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.

Reyner Banham liked Park Hill. To the greatest critical champion of New Brutalism, it was ‘the biggest brutalist building ever completed’ an example of all that he had, once at least, held dear. In his book The New Brutalism, written in 1966, five years after the completion of Park Hill, he identified in the various buildings he had collected together, ‘a preoccupation with habitat, the total built envrionment that shelters man and directs his movements’. For him Park Hill was the realization of an ideal, with its ‘four 12-foot wide pedestrian promenades’ that ‘thred through the whole complex’.

Yet as architects Hawkins Brown oversee the appliciation of a new cladding to one of the most significant housing projects in Europe, one is reminded of one aspect of the building that Banham, it’s earliest and most important friend, was confused by: the facade. He wrote in his seminal book: ‘for a certain period of the design process the architects were advised by John Foresters, an abstract sculptor, but neither his nor the influence of fashion seems to have had much effect. It simply looks as though the architects had more important things on their minds than facadepatterns.’ The significance of the facade, the outward-looking aspect of this huge habitat of 1,000 apartments over 13.3ha, escaped him.

Looking at the facade of Park Hill today, as the anodised aluminium panels in lemon yellow, mustard yellow and deep orange are being applied, it is hard to understand why. Although the colours of the panels were based on the coloured brick tones which were used on the original facade, the affect on the structure is muted. Now the integrity of the structure and the rigour of the idea is highlighted. The panels emphasise the modular structure but also, in the way that they diffuse direct light, emphasise the depth of the reveal. Hawkins Brown and Studio Egret West deserve praise for executing a foray into colour in the face of some astonishingly entrenched views about its use, expressed in the architectural press at the moment.

Designed by Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn, fresh out of the Architectural Association, for city architect Jack Wormsley, Park Hill’s significance outstrips the surviving work of the pair’s teachers, the Smithsons. Smith and Lynn’s radical interpretation of the ‘streets in the sky’ concept, marked a watershed moment in the progress of modernist architecture. Banham believed that the bridges kept the project ‘humanly comprehensible’. Ingeniously, the four rows exploit the steep grade of the site and allow ground-level access at the  southernmost ends. In addition, Smith and Lynn’s programme for creating three different types of apartment above, below and adjacent to the deck level forever changed the potential for mass-housing to suit the full range of home-owners from single pensioners to families of six or more.

These were created solely by the use of a programmatic plan. As Lynn wrote at the time: ‘the elevations were not “composed” in the usual sense and indeed were never drawn. 1:500 scale floor plans indicated the distribution of the various house types within the structure.’ In addition, Park Hill introduced to the UK important technical innovations in district heating and modular construction systems. The building, which maintains a datum at roof level, begins at four storeys in the south and reaches 13 storeys at the northern end. It is as dramatic a piece of housing as you will find anywere in the world.

Park Hill, though, fell into spectacular, almost  willful disrepair. In her 2007 book Estates, Lynsey Hanley, a huge critic of modernist housing, acknowledges that the termination of the steel industry in Sheffield was the main cause of Park Hill’s demise. The southernmost block, the highest, was particularly used as a sink estate, housing anyone the city authorities deemed as undesirable. The building wasn’t maintained and suffered from neglect. Hanley’s suggestion, however that the ‘streets in the skies’ provided ‘easy escape routes for muggers’ is hard to accept. (Our cities are full of potential escape routes for muggers. They are called roads.)

Hanley’s book highlights the contempt in which modernist housing is still held. Her own experiences of living in them were negative. However, Park Hill, which had only 1,500 inhabitants before refurbishment began, was initially a great success. ‘When the gales hit Sheffield in February 1962 the Lord Mayor launched an appeal fund for the homeless and the first cheque he received was from the Park Hill Tenants’ Association for £250,’ wrote Lynn in 1962. Despite the below-average tenant transfer rate it proved impossible to maintain the semblance of a successful social model beyond the first 20 years. The building was dubbed San Quentin by locals. Those who would see it appropriated for the people it was built for fail to understand the amount of work required just to make the city-side sections properly habitable again. Indeed the fact that the low-rise sections to the south are still inhabited and are successful developments, would appear to suggest that high-rise living is not the best form of communal living.

