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.

The Design Museum marks Sir Terence Conran’s 80th birthday with a major exhibition that explores his unique impact on contemporary life in Britain. Through his own design work, and also through his entrepreneurial flair, Conran has transformed the British way of life. As well as this, his design studio and architectural practice have a world wide reach. The Way We Live Now explores Conran’s impact and legacy, whilst also showing his design approach and inspirations. The exhibition traces his career from post-war austerity through to the new sensibility of the Festival of Britain in the 1950s, the birth of the Independent Group and the Pop Culture of the 1960s, to the design boom of the 1980s and on to the present day.

To compliment the exhibition, the Design Museum in collaboration with Blueprint,  has produced a book that features an exclusive interview by Johnny Tucker with Terence Conran and contributions from Deyan Sudjic, Stephan Bayley, Christopher Frayling and Fiona MacCarthy.

Blueprint has 10 copies of the book and ten pairs of tickets for the exhibition “Terence Conran: The way we live now” which runs until 04 March 2012 at the Design Museum. For a chance to win, send us your details including your name, email, contact number and address at info@blueprintmagazine.co.uk

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.’

Walking into the Power of Making at the V&A comes as a bit of a shock. The place is stuffed to the gills with an eclectic range of objects, from a crocheted, full-size bear and a cake that looks like a real baby to a prosthetic leg and a Fabrican spray-on dress. The walls are hung like a Royal Academy summer show, with objects cascading down the verticals.

It’s certainly no calm, white gallery space, more a Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities: exactly what curator Daniel Charny had in mind. Charny, a senior tutor in design products at the Royal College of Art and curator at the Aram Gallery is also a co-founder of creative consultancy From Now On. He wasn’t about to provide a quiet trawl through the icons of contemporary craft when he took on the Crafts Councils’ triennial show at the V&A. He researched the origins of both institutions and his brief to himself was to examine contemporary attitudes to skills and making. Making, he concluded, is universal, but despite renewed interest, skills are being lost.

The show is political, raising ideas about alienation from the means of production and about  commercialisation and globalisation. ‘People don’t know how things are made,’ Charny declares. ‘They no longer say “I want this; I can make it,” but rather “I need this; I will buy it.” They have lost the habit of making.’ Yet the exhibition is predicated on his belief that making is what makes us human and if, as he does, you know where to look, that making is ubiquitous. Making, he contends, is found at all levels of society, from those who make to survive to those who make to think; from those who work with traditional skills to those who use computer technology, and from those who work alone to others who collaborate. Making is the prerogative both of the professional and the amateur.

The link between the show’s 100-plus objects is that the makers understand their materials and processes and that their pieces are ingenious, made meticulously and with passion. Makers learn by doing; getting better with practice. Charny believes that this underlies modern life, empowering engineering, fine art and design. Hence the inclusion of a dry stone wall by Andrew Loudon near a prosthetic suit for Stephen Hawking by Michael T Rea.

‘Making is not an execution, it is an imaginative use of skills: making as thinking,’ says Charny. Witness a nylon filament ring by Nora Fok next to Peter Butcher’s machine embroidered, snowflake-shaped surgical implant, which provides multiple attachment points for tissue replacement and the way this leads on to the glass nose moulds made by Matt Durran and used to fashion engineered tissue that is eventaully transplanted on to the faces of disease victims.

The show doesn’t shy away from new technologies, updating notions of crafting and placing considerable emphasis on the use of 3D printing and open sourcing, where knowledge is swapped through the exchange of data, instructions for ‘hacking’ objects, or blueprints. A classic example is Mike Sheldrake’s surfboard kit, a list of instructions and templates made up by Tim Mason.

The show deals with traditional and ethnic crafts and the conscious use of tradition by makers to create identity. It also examines the subversion of materials and iconographies, as in chef Jacquy Pfeiffer’s spun-sugar sculptures and Michael Eden’s Wedgwood-like urns made by computer-aided drawing and additive layer manufacturing.

The exhibition also includes a ‘tinker corner’ for the occasional workshop and a selection of films about making. Many of the films showed pretty hideous objects being created, yet the area was crammed with spectators who seemed spellbound by the act of making. The Power of Making clearly resonates with visitors, despite the confusing and somewhat overpowering layout of the show. People need to read the labels but getting close enough is difficult. Sadly, there no touching allowed. Surely, the V&A could have found a way to make at least some of the objects available for handling? The real power of making is in touching and experiencing.

While big names are included in the show, it isn’t an apology for design/art/craft. Ego isn’t the essence of making, but many within the Crafts Council’s purview may resent their rare opportunity to be shown at the V&A being usurped by designers and engineers. However, Charny presents a powerful case for making that can only boost the sector and spur the public to rethink the idea that working with one’s hands is a sub-intellectual activity. They may even be inspired to make.

Future Memory Pavilion, an installation by Asif Khan and Pernilla Ohrstedt, is unveiled today as the Future Memory in Singapore, as the platform for promotion of British architects and designers, culminates.

The Future Memory Pavilion comprises of two cones stretching up to eight meters high and 20 meters in diameter. Made of ice and sand, the cones are formed using concentric ropes, that taper the structure.

Typically for Khan and on par with the Future Memory programme the form is designed to morph with passing time, as the ice melts and trickling water erodes the sand structure. Visitors are also encouraged to interact to represent the human impact on the environment. Ultimately both cones melt away. The manner in which the cones disappear is intended to provoke visitors to reflect on issues of climate and urban development.

The Pavilion’s creators, Khan and Ohrstedt, drew their inspiration from Singapore’s history. The conical forms emulate the hills of Singapore, which were methodically destroyed, as the soil was needed for the expansion of island’s grounds. Chinese merchants were importing ice from New England as far back as 1854. It was considered a luxury in the tropical climate and available only to the wealthiest Singaporeans.

Asif Khan is a Design Miami 2011 Designer of the Future known for his Cloud project and West Beach Café in Littlehampton. Pernilla Ohrstedt is an architect and exhibitions producer. Artists met at Bartlett architecture school. Recently they are preoccupied with setting up their new practice Pernilla&Asif. See next months Blueprint for an interview with the designers.

The Future Memory was created by Royal Academy of Arts and British Council.

Kitty by Jiran, 24

Thanks to everyone who visited our stand at 100% design this year and designed their own sign. We had hundreds of entries and here we bring you the ones that really caught our eye.

Ally Churches, 23 – Beware Elderly Pickpockets

Drew Wicken, 22 – Warning: Warning Ahead!

Grant Holt, 32 – My Dad….

Rosie, 22 – Pattern

Malcolm Duffin, ‘over 8′ – Road Tax

Patrick Myles, 63 – Werewolves

Beth Duddy, 26 – Chicken Crossing

Borom Chai, 21 – Ants

Make Industries, 35 – Bermuda Triangle

Ash Adams, 21 – Robot Speed Camera

Blueprint asked a series of designers, artists and architects to redesign the British roadsign. The response was diverse and thought-provoking, challenging the role of the ubiquitous notices and the type of commands we receive.

When was the last time you looked at a road sign? No, really looked? These ubiquitous parts of the urban fabric, order, cajole and inform us what’s going on with a set of icons that we’re so used, we more often than not register them almost subliminally. But have a long look and you’ll notice many of them have aged somewhat, like the man putting up an umbrella in nicely rounded wellies, those two Austin A40s battling it out for road position, or the speed camera that looks as if it would need a glass plate to capture your image as you sped past. So we asked a wide range of designers, architects and illustrators to Look Again at the signs for us. The response has been fantastic and these are just some of the results.

A huge thanks to everyone involved.

You can see more at our stand at 100%Design (22 – 25 September). What’s more hopefully you’ll be inspired to Look Again yourself.

Pete Fowler
Noma Bar
The Lindstrom Effect
Modern Toss
Mobile Studio
Richard Morrison
Luke and Eddie at Pentagram
Michael Wallis
Tomato
Airside
Checkland Kindleysides
The Chase
The Partners

Pete Fowler is an artist and designer. His work has been used by MTV, Greenpeace and the Super Furry Animals.

monsterism.net

Bar describes his work as visual communication, using the minimum elements for maximum communication.

nomabar.com

The Lindström Effect is Edinburgh-based Iain Bruce and Vala Jónsdóttir. They work in fashion, music and galleries.

thelindstromeffect.co.uk

Modern Toss is the creation of Mick Bunnage and Jon Link. Their cartoons were televised in 2006.

‘No one likes being told what to do these days, least of all by a pole stuck in the ground with some old-fashioned words stuck on it. By softening the ‘over-directional’ style of pre-Cameron/Clegg command signage and incorporating the raised inflection of modern chat, these signs are designed to create more of a ‘consensus’ between contemporary drivers and the signals they must take into account if they are going to complete a journey more or less alive. The result is a truly modern breakthrough in road safety, designed specifically to grab the fly-like attention span of the people most likely to mow you down while texting about some shit they’ve just seen on Youtube, OK?’

moderntoss.com

The London-based art and architecture practice works on socially-aware projects in the public realm.

themobilestudio.co.uk

Morrison is a designer of film title sequences, broadcast, commercials and TV branding.

‘Look Again – yes, but there is no need to change them. These symbols or pictographs depict qualities generally associated with the object within the circle or triangle. They are more easily recognised internationally because some prior association already exists in our visual thinking.

What I see is that they are child-like in their design. There is a good reason for that: what we see is in the visual has been born in the need to have a universal visual language understood across all borders, as you see from the plates supplied.

A new, satisfactory sign or signs will require the combined efforts of public and private organisations, industrialists, business, scientists and designers will have to pool their skills to make sure that the symbols of tomorrow properly fit the societies and public needs as a whole.’

richard-morrison.co.uk

Pentagram is a multi-disciplinary design firm with offices in London, New York and Berlin.
pentagram.com

Michael Wallis is creative director at CorkeWallis. A branding agency in West London.

‘Road signs will soon be entirely redundant. The new Ford Mondeo already recognises signs and tells you to slow down. What if Groupon was to buy all the road signs from the Government? Groupon delivers timely, location-based special offers to its members. A Groupon road sign would know who and where you were and how fast you were going so it could deliver personalised offers directly to your HUD windscreen.

Here a driver goes flying past – at that speed they are sure to enjoy an extreme sports offer. The car will already have informed the DVLA about the careless driving!’

corkewallis.com

Tomato was founded in 1991 in London as a collective of artists, designers, musicians and writers.

tomato.co.uk

The London design agency founded in 1998 works in fields ranging from film and digital to graphics.

airside.co.uk

Founded in 1979, the London-based company has designed for clients such as KFC and Converse.

checklandkindsleysides.com

Founded in 1986, the branding and graphics firm is in Manchester, London and Preston.

‘Is there anything fundamentally wrong with the road signs project that Kinneir+Calvert implemented in 1957 or have the People in Charge simply lost sight of its originality? What has gone terribly wrong is the physical placing and duplication of signs: visual clutter that results in an individual message not getting through to the road user. In much the same way that graphic designers protect their logotypes with‘safe zones’, maybe rules should apply to sign installation. Our sign system was copied by the rest of Europe but it is in serious need of a tweak to stay in front.

