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

Vladimir Tatlin never got to build his full 400m-high Tower to the Third International in St Petersburg. Jeremy Dixon, on the other hand, has managed to build it twice, albeit rather smaller and in London.

A decade before he co-founded the practice Dixon Jones to regenerate the Royal Opera House, he worked on a 10.5m-high model that was mounted on the roof of the Hayward Gallery as part of its 1971 show Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design since 1917. The latest construction dominates the Royal Academy’s Annenburg Courtyard for the exhibition Re-creating Tatlin’s Tower, which runs until 29 January.

Tatlin’s Tower was to be a double helix spiralling on a steel frame, forming a structure inclined at the same angle as Earth’s axis, spanning the river Neva and containing rotating geometric solids for buildings of diminishing size towards the apex. There have been many attempts to model the tower but not one of them has been as meticulous as Dixon’s.

His approach starts by forensically unravelling the source material to try to extract the exact structure intended by Tatlin. The problem is, Tatlin’s original designs don’t add up. According to Dixon, the 5m-high model that Tatlin himself built in 1920 is ‘not really strictly an engineering proposition, more of a sculptural proposition’. Furthermore, ‘his model is completely different to the other source material’. Two surviving Tatlin drawings show the spiral defining the tower’s edge with gradients behaving very differently – in one they flatten out to horizontal, unlike Tatlin’s model where the gradient is essentially constant.‘It’s a very odd thing’, concludes Dixon. ‘I suppose there must have been other drawings, as there is no relation between the two sets of spirals.’

Examining straight members holding the spiral, a concealed structure-defining inner cone emerged on which, as Dixon explains, ‘all the geometry is built and indeed the thing was actually built… he made the cone members and either did or didn’t take them out afterwards. We’re not sure’. The hidden cone members are the key. ‘In our reconstruction we set out to build it that way, and then take them out’.

In 1971, Dixon built small models in balsawood to get it right, and he worked with Sven Rindl of consulting engineer Felix J Samudy & Partners, who generated detailed freehand drawings as they talked.

From 6pm to midnight for two months, with architect colleagues Christopher Cross and Christopher Woodward he built the full wooden model inside the Hayward Gallery, in two parts due to space limits.‘We had four giant speakers in the corners of the room with the latest pop music on very, very loud,’ recalls Dixon enthusiastically.

In 2011, the project started with computer modelling in Microstation by Dixon Jones’ Chris Milan. He took the elevation and extrapolated an implied geometry of elliptical shapes that go underground and, where they intersect the cone, generate the spiral. Dixon sees in it ‘a lovely sense of the Tatlin Tower expressing movement… the futurist vision.’

The computer modelling not only produced new aesthetic insights, including a stunning CGI of the tower over the icy Neva , but also a blueprint for fabricator MDM in Brixton.

They set about building the tower with steel, but as there was insufficient time to make the spiral in steel at their yard they used plywood. Re-assembled at the Royal Academy, the spiral is being replaced with steel, and the internal solid elements – a cylinder below a pyramid below another cylinder, topped with a dome – are represented by mesh-covered shapes sprayed silver. The tower stands 10.5m high on a 10m-wide base, which set the limit on scale – any wider would have obstructed deliveries. Construction was carried out with with a cherry picker.

Black and white images give no clue to Tatlin’s intended colour.At the Hayward, recalls Dixon, ‘we painted it a brighter red… like a devil’. This time, like industrial steelwork, it is being painted with corrosion-resistant red oxide paint. This is far more subdued but Dixon is confident it is what Tatlin would have done.

In timing and its strange, twisting steel frame, Dixon’s tower chimes with Kapoor and Balmond’s Orbit tower for the London Olympics. But the new Tatlin Tower is just a recreation – the real unbuilt concept, Dixon says, ‘remains pristine… never sullied by time’.

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

According to Charles Jencks, who Blueprint labelled the ‘pope of postmoderns’ back in issue 2, modernism died on 16 March, 1972, with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igo housing estate in Missouri. Allesandro Mendini decided he was through with modernism in 1974 when he photographed a quasi-ritual burning of the Monumentino da Casa chair and placed the image on the cover of CassaBella, hisinfluential magazine. In 1979 Nils-Ole Lund unveiled his image ‘The future of architecture’, depicting a ruined version of James Stirling’s engineering building in Leicester, with a rusting car dominating the foreground. Postmodernism, Style and Subversion opens with this triumvirate – leaving the visitor under no illusions that the show begins where, according to Jencks et al, the modernist ideology died violently.

