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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 bottle-cap factory attracted the interest of the international team as a potential mixed-use site

The label Made in Taiwan no longer means what it used to. Last month in an article in the country’s main English language newspaper, The Taipei Times, a member of the Consumer Protection Commission in Taiwan complained that substandard goods made in mainland China were being passed off as having been made in the small independent island nation. Taiwan, once a world centre for the production of cheap electronic equipment, has undergone several economic transformations in the past few decades, from a manufacturing base in the 1980s, to a high-tech centre at the turn of the century – huge, paradigm shifts that have been enabled, in part, by government investment. Manufacturing now amounts to only 16 per cent of Taiwan’s economy, as its production plants are migrating to cheaper locations on the mainland.

Like many other contemporary Asian cities, Taipei – Taiwan’s capital – is technologically advanced. But one of the city’s most pressing issues is what to do with their manufacturing residue and post-industrial sheds. The city government has just initiated a project called Nangang 2050 – a three-year series of workshops where teams of academics and designers have been invited to imagine the future of Taipei as a creative industries hub. The international team took a redundant bottle-cap factory in the centre of Taipei – a city of seven million – and looked at turning it into an innovation quarter for creative production.

Learning from previous examples of co-opted industrial structures in Taipei, for example the Huashan Creative Park that was established in a former wine factory, the teams looked at how to turn the site into a mixed-use area – converting many existing buildings into small-scale live-work units, exhibition spaces and graduate housing. The group was not urban-planning in the conventional sense, and the teams developed integrated architectural, urban and public realm designs to connect the site to surrounding research and design industries, commercial centres and transport nodes.

A model of the re-imagined bottle-cap factory shows its transformation into place of live-work units and exhibition space

The Architectural Association housing and urbanism programme was partnered with the National Chiao Tung University Graduate Institute of Architecture (NCTU GIA) – one of a number of partnerships that include Tokyo University, Taipei University of Technology, UC Berkeley and TU Delft. The workshops promoted exchange on many levels, and the teams collaborated with business leaders, heads of industry, science-park developers, software companies, politicians and mayors, to develop urban ecologies for creative industries, restructuring the city and forming new economic and cultural veins.

Economic growth in Taipei has also become a political show. Making statements about the future of Taipei as a global capital and commissioning grand projects by international names has been one of the major tools for political advancement in the city. However, it has been realised that iconic buildings by celebrity architects – such as OMA’s Performing Arts Centre and Reiser + Umemoto’s Pop Music Centre – might not bring about the kind of holistic urban regeneration, cultural and economic growth that the city government is looking for. The workshops were motivated by an approach to the city in its capacity as a tool for continuous economic and industrial transformation.

In Taiwan, urbanism as a discipline performs well as an instrument of political discourse. There is much to-ing and fro-ing of leading figures between politics and academia, with professors jumping between university departments and public offices depending on who is in political power. Perhaps this exchange between urbanism and politics is not such a bad thing. Discussing the city in political circles, and politics in academia, puts the design disciplines in a powerful strategic position – a position reinforced by the considerable funding the government invested in the workshops.

Whether anything will come of the visions produced is hard to tell. At a ceremony last October, the deputy mayor, Lin Chien-yuan, said ‘I don’t care so much about the results, but more about the process’ and enthused about ‘interacting with an international community’ and putting Taiwan in a ‘global context’. This, the workshop certainly did achieve. More than this, Nangang 2050 opened borders between different sectors around shared discussions of the city, offering a new model in which academic expertise is applied to real-life situations.

As Vincent Nadin from TU Delft deftly concluded, ‘This wouldn’t happen in the UK. Academics, researchers, designers around the table with policy makers, politicians, local government and developers – if only!’

SI member and utopian architect Constant’s model of Yellow Sector, from Internationale Situationniste no.4, June 1960, shows the hanging Situationist city where play and residence are united

Founded by theorist and film-maker Guy Debord in 1957, the Situationist International (SI) was a group of European artists and poets, influenced by, and formed in reaction to, avant-garde movements, predominantly the Letterists, Surrealists and Cobra. Its theories married existentialist activism, psychoanalysis, the Marxist approach to commodity culture and the Frankfurt School philosophy with anarchistic aesthetic beliefs.

The protagonists, including Debord, utopian architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, painter Asger Jorn and philosopher Raoul Vaneigem, were primarily concerned with critiquing modern life. Employing theory as the principal means of inciting action, the group published an eponymously titled journal of essays between 1958 and 1969. The work incorporated raised questions about the idea behind an aesthetics of the everyday and the creation of revolutionary ’situations’. Later termed as dérive, this offered a way of creating completely new, unpredictable itineraries, dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses of the wanderer.

The significance of the SI to how we perceive the built environment today is indisputable. Anyone claiming to be a psychogeographer, or indeed flaneur, owes much to the movement. McDonough’s book is a compilation of excerpts from some of its seminal documents, reports, manifestoes and stories. Unlike previous appraisals of the movement’s relation to architecture, however, which tend to explore its formative period from 1957 to 1962, McDonough’s book includes work that falls outside of what he calls the ‘architectural interlude’.

The SI’s publication of theoretical writing, projects and dérive. This graphic reads: New Theatre of Operations in Culture, 1958

The inclusion of Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism, 1953, is a prime example. Credited with conceiving ‘psychogeography’ prior to the founding of the SI, Chtcheglov called for a modifiable built environment that changed with the desires of its inhabitants. This concept took flight in Archigram’s work in the Sixties and still has a bearing on many architects’ technological ambition today.

The book is divided into seven loosely chronological themes including Paris, Modern Myth, and Festival and Urban Revolution, and each chapter is represented by an emblematic image. One photograph, for example, shows Debord underneath the entrance to the Palais Idéal in France, an arbitrary fantastical structure outside of Paris, which formed an important inspiration for the SI along with other artists and philosophers at the time.

The SI offered a sustained critique of all forms of domination, the political division and the control of urban space, and the general poverty of intellectual life. In 1967, the same year that Debord’s seminal book The Society of Spectacle was released, the SI distributed an essay, On The Poverty of Student Life across Strasbourg University. The text has been attributed with influencing subsequent protests at the university, as well as the May 1968 Paris uprising. As a group they are key to our understanding of how we relate to our surroundings, and McDonough’s book gives us a flavour of this important intellectual moment.

The Situationists and the City: A Reader by Tom McDonough, published by Verso

Hut 5, Muharraq, Camille Zakharia

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

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

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

Hut 4, Seef, Camille Zakharia

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

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

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

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

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

Hut 6, Hidd, Camille Zakharia

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

Hut 13, Busaiteen, Camille Zakharia

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

Interior, Hut 13, Busaiteen, Camille Zakharia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1980, under the leadership of Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Cibic helped launch the Memphis Group. It was the same year that the first Venice Architecture Biennale was staged, featuring the exhibition Strada Novissima, which consisted of 20 facades by architects including Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, Rem Koolhaas and Arata Isozaki. It was a breakthrough year for postmodernism in design, and Cibic was at the centre of the movement. Thirty years later, he is showing his latest research project, Rethinking Happiness, at Venice: he claims that once again, it is an impetus to ‘radically rethink our way of confronting the future.’

The project is presented in a form that is becoming Cibic’s signature style – four large models, are displayed on separate tables, adding up a total surface area of 40sq m. Each one sets out the designer’s scheme for a real area – three in Italy, one in China – in the form of intricately detailed scaled replicas, populated by tiny, but distinctive, plastic human figures. For each one, a narrative or scenario is developed, incorporating the creation of new buildings and master plans. He describes it as ‘more like the production of a film than the traditional professional approach of the world of architecture, urban planning and design.’

Kurt W Forster, who curated the 9^th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002 sees these miniature constructions as essential to understanding Cibic’s overall approach, a way of making utopianism seem approachable: ‘reality needs to be reduced to a scale that allows us to think of it as something we can grasp and observe in all its part.’

The project envisions a self-sustaining community that could house about 250 young people

Yet the presentation of Rethinking Happiness, in all its carefully wrought detail, also aims to show that Cibic’s proposals could be applied in the real world. Viewers are encouraged to imagine themselves in the position of the miniature plastic figures, living inside the designer’s imaginary master plans. The hyperreal, close-up photography of Matteo Cibic removes the real world entirely and puts us, as viewers, inside the model.

Cibic was just 25 when he joined Sottsass in establishing Memphis, and was – as he remains – without formal training in either design or architecture: ‘I have Sottsass to thank for all my life,’ Cibic now says, ‘he always pushed to not become a specialist, to take a humanistic point of view, and look at a project through 180 degrees.’

On the outskirts of Milan, Superbazaar is designed to house students and immigrants, who, according to Cibic, share a similar economic condition

The designer set up his own design and architecture practice in 1989, Cibic Partners, through which he has created both commercial designs and self-initiated research projects. Rethinking Happiness is the result of a series of investigations, partly conducted through his teaching at numerous institutions – including the Domus Academy, the University of Architecture at Venice and Tongji University, in Shanghai – where new typologies for communal living are explored through storytelling and playful model-making. Previous manifestations include New Stories New Design from 2008, and Microrealities, which was shown at the last Venice Architecture Biennale in the same year. The joyful boldness and humour of the Memphis style remains in the manner of presentation, yet the iconoclasm has been replaced by a more comfortable, even regressive, plea for a contentment.

To spell out the ideas behind Rethinking Happiness, Cibic has produced a manifesto, in which he states that: ‘to fight our fears we need to find the way to proceed with a sort of sensible, creative and interesting planning that could produce ideas, proposals and answers able to guarantee an upgrading of life quality, for us as well as for our children and the people around us.’

Rural Urbanism is a proposal to preserve the existing agricultural tradition of community in China

It seems at first a benign form of dogma, marked by an almost child-like sense of optimism. This approach can be seen in the most suburban model shown by Cibic at Venice, titled Superbazaar. Its proposed location is on the outskirts of Milan, near the northern expressway, where a new subway station is being built, intersecting with the metropolitan rail bypass. It proposes taking advantage – and mitigating the problems – of this transport intersection with a public space populated by what Cibic considers the essential facilities of neighbourhood life: an outdoor market, skate park and rent hotel. Above the porticoes there is a complex of small housing units and low-cost work spaces designed for students and immigrants.

The simplicity, bordering on tweeness of some of the ideas suggested by Rethinking Happiness can be unnerving. Just as the physical scale of the sites is reduced to make the projects graspable, so the size of the communities that Cibic proposes are tiny, generally having populations of hundreds or in the low thousands. It implies that problems of economics and the environment can only be surmounted if society is reduced to a manageable scale.