Jock Kinneir’s typography spaced the letters in ‘tiles’ based on the capital I. Signs are now produced digitally. Has anyone worked out the visual difference between tiles and pixel-based systems (and the speeds we now drive at)? The newer technology in lighting is also something Jock Kinnear did not have. Apparently those smiley speed awareness signs are making a big impact. So maybe, lighting on signs that is activated by on-coming vehicles could boost road safety on a dark winter afternoon. And those motorway gantry signs: Couldn’t they offer something to make us happy instead of lying about there being animals on the carriageway?’

Triangles, circles and cycles

‘The Highway Code stipulates that warning signs are in triangles and orders in circles. Why? Does anybody really pay more attention to triangular signs than they do circular ones? As far as we can tell all that the triangular format does is restrict the size of the information making it harder to read from a distance.

Regarding cycling: Why should it be that a black cycle icon in a red circle means ‘‘No cycling’ and yet a black cycle icon in a red triangle means‘ ‘Cycle route ahead’? It makes no sense.’

National speed limits

‘This sign can mean the speed limit is either 30, 40, 50, 60, or 70mph. As the selection above illustrates (and this is not all of them), it all depends upon the type of road you are travelling on and the types of vehicle you are travelling in. It is no wonder, therefore, that the majority of drivers when passing a National Speed Limit sign and then spotting a speed camera in the distance have no idea what speed they should be travelling at. There must be a better way.’

National speed limits

‘What if the speed limit for car drivers was clearly indicated within the red circle? The retained diagonal black bar still indicates that is a national speed limit area and those towing would have to know they should do 10mph less than the speed limit on all road types as should coaches and lorries under 7.5tonnes unless travelling on a motorway. Drivers of cars would not have to remember any speed limitations. Drivers towing would only need to remember the one rule as opposed to three separate speed limits. Everybody wins aside from perhaps the speed cameras.’

No entry

‘Apparently the original usage of a no entry sign can be traced to Europe when formal shields were used to mark the boundaries of territories. Then when they did not want visitors to enter they would tie a bright red ribbon horizontally around the shield. It is now such a universally recognised sign that it is never likely to change but it does look more like a sign for the post office and we prefer our version.’

thechase.co.uk

This graphic design and branding strategy employs 70 people in London and New York.

the-partners.com

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.

Rachel Whiteread’s House won its creator the 1993 Turner Prize on the very day that local councillors authorised its demolition. A full-scale concrete cast of the inside of a terrace house – 193 Grove Road, Bow – the monumental sculpture courted just the right kind of controversy as well as collecting this prestigious art accolade. It also cemented the reputation of commissioning organisation Artangel within the contemporary art scene. Codirectors James Lingwood and Michael Morris became the twin engines behind Artangel in 1991, and since then they have propelled it into one of the most significant agencies working with artists to produce public artworks in the UK.

Over the past two decades, the organisation has helped to realise 70 projects while working with nearly 100 artists, ranging from Juan Muñoz to Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco to Steve McQueen. Artangel is predicated on the idea of providing a platform for ambitious site-specific projects that could not be accommodated in the conventional gallery or museum setting. These projects may be a large-scale work like Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of the 1984 clash between miners and the police, which involved more than 800 participants and was filmed by Mike Figgis; or the much smaller, but no less tricky to pull off Turner-nominee Roger Hiorns’ Seizure (2008), which had 75,000 litres of copper sulphate solution pumped into a condemned council flat to create a cobalt blue crystal-lined cave. Another mind-boggling and highly lyrical commission is Jem Finer’s Longplayer (2000, pictured below), a musical composition – without repetition – that will take one thousand years to play out.

Artangel is one of the pioneers of a working model where art institutions foster a direct relationship with artists. Over the last decade this model has ‘been incorporated into the mainstream of a lot of museum practises, ranging from the Tate and the Turbine Hall to the Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery and the smaller galleries,’ says Lingwood. In architecture, one can see the implication of this concept in the annual appearance of the Serpentine Pavilion.

Artangel’s influence is no less demonstrated by the loyal financial support it receives from both public and private sectors alike. Its grant from the Arts Council England makes up around 40 per cent of the annual turnover and it has managed a 31 per cent increase amid the Government’s funding cuts, though Morris remarks that this is because ‘over the years we’ve been able to knock on different doors at the Arts Council; now everything has been streamlined and consolidated into one.’ The rest of its funding is drawn from individual patrons including many artists and designers, such as Amanda Levete, Barber Osgerby, and private gallerists such as Victoria Miro and Sadie Coles, and even the Tate’s director Sir Nicholas Serota.

There were times when as a fledgling agency, there was not much work at all for Artangel in a given year, but as it celebrates its 20th, Lingwood and Morris find themselves having to juggle work. Between 2012 and 2014, the pair will commission three more film projects and next year will see the result of their collaboration with Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture. It will take the form of a
ferry boat stranded on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre.

Designed by artist Fiona Banner together with David Kohn Architects, A Room for London is in effect, a hotel room with a view – ‘from Big Ben to St Paul’s’. Members of the public will be able to book a night’s stay but alongside this, Artangel has devised a programme of cultural guests: ‘Writers, thinkers, musicians who will be invited to spend time in the room to reflect on how London finds itself in 2012’.

This year, the Artangel Collection at the Tate, which is compiled from 17 film and video works, was officially launched at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery during the Manchester International Festival (MIF). The idea for an archive of their moving image works has been on their minds for a couple of years, though ‘it’s quite an unusual thing to do because Artangel has always been predicated on the present and the future,’ says Lingwood. Also at MIF, which kicked off on the last day of June, Artangel premiered two new works: 1395 Days Without Red and Audio Obscura.

The first, by artists Šejla Kameric and Anri Sala, has been four years in the making. ‘The 1395 days in the title refers to the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996, which Šejla lived through as a teenager,’ explains Lingwood. ‘Without Red alludes to the fact that the beseiged citizens were advised not to wear bright colours because it would alert the snipers in the hills above.’ The second, Audio Obscura, is a 30-minute audio experience created by the poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw. It will be situated in the Manchester Piccadilly Station concourse, and is to give the ‘experience of overhearing conversations or thoughts of people who seem to be on the platform,’ says Morris.

This marked the first collaboration between the two organisations, yet it seems inevitable given that Artangel’s unassuming Clerkenwell office sits on the floor above those of MIF’s London branch. ‘We share much more with the MIF than an address,’ says Lingwood, ‘It’s about an approach. I mean, Artangel has always been about commissioning new work for the last 20 years. The MIF is about commissioning new works. We try and bring into the world new ideas of scale and ambition that other art organisations, other art festivals don’t want to take on.’

How Artangel goes about its projects is ‘always a big question’, says Lingwood. Usually, carefully chosen artists are invited to the table to discuss what they might have on their mind and to be as ambitious as possible. ‘We tend to work with artists only once,’ says Morris. ‘It’s a very long engagement because it really is from the ground up every step of the way.’ Indeed Artangel projects tend to take years, and it’s a commitment that’s far more than merely financial: ‘a kind of trusted, honest, critical, positive, productive relationship with an artist,’ says Lingwood. It is this relationship with the artist that is at the core of Artangel’s working method. ‘If you look at it this way, 10 or, certainly, 15 years ago, museums basically collected and presented work which existed. The primary relationship of many museums – not all – was with the artefacts,’ says Lingwood. ‘The primary relationship, for Artangel, has always been with artists.’

Another idea central to Artangel is that of production, and according to Lingwood, this notion has become more integral to the way other art organisations think about their programmes. When Artangel started out it saw its peers as being the Dia Art Foundation and Creative Time. Both were founded in 1974 in New York, and are non-profit arts organisations that help to realise projects whose scope would otherwise preclude them from traditional sources of funding and which are often situated in public spaces outside of the art gallery context. Lingwood adds that while the field is more crowded now, he believes that the broad range of projects that it takes on still gives Artangel the edge over others.

As a model for arts patronage, Artangel offers an amazing degree of flexibility for artists. ‘We don’t want to say it has to be this, this and this, and it has to happen in this place and at that time and for that amount of money,’ Lingwood says. ‘We want to find those limits at the end of the project.’ This means a highly open-ended, malleable approach, of unexpected twists and turns. For example, during the course of making 1395 Days without Red, Kamerić and Sala decided to each make their own film, based on the same footage material.

Artangel’s second decade has seen the organisation broaden its reach. and it has linked up with regional art galleries. For the time being this includes the Ikon in Birmingham and the Whitworth Gallery, and entails commissioning five new major film projects. In 2007, Artangel realised its first international commission, Roni Horn’s Library of Water, in a small coastal town of Stykkishólmur in Iceland. The library is home to 24 columns of glacier water that reflect and refract on to a field of weather-related words on the floor. The library also provides a writers’ retreat. There are more projects underway abroad, such as Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, a travelling sculpture that replicates the rural in suburban Detroit. A third project involving historic buildings in Toledo with sculptor Cristina Iglesias, is gradually gaining form. ‘But London is important to us,’ says Lingwood. Morris concurs: ‘Our international programme would never take the place of what we do in this city. We live and work here.’

Despite now being supported by a larger team, Lingwood stresses that he and Morris – they tend to lead on individual projects – would always maintain a direct hands-on approach to each project. Indeed, Morris had to leave two-thirds of the way through the interview to meet Lavinia Greenlaw at Euston station to test out her installation and Lingwood was soon dashing off to see the rough cut of one of the films for 1395 Days without Red. ‘Artangel’s not going to get so grand that we can only have some sort of executive, overseeing role,’ says Lingwood. ‘The moment where we feel that we no longer have projects that we actively, closely, passionately want to produce, that will be the moment we’ll bring an end to it.’

So what does the future hold for an organisation that always has its sights on tomorrow? ‘We’re excited actually to explore more fully the digital world. We feel that that is an area of future interest,’ says Lingwood, ‘So we’ve lots of challenges, lots of possibilities and that’s enough for us to fuel Artangel for some years.’

‘Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!’ declares BLAST, the 1914 summer publication by the Vorticist artists. This opening statement is painfully ironic; emerging just as Europe descended into World War I, Vorticism was destined to be short-lived. The Tate’s Manifesto for a Modern World is an intriguing insight into four years at the height of the London-based movement.

The show recreates the Vorticists’ 1915 and 1917 exhibitions. Including works by Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska along with paintings by their female contemporaries Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear and Helen Saunders, the Tate’s summer exhibition is an educational investigation into a forgotten period of British avant-garde.

Many of the celebrated sculptures were in The Royal Academy’s 2009 exhibition Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Gill. But Tate Britain makes the work far more accessible, taking the viewer through the Vorticist movement from its cubist influences to the invention of the ‘Vortograph’ (the first abstract photographs) allowing the visitor to pause and read BLAST; a combination of art, poetry and prose.

