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.

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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.

What is non-linearity? 
Non-linearity is where my work has been for the last 20 years. It’s been there since 91 when I stated in a lecture in Berlin in 1991 that the informal was a subject. So there’s that area of non-linear. Then there’s The Nonlinear Systems Organization at Penn Design, which I set up in my professorship as the Paul Philippe Cret Practice Professor of Architecture

You were working in a world in which post-modernism held sway. Did your ideas about non-linearity develop in opposition to that?
In the mid-1980s I suppose I felt caught in a trap of a stylised or minimum efficiency model that was running through planning. Architects would draw squares and the site boundary and everything would be reduced within it.  It felt like a very reductive system. It didn’t seem to be a profound design system, it seemed to be formulaic. My task in those days was to answer the architects question ‘where do the columns go?’ I started rebelling against that question. All you do is put in some columns and then another formula comes up about lengths and breadth. It was formulaic.

Did you look to the natural world for influence?
No, I started going back to study – I don’t know why I even thought about it – to read the fundamentals of architecture, so I went back to Vetruvius and to the Greek models and Pythagorean models and what I found there was an entire richness of invention: when it all began. 10,000 years ago. There was a very lively system of proportion. It wasn’t just a case of ‘I’ll put the Parthenon there’. There was a whole proportionate system at work with refinements ultimately but essentially in the guts of it, I found that all sacred architecture was given to certain specific systems of thought. And it made me think what is a modern system of thought? Of course I knew the classical one because we’ve inherited it. I thought that here was geometry as a system. This was what the Greeks had. It was very real for them. Buildings were frozen proportions. That was the way I was practising it and that was the way the people I was working with were practising it. It seemed that it had died somehow. It was now no more. It was now some formulaic system. So I posed questions to myself: ‘what is a contemporary method of looking at similar ideas?’

And what was your answer?
This question took me into algorithms as a new concept. That there could be something where you would start with a local concern only and then move on to compile and that somehow from this process which was completely a reverse to drawing a boundary and then cutting in. this was starting from inside and going outwards to end up somewhere. It seemed a totally different process. It was exciting and it gave me totally different results that looked sensible. That was surprising itself. But also interesting were the spatial effects. That was interesting to me.

Front of the Neue Staatgalerie Stuttgart, 1984. Concept by the British Architect James Stirling

Which projects help you develop these ideas?
I had done it subconsciously at the Neue Staatgalerie in Stutgart with James Stirling collaborating with him, very much led by him. But the famous ice-cream columns on that project came in through debates. Looking back I could see that I was moving my ideas on the subject– that was 1978 – but I didn’t realise that it was labeled. The first real reference for the thinking in practical terms was the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam with Koolhaas. He was a tabula rasa man at the time. He really didn’t want to go down the root of traditional architecture. So he was looking and I was looking and we came together. We were looking for animations, inventions, different ways of how to build. He was looking for more from an urban context and I was looking more from a spatial context. And so it was a happy meeting point.  The Kunsthalle was the first exemplar of how four parts of a building can have completely different systems.

If you walk round the building you can see that structurally there are four different solutions, which is not something you would do on a small building, 60m x 60m plan area. We tried to have a kind of system which could govern every single space and every time I tried to iron out conflicts that came from spatial arrangements – big rooms coming next to small room – it wouldn’t work. What do you do? In the early days I would try to have a system that governed all parts. Simply put, I let that rigidity go and I looked at everything on its own and said what works here? and what works here? If I transit from here to there – then what’s right? In the end a local language grew. It was a very successful project. I had no algorithms as such, but I was already beginning to animate, to make geometric animations in order to make space.

Fundamentally the difference between non-linear work and traditional work is traditional work spaces the gap. Every architect, every design starts here and then thinks about the next thing. You look at a room and then think where does the next one go. It’s about taking space as an empty vessel and putting things into it.

The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, which opened its doors in 1992

If you are not filling the space what are you doing?
I start somewhere and then I compile the next interval in that process I can chose right angles but the way the vertical would come in relation to the horizontal I believe would be more interesting in a school in a hospital, if I did it my way.

Through the 80s I would work with sketches and model but the late 90s I was working sketch and computer print out and by early 2003 I was working with sketch, computer print-out and 3D prototype. Physical models had dropped away, they were still important but in holistic work – because another part of non-linear work is that you are taking the whole spatial effect in one go. You are not taking parts and putting them together which is the case within reductive processes, if you put the parts together, you can pull them out into parts, hence your focus is only on the small parts. Technically a building is solved – you take a section, you spend hours making the floor work and then you extrude the section and repeat it – so it’s cut and paste methods really. More non-linear methods don’t allow you to do that. It has it’s problems of functionalities and things but so does any process, it’s just how do you master them.

How important is the natural world to your work?
Today, I sat out in my garden for 30 minutes and heard the bird sing and looked up at the trees. And I was quite refreshed. It is because when you look at the cloudscape or the trees there is a certain uniformity – the trees look like trees, in one way – all green in the forest – but there is this variation when you walk through the forest. Similarity and variation. Nature is much more varied than we can make buildings. But there is an element in that story that buildings that have some variation – a controlled variation – not random – within a uniformity.