In this project, Cibic provides, among other activities, a golf driving range

In Rural Urbanism – a title that could stand for the approach of Cibic’s entire project – a large rural territory, one hour from Shanghai, with an ancient agricultural tradition is described as being ‘crushed between a growing industrial zone and a new city’. The response, as shown at Venice, is to create an agricultural park of 4sq km with a population of 8,000 people housed in low-density residential structures. Elevated buildings are shown lining the streets, to create a perpendicular grid that floats over the countryside. In the middle of this ‘agricultural central park’ there are specialised farms that produce crops for the sustainable, profitable development of the countryside.

Another of the proposals outlined in Rethinking Happiness, A Campus in the Fields, is described by Cibic as the ‘Venice agri-techno valley’, which takes advantage of the landscapes and biodiversity of the Venetian lagoon. Again, it focuses on a small, homogenous community: the project imagines a young group that works on innovative start-ups connected with new technologies, who decide to use a large agricultural property, surrounded by water, as a settlement where about 250 young people can live and work. Cibic takes this as a starting point to propose a new campus model, which again emphasises self sufficiency through a mix of agriculture, private vegetable gardens, tourism and technology. He describes the communal vision of his project as ‘an idea of happiness that we build by rolling up our sleeves.’

The project calls for buildings to be elevated above the streets. The whole community would ‘float’ on a grid above the countryside

Rethinking Happiness, and its antecedents over the last couple of years, are the key output of Cibic workshop. This research centre was established by the designer in 2006 with the exclusive intention of imagining and developing new design typologies. Like Sottsass, he has brought in young architects and designers to contribute to his vision, including Tommaso Corà, an industrial designer from Venice, who began working with Cibic on design projects for companies such as Artemide and Foscarini, before becoming a key member of the team behind Microrealities.

In total, more than 40 people were involved in the creation of this latest project: from architects and designers to sociologists, energy consultants and models makers. Cibic describes the centre as being ‘not a school but an idea for setting up projects with a name and surname, around which we then build a project team.’

A detail of Superbazaar, described by Cibic as ‘a place to live, meet, buy, sell and swap

Though some have likened Cibic’s most recent master plans to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, the site of the workshop gives another possible clue to its inspiration. Located near Vicenza, Cibic workshop is housed in the Villa Pasini, which was designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, the Renaissance Venetian architect and writer, whose most renowned project was Palmanova, a small town outside Venice, built at the turn of the 17th century.

The guiding principles of Palmanova were a peculiar mix of military defensiveness – it has a nine-pointed star fortress plan – and humanistic ideals, designed to be inhabited by a community of self-sustaining merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. With this blend of the authoritarian and utopian idealism, there is an unmistakable echo in Cibic’s recent works of fantasy master planning.

For a project that proclaims its desire to promote the simple virtue of happiness, Cibic’s work seems full of oppositions: he emphasises realism, but the notion of a return to small-community living seems fantastical in the extreme; the models seem joyful, but there is an element of cloying fantasy that borders on the nightmarish. If the radicalism of Memphis has been tempered in Cibic’s work, its tendency for jarring contradictions remain strong.

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

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

Still from the film, Perestroika Songspiel by Chtot Delat 2009

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

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

A still from The Tower: A Songspiel, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scroll down to see all the work or click on the links below to go directly to the relevant school:

Architectural Association School of Architecture,
Robert Gordon University: Aberdeen,
Bartlett School of Architecture,
Brighton School of Architecture,
Bucks New University,
Cambridge University,
Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff,
Central Saint Martins,
De Monfort University,
Kingston University,
Leeds Metropolitan University,
London Metropolitan University,
Glasgow School of Art,
Manchester School of Architecture,
Manchester School of Art and Design,
University of Nottingham,
Leeds Metropolitan University,
Nottingham Trent University,
Oxford Brookes University,
Royal College of Art,
University of East London,
University of Westminster,

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Fredrick Hellberg: Diploma Unit 13

Winner of the AA’s Nicolas Pozner Prize for the Best Single Drawing of the Year, Hellberg’s design for a Japanese Embassy is printed on a manga-graphic kimono, which shows the building from all its aspects. The lining of the garment opens up to reveal the Tower of the Folding Stones – the office of the Japanese Ambassador – which like Embassy building, is revealed in plan on the back of the Kimono. Hellberg’s work tackles the unit brief of re-interpreting ornament with great individuality and rigour.  Graham Modlen

David Nightingale: Diploma Unit 13

Still within AA Diploma 13, Nightingale’s project for a Belgian Embassy was selected for achieving the best balance between prospect and proportions. This is a noteworthy achievement for a unit which is never fully upfront about the spatial organization of its projects. The unit agenda is ‘the reformed grammar of ornament’ which stems from Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament. Graham Modlen

Carlos H. Matos: Diploma Unit 14

With overtones of Super-studio, Mies, Ledoux, maybe even Roma Interrota, Diploma 14 is creating a impact with its polemic views of the city. Cite Carlos Matos’ insertion into the centre of Delft. In his project, Matos revisits Mies’ concept of universal space. He addresses the flexibility and ephermerality of contemporary industrial shed or generic industrial box. Graham Modlen

Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University

Sean Gaule: MArch

Sean’s proposition is for a cluster of buildings containing industrial processing, public promenade and a restaurant for consumption in Edinburgh. The proposals seek inspiration from familiar industrial forms and spatial architypes  evoking an optimistic atmosphere of renewed coastal harvesting and future trade. Sean’s project encapsulating ideas of productivity and consumption, industry and recreation, ruggedness and luxury, and enclosure and openness. David Howarth

Bartlett School of Architecture

Dan Slavinsky: Dip Arch

Slavinsky says his drawing depicts ‘an arcadia at the end of time’. His beautifully drafted project develops a language of ornament, which strongly references the architectural movement of Art Nouveau. The large scale drawings stole the show at the Bartlett which, as ever, ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Owen Pritchard

Brighton School of Architecture

Charlie Piper

Charlie worked closely with the institutions that serve the homeless in Brighton, and spent time with people who are living on the streets to understand their experience of the city. Charlie’s project inserts a series of urban interventions at different scales around the city that act as discreet support structures to better service homeless people and improve the public perception of homelessness. Angie Pescoe

Hien Nguyen Thu Nguyen

Hien’s project questions the ways in which we inhabit urban space and suggests a new set of criteria for urban regeneration, in which the afterlife of spaces is essential to keeping the city alive. Using landscape to create movement, architecture to create institutions,and public services to control time, Hien developed a scheme to regenerate 982m of Brighton seafront. The architecture is deliberately ambiguous and complex. Angie Pescoe

Bucks New University

Torti Hoare

Hoare’s range of hand-crafted furniture used leather that had been boiled and stretched to make it a stiff, structural material. Each piece demonstrated a willingness to experiment and use the material in new ways to create novel items of furniture. Hoare was awarded New Designer of the Year at the annual New Designers show in North London. Peter Kelly

Cambridge University

Natasha Amladi: BA Architecture

The brief for this project was to make a proposition for an ‘island’, which suggests a new way of working around food production and consumption. Amladi’s proposal for a site on the edge of the market town of Ely in Cambridgeshire was to create a youth retreat for school-age inner-city kids and their teachers. Amladi came up with an intelligent and positive response, which marries a social agenda with architecture. Her architectural language is sensitive to the natural conditions of the site, uses materials and ideas which are sophisticated and seductive, with special care given to the interior spaces offering unique and varied experiences for the children. Kate Goodwin

Benjamin Barfield Marks: BA Architecture

With ideas of bricolage in mind– repair and reuse- Ben proposed an indoor scuba diving centre be located in a former veneer factory in a residential neighbourhood in Bow, east London. It’s a playful and novel idea for the re-use of the building, suggesting an optimism for the future. Kate Goodwin

Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff

Alice Brownfield: BSc Architecture

Brownfield is an exceptional talent. A Part 1 graduate this year, she has the clear individual voice and relaxed virtuosity that marks her out as an instinctive architect. The most beautiful of her piece were created for a public house and hotel, set among the uber-banks of Zurich. The themes of the project and of much of her work are diversity and empathy: that we are enriched by seeing the world through the eyes of people very different to ourselves. Jonathan Adams

George Metcalfe: MArch

It is ironic that just as academia shows signs of coming to terms with the computer as a drawing tool, digital media themselves have advanced to the point where not just drawings and models but architecture itself may be replaced by digital simulacra. George’s project is, one of many in schools around the land exploring similar territory – but his does it with particular maturity and thoughtfulness: the technology, while in the foreground, is never an end in itself. This is some testament to his skill, because the technology is really breathtaking. City 2.0 emanates from a subtle but immensely complex building, in which each space acts as a three dimensional screen onto which alternate virtual spaces are superimposed. Jonathan Adams

Rachel Witham: MArch

Rachel’s prodigious technical skills and fine aesthetic judgement are evident in every creative move that she makes: a gazetteer of foot-worn man-hole covers, immaculately photographed, printed and bound; collage, pencil drawing and, most compelling of all, sweetly constructed models. The inspection covers are gateways to the under-world of our utilities: Rachel’s thesis project is a narrow slice of structure incised along the centre of Holborn’s Kingsway, exposing the rich complexity of our hidden service infrastructure and the ways in which it organises and mirrors metropolitan life. A vivid description is provided by this detail model: apertures linking engineered vessels, lined with gold, elevating the unseen to the immaculate. Jonathan Adams

Central Saint Martins

Gemma Roper: MA Industrial Design

This particular course retains strong links with industry, so that students work in collaboration with firms including Nokia. The Printerpreter is a playful subversion of mobile technology tat knits a scarf according to the characters sent in a text message. Each character is defined by a certain colour yam, which is knitted by the machine into a hoop on a scarf. The machine transfers a message that is ephemeral and throwaway, but a key feature in everyday life, into a physical form that transcends language. Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

Rohan Chhabra: MA Industrial Design

Part of a series titled Embodying Ethics, Chhabra’s hunting jacket that turns into a ram’s head wall mount is a superbly realised work of craftmanship and concept-led design. Chhabra sees the purpose of the series as exploring the ability of design to ask ethical, emotional and political questions. In this case, the hunting jacket has been designed with an extraordinarily intricate series of zips that allows it to transform into a ram’s head, creating something that promoted reflection, rather than a trophy. Also in the series is a piece of chair upholstery that unzips into a floor rug that mimics the shadow of a tree. Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

Liang Bo: MA Industrial Design

Liang Bo’s electric charging station are an investigation into how electricity charged cars may work with today’s available technologies. His two solutions included a bollard that provides contact with a conductor plate beneath the car in special bays for charging and a charging station which replaced the battery in the car using mechanics similar to a car wash. The project is believable and a considered response that provides answers to a problem, rather than simply more questions.Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

