This is from director Tom Jobbins, who managed to actually find some sunny days this summer.

Thanks to Pentax for the loan of the Marc Newson-designed K-01 – this was again shot on one of those.

What more could one ask of a film (this will make sense if you have a gander at the movie…)

Thanks again to Pentax for the loan of the Marc Newson-designed K-01s – this was shot on one of those.

Here, the graduates explain each project in their own words.

Click on a name to skip straight to that section:

Architectural Association School of Architecture,
Bartlett School of Architecture,
Brunel University,
Bucks New University,
Central Saint Martins,
University of Edinburgh,
Glasgow School of Art,
Greenwich University,
Leeds Metropolitan University
Liverpool John Moores
Manchester School of Architecture,
Northumbria University
University of Nottingham
Oxford & Cherwell Valley College,
Royal College of Art,
University of Salford,
University of Strathclyde
UEL
Westminster Univeristy

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Alexander Laing, Dip Arch

Project Title: Ghost In The Spectrum

Alaska’s Northern slope is ruled by an eternal night for 83 days of the year. The onset of darkness is kept at bay by our desire to control diurnal cycles and construct a perpetual day. The flow of electric light floods the streets fixing the shadows from November to February. Barrow’s fragile landscape is the site in which the opposing world views of scientists and native Eskimo’s collide. Both seeking ways in which to understand the world, technologies of sight are employed to search for answers to our future within a landscape rich in ancient mythology. Within the solitude and isolation of darkness, cultures throughout history have conceived legends and tales communicating the limitations of man. Darkness is a space of the imagination, harbouring all of our real and unreal fears within the abyss of blackness that consumes this barren landscape. The uncharted lands that previously sited our mythologies are all but colonised. The darkest reaches of space, the deepest oceans and tallest mountains are now familiar spaces. The perceived darkness of the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum’s define our limitations as humans and provide a site for future mythologies. The ghost in the spectrum is an alternative navigational system that mediates between the Eskimo’s mythological relationship to landscape (that provides a sense of place) and the visual technologies employed by the scientific community to analyse it. An architecture of mythologies is sited within the darkness of the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, only revealed through the objective lens of optical technologies. Ghost in the Spectrum is an architecture that exists in the space between the landscape and the instrument that records it.

Dessislava Lyutakova, Dip Arch

Project Title: Harmonic Frequencies -  An Allegorical Construct of Vibrating Architectures

Harmonic Frequencies is the design of a vibrating allegorical landscape that physicalizes the ephemeral processes in Modern Finance – Black Box Algorithms that account for more than 70% of Wall Street trading. The project uses BP share prices to investigate these algorithms as a Brit- ish company drilling for oil in Alaska. The model is a vibrating instrument, an allegorical stage that exhibits their behavior. It uses vibration as a mode of connecting to and experiencing this flow of data. It is a project conceived by Wittgenstein’s notion of making these calculating machines occur in nature and continued by the traders to bring these queer mathematical constructions to life. It is an exploration for a visceral method to relate to them so we can read fluctuations in the algorithm in the same way we read fluctuations in weather. Because just like weather used to shape commerce, trade winds and growing seasons, this is the contemporary weather shaping our world today.

Edith Wunsch, Dip Arch

Project title: Space of Spectacle
The University of London is one of the most crucial catalysts to London as a city and this proposal seeks to augment this catalyst. The project takes two observations of the University of London’s Bloomsbury Area into account: 1. The student strikes and occupation in 2011 and the fashion in which the students transform their ordinary environment into the extraordinary, using the existing university fabric as a backdrop to their stage. 2. The parasitical way in which high-pressure groups use the university for recruiting new members. Learning from these observations and translating the urban choreography these groups employ, Space of Spectacle creates a non-conditional space, intensifying the frictional overlap between university and city.

Reo Suzuki, Dip Arch

Project title: Theatre for history yet unseen

As opposed to our conceptual understanding about the issue, Barrow, Alaska is conceived as a ground zero of global warming.
There its effect has been exposed as the real crisis disconnecting the relation of landscape phenomena and cultural implications of Inupiaq.  To respond the context of the perception gap around the global issue, a private exhibition collecting lost land scape phenomena is held at AA school in 2065.
Series of on-site phenomena recreations in Barrow, are translated and Archived as dioramas for the remote audiences in the metropolis.  The dioramas carefully encompasses sea smoke formation used to role as landscape indicator in traditional whaling, snow blindness damaged hunter’s retina and ice terminology flourished between culture and the extreme landscape. It is architectural syntax as the context for imagination, as the fictional nostalgie in the future directing todays audience towards an as yet unseen tomorrow.

Samantha Lee, Dip Arch

Project title: Landscapes of Plausible Uncertainty

How much is a caribou worth? And is that worth more than the unknown quantity of oil in the Arctic Refuge? Is the cost of extracting that unknown quantity of oil, lower than the cost of cleaning up the possibility of an oil spill? As a landscape in the state of becoming, its value is contested through its potential futures. Supercomputers become the new oracles as they attempt to calculate these variables to inform policy and long term strategy. As these supercomputers model the complexity of nature, they become increasingly indistinguishable from the landscape they are modeling. The project speculates on a landscape re-imagined and re-engineered as the most advanced supercomputer on this planet. Through an Operating Manual for Sedna, nature becomes biological hardware, landscape survey equipment now measure computational outputs, and nature documentaries are reimagined as petaflops of risk calculations. Through this machine, our perceptions of Nature as cultural construction take us to an increasingly paradoxical evolution as we encounter questions that will define how we operate within the natural world, and value living systems.

Click here to download this Corbusier pdf to start doodling…

Have you seen those kid’s activity books where they say things like ‘This is your bedroom draw some monsters in it’, or ‘This is a London street during the Olympics, fill it with cars (but not the special lane…)’?

Well Cicada Books has brought out a supercool one full of design and architecture and we’ve got five copies to give away. So get you pens and colouring pencils out, download one the four pdf’s top and below here and doodle away. Put your name on the finished masterpiece and email it to us at info@blueprintmagazine.co.uk for a chance to win.

Click here for the above pdf

Click here for the above pdf

From the publisher: ‘Draw Me a House celebrates the power of architecture. An interactive colouring book for budding and actual architects and anyone interested in the built environment, it invites readers to think about, doodle and engage with architectural elements from Malian houses to New York skyscrapers.’

Click here for the above pdf

Thibaud Herem is a talented young illustrator who moved from France to London five years ago. His personal passion for architecture was the driving force behind this book. He has produced incredibly detailed limited edition architectural prints for UCL, Liberty and other institutions.

DRAW ME A HOUSE

Illustrated by Thibaud Herem,

£12.95

ISBN: 978-0956205377

A year ago, when AECOM won the bid to master plan the main site of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the proposed development plot was just a disused Formula 1 race circuit. Today, with three years to go until the finishing deadline it’s, well… it’s still covered with an old F1 track.
Time was always going to be an issue in this project as they do things with a different sense of urgency in Brazil. AECOM, being already involved in a number of urban regeneration projects in Brazil, was aware of this and used it to its advantage when bidding for the master planning. The practice, which has been closely involved in London 2012 (see page 48), decided to design all the venues as well.
‘It didn’t work master planning with just boxes for the stadia,’ says AECOM principal Graham Goymour. ‘We needed resolution of the spaces around the venues and time was definitely a factor – the Games were close enough that we saw the benefit of going to the next level. We felt we’d prequalified with a lot of the work we’d done on London 2012. There are a lot of differences but quite a few similarities. We knew about all of the operational demands that are required.’
For the bid AECOM’s sports architects also involved local partner DG Architects, plus Barcelona aquatic specialist Pujol – the architecture practice rather than the bewigged Barça centre-back – and the UK’s Wilkinson Eyre for the combined basketball, fencing, wrestling and judo, and handball arenas. The handball has been split away from the original group and was going to be  the transplanted basketball arena from London, which was also designed by Wilkinson Eyre, but at the time of writing that deal had fallen through.

Like London, legacy is a large part of the 2016 project. Essentially it breaks into two parts. First, the main venues will form a permanent Olympic training centre after the Games that, unlike London, ‘has to work as one cohesive site,’ says Goymour. The second part is mostly about housing and commercial space (AECOM’s competition entry also proposed a school to be built near a bordering favela and the redevelopment of the  international press building as a college). ‘A lot of money in a project like this goes into putting in the utilities, and we wanted at least 70 per cent of the infrastructure to be used afterwards,’ explains Goymour.
But mostly it’s about housing and it’s here that the real difference with London is highlighted. In a nutshell, the whole thing is private, being put together by the landowner and developers. The developers build the Olympic site and their pay-off is being allowed to redevelop the land into housing afterwards (Rio has the highest property prices in Brazil). Post-Olympics will see a mix of medium-density, low- to medium-rise buildings and a few high-rises, numbering around 6,500 units in total.
But first an Olympics site has to be built. Key to the scheme is the central waving spine that moves people around the site, in and out of the venues and up over the operational routes.Pretty much everyone will arrive at the top of the spine by bus, as there are no rail links. ‘The Olympic Way will handle around 40,000 people an hour,’ says Goymour, and it was subjected to a great deal of crowd-modelling software as ‘control of people is quite dynamic throughout the event, changing from one venue to another’.As well as addressing ingress and exit to the venues, the shape of the spine ‘creates these eddies of space that will be landscaped, have shade, and provide space for concessions,’ adds Goymour.

At the end of the spine is a circular viewing park with screens to watch live events. After the Games this will become a mangrove park with raised walkways, and quite a lot of the lagoon frontage will be turned over to public space in the final redevelopment. All they have
to do now is build it.

Olympic park 2014

When London dignitaries and sportspeople mounted the podium in Singapore in July 2005 to make their final presentation to
the International Olympic Committee,  it looked unlikely that we’d be celebrating London 2012 – the city’s bid was considered to be a distant second or third behind Paris and Madrid.

London’s surprising win that morning was attributed to its focus on urban regeneration and legacy: perhaps the first time an Olympic bid had specifically presented the Games as merely the warm up for a longer-term rejuvenation. Bill Hanway is executive director of operations at AECOM and behind the master planning for the 2012 Games. ‘We decided not to speak about the architectural wonders of the Games but focus instead on the total outcome the Games could deliver for London, and in particular East London, which has a range of social challenges and economic deprivation,’ he says. Or, as Mike Taylor, senior partner at Hopkins Architects and designer of the Velodrome puts it: ‘We thought of the Games as a kind of housewarming party.’