Jacob Epstein’s iconic sculpture ‘Rock Drill’ opens the show, displayed against a magenta wall (the same shade used for the Wyndham Lewis-designed BLAST cover) which encourages the viewer to look upwards at this imposing 1913 symbol of the machine. Recreated in 1974 for the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Vorticists and its Allies’, Epstein’s sculpture combines modern mechanised structure with primitive traditions. It is accompanied by sketches illustrating the development from its African art influences to its final reflection of an obsession with mechanised power and with its robust, robotic legs it embraces modernity. Its inclusion of a real life rock drill explores Duchamp’s 1913 idea of the ‘ready-made’; a concept that considered the choice of object to be a creative act.

Controversially once claiming, ‘Vorticism was, in fact, what I, personally, did and said at a certain period’, Wyndham Lewis is widely considered the group’s leader, noted by the Tate’s 1956 exhibition ‘Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism’.    However, it is another exponent, Gaudier-Brzeska who steals the focus of this exhibition. Presenting an   opportunity to see some of his sensitive sketches, it is the drawings which make Manifesto for a Modern World most attractive. They are displayed alongside his glistening alabaster sculptures, and the viewer is encouraged to explore the relationship between what the artist sees and what he has created. Gaudier wrote that ‘sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation; sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes.’ Gaudier’s seminal Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound is also on display.   It was commissioned by the poet himself and carved from Pentelicon marble (a resilient material used for the Parthenon’s architecture). Its magnificent scale and robust material makes this one of the most exceptional sculptures in the show.

For four years the Vorticists pioneered the machine aesthetic, idolised new inventions and cemented these as the future of Britain. By 1914, global events meant the Vorticists’ optimistic embrace of modernity became redundant.   Gaudier died in 1915 while serving with the French army, just weeks before the publication of BLAST War Number: Review of the Great English Vortex. With its geometric monochromatic cover and less controversial content, the influence of the war on the movement was clear.   BLAST NO.2 was to be the last review by the Vorticists and included Gaudier’s essay on Vortex, subtitled ‘Written from the trenches‘,where he died. Epstein’s Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill depicts an emasculated, shrunken figure which epitomises the artists’ depression following the loss of Gaudier and signalled the end of the movement.

While Tate Britain’s exhibition allows one to appreciate Vorticism visually it lacks some of the historical backing needed to understand the group’s cloudy concepts fully . It also skilfully neglects some of the more controversial theories. In one text, BLAST states, ‘To Suffragettes: In destruction, as in other things, stick to what you understand’. The publication is presented, but not explained. The show encourages the viewer to focus on the art and its visual influences, but not the extreme opinions of the artists themselves.

Manifesto for a Modern World, which consists mostly of smaller ink prints and previously unseen miniature sculptural experiments sourced by the Tate is, however, beautifully executed, allowing each exhibit to be individually appreciated. The curator, Chris Stephens, acknowledges the limited sizes of the works presented a challenge. Within such a large gallery space it would have been easy for these works to be lost. Instead, the space engagingly leads one through the colours and materials explored in Vorticism.

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World until 4 September at the Tate Britain

Where Language Stops is a new exhibition housed in the Wilkinson Gallery, a former East London industrial unit.

Conceived and curated by gallery owner Amanda Wilkinson and philosopher Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, the exhibition ties together an assortment of different media to assess the purpose of language in art. Each artist’s piece is a response to text written by Dronsfield on the subject for the exhibition.

The gallery awards visitors with little information for the exhibition. With no labels to each piece, a map with the credits is provided. A transcript of a conversation between Wilkinson and Dronsfield, skirting around the reasoning behind the exhibition is also available however, beyond this, there is no further context or explanation. The onus is placed on the visitor to develop their own meaning and path through the exhibition.

Dronsfield’s own response is exhibited in the first of two spacious rooms. A sequence of ten frames (pictured below) contains the same two pages of philosophical text, with each version missing different phrases and letters. Dronsfield addresses the importance of words and language to our understanding of the world. Without the missing text, the meaning is lost. Only once all ten versions have been read do we see in full what he has written – an assessment of French philosophy, featuring the likes of Derrida and Sartre.

above, from left: Dronsfield’s ‘A Picture of French Literature’ (2011) and
Juliette Bonneviot’s Medal of Honor Pollock Seven Red Paintings (2011)

As a piece of art, it is minimalist, monochromatic – black digital print on white paper – and draws in the viewer as each separate frame edges closer to delivering the full picture. Understanding the work is achieved through visually piecing together and eliminating the absent.

Joan Jonas’ untitled group of sketches range from rough solar system-like chalk sketches to obscure, almost shapeless, doodles. Jonas’ pieces say less immediately than Dronsfield’s texts, highlighting the broad range of responses that were produced by the contributors, however Jonas’ sketches have less impact due to their unclear message.

When moving upstairs into the second half of the exhibition, confronting the visitor is a surprising sight. Across the entrance, at chest height, is a canvas blocking the entrance (pictured below). The other side of the obstructive canvas – by Ilja Karilampi – reads ‘Vicki Leekx’, the title of musician M.I.A.’s 2010 mixtape. Her music itself is brash and uncompromising, and the imposition of this canvas on the visitor echoes that boldness in M.I.A.’s own work. The canvas communicates the personality of M.I.A. and her music through its brash positioning rather than through words or language.

The quality of the work continued with Lena Henke’s two striking black sculptures (pictured above), formed of fibreglass and epoxy with no clear shape or structure, occupying the centre space standing out for their eccentricity and craftsmanship in equal measure. It seems that each piece is intended to elicit a purely emotional response, not rationalised by an explanation of the artist’s intention. The folded forms appear like fabric, questioning our perception of material – extending the impact of the brief set by Dronsfield to aesthetic cultures beyond written language.

The range of responses from the artists has led to an equal mix of ambiguity and delight, due to Dronsfield and Wilkinson allowing each contributor to approach the brief from their own perspective.

Leaving the gallery, it remains unclear whether the exhibits are an explicit response to Dronsfield’s brief or whether it has been shaped to fit the parameters set by the curator. Regardless, Where Language Stops is a thought-provoking and challenging exhibition.

Where Language Stops until 14 August at the Wilkinson Gallery, E2

Between the Olympics and Victoria Park in East London lies an urban island called Hackney Wick, an unassuming place that as a four year resident witnessed some dramatic urban renewal in the last six months. As the adjacent landscape prepares for the greatest show on earth on 27 July, 2012 we welcome the fourth free annual arts festival to Hackney Wick and Fish Island – Hackney Wicked.

The area is recognised as the last bastion of concentrated artistic endeavour in the east-end, describing itself as a ’spontaneous combustion of enthusiasm from the local arts community’, with lots of studios open to those who venture up creaky staircases to meet local artists or enter blackened shop fronts for some Kwick Love or encounter a mural of a toothy Queen in sunglasses by local graffiti artist Sweet-Tooth.

The landscape in the everyday sense is sleepy but over the past month the rush to do something before the inevitable tidy up of 2012, a number of pop-up interventions in the empty spaces have emerged. Standing out: The Yard a theatre space designed by Practice Architecture and Films on Fridges, an open cinema, screening films in the glow of the shiny Olympic Stadium near Old Ford Lock (lurking behind docks the Floating Cinema waiting for its time to shine). Neighbouring a carpet warehouse, more artist’s studios along Dace Road and the building centre of Fish Island the local artist hub, Stour Space on Roach Road can also be found. All kinds of exchanges are taking place this weekend from limited edition prints and artefacts to vintage clothing at the Hackney Wick Flea Market at White Post Lane Yard to listening to music lyrics inspired by the Olympic experience collected from local residents which will eventually Light Up Your Street by Lucy Harrison.

The formal boundary of the Wick is a blurry one and laterally extends to the Folly for a Flyover by Assemble to the Greenway that leads along ultimately to the View Tube. Rich in stories and mythologies recently explored by artists commissioned by SPACE, in-between lies a patchwork of community gardens, bagel/printing/detergent warehouses, fish smokeries, mechanics, new build housing and very precise public realm improvements along towpaths and intersections.

In particular the new realm designed by MUF Architecture at Brinkworth Way and Prince Edward Road negotiates the tough line between old and new, sewing existing activities such as The Hackney Pearl Café with emerging occupancies like a cycle repair shop, picture framers or the See Studio gallery space. This year Prince Edward Road acts as a navigation hub for the festival, now permanently sign posted “Hackney Wick” along the roofline of Oslo House and this year being appropriated by light projections from Kent Hugo and Michael Wilson. Together they cast shadows over the solitary tulip tree in the middle of the road, the special Hackney Wick terrazzo ground surface and securely anchored ‘street furniture’. In parallel to the overland train runs Wallis Road and a line of firs and blossom trees from Victoria Park connecting the space between to The Cut, the local name for the Lea Navigation Canal and annual location of the heroic Coracle Regatta.

Tying the Wick together neatly is not easy and in some ways getting lost, back tracking and enjoying the mess is part of experiencing this place in transition – nothing will be the same again. So come and witness some urban eccentricity before it changes completely.

Given only the space of a 10m wall in the foyer of the Museum of London, the compact ‘Hand Drawn London’ exhibition delivers a concentrated collection of unique maps that complement its ongoing ‘London Street Photography’ exhibition running concurrently.

Comprising eleven maps by 10 designers, the objective of the exhibition is simple according to the curators: ‘Geographical or topographical accuracy is not the aim. Instead each map illustrates how certain areas of London appear to those who live and work there.’

The characters of both the areas of London and the artists themselves are apparent in the works. Flory Leow’s ‘London, Four Months Off the Boat’ (above) is a great example of this. A map of Bloomsbury, where she studies, Leow charts the emotional connections she has with a number of places; where first dates or first deep existential chats happened, for example. Pieces such as these add a human touch to normally impersonal maps.

The mix of areas featured in the maps echo London’s own mix of culture and diversity. Martin Usborne’s ‘Hoxton Square’ features just the vibrant square and its countless bars, while we head south of the Thames for Liam Roberts’ ‘Brixton as a Tree’, formed of streets acting as tendrils and branches with bars and other hangouts acting as the fruit. Fortunately, almost any London resident can find something to relate to and those less familiar with the city will certainly discover more about what it is like to live in the city.

Anika Mottershaw’s ‘Map of London’ (above) provides plenty of detail and humour. Prominently featuring musical references and venues (both past and present), Mottershaw’s work is very vocal. The way in which the eye is drawn in to certain statements and specific locations before being moved to somewhere bigger, brighter, or with more dinosaurs (it treads a fine line between realism and fantasy) feels more like a conversation with the artist than a drawing. Areas that Mottershaw may not know well are filled with broad estimations of what she imagines them to be like – Pimlico features ‘monocles and such’ and Elephant and Castle is simply a castle.

