President Jimmy Carter beneath the solar panels on the West Wing.

I read White Noise recently and noticed by chance that Picador have bizarrely just published a 40th anniversary edition of Don DeLillo’s book, although it was first published in 1985. Perhaps it is the accumulated prescience of the book that is urging them to bring forward its anniversary. Certainly we are only beginning to appreciate the importance of a book which manages to give a portrait of an American academic and his relatively happy family in such a way as to depict the deep crisis in modernity. Martin Amis went someway to acknowledging its power when in reviewing the later book Underworld in the New York Times in 1997 when he referred to White Noise as “that beautifully tender anxiety-dream”.

Given that it portrays a society on the verge of collapse, how can the book still be pertinent (nearly) 40 years later? Because, firstly, that society it depicted never collapsed, was never going to. Secondly because that society is still in that anxious state nearly four decades later. In White Noise, DeLillo is one of the first writers to instinctively understand that instability, quixotically, is a condition of an affluent society that has no collective understanding of its direction: a sense of imminent collapse is the result of the material foundation of modernity suddenly being questioned. Diane Johnson in her review of the book also in the New York Times says that the book prefigures Bhopal. It does no such thing. Bhopal was a real disaster, the ‘airborne toxic event’ in in DeLillo’s book is a disaster which is being managed as if it was a simulation.

Wells Office, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, architect Malcolm Wells.

John N. Duvall writes in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, “[He] has a rare gift for historicizing our present, a gift that empowers engaged readers to think historically themselves.” Whilst he was not actively capable of clairvoyance, Duvall is absolutely correct. More than any environmental disaster to come, the book emerges from the unease prompted by the first oil crisis of 1973 , prompted by the Yom Kippur War in Israel and then the further bout of insecurity prompted by the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that preceded it. Not only did this prompt a questioning of geopolitical relationships hitherto seen as secure but it also prompted a questioning of the physical infrastructure of America itself – its roads and its housing.

Michael Reynolds, architect. Turbine House, Taos, New Mexico.
Photograph © Michael Reynolds, 2007.

Mirko Zardini, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture has posited in a series of fascinating texts and exhibitions of which Sorry Out of Gas is the most directly pertinent that the oil crisis prompted a profound questioning of the modern project. Social programmes in the West until that time were predicated on a steady improvement in material wealth, mobility and technological advance. The Oil Crisis threw that in to question. Rather than directing criticism at the unequal distribution of the benefits of modernity, from this point on, social criticism began to be directed at the pernicious effect of modernity itself. What was just a bunch of drop-outs in the 1960s is ripe in 1973 for addressing a panic in Western states.

Steve Baer, designer. House of Steve Baer, Corrales, New Mexico, 1971.
Photography © Jon Naar, 1975/ 2007.

In Sorry Out of Gas we see in architectural terms the impact of this event on planning, particularly of homes. Individuals like Steve Baer – an inventor of passive solar devices and Mike Reynolds an architect and builder of houses made of old car tires packed with dirt- creating domestic structures with features which would permit a direct relationship with nature. As much as they represent considered responses to fears over imagined shortages of traditional building materials, they also sit in remote landscapes or are hidden in the earth. There is a physical remove from social interaction. Baer and Reynolds in particular have considered the unit they are building for to be the family.

Indeed it strikes me that White Noise analyses these newly configured elations between society and family, nature and man, in a way that provides a critical tool for analysing these domestic structures. It is telling too that the American family takes the full-weight of this anxiety in the book.  “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.”

Obviously this has a political significance both in terms of relations within states and between states. Caroline Maniaque-Benton, associate professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, has written persuasively about the development of an architecture which was prompted by “a desire for autonomy from the state and its infrastructure.” And yet we also see this desire for autonomy for the wider global system of oil consumption at the heart of the US government with Jimmy Carter installing solar power on to the roof of the White House. Carter makes an architectural response against the US drift towards – what he deemed as embroilment – in the Middle East.

American President Jimmy Carter dedicates the White House solar panels, 20 June 1979. Photograph © Jimmy Carter Library.

The attempt to retreat from the wider world, the domestic turn of environmentalism, are intimated in White Noise in a way we are only just beginning to appreciate. What book and architectural exhibition is an understanding the family, far from being in a Freudian sense, the source of neurosis. It is in fact a site on to which social disquiet is projected.

Barnes Railway Bridge

I have been following the work of illustrator Nigel Peake since I published his student thesis in the Scottish architecture magazine Prospect just before he won a Silver Commendation in the RIBA President’s Medal in 2005.  Since then he has created a number of studies of vernacular architecture as well as thoughtful illustrated analyses of how we perceive the world around us. I wrote an essay in his book Maps in 2008 and loved his later work Sheds. However I think his most recent book Bridges – a series on the Bridges of London drawn is his best work yet. Its publication gave me a chance to talk to him about the way he views drawing, its relationship to architecture and more importantly the city. 

 When did you the Bridge drawings?
The drawings were made last year, after summer and into autumn. They were drawn by hand and in sequence to how they appear along the river.

You have abstracted the bridges into comparable frames and sizes: which did you have to abstract the most? Or was it an even process? 
I am not sure if I thought of it as abstracting. I was really just looking at the bridges in terms of their structure, form and their inherent rhythm and song. So perhaps I was abstracting them but not to make it more interesting, just as a way of understanding and drawing that process. For me, drawing is a way of working out an idea or place and so the book is a document of that.

Battersea Bridge

The Bridges of London are very much ignored even though they are essential. Why do you think that is?
I am not sure why. They are wonderful elements and when you are in London you use them all the time. It is normal now not to look or observe. Cities are incredible places that hold all this movement, colour and noise that happen all at once, but not many seem to notice.

Could you live in London? 
At the moment, no. I like it very much and always enjoy being there, but if find it exhausting as a place and that is not great for my work.  I like to take time and look at things, some cities permit that (Paris, San Francisco, Edinburgh) but I always think I am getting in someones way if I pause in London. Cities are really intriguing places for me and one walk down a street is enough for me to draw for weeks, but for now it is better to live by the sea and visit them when I need to for work.

Could you design a bridge? 
Possibly. I did design a bridge for my thesis project on Istanbul, that was a rejuvenation of the Galata bridge. I find them incredible feats especially when I see photos of bridges that are in the process of being built and they appear to be cantilevering over the water or gap, this great weight hanging.

Blackfriars Bridge

Which of the bridges do you / have you used the most? 
In my life? Probably George IV Bridge in Edinburgh [which spans from Princes Street to the Royal Mile over Waverley Station]. I’d use it going to the architectural studio on chamber street from a copy/coffee/stationary/music shop.

What is your favourite bridge? 
I am fond of inhabitable bridges but a lot of thosee existed in the past and have been replaced by more ‘practical’ bridges. Beyond that, it is the idea of crossing that is really interesting to me and most bridges make this possible.

Kennington Bridge

What do you think of the Shard? 
Last time i was in London was December 2011. I cycled through the city at night with a friend. We had no particular place to go but we ended up following the Shard until we where below it. The modern day Polaris. It was surrounded by fog and the top part was hidden and glowing in the gloom and empty. At that moment I thought it was beautiful. I sometimes prefer incomplete buildings because they still allow you to imagine a different outcome.

Before you have been working very much on vernacular structures (sheds) or personal visions of discreet landscape, there seems to be a greater interest in deliberate structural form. Is that fair, and if so why do you think that’s the case?
I draw and paint things that are interest to me at that moment. But I have been spending more time in different cities and so that probably has affected me.

Tower Bridge

Which building in London addresses the river the best?
Walking along the Thames, it is almost as if a lot of the buildings along it ignore the river, as if it was a banal street. I do like it when the tide is high and you can look across with a flattened view if is as if the other side is an island.

Do you ever want to build anything? 
Yes, at first I would just like to build a wall. Sometimes I think of drawing as a lot like building. It is made up of layers, and slowly you add to it, until it needs nothing more.

You can buy the book here. 

Photograph from Cedric Price's archive. The McAppy project.

Fantastic news that the Cedric Price Potteries Thinkbelt exhibition curated by Barnabas Calder and designed by Alan Pert of Nord has made it to London from the Lighthouse in Glasgow. This great exhibitions reinvigorates Price’s plans and drawings as a set of instructions. Rather than conferring on the designs a value that its creator would have disliked intensely, the exhibition is instead an ambitious rethinking of contemporary infrastructure, both academic and industrial. A scale model train set showing the largest and arguably most revolutionary of all of Price’s work The Potteries Thinkbelt sits at the centre of the exhibition.

 At the centre of the exhibition is a carefully planned, scale model showing, not just the tracks and trains to scale but the various housing typologies that Price proposed for the university. Around them is hung a selection of Price’s aphorisms juxtaposed with explanations of his own research, criticisms of other approaches (“the University of East Anglia is the Norwich Municipal Golf Course on the fringe of Suburbia”) and proclamations relating to the Thinkbelt. Calder acknowledges that one of the reasons that Price is best remembered is for his ability to provide pithy remarks that are endlessly quotable. In this exhibition however Price is seen as a far more nuanced thinker than otherwise he is given credit for.

Photograph from Cedric Price's archive. The McAppy project.

Calder and Pert have offered us Price the provocateur. As well contextualising his Potteries proposal as a major rethinking of both the transport systems bequeathed to us by mass industry and the way an academic institution works, the exhibition with its model is of course, a provocation to the viewer. This is the scale an architect can think on, it says, if – and it is an important ‘if’ – he or she understands and appreciates architecture as operating within more than just an aesthetic system, but also a geophysical as well as economic, social and political one. ‘The possible must become more important than the improbable,’ reads one of the slogans on the wall.

