York: ‘there’s nothing wrong with the kind of aesthetic values and sensibilities that come from the higher end – ultimately [they] are of interest to the whole city. They’re the ones that can make this kind of sophisticated re-imagining work in 2011.’

The non-profit organisation produced blogs and information and unparalleled access to its ongoing growth and operation in an attempt to give the decommissioned freight line back to the community. However public, the park remains highly controlled. Indeed, one of its biggest criticisms has been where the fallout of private investment becomes obvious; heavy security at night and rules restricting vendors and the various activities normally associated with a park, such as ball games and dog-walking have been prohibited. Though its unique location elevated two storeys up required more security and regulations.

The Park has also cashed in on its unique vantage point. Offering views towards Upper West Side from its drop-down theatre arena and vistas out to the Hudson River. Its setting among some of New York’s prestigious new buildings, by the likes of Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry also position the park at an advantage over other cities, such as Philadelphia, where its derelict rail track runs through a mostly residential area.

The design team has also been careful to create engaging environments where there are no views. Making a virtue of the track’s course underneath red-brick buildings and spurs that stop dead where trains once offloaded their cargo to the warehouses. Indeed, Lauren Ross has developed a comprehensive arts programme at FHL, which reinforces the High Line as a destination. ‘It is an inspiring and inviting space that can be a platform for all the arts,’ she says. One artist, Kim Beck, whose installation Space Available places empty, warped billboards on rooftops around the High Line drawing attention to the banal urban details visible from an unusual vantage point above the streets. The intimacy of the park with its surrounding buildings has allowed the High Line to use the city as its canvas.

Perhaps Corner’s greatest skill has been to recognise and respond to the site’s innate plurality. On the one hand it has had the benefit of being a darling of the arts scene, traversing Chelsea’s gallery district where David Zwirner holds the one of the largest galleries in the city (after the Gagosian) and where the famed Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan Thomas fell into a fatal, whiskey-induced coma; Leonard Cohen rolled around with Janis Joplin and where a drug-addled Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy, then couldn’t remember if he had done it or not. On the other it is a local gem, weathered and worn into the fabric of the city. The area has its history and the residents have their nostalgia. This went some way to helping FHL gather allies among its neighbours. And those that already used the High Line for illegitimate strolls among its weedy meadows, had already voted with their feet.

Tracing the fringe of the West Side, east of the Hudson River, the High Line zigzags north through the Meatpacking District into Chelsea where it then continues up to 30th Street. This is phase II. Unfolding in the theatrical episodes, phase II applies the same materials and philosophy as phase I, including sensitively exposed tracks; tapered concrete paving strips and elegant benches that peel up from the floor. Dutch horticulturalist Piet Oudolf – who is also working with Peter Zumthor on this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park – has devised thresholds of thickets and meadows interspersed among a strip of lawn. At one point a raised platform places visitors among a canopy of trees. ‘Because section II is narrower and straighter, it’s less inherently segmented. There’s a bit more wilful design to create these episodes,’ says Corner.

It wasn’t that long ago that the urban model was always about the buildings and block-based development. Whatever remained was the residual space, an afterthought. In the case of the High Line, the public space led as an economic catalyst as well as a means of shaping the city itself. The High Line also marks the progress of a wider movement towards landscape design in the US, which puts public space at the centre of major urban development projects, such as Seattle’s waterfront regeneration and the area surrounding Niemeyer’s Arch in St Louis. Indeed, the High Line is a case in point; although a relatively small-scale project, it is an exemplar piece of landscape urbanism. It cannot, however, be canonised. The High Line’s success rests on its friends and its city. It is inimitable. ‘Unlike 20-odd years ago, when cities mimicked successful urban projects such as the festival waterfront, today the competition is harder,’ says Corner. ‘The demand is for difference.’

The construction of a new building is a brutal and traumatic act for a city. Even the tiniest of architectural moves requires a readjustment in the delicate balances within this complex organism. ‘The question is does Wakefield want a museum: will the body accept its transplant?’ asks David Chipperfield.

The RIBA Gold Medallist acknowledges that architects cannot answer this themselves but believes their decisions determine the acceptability of the transplant. Although superseding the Wakefield Art Gallery, which nestled in a Georgian house, Chipperfield’s latest incision into the British landscape, Hepworth Wakefield, is a cultural quantum leap for the city.

The site for the new gallery, which opened its doors on 21 May, is tricky: the headland of the River Calder is an island, stranded by the Hebble Navigation, which shortcuts a meander. Four lanes of traffic charge over the bridge adjacent to the Hepworth and uncomfortably close to a medieval bridge, which is adorned with the 14th-century Chantry Chapel of St Mary the Virgin renovated by George Gilbert Scott in 1842.

‘Towns like this got beaten up by traffic engineers, planners, architects,’ says Chipperfield. The isolated nature of the site, however, conjured some interesting challenges. In particular, it is visible from almost all angles: the bending river as it sweeps into a weir,  the continuing regeneration development on the other side, and the road bridge.

The main pedestrian access is across a new footbridge, which swings around, suspended above boats that are being repaired, and half-submerged vessels, returned to nature. From this approach, the huddled forms grow out of the mirror-still water; the building expresses a weight, as if at some point, it became lodged in a nook and stayed, along with the worn out boats.

Chipperfield notes that, in comparison to Margate’s Turner Contemporary, the Hepworth projects a greater ‘external personality’ attributed to its materiality. The expanse of blue-grey concrete is brutal but there is a softness, which suggests that over the years, its sharp corners will be smoothed by the swirling water.

There is a unique relationship between the industrial and the rural in northern English cities; they openly peer at each other, curious at the other’s exoticism. In Wakefield, this bond has intrigued artists, from Turner to the native Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, who have found it both harmonious and antagonistic. Moore once remarked that sculptures in landscape ‘possess their environment’. This seems fitting for the new building. It stands its ground, it announces its presence even, but the large windows allow the landscape to leak inside, so that even when one is inside, it is possible to feel part of the water – another obstacle for the charging weir to divert around.

‘The museum is a typology that tends to set up a front and back situation if you’re not careful,’ says Chipperfield, ‘we needed a building that could turn and face all ways.’ At the first meeting for sketch ideas, the architect presented a composite form comprising many little buildings, all facing different directions. These evolved into rooms.

A game of fiddly manipulations between interior volumes and exterior forms followed, moving through hundreds of iterations. All the rooms had to be approximately the same size, but by skewing the geometries – giving each room a high end and low end for example – the design team realised it could offer different conditions. ‘To play this sort of large-scale sculpture is both fascinating and difficult,’ says the architect. Almost in retaliation to the Turner Contemporary, the Hepworth plays with the imbalance of natural light; ceilings peel away from walls to reveal an almost cathedral-like glow of light above.

Each of the 10 gallery spaces has its own personality, some are more affable than others. Although there is a surprisingly small 1.5m variation in height between the forms externally, some rooms feel at least twice as high and light, and those without views can’t help but appear conventional next to their showy siblings. The 44 working models, composing the Hepworth Family Gift, inject a magical substance to this new institution and its architecture. The real gem is the gallery that houses an aluminium prototype for Winged Figure, which reaches up to the slice of light above as if about to take flight.

Other gallery directors might argue that a building with too much personality would be too intrusive but the director of the Hepworth Wakefield Trust, Simon Wallis, disagrees: ‘We’ve been given total flexibility by the architect. All light entering the building can be toned down with louvres, and even blacked out.’ Organised like a 19th-century museum, with an upper ring of galleries resting on a base of services, the curators have commented on a fluidity to the building. Visitors are led intuitively through it by the art, with sculptures in the next room framed through openings and the personalities of the rooms working as an orienting device.

According to Chipperfield, the biggest battle over the budget was to allow the walls to rise directly out of the water, rather than leave a margin of riverbank. It is conceivable that without this victory, we would be looking at an entirely different building. Conversely, other elements, which were bid farewell during cost saving, proved fortuitous accidents, including the in situ pouring of the pigmented concrete instead of using precast components. The results were unexpected but a success – a bit of a risk, one might say. ‘I think we got rid of people’s preconceptions that concrete must look a particular way,’ says Chipperfield.

The calm exuded by Chipperfield and his architecture perhaps disguises the risk-taking involved in his projects. At 5,232sq m, the Hepworth Wakefield is the largest purpose-built art gallery to open in Britain since 1968 when the Hayward first sparkled on London’s Southbank. Is the Hepworth truly risky like the unapologetically concrete Hayward was? ‘If there is a risk, it’s the risk of disconnect between community and the institution,’ says Chipperfield.

There was certainly risk in its origins when the Heritage Lottery Fund offered a grant of £4.9m towards the £35m project. The HLF usually gives attention to things that are already loved and deemed precious (what goes inside museums). It is more difficult to predict how the public will take to a brand new piece of architecture. ‘We were trying to move our architecture on from just being a box,’ says Chipperfield. Wary of falling into the trap of arbitrary form-making that has gripped others in recent times, the 2007 Stirling Prize winner believes that architects ‘have a responsibility to consider form making in relation to expected architecture’. Chipperfield adds: ‘Architects need to invent around architectural traditions.’

Wakefield is now a cultural destination in a triangle of world-class sculpture venues – joining the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton. In this essence, there is no sense of this being a provincial museum. It has a slickness that extends to the bespoke font designed by graphic designer, APFEL. At points, this slickness could be interpreted as austerity, however, with an overarching greyness that remains courteous to the art in the galleries but completely takes over downstairs. Only the learning studios are filled with the chaos and colour inevitable with children. Hot Touch, the inaugural exhibition by Eva Rothschild, binds colour with its context in an exciting way but time will tell how well the building can deal with the mess of colour.

A crumbling watermill, which almost kisses the main entrance, is in the process of being stitched back together and will be used for artist commissions. Wakefield must sharpen appearances in order to impress its new inhabitant. Freshly boarded up windows in the neighbouring textile mill gaze down like inquisitive eyes, following visitors into the entrance and around the gallery. It is the views that truly give the building a constant sense of place, a location. Peter Box, Wakefield’s council leader, has an aspiration for the silhouette of the Hepworth to take over from Victorian chimneys as the symbol of Wakefield for future generations.

Barbara Hepworth, who was born in Wakefield, once mused: ‘I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust, the contour.’ The Hepworth Wakefield seems a perfect match for the sculptures of Hepworth, Moore, Nicholson and Brancusi.

From the outside, the forms appear as solid as stone, punching a hole in the sky. When one is inside the gallery spaces, shimmering light and generous openings suggest there is just a sheet of paper separating interior from exterior. Chipperfield has designed a minimal, legible building that refers to a rigorous and complex process. It is surely a new chapter in the unfinished business of British Modernism.