Josiah Emsley: BA (Hons) Product Design

Responding to the fact that a work surface in use is never flat, Buro provides levels to create opportunity for subconscious prioritising. It also offers a mobile storage unit with drawers that can be self-assembled in seconds. The fittings are the structure; all components are CNC cut birch plywood, laminated with white Formica; to assemble, the user simply slots the parts together. The drawers are die-cut natural cairn board, with a length of elastic to hold the structure tight. Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

De Monfort University

Kevin Scott: BSc Product Design

Scott’s design for a collapsible bicycle was a rare example of a ‘one-liner’ idea having potential and was one of the smartest products displayed at the New Designers exhibition in July. The articulated frame, held together with a central chord that can be loosened by the user, allows the bike to be wrapped around a lamppost or tree. There is still room or development in the project: there is no integrated locking mechanism, and the frame will need more work to make it 100 per cent safe, but the idea demonstrated a refreshing clarity of thought. Peter Kelly

Kingston University

William Law: First Year Architecture

Rainham Marshes became the site of a study of threshold, landscape, material and space, culminating in a building composed of 3 spaces. Williams work is astonishing in the quality of its representation, as presented through drawings, models and photography. A model of his project, for a small educational and art building which takes its place within Peter Beard’s wonderful series of bridges, walkways and pavilions that meander through the marshes, is a strongly spatial and material presence, captured through exquisite model photography. Layers of paint, built up on surfaces of the large scale model, drip and run to exemplify the layers of weathering, time and renewal of the surface within this harsh, exposed environment. Internally the spaces are articulated as a series of intimate connected rooms, each with a particular quality and relationship to the landscape and the horizon. This is exemplary first year work, deeply rooted in the physical and tectonic qualities and bodes well for the future of the profession. David Howarth

Carlos dos Santos: Diploma in Architecture

The Ocean Estate at Shandy Park in Stepney Green used to be one of the most deprived Estates in Britain. Today, the area is changing radically with substantial funding. Carlos dos Santos has engaged with this scenario in an intelligent and inspiring way, setting his project for a new mosque for the area as a tool for invigorating the place itself. Carlos’ project makes an inspiring effort to open up the rich and hidden world of domesticity to the public realm, and to infuse this richness into his architecture.  His calm and straightforward analysis of the existing buildings and local people brings richness to his architecture. David Howarth

Paul Kittle: Diploma in Architecture

Paul Kittle’s work is concerned with the fallout from the construction of the M11 in the Roding Valley in the early 1970s. The comparison brought to light a series of peculiar landscape spaces which have an in-between character – caught between infrastructure and suburbia. The project proposes the transformation of existing Victorian brick sheds and co-opts modern electricity pylons to make three building groups each designed as a pairing of a big shed and a tall tower. Formally confident and materially contextual, these buildings feel like counterparts to the place, alter ego characters providing qualities of destination. Paul’s work is precise and skillful in terms of materiality and atmosphere but what is most compelling and resonantly right is the serious attitude taken towards investing this unloved landscape of uncertain use and purpose with a new social infrastructure of permanence. David Howarth

Will Pirkis: First Year Diploma

The project, for a school within London’s Lea Valley, seeks to define schools and their grounds as mediating spaces between the Lea Valley and communities that surround it. Will Perkis, a first year diploma student, won the Diploma Portfolio Prize. His work imaginatively explored the landscapes of the Lea Valley in relationship to the ideas of the picturesque, transforming and re-framing their latent, industrial and infrastructural qualities as a painterly horizon against which his  project was placed. The project was sophisticated and eloquent throughout, understanding the intrinsic relationship between strategy and detail, exploring refined tectonic and spatial strategies and articulately responding to precedent. David Howarth

Aladeyemi Aladerun: Diploma Graduate

Aladeyemi Aladerun has designed a new community building whilst working explicitly with the city as a background.  By creating handmade drawings of beauty and precision this information serves as an analysis of the value of what is being measured. Aladeyemi made use of the surface in a range of ways to examine the varied qualities of local identity. Indeed, one of the most notable things about the work of this student was ‘normal’ it is easy to almost miss; a glossy brown ashtray stand. Designed to look as if it had been in the pub for years, it was actually made up of a ‘turned’ Victorian spindle comprising the found shapes of a variety of beer glasses, jugs and other drinking and storage vessels. This work is a sensitive approach to the past and the future of places that uses precise practical tools to locate public significance. David Howarth

Leeds Metropolitan University

Sam George: PG Dip Architecture

A small scale independent brewery and visitor’s center designed for a disused chalk mine site in Reading, to maintain the area’s brewing traditions. An analogy between brewing processes and circulations within the body informs the project. Above ground the internal parts of the building take their form from the vascular like web of circular steel pipes, which carry the brewing processes over the heads of visitors and permeate the underground spaces. Exterior elevations show a building that appears to bubble over ground. Rather than shying away from a subject that is often presented as a national blight, this fun, playful project celebrates a local industry of beer making in the spirit of craft and merriment. Drawings show a design that is playful yet elegant. Danielle Hewitt

London Metropolitan University

Elly Ward: BA (Hons) Architecture

The Studios focus was the Thames Valley and more particularly its means of production – of ideas ,myths, objects and energy. Elli Ward won the best portfolio prize for her exceptional reworking of an existing shed into a new amenity building for a local community of Didcot, the ‘distribution capital of the Thames Valley.’ Wards work has exuberance in its representation and offers optimism in how we might sustainably re-occupy found enclosures such as these for spaces of community activity rather than commerce. The project reminds us of the fun palaces of Cedric Price and perhaps the Palace Der Republic, Berlin and is playful, mature intellectually grounded and above all exquisitely drawn and represented. David Howarth

Lucy Pritchard: Graduate Diploma in Architecture

The final designs of the studio focused on the Medieval town on Monpazier in France and how these ensembles or city buildings can contribute to the public realm of the city. Lucy’s project forms a bridge between the urban grain of the medieval town and the open farmland beyond. The project extends the form of the city with a coherent strategy of building ensembles, forming parentheses between a new agricultural field structure. There is a quiet civility in the proposals and a measured understanding of the subtle spatial hierarchies needed to perhaps successfully extend existing rural settlements and allow them to be fully self sustaining. David Howarth

Tji Young Lee: BA (Hons) Architecture

Tji Youngs project is for a series of water side brick structures; the Boatmans House, 2 boathouses and ‘The Red Hall’, a large warehouse for recycled building components. Tji Youngs buildings take reference from earlier drawn studies of artist Per Kirkeby’s brick structures and are beautifully executed and finely crafted. The pieces are infrastructural and mute, acting as simple vessels for in-habitation, but they are also characterful and ‘uncanny’, extending the rich narrative history of the site.The work shows a maturity, confidence in its execution and provides occasional humour in its narrative. David Howarth

Glasgow School of Art

Alex Whitton: Graduate Diploma Architecture

Porto’s historic center exhibits a huge paradox; a disconnect between an excluded, inner city poor and a transient tourist population. The irony is that the tourists are attracted by the very ‘picturesque dilapidation’ that ensures the social exclusion. The cathedral square is the point where the two sides meet; dense, dilapidated, ‘domestic vernacular’ and monumental, civic scale ‘city face’. The aim of this thesis is to form a program that can express this tension; bringing together the ‘inward’, domestic nature of a homeless refuge, with the ‘outward’, civic face of a performance center. In addition to displaying a formal bravura in terms of its bold interventions in a traditional historical context, the project also addresses fundamental social inclusion issues. Caroline Ednie

Anna Kraay: Visual Communications

A short documentary film about Anna’s dad, a model train/toy enthusiast and former trainspotter, looking at the role the hobby has played in his life and the response of others to these types of hobbies. Anna’s presentation at the degree show was reminiscent of the work of Oliver Postage and Tove Jansson’s Moomins – with a tangible aura of innocence rather than experience. Yet there is no cloying nostalgia, instead (and in common with Postage’s characters and narratives particularly) there is also a great deal of humanity, personal insight and social commentary – with a slightly surreal contemporary twist. Beguiling. Caroline Ednie

Embracing the principles of the Slow City  the brief called for the design of a shopping centre that can do more than fulfil practical shopping needs – one that will also afford an opportunity for cultural, social, civic and recreational activity. Hugo Corbett’s design proposal creates a public market place that not only segues seamlessly into the urban fabric of the traditional market town but also creates a new and integrated public realm experience. The proposal displays an understanding of Crieff’s distinctive character and offers a solution that stitches together rather than radically reinvents the existing urban area – resulting in an entirely appropriate response to the unique location as well as the Slow City brief. Caroline Ednie

The brief was to design of a Cook House where slow food will be growing, cooked and eaten. Hudspith’s proposal formally (and cleverly) chimes with the Slow Movement brief in that it’s set into the contours of the site. In this way it eschews the values of speed driven architecture – and its emphasis on visual dominance.  Hudspith’s proposal is site sympathetic and specific in that it echoes the Roman Camp ditches and ramparts that define this area of Perthshire, and in doing so it’s landscape hugging form, low material impact and low energy approach to design maximizes its sustainable credentials. The feeling of ‘emerging’ from the landscape further reflects the building’s function of growing, harvesting and preparing food. Caroline Ednie

Lauren has focused on suffers with Autism – in particular those who are also diagnosed with Sensory Processing disorder (SPD). This condition affects how an individuals processes and response to external stimuli – dramatically reducing their daily independence. The project was called BOA – Body Over Autism. Lauren designed a range of garments and arm cuffs which when worn, the weave constricts, emulating a deep pressure sensation on specific areas of the body – an outcome that is scientifically proven to lessen anxiety attacks associated with SPD. The project directly addresses the needs of someone living with a long-term health condition. The solution is simple yet extremely effective. Lauren’s BOA earned her the joint winner of the RSA Design Directions competition 09/10. Caroline Ednie

Nathan Cunningham: Architecture

The brief was to design a piece of architecture that embraces the ambitions and concept of the slow architecture movement. Nathan’s work beautifully encapsulates the ideas embodied in the Slow Movement that encourages a ‘jumping off the treadmill’ approach and sense of reflection.  The sense of removal and isolation is palpable, not only in terms of location but also in the spare, earthy language of the Cook House. The space evokes a sense of secular spirituality, and beautifully suggests an architecture that is capable of ‘restoring the inner world’ – a concept at the heart of the Slow movement. Caroline Ednie

“To take blood, you of course have to receive substantial training, but you do not need to be a nurse. What could happen if members of the public were trained to take blood and manage donation sessions away from NHS centres?”  This project suggests how such a system could work and imagines what might happen if the members of a local knitting group were to begin running their own tri-monthly blood donation sessions; exploring the rituals and objects that would evolve over time. This project no only encourages and promotes individuals to take a greater sense of responsibility and self-reliance in terms of their own health care, it is also politically prescient in terms of the current situation facing the National Health Service where resources are already stretched and dramatic cuts are on the horizon. Caroline Ednie

