Design for the Radiolara pavilion - the first printed building

In a small shed on an industrial park near Pisa is a machine that can print buildings. The machine itself looks like a prototype for the automotive industry. Four columns independently support a frame with a single armature on it. Driven by CAD software installed on a dust-covered computer terminal, the armature moves just millimetres above a pile of sand, expressing a magnesium-based solution from hundreds of nozzles on its lower side. It makes four passes. The layer dries and Enrico Dini recalibrates the armature frame. The system deposits the sand and then inorganic binding ink. The exercise is repeated. The millennia-long process of laying down sedimentary rock is accelerated into a day. A building emerges. This machine could be used to construct anything. Dini wants to build a cathedral with it. Or houses on the moon.

Dini’s machine marks a vital step change from the shoebox-size 3D printing of today, to tomorrow’s ability to print complete structures on site. Although others have been working hard on the prototype, Dini’s machine is ahead of the pack, with the Architectural Association beating several others to get to the first marketable version. The conceptual leap from modelling to manufacture may seem small, but making it has taken seven years of Dini’s personal endeavour in the face of bankruptcy and, when his ex-wife said she doubted his ability to complete the project, it cost him his marriage.

CAD drawings are translated by the d-shape into 3D layering. The machine deposits and binds layers 5-10mm deep allowing building designs to be realized within minute tolerances

Not that Dini shows much respect for his invention. His brother Ricardo is a talented mechanical engineer who also works on the project and proposed some of its defining features – the single armature for example. Today though he is beating recalcitrant parts of it with a hammer. Enrico refers to a pin system for calibrating the height of the frame as ‘this fucking device’. He is exasperated by its limitations. ‘My machine is stupid,’ he fumes. Perhaps there is certain dumbness to the binary logic of its on/off secretions compared to the complexity of the robots he once made for the shoe industry.

Dini’s background is in offline programming systems for six-axis robots. ‘Industrial robots are programmed by self-teaching. You bring the arm of the robot to a point, it memorises the point and then you bring it to another point and then you tell the robot to reapply this movement,’ he explains. This machine is different, less precise but more impressive.

Layers of sand are bound together to create a marble-like material, in effect turning it back into solid stone. The process includes internal curves, ducting and interior partitions. Here, hollow columns are being constructed from the base up

A 5mm-wide stream spreads out over the dust, becoming a 10mm layer when solid. Because the two components mix outside the nozzle, the machine does not clog up and can maintain an accuracy of around 25 dots per inch. The resulting material is solid stone. Dini may have simply brought together existing technologies and supercharged them with robotics but the implications are massive: digital architecture made real. Stone prefabrications. Printing housing estates.

‘Enrico can build your digital dreams,’ says the architect Andrea Morgante with a smile. Morgante, formerly of Future Systems and now in practice on his own, first met a rather desperate Dini in London in 2008 when the Italian inventor was touting his technology, known as d-shape, around London architectural practices. Hadid’s office was intrigued enough to go and have a look. Foster and Partners was sniffing around it too. Morgante was as taken by the warmth of his fellow Italian as by the possibilities of the technology. Indeed, Dini, a perfect host, is garrulous and open to a fault. One dreads to think of how he could be taken advantage of by the private equity firms and architects he’s constantly courting in London.

Although, technically, the d-shape process requires no human intervention, the machine sometimes benefits from a good whack with a hammer

Morgante however is his perfect foil, an Italian who understands how the London architecture establishment thinks. ‘[Enrico] wanted something challenging that showed what the technology could do. I developed this model which I knew that in other construction techniques or methods would be either quite difficult or very expensive,’ says Morgante. Together they are working on a proof of principle pavilion for a roundabout in the nearby town of Pontedera; a biomorphic eggshell named and designed after radiolarians, marine protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons.

In the soft light of a Tuscan afternoon, the nine cubic metre maquette of the structure glows. Next to it are sections of the final structure. Due to the confines of the roundabout, Morgante and Dini have decided to print the building in parts before assembling it on site. ‘If you were pouring concrete into a mould or milling marble it would be three times the price,’ says Morgante of the Radiolaria. Morgante’s work at Future Systems, which created the Media Centre at Lords Cricket Ground in London and Selfridges in Birmingham means that he understands the architectural implications of Dini’s machine. ‘I also knew that with organic shapes there was always an extra price to pay for curvy things. You want curves you have to pay,’ he says. Not any more. One of the many implications of Dini’s machine is that it could bring an avant-garde tradition of architecture into the mainstream almost immediately.

This is not the only implication. The otherwise affable Enrico Dini is finding it difficult to cope with all the implications. ‘I’ve been working in solitude and been unknown for several years. There was no pressure. I was just by myself,’ says Dini.

Dini claims the d-shape process is four times faster than conventional building, costs a third to a half as much as using Portland cement, creates little waste and is better for the environment. But its chief selling point may simply be that it makes creating Gaudiesque, curvy structures simple

In 2002 he had presented a robot that could make bespoke shoes. He unveiled it though just as Italian shoe manufacture collapsed and production moved abroad. He realised he’d have to reapply his training in robotics to another industry. For a while, he looked at creating hydrogen for future transport vehicles from wave power. Then in 2004, he began experimenting with 3D printing using epoxy resin, inventing and patenting a full-scale 3D printing method that used epoxy to bind sand. Enrico could now 3D-print buildings.

Epoxy resin sticks to anything – including the machine that is applying it. This led to high maintenance costs for the machines as well as inefficiencies when they were used. Enrico went back to the drawing board to invent anew. In 2007 he got a new patent for a system using an inorganic binding material and any old sand to 3D print buildings. ‘When I realized that nobody was going to give us money to develop it, I decided to fund the research. I remortgaged my house and borrowed money from my father,’ he says. In 2008 he printed the maquette for Radiolaria and since then, he’s been bombarded with ideas but no concrete funds for development.

Those that talk about how recessions are times for productive thinking and activity tend to have steady jobs. The realisation of Enrico Dini’s goals was seriously derailed at the end of 2008 when a large Italian cement manufacturer that had come forward as a major investor pulled out due to the credit crunch. Dini was forced to visit London, a city he now knows well, to tout his machine around.

‘I came to London because of architecture, private equity and love,’ he says. The last at least has been good to him. His partner, Anna, is Italian but has lived in London for 13 years. But private equity has been of little use and it is only now that architecture is coming round. The Architectural Association has approached him in order to buy a kind of working prototype – through which knowledge can be shared.

Dini claims the d-shape process is four times faster than conventional building, costs a third to a half as much as using Portland cement, creates little waste and is better for the environment. But its chief selling point may simply be that it makes creating Gaudiesque, curvy structures simple

Others are circling. Dini is pleased but doesn’t see it as an ultimate goal. A Belgian prototyping company has approached him to produce stone furniture. In the corner of the studio stands Dini’s version of what looks suspiciously like a Joris Laarman chaise longue. ‘They said the original is in MOMA but I don’t know who it is by,’ he shrugs, underwhelmed. Later he admits his real interest lies in producing buildings. ‘What I really want to do is to use the machine to complete the Sagrada Familia. And to build on the moon.’

***

Enrico Dini became an engineer because of his father Egisto, who taught Automotive Engineering at Pisa University. Egisto’s career-defining job though was as head of the Calculation Department at the celebrated Piaggio factory from the end of the war. He was a key member of the team that became one of the genuine legends of engineering that Corradino D’Ascanio set up to work on the helicopter and the Vespa scooter. Egisto was known by workers at Piaggio as The Great Unknown because of his thoughtfulness. Enrico seems to be more like his uncle, the garrulous and brilliantly named Dino Dini who was director of the Institute of Machinery at Pisa from 1965 to 1983 before spending some time working with NASA in Pasadena and writing a major work on missile manufacture. He spent his later years back at the University in Pisa as head of the Department of Energy, working on water-fuelled cars among other things. Enrico’s machine is the product of some serious engineering DNA.

It’s also the product of Pisa, a city with which the Dini name is intertwined. ‘I have been helped by a lot of friends in Pisa. There’s a very long tradition of mathematics and physics here. From this substrata came the development of national computing, which in Italy happened first in Pisa in the early 1970s. Since then there has grown a whole generation of informatics and IT people here. I found good people to drive the software for the machine. I have been helped by some very smart people that I enabled to make a lot of money in the past,’ he says, smiling. One also senses that his remarkable machine was also inspired by the city in a more poetic but to Dini, equally significant way.

Enrico’s father tells a story about the Second World War. The family home was close to the Ponte Mezzo in the heart of old Pisa. One day, while eating lunch, the family heard the sound of approaching US bombers. ‘Don’t worry,’ said grandfather Dini. ‘Pisa is an open town. The Americans won’t bomb us.’ The rumble of the planes grew louder. ‘Er, are you sure, Dad?’ said his father. ‘I’m sure,’ said his father. Two minutes later the American bombers emptied their payload on the bridges along the Arno and the Dini family was running through the streets. After the war, his father, newly graduated, worked for the Ministry of Public Works, engineering the replacement bridges before he was head hunted by D’Asconio for Piaggio.

Architect Andrea Morgante is working with Dini on the Radiolaria pavilion

Egisto Dini also helped build the roof on the Camposanto, another casualty of the American raids, a beautiful cloistered cemetery, tucked behind the Leaning Tower and the City’s Cathedral. Built in the 13th Century, the Camposanto’s flagstones are the graves of the town’s dignitaries. Inscribed on one stone is the name of Enrico Pistolesi, an expert in propeller dynamics who died in 1968 and was a mentor to the young Egisto Dini.

Enrico was named after Pistolesi and his name therefore is literally part of the built fabric of Pisa, a city known throughout the world for the malleability of its architecture. The Leaning Tower is a daily reminder that what we think is most solid is plastic. Enrico’s uncle has contributed to the scientific discussion on how the building is preserved.

Another Dini, Ulisse Dini, who was Enrico’s great uncle, is also buried in the Camposanto. A great mathematician his name is found all over the city. A statue of Enrico’s great uncle stands on Ulisse Dini street. Every city has a statue that is regularly adorned by the public. In Glasgow it’s the statue of Wellington that has a traffic cone on its head. In Pisa, it’s Ulisse Dini and a can of beer. Caught in the middle of declaiming the theorem to which he gave his name, his left hand is conveniently sculpted in such a way as to hold an empty can, a fact which makes Enrico almost as proud as the theorem. As a second year student, he was given an oral examination for his mathematics course and was of course asked to explain Dini’s Theorem, which, according to Enrico, helps ‘systematise infinitesimal calculations’.

It would be easy to overstate the importance of Enrico Dini’s personal history in the production of his printing machine. Much of his expertise is highly specialised, marrying CAD-driven informatics and top-end robotics to a chemical process he doesn’t fully understand. As we pass the chemistry department in the engineering department, Dini half-jokes that whenever he is trying to perfect his structural link by adding fibres or even new chemicals, he calls them up to see if its OK to do so. A couple of times they’ve said: ‘No! Don’t add that!’ Yet, Dini, a self-confessed ‘bad student’ has what his forefathers lacked, the entrepreneurial gene, and is able to co-opt other learning quickly. Before the Radiolaria pavilion begins construction in the spring, it is undergoing the results of strenuous boiling and freezing tests. All looks positive.

Isaac Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. Dini’s relationship with the European Space Agency gives some idea of the scale of his ambition. Through his academic contacts Dini heard about the European Space Agency Aurora programme, which was established by the agency to devise, and then implement, a plan for robotic and human exploration of the solar system, with the Moon and Mars as the most likely targets, and to establish a more permanent presence on the Moon.

Dini beams confidence despite receiving a tepid reception from British venture capitalists and the architectural establishment in London

He realised quickly that tenders must be undertaken with partners with experience of working in space and approached Alta Space, an expert in propulsion technologies. It is one of the many spin-out companies that have emerged from Pisa’s fertile research ecology. He also brought in experts from the elite college La Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and, famously, Norman Foster.

The project is not as fanciful as it sounds. The idea is to create a robot that could take the regolithic powder found on the moon and make buildings from it, using advanced sensor technology being developed by La Scuola Normale Superiore and propulsion devices created by Alta Space. In addition it would presumably create large structures in the manner of Foster and Partners. Given the way the practice’s buildings often go against the urban grain, the moon seems ideal.

One can’t help admire Foster though. Dini approached him in the hope of securing funding or work, yet the Machiavellian lord ends up getting work out of Dini – a nice research contract in space technology, an area he’s long been fascinated with. Foster and Partners appears to be cagey about Dini. There has clearly been much discussion with the practice but, the research contract aside, nothing solid has come out of it yet. The firm invited him to test his machine on making some cladding for Masdar City, Abu Dhabi. Dini, excited by the idea of using waste from the desalination process, tried to make paving slabs and cladding with salt. ‘It was a disaster,’ says Dini.

His architectural friends are keeping quiet about the Aurora contract too, although perhaps that is wise. The contract was nearly jeopardised at the end of last year, when Dini excitedly told me about the project and the story was picked up by the nationals who ran it under the headline ‘Norman Foster to build on the Moon.’ The European Space Agency was not pleased. Dini’s consortium, including Foster and Partners, still got the contract though.

Large-scale rapid prototyping using Dini’s inorganic ‘ink’ works far better than Dini’s first attempts at 3D

One wonders how such a warm and open individual as Enrico Dini will fare in this environment. His ambition stretches to the biggest challenges in architecture – including finishing Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which has been under construction since 1882.

Dini has been working closely with James Gardiner and Professor Mark Burry of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which is researching the incomplete Gaudí building. Gardiner has spent three months working alongside Dini in Pisa and believes that Dini’s machine is the closest to the market. ‘We hope to use d_shape to complete the cathedral,’ says Dini. He also jokes about printing a replica Leaning Tower.