London Zoo opened for scientific study in 1828 and for public view in 1847. It has since become as much an exhibition of architecture as a collection of animals. The grounds were designed by Decimus Burton, the zoo’s architect from 1826 to 1841, and it now holds an impressive assortment of listed buildings by an eclectic mix of architects. The zoo is home to work by Sir Hugh Casson; John James Joass (who ran John Belcher’s practice after Belcher died in 1913); one of only three of  Giles Gilbert Scott’s K3 telephone boxes in the UK ; the Lord Snowdon Aviary by Cedric Price and  landmark buildings by Tecton.

Tecton, founded by Russian emigre Berthold Lubetkin, is responsible for possibly the most famous building in the zoo – the Penguin Pool. Built in 1934 and now Grade-I listed, it is an exquisite example of modernist architecture. The building is characterised by two elegant sweeps of thin, unsupported concrete arranged in the shape of a double helix.

Alas, for all its architectural prominence and sculptural beauty, the failures of modernism also extend to the animal kingdom; the pool itself was too shallow for the penguins and the concrete damaged their feet. ‘The husbandry guidelines change every 20 years or so,’ says Robin Fitzgerald, construction manager at ZSL, who leads all building work at the zoo. ‘It got to the situation with the Lubetkin where we had to look elsewhere to accommodate the penguins. There was also the predatory danger from foxes, so, in 2004 we moved them to the old flamingo pool, which wasn’t ideal.’

This month sees the opening of the new £1.6m Penguin Beach, which is four times bigger than the Lubetkin pool. ‘The design stems from the husbandry requirements,’ says Fitzgerald. ‘The existing pool is only half a metre deep, the new pool has an average depth of 1.5m.’ The new enclosure allows the penguins to ‘porpoise’ and provides a current for the animals to swim against.

Out of the water, the designers have provided two beaches, one for the Humboldt penguins, which prefer sandier beaches with burrows to nest in, the other for the macaroni penguins, which create dished nests in the rounded pebbles provided for them. Since the animals moved in, two pairs of birds have already nested and the zoo expects about 10 successful births a year. The exhibit currently houses 70 penguins but has room for about 150 at full capacity. The design also incorporates an incubation room for rearing baby penguins if they are rejected by their parents and a nursery pool for the penguins to become familiar with the water before being introduced to the main colony.

‘What we have created is teased out of the brief from the keepers. We get them to write out in layman’s terms what is needed to meet the husbandry requirements,’ says Fitzgerald. ‘We can then elaborate on this and find out what is needed technically. When they say rocks, we have to determine what type of rocks; when they say sand, we have to determine what type of sand.’

For the visitor, a stepped amphitheatre constructed from reclaimed materials, allows unobstructed views of the penguins at feeding times. Laminated glass at two of the pool’s edges and a porthole window hidden under a bridge give views into the water to see the animals below the surface. These details are what Fitzgerald calls ‘nice to haves’ – design features that appeal to the visitor and provide different views of the animals.

‘The zoo has a long-term policy of bringing down the bars and being close to the animals,’ he adds. Work on the Penguin Beach started in March 2010, the zoo architects had to work within the guidelines of the Regent’s Park Conservation Area and the conservation plan of the zoo. ‘In everything we do we have to balance the needs of the animals, the visitor, the planners and the cost,’ says Fitzgerald. The zoo does not receive any government funding and all its income is generated through gate receipts and donations.

The role of London Zoo has changed from one of spectacle to one of conservation, in terms of the animals at least. With regardto the buildings that are protected, there are still questions about the role they have. ‘The original penguin pool will become a water feature,’ says Fitzgerald. ‘Lubetkin’s Gorilla House is currently a holding area for lemurs, but it’s not ideal. We will eventually have to find other uses for all the listed buildings once we have exhausted the animal possibilities.’

Pritzker-winning polemicist Thom Mayne  is a gifted talker who isn’t easy to stop once he’s started, as the audience at this year’s Royal Academy of Arts annual lecture will no doubt discover. ‘I’m really talking to myself when I give a talk,’ he says. ‘It lets the audience know what’s going on in my brain’. But that’s not to say his robust rhetoric is merely a stream of consciousness: each thought and every line of enquiry has had a long gestation.

For 25 years, Mayne, who is a professor at UCLA, was best known as a paper architect. Despite the Pritzker Prize he won in 2005, his New York office is lined with models of unrealised projects; faithful soldiers in a long-running battle. In 1972, he set up Morphosis in Santa Monica with Livio Santini, James Stafford and Michael Brickler. Ever since, Mayne has been developing his ideas about transparency, connectivity and the spaces in-between. Using his firm as the living model both for his theories and his belief in collaborative practice – Morphosis was so-named to indicate resistance to single authorship – Mayne became a key proponent of making LA the epicentre of avant-garde architecture in the US during the Seventies and Eighties.

His experimental designs for private residences and restaurants, such as the Lawrence Residence (1983) and the Beverley Hills eatery Kate Mantilini (1987) set the tone for LA’s tough, graphic aesthetic and the familiar use of layers of sheet-metal. But Mayne’s impact on design and architecture is perhaps most evident, and extensive, through his 30 years as a teacher. While Morphosis was being established, Mayne, along with five other local architects set up a new, independent architecture school; the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). ‘Morphosis and SCI-Arc were inextricable,’ he says.

Twenty years after he left the school and took up tenure at UCLA, it remains a venture close to his heart. (Mayne was recently made a trustee). ‘The Sixties and Seventies was a very unique time; there was an optimism, an interest in experimentation and innovation,’ he recalls. Poaching more than 40 students from established California universities, SCI-Arc became a mecca for alternative design education and discourse: a ‘college without walls’. ‘We never worried about whether it was going to exist next year. it just grew, and four or five years later we had 100 students,’ says Mayne. ‘We seemed to institutionalise anarchy.’

For his part, Mayne modelled SCI-Arc on New York’s Cooper Union under John Hejduc, and the AA in London, whose director, Alvin Boyarski ‘was probably one of the singular educational characters of the 20th century,’ according to Mayne. SCI-Arc continues to be a regular stop-off on the academic architecture circuit with regular speakers including Bernard Tschumi and tutors including Hernan
Diaz Alonso and Peter Cook. ‘It has always resisted a particular leadership,’ says Mayne, something he tries to emulate in his own approach to design. ‘I don’t like things being too fixed,’ he says. ‘I hit 55 and work just started to come in,’ says Mayne of a trajectory common to many architects. Mayne’s relatively recent successes also reflect a professional maturity. SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss says: ‘Thom walks the line between plausible and implausible and what’s appealing about him is that he never grew up. But a recent development is this veneer: he’s more personable.’

Since winning a competition to design the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California in 1999, Mayne’s unconventional – and sometimes impenetrable – approach to designing has attracted a string of civic commissions including the Caltrans District 7 HQ (2004) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellite Operations Facility in Maryland (2005). In the same year, the Pritzker Prize affirmed his status.

Though not interested in icon-building, Mayne is often chosen for projects because his designs are robust and distinctive. Often apertures (such as the one gouged out of the San Francisco Federal Building (2007) and given over to installation light artist James Turrell) speak of humanist and democratic space-making. ‘Tension, conflict and duality… the relationship between personal and public: that’s what architecture is,’ he says.

Even the internal day-to-day activity of a courthouse, which demands a certain amount of detachment and security at street level, was removed by Mayne in the Wayne Lyman Morse US Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon (2006, pictured above). Mayne designed the entrance as a plinth acting as a bridge at street level connecting the people and the institution designed to serve them. Mayne’s desire to invent new kinds of spaces hasn’t always made for easily accessible architecture and goes some way to explaining the less than consistent commissions he wins. His method calls upon architecture’s ‘autogenerative’ nature to create spontaneous areas and pockets of undetermined space. Mayne produces form and internal spaces by orchestrating collisions between organisational systems such as field theory. ‘I’m interested in that space between wilfulness and chance,’ he says. ‘I’m using [this method] as a force of invention so of course it is a discretionary means… I’m only pursuing it because I’m finding the things that are happening are positive and I’m able to produce a much more complicated organisational scheme,’ he adds.

The result is unusual, often visually chaotic interiors. Cooper Union’s dynamic interior with its soaring stairwell interrupted by strident beams and large plastic mesh netting is photographable and its openness accommodates impromptu gatherings, but it is somehow hard. Yet Mayne’s approach to design is far from cold. Mayne’s constant search for new spaces in architecture means that the driving force will never be comfort or warmth even if it has a considered, social agenda. Instead the focus is on stimulation and exploration. One such example is the Campus Recreation Center at the University of Cincinnati, (2005), which weaves various functions, such as an aquatic centre and standard classrooms, to create a cohesive environment. Metamorphosis’s Giant Interactive Group headquarters in Shanghai, which was completed last year, plays on the concept of enfolding landscape and architecture into a single site where ‘no two places
are alike,’ says Mayne.

However, not all of Mayne’s buildings are led by a machine aesthetic. In his Carabanchel, Madrid social housing project in 2006, the composition began with research into Moorish design and plays on landscape becoming architecture. ‘It’s about ideas that start with the city, not objects of design,’ he says.

What is perhaps most captivating about Mayne is his ceaseless activity and questioning. Seemingly dissatisfied with the length of time it takes to build, Mayne has returned to making artwork. Using 3D modelling machines and printers both in-house and outsourced, Mayne has been exploring his theories about random space-making through conceptual painting. Modelling black, white and metal-coloured canvasses, his thickly textured paintings are abstract yet familiar and urban – readable as a masterplan. Though seemingly displaced from his built work, the paintings complete a family of Mayne’s continuing investigations.

A soon-to-be-released book will draw on his years of work on urbanism, an area he feels has been overlooked: ‘There’s been no serious thinking on it since Team 10, CIAM,’ he says, referring to the schism that led to the demise of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne half a century ago. Given his relish for all things new, Mayne is a composite of his interests. Mayne himself is the ‘connective tissue’ that he talks about, between his theories, his buildings and his conceptual artwork. ‘We’re in the most diverse phase of my career and my office,’ says Mayne. ‘It’s been a really interesting era.’

On 26 May the former Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic was arrested and subsequently handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges that include genocide. The arrest closes a chapter in Serbia’s history and brings the country one step closer to joining its neighbour Slovenia as part of the European Union. It was against this unexpected backdrop that Belgrade Design Week was held. Invited international speakers had descended on the city as part of a lineup dubbed ‘the greatest creative minds of the 21st century’.

The conference was opened by Martin Gran of Snohetta. The Oslo-based architect has started a graphic design and branding company called Snohetta Design, which will work alongside the existing practice. Gran stated the need for architects to diversify in order to survive, proclaiming, ‘We can’t work in silos any more. A more holistic approach to design is needed, but we have to be the best in each discipline’.

