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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blueprint has joined forces with the Design Museum for this year’s Designers in Residence and the call is going out now for applicants. The scheme gives recent graduates – within the past five years – a chance to explore work around a given theme and grow as a designer, with a bursary provided by the museum. The scheme has previously been a springboard into the industry for the likes of Asif Kahn (Singapore Future Memory Pavilion) and Bethan Wood (twice featured in the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show). Deadline for entries is 20 February.

Download the application form here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been a vintage year for British design duo Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby; in the spring their first monograph was published by Rizzoli, which was followed a couple of months later by the unveiling of the 2012 Olympic torch, and now a solo exhibition at London art gallery Haunch of Venison.

Titled Ascent, the show spans three small rooms and is composed of seven pieces – that will each spawn a limited edition of six – alongside a smattering of working models and sketches. The works on display make formal allusion to Barber and Osgerby’s childhood fascination with boats and aeroplanes. A brass shelf Foil H and two functionally-dubious ‘wall-mounted structures’ share the shape of a glider’s tailplane. Of the latter, Foil V is covered in polished brass surface while Frame 1 a skeletal form rendered in wood and crafted by a boat builder. The most impressive are Planform Array V and Planform Array H, chandeliers with eight and 14 segments respectively, wrapped in Japanese paper and branching out from central stainless steel rods, appearing at once industrial and vegetal. The spare, beautiful geometries that we have come to expect from Barber and Osgerby are very much in evident, and nowhere more so that in Corona 800 and Corona 1100, doughnut shaped wall light fittings that can be seen as further iteration of the Iris series, their limited edition tables for the British manufacturer Established and Sons.

Despite being shown in an art gallery, Barber states unambiguously that their work lies in product design and not art. Unlike much of ‘Design Art’, which has tended towards narrative or exuberance and comical form-making, as displayed in the V&A’s 2009 exhibition Telling Tales, and exemplified by the work of Studio Job and Tord Boontje, Barber and Osgerby has kept to their sober aesthetics and steered clear from imbuing their works with meaning or social commentary.

As an exhibition, Ascent is not nearly as well crafted as the individual pieces. Certainly both designers and curator admit freely to not having designed these seven pieces to interact in any way with the colourful Victorian gallery spaces of Haunch of Venison’s temporary venue at 6 Burlington Gardens, while the text-free models and framed sketches fail to explicate the design process in any meaningful way.

What is most interesting about this partnership between Barber and Osgerby and Haunch of Venison – who has worked with designers before, notably Thomas Heatherwick – is the platform being carved out for design experimentation. These commissioned exhibitions allow designers to dally with complex and costly fabrication techniques (the bullnosing of Foil H demanded a technical know-how that led the designers to a small workshop in Italy) that would have been off-limits to products designed for mass manufacturing. If this is not exactly Design Art, it’s certainly a very fruitful collaboration between the two.

Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby: Ascent is on at Haunch of Venison, London from 24 Sep – 19 Nov

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

Young & Norgate zimmer sideboard

The Living Room is a showcase of established and emerging British design. Opening at the start of the London Design Festival, founder of brand DesignedMade, Jonathan Krawczuk and design journalist, Alyn Griffiths have curated a show that brings together the best of British design, transforming the Luna & Curious boutique in celebration of British talent.

Embroidered triangle wallpaper by CUSTHOM

Comparatively small aside other events at the festival, the exhibition combines beautiful designs from Another Country, Benchmark, Dare Studio, De La Espada, DesignedMade, Polly George, SCP, Viaduct, welovekaoru and CUSTHOM, using chairs, lamps and bookshelves to recreate a traditional British living room.

Finding a careful balance between established designers such as Established & Sons and relative newcomers, Fun Makes Good, the show promises to present a snapshot of British creativity in contrast to the increasingly international prominence of design firms at the London Design Festival.

Store for Estd. collection

With the success of last years Shoreditch Design Triangle event, award-winning designer Lee Broom once again displays work from his individual collection together with designers Max Lamb, Viable London and David Irwin in his collective venture, DeadGood. With their wire lighting collection, inspired by the classic urn lamp, and innovative U-Bend bookshelf, DeadGood hope to stand out from the crowd with an eclectic mix of unique furniture.