Price famously fought to ensure that his Inter-action Centre in Camden was not listed, believing steadfastly that the building had a purpose and once its purpose had been fulfilled it should no longer exist. Price was for pragmatism and against an architecture that crystalised dominant political or social modes into pretty shapes and thereby determined the habits of future generations. Yet his former assistant Stephen Mullen, who spoke at the opening of the exhibition in Glasgow, remembers Price occasionally allowing himself a guilty moment to focus on the visual appeal of his work. Calder also proposes a romantic appeal in Price’s collaged renderings of the Thinkbelt, although one might counter, even the architect’s own predilections for constructivism transplanted to the Potteries was a provocation – a challenge to the existing orthodoxy – rather than a piece of brutalist titillation.

The exhibition chooses an unexpected route to playing out Price’s ideas but it is by now means the only way. Another exhibition, Wish We Were Here appeared in a tight space at the Venice Biennale in 2010 and again in the AA in 2011. Curated by Samantha Hardingham, it showed a series of interviews with Price by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, which have been edited together to allow viewers to select particular passages by clicking on keywords. It also featured a couple of inspiring lectures and details from his notebooks.  Although the selections from these were not always obvious, they show the way in which Price ceaselessly, compulsively developed his semiotics.

Photograph from Cedric Price's archive. The McAppy project.

Price’s put faith in architecture as an agency for man to solve his own problems rather than garland himself with fripperies. Whilst the sensitive touch of Hardingham’s curation avoided the trap of turning Price into something he was not, Pert and Calder have appropriated his work to form a manifesto for architecture as the visible element of a system. Hardingham is writing what is ambitiously called a definitive book on Price and will appear at a symposium at the Bartlett School of Architecture to coincide with the arrival of the exhibition in London. She will appear alongside Calder, Kester Rattenbury Stephen Gage and Ruairi Glynn. It is hopefully a sign that Price’s approach to architecture as a critical mode of thinking about society will find a resurgence.

NB these images are from neither exhibition, but from Price’s archive held at the CCA in Montreal

Let’s take the The Tatlin Tower as a start. The version of this proposed structure was exhibited in the Russian Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale in Paris was already the second model of the proposal in existence. Sitting beneath a portrait of Lenin, the tower by this point had already begun its strange other life: not as a realisable project but as symbolic expression of the contributions art and technology can make to revolution. At the May Day parade in Leningrad of that year a notably different Tatlin model, flatter, more elongated in plan, was put on display. The pair of latticed spirals and the cross-bracing were there but the actual form of the building had changed. Subtly the exact form of the tower had ceased to be important.

Jean-Louis Cohen suggested in his Royal Academy lecture in December 2011 that there ought to be an exhibition of all the models made of the Tatlin. This is not as ludicrous as it sounds. As Nathalie Leleu says of the Tatlin: “this lost work has been reconstructed several times and each artefact synthesises and formalises a different state of knowledge in a given form and time.”  A largely thwarted attempt by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1968 to investigate the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, used two drafts and three photographs of the first model published in 1921 to create a 1:10 scale model, This was then adapted through information gleaned from a photograph of the 1925 model, (Leleu doesn’t specify which) together with a high-angle view of the top of the first tower under construction.

In 1971, for an exhibition on the Russian avant-garde at the Hayward Gallery in London, Jeremy Dixon, among others, rebuilt a model of the Tatlin based on drawings rather than photographs of models. Making more of the arches at the base than those extrapoloted from Tatlin’s models, Dixon’s effort is effectively the one that was rebuilt in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. The project had to be remade and remade, whenever the Russian avant-garde was addressed. The French rebuilt the Tower again in 1979 for the Paris-Moscow exhibition following, but theirs was ultimately a reworking of the Swedish model. Bizarrely the Swedish model was damaged and in turn reworked according to its French copy following an insurance payout. Note that it is the model that is remade, and not just an image which is reproduced. By rebuilding it there is an attempt to recommune with the purpose, even if only for a short summer. It has been rebuilt again from Dixon’s first model 40 years later in the court of the Royal Academy in London as part of the aforementioned Building the Revolution exhibition.

The way in which the Tatlin represents revolution is not straightforward or easy. A work which originally proclaimed the social purpose of art and architecture, it is apparently purposeless. In one sense it is utterly useless because it never achieved the practical goals of housing the congresses of the Third International. Purpose was everything to the constructivists, even if that purpose evolved. The contradictions pile on with each new iteration. Not having ever lived, it lives on. The critic Nikolai Punin noted that the monument was the anti-ruin par excellence because it departed from the Classical and Renaissance traditions. This has come true more than he could have expected, not having been built it cannot be corrupted. The tower operated primarily as a cri de guerre for the constructivists in the early 1920s and still does to those who sympathise with its origins. By remaking a model, you have to re-imagine the original purpose transmuted to a contemporary world. A network of artists including Lucy Skaer are attempting to rebuild the tower in full scale in pieces around the world.

Of course, the constructivist moment is not just visited through this architectural laying on of hands. As strange as it may seem, its impact on the development of architectural practice and theory is only now being understood. We are beginning to reappreciate the role of constructivism in a wider historical history after it was trashed within the Soviet Union due to the rise of Stalin and outside because the Soviet Union was closed to the West. A lot of the disregard was based on Cold War antipathy. For example, Reyner Banham did not feel that the Constructivists warranted their own chapter in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, despite our understanding now that it is one of the major sites if not of technological then certainly of organisational and theoretical development during his book’s period of study.

It is only now that the movements intense relationships with European architectural discourse are being understood.  A story that Cohen tells illustrates this perfectly. Le Corbusier brings back the blueprints of the Narkomfin with him following his trip to Moscow. An act, according to Cohen, that helped Le Corbusier to the design of the Unite in Marseille. Constructivism was an incredibly inventive moment. This is not, as Owen Hatherley  would have it because they prefigured a number of different architectural styles, but of more fundamental ideas about spatial organisation and construction. Fundamental design innovations were made by the Constructivists which are now such important parts of our designers vocabulary for creating space that we don’t recognise it: the social efficacy of multi-storey living, the division of domestic functions in a duplex. These are ideas that Le Corbusier took directly from Ginzburg and his Narkomfin.

It must be stated that the focus on the transfer of knowledge is not intended to devalue the work performed by the Constructivists in Russia. Constructivists were not just itinerant avant-gardists but committed communists. This retelling of the influence of the Constructivists is quite the opposite. It is an attempt to readdress the subsequent critical isolation of Constructivism, partly out of ignorance and partly of ideological distaste and to show that the limited number of buildings they created – many now under threat of demolition – is in many ways in inverse proportion to their skill and influence. Daniel Talesnik is currently doing interesting work in charting the relationship between the Bauhaus Red Brigade which arrived in Moscow from Weimar (just as the constructivists were forced out of power it must be said). Their leader Hannes Meyer later emigrated to Latin America, like many others.

The internationalism of the Constructivists is important and best understood through their interest in publishing. In his book, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture, S. O Khan-Magomedov explains how the Constructivists became the dominant school of the Russian avant-garde from 1921. According to Khan-Magomedov, the Constructivists were very interested in guaranteeing the political veracity of new architecture through a focus on the aesthetics of constructivism. He relates how the Vesnin brothers won the prize to design the Headquarters for Arcos, an Anglo-Soviet trading company. When they did so, they were the only purely constructivist project of 1924. One year later, the brothers also entered a competition for the Central Telegraph Office and the House of Textiles. All of these entries were in the constructivist style.

Frightened that Constructivism might turn into a purely external and formal style, Constructivists concentrated on the formulation of a set of artistic beliefs and the foundation of an organisation uniting the movement – the OSA. The OSA established the magazine Contemporary Architecture or SA as it is known in Russian. It began with the slogan ”Contemporary architecture must crystallize the new socialist way of life.”  The way Khan-Magomedov describes it, if there was going to be a repetition of the constructivist style then they at least would ensure that it adhered to the political motive behind it. Editorial meetings had a relatively fluid membership but the eldest Vesnin sat over it all.

The magazines are astonishing documents. Although utterly seductive in appearance, the text constantly interposes on the image and asserts the revolutionary social purpose of the architects work. The traditional hierarchy of the magazine page is attacked – graphics cut over images, floor plans float in white space. There is frequent use of the signature axonometric viewpoint to drawings used by Malevich, which throws the viewer over the project. Focus pieces covered industrial architecture and small studies of work in other countries, Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, Andre Lurcat in Paris. The editors used French and German on its cover lines in 1927. Captions were translated into German even earlier acknowledging the small but avid readership the publication had in the West.

Rodchenko’s contribution is obvious in the design but compared to his other work it is restrained, and the plans – loads and loads of plans – have primacy over photography or even elevations. The organisation of the magazine meanwhile is driven towards technology. In every other magazine published before or since the technical section is in the back, to sit near the advertisers of materials who are a publishers mainstay. The technical section moved in SA. In one issue in 1927, it is at the front of the magazine. Technical skills were at the vanguard of state-led architectural production.

From this perspective, the photographs at the heart of the Building the Revolution exhibition can be seen as exceptional documents of architectural ingenuity rather than art themselves. (They are also a testament to the construction workers who built them. Working seasonally with new concrete technologies as Chinese workers do today, they helped produce new forms for new types of housing which have held up well even in their disregard.) The ones that make up the bulk of the Royal Academy exhibition are not essentially documents which fixate on disregard, although that disregard is clear. We are now so used to the site of ruined modernism in contemporary art that it has become a cliché; a lame cipher that gestures to the idea of a lost utopia without really engaging with the often very specific reasons why a building has become ruined.