The theme of diversifying was prevalent across a number of presentations, Finnish designer Harri Koskinen described his recent foray into architecture with early images of his conference centre near the town of Fiskars in Finland. Javier Mariscal spoke about his diverse portfolio of work ranging from illustration to retail design – before dancing around the stage while explaining the ideas behind his stunning feature length animated film Chico and Rita. Arik Levy urged the audience to engage with the ‘emotional ergonomics of design’ and to ‘think with the heart and feel with the brain.’ The final day saw London take the stage with presentations from Postler Ferguson; Onedotzero; Mother; Weiden and Kennedy and Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects.

Although there was an impressive and entertaining agenda of speakers (and after-parties), Belgrade Design Week is something of a misnomer, which the organisers readily admit. In his opening address founder and creative director, Jovan Jelovac (pictured above), acknowledged that Serbia has little in the way of a ‘design industry’ to speak of or promote, preferring to call the event a ‘creative festival’. Jelovac is cautious about promoting Serbian design, but feels that the industry needs to be inspired by the international speakers he invites each year. ‘Serbian design is a seedling, it needs to be nurtured,’ he says. ‘It’s not worth us showcasing our work because it is so naive’.

But Jelovac’s words seem overly harsh, particularly when the branding, publishing and motion graphics that give the event its identity were provided by Serbian designers and all looked as accomplished as any offering from their international counterparts. Yet, Serbian design remained a footnote to the presentations by invited guests.

The 100% Serbia installations, consisting of 100 designs by top Serbian designers, were placed in shop windows across the old city but the event was poorly mapped and the work was hard to find and often lost among the retail design. The design week is a labour of love for the organiser, a not-for-profit organisation that sees its role as finding ‘solutions, models, tendencies for future needs based in European values and standards’. With the arrest of Mladic, Serbia has taken a major step towards joining Europe. Yet the tone surrounding Serbian design is apologetic and the approach to promoting design is fractious, Belgrade Design Week was held at the same time as a rival design festival Mikser – which focused on Serbian work – and so divided the audience in the city.

It is hard to be critical of the ambition that is demonstrated by the organiser. The Sixth Belgrade Design Week was funded privately with scant help from the government. Design is not a priority in a country that has  little in the way of manufacturing and which has oversubscribed and under-performing design schools. When Serbia joins the EU, the legwork done by Jelovac’s team ought to accelerate the development of its design industry and Belgrade Design Week will eventually become a platform on which Serbian design is presented with pride to the world.

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The Panel

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Edward Pearce, Dip Arch, website

‘The toxic garden infiltrates the iron ore resource supply chain in Western Australia, specifically in Port Hedland, in the Pilbara region. Fine iron ore dust, the primary by-product of the industry, cloaks the surrounding townscape. The proposal, a Toxic Garden, is an innovative infrastructure, parasitically leeching from existing industrial facilities. The “Toxic Garden” has been developed through a series of dust and electrical simulations, rather than conventional drawing. The architect becomes a choreographer of effects and phenomena, rather than discreet built objects,’ says Pearce.

Aram Mooradian, Dip Arch, website

Drawing inspiration from the gold trade in Australia and the Aboriginal civilisation and culture that it disrupts, Mooradian says his work, entitled ‘The Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions’, attempts to ‘[examine] the pathologies that we often take for granted, the fictions that we live and shape our futures by, through a catalogue of gold objects. Gold – our most precious resource – is valued above all other things not for its material value but for an entirely virtual one.’

Samantha Lee, Dip Arch, website

The Australian mineral trade inspired Lee’s work, which intends to ‘explores the space of the mining survey as a parallel site for intervention, where I have engineered a seasonal network of mysterious dreamtime anomalies. Anchored around aboriginal sacred sites these mythic objects slowly stalk the contested territory, distorting mining cartographies to generate a new form of landscape representation. These new anomalies of points and numbers, inserted into a purely economic dataset, are the ghosts of aboriginal sacred waterholes which have dried up due to mining activity’.

Bartlett School of Architecture

Bong Yeung, Dip Arch

‘The Lee Valley Super-Farm: Institute of Fresh Fruit & Vegetables in London examines the challenges of food and fuel supplies that the UK faces in economic, environmental and social terms. The project explores potential agricultural technologies that can boost productivity and environmental performance: hydroponic farming and the closed-glasshouse system,’ says Yeung. The project was communicated through exquisite hand drawing and delicate paper models that convey the depth of the complex landscape that it occupied. Yeung’s draughtmanship is testament to the power of architectural drawing.

Erika Suzuki, Dip Arch

Designed in response to the quantity of paper wasted by the City each day, Suzuki’s ‘Her Majesty’s Paper Factory’ aims to provide sustainable production and recycling of paper. ‘The new paper factory directs its attention towards recycling this paper waste, creating a closed loop within the City in which paper is recycled and reused within the Square Mile, and there is no need to transport waste to other destinations,’ Suzuki says.

Nada Tayeb. BSc (Hons) Architecture

‘Deconstructing the conventions of traditional theatre and auditorium layout, this opera house offers a contemporary viewing experience to a traditional performance; dealing with issues of communism, censorship and propaganda. Comprised of three simultaneous audiences watching a single and constant performance, the audiences intermittently circulate to subsequent auditoriums which offer entirely unique viewing experiences. The versatility of the stage and performative spaces serve a didactic purpose of “indoctrinating” the masses as Chinese theatre was believed to furnish good moral behaviour. The theatre acts as a mechanism to implicitly reinforce certain communist symbols and ideologies,’ says Tayeb.

Steven Baumann, Diploma/MA Architecture

Baumann’s work examines the disconnection between humanity and nature in urban buildings. ‘Combing the programmes of necropolis, power station, and orchard, The New London Necropolis seeks to address our relationship with life-cycles in planning the contemporary City of London,’ Baumann says. ‘The programmes intertwine to inhabit the same volume and site utilising their allegorical potential to manage the interdependent cycles of life and death, energy charge and dissipation, and blossom and decay that are housed in its fabric.’

Birmingham Institute of Architecture and Design

Paul Watt, BA Architecture

‘This project creates a solution for spending foreign aid, which can directly affect the people of Stoke-on-Trent and global refugees, within UK shores by creating a global school for 3D printing,’ says Watt. ‘The project celebrates the arrival of large automated digital fabrication; the Contour Crafter, a machine that will change the face of foreign aid, as refugee ‘towns’ will be ‘printed’ within days, not years. Local businesses will educate up to 10,000 refugees over a three-year period, teaching refugees to provide and support themselves using the contour crafter to 3D print fully customized consumer goods, creating novel businesses and social attractions, which will entice consumers and visitors to engage in Stoke’s deprived economy.’

Victoria Crozier, MA Architecture

Crozier’s project creates a possible solution to the stoppage of waste collection by Dagenham Council last year. ‘[The public] set up a rubbish collection scheme and dump waste on land at the coast of Dagenham. The risk of flooding from the River Thames is high and local people react by creating sea walls using the dumped rubbish,’ Crozier imagines. ‘The barrier is a structure which reacts of the force of the changing tide, adapting, moving and growing when a need is identified. The architecture is created based on the knowledge that local people with low skill bases and no funding must resource these found objects [which form the barrier] themselves.’

Brighton School of Architecture

Matthew Jeniec, Architecture

Concerned at the possibility of gentrification in Brixton, Jeniec attempts to create a centre that would increase social interaction and mix cultures and societies. ‘The re-imagined BHC [Black Heritage Centre] proposes a symbiotic relationship between “institute” and “existing” through the utilisation of architecture as a means to facilitate new kinds of “social situations” and experiences within the existing community,’ Jeniec believes. ‘Rentable retail spaces (as part of the Brixton Enterprise Hub) sit within the BHC’s physical territory, allowing local businesses to benefit from the institution’s footfall as well as providing a more locally sensitive means of generating profit.’

Bucks New University

James Uren, BA Contemporary Furniture

‘The Luso lounger is a modern reinterpretation of the chaise longue. It evolved from looking at redundant furniture, and reinventing it to suit the way in which we live today. The addition of a footstool means that there are a number of ways it can be used: as a day bed, lounger, chair, footstool. The Luso lounger is an interesting asymmetrical form that is versatile and makes excellent use of space. The under-frame has been constructed using American cherry; the shell is lacquered plywood,’ says Uren.

Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff

Angharad Palmer, MA Architecture, website

This project derives a method of settlement planning from analysis of the interdependence of the living components of organic cells. The starting point of the thesis is the notion that each component of the settlement has the ability to generate, store and distribute its own energy to every other component of the settlement. What makes the project fascinating is the way that the energy symbiosis generates such rich spatial and formal pattern. The development of the project through each stage of radical up-scaling is skilful and completely convincing. Diagrams, visuals and models are used beautifully to develop the narrative, and the absence of conventional architectural renderings comes across as a strength, not a weakness.

Ben Hansen, MA Architecture

As it does, periodically, prefabrication has returned to centre-stage in the architectural debate. We turn to it reluctantly, as we know that the most valued buildings are those that define the individual character of places. For this project the buildings are university research labs and the site is in Camden. The proposal is for a very permanent sculptured, concrete plinth with projecting service cores from which the transient accommodation blocks are hung. The form of the concrete plinth is derived from existing and historic contextual lines. It is an engaging idea, one often explored before, but this particular project demonstrates better than most how simple, mass-produced forms can yield rich urban patterns, provided the stage is set intelligently in advance.

Suzanne Prest, MA Architecture, website

A popular brief with students, the health spa demands no great functional rigour, provided the combination of space and setting captures a sense of spiritual harmony. Prest’s project starts from the right place: an abandoned quarry. There should be more projects like this, as these sites are abundant in Wales, overlooked but loaded with potential. The combination of cliff-face carving and embellishment echoes the beauty of Pueblo Indian cliff settlements. The project is expertly developed from its stringent landscape analysis through to its beguiling finished presentation.

Central Saint Martins

Anne Frobeen, MA Design (Furniture)

‘Simple Line chairs were created to help open up the body during sitting, a result of a MA research thesis completed at Central Saint Martins. Entitled Kinesthetic Imagination, the thesis proposes that by engaging the body in the design process, the designer is able to “see” latent design criteria, which might be overlooked using many contemporary design methodologies that are often centered around new materials or manufacturing processes. This project is a direct critique of the way that the design industry often pushes innovation through the use of materials, manufacturing process and the aesthetic that comes along with this,’ says Frobeen.

Jan Rose, MA Product Design, website

‘The Knitting Craftsman is a response to the ongoing trend of amateur craft making and professional rapid prototyping, resuming this craft technique to see what craft can teach us in the light of the present capacities of industry,’ says Rose. ‘Craftsmanship is a valuable tool for pushing forward innovation in manufacturing process and material production, therefore material and process take the lead in design thinking. Reusing knitting as a future manufacturing process is a critique of mass production, extensive consumerism and people’s perception of materials.’