Deadgood bookshelf by Max Lamb

Cubic bowl by Jonathan Krawczuk for DesignedMade

Contemporary timber furniture designers Young and Norgate creating a new version of their Zimmer sideboard specifically for the show, handcrafting a beautiful example of design and quality. ‘This exhibition will not only highlight the calibre of British design but the quality of British manufacturing, production and craftsmanship.’ says Krawczuk. With this innovative display, The Living Room aims to be a distinctive platform for British design culture.

The Living Room exhibition will run from 17 September until 2 October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite an outstanding programme of interdisciplinary workshops that has been running for more that 20 years, Boisbuchet is still design’s best kept secret.  The brainchild of Alexander von Vegesack, founder and director of the Vitra Design Museum, Boisbuchet is a former agricultural estate in the heart of France, turned into an international cultural hub (pictured above).

The workshops are aimed to design students and young designers curious to explore design process and experiment with materials and crafts at large. Boisbuchet is a non-profit organisation that has built its reputation with the support of the Vitra Design Museum, the Centre George Pompidou and CIRECA. Through the years it has purchased an extensive range of machine tools for wood and metal work, equipment for fashion and textiles, a fully working glass lab and ceramic kilns provided by Corning Museum of Glass.

The programme, which runs from April to October, is packed this year with exciting names from the design and architecture world including Max Lamb, Kengo Kuma, Estudio Campana, Shin Azumi and Nacho Carbonell amongst others. Beyond the long list of renowned names though, Boisbuchet is a place where creativity runs free from constraints established by manufacture and production, and allows students to focus instead on the pure curiosity to test and play with ideas.

Most workshops run for a week from a Sunday to the following Saturday, and in this period the participants are given the opportunity to work on a specific project/design concept with the supervision of the designers overseeing the workshops. It is not expected for students to have a fully functioning final product as long as the object/concept will show some elements of the initial project.

Since 2009 Boisbuchet has also been open to the general public with guided tours taking place daily on the estate, allowing access to the experimental buildings and pavilions that von Vegesack commissioned to architects such as Shigeru Ban and Simón Vélez amongst others. These buildings are used during the workshops as working studios and retreats.

Along the palatable programme of workshops, one of the highlights to year’s events is Naked Shapes, an inspiring exhibition on Japanese everyday objects made in aluminium and produced between 1910 and 1960 (examples pictured above). The 200 artifacts are part of the collection assembled by industrial designer Seiji Onishi, the gallerist Keiichi Sumi and the graphic designer Nobuhiro Yamaguchi. Any decoration has been removed from the objects. The stripped pure forms are simply enchanting and poetic. The collection that also includes, kitchen utensils, toys, furniture and household appliances will be in display at Boisbuchet until 9 October 2011.

For more information on Naked Shapes and the programme of workshops currently running visit their website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Panel

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Edward Pearce, Dip Arch, website

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

Aram Mooradian, Dip Arch, website

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

Samantha Lee, Dip Arch, website

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

Bartlett School of Architecture

Bong Yeung, Dip Arch

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

Erika Suzuki, Dip Arch

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

Nada Tayeb. BSc (Hons) Architecture

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

Steven Baumann, Diploma/MA Architecture

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

Birmingham Institute of Architecture and Design

Paul Watt, BA Architecture

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

Victoria Crozier, MA Architecture

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

Brighton School of Architecture

Matthew Jeniec, Architecture

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

Bucks New University

James Uren, BA Contemporary Furniture

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

Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff

Angharad Palmer, MA Architecture, website

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

Ben Hansen, MA Architecture

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

Suzanne Prest, MA Architecture, website

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

Central Saint Martins

Anne Frobeen, MA Design (Furniture)

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

Jan Rose, MA Product Design, website

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

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

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

Niloufar Afnan, MA Furniture Design, website

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

University of Dundee

Lewis Benmore, MA Architecture, website

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

Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)

