Thursday 24 May, 6–9 pm
The Gopher Hole
350–354 Old Street,
London, EC1V 9NQ

Blueprint and The Finnish Institute in London is delighted to announce a series of four events called HEL/LO – Let’s Talk. They will bring together architecture and design professionals from London and Helsinki for a lively discussion and exchange of ideas throughout the year. The first event to kick off the series on 24 May is called HEL/LO – Let’s Talk About Dreams. Held at The Gopher Hole in Shoreditch, it focuses on self-initiated, DIY architecture and design projects that shape the cities and communities we live in.

Self-initiated projects are demonstrating that the urge to create is stronger than ever as designers, architects and writers operate in a market that can be crowded and short of opportunities. The first HEL/LO invites a panel of speakers who have created publications, manifestos, buildings, products and events that have had an impact in London and Helsinki, to discuss the proactive nature of their work and the changing methods designers and architects are using to realise their dreams.

The speakers for the event are Helsinki-based architect and designer, Hella Hernberg and Olli Sirén, producer and initiator of groundbreaking community projects together with the London-based designer Asif Khan and the young architectural practice Mobile Studio.

The event series is accompanied by the HEL/LO – Let’s Talk blog, where the participants along with other contributing design and architecture professionals from Helsinki and London continue the dialogue and exchange of ideas.

The HEL/LO series continues with HEL/LO – Let’s Talk About Games during the London Festival of Architecture, 6 July at the White Building in Hackney Wick. The following two HEL/LO events take place in September, one during the London Design Festival and one in Helsinki during Helsinki Design Week. Studio EMMI and the Peepshow Collective have created the set design for all HEL/LO events. The series is one of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 international satellite events.

The event is free but booking is essential as places are limited. Please book your seat at http://helloletstalkaboutdreams.eventbrite.com

SPEAKERS:

HELLA HERNBERG
Hella is Helsinki-based architect and designer. Her main inspiration comes from a creative use of leftover materials; be it fabrics, attics or urban spaces. HEL/LO will be the London launch for Helsinki Beyond Dreams, a book on new urban culture in Helsinki, published by Urban Dream Management and edited by Hella.
www.hellahernberg.com

OLLI SIRÉN
Awarded the title Citizen of the Year 2012 in Helsinki, Olli specialises in creating participation through social media. His proactive approach has been instrumental in a number of recent events and concepts in Helsinki including the Restaurant Day, We Love Helsinki Soiva Kortteli (Sounds on the Block) and Kuorokäytävä (Choir Corridor).
www.ollisiren.fi

ASIF KHAN
London born designer Asif Khan studied architecture  at the Bartlett school, UCL and at the AA in London finishing his training in 2007. Khan has a particular eye for projects that combine each of his respective fields of interest and recently launched a multidisciplinary collaborative practice will Pernilla Ohrstedt, a fellow graduate of the Bartlett School. His completed projects include West Beach Café, Littlehampton (2008), Tetra Light (2007), Swivel for Danese Milano (2011), and furniture for primary schools in Malawi with Magis for the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative (2009-12).
www.pernilla-asif.com/

MOBILE STUDIO
Mobile Studio is a young, London-based architectural practice. People behind it, Max Dewdney and Chee-Kit Lai, also run an award-winning BSc Degree Unit at the Bartlett, UCL, and are visiting critics at a number of leading UK universities. Nominated for Young Architect of the Year Award in 2008, the practice is actively involved in cultural and socially aware projects within the public realm. It is a design-orientated practice, and places a strong emphasis on collaborative working and public engagement.
www.themobilestudio.co.uk

This Month, Blueprint focuses on the Shard. Architect Renzo Piano has transformed the London skyline with 306m, 87-storey tower that sets a precedent for high-rise in the capital. Herbert Wright talks to the architect and tells the story of this towering achievement that has already divided opinion across the city.

To accompany the issue, architectural photographer Paul Raftery – who shot our cover and the feature images – and Dan Lowe, director, have collaborated to create a timelapse film showing the final weeks of construction of The Shard tower in London Bridge, the tallest skyscraper in the United Kingdom. It was shot over many long days during the early months of 2012, from locations spanning from Greenwich Park to Hampstead Heath.

The June issue of Blueprint is available in shops now.

Self-publishing has never been more accessible than it is today thanks to the internet and the availability of digital printing. So, in many ways, In Numbers is a timely exhibition and book as it charts the growth of publications produced by artists since the Fifties to the present day.

From the rise of the small press in the Sixties to the DIY zine culture of the Eighties and Nineties, professional artists have taken on the format of magazines and postcards as a new platform for artistic expression, as well as a means of correspondence and sharing of ideas. But unlike mainstream magazines, these serial publications belong to a genre of their own. They do not conform to the conventional formats of news items and features, but become artworks in their own right.

In Numbers comes from a collection of some 60 publications produced by artists from around the world. Curator Matt Williams had the difficult task of selecting key documents to exhibit but succeeds in displaying a concise cross-section through carefully selected printed examples. From these you get a good sense of the physical objects, and the variety on display goes from bold visuals printed on pulpy paper to much quieter and delicate artworks. While you don’t get quite the sense of the physical objects in the accompanying book as you do in the exhibition, there is room to show  many more examples.

What is very apparent is the influence these artists have had on contemporary graphic design. Elements of overprinting, use of typography and other graphic elements dating back to the Seventies and Eighties can particularly be seen mirrored in today’s fashion and style magazines. But the driving content here is mostly political and cultural. The artist publication represented an often hard-hitting reflection of the world, from the violence of war to explicit sexual imagery.

The design approach is incredibly varied too. Cartoon-illustrated zine-style magazines appear very different than those that imitate consumer magazines, such as File (1972–1989). It was produced by an artistic collective called General Idea, formed by three artists who shared a house in Toronto. General Idea became an influential group in the international correspondence-art movement – a key reason for producing File.

The logo originally mimicked LIFE magazine’s trademark white lettering against a red rectangle as a ‘parasitic art project’, the idea being that copies could be placed in a newsstand and, because of its familiar appearance, could be picked up by people who would not normally be exposed to this kind of work. The page layouts also used headline fonts and text in the same way as you would expect to see in mass-produced publications.

Andy Warhol was one of File’s first subscribers, and influential contributors included Kathy Acker, Kim Gordon, Yoko Ono and David Byrne. Later, the covers dropped the original logo and adopted a more punk approach to their design. The 1977 Punk ‘til You Puke issue put Debbie Harry of Blondie on her first magazine cover and showcased punk/new era musicians such as Talking Heads, Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols.

The timeline in the exhibition and book presents an immediate graphic illustration of the often-short lifespan of some of the publications. However, there are exceptions, notably Control Magazine by Stephen Willats (1965– present day). Willats established the publication as a forum for artists to challenge mainstream notions of art and redefine it in light of the lack of other publishing opportunities. From the first issue, Willats produced the magazine as an artwork that included philosophical statements from contributing artists about the future of art practice, and he has continued to edit Control, often without staff, from his London flat.

Provoke’s life (1968–1969) was far briefer, in retrospect offering a cultural glimpse in time. Takuma Nakahiri, Koji Taki, Yukata Takanashi, and Takahiko Okada produced this photography-based magazine that challenged the ‘straight’ tradition of Japanese photojournalism of the time in just three issues. The photographs of William Klein, whose book New York had appeared in Japan a few years earlier, heavily influenced the grainy and blurry photographic style embodied in Provoke. Not only the style but also the content of the imagery was controversial for its time. The second issue revolved around a theme of Eros and was the magazine’s strongest statement. Its sequence of 22 photographs of a woman naked in a hotel room, watching television, smoking, and having sex is a powerful example of Provoke’s radical aesthetic.

Overall, many serial publications by artists in the collection are immediate responses to the cultural landscape of a specific period. Although traditional methods of printing and the hand-made quality are evident in many of the exhibited pieces, I have no doubt that technology advances will have
a major effect on the genre.

There is every indication that the desire to use traditional methods such as letterpress and screen printing will continue alongside the low production values of the photocopier, but online communication and the development of digital printing should introduce new aesthetics and offer artists more opportunities to produce new, challenging and experimental serial publications.

All images courtesy of the ICA

Amsterdam-based designer Jólan van der Wiel delights in calling his products ‘freakish and organic’ and he’s not wrong. They also beg the question, ‘How on earth did you do that?’ The answer, magnetism.

Essentially, for his stools, van der Wiel mixes a large amount of iron filings – around 6kg – with some liquid plastic, then uses magnets to draw up the legs. What’s left in the bowl forms the seat. The whole mixture sets within about five minutues and then you have a stool, which can cope with up to 200kg of weight and is surprisingly tactile too, with a vinyl-meets-rubber feel allied with its own unexpected weight.

The extraordinary shape of the stools and the method by which they are made all stem from van der Wiel’s exploration of the concept, ‘Nothing is something’ while studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (he graduated in 2011).

‘I wanted to demonstrate that we are able to utilise and exploit the things which already exist everywhere around us, and by doing so capture the invisible natural power in a material form. These are the kinds of techniques I can imagine exploiting further in other methods of production and in the quest for shapes within these processes.’

With his products called the Gravity Stool (there’s also a Gravity Bowl and a chandelier) van der Wiel’s intention was to try to set two of the Earth’s powerful unseen forces against each other – gravity and magnetism – to create a functional piece of furniture. There was no machine available that would let him do this, so he set about building his own Heath-Robinsonesque contraption, that looks essentially like a printing press with some enormous magnets attached to it.

‘My aim was to explore and visualise what was already there, but invisibly,’ says van der Wiel. ‘Gravity’s a force with a strong shaping effect and I intended to manipulate this using magnetism. As an invisible but omnipresent power, gravity offers the possibility of manifesting itself visually in the material. From the project’s beginning, I intended to take a step back and let the natural phenomenon itself determine the final shape of the object. My role as a designer should be nothing but a supporting one, determining only the conditions under which the object could take shape.’

Two of the key factors that van der Wiel controls are the material and the magnets (the number and power) he uses. Essentially, three sets of separate magnets means three legs. He mixes the iron and plastic together in a bowl then lowers the magnets towards the mixture before raising them up again pulling the legs up with it. The consistency of the mixture and especially the power of the magnets affect how long the legs can be.

‘The first step and the most important part is mixing the materials. If I don’t mix them well enough, the stool will become too hard or conversely won’t harden  at all,’ explains van der Wiel. ‘After that, in the case of the stool, I determine the shape of the seat and the places where the legs should be. Then I put the material in the mould and after that the natural forces take over. It’s always a surprise – the shapes are totally down to the magnetic fields.’

Now van der Wiel has his eye on expanding the method using electromagnets, believing he could use those to create tables. To that end, he’s scouting around for sponsors to enable the process.

All images courtesy of Jólan van der Wiel

‘It was clear to me that the contemporary architecture in the area was unsuccessful. It ruined it. The buildings have a certain mass and density that makes them seem fragile and uninteresting in the wider context. All these appear totally lost and boring.’ Architect Josep Lluis Mateo, sat in his office in a northern suburb of Barcelona, is speaking of the developments in the El Raval district of the city, immediately to the north of his most recent building – the €12m Filmoteca de Catalunya (Catalonia Film Institute).