Mixed with the more personal maps are some that seek to tell a story about London itself. Julia Forte’s sketch of ‘London Firsts’ provides a history lesson to make any Londoner proud. Various locales are marked with numbers, which correspond to achievements in London such as ‘world’s first underground trains’ or where the first grapefruits were sold in the city.

The problem with the small exhibition is that it only leaves you wanting more. Being only one short wall amidst a reception area and shop, right next to the constantly opening and closing front doors, robs the exhibition of the atmosphere it deserves. Having said that, perhaps hustle and bustle and loud conversation is the most London-like atmosphere of all.

‘Hand Drawn London’ until 11 September, Museum of London, EC1

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

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

‘I’d rather be in the middle of a situation than over on one side either looking in or looking out,’ reflects Sandback on his neglect of surface and solid forms in favour of minimalist lines. This idea could not be truer of the work recreated within the Victorian architecture of the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery. Declaring early on in his career a lack of interest in material or at least materiality alone, American sculptor Fred Sandback’s retrospective at Whitechapel illustrates the use of his trademark material, yarn, whilst presenting themselves as real life three-dimensional line drawings directly relating to their architectural environments.

Emerging from Yale School of Architecture and Art in the late sixties Sandback’s sculptures adhere to artist Frank Stella’s notion that in minimal art ‘What you see. Is what you see.’ Saying himself ‘my work just is what it is’ Sandback frequently requested exhibition spaces were stripped of all obstructions allowing us to indulge in his minimal creations.

With works spanning 1968 to 1991, Whitechapel Gallery traces Sandback’s experimentation with colour.  His ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ (a reference to Mondrian’s  autonomous 1942 painting) includes a series of single strands of slightly fuzzy yarn aligned with immense precision each individually drilled directly into the floor and then again through the sky light of Gallery 2.

Leaving viewers constantly searching for the area between forms, the sculptures break up the gallery space into a series of undisclosed paths. A seven-part construction originally created in 1982 and remade to specifically fit Whitechapel includes black yarn triangular planes linking the floor area to the ceiling, inviting the visitor to walk through the space Sandback has created.  The sensational contrast between the fragility of the material and vast large-scale sculpture is absorbing, engulfing the viewer into Sandback’s fascination with line, plane and lack of volume as they walk through the open space.

Supporting the installation Whitechapel Gallery has compiled archival original photographs of works, previous exhibition catalogues and drawings by Sandback with a focus on his exhibitions in London. These show how lines created with both yarn and pencil create a compelling parallel to space; a comparison Sandback made himself.

Chief curator of Whitechapel Gallery Achim Borchardt- Hume has produced a beautifully executed exhibition truly capturing the subtlety of Sandback’s work.  Tiny inverted corner structures ironically made using the most solid material on show (spring steel) and coloured in fluorescent blue can be found hidden within the architecture. These are just small reminders of Sandback’s site-specific intervention of this gallery space.

This small exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery presents a captivating show of Sandback’s archetypal works, which undoubtedly encourages further exploration into the artists intriguing creations.

Whitechapel Gallery,  E1 – Until 14 August

‘The pedestrian symbol was never intended to be painted,’ says Stephen Wragg, ‘it appeared on the road by mistake’. Over the last seven years, he has been photographing the walking men painted on our paths. The preoccupation began when Wragg was commissioned by Hertfordshire Highways to design a map for the growing number of cycle routes and found his gaze directed instead to a series of 2-D individuals. The project has revealed the unexpected presence of self-expression in a system steeped in standardisation and quality control. The emergence of these painted men is a recent phenomenon, connected to the increased popularity of cycling and consequent cycle lanes, which have created ambiguous territory.

Indeed, why should we need to be told where to walk? The walking human figure on traffic signs – or S2 as the symbol is officially referred – has not been standardised for road markings. In addition, the painting tools that are provided to road painters only produce lines of uniform width. The Department of Transport (DoT) admits there is no template for the walking figure because it is not an authorised sign and there are no intentions to introduce one.

It is assumed by the government department that pedestrians always have priority on pavements and so DoT is against giving any instructions that suggest otherwise. In practice, however, local authorities have found the need to introduce the S2 symbol to paths. Graphic designer Sue Perks, who is investigating the legacy of the Isotype – standardised symbols for information systems – as part of her PhD thesis at the University of Reading, says ‘the walking men reveal a lack of agreement between designers more than any segregation between designer and painter’.

Since Otto Neurath devised the Isotype (or International System of Typographic Picture Education) more than 80 years ago, there has been a debate in graphic design circles between advocates of standardisation and those who support adaptation according to brief. Perks suspects that while this theoretical argument has gone on among designers, painters have been churning out these anomalous men regardless. The tarmac decoration accompanying the new cycling routes has not gone unnoticed by the design world. In 2000, the design agency Carter Wong Tomlin published the book, 1057 – the DoT code for a cycle lane – which documented the subtle differences between ‘painted bikes’ in London. In the book, creative director Phil Carter likens some of the freehand bicycles to ‘instruments of torture’.

The individuality of the men, as illustrated by Wragg’s project, harkens back to an age before Herbert Spencer’s photographic essays were published in Typographica in 1961. The graphic designer highlighted the confusing mix of inconsistent signage at a time when the government was constructing a high-speed road network. This led to the ambitious project of developing an entirely new system of lettering and symbols, rigorously undertaken by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Although the symbols on road signs now seem generic in their familiarity, Calvert created the Transport pictograms from personal references (a cow called Patience at her parents’ farm was the model for the farm animals warning sign).

The walking men, however, are strongly singular and some of the figures beggar belief. Wragg’s favourite discovery is a multi-limbed creature in Leicester, where the painter has superimposed his own figure atop another. ‘How can someone walk away from something that looks so alien?’ he says. Tracey Waller, who has been running the Graphic Design MA for five years at Chelsea College of Art (where Kinneir, Calvert and Wragg all studied), says ‘this project contributes to a wider discussion questioning the increasing visual clutter on our streets’. As a designer and educator, Waller believes in researching new ways of thinking about the brief before it even reaches paint and cites the Shared Space concept as a good example. The project, piloted across Europe, is based on the integration of traffic with human activity and notable for its lack of road signs.

It is hoped that by ‘going public’, Wragg can build a collection of all the undiscovered examples, leading to a book or exhibition. Through participating, people will need to pay more notice to their surroundings and how they experience the city by foot. Wragg also knows a raised profile could unfortunately lead to the men’s demise, as Highways departments smarten up their act; he sympathises with an archaeologist, ‘when you uncover something, you can’t help but destroy it’. An archive will ensure a permanent record of this enjoyable blip in the British tendency to standardisation.

A sequence of 25 brass studs set in a polished concrete floor – metal casts of lipsticks, fake eyelashes and even a credit card seem arbitrary at first but they tell a tale of decadent luxury. Worldly Cares and Love Affairs is the brainchild of British conceptual artist Jonathan Ellery and directly inspired by David Bowie’s Maid of Bond Street, a song released in 1967 about the materialistic life of a rich and spoilt London girl. Although small in size (each stud measures 100 mm in diameter), Ellery’s installation is one of the key features of Mulberry’s new flagship store in Bond Street. Beside Ellery’s critical take on luxury, one wonders if his inspiration is Christina Ong. The Singaporean entrepreneur and major shareholder of Mulberry is nicknamed the Queen of Bond Street for her creative flair in Bond Street’s fashion franchises. The latest store by Mulberry challenges the status quo of the luxury market, by commissioning controversial artist Ellery and by getting Universal Design Studio (UDS) on board to design the interior space.

‘What Mulberry wanted was a space that expresses what a progressive company it has become,’ explains Hannah Carter-Owens, associate director at UDS. ‘For this reason the design evolved into a mix of contrasting interior elements.’ The design studio envisaged an unconventional layout and a palette of materials to complement Ellery’s brass studs, beginning at the striking entrance doors, which feature geometrical brass details. A curved stone dry wall wraps the retail space at street level. This clever feature also reshapes the otherwise rectilinear space and helps to regulate the temperature of the interior.

To counterbalance the solidity of the wall, the rest of the space has been kept deliberately flexible and is visually permeable from the entrance. Here the polished concrete floor is dotted with delicate mobile structures constructed from unfinished oak wood. These scaled-down architectural pieces resemble follies – referencing the picturesque landscape of rural Somerset where Mulberry originally started. By contrast, the deeper part of the store features geometrical brass plates – also echoing Ellery’s studs – that form the cladding to a more secluded space dedicated to the clothing division of Mulberry.

‘More than following a set brief, we started a very long conversation with Mulberry and worked together all the way, developing ideas through model-making and prototyping individual components and details,’ says Carter-Owens. One could question how raw materials such as stone and concrete, unfinished woodwork and brass are expected to convey the finesse of luxury. However this unexpected combination of materials has more to say about the way Mulberry combined two worlds in one: the rural and the urban. Despite major changes at the top of the company in recent years, the new flagship store combines the contrasting elements at the heart of the company. ‘The idea was to create something that would allow for a degree of flexibility, a simple shell yet very flexible – a store that won’t tire, a place that will stand the test of time’ says Carter-Owens.

Founded in 1971 by Roger Saul and his mother, the company grafted a quintessentially rural British care for materials and details to an urban aesthetic. This new store restates these values even though Mulberry was taken over by Challice Group (a corporate company headed by Ong) in 2004 and has since been incorporated into another of her business ventures. That is the multi-brand umbrella company Club 21 UK, which includes such fashion brands as Armani, Donna Karan and Dolce & Gabbana. In a time when corporate homogeneity appears to have affected even luxury brands – let alone the rest of the market – it is refreshing to see Mulberry wittily question their own values with the thought-provoking work that was commissioned from Ellery. Similarly, the design work by UDS offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of luxury. Luxury is not about cluttering a space with redundant displays of expensive materials. Instead it is deliberately selecting a few pieces that resonate with core aesthetic values – and Mulberry does that well.

Pipe dreams: sculptor Miguel Arruda re-imagines the house of tomorrow with a strict avoidance of the rectilinear

Inhabitable Sculpture, a walk-in architectural installation on show in Lisbon’s Architecture Triennale, is a radical rethink of the form of the future house. But its origins come from May 1968, when designer Miguel Arruda, freshly graduated from Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts, held his first sculptural exhibition. His curved volumes, echoing Henry Moore, included one form that was the same shape as the current structure.

Much has happened in the intervening years – Arruda was a soldier in Portugal’s last colonial war, returning to the newly democratic country to become a furniture designer and then an architect. His interest is in, he says, ‘the definition of interior space’ and it has led Arruda to a very different place from the paths illuminated by Alvaro Siza, the Pritzker-winning Modernist who has intoxicated Portuguese architecture for decades. Arruda says ‘the domination of Siza is not good…it is unnecessary to have more Siza.’ Arruda thinks that Portuguese architects don’t go and see what is happening in other countries. Architects he sees as important include Toyo Ito, Peter Zumthor, and, perhaps surprisingly, Ian Simpson.