Jessika Strataki, MA Communication Design (Digital Media), website

‘The Word Machine processes sentences from a database. It then attempts to map meaning in three-dimensional space using a set of rules of interpretation. The Word Machine will place the selected sentence in an angle in all 3 axes (x, y, z), each of which has been assigned its own meaning parameter of polar opposites,’ Strataki says. ‘The X axis stands for macro versus micro, Y axis for quantitative versus qualitative and Z axis objective versus subjective. The machine measures the meaning of the sentence by adding up the total of the key words within it, which have a specific predetermined measurement. These are defined in a growing Word Machine dictionary.’

Niloufar Afnan, MA Furniture Design, website

‘Inviting Surfaces begun initially through a four year length photography research on the cultural resilience of the Lebanese people, and grew from this research the development of contemporary furniture pieces,’ Afnan explains. ‘The collection of works questions the different possibilities of medium and form that can correspond to the associations of a table and chair. It is an exploration of new possibilities to fulfill common associations such as a seat, table surface or legs. To what extent does it affect our cognitive understanding of furniture? And how does it allow us to perceive solutions for broken objects?’

University of Dundee

Lewis Benmore, MA Architecture, website

New Nature: A Shifting Paradigm challenges the disengagement between humankind and a landscape in flux. It provides the portrait of a fragile coastal region, Walton-on-Naze, as a complex environment made through both endogenous and anthropogenic influences. For centuries man has adapted to this shifting landscape however recent attempts have been made to control the natural process of erosion. The architectural response entails a series of structures comprising a seawater desalination plant, which aims to re-establish a community within the fragile ecology that exists on the site. The physical manifestation of the plant engages with the backwaters, forming a symbiotic relationship between industry and nature.

Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)

Brynjar Sigurðarson, MA Product Design, website

Sigurðarson’s project consists of a group of objects designed around an imaginary hunter. The items include a stool partly made from hardened leather, which becomes rigid when it contacts hot water. Another is a backpack designed specifically for hunting. The vague animal shape of the backpack is designed to attract animals to the backpack, unaware of the intentions of the hunter. Collectively, the objects Sigurðarson has designed form a group of extraordinary hunting tokens.

Glasgow School of Art

Daniela Corda, BA Jewellery and Silversmithing

Corda works in non-precious metals to accentuate the effort of craft as opposed to the value of the material, and her use of synthetic stones accentuates this question of reality. Corda says: ’My work is an expression of my passion for philosophy, cosmology, alchemy and time. I am fascinated by the ever-thinning line between illusion and reality, and so I aim to create a realm of curious instruments that are beautifully pseudo yet undeniably wearable. The symbol of the brain is a predominant theme within my pieces and I use it to represent the evolution of the zeitgeist.’

Goldsmiths College

Kristina Cranfield, BA Design, website

Cranfield’s project, Ownership of the Face, questions the modern attitudes towards identity. ‘This project is part of an explorative journey that initially stemmed from observations of my own face. During my process I revealed interesting and unexpected pathways, which explored the human face as a representation of individual identity, yet it is subject to constant change and modification according to social environments,’ says Cranfield. ‘By studying how the face is manipulated, advertised and used as an image of corporate identity, I design processes, experiments, and devices to conceptualize my investigation in real world contexts.’

Matt House, BA Design

DITTO is a series of objects that reassesses and lampoons ideas embedded in others while providing a critique of design classics. ‘Copying is fundamental to development and social interaction, yet it is viewed negatively in education and creative fields. With new media, reproduction is engrained in culture, allowing us to embrace this phenomenon. How do individuals respond when you reiterate, reprocess and reclaim their property? We are the generation that remix, parody and re-enact. Go and henceforth copy,’ espouses House.

Greenwich University

Adam Shapland, Dip Arch

‘The scheme explores the relationship between the “event” and the city through the subversion of performance in “everyday” experience and situation. It questions the notions of theatre through thresholds between the backstage of the performers dwelling spaces and labyrinths of the school and the stage of the high wire, subverting the mundanity of the emphasised “journey to school” as an exposed event,’ claims Shapland. ‘The structure itself is projected as a device, exploring a temporal facade which dynamically shifts its state to act as a secondary blanket of performance determined by primary instances.’

Adis Dobardzic, Dip Arch

Dobardzic’s project is a therapy tower designed specifically for American author Paul Auster. ‘The tower reacts to the emotions and progress of the therapy process, which is reflected through the skin and structure of the tower. As he [Auster] journeys along the levels of the tower, he is confronted by spaces that ask oneself to dwell deep into his past, whether it be through catching ones reflection in the water well, psychoanalysis occurring in the Freudian therapy space or writing about past events in the empty room,’ Dobardzic says. ‘As the occupant discloses his past the tower too starts to shed its layers. It begins to vibrate, cables swing relentlessly from the building breaking fragments of the concrete fins, as a gust of fresh air swirls through the tower.’

Leo Robert, Dip Arch

This project attempts to find a solution to a future problem: ‘By 2050 it [the Thames Barrier] will be superseded by the Thames’ expansion as a result of global warming,’ says Robert. ‘The proposal is a series of towers that cluster around strategic flooded (or soon to be flooded) areas, concentrating on the Thames gateway. These towers respond to tidal and storm surges with a series of seawater antennas providing communication between clusters offering potential for a large scale network. The towers are operated by currents and separate seawater into salt and fresh water through a desalination and salt raking process. The fresh water is stored in a giant tank, and the salt flushed through an archive room located at the top of the tower.’

Sohail Sarwar, BA Architecture

Sarwar’s three projects tackle three very different subjects. The first is an interesting study comparing two similar establishments on Brick Lane, one a carefully arranged exhibition of artefacts, the other a shop containing second-hand goods. Sarwar assesses the oddity of two neighboring buildings that are so similar in content but not in purpose. The second project deals with designing an abstract guild for the former speaker Michael Martin whilst the third is a set of designs for a canoe-making school on the bank of the Thames.

Kent University

Alex Jackson, MA Architecture

Geotrails Network has been developed to secure a long-term sustainable economic and environmental future for the Dungeness Romney marsh area. The concept focuses on principles of Eco/Geotourism, in the form of interactive education, exploration and participation. The Geotrails Network Hub provides a visitor centre and educational tool for both the immediate community, and those visiting the area. It provides the opportunity for locals and visitors to become involved with the ongoing initiatives such as research and habitat creation.

Matthew Gisbey, MA Architecture

‘Unwrapping the Cloister’ proposes a scheme to construct a Benedictine monastery on Romney Marsh in Kent. Explaining his process, Gisbey said: ‘Provision for the austere and regimented lifestyle of a monk was the primary concern when considering the design. Factors such as the scale, access and existing use of the surrounding environment have also been taken into consideration in order for the monastery to sit comfortably in its proposed location.’

Kingston University

Agi Haines (website) and Laura Pratley (website), BA Graphic Design

Pratley and Haines designed alcohol containers in the shape of fuel pump nozzles. Their idea was to raise awareness of drink-driving and its dangers. ‘It is an issue that, as students, we are very aware of,’ the pair say. Casts were made from a nozzle found online and their bottle designs, combined with the foreboding labels, intend to ‘force the consumer to think responsibly about the choices they make.’ Pratley adds: ‘The idea is that when someone is about to pour themselves a drink, the bottle will remind them that they might have been planning to drive later on and give them a moment to pause for thought and reflect on the consequences of their actions.’

Ben Lambert and Jack Llewellyn, BA Design Interaction

Designers Lambert and Llewellyn devised their website in response to the Japanese tsunami crisis earlier in 2011. Keen to bring together as much information as possible: ‘The idea was to create an information sharing network that aims to bring together people with useful skills worldwide to create the most effective information resource possible,’ Llewellyn said. ‘The website allows contributors to add content, from Twitter feeds up to custom-designed maps, or specialist applications… Aid agencies told us that, in some parts of the world, official news sources are mistrusted by the authorities. The great thing about this site is that it’s entirely moderated by the members themselves.’

Hannah Shipley, BA Graphic Design, website

‘Brand Medals is a modern-day representation of how people value success by the hierarchy and the amount of brands they own. Brands are similar to military medals as they are worn with pride as symbols of achievement. In this case the more highly regarded brands are higher up the display cabinet and have more elaborate ribbons. This project combines wry humour with a serious critique of consumer culture, calling for us to reassess the relationship we have with material possessions,’ says Shipley.

Jonathon Warren, BA (Hons) Product and Furniture Design

Warren’s drain designs were inspired by his observation that many people walking through London do so with their eyes to the floor, whether it be looking at a mobile phone or a map. Warren then tried to design alternative signposts that were not above eye level. The drains themselves mesh well with the existing London signage and suit the calls for less street clutter from London Mayor Boris Johnson.

London Metropolitan University

Lauren Campany

West Everton Community have suffered 18 pub closures in the past 2 years resulting in private drinking, depression and antisocial behaviour. The landlords were key members in the community who knew people who attended pubs and sent them home when they had enough. This no longer exists. The mobile pub designed aims to look at a new model of a public house. Designed from a readily available shipping container the pub will be transported, to the neighbourhoods of empty pub sites, where it will house an archive of local history, a hairdressers, stage, and a drink station.

Nicolo Spino

Spino’s took his designs for hybrids of benches and plant beds, which he created as part of his university course, to the Milan Public Design Festival. The multifunctional pieces of furniture were formed solely from reclaimed materials in Milan and serve as a good example of eco-friendly design, which is only becoming more popular in the 21st Century. Spino was also able to gain work from this exposure, earning freelance work for a furniture shop in Milan this summer.

London South Bank University

Anurag Gautam, Dip Arch

Gautam’s project looks at how cargo airships used for transporting and constructing tall timber towers could revolutionise the way we design and construct our cities. Gautam says, ‘Modern construction methods are inefficient, time consuming and they congest our road networks. These methods formed the tall monolithic towers of steel and concrete as symbol of economic boom for the 20th century after the world became scarred by two world wars. Today we face an environmental and economic crisis and we need to revise our understanding of how we construct our tall urban icons. 21st century towers could be made from a new revolutionary timber based technology that mimics concrete: Solid engineered timber. Its financial and environmental properties could make it a symbol of 21st century construction. It has the potential to change the meaning of architecture.’

Daniel Schinagl, BA Architecture

‘The bank of the River Thames is one of the most photographed places in the world. The majority of these photos are uploaded to Google Maps. These documents together create a virtual space as a result of the observation by separate individuals,’ says Schinagl. ‘This is a collective memory, a virtual space to which anyone can have access. This is an interpretation of the Gestalt phenomenon in the physical, human environment. We do not see our environment in its whole presence, although a place or spot can be described and defined in an objective or subjective way, too.’