‘While under construction the buildings are nice, once they are completed, they are ugly,’ continues the head of practice Mateoarquitectura. ‘Pouring the concrete, placing the steel, digging holes, it is exciting. When the building is completed the architecture is ugly and unpleasant.’

El Raval was, and in some areas still is, an area notorious for its vice trade. Streetwalkers, drug dealers and junkies populated the dark winding lanes of the area that evolved outside the historic city walls. Geographically, El Raval sits to the north of Barcelona’s port, its limits defined by the main streets La Rambla to the east and Avinguda del Parallel to the west.

‘I knew very well it was, and still is, an interesting place, a very interesting place to put a new building,’ says Lluis Mateo. ‘The area has always lacked monumentality. It is a working-class district with factories. It was dense and lacked centrality. It has always been a problem.’

In an attempt to improve the area, the Rambla del Raval, completed in 2000, was ploughed through slum housing to create a wide urban boulevard that would provide a new focus within the maze of streets. Work is also underway to overhaul the Mercat (market) de Sant Antoni, a perplexing cruciform building that would have a far more dominating presence in another context, and on the insular MACBA by American architect Richard Meier, to the north. The area still remains a labyrinth of streets that skirt the now redundant coal-powered factories and fed the slum housing that filled the neighbourhood.

‘There was a struggle with the modern logic of building in El Raval. It was an insane, unhealthy place with no light and no fresh air, so the solution was a reductive process to the urban scale,’ says Lluis Mateo. ‘The modernists started to make interventions in the Thirties and made holes in the urban area, but the site for the Filmoteca building was made by a bomb during the civil war.’

The Filmoteca de Catalunya is, at first glance, a brute of a building – the younger, angrier Spanish cousin of the Hayward Gallery in London, maybe. The massive concrete walls barge up to the neighbouring residential buildings and glower over a sizeable public square. It is an unsubtle statement of permanence that exerts control over an area that lacks urban coherence. ‘I was not happy with the existing plan to improve the area – I ignored it. It’s not very exciting, it’s peripheral and boring normal housing,’ Lluis Mateo laughs. ‘It’s not easy to add a piece in a generic way to the area. So there was a square and I had to build into it. We had to convince the building to make the square.’

Lluis Mateo has made a defiant gesture to the other architects who have built in El Raval of late. Having won an open competition in 2004, beating more than 50 other entries in the initial stage and six others in the second, Lluis Mateo set about designing a building that not only served the functions of the film institute it was to house, but began to provide a sense of order to this contentious piece of the city. The building’s rough-and-ready appearance belies its purpose – this brute has a heart.

The longitudinal facades are an expression of pure construction; its crass materiality appears assured and fresh compared to the crumbling plaster on the tired facades that surround it. The concrete surfaces are like the po-faced glare of a nightclub bouncer, surveying the activity before it with an authoritarian stare. The building picks up the line of the street to the south and east, but is a storey lower than the surrounding buildings. At each end, Lluis Mateo has reduced the mass of the building by adding two cantilevers that open up the streetscape and provide a place to shelter from the sun or rain. ‘It’s a rectangular building, but on the short sides there are two special moments,’ says Lluis Mateo. ‘The building is around you protecting you, but you are connected and open, the building is opening up the area.’

The parallel facades act as massive beams that are tied together through a series of steel beams that support the floor plates. This allowed Lluis Mateo to keep the ground and second floor free of columns, hanging the structure from the walls-cum-beams, which in turn allows spaces within the building that are airy and open – quite an unexpected ambiance considering the density of the exterior. Gouged into the massive concrete surface are a series of parallel grooves that undulate across the length of the building. These help break up the monotony of the monolithic scale of the building and are actually a visual expression of the movement of the forces that are being transferred through the structure. The end of the beams tying the parallel walls together are left exposed on the exterior too, their black caps framed by a recess in the concrete surface. ‘It is my dream to make a building that is pure construction,’ says Lluis Mateo. ‘The savage energy of construction is something we should embrace.’

On all but the north-facing elevation the windows are screened to reduce glare and solar gain. It is here, and in the coloured glazing that appears on the ground floor and internally, that Lluis Mateo has succumbed to the use of cinematographic trickery. ‘The coloured glazing and the perforated screens work as filters and lenses,’ he says. ‘From  inside the building we are framing and distorting the reality of what is outside.’ On the south facade the building is clad with perforated Cor-ten steel that inverts the pattern of the windows on facing buildings. This is for privacy, but also turns the busy street into an intriguing blur of soft focus activity. Facing the square, a white steel screen hangs from the facade like a ragged cinema screen – the perforations pull tight over the windows and spread out, where it only reveals the ever-present concrete behind.

Inside, the basalt stonework of the public square bleeds into the entrance lobby, an attempt to make the building more welcoming and embedding the interior into the immediate environment. From here, visitors can proceed to a modest cafe that sits under the enormous northern cantilever, or travel up and down the utlitarian escalators that enforce a strict circulation pattern.

Lluis Mateo has carved out a fractured atrium that chicanes through the floor plates, allowing visitors to ascend from the bowels of the building to the office space on the top floor. Top-lit by a vast skylight, mirrors and light materials are used to reflect light through the building into the basement.

Contained within the 7,500 sq m building are two cinemas, the cafe, library, seminar rooms, office space and an exhibition space. The cinemas, one with 360 seats and a smaller 184-seater, have been placed underneath the public square, freeing up the external space. Here, the metaphorical foundations of the Filmoteca become the physical foundations of the building. ‘They are nothing spaces,’ says Lluis Mateo of the auditoria. ‘They are acoustically treated with some seats. It’s not relegation – it needs to be dark.’

The Filmoteca de Catalunya is a culmination of influences that Lluis Mateo has toyed with throughout his earlier buildings and a manifestation of his teachings as a professor at ETH in Zurich. His previously feted works such as the Borneo housing development in Amsterdam and the remodelling of the Banc Sabadell headquarters in Barcelona have had a rich tectonic presence and strong social purpose. With the Filmoteca, Lluis Mateo has stripped the building back to its essence and laid bare the structure, largely avoiding the superficial trickery of the medium it celebrates.

‘My role has to be to do something real, not a stage set. In this sense, the films are pure stage and unreal,’ says Lluis Mateo. ‘But this building was a conscious way of reacting to the existing strong reality of El Raval, with an extra dose of tectonic reality.’

All photographs by Adria Goula

‘I wanted to call it “Fancy rooms filled with crap”,’ muses David Shrigley at the opening of his latest exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, ‘but they said no.’ However, the show’s eventual title, Brain Activity, is rather apt, as it opens a window on to the artist’s methods of working.

Principally known for his drawings, Shrigley has produced at least 25,000 of them since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1991, pouring out his stream of consciousness on to paper. Of this enormous number, only about a quarter escaped his judicious editing; he explains: ‘I just keep the good ones and throw the bad ones away.’

Little more than 100 drawings have made it to the Hayward Gallery, arranged in storyboard-like rows across adjacent walls. Only on closer inspection does it become apparent that there is little narrative to unite the series. Each drawing is a tiny snapshot of a larger scene that the viewer can only imagine: ‘economy of narrative’,  Shrigley calls it.

His drawings in particular are pared-back, simple diagrammatic representations that, he says, ‘have nothing to do with craft’. He talks about ‘making drawings’ rather than drawing as an activity in itself.

Shrigley says this style evolved as a reaction to the seriousness of the art he was expected to produce at art school. This desire to provoke, along with his ‘environmental art’ course at Glasgow, helped to form his witty response to context, evident in early works such as Leisure Centre (1992) and Lost (1996).

For this show, his first major retrospective, Shrigley wanted to ‘give the work a reason to be in the space’. Much of it is new, having been created in response to the context – to fill it – hence he chose to make 12 large Eggs (2011) rather than one, and line them up, like a troop of Humpty Dumpties, along a high wall. He has translated the games he plays with scale in his work into his architectural manipulation. Most unsettling is a small opening in a wall, too low to be a doorway, that hints at – yet dashes – the opportunity of retreat from the hoard of copulating metal insects that is Untitled (2009).

He has also adeptly used the views out to the sculpture terraces, pulling a picture-postcard view of London into the gallery with bronze sculpture Look at This (2012).

Shrigley’s show is very much in keeping with the irreverent tone of the Hayward Gallery’s recent programme which tugs at the edges of the question ‘what is art?’ Psycho Buildings was particularly successful at engaging with the gallery’s physical and cultural identity, and drawing in new visitors. Similarly, Brain Activity does not take itself too seriously – not unexpectedly for an artist so humorous – and yet shows a consistency of approach that makes for a coherent and peculiarly compelling exhibition.

Weather Architecture acknowledges the creative stimulus of inclement weather in the emblematic Rousham Garden by architect William Kent (1685-1748), whereby Jonathan Hill portrays the sense of the picturesque and rural idyll that pervades it.

Here the English empirical garden transcended the ancien régime by mixing allegory from ancient Rome with gothic and Arcadian symbols referring to England’s pastoral past.
It repeats a pattern of cultural independence, established in the 15th century by Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy and separation from Papal Rome and in the 16th century when Sir Edward Coke argued that the unwritten law of England went back to the Druids.

Rousham Garden (1741) was planned as a place to heighten the viewer’s awareness of nature, never as a sequence of separated spaces but always as a series of oblique, picturesque views with multiple perspectives and allegorical readings in all directions. The opportunities for surveillance offered by the garden and which encouraged participation was made possible by use of two distinctive military features, the ridge and the ha-ha, both familiar and most likely encouraged by the client, General James Dormer.

Following Sir John Soane’s interest in the work of William Kent, later picturesque theories and the fascination in climate’s influence, Hill examines the national interest in the subtle variations and poetic effects of weather.

Soane’s concern over climate, tested by instruments to measure time and atmosphere, drove him to make and inhabit a complex interior as a garden and expand picturesque narratives through his phased alterations to 12-14 Lincoln Inn Fields. For Hill, today’s architects deal with climate rather than weather – weather is what you experience at a specific time. In Greek, the world for ‘the moment’ is same as for ‘weather’.

Weather challenges the common perception of architectural authorship, how, as Hill says, ‘others understand architects but also how architects understood their own work’. The best architecture has always embraced context and must inherently be harmonious with the weather.

Though few celebrate the stained concrete of the Haywood Gallery, it was surely intended that way in which the seasons are made visible, recorded and remembered. If one accepts the intentional nature of architecture to ‘weather’ then, as Hill suggests, one also recognises the contribution weather makes as a co-author.

Hill examines the art of weathering in the 18th-century trend for ruination due to empiricism’s attention to subjective experience, the heightened historical awareness in the Enlightenment’s concerns for origins and archaeology, and the value given to imagination, time and metaphor. Whether found or fabricated, the ruin related the present to the past, imagined or real.