Arruda has a distinguished portfolio of projects in which straight lines, white surfaces and a sense of play with mass and space may suggest the influence of Siza, yet he says flatly that ‘I cannot see it that way.’ But Arruda is not out to bury Siza. ‘He’s very important. There’s always a big lesson from Siza – for me, that is the way he handles natural light.’ That lesson is amply illustrated by the Bom Sucesso Cultural Centre at a convent site in Vila Franca de Xira, completed last year. Above ground, concrete rectangular enclosures on a hill flood ‘zenithal’ light into an ‘introspective space’, actually a complex of underground volumes, in one of which a tree grows. With its concealed spatiality, tunnel entrance and natural light, this project is a bridge to the Inhabitable Sculpture.

‘This Inhabitable Sculpture raises the question of the Sphere and the Cube in architecture,’ says Arruda. This year, Lisbon’s current Architecture Triennale, under the banner ‘Let’s Talk About Houses’, offered him the opportunity to build the dream of an organic space for living that goes back to his days as a young sculptor. The Inhabitable Sculpture is just outside the main Triennale exhibition at the Belem Cultural Centre (and which coincidentally features the Smithsons’ very different vision of the House of the Future). It is not an evolution of Arruda’s work, but a revolution – rejecting the rectilinear and furthering the ‘destruction of the paradigm of the box’.

Inhabitable Sculpture is essentially three conjoined spheres with two openings widening out from the structure, one reaching eight metres to the sky and the other an entrance, making the structure 12m long. A shell of MDF covers a steel frame, on which cork is mounted on interior and exterior surfaces. ‘At this moment, it’s not a house,’ explains Arruda, ‘it’s the experience of inner space.’ Yes, he likens it to ‘the mother’s belly’ and continues that ‘if you have a house with form, texture and materials (evoking) the human body, it’s good for our equilibrium.’

The current structure is hollow, but as a house, its three spheres would define a bedroom, living room/kitchen and bathroom, and a window would be cut through. A new golf resort development is considering building eight of these houses, and the national utility Electricidade de Portugal is working with Arruda on the possibility of its upper aperture housing 10 sq m of solar panel so that the house could be grid-independent. Furthermore, the form, already scaled from the original hand-sized sculpture to a prototype house shell, could be further scaled up. Arruda envisions a music venue with three auditoria and a huge terrace on top of it.

As the Triennale draws to a close in January, Inhabitable Sculpture will be dismantled, but only as far as its steel. Plants will be grown so that after two years, it will become a living, walk-through sculpture, with cork seating. It won’t be inhabitable, but it will act as a provocation to a country where the rectilinear rules.

The Fact of Matter by William Forsythe

The Hayward Gallery in London is developing a strong tradition of constructing immersive environments that explore the relationship between art and other creative disciplines. Psycho Buildings in 2008 and the more recent exhibition of Ernesto Neto with The New Décor in particular examined art’s acquaintance with architecture. The new show, Move: Choreographing You, tells the story of 50 years of experiments in visual arts and dance both through seminal pieces and new interventions. Far from merely being an anthology, it crafts a platform for unexpected dialogues and proposes new curatorial territory.

Curator Stephanie Rosenthal has transformed the gallery into an adventure playground where visitors are caught in a game between curiosity and reservation. Performers interact with inanimate objects that test the human body to its limits. The pieces highlight how objects structure our movement and behaviour, and how we apply our own narratives through emotion. This is cleverly demonstrated in Mike Kelley’s Test Room (1999), a surreal stage set of oversized play objects where actors perform a choreographed piece by Anita Pace. The artist William Forsythe’s more playful installation, The Fact of Matter, is a ‘choreographic object’ comprising 200 hanging gymnastic rings, challenging the brave to a test of agility.

Mike Kelley's Adaptation: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses

A shared theme of political manipulation arises, investigating the role of society as choreographer in the making of spaces, which leads to an interesting discourse within architecture. Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970) dictates sideways movement through a narrow, brightly lit passageway. Ten Thousand Waves (2010), a multi-screen film by Isaac Julien, tells a complex narrative beginning in 2004 with the tragedy of the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers and places the viewer right at the heart of the story through nine views arranged around a dark room.

With this show, the Hayward has raised the bar for the discussion of art and architecture in galleries; where previous attempts including Psycho Buildings and New Décor allowed the visitor to enter the art and observe, now they may become part of the art and hold the power to modify it. The political component of the works imposes a critical depth, preventing the show from slipping into spectacle.

One of the least successful endeavours is the weaving of paper screens through the gallery by Amanda Levete Architects, which unnecessarily fragments the space, denying one installation the opportunity to bleed visually into another. Fortunately, sounds infiltrate these confines and fill the gallery with an exciting concoction of clatters and screams.

Situated within the gallery spaces, a digital archive bestows further hands-on navigation to accompany the exhibition and deserves some exploration time. Thoughtfully designed by unit9, it captures the ambition of its physical counterpart more than a conventional catalogue might.

Rosenthal hopes for Move: Choreographing You to evolve from its opening day onwards. As a piece of open-ended research, its end point remains undefined. This is a show in progress and an energetic bid to marry the disciplines of the Southbank Centre as a collective.

Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, until 9th January

The twopart work includes the aluminium silhouette of Voyager craft inside the school building

The ancient Viking capital of Norway, Trondheim, is big on public art. City authorities have allocated a generous 1.25 per cent of their capital budget to it and 72 artworks, mainly by Norwegians, have been installed in the city’s public spaces and buildings since 2003. Killi Olsen’s Salamandernatten, a disturbing gauntlet of 72 looming, naked, female forms more than 3m high, was originally created for the 1989 São Paulo Biennial, and has been rehoused in a dim chamber below a bank. The others are new commissions, ranging from Vidar Koksvik’s whimsical, colourful and curly chandeliers to Stefan Christiansen’s calm, abstract granite sculptures called Gallus Ludens, which were erected along the Ilabekken valley in 2007. Despite their number, the works are better integrated into the environment than much of the UK’s public art.

This September, Trondheim unveiled another exceptional work: an architectural installation by London-based Japanese artist Nahoko Kudo, which includes a full-sized representation of a Voyager spacecraft. Mellom Jord og Himmel: Between Earth and Sky, is within and without the airy Nardo School, designed by local firm Eggen Arkitekter. Voyager, of course, is NASA’s most successful and far-reaching space exploration mission. Between 1979 and 1989, two Voyager craft surveyed all four great gas giants from Jupiter to Neptune and revealed a plethora of new worlds in the moons orbiting them. They are still operational, whizzing off into interstellar space. Voyager 1 is now more than 17 billion kilometres away, and Voyager 2 about 14 billion.

In Kudo’s installation, our planet is represented by a stainless steel disc 1.45m in diameter, on a support inclined at the angle of the Earth’s rotational axis, standing in the school courtyard. Inside the two-storey school, Kudo has hung a flat sculpture that is a 1:1-sized silhouette of a Voyager, above the main staircase. Fabricated in aluminium, it nevertheless weighs 332kg. An extended armature reaches down towards ground level, representing the metal boom that keeps the spacecraft’s nuclear power unit at a distance from its equipment. Both the Earth and Voyager elements have surfaces of yellow automobile paint. Despite glass doors and an open assembly hall space between them, one cannot be seen easily from the other’s position, yet there is a union.

Tokyo-born Kudo says that she was inspired by the work of Norwegian modernist Sverre Fehn, the 1997 Pritzker winner whose work was influenced by the interaction of interior and exterior in Japanese architecture. Kudo’s link between outside and in is conceptual. She says the work ‘embraces the notion that the Earth and a small spacecraft exist in one single expanse within a physical reality of their scale…this is about intangible distance and an ongoing infinite journey’. She notes that the children will eventually embark from the school into the great journey of life, but like Voyager’s fading but persistent signal, there will always be an invisible link to home.

One half of Mellom Jord og Himmel: Between Earth and Sky – a yellow disc inclined at the angle of the Earth’s rotation

There is another metaphor in the Voyager. Like education, it is a tool that can reveal and explain what was previously unknown. The yellow colour makes perception of the work like a retinal after-image after a bright flash of illumination. Kudo says that the colour had to ‘go well with’ the exterior’s cladding of slow-grown Scandinavian pine cured to create Kebony (a green alternative to rainforest hardwood), which gets ‘silvery, greyish brown in time…. Also, considering their long dark winter and amount of snow, I thought this colour will bring a good kick to the environment the children study’.

Kudo studied Photography at the Royal College of Arts and until recently was a visiting lecturer there. Her works have increasingly addressed the perception of science and often reference astronomical objects – a 2001 solo show in Paris was actually called Heavenly Bodies. With education in mind, her portfolio impressed Trondheim municipality’s committee, which invited her to propose an artwork for the school.

The extended boom and high-profile dish shape of Kudo’s Voyager coincidentally resonate with the form of another artwork from Trondheim’s programme: Torbjørn Skårild and Martin Smidt’s White Man’s Magic (2005). Mounted on the Old Town Bridge, it looks rather like a flying saucer on a pipe, with 10 protruding drums that in summer resonate from the impact of water jets pumped from the river below, to play music. Kudo’s installation also resonates with Trondheim’s technical standing as home to Norway’s Institute of Technology since 1910. Like both types of explorer – Vikings and Voyagers – Between Earth and Sky reaches out to the cosmos, but is also grounded in Trondheim and its history.

Vitrine Objects, 2009, a cabinet of curiosities amassed by the artist

Rachel Whiteread states in a video that plays on a loop in the Tate Britain café that she ‘has wanted to do a drawing show for ages’. Eighty of her drawings comprise this exhibition and it is a rare opportunity to see the process behind her work. The exhibition also includes models of some her works including Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, 1995.

While work such as House, 1993, and her proposal for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, 1998 work at a large scale, and use familiar building materials such as concrete and resin, Whiteread’s work could literally be seen as the antithesis of architecture. Rather than creating spaces she fills them; rather than framing activity she presents the edges of its container and the residue it leaves. This exhibition of her drawings, though, reveals that in realising her creations she follows a similar process to that of architects; examining texture, form, scale and proportion before departing in her own artistic direction.

Whiteread came to the attention of the British public on the hysteria fuelled wave of the Young British Artists. Thrust into the limelight by Charles Saatchi as part of the globally exhibited Sensation exhibition, Whiteread has not sunk to the depths of her peers: the cynical marketeering of Damien Hirst; the petulant insolence of Tracy Emin, nor the childish tactics of the Chapman brothers. Whiteread lets her work speak for itself and it has often caused a less outraged, but more confused, response from the public (House had the words ‘what for?’ Painted on the side by one puzzled vandal).

Critically acclaimed, she won the Turner Prize in 1996 and represented Britain at the Venice Art Biennale in 1997; critically derided she won the K Foundation Prize for Worst Piece of Art in 1994. This show is only the second exhibition of her drawings. They are, as Whiteread states ‘a place to worry things through’. The drawings are the vulnerable face of Whiteread’s work, before the creation of her bulky, uncompromising sculptures. They are the expression of the artist’s idea before they become engineered and fabricated as physical objects.