H_edge consists of around 6000 aluminium plates. Shown as part of the Element exhibition in Tokyo

People think when I called my show Element it was about nature, but I mean Element to refer to OUR nature. I think you create your own logic depending on what you are trying to do.  The bridge in Coimbra in Portugal – had I thought about any pre-context – I went there and looked at the river and I had to see the mayor and I knew the budget was absolutely minimal and I thought what can you do? You can’t do any fancy stuff with cables. I just sat there and thought about the river and thought about being here and going there and what would I do. Me. Personally. That place. From that comes an answer. The same thing happened in Philadelphia when the university asked me to do the footbridge across the railway tracks. Out of that logic of crossing and moving – came a certain narrative. So I came up with an idea of certain traces on the landscape, which became a tectonic and like a good novel 2/3 of the way through there was a crisis – and this thing emerged and wrapped itself around and then unwrapped and that was the denouement and I presented it like a novel. And it won favour with the Trustees.

When I saw it built – I couldn’t believe I had designed that bridge and Coimbra because they are worlds apart. One has a romantic nature a certain extravagance – it bakes in the sun and sparkles like jewels. And the other one in Philadelphia is hard-bitten, industrial and over the railway but they are both – one is a short journey of 45m and the other is 200m – but if you do the journey – you change your narrative.

The Coimbra Footbridge over the Mondego River near Coimbra in Portugal.

How has the establishment of the Nonlinear Systems Organization at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design helped you? What type of research organization is it?
I took up the Paul Philipe Cret Chair on the East coast of America. The most famous incumbent was Louis Kahn. He was there for 15 years. The person there before him was Le Ricolet – a theoretician – then it was Khan and then Joseph Rickwert. I’d already come to Penn – first thing I did 5 years ago was give lectures, in the physics, chemistry and biology department, cognitive science. No one from the architecture department had ever done that. That opened up thinking.  Then I formed the NSO having talked to the dean. I said why don’t we have some research here where the belief is that architecture needs more rigour – going back to the Greeks when there was rigour – and sciences have that as a given. Working along with scientific ideas will help. Also – and this was more of a gamble, maybe science can learn something from the synthesis that architects bring.

The Weave Bridge. A dramatic new bridge that links The University of Pennsylvania with its sports recreation ground

Before we talk about the ArcelorMittal Orbit, I wanted to talk about another project with Annish Kapoor. Together you have already completed one of the largest public arts projects in Britain called Temonos. What is it?
Temonos is one of five pieces in north-east England called the Teesside Giants. The idea was probably initiated four years ago. There were four or five big sites for urban regeneration: Darlington, Middlehaven, Middlesborough and Redcar. There were already master plans – huge ones – for schools and houses and developers were already in play. Each of them would bring attention to the region. And so the first was a bridge that was in Middlehaven. We were trying to get that ready for the Tall Ships race which ends there next year but that didn’t quite happen. So the next one that came up was the one in Middlesbrough, which we are working on now. The idea is still to go through with five sites, developing public art pieces for each of them over 15 years. If it completes it will be the biggest public art project in the UK, in terms of scope.

Temenos is a very strange piece in a way. It looks a bit like Marsyas, [the piece that Anish Kapoor and Balmond produced in the Tate Modern]. It’s an armature but it is also two rings raised into space – one elliptical and one circular. One is supported on a plinth and another one is hung from a mast. Soon on the Teesside skyline, you’ll find a circle hanging in space and a line juxtaposed against a circle and then you’ll see another circle 100m away. Only when you come close will you realize that they are connected by a wire.

How is it made?
The steel net starts at the rings – each cable is fixed 2.5m apart around the ring. The hoops, which keep the cables in place are about two or three metres away. The idea is that no one can climb on them. Middlesbrough Football Club stadium is nearby. You know after a match everyone will be challenged to climb that thing. We took a lot of care with health and safety, about not putting temptation in people’s way. Mind you, if someone wants to get there, they’re going to get there…

A rendering showing the Temenos project in Middlesbrough

In the middle of the piece the cables are close together. And so the cable net looks like a solid material in the middle but then it vanishes near to the rings. If you look at it obliquely it takes material shape; if you look at it square on – it’s whatever you see. When there’s rain on it and light catching it, it’s iridescent. It will play with the seasons and it will play with light.

Are the Teesside Giants designed to be a series?
There was a brief that they wanted some kind of single idea, but manifested differently because none of the mayors wanted anything that looked like what would be in the other towns. In the end it doesn’t have to come from one root idea. It would be nice but it doesn’t have to. I think the logic of the site will dictate that in a way. Teesside has a big engineering background. It’s a rugged landscape a massive horizontal landscape. Full of gantry cranes. I think they fit the tradition of the area. But they are art pieces as well.

Temonos under construction on Teesside.

When did you meet Anish Kapoor?
He phoned me up when he was awarded the Tate commission in early 2002. It was a big space and he’d only done studio work. He talked to some friends and someone said “you should work with Cecil” and we hit it off straight way. I liked the way he was thinking. We really are collaborators. Of course he gets more of the press because he is a famous artist. I liked the way he was always looking for something deeper in the form. Something intangible. I do that as well.