In his essay Dreaming in the Middle Ages, the Italian writer Umberto Eco, discerned, ‘a fantastic neomedievalism’ in contemporary Italian society. With the medieval street pattern of Pisa as its backdrop, the Dini family as a latter day guild of physicists and robotics experts and d_shape as a modern day cathedral building machine, it is easy to be seduced by this idea. Yet Pisa is also a place of enlightenment. It was in Pisa Cathedral that Galileo Galilei observed the swinging lanterns. From this he posited that pendulums have a constant period, and developed his Law of Inertia. It is a place where heretics give birth to new thinking and new technology. It is a place where Enrico Dini fits in perfectly.

Goldberger shares with philosopher Karsten Harries the belief that ‘one task of  architecture is to preserve at least a piece of utopia, and inevitably such a piece leaves and should leave a sting, awaken utopian longings, fill us with dreams of another and better world’. These are good arguments and they are joined by many other ideas about the relationship between artistic ambition and practicality; the difference between good buildings and great buildings, and architecture as a discussion between generations. Less successful are arguments about architecture as a framework for childhood memories and a chapter on suburbanisation and the sense of place.

The key buildings and texts that Goldberg uses to outline a recent history and a theory of architecture are much the same as you would find in a British architecture school’s undergraduate lecture programme, but his reflections on Yale, Vincent Scully and the 1960s campaign to save Pennsylvania Central Station in New York provide an insight into the passions and motivations of the US architectural scene. Goldberger dedicates the book to Vincent Scully and, in passing, confesses his sympathy for New Urbanism and evidence-based design, but his ideas are never really made explicit. At times it feels as if we are back in the PoMo 1980s arguing about Pevsner’s Cathedral and bike shed, the Villa Savoye’s leaking and preservation.

After reading this book I felt as if I had attended a really good dinner party rather than having been guided through an argument and a discipline. The strength of populist writing like Goldberger’s is that it is accessible and engaging; its weakness is that it rarely provides the reader with a proper appreciation of the context – the author’s world view is portrayed as common sense.

Despite good intentions, few products are successful in combining design, aesthetics and ergonomics in a way that is also friendly to users. The new Generation office chair, just launched in the UK by American furniture company Knoll, can be counted as a rare exception.

Created by New Zealand-based practice Formway Design for Knoll, Generation was four years in the making. At first glance it seems to be an evolution of the Life office chair that was created by the same designers and launched in 2002. Its key feature was a groundbreaking mechanism that automatically calibrates the weight of its user. For this new chair Formway Design and Knoll have carried on their research into giving more freedom and comfort of movement to office chair users, breaking away from the constrained formality of office seating. This particular part of the research was based on 400 hours of video recordings made in offices and workplaces.

The backrest and seat are independently adjustable, providing a variety of combinations for the user. This is obtained through the use of a flexible backnet, an elasticated material that can be molded, twisted and stretched in a way that provides support for the body and spine. The thermoplastic rubber is traditionally used in dishwasher hinges and ski-boot straps. A harder version ofthe material is used for the shell of the seat pad, it adjusts to the movment of the lower part of the body when seated. Generation is entirely manufactured in Italy, using 44% recycled content and is itself 54% recyclable.

One of the early scale models for the Generation office chair, with its distinctive back rest

An early full scale prototype testing the Back Rest Net pre-formed rubber back rest

A full scale model testing the performance of the Flex Back Net

Assembling a prototype for testing the especially designed Flex Seat plastic plate

Generation chairs out of the production line in the Knoll Italian factory.

But the relationship between the real project of the Museum of Innocence and the book is more complicated. The Turkish novelist, who lives in Istanbul, has aspired to create a museum for many years after visiting hundreds of collections around the world. Eleven years ago he purchased a building in Istanbul, and has been collecting objects for it ever since. The novel – published in Turkish in 2008, with a translation by Maureen Freely in the UK in 2009 – developed in parallel, the objects become part of the story in a complex layering of material culture and emotive drama.

The plot centres on the obsessional love of an aristocrat, Kemal, for an extraordinarily beautiful shopgirl, Füsun. Perhaps because they were brought together by an act of exchange – Kemal enters the shop to buy a bag for his fiancée – ordinary domestic objects have almost as important a role as the human characters. In this Pamuk has brilliantly captured Istanbul as a historic centre for export and trade. And as the story unfolds he builds up a vivid picture of the settings of ordinary life in the city, as Kemal’s love for Füsun takes him further away from his family’s high society background and deeper into her impoverished existence in the backstreets of Çukurcuma.

The affair begins in 1975. Kemal is engaged to Sibel, who is beautiful, sophisticated and wealthy, but he falls hopelessly for Füsun, a distant relative. They ‘break the taboo of virginity’ in an apartment that has lain empty for many years, a depot for discarded furniture purchased by Kemal’s mother. For several weeks, the pair make love in the dusty apartment in a block called the Merhamet Apartments. As he obsessively holds on to objects Füsun has touched, such as an earring or a glass, the flat becomes a repository for a collection dedicated to her.

Interwoven with their story are vivid descriptions of the buildings and streets of Istanbul. Some sections are intentionally didactic in their tone: Pamuk (speaking as Kemal) explains, ‘After Attaturk instructed the Turkish people to take surnames for themselves in 1934, it became fashionable to attach one’s new name to one’s newly constructed apartment building’. The writer grew up with his extended family in a building called the Pamuk Apartments. Another fashion was for families to name their property after a high-minded principle – hence the Merhamet (mercy) apartments.

When Füsun eventually rejects Kemal and marries a ‘tubby’, aspiring filmmaker,  Kemal’s love for her becomes intense to the point of fanatical obsession. For nine years he visits her family for dinner almost every evening, pilfering objects such as a quince grater or decorative china dog. Several critics have commented that the story drags for the central part of the book. The bigger problem is that Kemal’s love for Füsun simply is not credible. As the object of our hero’s devotion, and the focus of the museum, Füsun comes across increasingly as ignorant, self-obsessed and shallow, leaving us to wonder if Kemal’s love is a sign of his own weakness. Despite constant references to the depth of her humanity, the only convincing evidence is of her physical beauty, and for me the weakness of her character is the central flaw in the book.

In the final chapters Kemal tours the world’s museums, finding solace in small, obscure  collections such as Musée Edith Piaf in Paris, the Museum of Jurrassic Technology in Culver City and Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. When Kemal describes what he loves about these collections and places, there’s no doubt that it’s Pamuk speaking: ‘it was while strolling through the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona… that I first came to understand how my pure contentment flowed not just from these museums as collections, but from the harmony in the arrangement of their pictures and objects.’

The picture of Kemal that emerges in these closing chapters, when the character is  discussing museums, is far more sophisticated than when he describes his love for the superficial Füsun. He even manages a political dig at the city’s new museum Istanbul Modern, which was set up by the wealthy Eczacibasi family: ‘I’m afraid that this museum craze in the West has inspired the uncultured and insecure rich of this country to establish ersatz museums of modern art with adjoining restaurants’.

Kemal/Pamuk (the narrator and author seem to become one and the same towards the end) presents an excellent critique of contemporary museums with their branding, shops and instrumental agendas. He believes museums should show us our own lives, and that the Museum of Innocence will provide an insight into a love between two innocent individuals.

But will the connection with this (barely credible) love affair be enough to make a good museum? Pamuk’s novel, and the way it grew out of his fascination for museums, has made the two projects inseparable, to the point where finally we realise the book is the museum catalogue and even contains the admission ticket. But, just as a novel must be criticised with reference to it own genre, so the museum must be appreciated in its own terms and will stand or fall on the strength of its collection. We’ll have to wait and see if Pamuk is as discerning a collector as he is a writer.

A prototype flood-proof house designed by Nissen Adams

Ecobuild 2010 this year will be held at London’s Earls Court from the 2 – 4 March. The program includes exhibitors from large companies such as Rockwool, Sika  and Finnforest as well as providing a Green Shoots zone, for smaller entrepreneurs to reveal their products and services. The event will also host seminars and lectures delivered by around 500 speakers covering topics ranging from ‘designing out waste’ to ‘retrofitting green roofs and walls’. Ahead of his lecture at the event, Austin Williams has reviewed the recent RIBA Building Futures publication Facing up to Rising Sea Levels. An edited version appears below. The full review will appear in the April issue of Blueprint, which will be in the shops next week

Facing up to Rising Sea Levels: The Future of our Coastal Cities takes it as read that we should be uniquely concerned about rising tides. It’s all part of ‘reconnecting people and water’ apparently. ‘Sea levels are unmistakably rising’, it says and indeed, the IPCC report Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis confirms that average global sea levels may rise by up to 580mm over the next 100 years. However, it also cautions that this might be as low as 220 mm (and that regional variations might be a mere 70 mm). There are many other provisos that have been left out of the Building Futures report. For example, the IPCC states that “Many ocean observations are poorly sampled (and)… observational records only cover a relatively short period of time (e.g., the 1950s to the present)… and in some cases decadal variability and/or poor sampling may prevent detection of long-term trends’.

The government’s ‘UK Climate Projections’ (UKCP09) states merely, that the ’sea level around the UK rose by about 1mm/yr in the 20th century’ although “this is predicted to be higher in the 21st century”. Leaving aside the fact that UKCP09 gets it data from the somewhat discredited University of East Anglia, it is fair to say – with just over 90 per cent certainty – that sea levels are ‘unmistakably” rising. How much of a problem that will be is a moot point.

But think-tanks don’t get funded for moot points. Taking its lead from Sir Michael Pitt’s review of the 2007 floods, Facing up to rising sea levels conducts a thought-experiment about two high flood-risk cities: Kingston-upon-Hull and Portsmouth. Undoubtedly, there are real issues to be addressed, but this report adds nothing to the debate, except as a self-fulfilling driver for more consultation reports on the same topic. Using scenario planning, it asks whether we should retreat, defend or attack.

‘Retreat’ implies allowing nature to take its course, whereby the ’severe risk of a flooded future” could be turned into ‘a destination-making’ intervention?”Defence’ reflects a more traditional tidal barrier strategy but one that, for Building Futures, incorporates ‘performing arts spaces and other art venues’ in the sea wall. And the ‘attack’ theme suggests, inter alia, appropriating decommissioned oil platforms or building ’smaller houseboat communities’?

Actually, the report acknowledges that Hull’s recent floods were caused not by breached flood defenses but because the ‘city’s drainage infrastructure was unable to cope.’ On that basis, it could be argued that the headlong rush towards Sustainable Urban Drainage (retaining surface water in situ) while shying away from effective mains infrastructure, is an accident waiting to happen.

It’s worth remembering what happens without infrastructure. In 1953, 300 people in the UK were killed by a 2.7 metre high tidal surge that swept around the east coast of Britain. (Hull is at 2 – 4 metres above sea-level). The flood was even more devastating in the Netherlands. Reaching a maximum height of 5.6 metres above mean sea level, it killed 1835 people and created 500.000 refugees. In the UK, the disaster forced the government to initiate a project of coastal upgrades, but with much of its land below sea-level, Holland’s long-term flood defence ambitions were of central important to its existence. As a result, its Deltawerken barrier project took 45 years to complete. It is an example of the historic ambition of the Netherlanders to employ engineering solutions and structural planning on a vast scale and timeframe in order to transform nature. Building Futures want to accommodate to nature. Which one is the folly?

Austin Williams is founder of Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism.

The full version of this review will appear in the April 2010 issue of Blueprint.

In her book, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Albena Yaneva reveals how an interest in the latter, the processes of making and the mechanisms by which ideas and models can migrate within an office environment, has informed some of the most influential architecture of the 21st Century so far. Yaneva worked for OMA from 2002 to 2004, a period when it was designing the Seattle Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the China Central Television (CCTV) building in Beijing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Casa da Musica in Porto. These were described as the ‘new swoosh line’ (after the Nike logo) of buildings. Focused on pragmatic operational issues they were designed by escaling and inverting blue foam block models roughly cut and displayed on a project table for discussion and assimilation or rejection. Here, a process of creative-selection took place that allowed and indeed promoted the cross-fertilisation of ideas from other project teams. A true survival of the fittest ideas.

The most famous of these OMA legends was the story about how the new Porto concert hall, La Casa da Musica (picture above), came to fruition. The design originated in a commission for a house in Rotterdam for a client ‘obsessed by order and tidiness’ who dropped the project just as OMA entered the competition for the Porto concert hall. The abandoned model of the private house lingered on the model tables for months ready for recycling and reuse and still held traces of the earlier design process ripe for reinvention. In this case the house model was blown up in scale, ‘the core became the main auditorium, with the foyers, rehearsal halls and offices packed into the left over space around it’, reports Yaneva.

The writer explores this notion further to find the essence of OMA design that clearly does not start from scratch and necessitates the keeping of all models for future design recycling and to maintain a prolific ontological milieu for design invention and reappropriation. ‘Even the schemes that are abandoned, hundreds of models, can be recognised within the process. They are just different steps in the process’.

Yaneva’s insight into the working of the OMA office reminds me of a myth from the office of SANAA, designers of the New Museum in NYC, when in a fallow period of work principle Ryue Nishizawa decided to cut the desks in half, the concept being that this would double the number of desks and with more workstations in the office more work would follow. It can be no coincidence that the two most influential offices in the world, SANAA and OMA are products of a constant desire to reinvent the way in which architecture is made and to find innovation in new processes of design.

This was about 45 years BG (before Google) so I found a book that explained how type was made. Not too useful, but I gleaned from the pictures that those little pieces of metal had to be assembled into rows to create printable meaning. The results of my early work as a printer and compositor were very much defined by how many metal letters I had for each character, rather than by a choice of typeface or size. I made what I could of available technology and my limited knowledge.