Now, after almost 10 years of planning, the party has begun. But when the celebrations are over and the hangovers clear, what will Londoners find? Will we see an East London regeneration that has the hallmarks of Barcelona’s transformation, or an empty and bedraggled temple to hubris of Athenian proportions? Hanway says legacy is enshrined in the project. ‘Right from the beginning, legacy was a strategic decision. We never drew up a plan that was just an Olympic plan. There was always also a transition plan and a legacy plan. For example, we made sure that infrastructure was in the right place for legacy use, not just for the Games; that roads were placed where they’d be needed after the Olympics,’ he says.
It’s clear that legacy has played a key role in the design of the main venues. The Zaha Hadid-designed Aquatics Centre will have a capacity for 17,500 spectators during the Games, reduced to a maximum of 2,500 post-Games. The two clumsy wings on either side (which house additional seating but detract from the centre’s visually pleasing wave shape) will take 10 months
to dismantle, after which the centre will provide two 50m swimming pools for public use, doubling the number of Olympic-size pools in London.
In designing the Velodrome, Hopkins Architects had to address conflict between Olympic Broadcast Services’ (OBS) needs and legacy requirements. ‘The broadcast service wants total control of light in venues and this means minimising natural light because the OBS can’t control it,’ says Taylor. ‘We decided natural light was the right answer for legacy users, to reduce running costs and improve the environmental performance of the building, so we designed for legacy. We pressed on with rooflights, leaving the OBS to black them out if it insists on it for the Games.’

Olympic park 2012
Other stadia, including the white-clad basketball arena, have been built specifically as temporary venues. Says Hanway: ‘Fundamental to the London plan is that for those events with little legacy value and smaller followings, such as fencing and taekwondo for example, the stadiums are temporary.’ In part this obsession with post-Games legacy can be traced back to the Athens Games of 2004. Athens’ legacy is considered among the worst of any Olympiad: as many as 21 out of its 22 venues lie abandoned and maintenance of the sites alone has cost as much as £500m.  ‘We didn’t find a plan for the post-Olympics development of the venues,’ said New Democracy politician Fani Palli-Petralia in 2008, before the financial crisis and its subsequent impact. ‘When a city gets the Games, it should make a business plan and decide what the country needs for the day after the Olympics. This did not happen.’

Greg Clark, senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Europe and the author of a number of books on legacy, says Athens is sometimes unfairly judged. He points to improvements to transport, in particular the Athens’ underground, its airport infrastructure and significant improvements to building codes and tourism. But he does acknowledge that ‘there was no plan for how to use the Olympic venues post-Games and most are still mothballed. London has learned from that. It has been very keen to secure post-Olympic usage of key venues as a result of the Athens experience.’
Sydney, too, provided key pointers. Sue Holliday, the former chief planner for the Sydney Games of 2000, told a conference recently that the host city should have focused earlier on the legacy programme for the Olympics site. Legacy planning didn’t begin until after the Games finished and there was no long-term plan for the park’s redevelopment until 2005. A business campus is now being established but the space still needs a public subsidy of more than £35m a year. ‘We didn’t really have a policy for what would happen to the Olympic site after the Games and we paid the price for that,’ Holliday says.

London organisers took note. Says Peter Tudor, director of venues at London Legacy Development Corporation, ‘London is further ahead with its legacy plans than any previous host city. We have secured the future of six of the eight permanent venues and are well on our way to appointing operators for the remaining two.’  The main stadium and press centre are the only two permanent venues that have yet to find a post-Games use, and Tudor believes both are likely to be finalised shortly. A creative or Silicon Valley-style commercial hub is the most likely use for the press centre and the hope remains that a football club will take over the main stadium.

But the real legacy of these London Games will not be in its temples to sport. Legacy goes far beyond stadia, which is perhaps just as well as architecturally there are few gems – the Velodrome and the lean but appealing Copper Box multi-use arena
by Make are two; the John McAslan and Partners rust-red energy centre is another. The main stadium in no way rivals the complex visual delight of the Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei-designed Bird’s Nest in Beijing and the site itself will never compete with Barcelona or Sydney’s sun-drenched parks. Instead, the legacy of the 2012 Games is most likely to be judged on their impact on urban renewal and place-making in East London. Clark points to the importance of public realm, architecture and urban design in achieving long-term social legacies. ‘If we want East London to have a different future it has to look different,’ he says. ‘It needs a high quality of place and amenities so that people decide to stay there rather than move out as their wealth increases. To become a more mixed-income location, the place-making agenda is a very important part of what we have to do.’

Olympic park 2030

A key aspect of the place-making legacy is the Olympic Park itself, which will become the Queen Elizabeth Park, one of the largest urban parks to be created in Britain in the past 50 years. Waterways, cycle tracks, footpaths, sporting facilities such as tennis courts and hockey pitches and lush acres of new parkland are planned, and the park should be open for public use from July 2013.
East Village – the Athlete’s Village during the Games – will also play a key role. It will be converted to housing, with some 4000 properties becoming available to Londoners by mid-2014. Other developments include 900 family homes in the Chobham Manor area in the north east of the park. Five neighbourhoods in with 7,000 homes are scheduled to open; 42 per cent of which will be family homes, 35 per cent affordable housing.

Social infrastructure is also planned: three schools (two primary and one secondary); nine nurseries; two walk-in health centres; one primary care health centre; and community, leisure and  cultural facilities are all on the cards. Jonathan Kendall, director of urban design at Fletcher Priest, the master planner of East Village, points to the accelerated time frame as a positive legacy of the Games: ‘The development of the housing and community spaces of the village would have taken 20 to 30 years to build in a non-Olympic world; the Olympics have condensed delivery to seven years.’  The architecture of the estate is not immediately lovable: 10-storey blocks in
a repetitive scheme that lacks a sense of warmth. But Kendall believes a sense of community will develop over time. ‘In Barcelona there are retail and commercial spaces on the lower levels of the village but the end result is an area that feels a bit sterile. We’ve gone for front doors instead. We’re emulating the London grain, the London typology,’ Kendall says.
The architectural planning may have been inspired by developments such as Maida Vale but the result – a dense
grid of high blocks – is not typical of the area in which two-storey terraces are still the norm.
‘I think we’ll be able to measure the success of the legacy by how much the edges blur between the new and the existing,’ says Kendall. ‘At the moment there’s an internal completeness, but there’s no getting away from the physical distance between this estate and the existing world. I hope a seamlessness will follow over time. In Barcelona you can’t quite tell where the edge of the park is, and that’s part of the success.’

The village will be handed over to its new owner, Qatari Diar, by March 2014. Some 30 per cent has been designated as affordable – the true measure of legacy may well be how affordable it actually ends up being for the economically deprived communities that border the area.  ‘Legacy isn’t just about whether  a development is economically sustainable but also about whether it delivers community cohesion, how it transforms the built environment and how it transforms how it feels to live in the area,’ says Iain Macrury, director of the London East Research Institute. ‘It’s important to measure factors such as the reputation of the area, community displacement or development, transformation of physical space and the way the city is used. We should be looking at livability surveys after the Games that assess the urban realm, who lives there, how it feels to live there, and how people use it.’
Clark concurs that measuring legacy outcomes is not straightforward. Economically, he says, it looks like there’ll be some success at least. According to an April 2012 report from property agent CBRE, £1.6bn has been invested in East London over the past two years, and
Clark believes there’s ‘a palpable boost of investment in the area’ pointing  to investments in homes and retail developments. ‘And we’re seeing a physical infrastructure legacy too, with power lines, Underground and road building. The social legacy though is rather more uncertain,’ he says. And, as Macrury points out: ‘Legacy won’t just happen.’ To be a success it needs ongoing stewardship, investment and management. After the Games we need to capitalise on the money that’s been invested and make sure we deliver
on-going regeneration, social and community support.’

The London Velodrome sits poised and elegant on the Olympic stage, ready for the starter’s gun and the world’s cameras; but in architecture terms, the structure is far more method actor than glittering celebrity, as I found out talking to Mike Taylor, who led the design team for Hopkins Architects.

For rather than directing focus to the brief, glamorous moments in the spotlight, the team initiated the design process by working ‘from the inside out’ – like a silkworm making its cocoon – creating a streamlined sustainable container that will fulfil its function to minimalist perfection, and continue to inspire long after the cameras have moved on. It is the long-term Olympics’ vision that is highlighted in this modest but beautiful structure, and a kind of truth in design: each element is there for a reason; there is nothing superfluous or self-indulgent, and maybe this is why people love it. It is the architectural equivalent of a world-class athlete.

The design process for the Velodrome began, not with the outline of the double curve as one might imagine, but with the central core and defining purpose of the structure – the cycling track itself. ‘We designed it for the legacy, to be as efficient as possible, and then converted it for the Games. We had a bicycle in mind, not as a literal image [as in the Beijing Olympics] but as an engineering idea. A bicycle
is minimal, streamlined: we reduced the amount of materials, thereby reducing the cost and the carbon embedded in it, and we made it lightweight, we shrink-wrapped it – wrapping the 6,000 seats tightly around the track, making a building that simply defines the volume inside it, focusing on the engineering, the philosophy,’ says Taylor. This no-nonsense pragmatism is at the heart of the design, to the extent that a comment on the beauty of the Western red cedar curving into the air like a sculpture was instantly rebutted by the simple bare facts: ‘The red colour will soon fade to grey.’ There is also a strong sense, from Taylor’s comments, that the team of architects and engineers were in direct and deliberate competition with Beijing.

Using 56km of sustainable Siberian pine (shipped in 40mmx40mm cross-sections and requiring more than 350,000 nails), the track was designed by Ron Webb, who ‘works like a boat builder’ and designed tracks for Sydney, Athens and Manchester. Somewhat surprisingly, given the absolute precision of sport, Webb slightly modifies the shape each time; for 2012 ‘he tweaked the geometry of the curve’, finding a balance in pleasing the different cycling disciplines that will perform on the track.

As Taylor says, the task was then ‘to integrate the engineering and architectural thinking, to reflect the geometry of the track and to create a building that exudes dynamism… We went for a light structure [the roof structure weighs less than half that of the Beijing velodrome] and the double-curving structure is very efficient; it’s a saddle shape that cuts down on the cladding, and it’s as flat as possible: the roof across the suspended part dips by 8m and the arch is only 4m, so the length between the tallest and lowest parts is only 12m…. We were also mindful that the building is a piece of sculpture in the Olympic Park and that the perception of its form will change as you move around. The curves pick up the light too,’ he adds, almost as an afterthought.

Sustainable materials were used throughout, according to ‘the ambitious brief’ [all the wood, for example, is FSC-certified] and rainwater collection forms part of the reduced water consumption. However, Taylor is quick to point out that a successful sustainable design is not the result of ticking a sequence of given boxes, but one that evolves as an intrinsic part of the engineering, architecture and philosophical processes, working together like a seamless well-oiled machine: ‘You get the right individuals to work on it and then you let them get on with it. It’s not a prescriptive process; it’s a highly specific one. It’s about understanding; developing philosophical premises that enable sustainability.’

From the sky, the roof of the Velodrome looks like a slashed Fontana canvas; but again, Taylor seems only passingly concerned about the visual appearance, his emphasis being on the technical innovations and the employment of industrial and recycled materials, which obviously give him immense satisfaction. The structure is made from steel manufactured in the North West, more than 2,500 sections of steelwork, the ‘roller-coaster-shaped ring beam’ from the USA was formerly a pipe in the chemical industry, and recycled concrete has also been used. The structure of the roof follows that of the 1972 Munich stadium: a stiff beam around the outside with stretched 36mm cable net across it as a tension structure. What is new is the 300mm-thick insulation over the net, with wooden cassettes on top and the metal roof: this means that minimal energy is required to heat the building and it will be very warm inside for the Olympics. ‘Cyclists like it to be as hot as possible for competition: the thinner the air the faster they go,’ he says.