Manchester School of Architecture

Harry Mulligan, Dip Arch

By utilising a disused canal basin in Milan for the location of his design, Mulligan describes his work as an attempt to regenerate the Milanese canal district. ‘Integral to the scheme are a host of environmental systems including a homeostatic double skin façade admitting diffused daylight throughout the exhibition spaces,’ Mulligan said of his design. ‘The skin reflects a mapping of the current fashion institutions within Milan, creating an aesthetic derived from the fashion industry of the city itself.’

Maryam Osman, Dip Arch

A peculiar mix of an IVF clinic and a pleasure boat ride, Osman says her building ‘derived from the essence of pleasure and purpose as sexual escapism.’ Osman attempted to blend the two separate ideas without making them one singular place, including a pair of crossing staircases where for a brief moment the inhabitants of the two sections of the building are close.

Nottingham University

Jack Sawbridge, Dip Arch, website

Denis Diderot called for ‘Liberal Art’ to learn from ‘Mechanical Art’, for making to take precedence over the made. Sawbridge’s work focuses on design through the practice of making to inform the production of the object. This project, entitled Diderot’s Workshop, is sited on the French-German border. The language of tension and tuning is represented throughout the structure by a system of looms that are weaving the countries’ flags. Sawbridge’s work was exhibited in the Architecture Room at the RA’s Summer Exhibition this year.

Marialena Tsolka, BA Architecture

‘Bensalem’s Hydra’ was selected by the Royal Academy of Arts for inclusion in the architecture room at its annual Summer Exhibition. The project proposes a hydroponic landscape embodying the crossover between architecture, geology and science, and projecting the gap between the architecural skin and the structure: a hybrid effect that becomes the common ground of nature and machine. The original drawing is more than 2m in length and took Tsolka six weeks in total to produce, first drawing in pencil, then digitally manipulating the image before rendering it by hand in ink. Tsolka drew inspiration for the work from Gaudi, Calatrava and HR Giger.

Nottingham Trent University

Joe Oliver, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, website

‘The work I displayed was for a New Scientist magazine supplement entitled Ten Scientific Objects that Changed the World. Instead of simply illustrating the objects as they are, I wanted to portray the story behind each object, aiming to keep each illustration as simple and as clear as possible… while still allowing the viewer to read the meanings for themselves. Also, I think choosing the right colours is vital, especially with vector illustrations like these. The wrong shade could prevent the whole composition from working,’ says Oliver.

Kenson Lai, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, website

‘EYE ARE GRAFIK DESIGNER-ERRR is a project of quips that illustrates some of the generic clichés and honest truths I have observed in my years of a graphic design education. It came from frustration that graphic design is a tool for communicating but instead churns out waves upon waves of visual fluff instead of inspiring and different ideas. The book humorously pokes fun of said fluff others create but also the clichés my own work suffers from. The unavoidable nature of this seemed to be universal but never voiced, which became the basis of the project,’ says Lai.

University of Portsmouth

Natasha Butler (website) and Joshua Kievenaar (website)

RIBA silver medal nominees Butler and Kievenaar’s ‘Bridge of Alchemy’ project sees a number of structures built into and beneath a rock face in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The complex buildings are stacked with Moroccan tradition and culture to entice travellers. Astounding amounts of detail are squeezed into every drawing and the effort and inspiration behind the designs are admirable.

University of Plymouth

Oliver Blanchard, BA (Hons) 3D Design

‘Together the Breakdown Beacon and Guide, aim to protect motorists with limited mobility and others in a roadside breakdown.Currently, motorists are instructed to move away from their vehicle, however for some people this is not an option. Motorists who cannot leave their vehicle are forced to sit and await rescue, leaving themselves at grave risk of a fatal accident. The Breakdown Beacon changes this. The Breakdown Beacon is an innovative inflatable warning, which allows stranded motorists to alert other road users of the potentially dangerous situation ahead. Once slipped over the window, the activation cord is pulled, inflating the illuminated beacon to a height of over 2m,’ says Blanchard.

Royal College of Art

Bethany Wells, Dip Arch, website

Following a series of interdisciplinary live projects throughout the year, in collaboration with the Transition Network, this thesis project speculates how the area around Finsbury Park, north London, could become occupied, activated, amended, infilled and embedded with a new educational network. The Fairground Collective proposes an alternative model for higher education, activating underused spaces within the urban environment, and using the high street as an informal urban campus, bridging education, design practice and community action.

Robert Ware, MA Architecture, website

‘The Repository of the Eternal Now is an addition to St Paul’s Cathedral which builds itself in real time using data from the 41 Stock Market sectors that the Church of England invests in. This data is then embodied in the physical towers, which grow in relation to the sector’s success. The repository has a stark, securocratic exterior with a dynamic interior richly adorned with intertwining iconographies,’ says Ware. This beautifully presented project balanced the politics of the C of E’s investment policy with the exploration of technologies that would allow the realisation of the repository. Ware developed a 3D printer that could represent the data he harvested as physical data objects, which in turn informed his architectural proposal.

Helen Moore, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

‘Working with the language of colour, glaze, mass and multiple, my practice aims to create a dynamic and hypnotic feast for the senses. Inhabiting the context where analytical, sensual and material intertwine, this current body of work marries simple abstract forms with the richness of ceramic surface, through visually stimulating and tactile “wallscapes”,’ says Moore. ‘Each wallscape captures a metaphysical space where scientific and poetic, tangible and intangible, logical and creative converge. Connecting the seemingly disparate facets of my own consciousness, they seek an expanded understanding of the emotional and metaphorical capacity of colour within an analytical framework.’

Malene Rasmussen, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

Rasmussen’s two projects, ‘If I Had A Heart, It Could Love You’ and ‘Fire Walk With Me’, share themes and the same level of technical quality. The juxtaposition of fine, polished ceramic flames and ominous snakes draw in viewers. Of her pieces, Rasmussen said: ‘I want my work to look like a very skilled child could have made it, clumsy and elaborate at the same time. My intention is to create compositions that have an underlying story and mood.’

Ilona Gaynor. MA Design Interactions, website

Referencing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘Black Swan’ theory on the importance of unpredictable events, ‘Everything Ends in Chaos is an attempt to artificially construct a financial Black Swan,’ explains Gaynor. ‘Positioned in hindsight, and told through a series of fragmented hypothetical narratives that have undergone various financial assessments; from investment bankers and insurance brokers to loss adjusters and risk strategists, drawing upon the practice of insurance with the means to investigate and underpin the moment at which economical fact becomes fiction and vise versa.’

Kevin Grennan, MA Design Interactions, website

Grennan’s bizarre collection of pictures examines the evolution of robotics. ‘Much current research into robotics is focused on the creation of anthropomorphic robots – machines that look and appear to behave like humans. Although there are valid reasons for this research (and a good deal of egotism), I believe that this approach is fundamentally flawed,’ Grennan explains. He says his work aims to explore the edges of anthropomorphism and ask if this approach really is the way we want to relate to future machines.

Lisa Ma, MA Design Interactions, website

Researching passengers facing extended delays, Ma tried to find a way to entertain and occupy them. Ma’s alternative is a bike ride tour around the outskirts of the airport. ‘The project creates a dialogue between the visitors passing through and local residents that were deeply affected by but rarely in direct contact with goings on inside the fences of the airport,’ says Ma. Her hope is that the experience ‘brings together two disparate communities and leaves entertaining and memorable experiences for the passengers and a new form of activism for the protesters.’

Marguerite Humeau, MA Design Interactions, website

‘Back, Here Below, Formidable’ aimed to recreate the sound of extinct animals – such as the woolly mammoth pictured here – by reconstructing their vocal tracts. The major problem is that this part is made from soft tissue and so doesn’t fossilise. Only the bones of the long-dead animals have been preserved through time. These beasts’ bellowings were recreated by extrapolation from living descendants. New larynx and vocal cords, windpipes of estimated length and diameter, and artificial breathing produced by an air compressor brought them to life again.

Alexander Groves, MA Design Products, website

‘The Sea Chair Project’, which has the funding to become a fully-fledged ‘floating factory’, aims to collect and recycle waste plastic in the ocean. Plastic, mostly 2mm diameter plastic pellets of which Groves say there are 13,000 per square mile, will sifted from the water using a ‘sluice-like contraption’, with the plastic later reformed into comfortable plastic chairs for the local fishermen. Groves and his team plan to make the chairs in time for display in Milan next year.

Markus Kayser, MA Design Products, website

‘In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance,’ Kayser says. ‘In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology,’ Kayser concludes: ‘Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and triggers dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource – the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers, this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking.

Oscar Lhermitte, MA Design Products, website

‘Over time, society has developed a complex rhythm that demands we live in an environment artificially lit twenty-four hours a day, preventing us from experiencing the natural lights coming from billions of light years away,’ says Lhermitte. ‘The Urban Stargazing project focuses on bringing back the stars in the city sky by recreating existing constellations and adding new ones, narrating old and contemporary myths about London. Twelve groups of stars have been installed at different locations in the city, and can only be observed by the naked eye at night time. The brightness intensity is so subtle that one might not even notice them.’

Liam Reeves, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

‘As technology advances, the ways that we perceive, understand, and influence the world around us are also changing. The concept of craftsmanship itself is transforming; skill in using digital media has become comparable to skill in manipulating molten glass or other materials,’ says Reeves. ‘This work uses the tradition, technique and language of glassblowing as a lens through which to explore the effect these kinds of technological advance have on the way that we interface with our environment, and ultimately their inherent transience as innovations are superseded in their own evolution.’

Sheffield University

Neil Cooke, MA Architecture

This project aims to promote the reuse of heritage sites for touristic and regenerative use in Blackpool, as a reaction to the council’s tendency to denigrate old buildings in the pursuit of modernity. It proposes an airship mooring station at the top of the Blackpool Tower, with an elegant hotel added to the rooftop of the existing base; restoring its ballroom and circus wings and creating a vibrant ‘street life’ around a central atrium, with views straight up through a glazed screen to the tower itself. In contrast to the complexity of the tower, the 52-room hotel (matching the 52 passenger capacity of the airship) is all about legibility and clarity.

Toby Knipping, MA Architecture

‘Repurposing Ruin explores the past and future of St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross – a modern monastic ruin. The aesthetics of decay are celebrated in a programme that brings together process involving Wood, Whiskey, Fire & Water,’ says Knipping. ‘A single malt scotch whiskey distillery and woodworking educational facility bring new layers of life and overgrowth to the brutal structure and the arboreal estate that it occupies. The project imagines a remote heterotopia where the commanding ruin acts as a backdrop to industry and activity that connects local desires with national significance that will ultimately contribute new layers of archaeology…. Space and Light becomes Substance and Shadow.’