It could evoke a lost idyll that would never be repeated, transfer gravitas and authority from one era to another, or suggest that the successes of the present will surpass those of the past. As Hill says: ‘Whether classical or gothic, ruins developed the 18th-century discourse on nationhood and nature… the visionary ruins of Piranesi and Soane were appropriate to an era that valued self-expression, temporal awareness and multiple meanings and the potential for language reinvention.’

The recurring attitudes to the environment are picked up in the mid-20th century where, ‘as before creative architects looked to the past to imagine the future, using the weather as their principal means to recognise and represent time’. Using Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Hill questions whether the architect intended the house to flood and when one should recognise the weather’s role in affirming the Northern romantic tradition.

Farnsworth continues romantic investigations earlier established by van der Rohe’s interest in Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Van der Rohe stated: ‘If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from the outside.’ Hill argues: ‘Within its vulnerable interior the full effects of weather and weathering are amplified and experienced, from the pleasant beauty of sunlight to the painful beauty of cold and condensation, from the majesty of thunder and lightning to the fearful flood when immediate danger overcomes the sublime.’ Either way, within the Farnsworth House ambiguity is a hesitant margin between its architect and the weather. For Hill, Farnsworth House is a hinge between the early modernist control of nature and the later modernist accommodation of nature.

Twentieth-century weathering is a quality imbued in material. Van der Rohe while designing the Barcelona Pavilion, found ‘my experiments with a glass model helped me on my way and I soon recognised that, by employing glass, it is not an effect of light and shadow one wants to achieve but a rich interplay of light reflections’.

Nature is seen in the pavilion’s polished surfaces, not in  the transparency of the pavilion’s many reflective surfaces: water, chrome, red onyx, green marble, yellow travertine when wet, and glass, which is either clear, white, grey or green.

Hill credits the weather and a ‘sense of north’ in allowing modernism to connect with national romanticism  and flourish in Scandinavia and Germany. The Nordic climate does not encourage submission to the seasons and gentle weathering. The dialogue with nature remains, but rather than the benign encounter of the picturesque it is confrontational as well as celebratory and closer to the romanticism expressed in 19th-century landscape paintings.

For Hill, architect Sverre Fehn is an author of weather, successfully exporting the northern romantic mist to a milder Italian climate – in 1962 Fehn blurred architecture and nature to the extent that Nordic light is the Nordic Pavilion’s principal material.

Hill’s treatise, both charts the cultural history of environmental discourse and paves the way for future areas of special architectural interest. There exists a tipping point in teaching sustainable design, and Weather Architecture encourages critical re-evaluations of contemporary responses to climate change.

by Jonathan Hill, Published by Routedge, £34.99

German architect and publisher Philipp Meuser describes Pyongyang, the North Korean psycho regime’s capital, as ‘arguably the world’s best-preserved open-air museum of socialist architecture’. This publication offers a solid armchair trip through it. Volume 1 has photographs and descriptions furnished by the official Pyongyang Foreign Publishing House, without critical comment, but Volume 2 includes critical and analytical essays. Best to leave the latter at home if you’re planning a trip.

South Korean architectural historian Ahn Chang-mo comprehensively charts the development of Pyongyang from before its destruction in the 1950-1953 Korean War. He says that the architecture of Pyongyang is ‘completely different’ from that of other socialist states, but anyone who has wandered along, say, Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, would instantly recognise the stolid heroic architecture set in wide, windswept spaces. The spaces are wider in Pyongyang, Ahn explains, to reduce damage in war, and he highlights how North Korean architecture diverged from Soviet styles. From the Sixties, traditional Korean elements and typologies were encouraged, coinciding with founding dictator Kim Il-Sung’s unique political philosophy, Juche. From the Eighties  international influences are absorbed. This contextualises works like the 170m-high granite Juche Tower monument to the Ryugyong Hotel, long an unfinished shell whose very existence locals denied, despite its 330m height. Only now is this concrete rocket-cum-pyramid being completed, with new glass cladding.

Christian Posthafen’s essay ‘on the Legibility of Spatial Production’ is somewhat less illuminating, stuck in the arcane vagaries of philosophers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, although his comparison of citizenship in Augustan Rome and contemporary Pyongyang is more interesting.

The drivel of Kim Jong-il’s interminable treatise ‘On Architecture’ makes Posthafen read like a thriller in comparison. Mercifully, here we get an edited version — the original was five times longer. The Dear Leader was no Palladio. His banal generalisations, repetitions and inconsistencies are occasionally lightened by references to door handles or exhortations about making grand monuments to the
leader (ie, him).

No mention is made of Pyongyang’s loony attempt to co-host the 1988 Olympics with Seoul, despite 30,000 crack soldiers from the Korean People’s Army being assigned to whip up a blizzard of buildings in Kwangbok. Desperate Olympic hopes are why vast athletic and housing facilities and the May Day Stadium, the world’s largest, were started. It’s a rare oversight in Meuser’s own essay surveying the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ that is Pyongyang. Overall, he has produced a fascinating insight, with great photography, into this freak city and the urbanism of megalomaniacs, both stranded by history.

Edited by Philipp Meuser, DOM Publishers, £31.90
Images Courtesy of Meuser/ DOM Publishers

Just off Brick Lane, on Wentworth Street in London’s East End, is the Dellow Centre, new premises of the charity Providence Row that supports the homeless in Tower Hamlets and the City of London. London-based architect Featherstone Young has just completed a new arts and activity building on a site opposite the charity’s exisiting facilities, built in the Eighties.

‘They appointed us because we were local,’ says Sarah Featherstone, director of Featherstone Young. ‘I’m not sure how familiar they were with our other work, but they wanted an architect who really understood the local area.’ Featherstone Young has undertaken jobs with a sensitive brief and hugely specific  requirements from the client with great success in the past, exercising great rigour in understanding the client’s needs and finding a suitable design response.

The original brief from Providence Row had been for a two-storey building, but it was reworked to incorporate a third. Featherstone Young has delivered a cheerful yet robust 367 sq m building in just 11 months that makes the most of a cramped site and a tight budget of just £475,000.

Sat on the eastern side of the Dellow Centre courtyard, hemmed in behind some forbidding access gates, the new building is shoehorned between an office building that faces out on to the street and a massive hole in the ground, that will soon be an EDL substation. As a result, it only has one facade, facing south-east.

The ground floor is clad in corrugated steel in shades of green, partly perforated, to add texture and porosity to the surface. It is a welcome splash of colour among the monotonous palette of bland brick that dominates the area. ‘I think it’s OK to have some fun with a project like this, particularly when using industrial materials like steel,’ says Featherstone. The central panels of the wall are pivoted to open up the workshop behind to the courtyard – the centre offers bike maintenance courses over a six-week period to groups and hopes to expand its remit. In summer, activities will spill out
into the courtyard. ‘The project was about addressing the courtyard. Allowing the clients to see what is going on through the workshop windows and doors will pique curiosity,’ says Featherstone.

Above this is a cantilevered level clad in Bluclad external rainscreen board that from a distance has the appearance of concrete. The facade zigzags across the building, with its
four windows set in to be angled away from the hostel rooms opposite while maximising the amount of light entering the building from the crowded space outside. This tiered facade challenges the rectilinear geometry of the courtyard and provides the building with a visual stimulus.

It is a bold move for the architect – and Providence Row – to make, but it speaks volumes about the conviction that the architect has in the building and that the charity has in its presence.

On the second floor the green steel reappears, the building line receding to create a tight but pleasant enough balconied floor for the charity’s administrative staff. Large sliding glazed doors allow the light to pour into the open-plan office that is home to eight full-time staff and an army of support staff and therapists who help the Dellow Centre operate.

Tim Brotherton

The interior plan is simple: the building has three principal spaces that sit behind the facade – a workshop on the ground floor, a classroom-cum-performance room with large timber-framed windows on the first floor and offices on the top floor. Arranged behind this are much-needed storage spaces for the centre and a wide stairway that creeps up the northern wall.

The finishes are raw. Painted breeze-block walls, unpolished concrete floors and plastic-cased fluorescent lights ensure there is no glamour. Yet the building does not feel banal or tawdry. The architect has provided well-lit, warm spaces that will be easy to maintain on a shoestring budget – testament to the care that has been put into the project.

Featherstone Young has demonstrated its expertise in crafting buildings whatever the budget and purpose, be it a private residence such as Ty-Hedfan or the Dellow Centre. The latter is an excellent example of an architect exerting control over a site and project that could so easily have been mired in mediocrity.

This is a very good building that has been delivered on a tight budget, managing to find a balance between making a visual statement and providing practical space with character and purpose, for a charity and its clients that are in need of both.

Inga Powilleit

As a practice that prides itself on impacting on, but also extending beyond, architecture, the Dutch practice UNStudio has long had a resolute approach to the architectural discipline that stressed the importance of research and testing. What started as an art historian-architect collaboration between Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos 24 years ago has eloquently morphed into a practice that relies on its self-imposed ‘platforms’.  While many themes radiate – a fascination with such notions as inbetween, objectivity and design models – the ideological understanding of the architect’s role fluctuates from the craftsmanship of arts-driven persuasions to the methodological principles of science.

When referencing projects in UNStudio’s practical portfolio – be it the Möbius House (1993), with its soothing angular form, large-span glazing and provocative cantilever; the VilLA NM (2000), which exemplifies a gradual progression towards more fluid forms and subtle facade twists; the New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion (2011), where the biomorphic folds contort the full formal gestures of the building; or Raffles City (scheduled completion 2014), an implausibly large, mixed-use development project with sweeping geometric forms that emphasise a computational facade treatment – what becomes palpable is that an aesthetic sensibility continues conjunction to a recurring theoretical position. UNStudio’s ideological framework remains in refreshing flux.

When talking to van Berkel, what becomes apparent is that the practice functions as a research-based entity. The studio operates under four specific research platforms that feed into its built work. They are categorised as ASP (architectural sustainability platform), IOP (innovative organisations olatform), SPP (smart parameters platform) and IMP (inventive materials platform). Such research categorisations have made UNStudio one of the forerunners in technological advancement in architecture. Indeed, van Berkel was recently invited to become part of Gehry Technologies, an alliance founded by Frank Gehry that strives to apply innovative solutions to current or continuing architectural problems.

The group represents a new type of professional organisation that heroically attempts to empower design. In UNStudio, van Berkel alludes to the analogy that the office is spatially arranged and formatted akin to a science lab, whereby its built projects are the result of much research and testing from inside the ‘lab’.

‘We see these platforms as communities,’ says van Berkel. ‘When someone joins the office you are not a draftsman anymore – in the space of a year you can find out for yourself which platform you would like to belong to. It is all about how you gain knowledge and how you share it; the practice is used in order to educate yourself, so we educate ourselves continually through these platforms. Every two weeks, for example,  we have an external consultant come in and give a lecture. This experiment came out of my own interest in science after I studied how science labs operate.’