The temperature is also maintained by the grassy earth berms, which reduce heat loss; again a purely practical choice, as Taylor asserts: ‘… the ground conditions were so bad, being on the site of the old West Ham rubbish tip … it made financial sense to raise the building out of the ground.’ It was a practical solution, however, that led to a beautiful and evocative design. The earth berms form a green shelter or ‘plinth’, balanced on a glass band that runs around the building, giving a 360-degree impression of speed and lightness. There is obvious poetry here too, despite Taylor’s reluctance to say so. But talking to him more, I begin to realise that his approach is not a denial of beauty in favour of stark pragmatism; rather he treats architecture as a scientist treats nature, with the unspoken acceptance that where materials, design and function are seamlessly united, beauty is inevitable, so why go on about it?

The Velodrome is a structure that places the people who use it at the top of the list: the athletes (Sir Chris Hoy’s design input resulted in industrial air curtains to keep out the cold winter air, a strategically placed toilet for the competitors, and extended seating to ensure a noise continuum); and the spectators, both inside and outside: ‘The glass ring gives this inside-outside connection: you see glimpses of cyclists inside, and you can look out from the inside.’ There is even a point at which the athlete and spectator become one: ‘The cyclists appreciate the natural light and seeing out: at the top of the banking, they can actually look out {through the glass band]; there is transparency and natural ventilation.’

It will soon be seen if this graceful, sustainable building can actually enhance the athletes’ performance; whether the pared-down elements assembled by a team of designers and engineers to maximise performance and speed will actually result
in new world records. If so, then this is surely the right direction for a form of architecture that is ideally the bed-fellow of science (though with a touch of poetry too!).

Mike Taylor’s last words sum up the modest philosophy of the 2012 Velodrome: ‘We set out to make a highly rational, elegant, efficient structure, looking to be responsive. You need the right team, backing, materials, engineers, designers, subcontractors, and the time to evaluate all the elements. Then you have the whole package… It is a good example of integrated design – what Britain does well. Hopefully it inspires.’ We shall soon see.

The Velodrome design team was Hopkins Architects, Expedition Engineering and BDSP. It was built by contractor ISG.
With thanks to the ODA for permission to use images of the Velodrome

Entry Criteria
The awards are open to interdisciplinary designers aged 18-30 from around the world.  The content and nature of the works submitted must reflect the main aims of BE OPEN, which is an international humanitarian project that searches for original solutions and technologies of the future and promotes their implementation today.

You can read more about BE OPEN and the Awards at www.beopenfuture.com

Information about the BE OPEN Awards winners in Milan, April 2012, see here

Submissions should be sent to  awards@beopenfuture.com by 15 August 2012

2012 Timeline:
1-15 August -  Project submissions
15-25 August  - Shortlist of 3 finalists selected by the jury. (Stage I).
18-23 September - Winner selected by an international panel of experts in the worlds of design, business, education and the arts (Stage II).
23 September - BE OPEN AWARDS Winners Ceremony, London.

Full BE OPEN Awards terms and conditions can be found here.

Blueprint is a partner of Global Design Forum 2012

Blueprint is the media partner for the first Global Design Forum being organised by the London Design Festival this September.

Styled as a ‘thought leadership event’ it’s will bring together a star-alliance of design luminaries, organisations and talents to debate the design industry’s key issues and pressure points with a view to effecting real change.

Google's Dr Astro Teller

Already part of the event are Google’s director of new projects Dr Astro Teller and established international designers including Thomas Heatherwick,  Tom Dixon, Richard Seymour, Paul Priestman and Yves Behar.

Delegates will get a chance to debate, discuss and make decisions about how they would like design to impact on the world, today and in the future. The aim is to set the global design agenda and inspire positive new directions for the sector.

This inaugural forum takes place at the Central Saint Martin’s campus in King’s Cross, London on 18 September.

To be part of the discussion, book now:

globaldesignforum.com

Illustration from Batman: Death and Design by Dave Taylor

In midtown Gotham a construction crane collapses, narrowly missing Bruce Wayne during his public address to announce the demolition of the city’s Grand Central Station to make way for a new ultra-modern replacement. So begins the Caped Crusader’s first ‘architectural’ adventure, involving a corrupt union boss, an egocentric architect, a beautiful heroine, and a new villain – part-vigilante part-architectural critic.

This latest storyline was the vision of writer, graphic designer and lifelong Bat-fan, Chip Kidd. When DC Comics offered him his dream project he approached it from a totally personal perspective – marrying his passion for design with his love of comic books – Batman: Death by Design was born. Kidd told me that he came up with the title first. To find a title that had not been used in the Superhero’s 50-year history was a challenge in itself, but most importantly it fitted with the characters and the storyline that he wanted to create. Bearing in mind the importance of continuity when writing new material for a long-established comic-book character, he wanted to take a classic approach, and set his story in Gotham in 1939.

Limited to 100 pages by DC Comics, Kidd thought that leaving out Robin would be one less complication to the plot and give more space to develop new characters. Batman devotees are generally not huge fans of Robin anyway. He also decided to drop Commissioner Gordon, simply because he wanted his Batman to be an outlaw with the police out to get him. But classic characters, such as deranged, psychotic arch-enemy The Joker are included, along with Alfred, the loyal butler. He knows that Bruce is secretly Batman and his lifelong service makes him his closest ally.

Coincidentally the next Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, is released in July after this new graphic novel is published and will no doubt be as dark as Nolan’s previous films. The contemporary Hollywood portrayal of Bruce Wayne is as a psychologically scarred individual whose alter ego is a ruthless vigilante. In contrast, Kidd’s Batman has no problem with his identity and the story is all about the adventure, written with an innocent sense of humour.

That said, the situations in the novel are based on real-life events. The storyline of the proposed demolition of Gotham’s Grand Central Station is heavily based on the publicly opposed destruction of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1963. Likewise, the collapse of construction cranes in Manhattan in 2008 and 2010, are also referenced in the novel’s plot. In fictional Gotham, Batman is there to root out the cause of the disasters and its implications for the future of the city. There is a vital resurgence in Gotham’s building industry, but behind the scenes is corruption at the highest level. Heavily involved is the ruthless union boss Bart Loar. So when intrepid young Gotham Gazette reporter Richard Frank also starts to get to the bottom of the story, he unwittingly puts his own life in danger.

Meanwhile, riding high on the crest of the wave is Gotham’s own ‘starchitect’, the amusingly named Kem Roomhaus, commissioned to design The Ceiling, a nightclub billed to be the most glamorous in the world. The building is made entirely out of glass and is suspended between four skyscrapers so that the cream of Gotham can party way above the minions below.

Batman and the Joker battle it out (Illustration by Dave Taylor)

As ever, though, The Joker seizes the opportunity to gate-crash the launch party and rob the guests at gunpoint. At this moment enters a new character, Exacto. He mysteriously appears to tell them they are facing an even greater danger.
He announces to the crowd that the architect’s design is unsound and the stresses on the structure were improperly calculated. They must all leave the building immediately as it will not bear their weight and they will plummet to their deaths on the streets below. As Roomhaus, cowering under a table, protests this accusation – the building does indeed start to crack…

Exacto is an anti-hero who seemingly has the ability to predict structural catastrophes just before they happen, and teleport to them at will. Kidd thought, what if an architectural critic could become more like a Batman-type figure who goes beyond writing and publishing his views, and at key moments appears, declares the situation, and watches things crumble? Even the design of his logo puts emphasis on the word ‘act’, as he considers himself an architectural activist. His agenda is to have a direct influence on the architecture of the city, and he will stop at nothing to do what he believes to be in the greater public interest.

He is not alone in his fight over the architectural issues facing the city. Self-proclaimed ‘urban preservationist’ Cyndia Syl is on a mission to save the Grand Central Station that she regards as a masterpiece that has been nearly destroyed by neglect. She goes straight to the influential Bruce Wayne, who has the power to save the building that was originally commissioned by his own father 20 years earlier. However Wayne points out to her that to properly restore the station would cost twice as much as simply tearing it down and starting again. He also believes that the architect placed style and effect above everything else, and questions the design’s original structural integrity. He thinks that was fundamental to the decline of the building and that it simply has to be demolished. But Syl remains resolute to save it and is determined to persuade Wayne that he is wrong to allow the plans to go ahead. It’s all very archi-juicy.

When Kidd first drafted his script, he had a vision of the overall look of the design to combine elements from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for its architecture, and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront for its union corruption. That in effect became the visual brief and to realise this his editor at DC, Mark Chiarello, suggested British artist Dave Taylor. Taylor is known not only for his figurative work but also his ability to draw not only buildings but entire cities from the imagination. Coincidentally Taylor’s father had been a civil engineer and this gave him an additional insight into the realities of working within the construction industry. From an early age he was familiar with seeing architects’ offices, drawing boards and models.

Creating Thirties’ Gotham was one of the main challenges for Taylor, alongside portraying Kidd’s cast of characters of whom he also had a clear vision. He decided to base the lead characters’ features on actors from the silver screen. So Bruce Wayne is the young Montgomery Clift, Cyndia Syl is Grace Kelly, and The Joker is Conrad Veidt from The Man Who Laughs (1928). Just for fun, Kidd asked Taylor to draw him into the story and as the son of the late Greenside Snr, the architect responsible for the original Grand Central Station. New villain Exacto was originally designed by Kidd and then brought to life through Taylor’s artistry. His costume also looks like it was designed in a bygone era, and he wears a mask that resembles the goggles and cap worn by vintage fighter pilots and clothing like the period Rocketeer comic character.

The cover of Batman: Death by Design by Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor

Batman made his debut in Detective Comics in 1939, and through his attention to detail Kidd chose to adopt the original bat-symbol from that first appearance. The original graphic was just the bat wings – the head being added in the comic-book series that followed later. Taylor carried out extensive research to get the overall aesthetic right. In particular he studied the work of Andrew Loomis, an illustrator who worked during the Thirties and Forties and who became well-known for his figurative drawing guides. Taylor set about training himself to draw in the style of the period to make every frame look as convincing as possible.

Closely following the brief he also looked at futuristic style and ideas promoted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair under the theme Building the World of Tomorrow. Only then did he set about to design everything from the city architecture to the details including the fixtures and fittings – most apparent in his drawings of the office of Greenside Architects. Even Batman’s famous ‘toys’, his ingenious experimental gadgets, were designed by Taylor in the same way. The construction cranes around the city are a key element to the plot but are also used to symbolise the rapid growth of a city that is optimistically striving towards a ‘better future’.