Untitled, 2005, from Whiteread’s postcard series

The drawings show Whiteread’s investigative process; they appear as a search for order and understanding of volume rather than schematics or a blueprint for the final artworks. As an intimate portrayal of her thoughts, the errors and corrections reveal a fallibility that is hard to detect in her completed sculptures.

Whiteread was trained as a painter but rejected the medium before undertaking the DAAD scholarship in Berlin in 1993. Here she established a studio in her apartment and returned to drawing. Study for floor Black / White, 1993, and the meandering Floor, 1993, document this period. They are coarser in execution than some of the other studies, but form an important part of the story.

Arranged thematically, the drawings are grouped under headings including floors; doors, windows, switches, and slab. The drawings focus on the artist’s fascination with the seemingly mundane, using layers of oil crayon, correction fluid, ink and even silver leaf on sheets of graph, card and tracing paper. Study for Amber Slab, 1997, examines the positive and negative space around a mortuary slab. The simple shapes arranged on a sheet of graph paper, one filled in with correction fluid, the other coated with varnish work as a test. While the inclusion of sculptures Closet, 1998, and Table and Chair (Clear), 1994, provide context for the drawings, they also raise doubts about the ability of the drawings to stand alone.

In the final room is a series of postcard studies by Whiteread. The surfaces of the cards have been drawn on, painted, scratched and perforated by the artist (see above). In many cases the work strives for the same effect as her sculptures: animating the space around architectural elements. When viewed in proximity to her Study for House, 1992, or the 1997 studies that preceded her Watertower project, they appear as quick exercises in which Whiteread is honing her approach.

These cards sit alongside Vitrine Objects, a cabinet of found items – including knick-knacks such as snow globes and little model houses, alongside untouched pieces of wood or rock – amassed by the artist. While her sculptural work almost exclusively looks at the man-made, this exhibit shows an interest in the natural world that may hint at future themes in her work.

As a whole the drawings in this show lack the dramatic impact of her sculptures. Yet far from being a ‘worry’ through ideas, they offer further insight into Whiteread’s world view.

Rachel Whiteread – Drawings, Tate Britain, until 16 January

Hut 5, Muharraq, Camille Zakharia

In the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, at the Venice Biennale, Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) unveiled its plans to develop the Libyan Sahara for tourism. The project, titled Almost Nothing, showed that Koolhaas has not been commissioned to build a thing: ‘It’s preservation,’ he explains, if one begins to imagine mechanized buildings rising from the sands. ‘We don’t always want to build. We’ve found ways other than building to address situations.’

To safeguard its natural assets and towns from the avarice of a global tourism industry, Koolhaas believes the Libyan Sahara can focus on offering ‘almost nothing’. As opposed to resorts that offer the world, it can hold on to the ‘weakness’, the remoteness, lack of facilities, a foreboding culture and nature that would traditionally preclude mass tourism. The proposal had much in common with the Golden Lion-winning Bahrain Pavilion – where fisherman’s huts were transplanted wholesale from the Persian Gulf to the Venetian Arsenale.

In Arabic, Bahrain means ‘two seas’, referring to the presence of freshwater springs beneath saltwater oceans. Host to the infamous Gulf Pearl and a rich, ecologically diverse seabed, the shallow waters have been systematically infilled and destroyed by offshore steel dredgers continuously scavenging sand for landfill and reclamation. The impact has been enormous, once clear waters and abundant seabed are turned into muddy underwater wastelands covered by kilometre-long dredging silt plumes. The resultant land reclamation has broken the Bahrainis connection with the sea and in some cases pushed the coastline several kilometers further out.

Hut 4, Seef, Camille Zakharia

This separation from the sea is profound in a place where, once, many Bahrainis learnt to swim before they could ride a bike. Minister of Culture, Sh. Mai Bint Mohammed Al-Khalifa asks,’ where is the sea to be found today? And where are the coasts that live in our memories but have physically vanished from our maps, replaced by the urban sprawl that has robbed us of our cherished sea?’

The preservation of the Bahrain coastal front was a mandatory clause for the timely 2005 inclusion of the Qal’at Bahrain site on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This was rapidly followed by the completion in 2007 of the Bahrain 2030 National Planning Development Strategy to celebrate, protect and renew 75,000ha of the remaining fragile waterfronts. A key recommendation of the National Plan was the need to regulate the Kingdom’s fishing communities, setting limits to prevent over fishing and preserve the fishing industry. Traditional industries of fishing, international trade, pearl diving and recreational boating have all created a close and critical relationship between Bahrainis and the open water. The cutting off of traditional fishing villages from the waterfront by rampant land filling of commercial, hotel and residential developments has spawned a modern phenomenon of seaside squatters living in ad hoc, self-built huts. Described as ‘portable cabins’ by the Gulf Daily News the huts symbolise the public reclamation of the newly constructed, privately owned waterfronts.

Harry Gugger, ex-Herzog de Meuron partner and chair of the Lausanne-based EPFL Laboratory for the Production of Architecture chose to install the humble fisherman’s huts in the Venice Arsenale to symbolise the plight of Bahrain’s cultural heritage and it’s declining connection with the sea. Titled Reclaim, the exhibit of three huts represents the first official national participation of a Gulf State at the prestigious International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

The Bahrain Pavilion at first seems odd and intriguing, the poignant absence of water, except for the sounds of an unseen nearby Venetian canal, trigger memories of the sea followed by the sense of loss in the voices of local fishermen, who, in documentary interviews, are seen lamenting the demise of the Bahrain coastline and the rampant development, relocating and privatising the coastline, moving it ever further away from the fishermen’s huts and out of bounds to public bathing.

For Gugger, in collaboration with curator Noura Al-Sayeh: ‘having been dismantled in Bahrain and resurrected at the Arsenale in the exact same way, the shacks talk of another interesting topic, architecture without architects.’ Essentially, they allowed the theme of the Biennale, People Meet in Architecture, to emanate from the exhibits that retain their authenticity because Gugger and his team have managed to conduct painstaking research to identify and harness the essence of a project. This demonstrates Gugger’s interest in dilettantism, the application of the ever-enquiring mind of the amateur where ‘keen and profound interest’ exists to challenge the way architects are ‘limited by their professionalism. If you are an architect and you design museums, then you pretend to know what a museum is, rather than base your approach on a love of museums and a love of art.’

Hut 6, Hidd, Camille Zakharia

The bilingual (English / Arabic) catalogue supports the fish hut ‘experience’ with quantitative analysis charting the historic impact of landfill on the urban, social and economic. In its clear portrayal of detailed research the catalogue feels typically Swiss and reminds one of the deliciously printed ETH Studio Basel / Herzog de Meuron ‘Switzerland – An Urban Portrait’. Gugger is quick to distance his work at LAPA from the more ‘phenomenological, abstract analysis’ practiced by the competing ETH. Since 2005, Gugger and LAPA has been using the latest digital technologies to expand the production of architecture in both frontend urban planning and, at the opposite end of the scale spectrum, the fabrication of 1:1 prototypes. By embracing new digital technologies Gugger believes the role of the architect can become broader and more far-reaching than ever before in the history of the profession.

Hut 13, Busaiteen, Camille Zakharia

In contrast, and transplanted inside the Arsenale, each hut creates a condition that curator Noura Al-Seyeh describes as ‘The awkwardness of their situation, disconnected from their coastal scenery, relates to the discomfort vis á vis our coastline. This architecture without architects, through the immediacy of its architectural form, speaks of the quest for a more direct relation to the sea. In line with the theme of this year’s Biennale, it offers visitors a chance to experience rather than observe architecture and, through a series of interviews allows them to engage with the anonymous architects and fishermen of these huts as they speak about their relation to the sea.’

Interior, Hut 13, Busaiteen, Camille Zakharia

The rising loss of social identity is represented in Suha Matar’s qualitative research who when interviewing recently graduated Bahraini realised that ‘although they all condemned reclamation, there was an overall indifference to the sea’s integral role to the island’s livelihood and identity. None had seen the oyster beds, knew of the dangerous sea life close by, nor could recognise the pearling songs of yesteryear.’

It could be argued, though, that preserving the Bahrain fishing huts celebrates cultural heritage, appeals to global tourism and enables further waterfront development. It is here that the similarity with Koolhaas’s approach to the Libyan desert becomes most apparent – in both cases modernisation can be employed to preserve the authentic and the natural. OMA’s proposed temporary Desert Stations in Libya make new construction less urgent, while cellular communications lessen the need for unsightly pylons and make possible a contemporary nomadism, where protected ‘do nothing’ areas allow the sands and nature to rehabilitate mistaken development of the past.

For Bahrain, the three fishing huts at the Biennale are transient forms of architecture presented as devices for reclaiming the sea as a form of public space. Their detailed record, removal and elevation into museum artefacts seems to sanctify a new era of waterfront development, not of ad hoc fishing huts but of modern fishing harbours, marinas and restaurants to cater for the massive expected rise of regional migration and to regulate the fishing industry. This is Bahrain proudly promoting its cultural heritage in theMiddle East and responding to exponential growth in regional air travel. Bahrain International Airport is building new terminals for completion by 2013 to cater for the expected tripling in passenger capacity, up to an estimated 15 million passengers a year.

The Bahrain pavilion, curated by Harry Gugger won the Golden Lion award

Like the Victorians used to ‘take the waters’ in Britain to escape the everoverpopulated cities, the members of the monied and mobile Middle East are being drawn to a new global seaside to escape the densification created by rapid regional development. For Gugger the fishing huts, ‘embody public and private space and asks what is our relationship with the waterfront after allowing too much real estate?’

On reflection Gugger says, ‘I knew I did not want to do an ordinary exhibition. The location of the huts in Venice is site specific. In any other context they would be void of meaning.’

It’s easy to see what he means. The land reclamation of Bahrain has been fuelled by the addition of thousands of hectares of land, in and around the islands and cities of Bahrain over the last 80 years. It is reminiscent of the land reclamation that has guided the development of Venice since the 9th century.

A recent initiative to establish a Bahrain public coastal walk has been hugely popular and it seems that, within Venice, is a glint of optimism for a 21stcentury Bahrain.

‘Absurd’ reads the foot-high spray-painted letters emblazoned across the side of the grey transit van sitting on a dusty building site behind King’s Cross station in central-north London. ‘It wasn’t me,’ insists its owner. The slogan, he says, is a surreal scar from his days in Hackney. Even so, it seems appropriate that this should happen to Graham Hudson. The London-based sculptor, who has recently completed a six-month residency of Kings Cross Central, has a keen interest in found materials and engaging with unorthodox environments. His work is characterised by a celebration of the absurd and a gleeful enthusiasm for arranging defiantly unaesthetic materials as artworks. Previous works have included building a life-size tank from scrap wood, sculptural forms created from scaffold and rubble, and hanging from the ceiling dressed as Superman.