From here on in, the show takes a thematic journey through PoMo. It deals with the movement stylistically, sometimes awkwardly jumbling disciplines but providing a riotous breeze through two decades that fostered a culture of excess and exuberance in design, architecture, art and pop culture that remains contentious and divisive.

The exhibition was three years in the making, and is the last in a series of shows for the V&A that have covered stylistic periods in history, from art nouveau, surrealism and art deco to modernism. ‘We think 30 years is long enough to have the benefit of hindsight,’ say curators Jane Pavitt and Glenn Adamson. ‘This is the first retrospective of this scope; what made it interesting is that so many of the protagonists are still around.’

Opening with architecture, the usual suspects have been lined up to show how this discipline led the way in eschewing the turgid lexicon of modernism and found a healthy disrespect for history, and clashing styles in materials and colours. Models of Venturi and Scott Brown’s Vanna Venturi House with its baby blue broken pediment and Charles Moore’s Piazza Del’itallia shopping mall in New Orleans are interspersed with drawings by the likes of Stirling and Gowan, Aldo Rossi and Rem Koolhaas. This part of the  exhibition takes time to fathom, compared to the exhibits that follow. Each drawing has to be decoded as a building, then further disassembled to recognise the historical and aesthetic references. Looming above it all is Hans Hollein’s Strada Novissima, The Presence of the Past that originally stood at the inaugural Venice biennale in 1980. The columns present a condensed architectural history of the world, presenting milliennia of design as a simple consumable image.

The curators have dealt with the darker side of postmodernism, as well as the eccentric and lavish excesses in the fashion and pop world. Ron Arad’s concrete stereo for One Off, Vivienne Westwood’s voodoo clothes and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner similarly reject the traditions of the past, but provide a less-bold and consumable vision of the future, tainted with anxiety.

Compare this to the work of the Memphis group, with the designs of Sotsass and Mariscal in which the PoMo aesthetic is pumped up. There appears to be a lack of complexity or social commentary – yet the Memphis work is a highlight of the show.

The show really comes alive where pop is combined with fashion. The assemblage of music sampling, combining styles and rhythms, with icons and singers (including Annie Lennox, David Byrne of Talking Heads, and the high priestess of PoMo Grace Jones) is presented in a orgy of flashing lights and spiky pop rhythms. This is how PoMo would like to be remembered, as a blaze of serious fun.

The next room looks at graphic design. With the introduction of the Face magazine designed by Neville Brody and Peter Saville’s work for Factory Records, here is PoMo at its strongest, in 2D and as ephemera.

The final room charts the demise of PoMo as it became a symbol of everything that is loathed in the creative arts – commercial complicity. The curators present a trinity of architecture, art and fashion that underline the extent to which PoMo had spread. A 6ft drawing of Philip Johnson’s AT&T tower stands between a stainless steel Jeff Koons bust of Louis XIV and a suitably bling jacket by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel.

Here is the moment when PoMo went into terminal decline and the excess became utterly commodified. The joy, it seems, was lost. There is a darker tone in a room where Jenny Holzer’s bill board in Times Square proclaims ‘Protect me from What I Want’ dominates the wall facing a gallery of late PoMo designer products, gleaming from behind the glass screens.

Postmodernism is the most recent ‘ism’ to be fully inaugurated into the tomes of design history. Style and Subversion demonstrates that it still manages to have the ability to question our cultural and aesthetic perspectives, create all manner of stylistic arguments and occasionally raise a smile. The show is a fitting greatest-hits package of the heresy of designers during an age of excess, but it will leave you none the wiser about how or why it all happened.

The fourth edition of the Shape to Fabrication Conference will kick-start on 14 November with a new addition to the programme – a series of four workshops exploring digital fabrication and advanced computational techniques.

Shape to Fabrication is a yearly conference for the architecture, construction and engineering industry concentrating on issue of manufacture of elaborate elements with the use of Computer Aided Design software.

Preceding the conference will be four days of workshops lead by experts in the commercial development of software for Rhino – Daniel Piker, SMART Form, Evolute and David Rutten – who will be paired up with four developers of novel fabrication technologies – Robofold, Archiwaste, Cutting Edge and Cordek. Divided into four teams they will guide the participants in creating installations that will be integrated together upon completion. The outcome will be on display for ten days after the conference at the London’s South Bank University.

The workshops are a starting point for a conference that will span over two days. The organiser SimplyRhino, a Rhino3d supplier for UK, and Robofold, a London based manufacturer, have invited expert builders, makers from leading design and engineering companies and the workshop participants to join discussions on the subject of software development for the digital fabrication industry.