Christian Richters

Christian Richters

Christian Richters

UNStudio

UNStudio

Ben Tallon

Aside from hardline left-wingers, no one would probably claim wholeheartedly that the failure of the big banks and massive bailouts in 2008 that led to rising unemployment, among other things, was a good thing. Can failure ever be for the good? It’s difficult to come to a conclusion because nobody likes to talk about their failures. The public discourse around architecture is overwhelmingly slanted towards narratives of success because, by and large in our society, vocational failure is stigma.

In Britain, this peak was not only due to the relative abundance of opportunities to build but also the growth of public and media attention on the profession, which began to grow in the mid-Eighties with the fracas around Prince Charles’s address damning modern architecture. Then, in 1997, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao allowed architecture to be seen as not only glamorous but also as a catalyst for economic growth, the unholy coupling of architecture with urban regeneration falsely fashioning an aura and a mirage of success around the profession.

Ben Tallon

Her study of the ill-fated development considers non-architectural factors, such as chronic cost-cutting and reduced amenities, steadily declining occupancy rates due to changing demands in the housing market that further affected the estate’s already poor level of management and maintenance. She found that these socio-economic issues had more impact on the demise of the estate than any particular design flaw (though there were some, such as the skip-stop elevators), and least of all, high modernist design philosophy as a whole. Bristol concluded: ‘By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems. Simultaneously it legitimates the architecture profession by implying that deeply embedded social problems are caused, and therefore solved, by architectural design.’

Ben Tallon

Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile-High City, architectural visions of self-contained, mega-scaled vertical cities have rarely gone far from the drawing board. However, one has just physically arisen, spectacularly and in public.

The Fox: Ronan Bouroullec

The elder of the Brittany-born brothers, Ronan, 40, sits cross-legged opposite me. ‘It’s quite a brutal description isn’t it?’ he asks weighing every word. Ronan’s socks are Red-Riding-Hood red. We are sitting without shoes in the Raphael Gallery of the V&A on the Bouroullecs’ Textile Field installation, a vast, gently inclined carpet of upholstery in green and blue. This is the duo’s third collaboration with Danish manufacturer Kvadrat – the one before this was the sublime Clouds project in 2008, a shape-shifting creation that blurred the boundaries between furniture and fabric.

Clouds allowed users to form it into abstract forms. It has a typical Bouroullec cleverness with a puzzle-like twist. Clouds invites no definition. It is entre chien et loup, a French expression for the time of day just before night, when the light is so dim you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf. It applies to the unfathomed gap that exists between the familiar and the unknown, the comfortable and the strange, a place the Bouroullecs creatively inhabit.

The Bouroullecs reached something of a zenith in 2011. Their first major retrospective in France, Bivouac, opened in the Pompidou-Metz and runs until this July. It is a 930 sq m tribute to the past 10 years of their work, at the Shigeru Ban-designed Lorraine annexe of the Pompidou Centre, with the monographic show featuring more than 300 objects, drawings and experiments.

Ronan, smartly dressed in slacks and a shirt, is the more serious of the two. He is precise. ‘It is hard and difficult to be in a relationship with a piece,’ he explains, a little sullenly. ‘You need sensuality to understand anything.’ He was the first of the two to become a designer after leaving the family home in Quimper, off to study furniture design at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Acclaim came early for the brothers. In 1997, the year they began working together, they presented Disintegrated Kitchen at the Salon du Meuble in Paris. It was here that they were spotted by Giulio Cappellini, an encounter which led to their first major industrial design projects, including Closed Bed and Spring Chair. Ronan likens the Bouroullec design process from idée to réalisation as ‘a chaos we control’. It is revelation that sits in stark contrast to the delicate intelligence and simplicity of the completed work. ‘There is no formula,’ says Ronan, describing how the fluidity between the initial thinking, drawings and 3D modelling repeats itself in a loop until both brothers are satisfied. ‘We never compromise with each other,’ he says. ‘We are violent with ourselves and each other in order to do something correct.’ You cannot imagine Ronan and Erwan apart though. ‘We argue with ourselves and each other but that passion is necessary for what we have to do.’

Ronan’s creative outlook mirrors his interpretation of the wider world as a place of chaos. ‘Design is a method of communication that creates a picture on a white card in a world that is a jungle with barely controlled political systems,’ he says.

In January 2011, Ronan and Erwan marked a change in direction with their Ploum sofa for Ligne Roset – a simple sponge-like piece created from just two pieces of stretched, foam-backed fabric. ‘A voluptuous piece of fruit,’ extoles Ronan, savouring every word. ‘That is why I like fabric so much. In a bed we eat, we sleep, we have sex. We have so many different relationships to it.’ There was also a contemporary re-imagining of a kilim rug. Losange, for carpet producer Nanimarquina, was designed in the Bouroullecs’ studio and hand-made by village craftsmen in northern Pakistan. Kilims combine 13 colours in striking tessellated diamond-shaped patterns, using Afghan wool. Losange highlights not just unique colour tones but also imperfections – a luxury for the Bouroullecs, so used to working within the perfectionist parameters of European über design. ‘I am fascinated by the imprecisions,’ reveals Ronan. ‘There is a certain freedom in it.’

Unlike his brother, Ronan doesn’t like travelling and he had recently spent an uncomfortable two days on the 20th floor of a hotel in Shanghai: ‘It is a vertical city and I don’t like tall buildings.’ For Ronan, Shanghai is a city where the future is happening so fast he doesn’t understand how people can keep up. ‘I’m both scared and fascinated by this and by technology,’ he says as we discuss future shock. ‘We are in a spectacular period where the speed of communication allows for things that we could never have imagined before.’

Perhaps their most intriguing project is yet to come – a contemporary addition to the dramatic Gabriel staircase at the Château de Versailles outside Paris. Originally designed in 1772 by architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the staircase leading to the royal apartments was only completed in 1985. The commission, already courting political controversy from traditionalists, marries pure art with absolute design. ‘A good designer is like a good artist. The relationship between art and design comes out of the same energy and the same passion,’ Ronan insists. ‘Art has a visionary point of view. Our discipline is to create functionalities.’

It has been suggested that the idiosyncrasies that characterise the pair’s current projects are part of a manifestation of a mid-life crisis. ‘It is true that maturity has brought with it a certain restlessness but there is much work to be done. Erwan is a romantic,’ Ronan says. ‘I don’t know how I would describe myself. People call me a perfectionist, but I don’t agree.’

The Hedgehog: Erwan Bouroullec

The more relaxed and playful of the brothers, Erwan is telling me why he won’t teach. ‘Ronan has been approached,’ the 35 year old says. ‘I remember a picture of the Cultural Revolution in China of teachers being beaten by their students. It scared me!’ Maybe it was the thought of re-education by fervent young Maoists but we have to pause the interview. Erwan wants to nip outside for a cigarette.

It is nearing the end of the day and the crowds are filing past us out of the V&A. ‘I like to understand the way people speak, walk and eat,’ he says after taking a drag on his cigarette. In the gathering autumnal dusk Erwan looks detached as he runs his fingers through his beard as he smokes. ‘I’m not interested in cities,’ Erwan says. ‘But I love watching people.’

It was 1997 when younger brother Erwan helped Ronan realise his first projects. Erwan studied Fine Art at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy-Pontoise, and his art background permeates his thinking. Erwan has never subscribed to any design theory; the brothers had an immediate synergy and a creative relationship was born. It is difficult not to see the Bouroullecs’ body of work as nothing less than a realisation in form and space of a profound relationship.

One of the Bouroullecs most enduring relationships has been with Vitra, whose chairman, Rolf Fehlbaum, asked them in 2000 to begin work on what became the still-evolving innovative office-system series Joyn for hot-desking, flexitime workers. ‘People ask us “Why are the Bouroullecs doing another project with Vitra?”’ he says. ‘It might look like we are all old friends, but we fight our corner.’

‘We love the idea of a product that is dynamic and does not belong to a space,’ Erwan reveals as he describes one of the few interior design projects they have done – the Dos Palillos restaurant in the Casa Camper Hotel, Berlin, in 2009: ‘We provided a hardcore, simple wooden structure without any decoration because we wanted life to grow in it.’

At the moment Erwan has been thinking about how children search for storytelling details in objects. He has a young daughter. ‘She uses her environment in a practical way,’ he says, but won’t entertain the idea of designing for children. ‘Someone said that we are in the midst of a mid-life crisis,’ he confesses, which he ascribes to what he terms the ‘pure thinking’ inherent in Western societies that has become more pronounced in the face of globalisation. He says this has brought both freedom and entrapment: ‘Fifty years ago 50 people would produce a car. Today 10,000 people are involved across the world yet none of them are able to sum up the car’s value. People are losing touch with the fundamentals of reality.’

Erwan does not like overriding systems, be they intellectual or political: ‘When the decision is the small part of the cloud, detached from everyone, it makes life stranger and more fake. There is no need for an upper rule. I think everything should be less organised than it is. I dream of a type of democracy based only on small decisions.’

This Bouroullec believes that the new century brings an opportunity for new intellectual enterprise, a new age of enlightenment at a time when mediocrity is in the ascendant. ‘I am not thinking of conquering the West,’ Erwan says, laughing, but he is intrigued by the possibility of a new type of frontierism. That said, he adds, ‘Sometimes I feel that if you are looking at Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was quite visionary, this white, clean, efficient future is just not going to happen.’

While Erwan admires technology he doesn’t want design or art to be dictated by it. We are talking about David Hockney’s digital paintings, Fresh Flowers, created using an iPad and displayed in Paris last year. ‘It’s the strange life of designers that we work so closely with machines yet are afraid of them,’ he says and mentions a book he is reading – Grand Junction, by Maurice Dantec, set in a cyberpunk world controlled by an artificial intelligence. ‘It raises the question of being a prisoner of technology,’ he says.

But the Bouroullecs are not technophobes. To coincide with the Metz exhibition, they have created an iPad app that gives viewers a grand tour of their best work.  Called Cercles, the app presents more than 200 images including products, drawings and models. Double-tap on any given design and you are presented with the work in such detail that you can examine individual fibres.

Erwan might be prickly when it comes to technology, but he quite likes being described as a Hedgehog (Ibsen, Proust, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche share the same characteristic). The classification does throws light on his singular aesthetic approach: despite being a man with the ‘big idea’, he doesn’t take it seriously. As well as his current sci-fi novel, Erwan also admits to reading fairy stories: ‘I’m a romantic,’ he admits, but then stops himself and adds, ‘but probably not very.’ And how would he sum up Ronan after 15 years of working together? ‘I don’t have a good word for him yet,’ he says smiling and reaching for another cigarette.

James Morris

The Notting Hill Carnival now attracts more than a million people to the streets of west London to join in what, after Rio’s, is the world’s largest street festival. It is one of the most diverse and exciting spectacles of social solidarity in the capital, and estimates say the annual event injects more than £90m into the local economy. Carnival Village Trust, an umbrella organisation dedicated to the promotion of carnival arts, approached London-based architecture practice Foster Wilson to design a new arts centre to house four of the principal groups that help realise the event each year: the Mangrove and Ebony steel bands, the Association of British Calypsonians, and Yaa Asantewaa Arts group.