The Last Renaissance at the Cross is a brick and slate sculpture, one of many that Hudson has made out of found materials on the site of Central St Martins’ new home

An appropriately ambiguous location, King’s Cross Central is a 27ha site standing at a crossroads in space and time. As a transport hub its tendrils reach out across the UK and into Europe, and with a series of major transport, office, retail, education and leisure projects it looks to finally shake itself free of its seedy past. Current high-profile developments such as the reworkings of St Pancras and King’s Cross stations and the new build for the relocation of Central St Martins College of Art and Design (CSM). As part of this extensive regeneration, which plans 50 new structures and 20 refurbishments to historic buildings, the developers joined forces with the Arts Council to house an artist-in-residence from November 2009 to May this year. Though Hudson’s studio has officially now moved elsewhere, he is still working at Kings Cross, primarily making films.

Hardboard Study 1 on the King’s Cross site. It consists of a piece of wood balanced on a timber pole, embedded in a bucket of concrete

Guiding me around the site, Hudson exudes a palpable joy in the persona of the artist as eccentric interloper amongst the debris and earnest construction. Yet the playfulness and eccentricity derives from a considered commitment to interact meaningfully with the site and, increasingly, the ideas that underpin Hudson’s practice are being taken seriously. In 2006, Hudson transformed Chelsea College of Arts’ central parade into his studio, a ramshackle ever evolving scrapyard of ideas. He applied a similarly literal approach to the notion of residency at King’s Cross, committing to creating 181 sculptures, one for each day of the residency period, working on-site and using only materials found on the building site itself.

Hudson initially found himself nailing together found pieces of pallet and wood, but was instantly dissatisfied with the results, feeling them to be overly contrived. Keen to guard against ‘masterpiece syndrome’, each sculpture became simpler, more spontaneous and more in keeping with the environment around him. With Hudson using found materials and arranging them into simple constructions dotted around the construction site, it takes one’s own judgment to decipher which marriages of objects are Hudson’s interventions, and which have arrived spontaneously. Pointing out a polystyrene coffee cup propped on to the end of a diagonally slanted metal pole, Hudson admits that this was probably placed by one of the builders but, in the spirit of the ready-made, Hudson is ‘happy to claim that one.’ Whether this construction worker’s Duchampian moment would have happened naturally, or was a response to the strange presence of an artist lurking around the site is unclear, but Hudson relishes the notion of a sculpture battle with the builders. He has form in this area, having previously instigated a series of Sculpture Wars at Chelsea College of Art, 2008, by pitting artists against each other to build spontaneous artworks, propelled urgently by Ride of the Valkyries blaring through speakers.

2:1 Chair (Arm chair), 2010

The demolition at King’s Cross of infamous Eighties and Nineties rave venue Bagleys, has caused Hudson to question the nature of cultural heritage. He has found himself increasingly drawn into the dichotomy of destruction and creation, churning up pasts and contemplating possible futures.

In one of a series of videos to be exhibited at the nearby German Gymnasium in October, Hudson dons his hardhat to explore the former nightspot in the company of Guardian music critic, Alexis Petridis. The artist bemoans English Heritage’s disinterest in the venue: ‘the history and preservation of the site really seems to be “before the war”, and I’m interested in the idea that something is perhaps being lost and in 200 years time, they’ll look back and think, “why did you demolish the nightclubs?”‘ Yet he realises that a nightclub without people can be an unremarkable space. As Petridis notes, ‘the architecture of hedonism is actually inside the hedonist’s brain.’ This raises the question of how a cultural icon such as Bagleys can be commemorated, when it is the people, the atmosphere and the zeitgeist that makes it noteworthy rather than the structure that houses it. ‘Often what appears to be the most ephemeral can tell you the most about a time, and can have the most resonance,’ observes Petridis as they crunch through the debris of glow sticks, mirrorballs and plastic wristbands.

Industrial Revolution (8 mins 42 secs), aluminium sculpture from 2009

Nonetheless, Hudson is proposing to memorialise another icon of music culture for a commission in Austin, Texas where he plans to recreate the scaffolding for the iconic, and now demolished, London Astoria on Charing Cross Road, based on the original plans. This is a technique that Hudson has used before in a commission for Fendi In Milan, where he created a scaffold reconstruction of a demolished Mies van der Rohe building in Chicago. Melding notions of impermanence and memory, the framework that enables a building’s birth is recreated after the building has lived its life and expired, as if the architectural flesh has rotted away leaving, ‘a skeleton, an echo and a reflection.’

Hudson sees scaffold as the principal architecture of London: ‘it is permanent yet always on the move, always temporary…. It doesn’t care if it’s a tower block or a church, it just forms itself around anything. To me, it’s almost like this living thing, moving around the city.’ It represents the authentic city, rather than the picture postcard. Always shifting, regenerating and defying prescribed ideas; it is sometimes beautiful but often ugly.

Hudson’s large-scale sculpture made from discarded material. The Ruins, 2009, Monitor Gallery, Rome

These themes have found a voice at King’s Cross, where Hudson has become fascinated by two test beds, standing on what will be an open courtyard space called Cubitt Park in the new site for CSM. These curious concrete and glass constructions, standing like small waiting rooms, were constructed by the architects, Stanton Williams, to allow the client to physically see the material options for the final build.

As it stands, these will be demolished before the college opens in September 2011. Hudson is proposing that they be kept as sculptures in the courtyard as monuments to the creative process and as a marker of the many possible paths that the architects could have gone down before completing the final building. Unlike Bagleys’ shabby shell, the test beds are ‘stupidly beautiful’, says Hudson, and they remind us that not all in life is a fait accompli. ‘There’s an absurdity and innocence about the final look, even though they arrived through a purely functional process,’ he says, ‘they’re not meant to be viewed (as artworks). I like the idea of them as follies or as sketchbooks.’

Sajida Talfah, 2007/2008, a steel, plastic and cardboard tree-like form in Holland Park, London

The sculptures celebrate the process of architectural creation and development. If there is critique, he argues, it is of public art, specifically those sites that ship in ideas from outside, brandishing Anish Kapoor’s Arcelor Mittal Orbit at the Olympic site as an example of an alien concept stamped onto a locale. These Stanton Williams mock-ups reflect the site because they are born from the same primordial creativity as the architecture that frames it. Hudson and Kings Cross art curator Ben Borth wick are hopeful that they can mount a sufficiently supported campaign to save the test beds. Keen support comes from MA Narrative Environment tutors at CSM who have proposed teaching their first lessons from the structures, while the site is still under construction.

On Off, 2008, a scaffold and woodenpallet staircase at Project Space 176, Zabloudowicz in London

Increasingly, Hudson’s concerns coincide with those of design. He was named as a Designer of the Future at Design Miami 2010. For the artist, this is partly a consequence of scale. As the size of his sculptural work increases they become more like architecture – and buildings are simply  the ultimate ‘ready-mades’. Yet with his first permanent piece in the pipeline – a sculpture of an amphitheatre in Barking, London – his chaotic conceptualism may be about to leave its mark more definitively on the landscape. This is perhaps ironic as his most potent works, his scaffold constructs and potentially, the test-bed sculptures at King’s Cross, are reminders that even those things set in stone are in fact, temporary. Hudson shrugs his shoulders, ‘everything gets torn down in the end’

Hudson is campaigning to keep the Stanton Williams’ ‘test beds’ as part of Central St Martins’ new home. The concrete constructions displayed the material options at 1:1 scale

The girls represent a strand of Russian society. Others like proletarian patriots, migrant workers, nostalgic pensioners and fiery radicals, are represented, each of them airing their views in song while a committee of the powerful sit above them, charged with selling the idea of Gazprom’s proposed super-tall skyscraper in St Petersburg. The committee boasts that the tower will make St Petersburg the ‘Dubai of the North’.

Working with Glulya (Natalya Pershina), Vilensky co-designed the film-set as well as the striking red Constructivist tiered architectural installation in the ICA gallery from which to view the film on big screen. He modelled it on Alexander Rodchenko designs for workers clubs in the 1920s. Tentacles reach down from the film’s fictional committee into the people below, and at the ICA, these tentacles weave out into the concourse, reminiscent of Thomas Heatherwick’s 1997 ribbon installation at Harvey Nichols, Knightsbridge, but in red fabric and with sinister intent.

Still from the film, Perestroika Songspiel by Chtot Delat 2009

“Chto delat?” meaning “What is to be done?”, was the revolutionary question asked by Lenin in 1902 and the writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky in 1862, about the state of the powerless masses in Russia. Chto Delat’s film, a sort of Brecht/Kurt Weil mini-opera directed by Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), is not just a satire about contemporary Russian society and power, but an unusual creative response to the ‘struggle’ many historic cities face with plans to build massive skyscrapers.

London has already seen English Heritage defeated at public enquiries that approved the Heron Tower and The Shard, but Paris is just taking a breather from wrestling with Sarkozy’s desire to build skyscrapers within the Boulevard Periphique, and cities worldwide have been fretting about high-rise over their heritage cityscapes. Even New York has struggled with new skyscrapers- the Pelli-designed Fifteen Penn Plaza was dubbed the ‘Evil Twin’ of the Empire State Building, but has controversially been shooed in against popular opposition and planning restrictions.

A still from The Tower: A Songspiel, 2010

In Russia, great skyline structures have a history of appearing or disappearing at the whim of political power. St Petersburg’s tallest (apart from a TV tower) is the 122m-high golden-spired Peter and Paul Cathedral, conjured up like the city itself for Peter the Great (but completed in 1733, after his death). Stalin notoriously had Moscow’s 103m-high Cathedral of Christ the Saviour destroyed, and not to be upstaged by the capitalist Americans, he also decreed Moscow’s Seven Sisters skyscrapers. The mightiest, the 239m-high Moscow State University, whose ‘Wedding Cake’ monumental-baroque fusion style was probably inspired by New York’s 1914 Municipal Building, was the tallest skyscraper outside the USA until the 1980s. War stopped Stalin building the 410m-high Palace of the Soviets, topped with a ginormous statue of Lenin, in place of the cathedral, but Moscow’s current mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a man who recently wanted to honour Stalin with billboards, has overseen a new bonanza of Moscow skyscrapers. The Foster-designed 600m-high Russia Tower was killed by the credit crunch, but the 380m-high Mercury Tower is under construction and will become Europe’s tallest. Despite a scant regard for heritage, in 1995 Luzhkov also had Christ the Saviour rebuilt. His wife’s construction business has made her a billionaire, but just this week, Luzhkov was fired by presidential decree.