Brynjar Sigurðarson, MA Product Design, website

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

Glasgow School of Art

Daniela Corda, BA Jewellery and Silversmithing

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

Goldsmiths College

Kristina Cranfield, BA Design, website

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

Matt House, BA Design

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

Greenwich University

Adam Shapland, Dip Arch

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

Adis Dobardzic, Dip Arch

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

Leo Robert, Dip Arch

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

Sohail Sarwar, BA Architecture

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

Kent University

Alex Jackson, MA Architecture

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

Matthew Gisbey, MA Architecture

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

Kingston University

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

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

Ben Lambert and Jack Llewellyn, BA Design Interaction

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

Hannah Shipley, BA Graphic Design, website

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

Jonathon Warren, BA (Hons) Product and Furniture Design

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

London Metropolitan University

Lauren Campany

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

Nicolo Spino

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

London South Bank University

Anurag Gautam, Dip Arch

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

Daniel Schinagl, BA Architecture

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

Manchester School of Architecture

Harry Mulligan, Dip Arch

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

Maryam Osman, Dip Arch

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

Nottingham University

Jack Sawbridge, Dip Arch, website

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

Marialena Tsolka, BA Architecture

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

Nottingham Trent University

Joe Oliver, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, website

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

Kenson Lai, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, website

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

University of Portsmouth

Natasha Butler (website) and Joshua Kievenaar (website)

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

University of Plymouth

Oliver Blanchard, BA (Hons) 3D Design

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

Royal College of Art

Bethany Wells, Dip Arch, website

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

Robert Ware, MA Architecture, website

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

Helen Moore, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

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

Malene Rasmussen, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

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

Ilona Gaynor. MA Design Interactions, website

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

Kevin Grennan, MA Design Interactions, website

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

Lisa Ma, MA Design Interactions, website

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

Marguerite Humeau, MA Design Interactions, website

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

Alexander Groves, MA Design Products, website

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

Markus Kayser, MA Design Products, website

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

Oscar Lhermitte, MA Design Products, website

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

Liam Reeves, MA Ceramics and Glass, website

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

Sheffield University

Neil Cooke, MA Architecture

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

Toby Knipping, MA Architecture

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

Westminster University

Kenzaf Chung, Diploma Architecture, website

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

Andrew Cumine, Diploma Architecture

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

David Charlton, Diploma Architecture

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

Keir Alexander, Diploma Architecture

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

Rowan Sloss, Diploma Architecture, website

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

The Panel

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

Alex Warnock-Smith, website

Esme Fieldhouse, website

David Howarth, website

Torange Khonsari, website

Alyn Griffiths, website

Paul Kelsall, website

Ajmir Kandola, website

Michael Hudson, website

Graham Modlen, website

Nelly Ben Hayoun, website

Johnathan Adam, website

Veronica Simpson, website

Steve Townsend

Natre Wannathepsakul

and Jean Wang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘As soon as we popped open the box, the Nintendo 3DS moved from desk to desk, here at our studio, and was the major distraction for a week. It is a definite concept progression from the original Nintendo DS, with ever-increasing possibilities for the games and application designer. Its unique range of available control methods, a touch screen, stylus, and 3D camera offers more possibilities for games and applications to interface with the user.

‘In our opinion, the real technological leap for the unit is not solely the inclusion of a 3D screen or camera – although it is impressive to have these features on a consumer unit, they are certainly do not create an instant holodeck – the real potential we see is using the 3D camera as an augmented reality device to create the long-promised breed of alternate reality games and applications that have been so far a science fiction to the consumer.

‘What the 3DS delivers, as so many technological artefacts have promised in the last decade, is a portable console that can successfully mix virtual and physical elements with startling accuracy. Using the image depth from its stereoscopic camera, 3D objects can be dropped into view, panned around and interacted with. In an urban context, the 3DS has the potential to offer unprecedented possibilities.

‘Sadly, the drawbacks are evident as soon as you begin to tinker. Nintendo’s software development kits are notoriously difficult to obtain, and require a significant financial commitment to the company. Whereas Microsoft offered the open source community the opportunity to get to grips with its revolutionary motion detection Xbox 360 peripheral Kinect, Nintendo retain an incredibly proprietary stance.’

Last year Media Lab, the Boston-based experimental faction of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), celebrated its 25th birthday. The occasion was marked by the launch of its new graphic identity. Following the opening of the Lab’s new home, E14, this February, the new logo also heralded a period of transition for the institution. In the run-up to the anniversary, the school recruited Richard The, a recent Media Lab graduate, along with E Roon Kang to reinvigorate the existing logo, a simple yet robust colour bar, which had been the institution’s only dedicated graphic identity since its establishment back in 1985.