Another challenge was how to tackle the ‘maxi-minimalist’ architecture of Kem Roomhaus. Working out how to visualise The Ceiling nightclub was a huge task in itself, resulting in a spectacular drawing that views the entire structure from an angle that shows the people dining and dancing on an enormous glass floor, high above the streets below. Taylor also tackled the Roomhaus design for the new Grand Central Station and drew the model based on a humpback whale. This is a totally futuristic fantasy in which the carbon monoxide generated around the building is recycled and used as fuel. This abstract idea wins Roomhaus the competition, but also gives Exacto another opportunity to mysteriously appear and point out why his design will never work…

The finished drawings are predominantly black and white, with just a subtle use of spot colours. Alongside the Thirties’ styling, the monochrome approach also harks back to the movies of the period. First drawn in graphite, Taylor’s sketches were scanned so that he could add colour using Photoshop. Taylor’s economic palette enhances the drawings, notably with the street lighting. He has cleverly captured that warm, orange, sodium glow of street lighting you see in Manhattan. You can see it on the cover and it is used to great effect in the drawing of The Ceiling nightclub. Taylor creates a real sense of depth looking through the glass at the river of light in the street below.

Batman: Death by Design has been a labour of love for both Kidd and Taylor. As well as being a lot of fun it contains 
real issues regularly faced by architects, developers and politicians, albeit dealt with in a deliberately naive way. Its unique storyline may well make it a cult classic, even if it’s only among the architectural community.

Renzo Piano inside the Shard (Photo by David Vintiner)

Renzo Piano knows how to make buildings that vanish. Two current projects, one a crystalline tower over London that shatters outdated ideas about what a skyscraper is and about the metropolis it stands in, the other an intervention at the timeless site of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel, both do it.

One disappears into the sky, the other into the earth, and both cunningly use angles. ‘A little trick’, Piano intimates, as he enters a room at the Paris offices of his practice RPBW, brandishing a photo from an online forum of Shard observers. It shows a surprisingly narrow, angular finger of light tapering into the sky blue, but on either side, the tower’s form simply merges with it. ‘Like a kaleidoscope that reflects the sky!’ bubbles Piano. ‘You can spend a day in front of it and it will never be the same.’

Piano, now 74, is charm and tact embodied, a kindly guru in a woolly jumper that’s so sky blue that the Shard could well disappear into it. He is as high on ideas as if they were pills he’d popped. He flatters those he talks with, offering thoughts like intimacies, and frequently responding ‘you are right’. The charisma he deploys on developers, mayors and press around the world indicates another characteristic – deep patience.

Ever since 2001 he’s been telling the same story to evangelise London’s 306m-high Shard, just now finishing construction – but, he says, it’s ‘a good story’. For him, the mixed-use skyscraper tells ‘the way the city may save land, instead of dispersing, the idea that the city can grow from inside’. He talks about exploiting public transport hubs, and the idea of ‘making a building that can intensify the city of London, especially in a place that needs life, without adding traffic. [Then London Mayor] Ken Livingstone was brilliant. He asked me not put more than 48 parking spaces. 48 is nothing!’ (It’s actually the minimum required for disabled drivers.)

One of Renzo Piano's original sketches for the Shard (credit Renzo Piano)

The Shard’s vanishing trick, due to its off-vertical facades of especially clear glass, was crucial at the 2003 public enquiry it had to win. ‘I was very grateful for those months of discussion,’ Piano recalls. ‘In some ways the building became better.’ Rather than nervous, he says his state was anxiety. ‘It’s like going to the doctor with your baby. It’s love… and you are taking care of your creature in some way’. Richard Rogers had helped him prepare, stressing public realm and the Shard’s intensification of London.

The friendship with Rogers dates from when they taught at the Architectural Association in the late Sixties. Rogers was more scholarly, Piano more interested in practical experiments, taking him into Bedford Square every day to build things. He says they looked like Beatles (presumably White Album period). ‘We were like bad boys. That’s the reason we won “Beaubo”’. Short for Palais de Beaubourg and said the same as ‘bobo’, meaning bohemian-bourgeois types, he uses the name to refer to the Centre Pompidou. ‘It was part of the provocation to make a joyful spaceship, right in the middle of Paris,’ he says of the huge, colourful art centre just a block away, which still has all the va-va-voom of when it opened in 1977.

After Pompidou, Piano and Rogers were hot names. Piano set up RPBW in 1981, and gradually built it into a global design force, which has recently expanded from Paris and Genoa to New York. He describes the practice as ‘a joyful machine’. He shares ownership with 10 partners and 15 associates, some of whom have been there through all four decades. ‘They give you strength and continuity, a coherence, not just in terms of design but in the way you behave, with client and all that’.

Buildings are in his blood – he comes from a Genoese family where all the men – ‘my father, my grandfather, my uncle, my brother’ – were builders. It may explain why the practice is called a building workshop. In Paris, it actually fronts on to the street with the model workshop, complete with tools and workbenches for all to see. In the offices, a red model of the ribbing from the Kansai Airport terminal in Osaka hangs from the ceiling like a great tapeworm. 1:100 models of the Shard and 2007’s New York Times Building sit together, immaculate white sentinels. Active projects are everywhere around: a major intervention at the Fondation Pathé and a strangely blocky new Ministry of Justice, both in Paris; Valetta’s City Gates in Malta, and a 30-year project for a new Colombia University campus in Manhattan’s Washington Heights.

Piano won the Pritzker Prize in 1998, and up to last year had served five years on its jury. He’s not surprised that Wang Shu won this year. He is adamant that Pritzkers are not given for strategic/political reasons, nor to a predictable name. ‘Pritzker is a great responsibility’, he says. ‘It’s trying to detect the little seeds of freedom, of creativity, of talent. It’s not easy. I absolutely agree that China is one of those places where this talent shows up.’ He notes that while at RPBW, ‘Chinese students want to learn and go back with stealing knowledge. I like that!’

The Fondazione Renzo Piano brings international students to work and learn from his practice, an arrangement he compares to ‘la bottega’, meaning again workshop, but, he says, with Renaissance Italy’s implication of ‘the art of teaching by showing, by absorbing, even by stealing’.

It’s a process he went through himself. ‘I learned from masters,’ he says, naming among others Jean Prouvé, best known for La Maison Tropicale. But absorbing their skills can only go so far. ‘One day you say,“Fuck!”– I need my freedom’, he explains. ‘If you don’t have that shift to desire freedom, you get paralysed. You have to be grateful and be a rebel’. Piano’s ‘fuck’ moment came as a student with neo-rationalist designer Franco Albini and then techno-functionalist designer and Domus editor Marco Zanuso.

Piano worked briefly for another master, Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, in 1965. When approached to design new galleries for Khan’s 1972 legendary Kimbell Art Gallery in Fort Worth, he initially said no: ‘In such a scheme you have a problem because, if you are not careful, if you are arrogant, you start to compete, then you are bloody stupid. Or you can be totally reverential, so subdued, intimidated that you disappear’. Piano was loath to tamper around Khan’s work. ‘Then’, he says, ‘I started to build up my freedom… Those schemes are always coming from a double attitude – respect and rebellion.’ Piano’s own new Fort Worth $125m galleries, separated from Khan’s, open in 2013.

Plans for the Shard (Image credit Renzo Piano)

It was the same story when he was asked, despite being a non-believer, to design facilities at Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel. When he finally said yes, he faced a campaign by the Fondation Le Corbusier, guardians of his legacy, to overcome. Piano says it ‘was not totally clean’ and suspects that ‘they wanted to gain control of the chapel’. The fondation gained the support of big-name architects, such as Alvaro Siza, but they never said that his new nunnery and gatehouse, down the slope, was invisible from the chapel, tucked into the earth so as not to disturb the setting that le Corbusier had found so mystical, or that Piano was the architect. ‘Alvaro told me he didn’t know,’ recalls Piano. A public enquiry voted 40-0 in favour of the plans, which completed last year. ‘It’s emotionally completely different from the chapel,’ he explains. ‘It’s more about silence, about living in the forest, like a little house.’

Ronchamp and the Shard share Piano’s clarity of design and openness to natural light, but how different the tranquility of
a nunnery and the vertical dynamics of the big-city skyscraper. The Shard dwarfs anything else on London’s skyline, and its crystalline quality makes even the current wave of glass skyscrapers look dingy. Its angularity not only plays with light, but seems to evaporate mass with height.

Piano’s original vision was sketched in Potsdamerplatz, Berlin in 2000, when he met developer Irvine Sellar. It has evolved, and now been realised by the architects in charge, RPBW’s Joost Moolhuijzen and William Matthews. The Shard’s base merges seamlessly with the surrounding public realm and London Bridge station with its 54 million-a-year users.

The tower’s jagged facades begin 20m up, two on each side of a square, all angled differently in plan. Grey blinds in each triple-glass panel are activated by solar sensors, and stored in red boxes, the only colour in the facade. The tower’s form has a blocky extension, or ‘backpack’, to pack more in.
Piano describes it as ‘a liaison’ between brick buildings on St Thomas Street and the tower. The highest storeys, above the concrete core, are the Observatory, which will include a jaw-dropping, triple-height space suspended in the sky. It will handle a million visitors a year, a third of what the London Eye gets – Matthews said that any more and it would be a ‘turbo-sausage machine’. Above it, Piano considered a meditation space, but access is limited and anyway, the Observatory will already blow people’s minds.

The original eco-ideas of drawing on the London aquifer and passively radiating excess heat with 3km of pipe in the spire have been dropped, but the Shard has good sustainability credentials. Much of the steel is recycled, and the concrete uses fly-ash. Heat from offices will reduce energy requirements from above. Not least, it plugs straight into the nexus of rail, Tube and buses. There is confidence for a BREEAM Excellent rating.

The Shard nearing completion on London's South Bank (Photo by Paul Raftery)

At 310m above sea-level, the Shard breaches the Civil Aviation Authority’s 1,000ft limit by just over 5m – Matthews noted that, ironically, planes now fly lower to get the view. It’s only serious London competition, the 288m-high Pinnacle, is halted. A decade ago, there were only 18 skyscrapers in the world taller than the Shard, but now there are 60. The Foster-designed twin Hermitage Plaza towers at 320m high at Le Defense in Paris have been approved. It’s as if cities are somehow second rate if they don’t have a super-tall (300m plus) tower.

‘It’s true, you are right,’, Piano reflects. ‘But this is not a good part of the story. You know very well it’s a phallic symbol. In Italian it’s called priapismo. I like the idea of going up because it’s a pleasure, the fresh air. I don’t like the idea that you race up to show you are more powerful than someone else. Our job is not to follow that line.’ From the word go he has insisted that it is not about height, although he is set to double the Shard height with Seoul’s Yongsan tower. What matters is ‘the art of intensifying the city’ and the 24-hour mixed use that makes it ‘a vertical city’.

But surely, the city is different – full of surprise, different spaces, textures and atmospheres? Piano again agrees – ‘I love historical centres, I love cities.’ His analogy of building as city goes back to the Centre  Pompidou. ‘ I used this idea that it’s like a little town. You have streets, stairs, plazas, you have different functions. The city is not predictable.’ He promises surprise at the Shard, especially at the Observatory – ‘I can already see the faces of the people there.’