Manchester School of Architecture

Steve Connah

Connah’s project “Robinson at Junction 31: Reveries in non-Place” was presented cleanly and properly. Long 2D line drawings and postcard size colour studies. It’s economically set out, simple, no fuss work. The detailing of the project are reminiscent of Nat Chard, whose work often deals with the notion of an indeterminate architecture. All in all the work was strong, and wouldn’t be misplaced amongst the RIBA Silver Metal nominations. That said, the work could have been more exhaustive. Graham Modlen

Manchester School of Art & Design

Stacy Brafield: Embroidery

“I’m told Manchester has the only school of embroidery in the UK. It shows. None had really considered life outside their Sixties tower; where they are incubated and hatched for three years along with other applied arts departments, including architecture. Yet their work nearly crawls out of the windows and across the city. Brafield works with VCR and cassette tape weaving big, stripy, shimmering black panels that wave over walls, turning space into disco-y-syrup. It tells a story with the materials at a small scale, then stretches or enlarges the work across the space and metaphorically out of the window. Graham Modlen

Nicola Searle: Embroidery

Still in the Embroidery School, Nicola Searle has sewn a geopolitical maps of Africa and South America into cloths of her own design, thread composition and weave; identifying each country in a different type of beaded thread, then taken details and woven them back into shirt details – weird, dour in colour, but visionary. Graham Modlen

Sarah Fletcher: Embroidery

Sarah Fletcher has cast pink masks and pinned some 300 plus masks to a large section of wall in a grid. Each of them has a crack, requiring stitch work to hold together. One looks at them from the inside. Painful.  Her work honours the pioneering facial surgery work that was carried out after the horrors of the 1st World War. Explanation that makes her work all the more moving. Graham Modlen

Steven Clark: Embroidery

Clark mixes carbon, locust wings and legs, a type of ginko bush, hexagonal tiles made from cement plus other materials all stitched together with bronze discs. This raw ambition is folded together to hint at a 3D dystopian view of the future. Graham Modlen

University of Nottingham

Chandni Modha: BArch

‘Decadence is back.’ Modha has lamented the loss of ornament and devised a set of decadent body adornments that serve dual functions. This elegant, insightful project subverts jewellery into a series of useful tools, that in turn are used to calibrate a new architectural landscapes set within Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. The beautiful artefact’s and drawings that compromise this compelling project draw together phenomenology aesthetics and technique. Owen Pritchard

Michelle Yeung: DipArch

This project is a response to the need to provide sustainable and desirable homes at high density. The essential design concept envisages the construction of a huge v-shaped frame on which a large number of revolving cylindrical pods are hung. The internal surfaces of these pods incorporate different built-in functions (so the base might be a kitchen while the roof might be a bedroom. This project has a confident, radical, avant-guarde approach, underpinned by a robust belief in the ability of technology and innovation to solve one of the globe’s looming problems. It shakes off conventional notions of how we should live and how we should arrange our space and it invites us to consider an entirely new way of seeing things. Nick Ebbs

Nottingham Trent University

Samantha Gill: Architecture

The idea of this project is to take dead spaces at roof level in London and to open them up. The concept is beautifully and imaginatively articulated with seductive images and drawings that illustrate how rooftops could be used as a “free running” course by runners and jumpers. The project is challenging, dynamic exciting. It has zest, playfulness and excitement – it points to dynamic new futures and is marvellously free of all the constraints that encourage us to be safe and secure…..not that for one moment am I suggesting we jump from roof to roof that is not the point. A powerful, positive, playful invitation to look at very familiar but largely dead spaces in a new way thereby opening up new possibilities. Nick Ebbs.

Oxford Brookes University

Edmund Drury: BA (Hons) Architecture

An inhabitable bridge for performing arts. Seeking to blur the boundary between artist and voyeur anyone using the bridge was to become a part of its exhibition, the performance itself. Taking its cue from a brief of semi-living architecture the bridge became a series of separate organisms each in constant flux between introversion and extroversion imitating the life of plants, slowly gathering energy so as to present themselves to the world. ‘Organism’ has become one of the architectural trends recently. Among those looking at similar approach to organism, this semi-living architecture proposal suggests a new definition of ‘organic architecture. Mami Sayo

Rodolfo Rodriguez: BA (Hons) Architecture

The memory of the place is captured by our first impression, precisely at the moment where one’s senses are stimulated, generating a connection between the individual and the city. Before using the walking device we are unable to recognize the beauty and atmosphere of the city. After using the walking device the senses are awakened and the individual is able to identify with the place. What a fantastic idea to have a cup of tea with the aroma and atmosphere of the city you are walking. The mechanism of the device is designed to its details. This will definitely create our better future and improvement in day to day life. Mami Sayo

Royal College of Art

Oliver Wainwright: DipArc

This project develops a vision for Mayfair, the area with the highest density of diplomatic missions anywhere in the world. Current trends in London’s development, such as the proliferation of Business Improvement Districts, and the rise of terrorism-driven fortress urbanism, are analysed and transformed into a new urbanism. Grosvenor Square becomes the site for an extraordinary flagship project -  monumental and terrifying. Wainwright’s part of the exhibition was fitted out with a Persian rug, wall mounted flags and a timber vitrine containing BD, Cabe Reports and the Economist, all reporting on different aspects of his project. He operates with a sober sharpness, precision and efficiency, which is uncanny for a student. Judith Losing

Hye Yeon Park: MA Design Products

Park designed two distinct, witty products that brought a humanity and humour to the digital clock faces. ‘Mr Clock’ has a display that seems to flip around eccentrically until the viewer stands directly in front – at this point the clock starts to ‘behave’ itself and reveal the right time. ‘Inbetween Time’ is both a technically impressive piece of interaction design, and an appears work of motion graphics, with the numbers on the display morphing into each other as time passes. Park says that this fluid transition represent the ‘flow of time’. Peter Kelly

Je Baak: MA Communications Art & Design

In the RCA’s Communication Art & Deisng course, Baaks work stood out for its technical perfection and vaguely hypnotic beauty. At the show Baak displayed three animations on loop comprising video footage of fairground rides combined with moving montages that give industrial looking structures the appearance of undulating sea creatures. Much of Baak’s work reflects his interest in Buddhism; reinterpreting everyday scenes to give them a sense of poetry. Peter Kelly

Jamie Tunnard: MA Design Products

The Desklamp/Projector is a dual-function desk lamp. The lamp head contains a LED bulb for use as a normal lamp. It also houses a miniature LED projector module, which enabled moving images to be displayed. The Desklamp/Projector can be connected to a DVD player or TV receiver box via ports in the lamps base. What instinctively drew me to this project was its inventive spirit. It evoked images of modern-day man inventor, sparks flying from a shed at the bottom of the garden. In the audio-visual industry, which is over-populated with identikit grey boxes, this project has a soul and personality. Tonnes of potential, both as a contract product but also as a domestic object. Richard Shed.

Seongyong Lee: MA Design Products

Plytube is a wooden tube created using similar principles of making cardboard tubes, for which Seongyong developed additional process to increase its structural integrity. It is a great piece of furniture. In quite a saturated market Lee’s plytube furniture stands out as original and distinctive, but also feasible and marketable. I love the honesty of each exposed joint, very sensitive detailing and finishing, and then, when you handle the product, it has wonderful tactile qualities too. Richard Shed.

Sarah Wiberly: MA Ceramics

Part of the exhibition Out of Practice, which showcased the outcome of a collaboration between the RCA , MA ceramics and glass and dance company Siobhan Davies Studios, between the Lines was inspired by the quality of the lighting and verticality of studios designed by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects. Set in between two glass panes on the first floor of the Siobhan Davies Studios, this delicate sequence of glass tubes creates a visual rhythm which as well as being an interpretation of movement, in its layout and structure, evokes a close connection to the world of sound and music.
Gian Luca Amadei

Megan Charnley: DipArch

Taking it lead from Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, the project transforms Kings Cross and St Pancras Station into a learning landscape, the main Wikiversity Campus. The Wikiversity exploits the infrastructure of the railway network, the urban locations of stations throughout the country, and the time spent travelling or waiting to travel to offer informal learning opportunities. What gripped me most in Megan’s work was the optimism and freshness of her writing – she is able to create an atmosphere through the content and graphics of a train timetable – anyone for Conversational French on the 0800 – 0846 from London Kings Cross to Peterborough? Her manifesto for unconstrained imaginations recalls the modernist Marxism of Berthold Brecht, which is refreshing and delightful, and the last thing I expected walking into at the RCA. Judith Losing

University of East London

Vassilis Pafilis: PhD in Fine Arts

Vassilis Pafilis work tuned my eyes to a very different geographical situation in London’s New East Town, complete with its very own airport across Royal Victoria dock, setting the acoustic tone. His large cracked-oil paintings; studies of beaches, horizons, heaving seas in thunderous ochres, browns and greys, certainly took me somewhere.   It’s not ‘greek to me’ but it might be to him.  His work is very different in tone to some other cracking canvases in this (very) Professional Doctorate in Fine Art display. Graham Modlen

University of Westminster

Elizabeth Blundell: DipArch

A postal sorting office and private residence dedicated to the collection and preservation of letters in Bayswater constructs an architectural letter to London. Written to address emotional loss within the city, through the practice of letter writing users are encouraged to articulate the loss experienced in their lives. The project forms an ode to absence and encourages the expression of grief in a society where one is rigorously coerced  to don a ’stiff upper lip’. This project combines subtle intervention with architectural rigour that culminates in a powerful yet tender proposition for a building. Owen Pritchard

James Gardener: DipArch

High Tide Street is an inhabitable bridge on the Thames, which shifts with the changing tide and connects to Silvertown in London’s Docklands with Woolwich in the North. Addressing the city’s north-south divide, Gardener’s project offers an elegant means to re-territorialise a once vibrant artery. The project transcends the limitations of scale in architecture. The beautifully composed film and drawings show the vacillating structure reconfiguring to create a walkway over habitable pods. Gardener’s vision of a ‘cultural highstreet’ which includes a floating library, concert hall and fish market, balances the magical with the prosaic. Gwen Webber

A detail from Jurgen Mayer H's award winning proposals

Jurgen Mayer Architects were last named the winner of the Audi Urban Futures Award. The award is an innovation was set up by the German car manufacturer to encourage discussions around the relationship between mobility and urban planning. Mayer’s winning proposal posited a future where cars are run entirely on electricity taken from a smart-grid, known as the Electricity Embedded Environment.  The visualizations of the project, consisting of rapid-prototyped models and Minority-Report-style renderings, showed a world of 2030 where the digital, virtual and real worlds have melded together – cars come with integrated augmented reality software and the flow of traffic is automated. The practice receives a prize of 100,000 euros.