After many attempts at reformatting the original design, however, David Small, a Lab professor until last year who instigated the redesign, felt it was time to give Media Lab a fresh start. ‘It is meaningful that it marks the end of 25 years and that this is for a new generation for the next 25,’ says Small. The main ambition of the design was to encompass all aspects of the school. The Logo embodies its unusual focus group-based structure; its keen encouragement of cross-disciplinary education and research; its transparency both to the public and between researchers. The original graphic identity by Jacqueline Casey, developed in 1984, was however a more fundamental basis for the new logo. That was based, in turn, on a panelled wall mural by Kenneth Noland, which was painted directly on the metal skin of the atrium in the IM Pei-designed Wiesner building (which used to house the Media Lab until recently) and continues along the exterior surface of the building.

Casey’s colour bar was never a logo per se and by the time Small returned to work at the Lab 10 years after graduating, it was a redundant feature with little in the way of a graphic unity to the expansive subsets of researchers and the main institution itself. ‘Jacqueline’s identity might have been one of the first changeable systems to be designed,’ says Small. ‘It bugged me how much they had ruined the original identity – I’m not sure anyone was left who knew it was even a system.’ Taking the original logo as a starting point and referring to tangible aspects of the school – the new building’s glass atrium structure and its coloured stairs demarking the different zones of research within it – the new logo stretches the limits of graphic design. ‘It was a complex process,’ says The, who now works with Berlin-based practice The Green Eyl. ‘Because the school is so broad in its scope and reputation.’ Brought on-board by Small, The was the perfect candidate for the job, having previously worked on interactive and adaptive installations with designer Stefan Sagmeister in New York.

Using a custom-made algorithm the new design features three intersecting coloured spotlights, which can be organised into 40,000 different shapes and 12 colour combinations. The new logo will supply the Media Lab with 25 years’ worth of individualised business cards, which was the actual start-point for the redesign. Each Media Lab student and professor can choose from the range on offer and claim their own unique logo shape and colour combination.

According to Small, these will eventually act as a key to access people’s profile and work. ‘The card could be waved in front of a computer and open a new world,’ he says. This also avoids the common problem of devolving a core identity. Rather than numerous iterations diluting the Media Lab brand, instead they align the various personalities of all staff and students with the institution’s stated mission.

Indeed, although welcomed by many, the recent rebranding highlights the Lab’s need for such clarity, something that Small feels is key to its future growth and direction. ‘Since being established, the Lab’s mission has become much broader,’ he says. ‘In 1989, when I graduated we were anticipating the internet and everything being about social media. But now it is a very different environment.’ Under the latest directorship of Frank Moss and guided by the motto ‘inventing a better future’, the Lab has become increasingly adaptive to new challenges, shifting its research to include diverse fields of study such as nanotechnology and biomechanics. While its research is behind the underlying technology of numerous ground-breaking commercial products including Guitar Hero, Lego Mindstorms and initiatives such as One Laptop per Child, the Lab’s graphic identity remained ambiguous.

Conversely, now the institution has an identity – albeit an adaptive and personalised one – it has no titular head after director Moss resigned in February. It seems an unusual situation for a brand to define an institution’s identity without a leader to promote it. So while the new logo builds on the Media Lab’s history and reflects its current relevance, it will be down to the new director to take the institution out of a transition phase and define a clear approach for the future.

‘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.

In 1989 the former Theatre de La Gaîté Lyrique reopened as Magic Planet, a theme park costing 61 million euros: an act akin to putting Eurodisney inside the Garrick Theatre in London. In 1991, it was closed and became known as ‘The Sad Mute’ to locals.

Last month, the building thundered back into life as a gallery, after an 85 Million euro redesign by architect Manuelle Gautrand. 18,000 visitors passed through the restored building over five days to experience the opening event, designed by London-based United Visual Artists. This month will see the opening of its inaugural exhibition Super-Human-Romantics by British digital artist Matt Pyke.

Super-Computer-Romantics will comprise 14 new works by the digital artist and his collective, Universal Everything. Pyke works out of a cabin in his garden in Sheffield, having moved to the city in the mid-1990s to work for Designers Republic. He began his career studying botanical and anatomical drawing at Portsmouth then Croydon College of Art. He first made his name designing record covers, then directing videos for Sheffield-based Warp Records.

In 2004 Pyke decided to go it alone and formed Universal Everything. Since then he has designed digital art and marketing for clients that include George Michael, Chanel and Deutsche Bank. His work has been seen on massive digital screens at Heathrow Terminal 5, on the side of Skyscrapers in China as well as on TV for Welsh Channel S4C.