A still from the film Perestroika Songspiel by Chtot Delat, 2008

In 1920, Vladimir Tatlin designed the unbuilt 400m-heigh Monument to The Third International for St Petersburg, an icon of structuralist-constructivist architecture, with its spiralling metal frame enclosing rotating buildings. An image of it repeats in the wall montages of Chto Delat’s ICA show. St Petersburg’s current virtual giant, the Okhta Centre’s tower and the subject of the songspiel film, would be even higher, by a few metres. The Okhta Centre includes amenities like a Contemporary Art Museum. The tower would be the headquarters of Gazprom Neft, the oil division of the hefty fossil fuel conglomerate. CGIs of this tapering glass tower beside a great urban river may are reminiscent of The Shard’s visualisations, and like it, it is a very sleek contemporary tower with high environmental performance. Its twisting form is meant to evoke water although it’s clearly more like a flame.

The history of the tower also has twists, but farcical ones. In 2006, the city lured Gazprom from Omsk with a package of big tax breaks, and an architectural competition was initiated to design a skyscraper for the site on the Neva River opposite the eighteenth-century Smolny cathedral and convent. It attracted architects including Nouvel, Rogers, Koolhas and Libeskind, but the local Union of Architects protested that a skyscraper would threaten the city’s UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Foster, Raphael Viñoly and Kisho Kurokawa resigned from the jury over the way it was organised. The following year, the design contract went to Edinburgh-based global architecture practice RMJM, who have been taking on the likes of SOM, KPF, Foster, Pelli etc for their trophy skyscraper designs such as the leaning Capital Gate in Abu Dhabi. The first demonstration against the tower took place, but was diverted away from downtown St Petersburg. Town planning committee meeting minutes in which reservations about the tower were aired were spin-doctored, while local opera director Valery Gergiev came out in favour of the tower. In 2008, half the audience at a public enquiry were allegedly recruited by pro-tower forces from a film extras agency, but anti-tower activists invaded the stage and riot police were summoned to clear them.

Last year, 42 cultural figures signed an open letter to President Medvedev in support of the development. But cracks were starting to appear in the official solid-as-stone façade of support for it. The city sold its half-share in the centre’s development company, and state television aired negative views about the tower. In October, a large anti-tower demonstration demanded the resignation of St Petersburg’s governor Valentina Matviyenko, originally promoted by Vladimir Putin (now Prime Minister) and seen by some as Russia’s answer to Margaret Thatcher. Medvedev has pointedly not spoken in favour of the tower. This July, the Russian Constitutional Court ruled that the city must honour international heritage laws, meaning UNESCO, which indeed has threatened to de-list it as a World Heritage site. That same threat has seen skyscraper plans re-appraised elsewhere, for example in Cologne, Seoul, Prague and even behind the Tower of London. The court’s ruling, however, is not the end of the story. The Okhta Centre’s website continues with updated news about archaeology and meetings, and RMJM’s site still carries the project.

Film still from Angry Sandwich people, a video-newspaper project by Chtot Delat, 2005.

I asked Vilensky if the recent confused signals about the Okhta Centre were in any way a victory for popular opposition to it, or instead a reflection of a subtle power struggle between the St Petersburgers running the country- Putin (pro-tower) and Medvedev (anti-tower)?

‘We must be clear on this and admit that we do not know’, he responds. ‘The power structure and decision making is very non-transparent in Russia’. Referring to the film, he explains that ‘for us (it) was important gesture that we construct the situation of the power and speak how we imagine it might work’. Vilensky is not anti-development anyway. He thinks St Petersburg’s heritage is over-protected, talking about the ‘completely humiliating conditions’ of the old urban fabric where ‘over 20% of real estate is falling apart’, and understands that ‘people want to live decently’. The tower is really a metaphor for political and state-capitalist power in Russia generally. ‘The artist can approach the totality of the power by analysing certain cases – and the Gazprom tower is (a) really great case’. The film has been screened at two Russian festivals- Kinoshock at Anapa, near St Petersburg on the Baltic coast, and TEXTURE in Perm, as well as at the First Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg, to positive reaction, and ‘it definitely fit into many campaign(s) of civic resistance to the current power’. The only hassle Chto Delat seem to have had with the authorities is the refusal of four printing houses to print their newspaper.

Chto Delat’s ICA show is politically-charged, didactic, packed with great design and art, and it’s fun. Power rather than tower may be the point of their film. Interestingly, RMJM’s first tower lies nearby- founder Robert Matthew’s New Zealand House is just 69m high and was completed in 1963. His original design went up to 95m, but Prince Phillip objected to something so tall near Buckingham Palace. In England, too, power manipulates the skyline, but in a very different way to Russia.

KikiT VisuoSonic research studio from Southampton university designed an installation that is, surprisingly, interacting with an otherwise rather static 11th century Devonshire Hunting Tapestry part of the V&A Collections. The device will react in accordance to sound and movement in the gallery space. VisuoSonic juxtaposed the original tapestry with a digitalised ever-changing version. A performance will take place in the Devonshire Gallery (94) on Friday 24 at 8pm.

Blow and Roll, by Polish designer Oscar Zieta, is the ribbon shaped installation taking centre stage this year in the main courtyard of the V&A (otherwise known as the John Madejski Garden). It is formed by a series of intersecting arches using strips of rolled steel using Zieta’s FIDU technology. This process begins by welding together two pieces of sheet steel measuring the same perimeter, and then has air blown into it. Zieta turned the construction of his installation into a live performance formed by V&A visitors and the press, during which the strips of metal unrolled gently to form an arch, while a compressor was filling them with air.

Diametrically opposite to Zieta’s central stage is I Cling to Virtue the installation by artists Onkar Kular and Noam Toran in the Jones Galleries. A sequence of displays dedicated  to European decorative arts between 1600-1800. This part of the V&A feels somehow remote from the rest of the museum, and for this reason a very intriguing space. The room chosen by Kular and Toran is an unusual octagonal space without any natural reminiscent of Ken Adams’ film set designs for Doctor Strangelove.

By cleverly merging reality with fiction Kular and Toran weave the history of a fictional family (Lövy) with real historical events. The artists the created a collection of memorabilia to narrate the family’s history including video footage and objects. To complement the artificial memories created the artists fabricated the objects using 3D printing technology. A must see.

‘The Solo’, is the latest film by artist Andrew Cross to celebrate the subject without resorting to seemingly literal visual metaphors. In much of Cross’s work the subject is omni-present by it’s absence, it’s deliberate omission literally burns the retina. In Cross’s own words, ‘if people are looking at something over here, then I choose to point the camera over here’.

In ‘Passage’, commissioned in 2007 to celebrate the opening of St Pancras International and High Speed 1, Cross chose to record the changing landscape along the route of a Eurostar train travelling from Paris to London without once resorting to trains and railway paraphernalia. In ‘Passage’ the final ‘arrival’ into St Pancras, via a nearby canal tunnel and accompanied by a David Lang musical score, became a form of spiritual ascension.

‘Passage’, was Cross’s first piece with a musician and ‘The Solo’ seems a natural successor. This time Cross has collaborated with drummer Carl Palmer of rock ‘super group’ Emerson Lake & Palmer, composing multiple camera views to record the minutiae of Palmer’s performance. Yet again we are sent on an enthralling journey as if Palmer is surrounded by an audience of adoring fans and one can only get to the front by way of an impossibly restricted view. There is delight and wonder not just in appreciating Palmer’s mastery of the archetype 1970s drum solo, but also beauty in the detail ensemble of pedals, drums, and symbols. Cross’s framed views abstract the kit and focus on Palmer’s foot drawing the analogy with a foot on the accelerator pedal of a roaring engine hurtling along a track beating to fuel injected cam valves. The allusion of mechanical majesty is further eluded by the title. Is Cross paying homage to great soloists? Is ‘The Solo’ a reference to solo flight and the aviators Charles Lindbergh or Amelia Earhart’s first non-stop transatlantic flights?

So what is it that most appeals in Cross’s work? For this I have to refer to my trusty ‘Aircraft Recognition Guide’ first written by R.A Saville-Sneath in 1941 who divulges the art of observation and reveals exactly what Cross is tapping into.  ’Many people, without conscious study, but possessing a trained or natural aptitude for observation, rapidly become familiar with the appearance of [items] commonly seen in their own neighbourhood. Others find that the recognition – even of types frequently seen – is unexpectedly difficult. This difficulty in recognising different types is very rarely associated with defective vision – in a literal sense. Generally, it arises from lack of knowing ‘where to look’ for certain distinctive points which, to the initiated are obvious and as easily recognisable as the features of a familiar face.’

Knowing ‘where to look’ is never an issue with Cross’s work, as he revels the visual signatures, allowing us to participate in the closed world of the initiated and the obsessive. This instantaneous, appararently instinctive, but certain recognition of, is the finished performance, the final stage of proficiency to which Cross’s piece’s one is directed.

Given most of Cross’s subjects return to his childhood observations associated with growing up on the family farm within the proximity of the British Army and the Salisbury Plain Training Area, it’s clear we are being taken on journey back to halcyon days in which the artist Andrew Cross emerged. ‘The Solo’ is part of those reminiscences of childhood and early adulthood and eloquently reconnects Cross’s primary interests in the music, landscape and socio-geography of 1970s Britain. The English journey has just begun.

The Solo, a film by Andrew Cross featuring Carl Palmer,  1-25 July 2010, Ikon Gallery , 1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham, B1 2HS

Artist and photographer Minnie Weisz’ most recent exhibition explores London’s Kings Cross, in collaboration with costume and set designer Caroline Collinge. The show is at Minnie Weisz’ studio, which is situated under a Victorian Arch on Pancras Road.

The work focuses on the architecture of Kings Cross, photographing the abandoned and derelict remains of Victorian buildings and in turn revealing stories from its history. The exhibition builds on Weisz’ fascination with the past, a feature of many of her recent works. Including revisiting the now demolished Culross building with an ex-resident to hear his memories. This is the first fine art exhibition for Caroline Collinge, and the first collaboration between the two artists.

Throughout the works on display there are continuous references to bones and teeth, with skeleton-like structures reflecting the carcass of Victorian Kings Cross and the memories within. Collinge explores a range of materials, including paper folding using old maps and pages from books, shaping them into costume, forms and structures using origami techniques as well as a large-scale crinoline bone. Both artists describe their collaboration as a natural meeting of vision and understanding. The derelict areas they explored could have seemed unwelcoming, but the two artists developed and produced a fantasy impression of what might have otherwise become an impersonal tour of abandoned spaces.

Each night throughout the exhibition films will be shown in the window of the Minnie Weisz gallery for the “stray dogs, passersby and streetwalkers” that roam Kings Cross. The opening night reception featured a reading by visionary writer Aidan Andrew Dun, known as the Poet of Kings Cross. He read from Vale Royal (1995), a verse poem in two cycles and a haunting narrative that seems to grasp the core of London, which he claimed took him 23 years of consideration. The poet, who had the appearance of a Rolling Stone type rock star, tapped his foot to the beat of his literature as the audience stood mesmerised with the story. It was the fitting experience for a reflective evening, and the exhibition was an appropriate tribute to the long history and bright future of Kings Cross.

The display was part of the Reveal festival, a ten day series of events and exhibitions in and around the Kings Cross area.