Among others joining this year’s conference will be Tim Crawshaw of Populous, The Official Architectural and Overlay Design Services Provider to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Tristan Simmonds and Buro Happold who worked on Zaha Hadid’s Cairo Expo City project. Konstantin Gaytandzhiev, the Chaos Group representative will provide an insight into newest software developments for Grasshopper and Rhino3d.

The main aim of the conference and the exhibition is to promote the digital methods of design and fabrication as well as inspire the design community.

14-17 November 2011 workshops. (RoboFold)
18-19 November 2011 conference. (South Bank University)
21-30 November 2011 exhibition. (South Bank University)

http://www.shapetofabrication.com/

http://www.robofold.com/

http://www.simplyrhino.co.uk/

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/

Kitty by Jiran, 24

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

Ally Churches, 23 – Beware Elderly Pickpockets

Drew Wicken, 22 – Warning: Warning Ahead!

Grant Holt, 32 – My Dad….

Rosie, 22 – Pattern

Malcolm Duffin, ‘over 8′ – Road Tax

Patrick Myles, 63 – Werewolves

Beth Duddy, 26 – Chicken Crossing

Borom Chai, 21 – Ants

Make Industries, 35 – Bermuda Triangle

Ash Adams, 21 – Robot Speed Camera

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

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

A huge thanks to everyone involved.

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

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

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

monsterism.net

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

nomabar.com

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

thelindstromeffect.co.uk

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

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

moderntoss.com

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

themobilestudio.co.uk

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

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

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

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

richard-morrison.co.uk

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

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

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

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

corkewallis.com

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

tomato.co.uk

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

airside.co.uk

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

checklandkindsleysides.com

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

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

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

Triangles, circles and cycles

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

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

National speed limits

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

National speed limits

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

No entry

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

thechase.co.uk

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

the-partners.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Kenneth Grange, is 82, excellent company and ‘up to his eyes’ in design. First, there’s the Design Museum’s retrospective of his five decades in the industry to prepare for, which involves sifting through ‘miles of archives’. Then there are client projects: a chair for Hitch Mylius and Anglepoise’s latest lamp, the TypeC, and continued work for Margaret Howell.

And, of course, there are his own ideas to pursue. The latest is a medical device – patent awaiting – born out of his ‘interesting experience’ of having both knees replaced, though not at the same time. His old friend Lucien Day – ‘very warm and generous, but no buggering about with her’ – had both done at once, and that is not advisable. Much of this work happens at his house in Devon, but we meet at his London home, tucked away down a leafy lane in Hampstead.

So Grange combines professional staying power with continued good health. ‘I’m immortal. That comes from a big work ethic, I feel guilty if I’m not working.’

There is a sense that in product design terms, Grange has seen it all. He was heavily involved with British manufacturers in those halcyon days of the Sixties and Seventies, when technology and increased consumption led to a stream of product innovation.

His client list from those times reads like a Who’s Who of British manufacturing: Kodak, Kenwood, Ronson, Morphy Richards, Wilkinson, British Rail. And the client relationships that started then were often long-standing, with Grange in design director roles. Such relationships continued with the establishment of Pentagram in 1972, of which Grange was a founder-member.

The portfolio of work is appropriately eye-catching. Ground-breaking designs or redesigns abound, many of which (the Kenwood Mixer, the TX1 taxi, the Kodak Instamatic) have gained iconic status. So Grange is well-placed to muse on the state of the design nation. One of the main things to have changed over his career is the nature of clients and hence of the client relationship.

Pictured above: Some of Grange’s most influential designs: The Intercity 125 train, the Rural Postbox and the TX1 taxi

He cites chief designer Jonathan Ive’s relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs as one of those rare things and ‘an amazing piece of good fortune. He’s dealing with a man who wants to push him to the limit.’Marriages – like that of Ive and Jobs – are less common now than they were in the Seventies and Eighties, because ‘the great financial forces of darkness have taken over. Braun, Pirelli, Olivetti, Hermann Miller, they all had powerful design identities. But now if shares drop, firms will bring in someone like Lady Gaga [to boost the brand’s image, rather than rely on real design thinking]. That’s straight forward heavy duty commerce, the share price drives everything.’

This attitude links in, he says, with the demise of the family- or privately-owned business. Grange was lucky to often find himself working for company founders or their descendants, Kenwood and Anglepoise for example. And he reveals nostalgia for a time when clients were gentlemanly and paid well for good design.

