Though Bass had more than a dozen years of his career still ahead of him when this portrait was taken, in one sense it is a taking stock of achievements so far. At this time he was one of the most celebrated designers in the world, and more than that, he had helped to shape post-war visual culture. Bass was born on 8 May, 1920, in the East Bronx, New York City, the second child of hard-working Jewish immigrants, who later encouraged his flair for art. Even as a schoolboy he showed the magpie instincts of the true designer, with his passionate interest in the visual world coupled with an ability to ‘collect’ visual gems that had caught his eye, and to adapt and transform them to his creative needs.

As a boy he spent a lot of time looking at the special exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works he liked most were artefacts from Egypt and other ancient civilisations. Bass credits MoMA for ‘some of the most delicious, indelible memories’ of his childhood. A design for Ohio Blue Tip Matches, on page 302 of the book, shows a mirror-image motif of a highly stylised face, loosely based on Aztec iconography.

After leaving the Art Students’ League, where he was a scholarship student, in 1938 Bass went to work for Warner Brothers as a ’lettering and paste-up man’ for $20 a week. Jonas Rosenfeld, the ad executive who employed Bass recalled his ‘willingness to experiment’. Bass was an innovator, a life-long quality that worked as a catalyst in the formation of his design habits. Shortly after, when he had gone to work for the Fox Corporation, he was to bring about an historically important design innovation when he introduced to film advertising his first love, the high-design standards set by the glossy magazines.

But the most important shaping influence on Bass as a designer was still to come. Word reached the eager Bass that George Kepes, a Hungarian émigré, and Bauhaus protégé, was now teaching at Brooklyn College. Bass enrolled immediately. Kepes proved to be the guru Bass was looking for. Kepes’s book, Language and Vision (1944) was one of those rare texts that accommodated both high-falutin’ modernist design theories and examples of brash contemporary American advertising. The penthouse and the pavement, so to speak, between the same covers. ‘He really just set me on fire,’ recalled Bass of his mentor, decades later.

László Moholy-Nagy, the fabled Bauhaus teacher, and previously colleague of Kepes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, had written a book, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, that was to have a lasting influence on Bass. These two elder designers opened up a new world for the younger man. The beautiful title sequence for the film Casino, starring Robert de Niro, with its highly kinetic visuals, can be read as a homage to Maholy-Nagy’s 1930 film, the shimmering and visionary, Light-Space Modulator. (Only Bass’ wife Elaine, muse and lifelong co-worker at Saul Bass and Associates, was to have a greater influence on him.)

Jennifer Bass, Saul’s daughter and design historian, Pat Kirkham, expertly and passionately chart the trajectory of Bass’s career and life in this lively book, making for a fascinating story. This book comprises nothing less than a 400-or so page treasure chest of visual delights. Martin Scorsese, the film director with whom Bass was to have so many fruitful collaborations, pays him an apposite tribute in the foreword. ‘This book,’ he says, ‘so carefully designed and lovingly assembled, is a fitting tribute to a great artist. A giant. And now, welcome to the world of Saul Bass.’

Laurence King Publishing, £48

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reintroduction of Atlantic Salmons, Urban Physic Garden, underground climbing facilities and above all low rent studios in church spires. Everything could happen in London if you look at the proposals gathered under Somerset House’s roof.

RIBA received 138 responses to their open competition aiming to find the most creative designs that would reclaim forgotten parts of the capital. 29 shortlisted proposals, divided into four categories: growing, play, civic and inhabited spaces, are displayed within the Great Arch Lobby and Lightwells of Somerset House. The exhibition, set in the labyrinth of outside passages and small chambers safeguarding the proposals, is a forgotten space itself and adds to the atmosphere of quest and discovery present in all the designs.

The road to the winning proposal is a long one. Hidden in Inhabited Spaces corner is (IN)Spires, Alex Scott-Whitby’s not so much a design, but an idea to reclaim the spires of London churches. Scott-Whitby who already put his idea into life is residing in St Mary Woolnoth above Bank station. Ultimately he aims at converting 38 of London’s 51 spires into low rent studios for creative community. Anyone could apply to become a curate and curator all in one.The second Prize proposal shows the same sense of practicality. The Urban Climbing Wall would utilise the air raid shelters situated under Clapham High Street turning them into climbing, abseiling and potholing centre in the heart of London. Steve McCoy, the author of the proposal, planned to place the main entrance in the decorative tower that would be constructed on top of the existing pillbox.

Within the civic spaces category, the Lift Platz project by Colin Rose and Katharine Hibbert was particularly noteworthy. Chosen as one of the commended proposals it plans to create stops for hitchhikers along the Newham Way. The shelters would be made of old road signs to make them low-cost and visible. They will be fitted with the map of the region and a cardboard dispenser to write the destination. The surrounding areas will be planted with wild growing food available to the hitchhikers.

Sadly the growing spaces did not show the same kind of practicality and integrity as other proposals. Most were large-scale projects that would require huge funding or are impossible to realize because of land ownership. Whereas other categories concentrated on utilising buildings and spaces that were easily accessible even to minor investors. The one proposal that stood out was an Urban Physic Garden by Wayward Plants. As an answer to new EU Directive on herbal medicine it plans to create herb gardens in the area of Nag’s Head Yard, owned by King’s College Medical Campus. As a public space it would also serve as a platform for locals to come together.

The diversity of proposals adds to the relevance of the project to the wider public. Ranging from the metaphorical Library of Memories evoked by smells, sounds and sights of old London infrastructure, to straightforward architectural designs accompanied by drawings and 3D models made to the highest standard, it gives an insight into what London, as a city, has to offer.

Not all proposals showed the same level of professionalism in terms of presentation, since anyone could enter the competition, but they mostly made up for it with innovative and well-thought ideas.

Throughout the exhibition there is recurring trend of simplicity of ideas. The appreciation for London is manifested by the proposals that take anything the city has to offer and seek improvement rather than change. What the exhibition managed to achieve is to show that not much is needed to turn the run down and forgotten spaces into innovative, community driven urban areas.

Forgotten Spaces is on at Somerset House , London until 29 January

http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/forgotten-spaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audi chose the massive Frankfurt Motor Show to debut its urban concept car. The vehicle has grown out of its Urban Future Initiative programme looking at cities and mobility issues of the future, with involvement from the likes of Jurgen Mayer H and, from the UK, Alison Brooks Architects.

Preceding the motorshow was the latest of Audi’s UFI summits, with a wide-ranging roster of invited guests looking at everything from future fuels (albeit in a rather incomprehensible way) to city evolution, the latter addressed separately by the husband-and-wife team of urban aficionadas (among other things) Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen.

Innovation and creativity consultant Charles Leadbeater proved one of the most thought-provoking speakers and in one of the accompanying seminars enquired: ‘When will someone come up with the iPhone of cars?’ He was talking about a single solution to mobility, something that motor manufacturers are moving further from with every R&D dollar they spend. The show itself proved this well, as marques moved in wildy differing directions away from their traditional core markets and looked to plug every gap with a model.

It’s not a new phenomenon – witness the unlikely success of Porsche and its Cayenne or the more recent launch of the Aston Martin’s Cygnet (created to help it reach fleet emission standards) looking like a massively overspec’ed Smart car. In fact, even niche-dweller Smart – Daimler Group’s answer to a particular market – has started looking elsewhere, with the launch of its electric ebike, which goes  on sale early next year with a hefty price tag expected to be in the region of  £2,500.