Westminster University

Kenzaf Chung, Diploma Architecture, website

The idea of Chung’s ‘Breathing Platform’ is to ‘create a breathing platform which will rise with the rising sea levels, providing a possible habitation for human society in the future. The breathing platform will be a sustainable form of living, having a factory for seafood processing and a factory for container manufacturing at the highest level with dwelling spaces, growing places and social functions below water ready and waiting for use when the sea level rises and floods the town of Whitstable.

Andrew Cumine, Diploma Architecture

Cumine’s project, ‘Royal Laundry’, involved the designing of ‘a Royal Laundry facility for all the textiles and tapestries housed in Madrid’s royal palace,’ Cumine explains. ‘The laundry exhibits the monumental scale of the domestic by exposing the domestic scale of the royal. The codes and processes of cleaning organize sorting, washing, drying and repairs into viewable territories, and re-curate the royal treasures and the royal everyday.’

David Charlton, Diploma Architecture

‘Plaza de la Luna is an accidental square, the result of civil war bombing. The random disappearance of two city blocks in central Madrid exposed four ordinary street elevations to unexpected status,’ says Charlton. ‘The bomb crater created an opportunity for a 4-storey underground car park, except that the absent topography had to be arti­ficially reinstated above its flat roof to join up the marooned entrances and rooms on the periphery… The project imagines a partial u-turn, excavating back to the car park roof as a datum for a new strategy.’

Keir Alexander, Diploma Architecture

Alexander’s work depicts the renovation of one of Madrid’s more famous squares. ‘The design thesis was realised in two parts: the first, an analytical unpicking of Madrid’s famous Plaza Mayor, an outstanding example of a grand baroque urban gesture,’ explains Alexander. ‘The project then imagines applying such urban ambitions to a contemporary setting, in the bohemian district of Malasaña. A project conceived by modern egalitarian principles rather than by the conceits of kings.’

Rowan Sloss, Diploma Architecture, website

‘Told across several books of text and images, in­cluding The PARADISE Guide to Ávila and The Instaurative House, the PARADISE project – a research hotel, a retreat, a garden – is a concrete proposal for a place that will exist in the mind as much as in steel and wood,’ Sloss says.

The Panel

Thanks to our critic panel, who each year take the time to visit the shows and select the best work.

Alex Warnock-Smith, website

Esme Fieldhouse, website

David Howarth, website

Torange Khonsari, website

Alyn Griffiths, website

Paul Kelsall, website

Ajmir Kandola, website

Michael Hudson, website

Graham Modlen, website

Nelly Ben Hayoun, website

Johnathan Adam, website

Veronica Simpson, website

Steve Townsend

Natre Wannathepsakul

and Jean Wang

This month sees the opening of a remarkable exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in London by United Visual Artists. For the show, High Arctic, the new Sammy Ofer Wing is transformed into an abstract arctic landscape by the designers and offering an immersive experience that celebrates the unique landscape of the Svalbard archipelago of northern Norway.

UVA has a history of creating installations that test the boundaries between physical and digital environments. The company was founded in 2003 by Matt Clark, Chris Bird and Ash Nehru and is now 17-strong, employing a mix of designers, technicians and programmers.

The company was invited to design the opening event at digital art gallery La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, which saw 18,000 visitors in five days visit the show and has received acclaim for its installations Chorus at the Wapping Project and Speed of Light at the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank.

UVA will inaugurate the new wing of the NMM, it is a prospect that excites special exhibitions senior project manager Matthew Lawrence. ‘We have never had a gallery for temporary exhibitions before, or a space so flexible’. says Lawrence. ‘We really hope to attract new audiences, we are blessed with the amazing gift of architecture by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, but that comes with baggage. The new wing will change what people expect of the museum’.

Upon winning the commission, Matt Clark travelled to the Arctic with the charity Cape Farewell which takes artists, designers, scientists, writers and academics above the Arctic Circle to teach them about the beautiful but threatened landscape, hoping that they will then educate others based on their first-hand experience. Such visitors have included Ian McEwan, Antony Gormley, Jarvis Cocker and Rachel Whiteread. ‘The sense of scale was breathtaking, disorientating even,’ says Clark. ‘We were told that glaciers that have taken 55,000 years to form will no longer be there when our children are in their teens.’

Having visited the landscape and having learned about the harsh but fragile environment, Clark had to set about coordinating the skills of UVA to create an installation that could relay his experiences. ‘There’s almost an apathy about climate change at the moment,’ he says. ‘The exhibition could not be a science lesson, people would have to get emotionally involved before you hit them with the science and facts.’

Lawrence concurs. ‘Most people don’t expect digital exhibitions to be emotive, but it was clear we needed to express to people what they stand to lose rather than banging them over the head with what they should be doing,’ he says.

UVA has responded with an exhibition set 100 years in the future, but which tracks back 2,500 years to the Greek navigators who first explored the Arctic Ocean. The 800sq m space is filled with 3,000 wooden plinths of varying heights, each one a monument to part of
the landscape. This physical environment is overlaid with digital information that will be revealed by the visitor shining a UV light on to the monuments and floor. ‘There is not a linear narrative to the exhibition,’ says Clark, ‘The Arctic is a hyperreal environment and
this is an abstraction of that. We are consciously avoiding the “Imax experience” and providing an environment which visitors can explore and discover.’

The installation has been extensively modelled both physically and digitally, using UVA’s in-house software d3. ‘The monuments themselves we first designed using Lego,’ says Clark, ‘and the final wooden columns that make up the landscape are 10 times larger than the original blocks. These are arranged in the underground exhibition space, which is darkened for the purposes of the exhibition, and the whole landscape is reflected in mirrored surfaces covering each wall, providing an implied extension of the landscape’.

The wooden monuments are arranged in the space in a grid pattern. Their heights are determined by a landscape mapped and then translated to represent peaks, ridges and gullies. The grid dissipates to allow projections from cameras suspended from the ceiling into a digital ‘pool’. Each of the 10 digital projections contains a seascape with fragments of icebergs and a soundscape that is revealed by visitors’ movements as well as their interacting with the physical landscape created by the monuments.

The visitor reveals the information by shining a UV light across the installation. This light also reveals a text by English poet Nick Drake, who travelled on the expedition with Clark. ‘We have never worked in an institution like the NMM before,’ says Clark, ‘We had to work out how to engage everyone from a five year-old to an eighty year-old.’

High Arctic is a bold venture for both the NMM and UVA. The museum sees the exhibition as the first in the series of shows about expeditions and maritime voyage. For UVA it is the first time it is marrying its technical expertise to generate a response beyond the abstract, as exhibition designers rather than artists. This brave move by both parties could set the standard in exhibition design in London for the coming years.

High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich -14 July 2011–13 January 2012

Lurking in the shadow of the Royal London Hospital, tucked behind a bar garishly painted in tiger stripes, lies the Whitechapel Giftshop: part home, part community art project, part performance space. Its humble shop front, lit with in neon announcing ‘gift’, conceals a project that tests the typology of the home and presents an alternative to the traditional role of the architect.

Public Works, the architect for this project ‘sought to challenge the programs and functions that we take for granted,’ says Torange Khonsari, one of its founders. ‘For example: the challenge of using a private space as an avant-garde performance space’.

Public Works is a not-for-profit company and operates out of a studio in east London as a collective of architects and artists whose intention is to carry out projects that ‘work within and towards public space’.

The practice questions the roles that art and architecture play in each project. ‘They are extremely different disciplines and it took us a long time to see how the cultural context could enter the architectural context,’ says Khonsari. ‘Architects find it hard to understand it if you don’t think they are artists but the language of architecture differs from that of art.’ This aspect of critical practice has allowed Public Works to develop the definition of its role at a time when the profession is in an identity crisis.

Andreas Lang, Kathryn Bohm, Torange Khonsari and Sandra Denicke-Polcher founded Public Works in 2004 to create ‘socio-spatial and physical structures, public events and publications’. Lang and Bohm had worked together on public art commissions since 1998; Khonsari and Denicke-Polcher had worked on masterplanning projects in the public realm. (Denicke-Polcher later left).

Khonsari talks of freeing the architect from the subservient role of service provider through collaboration and dialogue, seeking to span the complicated relationships that prevail in conventional practice. ‘We critically evaluate each step of the process, from the brief and the economics to the collaborations with clients, public and art commissioning bodies.’ says Khonsari, ‘That said, we haven’t managed to completely deal with some of these issues. The Whitechapel Giftshop project was one of the first chances we had to test these ideas.’

Public Works said it would only undertake the project if some community aspect were to be brought into the proposal. Taking inspiration from the 1983 book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, the clients, Pele and Pilar Cortizo-Burgess agreed to a series of residencies with each artist donating an item from their residency. As the shop’s website put it: ‘a person can only “buy” one of these gifts by leaving something in return that they’ve made themselves. Our currency will be the gift’s story.’

The residencies were run by Pilar, who has a background in advertising. It saw six artists use the space over a five-month period. It was a chance for the creative processes she engaged with at work to become a part of her personal life.‘ As an idea it lives beyond the space,’ she says, ‘as it’s connected to what I do in my work, and what I also feel I’m here to do personally’. The output was diverse: Kamala Katbaana created Whitechapel is Sound, in which the the sonic landscape of the surrounding area was replayed in the shop; Verity Keefe offered local people a skill exchange.

For the clients, it was a positive use of the space and a chance to engage with the community they were building a home in. ‘Public Works came with ideas, ideas that they and us were excited about,’ says Cortizo-Burgess. ‘We saw it as the return of the property to the traditional live/work unit of the high street, where life would happen just beyond the shop floor. The building was always a space between the public and private. We wanted that and more’.

Through a door and red velvet curtain at the back of the shop lies the private dwelling. The building itself is a former saw mill, which subsequently was used as a pottery. Visitors emerge into a top-lit, double-height living space. A mezzanine level above the kitchen houses a snug that looks down over the airy volume. Facing the kitchen is a self-contained area that houses the bedroom, bathroom and study. It has its own facade with a large window to the bedroom, and four-panel folding doors to the study. Essentially, it is a house within a house and the only truly private domain in the project. The living room is an intermediate territory between the shop and bedroom. Public Works has achieved an assured rationalisation of an awkward space. Rather than being a sterile modern home, it strikes a balance between minimalist influences and the playful eccentricities of the fixtures.

Working closely with the contractor Geoff Chance, the architect has consciously retained the integrity of the space rather than providing a simple image of domesticity.  ‘I’m a great believer in ‘Inside out’’, says Cortizo-Burgess. ‘The architect managed to pay homage to the vintage of the space, whilst also providing a modern home.’ In the living space, the guttering is exposed and the electrical chasing meanders around the wall unapologetically. There are more surreal details too:  a skylight in the bedroom floor peers straight down into the toilet below; the floor of the mezzanine is a steel grille that would traditionally be used externally; in the kitchen a beautiful polished concrete work surface sits on scaffold poles.