A few years later I did a short apprenticeship with a ‘real’ printer and was surprised how well I had guessed what to do with the tools at my disposal. Unlike HTML coding or working with Photoshop filters, setting type and printing on letterpress machines was mechanical, with results (including mistakes) immediately visible, albeit without a command-z key available to cancel wrong actions.

My professional life has involved learning a series of skills that have eventually become redundant. After setting metal type, I learnt photosetting and the required darkroom techniques. I could probably still strip negatives, use a scalpel to cut lines of film or paper positives and use a stat camera. Except that those skills have been unnecessary since I bought my first Macintosh in 1984 and subsequently scrapped my darkroom.

During the photosetting phase, the number of typefaces at my disposal – or rather, at the disposal of the typeshops I had to order from – rose to about 800. More than I could ever have imagined during my letterpress days, but there were still only a limited range of sizes available and setting type was atrociously expensive. So we had to learn to ‘copy-prep’: prepare our manuscripts for typesetting, work out the proper sizes and provide detailed sketches for the compositors. Errors were costly. That helped me up the learning curve.

Our design work was more flexible than ever but still dominated by technology. Type was now set ‘close, not touching’ and some weird typefaces from New York were spec’ed that I would be embarrassed even to mention today. Four-colour printing was the exception, not the rule, and we had to imagine what the result would be like, with only our sketches and past experience to go by. Taking creative risks was only for big advertising agencies who could afford to proof stuff over and over until it looked good. Printers, pre-press houses and typeshops made a good living from their occult knowledge.

Having typesetting, photo-retouching and ultimately all pre-press work available on an affordable desktop liberated designers from the constraints of these trades, but at the expense of losing all that knowledge. We all got carried away with the new possibilities: established rules were for suckers and old farts. Graphic designers started over-using the newfound freedom. Type was cut up, pictures hacked apart and ‘legible’ became synonymous with ‘boring’.

It didn’t take too long before the word ‘creative’ got itself a bad reputation because anybody could push mice and hit keystrokes, regardless of skills, let alone training. Some designers were good at making digital pictures that could pass as pages, but the imitators soon gave that whole trend a bad name. You could always see what version of Photoshop they had been using.

Nowadays, students of all areas of design have mastered their applications to an extent that frees them from almost all constraints. They are able to visualise exactly what they imagined and can give shape to any concept. After centuries of being dominated by technology – from cutting wood to printing negatives, from baking mud bricks to reinforcing concrete – designers of all disciplines now have the tools to present and make anything imaginable.

I’m not sure whether to envy today’s generation of designers and architects for no longer being able to blame their shortcomings on the limits of technology. There is no excuse for not coming up with new concepts. Except, ultimately, gravity. And there will always be clients to blame. That has not changed since the Pope asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of that little chapel in the Vatican.

Like Time Lords, the boffins have regenerated… and this time, they’re artists! That’s one conclusion to draw from the Kinetica Art Fair , (4 – 7 February), dedicated to kinetic, cybernetic, electronic and light art in the P3 Gallery situated deep in the concrete underbelly of the University of Westminster campus in London. The first thing you see is Ben Parry and Jacques Chaucat’s Milk Float in the subterranean car park- a mad, clunky installation of animated wheels, horns and pulleys on a milk float. It’s one of many amusements to be had at the show, and it demonstrates art’s latest fad- using and fusing technology, whether digital, steam-punk or Heath Robinson. Is technology the ticket for art’s future, or merely the provider of tools that become obsolete as new technology replace them? Is technology the messenger or the message for the artist?

Digital technology generates much of the easy-access eye-candy art of the present. At Kinetica Art Fair, there was no shortage of screens of digital wizardry, and Berlin gallery [DAM] even exhibited a rendered film co-authored by a Second Life artist avatar, Gazina Baboli. Digital art, though, is best when it reflects reality. Flutter, by London-based Cinimod Studio, is a row of 44 screens showing a spectral, virtual butterfly, its flight sliced into frames, each animated. This is nature dissected and amplified by technology, not for science but for its inherent beauty. Tenderpixel Gallery’s stand had another example of new digitally-enabling paths- Jeremy Woods’ My Ghost is a simple, legendless graphic of his movements over 10 years around London as tracked by GPS- an elegant, organic personal psychogeography.

Many installations feel like the future. Rosaline de Thélin’s Homos Luminosos hangs ghost-like figures of light in cascades of optical fibre, like people teleporting into the Starship Enterprise, but with a stark white-against-black aesthetic. Jason Bruges has 30 small PSP screens on a mobile called Screen Cloud, and seductively, they display different colours as it turns. Lewis Sykes offers a future of sorts to the ancient art of bell-ringing in P.E.A.L.  Pass your hand through a light column in a virtual ‘campanile’, and a bell is triggered. The sequence played becomes a polymer-like graphic in a magic circle on the floor.

There is a certain romance in manipulating technology, personified in the image of the white-coated boffin. The artists on show at the ArtHertz stand don’t wear the coats but exemplify a focus on weird retro-gadgetry. Andrew Black uses classic Nixie tubes in his intriguing No Numbers computational machine, and makes an off-mains incandescent bulb shine with sound that you bring to it. Sarah Angliss’ Ealing Feeder is a sinister musical box of bells holding a doll, inspired by the 30s obsession with electricity to replace domestic servants. This is a taster of the ambitious Electricity and Ghosts show planned for Battersea Power Station, which plays with the concept of the ghost in the machine. Boffins can come from anywhere, like Hungary’s Rudolf Pacsika. His splendid Generator is a mad electric pendulum, its weight a screen display of his son apparently pushing it to swing.

Boffins as artists, though, are not a new breed. Bruce Lacey, a survivor from the ICA’s pioneering 1968 show Digital Serendipity, resurrected his original robot R.O.S.A. B.O.S.O.M., which stands for Radio Operated Simulated Actress Battery or Standby Operated Mains. She’s a big girl who once played the Queen of France at the Royal Court, and as well as telescopic red lips and a supply of confetti to court with, she uses aircraft engine parts. This is still as charmingly whimsical as it must have been back in its day, and unlike the ersatz past of, say, steam-punk, it is an authentic past. Other 60s veterans were also exhibiting- a piece by Liliane Lijn without her trademark cones, and two recent light boxes by Peter Sedgley, called Windomes, where reflection and refraction create a pure, featureless infinite regression. He says of the technology back in the 60s: ‘it opened up a new dimension in materials, a new palette’.

Nowadays, technology comes with a guilty conscience, and Kinetica is planting a forest in Colombia to offset the fair’s carbon footprint. But imagine an overcast, windless day when fossil fuels are spent- few kinetic works would then perform without that day’s electricity. Dutch Hans Kooi’s sculptures are an exception. His big, colourful Alexander Calderesque works float solid elements that defy gravity. There are no strings- just magnets. This more abstract style is as bright as any glowing tubes, installations or contraptions.

Technology and art is in vogue, reflected in shows like the Royal Academy’s recent Earth and Victoria & Albert Museum’s current Decode. Concept may blur with whimsy, or even gimmickry- but frontiers are being pushed, just as in the 60s. The big conclusion from Kinetica is that technology in art is a medium that still risks becoming the message.

Humidifier designed by Naoto Fukasawa

In the prologue to his book, White, Kenya Hara writes: ‘it is my hope that, by the time you have finished reading this book, “white” will look differently to you.’ It certainly does that, perhaps more so for the English speaking readers, as Hara also notes.

This simple essay is filled with reflections on Japanese history and the culture’s inherent sensitivities that have influenced the directions of some contemporary designers, architects and artists, from Japan and abroad. Referring to the internationally acclaimed book, In Praise of Shadow by Tanizaki Junichiro, Hara writes, ‘locating a vanishing point of a drawing using shadow is splendid. Yet can’t there be another vanishing point, namely, that of extreme brightness contrasted with dark shadow?’

Hara relates whiteness to the concept of emptiness throughout the book, arguing the power of simplicity. He investigates the Japanese sensibility, analysing the 15th-century Higashiyama Jishoji temple that Ashikaga Yoshimasa built in Kyoto, including the teahouses, and Sen no Rikyū, who refined the simplicity of teahouse space. Hara explains that ‘the teahouse’s very emptiness turns it into a stage on which human consciousness can rise to the metaphysical level’. He argues that emptiness is part of a communication process as we move to fill in spaces, expressing also his belief that communication and ideas emerge from emptiness.

Hara, graphic designer and Muji art director, is among many designers who work well with ‘white’, including architects in Japan such as SANAA and Sou Fujimoto, or product designer Naoto Fukasawa. Muji products are now popular worldwide and SANAA has built internationally. Japanese designers are particularly skilled at designing white, or translucent, canvases, which become the background to activities and the everyday uses.

Obviously, this method is not just limited to Japanese design and modern simplicity is everywhere. However, successful designs by Japanese designers seem to have the refined sense of control and indeed, ‘emptiness’, perhaps founded subconsciously in its history such as Sen no Rikyū’s Seven Rules for the Way of Tea. Hara cites that ‘the ideal that we strive for is the realization of a plan that will evoke the imaginative powers of our audience’.

The last chapter is the most fascinating part of the book, in which he discusses ‘cleaning’ and ‘defamiliarisation’. On cleaning he says, ‘I think the Japanese sensibility is probably more attuned to preservation than newness… I think that innovation comes from that consciousness that tries to maintain things as they are’. On defamiliarisation, he argues, ‘I think that the attempt to create “unfamiliar” objects is the essence of the creativity that leads us to “understand” things… Defamiliarisation is closely related to white. White lies in our consciousness as fresh information escaped from our established world of knowledge’.

This book is not about colour, rather an attitude towards design. In an age where opinions divide over iconic objects and context-sympathetic designs, this book offers another angle. It adds to the debate that ‘to design’ can be a more subtle process, requiring utmost sincerity, training and accumulated experience to create a space to receive people in.

The Hiroshima Chair by Naoto Fukasawa from the Maruni Collection, launched in 2008

It was fate that bought together Japanese furniture brand Maruni and London furniture showroom Viaduct at the Milan Salone del Mobile in 2005. The director of Viaduct, James Mair, stumbled upon Maruni’s stand at the show and was impressed by its 2004 Nextmaruni series, a range of furniture by Japan’s leading contemporary designers.

Unbeknown to Mair, the directors of the Hiroshima-based company then visited the Viaduct showroom. Although sympathetic to Mair’s process of selecting furniture, it wasn’t until four years later that Maruni brought its latest collection to the UK at Viaduct.

Complementing the Clerkenwell showroom’s 1930s industrial building, the clean-cut beech- and oak-wood tables and chairs on show are from the Hiroshima range by Naoto Fukasawa. For Mair, however, this only represents a portion of what he hopes to bring to Viaduct in the future, including the simple, yet varied Nextmaruni series, which first caught his eye in Milan.

Indeed, Maruni has pioneered impressive wooden furniture since it was founded in 1928. Following industrialisation in the 1920s, even before large Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota had been established, Maruni started mass producing furniture at its Showa Mageki Kojo (bent-wood factory) in Hiroshima.

Developed under the slogan ‘industrialising craftwork’, the company’s innovative technology enabled it to bend wood without complicated manual skills. Affected by the economic crisis in the 1990s, Maruni decided to look back to its origins, and began questioning the value and identity of Japanese culture, which had been lost during its rapid economic growth. Studying traditional aesthetic values, the company rediscovered the importance of physical sensations, characterised by the expression ‘haptic’, which has been explored by Japanese designer Kenya Hara.

For a long time in Japan, the texture of wooden architecture has been celebrated through touch and the Japanese style of living: taking off shoes indoors, and sitting and sleeping on the floor. Responding to an increasingly westernized society in Japan, Maruni’s recent collections suggest that chairs, more than other type of furniture, have the potential to heighten our experience of touch, as they come in contact with the body much in the manner of clothes.

This philosophy typifies the Nextmaruni series for which international designers including Jasper Morrison, SANAA and Fukasawa have been commissioned to create chairs that present their own understanding of a Japanese aesthetic. Imbued with each designer’s personality, the result points towards a new approach to Japanese culture.

A sweet designed by Yukio Hashimoto and made by Toraya

Architect Souhei Imamura is always busy on several projects at once. Apart from teaching at Waseda University, he runs an architectural practice, Atelier Imamu, and collaborates with overseas architects on projects in Tokyo, most recently on a house with Felix Claus (see Blueprint March 2008). One of his more unusual collaborations has been with the Japanese confectionary company Toraya, as part of a project by Foro 08 a multidisciplinary design group.

The records of Toraya date back to 1600 when the company was established in Kyoto and supplied the traditional wagashi (confectionary) to the Imperial family. The best known variety of wagashi is perhaps yōkan, a type of jelly made from adzuki-bean paste, kanten (a type of seaweed) and sugar. Working with a master sweet-maker, Imamura came up with a design for a house-like sweet, made from thick, transparent yōkan.

Noting that architecture is about the location of human beings in space, he decided to place an air bubble in the centre of the sweet, so that when it is eaten, the familiar configuration is reversed and you ‘eat the air in the sweet’. ‘We can’t design space or air so I tried to capture the essence of air that we can eat,’ explains Imamura.

Souhei Imamura’s architectural sweets made by Toraya

Decisions about flavour and ingredients were entirely left to the master sweet-maker who was restricted to making 10 house sweets per day for the duration of the three-day exhibition, due to the time-consuming nature of the work. Each sweet had to be consumed within two hours before the sugar began to crystallize in the air.

Toraya, which has tearooms in Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris and New York, has about 300 recipes for wagashi of which around 30 are usually in production at any one time. Varieties such as Namagashi are beautifully crafted to reflect the seasons and are made from fresh ingredients that must be eaten the same day.