When filtered through the lens of the rebuilt Tatlin tower it is clear that Pare’s photographs are in fact documents not of derelict buildings but appreciations of architectural ingenuity:  the split staircases at the Narkomzem, the use of the four storey corner towers on a three storey block at the Proletariat Club; it’s a catalogue of ingenuity. Pare’s photographs were first published in his book Lost Vanguard in 2007., with a foreword by Phyllis Lambert and like the exhibition, it shows the scope of the constructivist project: The Central Post Office in Kharkov in the Ukraine. The Palace of the Press in Baku in Azerbaijan. It is a programme integral to the DNA of the CCA; reinstating a vital moment in the evolution of architecture through vigorous research, commitment and, perhaps most importantly, the use of a camera. It is Pare’s greatest achievement, next to his role in founding the photography collection of the CCA.

Of course it is right that some of these buildings are retained. Clem Cecil, the indefatigable champion of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society, has done an incredible job in convincing a new generation of wealthy oligarchs that they have a role in conserving the architecture of the Constructivists. This is the only strategy open to the conservationists and it’s a parlous one. For example, the oligarch who was supporting the Melnikov House withdrew at the first sign of the economic downturn. There are truly great works and one would hope to see some of them remain as examples of the way this group of architects practiced. However, the strongest heritage that the Constructivists offer contemporary architects is their exemplary practice.

I didn’t know Isi Metzstein as well as those who worked with and studied under him nor, of course, his family. Two days after his death now, there will be individuals he worked alongside at the Glasgow School of Art who will be remembering his insights and his put-downs – he was a master of both – in a way I never can.

Indeed I met him on only a handful of occasions in the later years of his life. I remember in passing the day I drove him around the central belt of Scotland for a design award in a mini-bus listening to him – in his mid 70s – besting John McAslan in their every exchange and giving harsh but fair criticism of the projects we saw.

However, growing into the world of architecture in Scotland in the early years of the century, the discovery of the work and teaching of Isi and his closest working partner Andy McMillan was, once unearthed, a life-changing discovery. If a German Jew who escaped on the kinder transport and a working class Scot could achieve as much as they did from evening classes and learning on the job; if they could improve not just the material culture of an often forgotten corner of Europe but in addition the quality of its critical discourse, then, well, we all needed to raise our aims.

The novelist Alasdair Gray popularised the quote, ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’; a phrase that eventually was inscribed into the wall of the Scottish Parliament. However, in architectural terms, it is the work of Metzstein and MacMillan to whom the words best apply. Like Gray they saw the world around them as it was and as it could be. Like him though they were correctives to the vague aspirational culture, which couldn’t differentiate between the two,  that dominated the late 20th century in Scotland like elsewhere in the UK.

And whilst Metzstein and MacMillan, like others of their generation, worked and studied nearly every hour they had, they were also clear about the importance of reading and debating about what they read in coffee bars as a means of furthering their understanding of architecture. Influenced hugely by the work of Alvar Aalto they learned about his work in magazines. When I hear people scoffing at the damaging effect of magazines have on the creative imagination, I always think of Metzstein and MacMillan pouring over an Aalto project in the AR in a Glasgow cafe and how an understanding of the logic at work there perhaps went into the striated brickwork of St. Bride’s in East Kilbride or the complex fenestration of Sacred Heart in Cumbernauld.  How they took from Corbusier in a book the urgent logic of the plan and applied it to a small church in Bo’ness.

These designs were unique, brilliant, Scottish but engaged in a fascinating dialogue with the work of the greats of European Modernism. Not afforded the same chances as other architects at that time to work on civic projects they got a chance with the Church and in turn turned them into civic institutions operating within the new towns of the period. Through working for a Jack Coia at Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, a man who had friend in  the Catholic Church, they were given an opportunity and they seized it with both hands.

Their masterpiece of course was St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross and visiting it in its dilapidated state was a pilgrimage for young Scots, only some of them architects. To understand how such a great building could be conceived and assembled, and then be left to crumble was a vital lesson for a whole generation. To study it changed the way you looked at architecture and a growing appreciation of of its worth created a bulwark against mediocrity and inferiority in Scottish cultural life at the beginning of this century.

Isi was reputedly a tough critic as a teacher and he may have made a few students cry. But I’m sure these students went on to realise that professional life was much harsher than a tough call on their academic work. He in turn took the harshness of the way his work was disregarded for a good two decades with equanimity and he never made much of the exacting way he learned his profession. He also urged many more on to higher and better things, making them laugh a great deal as well. His daughter Ruth found consolation in this after her father’s death. She said: ”I’m just so pleased that so many people really appreciated him and responded to his insatiable drive to stimulate and amuse.”

photograph by Jonathan Root.

What is unique about the casinos and hotels of Las Vegas is not their gaudiness of that they have stories attached to them. No, the unique thing about them is the huge difference between the story that was planned for them at the beginning and the often violent myths that define them after their short lives are over. It is almost impossible to read the famous sign for the Stardust casino as a celebration of the nuclear tests that took place in Nye County about 100km away from Vegas during the 1950s, but that’s exactly what it is.  There’s one of many about Howard Hughes, who as he slipped into insanity on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn, bought the Silver Slipper casino so he could reposition its famous neon sign so it wouldn’t keep him awake at night. Although the casinos are demolished after 20, 30 years, the stories pile up like sediment: the latest venture is always a means of viewing the ever growing history of Las Vegas. The strip may stay forever young, but the pile of stories grows higher.

The past is now to be viewed through shards of glass of CityCenter, an $8 billion, 1.8 million sq m casino resort built in just 5 years. designed by the architects of corporate America: Pelli, Viñoly, Foster, and Kohn Pederson Fox.

A panorama of CityCenter from the Strip. Daniel Libeskind’s shopping centre Crystals is in the foreground. Helmut Jahn’s Veer Towers are immediately behind

What is new about CityCenter is its claim to permanence. Helmut Jahn, architect of another tower on the site, compared the skyline of Las Vegas to a collage rather than a profile like Chicago or New York. ‘Until now, the memory of Las Vegas’ skyline was graphic; our goal was to make it architectural,’ he says. An engaging falsehood, but a new one at least.

Never has a casino resort had such grand architectural claims made for it and this comes from the top. Jim Murran, CEO of MGM Mirage, developers of the project claims he once considered a career in architecture. When it came to CityCenter, he exercised his interest. ‘I knew that world-class architects could make an experience that was meaningful and immersing,’ he said. References to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s book Learning from Las Vegas come thick and fast from the publicist, scribbled down by food and hotel writers from LA and New York. (There’s a cocktail critic around here somewhere).

When Las Vegas expanded in the 1940 and 1950s, the casinos were sheds and the hotels simple blocks. The signs became everything. Venturi and Scott Brown also predicted the coming of the building-as-sign or as we know it now, the themed hotel. Luxor along the strip is a themed Egyptian hotel in the shape of a pyramid. Even Belagio, MGM Mirage’s most luxurious and most recent building before CityCenter is still vaguely themed on 19th century Italy. CityCenter, so the argument goes, is somehow three-dimensional compared to everything that has gone before; urbanism rather than resort building.

Yet, Las Vegas is designed to bamboozle and bewilder. Here architecture is just one device to deliberately confound the judgment of the gambler. Sunlight is kept out of casino floors so you can’t tell how long you’ve been losing money. Hotel lobbies are difficult to navigate so you come up against the slot machines, black jack tables -  saggy-faced old timers losing their years savings. The casino bosses want you lost in space and time. And isn’t just the interiors that perform this trick on you.

During the 1990s the major hotel and casino complexes built along the Strip, were all themed. The Paris casino is dominated by a half-sized Eiffel tower; the Venetian by a replica of the Doge’s Palace. Inside you can ride a gondola along swimming pool blue canals. It’s fakeness reveals itself in fantastic ways.  Your safety belt strapped around you, moving slowly over, crystal clear water 1m deep, your gondolier sings Louis Prima to you. A helium balloon bounces gently against the surface of the painted sky. It is as if the hoteliers absorbed the lessons of Hunter S. Thompson and took the simple fraudulent glamour of the 1950s – the Rat Pack and so on – and added halucinogens. You don’t need to take drugs in today’s Vegas. The place has taken them for you. Las Vegas absorbs its own myths – like lysergide onto blotting paper.

So how can CityCenter be somehow more honest than what has gone before?

For a start CityCenter is not a city centre. Certainly there are small urban moments to it largely at the various access points to the Libeskind designed shopping centre called with a brilliant Las Vegas logic Crystals.

The Golden Nugget was built in 1946 in the downturn area north of the Strip. It is one of the oldest casinos in the city and feels like it

There’s a small plaza between it and the hotel Aria, which has a Henry Moore in it. Like a forgotten corner of Cincinatti. There’s also an entrance onto a raised walkway that connects to a bridge across the strip – like getting to the Metro in Dubai. But that’s about it. Everywhere else feels like a resort compound albeit a very high class one. Crystals is a stunning mall with canted cross beams dominating a undulating cave-like roof but to suggest that it provides a retail centre for Las Vegas, which according to the US Census Bureau is one of the fastest growing in the USA is ridiculous. If you thought Libeskind’s version of deconstructivism couldn’t be debased further you need to see the spotlights casting fake sunlight from angular windows in Las Vegas. To cap it all, the angular interior has to fight with the first bizarre version of green design, Las Vegas style: an angular vegetable parterre in the middle of the concourse, a double height interior treehouse in the shape – it very much appears – of a cock and balls. Dominated by top end brands, like Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Tom Ford and Versace, this is not where the two million people who call Las Vegas home are going to buy their underpants.