The detailing in each room brings the space to life. Many of the fixtures and fittings were sourced off eBay. The hand basin, for example, is salvaged from the Orient Express and the drinks cabinet is an old whiskey crate mounted on the wall.

Khonsari archived information about where and who the items were sourced from, along with any anecdotal evidence. The house has an appropriated history embedded in its material presence, an idea that Public Works explored in its 2007 project The Folk Float, a mobile museum for the town of Egremont in Cumbria. On a budget of just £15,000, the project was a mobile archive that allowed the town to create a physical record of its collective history through the donation of personal property as artefacts. The Folk Float provided display cabinets, whiteboards to record information later uploaded and stored digitally as an extension to this public archive.

The final part of this story takes the material of the house and, again, re-appropriates its story. Public Works and Thirty Bird Productions collaborated on a production of a play called Plastic by writer Mehrdad Seyf. The play saw an audience of 20 allowed access to the property, which became an immersive setting for the performance. The surreal, playful and eccentric features of the building became props and a set. ‘The performance challenged the nature of story telling in theatre,’ says Khonsari. ’But in the context of the house, it was a balance between the real and ethereal. People didn’t know what was a prop or part of the building.’

In 2009, the architect worked on a mobile theatre called ‘My Club’ in collaboration with the theatre company.  Together the reinterpreted a flat bed ex-army Bedford truck to carry a set and organised a series of events that engaged the audience outside of the spectacle of performance. They continue to work on the project, when funds become available, to add more components, testing the potential of each chosen typology, exploring the ways to encourage proactive participation and of bringing people together through cultural intervention. It is architecture as prop and prop as architecture but once the performance has finished, the architecture still has to perform.

Public works success comes from being continually self-critical and working to evaluate the long-term impact of their actions. The practice looks at the public as individuals and uses each project to examine what specific conditions can reaffirm community identity through built work and public interaction, in a sense it is a form of regeneration.

Khonsari is leading a project for Public Works in West Bengal, India. Working with NGO Baglanatak and London Metropolitan University to identify and save traditional crafts. Public Works has provided resource centres that allow the communities to continue the traditions that were once prevalent, and has helped document and map the origins and processes involved in the crafts, so the knowledge can be shared and passed on. ‘We see the public as experts’, says Khonsari. ‘And it’s learning from them what we can as architects and artists to help them retain a sense of identity and culture through our work that drives us.’

‘What makes me most proud about this project’, says architect Charles Correa, ‘is that it is not a Museum of Modern Art… I’m fed up of these things’. He is talking about the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, a great sculptural complex set in landscaped, waterside surroundings, suggesting a cultural project intended to create the ‘Bilbao effect’. ‘On the contrary,’ says Correa, its purpose is ‘to help people grappling with real problems: cancer, brain damage, going blind’.

In fact, the story of the centre starts with Portugal’s richest man, industrialist António de Sommer Champalimaud,  going blind. He died in 2004, leaving €500m (£435m) to establish the Champalimaud Foundation for biomedical research. Its director João Botelho toured Europe and North America, meeting scientists and looking at research institutes. He was so impressed by Correa’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed in 2005, that he rang Correa at his practice in Mumbai to ask if he would look at the site Champalimaud had acquired for its centre. On a drizzly evening in 2007, the men walked out where the river Tagus flows into the Atlantic, adjacent to the 490-year old Tower of Belém built to celebrate the exploits of Vasco da Gama and other intrepid Portuguese explorers in the Age of Discovery. They found the site locked but, Correa recalls, ‘that night, going to sleep, I knew that whatever else we did, the site must be structured along a powerful architectural diagonal axis, an open-to-sky space, going right from the entrance to the opposite corner, where you finally see the river beginning to merge with the ocean and the great unknown.

’Half of Champalimaud’s 60,000 sq m is given to public gardens and waterfront promenades. The centre offers diagnosis and treatment, but is also a launch pad for research that will take scientists into uncharted territory, just as its location did for the great navigators. Correa says the site’s history is ‘a perfect metaphor for the discoveries of modern science’.

The centre was officially opened last year but is only now coming to life as equipment and scientists arrive. The architectural axis defines a 125m-long public pathway between two marble-clad citadels with curving facades punctuated by great elliptic windows. The gentle slope of the path renders the ocean ahead invisible. ‘When you walk there, you cannot help thinking of who went from that point 500 years ago,’ says Correa. At its top, seven metres above ground level, two monolithic 15m-high columns of blue concrete stand like guardians before a pool that appears to touch the sea beyond. Like an infinity pool, its 15cm-deep water flows gently over its far edge. In it is an enigmatic, mirrored dome reflecting the sky. Correa says just that its meaning is ‘what you have set out to discover’.

For Correa, the axial passage is a reference to the famous plaza between research buildings at Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, completed in 1966 and also open to the sea. He visited Salk in the Seventies and recalls that ‘when you go there, you’ll feel you can see all the way to China.’ Kahn had originally intended to have an orchard there, but the Mexican architect Luis Barragán suggested the water channel that runs along it instead. Correa says that ‘I don’t have any trees on the plaza because I began to see that the project was really about three stone ships sailing in a sea of granite.’

Two of these ships are the centre’s main buildings, clad in Portuguese Lioz marble. The four-storey, 32,629 sq m Building A is the larger, and full of transparency. The airy reception atrium is divided from its most spectacular feature, 2,700 sq m of enclosed garden, by a curtain wall comprising 19.2m of suspended glass. The original intention was to house a rainforest, but with fully grown palm trees currently dominating the plantings, it is better described as a tropical garden. It is open to the air not just beneath an open pergola, but by great metallic-lined oval apertures that seem to have melted out of the full-height walls separating it from the centre’s axial passage outside. From the research terrace on its other side, they present surrealistic glimpses of buildings, walkways and the river beyond. Correa pinpoints the garden’s ‘healing presence’ as one of the three elements, along with ‘the water around us’ and ‘the sky above’.

Building A is split longitudinally, and in its other half, the two lower floors contain diagnosis and clinical facilities. Some 300 patients a day can be treated, and there’s also a hairdresser, beauty shop, prayer room and a children’s playroom. At the site’s apex, a walled exterior garden of stepped rectilinear stone contains granite planters offering ‘chemotherapy’ of sorts.

All signage is in Portuguese and English, with ceramic location symbols by Studio Dumbar of Rotterdam. Heavy equipment is tucked away on the lowest floor, including a gamma camera and, behind 2m-thick concrete walls, a particle accelerator. The two upper floors are for research, with laboratories off a long corridor that occupants have dubbed ‘Sunset Boulevard’. A gallery of cancer laboratory workbenches runs along a terrace above the enclosed garden. Animals such as flies (but no primates) will be experimented on under ‘strict ethical guidelines’. The top floor is for neuroscience. The shell-space is generous, to future-proof Champalimaud against
the demands of new technology. The technical fit-out is being implemented by Hillier of Philadelphia, now part of RMJM.

Buildings A and B are linked by an ethereal 21m-long tubular bridge of stratified glass and steel, engineered by Professor Jens Schneider of Darmstadt University and Bellapart of Olot, Spain. It leads into administration offices in the smaller building. The boardroom is discretely enriched by baroque chairs and a canvas by rococo painter François Boucher, and has its own private garden terrace. Nearby is the auditorium, with a ceiling curved on two axes for acoustic properties, and seating by Figueras. The eye-opener here is another great egg-shaped window 14m wide and 7m high. Correa had drawn frame lines for glass but the foundation wanted a single, unbroken pane, so four sheets of acrylic weighing 8.5 tonnes were laminated by the team that fitted out the Lisbon Aquarium. Lowering curtains to blind the window evokes a great eye closing. On the ground floor is the Darwin Restaurant, with English leather sofas, red torus lightshades, and quotes from Darwin on the walls. There is also a 400-capacity exhibition space.

The third ‘stone ship’ is a public amphitheatre, its stage set against the backdrop of the river. Deserted, it feels
as if it could be the setting of a de Chirico dreamscape, but soon scientific meetings and performances will fill this place.

When the centre was inaugurated last October, Correa had fallen and broken a hip, and appeared in a wheelchair. The Portuguese president and prime minister attended, and the Champalimaud Foundation president, former health minister Leonor Beleza, declared it open by writing on one of the concrete columns. The Lisbon Architecture Triennale, then underway, was oddly silent about Champalimaud, although its organisers say, ‘we tried to establish a partnership but we were not successful.’

Champalimaud is a long way from Mathew Street, the genteel backwater facing Mumbai’s Western Railway lines, where Correa is based. He is now 80, and is closing his practice after 52 years. ‘It’s better to stop when you’re ahead,’ he comments. As an architect and planner, he is legendary. His first built work, the Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad, was opened in 1963 by first Indian prime minister Jawarhalal Nehru, and Rajiv Gandhi personally appointed him as head of India’s National Commission on Urbanisation in 1985. His legacy ranges from the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in New York to low-cost housing in Mumbai’s Dharavi ‘slum’.

Two projects remain in the pipeline – a design facility for Mahindra in Chennai, and the Ismaili Centre in Toronto, to open in 2013. From then on, Correa will be concentrating on his native India alone. He is establishing a foundation in Goa where he will work  pro bono and involve local people in planning.

The £87m Champalimaud Centre is an extraordinary design achievement. It is a partially solar-powered, high-tech building, yet has none of the cold steeliness of the high-tech style, and it embodies a cool, timeless post-modernism, ‘without’, he says, ‘resorting to ersatz fashions’.

Despite Portugal’s architectural star shining with Eduardo Souta da Moura’s Pritzker, a foreign architect has designed what must be the country’s best building of the century so far. Correa praises Portuguese architecture and sees a ‘wonderful sense of something which is monumental’ in Alvaro Siza’s work that Champalimaud shares. Certainly, his approach to its location is vital, drawing deeply on Portugal’s spirit and history. Correa’s ethos has always recognised ‘the importance of the built-form revealing what [Norwegian architectural theorist Christian] Norberg-Schulz calls the genius loci of the site’.

But Correa also brings to something uniquely Indian to Champalimaud, which has always run through his work. ‘Just about all my buildings have been concerned with the metaphysical qualities of open-to-sky space,’ he explains. Almost everyone of them, starting with the Gandhi Memorial Museum at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, and continuing on to Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal (an arts complex opened in 1982) and the Jawaharlal Kala Kendra in Jaipur (a cultural centre opened in 1991) are ‘structured around the ritualistic pathway – a journey crucial to the architectural experience’.

At the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, the metaphysical presence of sky and the ritualistic pathway are Correa’s known unknowns. Along with so much else there, they serve to create an extraordinary environment conducive to well-being and therapy and,  simultaneously, a sense of wonder.