The exhibition, The Shape of Japanese Sweets at the Kakiden Gallery in Shinjuku, was curated by Imamura along with four other designers from Foro 08: Rikuo Rishimori (architect and director of Foro 08, who was inspired to set up the group after working with Massimiliano Fuksas); Akira Minagawa (fashion designer); Yukio Hashimoto (interior designer), and Kei Matsushita (graphic designer). Foro 08 has its own gallery in Shirokanedai, Tokyo, from which it organises events, exhibitions and discussions about design and everyday life.

The Ghostvillage Project from Agents Of Change on Vimeo

FOA’s past work includes the Yokohama International Cruise Terminal, the Spanish Pavilion at the Aichi International Expo in Japan and Publishing Headquarters in Paju, Korea in addition to a wide range of European projects including its acclaimed John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex in Leicester and the Carabanchel Social Housing in Madrid (pictured above). The practice’s current projects are the new Ravensbourne College scheme, next to the O2 Arena in Greenwich and the overhaul of Birmingham New Street station for Network Rail, as well as buildings in Europe, Korea and Malaysia.

In the talk, Moussavi will discuss her work, past, present and future, and consider whether the West can learn from Asian approaches to urban design and architecture. It will be an exceptional opportunity to hear one of the world’s leading architects talk about her work.

Date: Tuesday 26 Jan, 2010
Time: 6.45pm
Tickets: £10
Concessions: £5
Location: Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP

Booking:
Tel: 020 7307 5454
Email: enquiries@asiahouse.co.uk
http://www.asiahouse.org/net/Events.aspx

Organising the two performance spaces around a single circulation datum for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Sketchbook 57, 25 June 2001

This evening, architect Nicholas Grimshaw will give a talk at the Royal Academy on the  the important role that drawing plays in his design practice. The event is part an ongoing exhibition at the RA, entitled Capturing the Concept: The Sketchbooks of Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, which is also accompanied by the publication that features a broad selection of his drawings from the last 30 years. Tim Abrahams talked to the architect about a life spent drawing, and the relationship between sketching and architecture.

Tell me about the sketchbooks.
There are 62 books that span from 1982 to 2008. I’ve always used black Daler plain sketchbooks to write in; everything goes in there. From trying to work out staff pay rises to costings and every kind of squiggle really. But what Stephen Farthing [co-author of Grimshaw’s published sketchbooks and Chair of Drawing at the University of Arts London] and I have concentrated on, in the new publication, are spreads that have a visual appeal.

Are all the drawings within the sketchbooks for the same purpose?
There is a line between a concept drawing and an execution drawing. One is a drawing that you would give to a carpenter or a steel worker. It’s still freehand but it’s an instruction. While a concept drawing is more of a pictogram; an idea. They are two different things. On some level they merge, but I think it’s a very interesting dividing line between the two.

The other question is: can these kinds of drawings be works of art? Because they’re not done for that reason. They can become a work of art. Leonardoda Vinci did a drawing of a piece of machinery to explore an idea about its mechanics but now, several hundred years later, it has become a work of art. Or has it? Is that only because he was also an artist? It’s an interesting area.

British Pavilion at Seville Expo 1992. Sketchbook 19, 17 October 1989

How important is it that it’s your hand on the pen?
I talk to people in my office who design on computers and they say, ‘I am drawing Nick. My hand is on the mouse and the mouse is the pen.’ People feel equivocal about that. Do you really move the mouse in the way you move a pen? I am not particularly computer literate so I don’t really know. I don’t think even now, even with the most sophisticated gear, you can draw a curved line how you want it drawn.

In the end, your brain starts to work in line with the equipment you’ve got. You can look at things from different angles and you can rotate them. When you get to understand the machinery, you are using it in the same way as using a pen, which, after all, is a machine in its own right. People who did cave paintings would argue that using a pen is cheating, and that we ought to be drawing with our fingers. The pen comes between you and the surface. So I wouldn’t be dogmatic at all.

Preparatory sketches for a submission for the Heathrow Terminal 5 competition. Sketchbook 17, late April 1989

When did you start drawing?
I started off at Edinburgh College of Art. There was a good respect for drawing there. We used to do life drawing. We were taught it in the sense that you had criticism of what you were doing. We would draw on heavy-weight Wattman paper and we used to mix our own Chinese inks.

Life drawing was a part of architecture education from day one. It was the first thing we did, which was quite shocking. We were 18-years-old and didn’t even know what architecture school was. For our first activity we had to draw a naked body and we thought, “what’s going on here?” There wasn’t an obvious relationship between the human body and what we had been expecting to do, which was buildings. It was a very good and interesting relationship, though, and a great way to start. We looked at rounded forms. Perspective on the human body is very difficult to draw. If you look at a limb going away from you, it’s getting thinner by perspective as well as the fact that it’s getting thinner anyway. Looking closely at that is very good training for visualising volumes.

A diagram for a Westinghouse train which would stop at every aircraft stand

How does that contrast with today?
In 1960 it was assumed that if you were an architect you could draw. Sketching and drawing form was just as important as careful draughtsmanship. It was much more a feeling of being a whole person, a complete artist. Today, young architects have a grip of computer programmes, and, apart from the non-physicality of the action, they are creating extraordinary 3D shapes.

Do you have any doubts about computer aided design?
The one doubt I have is that it feels like it’s generating itself. Things morph into something else before your brain has actually caught up with them. Whereas the way I was trained was to formulate something in your brain, and walk around and think about it and then compose it. Manipulating it in your brain before putting it down on paper. Sometimes with computers you feel you’re just making choices. You could also argue, however, that there is no difference.

Do you look back at early concept sketches as you progress through a building?
If you build buildings, you get on with it. You don’t think, “I must go back and look at my concepts to see if we are going in the same direction”. You’re always moving forward to the detail. Where did you draw these sketches? A lot of these drawings were done at meetings, sitting around a table at the time. I believe in everybody contributing: throwing ideas on the table and fighting for them.

This glazed enclosure was part of a proposal for a series of arches on the

How closely do these images relate to the final buildings?
Parts of them are there in the final structure. Other things get discarded. The value of drawing is that it helps you to feel your way towards the solution. A building where you’ve thrashed away at the technical side, the briefing side and the circulation side tends to be sterile. With hospitals, for example, you’re endlessly told the distance between the beds and the nurse’s stations, and the window size. You can work on this for years and it’s very difficult to climb back to a concept. You’re swamped with detail. I do greatly treasure those conceptual moments that happen at the early stages, where you suddenly see some influence or meaning in the project, which you hold on to… I think the best buildings do have a strong concept. In a sense you become conditioned by what the computer can draw for you, rather than what you see.

Do you encourage architects to draw?
I remember watching some school kids drawing in the Royal Academy and I said to someone, “it’s very touching isn’t it?” And she replied, “well, these kids could be the last generation that write.” And I thought maybe she’s right. Why would they write long hand when they have the facilities to type on laptops at the age of six? Which is fascinating. We used to issue black sketchbooks in the office. We’d hand them out whenever someone wanted a new one. Now I don’t know what the situation is.

We also used to make models with our hands all the time. Now most of the models are made by professionals using computerised cutting machines and rapid prototyping. At the Bartlett degreeshow last year, I found there were some beautiful models. Like drawing, model making is a wonderful way of exploring. In some ways it’s even more clear. If you create a structure in model form, you can see if the scale is wrong and can cut bits off because you’re working in 3D. I was excited to see that coming back.

What has been the main realization of editing the book of your drawings?
More than anything else, it has reminded me that drawing is a wonderful thing to do, it’s really satisfying. What it made me think – my lasting thought – has been that I should actually do more of it. As life goes on you tend to be more involved in criticism, meetings and judging, and it’s really easy to lose sight of doing things yourself. You should hold on to what your real abilities are.

What does the future hold for your practice?
Well, we are doing a lot of work in America: lots of infrastructure projects, including a huge reservoir, which provides water for the whole of New York, as well as all the landscaping and buildings related to it. It’s got a golfcourse on top. It’s a huge job. We’re also doing an open-air auditorium in Coney Island. We’re doing Fulton Transport Interchange, where all the subway lines cross, one block from Ground Zero.

We are getting involved in Railway infrastructure as well. The American railway system needs a complete upgrade. American’s don’t rely on railways as we do. They are so used to hopping on planes and treating them like buses. I remember when we first got that job in Albany, I explained that we had just come off the train from New York, and there was terrific, inspiring landscape. Suddenly they all looked a bit blank, until I realised that probably none of them had ever been on a train. They would commute up and down the Hudson. One of the lecturers then said: “oh. We don’t travel by train. We either drive or we fly”.

Nicholas Grimshaw’s sketches are on show at  the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 6 November-31 January. The Sketchbooks of Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, published by the Royal Academy, is out now.

This collaboration has led to the creation of a font entitled Floorplay. The floorplan of buildings have been translated to find the form of individual characters, which in turn have been turned into models of buildings by the model shop. The aesthetic qualities of the model were the key factor in the design of the font and models, this is an ethos which both Praline and The Model Shop share and it has resulted in a communicative exhibit that highlights the tensions that exist when appropriating language for architecture. The model shop have created four physical interpretations of characters spelling out the word ‘Avec’ (French for ‘with’). Photographs of the model will show the different aspects of the collaboration accompanying the entire laser-cut alphabet and physical model.

The project has evolved from architectural floor plates to font, from font to model, from model to 3D letters, to photographs, to text. All these elements will be installed in the exhibition, to demonstrate the process behind the collaboration. On completion, Praline hope that the font will be made available to download for free.

If You Could Collaborate
15 — 23 January 2010, 12–6pm
(open late on 21 January, 12–9pm)
A Foundation Gallery at Rochelle School, London E2 7ES.

The canteen in Samara, shot from the air in 2007

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

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

Location of the Samara region in Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in 1999, lots of people were afraid of the Millennium Bug. They thought (or were being told by the computer industry) that at midnight on 31 December, all the systems would crash and our world, totally dependent on computers as it is, would come to a halt. That didn’t happen. Most of us also thought that the beginning of a new decade, century and millennium all at once would also magically make our sins disappear and ring in a New Age. That didn’t happen either.

Instead, it took until September 2008 for the Old Order to crash. While governments have been busy exercising damage control, I don’t see any attempts at solving the problems that caused the mess. Instead, we hope that by the end of 2010 we’ll be back where we were before it all collapsed. Nothing has really changed, and the whole thing could happen again, as if we’d only rewound the tape and had to experience the whole thing once more. It feels like a Terminator movie, where we’re frantically trying to prevent our own future from happening in the past.

As always, politicians have been busy ignoring reality and keep telling us that we can lower taxes and invest public money to create jobs at the same time. The people are actually ahead of their elected representatives and know that two minuses do not make a plus, certainly not in our balance books, and neither on a national or international level.

We’ve had a new government in Germany since the end of October. The coalition parties got elected on the promise of bringing change: radical tax reform, new labour laws, health reform, the works. ‘Yes, we can,’ they said, and voters believed them because they knew that we need radical measures to get us out of the mess. Nothing, however, will happen. Compromise between the two parties is preventing any new thinking, let alone actions. The political scene – the press, politicians, lobbyists and financial institutions – all seem to be afraid of even moving, in Berlin and in Washington alike. While the old system obviously broke, nobody wants to design a new one.

What is it that makes these people so afraid of the New? It cannot be the word alone: New Balls, New Potatoes, New Information, New Friends: all those mean fresh and unused, bringing hope, fun and life. New Ideas, New Address, New Shoes: those, however, mean change, learning, blisters on your feet. Most new things in our daily life are a nuisance, more often than not, as they are associated with extra trouble. The last thing we’re interested in is a new layout for our daily paper, let alone a new operating system for our home computer.

Unfortunately it is our job as designers to invent new stuff every day, or at least make much new ado about old ideas. Our clients, however, are not really interested in the unnecessary risks usually associated with anything new and unprecedented; and neither are we, if we’re honest about it. So we end up keeping what’s tried and tested, and repackaging it. I’ve yet to meet a client who would be willing to risk their job for a revolutionary but untried concept. Only advertising gets that sort of license now and again, because it can be new and daring without long-term damage.

There are aspects of our work that are actually well served by being afraid of the New. Designers always want to design ‘new’ and ‘experimental’ interfaces. I could never imagine anything worse than that. When we use a website or a computer, the last thing we need is having to guess whether the normal reading direction from left to right still applies or if hierarchies still run from top to bottom.

I would bet that a lot of people (mainly men) never enter into a permanent relationship because they would have to give up old habits. Not every partner appreciates the attraction of worn-out ‘favourite’ slippers, faded and wobbly ‘cuddly’ chairs, or brown-encrusted football-club teacups. Reforms are blocked in every household and office. Why change what has been working for a long time? We know that New Persil is identical to the old one, except for the packaging. We don’t buy it because of that, but in spite of it.

The old system obviously stopped working, but there are too many people and institutions who have too much invested in the Old Order to even think about radical change. I can only conclude that the crisis didn’t hurt enough, at least not the people who are in a position to change things. I am not holding my breath for the general election in the UK. Unless we can all overcome our fear of the New, for once.

Erik Spiekermann set up MetaDesign and FontShop, and worked in London from 1973 to 1981. A teacher, author and designer, he is a partner at EdenSpiekermann, which has offices in Berlin and Amsterdam.

The second floor of London’s Design Museum is currently occupied by two exhibitions: Ergonomics: Real Design, and Less is More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams. The first one takes up about one quarter of the floor space; the second extends over all the rest. This disparity is immediately striking. Is it intentional? Is there some devious, hidden agenda to which we unsuspecting visitors are being subjected by the directorate of the Museum? And if so, what conclusion are we expected to draw from the incongruous pairing?

The Ergonomics exhibition marks 60 years since the founding of the Ergonomics Society and is the product of a partnership between the Design Museum, Brunel University, Loughborough University, Laura Grant Associates and the Society itself. The first item you encounter in the show, prominently displayed, is an anthropometrically correct tape measure: useful, undoubtedly, and quite pretty; but it is such a trivial entry in the list of achievements over the 60 year existence of such a crucially important discipline, to be given such pride of position.