Confusion or diffusion raged on in Frankfurt, as the Mini went super meaty, Landrover went playful sporty and Citroën launched an ‘executive’ van that looks very much like a large silver piggy bank.

Hybrids and electric vehicles (EVs) of course are still to the fore, in particular the Ampera (good name!) from Opel on sale early next year, an electric Ford Focus due to hit the showrooms in 2013, and the already available Nissan Leaf.

At least EVs and hybrids are moving away from the ‘green = ugly’ model championed by the Toyota Prius. BMW in particular launched two machines, the i3 and  i8 Concepts (out in 2013); the latter styled with all the sporting panache BMW can muster, right down to the vertically opening doors – and it’s fast too, 0-62mph in less than five seconds.

These are both interesting and confusing times in the car, sorry – mobility industry. Audi exemplifies this well. The UFI summits are of a high quality, addressing key issues of our time; the concept car Audi launched had little to offer, on the other hand. We’re going to have to wait until at least next year, and probably very much longer, before a bold, one-size-fits-all, iPhone-like answer to mobility makes its debut.

Donald Judd, American artist, art critic, architect and compulsive consumer of space, loved cacti. Everytime he and his family moved apartment, the cactus would move with him. And as his friend Jamie Dearing recalled, while Judd rented a space on 19th Street, New York, Judd was nurturing a sprawling cactus. Then space got tight so he moved the cactus to another floor. When, again, he needed more space, the cactus was lugged with Dearing’s dutiful help to the roof where, Judd announced: ‘I’ve bought a building.’ Rather than excitement, Dearing thought only of the cactus and felt weary. And so one small anecdote goes about Judd, – one of many tales that didn’t make the cut in Marfa Voices, a 25-minute film that documents some of the people who were a part of Judd’s life and work in the build up to and during his residence in the small West Texas town of Marfa. Those that did make it in, however, construct a humourous and revelatory story about the man and his visionary approach to displaying art.

Directed by his daughter Rainer Judd with local Marfa radio broadcaster and documentary film-maker Karen Bernstein, the film is part of a larger oral history project by the Judd Foundation. Set up in 1996 by Rainer and her brother Flavin Judd to take care of their father’s indebted estate after he died in 1994, the Foundation is also overseeing the careful, extensive renovation of Judd’s building at 101 Spring Street with New York-based Architecture Research Office (ARO). The voices project, though, is vicarious, a way of communicating Judd through the people who made him who he was and whom he had a hand in changing as well. Consisting of interviews with Marfa locals who knew Judd both professionally and personally – often both – it also includes interviews with Judd’s contemporaries and New York art-world friends, which helps to place his work in context. After all Judd was most prolific at a time of great upheaval and change in the city and the art world. The Sixties and Seventies also produced artists including Dan Flavin who was experimenting with light in space and Sol LeWitt whose carefully executed geometric wall painting was part of the new radical aesthetic of the time. But it is not these big names who tell Judd’s story, which is why Marfa Voices is a such a disarmingly honest and intimate portrayal.

In 1977, Judd moved his studio and his children from their Spring Street residence in New York down to the remote West Texas town and over the course of the next 20-odd years until his death, Judd would accumulate and curate 15 buildings in Marfa. Driven by his love for architecture and art he developed a new museum/gallery typology that crystalised his belief in permanent installation. Judd would reconstruct and preserve buildings that held architectural interest for him, one of which included a bank on the main street of the town. Indeed, Judd’s architectural work took centre stage when he moved south. His nostalgia for traditional city growth around a central spine, was the driver behind Judd’s purchase of four buildings along Marfa’s waning main street in the Eighties. In the bank, Judd stripped back the interior to reveal a mural by the original architect, which became essential to the final effect. As Lawrence Weiner, American typographer and a contemporary said, ‘Judd gave dignity to things.’

Indeed, Judd considered art as an integral part of its setting, the architectural and natural environment. Although seemingly incongruous with his artwork, which featured new materials in pure geometric forms – often labelled minimalist – his preservation efforts were not solely habitual, however and had to do with his respect for history and embodied quality in materials. The Chinati Foundation, another of Judd’s legacies, was set up to carry on this appreciation for value-laden objects and spaces in Marfa. Its collection includes works by Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, John Wesley and Roni Horn.

The large archive of interviews used in Marfa Voices was initially conceived as primary source material for academic or artistic research. The final edit, however, is a result of bloody-mindedness by Judd who felt impelled by the personal and familial aspect of the project. For this reason, and due to cost and time constraints, the film, a straight talking heads documentary compiled in under a week, is raw, unrefined and focuses on Judd’s move to Marfa, more than the context of the time. The film is so skilfully edited that the impact is emotive, evoking a spirited man and visionary artist.

In 2006, Marfa Voices was shown at the annual open house event in Marfa – organised by the Chinati Foundation – and was so well received that the foundation decided to expand the film project. In this way, Marfa, as it is today, is a part of Judd and its continuing existence as a rich and varied town is part of Judd’s own legacy. As Willie Hernandez, a Marfa resident and family friend says at the close of the film: ‘It’s the people who’ve gone who have made Marfa what it is… it’s our kids who are going to feel the dreams that our parents left.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.’

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 Spontaneous City follows an intimidatingly impressive pedigree of Dutch masterplanning. Perhaps because of the need to design longterm solutions for a flood-prone and high-density country, planning seems to run in the blood among architects in the Netherlands. The most prominent figure in recent years is, of course, Rem Koolhaas who set up his Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975 and is revered for pioneering the technique of condensing city visions into book/magazine hybrids. Publications like Mutations and Content, joined by MVRDV’s KM3 and FARMAX along the way, are ambitious and propositional but are also, notably, filled with rigorous analysis and statistics. They have proved incredibly influential on the architect’s role in urban planning and also on architectural publishing.

One urban planner who has clearly been influenced by this ancestry is Gert Urhahn, who, in 1991, set up Urhahn Urban Design (UUD) – the team behind the Spontaneous City. Intriguingly, though, this group seems determined to emphasise the novelty, rather than the continuity, of its position: within the first chapter, Amsterdam-based UUD holds the usually invincible Koolhaas to account for his masterplan of Binckhorst, an industrial area of The Hague. UUD observed that OMA had committed far too little research on the value of what already existed with its masterplan consisting of ‘95% ambition and 5% actual plan’.

To counter, UUD suggests a more uncertain process, driven by bottom-up initiatives where there is no single end goal. This approach places greater importance on the interim period of transformation, when further opportunities for intervention are presented. The Binckhorst project is used to illustrate a wider point: with the sudden disappearance of major financing, the days of the city-scale masterplan are over. The authors hope that this book can be a manual for reinventing the city, but it is also a heartfelt call for urban designers and architects to reinvent themselves. We must accustom ourselves to the idea of the city as unfinished: ‘it always has surprises in store’, says Urhahn.

A short and snappy introduction leaps straight into a manifesto for this new approach. The Spontaneous City is evocatively introduced as a market place where supply and demand sculpt urban form, and the manifesto is laid out in four pragmatic principles: zoom-in, supervise open developments, create collective ideals, and be user-oriented. Typical of Dutch visions, there is no shying away from the presence of a commercial imperative (often the persona non grata in other countries). There is a clear intent that this proposal should thread itself into real developments and not remain locked in theory.