It is as much an expression of the casino culture as Ti  or Mandalay, albeit with a mildly self-deceiving twist. At the opening of  the new branch of Tiffany’s, we wandered into a set by Matt Goss – formerly of boy band Bros and now managed by Robin Antin, the woman who established the Pussycat Dolls. Goss, in Dean Martin style pork pie hat did some ex-Brat pack numbers and shook hands with the Brits who recognised him.

CityCenter’s novelty is to include luxury condominium blocks. The residential part of the development provides serviced apartments for wealthy out-of-towners, high rolling gamblers who visit the city several times a year. Film producers from LA. Real estate millionaires from New York. A wealthy Arab gambler bought 42 condo units for $60m back in 2006. It’s not just the economic climate that keeps the department blocks from feeling empty, it’s the fact that they will be occupied by the super-rich for short periods of time. The talk is of Arabs and the Chinese: people from countries full of glass towers. Las Vegas – you have to admire them – is commodifying . The ‘road’ through the site, is just a hotel driveway, new to Las Vegas perhaps but part of the established architectural language of luxury hotels elsewhere in America. Most deceitful of all is the People Mover, a monorail system that snakes through the plaza. It looks like a piece of pioneering transport infrastructure but it is little more than a spectacle of urbanism. Separate from any network, it takes the congenitally lazy from one side of the site to the other, without connecting into any wider system.

Excalibur casino is the soul of modern Las Vegas. Its fairytale exterior was modeled on Mad Ludwig’s castle in Bavaria. Madness on madness

So in terms of its espoused urbanistic role CityCenter is a fake – a hollow gesture to urbanism in search of the top top dollar. Jahn’s claim that it is an architectural statement in a city hitherto hooked on graphics is more interesting, if utterly disingenuous.

To suggest, that Las Vegas’s skyline is two-dimensional is wrong. Those lucky to arrive at Las Vegas at just the right time of morning, as your plane taxis passed the southern end of the strip, will see the sun will glint on the golden glazing of the Four Seasons Hotel, part of the Mandalay Bay casino complex. A tripartite tower block, it has 43 storey and 3,300 rooms but seems so much less. Gold leaf was used on its glazing. Beneath the jagged maw of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, snow covered until the mid-Spring, it looks like a delicate confection. Is it a beautiful bit of architecture? Yes, I think so. But then could that be because it’s next to a really big and stupid concrete pyramid…When you walk into that and realise that the 4,400 hotel rooms are inversely stacked around the interior of the pyramid, your whole register of architectural possibility shifts permanently. Any city that is able to commodify the Dubai skyscraper as it does at CityCenter is capable of anything.

And no one has confused things more than Steve Wynn. Like an inverse Venturi, he has co-opted high culture into the Strip. He built themed hotels and then in the last, the Belagio, hung Picasso’s in them. In 2005, as he was going blind, he closed the era of the themed hotel with the eponymous Wynn, a super-styled luxury modernist hotel. This elegant curve of a tower, in chocolate tinted glass and gold bands announced itself as a step change for Las Vegas. Venturi and Scott Brown turned their backs on Vegas in disgust at this wanton aspiration. Still, Wynn who had won over the art crowd by his assiduous purchases of Impressionist art, was stung by the architectural critics who attacked him for his pretensions. ‘You see if they don’t start building crescent shaped buildings around here now,’ he said. Wynn is still a hero around these parts. Drunk after seeing a Matt Goss set at the Palms Casino Resort, we take a taxi and gazing at the squiggle of Wynn’s signature, smudged on the rainy skyline, we facetiously wonder aloud who would win in a fight between Wynn and Donald Trump. The taxi driver takes our proposition at face value. ‘I think Wynn’s a strong guy, he could take Trump straight on, but Wynn’s got poor peripheral vision and Trump might be able to take advantage of that.’ Indeed Steve Wynn suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease which affects peripheral vision. Whoever believes Las Vegas is drenched in irony, hasn’t been.

Although it is the progeny of MGM Mirage ostensibly, the CityCenter is an extension of Steve Wynn’s model of Las Vegas glamour. Indeed much of MGM Mirage used to belong to Wynn until they bought him out in 2000. The CityCenter is a result of his thinking about the new direction of Las Vegas, a compound full of different buildings rather than a monolith. Of course there is a lot of architecture at CityCenter. It appears to be seven different structures. The Veer Towers by Jahn, rise out of the rippling aluminium roof of the shopping centre, Crystals. To the south of the site is a classic modernist hotel tower by Foster that stands apart and as yet unfinished at the very corner of the site. Due to poorly poured concrete that proved too costly to fix, MGM Mirage were forced to lop 21 floors from the top of the building. The tower is still a success: a slender volume in banded blue glass. Other projects are less successful: a bland, Viñoly-designed, (and ,yes) crescent-shaped 1500 room hotel that is articulated as three thin volumes; a 47-storey W-shaped plan hotel by KPF.

Individually the architecture, the Veer Towers aside, are pretty standard.  As part of an ensemble though the towers, playing their clever games at reducing their obvious mass, have an impact. Indeed the CityCenter is an ensemble orchestrated by one executive architect Gensler and built by one contractor Perini. Nor does it entirely lose its status as graphic design. The CityCenter provides little skyline. Like Vegas of old, it works best at night, when it looks like the photograph of a huge neon sign at the point of detonation. The skyline of Las Vegas is a collage – a predominantly graphic rather than architectural experience.

*                      *                    *

Las Vegas began to the north of the strip. The first casinos grew up on Fremont Street. Binion’s is still there. The Golden Nugget too. A short walk away to the east stands the Neon Museum’s Boneyard. A holding pen for a collection of neon signs gathered together in the 1990s as themed casinos took over from the decorated sheds. Run by a small charitable organisation put together by civic, historical minded artists, the Neon Museum set up the Boneyard in 1998 and have been slowly restoring signs and putting them back into the city’s fabric since. The Silver Slipper that so offended Howard Hughes stands just outside the yard now. Yet so many signs were lost. Rather than dismantling them before the casinos were demolished, they were detonated at the same time.

The Neon Museum though has rescued a few. There’s the signage from the Moulin Rouge, the first desegregated casino that opened in 1955 and was co-owned by boxer Joe Louis. The sign was designed by the great female neon designer Betty Lewis who also designed the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign. The casino was only open for a matter of months but during its short life Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, and Louis Armstrong performed often. Indeed the story goes that when white entertainers started going there, the casino was shut down by the Mob. The Boneyard is Las Vegas’s library and museum; one which charges thousands to people like Elton John and Tim Burton to use as a backdrop and then feeds the profit back into restoration.

This is where you will find, the Las Vegas you thought still existed before you first arrived. If feels, like a Neon Area 51, containing a whole alternative history to America. Indeed the real Area 51, a secret US military where the U-2 plane was tested and where conspiracy theorists believe the American government have stashed alien craft, can be seen from the Boneyard across the valley. Yet the Boneyard is also a repository of personal histories. Guided tours are packed with those who came to Las Vegas before the 1990s looking for memories of their visits. A couple from Fort Worth in Texas, pose in front of a sign salvaged from the wedding chapel they were married in. They are delighted to find it, delighted to find any part of the town that they recognise. Asked how they feel to have the places they remember so largely erased, they respond with quiet awe rather than regret.

Sitting in the small office in a community centre across the street, is the Neon Museum’s part-time operations manager, Danielle Kelly. She describes the CityCenter as the ‘Death Star’ and referring to the difficulty of getting in to the structure as ‘the Vatican on the Strip’. (Indeed, in an interview in Business Week, Jim Murran the CEO of MGM Mirage has also referred to the resort as the Vatican but he was referring to the metaquartzite stone flagging of the interior.) Kelly though admits that whilst she doesn’t like the CityCenter, Las Vegas as a whole needs it to be successful. Even in a city with an expanding population, working in ever diversifying industries such as tertiary education, gambling-led tourism is still the big business. CityCenter employs 12,000 people. Its failure would be catastrophic also in terms of the image of the city as a dynamic place that successfully reinvents itself.

In her book Winner Takes All – a history of contemporary Las Vegas, The Wall Street Journal columnist Christina Binkley writes: ‘Las Vegas initially had nothing going for it, except its willingness to be bulldozed. And imploded and bulldozed again into resurrection.’ For this reason, nothing is more deceptive than CityCenter’s sustainability credentials. Whilst all but one structure on the site has achieved Gold LEED certification, Las Vegas is a city, which renews itself repeatedly. The most optimistic prediction of its life is 50 years. It is likely to be less. Even the famous Dunes, where Sinatra played, only made it to 38 before it was demolished. Hilariously, the main claim to sustainability of the Beso nightclub co-owned by Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria Parker, which is part of CityCenter is that the Swarovski crystals in the chandeliers around the dance floor were made from the curtain at last years Oscars. Any theory based on the architectural devices it employs is likely to become junk just as quickly.

There is a Las Vegas beyond the Strip. There is a local life that is bubbling around the tourists and away from the strip: amazing little bars with singing barmaids, a dynamic music scene, old-fashioned pool bars were you can while away whole afternoons.

The Strip though continues to commodify everything; sex, history, politics – all for your fun, all for your entertainment. It’s like a machine that you put values into, and get pleasure out the other end. Why should late modernist tower blocks and urbanism be any different? Why should the urban spectacle of Shanghai’s skyline or Dubai’s be any different? You have to admire the bosses of CityCenter for identifying the architectural preferences of their new customers in the Far East and China: spectacular glass clad towers, throwing them through the blender and then pretending that they’ve made an urban gesture. If you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one, and the real nature of CityCenter almost disappears in its size. It isn’t the end of Las Vegas, of course. There are still mavericks in the game, still enough lunatics with frontier spirit to keep the manic energy of the Strip going, in recessions more than ever. Meanwhile the city is accruing a fascinating jumbled material history from the carnage. The days of the themed hotels such as Excalibur, New York New York are numbered. One day, in a decade or so, a miniature Eiffel Tower will be demolished or saved by a museum.