Tell us about Marsyas, the piece you made together for the Tate’s Turbine Hall.

At 140m, it spanned the entire length of the hall. It was 45m high and it was just 1mm of fabric. I’d never done a fabric structure before and I didn’t want to have the usual language of fabric, which you see all over – lots of wires holding the fabric up. You feel the tension pulling it. I wanted the fabric to be everything, so that you don’t see anything: look, no hands!

Marsyas in the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern in 2002. Balmond’s first collaboration with Anish Kapoor

How important was it for you both?
With Marsyas; artists wrote about it as a great piece of art, architects thought of it as a great piece of architecture and the structural people said “my God how was that done?” In the end it transcends our own boundaries. Anish was working in small forms as a sculptor, working with smoothness. I was working with building frames and the logic of programmes. In the end, I think, it is beyond our disciplines.

It’s a crucible of invention. It’s a little research product. I have very few collaborators: I have Anish in the art world; then there’s Toyo Ito with whom I worked on theSerpentine Pavilion – a lovely subtle mind at work. And Rem Koolhaas – a Western product, a dynamo of invention, a very interesting mind.

How has it been working within the Olympics site?
Interesting. There’s a lot of politics. It’s a hugely risk-averse culture. People want to be sure it can happen and it will be built in time for the money we say it will be. So we have worked with a contractor in a consortium to try and make sure it can be done on time and within budget. We are applying for planning consent soon. We have done quite a bit of work on it to make sure it goes through all these bureaucratic gates; it wouldn’t have been announced otherwise. The Mayor can’t afford to announce something that wouldn’t happen. It’s also interesting having a sponsor. It’s the old way of working, having a patron. This time it is Mittal Steel. That’s not why we used steel actually. For a 200m-high structure on a minimum budget, you have to use steel.

A model of ArcelorMittal Orbit

What will it be like to visit?
It’s not just a tower to go up and have a look at London, although there are observations decks and eating facilities up there. We are trying to make it as good an experience as you can have – to go up through the piece. We are working on the feeling of entering it. It’s more than the object. It’s the experience of going there to get to the top. We’ll be on site in two months, so that’s what we are working on now: the little things that make all the difference.

Do you think it’s significant that the sponsor, the engineer and the artist are all from the Indian subcontinent?
It never occurred to me that we all had Asian roots. I’m a British citizen. I’ve been here for 40 years. Anish similarly. He went to school in India briefly but moved to London and I graduated here. It could’ve been another sponsor, it’s just the way it happened. I didn’t think about it until just before the press conference and I suddenly thought there will be a picture of three of us, grinning away.

That’s the beauty of Britain. It has assimilated us so completely. I feel at home here. Anish too. I’ve been tempted many times to move abroad in my career. People have tried to get me to go to other places. My wife’s American but I think this invention – British engineering, British architecture, British art – is very strong. I’m thrilled to be working in London for once. I’ve done all my work abroad – the concert halls, the bridges, everything – and it’s really nice to work in England again. I did a lot of work here in the Seventies but not really in the last 20 years.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Lakshmi Mittal - main sponsor of the structure, Anish Kapoor and at the far right Cecil Balmond

Why did you leave Sri Lanka?
I left because there were ethnic problems and my father was the wrong kind of mix. He was mixed race and Christian: part of the privileged minority that the British handed over to in 1948. My great-great grandfather was English. The Balmond name comes from Somerset. I did a genealogy search and there are hundreds of Balmond’s buried around Tiverton. My father went out with the railways in the mid-19th century and intermarried. And that’s why we are not pure race. As nationalism grew, those people were put under pressure: why were they privileged? Because they spoke good English. English is my mother tongue as Singhalese is. We spoke English at home but Singhalese elsewhere.

I was in university in Sri Lanka and I thought I needed to move so I went to Africa. I did half a degree in chemistry and mathematics in Nigeria. The most insightful teacher I ever had in mathematics was a Senegalese professor there. It was a crazy serendipitous thing. I was very lucky. My teachers in maths were always very gifted. I had a beautiful Indian teach me maths when I was younger.

When did you first come to Britain?
I came to Britain in 1963 and realised that I really wanted to go and work in Africa. I did my degree here and went back to Africa promptly, did three years there and then the Biafran War happened so I came back and joined Arup here, and did some postgraduate work at Imperial College.

What was Nigeria like?
It was a fantastic time to be in Nigeria. I had a real cultural awakening there. I grew up in an a very refined Asian culture – which is 3,000 years old. Nigeria was raw, powerful, drumming. It was the perfect age to be there. It was a great time in my life and I’ve kept my friends from then. It’s a shame it got so crazy there.

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.

London’s design scene has been dominated by designers working with craft techniques such as knitting. This has led to a kind of fetishisation of the handmade, a strange pre-reccession moment when the market for one-off handmade design bizarrely fed into a belief amongst young designers that they could somehow knit their way to providing to society’s needs. As long as we are a society we will have mass manufacturing. There is however room for some adaptation of this phenomena. In his book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett compared the open source world of Linux favourably with the world of Fordian manufacturing and posited it as an alternative model.