Other, more weighty aspects of ergonomics are, indeed, hinted at in other exhibits. No one could deny the (literally) vital importance of correct labelling for medication packaging. Yet this topic, worth an exhibition to itself, is dealt with so cursorily that most visitors to the exhibition, as I witnessed on two visits, pass it with hardly a glance.

The simplest, most obvious principle in ergonomics appears to have been overlooked in the placing of a video screen over a medical resuscitation trolley, right against a large window so that, during normal daylight, it is almost impossible to scan. Yet all too clearly visible are nine large video screens relating to the Bloodhound SSC Land Speed Record vehicle, five of which have identical films of the vehicle at speed, the other four having identical views of the the cab interior. They flicker continually and are merely an unhelpful distraction, having no discernible ergonomic content. Dominating the longest wall is an array of unexplained diagrams of manikins doing nothing in particular and hands grasping – what? To top it all, this feature, and the plinths and supports of all the other exhibits, are finished in a bilious yellow. Ugh!

Thankfully (at first), you retreat into the uniform greyness of the Dieter Rams exhibition. Here, all is cool, ordered, coherent. Rams joined the German consumer electronics company, Braun AG in 1955, first as interior designer, then as product designer. Appointed director of design in 1962, he stayed with Braun until his retirement in 1995. During his 40 years with the company he created a consistent design style unparalleled in this field. The exhibition is a celebration of this achievement. Its tone is reverent and fulsome (the only critical note being a nitpicking aside from Reyner Banham to the effect that he found it impossible to insert his slice of bread into the inedequate slot in the toaster), and you feel almost as though you are in church.

But… some 10 metres along the first row of exhibits you begin to have the strangest recurring quandary: is this a heater? an infrared lamp? A portable radio? a  tuner? a slide projector? You even find yourself, occasionally, resorting to the caption, just to make sure. Perhaps this is just the result of such a vast exposure of one person’s work and is only to be expected. Be that as it may, you cannot resist the increasing impression of – yes, it has to be said – sameyness.

It wasn’t always so with Braun products. I well remember the pleasure of seeing and handling the SK4 radio/record player of 1956, co-designed by Rams and Hans Gugelot, Here was something different from all the other, undistinguished competitors, something to marvel at; but the thrill had gone, for me at any rate, by 1976, when the incomparable Bang & Olufsen 1900 tuner/amplifier appeared. Only 8cm high – no larger than was needed to encompass the necessary innards – it made the cuboid equivalents from Braun look ponderous in comparison. Furthermore, it looked as if B&O’s designer, Jacob Jensen,  had taken note of ergonomics whereas Rams appeared not to be at all concerned about it.

So here we get to the nub: the exhibits in ‘Ergonomics: Real Design’ appear to dispense with anything approaching style or elegance; and the Rams exhibits appear to have sacrificed everything, including ergonomics, for a cuboid obsession that is, in the end, sterile. Being charitable, you might suppose that, as suggested at the head of this review, the Design Museum intended to point up this dichotomy, which reflects badly on both exhibitions. I think not; but we can draw the lesson, nevertheless, can we not?

In the run up to the general election, the term change will be much used and abused at Westminster. As Brendan O’Neill, editor of the independent political site, Spiked, points out, Gordon Brown used the word nearly 50 times in his speech to the Labour Party Conference; Peter Mandelson used it 38 times, and David Cameron has claimed to be launching a ‘movement for change’. ‘”Change” has become the buzzword of our age because the parties are no longer rooted in a clear set of values,’ says O’Neill.

With that in mind, we decided to launch a search for the people who we felt are really making change: being proactive, maverick and challenging, rather than simply waiting for a change of government. We enlisted the help of many contributors and friends to compile a list that includes well-known names and complete newcomers. In addition to these choices, we also asked three experts in the fields of technology, architecture, urbanism and product/furniture design to make their own suggestions about who will bring change in 2010. You can see their lists here

All illustrations by Marta Baztan

The Cloud Design Team
Architect Carlo Ratti (pictured) of Massachussetts Institute of Technology and his team may not have won the Mayor’s competition to design an observatory for the London Olympics, but they plan to build The Cloud independently on a different site. The team will start fundraising (or ‘Cloudraising’) for the project in 2010, working with members of Barack Obama’s campaign team, and with support from Google, which will provide free advertising and the structure for a micro-donations site where the public will buy into the project.

The vision for this incredibly ambitious idea was conceived in Milan with advice from the writer Umberto Eco. Others on the team – which is spread across five continents – include artist Tomas Saraceno; architect Alex Haw, and engineer Jörg Schlaich. The Cloud consists of a 120m-high, cable-net tower, with observation deck and inflatable spheres, each containing a lattice of LEDs. Ratti describes the design as ‘light as air itself – a tribute to a digital age of bits and atoms beyond the antiquity of steel and glass – a structure which reveals the connected networks of a common humanity fuelling the Olympics, its 2012 host city, and the world itself’.

Finn Williams, Urban designer, Croydon Council
Williams pursues imaginative, but realistic, solutions to urban design problems. Since being appointed urban designer to Croydon Council in January 2009, Williams has already launched an ambitious 30-year regeneration programme, along with architects Studio Egret West for the East Croydon region. 2010 will see the first steps of this scheme being realized: ‘I’m looking forward to turning radically practical plans by young offices like Studio Egret West, East and OKRA into road works and building sites,’ says Williams.

Despite his background of thinking about urban design on a large scale, working with the likes of Rem Koolhaas and General Public Agency, his plans for 2010 also involve change at a more pragmatic level: improving the quality of local authority planners through basic means such as altering the job description and removing bureaucracy to make it a more desirable role. He is working with the Architecture Foundation and the Greater London Authority on introducing work placements at local councils for architecture graduates.
 

Regina Peldszus, Researcher, Kingston University
While most designers these days seem content to limit their field of study to the immediate environment, it’s good to hear of someone looking at design that will potentially help us to reach new environments. In 2010 Regina Peldszus will finish a three-year AHRC-funded research project at the Design Research Centre and the Astronautics and Space Systems Group at Kingston University. This involves developing design approaches to make the interior of spacecrafts on long, isolated transfer missions, such as to Mars or a Near- Earth Asteroid, more habitable.

So far her work has taken her to subarctic Lapland, the European Space Agency (ESA), and to NASA in California. Peldszus hopes to set up an infrastructure for research into design for (human) space flight in London, similar to other hubs in Europe.

The timing, she says, is perfect and the UK is well positioned for this, with a Briton in the new class of European astronauts; front-row involvement in space tourism; new extreme-environment architecture; a young but ambitious field of space medicine and, of course, a long tradition of excellence in space engineering. ‘If we pair all of this with world-class design schools in London, and it could be a lot of fun,’ says Peldszus.
 

Alan Pert, Architect, NORD Architecture
Regardless of the scale or nature of the project, NORD Architecture, led by Pert, has a habit of rethinking the norm. Its master plan for Stoke-on-Trent demonstrated a new approach to regeneration, combining infrastructure improvements with a subtle awareness of the city’s history as a centre of the ceramics industry. The first completed project of the master plan, the Bridgewater Bridge, has exemplified this approach. 2010 is an important year for NORD: it will see the completion of two significant projects on very different scales. The Wexford County Council offices in the south-east of Ireland, will be the Glasgow-based practice’s largest project to date. NORD will also be completing a house in Dungeness, part of the Living Architecture portfolio that also includes houses designed by Hopkins, MVRDV and Peter Zumthor.

NORD’s project includes design down to the smallest detail, and they have prototyped a range of fixtures and fittings including bespoke furniture items. Pert is also looking to extend his academic involvement, taking on research projects into prototype housing that will ultimately feed back into his practice.

Manick Govinda, Arts Project Manager, Arts Admin.
Having gathered nearly 10,000 signatures for a petition, in 2010, Manick Govinda plans to up the ante on the campaign he’s leading (with the Manifesto Club) against draconian new regulations restricting non-EU artists visiting the UK. The Home Office restrictions affect international artists and academics visiting the UK for talks, temporary exhibitions, concerts, or artists’ residencies. They now have to submit to a series of arduous and expensive procedures to get their visa, and then more bureaucratic controls when they are in the UK. Already a series of concerts and residencies have been cancelled.

As a direct result of the campaign, Govinda and Arts Admin were invited by a developer to commission a range of permanent artworks for the Town Hall Hotel and apartments in Bethnal Green, which will open in April. Designed by RARE Architecture, the project will feature the work of emerging East-End talent, and, says Govinda, ‘is a good opportunity to raise the issue of freedom of movement’.

Jules Wright, Curator, The Wapping Project
Wright has developed a reputation for ground-breaking exhibitions at The Wapping Project gallery in east London. While that space is owned by charitable organisation, the Women’s Playhouse Trust, Wright is now expanding her operations with a new, personally owned space in the shadow of Tate Modern: The Wapping Project Bankside.

With this space, Wright aims to further encourage interest in collecting photography, film and video. The gallery will be representing the work of both emerging photographers, and those with great experience. 2010 will see original work displayed by, among others, 38-year-old photographer Annabel Elgar, who uses places and architecture to create disturbing scenes in her photography, and new work by the 93-year-old fashion photographer Lillian Bassman.

This year will also see Wright directing a photo story, North of the Arctic Circle, and a drama at The Wapping Project; staging a retrospective of one of the UK’s most treasured painters, and, she hopes, opening a hotel in Wapping.

Yuli Toh and Takero Shimazaki
Plenty of architects are unhappy with the official architectural education that is on offer around the world. But very few go as far as setting up an architecture school in their own studio. In 2010 Takero Shimazaki and Yuli Toh will launch a two-week workshop in Japan and a series of evening workshops, in addition to the four-week summer forum they’ve been running for the past few years in their London office, which has now produced more than 70 graduates.

Their aim is to explore ‘authorship’ in architecture, which they believe is hard for architects to hold on to in the professional world. ‘Creators need to take ownership and pride in what they make and design and not rely on a ready-made formula, or a global language,’ says Shimazaki.

Toh Shimazaki Architects (TSA) believes that a personal, intuitive approach is often squashed out of contemporary architecture. They hope the workshops and summer forum will build confidence so that architects can give a personal response to the site and brief, instead of being dominated by the pragmatics of the situation.

The TSA Forum is also unique in bringing architects together, breaking down the professional jealousies that often affect the profession. On top of this, TSA has started Forum Mini, an architecture school for 6-12 year olds.

Richard Wilson, Sculptor
It is a remarkable testament to Wilson’s ongoing creativity that he is still able to confound preconceptions and generate unease with his work more than 30 years after his first solo show. In 2009 the artist created the illusion of a crushed and wrecked corner on the facade of the London School of Economics’ New Academic Building. The installation challenged architectural expectations in much the same way as his famous Turning the Place Over work in Liverpool, 2007.

After a year of planning and implementing large-scale works, Wilson begins 2010 able to start a new set of projects. One of these will, assuming permissions can be obtained, be an artwork that subverts the perceived stability of cranes: working with The Wapping Project’s Jules Wright, he will install orange neon lighting on the etal struts of a large construction crane and at a slight angle to the structure. Oscillating between these two positions, the light will create an impression that the crane is shaking and unstable.

Elena Corchero, Textile Designer, Lost Values
A winner of the Blueprint Award for Best Use of Materials at 100% Design 2009, Elena Corchero has big plans to roll out her products and form new collaborations, including a project with Kate Stone from Novalia Printed Electronics for interactive paper goods.

In 2010 she will expand her business, Lost Values, from a new base at central London’s Cockpit Arts, selling her LFLECT products that combine a reflective thread with traditional knitware. Until now, Corchero has been based at Distance Lab in the Highlands of Scotland, a creative research organization bringing together digital media technology, design and the arts.

She hopes soon to incorporate the LFLECT technology into interiors, and also has a range of jewellery and products that explore portable solar technology, including a parasol that after being exposed to sunlight during the day, becomes a light at night.

Corchero plans to run a series of workshops on smart textiles and electronics from her Holborn base. She is particularly eager to encourage girls to get involved: ‘there’s still a huge gap between girls and boys. If you go to Hamley’s toyshop, the technology section is full of boys’.

Agents of change,  Graffiti Artists
This collective of artists gave graffiti a new depth and poignancy with its Ghost Village project in October 2009, in which it created paintings on the walls throughout the abandoned village of Polphail in south-west Scotland. The project was carried out by core members Timid, Remi Rough System and LXOne, along with collaborators Derm and Stormie Mills.

This same group, who are based across Europe, will be working together on projects in the year ahead: Agents of Change are going into 2010 with plans to take their imaginative approach to abandoned structures up to a new scale. Current ideas include working an a coal-fuelled power plant in Scotland, which was only decommissioned in the summer of 2009, and on a military tank staging post in east Berlin.

Responding to the specific historical and personal resonance of sites, these projects hope to bring greater challenges, both on a practical level and in dealing with larger historical and political ideas.

The Manifesto Club, Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life
In 2010 the Manifesto Club will launch a campaign against alcohol control zones, which are increasingly restricting peoples’ freedom to drink in local parks and on beaches. The campaign follows Josie Appleton and Dolan Cummings’ (pictured right) report on the booze bans affecting the UK, charting the creeping growth of drinking regulation, and showing how public space is being reorganised around the whims of police and bureaucrats.

They are also planning an international launch for the their book Attention Please, which documents patronising and pointless safety signs that are polluting public space. The book began as a photoessay by RCA design graduate Tom Mower, who photographed needless warning signs in the built environment: tape over a crack in the pavement, or a puddle marked off with police cones. The project questions what such useless bureaucratic signage means for the look and feel of urban life, and called for a more rational approach to public space. Later, members of the public made their own contributions via the Manifesto Club’s website.

