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.

The Design Museum marks Sir Terence Conran’s 80th birthday with a major exhibition that explores his unique impact on contemporary life in Britain. Through his own design work, and also through his entrepreneurial flair, Conran has transformed the British way of life. As well as this, his design studio and architectural practice have a world wide reach. The Way We Live Now explores Conran’s impact and legacy, whilst also showing his design approach and inspirations. The exhibition traces his career from post-war austerity through to the new sensibility of the Festival of Britain in the 1950s, the birth of the Independent Group and the Pop Culture of the 1960s, to the design boom of the 1980s and on to the present day.

To compliment the exhibition, the Design Museum in collaboration with Blueprint,  has produced a book that features an exclusive interview by Johnny Tucker with Terence Conran and contributions from Deyan Sudjic, Stephan Bayley, Christopher Frayling and Fiona MacCarthy.

Blueprint has 10 copies of the book and ten pairs of tickets for the exhibition “Terence Conran: The way we live now” which runs until 04 March 2012 at the Design Museum. For a chance to win, send us your details including your name, email, contact number and address at info@blueprintmagazine.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.shapetofabrication.com/

http://www.robofold.com/

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

Once I know what topic I want to (or have to) write about, the most critical decision becomes inevitable: how to begin? No evening class in Creative Writing, no journalism course fails to mention how important the first sentence is for the impression a text makes upon the unprepared reader. Norbert Miller, a German literary historian, published a collection of essays about what he called this ‘radical decision’. The first sentence compresses the infinite space for reflection into a finite object, settling on one version out of a multitude of variations and possible strategies.

Consider these alternatives: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ and ‘One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.’

The first example is by the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who thus began his Paul Clifford. The second is, of course, from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. After a beginning like this, you know Kafka’s novel is not going to be light reading, while Bulwer-Lytton’s turn of phrase does not bode well if you’re looking for world literature. Its author gave his name to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The 2011 winner, Professor Sue Fondrie from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, wrote: ‘Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanesof a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories’.

If you spend any time reading press releases, this style of writing won’t surprise you, even though the topics may be less personal. Mixing as many unrelated metaphors as possible into one statement seems to be considered a high art in those circles. Many trades have developed their own style of templated writing. You can actually find bullshit generators online that provide ready-made statements, such as this from artybollocks.com: ‘My work explores the relationship between acquired synesthesia and emotional memories. With influences as diverse as Nietzsche and Roy Lichtenstein, new synergies are crafted from both.’

If that isn’t good (or bad) enough for your purpose, there are alternatives: ‘My work explores the relationship between the tyranny of ageing and skateboard ethics. With influences as diverse as Kierkegaard and John Lennon, new combinations are generated from both simple and complex meanings.’

Increasing levels of complexity, cliche and incomprehensibility are on offer. I am sure that there are bullshit generators for architects and designers somewhere. I haven’t bothered to look for them yet for fear of being infected.

Before one even gets to the first sentence, though, potential readers have to pass another obstacle: the title of the book. While the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest encourages people to write original lines just for the contest, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, commonly known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award that has been made annually since 2000. The winner is decided by a public vote on the Bookseller’s website. The very first award in 1978 went to a publication by the University of Tokyo Press about medical studies using laboratory mice with inhibited immune systems, accordingly but somewhat surprisingly titled Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.

The 2000 winner delighted with High Performance Stiffened Structures, published by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Then there’s Highlights in the History of Concrete, by CC Stanley, published by the British Cement Association. It stormed the Oddest Title in 1994.

What is almost as difficult as starting a text is finishing it. At the end, you are supposed to offer some closure, like answering the rhetorical question posed in the first paragraph; revealing an unexpected answer to a problem that your article had discovered, or at least wrapping up your ramblings with a phrase that would make punters happy about just having grown older by 10 minutes reading it without immediate danger to their health. There could even be a conclusion that would add lasting benefit to all that intellectual activity.

This time, I got to my 800 words or so rather cheaply: a quarter are quotes. To get maximum benefit from reading this, you should look online for bullshit detectors and humorous literary awards. If nothing else, it’ll help against the dreaded Fear of the First Line: you can always do better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This October, one of the principal buildings of the King’s Cross masterplan opens its doors to 4,500 students. Central St Martins is one of the most famous design schools in the world, with an illustrious alumni including artist Sir Peter Blake, fashion designer Stella McCartney and Pulp vocalist Jarvis Cocker. The school is moving nearly all of its operations to the newly restored and extended Granary Building at the heart of the King’s Cross development, employing London-based architect Stanton Williams to design the 40,000sq m scheme.