The last section of the ArcelorMittal Orbit is put in place

I want to say something about the history of the relationship between towers and the Olympic Games, leading to a few comments on the outpourings of disgust around the ArcelorMittal Orbit. It is often forgotten that this began with the Eiffel Tower.

Although Eiffel established his company to design, construct and operate the Tower for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, he gave his progeny an extensive overhaul for the 1900 event. This Exposition was of course the umbrella event for the second Olympiad, of questionable success in itself to the Olympic movement but which secured the Games as an ongoing event. According to Bertrand Lemoine,  the tower was repainted in orange-y red. Electrical flood lighting system and hydraulic elevators were installed and over one million visitors attended it. By this time, Eiffel had made a second fortune from the tower and had secured its position as a much loved object. Yet it had always been that way. Before it had been completed the Tower was derided. On Valentine’s Day in 1887 before the Eiffel Tower was completed a number of writers, including Guy de Maupassant wrote the Artists Protest an open letter complaining about the Eiffel Tower. They wrote: “in the ignored name of French taste in the threatened name of French art and history against the erection in the very heart of our capital of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower, which popular ill-feeling so often an arbiter of good sense and justice has already christened the Tower of Babel. Is the city of Paris any longer to associate itself with the outlandish mercenary fancies of a constructor of works of engineering?”  They then strove to outdo each other in description of the Tower. Leon Bloy called it “this truly tragic street lamp” whilst Paul Verlaine went for “this belfry skeleton”. “This high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders” wrote Guy Maupassant.  “This funnel shaped grille” wrote Joris-Karl Huysmans. Although the Realist tradition in literature was slowly dying, many of these writers – Verlaine aside – operated within it. The realist tradition in the novel asserts the writer as a compiler of a total artistic vision. The style of writing is exhaustive, that is, including or considering all elements. The writer has the privileged position of looking down on the city.

The final part of the construction phase at the Olympic Park, October, 2011

In his essay The Eiffel Tower, Roland Barthes explains the success of the eponymous structure in a number of ways. Barthes strips away the ways in which the Tower appeals to us the way it has been at various times through history “a symbol of Paris, of modernity, of communication, of science or of the nineteenth century.”  Rejecting Eiffel’s own insistance that the tower was useful for scientific experiments as a post-rationalisation and irrelevance, Barthes comapres the tower to “a phenomenon of nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable” . In the tower he finds a symbol at once open and totalising; operating not just on an urban level but on an international one. Quoting the famed story that Maupassant liked to lunch in the restaurant so he couldn’t see the tower, Barthes says: “this pure, virtually empty sign, is ineluctable because it means everything. In order to negate the Eiffel Tower… you must like Maupassant get up on it and so to speak identify yourself with it.” The success of the tower, according to Barthes is its uselessness. Of course the tower had one function which does not detract from Barthes point. Rather than to offend stuffy writers, a good enough reason to exist, it was also added to the exhibition site to show to visitors where the new Exposition site was – a fact that does not detract from its symbolic openness. Since then the Olympic movement has repeatedly championed that urban intervention, that useless architectural gesture, the Tower. A structure devised solely to be looked at and to look from. Something that promises a universal opportunity to constitute the city in ones own way. As time has gone by the Tower has become ever more complex as the need to innovate compels architects ever further. The Berlin Bell Tower and the Finnish Olympic Tower, both cuboid structures appended to the stadium; solid, monumental and enigmatic. The Haymarket Tower in Melbourne which was effectively a reworking of the Skylon as seen at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Most beautiful of all, and a sign that the accumulative pressure to innovate is a positive. the Olympic Memorial Tower Tokyo, slabs of concrete, piled high to create a structure that is both an accumulation of members and a distinct object in itself. Later more sculptural inventions that pushed technical possibilities beyond their limits. Both the Montreal Leaning Tower and the Montjüic Communications Tower for Barcelona were either delayed or had their original designs altered, but they both share a kind of technological primitivism. They are both made by architects appropriating the techniques of modernist sculptors: taking forms, such as the leaning tower and the spear, as symbolic on an almost mythological level and reworking them. Whilst this is a problem when architects do this with a building. Gehry’s Guggenheim at Bilbao being an example, it works with a tower, useful only in the terms Barthes describes, to look at and look from.

The top loop of the ArcelorMittal Orbit is 114.5 metres tall, making it Britain's tallest artwork.

This is partly why we are witnessing such a critical hand-wringing over the ArcerlorMittal Orbit. Here is a structure which is in the conventional architectural sense ‘useless’ and therefore outwith the usual critical strictures of architecture. Instead the tower is based on a relationship with the viewer that is largely based on ascribing a symbolic value to the structure, even if it has none itself. To suggest that the symbol is a working out the Olympic symbol, or a physical extrapolation of the torch is the same as saying it looks like a hookah pipe or a roller coaster. What is more interesting is that there is now an additional dimension to the Tower. Barthes describes the dual relationship between looking at the tower and looking from the tower at the city, reconstituting making it ones own. There is now the other dimension of time added to the Tower. This I think is best exemplified by a piece by Olly Wainwright in Domus who has genuine misgivings about the structure yet imagines a popular turn towards the tower in the future, as happened with the Eiffel Tower. As it happens I don’t agree with Wainwright’s assertion that there is universal critical revulsion at the Tower but his own feelings are clear. I think perhaps as Kosmograd has questioned: “Should we hate the ArcelorMittal Orbit just because we don’t like its provenance?” he strays a little towards his dislike of corporate sponsorship. in the way he describes the “bloated lunacy” of the structure. I am not sure that a critic can go around the world today, disliking a building on the relative morality of those that commissioned it. Indeed for once Owen Hatherley is able to separate the political origins of a structure with its aesthetics and comes down in favour of it. (Kind of.) However, I think Wainwright is telling in his final paragraph.

Strangely, the Orbit it is so wilfully grotesque that it is almost likeable. Given the lack of site access (it won’t be fully complete until next spring), all assessments have been made at arm’s length—little different to the scaleless perception of the original rendering. Given time, it may well garner a cultish following—and, providing 20 mile vistas across London and a thrilling view straight down into the stadium, no doubt enjoy the traditional volte-face in the press.

Here we have an honest appraisal of the situation: a tower which is almost designed to scramble our aesthetic sensibilities in looking at it, preparing us for the aesthetic act of reconstituting the city from a new view when we go up it. Critics who hate towers tend to be onto a loser as Wainwright acknowledges. Towers tend to be very good at their basic function: to be looked at and to look from. As Barthes also says, the tower is a journey, climbing it is the akin to the country boy coming to the city and claiming it as his own. Indeed Wainwright is the first writer, despite himself perhaps, to touch on why I don’t hate the form of the Tower. Indeed I am totally ambivalent about it.  The one problem that has occurred with the passing of time is that viewers are more wise to the game of imagining a symbolic purpose and are less likely to go along with it. In addition what we have already is only half the journey.

Axonometric of Helical Stairway part of the‘Entertainments Palace’ on the site of the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, London. Originally ‘failed’ as student final thesis project at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Michael Webb was born in Henley-on-Thames in England. Along with his fellow members of the Archigram Group, Webb has contributed more than any other British architect to the wholesale revolution in architectural drawing that took place in the 1960s. Co-opting techniques and approaches from advertising, graphic design or pop-art, Webb together with his fellow Archigramers Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Compton, Michael Webb, David Greene and the other one rethought the role of architecture, as a facilitator of modern life rather than a picturesque backdrop. He has gone on to consistently push and reconsider the manner in which architecture is presented at drawing stage. I spoke to him at the CCA where he was working on his current project. 

View of Henley Regatta from a postcard showing finishing lines and lines of perspective

You are working on a project whilst you are at the CCA that is based on a postcard with an image of Henley Regatta on it. Tell me a bit about the postcard.
I found it in November 2010 on the internet along with 500 other images of the regatta. The source was a company that markets old postcards. It’s actually the card and not a reproduction of it. And there is a message on the back that was from a young crew man to a young woman at the Blandford School for Girls. It should have been romantic but it wasn’t. I’m sure she would’ve wanted something a bit racier from him, as it were.

It’s a fascinating conflation of nostalgia and futurity. You’ve taken a rigorous set of technical approaches to perspective and sections applied to a pastoral scene of extreme Englishness.
Ah. The hats women are wearing – rounded hats with a broad brim – would suggest that it is the 1920s. But the stamp on the other side has the head of George VI on it, which would suggest it was 1936 after the abdication.

How have you addressed the image?
I am a romantic soul but strictures imposed by the Anglican church and school training make romanticism acceptable only if it is trammeled; contained within a rigorous mathematical or philosophical corset. If you happen to think of the postcard view of the regatta as an elevation rather than as a perspective then you can move things around and not violate any law of perspective. So if you move the umpires launch forward to the front of the image, it would appear much smaller because you don’t change the size when you bring it forward. So the guys rowing would look to their right and see a tiny little boat there with old men in it. I thought that image would be very funny.

A very small version of Michael Webb's current project

But then that’s not that you’ve done with the oil painting?
A suite of drawings, elegiac and interpretive in nature, that depicts the regatta course at Henley-on-Thames does not fit neatly into any known category of architectural endeavour. Though authored by an architect…me, a perusal of the suite might reveal, if anything, an interest in the more arcane areas of perspective projection.