The Spontaneous City is by no means an entirely new idea. The authors acknowledge this and set their ideas in a context that has been brewing for some time, even if it has generally been an exception to the rule. The book follows its stark, no-frills manifesto with an illustration: it is a genealogical grid presenting 100 years of the Spontaneous City – kicking off with Patrick Geddes, the ‘godfather of urban planning’.

The main bulk of the book comes in seven chapters that present the fundamental characteristics of a Spontaneous City and its users: entrepreneurial, inventive, flexible, open, independent, multifaceted and dynamic. The book is a collaboration with Partizan Publik, a ‘design and action’ collective based in Amsterdam, but which is also part of a network stretching to Beirut, Detroit, Moscow and Tbilisi. Indeed, a pluralist approach runs through the book; architects, urban designers and planners are allowed a platform, as are developers and investors. Consequently the book’s quick pace never sinks into a rant.

Despite the economic pragmatism, this is not a sad reflection upon an age of thriftiness and dried-up opportunities. The book successfully conveys the excitement of a Spontaneous City through a rich mix of essays, interviews, cartoons, and exploded diagrams. Together, they paint a picture of unpredictable events becoming the framework for a new system of planning. It highlights the inspiring fact that it is now individuals and small businesses that have the chance to instigate projects and actually see them realised.

Contributors Joop de Boer and Jeroen Beekmans run the online magazine Pop-Up City, which seeks out temporary projects of all shapes and sizes from across the globe with an analytical eye (London’s own Cineroleum featured in it last year). They point out: ‘It is not about the spontaneity of the intervention, but about the spontaneous social interaction it brings out.’ All of a sudden, the whole Spontaneous City becomes greater than the sum of its small-scale parts.

The Spontaneous City, Urhahn Urban Design, BIS Publishers, £28

What would space travel look like if the Russian Mir space station had been bought by rogue entrepreneurs and kept in orbit for private enterprises to use? No doubt it would have accelerated today’s feverish race to develop space tourism and been a catalyst for other commercial enterprises. It would have also affected the Soviet-American relationship, most likely for the worse. Director Michael Potter’s debut documentary, Orphans of Apollo, suggests all of the above was a real prospect not long ago, when in 1999 a group of space enthusiasts and businessmen tried to buy the Mir.

The film features interviews with the main protagonists of the project – a group of entrepreneurs, some of whom refer to themselves as ‘anarcho-capitalists’ – as well as NASA and former Mir administration, other space experts and enthusiasts. It traces the events leading up to and after the failed attempt to take part ownership of the Mir space station to prevent its impending decommission. The group, made up of members from an alternative organisation The Space Frontier Foundation was driven by disenchantment at America’s post-Apollo efforts to re-launch man into space and build on the moon. When the Nixon administration pulled the funds from the space programme, an underworld of self-initiated and privately-funded space organisations rallied around and set out to continue space exploration, inspired by the initial promise of 1969’s successful moon landing. ‘As Apollo’s children, we were now Apollo’s orphans, we’d been left out in the cold,’ says Rick Tumlinson, space activist and entrepreneur.

The members of the Space Frontier Foundation enlisted wealthy telecommunications businessman Walt Anderson, who believed that space should be the domain of the private sector. Without needing much persuasion Anderson put $7m behind the plan to part-privatise Mir. At the time, the USA was putting pressure on the economically crippled Russia to honour its agreement to help build the International Space Station. That entailed Russia destroying Mir, despite the fact that the newest parts of its modular structure (core parts had been put in space in 1986) were only a few years old.

The team approached Russian agency RSC Inergia, which had been responsible for running Mir, as well as for launching Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, in 1957 and making Yuri Gagarin the first man in space, in 1961 (the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, followed in 1963). It set forth a business plan to its director Yuri Semenov that tapped into one of Russia’s proudest successes – the country’s frequent superiority over the Americans in the Space Race. ‘The Mir represented all achievements of our country’s modern science and technology as well as international ones,’ says Semenov. The provocative nature of the Mir rescue proposal is a measure of ‘wild west’ American culture at that time.

The film allows little room to misinterpret its implicit anti-American and anti-establishment overtones. To take space out of the hands of a government agency ‘and give it to real people for a real profit’, as author and Rotary Rocket investor Tom Clancy says, smacks of a revolution in the way space is seen. The film expounds the notion that America, in its role as the premier capitalist on Earth, is playing at being the socialists of space. Meanwhile, the former Soviets of communist Russia have embraced capitalism in all its forms when it comes to space.

The lack of a narrative voice in the film – to give a contextual setting to what’s going on – is problematic and the result is that interesting questions are raised but left unanswered. For example, why is the American government so concerned  that everything put into space is a potential weapon? The film’s heavy focus on Anderson as a character – despite his absence from the interviews – serves to further affect a conspiratorial tone when we discover right at the end that he is appealing charges of fraud from his American prison cell.

Space exploration is exciting because it attracts Utopian ideals and rewards pioneering spirit – albeit in the long run. Had the orphans of the Apollo space programme been successful, it would have signalled the beginning of a democratic space age. A decade later, it’s a new generation that has taken up the gauntlet. Robert Bigelow’s efforts to use inflatable structures as a space station (see page 22) and others’ ongoing work to develop a space elevator are ideas that stem from a movement lead by dreamers whose ventures were apparent failures. Indeed the film’s appeal is the ambition of its main characters. As Dr Peter Diamandis, X-Prize founder says, ‘the day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea’.

Demarcations of this kind denote the abiding military relationship between the US and UK

Patrick Keiller is a British film-maker, architect, teacher and installation artist. Trained as an architect at the Bartlett, Keiller went on to the Royal College of Arts in 1979, where he started to experiment with film. Since then it has become his medium of choice and with it he scrutinizes the issues surrounding ideas of dwelling. He began with a series of short films, each no more than 20 minutes long, and used fictional narratives to explore London suburbs and the north of England. 

In 1994, his first feature film, London, recorded a year in the life of the city and its prophesied moment of decline, seen through the eyes of Robinson and described by an unseen narrator. Robinson in Space (1997) continued the job of chronicling malaise. Charged with uncovering ‘the problem of England’, Robinson and the narrator take a seven-trip incursion to examine the state of the country. 

In 2000, Keiller took up the problem of British housing in an 80-minute film-essay entitled The Dilapidated Dwelling. There are more traditional documentary elements here such as interviews with architect Cedric Price, feminist geographer Doreen Massey and the inclusion of archive footage.  

This paved the way for Robinson in Ruins (2010). It is just one of the outcomes of a three-year research project undertaken by Keiller as a research fellow at the Royal College of Art with a group of academics from other institutions – including Massey – examining the notion of  ‘dwelling’ itself. The film is a record of a round trip in southern England, mostly in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. 

At the heart of this travelogue, distinctions are drawn between the laissez-faire (and later capitalist) mobility of resources and labour, and a seemingly outmoded but missed sense of belonging and rootedness in the agricultural landscape.  