His other concern is quality. ‘My principle responsibility is to make things that are better.’ But despite its relative wealth, modern society demands more and more stuff at lower and lower prices, which leads to things being poorly made, or being marketed with artificially-manufactured benefits.‘As design director for a number of firms I would sit at meetings and we would be “responding to the marketplace”, meaning satisfying an invented benefit that the marketing department had concocted.
I’ve worked for so many different firms on so many different products, I’ve been affected by a whole range of trickery. Of those five blades in a razor, I can tell you that only two are effective.’

However, he is pragmatic enough to admit that ‘it’s the capitalist system. You need a sense of humour and cynicism to deal with it.’As for poorly-made products: ‘Toasters and irons fail. It’s shocking in a moral sense.’ But he admits that though ‘it’s dead easy to be critical, if you pursue it with intelligent people the answer is dramatic: to make fewer things but charge a lot for them.’

He calls to mind a pair of secateurs in his archive that were given to him at Wilkinson – the firm’s first garden tools. ‘If they were on the table now they would make you salivate. They were exquisite
and that fits my argument about price. They could have sold them extremely expensively.’ If you were to pay a lot of money for a simple thing you would look after it, he argues. ‘Those secateurs would invite you to keep them sharp.’

Occasionally, he says, somebody comes to the market with a new invention and they can force people to pay a lot, ‘and the game can change. That would be changing the pattern of consumption.’ James Dyson almost pulled it off with his vacuum cleaner, ‘but he didn’t charge enough’.

Grange’s hobbyhorse is to get a degree course in repairs going. As a teacher at the Royal College of Art and holder of five honorary doctorates, he’s been talking to current educators about it, and believes it will happen. ‘I think repairing is the most rewarding game of all. If the world had continued on its existing pattern, food would have become disposable. But you don’t throw away your pans, and now there’s a big cult of craftsmanship in food.’ The same turn-around could happen with products, he argues.

Anglepoise is interested in this too. Director ‘Simon Terry talks about building up the repair side. He accepts it as obligation when he took over the family business. It’s admirable and romantic.’ And interestingly, Dyson is offering £60 off your next vacuum cleaner if you recycle your old one with them, regardless of its brand. So with all these ideas and energy and good humour it seems that Grange is going from strength to strength.

• Kenneth Grange, Making Britain Modern at the Design Museum 20 July – 30 October

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austrian Cultural Forum, SW7- until 8 July

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

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

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

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

Beardsmore Gallery, NW5- until 18 June

The work of Wim Crouwel has had a profound influence on contemporary graphic design. During the post-war Dutch design scene, dominated by an expressive painterly approach, Crouwel was influenced by modernism and the International Typographic Style, or the Swiss Style. The current exhibition at the Design Museum. Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey (until 3 July), charts the designer’s prolific career, including a significant body of work for the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and later for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. It was here that he was not only given the opportunity to develop his own graphic language through posters for the museum, but was also commissioned to work on the exhibition design. The most significant aspect of these iconic posters is that Crouwel reflected the subject of the exhibition by communicating it through a striking type and use of colour, and not by using an image. For instance, with the Hiroshima exhibition (1957), which consisted of horrific paintings and drawings by two Japanese artists, Crouwel responded by using heavy black type on a solid fiery red background. Using one word to make an ‘image’-based typography became a running theme throughout his posters during this time.

The use of grids in graphic design had been developed by Swiss designers and this influenced much of the work both on the posters and exhibition catalogues. It was this process that led to Crouwel’s grid-designed lettering. An excellent example of this can be seen in the Vormgevers poster (1968). It was an industrial design exhibition and that gave Crouwel the idea of making the structure visible for the first time, and a typeface that fitted directly into the grid system was developed. There are intricate original drawings on display at the Design Museum that remind us that all this work was done by hand, yet still look fresh and fit entirely into our now digital world.

Another great example of this can be seen through Crouwel’s innovative approach to the calendar designs that he did in the Fifties for the printing firm, Van De Greer. Again, the design solution was entirely typographical and he ended up producing 25 different calendars in total. Type designer David Quay, of the Foundry, approached Crouwel to develop his lettering into digital fonts. With Quay’s expertise, they developed the typefaces together. The first was named Gridnik, after a nickname given to Crouwel by his friends in the Seventies because of his obsession with grids.