The photographer has exposed the film at the precise moment the prow of the leading boat touches the finish line. For eternity will the winning team savour their triumph and the losers the ignominy of their defeat.

I feel irresistibly drawn along the lines of course markers to this point. I want to journey to the point of infinity. Allowing a moving point to represent my progress…is the journey to be understood as a 2D traversal of the surface of the photographic emulsion or as an incursion into the 3D space of the regatta course depicted in the photograph?

…

Daybreak by Maxfield Parrish

Is it normal for you to spend this much time on a piece?
The method by which it is painted involves a long time. I love the work of the American illustrator Maxfield Parrish. He loved to paint paintings of mainly naked asexual young people disporting themselves in some idyllic environment. In the 1920s or 1930s he was very popular and many houses in the US had a print of a particular painting he’d done which was set on a terrace with classical columns in front of a lake with mountains on the other side of the lake. So ideal. And I saw one of these in the flesh and it was full of light in beautiful gradations of colours and all without the single evidence of a brush stroke. To hell with modern art and Picasso. Maxfield Parrish is skill without invention… it is quality kitsch.

A hotrod from the 1960s. Air-brushed. Nice.

But your picture doesn’t look kitsch.
That’s because the subject matter is quite different. His would take all about a year, because you would have drying time of your oil paint to worry about. Can’t put another layer of paint on top of a layer of paint before about a week. A huge number of layers as well. In fact that’s where the beauty of it builds up, you get all these layers on top of each other.

It was a technique rather like all the crazy hot-rod artists from California in the 1960s. When they’d do a car they’d probably put on about 24 / 25 layers of paint but they’d put one layer on and they’d hand rub it. Even the finest sandpaper would be too rough, so you’d have some sort of powder, you’d rub it with a cloth and it makes the paint incredibly smooth. Then you’d put another layer of spray paint on 20 times and in the end you’d get this amazing layer. They have this depth to the colour, which is amazing: with great transparency and depth.

…

This guy Maxfield Parrish wrote about oil paints and he said you can never mix paints together. He said that if you wanted a grey and you mixed white and black you would get opacity and you would lose transparency. You get to wait a week or two to dry. The worst thing you can do is start too soon and then you start disturbing the layer beneath. Forget it if that’s happened.

Did you ever use airbrush techniques with your drawings for Archigram?
I started using airbrush and I didn’t enjoy that at all. Now some people do amazing things with it. You only have to look a those illustrated books of World War II fighters and bombers you find displayed in book stores.

I was trying to use airbrush on illustration board. I bought an airbrush and a compressor. But if you were spraying, and someone nudged you on the arm or you had a spasm, you screwed it up and there was nothing you could do about it. Airbrush is a very hair-raising experience. You don’t enjoy doing it. Unless of course you’d done so many that it becomes second nature.

What was the technique used for generally?
You could work on a small scale with the smallest ones, for jewellery and also for photo retouching. A friend of mine was teaching at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and his brother was a retoucher, using an airbrush and he was doing very well at it and from one year to the next his business was wiped out because Photoshop was invented. Think how easy it is now to take the rubber stamp tool and remove a hair from a girl’s face… And they would have had to mask it off course, go through all this rigmarole to do the same. It’s a sort of tragedy that airbrushing went though; a revolution in drawing.

Elevation of car ramp system from the Entertainments Palace

Funny that the term has entered into popular usage and yet we no longer use it…
There’s an airbrush tool on Photoshop, isn’t there? Do we still use the term to airbrush something out? We do don’t we… They were invented in the 1920s for commercial work. Archigram started using them in the late 1960s and the early 1970s after forsaking coloured overlays.

Tell me about who owns the Sin Centre pictures now.
Niall Hobhouse. He commissioned Cedric Price to do some farm buildings, knowing that it was unlikely any buildings would get built. He told me he said in desperation to Price there’s a museum in Bath, you could help me design that. Price went away and came back 5 days later saying, “Dear Niall do you realise that there are already 18 museums in Bath?” So nothing ever happened.

Entertainments Palace, Leister Square (The Sin Centre), EW Section, Michael Webb, © Archigram 1961-63

When did you finish the Sin Centre project?
I started on the Sin Centre in 1962. It was my thesis projects. But I’ve done a few drawings on it between then and now. I did a few for a show at Cornell in 1990 or maybe later. I’d done some drawings in the 70s. There are two types of artists: some I think do a project and never think about it again; others, for example Schubert when asked how he composed said, “I finish one piece and begin the next.” Brahms kept revisiting early stuff and trying to improve it. I’m like that. I can’t bear to let something go…Hence this harking back to what I’d done quite a few years back.

Why did you go back to it?
Maybe it is also vanity. I felt the initial drawings I’d done didn’t do the project justice.  They just didn’t capture it. There were ideas that I hadn’t mange to express in the drawings. So yes, the reason I kept going back to the project is vanity. Vanity and a wish to be thought of as a virtuoso; neither are particularly worthy attributes to have.

But also the models were destroyed I believe.
Yes, Model No. 1 is not around any more… Landfill somewhere near London. In bits. Not extant. Decidedly not extant.

The second model was much better; but it still wasn’t good. It was done in 1964.  That didn’t last either and could very well be occupying that same landfill as the first model. It went on view at the AA and I had little cars to scale, and some rotter pulled them off when no one was looking.

of 90 Deg. And Elevation of 270 Deg. of Circular Car Ramp, Entertainments Palace, aka Sin Centre by Michael Webb, aka a member of Archigram

What is so good about the current model?
The current model has attached to it sheets of 0.005 inch thick stainless steel. It’s called shim stock and you cut it with a special guillotine. The idea was that the sheet metal would look like an airplane wing. When I designed the Sin Palace I’d been fascinated by the precision and beauty of an aeroplane wing… the beating it took. Whenever the flaps of the spoilers deployed and how they sill managed to be perfectly down flat afterwards. By contrast when Gehry uses metal sheeting it seems merely decorative.

…

The third model has been made over a period about 15 years and it’s still not completed. And it never will be. It’s too complicated. It’s got to be the scale of Matchbox scale. It’s about 1:57, that’s the average scale of a Matchbox car, but they do vary.

What did you think of the 3D computer printing technology?
Hmmm. Mixed. The curves of the stairway had a corduroy texture you had to apply epoxy filler to get smooth. Still rough but I’m not all that impressed with the current quality of 3D printing. Given that on my model many surfaces had to be covered with epoxy. It doesn’t seem to work at small scale. There are tubes sticking to which the rest of the stairs are attached. There’s a subtle joint worthy of Conrad Wachsmann but the computer printer couldn’t handle it. I had to drill holes and insert a brass tube and attach a strut to the tube.

Konrad Wachsmann's hangar project for the USAF. You don't hear about him much anymore

Could you tell me a bit about your admiration of Wachsmann?
Yes you don’t hear too much about poor old Konrad Wachsmann anymore. Interesting guy: he started off in Europe and went to US and did a project for the US Air Force designing giant hanger to house and protect B52 bombers. The structure of theses hangers was huge: a giant space frame composed of aluminum tubes and ingenious designed joints. It was more like jewelry production than construction, so fine and delicate were the joints. Of course, a labourer, an employee of a building company or a steel fabricators, their tool of choice is a sledgehammer. When they’d hit a joint it shattered, so it was never taken seriously and it remained a beautiful model. Space frames all told are a bit of a lie. No matter what structure you use it helps that it’s thicker in the middle than the ends due to the transference of loads. Space frame doesn’t let you do that because they’re of uniform depth throughout.

An Immelman turn

Tell me about the staircases in the Sin Centre.
Probably wouldn’t work but, hey… How the escalators turn was modeled on the Immelman turn – world one fighter ace maneuver. If say an English Sopwith Pup, a biplane fighter, was following a Fokker Wolf, if the pilot of that Wolf was one Max Immelman and he’s being chased, he’d climb up and rotate as he climbed. He’d then dive repeating the same move. Lo and behold! The chap in the Sopwith Pup would suddenly see Immelman in his rear-view mirror.

What is this? 

Entertainments Palace, Leister Square (The Sin Centre), Membrane Roof, Front Elevation, M. Webb, © Archigram 1961-63

It’s a lines drawing. If you are developing a floor surface that is constantly changing angle, especially if you have a ramp in one place and a ramp going the other way so you have twisted floor plates. There is a connection and the way a lines drawing is made of a ships hull, which includes sections taken through the ships hull and at right angle to the axes of the keel and to the waterline. So you get three planes that you can work out the subtle and beautiful shape of the hull.

When was the building first published?
By Kenneth Frampton in November 63 in Architecture Design. Thank you Ken! Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui came after that.

Looking up the double-helix staircase at The Chateau Chambord in France

Where did you get the idea for the Double Helix ramp?
Of course this was about the time that Crick and Watson had developed their vision of the double helix DNA molecule, but I’m not sure if I was fully aware of that. I was familiar with the double helix staircase at the Chateau Chambord in the Loire. They beat me to the draw by about 300 years.

I note from your description of the project in your thesis the following line: “maybe the transatlantic displacement of the idea is inept, but the only time you get to do something really nutty is when you are student.” What did you mean by transatlantic?
Going to America I suppose.

How did you first get to America?
I was offered a job at Virginia teaching in 65 and I took it. That was because David Greene had gone there with the help of an intermediary Ken Doggett, and he’d gone there and they liked him and they thought if he’s like this then I must be like him, and they discovered to their chagrin that I was not like him.