The Turner Contemporary is housed on the site of the boarding house that the painter JMW Turner stayed in on his frequents visits to the town, hence its name, and where his relationship with his landlady Mrs Booth blossomed. The new gallery dominates the view at the east end of the beach, as the headland begins to rise above the town. The bay is characterised by a sweep of flashing, chiming amusement arcades and faded cafes with tired facades, each enduring a hangover from the days of heady seaside success.

Chipperfield was appointed as the architect in 2006, the previous scheme by Norwegian architect Snøhetta had been shelved as costs were spiralling. The original proposal was for a shell-like structure that sat out in the choppy waters of the North Sea. With the benefit of hindsight, it was part of a fleeting fashion, which saw architects seeking to create visually spectacular buildings, fuelled by the intoxicating mix of Lottery funding and emerging technologies – typified by Nigel Coates’ National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. The new building is back on the original site proposed in the competition, which the Snøhetta scheme ignored. ’Physically speaking, the site is difficult,’ says Chipperfield, ‘the previous scheme had a different relationship with the sea and we inherited the anxieties from that.’ When Chipperfield was appointed, a series of public consultations were staged to reassure the community, which was fearful of another debacle. ‘The emphasis was on delivery and working within limits,’ says the architect, ‘there could be no whiff of overspend or overtime.’

The Turner Contemporary is a robust building in form, character and material. The boat-shed volumes sit in defiant confrontation to the sea, its forms are assuredly crisp, forced by the galleries it contains. The planar exterior stands resolute against the incoming sea and wind, raised on a concrete plinth to prevent flooding. This practical measure also detaches the building from the promenade in front of it, presenting itself as a monument to the North Sea. On a particularly stormy day, the water can breach the sea wall and smash against the building. The exterior is clad in small panels of 24 mm laminated glass, held in place with aluminium supports, which has been bolt tested to withstand those forces. ‘It couldn’t look like it could be blown or washed away. Michelangelo said a good test of a sculpture is to roll it down a mountain, I think that’s true for architecture,’ says Chipperfield.

The ground floor is an extension of the public realm. A cafe sits on a courtyard that faces south towards the town across the beach. The expanse of grey concrete that holds back the road, which climbs up the headland, encloses the building from the cliff and ultimately the town. ‘It is a slightly stranded building,’ says Chipperfield, ‘stranded on the beach in a way.’ Inside, a space has been left over for a gift shop and information desk. On this floor, the building reveals more of its construction than in the gallery spaces above, it feels more rugged and less poised. In each of the Foyle rooms, a public space named after the Foyle Foundation which helped fund the gallery, large windows frame the sea. It’s a simple tactic to present the elements that define the town back to the visitor. The building celebrates the meeting of sea and sky that drew Turner back to Margate time and time again.

The gallery spaces occupy the first floor. ‘I remain convinced about the authority of room structure and getting daylight into all the spaces,’ says Chipperfield. He eschews talk of narrative and metaphor in this building, avoiding any puffery by concentrating on the tangible qualities of the spaces. The three simple galleries are top lit with an even north light. Chipperfield, along with Arup, worked the proportions of the room while mixing north and south light to achieve an even ambience that leaves no shadows.

The sober atmosphere that pervades these spaces could be dismissed as prosaic, but the emphasis is on quality, of both light and form. ‘The home of art is not the temple-like room of the museum,’ says Chipperfield. ‘You expect museums to be formal, I want this institution to feel like an artist’s studio where someone has come in and left their work on the wall.’

Chipperfield has provided a building that will serve the arts in north Kent well. In his words, ‘It’s a modest looking art centre, a good art space using money in the most appropriate manner.’ It’s hard not to admire the quiet confidence that the building exudes. It stands as an affront to nature, the faded Victorian character of the town and more fashionable cosmopolitan locations that might be a more obvious choice for this type of building. His work in Margate is now complete, it is up to the directors of the programme, armed with the robust tool that Chipperfield has provided, to make the institution work.

Margate has aspirations. Since the completion of the gallery, talk of the town having a renaissance is rife. The national press has already reported that property prices are beginning to rise as a result of the institution opening. The Bilbao effect is widely disregarded as the over-simplification of a complex masterplan, even Gehry acknowledges it, and Chipperfield is careful to distance himself from the murmurings of regeneration. ‘Saying you want to do regeneration [with a building like this] is like saying you play professional rugby so you can be an after dinner speaker,’ he says. ‘We are suspicious of culture for the sake of it in this country. Regeneration is what politicians use to justify culture.’ Chipperfield has faith in his building to work on its own terms,in its own right. He is right about regeneration too, a single building cannot revive the fortunes of a town, the factors that determine the future of Margate are nebulous.

Margate’s link with Turner is somewhat tenuous too, it is not necessarily the first location that comes to mind when considering the artist. He was a frequent visitor, yet it seems the connection is being forced upon the town in an attempt to consolidate the arts scene in the area and bestow gravitas on the new institution. The Turner Contemporary started in 2001, using temporary locations in Margate to stage exhibitions, workshops and cultural events. The project has run alongside the attempts to revive the famous Dreamland theme park further along the seafront (see panel). The director of the gallery, Victoria Pomery, is more bullish about the ambition of the cultural programme. ‘Turner Contemporary on its own can’t do everything, but I am positive that art does regenerate and does make a difference to the lives of people,’ she says. ‘We will be inspiring and challenging people about their lives, changing people’s mindsets.’ The opening show will feature works by artists Daniel Buren, Russel Crotty and Teresita Fernandez. The pieces are centred around a Turner painting, ‘the Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, on the Island of St Vincent at Midnight, on the 30th of April 1812, from a Sketch taken at the time by Hugh P Keane, Esquire’. The contemporary art that is exhibited is highly conceptual and abstract. It’s a brave move to launch the gallery with a show that is less likely to appeal to those in search of art in the style of its namesake.

Undoubtedly, projects like the Turner Contemporary are a much-needed outlet for the vast collections of art that sit in storage units for the major galleries around the country. Institutions can extend their influence and create revenues through loaning their works to galleries like the Turner Contemporary, finding new audiences without the commitment of building their own spaces. Also, thoughtful and carefully designed buildings like the Turner Contemporary, which is masterfully executed, are providing spaces that are perfect for a revolving roster of exhibitions, typified by the continuing success of Nottingham Contemporary by Caruso St. John.
Come summer, Margate will have an added incentive to visit over its neighbours. Yet the Turner Contemporary has no permanent collection, its cultural programme will have to continue to engage local residents once the summer crowds have left and the grey skies of winter return. It is then, on the days the weather is at its most unforgiving and the locals are loathe to step out of their homes, when Turner Contemporary will be tested. ‘This is a building that brings together the town, the sea, the art,’ says Chipperfield. In a physical sense this is true, it’s apparent in the architecture, the coming years will show if this is true for the community. Turner might yet become synonymous with Margate.

In the stripped basement of a Knightsbridge house the Austrian Cultural Forum presents its Visual Arts Platform. ‘In View Of…’ is the second exhibition of a juxtaposition project. Curated by Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques the scheme has a clear concept; two emerging artists; one working in Austria and one in England are asked to reinterpret each other’s work resulting in a final exhibition. This summer sees the turn of London based installation artist Joe Watling and Roswitha Weingrill who currently works in Vienna.

Both artists are fascinated by the abstraction and recreation of commonplace architectural features.  Using two very different media ‘In View Of…’ illustrates the artists’ mutual interests.  Watling’s temporary structures are built from ordinary materials. MDF boards create walls and painted grey steps, while metal industrial pipes form banisters. Displayed directly next to each construction is Weingrill’s two-dimensional paper reflection.  In this case, a collage created using neutral toned textured paper represents the same staircase.

Weingrill’s work takes an analytical approach.  She uses the subtle differences in the opacity and surface qualities of paper to represent architectural spaces with mechanical forms.  Whilst her collages are not immediately attention seeking, they do slowly lure the viewer in.  The unusual contradicting perspectives, created using scalpel sliced paper make Weingrill’s work intriguing, as a viewer we are left to determine space purely through the differing tones and thicknesses of paper.  These delicate compositions sit uncomfortably next to Watling’s intrusive installations.  Haphazardly organised with a raw finish Watling’s work appears far more literal.  However, on closer inspection what are initially presented as simple partition walls are reinvented.  The viewer becomes confused by their slight slant, the way not all the angles are ninety degrees and how they could never structurally function in a real life home.  Watling’s unsettling interventions create fractures throughout the room.  By disjointing what is meant to be a collaborative space Watling’s work contradicts the concept of connection, a critical aspect of the Visual Arts Platforms’ idea.

It is the contrast between the working methods of these two artists that makes ‘In View Of…’ most interesting.  The exhibition explores how two-dimensional drawings can be translated into three-dimensional installations with artists using their favoured materials and practices alongside one another.  The Visual Arts Platform presents an exhibition idea with potential. However, it is optimistic of the Austrian Cultural Forum to presume the exhibition concept can be successfully appreciated in the small gallery space provided.

Austrian Cultural Forum, SW7- until 8 July

Hidden by its shop front exterior Beardsmore Gallery in north London is a new collection of works by English artist Rebecca Salter.  Consisting mostly of drawings and including some sculptural experiments Salter’s work places emphasis on surfaces and mark making instead of traditional notions of perspective, maintaining that ‘Space is defined and separated by colour and texture’.

Originally trained as a ceramicist, Salter’s textural drawings on show at Beardsmore Gallery are stark contrasts to her early works.  This year Salter had a major survey exhibition ‘Into the Light of Things’ at Yale Centre for British Art demonstrating these variations with works on show spanning 1981-2010, and currently further examples of her creations can be seen at Tate Britain’s exhibition Watercolour.  Despite her focus on drawing Salter maintains her work is sculptural and is largely inspired by textures, patterns and surfaces occurring in nature, frequently visiting the British countryside for stimulation.

Salter’s previous projects involve translating the intensity of her investigative texture drawings onto glass in architectural environments.  Guy’s Hospital Haematology unit in London is home to one of Salter’s glazed creations.   Heavily influenced by both Japanese art and architecture after studying at Kyoto City University of the Arts this site-specific commission plays with light and the way it enters the building ‘guiding’ visitors through the architecture with the use of directional mark making whilst allowing the artists self-named concept, ‘calligraphy of light’ to be fully exploited.

Salter’s abstract drawings are seductive, once you begin to understand one texture you are obliged to investigate the others.  Appearing almost as an advert for drawing Salter’s works are built up through layers of mark making, she constantly varies her drawing technique by using bold, subtle, thick and thin marks with each dynamic stain entirely different.  Their complexity is heightened by Beardsmore’s simplistic gallery space, a small exhibition area allowing the viewer to focus closely on the art works.

Beardsmore Gallery, NW5- until 18 June