Unbeknownst to Sennett individuals in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands have been copying that very Linux model of development, by planning and building structures and furniture using an agreed set of modules. Open Structures  is perhaps the best but other more established people like Droog are thinking along these lines too. The idea is that with a basic grid of 60cm x 60cm to be built upon and a 4cm x 4cm grid for structural supports or members.  

Open Structures website shows that a number of mutually compatible design components, brackets, plates, wheel joints and structural frames have been created by an ever widening group of designers. These can then be used to create larger objects. The idea is rather than using modules created hierarchically these are created using a network. I spoke to one of the projects devisers and champions, Thomas Lommee.

How did the idea for Open Structure emerge?
I was working on a project called World House, which looked into how we can construct in a more cyclical way. Thinking of objects not as static objects but adaptable. This moved on to thinking about how could systems thinking help this cyclical society. That’s actually where the open source idea emerged from. The main intention of the whole project about how could we construct in a more cyclical way so that we don’t design and produce things that we don’t conceive them as static objects, but in fact as dynamic puzzles. I began researching modularity. You see modular systems in a hiericarchical society, of course, but I wondered how would they work in a networked sociey. I saw that if you look on the internet, that’s where open modular thinking is already taking place. Wikipedia does it with knowledge and Linux does it with coding. If you look at the Wikipedia logo, that’s a puzzle, everyone adds a piece, it could be interesting to apply this to construction. I wondered whether you could design a script or a code (a kind of shared DNA for our built environment) for products and that’s how I came to this kind of grid that you try to share.

What was your main objective?
The main objective was how to design in a more sustainable way and that led to thinking  about modularity and then that led to thinking about what modularity means in today’s world which is not a hierarchical society but a network society.  It’s a logical condsequence of what is already happening today.

How did you make the practical decision about the size of the grid?
If you are going to build a grid you are going to have to think about the dimensions of that grid. What is it going to be inches or cm? And if it is centimetres is it going to be four or five centimetres. Before I made that decision I  measured everything I could find. I wanted to build on exisitng standards so that as a user could use modules from the past as well as the future. I found that one standard that reoccurs is the square of 60cm x 60cm that is frequently used in kitchen but also in transport. If you look at what, logistical infrastucture uses the pallette is generally 120cm x 80cm. More often than not the cardboard box is 60cm x 40cm so they can fit on a pallete. This expands up to the size of the container and ultimately the ship (at a certain point I even researched if there would be a relation between the dimensions of a sugarcane and a containership .. something like a giant babushka where one always fits perfectly into the next). So if you divide that 60cm x 60cm grid down by 15 you get 4cm x 4cm.

What impact did this decision have for the practicalities of furniture design and manufacture?
This was perfect for construction of furniture because it wasn’t too small and it wasn’t too big. If the unit becomes too small the options become too random and if the unit becomes too big the options become limited. Through experiementation I found that 4cm x 4cm was a good unit. You can also divide it by two easily. 4x4cm is a good dimenion if you want to make funiture in wood but 2cm x 2cm s a tue is good for metal. Not too thick and not too thin. There are basically a bunch of reasons why 60cm x 60cm works best and these emerged out of making prototypes and trying it out and talking with people. I think to pin down these codes took around a year of testing, experimentation and discusision. This was done with other people. The University of Brussels and all kinds of people.

What is your background?
My background is in Industrial Design which I studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Rather than making a physical object for my thesis, I graduated with a future vision – a book which contained all kinds of ideas about the future and about how we as a society would relate to the network, about the interrelations that could emerge between hardware and software, 3D and 2D. This was in 2002. Afterwards I started at a graphic design agency – and was generally working on how to use graphics to communciate ideas. I worked thefore 4 or 5 years and then I joined the Institute Without Bourndaries in 2006. They had just been working on the Massive Change project with Bruce Mau, but I worked on the World House project with them. I did some research in post-graduate capacity for about one year. This refined my scope towards systems thinking. I began thinking not only about the ojbect, but also the service, and the interaction between the software and hardware of design and archtiecture as it where.

 What methods are you emplying to try and attract people to using the system? 
Actually I don’t. My ambition in the whole process is understand the network as well as is possible. The best way is to work with it. By doing this project, by inviting people I know and by making prototypes, it is making me understand how a community functions, how networks function. One of the things I learned within a network socitety is that if an idea is good, it will be picked up. It’s a more organic process. It’s more interesting to observe and follow how this idea is eveolving. I am not making the recipe, I’m designing the kitchen so other people can cook.

How did you test this idea of a network initially?
The first thing I did was ask people around me, personal friends working in the field of design and architecture. People who make things, a friend of mine has a bike shop for example and he is super handy. I asked other people from all different fields to contribute in 2008 so we could make our first presentation in 2009. I gave them a grid and asked them to do things. They came back with different objects and these were exhibited. There was then interest from design schools in Belgium and Holland. I came in and gave it to the students and they worked with it. I think the tutors like to see how they could experiment with this way of thinking. And actually at this point, the thing travelled and began to take on a life.