The listing of the building in 1998 was an acknowledgement of the architectural significance of Park Hill and was strongly resisted at the time by the Council who wanted it to be knocked down. On the other hand, those who would see Park Hill preserved in aspic, cried foul. ‘The ideologies of regeneration and heritage, when applied to the very different ethics of New Brutalism, can only destroy the thing they claim to love,’ wrote Owen Hatherley about the estate, apparently unaware of the contradiction in what he was saying. His alternatives aren’t clear although he has suggested squatting it.

Between these two extremes, the rest of us live. In 2003, in conjunction with English Partnerships (the national regeneration agency), the City Council began to put together a vision for the future of the estate, which was to transform Park Hill from sink estate to mixed-tenure, mixed-use. Surveys commissioned at the time showed the need for a reduction in Council-rented units on the estate. The partners proposed a split in the number of units to one-third social rented, one-third market sale and one-third commercial space.

Most of the funding will come from Urban Splash as the developer. However, Transform South Yorkshire, the Government’s Housing Market Renewal Agency is providing £13m to cover enabling costs, including home loss payments to residents, security and the demolition of nonlisted buildings.

The Homes and Communities Agency is providing £14m for gap funding and £10m to provide 200 units for rent and 40 for shared ownership. Parkway Housing (MMHG) will also contribute £10m to this. English Heritage is providing £500,000 for specialist concrete repairs. Urban Splash has been protected from the worst dangers of development and should make a good profit on the building. But then, given that they made a loss between April 2008 and March 2010 of £48.6m, they will need to.

Fortunately for them, Hawkins Brown and Studio Egret West have successfully retained the architectural integrity of this structure but also made it appealing to a sceptical public. Remember: this was one of 12 buildings voted for on the Channel 4 series Demolition in 2005. The façade treatments are particularly successful. Greg Moss, the project architect for Hawkins Brown explains: ‘our premise was to invert the proportion of brick work to glazing. On the old facade it is two-thirds brick, and one-third glazing. We’ve flipped it on the ew elevation, so basically all the bedrooms get far more and better northern light and go from being quite dingy to actually quite generous.’ It is also a bold graphic reinvention of the facade. The sheer cliff face of grey that used to loom over Sheffield has now been punctured with colour. The reconditioned concrete structure benefits from having completely different material adjacent to it.

The streets in the sky have been altered as well, although not radically. As Moss puts it: ‘the analogy of the street in the sky is lost somewhat, it’s not like a proper street.’ Indeed, the ceiling is only 2.3m high, from finished floor to soffit. The New Brutalists took Le Corbusier’s rue intérieure and tried to make it less cramped and crowded by running along the perimeter of the building. But the ‘rue extérieure’, certainly the ones at Park Hill, suffered the same problem as the rue interieure. Lynn, identified the way Corbusian modernism created an ‘indoor no man’s land’ but he was not fully successful in dealing with it.

Due to the lack of windows on to them, the wide passageways never became real streets. With a low ceiling height they still felt cramped. In his early visits to the building, Lynn noted with pleasure that they had been appropriated by the building’s tenants. This, however, did not continue. To break the severe relationship between public and private spaces, Hawkins Brown and Studio Egret West have extended the boundary of the apartments outwards, creating semi-public vestibules.

Far from being obstructive as Hanley suggests, English Heritage has worked closely with the architects. Asked if there was anything that the architects tried to change but were told they couldn’t, Moss says: ‘there is one element that we were quite adamant about which was the balustrades. At one point they said we had gone a step too far, and I think we probably had.’ As it is, the old baulstrades have been replaced with reinforced concrete ones. ‘It’s really interesting drawing it, because you make one move, and then its played out a few hundred times. It’s an interesting process, because we made what we thought were quite subtle changes, but then realised that they have a massive effect on the elevation,’ says Moss.

Even though he admired the architectural honesty of the building, Banham failed, possibly deliberately, to appreciate the aesthetic rigour of this elevation. Banham wanted more than style. He wanted revolution. ‘For all its brave talk of an ethic not an aesthetic, Brutalism never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of reference. For a short period around 1953-1955 it looked as if an other architecture might indeed emerge, entirely free of the professional preconceptions and prejudices that have encrusted architecture since it became “an art”,’ he wrote.