The result is the new Yaa Centre building, named after Yaa Asantewaa, the warrior queen of the Asante tribe. Central to the continuing success of the carnival is the work done by the tireless organisers, artists, musicians and designers who create the colourful floats, music and spectacular costumes that define it.  The Yaa Centre will promote African Caribbean art and culture through supporting and enabling emerging talent in dance, music, theatre, spoken word and carnival arts.

Tucked away behind a cobbled residential mews in Notting Hill, the Yaa Centre is reached through an archway. The archway opens to an irregularly shaped courtyard that has been resurfaced and decorated with a colourful pattern, an abstraction of the geometric designs that characterise traditional Ghanaian Kente woven cloth. Beyond a rogue outbuilding and a single tree is the solitary facade of the Yaa Centre.

It is clad in deep red Cor-ten steel, arranged in a random pattern of panels around large windows that work to allow light to penetrate through the rooms and into the central space and first-floor gallery. ‘We considered using masonry [instead of Cor-ten], but we wanted to make the facade special rather than blend in,’ says Matthew Baker, who led the project for Foster Wilson. ‘We wanted it to stand out of its context using the natural colour of the materials. The way the material will weather will give it a life beyond the expectation of the designer.’ The facade, although a deliberate juxtaposition to its immediate context, is a graceful use of a material that is more often used on a monumental scale. The pattern of the Cor-ten panels provides shadow and depth that brings life to the surface and complements the geometry of the pointing that prevails everywhere you look around the courtyard.

James Morris

The building’s interior is finished in a manner that could only be deemed ‘honest’. Concrete blockwork is left exposed, the grain of the plywood formwork is seen on the poured concrete, powerfloat marks are left on the floor and steel beams are left exposed and painted red. Services are visible running across the ceilings and there is a sense that the building is expected to be bashed around with the relentless activity that will animate the spaces. ‘People think that when you go for the “industrial” look that we have here it’s easy and you just leave things half-finished,’ says Baker. ‘But it means you have to be more deliberate with everything you have left exposed so that it doesn’t look a mess.’

Providing ample space for a multitude of noisy and messy activities, the Yaa Centre has metal workshops, art rooms, sewing workshops, a cafe, a steel band rehearsal room, a steel pan tuning room, offices, a creative IT suite and an education room, all arranged around a large central space with a dance floor and bar and framed by a gallery. The back half of the building is retained from the site’s former use as a taxi-meter factory, with the building’s battered original brickwork  cleaned up ready for a new lease of  life. On a tight budget of £4.5m (from the Arts Council Lottery Fund), the architect has delivered a building that provides ample spaces and facilities for its users.

James Morris

‘We didn’t have a brief as such,’ says Baker. ‘There was never a singular vision for the project from the client. Essentially what we have designed is a community centre with a workshop building for carnival arts.’ Operating such a building in a residential area meant that the architect had to ensure that the views from it did not overlook the neighbouring properties and that the tremendous sounds eminating from it were contained so as not to disrupt the genial atmosphere of the mews. The rehearsal room and steel pan tuning room – surely a once-in-a-lifetime specification – are designed as a box within a box. To allow for acoustic isolation, the rooms have suspended floors and there are acoustic gaps between the plywood finish and the concealed structural walls. The circulation spaces have been placed adjacent to the party walls to ensure another level of acoustic separation; with such a tight space, the architect has been canny in orchestrating the functions of the building. The high quality of light in the main hall and the workshops has been achieved through thorough testing and modelling with consultant Skelly and Couch – in a building with only a south-east facing facade there are few gloomy moments thanks to  numerous rooflights in the main space.

Foster Wilson has delivered a welcoming yet robust community centre that is primed to become a lively home for the Carnival Village Trust. It also avoids the pitfalls of so many Lottery-funded community arts projects – ambiguous spaces and wasted cash on expensive finishes and equipment that is rarely used. The Yaa Centre has been cleverly designed to overcome the constraints placed on it by its unlikely setting, and almost finished, this surprising project will soon bubble to life.

What do Elizabeth Fry, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Sir John Houblon, Matthew Boulton and James Watt have in common? Have a look in your wallet and you may well see Fry, Darwin and Smith peering back at you from the fivers, tenners and twenties. You’re probably less likely to see Boulton and Watt as they’re on a new £50 note design and soon you won’t see Houblon at all, as he’s on the current £50 that the aforementioned pair have just replaced. Expect Houblon to get his marching orders early this year.

You’ll have a period of a few months to use up or trade in your old £50 notes and then, when they cease to become legal tender, you may as well use them to stuff your mattress. Actually that’s not true, because no matter how old a note is, you can always take it to the Bank of England and trade it in at face value. It may be worth having a look in the attic, because according to Bank of England museum curator, John Keyworth, 63 £1,000 notes are still kicking around somewhere (though collectors will now give you way more than a grand for one).

But back to the public face of our notes. We’ve been putting people on them since the Seventies. Have you ever wondered who gets to choose who goes on there and why they’re so old and many of them a bit obscure? Can’t we rustle up a few better worthies than Fry and Smith? The final decision on this rests with the governor of the Bank of England, currently Sir Mervyn King. He chooses from a shortlist of people who, according to Keyworth, are ‘British’ (naturalised foreigners such as Handel would count), and have ‘made a major contribution to British society’. He says it’s also important there are no ‘skeletons’ in their closets; controversy is not something the bank courts. For that reason politicians are also avoided until they reach ‘statesman status’, so now Winston Churchill is in the running and maybe Lloyd George, since there have already been two Scots on bank notes, but no Welsh.

The bank has a list of people suggested by the public and, on reflection, it may be a good thing that we’re not in control, having offered up the likes of Terry Wogan, David Beckham, Richard Branson and Robbie Williams. The only person nominated with any design credentials is the architect William Clough-Ellis. Lady Di is also on the list – imagine her on one side and the Queen on the other, that would be a right royal face off (though Bansky has already done it.) So for now, Boulton and Watt have been selected, the first time two people have appeared together. As well as being the powerhouses, almost literally, of the industrial revolution, they also had a direct link with our currency having at one point been asked to used their steam engines to mint coins. Once given the governor’s seal of approval, the design process begins. In the past it was down to individual designers; now it’s gone in-house with the world’s largest currency printer and papermaker, De La Rue.

In 2010, 300,000 counterfeit notes were taken out of circulation, 280,000 of which were £20 notes. Naturally, the design process is dominated by these statistics, with seven security features built in, including raised printing, micro-lettering, UV ink printing and lenticular ‘motion thread’. Aesthetics also play a major part. The detail in the drawings is huge and so is the attention to detail. The intricate decorative elements are usually firmly grounded in history. There are also a number of items that always have to be included such as ‘I promise to pay…’ and the gothic BoE script above that legend, unchanged since the first printed £50 note from 1853. Britannia, the symbol of the BoE, always appears too, but varies between historical versions on the designer’s whim.

As mentioned, in the past the design was down to individuals such as Roger Withington, who created the last £50 issued in 1994. These days no names are released. Interestingly, the Withington £50 was primarily drawn by hand, and at the modest BoE exhibition on the new note (until 23 March) there’s one of his original drawings of part of a note. It is around 20cm square, complete with handwritten pencil notes for the engravers. Not surprisingly, this time the process has been ‘90 per cent digital’ says Keyworth. A mixture of intaglio, letterpress and offset printing is now used, on special paper with cotton to give it a certain feel and longevity. I’m not sure if those missing 63 notes were printed on the same tough substrate, but if they were, I’d love to get my hands on one. I’d grab a taxi and look forward to seeing the cabbie’s face when I said, ‘I haven’t anything smaller. Have you got change for a thousand?’

‘100 bloody storeys! My god!’ exclaims Sir Terry Farrell, full of pride, craning his neck to take in the full 442m height of the just-completed KK100 tower in Shenzhen, China. ‘When something is finished, it takes a while to take it in, particularly when so many don’t get built. Is it real, is it there?’ he muses. The sleek, sculptural office and hotel structure is most definitely real – not just as the world’s eighth or ninth tallest skyscraper (depending on whether Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers are counted as one or two), but as the latest achievement of his Hong Kong office, which celebrated its 20th anniversary at the end of 2011.

It’s a long way from Farrell’s first built project, the Blackwall Tunnel ventilation buildings, designed when he worked for the London County Council 50 years ago. Yet they share a graceful curvature absolutely apart from buildings around them. The now-listed ventilation structures have neighbours that include Rogers’ Reuters Building, the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens and Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower: ‘Buildings that look mechanical are occupied by people; only the industrial building is soft,’ notes Farrell.

Similarly, KK100 is very different to anything else in Luohu, the heart of Shenzhen, host to a horde of colourful retro-futuristic postmodernist towers, such as the KY Cheung-designed Shun Hing Square tower, a Flash Gordon fantasy that in 1996 was the tallest skyscraper outside of the USA. KK100’s form evokes a waterfall or a fountain. ‘It is not intrusive,’ says Farrell. ‘I think simplicity is a natural thing to do with a skyscraper.’

He reveals that the tower ‘began life as a design for a tall building at Kowloon, based on a blade of grass’. Farrell’s asymmetric 110-storey tower, above the vast Kowloon transport-orientated development that Farrell masterplanned in 1998 for land reclaimed from Victoria Harbour, wasn’t built. Developers plumped instead for a 118-storey KPF design, in a ring of office and residential towers. ‘The architecture’s fairly horrendous, isn’t it?’ he asks rhetorically.

Farrell first came to Hong Kong in 1964, returning from his masters degree at the University of Pennsylvania on a RIBA-sponsored study trip that also took him to Tokyo, Bangkok and India. He recalls Hong Kong then as ‘a colonial town in many ways. I remember them playing cricket, probably where [IM Pei’s] Bank of China Building is now. Then I came again in 1980 and was astonished by how much had been built, and how it was changing.’ In 1990, Farrell returned to establish the local practice, now called TFP Farrells.

By that time the Farrell name was synonymous with British postmodernism, established with bright, game-changing projects such as buildings for Clifton’s Nursery in Covent Garden and TV-am in Camden. But he had also always been fascinated by spatial complexity and particularly ‘the effect of railway and bus stations and centrality, and complex three-dimensional urbanism’.

The transformation of London’s Charing Cross Station led to the Kowloon Station hub commission, which in turn led to the recent vast stations in Beijing and then Guangzhou, the biggest in Asia. It also led to projects further afield, including the Ground Transportation Center at Incheon Airport, a great airy curving structure complete with idyllic internal gardens, which can handle 50 million travellers yearly. In the pipeline is a redevelopment of New Delhi Station, linking a huge structure filled with light and colour with Luytens’ Connaught Place in a masterplan that cuts a swathe of green across the city. Farrell started off not so much as a postmodernist as an antimodernist. Whilst a student in Pennsylvania, he absorbed the ideas of urban planning activist Jane Jacobs and the visual impact of pop art, and he hung out with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. He noted the latter’s seminal Vana Venturi House, and the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. All this sowed doubts about modernism and shaped his ideas about place-making and urbanism.