Piano ponders when asked what buildings he would like to be remembered for. He picks the Centre Pompidou, his own Genoa offices (‘a greenhouse on top of the sea, the perfect interpretation of the environment’)… and the Shard, whose genesis was when his youngest child was born. ‘The tendency is to say you love the youngest child most, the one who is still there, who needs more help… Maybe I’m saying so because the Shard of Glass is the youngest, but also because I love the story.’

Is the Shard a good thing? You bet. Why? Firstly, as promised, it epitomises the new development model of intensification and connectivity and even suggests an urban car-free future. Secondly, foolishly or not, it confidently reaffirms London’s future world status by joining it to the now Asian-dominated club of cities with supertalls, yet does so without denying the history around it. Thirdly, its form reinvents the heavenward aspiration of gothic spires, but with air and light, and just as big glass becomes questioned and cliché, it is re-presented, crisp and fresh. Lastly, most skyscrapers could belong anywhere, from Dallas to Dubai, but the best are uniquely local. The Shard is already visually redefining London, even with the quiet thrill of distant glimpses.

‘The building will be adopted, because it will be public,’ says Piano. ‘I think people will start to love it more and more.’ Many are sharing that love already.

Belgrade Design Week 2012

Belgrade Design Week (BDW) is a paradox. The city has no design reputation to speak of, yet it hosts an annual affair that attracts top-flight speakers from around the world. Just as surprisingly, it showcases a few regional products and designs that stand up to the best European standards. The main event this year took place in the National Library of Serbia, a respectable, copper-roofed, mid-Modernist building by Ivo Kurtovic, which opened in 1973 and was rehabilitated in 2011 for the BDW Conference.

BDW founder and curator Jovan Jelovac proved to be an excellent MC for the packed schedule. A natural showman, he introduced each speaker as if hosting a super-hip Gala Performance, then asked them questions with an informed cosmopolitanism worthy of a top London, New York or Milan event. Plus, he somehow juggled incessant technical problems with the demands of live streaming. When he insisted that a break would be 20 minutes max, that meant at at least 40 minutes to shmooze and eat ice cream outside in the baking Belgrade sunshine.

Ole Jensen dons his medieval-style hat

The speakers Jelovic lined up were an eclectic bunch, spanning product design, architecture and advertising. Not everyone was as masterly as Jelovac on stage: Danish designer Ole Jensen, who shuns digital for a more hands-on workshop approach, flailed about and lost his grip on English but won a well-deserved round of applause when he donned the sinisterly medieval hood he’d designed for the Danish Design Council’s Haervejen Project.

Thessaloniki-based designers Beetroot gave a presentation about their acclaimed Greek Monsters exhibition project (rather like a family of mutated Nando’s chicken logos), in the context of Greece itself becoming ‘the economic monster of Europe’. It was an exercise in triumph of hope over adversity, but the delivery was as if by a manic depressive. Nevertheless, Beetroot too had the audience cheering- one suspects a Eurovision-type regional solidarity with their beleaguered neighbour. Ad agency 180 Amsterdam took their name from a Francis Ford Coppola quote: ‘Whenever you get into trouble, keep going. Do a 180-degree turn.’ They tracked the great director down in California for further elucidation but, after another tech melt-down, the resulting clip of the great man was a damp squib- all he had to add was that advertising should be limited to a few hours a day. If only.

At the other extreme were some inspirational presentations, none more so than the legendary Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld. With minimalist pre-amble, he presented a succession of images, objects, film clips and songs that inspired him, with no additional comment beyond naming each piece. Brazilian sculptors and painters, Andy Warhol, Fellini, Japanese food, Vivienne Westwood, Brazil itself, all of Yellow Submarine’s surrealistic Eleanor Rigby animation… over 50 items. The emotional intensity he built was unprecedented and left several hundred people stunned. ‘And now the results, some fragments of my work’ he said, before a fast-forward tumble of images of divine modernism, sensual concrete and wood, furniture and eclectic decor. Your correspondent later caught up with him at Belgrade’s super-chic Square Nine Hotel, which he designed – watch this space.

Also awe-inspiring and personal was designer Mathieu Lehanneur’s presentation of projects addressing questions from ‘how to born?’ (sic) to ‘how to die?’. Perhaps France’s best creative mind, he was a worthy recipient of the ‘Belgrade Grand Prix of Design’ award at the closing party, where he gamely offered a few lines of ‘Je Ne Regrete Rien’.

Some speakers impressed in milder ways. Martino Gamper’s wonderful adventures with chairs culminated in his Bench to Bench project in Hackney Wick- like guerrilla gardening but with street furniture. The leading practice from Serbia’s ex-Yugoslav neighbour Croatia, Studio 3LHD, presented works culminating in their dreamy Hotel Lone- their’s was a journey into accomplished and beautiful architecture and interior design.

Two speakers each came on like a slick-haired German Superman with suits and big ideas after a power-elite workshop on presentations. (These things are at last moving on from Steve Jobs’ template). Robert Klanten of Berlin publishers Gestaten Verlag was dazzling and comprehensive as he swept us through the origins, meaning and trends of the whole contemporary design universe.

Belgrade Design Festival 2012

Closing the conference, Patrik Schumacher led us into his new theory of the whole architecture universe. A partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, he didn’t mention her at all, but plenty of their projects flashed by, and he shares her dialect of architecturalese (texturally coded speech that has topologic fluidity, interlocking tectonically and morphologically in differentiated conceptual spaces etc etc). The theory’s Parametric Semiology, as laid out in new book The Autopoiesis of Architecture (Vol 2) is heavy, fascinating… and perhaps a little too disengaged from the reality of millennia of previous architecture.

It wasn’t all presentations. Nor even drinks and parties in überhip venues dotted like outposts of recession-oblivious designer cool across the beautiful but struggling city. There were exhibitions as well. For example, the Croatians mounted a crisp show of furniture and product design called Common Sense and Sensibility, curated by Tatjana Bartakovic, in the entrance of the conference venue. The elegant simplicity of colour, form and unpretentious materiality indicates that the spirit of Dieter Rhams is alive and well, and design can thrive even in places where industry has vanished and government is indifferent.

Yugoslavia had a design culture that produced the Yugo car and its own (non-aligned) variations on socialist architecture. Novi Beograd, across the river from old Belgrade, is a whole city of socialist planning on a grid of wide boulevards, now embellished with PoMo offices the nightly throbbing of techno beats from party boats. The Genex Tower there challenges the Trellick Tower as the most striking Brutalist skyscraper anywhere. An excellent exhibition, Unfinished Modernisations at the Museum of Yugoslav History, comprehensively surveyed this glorious, now-dead, design era.

Across the ex-Yugoslav republics, there is hope that design culture is being reborn. But as Bartakovic says of Croatia, designers are working in ‘an age of new poverty’. Few recognise that design is a service industry that can help European countries survive in the new world order. Here’s hoping that by sampling and showcasing the global design scene, the annual Belgrade Design Week will inspire a new generation of Balkan designers- they can only make life better.

Herzog & de Meuron reflect on the Serpentine Pavilion (Photo by Johnny Tucker)

Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion – the 12th to date – is complete and drawing the crowds into its subterranean womb in London’s Hyde Park. The view of the bijoux Thirties tea pavilion – a gallery since 1970 – has never been so unobstructed. The Swiss architecture practice and Chinese artist’s subtle insertion is very different from Peter Zumthor’s dense, monolithic structure that went before, or Jean Nouvel’s eye-bruising, fire-engine red structure before that.

Using the sloping topology of the site, the roof – which in effect is a disc filled with water meant to act like a mirror to the elements – is at waist height near the gallery, but low enough to allow access beneath at the sides furthest away from the gallery. 
The roof is like a temporary cover over an archeological dig while the contents beneath feel as though they’ve been with us a long time, like a Roman amphitheatre rediscovered. This is all very fitting for a project that is all about what has gone before.

It feels very much of its place, the topography guides you in and there are no barriers to the space, other than the subtleties of suggested ingress such as paths bordered by the kind of grass that parks usually dot with ‘Keep off…’ signs.

Visitors admire the expanse of water atop the Serpentine Pavilion (Photo by Johnny Tucker)

The basic premise is very simple. H&dM has chosen to dig down to the watertable and, in so doing, reveal the foundations of the 11 pavilions that have gone before. A circle offset from the roof acts as the frame for the geometry that is revealed below. There are, however, no big concrete foundations left over; the basis is more notional – though there are apparently subtle changes in the earth where it has been replaced and refilled.

‘We know exactly what has happened, because we have images and drawings. Everything is recorded. If you lay them on top of each other they create this kind of amazing, almost seemingly cult-like, structure which is also very beautiful,’ explains Jacques Herzog. ‘So we are given 
a form… given a kind of landscape.

Architecturally we have a form without having to invent it ourselves, which is very typical of what we have done in the past and something that Weiwei also loves very much – discovering things that are there and have their own beauty. We wanted to use that, to reconstruct it in new materials and bring it all up to the same level so that together it would make a landscape that people could use to sit on and hang out in.

‘What I like about it is that it is found and that we can also behave as if it was found – so you never know what is fiction and what is reality. It is very serious because every single trace is fact, but of course it doesn’t exist anymore really… There’s been an editing process.’

The excavated space provides an alluring relaxation area (Photo by Johnny Tucker)

Eleven columns, one for each of the previous pavilions, hold up the roof with their cross-sections extrapolated from the geometry of the way the previous structures’ footprints overlap. A 12th column has been added by Herzog & de Meuron, using a much simpler form that also reveals its steel structure (the others are fully clad in cork – more of that later) and sited for structural rather than aesthetic reasons. It’s rather like making sure the public knows what’s original and what’s new in an archeological restoration.

‘We were not interested in symbolism or irony,’ says Herzog. ‘It is just the pleasure of revealing these traces – all the people that have done something are here again in a common party or celebration. It’s not about this one versus that one – there is nothing of that. This design doesn’t say anything about the previous ones.’

Early schemes for this latest pavilion involved platonic objects, but these were quickly dismissed in favour of revealing what had gone before. The simple geometry of two circles (the roof one cut off in a line to address the gallery) is all that is left from this. The archeological aspect of the project has also developed from initial ideas about an underground pavilion, which couldn’t be developed as the practice discovered the water table lies just 1.5m under the surface.

This particular build has been challenging. With just six months from invitation to completion, the building work naturally carried on right up until the last moment. The weather is an important part of the scheme, but it also played a role in the construction of this outdoor project during the wettest weather ever recorded during that period. With a week to go I looked in on the site, and the underneath had a long way to go – it was still just a hole in the ground. But on the day of opening the building was finished, bar a couple of very minor snags, and that’s all that counts.