Even in 1966 Banham could see how the ethic and aesthetic unity of Brutalism had fallen away. Five years after Park Hill was completed he could see that they were actually in conflict. Banham would have perhaps prefered it if the structure had been demolished rather than become an Urban Splash development. Park Hill after all came to stand as a monument to how poorly Britain lived up to the total social vision, which had led to its creation. If you knock this monument down, both critics and fans of the building could then pretend the whole episode never happened.

Mixed-tenure, though, is certainly better than no tenure at all and those that set themselves against it do so are doing so not for architectural reasons but simply to score an unworkable political point. Indeed the most successful estates, including the one I live on in London are mixed. Furthermore it is also heartening to see a great building being brought dramatically back to life. The streets in the sky concept will undergo a new and fairer test with the building no longer being expected to house all of Sheffield’s problems. Idealism might create another Park Hill but only pragmatism and a good eye will save this one .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is something disquieting about looking at a series of plates with similar images of the Library of Congress in Washington DC on them. It is not altogether clear where they are simply mementoes purchased in a souvenir shop or if they are smaller limited editions, gifts to privileged users or friends of the library. Perhaps it was to make the former feel like the latter. Representative of the collection as a whole, the plates shown here depict the library in isolation, representing it in a time before neighboring buildings were built or simply blurring them out. In an attempt to help me explain them, the CCA’s Head of Collection Reference Renata Gutman found an essay by Dale Allen Gyure The Heart of the University: A History of the Library as an Architectural Symbol of American Higher Education Winterthur Portfolio 42 (Summer/Autumn 2008) on the role of the library in American campuses.

Allen Gyure’s thesis – which focuses mainly on university libraries – has strange implications for libraries in the electronic age. He describes the tertiary educational system in the USA in the early part of the 19^th century as being emphatically based on learning by rote. Examining a Yale report of 1828, he writes: “implicit in the report was the remarkable reasoning that single text with recitations is superior to the use of the library.” Apart from one stunning exception at the University of Virginia, designed in part by Thomas Jefferson, university libraries at this time where above or adjacent to university chapels. They were infrequently open for lending and were usually small.

Gyure’s suggests that the turning point in the architecture of university libraries was when in 1882 the Harvard Board of Overseers changed the universities motto from Christo et Ecclesiae to Veritas. It is this moment when seeking rather than repeating becomes the dominant mode of learning. Expressed in architectural terms, Gyure says, from this date university libraries become central to campus planning, and finally, some years after Jefferson’s death , began to live up to his vision of learning by giving libraries central or dominating positions within campus plans.

Replacing chapels and central administration as the heart of the university, the library was elevated to a quasi-religious status. Today, in an era when the institutional parameters of a lending library are being questioned, this has a charge. Here is the library as temple, the library as a closed institution containing knowledge. And this is what makes these plates so strange and so powerful. Certainly, the Library of Congress has a specific power: founded as it is on Jefferson’s personal library, sold to the US government after the British destroyed the original library in 1812. But the sanctity of the institution typified a general feeling about libraries, while an image of it reproduced on a plate today prompts a sense of unease.

An essay by Karen Coyle explains the growing anxiety about electronic information and the library. She explains that:

“In the electronic age rather than owing a unit of information … the library typically leases access to information. The use of leased information is governed not by copyright law but by the contract with the individual information provider.”

The liberation of information from the physical realm creates an anxiety for the institution of the library. How does it monitor usage? Disseminate information? Is it in fact obsolete?

In the UK this sense of insecurity about libraries has been exacerbated by budgetary concerns. As local authorities in the UK are forced to contemplate library closures due to the cuts by a conservative-led government, we are trying to express exactly what it is that makes a library so special.

Alan Bennett writing in the LRB describes it thus:

“I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled.”

The library as repository of learning and literary success can be a daunting place for a young man. Bennett allows us to see how this relates to himself a working class boy at Oxford in the 1950s. He describes walking across a square which is surrounded by libraries and has one the Radcliffe Camera sitting in the middle: “crossing it on a moonlit winter’s night lifted the heart, though that was often the trouble with Oxford, the architecture out-soared one’s feelings.”