The architect was initially brought in to design a 12-storey building in Holborn in 2002, to unify the 11 buildings across six disparate locations around the capital that made up CSM. However, the institution seized the opportunity to take the King’s Cross site when it became available, finding £200m to purchase and develop it (construction costs were £92m) and Stanton Williams switched its attentions across town. Planning permission was granted in April 2008.

The new campus will announce itself across Granary Square, its listed facade framed by the boulevard that rises from the station across the canal. Beyond the entrance to the building, the street is internalised, running the length of the building from north to south culminating in a theatre at the northern end. It is flanked by four storeys on each side and covered with an ETFE roof. ‘The project is ultimately about creating an environment that will enhance the student experience; to create a building complex with flexible spaces that allows the college latitude,’ says Paul Williams, co-founder of Stanton Williams. ‘By latitude, I mean interior spaces that can evolve, change over time and respond to changing teaching methods – all, importantly, within an organising architectural framework.’

The appearance of the building is deceptive from the exterior: hemmed in by the listed train sheds on the east and west, the building appears very dense. Yet each space is flooded with light, and the architects have retained the rugged, industrial character of the building and juxtaposed it with assured planar forms. The western flank is given over to lecture theatres and studio spaces; the eastern flank contains workshops and office spaces. The building also contains dance studios, black and white box studios and a theatre. ‘Our aim has been to create a stage for transformation, a sequence of spaces that can be orchestrated differently over time between staff and students, where new interactions, chance and experimentation can create that ‘slipstream’ between disciplines,’ says Williams. This is a building developed to house an institution with a Bauhaus pedagogy.

The internal street avoids monotony as it is asymmetrical, it is crossed on 5m-wide bridges that can be appropriated by students for displays and crit panels. The new pristine white walls are interspersed with plywood boards for the students to adorn with work. Generous openings, ceiling heights and roof lights ensure that the experience of the building never becomes overbearing, not even the massive internal facade of the Granary Building has the chance to dominate the space. The building layers the academic activity both vertically and laterally, echoing the activity of the buildings former use, where material and grain moved around the site using trucks, turntable and hoists. Progressing through the circulation spaces that connect the functions, the architect frames the old Building against the skin of the new intervention, providing a tapestry of uncompromising, scarred brick and iron Victoriana against crisp and powerful concrete, steel and glass.

Stanton Williams has provided a series of spaces with different textures and moods that the staff and students will interpret and use. The character of the building as a whole, while unoccupied, remains as a warehouse or interchange, yet it is primed for activity.  It is less poised than the body of work the architect has previously produced, typified by its museum project at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Williams hopes that the building has a ‘rationality and reason’ that improves over its lifespan.

As the first building to be occupied in this newest piece of London, Stanton Williams has provided a thoroughly convincing building, steeped in character yet pragmatically realised. This will set the rhythm and character of the whole development. The final touches are being added by Pringle Brandon and Overbury who are coordinating the fit-out, but Williams stresses, ‘It’s not complete now, and in my view never should be.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound enhances the way we perceive and understand space. In the city it does this by connecting the realm of public space to the private and intimate space of our minds. Sound gives any space, interior or exterior, its identity and is an important navigation and orientation tool.

Yet actually identifying a space aurally is difficult, especially in busy cityscapes where incessant noise erases and blurs the traces of other sounds. This, however, was the first task the participants of contemporary music and art promoter Sound and Music’s Ways of Hearing project were asked to carry out. This was the inaugural  workshop that kick-started a national programme of sound exploration and research.

In all, 36 sound artists, acousticians, designers, policy-makers and researchers took part, grouped in three distinct research city hubs: Bristol, London and Leeds.  As well as bringing together these professionals to explore the relationship between sound and built environment, Ways of Hearing aims to help individual practices with a specific interest to develop new design approaches, processes and innovations in sound.

The Ways of Hearing project can be defined as an experimental platform aiming to provoke new research and creative ideas combined with sound technologies. It also focuses on the cross-disciplinary intersection between sound, architecture and the arts. It was co-produced by MAAP (Media and Arts Partnership) a Leeds based public art consultancy directed by Sue Ball that played a crucial role on structuring the methodology of the programme and the selection of participant artist. This was coordinated with John Kieffer and Richard Whitelow from Sound and Music. The name Ways of Hearing came from a workshop that MAAP initiated in 2005 with American sound artist Bill Fontana.

As part of broadening the spectrum of sound exploration and creative investigation on a national scale, Sound and Music invited Arup and Blueprint to be project partners for Ways of Hearing. It also established a substantial network of local partners including Opera North and Lumen in Leeds, Musarc in London, and Arnolfini and the Architecture Centre in Bristol.