What are the plans for the next stage?
I decided to take all the objects apart and make a physical data base of them. The next step will be to make a small physical space in Brussels where people can come and puzzle with the parts and maybe make new parts,. So next to the online database of objects there will be a physical space. It is an update of a second hand store, providing not just objects but component and parts. This is my interest now. Think around this system. What kind of new public spaces will emerge? What kind of distribution networks will it need. It makes it more tangible.

Are people uploading stuff?
It happens but not very often. At this point, it’s not that the stysme is alinve and working, it’s not alive and generating it’s own economy. I am not sure if we are going to get there. I hope so. It’s more of a questions than an answer. It poses the question ‘can this kind of system work?’ rather than saying that this how we will make things in the future

The value of the whole experiement is to show people how to approach things diferently. It’s a different way of thinking firstly but of course I would think it was great if it grew from an idea that was shown in galleries, to a system which people used to make things. I thought that this showed the real value of centres for art and architeture (e.g. Z33 in Belgium and Stroom, Den Haag, they gave me a lot of structural support in the early stages of the project) as well, this is where ideas can get the oxygen they need to develop. I would love it if the idea sprawled into society.

 What is your ambition for the project both in the short term and the long term?
In the short term my hope is to better understand the network. My long term ambition is in a way I suppse to alter the relationship between user and object. If we now see objects as static monoliths, I could imagine a world where objects become more modular so you look at it and you don’t say, ‘I like it’ or ‘Idon’t like it,’ but you say ‘how do we alter it so that we would like it, so that it would become useful for us’. I am interested in the idea that you see an object in the street and you take it home, take it apart, and salvage pieces. A modular networked system of design would generate an incentive to use, to update and adapt. And to become more involved rather than just consuming an object, and throwing it away when it breaks down.

It facilitates the user and encourages him or her to interact with it, to use it, to exchange parts, to stimulate conversations. If I don’t ned a part I can give it to someone else., so I can see a way for micro-economies to be generated. It is also a good start for younger designers because you don’t have to creat a full modular sysetm. Previously a system was closed and if I was a young designer I would have to design the whole system. You don’t have to deisgn a whole stysem now you are contributing one part and creating one of the micro-ecnomies of a larger system. 

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

The strange British genius for turning media production into a prolonged spectacle, which we have seen during the hackgate scandal, dates back at least to the Great Exhibition of 1851 I would say. Reading through the huge profusion of books produced to coincide with that event one is struck by the advanced way in which the organizers thought of it as a mediated spectacle even before it happened. Routledge’s Guide to the Great Exhibition in 1851 one of these many products explains this in the first paragraph of its introduction: ‘Thousands and thousands throngs from all grades of society will witness it… while it will be presented to still greater numbers by the aid of pictures, by descriptions of in the languages of the principal nations and by each eye witness becoming as it were a lecturer upon what he has seen when he returns to his own country.’

In architectural terms the Crystal Palace may have been a single structure but it was also a celebration of reproduction. Paxton, describing his plan with pride declared that “a section of one part shows the whole’. However the palace was not simply a celebration of standardization, but more a theatrical approach to it. From west to east the flooring of the Palace was slightly inclined, as the Companion, puts it: ‘like the stage of a theatre’. What I find particularly fascinating about the Palace though was that they built an engine house nearby in order to power an on site printing press. It was effectively the site of its own dissemination. Made by serial production, it was mediated by serial production.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

What is astonishing about the coverage of the newspapers is not simply that they covered it a great length but that they covered it chronologically. Of course the state opening would get a big notice but papers like the Guardian published the daily experiences of their reporters at the Exhibition, noting meticulously, firstly the weather (of course) and then the shifting patterns of interest in different areas of the event.

“The room for the reception of agricultural implements attracted but little regard, their contents having a more immediate interest for those who it may be supposed are deferring a visit to London until a reduction in the price of admission… shall have placed its advantages more within reach.”

The French may have held several exhibitions in Paris in the earlier part of the century but the English seized the opportunity to firstly internationalize the event and secondly mediate it. Different publishers, all with familiar names, vied with each other for supremacy. W.M. Clark’s The Crystal Palace and Its Contents: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was published in weekly parts from October 1851 to March 1852. It opens with an exhaustive list of the contents of the book and the exhibition. In its Introductory Address, the editor suggests that ‘the advantages intended to society through this great undertaking will mainly depend upon the record of important facts eliminated, and the valuable examples presented to observation.’

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

A whole industry of printing, publishing and journalism stepped up to try and cover the scale of the Exhibition. Two official catalogues were made: a large one and a smaller condensed one. In the introduction to the former, Robert Ellis the editor of the official Catalogue narrates meticulously how four different forms were edited down to make the main catalogue and then the second condensed version of a portable size. The construction of the catalogue is part of the event. ‘The danger of inaccuracy also in the scientific descriptions and in their literary construction required attention,’ he writes, adding a note of drama. ‘A number of scientific gentlemen’ were convened to proof the pages. 48 pages of advertisements are added to the catalogues 320 pages of description.