Anthony Hoete, Architect, What Architecture
Hoete’s past projects, from a rooftop nursery in Hackney, to the architectural ‘hijacking’ of a suburban detached house, take problematic briefs and stringent red-tape requirements as an opportunity for innovation. His next project is a west London school with a Lego facade. The idea was a response to the Government’s Every Child Matters programme, and managed to include the pupils, as well as parents and local officials, in the design process.

Hoete has also designed a community centre in Senegal, where the plans have been woven into the clothing of the locals who will be building the structure. Also on the cards in 2010 is the renovation of a Maori glass hut, which was transported to the UK from New Zealand in the 19th century, and now sits in the grounds of a Surrey country house. Hoete’s approach rejects ‘cryogenically sealing’ listed buildings, and intends to turn it into a working public amenity.

Abraham Thomas, Curator of Designs, Victoria and Albert Museum
In an ambitious project that will open during the London Festival of Architecture, Abraham Thomas is bringing several of the world’s most interesting architects to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Seven designs have been commissioned from architects including Terunobu Fujimori of Japan, Rural Studio of the USA, Studio Mumbai of India and Helen and Hard of Norway.

Full-scale, small buildings will be located around the museum so that the visitor can explore the power of small spaces on themes such as work, play, contemplation and performance. Thomas’s aim is that people should be able to experience the architecture directly, rather than just through looking at drawings and models.
 

Alun Moreton, Architect, Scott Brownrigg
Dr Ivana Wingham, Academic, University of Brighton
This unlikely pairing demonstrates that commercial architectural practice need not work at a distance from more theoretical, academic research. Moreton is an associate at Scott Brownrigg, a well-established architecture practice with a roster of corporate and public clients. Wingham is an architectural academic at University of Brighton, whose research has focused on the links between architectural theory and practice. They have initiated a series of exhibitions and debates titled No Place Like Home, held at Scott Brownrigg’s London office.

The project, which continues into February 2010 and is likely to spur similar events, is partly a response to the simplistic and negative tone of the Prince Charles vs Richard Rogers debate over Chelsea Barracks, but also a dissatisfaction with the level of communication between architects, educational institutions and the general public.

Each of the four installations in the series explores the public space of a different European city: Athens, London, Milan and Tallinn. They range from a Temporary Urban Garden by Wingham, to a focollaboration between fashion and theatre designer Reet Aus and Finnish composer, sound designer and producer Ville Hyvönen.
 

Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook
Led by writer and graphic designer Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brooks, of graphic design agency Spin, Unit Editions is no ordinary publishing company. Specialising in books that are about, by and for designers, it is specifically interested in hybrid books, which Shaughnessy describes as ‘books that exist as physical high-quality entities, but also have additional content online’.

With Unit Editions, Shaughnessy and Brooks are proposing a way forward for book publishing and, in the process, demonstrating that designers can lead the way: ‘publishers who follow the record industry’s example and ignore the internet are doomed.’Following 2009’s Studio Culture, which featured designers’ studios and interviews that explored the different ways to run a creative practice, Unit Editions’ next project will be titled Super graphics. It will be an investigation into the use of graphics and imagery in the built environment today and in the 1960s and 1970s when such work first blossomed.
 

David Adjaye, Architect, Adjaye Associates
While the urban centres of China, India and Brazil have been muchanalysed in recent years, African cities have received relatively little attention. This could begin to change, led by the efforts of David Adjaye. Over the last 10 years Adjaye has been taking photographs of cities across all of Africa’s 53 countries. ‘Africa has always suffered from being thought about in vague terms as being dangerous, or the victim of extreme of poverty. I’m not sure that people can even imagine what an African city looks like,’ says Adjaye.

A selection of the architect’s photography will be exhibited at the Design Museum at the end of March, and will also be published in a book. Though the photographs in Adjaye’s collections are intentionally taken without too much deliberation, almost as snapshots, they signify the start of a growing interest in Africa’s major cities.

James Woudhuysen, Professor of forecasting and innovating, De Montfort University
In design, and in problem-solving generally, it’s vital not simply to respond to the ‘problem as given’, but also to question the brief. The West is far too keen to base innovation on social trends, rather than ‘technology push’. What’s needed is a combination of both approaches in a subtle way. After all, neither the Sony Walkman, nor Google, came out of research into social trends.

In the past decade, it has become an axiom that innovation should not be a top-down, technology-led affair initiated from within companies, but should rather begin from the outside, with the consumer and his or her needs, and then proceed ‘bottom-up’. This is a foolish doctrine, which amounts to little else than seeing the unconscious hand of the market – and indeed simply the market for personal consumption – as the best or only source of innovation. It is also foolish to imagine that people are consumers, when most of the time they are hard at work. Finally it is stupid to imagine that people are defined simply by their needs, whether existing or latent. People are also defined – and this is what differentiates them from animals – by their talents.

The examples I’ve chosen show that the real world of innovations doesn’t simply consist of noticing that people are getting older, or greener in their outlook, or more feminine in their values – and then developing new products to leverage these trends. Life is not so simple.

As the location of innovation has shifted from West to East, so Western apprehensions about the future, and about the East’s role in that future, have grown. As a result the protection of the environment, and the protection of children, have emerged as new forms of protectionism.

Don Mattrick and Alex Kipman, Microsoft
Mattrick, the head of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment division and the former head of Electronic Arts, together with engineer Kipman, decided to go one better than the Nintendo Wii and equipped Xbox games machines with a new kind of controller: users. To Xbox, the user simply adds a module that contains a video camera with which to track 48 joints of the user’s body and its movements, an infrared camera that tracks depth, and a clever microphone which can distinguish between different voices and act upon spoken commands. The result is Natal, which offers the experience of playing ballgames without balls, and driving without steering wheels or pedals.

Natal can track multiple users. It can work out where you are if you’re standing behind a piece of furniture. It uses face recognition, but can also read what’s on a piece of paper and use what it reads to develop the game being played. The software, applications and depth-sensing camera in Natal will make their way on from the ‘large niche’ of computer gamers and into the office environment.

James Dyson
Apart from Rolls Royce, inventor James Dyson is the best-known remaining example of success in British manufacturing. Dyson’s DC31, launched in 2009, is an example of innovation through sensitivity to human patterns of cleaning, but firmly based on an engineering breakthrough. The DC31 relies on a digital motor named V2. Based on some very clever physics, the motor was no fewer than seven years in development. It spins at more than 100,000 revolutions per minute, five times faster than a Formula One racing car engine. The microprocessors that control the V2 adjust at more than 3,000 times per second, so that the whole ensemble boasts an extremely high energy-efficiency for an extremely low weight and volume.

Roger Pielke
Pielke, of the University of Colorado, is a great critic of climate change zeolotry, and is doing important analysis exploring the air capture of CO2. In the West, and even in China, much global warming commentary consists of moralizing instructions to lower people‘s energy consumption. However, Pielke reckons that the costs over the 21st century of capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere, so as to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions, could be better than those presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The technology is in its infancy, but could reduce concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, rather than capture and store new emissions made at power stations (Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS). There is a chance that relatively simple chemical processes could be put in containersized laboratories and shipped all over the world.

Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere will directly reduce the greenhouse effect. Better still, the CO2 can be stripped of oxygen, so that the carbon left can be combined with hydrogen from water to create new hydrocarbons and so top up the world’s slowly dwindling stock of oil. Greens might be unhappy at this potentially very powerful means of undoing previous damage to the atmosphere, for it would make unnecessary those changes in patterns of behaviour that they so want to bring to Western, and Chinese, consumers. But air capture would represent enormous progress.

                                  
Ben Hughes, Course Director of Industrial Design MA, Central St Martins
With recession ringing in our ears and six months of election tedium ahead, 2010 is shaping up nicely as something of a non-year. Anything that challenges this will be most welcome. In every presentation and business seminar in 2009, the emphasis seemed to be on ‘riding out the storm,’ including explicit advice from the Design Business Association against any micro-company entrepreneurial activity. What rubbish. My advice is to go up to your bedroom and don’t come down until you’ve started a company.

Looking ahead, I predict the collapse of the fragile house of turds otherwise known as the Design Art phenomenon. People will suddenly come to their senses and realize that it’s not design and it’s not art, it’s just very expensive and they don’t want and can’t afford it. The demise of Big Brother will be met with even more widespread jubilation, but before we know it it will be replaced with something even more inane aimed at an ever-shrinking attention span.

Some of the things I’m most looking forward to in 2010 are: the release of the Apple tablet; the TFL bike-hire scheme; Ron Arad’s show at the Barbican; Space Hijackers getting their tank back and putting it to good use; Ai WeiWei’s recovery and new work; something happening about the new Routemaster; Shanghai Expo and seeing Thomas Heatherwick’s glowstick hedgehog – so far topping the charts as the event’s least unattractive pavilion; Banksy being knighted in the New Year’s Honours list, and the A-Team movie adaptation. In my view, people who will change things are:

Paul Justin
Justin is the Australian designer behind the genius Makedo kit, showcased at 100% Design this year. Who would have thought that you could improve the cable tie? The way he has gone about producing and promoting the idea is as good as the product itself.

Eric Wilhelm
Although not the easiest or most pleasing interface, Wilhelm’s Instructables website is now the first stop for many home projects. Its potent blend of Blue Peter, Scrapheap Challenge and Readymade Magazine is fuelling interest and an increased sophistication in kitchen-table innovation.

Olivier Geoffroy
Geoffroy’s London-based furniture company, Unto This Last, has been paving the way for dispersed, hi-tech, localised production for 10 years. While others have talked about it, he has proved that it can work. Companies such as Ponoko, Shapeways and Materialise are providing exciting options for DIY rapid manufacture, but Geoffroy’s approach is a complete revision of the design manufacture- distribution-retail scenario, and seems more fully integrated.

                              
Liam Young and Darryl Chen, Think Tank, Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today
In the New Year it is hoped that ideas will be a means for opening up debates, rather than just a necessity to provide solutions. We hope to take a part in this, exploring alternative models of practice where provocations and speculative proposals are delivered as ends in themselves.

Humans have always regaled themselves with imaginative tales of the future or skewed stories of an alternate present. We furnish the fictional spaces of these parallel worlds with objects and ideas that at the same time reveal the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. These narratives allow us to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios from a distance. As architects and urbanists we look to speculative practitioners from fields such as gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art for inspiration and alternate approaches.

We see our work as combining storytelling with explorations of strange, but real, environments. In 2010 Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today will take a series of speculative and real journeys, including a trip to the Arctic Circle, with the Architectural Association and Kate Davies of Liquid Factory. We will also be visiting the Galapagos Islands, and Cuba with the Bartlett School of architecture and architect Jan Kattein.

We will also be editing a book with another specialist in speculative architecture, Geoff Manaugh (who runs the BLDGBLOG website), documenting our 2009 event Thrilling Wonder Stories. We will be curating Weird Tales, the sequel to this event, in May 2010. It will expand into the world of freaks, conspirators and outcasts by invited practitioners operating at the fringe of their disciplines. The three individuals and groups listed below are just such operators, who represent the imaginative thinking that is vital to the progression of architecture.

Blast Theory
Brighton-based Blast Theory is a group of artists that use a variety of interactive media. Led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, the group’s work explores interactivity and the social and political aspects of technology. In 2010 they will begin a resident PhD programme in collaboration with the University of Nottingham. They will also begin a residency at the Banff New Media Institute, Canada, the result of the first ever Locative Cinema Commission, which is part-funded by the Sundance Film Festival.

Warren Ellis
The comic book author and screenwriter, who lives in Southend, is best known for his Transmetropolitan series of postcyberpunk comic books for DC Comics. He has a number of upcoming books and films including a new publication using a survey of speculative city projects as a narrative backdrop.

Viktor Antonov
Art director for seminal computer game Half Life II and French animated feature Renaissance. His new book on utopias and fictional cities and animated films is due to appear in 2010.

Roger Hiorn's 'Seizure' 2009

Following on from the success of Seizure, Roger Hiorn’s Turner Prize nominated blue crystal cave in a one-bedroom council flat in Elephant & Castle, London-based arts producer Artangel is searching for a very particular type of  building for its next project with an internationally acclaimed British artist.

The building Artangel needs is ideally a large – preferably postwar – municipal building awaiting demolition, though other types of building would be considered.  The artist would like to make a large-scale sculptural intervention involving the partial demolition of the building. Ideally the project will open to the public in June 2010 so the building would be required in early 2010. 

Based in London but working across Britain and beyond, Artangel commissions exceptional projects by outstanding contemporary artists. Over the past two decades, the projects have materialised in a range of different sites and situations and in countless forms of media.

Many Artangel projects are given shape by a particular place and time. They can involve journeys to unfamiliar locations, from underground hangars to abandoned libraries. Or sometimes they can offer unfamiliar experiences in more familiar environments – a terraced house, a department store or daytime television.

This open-ended approach to the artistic process has seen Artangel generate some of the most talked-about, contentious and acclaimed art of recent times, including work by Francis Alÿs, Matthew Barney, Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Steve McQueen, Michael Landy, Brian Eno, Gregor Schneider, Robert Wilson and Rachel Whiteread.

If you have any suggestions for the next site, please contact Artangel’s Head of Production, Rob Bowman on rob@artangel.org.uk or 020 7713 1400

For more information about Artangel see www.artangel.org.uk

The futile search for a contemporary ‘British’ national design identity provided a quaint theme for this year’s London Design Festival (LDF). This was accompanied by some soul searching in the broadsheets on what exactly constitutes British design and whether it has lost its mojo.