The archeological aspect of the project mirrors what the practice has recently been doing for the Park Avenue Armory in New York. This recent project has seen it restoring and, importantly, revealing what has happened since the building opened 
in the 1860s. ‘That’s a richly layered building. We treated it as a monument, revealing the physical traces produced over time, preserving it for the future and in so doing reinventing it,’ says Herzog.

The mirror of water atop the current pavilion (Photo by Johnny Tucker)

Back in London, adding the circular frame to the pavilion excavations/restorations has had the effect of making 
it feel like an amphitheatre, which Herzog sees as ‘a fascinating synergy’. From ground level you descend into this dark space –everything has been covered with a deep brown cork. The material has an interesting duality in that it delineates the geometry of the inner sanctum very crisply, exentuating the found lines. At the same time it is very much of the earth, from the colour to the natural feel and smell that emanates from it.

This is very much part of the sensorial experience of this particular pavilion; the smell and touch of the cork and the way it works with light. From outside the space beneath the canopy looks dark, but intriguing rather than forbidding. From within, the eye accustomises and the rest 
of the park appears searingly bright. And light, with the help of the weather, is also the key factor for the roof, which is meant to act as a mirror for the sky and prevailing conditions. (To be honest, it’s not as mirror-like as I’d been expecting from our discussions in Basel.) When it’s bright and you look at a reflection of the sky it works well, but the surrounding trees mean much of it is darker and then your eye is drawn to the grey metal beneath the water’s surface.

But what is key is that you want 
to do this, you want to experience this space and all the aspects of the really 
rather beautiful way it has entered the landscape. It is without doubt one of the best the Serpentine Gallery has engendered and it’s going to be a hard act to follow, period, since it is in many ways, particularly visually and metaphorically, like a full stop.

Emirates Air Line cable car will connect the Royal Albert Dock with Greenwich

The London skyline is becoming increasingly eclectic. The bulbous Gherkin (Foster + Partners), the towering Shard (RPBW) and the wind-turbine-topped, elongated-barcode that is the Strata tower (BFLS) will soon be joined by the Cheese Grater (RSHP), the Boomerang (Ian Simpson and Partners) and the Walkie-Talkie (RVA).

Aside from high-rise towers, there have been more eccentric and, in some cases, more loved additions that peek above the rooftops. The London Eye, at first implemented as a temporary attraction, has become one of the most recognisable modern additions to the capital’s silhouette. The Arcelor Mittal tower in the Olympic Park wriggles skywards in an ugly tangle of red. And now, a stone’s throw away from the sky-piercing crown of the O2 Arena, two spiralling towers have emerged from the banks of the Thames, and they have a pragmatic use as well.

At the end of 2009, a design competition to provide a river crossing linking the Greenwich peninsula to Albert Dock was launched by Transport for London, after its feasibility study had identified the need for a crossing.

Taking into account the flight path to City Airport, river traffic, the existing infrastructure, the proximity of the towers to the flood defences and a protected zone under the river, among other issues, the route across the river was tightly defined. ‘There was an incredible set of restraints – below ground, on the ground, in the river and in the air,’ says Oliver Tyler, director at Wilkinson Eyre who led the winning project team.

Having established that a cable car was the most feasible option, Wilkinson Eyre began to work within the parameters to create a configuration for the three towers the cable would pass between. ‘One of the key issues was the cable, which sags,’ says Tyler. ‘We had to achieve a clearance of 54m – the same as the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge in Dartford – to allow river traffic to pass unhindered.’ Height restrictions on the towers limited them to 90m (the height of the O2’s masts), so an optimum distance between the principal towers was designated by the cable-car specialist, Austrian firm Dopplemayr, along a straight line.

The river crossing can be read as two distinct elements: the docking stations on the north and south banks and the towers supporting the cable. ‘Our early concepts were about developing the stations as a lantern, predominantly glazed to have a presence night and day. We were also keen to exploit the mechanics of the system and the movement,’ Tyler adds.

The cable car makes a striking addition to the skyline (Photo by Luke Hayes)

The design of the docking stations is relatively simple in plan, expressing in simple materials and fairfaced concrete the radial movement of the cable cars as they pass through the building and return across the river.

A cantilevered landing pad occupies the first floor, where passengers will get on and off the cars. The glazing is arranged into a rhythmic acceleration that reflects the launch of the gondolas into the sky. During the day, people outside the station will see the mechanics and movement of passengers, and by night they will see an abstracted expression of the same movement in light and shadow.

On the ground floor, in the undercroft of the landing pad, is ticketing and the access gates. The south station will be slightly larger, as provision has been made there for storage and maintenance of the cars, and beneath it is designated as an exhibition and retail space.

‘We were very keen to develop something very visual that had its own identity. We looked at other similar schemes around the world and they tend to be very utilitarian and made of standard components,’ says Tyler. ‘Both stations should have a very similar language to each other and the three towers should be a family of details.’

The design team explored different methods of creating towers that were visually and structurally engaging, arriving at a compromise between a steel net structure, that is visually light, and a solid pylon.

‘We decided to deconstruct a solid tower into a series of steel ribbons, and developed an idea of creating a spiral held with helical ties,’ says Tyler. ‘This then splays out to pick up the cable car running gear at the top.’

The gaps in the structure reduce the visual intensity of the towers as well as helping to shed wind loading.

Wilkinson Eyre took the scheme to planning and prepared a tender package for the project’s construction. Architecture practice Aedas and construction firm Mace won the contract to build and operate the station, with Wilkinson Eyre retained by the client as a consultant on the project.

Since opening on 28 June 2012, passengers have been able to travel along the 1.1km route in five minutes inside one of 34 gondolas that each hold 8–10 people.

This addition to the London skyline will no doubt prove to be a popular tourist attraction, but on a practical, level it will ease the congestion on the area’s transport infrastructure, providing a route out of Greenwich that, on a busy night at the O2 arena with the Jubilee Line down, can prove very testing.

The newly restored Cutty Sark (Photo by Jim Stephenson)

The Cutty Sark epitomises two great British love affairs: sailing and tea. Built in 1869, it is the last of the tea clippers, streamlined sailing ships which raced from China to London to bring the new season’s tea to market.

Last month, the Cutty Sark reopened as a museum at its dry dock in the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site after a £50m overhaul by architecture practice Grimshaw and engineering firm Buro Happold.
Part of the project involved repairing substantial damage from when a fire ripped through its wooden structure in 2007 while an earlier restoration project was underway. The fire prompted renewed public interest in the ship and initiated a fundraising campaign that made this more ambitious project possible, but the unusual way the ship is now displayed has not been to everyone’s taste.

As well as raising the Cutty Sark, figuratively speaking, from the ashes, Grimshaw has raised it literally, too, hoisting the 963-tonne vessel three metres above its concrete berth so that, for the first time, visitors can walk underneath it. The space created beneath the ship has been transformed into a venue which will host corporate events, bringing in revenue that Grimshaw says is essential if the project is to be commercially viable.

Visitors admire the ships sleek hull (Photo by Jim Stephenson)

The new space allows visitors to admire the awesome sleekness of the ship’s composite iron and timber hull, a hydrodynamic design that let the Cutty Sark slice through water at amazing speeds. With consummate attention to detail, Grimshaw has also replicated the hull’s original coating of muntz metal, a brass alloy which repelled barnacles to make the ship even faster.

Lifting the Cutty Sark required the installation of an internal steel structure, which carries the ship’s weight and is anchored to the concrete berth by 24 external struts. This structure also incorporates an elevated walkway which conveys visitors from ground level into the Cutty Sark’s hold deck. A glass canopy, designed to evoke water, envelopes the ship at its highest waterline and provides a roof for the venue below.

Criticism of the project has tended to focus on this unambiguously modern glass structure. Some have suggested that the glass, which is not transparent enough to see through from a distance, means the ship’s hull is no longer visible from outside. But Chris Nash, a partner at Grimshaw and himself a keen sailor, refutes this. ‘What you see above the glass is actually what you used to see above the dry berth. All that’s inside the glass is the part of the hull that was not visible before,’ he says.

View of the Cutty Sark Visitor Centre (Photo by Jim Stephenson)

According to Nash, raising the ship was also vital for conservation. ‘A ship is designed to be supported in water,’ he says, ‘but the Cutty Sark has been resting on its keel for 50 years, meaning the hull was gradually sagging. By lifting the ship with the new skeleton we were able to replicate the load conditions of a ship floating in water and allow the hull to return to its original shape.’ A 1998 survey by the Three Quays Marine Services supports this view, concluding that if nothing was done to conserve the structure it would become unsafe within a decade.

Purists who have baulked at the glass enclosure will perhaps be more approving of the ship’s interior, whose painstaking restoration involved the removal of 540 of the original hardwood hull planks, each of which was treated for damage and decay before being reattached to the ship. The wrought-iron ribs that support the hull were also treated and replaced where necessary. New and old are clearly distinguished, with the original ironwork painted white and the new steel structure in grey. The story of the ship is told on the ‘tween deck (the middle of the three decks) with interactive exhibits, designed by Designmap, that are sure to keep busloads of schoolchildren amused for years to come.

Architects with Grimshaw’s experience know that taking on a public heritage project such as this can be a double-edged sword: you’re bound to get your name in the papers, but you may not always like what you read. ‘That can be a problem,’ says Nash, ‘but it’s something we’re used to. We’ve done many prominent public projects and you do your best; you do things for the right reasons and you hope that people will appreciate that.’

It is early days, but Grimshaw believes this innovative way of displaying the Cutty Sark will set a benchmark for how historic ships are preserved in the future. And what it offers visitors is a new perspective on one of the best-preserved examples

Still taken from Blueprint Lomokino movie by Film Club

In these all-encompassing digital days Blueprint has decided to look in the opposite direction for a while and celebrate the warmth and humanity of the analogue age, when the letter ‘i’ was just another vowel.

Lomography has long-championed the world of film, keeping its eye firmly focused on the world of sprockets and emulsions. A few months ago it launched the Lomokino, a hand-cranked, 35mm movie camera, so we grabbed a handful and handed them over to a handpicked group of creatives, from architects to actual filmmakers.

Their brief was simple: makes us a film of less than a minute (simple but not everyone managed that bit!) around the topic Inside Out.

The results range from the magical to the surreal, with the final four shown here.

Blueprint Lomokino movie by Film Club from Blueprint on Vimeo.

Blueprint Lomokino movie by The Partners from Blueprint on Vimeo.

Blueprint Lomokino movie by Studio Columba from Blueprint on Vimeo.

Blueprint Lomokino movie by Nissen Richards from Blueprint on Vimeo.

We will be making more of these Lomokino movies and have also teamed up with Pentax, which is lending us some Marc Newson-designed digital cameras. The resulting films will be on show at Design Junction during London Design Festival in September.

If you’d like to get involved in making a movie for us, email the editor, Johnny Tucker, on Johnny.tucker@blueprintmagazine.co.uk with ‘moviemaker’ in the subject box.