After the initial two-day workshops, which were run by a core group of practitioners brought in by Sound and Music to support each city group, participants had a week to finalise and submit their research proposals. They then had a further eight weeks to work on their projects.

Although the workshops were designed for experimentation and work-in-progress research, some projects reached completion during the process, while others continue to develop.

In the November issue we take a look at five specific research projects from the Ways of Hearing, which illustrate the wide spectrum of theoretical enquiry and practical creative research engendered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Memory Pavilion, an installation by Asif Khan and Pernilla Ohrstedt, is unveiled today as the Future Memory in Singapore, as the platform for promotion of British architects and designers, culminates.

The Future Memory Pavilion comprises of two cones stretching up to eight meters high and 20 meters in diameter. Made of ice and sand, the cones are formed using concentric ropes, that taper the structure.

Typically for Khan and on par with the Future Memory programme the form is designed to morph with passing time, as the ice melts and trickling water erodes the sand structure. Visitors are also encouraged to interact to represent the human impact on the environment. Ultimately both cones melt away. The manner in which the cones disappear is intended to provoke visitors to reflect on issues of climate and urban development.

The Pavilion’s creators, Khan and Ohrstedt, drew their inspiration from Singapore’s history. The conical forms emulate the hills of Singapore, which were methodically destroyed, as the soil was needed for the expansion of island’s grounds. Chinese merchants were importing ice from New England as far back as 1854. It was considered a luxury in the tropical climate and available only to the wealthiest Singaporeans.

Asif Khan is a Design Miami 2011 Designer of the Future known for his Cloud project and West Beach Café in Littlehampton. Pernilla Ohrstedt is an architect and exhibitions producer. Artists met at Bartlett architecture school. Recently they are preoccupied with setting up their new practice Pernilla&Asif. See next months Blueprint for an interview with the designers.

The Future Memory was created by Royal Academy of Arts and British Council.

Today, Tigerman McCurry, the practice he shares with Margaret McCurry, is a significant part of what some believe is a re-emergence of post-modernist thinking. For Petit, Tigerman’s archive, which joined work by Eero Saarinen, among others, in Yale’s drawings depository this year, represents Tigerman’s pursuit of a universal truth about architecture. ‘It’s always relevant to remind people of the cultural function of architecture and that it is not simply a business,’ he says.

Petit’s curation of the Tigerman retrospective, Ceci n’est pas une Rêverie (This is Not a Dream), which opened in August, posits Tigerman’s scepticism as important for its critical value, rather than characterising it as cynicism or folly – as post-modernism is often read. Only his conceptual work is on show: texts and drawings of strange animals ‘doing strange things to buildings’ as Petit puts it. ‘There’s obviously an ironic component to my work,’ says Tigerman, ‘but it’s all done in the context of reintroducing complexity into what is otherwise simplistic.’ His satirical cartoons, or ‘architoons’, communicate architecture’s fallibility and the necessity of human presence: aspects that post-modernists’ claim modernism cast aside.

At City University of New York in November, the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art will host the symposium Reconsidering Post-modernism. Meanwhile the V&A’s exhibition Post-modern: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, positions the movement as a ticking time-bomb. ‘We wanted to show how post-modernism collapsed under its own weight,’ says show curator Glenn Adamson, who believes there is a revival going on. ‘In the past five years, post-modernism has gone from being a toxic term to stylish and fashionable,’ he says. Adamson puts it down to a generation shift, the recent recession and post-modernism’s maturity. ‘Post-modernists have moved on to make their own narratives… and the younger generation can discover new things,’ he says.

In his work, Tigerman has railed against the over-simplification of architecture. ‘Part of the yearning for post-modernism in the Seventies was because modernism didn’t allow for idiosyncrasy,’ he says. Tigerman’s buildings – such as the phallic Daisy House, in Porter, Indiana (1978) – direct criticism towards the evolution of modernism that eventually rejected the individual in the design process. But his work isn’t merely reactionary. In his 1978 collage, The Titanic, Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall sinks into Lake Michigan under a surrealist sky; it’s a clarion call for change, the end of modernism, not a criticism of its forefathers.

The continuing deluge of production-line developments is being challenged by a spirited, younger generation re-evaluating the importance of historical reference and vernacular in design. Robert Stern, Dean of Yale University, cites the UK as pivotal in the new post-modernism, and lists practices including FAT and Agents of Change (AOC) as its champions. UK-based architect Post-Works and artist Pablo Bronstein have been reapplying aspects of post-modernism to contemporary spaces. However, Tigerman doubts whether this does, in fact, indicate a shift towards a new post-modernism. He thinks it is a return to engaging with social issues, the users and  clients.