For Super-Computer-Romantics, Pyke will be returning, to some extent, to his roots. The exhibition will transform La Gaîté Lyrique into a vision of the world as Matt Pyke sees it. It will combine rigorous programming and sumptuous animation to create artworks that are both emotionally evocative and visually complex. ‘It’s a romantic vision,’ says Pyke. ‘There is no strong political agenda, it is beauty for beauty’s sake – it’s quite hedonistic in that sense.’ And utterly appropriate for a former variety theatre and failed theme park.

The works will include a 3m-projection of a quasi-human creature represented in various materials, which follows the evolution of mankind’s understanding of materials. The footsteps of the beast will pound throughout the building, providing a rhythm to the whole exhibition. Pyke appreciates that his ideas could remain abstract as visual patterns or animations. ‘In some cases we have anthropomorphised ideas to get the viewer to feel empathy for the work.’

La Gaîté Lyrique is described as ‘a stage for the digital revolution’. The programme of events promises to be bombastic and its opening has reinvigorated the area just north of the Pompidou Centre. The gallery will dedicate itself to promoting digital art as well as providing workshops and studios for artists and musicians to develop their ideas. Jerome Delormas, the director of the gallery, underlines their approach: ‘in the digital era, some content has no status, is it information? Is it art?’ he asks. ‘We have a saying, “être sur la brèche”, we always need to be at the breach, at the cutting edge of what is happening.’

La Gaîté Lyrique puts faith in the artists who will occupy it, providing organisational and technical support for artists to show the world that digital art can transcend the misconception that it is purely commercial and that it can be just as emotionally stirring as what are considered by some as traditional art forms.

Gautrand had to organise the 13,000 sq m building across seven levels to combine the complex functions. What exists is essentially a box within a box, the building centres around the Grand Salle, a flexible performance space that can be configured as an auditorium, a simple empty black box and everything in-between. The room is clad with a metallic finish that demonstrates where the auditorium is pushing through the floorplates, which also acts as a useful orientation device.

The building is primed to be reinterpreted however an artist feels, with exhibition spaces looking like conventional galleries when unused. Almost every surface can be projected onto and there are over 3,000 speakers hidden around the public areas. The building is not heroic, the grand gestures are left to the artists, and the character of the existing building confined to the protected elements, the entrance lobby and bar. Gautrand has injected playful touches where the programme is tighter, for example the smaller, 130-seat auditorium is bright yellow with a sparkling green floor. Further to this, the building has a bank of ‘éclaireuses’; modular pods on rollers that can be plugged into any space in the building and can be configured as cloakrooms, bookshelves, dressing rooms or installations, providing further flexibility if needed.

La Gaîté Lyrique is an exciting prospect. Digital art finally has a home that provides everything it needs to develop its standing as a serious art form outside of the commercial world. The two opening attractions have both been by British artists, which is a reflection of the talent that exists in the UK. The Public by Will Alsop could have been as exciting prospect as La Gaîté Lyrique. Alsop’s eccentric interior competes with art rather than supporting and containing it, this is as much the problem as lack of curatorial direction. For now, Paris will be the place that best showcases the work of Britain’s leading talent in digital art.

Super-Computer-Romantics, La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, 21 April-27 May 2011

The most intriguing exhibition at Maison et Objet this year was a small retrospective, featuring a selection of recent design pieces by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec. As well as celebrating the pair’s work in their homeland, the show was a reminder of the brothers’ intense design activity. It was an opportunity to experience all their recent design products in one place; the effect was not dissimilar to that of a family portrait. For the first time, it felt as if the Bouroullecs had been accepted as part of the establishment, appreciated beyond the insular design world for work that British designer Jasper Morrison identified as ‘thoughtful and disciplined, with a real spirit and poetry’.

In their most recent work, there is a palpable sense of the brothers, born in Quimper in Brittany, reflecting on their new status as an institution. Coincidently, another show on French soil, at the Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux, is dedicated to this particular aspect of their design practice. Entitled Album, it is comprised of about 800 drawings, watercolours and photographs by the Bouroullecs, including some of the concept drawings of their most recent projects and about 100 sketches of chairs that were never made. Again, as the title of the show suggests, there is a sense of a family relationship between Bouroullec pieces – a collection of individuals. ‘The most important thing for us is about giving some character to the product,’ says Erwan Bouroullec.