Last night’s announcement was the first major event of the Venice Architecture Biennale. The Audi-sponsored awards event, held in the car-less city of Venice focused on the negative impact of cars on the environment and cities. In addition to Jurgen Mayer, the other finalists were Alison Brooks Architects, Bjarke Ingles Group, Cloud9, and Standardarchitecture. New York-based practice Diller Scofidio + Renfro were involved in the first stage of the awards, which were presented at Audi Urban Futures conference in London earlier, but had to pull out due to excessive workload.

Mayer's vision of an integrated virtual reality and electricity grid

Alison Brooks said: “I think really hard work needs to be done to reintegrate ecology and nature into cities,  and to shift the priority from traffic and infrastructure to nature and people.” Rupert Stadler, the CEO of Audi worldwide, explained the involvement of the car manufacturer by saying that it was essential for the growth of the any company in the automobile to ‘understand and appreciate the culture and growth of cities in the future.’ They have certainly invested heavily in the programme. The prize money is five times bigger than the Stirling.

The event, designed to provoke debate about the future was held in the Scuola della Misericordia, designed by sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino. It was part-constructed in the second half of the 15^th century, but never completed and has been maintain in the half-finished state for nearly 600 years. The awards were presented in its main hall, which at 21m x 49m is second only in size in Venice to the Doge’s Palace. The building has been empty and unused for the last 30 years.

Even in positive speculations about the future, Venice gets a doing.

]]> http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/venice-the-car-free-city/feed/ 0 http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/tel-aviv-signs-of-a-normal-city/ http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/tel-aviv-signs-of-a-normal-city/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:29:23 +0000 Rob wilson http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/?p=8076

Tel Aviv Museum of Art contains spaces that are completely internalised and without natural light

‘I love this city,’ enthused my taxi driver, ‘it’s like New York: 24 hour.’ And keeping up the banter until Ben Gurion Airport, he presented a good simulcrum of a New York cabbie though the statement itself was a touch hyperbolic, considering the scale and physical make-up of Tel Aviv. Its inner-city population is only 400,000 and until recently the city was relatively low rise. But the parallels are there. Tel Aviv-Yafo – to give the city its full name reflecting its municipal union with the ancient port city of Jaffa – is Israel’s most financially robust, culturally dominant, and liberal city.

Starting with the celebration last year of the Tel Aviv’s centennial, it seems the city is looking afresh at how to market itself internationally: casting around for its ‘Big Apple’ ticket. In some ways, self-promotion is an inherent part of the city’s identity. The name Tel Aviv can be seen as an early form of marketing, designed, like New York, to hold similar historical-but-new resonances. It comes from the Hebrew translation by Nahum Sokolow of Altneuland, the title of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist novel. Tel means an archaeological mound or site literally layered in history; aviv means Spring.

Now, the city has appointed an international outreach coordinator, the highly personable Eytan Schwartz, who runs through the expected routine ‘not competing with the big global cities’; ‘looking at what makes us a unique destination’; ‘learning from Barcelona’ but then also, much more tellingly, states: ‘we want to be normal’, underlining the desire to lose what makes living in Israel utterly unique: its political context as a state existing as part-palimpsest with that of the Palestinians.

The design of the Museum of Art is redolent of Libeskind’s work

Architecture and construction is always political – a potential tool of those in power – and this truer in Israel than anywhere else, as the remains of the Ottoman and British presence here attests. In Gaza, on their withdrawal in 2005, the Israelis demolished their settlements before pulling out. Rather than a process of relinquishing control, this was a planned destruction: a removal from use. Sandi Hilal highlighted the key importance of the ability to plan, and the impact of its denial to the Palestinians, in the May 2010 Tate Modern debate, Decolonizing Architecture. This is also the name of the architectural collective she has founded with Eyal Weizman and Alessandro Petti to consider the questions such as what does it mean to reuse ‘the house of your enemy’ and how ex-Israeli security structures might be recycled by the Palestinians.

But just as New York is not America, Tel Aviv is also notorious for being semidetached – politically, culturally and attitudinally – from the rest of the country. This was encapsulated in the 2006 film The Bubble, which follows a story of doomed gay love between a Palestinian and a Jew set against the backdrop of a liberal Tel Aviv, starting during the intifada and concluding in a suicide bombing. In this context, the city’s current spate of look-atme buildings is particularly interesting in that it reveals Tel Aviv’s ambition to be thought of as an international city, rather than tied to controversies over territory.

The Perez Center for Peace overlooks the sea, and when empty seems like a viewing station, a folly perhaps

This phase started in Holon, a separate city from Tel Aviv and one stereotypically looked down on culturally. It’s a bit ‘bridge and tunnel’ as one Tel Aviv architect put it. Here, Ron Arad’s Design Museum has put the city on the ‘cultural icon’ map with it’s vividly red, orange peel-like, Corten skin.

Tel Aviv’s riposte is currently under construction: the extension to the Museum of Art by US architect Preston Scott Cohen. This proto-Libeskind essay in facetted angled facades has a skin formed of silvery pre-cast concrete panels, hung off a concrete frame. Internally it has a steel frame with a series of huge steel beams allowing for the large spans of the gallery spaces described as a series of ‘abstract boxes’, which, surprisingly, will be internalized, having no option of even partial natural lighting.

Further south on the coast in Jaffa, another distinctively clad building has just been completed. The Peres Center for Peace, named after Shimon Peres is on a prominent site, facing the ocean. The Center runs a series of ‘professional, educational and recreational’ programmes designed to bring together Arabs and Israelis. Its design, a linear striated form facing out to the sea, is based on a sketch by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas produced over dinner with Peres, and subsequently translated on site by a local architect Yoav Messer.

Its flanks are formed by alternating layers of greenish concrete and glass, the former cast on site using local sand, layer by layer, with bespoke glass panes fitted between. This laborious process of construction has meant it has taken 10 years to complete. Inside, the facade creates very beautiful effects of light, especially in a strange tall void space at the rear, while at the front, a conference auditorium on the top floor faces a stage with a fantastic panorama of the sea beyond.

When I visited, perhaps because it was nearly empty, the building seemed vaguely purposeless as a structure, more like a viewing platform for the sea, almost a folly: obviously not the intended message. In domestic architecture too, there seems to be more of a look-at-me attitude that means small architectural ‘icons’ are replacing the relatively modest houses of the socialist state dating from the 1950s in which even the Israeli leaders used to live.

In the wealthy northern suburb of Zahala, the architect Arieh Ginzburg is just completing The Orange House: its most immediately striking feature revealed in its name. It is a series of steel-framed boxes, constructed of girders painted bright orange. One cantilevers out and under it you enter the house by crossing a bridge with pools of water on either side that cool the breezes the house is orientated to catch. Every element in the house is off-the-shelf or standard industrial and the colour, exposed steelwork and use of plywood interior fittings, give the house a 1970s high-tech look that feels rather novel again.

It is not surprise that architecture is seen as central to marketing the new Tel Aviv. For Tel Aviv has at its heart the White City: the late 1920s extension laid out by the British planner Patrick Geddes as a garden city, following the ideas of Ebenezer Howard. In its development, it presented a blank canvas for a flood of emigrant Jewish architectural talent who had trained in the International Style in Europe.

What resulted is the highest concentration of early modernist buildings in the world, with street upon street of so-called Bauhaus buildings (although only two of the original architects actually trained at the German design school). For this, Tel Aviv was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, catching a bit of a zeitgeist moment for the renewed appreciation and reappraisal of modernism worldwide. Consequently the city has been able to project itself as at heart an untouched modernist gem: a gift for the municipal marketing department.

Reflecting the renewed importance and appreciation of the original master plan, which still sets the feel and grain of the city, the centennial year kicked off with a conference on the architectural future of the city. Overall, the year-long celebration has had a galvanising and profile-raising effect on discussions of the planning and built heritage and contemporary architecture in the city. Guides to the White City were produced and, this year, Houses from Within, an Open House-inspired event organised by Aviva Levinson and architect Alon Bin-Nun, was promoted for the first time by the Municipality of Tel Aviv.

A clutch of fabulous apartments owned by graphic designers and architects opened up to the public over the course of the two day event, but Houses from Within also gave a fascinating insight into the history of the city, showing how it can be read through its architecture. It included talks and tours on some of the major planning and infrastructure decisions that have shaped it and are shaping it now: such as the reworking of the central space to provide an expanded public space: one of many landscaping projects that are greening the city.

In the centre, the White City is beginning to see major conservation work carried out. One of the leading figures in this is Professor Nitza Szmuk, an expert on the modernist back-catalogue of Tel Aviv. She is currently advising on the restoration of one of the most significant modernist buildings, Polishuk House, built in 1934 as offices over commercial space on a prominent corner site adjacent to the central Ha-Carmel market.

The Polishuk House built in the International Style is being turned into a boutique hotel with pool

The developer plans to convert it into a boutique hotel – one of a rash of such projects that seem to have sprung up in the city in the last couple of years. While this seems a good re-use of an otherwise neglected building, surprisingly, despite its historic status it is going have a rooftop pool, which will mean completely gutting of the building. Conservation laws appear only skin deep.

Many poorer neighbourhoods though, such as the Shapira district in the south an area with a high illegal immigrant population on the border of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, remain under the radar of the official image of the city. This was highlighted in a recent study by the architect Sharon Rotbard and in his 2005 book White City, Black City. It was significant that the three ‘route’ maps produced by the municipal authorities for the centennial, to celebrate the city’s history, focused first on the White City (the ‘white route’) and then merely used the two natural features of Tel Aviv’s site, the Nahal HaYarkon River to the north and its coastline as a‘green route’ and a ‘blue route’, leaving much of the city as unexplored hinterland.

The blue route though does highlight the much-upgraded beach front, coastline promenade and cycle routes that connect central Tel Aviv down to Jaffa. The historic port there is undergoing major renovation, although there are less welcome signs of new money coming in, such as Andromeda Hill, a gated neighbourhood perched on the slopes behind the port, a development that has already elicited local protest.

The White City was built to a garden city master plan

Overall, Tel Aviv does seem to have an energy that doesn’t need to be glossed-up by marketing-speak. It looks like a good place to live and feels like it’s getting better. There are the usual pressures of traffic, concerns over high-rise over-development and of the wealthy displacing the less well-off in newly fashionable neighbourhoods, but these are the signs of a ‘normal’ city. Whatever the normality or otherwise of Tel Aviv, there seems an optimism in the city, which for the most part is embracing change while maintaining what is undoubtedly its unique feel

The Ghostvillage Project from Agents Of Change on Vimeo

The canteen in Samara, shot from the air in 2007

In spring 2007 I went to Samara, a city some 500 miles south east of Moscow on the Volga River, to look at the Maslennikov factory canteen (1930-1932) by one of the few female architects of the Soviet avant-garde, Yekaterina Maximova. It has a ground plan in the form of a hammer and sickle and, despite years of neglect, is a monument to the innovative period in which it was built. A press conference was held by the Hammer and Sickle Movement, defending the factory canteen from demolition. I was struck by their determination to defend a period that had been so unfashionable for most of the Soviet era.