There is a distinct style that defines Keiller’s work. He scrapes his canvas down to the bare essentials: since The Dilapidated Dwelling, he has not used any musical score and for Robinson in Ruins, narrator Vanessa Redgrave keeps her voice entirely flat and unemotional. The films are a collection of moving images, captured with a static camera, complemented by scholarly and wry scripts.  

In Robinson in Ruins, locations might be a disused quarry or a Lidl store. Despite the seeming banality of his subjects, Keiller nevertheless understands the need to engage his audience through beautiful cinematography. 

Amid the flow of scenes and narration are longer takes of a and scape. A common visual motif is  flowers swaying to the rhythm of the wind. In every frame, there is a lyrical beauty: in one scene the camera gazes at a tractor ploughing over a field of wheat. It is a partly cloudy day and the sunlight pours through at intervals so that the wheat appears in one moment a dull beige and in another a lustrous gold. 

This effect was not created artificially; Keiller shows that, to capture such an enchanting sequence of images, you simply have to keep looking long enough. He plays to the medium’s strength by exercising its most tyrannical characteristic: film forces the viewer to experience the work at a pace set by its creator.  

Keiller refuses to employ a straightforward pedagogy, opting instead for a surrealist assimilation of borrowed quotes and found images to make associations between little known historical events and academic Marxist theories. However, this also means that his work can appear abstruse and divorced from any strong polemical impact. For example, when the narrator recounts the banking crisis against the backdrop of a spider knitting its web, the symbolism is not without paradox. The fabrication of the silvery mesh, in its visual intricacy and apparent grace, is so bewitching to watch that its purpose for entrapment loses its menace.  

Equally some of Robinson’s arguments are disputable if not downright vague – for example his advocacy for an architecture inspired by flowers and natural processes. This absurdly mirrors the premise – or at least the rhetoric – of certain strands of contemporary high-tech architecture that couldn’t be further estranged from Robinson’s aesthetics. 

Keiller’s approach of utilizing aesthetics as political and social motivator may be polemically deficient, but it is defiantly powerful in leaving a lasting impression: the laconic beauty of the film is quite simply unforgettable. 

A dual format DVD and Blu-ray edition of Robinson in Ruins will be issued by the BFI in June.

Showing in cinemas across the UK during January and February
www.bfi.org.uk

The severe climate of the Arctic poses one of the most demanding challenges for architects, be it in designing more permanent dwellings for the native inhabitants or the more temporary structures for the scientists and researchers who work there. The establishment of Western-style townships in the circumpolar regions by ‘southerners’ (as everyone else in the world inevitably is to the Arctic) disregarded the nomadic lifestyle of the native inhabitants, who have their own tradition of building strategies and an aesthetic deeply tied to their spiritual beliefs. As more attention turns towards the untapped resources of the North, there remain today, acute misconceptions about the way of life suitable to its environs.

The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) was set up as a non-profit cultural organisation to ‘direct attention to the global, cultural, and ecological significance of the polar regions’. One of its main objectives is the development of a model for a mobile habitat and communication network for use in the circumpolar regions. The inquiry centres on Nunavut, which covers most of the Canadian Arctic region and is one of the northernmost permanently inhabited area in the world, with a principally Inuit population.

Arctic Perspective Cahier No.1: Architecture is the first of API’s four planned publications. Focusing on architecture, it is divided into three parts: the first is a documentation of API’s open competition for a ‘mobile media-centric habitation and work unit’. The second part comprises essays describing the traditional shelters of the indigenous people; the investigation into mobile structures by ‘southern’ architects, with particular emphasis on the works and influence of Buckminster Fuller; and a reassessment of the architectural works of the architect Ralph Erskine.

The third part of the book accounts two journeys into the Arctic: the first a detailed list of the inventory and instructions for a voyage to discover the possible existence of a north-west passage undertaken in 1818 by the British explorer John Ross. The second is a day-to-day report by members of the API on their expedition in 2009.

The layout of Cahier No.1 is puzzling and readers should start with Part 2 and leave Part 1 until last. In this way one is provided with the general background of the Arctic’s culture and environment, and the history of the development of mobile architecture. The inclusion of the 1818 voyage, while providing a historical backdrop to API’s latterday journey is superfluous to the publication. But these are minor quibbles, as the essays and API’s fieldwork journal are written to be informative without being abstruse and are highly enjoyable. More detailed analyses of the Arctic’s geopolitics and ideologies and the technological perspective on how to build in this hostile condition is promised in future volumes.

What this book promotes is the argument for an informed, fair and respectful engagement with the Arctic environment, its people and their cultures. Without denying the advantages of modern technologies, API’s approach tends towards that of observer and imitator rather than the patronising colonialist attitudes of old. This is demonstrated when the API crew realise the superiority of traditional tents to their own dome ones: ‘Theirs are roomy, dry, and warm canvas, compared to our nylon domes that have little more than rooms to sleep […] always amazed at how fast the large traditional tents go up in comparison to our dome tents.’

The most pointed illustration of a naïve attitude towards the implication of colonisation comes in the essay by Jérémie Michael McGowan on the Swedish architect Ralph Erskine.

Described as the exemplary architect of modern Arctic indigenous buildings, he was touted by the architectural establishment for the humanitarian concern of his work, particularly through Architectural Design’s uncritical profile of 1977. Erskine was taken at his own words, or rather, his own drawings. The hand-drawn image for the Resolute Bay project in Nunavut shows a Utopian community housed in a cluster of brightly coloured boxes on stilts, enclosed within a long coiling building that acts as a perimeter wall, shielding against the northern winds and opened on the southern side to the sun. Although it cemented Erskine’s reputation, it was never built. But what McGowan finds problematic is the social and political context within which Erskine’s design was situated.

Erskine’s Canadian Arctic project – unwittingly or otherwise – colluded with the exploitative programme of forced integration and relocation of the indigenous population that had been carried out by the government since the 1930s.­

The rhetoric Erskine employed in the 1960s and 1970s in promoting the northern circumpolar region as
an area replete in natural resources and ripe for inhabitation bears an uncanny similarity to the way we talk about the moon and Mars today. Similarly, the challenge to configure a form of shelter that could sustain human life in these environments should not blind us to the need for a careful study and analysis of their existing natural systems and the implications that our contact with them may engender. The conquest of the Arctic and its consequences may be a lesson worth revisiting even if these extraterrestrial bodies are without sentient life forms as we would define it.

Arctic Perspective Cahier No.1: Architecture, Andreas Müller (editor), Hatje Cantz, £17.99

Junya Watanabe’s AW collection is found within ‘Tradition and Innovation’

Japanese fashion is always so richly of its time, so fiercely imaginative and original that even if you only wear it once, it’s an investment never to be regretted. After seeing Issey Miyake’s exhibition Making Things at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 1998, I craved a piece of APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) – wearing it felt like being part of an experiment to reinvent the way we dress, and the way things are made. But if they are constantly innovating, Japanese fashion designers also seem to follow their own rules, a self-determined logic, refreshingly oblivious to the dictat of trend, with its rules about colour, shape and hemlines. This is reflected in the Barbican’s show. Garments created decades apart are being exhibited alongside each other without the passage of time being at all apparent.  

Future Beauty has been much anticipated. With garments from the Kyoto Costume Institute, and an exhibition design by the inventive Tokyo-based architect Sou Fujimoto, it could only be a treat in the making. The show is broken into two main approaches, following the double-level structure of the Barbican Art Gallery.  