This self-awareness can prove a curse for designers. Far from resting on their laurels, however, the brothers’ emergence as significant cultural figures in their native land has been accompanied by some excellent new work. In Paris, alongside the Vegetal Chair for Vitra and Clouds tiles for Kvadrat, was the latest piece: Losanges, designed for the Catalan rug company Nanimarquina (pictured above). This new collection is a re-interpretation of the traditional Persian rug using the hand-crafted kilim technique, which was originally used for weaving cloth. Each design piece resembles a distorted checkerboard of colours, in which each square has been stretched and warped into a rhombus.

The piece fitted in perfectly with older works at the French design trade show. Displayed on a white tilted plane, chairs, plates, and even sofas gave the impression of gripping onto the sloping ground, looking alarmingly precarious, as if they could have slid down all at once. This sense of potential chaos heightened the seductive aesthetic power of the pieces on show. The Bouroullecs have clearly now achieved greater control over their vision regardless of who they are working with.

The brothers always promised to be the best big-name furniture designers to come out of France since Philippe Starck, but one can see in their work that they aren’t content to tread the same ground as their more famous countrymen. For one thing, they are never willfully outlandish. Although the work of the Bouroullecs is innovative, when engaging with manufacturing technologies and challenging traditional crafts, it is also evocative of familiar forms. Their designs seem to tap into a universal visual language without being nostalgic, repetitive or clichéd.

Developing a design language with integrity is something that the French duo has been working at for some time. ‘We look a lot into our design language, about the way we do things,’ explains Erwan, ‘to us it seems we are not making dramatic changes in design, yet when I look around, it feels as if we do. It is like when you look at something and then by observing it more closely you discover the thing you didn’t perceive at first.’

In recent years, the Bouroullecs have also developed a way of communicating their design projects that doesn’t just focus on a final product but instead, tells the story of the process behind it. This first arose with the Steelwood chair for Italian furniture company Magis, and more recently with the Vegetal chair. For this project, the Bouroullecs commissioned a short video to document each stage of the design process. ‘When you engage in a work, this work also starts to create its own value. It is not something you plan but it is something that comes with it,’ says Erwan.

It is for this reason that a new project by the Bouroullecs, such as the Losanges rug range, reminds us that design entails a deeper cultural commitment, which reaches beyond its mere aesthetic and commercial values. This is why the French brothers are slowly achieving cultural status in a country that rarely confers that honour on its designers.

The exhibition Album is at the Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux until 24 April

When completed, the new Campus of Justice in Madrid by Foster + Partners will not only be the largest building complex in Europe for administering justice, it will also be the first to contain law courts with adaptable ceilings. The British practice has collaborated with the American inventor Chuck Hoberman, who is perhaps best known for his toys and 3D mechanical puzzles. As the cluster of buildings takes shape in Spain, The Building Centre in London is celebrating Hoberman’s groundbreaking work in architectural structures with an exhibition called Living Form – a display of his current projects and innovative research.

As the exhibition illustrates, Hoberman’s work is extremely complex yet surprisingly versatile. His structures, whether toys or large-scale installations, adapt by expanding and shrinking with harmonious simplicity. Although his work could be mistaken for being self-consciously visionary, it is in fact a series of serious propositions in the field of adaptable structures that hold the potential to influence architecture and building construction methods.

Some of Hoberman’s most recent research and prototypes, which test the adaptability of structures such as building facades, are also on show. Along with Hoberman’s more theoretical investigations, the exhibition features mechanical prototypes for adaptable ceilings being used by Foster at the Campus of Justice. For this series of glass and steel buildings set in the outskirts of the Spanish capital, Hoberman has designed a solution that minimises solar gain by maximising the use of natural daylight in the buildings.

Hoberman has developed a modular hexagonal shading device that will be part of the glass roof designed by the architect. Each shading unit is independent and able to mechanically expand and retract by responding to the current external weather conditions, immediately affecting the quality of the interior environment and level of comfort. When each unit is retracted it will be concealed within the structural profile of the roof. Hoberman – who studied sculpture at The Cooper Union in New York followed by a Masters in engineering at Columbia – has created something that is both technically ingenious and sculpturally impressive.