Was there a natural drift towards the USA for Archigram?
All of us in Archigram were rather fascinated by America or at least that which we took to be America. America was Bucky Fuller and Wachsmann and a land of drive-in architecture, a lifestyle that involved families moving house much more than in Europe. It seemed then that America was the future and it was a bright future. I remember Churchill in one of his wartime speeches quoting a poem by Hugh Clough, ”Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth.” One of the final lines talks about light coming through western windows. Churchill used that in one of his wartime speeches, gently hinting to the US that they might want to join in the fight against Germany.

Although in a very different way, we looked to US similarly for redemption. The future was to be seen in America.

Is that still the case?
I’m afraid to say that I think the situation has been reversed. UK seems to be more modern. When you arrive at Heathrow, you can arrive and take a fast train to London. When you get to JFK, you take a train and you have to change at Jamaica station before you can do anything else.

Francois Dallegret's illustration for Banham's A Home is not a House.

What were the influences leading you to look to America?
Part of the awareness came from Reyner Banham. I read A Home is Not a House so many times I could almost quote it verbatim. I was just intrigued by this argument that when your homes contain so much gadgetry, so much wiring, for heating, ventilation ducts and so on, why have a house to hold it all up? He makes a case that the developing lifestyle of moving quickly and never spending more than 5 years as was becoming the case in the USA is better accommodated by an inflatable enclosure than a permanent house.

This was architecture appropriate to the US, far more suitable than period colonialism. He praised drive-in and talked about that a bit. It was so influential on us, I tell you. But then one realised that the mobile home is no more mobile than the ranch-style split-level. Well it could be mobile but it wasn’t. If one has pleasant fantasies about another country, one shouldn’t certainly go there and one certainly shouldn’t live there.

So why did you decide to stay in the USA?
Given my gradual realisation of who I was – that comes in ones 20s and 30s, too late perhaps for that first major mistake one makes – I decided I basically wanted to sit at home and make drawings. I hate to say it, but the US system of higher learning allows one that. I would have found it much harder in the UK rather than the US. I also felt that the others in Archigram were a bit to close. I needed a certain distance. On the other hand to share the same place producing drawings would have helped. There’s always a flip side.

How did the other Archigram-ers operate or relate to the USA?
David Green was already in Virginia Tech. Warren Chalk was teaching over here too. Ron Herron went to LA – he was at UCLA for 3 years and worked for César Pelli.

Logplug - A speculative design for service sockets for mobile and temporary living in landscape settings.

How did the reality of America influence Archigram’s work?
David Green, I think was affected by America quite deeply. If you look at his Rok-plug, Log-plug project you can really see it. If you married the motivation behind the Hudson Valley School of painters with us, you got this project. They were painting the wilderness of North America in the mid 19^th century as a means of preserving it. Sometimes you have a whiff of smoke coming up. The iron horse is racing across the landscape… If you put together that sadness about the disappearance of the natural world plus the high tech stuff we were interested in you have that project. It is the working out in drawing form of the nation that Banham had started to address in A Home Is Not a House. David’s project is a plastic log that in a rural or park situation provides an access to networks of supply pipes. That’s a direct influence of America filtered through Banham and drawn by David Green.

How about the others?
Ron was more attracted to the brashness and cockiness of the USA; what Americans like to describe as that ‘can-do’ attitude. He liked the America were you asked someone how they were, and they’d say “great” whereas in the UK they’d say “oh y’know bearing up.”

You get much more times to oneself and you are very adequately compensated. I’m also fond of US students by and large. There’s a certain enthusiasm there. I particularly like the enthusiasm of the younger students. Yet I even found the world-weariness of the older students interesting. They’d learned how to play the academic game but they still worked hard. You had a few nuts, of course, and a few hopeless cases but you have them anywhere.

Do you regret leaving in England ever?
Yes. Sometimes I regret forsaking England. I think some English émigrés feel far more English in America than they ever did at home. There’s nothing I like more that to watch public broadcasting channel and see an English program. If you want to love a country the best place is to be out of it. You remember the good things when you are away. If I want to love England then I stay in America. But I can see that is selfish. I suppose a part of me feels like I should go back and create Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

I’m still very English. I couldn’t become a US citizen, which reminds me I’ve got to renew my green card. A customs official said to me recently, “you’ve been an alien longer than I’ve been alive.”  That’s dubious again because you live in a place but you can’t participate in the governance of it.

There are some architects that are form givers, Kahn, Corbu, who create a system of form in building. We didn’t do that. What we did was to visualise the lifestyle that seemed to be developing and show an architecture that would not only stand alongside it but also enable it. Some of the most classic drawings that were done by Ron and Peter one has to say. Amazing drawings where 75 percent of the image is of a photograph of lovely young people who these days are looking jaundiced and curling up at the edges.

Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz, Raumstadt, 1959. 700 x 700 x 1350 mm. Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans, France. Photo by Philippe Magnon via Megastructures Reloaded

Then up in the corner is a space frame roof borrowed from Schultze-Fielitz in the top corner. You never hear that name much. Yona Friedman used that Space Frame idea and Konrad.

We tried to introduce it into the Montreal Tower. It was a huge tower that Archigram proposed where we borrowed Bucky’s idea but the way that the triangulation of the panels coming off the towers in a flowing form reveals the lack of understanding of the geodesic and structural implications of geodesic forms. Mind you Fuller didn’t understand it. What he says domes can do is not what they can.

How did Archigram change drawing?
If you think of the sort of drawing one was expected to do prior to the beginning of Archigram there was very little projection or experimentation in projection. If you had a figure it should be modest and there merely to indicate scale, certainly not to occupy three quarters of drawing surface. We were a breakaway but on the other hand if you look at Richard Hamilton, “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” you can see where we got the idea from. Richard Hamilton was an interesting guy. He was one of the Situationists. The Appealing picture is a collage made of magazines and it shows a very conventional, even cheap looking, living room. Bathing beauty and a muscle man posing; huge biceps and then out of the door and there’s a beautiful marble staircase leading to the floodlit cinema entrance. It is a beautiful dream-like picture. Archigram’s drawing style derives from that.

Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Why we needed it was to show an architecture appropriate to our period of time. It was an exciting period full of experimentation, bright colours, casual sex; it was the spirit of that period. That was put into those drawings – particularly those by Ron, Peter and to an extent Denis. It wasn’t really about showing new architecture it was about showing the building is in itself fun and exciting and is perhaps merely a backdrop to what is going on. The big thing is the fun times and the architecture that merely enables it but doesn’t determine it. The view of architecture prior to that was that you live according to the dictates of the building you are in. You are inventing a life and the architecture allows you to do it.

This is just the first and most obvious visual link between the small town and Ignalina, the nuclear power station that it was built to service. It stands just 8km from this town of high-rise blocks inside a ring road. When the second reactor unit was completed in 1987, the station was the most powerful in the world. A grid stretched out from it across the flat lands of the Soviet Union’s Baltic dominions; one building providing electricity to 8 million people in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia and Kaliningrad, an eastern enclave of Russia.

One of the conditions of Lithuania joining the EU in 2004 was a promise to decommission the Soviet built station and indeed the first of the massive RBMK 1500 water-cooled reactors was shut down in 2005. The process of decommissioning it though has become complex, expensive and potentially disastrous for the economic stability of teh whole regions.  In 2008, sensing a change of heart in Europe over nuclear power prompted by fear of global warming – the Lithuanian government petitioned the European Union to allow them to keep Ignalina. A hastily organised referendum showed a majority were in favour of retaining the plant, even if the 50% turnout wasn’t reached to make it binding. In December 2009 the plant stopped producing electricity.

Brigita Dauniene, Director of the Information Centre at the plant, holds out little hope. She pauses before she uses the phrase ‘so-called Chernobyl style reactor’ but she can’t help use the phrase. Every nuclear power facility is dogged by the disaster but Ignalina more than others. The twin reactors were built to produce the same 1500 MWe of power in the same way. Despite this fact, the second reactor unit came on line after Chernobyl, an event which, so the town’s people say registered little on their geiger counter. When they say they don’t have faith in their unique civic measuring device, they have good reason as to why.

Despite, the huge work that has gone into cleaning up Ignalina and a 2004 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which stated that Ignalina was as clean and as safe as any Western nuclear power station, its closure is more than likely. In Visaginas they are remarkably sanguine about the prospect of Ignalina. ‘We don’t expect much but we will see what will be the outcome,’ says Dauniene.

Visiginas exists solely because of Ignalina. It was built to service the station. An umbilical chord links the station to the town; 10km of shiny new aluminium pipes, which provides hot water free of charge to the city. As one drives from the plant into the town, the pipe vaults the road in places disappears into the woods. Somewhere through these woods lies Belarus – still in the grips of anachronistic Soviet totalitarianism. Condoleeza Rice called it “the last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe”.

Belarus shows what strange relationships are expressed by pipelines in this part of the world. The former Soviet state was brought back into a loose federation with Russia by its president Lukashenko in the 1990s. This hasn’t stopped huge disputes taking place between the two countries. In January 2007 the Russian state-owned pipeline company Transneft stopped pumping oil into the Druzhba pipeline which runs through Belarus.  According to the Russian company, Belarus was siphoning the oil off illegally. This caused consternation in Germany and Poland which relied on oil coming through the Druzhba pipeline. According to Belorussian authorities, Russia had ceased paying a transit tax for moving oil through Belarus. This had in turn been imposed after Russia doubled the price it charges Belarus for gas supplies. It was a fascinating stalemate: who actually owns a pipeline, the country who pumps stuff through it, the country who buys the stuff at the other end or the country it runs through?