The range is what is most staggering about the reportage on the event, with every conceivable reader catered for. Most spectacular though is architect Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt’s The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, which is effectively one of the most ostentatious but superbly, delivered pieces of lithography ever, performed by Day and Son. Showing selected items from the Exhibition which had been produced by a team of 20 draftsmen and a large number of lithographers, it featured astonishing prints of items entitled, ‘Specimens of painted lacquer work from Lahore,’ ‘Window Ornament from Tunis,’ ‘The Crystal Fountain by F & C Osler of Birmingham. From 1^st October 1851 to 7^th March 1853, 160 colored lithographed plates of the highest quality were published.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

The Post-script to the collected lithographs explains the purpose as not primarily concerned with informing a public but in showing off a production skills. “Shortly after the opening of the Great Exhibition, the Publisher called upon the author and stating his desire to demonstrate, upon a great scale, the capabilities of colourprinting as an auxiliary to industrial education requested him to undertake this work,” writes the editor. He then goes on to explain the publishing process.  Originally the publishers intended to serialize the work in 38 parts, once every two weeks, but then realized they wanted to serialize the publishing in five larger parts so found themselves having to increase the number of smaller parts to forty, selling them for 7 shillings and 6 pence each. The first number appeared on the 1st of October and the last will have been published on the 7^th March 1853.  Jones calculated that it had required 25 tons of stone to create the lithographs.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

In Society of the Spectacle Guy DeBord notes, ‘in a world that is truly upside down the true is a moment of false.’ And much as satirists have been having a field day pointing out the disparities between reality and reportage during the #hackgate scandal it is only in the pages of the Radical progressive magazine Punch that we really understand and appreciate the Great Exhibition in context. Initially the satirical magazine had derided the project but as it opened and was received well by the very proletariat that Punch wished to see enfranchised the magazine changed tack and acknowledged its generally positive impact. Indeed the magazine used it as a stick to beat other less efficient institutions.

The satirical magazine notes ‘that we are this year treated with the meeting in London of two very striking extremes in the shape of the Exhibition of Industry at Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of Idleness at the Palace of Westminster.’ The magazine uses the Palace as a means of criticizing the delay in getting the budget passed. ‘It is expected that by the time our visitors arrive from aboard, the arrangement of doing nothing will be quite complete.”

In another issue the magazine notes that thanks to the Great Exhibition the year of 1851 “seems to the Year of Expectations”. It goes on to note “Everyone is expecting something! Every lodging-house-keeper is expecting to let her lodgings at three and four and five times the normal rent… Every bigoted Englishman … expects to see every foreigner with long moustachios, long beard and long hair and dirty habits.’ It concludes: ‘we can only say that amongst so may expectations more or less fragile that it will be a very great wonder if a few of them are not broken.’

The British press is often typified by its extremes: from its most scurrilous publications like the now defunct News of the World to organs such as the BBC who at their best provide exceptional reportage. What makes British media so rich is its profusion, partly because of class distinctions. The contradictions that arise from this relationship gives the papers their bite whilst also making them at times, tiresomely self-referential. Just as publishers in the 1850s realized new ways of turning the Great Exhibition into a serial publishing event, so wiley editors of respectable papers have realized today that leaks now come in large format and that if you release them slowly using online and social media network dissemination, followed by analysis in print, you can ride the surf of a scandal for much longer.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

There is a moment in Superman III when good Superman returns from having defeated Robert Vaughan and undoes all the errors of bad Superman. Early in the film, high on the effects of low-grade kryptonite, he straightened the leaning tower in Pisa but he has now come to his senses and returns the Pisa to its inclined state, causing the vendor of straightened souvenirs a further level of frustration, having already destroyed all his previous inclined models. (There is probably one of the best double-takes I’ve ever seen in the cinema in this clip.)

I was reminded of this episode when I was given special dispensation to take photographs of the architectural souvenirs in the CCA Collection vaults. Instead of inclined towers in Pisa I was surprised by the inclined tower of the Stade Olympique in Montreal. This model piqued my interest not just because the Olympic Games is a huge and very particular fascination to me – see, just for example this post – but because this is a souvenir of a building that doesn’t actually exist. Or rather, it exists but not in this form. As I suggested in a previous post,  one of the main reasons for Montreal’s complicated relationship with the Olympics is not simply that costs over-ran but that on the day, the stadium wasn’t ready. This souvenir apparently captures that failure.

Depicting the building not as how it was planned but as it actually looked when the games started, the model shows a truncated inclined tower. Instead of the corbra-headed wonder apparently holding up the roof of the stadium with high-tension cables that appears today, the toy looks like a drunkenly assembled version of a USS Enterprise replica with the main disc – forgive me Trekkies for my lack of structural knowledge – rammed into the base of the stem rather than balancing gracefully on top.

Indeed, unlike the majority of souvenirs in the collection, which are made of ceramic or metal, the Stade Olympique is made of plastic. Made in the early months of 1976 one presumes, the souvenir predates the merchandise sold around Star Wars, released a year after the Montreal Olympics. However it is made of similar plastic and presented in a very similar way. It actually and perhaps inadvertently captures the spirt of boldly going forwards in its material and its presentation.