And yet a hard won familiarity with libraries – the blessings they offered – Bennett implies made him who he is. His chance to read Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine to find a place to study without being bothered in his small family home, permitted him to explore the libraries of his youth in the face of the frightening admonitions of the ex-World War one servicemen and the stifling air of reverence in these places, designed above all to speak of civic pride.

Philip Larkin, a writer with whom Alan Bennett shared a great deal though Larkin was a poet and Bennett a dramatist and short-fiction writer, shared an even more extreme ambivalence with libraries. In a recent essay, the British architecture critic Hugh Pearman notes that during Larkin’s most productive years he was, in fact, building two libraries as part of his position as chief librarian at Hull University. Pearman notes that Larkin felt resentful towards his day-job for interfering with his literary endeavors. “Why should I let the toad work / squat on my life?”  he had written in his poem, Toads in 1954

Yet as Pearman details in his excellent study, Larkin was a hard working, conscientious librarian, and by the end a standout client. Castle, Park, Dean and Hook, the firm of architects who built the second library, were impressed. According to Geoff Hook, who is quoted in a biography by Andrew Motion, Pearman was a perfect client representative:

“He was able to by-pass obstacles by operating person to person. He knew it was a seat of the pants job and therefore went straight to the heart of the matter, whatever it was. It was an extraordinary talent— if he’d been planning London Airport it would have been the same.”

What would a poet’s airport look like? Surprisingly prosaic I would imagine. According to Pearman, the second phase of Hull University – a poet’s library – is “a defiantly strange eight storey crinkle – cut tile and plate glass lump.” Larkin was apparently more interested in housing a million books and calculating student-to-seat ratios. He didn’t seem to mind the overt brutalism of Castle, Park, Dean and Hook’s design that proclaims in its own machine-age way the importance of reading.

But then a library isn’t the same as reading or writing. Whilst he spent 14 years planning and building libraries, Larkin was also working on his best poetry. As Pearman notes: “it seems that the years of overwork building his libraries, far from holding him back, gave him the necessary impetus to write what he had to write.”  We need to bear this in mind as we consider the new generation of libraries, which will be architecturally at least quite different, even from Larkin’s libraries in Hull. Perhaps rather inadvertently, buildings like these became monuments to reading as an act of intellectual production, daunting in its own way. In the haphazard plan of British universities, Brutalism provided a means for the library to become an institution, a great keep of learning.

Of course, the re-thinking of libraries is not simply spatial. The rethinking of copyright law is now fundamental to the existence of libraries. Coyle wonders whether libraries could print out copies to lend to users, thereby retaining physical ownership of the information rather than acting as kind of leasing agent to the reader. This she acknowledges would not work for high demand items or long reports: “It doesn’t make sense to return printing to a cottage industry, taking place in libraries and homes.”  I would say that just because mass dissemination has a local point of distribution this doesn’t mean it is a cottage industry. A post office – another institution under attack in the UK – may be a local facility, but it is also a place were sophisticated methods of international financial and information exchange finally meet the end user. These two institutions could become one.

I think that the death of print is greatly exaggerated and that libraries may become localized free-to-print points with an area for reading on-site. Old libraries will retain their use. Newer libraries will express their role as sites of exchange rather than temples of learning. This process is already underway and explains why even librarians are slightly bemused by the librariana of Norman D. Stevens. Although they are only a couple of decades old they already feel like relics from a more deferential era. Personally I can live with libraries taking another step away from their 19^th century role as secular temples in order to become places were people gather information and in a room or two adjacent, quietly read. Were it not for their stupid name, the Idea Stores by David Adjaye in East London would be a good model. And indeed the Seattle Public Library is this on a grand urban scale married with a provision for much needed public space.

The stumbling block of course is copyright. Coyle’s other suggestion that copyright laws be developed in relation to the author rather than the publisher could radicalize the relationship between reader and writer, with libraries, if anything, gaining greater significance than they have now, becoming sites were books are printed not as a record of what has been published but what has been read. They will be staffed by those rare people who have the ability to help people find the information they want even if those people don’t know what they are looking for exactly.

Thanks to Renata Gutman for her help with this post.