This story is of course foremost in Lithuanian minds as they consider closer reliance on Russia for energy. Instead of sitting at the heart of their own energy network they are a staging post on the Russians. It’s a power dynamic that is sadly familiar to them from their days as a vassal state of Russia.

Nothing comes from the east except trouble. In Visiginas there is no need to head in that direction. Indeed it is financially beyond many as the visas are so expensive with Lukashenko retaining a Soviet style control of his borders. As such the town does not benefit from any trade with its neighbouring nation. Indeed, there is no ostensible reason for a town to be here other than the plant. What is remarkable is the fact the local inhabitants are upbeat. I meet Elena Cekiene, the town’s Director of Education ‘even with the second reactor closed we only have about 6% unemployment here,’ she says. Cekiene is organiser of their Country and Western music festival. A friend of mine who has attended the country festival in the town says it is an incredible sight. A slice of Americana in the heart of darkest Europe. The first proto-festival was held in August 24 1991 and was nearly cancelled due to the putsch a few days earlier in Moscow. As the founding organiser Virgis Stakėnas puts it, “Fortunately madmen defeated. Fortunately no one lost the will. And the festival was held.”

The festival helped Visiginas change. Indeed the festival was called Visiginas before the town was. In 1991 it was still name Snieckus after the leader of the People’s Soviet in Lithuania during the Soviet Occupation. Indeed, The town has a far higher than average percentage of Russians living in it. As Cekiene puts it many of the inhabitants over the age of 40 cannot speak Lithuania which is the only official language of government. For these fact and a memory that it was off-limits to normal citizens during the Soviet period, means that Visaginas was a pariah town, built at the same time by the same people as the power station. Despite this link Cekiene believes that the town can outlive its demise. ‘A businessman from Vilnius has opened a cement factory here and is renovating one of the tower blocks. He’s selling them for the same price as you would buy in Vilnius,’ she says.

For an outsider it is hard to imagine Visaginas existing without the nuclear power station. The imagery of nuclear power gives the place the only character it has. In front of the dreariest 10 storey blocks, climbing frames re-enact the drama of the neutron leaving the atom. The seating on the whirlyig mimics the diagram of electrons circling the nucleus.  The kindergartens and the schools of Visaginas no longer come out of the budget of the power station as was the case in Soviet times, but the link is strong. Visiginas shows how closely embedded nuclear power is into the living fabric of this country and by extension every advanced nation which uses nuclear power. We may ignore the natural disaster of a tsunami, to concentrate on a vastly exaggerated threat of a man-made one but what happens when our own fears lead us to slowly destroy a place.

Without the manic energy of the nuclear vocabulary and you have little else in Visiginas. The wider national economy is going to be less without it to and indeed Europe’s power supply as a whole is going to be lesser without nuclear power. Germany made a startling retreat from nuclear power following the limited contamination caused by Fukushima. Visiginas is a microcosm of that retreat. For the next 25 years, the town will earn some employment – at least 1000 – from the power station as decommission continues, to a point according to Dauniene, where the power station is returned to a ‘flat piece of grass.’ Regardless of whether you think nuclear energy is a long-term proposition or not, the alternative facing Lithuania is stark. They have a Soviet built reconditioned gas-powered station between Vilnius and Kaunas ready to fire up when Ignalina goes dead. The nuclear energy produced by a Soviet built power station and closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency would surely be cleaner than a gas-fired power station.

Yet the very fabric of the town to which Ignalina is linked provides reasons why we in the West would like to to do away with it. Visaginas is a monument to the double trauma caused by nuclear and Soviet power. We know that the power station was designed by NIKIET (Scientific Research and Nuclear Facility Designing Institute) a Russian organisation that still exists. We probably won’t ever know who designed the town, because archives for it were either retained by the Russians or destroyed when they departed.

According to Cekiene, the same military engineers that built the power station built the town. Where the forest start at the very edge of the town lie piles of plattenbau covered in moss. Building blocks for an expansion that never came, they now look like strange tombs. A graveyard. At the power station, the machine that retracts and adds power rods to the reactor core has the same stork painted on it that flies over the town centre. These climbing frames, express delight at the creativity of mankind but also in their manic aspects a great fear. The playgrounds represent the same atomic age dilemna as characters in Marvel comics: Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, and Dr. Octagon, although they do so inadvertenly. In these characters there is a manic energy and a warning against hubris. Science can be your downfall as well as your liberator, they say.

Yet in their dilapidated state one can see what damage there is in fearing mankind’s power too. As the climbing frames rust the whole process of decommissioning begins to unravel as well. This year, the Lithuanian energy minister Arvydas Sekmokas announced that although 60% of the money allocated to the disassembly of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant has been spent, without anything to show for it.

According to the Centre for Eastern Studies ‘Some of the storage facilities being built by [Russian-owned firm] Nukem Technologies were to be used for the needs of the new nuclear power plant which Lithuania is planning to build next to the old one. Although energy production at Ignalina has ended, the fuel must remain in the reactor because Nukem has failed to build the storage facilities which were expected to be completed 3 or 4 years ago. Nevertheless, it has been paid remuneration for the work (without imposing default penalties) as has the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development for handling the fund.”

This farce is beginning to have a serious affect. Nukem Technologies is going to asking for extra money to complete the job. Lithuania’s deputy minister of energy resigned on 6 September 2011 and the project is facing a financing gap of €1.5 billion for the second phase after 2014. Electricity has begun to rise in price. The government itself predicted a 30% increase during 2010. Reuteur’s reported in 2010 that analysts believed Lithuania’s GDP growth would contract by 1–1.5%, and increase inflation by 1%. Furthermore Lithuania will have to rely on imports from Russia, which as neighbouring Belorus has found is a sure means to be back in the old colonial powers thrall. The perceived threat of nuclear disaster is more damaging than any real disaster.

Whilst Visiginas is a fascinating product of a historic moment but together with the power station to which it is umbilically attached, it is more than a historic artefact. It is a problem that relates to the most pressing issue of our time: how we define clean power and how we provide it.  Ignalina provides electricity to 8 million homes. Will knocking it down and pretending it never existed really solve our energy problems?

What is most striking is that the apparently most ephemeral works – graphic design such as Peter Saville’s work for Factory records and Vaughn Oliver’s work for 4AD have aged far better than the models of Charles Moore or even Arata Isozaki. The mannerly appropriation of historical design tropes is as much to do with the death of the future as it with the a strategy of coping with the dominance of capital. As Diogo Seixas Lopes has identified, the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena by Aldo Rossi is an acme of this sense of dislocation with the future. The phenomenal theatrical power of the project arrives from a double melancholy – a death of an attitude to death. Rossi’s use of renaissance perspectives in his drawings for this project merely highlight the impossibility of calling that idea back into life. It is an incredibly personal vision and one which gives this exhibition its charge, but, it is also a melancholic moment. We can only pretend for a moment that we still look at the world this way.

Indeed the game Postmodernism plays with the past is more complex even than the games of quotation we know. A post-modernist project like Moore’s Piazza is an argument with an imagined version of Corbusian urban planning. Post-modernism takes no account of what Colin St. John Wilson called the Other Tradition of Modern Architecture. Only if we utterly discount the ideas of architects like Alvar Aalto can we say that post-modernist planning reintroduced the ideas of human scale, and the pre-eminence of the pedestrian. As Frederic Jameson noted the historicist turn in postmodernist literature was prefigured in architecture. It can’t be Postmodernist if it doesn’t play with the past.

And once you play with the past, what a strange unhappy land you find yourself in. This exhibition is shot through with an air of melancholy – the loss of a childhood innocence in relation to an object accounts for the odd charge that Memphis’s design artefacts still have. The sound of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman seeps through the entire installation.  The shooting of Zhora in Blade Runner becomes its most powerful moving image. Through obsessing on our own memories as the anchor of our humanity, those memories themselves become illusive. This is why the curators claim Blade Runner as a postmodernist text par excellence and initially sceptical I left convinced.  Postmodernism: Style and Subversion portrays an artistic strategy that communicated alienation as much as it did a self-awareness.

This melancholy actually works well in graphic design and music videos. That quality of popular music which as Neil Tennant makes you feel happy and sad at the same time. Postmodernism is revealed to be something rather adolescent: an awareness that one is not in control of the world’s values but is part of the world. This feeling permeates the two dimensional design work of that period. Architecture though must provide more. It must express more than a sense of detachment from the world. It can’t be the equivalent of a New Order video as wonderful as they are. It operates in constructing the future and is celebrating its own failure if it is somehow alienated. That this should actually attract designers to it as a philosophy today is an indictment of their ambition.

This exhibition also shows how architects themselves are partially to blame in creating the problems we have today. We may deride the way that he or she has lost her place within the practical system of delivering a building but then the narrative arc of this show also contains moments in which designers are clearly exchanging their role as social visionary for his 15 minutes of fame. Through architects creating design artefacts we see rising our existing system of exceptionalism – where architects are given carte blanche with grand projets but curtailed in the quotidian business of designing schools and hospitals.

There are  a whole raft of architects who still operate as modernists. They tend to be our most thoughtful designers as well. I’m probably alone but I think that OMA and that offices spin-offs such as REX operate within that modernist tradition. Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works has expressed a belief which this exhibition bears out: that Postmodernism is a blip in the trajectory of Modernism. They are aware that their architecture operates in a mediated way as well as a real one but they are more interested in the real. Indeed their architecture is a result of considering systems of architectural production as much as media representation and therefore re-asserts an idea of the real. Postmodernism’s main positive contribution was to allow structures to comment on their own history. This is fine but it isn’t radical and it doesn’t determine the direction architecture. It is far more radical today to assert ones modernity than ones postmodernity.