Upon entering, the route follows a path through different themes while upstairs, the eight alcoves profile seven leading designers plus the ‘next generation’. A sense of time is entirely absent, apart from as an identifier in captions, as if the curators consciously rejected the idea that collections might have been generated in response to events in the outside world, or even in the world of fashion.  

The rejection of chronology is refreshing in the context of fashion, which is so dominated by seasons, but also frustrating.  

In the section devoted to Issey Miyake, we see the designer’s latest incredible experiments in flat geometric shapes that transform into remarkable garments (the 132 5 project) – the first time this long awaited collection has been unveiled in the UK. The curators give this new work equal weight to ‘old’ collections by Rei Kawakubo and the other leading designers. Yet I can’t help feeling disappointed at the lack of recognition for ‘the new’ which, like it or not, is still a key driver in fashion.  

Of course, it is thrilling to see many of the garments in the flesh, having seen them in magazines over the years. Commes des Garcons’ wedding skirt made from kraft paper seems as fresh as when it appeared in i-D magazine in 2007. The exhibition’s brief descriptive captions often refer to the inventive use of unconventional materials, for example Junya Watanabe’s garments made from industrial and functional materials such as interlining. It’s enjoyable to see less familiar pieces, such as Kosuke Tsumura’s Final Home (1994), a white net coat stuffed with scrunched newspaper.  

The themes, however, are inconsistent (veering from such literary reference as ‘In Praise of Shadows’ to blunt description) and left me wanting more. The most successful is ‘Flatness’, which features the extraordinary photographs of Rei Kawakubo’s work taken by Naoya Hatakeyama in 2009. Laying out garments in the series, Hatakeyama draws out the geometric structure in each: when laid flat on the floor the clothes have the character of geometric shapes and only when wrapped around the human body do they take on dynamic sculptural forms. These photographs are a highlight of the exhibition, although they suggest an alternative theme, which is barely explored – that of process. Most Japanese fashion explores process of some sort, whether in the overt form of Issey Miyake’s APOC or with Yohji Yamamoto’s subverted tailoring. Yet the exhibition steers away from the technical, drawing a veil over the making, experimenting and research that lies behind the work.  

This is described as a comprehensive survey show, and there is no doubt that the Kyoto Costume Institute has a remarkable collection. However it is primarily a show for existing fans of Japanese fashion, and barely scratches the surface of the careers of Japan’s leading designers, while providing the briefest glimpse into important influences such as street style in the section dubbed ‘Cool Japan’.  

The ‘flatness’ of Issey Miyake’s APOC King and Queen collection

Many of the themes are further explored in the exhibition’s fantastic events programme, and the catalogue published by Merrell contains much more detail as well as a series of excellent essays.On the upper level of the gallery, alcoves devoted to the key designers are a chance to look at each in greater depth, yet the size of each space cannot possibly do them justice.  

The inclusion of such less well known designers as Hokuto Katsui and Yao Nagi of Mintdesigns, is interesting but it serves to reinforce how Japanese fashion continues to be dominated by a small group.  

Next month’s exhibition on Yohji Yamamoto (at the V&A from March), it will be a good follow up to Future Beauty. And for diehard fans of Japanese fashion, there’s always the January sale at Dover Street Market.

15 October – 6 February
Barbican Art Gallery

A section through the scarred Vermont landscape in the Rock of Ages #13

Journeys, the latest exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), is a modern-day matryoshka doll. It is a research project, a show, a book and an ongoing online exhibition. And it is a wonderful process of unravelling.

As the title explains, the exhibition is about the movement of people, ideas, buildings and fruit, and how this has made an impact on our environment. Though the notion of borders and national identity is immensely topical, it is a political minefield. However, this show approaches the subject from a different perspective. Instead of measuring the merits of migration, it denotes its effects and its drivers. Though it touches on immigration, the exhibition and accompanying book are not limited to human migration, nor are they tethered to a discussion about open borders and globalisation. Rather, through the use of storytelling they offer a comprehensive and alternative way into the conversation about the effects of movement.

Each story is divided into themes in the exhibition and illustrates a different aspect of change through different agencies. In the case of the higgledy-piggledy residential communities of Newfoundland, Canada, it was government-enforced relocation that saw fishing communities, previously isolated along the coastline, moved into areas that could be serviced by an existing infrastructure. Residents had to drag their houses – literally – across land and sea to new villages. The epic journey was made possible only because of the residents’ foundation-less houses, designed to be moved according to fishing patterns.

The exhibition’s wide-reaching spectrum also takes in the effect of changes that occurred without an external human agency. The buoyant husk of a coconut has allowed it to travel below the commercial radar to re-seed unregulated areas and has, because of currents and weather patterns, changed the economy, image and appeal of its host shores. Indeed, one aim of the show is to highlight the fallibility of human agencies. What might have been intended by one action can have myriad unforeseen results.

Under the theme Interpretation, for example, OMA’s 1986 proposal for the Bijlmermeer estate in Amsterdam highlights the convergence of different ideologies and aspirations. Siegfried Nassuth’s new addition to the city was envisioned as an application of modernist principles of air, traffic separation and equal opportunities for its residents. The ideals did not hold up in the face of poorly managed services: residents were isolated and the buildings neglected. Following the influx of Surinamese immigrants to the Netherlands in 1975, the vacancies in the Bijlmermeer offered long-term housing for them and other minority groups. Though communities interpreted and appropriated the modern spaces to their own means, the lack of facilities and increase in poverty and crime made Bijlmermeer an image of urban planning defeat. OMA’s plan was never carried out, though it remains one of many positive responses by designers to a problem common to modernist, social housing around the world.

Journeys through time in Ireland with 'Two houses, one traditional, one modern'

By analysing the architectural issues raised by increased global mobility, the curator Giovanna Borasi offers a new lens through which to understand change. It is one that shows cause and effect as being far from linear.

Along with the exchange of ideas and experience, it is often economy that affects and is effected by movement. In the 1950s Japanese farmers who emigrated to Bolivia were unsuccessful in employing traditional Bolivian farming techniques. So they experimented with methods and crops alien to South America and those farmlands are now the centre of agrarian commerce for the country. In Liberia it was social status that created a new landscape. When freed slaves in the American south settled in Liberia, they took with them the image of prosperity and built houses in the style of their previous owners. In America, raised verandas and pitched roofs were considered fit only for the wealthy, so in Liberia the style became a ladder for social mobility.

While other themes use a variety of material to tell the story, Max Belcher’s beautiful black and white photographs mirroring the similarities between the two continents is powerful. In stark contrast are the huge colour photos by Edward Burtynsky of the Barre quarries, which envelop a huge area of Vermont, USA. The population’s skills – imported from turn of the 20th-century Italy – and the density of expertise determined the growth of this small town as a national centre of memorial sculpture.

Designed with Brooklyn-based artist Martin Beck, the show draws on commonalities and tensions between themes using contrasting and complementary media and colour coding. The levels of complexity of such a wide topic as migration have been carefully mapped and the result is comprehensive and undictatorial.

Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal – until March 13th

Rubén Gallo’s essay on Tlatelolco marks the lifespan of a doomed 1960s housing complex in Mexico City. Educated in Paris, architect Mario Pani envisioned Corbusian modernism for one million sq m of new housing. The architect even designed a ‘modernist pyramid’ (a traditional symbol of human sacrifice) to loom over Aztec remains found on site. The adjacent Plaza of the Three Cultures became the scene of tragedy in 1968, when the army massacred 300 students. Further catastrophe came when the powerful 1985 earthquake caused high-rise blocks to collapse. Of Mexico’s 9000 casualties that day, thousands came from Tlatelolco. Subsequent investigations revealed a web of corruption in the construction process. Utopic visions of a Mexican identity disintegrated into a real life dystopia with ruinous pieces of architecture standing monument to megalomaniac design and corruption.

Dystopic visions are perhaps most familiar from the cinema, in such films as Blade Runner and Sin City, but this book looks towards the ‘larger apparatus of perception in the modern city’: pieces of architecture and printed press, among others. The rise of the printed press is inseparable from the rise of technology and capitalism, and its influence has forged a dependence on the image in modern society.

In his essay, Topographies of Distress, David R. Ambaras concentrates on 1930s Tokyo to explore the urban representation that arose with modern journalism. Ambaras refers to the media coverage of a spate of infant deaths in the deprived area of Iwanosaka, which became the setting for the dystopic image of slum life – a reflection of the anxieties of Japan’s bourgeois class who understood poverty only through images. The increase in literacy and commuting by train fuelled the rise of newspapers and the thirst for sensationalism.

The dystopic image often acts as a warning of the dark future that awaits if we continue living the way we do. Mike Davis’ seminal Planet of Slums (2006) argues precisely this. It also exists as a representation of the existing city through a screen
of anxiety. Based on perception, this infers that there are many different images of the same city existing in parallel rather than one simple view, as before; echoing the belief of French philosopher Michel Foucault, that we are living in an ‘epoch of simultaneity’. Urban dystopia has entered modern thought at a time when globalisation signals the loss of both local culture and moral frameworks.

The belief that dystopia is the opposite of utopia is challenged by the utopic visions of 20th century regimes. In discussing the emergence of cinematic criticism of the fast transition to an urban lifestyle in China, Li Zhang poses the question: Post-socialist Urban Dystopia? Independent Chinese filmmakers such as the Sixth Generation focus on the ‘insignificant’ people caught up in the forced relocation of communities into cities. ‘The visible hand of the state has been replaced by the invisible hand of the market’ says Zhang, allowing crime and violence to prosper. Setting the tone for a dystopic narrative, the ‘other Chinese city’ plays the role of protagonist in films that depict the bleakness of everyday lives. These films have catalysed democratic discussion among their audiences.

The territory for new discussion lies in the interstitial regions of the chapters; hence this is not necessarily a book to be read in order. Prakash permits a nod to the more common themes – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis earns itself an essay, for example. However, the more captivating essays are the less conventional. A potent argument emerges that the history of urban dystopia is entangled with images projected by those most anxious about the future. Ironically, these perceptions usually belong to the part of society that is comfortable and in control – and not the real-life inhabitants of the dystopic city. It is a shame that this book is presumed to target a specific academic audience; Noir Urbanisms deserves to be widely read and debated. In describing why inequalities or disasters have occurred, this becomes a lesson for the architects and urban designers master-planning cities of the future.

Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, Gyan Prakash (editor), Princeton University Press, £20.95

The initial model of a First World War battlefield is prepared for casting

Once Upon a Wartime brings five 20th-century children’s stories about the experience of war to life in a forthcoming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. The exhibition, designed by Pippa Nissen Studio, uses the books: War Horse; Carrie’s War; The Machine Gunners; The Silver Sword and Little Soldier to provide an insight into the reality behind the fiction. Nissen’s role has been to create a unified approach that brings the fictional stories into the detailed and realistic settings required by the museum’s educative mission. ‘Working with the experts from the Imperial War Museum, we had to find a balance between engaging, entertaining and educating children without scaring them,’ she says.

The architects rented a warehouse space in East London for the project and – with the help of a team of architecture students from Kingston University and the Bartlett – produced models of three stories in four months. Working with the experts from the museum and using its massive archives, Nissen and her team determined the landscapes, constructions and materials needed for each story. The models were made in cardboard, clay and plaster before being cast in silicone rubber. The silicone was then used as a negative to cast the final model in plaster. ‘We wanted to avoid making them too dolls housey and quaint,’ says Nissen. ‘If they were cast and monochrome, the children’s imagination could do the rest – making them technicolour.’ The resultant models are simple yet detailed, and disarmingly beautiful.

Nissen’s original sketch for the War Horse room explores possibilities for the exhibition

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo, published in 1982, looks at the horrors of the First World War through the eyes of the horse. A play of the book has wowed audiences at the National Theatre for the last three years and a Steven Spielberg-directed movie of it is due in cinemas later this year.

Elements of a Warsaw townhouse are laid out before being assembled for the Silver Sword model

The model used here is a recreation of World War One trenches. It was researched from the construction manuals in the museum archive. The German trenches are wider than the Allies, and situated on higher ground. The model, divided into six parts, slopes gently to the narrow, plank-clad Allied trenches across a bombed out no-mans-land. The backdrop to this will be video imagery of actual WWI battlefields and specially commissioned photographs of mud. The playfulness and craft of the models belie the academic rigour of realising them.

To create unique atmospheres in each room, maquettes that explored textures were used to test ideas

For The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier’s 1956 book, Nissen used the devastation of Warsaw to provide context for the model. It cuts a section through the shell of a house and street to reveal the warren of spaces the characters occupied. Dust and debris scatters the model, makeshift furniture sits in the basement, the bricks on the walls are imperfect and cracked.

The process of the War Horse model. The original cardboard model, the plaster negative and the final cast model

In providing this hyperreal image of the set for the book the young audience can decipher the landscape on a scale they are familiar with. ‘For all the models we had to focus on the detail at a tiny scale,’ says Joel Cady who ran the project with Nissen. ‘Children will be aware of that and it will speak to them.’

The office relocated to the RARA workshop in Clapton, east London, to create the models. The process was too big and messy to complete in the Nissen Studio

The Machine Gunners model is the most theatrical of the three. The 1975 Robert Westall novel is set in North Wales, so Nissen instructed museum photographers to take photographs of the trees and landscapes described in the book. This is then abstracted into laser-cut panels that build up in three layers. The bunker around which the narrative is set appears in 3D against the rest of the 2D landscape.

The completed Silver Sword model depicts a section through a street during WWII

The room designed for Carrie’s War, the 1973 tale of child evacuees by Nina Bawden, will be framed by a blank proscenium arch through which you enter a kitchen. This careful balance of theatrics with the uncanny reflects the dialogue between the reality of history and the fictional narrative. The kitchen will be stocked with rations and contains such artefacts as ration books. The set helps prove the context of the fiction as fact. It’s educational, but entertaining as well.

Meticulous attention is paid to detail to ensure that every aspect of the model will engage the imagination of children and adults alike

The museum had experts for everything,’ says Nissen. ‘Every detail down to the colours in the wallpaper is authentic.’ The design of the exhibition displays a firm belief in the strength of children’s imagination. The spatial arrangement of the rooms is irregular, resulting in a sense of dynamism and adventure. ‘The spaces were conceived as immersive,’ says Nissen. ‘Sometimes they reveal the history behind the story and sometimes they are more emotional to capture the imagination and create a metaphor for part of the story.’