In 1963, Total Design was founded, a multi-disciplinary group of kindred spirits including Wim Crouwel, along with Friso Kramer, Ben Bos, Benno Wissing and Paul and Dick Schwarz, whose manifesto was essentially to redesign Dutch design. In the years that he worked at Total Design, Crouwel produced many logotypes and typefaces for companies such as IBM and Olivetti. Through this work, he professionalised corporate identity, which helped shape the face of modernity and the approach to graphic design that is now synonymous with the Netherlands.

There are examples on display of later work influenced by Crouwel and an example of his New Alphabet typeface put to use by designers Peter Saville and Brett Wickens on the cover for the 1988 Joy Division album, Substance 1977-1980.

When I asked Crouwel his reaction to this, he answered that he was flattered that they had used his typeface. However, he added that he had first seen it in a pop magazine and they had altered the letters to make it more legible, which was not the original idea! In the run-up to the exhibition, Crouwel’s New Alphabet typeface has been reproduced on products such as a wallpaper for Cole & Son and a rug for Tai Ping, both designed by Tony Brook, who has co-curated the show.

At 83, Wim Crouwel is still working and was recently commissioned to design the front cover of Wallpaper magazine to coincide with this retrospective. An exhibition like this in London is long overdue and the work on display stands as an education to students of  communication design and practising professionals alike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whitechapel Gallery,  E1 – Until 14 August

‘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.’

In 1751, the outlandish 6th Earl of Coventry commissioned two whippersnappers to remodel his estate at Croome to make it fit for a king (quite literally, playing host to a number of royals through the years). Here, in rural Worcestershire, Robert Adam and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown established their reputations by crafting both impressive interiors and stunning views of a landscape dotted with eye-catchers. Exactly 260 years later and Croome Court is the scene for yet another leap of bold innovation. National Trust (NT) is piloting the role of ‘creative producer’ to design a modern intervention for the historic building, to last a year. London-based architecture and design studio We Made That has stepped up to the challenge and created the Croome Withdrawing Room: a piece of inhabitable furniture that seeks to interact with its unique context and offer fresh perspectives.

‘The spirit of Croome has always been an innovative and daring place,’ says Oliver Goodhall, partner at We Made That. In response to an open call for ideas last September, WMT presented a room within a room, affectionately coined ‘the lump’, a way of inserting new into old. This led to research into the etymology of the withdrawing room, which has been abbreviated to drawing room over the years. It was only in September 2009 that the house and landscape were reunited for the public to experience for the first time. Croome presently lies in a ghostly state, emptied of its contents – all guts on show as it begins a long period of restoration. There are no ‘do not touch’ signs and kids tear through the unfurnished rooms, until eventually reaching boredom. However, the rundown state of the house and lack of preciousness afforded a freedom to the architect. ‘The hollow, echoey spaces change the acoustics and how you move around,’ says Goodhall.

We Made That describes a dense design process, which has seen the physical construction of the installation come together quickly at the end of a feverish six-month period to design a brief for this new role of creative producer. The pair organised three truly participative workshops with volunteers to explore a contemporary interpretation of ‘withdrawing’ and test out materiality appropriate for such an environment. Rather than being sceptical, the curious volunteers, most of whom are retirees, understood the history of risk taking at Croome Court, following in the footsteps of the fledgling Adam and Brown in the mid-18th century. The workshops proved engaging design tools for the architect, as part of an iterative process of gathering ideas. ‘It was frustrating for them at first that we left it so open-ended,’ says Holly Lewis, partner at We Made That. ‘We didn’t want to pay lip service then just go ahead with our own idea.’

The form of the installation was, at first, considered as a solid with spaces carved out for ‘curating views’, including raised spots for either sitting in solitude or with friends. Feeling a little constrained, the architect then considered the outside edge as an additional form in itself, folding in and out, something for people to touch and follow all the way round the room.

As the name suggests, We Made That pursues a hands-on approach during projects. After enlisting Millimetre – which worked with Studio Weave on the Longest Bench in Littlehampton – to fabricate the timber base and steel structure, Lewis and Goodhall hung the layers of stratified fabric (all 103 individually laser-cut pieces) from the steel rails over one weekend while the house was open. ‘It was important that the installation materialised in front of the eyes of visitors and volunteers, and not suddenly appear overnight,’ says Goodhall. We Made That collaborated with archivists to tap into a vast pool of knowledge and unpick the context of Croome’s drawing room, previously known as the Blue Damask Room after its lavish soft furnishings. The decision to use iridescent material came from the workshops and research, and the desire to create a warm and comfortable space for withdrawing.