In 1918 Lenin called on artists to create ‘monuments to the Russian socialist revolution.’ The factory canteen, with its architecture parlante, fulfilled this beautifully by providing a necessary function and celebrating the revolution. Factory canteens were intended to free women from the shackles of domestic duties, allowing them to devote their energies to the building of the Soviet Union. Samara (then Kuibyshev) was the capital of a large agrarian area, busy building enormous factories and becoming an industrial centre. Food was cooked in the ‘hammer’ and transported on conveyor belts to the ‘sickle’ part of the building. Cheap, hot meals were served all day and there were also rooms where the builders of the Soviet Union could relax: a reading room and a gym. Maximova’s factory canteen has a reinforced concrete building frame, due to a lack of metal. This was one of the first in the city, an example of how shortages forced architects to test the boundaries of their materials. The Soviet avant-garde was a time of explosive creativity. In art as in society, everything was turned on its head: old ways of seeing and creating were rejected and replaced with new forms that harnessed new technology and the revolutionary spirit of the time.

Location of the Samara region in Russia

The avant-garde period was high on energy but it was also one of extreme poverty and hardship. Constructivism was rejected under Stalin, and existing buildings sometimes adapted. In 1944 the factory canteen was given a classical re-working: its predominantly glass facades were filled in and windows given classical forms. These distortions of architectural form and the negative associations with the era, mean that developers now wishing to sweep away architecture of the avant-garde, are baffled by any movement to stop them on the part of the public. The developer wishing to knock down the factory canteen invited the head of the Hammer and Sickle Movement, architect Vitaly Stadnikov, and myself to dinner in an elegant post-war modernist building (which he announced over pudding that he also intended to demolish) and probed us to try and understand why we were interested in the building. In the spirit of the avantgarde, Stadnikov said, ‘we are enthusiasts.’ The developer found it hard to believe that we were not on somebody’s payroll, and the conversation ended.

Samara is the sixth Russian city in terms of population and was chosen as the emergency capital during the Second World War, when many ministries were evacuated there and Stalin had a deep bunker constructed. Samara was a ‘closed city’ during Soviet times due to its arms production sites. Since the fall of Communism, it has lost approximately one third of its historic buildings, and corruption is rife. Architecture and planning is a dangerous business: the head architect of the neighbouring town Togliatti was assassinated five years ago. In the first years of post-Soviet capitalism, there was a rush for the best plots of land in the city; the embankment became built up with high-rise buildings for a new middle class, architectural monuments in the historic centre were regularly razed to the ground in mysterious fires.

Ground plan of Yakaterina Maximova’s factory canteen (1930-32)

Despite this rush for profit and desire to establish a new set of symbols for the city, there are still many people who feel that witnesses of 20th-century history like the factory canteen must be saved. The campaign has support from UNESCO, DoCoMoMo, SAVE Europe’s Heritage and Russian charity MAPS (Moscow Architecture Preservation Society) and has led to a book on Moscow by MAPS and SAVE, published in December 2009. The editor, Stadnikov, has rallied Samara to think of new ways to reuse buildings like the factory canteen: victims of Russia’s turbulent history. This determined campaigning continues the spirit of the avantgarde. If the era’s buildings are embraced in Samara, they will be a rich source of inspiration for future generations.

Samara Endangered City on the Volga, a bilingual report by SAVE Europe’s Heritage and MAPS is available from www.savebritainsheritage.org

Clementine Cecil is co-founder and trustee of MAPS. She will be giving a lecture, about the unsung heroes of Russia’s conservation movement, Russian Heroes of Conservation on 17 February at Pushkin House, WC1.

Detail from Oliver Lowrie's cartoon strip Paper City

A city of artificial hills, with towers peaking above the clouds in permanent sunshine, is the vision drawn by Anna Boldina, winner of Blueprint and the Royal Academy’s Paper City competition. Boldina, who is an urban design graduate from Moscow, has lived in London for one year and was inspired to draw her idea after seeing the exhibition earlier this year at the Royal Academy (RA). The competition received more than 150 entries, and was judged by architect Peter Cook; illustrator Sara Fanelli; RA architecture curator Kate Goodwin, and Blueprint editor Vicky Richardson. Other shortlisted entries to the competition can be viewed on the Royal Academy’s website here

Thanks to those who provided prizes: Alessi for the prize of a Crevasse vase designed by Zaha Hadid, for the winner, Anna Boldina; the Society of Architectural Illustrators for a subscription to its journal, and to Daler-Rowney for art materials for the children’s prize

Overall winner Anna Boldina created a city made up of artificial hills and towers that rise above the clouds

A special illustration prize was awarded to Tom Gibson and Bee Emmott for a poetic photographic image. Runners-up included an exquisite pen-and-ink drawing of The Automatic City by George King; Zoltán Gaál’s detailed and humorous drawing of what people need in a city, including a detox clinic located next to an off-licence, and Metamorphocity, a machine for transforming the way people live, by Oliver Lowrie. In the children’s category, the prize went to Hamish Fawcett for his drawing of the city as a human body, with Daniella Howe as the runner-up. Both are aged 11 years and from Norman Court School in Hampshire.
 

Zoltán Gaál’s annotated drawing of a city showing everything people need to live

Winner of the prize for illustration: Tom Gibson and Bee Emmott created this poetic image using photography

Runner-up in the illustration category: George King’s delicate pen-and-ink drawing of The Automatic City

Runner-up Oliver Lowrie’s cartoon-strip presentation of an idea for a machine to transform life in the city titled Metamorphocity

Blueprint volunteers test the limits of public space. Photograph by David Cowlard

How and why has so much anti-social space been created in Britain? Anna Minton has written an important book on the topic. Ground Control doesn’t shriek, it isn’t utopian and it certainly isn’t environmental determinism. But it is highly readable and thoroughly researched and it should be required reading for architects and planners. Minton manages to cut right into the mismatch between the upbeat language of regeneration and the sense that our experience of the new urban environment is less than wonderful. She writes about soulless privately patrolled spaces that feed bigoted incuriosity and consumerism more than they enhance civic responsibility or happiness. She points out that the social classes may be physically close to each other, but they remain separate, their lives unfolding in segregated and often fortified enclaves where encounters with strangers are rare.

Minton’s writing is vivid. She takes us to places where we see first-hand the impacts of the rich living behind science-fiction levels of security technology, planning fantasy lives where surprises aren’t supposed to happen. She outlines the urban policies that lead to fit-for-purpose terraced houses being demolished and replaced by developments of questionable architectural quality. The book also gives shocking facts about military surveillance adapted for city-centre management. It makes for uncomfortable reading for anyone who was ever an enthusiast of New Labour’s urban policies.

Divided into sections on The City, The Home and Civil Society, the book argues that the problems go back to a cocktail of misplaced beliefs and policies imported from America. These explain why Britain feels so different from the Continent. The French, the Germans, the Danes apparently enjoy an environment built for leisurely urban life and, by implication, truly civic public culture.

In today’s Britain Jane Jacobs’ happy shopkeepers and ubiquitous eyes on the street have no chance. Here we are caught in a vicious cycle of ever enhanced security technologies and growing paranoia which, echoed and amplified by the media, leaves us confused and angry as well as fearful. Gated communities are not, Minton writes, uniquely a luxury affair. High security living, as she calls it, produces segregated enclaves for the less rich too, not because people in Britain prefer it but because official enthusiasm for defensible space has put pressure on developers to build it.

Those who see nothing to worry about in rolling out business improvement districts and giving priority to consumer culture, should read the book for its astute analysis of both the origins and probable outcomes of allowing private interests and private security to control public space and behaviour. Minton gives depth to debates that easily get caught in shallow consumerist banalities.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed (see Blueprint issue 281) that both Conservatives and New Labour have made concrete some frightening ideologies that separate people, control behaviour and institutionalise mistrust. And this has been done in the seductive language of urban renaissance and safety. The privatization of what was formerly public has been justified by the TINA-doctrine – ‘there is no alternative’. But the research and critiques that Minton reports demonstrate that complaints as well as alternatives have been voiced for years and decades already.

The message of the book is not new. What is remarkable is that it has taken so long for critiques that have become boringly repetitive in academic and campaign literature, to find their way into such an accessible form. Minton is to be thanked for tackling the complicated relationships between people’s (and local government’s) desire for clean, safe and green environments and the rise of an economic orthodoxy where commercial logic penetrates areas where markets could never operate.

To argue her case, Minton repeatedly refers to Oliver James’ book Affluenza about how unhappy Britain and the USA are compared to Continental Europe and argues that Britain has frequently copied American urban policies. This is not quite persuasive. In terms of the health of civil society, the Continent has its troubles, and just like here, the ugliest results of social polarisation are rarely shown to visitors. On the other hand, Britain’s stubbornly persistent class system and the land-ownership patterns that go with it suggest that there is more to be explored here than a penchant for American fashions.

Nonetheless, Minton has managed to weave together a story that is complicated and complex, and where reality easily gets lost in a mix of manipulative market-speak and politicians’ claims to impotence. And it’s a story that architects and planners, as well as architectural journalists, are almost ethically bound to engage with. After all, in the last few decades we have predominantly built for the individualist, the winner, the consumer and the paranoiac. As Minton notes, now is a fantastic time to change all this.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the twenty-first-century, is published by Penguin

There was obviously something in the air when decided to do a special issue of Blueprint about the limits of public space. London’s summer heatwave, the activities of the Manifesto Club, and the opening of The High Line in New York have all contributed to rash of attempts to work out what public space is for, and how to make it work.

This seems to have been playing on the mind of London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, for a little while. The scheme to place pianos around the city and provoke public singalongs seemed like a jolly idea. But if a return to the ‘good old days’ of Londoners gathering around the old Joanna (as imagined by some) was the plan, it hasn’t really materialized. It’ll be interesting to see if Antony Gormley’s One & Other Fourth Plinth – described in the Guardian as a ‘public-access talent show’ – will be more successful in capturing the popular imagination.

Having also incurred the fury of the Guide Dogs for the Blind by supporting the Dixon Jones-designed ‘shared surface’ scheme for Exhibition Road in London, Johnson has now made an open call for ideas on how to revitalize London’s public spaces. Blueprint has made its own suggestion.