The model of the Warsaw streetscape was researched using films and photography to find a context that lent itself to the narrative of The Silver Sword

The ambition of delivering an idea of a horrific, incomprehensible situation to children is not to be underestimated. The combination of painstaking research, meticulous design and sheer hard work is likely to ensure that this exhibition will be engaging, understandable and enjoyable, rather than patronising or overly academic.

Once Upon A Wartime: Classic War Stories for Children, Imperial War Museum, London. 11th February to 30th October

The plaid pattern covering BedCrate imitates that found on pyjamas

This project, The Crate Series, first planted itself in the consciousness of Studio Makkink & Bey in India. Architect Rianne Makkink witnessed the humble crate defining all measure of everyday environments for inhabitants of the cramped cities, and wondered how this might be tested in her own familiar surroundings. Upon returning to the Netherlands, Makkink, along with product designer Jurgen Bey, began an exploration into furniture units that could generate human scale as well as personal autonomy. ‘We have created a landscape for living and working,’ Bey states proudly. The exhibition resembles a Hejduk-esque theatre set and includes different blends of antique furniture and shipping crates, which reinvent the functional objects of our domestic lives.

The works appear deceptively raw at first glance. Soft materials wrap around the hard wood on only those introspective surfaces that are touched. BedCrate encloses a raised sleeping area, with the private interior covered in fur and leather; the material extends to a square on the floor just at the point where the rousing resident steps out of bed.

A Rotterdam warehouse played host to Studio Makkink & Bey in the creation of the Crate Series. A time constraint of two months (before the lease ran out) highlighted the necessity to pack away the furniture in containers, ready to decant elsewhere. ClockCrate is the most obvious depiction of the temporal balance between work and leisure. A 19^th-century clock chimes as a work apron hangs on a hook to the left and pyjamas to the right, marking the abrupt transition from labour to relaxation.

The importance of temporary combinations that change according to the situation led the team to devise multi-functioning objects. VacuumCleanerCrate, with its ornate tea set, acts as a place for refreshment but the inclusion of a vacuum cleaner, to clean up the crumbs, flips the piece into a work tool. Paradoxically, this Crate solves a problem that it created in the first place – revealing it as a unit of research rather than one of furniture. Through latching onto the mechanisms of existing furniture and appliances, the designers have entered the project as much into a discourse on Duchamp’s readymades as one on sustainable design.

VacuumCleanerCrate wears a colourful skin of thread

Makkink confesses to being frustrated by the politics of architecture, particularly at an urban scale, owing to the constraints of any commission. She remembers the freedom of product design upon first collaborating with Bey in 2002, transferring her skills and knowledge as architect to the most intimate of spaces.

Each piece in the Crate Series is thoughtful and imaginative, and sits happily in the gallery as products of an engaging process. The titles brand the units as functional objects, not pieces of art, as if preparing them for mass-production, with the reinterpretation of transport crates challenging the greedy consumption of consumerism. It’s an exhibition that demonstrates furniture design as firmly within the realm of architecture. The Crates are instinctively spatial: they self-consciously contain functions within particular spaces, but, equally, experiment with the blurring of boundaries between activities. Studio Makkink & Bey has crafted miniature pieces of architecture, which playfully toy with how our household objects might define and deconstruct the balance between work and play.

The Crate Series, Spring Projects, London NW5 – until January 14th

Vincent Connare’s invention of Comic Sans typeface has led to a world of digital bunny abuse – for which Connare has apologised, but only in Comic Sans

Simon Garfield isn’t a designer. Or an architect or a visual artist or a typesetter. What he is, is a journalist and author of many excellent books on esoteric subjects. Oh, I lied about him not being a typersetter – he is, but only on an amateur basis. And that’s the setting-off point for Just My Type, his humorous book on fonts: everyone can be a passionate amateur now.

Opening with a light-hearted chapter on Comic Sans, he sets the tone for the rest of the book: amusing and informative. Most graphic designers hate Comic Sans. It was designed by Vincent Connare in 1994 for Microsoft and was included as a supplementary typeface in Windows 95. It was an instant smash hit. But not with designers. To make the point, Garfield points you towards the website – BanComicSans – dedicated to its death.

Garfield narrates a history of lettering through a series of themed chapters interspersed with such general chapters as The Ampersand or DIY Type.

And with all this, he shows how social convention has changed in just a short space of time. These days, capital letters in email or text messages means ‘YOU HATE SOMEONE AND ARE SHOUTING’. Included is the cautionary tale of Vicki Walker, an unfortunate accountant, who lost her job for sending out a straightforward memo in upper case – giving it (what was deemed) an inappropriate and aggressive meaning.

A knowledge of typefaces has become accessible to everyone in the digital age and no longer exclusive to a small group of specialists, or those working in the media industry.

Garfield recounts the Guardian’s now famous April Fool’s hoax of 1977 when they ran a piece marking the 10th anniversary of the independence of San Serriffe: a republic whose every name was taken from the world of fonts. Situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean it is said that some readers actually tried to book a holiday there, but no travel agent could locate Bodoni International airport. Today it would be far too obvious a prank to pull off.

What’s more, Garfield shows, changing the typeface of a global brand like IKEA can have enormous commercial implications. He says: ‘When IKEA dropped its elegant Futura for the more contemporary Verdana, the switch had caused consternation not only among type geeks, but also among real people’  – who reacted by buying less. To ram this point home, he drops a monstrosity on the reader – the 2012 Olympic typeface. Read that chunky, sportless font – and weep.

Just My Type is an immensely refreshing offering from an author who is fascinated by his subject. Conveying the richness and the personality of typefaces with love and passion, this is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the world of lettering.

Just My Type By Simon Garfield, Profile Books, £14.99

Antonio Lopez - New York Times Magazine 1967

Drawing Fashion at the London Design Museum comprises a selection of 150 works by 16 fashion illustrators, created for various designers as advertising material, usually for publication in commercial magazines.

They have been drawn from the extensive collection of Joelle Chariau, founder and owner of a Munich gallery specialising in fashion drawings. The exhibition spans a century beginning with the heyday of fashion drawing in the 1910s and 20s, when it was the principal means of communicating fashion to the consumer. The show follows through to the present, where fashion drawings are coming to be seen more and more as art. Visibly, there is a unifying style to a whole century’s output, or at least, a congruence in the mediums used. The prominence of pencil, charcoal and watercolour; the looseness of the lines and the sparseness of detail; the emphasis on the outline of forms and not the textuality of materials, are evident throughout the show.

At their best, these works transcend any photography: they demand a far more personal response from the illustrators. And when they can capture the essence of a design and its desirability, the images they produce are mesmerising.

Conspicuous within the works of illustrators at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly Georges Lepape and Erte, is the conversation between art and fashion, where the influences of art deco, Picasso and Japonisme permeate. Lepape and Andre Edouard Marty, whose popularity peaked in the 1910s and 20s, represented fashion in context. They placed women in scenarios that evoke a narrative, an area of potential in the medium that seems to have been abandoned by later illustrators. In a drawing by Lepape, a demure lady in evening dress stands alone, with a crowd of high society men and women looking on from a distance and commenting. It is an ambiguous image, and all the more intriguing because of it.