Ironically as collector Ron Salvatore writes on his blog, the Kenner company, who in 1977 were a small-scale manufacturer of toys, also faced delays . Serial production is not always straightforward:

“In late 1977, the company couldn’t get their Falcon toys to market fast enough. Forced to push their operation into overdrive in order to capitalize on the film’s enormous popularity, they had employees working overtime building the massive wooden pattern that was needed to create the Falcon’s steel production moulds – the same steel moulds that would be used to produce thousands of the toys for Christmas of ’79.”

Whilst Montreal’s architects were unable to complete the stadium on time, its commercial team and the Quebec-based toy company were able to get the toy out in time. No small feat as we can see from Kenner’s experience.

It is disconcerting too to see the World Trade Centre in New York as a souvenir, especially given that it is a post 9-11 souvenir, inscribed with the words “The World Trade Center, 09-11-01. The Memory Lives On.” Of course, this could be a sick perversion of Superman III – a souvenir of the building before it was destroyed, with the memory of its demise bolted on afterwards. Even if it isn’t, to me it is a strange thing to memorialise. The Ground Zero site is plagued by souvenir hunters who thrive because they provide a popular service. How odd that you would need a souvenir of the Trade Centre. Here for the very specific reason of the terror caused by its destruction we do not remember the building at all, only its hideous collapse

On one basic level, I would say from viewing these pieces ranked together on their racks like miniature reordered cities, it is important distinction that these are not memories of the building, but memories of being at the building or, disconcertingly in the case of the World Trade Centre, being at the non-building. I have my own strange take on that. I was looking back at some photographs I took when I went to Pisa and I though I don’t have one of the tower, I have two of merchandise. (I’m showing the non-rude one here.) Perhaps I was subconsciously inspired by Superman III and I realised that here was a building more famous for being memorialised than for actually existing.

The strange affect of the souvenir is actually to make us forget the original. There are a huge number of stadiums in the Collection but then that is surely because they make such good ashtrays, including a model of the L.A. Angels Baseball Stadium with rests for 8 different cigarettes. You can feel your lungs congest just by looking at it and perhaps because you are imagining a scene of second rate Mad Men socialising from sometime in the early sixties, it is hard to remember think of the original. For architects, I can see why this would be intriguing: mass produced items that replicate the single object. Is it a taunt from popular culture on the failure of architectural production to suit itself to the age of mass consumption?

I don’t think so. It adds a charge to them certainly but one would have thought that the era of architectural icons would be perfect for souvenirs, but it isn’t. Souvenirs have to be simple shapes to be made. Towers or blocks are best. It’s or that reason that Norman Foster seems pretty good at making souvenir-able architecture: 30 St. Mary Axe and the Hearst Tower both make a showing, but it is only really what happens to a building after it is completed that can control whether a souvenir stands out from the crowd of other more generic items. Souvenirs don’t memorialise objects, which is why the originals sometimes fade from view when we look at a souvenir; instead they act as intersections between the narrative of a building and the narrative of a person.

Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915. Mercury toned platinum print mounted on Japanese paper, 25.6 x 32.3 cm. PH1985:0224. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. ©Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

On 16 September 1920, a wagonload containing 45 kilos of explosives and 230 kilos of lead weights placed outside the JP Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street in New York was detonated, killing 38 people and injuring many more. The glass in the tall windows was blown inwards killing at least one JP Morgan employee of and injuring others. Interviewed in the New York Times the following day, one of the partners of JP Morgan Bank said: “From what we have learned I am inclined to believe that the explosion was due merely to an accident. There are no reasons that we can find that would lead to a premeditated bombing.”

He was wrong, of course. The confidence of the police that the explosion was an accident led them to remove the detritus and lose precious evidence as to the identity of the perpetrators. Although no one was charged, it is believed today that the bombing was conducted by a group of Italian anarchists known as the Galleanists, after Luigi Galleani who by 1920 had already been deported from the USA. Once the real intention of the explosion had been uncovered, it led to a pre-McCarthyite hunt for European radicals and another prolonged period of fear of violent revolution in the USA. Strangely, whilst the event still has a material impact on the fabric of New York, in many ways the bombing has best been memorialised in an image that predates it.

Paul Strand’s photographic masterpiece Wall Street shows the same sunken windows that would be destroyed by the anarchist bomb. His picture was taken five years earlier but subsequent events have lent to the image a political intention that was arguably not there originally. Maria Morris Hombourg explores this in her introduction to Paul Strand Circa 1916, published by MOMA in 1998 to coincide with the exhbition of that year. She notes that in the 1950s Strand responded to a pointed reading of the picture by the photographer Walter Rosenblum, saying: “Actually at that time I knew nothing about cartels etc. I was trying to photograph the surging to work and no doubt the black shapes of the windows have perhaps the quality of a great maw into which the people rush.”