New York, by contrast, has been basking in the glory of a hugely popular public space project: at the beginning of June,  The High Line, by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, opened to near-universal praise. Nicolai Ouroussoff described it as “one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years.” There was just one voice of dissent but that was quickly stomped my Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, who described the critique on Twitter as “possibly the stupidest piece of urban criticism I’ve read in recent memory”. Less trumpeted was the, perhaps temporary, creation of a ‘pedestrian mall’ in Times Square: essentially a cordoned-off area with a few haphazardly arranged seats for spot of lunchtime relaxation. Some consider it a slipshod arrangement unworthy of a great city; but it is interesting to note that New York’s two most prominent efforts to transform public space have been about creating areas of calm and contemplation in a fearsomely busy city. London, on the other hand, seems desperate to inject life into increasingly deadened urban spaces. 

In Rome, politics and architecture are always deeply interwoven. Yet as Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, and other ambitious buildings, reach completion, Peter Kelly finds that the city’s architects have been thrown into deeper uncertainty by a radical change in administration.

Luca Galofaro, the 44-year-old founder of Rome-based architects IAN+ talks with dismay about running a practice in the Italian capital: ‘Projects in Rome just stop. For months… years at a time. The bureaucracy is crazy. You can’t hold on to staff for the duration of a project because for long periods there’s just not enough work to do.’

Like many of his contemporaries, his office is on the outskirts of Rome, exploiting the cheaper rent of neglected areas and a spacious converted building that can accommodate fluctuating staff levels. His prognosis for Roman architects seems hopeless. Yet on his laptop are renderings showing ideas with huge ambition and imagination: hollowing out vast historic buildings in the city centre and filling them with dense stacks of accommodation; a scheme for a museo-lab superstructure in Rome, and a huge, arcing, skeletal office tower. Some are genuine proposals, others are intellectual exercises, but the distinction is not clear.

Artwork by Stalker Lab

This mix of creative productivity and frustrated stagnation is typical of young architects in Rome. The most extreme, and most internationally-known example is Stalker Lab. A loose collective of architects and artists that emerged in the mid-Nineties, it organised epic walks tracing the outer reaches of Rome’s ever-expanding outskirts and documented them through writing and photography. Led by founding member Lorenzo Romito, it has continued to pursue an overtly political agenda, squatting in disused buildings, working with the immigrant communities and encouraging outsiders to engage with the city through art and building, but eschewing offers to design buildings themselves.

Borderline Metropolis by Labics

Roman architects are, in many ways, forced into pursuing such a theoretical agenda by the long-term frustrations of the city’s political scene and this has only been intensified by recent political upheaval. If you thought the economic downturn has made life difficult for architects in London, New York or any other major city in the world, spare a thought for those in Rome. Italy’s capital city is experiencing the downturn against a backdrop of a labyrinthine bureaucracy, administrative transformation, and a major corruption scandal that, together, have resulted in near-paralysis for the architecture community. This is even without the eternal problem of building in Rome’s ancient city centre, which is fiercely protected by conservationists.

In recent years much has been made of Rome’s renaissance as an architecturally vibrant city: 15 unbroken years of left-wing administration, led first by Francesco Rutelli and then by Walter Veltroni, announced a seemingly endless round of architectural competitions for public projects. Programmes for the creation of 100 new piazzas, new churches for the millennium and a system that required developers to incorporate public projects into their schemes were instigated.

Model of the new Congress Centre by Massimiliano Fuksas

Beguiling renderings and models of projects by architects like Rem Koolhaas and Massimiliano Fuksas appeared and so did cranes as major projects for the ‘eternal city’ by Renzo Piano, Richard Meier and Zaha Hadid gradually reached completion. These developments brought hope: while the pace of construction remained agonisingly slow, there was a perception that Rome was entering a new phase of modernity.

Then, in April last year, everything changed. The city elections brought a new regime, led by Mayor Gianni Alemanno. The left-wing parties of Italy had imploded under charges of corruption (which had previously been thought to be the domain of the right). Rutelli – briefly returning for a term while Veltroni ran for national office – was replaced with Alemanno, described by The Independent’s Italian correspondent as a ‘former street-fighting neo-fascist’.

It quickly became apparent that Mayor Alemanno was no lover of modern architecture. Once he took office, all projects that had not started construction – and even some that had – were suspended. Architectural competitions were halted. Veltroni’s General Master Plan, which called for the creation and densification of new ‘centres’ on the periphery of the city, has also been frozen.

Most famously, Alemanno announced during the election campaign that he would have Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis Museum, which only opened in 2006, demolished if he came to power. A seemingly modest building designed to display ancient Roman Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace) on the banks of the generally neglected River Tiber, it is nevertheless situated within the city walls and was a badge of honour for Veltroni who saw himself as a patron of modern architecture and pushed through its inauguration, 11 years after Rutelli directly commissioned Meier without an open competition. Its continued existence, therefore, became a major political issue.

In particular, the election of Mayor Alemanno has left a raft of major building projects in stasis. Most, although not all, are concerned with the development of Rome’s periphery: areas that lack the rich heritage or tight street plan of the historic centre and are characterized by industrial buildings or the 1930s constructions of Mussolini. One of the largest is the master plan for the vast site of the old Mercati Generali in the area of Ostiense, a district just south west of the ancient city walls.

OMA's proposed redevelopment of the Mercati Generali

Run-down for sure, the area has an appealingly shambolic, disorganized feel and is dominated by the industrial landmarks of its huge Italgas gasometers; unsurprisingly, the district has become a haven for artists and young architects including Stalker Lab, MaO and Labics. The master plan, drawn up by OMA, proposed a cultural and commercial area: a theatre, cinema, restaurants, a central market plaza and retail spaces, but the site is now bordered by a metal fence that shows no signs of coming down in the near future.

There were also significant plans for reviving the city’s infrastructure; in the east of the capital, the crumbling Tiburtina Station was due to be redeveloped by ABDR architects, to become Rome’s main rail hub. In the south of the city, in the 1930s-built EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma) district, there were plans for an aquarium underneath the EUR artificial lake, and two new skyscrapers with a luxury residential block by Renzo Piano. These plans are now all under review by the new administration. A major congress centre by Studio Fuksas, known as ‘the cloud’ is almost certain to go ahead, primarily because the cost of halting it would be greater than its completion. In the 12 months since Alemanno took charge, not a single new project has been announced.

If this climate of profound of uncertainty was not enough, a scandal involving some hugely prominent architectural practices adds another layer of crisis. Marco Casamonti, founding member of one of the country’s most successful firms, Archea Associati, was arrested in December 2008 for illegally falsifying a public competition for a project in Florence. The scandal, which is currently under judicial review, implicates some of the leading figures in a generation of Italian architects that have become a dominant force over the last decade. If Casamonti is found guilty the effect will be tumultuous and cause further re-evaluation among the architecture profession.

It is a peculiar result of the slow  progress of architectural projects in Rome, that some of the grandest results of the Rutteli-Veltroni era are reaching completion just at this time of crisis. The great emblem of the previous administration was, and remains, the MAXXI. Indeed, an administrative body, DARC, was established by the city government to promote contemporary art and architecture, with particular attention given to bringing the building to completion. Zaha Hadid’s sinuous, snaking complex of galleries is now reaching completion in the north west of the city. Hadid’s design won over the competition jury with its efforts to integrate one of the few areas in Rome that is rich with modern architecture.

Located in the Flaminio district in the north-west outskirts of Rome, an area typified in particular by 1930s housing projects, the MAXXI is on the Guido Reni, a road that, to the east, leads to Piano’s Auditorium, Parco della Musica, which was completed in 2002. To the west is the River Tiber where a footbridge designed by Buro Happold is currently under construction. This will connect directly with Rome’s 1960 Olympic site, a stunning complex, which was designed by Pier Luigi Nervi who updated the structures built by Mussolini in preparation for the aborted 1944 Games.

The MAXXI is the most ambitious building to be constructed in the Italian capital since the Olympics. It nestles up against and wraps around a set of army barracks from the Mussolini era, which are also to be used to display the collection. The sheer scale of the project is overwhelming, and inside there are moments of remarkable drama as the extended, contorted rectangular forms intersect.

The building has its problems: the urbanistic concept is difficult to read from the inside; it is also near-impossible to imagine how the work will be displayed in such a complex environment (the first exhibition is due to open in 2010), and the ambition of its structure is let down by some awkward metal columns at its south entrance. Yet, its unrepentant modernity is unique in Rome.

The Macro by Decq Cornette

Also nearing completion is the MACRO modern art museum, designed by the Parisian Decq Cornette architects, which joins King Roselli’s Lateran University library and Piano’s auditorium as the most remarkable projects completed in Rome in recent times. Designed largely by established, internationally renowned architects, these buildings will come to be seen as emblems of a specific era – less concentrated but almost as distinctive and identifiable as Mussolini’s EUR. Perhaps more poignant, though, are the smaller projects by young practices such as Andrea Stipa’s futuristic cinema interior, hidden within historic buildings to the south east of the city centre or the beautiful Corten walkway designed by Nemesi Studio for the ancient, monumental Mercati Traianei Museum also within the city walls. These projects show how the ancient and modern can co-exist in interesting ways: it will be truly unfortunate if such emerging and talented architects don’t get the chance to pursue these possibilities.

The Lateran University Library extension by King Roselli

Even before the change in administrations, such opportunities were rare enough. The British School at Rome is currently running a series of exhibitions entitled London-Rome: Work in Progress: sequentially presenting the current work of young architects in the British and Italian capitals, and the comparison is telling. The London practices, including Carmody Groarke, Witherford Watson Mann and 6a Architects have, over the last 10 years, built up varied portfolios of completed projects. Their Roman counterparts, such as Ma0, Andrea Stipa, and N!Studio have realized projects but there is a noticeable difference in quantity, scale and the frequency they are able to work in their home city. According to Stipa, the English practices, despite being younger on the whole, have a head start of ‘about 10 years. What they achieve at 35, we do at 45.’

In the absence of construction projects, many of the younger generation are now turning their critical attention to what went wrong, focusing even more of the failures of left-wing administration than the predictable antipathy of the right.

Francesco Garofalo, an architect, critic and university tutor who often worked closely with the previous administration and advised on architectural competitions, feels that there was a failure of determination and coherence about the 15-year rash of architectural programmes and proposals. ‘We ended up with an accumulation of projects without a vision: there was no ethos behind it,’ he says. This provides an interesting contrast with Rome’s mayor of the late 1970s, Giulio Carlo Argan, who was an art historian and commissioned the renowned Roma Interrotta exhibition, which was brought to the Venice Architecture Biennale of 1978.