In July 1932, Vogue placed the first photographic image on its cover. It was a fateful moment that spelt the rapid decline of drawing in fashion magazines and advertising. Despite such adversity, in 1947 René Gruau relaunched drawing as the exemplary platform for haute couture by conveying so convincingly the allure of Christian Dior’s first collection through a buoyant and coolly flirtatious femininity. Then in the 60s and 70s, Antonio Lopez was able to woo the fashion world’s attention by capturing in his drawings the exuberance of youth culture through fierce and masculine women. Lopez was also the master of tongue-in-cheek quotations, that range in their sources from Cubism to Futurism and Pop Art. His work went beyond fashion magazines: a piece in an untitled series for the New York Times in 1965 is a three panel comic strip with a pastiche of the weeping woman from Roy Lichtenstein’s Hopeless (1963), with photographic collages of a space shuttle taking off in the background. Lopez’s social commentary is quite unique among fashion drawings, it places his images within a time and place, defined by clothing and landmark events that would have been chronicled by the NYT. Despite this, it is still far from a serious critique. They are, rather, frivolous and fun takes on the times.

Mats Gustafson’s watercolour of a catwalk model is subtle, but insular

Today’s illustration marks a significant departure from these precedents. They are represented by the works of the three contemporary artists, hailed by the exhibition as the ‘Fashion Drawing for the Future’. The triumvirate is composed of Mats Gustafson, Aurore de La Morinerie and François Berthoud. Gustafson is a favourite of the Vogue magazines: his drawings for Alexander McQueen appeared in Vogue China’s May issue of this year. His delicate watercolours depict minimal outlines; sometimes his figures are merely shadows, lost in a haze or hidden behind a translucent screen. La Morinerie’s monotypes, most of which were printed in the past two years, show a striking similarity to Gustafson’s work, though her images are rougher and employ a stronger colour palette. Collectively, they differ to their predecessors on a more fundamental level, they have cede to portray seductive women. Morinerie and Gustafson’s women appear as anonymous bodies, muted and silent as mannequins.

The exhibition ends on an optimistic note, celebrating the medium’s burgeoning reputation among art curators. This, however, feels misplaced. The trend towards more and more abstraction signals fashion drawing’s final defeat, as it begins to abandon its engagement with the outside world. It is also denying its consumerist and populist nature, retreating into the realm of fine art. This can be seen in the establishment of the Fashion Illustration Gallery, which opened in London’s Mayfair in 2007, and collects and sells works by fashion illustrators, most of which were only created in the past decade.

Contemporary fashion drawings, elegant but de-sensualised, have shed much of the refined seduction – as opposed to the crude one of pornography – that once made the work so appealing. In pieces such as In the Mirror (2009), Berthoud ramps up the sexualisation to such a degree that even Lopez, working in the decades of the sexual revolution, resisted. This exhibition’s note of optimism is doubly false: by presenting only a handful of renowned illustrators from each era despite the substantial exhibition space, Drawing Fashion reinforces the irrevocable dominance of photography within fashion. It unwittingly confirms drawing as a niche discipline for only a few masters who can rise above the horde of superstar photographers.

Drawing Fashion, Design Museum, London – Until March 6th

The Hulme Crescents estate, birthplace of ‘Madchester’, gave way to Homes for Change

The architectural state-of-the-nation book has a rich pedigree. Owen Hatherley’s second book, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, follows in the tradition of JB Priestly’s English Journey and Ian Nairn’s Outrage. As these writers defined the 1930s and 1950s respectively, so Hatherley takes on the Blairite era, casting a critical eye over the ‘regeneration’ that sought to invigorate communities and local economies through pathfinder schemes and dubious PFI contracts. In all he travelled to 12 cities that have experienced such initiatives in the past 13 years, including Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester. Much of the work originally appeared in BD under the title Urban Trawl. This book expands on these shorter pieces, exploring the issues at greater length.

The intent is to read the politics of modern Britain through its architecture. It is a politics, Hatherley argues, lacking in the morality prevalent within the modernist developments of post-war Britain. The targets are often well chosen. In Nottingham, for example, he identifies the strengths of Caruso St John’s Nottingham Contemporary gallery and launches a fully justified attack on the Nottingham University Jubilee campus extension by perpetually awful architect Make. When Hatherley hits home the articulation of his despair is very sharp: he likens Ken Shuttleworth’s Aspire sculpture to ‘spokes in a windsock’. The author moves out of city centres to assess the new ‘subtopias’, only to find that one substandard experiment in housing has been replaced with another and only the language of marketing has changed.

Make’s Jubilee campus and Aspire sculpture come in for stick in Hatherley’s book

The book has admirable intentions. The problem is that Hatherley’s criteria frequently shift. Take the chapter on Manchester and the unquestionable influence of Tony Wilson on the city’s cultural renaissance and music scene in the 1980s and 90s, which, Hatherley posits, grew from the desolate landscape of the local environment. The model of living that he identifies as the cradle of this creative explosion, the council blocks of the Hulme Crescents estate, were squatted illegally. He states: ‘The labyrinthine complexity of the blocks, the noise and sense of dynamism, the lack of feeling of “ownership” in the communal areas were perfect for the purposes of a self-creating urbanism.’ The seeds of this cultural explosion were sown in the failure of the large scale housing blocks that were deemed unfit for use and no longer exist. This is not a model for living that is replicable or could be considered reasonable.

Nor is this view consistent. In Cardiff there is no mention of the revival of identity in the city at the turn of the millennium, where, after years in a cultural abyss, South Wales had an explosion of creativity in the arts that was set against the backdrop of the regenerated capital that Hatherley rails against.

He also contradicts himself when it comes to specific buildings. When describing the now-demolished, brutalist Trinity Square Carpark in Gateshead, Hatherley states: ‘Neglected for decades it’s undeniable (and irrelevant) that the detailing is decidedly cheap’ when commenting on how remarkable the building is. Fair enough. Yet, in Leeds he rails against the Sky Plaza. ‘Here, grey cladding and a green lift tower seem calculatedly crap’. It comes easily to the author to be hypercritical of the Blairite era architecture, yet he is uncritical of the experiments that precede it. Hatherley’s passion is undeniable, yet too often in this book emotion takes control of the narrative voice. Despair is the prevalent tone and makes for uncomfortable reading.

There is a lack of regard for people here. The acknowledgements show a wealth of research and thanks a long list of people who have provided a critical insight. Yet Hatherley hardly ever engages with inhabitants or citizens, aside from a few encounters where the author has been yelled at. Where are the voices that have to engage daily with the endless low-grade modernity he identifies? The lack of these voices ensure that there is no contradiction of his rhetoric. No one offers an opinion that might indicate they like their city; no one states that their standard of living has improved.

The book highlights the struggle that towns and cities have faced in finding an identity in the post-industrial era. Yet, placing blame on such a vague political movement as Blairism, whose wreckage we are still sifting through, is too simplistic. For one thing, the architecture Hatherley lauds has had, in some cases, half a century to be considered a failure and then critically redeemed; in the case of the modern developments he criticises, they have had less than a decade. With its desolate world view, this book is often more compelling than it is convincing.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Verso, £17.99

The Fact of Matter by William Forsythe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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