The project has been supported by Trust New Art, NT’s contemporary art and craft programme, in partnership with the Arts Council. It certainly seems a savvy move on the part of Croome to appoint a creative producer and show the sort of forward-thinking ambition required to catch the attention of the Heritage Lottery Fund – without its £15,000 development award, there would have been no installation. We Made That has chosen to define the creative producer through an architectural process, specifically by exploring a mediating language that communicates with both volunteers and archivists on the one hand, and construction professionals on the other. The outcome is an intriguing interlude in rattling around a series of empty spaces. ‘It’s a little surprise awaiting people along the route,’ says Lewis.

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

During his long career, Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) designed more than 4,000 cogent, bold and instantly legible symbols and figures. The politically engaged graphic artist and designer portrayed the world in wood and linoleum cuts. It is still possible to discern his influence today in our everyday lives – in information graphics, on our computer screens and mobile phones. His pictograms are all-but ubiquitous, comprising a visual shorthand geared to a society that seems to live constantly on fast-forward. In the 1920s, Arntz began collaborating with Otto Neurath after the social scientist asked him to design symbols for the ‘International System Of TYpographic Picture Education’ (ISOTYPE). Arntz’ pictograms formed a pictorial system of knowledge transfer, one that made information concerning the relentless development of industrial, electronic and sociocultural knowledge available to everyone. Information was thus democratised, according to Neurath’s phrase: ‘Words divide – images unite’.

The key to Arntz’ effectiveness and lasting significance as a designer lies in his unique ability to transfer data through images, motivated by a passionate commitment to society and a desire to share information with the public at large. In the socialist milieu of 1930s Vienna, Arntz and Neurath sought, idealistically, to enlighten its citizens and help them develop their Bildung (education as well-informed citizens). Clearly, there’s a broadly Modernist aesthetic also at work here, centred around the notion that the qualities inherent in good design could help improve the standard of people’s lives. Could such idealism survive into the internet age with its accompanying surge in the production of imagery?

This idealism, by today’s standards, comes with a sort of innocence, one now replaced by relativism, issuing from our media-fixated social environment. Irony counters almost any attempt at a single reading of an Arntz pictogram, such an approach being regarded as a trap or illusion. The 21st century’s greater variety of information and the sheer saturation of imagery via the media has undeniably led to a noisy confusion of a pictorial kind. It is not difficult for impartial information to blur into a form of coercion when such symbols are used to try and sell us an advertiser’s product. Some of Arntz’ pictograms, conceived as a sort of visual Esperanto, show their age more than others. His symbols illustrating women working, for instance, invariably show them undertaking domestic tasks in the home, sewing and cooking, or shopping for food, basket-in-hand. Men are usually shown working in factories, as postmen and in laboratories.

It is possible today for the same purpose to be served by a whole range of imagery – take the numerous different images signifying male and female public toilets. In our globalised world, where numerous cultures and subcultures are textually and visually mixed, images like Arntz’ and his successors can ease communication – even though his and Neurath’s particular vision and goals might no longer chime with contemporary diversity and visual complexity. Yet what gives Arntz’ work its continuing ‘newness’ and vitality is his seizure of something from the real world and its coding. Whether it be the graphic of a slouching figure of an unemployed man wearing a cap, or simply an image of a letter, building or car, and approximating them in a pictogram.

Complementing hundreds of examples of pictograms, the book includes a biographical sketch of Arntz’ fascinating life along with a selection of oil paintings, political prints and other rare visual material previously unpublished. A series of incisive essays written by stars from the contemporary graphic design world influenced by Arntz complete the picture. Graphic design guru, Nigel Holmes describes an image he’s created that shows himself and his partner cycling together. It’s drawn from a modified image originally by Arntz, and was part of a graphic commissioned by Attaché magazine. ‘Am I stealing Arntz’ work?’, Holmes asks himself. ‘I hope it’s seen as more of a homage to him’, he writes. This essay contains other visual homages to Arntz, in the form of Holmes’ well crafted work for Mexican Yellow Pages, Network World and the Radio Times.

These pictograms might be a little slicker than Arntz’ work – inevitably their look is more contemporary – but they show Holmes making the same quest for a personal visual vocabulary as his master, adding in their turn to the growing mountain of visual symbols. ‘I have tremendous respect for his work,’ continues Holmes, ‘and I’d like to think that this essay might help others appreciate his influence on aspects of current graphic design’. A fitting way to salute Gerd Arntz’ achievement.

Gerd Arntz – Graphic Designer, Edited by Ed Annink and Max Bruinsma, 010 Publishers, £34.50

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