In that instance there was a Mayor with a decided vision, although little was actually constructed under his leadership. When it comes to Rutelli and Veltroni, it is certainly true that schemes such as the 100 Piazzas yielded pitifully few results, and schemes that did, such as the building of new churches, had little relevance to the fabric of the city. Garofalo sees the overall ineffectiveness of DARC, which is now being gradually wound down, as being due to Veltroni’s failure to distinguish between art and architecture, and between curation and bureaucracy.

Even the city’s General Master Plan was let down by a failure to carry through the original vision to the layers of bureaucracy and developers. Alberto Lacavoni of Ma0 points out that the notion of creating new, peripheral centres merely became a licence to build enormous shopping malls such as Porta di Roma, (one of the largest in Europe) in Rome’s north-western suburbs. ‘The administration was too weak, incapable of managing the process: developers are too powerful in Rome,’ he says.

Most of these architects will, of course, continue to propose, design and build projects wherever possible, but without the potential of continuous architectural competitions in their home city, the development of ideas and the refinement of these critiques will become an ever-more important part of their practice. Exhibitions such as London-Rome, and events such as the Venice Architecture Biennale become increasingly essential outlets for experimentation and arenas for discussion with architects outside Italy.

Architects in Rome have become used to the need for imagination, flexibility and, often, individual activism to get by. Romito, who has determinedly pursued this path with Stalker Lab for more than 10 years, denies that he is anti-architecture but argues that the fundamentals of Roman society and its administration must change before it is worth building a thing.

His critique of the city’s attitude to immigration and its failure to make outsiders a part of any future vision is stinging, but when asked if he would  build elsewhere his reply is revealing: ‘Rome is my city, I love it here.’ Without political support, however, he sees the educational culture as key to city’s future. Romito’s main ambition now is to establish a counter-cultural university, where alternative ideas about Rome can
be pursued and encouraged.

Farmacy: Samantha Lee

The London Yields exhibition currently on show at The Building Centre in London investigates the unexploited possibilities for urban agriculture in London. Two of the most visionary schemes presented at the London Yields are Farmacy by Samantha Lee and King’s Vine London by Soonil Kim-King, both students from the Architectural Association. Farmacy is a proposal for a farm which grows, manufactures and sells medicinal herbs. The scheme envisages the herbs being grown within nests along the brick wall of Regent’s Canal. The iconic gasometers house the factory production and its machinery where the herbs get washed, dried, ground and distilled: prepared for commercial use.

King's Vine: Soonil Kim-King

King’s Vine London is a design solution for an aerial vineyard by Soonil Kim-King, an Intermediate student in Unit 3, at the AA.

King's Vine: Soonil Kim

Kim-King’s impressive design was inspired by the reticular structure of railway networks between St Pancras and King’s Cross station. Although his proposal has a surreal cinematic quality, which recalls Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the vineyards have a realistic calculated production capacity of 10,000 bottles of red wine every year. The intermediate Unit 3 at the AA is run by Nanette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos.

Urban Agriculture Curtain: Bohn & Viljoen with Hadlow College

For the more grounded inner city residents tempted to embrace the urban agriculture trend imposed by the recent credit crunch and the soaring prices of food supplies, London based practice Bohn & Viljoen Architects (in collaboration with Hadlow College) has developed a suspended vertical structure for growing vegetables. The Urban Agriculture Curtain – which provides the window display for the duration of the show – will be growing salads and herbs to be harvested (and promptly replaced) every two weeks for consumption in The Building Centre’s Café.

Capital Growth: James Potter

Part of the exhibition is also The Capital Growth campaign scheme, which aims to create 2,012 growing spaces by 2012. In its first phase, Capital Growth aimed to establish 50 new growing spaces in London. In the long term the campaign hopes to give practical support to communities as well as getting involved directly with landowners and planning issues.

Croydon Roofscape: AOC

London Yields is at The Building Centre 9 April – 30 May 2009

Just as we were finishing work on our latest Italian-themed issue, which includes a special report on the current troubles of architects in Rome, news spread around the world of President Sarkozy’s competition to create a new Grand Plan for Paris.  At first, the contrast between the two cities could not appear more marked. The political situation in Rome – in particular the election of a new right-wing mayor after nearly 20 years of left-wing mayors who were sympathetic to modern art and buildings – is paralyzing the city’s architects. Projects are being cancelled, architects are losing work and nothing is being built or commissioned. In Paris, however, it seemed as if a forward-looking leader was giving architects a license to be truly ambitious. “I don’t want a virtual city: I want projects. You have the absolute freedom to dream, and the means to go with it,” President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly told a stellar line-up of 10 international architecture practices in March. The idea was to create a new grand plan for Paris, to rejuvenate they city’s outskirts and to think boldly about expanding its boundaries.  The plans, developed by practices including Rogers Stirk Harbour, Jean Nouvel, and lauded urbanist Christian de Portzamparc, ranging from creating of enormous new parks, bringing mixed populations into high-rises, to building high-speed train lines, and even the movement of existing Parisian monuments.

In a time of recession, the scheme is remarkable, no doubt:  “Sarkozy, or at least his advisors, wants to redefine the city and its region in a manner unheard of since Baron Haussmann in the mid-19th century” enthused Tom Dyckhoff in The Times. Yet, just like in Rome, Parisian politics and architecture are impossible to separate, and Sarkozy was soon accused by some of pure political gesturing. The Telegraph reported that opposition Socialists were describing Sarkozy’s plan as a “Trojan horse” to reclaim power in Paris and the surrounding areas – mostly run by the Left. Jonathan Glancey, writing in The Guardian, was also suspicious of such grandiose proposals: “surely what is needed is a way of…  creating and nurturing the education, the jobs, the businesses and the ways of life that will allow Paris to develop humanely.” Zaha Hadid, who had not been requested to develop ideas for Sarkozy, told Building Design that the schemes were doomed to failure because “if you want to design through consensus, you end up with a kind of mediocre solution because… the committee system does not allow for extreme solutions.”

Suspicion and cynicism is not an unavoidable response to such grand visions. It is heartening that anyone is thinking on such a huge scale: as Nicolai Ouroussoff commented in the New York Times, “even if none of the proposals are ever built, they show a daring that has not been seen in a Western city for decades.” But this is clearly not enough. The current malaise of Roman architecture shows that hopes raised by apparently progressive administrations can result in even greater despair when the promises aren’t fulfilled.  We will have a better idea if Paris awaits a similar fate in the coming months, when Sarkovy announces the next stage in the Grand Plan, and his resolve is really put to the test. 

It is time to reassess the extreme clichés about Dubai. To many, it is a fabulous place, fast-forwarding into the future with stunning, drop-dead architecture and stupefying engineering driven by a can-do mentality that casually obliterates Guinness records. Alternatively, it is the quintessential dystopia sprung from unfettered development, environmentally and socially unsustainable, and an architectural zoo in a playground for the super-rich. 

Think again. Yes, the rich are luxuriating in the fantasy hotels and the McVillas on the Palm Jumeirah, but on the ground, ordinary people are starting to make the city buzz. Streets are coming alive in cityscapes that weren’t rendered in advance. Dubai is actually beginning to feel like a real city. The heart of a functioning metropolis is a vibrant downtown. Ten years ago, Dubai’s was the old business district of Dehra around Dubai Creek, but things move quickly here. 

For the next decade, super-developer Emaar is building a district called Downtown. Its first elements opened at the end of 2008 – WS Atkins’ The Address, a stylish hotel and condo tower, and the Dubai Mall, with two and a half times the retail space of London’s Westfield. Behind them is Adrian Smith’s Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest structure, looking curiously Flash Gordon as its silvery curves glint in the sun. This Downtown will certainly dazzle, yet real downtowns are rarely the result of planning. They are haphazard places. Indeed, an impromptu downtown lies along a stretch of Dubai’s central artery, Sheikh Zayed Road (SZR), between the iconic Emirates Towers and the Dubai Mall. This is not the most conducive environment for city life – SZR is a 10-lane freeway where the minimum speed is 60kph. Yet here, cafes and restaurants are full; busy supermarkets trade late into the night, and the sidewalks bustle. All this takes place at the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers that back on to what are still mainly car parks and vacant lots. Elsewhere in Dubai, high-rises are spaced to better behold them, but along SZR, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, as in New York or Chicago. Sure enough, the street life, the crazy whizz of traffic and the linear massing of random buildings make walking along SZR as exhilarating as Fifth Avenue or Michigan Avenue.

Crossing SZR, however, is another matter. There are only two pedestrian crossings in this 2km strip. Like Los Angeles, Dubai has been built for the motor, but that is about to change. In September, Dubai’s largely Japanese-designed and built Metro will open. Most of the Red Line’s 50km length runs on concrete flyovers beside SZR, and every station will connect both sides by bridge. Overnight, SZR will transform from a people-barrier to an axis of public connectivity. A second line opens in 2010, and Metro traffic could rise to 355m per year. London’s tube carries more than a billion, but that’s after 145 years’ development. Furthermore, a 7km Palm Jumeirah monorail, and, in 2011, the 14km Al Sufouh Tram, will seamlessly connect to the Metro.

In 2008, commuting meant driving an SUV or air-conditioned limo, or for the army of Asian construction workers, a battered minibus from a labour compound. By 2011, it will mean riding one of the best public transport systems. Dubai’s transformation coincides with the rise of a resident middle-class for whom the day is more than shopping and suntans, and buying milk means going to a corner shop rather than a mega-mall. The middle ground between low-pay workers and the elite of high-flying executives, holiday-home owners and the super-rich is beginning to fill. Projects like Zaha Hadid’s Opera House even promise culture. Of course, property prices are now falling. Outlandish plans such as the world’s largest airport, funfair and golfing city, and no less than 2km-plus skyscrapers to dwarf the Burj Dubai, may well get stuck in a project pipeline no longer lubricated by credit. Emaar’s rival hyper-developer, Nakheel, recently announced its plans for Universe Islands, which seem cosmically over-confident. Yet Nakheel has already dredged two more Palms, which dwarf the Palm Jumeirah – each could host more than a million residents.

In 2008, Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne warned that Dubai was heading towards ‘ecological disaster,’ in part because of the lack of joined-up planning. But there is a hand guiding Dubai’s development – curiously, its leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Credit him for the explosion of Sim City-on-acid development, but also initiatives like the public transport net. And the architects who’ve had the biggest impact on Dubai, WS Atkins and Adrian Smith, are both pacesetters in green building technology rather than followers. Sustainability is on the agenda – the United Arab Emirates has committed to the Kyoto Protocol (and legislated against the extreme conditions of construction workers). As Dubai ripens into a world city under the sort of sunshine the planet Mercury experiences, there are good signs on the drawing board as well as the street.  

Herbert Wright is a freelance writer and the author of London High and Skyscrapers