‘All architecture begins with the context of people and time,’ says Farrell. ‘Le Corbusier and Mies [van der Rohe] never got to grips with the city.’ He dismisses the former’s Ville Radieuse as having ‘no sense of place or time, and perhaps no personality’, likening it to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and unlike Blade Runner with its intense urbanism and compressed time.

Back in London in the Sixties, he went into practice with Nicholas Grimshaw. The celebrated Herman Miller factory in Bath was Grimshaw’s work, done while Farrell was designing a housing scheme of ‘mass-produced but suburban houses, with different expression from building to building’. Farrell was ‘beginning to think much more about urbanism and building strategies, rather than buildings as technological objects, like chic industrial design, which is what Nick was into. I just felt that it wasn’t interested in legacy or people or urbanism or all that.’ He continues: ‘It had become so narrow by the end of the Seventies. Milton Keynes and the sheds of Grimshaw and the narcissism of Mies van der Rohe followers; it was all very rigid. It was about construction and about technology and technique. It was more and more reductive; there was no fun, no variety and no reference to the city and the place.’

But he is unconvinced that postmodernism was a style, and if it was ‘it didn’t have a lot of endurance. For me, it was just liberating architecture again.’ He sees its true inheritors as ‘architects who you don’t think of being postmodernist at the time, like Will Alsop and Frank Gehry. I think it made possible Zaha Hadid.’ Two Nineties’ Hong Kong buildings match the refreshing playfulness of Farrell’s work in London. The Peak Tower, a leisure centre and funicular railway terminus perched high above Central’s skyscrapers, cuts a symbolic profile on Hong Kong’s Ridgeline, referencing traditional Chinese roof eaves. Across the bay is the Kowloon Ventilation Building with its bright yellow funnel towers, ‘like the Peak Tower, turned up-side down,’ notes Farrell.

So, has the playfulness been lost in Farrell’s bigger projects? ‘A very tall building or a railway station in China are more serious,’ he admits, but postmodernist allusion is still there. ‘The Beijing South Station has many references to the big circular temples like the Temple of Heaven,’ he offers, ‘and the huge interiors of the China Petroleum Building are very monumental. It has agricultural and other references, which I quite like.’ Feng shui, a Hong Kong concern that doesn’t extend to the mainland, doesn’t worry Farrell. He recalls a client there who always called the feng shui man in after a project was built, ‘because if you call them in beforehand, they want a percentage fee on the building. If he comes in afterwards, he was on time-charge!’ And if the energy is flowing off in some bad direction, ‘you just put a mirror there – it’s cheaper than turning the building round.’

As for the more serious worries about a Chinese property bubble, he knows that ‘having lived through several recessions they are very real things’. But he contrasts the situation with Dubai, where ‘the actual population who have passports is probably the size of York’ and the theory was famously: build it and they will come. ‘The difference between Dubai and China is that they don’t have to come, there’s one and a quarter of a billion people there already!’

Although the idea of KK100’s design started with Farrell’s Kowloon tower and the design work began while he was in Hong Kong, he gives full credit to Munich-born Hong Kong partner Stephan Krummeck as the lead designer. Another great new skyscraper in the Pearl River Delta, Wilkinson Eyre’s 440m-tall Guangzhou International Finance Centre, has similarities – a British practice, structural engineering by Arup, and not least a very slender tapering form. But the Guangzhou tower started life much later, in 2004, and Farrell was unaware of it, so there’s no aspect of competition between the two. Both place a hotel above office floors, but that formula started with the Landmark Tower in Yokohama in 1993 and is a consequence of the concrete core disappearing towards the top.

What seemed contentious with KK100 was clearing the site for developer Kingkey’s retail, residential and signature tower scheme. Caiwuwei Village was a warren of tenement housing, knocked up quickly to accommodate an exploding population as Shenzhen famously erupted from fishing villages into a megacity of 10 million souls in the mere three decades since Deng Xiaoping made it China’s first special economic zone. Many such neighbourhoods still remain, blocks packed so tight that merely a metre often separates them. Caiwuwei was ridden by crime and, unusually, Kingkey offered its residents not only a new flat on-site but a second one to give them a rental income. One couple held out, and parallel to an earlier case in Chongqing, became stranded in the otherwise cleared site in their ‘Nail House’. In 2007, they accepted an offer of 12 million yuan (about £1.2m) but no flat, and are reported to have regretted holding out.

The Farrell masterplan for the site includes the KK100 Mall, shaped as fluidly as a Hadid design and full of high-end brands. Five curved high-rise residential towers and a smaller office tower rise above it. A direct link to the Grand Theatre Metro station will open in 2012. But the highlight, of course, is the KK100 tower. It is indeed an unfeasibly slender beast, with a rectangular footprint and a height to width ratio of 11.5:1 on its narrow, almost vertical east-west facades. Cross-bracing behind their dark glass is strangely reminiscent of Chicago’s John Hancock Tower, which also tapers but with converging straight edges. The wide north and south facades switch seamlessly from elliptical curvature to vertical as they drop, but on the south facade, the curtain wall flares out above a plaza in a dramatic gesture to form an entrance canopy. This is the entrance to the monumental marble lobby for the tower’s office floors on levels 5 to 72, totalling 173,000 sq m, including seven trading floors. Six double-decker lifts reach a single skylobby at levels 39/40.

With a classic tube-in-tube structure, perimeter columns share the load with the central concrete core, which ends above the offices, so the St Regis Hotel is within a steel frame. It is entered from the north, opposite the mall, and four lifts whisk guests straight to the reception, unusually positioned above the rooms, at level 94. The 250 rooms encircle a 16-storey atrium. The decor, by upmarket hotel specialist practice ChengChung Design of Hong Kong, is discreet, all wood, mirrors, veined marble and minimal art. Being in the St Regis spa and swimming pool on level 75 feels like arriving in heaven with a clean platinum Amex card.

But the best is at the very top. Above the hotel reception is a 39m-high crystal palace formed by A-frames, and in the void is a multi-storey, egg-shaped pod. Here, you enter a three-dimensional maze of stairs and landings with nooks and sofas. Farrell says simply, ‘It is fun.’ Two exterior elements complete KK100’s spectacle. Kingsun Optoelectronics of Guangzhou uses LED strips on the wide facades’ vertical mullions to present a spectacular kinetic colour light show at night, constantly changing with themes such as falling water and expanding ripples. And all around the block street-furniture lightposts by Kan and Lau in the shape of KK100  add a crisp, human-scale touch, although one post rises to about 12m.

KK100 will not long remain Shenzhen’s tallest building. A 648m-high tower by KFP is underway and TFP Farrells is in the running for another 600m-high tower. In Beijing’s new Chaoyang business zone, masterplanned by Farrell, it has won five commissions to design towers, including the 520m-high Z15. Farrell is philosophical about joining the elite supertall designer club. His 2003 plan for South Kensington Station included a six-storey element dubbed The Tower. ‘The clients were Huchison Whampoa,’ he recalls. Their reaction was “Where is the tower?”’

One suspects that Farrell’s evolution from antimodernist, via postmodernist hero and supreme masterplanner to leader of a global design powerhouse is a story with much more to come. As he says of KK100, ‘it’s an extraordinary thing!’

When Union General Sherman led his troops across Georgia in the American Civil War he was not prepared to be moved from his course of destroy-and-conquer by any resisting faction, let alone by a single town’s charm. However, when he arrived in Savannah, instead of razing its buildings like Atlanta before it, he decided to spare the nation’s last colonial city and gift wrap it for President Lincoln for Christmas. So powerful was Robert Oglethorpe’s 1733 urban plan that the houses and squares were saved from destruction.

With a significant historic preservation society stretching back 60 years and the largest designated historic area in the USA, it is rare for Savannah to watch ground-up design that isn’t either regionally inflected or tentatively secreted into preservation projects. Last month, however, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) opened its new art museum; it is a building that reverses this process and stitches the old into the new.

‘It is more than architecture,’ says Christian Sottile, the museum’s lead architect, former SCAD graduate and professor at the college. ‘The museum is an ideology.’ Indeed, on one hand it is a physical manifestation of the college’s academic mission: for 33 years the college has expanded its curriculum, to include disciplines as wide-ranging as animation and design management, as well as its campuses – as of 2010 they include ones in Lacoste, France and Hong Kong. The museum includes classrooms and acts as a centrepiece for SCAD: a live lab for research and study.

On the other hand, the new building is in keeping with a long lineage of preservation in Savannah. Its monopoly of art colleges in the South – in 2006 it merged with Atlanta’s College of Art, making it one of the largest American art schools – began when the college channelled its resources into buying and restoring old buildings in Savannah to house its staff and students. SCAD’s portfolio has grown since 1978 to 75 buildings, around 190,000 sq m worth more than £11m, from shipyard storage units to elementary schools, repurposed as dorms, classrooms and studios.

Unlike the renovations of SCAD’s other academic buildings, however, the museum was a blank canvas. At least, there were options in direction the designers could take.  The new two-storey building extends more than 150m from the original SCAD museum, a Greek Revival structure, which in its day was the headquarters of the Central of Georgia Railroad – the country’s last remaining antebellum railway complex.

Salvaging all that remained of the Savannah Grey bricks from the neglected and tumbling down depot building on site, the architects designed a building to rise again. Smooth concrete slabs slide out from behind a patchwork of broken brick walls. Fragments of original brick shell form frames around artwork hung behind glass enclosures: ‘jewel boxes’ that offer a street-side gallery. Inside, through the core of the 7,618 sq m, brick arches delineate the three main ground-floor galleries and stretch up to classrooms on the floor above, while reclaimed timber planks from the old depot clad the auditorium walls.

Crediting the contributions of SCAD’s diverse span of disciplines for the museum’s overall scheme, Sottile states: ‘The museum began with art.’ The project harnesses cutting-edge preservation techniques – researched at SCAD – and has integrated them behind the scenes, including the hurricane-resistant C-shaped channel glass in the entrance’s lantern; the delicate stabilising technique which installed a raft support underneath the old leaning walls, and the metal pins that bore through the old brickwork into concrete-cast styrofoam to retain their function.

It is the more visible aspects of furniture design and interactive technology and textiles, however, that rip the museum from the past into the future: Design Within Reach’s illuminated Chester Armchair, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s 3D wallpaper and Pentagram’s digital table make you feel like part of Mission Impossible while navigating the collection and  are reminders that the college also exists outside of its historical context.

Perhaps it is impossible to extricate any building from its past. Unlike Moshe Safdie’s 2006 extension to the city’s Telfair Museum, whose stone and glass connector is a parody of classical proportions found in Savannah architecture, Sottile’s design lifts history alongside contemporary design as an equal. He has aligned the art museum with Oglethorpe’s masterplan. Its lantern stands 26mtall and acts as a beacon, joining the landmark spires and clocktowers that make up the skyline. Widely considered to be America’s first planned city, Savannah was loosely based on London’s town plan, and Oglethorpe’s Utopian grid was designed to offer respite from buildings; dwellings were punctuated with open plots of land. ‘Savannah is the most walkable city in America,’ says Sottile.