Our thanks to Lomography for lending us the cameras for so long – long enough for them to bring out another version the Lomokino MUBI… You can find out more about Lomography’s unapologetically analogue world at lomographylondon.co.uk

It’s been 110 years in the making for the facade at the Whitechapel Gallery in London to be completed. Finally, with the help of British artist Rachel Whiteread, the Gallery has decorated the recessed plaque between the two terracotta towers on Whitechapel High Street with golden leaves cast in bronze. The original Charles Harrison Townsend designed building was left blank for almost a century after a mosaic frieze by Victorian artist and illustrator Walter Crane was never realised.

The resolution of this missing link marks Rachel Whiteread’s first ever permanent public commission in the UK. Whiteread who has been living on Whitechapel’s doorstep for the past 25 years expresses, ‘a deep connection with the area and its cultural depths and diversity’. Her entire cast of a Victorian house from 1993 (the same year she was the first woman to win the Turner Prize), was just around the corner, until it got unceremoniously demolished by the same Tower Hamlets council which have allowed this new permanent addition on the Gallery frontage.

Whitechapel Gallery first collaborated with Whiteread back in 2006, when she became an artist advisor with the architect Robbrecht en Daem for the Whitechapel Gallery’s extension to its neighbouring Passmore Edwards library. This year, Whiteread was co-commissioned with the London 2012 Festival and High Street 2012 programmes, funded by The Art Fund, to renew the focus of one of London’s principle street arteries and Olympic route. The High Street 2012 campaign is part of Boris Johnson’s London’s Great Outdoors initiative to improve public spaces across the capital.

Artist Rachel Whiteread

Whiteread appeared to be the perfect candidate to Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, ‘We thought, here’s an artist who throughout all her practice, adds very little, in a sense, but what she adds is profound and monumental’. Renowned for her casts of existing objects, be it a familiar London vernacular or the water towers of New York, Whiteread has covered the frieze with leaves and branches in gold leaf. The piece can be recognised as a Whiteread by the four subtle reliefs of the 36 windows on the original facade, replacing the familiar Whitechapel Gallery sign permanently.

Following trips to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, Whiteread became inspired by the rooftop gilded angels and heraldic weathervanes of London’s skyline. The tangled gold leaves and branches were also influenced by the way urban nature sprouts tenaciously in undesired places such as pavement cracks and street gutters. These hidden treasures, buddlleia or ‘Hackney weed’ as Whiteread likes to call it, become celebrated as part of the city as much as the gilded rooftop furniture seen from St Paul’s, ‘This is a way of bringing something that is a rogue bit of nature, that we’re busy tearing out, and actually, celebrating it and giving in the longevity of bronze, and the beauty and glister that the east end sorely need’.

The new addition celebrates the original terracotta architecture of the Whitechapel Gallery by casting the historical Tree of Life motifs on the base of the towers. A legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Tree of Life symbolises social renewal through the arts, an apt emblem for the current London 2012 Festival and the Cultural Olympiad. This is not just a pretty face, but portrays the Gallery’s historic mission to bring contemporary art to the east end. It is hoped the gilded leaves will become a golden legacy long after the London 2012 Olympics this summer, acting as a hallmark for the Gallery in the place of the Whitechapel font, achieving the same purpose as the original Tree of Life nearly a century ago.

Four casts of the original windows, alongside the golden leaves

Whiteread’s approach is to make us think about how her sculptures relate to our daily lives, both in our subjective experience of space and in our sense of memory. The commission at Whitechapel is both subtle and thought provoking. Although ostentatious in the sense that it is made of gold-leaf and bronze, the delicacy of the leaves is profoundly quiet and inconspicuous. The height of the commission means that you may suddenly come across it as you go about your daily life on the street, or you may, unfortunately, blindly pass it by. It may not be shouting from the rooftop, but perhaps we should take care to look up from the ‘Hackney weed’ ridden cracks in the pavement more often. Whiteread humorously poked fun at the urban life of pigeons, litter and Hackney weeds, concluding, ‘I’m looking forward to actually, the first blue plastic bag attaching itself to the leaves’.

Friday 6 July, 6–9 pm
The White Building,
Unit 7, Queen’s Yard,
White Post Lane
Hackney Wick,
London, E9 5EN

To coincide with the London Festival of Architecture, the Finnish Institute in London is delighted to announce the second event in a series of four design discussions titled HEL/LO – Let’s Talk About Games.

The urban fabric of the city is increasingly governed by rules surrounding security, ownership and surveillance. Citizens in both Helsinki and London have been left uncertain about the ways in which the public can occupy and use seemingly public space. From utopian visions to playful interventions, HEL/LO 2 has invited speakers who are working to develop creative systems, strategies and designs that aim to alter public spaces and the way we inhabit them. Speakers include Helsinki-based Martti Kalliala, an architect and writer specialising in urbanism and cultural analysis, and YKON, a collective made of artists, designers, game developers and art historians along with UK participants Public Works, a London-based, artist and architect collective and award-winning architectural practice Studio Weave.

“Games and the processes that constitute the building and existence of a city are not only analogous but, in fact, share similar structures and organising principles – even if, or maybe exactly because, both ‘city’ and ‘game’ are concepts without widely agreed-upon, unambiguous definitions. Yet, if a city is literally interpreted as a game-like process, the most important thing in order to be able to affect any meaningful change is, in addition to identifying the players, to understand their rewards and aspirations”, says Martti Kalliala who has recently published the book Solution 239–246, Finland: The Welfare Game (Sternberg Press).

HEL/LO – Let’s Talk About Games is organised as part of the London Festival of Architecture and will be held at the White Building, an exciting new canal-side Olympic-edge cultural venue, run by SPACE and designed by David Kohn Architects. Launched in May 2012, the HEL/LO series brings together architecture and design professionals from London and Helsinki. The series continues in September with the third HEL/LO event in Helsinki during Helsinki Design Week and concluding with the fourth in London during the London Design Festival.

The HEL/LO series is organised in collaboration with Blueprint magazine, and is one of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 international satellite events.

HEL/LO 2 is part of the British Council’s International Architecture and Design Showcase 2012
(21 June – 23 September); a global gathering of cultural projects that investigate architecture and design from across the world, presented for the London 2012 Festival.

The event is free but booking is essential as places are limited.

Please book your seat here.

Notes on speakers:

MARTTI KALLIALA (FI)
Martti Kalliala is a Helsinki-based architect and founder of the design and research studio Pro Toto, focusing on architecture, urbanism, strategic design and cultural analysis. Kalliala recently edited and co-authored the book Solution 239-246, Finland: The Welfare Game, published by Sternberg Press. The volume puts forth a series of spatial, economic, social and cultural projects for tackling Finland’s quandaries. Kalliala’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Moscow and Shenzhen architectural biennales, and has received numerous awards and prizes, including a high commendation in the AR Emerging Architecture Awards and a nomination for the Scandinavian Forum Prize. He also comprises half of electronic music duos Renaissance Man and Heat Death.
http://pro-toto.eu

YKON (FI/DE)
YKON is a Helsinki-based not-for-profit organisation whose members include artists, designers, game developers and art historians who share a deep interest in current utopian thought and practice. Since 2005, YKON has worked on themes such as micro nations, social architecture, alternative economies, scenario developments, participatory processes, mapping and game design. In May-June 2012, YKON are the first international residents at the White Building, London, as part of the Permacultures residency programme at SPACE. During its residency, YKON has been working on the YKON game, a tool for utopian envisioning within a playful setting. The game was developed in 2009 and is inspired by architect and utopian thinker Buckminster Fuller’s World Game. YKON is: Ulu Braun, Tellervo Kalleinen, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Pekko Koskinen, Christina Kral and Tomas Träskman. 
www.ykon.org

PUBLIC WORKS (UK)
In 2004 Public Works became the name for a group of architects and artists who had been collaborating in different constellations since 1999. The common denominator for a shared practice was an interest in making socially inclusive public realm, be it art or architecture. Public works designs temporary or permanent mobile structures roaming public space to reveal the meanings hidden within the public realm, grounded in its locality, its community and its potential future function and program. Their projects implement innovation and participation as part of a methodology towards cultural, social and spatial production within the city and its rural context, where local stakeholders take ownership and authorship.
www.publicworksgroup.net

STUDIO WEAVE (UK)
Studio Weave is an award-winning emerging architecture practice profiled as one of “Britain’s Brightest Young Architects”. The studio’s work encompasses an extremely diverse range of projects from furniture and art projects, to buildings, landscapes and urban design. Since setting up in 2006 Studio Weave has delivered a number of award-winning projects including ‘The Longest Bench’, a £475k seafront regeneration scheme in Littlehampton, West Sussex; ‘Freya and Robin’, two allegorical pavilions peering over the water as part of the Kielder Art and Architecture Programme, Northumberland; and the ‘Floating Cinema’, a project for the Olympic Delivery Authority to transform a canal boat into a travelling host for film screenings.
www.studioweave.com

HEL/LO 2 is kindly supported by CrestJMT Leather

CrestJMT Leather is a global producer of high quality leathers, delivering the largest and most comprehensive upholstery leather collection available in the UK.

They have just launched their latest collection of upholstery leathers: Collection 3. The new collection combines careful selection of raw materials to produce six great value ranges, each with their own unique look and characteristics to give customers a far greater choice of quality.

It is ideal for customers who are looking for high quality, great value, hard-wearing leathers that are perfect for many types of applications and complements perfectly Collections 1 and 2 which are suitable for a variety of applications, including domestic, commercial and marine.

http://www.crestjmtleather.co.uk/

New Designers, an annual showcase of up-and-coming creative talent, returns to the Business Design Centre in Islington, north London next week, and the organisers are kindly offering readers of Blueprint a 25 per cent discount on tickets.

John Madin, Birmingham’s most famous 20th-century architect, would surely have loved Architex. It was a construction set for children, of all ages, made in England in the Sixties. I had one. Yellow plastic I-beams could be clipped together with clear plastic joints to create the frames of sub-Miesian or sub-SOM-style office blocks. With plasticised cardboard floors slotted into place, and cladding with clear plastic windows pressed into frames – hey presto! – you had created yet another scale-model office block that looked much like Madin’s Birmingham Post and Mail newspaper HQ of 1964, since demolished.

Architex seemed more sophisticated, and certainly more modernist, than Bayko, another childhood favourite; a construction set dating from the late Thirties, this allowed you to build a variety of pitched roofed and bay-windowed suburban villas, of the kind that were being rushed up around Birmingham when John Madin was growing up there in a detached Victorian villa in Moseley, birthplace of JRR Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame, Neville ‘Peace in Our Time’ Chamberlain and Ali Campbell, founder and lead singer of UB40.

I mention these construction sets because while reading about Madin for this article, I came across a delightful and revealing black-and-white documentary made in 1965 when the architect, then 41, was reaching the height of his powers. Directed by John Bird and produced by Philip Donnellan, this was one a series of six films called Six Men, portraying the half-dozen top professionals doing most to push Birmingham into the era of shopping centres, 100mph InterCity electrics, Spaghetti Junction, six-cylinder BMC Pininfarina saloons, jet aircraft, cigarette smoke and comprehensive development.