The project was developed as part of the Adaptive Building Initiative (ABI), which the American inventor co-founded in 2008 with structural engineering practice Buro Happold in order to explore how buildings respond in real time to environmental changes. Of course, such initiatives as ABI are not new for Buro Happold, who thrive on generating ideas and solutions in a cross-disciplinary environment. ‘What we are trying to do with ABI is to bring a new capacity to buildings,’ explains Hoberman, ‘by enabling architecture to perform with controlling functions and adapting to weather conditions.’ Besides practical applications though, ABI’s agenda is to develop solutions for possible future scenarios. ‘It’s terrible to say, but climate change is an amazing chance for designers and inventors,’ says Hoberman. He has arrived at more serious projects like the Campus of Justice after working on more obviously playful projects early in his career. In 1995 Hoberman launched his toy division before moving to compelling large-scale projects, including the breathtaking suspended LED screen used for U2’s 360-degree world tour, which kicked off at the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona in 2009. The cylindrical adjustable structure, comprising 888 movable LED screens, was designed in partnership with video technology specialists, Barco Innovative Designs.

Hoberman’s fascination with movement and adaptability is not a brand new idea, of course. One just has to look back through architectural history to see how distinctively each architectural style, from Gothic to Baroque, has attempted to achieve a tension between stillness and movement. It wasn’t until the 20th century, however, that pioneers were inspired by developments in technology to propose architecture in which the movement was literal, for example Archigram’s Walking and Plug-in Cities. Although these projects were hugely influential on the aesthetics of the High-Tech movement in British architecture, the reality of adaptability was jettisoned.

Hoberman and ABI have returned to the idea of movement and transformation being integral to a building’s performance – not merely a suggestion, as has often been the case in other architectural projects, including ones by Foster. The impact of this shift, initiated by Hoberman, is not just redefining architectural aesthetics, but will also improve the quality of the built environment.

The exhibition Living Form: The Transformable Work of Chuck Hoberman is at The Building Centre in London until 30th April

In 1969, David Bowie’s Major Tom described his home as a ‘tin can’. From our occasional glimpses into the International Space Station’s (ISS) cramped confines, things have not changed dramatically. There is, however, an alternative being mooted. Robert T Bigelow has a different proposition: a habitable inflatable module. Although this sounds strange, it makes sense and allows for larger volumes of usable space to be packed tightly into the same payload at launch as a conventional metal tube. Bigelow Aerospace plans a commercial space station by 2015, with modules to rent. The biggest, a BA 330, offers a roomy 330 cubic metre interior – a giant leap in habitable space compared to NASA’s current Destiny research module at the ISS, which is only 106 cubic metres in volume.

Bigelow is passionate about commercialising manned space activity, and he’s put his money where his mouth is: he’s invested $18 million since 1998 in Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. His aim is to commercialise low Earth orbit (LEO) – the area roughly 160-2,000km above the Earth in which you’ll find various satellites, tonnes of debris and the ISS. ‘LEO becoming the domain of private enterprise’, says Bigelow, ‘[means] commercial companies moving beyond serving as sub-contractors to NASA. LEO has been dominated by NASA and a handful of other government space agencies.’ Bigelow is targeting entire countries to lease his modules, and argues that those who exploit the opportunities of microgravity ‘will become the economic giants and political leaders of the future’. Memoranda of understanding have been signed by the UK, Japan and other nations. Although not binding commitments, Bigelow says they ‘serve as an important intermediate step’.

What countries or companies do with their module is up to them. Bigelow built his personal fortune from the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, so not surprisingly the press has touted space tourism. ‘We are not building a space hotel,’  he insists, although ‘if Hilton or Marriott hired us, we would be happy to design such a facility.’ Instead, Bigelow sees more serious, wealth-creating use of LEO’s microgravity ‘that will benefit the entire globe’. He stresses that his offering is ‘a world-class platform for commercial and scientific research and development as well as manufacturing… akin to a national lab’.

Two habitable Bigelow modules are almost ready to go. As well as the 13.7m long BA 330, which already exists as a production model, there is Sundancer, 8.8m long with a pressurised volume of 180 cubic metres. Bigelow already has astronauts to service these modules. Life-support systems testing began in October. The roadblock to getting them into service is a lack of a transport system or capsule to get astronauts up and down from LEO. ‘Without such a capsule we cannot proceed,’ says Bigelow, ‘and it certainly represents the long pole in the tent.’ Undeterred, his company is now participating in Boeing’s NASA-backed CST-100 capsule, designed to dock not just with the ISS, but also Bigelow’s station, which will consist of two Sundancers and a BA 330 around a central docking unit.