Nestling within existing parameters, the new building responds to the city’s famously punctuated streetscape and is interupted by a partly walled courtyard, the remnants of the original depot. For better or worse, the art museum’s historical modern design is aligned with the charm that halted Sherman’s March to the Sea 150 years ago.

Following his acclaimed films about fonts and industrial design, Helvetica and Objectified, the final instalment in director Gary Hustwit’s design trilogy focuses on 21st-century cities.  Urbanized was conceived in 2007 while Hustwit was on screening tour with Helvetica. ‘I didn’t start these films with a thesis or agenda; they’ve really been explorations into subjects I’m curious about,’ says Hustwit. ‘But I think it is critical [in Urbanized’s case] to share these ideas between cities and citizens, and get people more involved in envisioning what kind of city they want to live in.’

‘Small’ can instinctively imply an unappealing, claustrophobic space. However, in Nano House: Innovations for small dwellings, Phyllis Richardson presents a collection of 43 ‘small’ dwellings and examines the feasibility of mini living spaces.

Where space is limited and energy use is a global concern, ‘nano’ houses, with versatility and appreciation for materials in their design, could be a sustainable way forward, tackling the future impact of an increasingly compact urban environment.

Stripping it down to the fundamentals of living, Richardson analyses innovative alternatives that deal with our current demands for high-tech and lavish lifestyles. She has created a directory of clever ideas that can be adapted from a larger scale, marrying traditional ideas, such as Le Corbusier’s vertical habitats, with responsible design. With thoughtful, spatial arrangements, the ‘nano’ house can range from a simple Mies van der Rohe-inspired SmartBox for the 2010 Solar Decathlon competition to dmVA Architects eccentric Blob, a temporary ‘space egg’ that contains essential living compartments. From floating mobile houses, groundbreaking ‘green’ technologies to temporary pop-up designs, these 50 sq m-75 sq m dwellings challenge the notion ‘living small is living with less’.

Renowned for his discussions on minimal living, Le Corbusier‘s view was that a house should provide:‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, personal life.’ These seem to be of most importance in small-scale design, a starting point from which the architects featured in this book progress into high-quality designs comparative in space, light and luxury to dwellings twice the size.

It is easy to see the appeal of living in some of these small buildings, many demonstrating luxurious and efficient designs. Sunset Cabin, for example, by architecture practice Taylor Smyth, uses birch veneered plywood louvres around the perimeter of the facade, photographed to highlight a pattern of filtered light and shadow that seem to radiate internal space. In contrast, examples such as HSH Architekti’s Villa Hermina in the Czech Republic question whether a cantilevered bookshelf-bed can be described as a luxury. Even though the flexible internal layout amplifies a dynamic spatial experience, it makes it difficult to imagine this as a suitable setting for a comfortable family home.

Small structures are useful: they are an economic way to test ideas and explore the possibilities of viable low-energy alternatives. In architect Ryszard Rychlicki’s Instant Lung, for example, he ‘transfers the air-filtering mask and the soundproof headphones to the function of a house.’  Based next to a motorway and accustomed to poor air quality, the architect has designed a central felt and cotton ’lung’ to take the air through a narrow gap in the external wall, naturally ventilating the interior.

Throughout the projects in the book, materials are used to heighten spaces and break boundaries between inside and out. Transforming hard materials such as concrete and glass into delicate finishes, the House in Hiro by Suppose Design Office generates more space through the meticulous use of light and materials, ‘bringing indoors the materials that evoke elements of the outdoors.’
With heavy timber and glass as a trend, the designs also particularly relevant to affordable-housing and prefabricated markets. The book’s last chapter investigates housing needs in developing countries, presenting projects which can be replicated on a large scale, especially post-disaster.

With a strong focus on ‘architecture that follows necessity’, TYIN Tegenstue, a group of students from Norway, presents solutions in response to emergency settlements on the Thai-Burma border, creating sleeping accommodation with simple ingenuity, using recycled materials such as car tyres to case the concrete foundations.

Showing affordability and excellence in design and energy-efficient production, this book is inspiring, a realisation of possibilities in resourceful living and a catalogue of ideas that provides easy yet sophisticated solutions to space shortages making ‘small’ mean more.

‘Libraries Give us Power’ was the slogan above the door of Pillgwenlly Library, a statement that was adopted for the opening line of the 1996 Britpop anthem by the Manic Street Preachers, A Design for Life. The irony of beer-soaked ‘lads’ in Ben Sherman shirts swaying violently while extolling the virtues of democratic access to printed information was not lost on the band. The sign was stolen or lost when the library was refurbished – a piece of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia for a fan maybe – but the sentiment remains, and it seems more prescient than ever. If there is one building typology that can evoke a passionate response from the public, the teary-eyed nostalgia for libraries takes some beating.

After the Coalition Goverment’s 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, set the tone for this ‘austerity age’, local authority budget cuts have closed, or put under the threat of closure, 433 libraries around the country. The 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act set out ‘the statutory duty for all local authorities to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service’, yet it seems that libraries are easy prey for the beancounters.

A new public library is a rare thing. Birmingham is replacing its brutalist behemoth of books with a new building by Mecanoo architects; on a smaller scale FAT architects completed a refurbishment of Thornton Heath Library. In 2006, David Adjaye rebranded libraries as Idea Stores, to be found dotted around East London, and in 2000 Will Alsop won a Stirling Prize for his Library in the Sky in Peckham. Now there is the £13.7m Canada Water Library by London-based architecture practice CZWG.

The new library sits on the edge of the Canada Water basin, a relic of the area’s former life as a hive of activity with shipyards, jetties, piers and warehouses that transformed the marshlands of Rotherhithe from the late 1600s onwards. As the nature of shipping changed, the shallow basins became unsuitable for the massive vessels bringing in goods and the area entered a period of decline. Like many other once-thriving ports across the UK, the area became typified by poor housing, overcrowding, high crime rates and widespread poverty, and it was heavily bombed in the Second World War.

The decline continued, and between 1978 and 1983 more than 12,000 jobs were lost. London’s docklands were described as some eight square miles of dereliction by the then Secretary of State Michael Heseltine in his book, Life in the Jungle: ‘I had found myself in a small plane, heading in that direction by way of the London’s East End. My indignation at what was happening on the South Bank was nothing compared to my reaction to the immense tracts of dereliction I now observed. The rotting docks – long since abandoned for deep-water harbours able to take modern container ships downstream – the crumbling infrastructure that had once supported their thriving industry, and vast expanses of polluted land left behind by modern technology and enhanced environmentalism.’

The London Docklands Development Committee was founded in 1981 by Heseltine. Although the LDDC disbanded in 1998, it was responsible for transforming 1,756 acres of dockland and 417 acres of basins across Southwark, Lewisham, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Newham as part of the Greater London Development plan launched in 1976. The designation of the area as an Enterprise Zone was responsible for the transformation into what we see today. Though it is a model that is being reintroduced by the current government, it leaves many questions unanswered as to the incentives offered to business to build privately on the land. The current masterplan has its foundations in the work of the LDDC, albeit initiated under the last Labour government.

Canada Water is a strange landscape of high-density apartments and social housing, arranged around a Tube station designed by Eva Jiricna, the basin and the spectacularly bland Surrey Quays shopping centre. A product of dubious political policy and speculative housebuilding that can be attributed to both the New Left and the Old Right, it is here in Canada Water, above the Tube station, that the new library stands.

CZWG has built a monolithic, inverted pyramid clad in rippling bronze aluminium that is inspired by the gentle movement of the water that the upper floors overhang. ‘We went for clarity,’ says Piers Gough, director of CZWG. ‘Public buildings are something fairly new for us; we usually do a public toilet or cafe. It’s tricky balancing glamour with the quotidian notions of squandering money. It couldn’t look like an office or a shopping centre; it’s not a generic building type – it’s celebratory, a beacon.’ The form of the building is visually uncomplicated, unabashedly planar – yet sat among the tawdry banality of its immediate environment it, somewhat surprisingly, has an appearance that stakes a convincing claim as the civic hub in this developer-led purgatory.

The exterior form was arrived at through the desire to contain the reading room on one floor. The library occupies the third floor of the building that splays out skywards to accommodate it – the maximum footprint of the building would not have allowed this if it was simply extruded from the constrained footprint at ground level. The walls teeter out at 50 degrees, overhanging the water and the as-yet-unfinished public square to the east. The large windows are recessed into the walls or extrude slightly – the double-height, north-facing windows are a subtle nod to the grand civic tradition of council buildings.

Accessing the building from one of the three ground-floor entrances the visitor’s first encounter is with the cafe and a smattering of books, which lead on to a grand spiral staircase – a big defining gesture that makes wayfinding easy. Also on this floor is a 120-seat performance space that is linked to the exterior public plaza. The raking of the walls makes for an unconventional space that struggles to make good use of the awkward angles supplied by the plan, yet it’s an opportunity for the building to expand its remit beyond being solely a traditional library.

Finished in a warm oak veneer, the staircase takes the visitor up through two floors in a 360-degree sweep. With it, CZWG has provided a procession to the large reading room that can hold 40,000 books, overlooked by a gallery that contains the reference library and 30 workstations. The library floor is arranged into three areas, with books for children, teenagers and adults stored on meandering bookshelves that lead visitors to the windows. Above, the roof dips at the centre to accommodate the trusses concealed behind it, again drawing the visitor to the periphery of the room. ‘We hope that this open-plan space will be sociable, but also a refuge to go to by yourself,’ says Gough.

Gough and CZWG have produced a building that begins to make sense of a landscape that lacks focus and coherence on an urban scale. It may not be to everyone’s liking, but it draws together the few redeeming factors of its immediate context into a robust and striking civic institution. The building may lack a little finesse in the finishes and the raking walls provide a few useless pockets that pepper the building (‘The staff say they can chuck a sofa in; they are happy,’ says Gough) –
but this is a small price to pay for the library, which is a grand space that feels comfortable for the individual.

‘When designing a library, there is a danger of being overawed with the responsibility of such a project,’ says Gough. ‘This building has some of our larkiness to it, in the overall shape. But most importantly we feel it works. It’s not an architectural caprice based on a library.  ‘I hope that the building engenders a sense that the world of the mind is as important as the consumer part of life.’

The pairing of project and practice becomes even stronger in the form of the new museum, taking its lead from the surrounding radical architectures devised by the likes of artists Robert Motherwell and Pierre Chareau, whose repurposed Second World War storage units, kit-of-parts Nissen huts, set an aesthetic tone of industry and experimentation in the open, light-filled landscape. ‘[Sculptor Alexander] Calder came and painted his red inside and [playwright] Samuel Beckett stayed here,’ says critic and former curator at the Parrish, Alastair Gordon. ‘It is a convergence of creativity and invention in one place.’