Long gone are the days when Brits designed for UK plc to make. Established and Sons, the poster boy of Blighty’s furniture industry, tried to live the dream when they launched under the Made in Great Britain tagline in 2005, only to quietly shift most of its production to Italy, due to the lamentable state of our domestic manufacturing base. In an article that preceded the LDF, Alice Rawsthorn bemoaned the passing of a golden age of red Routemaster buses, K2 telephone boxes and Mini Coopers, an era of national design that passed decades ago.

Ron Arad and Jonathan Ive define the parameters of contemporary affairs. As a London-based Israeli, Arad spends most of his time working for overseas clients, while the very British Ive crafts Apple’s technology in California, which is then made in China. Back in the UK, little sleep should be lost over Philippe Starck’s despair at the lack of talent appearing on Design for Life, his Apprentice-style show on BBC TV. Reared on reality programmes, a generation of young and savvy designers simply didn’t apply to get a placement with Starck’s agency, understanding all too well that the show’s mission is simply to humiliate.

Design in Britain, edited by Deyan Sudjic, wisely side-steps the obsolete notion of British Design. Instead, it frames its subject as an exploration of ‘the impact of contemporary design in Britain’. As a celebration of 20 years of the Design Museum, it is also provides a timely opportunity to review design’s boom years before the crash, and asks where now? It arrives amid calls for the nation’s creative industries to step up and replace financial services as the UK’s chief economic dynamo.

Conventionally enough, the book is divided up by the disciplines of product, architectural, automotive, graphic, fashion, interaction and brand identity design. Penned by industry insiders, it sets out to offer a helicopter view of the best contemporary design in Britain and illuminate the workings of different design disciplines.

Andrew Nahum’s deft chapter on cars is the highlight. Focusing on the revival of Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Mini, Nahum demolishes the myth of there ever having been a British aesthetic. All these quintessentially British brands have, he argues, an ‘undeniably mixed and transnational bloodline’.

Early Rollers were influenced by French coach-builders; in Aston Martin’s pivotal 1920s, its director was Italian, and of course the Mini was designed by Alec Issigonis – a Greek. Nahum cheekily goes on to suggest that our dim semantic perceptions of national identity could be likened to ‘false memory syndrome’.

Sudjic delineates his review of architecture with Prince Charles’ 1984 carbuncle speech, and contrasts the gloomy prospects for the profession then with its consequent late modernist triumphs. He also makes an eloquent case for David Chipperfield as a worthy heir after the long reign of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Simon Waterfall’s account of the very short history of interaction design is unashamedly anecdotal and self-promotional. Wally Olins strikes a better balance between personal account and the long view. His authoritative sweep of identity’s evolution from house style and corporate personality through corporate identity to branding is, if overly historical, usefully situated in a rich social and economic context. Rick Poynor’s comprehensive and impressively well-organised survey of contemporary currents in graphic design recasts branding as a necessary, if not altogether welcome, design imperative.

Pluralism emerges as design in Britain’s unifying strength, but, at a time when so many yearn for traits of ‘Britishness’ the historical factors behind this lack of a coherent design ideology are left unexplored. As is its unspoken weakness – design’s free-floating nature leaves it largely untethered from British industry, making it more easily transplantable to the next global hot spot. For 10 years after 1997, designers and multinationals decamped to London, buying into the multicultural narrative of the Cool Britannia projected by New Labour. With design now confronted by a very different era, one is left wondering what this fine collection of contributors think about its prospects.

Where does London fit into a multi-polar international landscape alongside the increasingly assured creative hubs like Shanghai, Mumbai and Seoul? How will the recent, more self-indulgent, strains of design fare in an era of austerity? What about a grown-up appraisal of design’s real economic impact, and of whether or not it can really step into the shoes of the UK’s humbled financial sector? At a time when the traditional boundaries between design disciplines have blurred and the reach of design has expanded, this book seems overly constrained by conventional limits.

While contemporary developments such as service design, experience design, design thinking, design strategy and social design are hotly debated, their absence here looks like a missed opportunity, especially when British designers are among their pioneers. Such new avenues are only hinted at in the final chapter, based on a conversation with Paola Antonelli. She suggests that ‘designers of the future will be not so much be “makers” but synthesisers’. A key point, that deserves exploring in a book of its own.

Kevin McCullagh is founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy. He is currently looking at the future of mobile health and China’s emerging design aesthetic.

Fisco handheld tape measure, which is featured in the Design Museum's current exhibition, Design Real

Allusions to ergonomics abound: human factors, user-friendly, usability engineering, human-centred design and heuristic evaluation. We are confronted by clumped initials: GUI (graphical user interface), HMI (human-machine interface) and, if you can believe it, TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it). Any comprehensive design initiative inevitably requires such bed companions, and the more the merrier. To dispense with them, it is implied, would be to court universal disapproval.

Once upon a time, it seems to me, it was all so much more straightforward. When Michael Farr became editor of Design magazine, the monthly voice of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID), in 1952, he was determined to shine the bright light of analytical thought on the mysterious practice of design. In particular, he wanted to brandish the baton of ergonomics, a name that was new to all but a few. The word had been employed (some thought invented) by the psychologist Hywel Murrell in a meeting at the UK Admiralty in 1949. He introduced it to encompass the studies on which he had been engaged during and after the Second World War. In fact, ‘ergonomics’ had been coined almost a hundred years before by a Polish biologist, Wojciech Jastrzebowski, in a treatise titled The Outline of Ergonomics, i.e. The Science of Work (1857), and of course, the study of work is as old as the plough, the axe and the pitchfork. You could ask, what’s in a name?

He recruited a stable of writers who explored, each in their own area of expertise, the new topic. They included the applied psychologist Brian Shackel (later Professor of Industrial Ergonomics at Loughborough University), the engineering designer Bruce Archer (later Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art) and the industrial systems designer John Christopher Jones (later the first Professor of Design at the Open University and author of Design Methods, a major text on the subject). All shared Farr’s devotion to the newly formed principles of ergonomics, also known as human factors design. They and their editor flung down a gauntlet to the strangely blinkered world of product, furniture and industrial design.

An issue of Design magazine from 1960 when Ken Garland was art editor

Reactions were mixed. Some welcomed their findings and incorporated them happily in their designs for products as diverse as forklift trucks, cutlery and office furniture; others were suspicious, believing their own freedom of action as designers would be improperly constrained by the findings of these interlopers. They had their shibboleths, which they were not going to relinquish without a struggle.

Shackel, Archer, Jones and their fellows were undaunted by this. Their approach challenged the status quo and at one point, the question was raised, why does the design community speak so uncritically of the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Chair and the Charles and Ray Eames Easy Chair? From their perspective, both chairs are ergonomically absurd: the former can only be sat in by a six-foot-four man if his feet are to touch the floor; and the latter has a concave curve in its back giving absolutely no support for the lumbar (lower) area of the spine.

These were standard fittings, not optional extras, and as the author states, ‘any unenlightened operator who demands steel panels [instead of the glass panels] has to pay extra for them.’ Well done Design magazine. Well done ergonomists and well done BMC, you would say: now we’re really motoring. But where are those low-set window panels that reveal the presence of cyclists and children now? Or those canted doors that don’t suddenly open in the face of oncoming traffic? They are nowhere to be seen.

The UK Ergonomics Society is still going strong, and has many sister bodies all over the world; but when did it last hit the headlines? When did its chief executive (whoever he or she is) last lead a mass protest against any one of the many abuses in society resulting from the inhuman design of machines? When was ergonomics last mentioned on Newsnight? Did Michael Farr and his team spend the Fifties and early Sixties shouting their heads off for nothing?

Ken Garland was art editor of Design magazine from 1955-1962, when he established his own graphic design practice, Ken Garland and Associates

The exhibition, Ergonomics: Real Design is at the Design Museum, SE1, 18 November-7 March

‘I’m the urban spaceman, baby; I’ve got speed
I’ve got everything I need
I’m the urban spaceman, baby; I can fly
I’m a supersonic guy.’

With this verse by the Bonzo Dog Band, host Christopher Frayling concluded the V&A’s second annual design lecture. It had been a journey through design disciplines, the relationship between design and art and their influence in the making of a designed world.

Marc Newson is considered by many to be the leading light of contemporary design today. He describes his work as instinctive, creating what he believes to be a ‘representation of fantastical objects’. His work flows from design concepts with artistic connotations to designs that are functional and mass-produced. Newson is unable to define his initial concepts as either fantasy art or product design. He himself is unaware of the forces that may emerge to influence his final creation. Where will his work ultimately be placed: in a home or a gallery?

When questioned if the Lockheed Lounge (1986) was comfortable, Newson answered: ‘No, not really’.  He conceives his designs firstly by visualising the end product. His subsequent reversal of the Modernist methodology means the initial idea supersedes the process of creation. He develops new methods so that the work reflects his mental visualisation.

A difficulty that Newton had to overcome while creating the Lockheed Lounge was his inability to achieve the effect of a shining, metallic-like material while still maintaining an original, fluent form. The solution was found in his understanding of materials and by choosing the best technique. It is a universal conception that the function of a chair is to be comfortable, yet the circumstances needed to achieve the chair’s desired effect (completely metallic) made it extremely uncomfortable. Therefore this chair, minus its core function, assumes the connotation of ‘art’, as its lack of comfort prohibited its mass production.

Newson graduated from the College of the Art in Sydney in jewellery and sculpture in 1984. He has since worked in Sydney, Tokyo, Paris and most recently in London for private and corporate clients, designing furniture, interiors, bicycles, homewares, shoes as well as an inspirational concept car, the interiors of a private plane and even the interiors of a space jet.

The key element of Newson’s work is his ability to manipulate materials. He is able to utilise and apply different techniques of manipulation to the same material, creating a vast range of original effects. He describes this instinctive attitude towards materials as a need to explore their tactical and versatile nature. Therefore playing with their properties becomes a game in which Newson attempts to discover the widest rage of effects that a material can embrace. He maintains a visual and creative approach to different projects, transferring his methods and techniques out of their initial framework, utilising his skills and applying them in various different contexts with the aim of creating an alternate perception of his work.The attitude of Newson, to explore and undertake new paths in the direction of his designs, reflects and explains his wide range of production in different fields.

Frayling: ‘Is there anything you haven’t designed?’
Newson: ‘Yes, but I can’t remember what it is.’

Newson is a designer without limits. He spans the fields of design, manipulating and using material in the most absurd contexts.  A designer, an artist, but mostly Newson is an ingenious creative thinker and inspirational explorer. He describes himself as a ‘geek’ and as someone who knows how to visualise an idea. In fact, he believes that a designer must be a geek to be considered any good. The reasoning behind this statement is that the designer must have an obsession for the details and be precise in the execution of every aspect for the product to work. Yet again he doesn’t place himself within the conventional limits of a design. Nor does he define himself as an established member of a specific framework. Instead he embraces his talents and journeys to connect subject areas that are apparently unrelated.

Newson has been able to move from one discipline to another and find the connection between art, design and engineering. He is the ‘supersonic guy’ who has given no limits to design and, willingly or not, we have to keep up with his creativity and his speed.

Elena Bianchini is studying for an MA in Design Writing at the London College of Communication ]]> http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/design/supersonic-design/feed/ 0 http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/art/man-and-machine/ http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/art/man-and-machine/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:52:27 +0000 Vicky Richardson http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/?p=5686

 
In a recent lecture at the Barbican in London, American designer/artist James Wines declared that the Age of Industry, in which we were fascinated by machinery, is over and that we are now beginning an Age of Ecology, where we will rediscover our relationship with nature. It’s a widely held view that humanity lost touch with the natural environment during the 20th century, and that industrial development has damaged the planet almost to the point of no return.

Despite the politics of sustainability, the relationship of man and machine continues to fascinate designers, artists and architects as can be seen in a current flurry of activity on the international art and design scene. It might suggest that rather than de-humanising society, the exploration and fascination with machines, makes us more conscious of our humanity.

Current explorations of man and machine reveal nostalgia for the industrial economy, and point to disillusionment with financial services. Conrad Shawcross’s recent installation in the abandoned Kingsway tram subway (picture above) consisted of two rope machines that wove a thick hauser from 324 spools of coloured string. Exploiting the length of the sub way, the machines began back-to back in the centre of the space and gradually moved away from each other following the old tracks. The piece explored the passing of time, but also revealed a fascination with past industry and defunct systems.

In Liverpool the arts organization Metal, which was founded by Jude Kelly in 2002, shows a similar fascination for spaces and technologies of the past. Metal has turned the original engine room, boiler house and accumulator tower (constructed in 1836) on platforms one and two of Edge Hill Station, the UK’s first passenger station, into arts spaces. The exhibition, XXX: Get Off At Edge Hill, asked Liverpool artists to create work to reflect the way that new technology and the industrial revolution led to a new freedom of expression, and freed up ideas about the human body. According to Metal, ‘Barbarella’s Orgasmatron perhaps most clearly illustrates the comic aspects of experimentation with technology and the body’.

To be acceptable, technology must today be constrained and monitored for carbon emissions, yet in the early 20th century, artists celebrated industry as a victory over nature, which was regarded as a threat rather than vulnerable victim. In 1913 Russian constructivist El Lissitzky wrote and designed an opera, Victory Over the Sun, about the impact of electricity on society. For a later version he devised mechanical puppets to be made at a vast scale from industrial materials, although these were never constructed.

The Second World War brought a huge shift in attitude to technology, with the devastating impact of an industrial-scale war. In the post-war years the fascination with machines, while very much present during the 1960s and evident in the work of artist/designers like Eduardo Paolozzi, was always tinged with doubt.

Jean Tinguely’s 1954 work, Detached Element

Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely is the subject of a current show at Tate Liverpool, Joyous Machines. Tinguely began creating machines in the 1950s, as a way of bringing movement into art. His Meta-matics drawing machines overtly explored the notion that machines are superior to human beings, and can create better, more perfect outcomes, although the machines always required human intervention to make the drawing possible.