‘Denuding architecture or buildings of the individual and looking at the work itself – producing architecture for its own sake – has reached its limits,’ he says. His Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago (2007) – the USA’s largest centre for the homeless – the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (1982), and  Illinois Holocaust Museum (2000), are all manifestations of Tigerman’s post-modernism. ‘His project really was to remind people architecture wasn’t just about aesthetics but also ethics,’ says Petit.

In some ways his work answers the question about post-modernism’s direction. ‘I think there’s plenty of grist to work with,’ says Tigerman. ‘Sustainable energy, problems connected with capitalism, like homelessness.’ Indeed, much of this is dealt with by his students at the alternative design school, Archeworks in Chicago, which he set up with Eva Maddox in 1993. Its ambition, to make meaningful design that responds to human needs and changeability, is a signpost for any young architect keen to understand where post-modernism went. For Tigerman, ‘architecture has always tried to make what is useful artful, ­­it is not just a useful art.’Following Yale, New Haven, Ceci n’est pas une Reverie will travel to the Graham Foundation, Chicago. Stanley Tigerman’s autobiography, Designing Bridges to Burn (ORO) anda book of essays, Schlepping Through Ambivalence (Yale University Press) are launched later this month.

Kitty by Jiran, 24

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

Ally Churches, 23 – Beware Elderly Pickpockets

Drew Wicken, 22 – Warning: Warning Ahead!

Grant Holt, 32 – My Dad….

Rosie, 22 – Pattern

Malcolm Duffin, ‘over 8′ – Road Tax

Patrick Myles, 63 – Werewolves

Beth Duddy, 26 – Chicken Crossing

Borom Chai, 21 – Ants

Make Industries, 35 – Bermuda Triangle

Ash Adams, 21 – Robot Speed Camera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A huge thanks to everyone involved.

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

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

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

monsterism.net

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

nomabar.com

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

thelindstromeffect.co.uk

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

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

moderntoss.com

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

themobilestudio.co.uk

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

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

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

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

richard-morrison.co.uk

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

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

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

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

corkewallis.com

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

tomato.co.uk

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

airside.co.uk

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

checklandkindsleysides.com

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

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

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

Triangles, circles and cycles

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

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

National speed limits

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

National speed limits

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

No entry

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

thechase.co.uk

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

the-partners.com

Young & Norgate zimmer sideboard

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

Embroidered triangle wallpaper by CUSTHOM

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

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

Store for Estd. collection

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

Deadgood bookshelf by Max Lamb

Cubic bowl by Jonathan Krawczuk for DesignedMade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stepping on to the National Memorial at Ground Zero it is hard to feel anything but awestruck by its flatness. The plaza, a plateau 3.2 hectares (8 acres) across downtown Manhattan, is due to open on 11 September to mark the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. It is the only part of the memorial that will be opening that day. The National Museum hidden beneath the immense waterfalls, along with four new WTC towers being built on the other 3.2ha will carry on into next year. Steeped in controversy from the offset, the plaza also tells a story of design by committee.

The surface of the memorial plaza is simple, focusing on three main elements: the plaza plane, the trees and the waterfalls. The process of memorialising such recent history, however, has been complex as America struggled to balance a sensitive response with an urgency to demonstrate its bow-fingers. Preceding Michael Arad’s winning scheme in 2003 were soulless iterations of commercial developments that sought to compensate the exact square footage of office space lost in the attacks. In a moment of Athenian democracy that would come to define the design process, the public spoke out and the plans were scrapped.

The second round of proposals were released in 2002, again to public outcry, and again because the memorial grounds played second fiddle to towering corporate ambitions. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable writing in the Wall Street Journal at the time called them ‘cookie-cutter losers’ of ‘conceptual poverty’. Responding to the demand for a meaningful memorial on the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC); the land-owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and developer Larry Silverstein (who had leased theWTC only months before the attacks) launched an international competition and in February 2003 Daniel Libeskind’s masterplan was selected.

In the phases of development that followed, Libeskind’s plan was scaled back, and his ideas for regeneration at street-level, to build a cultural and a performance space and draw enterprise and community to the pallid Downtown, were abandoned. Arad’s plan (which the judges called ’sparse’ at the time) beat 5,200 other entrants despite violating Libeskind’s vision for a submerged park, instead raising the plaza to street level and paving over the crater. ‘I wanted to give the space back to the city,’ says Arad. Indeed, accessibility and procession are fundamental to the final design. Open on all sides, hemmed in by West and Liberty Streets to the west and the south, Libeskind’s plan has reinstated Greenwich Street, which runs north-south to the east and Vesey Street running east-west along the north of the site. While Santiago Calatrava’s PATH railway station, due for completion in 2015, will connect New Jersey once more and bring an estimated 10 million people through the site annually.