On a recent visit to the museum, Herzog admits to tinkering with some details to allow more light into the building. ‘It’s dangerous to let architects visit the construction site at this stage,’ he jokes. But this appreciation for the area’s best asset is compounded by a long-time preoccupation with perception and collaboration with artists. When they started their office in the late Seventies neither had a clear vision or mission for their practice. While Herzog began studying biology and chemistry and de Meuron was involved in structural engineering, the childhood friends’ lack of clarity led them to architecture, and from 1970–1975 they both studied at ETH Zurich with Aldo Rossi and Dolf Schnebli.

‘We thought that maybe architecture could be something interesting – an intersection of many other disciplines,’ says Herzog. ‘We had lots of artists in our circle of friends.’ One in particular, Remy Zaugg, would become an important part of their development and thinking (Zaugg’s 1986 essay Das Museum, das ich Mir Erträume, is widely regarded as a game-changer for how the Western world viewed museums). In the early years, the three of them travelled together and colluded on masterplans and urban designs. Disillusioned with the end of modernism and uninterested in the shift  of postmodernism into deconstructivism, Herzog and de Meuron found their projects fell into what was later described as minimalism. ‘We didn’t know which direction we would go in,’ says Herzog, ‘but no one was thinking minimalism was what we were doing. It was an art term, it wasn’t being used in architecture.’ Herzog is clear, however, that there is a distinction between art and architecture: ‘It is a dangerous question: sometimes architecture is close to art, on the other hand architecture also has a very functional side,’ he says. ‘Architecture has to work and it’s annoying if it doesn’t.’

The tightly woven connection with art became a trajectory and projects such as the HQ for La Roche, Basel, which began in 1993 and completed in 2000, and its accompanying monograph, Architecture by Herzog and de Meuron; Wall Painting by Remy Zaugg: A Work for Roche Basel, revealed the practice’s highly collaborative nature, not least informed by the fact that there have always been two practice principals. With each project grounded from the outset in a dialogue, the practice was able to develop in a more fluid and critical way than more ostensibly hierarchical offices. ‘We are very different,’ says Herzog (‘de Meuron does the work,’ he laughs), ‘but we’ve been doing things together because it’s faster and the outcome is less based on one person. You get rid of obsessions more easily.’

Rebuking the idea of single authorship and personal style – ‘We always  wanted to escape that,’ – Herzog believes their work benefits from difference  and distinction. In a recent study, as part of their teaching at ETH Studio  Basel, Herzog, de Meuron and fellow tutors Roger Diener and Marcel Mieli  identified specificity in urban planning as an interesting outcome of  globalisation, rather than the more common opinion that 21st-century cities  are more generic. ‘Cities become more like characters; the older they get the  more they have specific patterns,’ says Herzog. ‘This century has started with  making these differences very apparent, bringing back the notion of reality;  real disasters, real earthquakes, real bombing, not everything disappears in a  cloud of virtuality as they were telling us at the end of the 20th century, based on French philosophy and deconstructivism.’ When published, the investigation will be Studio Basel’s ninth research project. Slow but considered, it seems the office and its teaching works at a pace that isn’t set by trends or forces other than what data and conversations require. Gestation and analysis are key aspects of their work.

The Park Avenue Armoury, New York

Herzog doesn’t underplay the vital role that teaching has in the practice either: ‘We use architecture as a tool to understand what goes on in the world,’ he says. ‘Architecture touches on so many things… it is the petrification of our societies. I think that every generation looks at this in a different way and through teaching you have another approach, another access to the world.’ The studio focuses on in-depth research into the contemporary city. Interestingly, its own location in Basel, away from the main university campus in Zurich, has had an impact on shifting the geopolitical and aesthetic landscape of its local environment by attracting other studios, including the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) Laba run by Harry Gugger to settle there.

‘Somehow, making that geographical shift is part of the message: ETH Zurich is a great school but we think architecture schools shouldn’t be too large,’ says Herzog. ‘Students should travel and have a different perspective.’ Though Basel is not counted among the architecture capitals, such as London and New York, Herzog remains resolute and clear about the significance of staying put. When asked why his practice remains in Basel
his answer is direct: ‘Where else?’

Indeed, the notion of specificity filters through all the practice’s projects. It would be callous to assume that the reuse of designs act as a family without differentiation. The original village model for the Parrish Art Museum went on to inform the arrangement of the ongoing Guadalajara Museum, or the continuation of themes, such as the structured genealogy that produced the stack system, as seen in the Vitrahaus and Lymen House as well as resonating through the Parrish Art Museum.  With each project the designers tease out the details, the context, introduce the materials and precisely peel back the layers of history and value embedded in the project. ‘Restoration – there always exists something – never a vacuum,’ says Herzog.

The Basel Cultural Museum

Its work restoring buildings, such as  the recently opened Park Avenue  Armoury in New York and the Basel  Cultural Museum, have become as  integral to the architects’ dextrous  design handiwork as its ground-up  projects. In October, the practice  announced its selection as project  architects for the new Blavatnik  School of Government in Oxford and  the Gymnasium Project in Natal,  Brazil. The varying challenges of each speak of the practice’s breadth of perspective and versatility, as well as their celebrity status.

In its mature days the office is becoming increasingly transparent. This year it launched its first website – functional ‘white pages’ of text, with windows opening on to individual aspects of the practice. For an office that has until now almost solely communicated its philosophy and physical manifestations through essays, carefully orchestrated interviews and well considered monographs, this new venture speaks volumes about the way it wants to be received. ‘It wasn’t because we thought we were being cool,’ says Herzog. ‘It just took a long time, four or five years, to make decisions about it and put it together.’ Like a considered artwork, the website has become a living part of the practice: an appendage.

After 30 years, Herzog and de Meuron have anchored their reputation with projects such as Tate Modern (2000), the Bird’s Nest (2008) and 1111 Lincoln Road (2009) and other scales such as the Parrish and the Museum of Culture in Basel. The recurring theme of discussion, gestation and collaboration, either with a client, artist, photographer or architect, avoids the practice being limited by its own style.

Herzog points to architecture’s specificity as a reason for his ongoing passion for the discipline. ‘Great buildings have that one thing that is so important, it sets them apart,’ he says. ‘It may be difficult to describe… a technical description or a functional diagram doesn’t do it, but you can somewhat feel it, you will understand that it is great, maybe without even liking it… this is what makes architecture so interesting and different from other things like sculpture or painting.’

Nick Guttridge

Sat on the edge of Bute Park, in the shadow of Cardiff Castle (a gothic fantasy built for the 3rd Earl of Bute in 1873) is the home of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Founded in 1949, the school had a purpose-built facility erected in the Seventies on North Road, a major arterial route into the city centre. Over time it had become woefully inadequate and an ugly physical presence for the college, awarded its Royal Charter in 2002.

Following a competition in 2007 looking for designs to expand the school and modernise the facilities, the RWCMD appointed London-based architecture practice BFLS. The practice faced a client and city council that had reservations about cost and feasibility – an earlier scheme by John McAslan + Partners had been shelved – and they were nervous about another false start. On top of this, the existing building had to remain open for students while the work was done. ‘We worked closely with the client and the planners, always working backwards from the total build cost of £22.5m,’ says Jason Flanagan, the ‘F’ of BFLS. ‘We won the competition with the design for the recital chamber and the theatre, then worked to sort out a shopping list of “must-haves” with the college.’ The brief evolved into a building that fits the bill as both a performing arts college and a performing arts centre. The doors are open to everyone.

The new building brings all the students on to one site for the first time (previously they had been scattered across Cardiff in ad-hoc accommodation), letting musicians, designers, singers and actors  interact with each other in both structured and informal sessions. ‘We had lost our sense of community,’ says Hilary Boulding, RWCMD principal. ‘There is now a multiplicity to the arts activity at the school. We had a vision of how we wanted to take it forward beyond the confines of our old, anonymous building – we can now bring artists together at the peak of their training, and get the public involved.’ Key to this is the foyer space that links the 450-seat Dora Stoutzker Hall, the 180-seat Richard Burton Theatre and the original building. Flanked by huge glazed walls, the vast and airy space incorporates a cafe with rehearsal spaces above, and affords a great view of the beautiful park across the canal to the west. Even on a grey winter’s day the view is beguiling.

The finishes are simple and robust, the furniture functional, but the space is welcoming and bubbles with excited chatter and musical notes floating out of the rehearsal rooms high above. On Fridays the building regularly attracts good-sized crowds to informal jazz nights. ‘The students were dubious about having the public in the building all the time,’ says Boulding. ‘We convinced them that it was their building, and their public – it is a good thing that they are exposed in this way.’ From the foyer, the students pass through security gates and along a cavernous arcade with light cascading down from a clerestory three storeys above. The arcade is filled with work by theatre-design students and is the interface between the existing building, now painted white as a quick aesthetic fix, and the extension. The new theatre and recital hall are housed in two distinct drums, with entrances carved neatly out of their massive walls, peeling away to reveal stairways and balconies.

The recital hall, the only purpose-built chamber music hall in Wales, is a classic shoebox clad in birch plywood. It has been moulded to balance the primary and reflected sounds that fill the space during a performance, and the stage sits in a coffered basin, placed in the round by a balcony that wraps above it. ‘The details replicate what you would find in an 18th-century chamber room with pilasters, but without the fussy ornament,’ says Flanagan. ‘We knew the room should feel good and the audience and the orchestra should enjoy the space. It acts as an instrument, which the performer must learn to play.’ The proximity of the audience to the orchestra and the novel views from the balcony (see p10) ensure that, despite its size, the hall offers an intimate and intense experience.

The building is united under a thin blade of a roof that ties together the individual architectural elements below. It provides a datum under which the full-height flytower of the Burton Theatre is neatly concealed. Facing east, the building announces itself with a series of grey fins that are a respectful nod to the Portland stone buildings of the civic centre opposite. To the rear, the dirty brick of the old building makes an unwelcome reappearance, but this breaks off into the timber and glazing of the extension. At the northern tip is the cedar-clad exterior of the recital hall, arranged in blades that gently address the natural beauty of the parkland beyond. It is a building designed with confidence to announce its presence as part of the city without precocious or elaborate aesthetic gestures.

Crucially, BFLS has delivered an institution that avoids the pitfalls of nostalgia and lazy stereotypes that could easily have been arrived at, all slate and Celtic knot tracery with dragon motifs plastered on the walls. The finishes are not luxurious – far from it – but BFLS has strived to understand the needs of the college and the role the building plays as an interface between the students and the public. The Dora Stoutzker auditorium is a wonderful space executed with mastery by an architect clearly enthused with the idea of providing a beautiful space with fantastic acoustic properties.

Until this year not many people knew there was a conservatoire in Cardiff. Now the RWCMD, which also bills itself as the National Conservatoire of Wales, not only provides a landmark delineating the entrance to the Welsh capital, but also a home for the new generations of Burtons, Hopkinses, Terfels and Jenkinses to hone their craft in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurence King Publishing, £48

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the application form here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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