By 1960, Tinguely was making machines that were out of human control, the ultimate being an auto destructive work, Homage to New York. Having been granted permission to construct the work in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art, Tinguely assembled a huge pile of junk parts including bicycle and pram wheels, steel tubing, a meteorological balloon and a piano which were connected to form a sprawling interconnected, mechanical structure. Guests were invited to a ‘happening’, to witness the self-destruction of the machine, but things did no go according to plan and after a bucket of petrol caught fire the machine had to be destroyed by museum guards.

Joyous Machines explores Tinguely’s work through the eyesof contemporary artist Michael Landy, who himself has been fascinated by the outputs of machinery and by consumer society. In 1995, as a response to the Thatcher government and mass unemployment of the last recession, Landy created a machine work titled Scrap head Services as a comment on the decline of industry and the shift to a service economy.

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest among designers and artists in digital technology and in products that could only be designed along with computers: CNC (computer numerical controlled) cut patterns; models that are printed in 3D; mass-produced bespoke products, and digital customisation.

The area of digital crafts has rapidly expanded to explore the impact of new technology on traditional practices in textiles, jewellery-making and ceramics. The spread and cheapening of 3D-printing machines has also rekindled designers’ interest in a new machine aesthetic, and the relationship between handmade and industrial production. This year’s 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus (which Erik Spiekermann discusses here) is a good time to be launching a new, positive investigation of man and machine.

Chris Greenaway
 
This image and the ongoing series from which it is taken is a means of exploration in isolated public spaces. It looks at these areas after dark, and manipulates the lighting to scrutinise the relationship between the purpose of the place and how it is actually perceived. It is manufactured to be found curious how signage designed to encourage the safe crossing of pedestrians is turned on its head to display scenes that would create unease and connote danger. Being someone who frequently walks at night, this represents a personal reflection on my feelings, a response to the barrage of media stories concerning senseless attacks and muggings that appear so rampant across the country. It comments on how poorly lit areas are ripe for trouble, and the effect that feeling insecure on the streets can have on the lives of the community.

Alick Cotterill

Many results of 1960s planning disasters can still be seen today, neglected by councils now just as their design was neglected 40 years ago. In this instance, some effort has been made to provide recreational areas for the younger generation, but even this has been not been properly thought through. With the multifunctional court here completely unlit and its surroundings not faring much better, it’s no wonder that stereotypically these types of places are seen as unsafe, shady locations. The photographer provided the light seen here bathing the court. It is clear that the recreational parts were added far later than the 60s, yet it seems lessons have not been learnt.

Brooke Phillips

This picture shows the re-branded southwest train, which runs between Brockenhurst and Lymington as the Heritage Line. The heritage service was launched on May 12 2005. Given that it was only a few years ago that slam-door trains were the main stay of the South of England railway services, the surprisingly nostalgic train is idyllic and proud when making the 30-minute loop back and forth between its 3 close stops everyday. However changes to replace the heritage line with modern trains will take place in May 2010. So it seems that it may have been no more than a marketing exercise and excuse to run time-expired rolling stock as the heritage line.

Maddie Waters

As Southampton is famous for its twin tide and historic water front, I chose to photograph the River Itchen after visiting various locations around the area. This particular photograph was taken early one morning from underneath the horseshoe bridge on the St Denis side of the river. The image shows a silhouette of the recent developments of Bitterne Manor. As daylight breaks over the river, beautiful reflections are generated making for a good image. I used a long shutter speed and an Aperture of F22 to allow the camera to pick up the reflections on the water but keep the buildings in shadow. I chose to loose the detail of the buildings so to allow them to appear as one block colour against the water. I wanted to create a contrast between man made buildings and the natural environment.

Pawel Miatkowski

The history of Bournemouth Pier starts in 1859, when it was 1,000 ft long  and ended with a T head, which was washed away after marine teredo worms caused damage to wooden pile.  In 1880 Pier was reopened with a new iron construction. In years 1945-1950 the pier was reconstructed again, and in 1960 the seat pavilion was added. Between 1979 and 1981 the structure was strengthened with concrete and an entrance was built. Today it is part of a beach leisure center surrounded with nightclubs, restaurants and hotels. It is a romantic and historical place; there are lots of events going on. I decided to have a look what is underneath, to the part that is not visited by many people. I chose evening hours when it started getting dark – I was able to take long-exposure pictures, to capture the movement of water and the light reflections between the pier’s symmetrical construction.

Rebecca Starsmore

The Ryde Paddle Steamer lies rotting on the Isle of Wight.  This vessel holds a huge amount of history.  Two years after its launch in 1937 it was commissioned by the Royal Navy as a minesweeper, then as an anti-aircraft ship.  It is one of the few remaining vessels that were present at the D Day landings on Omaha beach. Since then it has been converted in to a gin palace, a floating hotel and finally a nightclub.  Unfortunately now it has been left to rot.  The Paddle Steamer Ryde Trust is putting in a huge effort to raise £7 Million in order to save it and restore it to its former glory.

Suzanne Williams

I have always been interested in architecture and the adaptation of old spaces for modern purposes such as tourism, industry and housing. This image shows the modern use within the ringing chamber of Winchester Cathedral. The sweeping ropes seem to mask the stone arches and old timbers, and highlights the human involvement that still occurs in this ancient Norman Tower on a day to day basis. In this photo the ends of the ropes are looped onto a set of hooks that can be raised and lowered from the ceiling, this is so that they are safely out of the way when they are not being used.

James Clark 

This image inspired me to begin a series documenting houses that are situated directly by electricity pylons. It began as an exploration into our attitudes towards energy in today’s increasingly power-hungry world – everyone wants to reap the benefits, yet few would volunteer to suffer both the visual and much-debated physical side effects of living in such close proximity to a pylon. However, estimates show this is a burden that 23,000 UK households must bear. This project also touches on the theme of sub-urban spread – like many others, this pylon out-dates the houses around it, calling into question the judgment used in town planning during suburbia’s outward sprawl.  

Detail from Oliver Lowrie's cartoon strip Paper City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tenor of the conversation in the common rooms and bars around the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University must be pretty bleak, never mind in its lecture halls and laboratories. ‘The last thing I thought I would hear today was technological optimism,’ said Peter Guthrie at a conference last week, entitled Minimum or Maximum Cities, organised by Alastair Donald and Ye Zhang. The professor seemed genuinely surprised by an optimistic attitude to technological solutions to future energy supplies. This wouldn’t be worthy of note but for the fact that Guthrie is Professor of Engineering of Sustainable Development at one of the world’s most important universities. If he can say that he has no faith in humankind to consider future generations, when it comes to energy policy, we are certainly in a predicament.

It is in this context of pessimism that Blueprint’s  Paper Cities exhibition was supposed to address. The utopian quality is all too clear in the series but I think even we have been surprised by how many visions it has helped record and give voice to. The discussions at Maximum or Minimum Cities makes one realise that these sketches are also social potentials, outlines of plans to be put into action. Following debates on society, transport and energy, the conference opened up into a Paper City crit. Architects Derek Walker, Karl Sharro and Darryl Chen gave three short presentations on their proposals. Looking at the plans by Derek Walker, first city planner to Milton Keynes, one realises how quickly cities can be built from sketched plans and how much a city is dictated to by the ideals that found it.

What is so astonishing about the majority of environmentalist rhetoric, or the rhetoric of sustainability is how it fundamentally rejects ideas of progress. Steve Melia, founder member of Car Free UK, speaking at The Agile City session, fundamentally rejected the idea of growth, economic or otherwise. Melia has cycled across North West Europe looking at car free cities and believes we have a lot to learn. One wishes he could travel a little further, say to the Middle East and India, and see what economic growth is doing for people in these countries. Cities can and will be produced from sketches and plans. Economic downturns in Dubai have prompted much moralising tut-tutting in the West as if making a place for people to live in is a sin, and debt restructuring is a moral consequence for building a city rather than a historical moment in the evolution of a place.

Of course criticising sustainabilty can  become something of a crusade, largely because its tenets – anti-growth, anti-humansim – are such malign influences. Even if manmade climate change is a fact, I would argue, the approach of the sustainable lobby is the worst way of going about alleviating it. Let’s have clean transport and energy in socially integrated cities but lets make it for the people of that city rather than for a quasi-religious vision of the planet or, as is now increasingly common amongst the sustainability lobby, for a dystopian vision extrapolated from our own cynicism.

So fundamentally does the sustainable lobby attack a core principle of Western progressive thought – improving the world for our children – that their monopoly on the future has to be questioned. A major part of the thinking on sustainability is to go back to where we once were; an insistence that we unthink the industrial revolution. Where are our green utopias? Spencer de Grey from Foster + Partners spoke briefly in the session on energy about Masdar, and the subterranean personal transport system that may be used. Details about Masdar, though, remain an enigma, and it has already been talked down by its designers as ‘an experiment’ rather than a valid place to live in.

Joe Simpson of the Movement Bureau think tank, posited Chris Hardwick’s VeloCity as a possible vision of future transport infrastructure. Simpson has written elsewhere about an integrated sophisticated transport system orientated around new technology. Yet, as Alistair Donald made clear at the conference, the Dan Dare quality of such projects should not be apologised for but celebrated. We would agree. One of the important understandings that commissioning and discussing Paper Cities have led us to, is that visions, drawn or sketched in our case, but written or filmed in others, work. The extravagance of an idea is often its saving grace, as Karl Sharro’s sketch for Dubai suggests.

Of course we shouldn’t get obsessed by form. Asked what he thought of the additions to Milton Keynes since his plan completed, Derek Walker said, ‘shit happens’. He has a right to be diffident. The rigour of his plan for Milton Keynes cannot be assailed by a few architectural alterations. But his plan still began by visualising. By siting on a hill and drawing a plan. There is a vacuum for these and young architects, engineers and designers need to enter into this space. Because we need good positive plans like we never have before.

The creations of David Tajchman could be the next best thing to happen in architecture and design. Among his latest projects is Woody Alien (pictured), an exemplary house for the 21st century: elegant, original and energy-efficient. In addition to his raw talent and ambition, Tajchman also seems to have been fortuitous in meeting the right people at the right time. Born in 1977 in Brussels, he qualified as an architect in 1999 before leaving Belgium for London to study at the Bartlett. There, he was taught by Peter Cook. Though he is now permanently based in Paris with an office in Brussels, when he is not designing his vision for the future, Tajchman works as Cook’s assistant at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture.

Woody Alien consists of two houses built in one, in which everything produced by the residents and natural forces, such as rain and wind, is reused as an energy source, making the house self-sufficient. A self-initiated design, Tajchman is now pitching the virtual house to potential clients.

Tajchman’s Woody Alien house, which is designed to be totally self-sufficient

The virtual visit begins with a bookshop on the ground floor, rather strangely located next to a garage, where an electric car is fed by biogas, which produces electricity for the whole house. Next to the garage, the image of a cow symbolises organic waste, which will create the biogas and, for those who don’t fancy a cow on their ground floor, there is of course the more obvious alternative of human waste. Not to mention compost from the vegetable roof garden or generated by food making.

The roof acts as a rain reservoir, forming a swimming pool that is treated with aquatic plants to filter the water and make it drinkable and distributed around the house. Further along, a small, neat wind turbine supplies electricity and the garden grows organic vegetables. The two houses (90 and 140sq m) and the bookshop have been conceived as a single project. They sit side by side as well as one slotted on top of the other. This monolithic approach aims to question the concept of semi-detached housing. Inside, ramps and various inclines facilitate the movement of disabled or elderly residents, and help to direct the sunlight throughout the interior. Large apertures equipped with triple glazing are covered with wooden sun breakers, allowing people to control the amount of heat and light coming into the house.

Overtly influenced by François Roche (of French practice R&sie(n)), Tajchman is perhaps more classic and pragmatic than his wild and highly intellectual elder. He also has a passion for food, a fascination made apparent on his website. Pictures of barely recognizable dishes that, at first glance, might be mistaken for a peculiar architecture but which are used only for inspiration.

For the majority of its patrons, King’s Cross St. Pancras Underground Station is a badly designed labyrinth, a chore to navigate and, on the whole, best avoided. However, the pain that comes from being dragged along its undercurrent of tourists and commuters could soon be relieved after tonight’s unveiling of Full Circle (below) by Norwegian Knut Henrik Henriksen, the first permanent artwork to be installed on the network since Paolozzi’s mosaics at Tottenham Court Road in 1984.

The size and form of Henriksen’s sculpture is frequently defined by such architectural specificities as the height, depth and materials of a given location. These become starting points for his work and in this case the circular end wall of the concourse tunnel is the origin of his concept. The circle is truncated where it meets the floor, implying a ‘lost’ segment of circle beneath. This segment has been ‘reinstated’, conceptually exhumed by Henriksen, and mounted as an integral architectural feature of the end wall. It has been fabricated from the same material as the wall itself (shot-peened stainless steel), which gives it the look of a minimalist relief: a subtle, elegant work in metallic grey.  

Henriksen’s practise draws on a powerful preoccupation with architecture and, to some extent, the continuing influence of 20th century Modernism on contemporary art and architecture alike. This makes him an ideal person to work with Art On The Underground; after all, during the 1930s, London Underground’s Managing Director Frank Pick was so inspired by European Modernist ideals that he champion the unifying principle of ‘Total Design’ which saw concepts such as the Roundel, the Tube map, the Johnston typeface, plus posters and station designs join together to become the present day’s London Underground’s world renowned identity.

Full Circle has been created as part of the King’s Cross station upgrade which will see two new ticket halls and several new pedestrian tunnels constructed to cater for growing numbers of Tube passengers. The next station due for upgrade is Tottenham Court Road which will benefit from a new piece of commissioned work by French abstract minimalist Daniel Buren.

Daisy Hutchison