The plaza is also envisioned as a break-out space for the local office workers. The challenge, therefore, was to create a sanctuary in the centre to allow for peaceful contemplation and remembrance. In some ways the one-acre voids set in the footprint of the original towers act as a vacuum, drawing one’s attention to the site of the atrocity. Here, the focus is on depth – all 10 metres of it – rather than height; the inverse of the twin towers’ significance and symbolism.

Here, too the names of victims from both attacks on the WTC (in 2001 and the 1993 bombing) are incised into the tilted bronze wings skirting the waterfalls’ edge. It is a powerful expression of the scale of devastation, the magnitude of the architecture that was so fallible as well as the number of people who died within them. The inscriptions marry spatial and emotional relationships and names are grouped according to affiliation: in 2009, the 9/11 National Memorial Foundation asked all the victims’ families to list who they would like to see their loved ones listed next to. Arad and his team created a constellation of names in rows of three and five that answered all 1,200 requests.

The plaza allows one to peel away from the city. The green-grey stone plane will be pierced with 415 white oak trees arranged along abacus bands of varying widths. Transplanted from the states where the victims lived, the uniform trees form a forest landscape looking north to south, offering a place to be enveloped and buffered from the city. Looking east-west they align as a colonnade, eventually they will arch to form a canopy and a parkland for the memorial district. The soft landscaping was a request from the jury who thought Arad’s design too austere. In response, he partnered with Peter Walker landscape architects. ‘I particularly liked Michael’s proposal because it reminded me of[sculptor] Michael Heizer,’ says Walker. ‘Heizer digs holes in the ground. There are two elements crucial to it – the hole and the ground plane it is dug into. So the more perfect, more constant the plane the more amazing the hole would be.’

In initial plans the plane was more constant. Arad had sunk a ramp between the waterfalls to where the names of the victims were etched around pools below the waterfalls. It was a powerful gesture, and would, like the 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington by Maya Lin, focus on descending and being enveloped in the ground. However, the subterranean commemorative space was vetoed as too expensive and for fear that the ramp would be a target for potential bomb attacks. When it opens next year, the Snohetta-designed Museum pavilion will act as the gateway, and security measure, leading to the galleries 10m below ground.

Designed by Aedas with the National Memorial Foundation’s support, the cavernous museum will house artefacts including a crushed yellow taxi, fire-fighters’ suits and remnants of Minoru Yamasaki’s Twin Towers such as the concrete tridents from its base. And 10m  down, visitors will encounter the surviving slurry wall, which featured so strongly in Libeskind’s presentation eight years ago for being ‘as eloquent as The Constitution itself, asserting the durability of democracy and the value of individual life’.

The conversation in the lead-up to the tenth anniversary has centred around how to commemorate recent history. The National Building Centre in Washington held a lecture in July with representatives from the three memorial sites where the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11; Pennsylvania, at the Pentagon in Washington and New York. It is rare for a memorial to be built so soon after the event says Paul Murdoch, the architect behind the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, where passengers on the hijacked flight brought the plane down before it reached its supposed target, the Capitol building in Washington. Here the site has implicit solitude, a field of 890ha and a crater from the crash. Maintaining this was important to the victims’ families, says Murdoch. ‘You want to be clear about setting up certain opportunities to visitors without programming what they’re going to get from that,’ he says. Meanwhile, the Pentagon Memorial by KBAS Studio directly references the age range of those killed in the highjacking. Here under-lit benches peel up from the ground, organised by a timeline based on the ages of the individuals and dedicated to each one.

The designs share a lack of signature or the notion of unity, though in the case of the National Memorial in New York, it is yet to be seen whether this will be so. Unlike in Central Park where the 341ha feel as much a part of the urban fabric as the buildings that hem it in and the city that frames it, the National Memorial feels like a crater in a thicket of buildings.
The sense of flatness is heightened by the surrounding half-completed developments that make up the rest of the site, many of which have had to be put on hold during the financial crisis. While Libeskind’s plan has been taken as a guideline, in trying to deliver a memorial to individuals as well as a collective and still maintain its market value, the ground zero may suffer a classic New York urban planning condition of disjunction. For now, though, the plaza is a feat of city reclamation, as Walker puts it,of ‘making nothing something.’