In Bird’s film, Madin, who died in January this year,  is shown as a thrusting, go-ahead, chap living in a modern house of his own design and, when not water skiing on fashionable Midlands reservoirs, racing Scalextric cars at home with his three children, or jetting to London – champagne all the way – in a BEA Trident, is seen dressed in tailored tweeds, sucking at a pipe and running the country’s third largest private practice – John HD Madin and Partners – at the time specialising in producing Architex-like buildings in and around Birmingham.

How quickly this young wartime Royal Engineers officer rose to the top of his professional tree. Just eight years before completing the Post and Mail building, he had been paid £6 10s [£6.50] to design a suburban house extension; fees for the Lever House-style newspaper office were £155,000. Asked by Bird what he wanted to do most, Madin suggested the design of an entire new town, built for a new way of life and designed down to the last new detail. How he loved ‘comprehensive development’, and, a few years later, how fondly he liked to imagine his most famous building – Birmingham Central Library – as the hub, and modern heart, of a completely rebuilt city centre designed in its entirety by… John Madin.

It is touching to watch that episode of Six Men today, when Madin’s library is set to be demolished, though when compared with the new Library of Birmingham nearing completion close by, Madin’s library, opened in January 1974, seems modest. It was to have been clad in Travertine or Portland stone, but ended up – given a shortage of cash – brute-concrete naked. The brooding, fortress-like appearance of the main block – the reference library in the guise of an inverted, eight-storey ziggurat – has probably done the building no favours in the popular imagination, while the atrium and public concourse at the heart of the building is now a part of a shopping complex called Paradise Forum.

Can this really be heaven, I wondered as I scuttled through the world of McDonald’s, City Nails, Spar and JD Wetherspoon? How are these emporia meant to complement the library? Not at all really, and yet it hardly matters now that the building has been condemned, despite lively local and national campaigns – principally by the Twentieth Century Society – to save it.

Without the ‘comprehensive development’ surrounding it, the library has always been an architectural one-off, an anomaly rather than a blueprint for a futuristic city centre that never happened. So, the building – ‘functional, not brutal’, said Madin – seems out of sorts and out of place today, especially as it has been flanked, since the mid-Eighties, by the tacky-looking, steel and glass Copthorne Hotel (Architex would do a better job) – and hemmed in by a swirling carpet of horrid herringbone brick pavement, pricked with ‘heritage’-style signposts and potted plants better suited to a patio in Moseley than a civic square.

Inside, the Madin building proves to be rather fine and with a little imagination, it could yet become a much-admired and popular art gallery as well as a reference library, while it is big enough to house all sorts of spaces and activities for clubs and societies as well as cafes and restaurants, a cinema and, well… pretty much anything anyone except that local councillors and their officers, hell-bent on turning Paradise Forum and the library into lucrative real estate, might come up with. The building could then work again, as it was intended to do, as a civic design of the future.

Whatever one makes of the decision to build a new central library here, it is good to see that at least the site is on Centenary Square in the city centre rather than on its East Side, as was the case some years when Richard Rogers was asked to design an ambitious replacement for Madin’s library. This never happened. It is difficult, though, to judge the giant new, yet incomplete, Library of Birmingham designed by the Dutch firm, Mecanoo, which – founded in 1984 – took its name from Meccano, another model construction set.

Centred around a cavernous internal atrium, the spaces here are even bigger than Madin’s. The most controversial aspect of the building is probably the vast necklace of aluminium circles wrapped around its facades. These can represent whatever takes your fancy – jewellery, wheels, generic patterns found in cultures worldwide – but will certainly mark the building out as being different from its neighbours.

If, in fact, you take a stroll from the almost comically grim New Street station (designed by Kenneth J Davies of British Rail’s London Midland Region, and opened in 1967) up and through Madin’s Central Library and on to Centenary Square, what is most striking is the manner in which these great disconnected chunks of the city appear to be composed of individual – and sometimes highly individualistic – buildings that appear to be talking to themselves; the architecture of central Birmingham seems uninterested in conversation. It needs stitching together comprehensively. John Madin was the last architect to try to do this and his style appears not just to be out of fashion, but to have been condemned out of hand: at least four of his major buildings have been demolished over the past few years. The library is next.

‘You can only do the best you can at the time,’ says Madin in Six Men, doing his best to look philosophical. Clearly his Architex-best was not enough for the brave and shiny new Birmingham of the 21st century.

Designed in Moleskine’s iconic style that has long been appreciated for it’s pure material beauty, a new architecture series, Inspiration and Process, features sketches by four renowned architects and practices: Bolles+Wilson, Giancarlo De Carlo, Zaha Hadid and Alberto Kalach. Covered in light grey cardboard tied with Moleskin’s signature elastic strap, the books feature each architect’s drawings and sketches along with interviews and essays.

As a pioneer of digital architecture in the Eighties, the Hadid book reveals her attitude towards the current movement of parametric architecture in which she now leads the world. As a means of architectural production, hand-drawn sketches on paper are the nostalgic process for her. Hadid argues computation increasingly simplifies the production process, spatial discoveries decrease and it is rather barren compared to those in the pre-digital age. ‘Now there is sameness and far fewer surprises – you don’t get so many layers of discovery,’ she expounds in her interview.

In an accompanying essay in the book, Marco Sammicheli, a PhD and researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, focuses on multicultural influences on her work. Arabic and Chinese calligraphy and Russian suprematism, in which she had great interest, can clearly be seen to affect her pictorial representations for her 2010 Stirling Prize-winning MAXXI, Rome’s Museum of XXI Century Arts.

The way Alberto Kalach considers sketches, as a means of spatial exploration, is markedly different from Hadid. In the wide range of his projects, from minimal houses such as the palapa – an open-sided ocean-front dwelling with a thatched roof in Acapulco– to urban planning such as housing blocks spanning  mangroves in Cancun, most of his sketches are hand drawn with dynamic, fine and even sensual pencil lines. In an age where digital tools are an inevitable part of the architectural design process, Kalach clearly appreciates the immediacy of hand-drawings as a way in which he can most appropriately convey the spaces.

Architects never have the ‘blank sheet’ of paper as the initial condition of a site. The zestful strokes and colouring in Kalach’s sketches are redolent of the explosive natural context in the city, to which he attempts to integrate his imaginary architecture with utmost respect and empathy towards nature. ‘Under the magnificent geography and the landscape the question is how to touch it; where it will hurt less,’ he says.

Each of these books reveals the unique perspective of the architect. Hadid reminisces about the deep and creative spatial explorations in the process of paper drawings within the current hegemony of parametric architecture; Kalach still believes in the imaginary integration of an existing context and an architect’s vision gained through strokes and marks on paper. Amid the confusion of what is ‘real’, continuously altered by emerging 3D modelling software and algorithmic systems to generate architecture without any tangible medium, perhaps these books are a timely reminder of the power of the tangible and the immediate, as we advance into the post-digital age.

Inspiration and Process in Architecture, Published by Moleskin, £24.99

Here is a picture of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron chilling on their champagne-bottle-stop cork stools beneath their lily-pad disk of water.

Next month, Blueprint’s 2012 Olympcs issue will be spearheaded by Herzog and de Meuron’s Serpentine Pavilion with artist, friend and collaborator on the Beijing Olympics Bird’s Nest Stadium, Ai Weiwei. The Serpentine Pavilion, which is the culmination of the UK Cultural Olympiad, takes visitors below ground to discover a palimpsest of past pavilions. Our August issue will look at the project in detail following our editor Johnny Tucker’s trip to Basel to meet Herzog and de Meuron. The rest of the issue looks at the Olympic site, its legacy and forwards to 2016.

August issue out end of July.

‘Reclaim the heavens! Cities in the sky! Concrete solutions!’

Let Slip, a London-based theatre company, present their latest play Machines for Living, satirising the legacy of Britain’s tower blocks. The play focuses on two architects think their design ideologies can change the way we live. But when they move into the tower block they have built, although engineered to encourage kinship and social harmony, the building falls into disrepair and social decay.

Machines for Living follows Let Slip’s debut show Hamster Town, which was staged at Camden People’s Theatre in August 2011. The play will be on at The Blue Elephant Theatre in Camberwell, London until 16 June.

We have two pairs of tickets to give away (dates subject to availability), send an email to opritchard@blueprintmagazine.co.uk with your preferred dates, name and contact number.

It all began with the moulded plywood chair. Voted by Time Magazine as the greatest design of the 20^th Century, and conceived for a competition at MoMA in 1940 with Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames attempted to reinvent the very idea of the chair. They wanted to mass-produce compound curves without any upholstery, for which they first experimented with plywood splints for the wounded military during World War II. A new film has been released, produced by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey and narrated by actor James Franco, that is the first to document their life and work since their death. It was created as part of PBS’s American Masters, an award winning biography series that celebrates arts and culture with documentary film profiles. The film also begins with the moulded plywood chair, but goes on to tell a far more complex story, as I found out at the UK premiere held at the Vitra showroom during Clerkenwell Design Week.

Charles and Ray Eames weren’t just furniture designers; they were also artists, photographers and filmmakers, and most crucially, a couple. These weren’t job descriptions to them; they were a way of life. Charles and Ray were experts in creating an image of themselves; they became a cultural symbol of the ideal modern couple through their use of eccentric clothes and playful photographs. The film strips back these smiling publicity images with the help of lost love letters and archived material, to reveal the highs and lows of a couple bonded by both love and work. Accompanying interviews with family members and junior designers at “The Eamery” as they nicknamed it, give an intimate and candid view into the husband-and-wife team of 40 years.

The film focuses on 901, Washington Boulevard; the Eames’ unconventional studio conceived in a warehouse off Venice Beach, California. Described by former employees as a ‘circus’, the fascinating archival footage shows an informal environment with every kind of object on every kind of surface. Charles and Ray advocated ‘take your pleasure seriously’, a maxim that carried through their design process of learning by doing, but never delegating understanding. They sought to ‘make the best, for the most, for the least’, a design ethos concerned with a way of thinking and living, that soon became embodied in their marketing campaigns for their furniture.

This was the time of Mad Men and archaic sexual politics, when the feminist consciousness hadn’t found a voice. In interviews, we always see Ray quietly stood behind her partner, despite Charles’ emphasis on their collaborative effort. The film challenges the assumption that Charles was the main designer by successfully documenting the frustrations of authorship and control, both with Ray and the other designers at the Eames office. The documentary highlights that it was precisely because they collaborated together as a couple that they were so successful. As is evident in the ironic title and also in the narration of the film, it is impossible to separate the two and their different roles in the design process. Charles was an architectural school dropout who never got his licence, and Ray was a painter who rarely painted. Instead, they became a brand, designing large-scale exhibitions and shooting quirky films, making a name for Boeing, IBM, Polaroid and Herman Miller in the process. As the narrator, James Franco says, ‘they wanted to work for the Google of their time’.

Now on DVD at First Run Features.

All images courtesy of Eames Office, LLC.