Although Bigelow is one of a new set of private entrepreneurs, his work owes a debt to NASA. In 2002, Bigelow licensed NASA patents for an alternative to the conventional ‘tin cans’ that house astronauts and equipment in orbit. The TransHab project was based around a tube of 30cm-thick laminated materials capable of absorbing impacts from meteors and debris while also insulating against exterior temperature variations of 250°C.The structure had to be flexible enough to inflate to almost double its launch diameter.

In 2000, the US Congress banned the US space agency from building expandable space modules, in a complex bill addressing its spiralling funding. According to Bigelow, ‘My understanding is that the furthest NASA got before the programme was terminated was to construct and test some restraint layers.’ He adds that ‘many expandable habitats look alike externally, which is why from a superficial perspective NASA plans can bear a resemblance to illustrations of our own products’.

The technology, though, now sets Bigelow apart from his commercial competition. Other companies such as Orbital Technologies are planning to launch a small metal module. This month, Excalibur Almaz shipped two unused 1970s Soviet military space station modules to the Isle of Man for testing. Bigelow is unfazed, expressing confidence in his ‘superior architecture and usable volume’. A crowded marketplace in LEO is exactly where Bigelow’s unique inflated modules should blow away the competition.

I became an astrophysicist, studying first at Harvard and followed by a post-doctorate at Leicester University in the UK. On returning to the US in the mid-1970s, I envisioned a career in space research at MIT but my life took a different turn. At the time, NASA was working on the development of the Space Shuttle and put out a call for new astronauts. The Shuttle required a crew of seven, only two of whom needed to be test pilots. The rest could be engineers, scientists or medical doctors. So I decided to apply and was selected in 1978. It took two years of basic training before I was qualified to be assigned to a flight into space. Since then I have been on five space missions, the most famous of which was flying up to fix the Hubble space station in 1993, with my last flight taking place in 1996 after 20 years as an astronaut with NASA.

Working with NASA, you become very sensitive to how humans use architecture in a weightless environment. Through training exercises you learn about a ‘local vertical’ – in space you have no idea of what is up or down. There is no right way up: one compartment’s floor might be another’s ceiling or work surface. The architectural design of a spacecraft, therefore, is significant to the crew’s ability to orientate itself. In the old Russian Mir space station, there were different modules, each of which had a different orientation, often leading to temporary disorientation with the crew moved from one module to another.

In the International Space Station, there have been efforts made to maintain a local vertical throughout the entire station. With a mix of American, Russian, European and Japanese designers and engineers responsible for building the station’s modules, there was a wildly different compass guiding each one. It can be dangerous to have significant discontinuity, so uniformity is a major part of the ongoing design process there.

There are a few obvious issues of design for astronauts: privacy features heavily in such an intimate, shared space. Across the board, space-related design is quite conservative and the challenge is mostly prosaic – how to have a toilet on-board a space shuttle, for example. The design itself isn’t dissimilar to an airplane lavatory, except that it is probably the only toilet in the world with a seatbelt to avoid floating away when using it! When there’s sufficient motivation, humans are willing to put up with less comfort for a short amount of time, like living out of a tent on camping trips. So, when NASA sets guidelines for the particular amount of volume of space required, related to the need for comfortable working and living conditions, often there is waste and inefficient design. When creating a design for an environment, there’s no ‘one size fits all’– it is dependent on the type of environment and the mission. In each circumstance, designers should test the guidelines themselves and work to what their own experience tells them: there’s no easy way to explain how it feels in space.

Recent developments in design have been the inclusion of advanced communication technology: it is now possible to telephone anywhere on Earth from outer space. The problem of boredom in space travel has been the topic of some recent discussion, but certainly on spacecrafts, there is no time to be bored. It is more a case of isolation: you have a beautiful view but you can’t smell the flowers or hold your family, so communication has been a huge progression for astronauts
and cosmonauts alike.

I recently attended the announcement of the winner of the SHIFTboston Moon competition. It was an excellent starting point for the exploration of design and to get people thinking about the serious possibilities of lunar habitation. However, if we tried to implement them, a lot of the designs would fall down because of engineering problems. One of the biggest challenges in achieving habitation on the moon is people’s desire to have a great view of their environment but due to the vast amount of surface radiation, people staying on the moon will probably have to live underground. How do you deal with that? You need a lot of material between you and the lunar surface. It’s details such as these that are the most fascinating and need focus. That is architecture’s challenge

Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman is Professor of the Practice of Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. He is a former NASA astronaut who has made five space flights, becoming the first astronaut to log 1,000 hours of flight time aboard the Space Shuttle