Did the anarchists attack the JP Morgan bank because of the charge that the windows had in Strand’s photograph? Certainly the picture was popular but initially it was noted only within a small circle and since the local police cleared the area of evidence with the same efficiency that the State Department demonstrated in returning any Italian with links to leftist or anarchist groups back to their homeland, we will never know. However, the photograph itself has been radicalized as a consequence. A photo that Strand took the same year at the Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco shows a couple in black, breaking the rhythm of neoclassical columns in a similar way but lacking a parallel sense of menace.

It is not just the politics of anarchist terror that have radicalized the image, but Strand’s later association with groups like Frontier Films that were attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The picture not only became more radical but so did its author. The world that they inhabited grew more divided as well, leading to Strand’s departure for France from 1949. It is possible though to look at the photograph again not just as a socialist or anarchist critique of capitalism; to look again at the relationship between the structure and those figures beneath it.

Irving Underhill, Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 2 January 1930. Gelatin silver print, 25.7 x 34.1 cm. PH1987:0180. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

 Irving Underhill was not a photographer in the same vein as Strand. He was a good architectural photographer who documented the construction boom at the beginning of the twentieth century, employing simple innovations to best capture a new urban condition. He was an architectural taxonomist,  recording new projects as they went up: the construction of the Manhattan Bridge and municipal buildings in Brooklyn, but his best pictures capture bigger buildings in Manhattan. He developed a sense of urban dynamism in architectural photography by taking pictures from the 5^th or 6^th floor across the street, and rather than capturing the elevation face on, he captures it an acute angle of around 30 degrees.

As the Bowery Boys blog explains, Underhill:

“Was so successful that his agency received exclusive commissions to photograph and promote new buildings like the Woolworth Building, which he would capture in timed intervals to track the construction process. Many years later, his name could be seen from blocks away, plastered along the top of his studios at Broadway and Park Place.”

Underhill superimposed his office with the massive lettering “Irving Underhill, General Photographer” across one whole block, effectively inviting his name to be read on the grand urban scale, he was discerning in new buildings.

Irving Underhill, Irving Trust Company Building Site, 1 Wall Street, New York City, 1 August 1930. Gelatin silver print, 34 x 25.8 cm. PH1987:0183. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

The series of Underhill photographs in the CCA Collection are of 1 Wall Street, designed by Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker Architects and built by Mark Eidlitz and Son. The first picture, taken on Jan 2^nd, 1930, shows preparatory work on the foundations; another taken on August 1^st shows the building nearly topping out. There are other pictures taken at around one month intervals, And the accumulated effect of the series of 7 photographs—and you’ll have to take my word because only the first and the last of them are shown here—is to create a sense of wonder at the speed of construction and to create, surprisingly, a sense of ghostly absence. The phantom presences in the series of images are the construction workers who built so quickly. Perhaps it is a coincidence but in the first picture we see a graveyard on the opposite side of the street; the worker is both departed and memorialized.

What Strand does in his abstracted way is show a direct relation between human form and building. It is not the building alone that is symbolic but its relation with the human form. Indeed it is the key relationship in the picture and one that explains its enduring appeal. An image like Ilse Bing’s Wall Street captures a more conventional critique of the experience of Wall Street. It is worth noting that the strand of light she finds between the canyons of Wall Street is the subject and it is almost the exact shape as Underhill’s picture of Wall Street, dominating the picture in the same way, albeit from top to bottom rather bottom to top.

Bing’s picture was taken in 1936 and is influenced more by early surrealist abstraction, her harsher lines and the higher contrast between light and dark is more redolent of the work of German expressionist film makers. The spear of light that descends into the chasm of the financial district leads the eye to the light of police car. This noir-ish image is doom-laden. Bing, on a trip to New York from Paris, has not yet found in New York, her second home, as she was to from 1941. The place image is imbued with a sense of impending catastrophe.

Ilse Bing, No. 13 Wall Street, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 28.2 x 18.8 cm. PH1986:0292. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. © Estate of Ilse Bing.

My colleague Gwen Webber recently gave a critique  over the appropriation of images of Detroit to portray illustrate the effects of the banking crisis of late 2008. She detailed a complaint made last year by the Detroit-based photographer James Griffioen that fellow practitioners from all over the world were pitchingup in his home city from all over the world and contacting him for advice on finding locations for a suitable images of the post-2008 recession; even if the cause of that recession was not found in Detroit, but instead where Strand had taken his photographs. Griffioen’s point which he discusses on his blog was that, yes, there are degraded buildings in Detroit – he took pictures of them himself – but he did so in a way that explained a more complex relationship between humans and their built environment.

What makes Strand’s picture so entrancing is exactly that: the relationship it establishes between the workers and the blank chasm of JP Morgan’s windows. Black figures. Black windows. The power of Strand’s image is the sense that the structure of oppression is generated by the very men and women that passed by it. The maw is formed from their own inky substance, a feature heightened by Strand’s use of a Japanese paper that soaks up the image. What gives it even greater power is that it offers those individuals the chance to see clearly their own relationship and – should they wish – do something about it.

By the time of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo the torch relay had become a symbol of the International Olympic Committee’s expanding empire and its relationship with film had become firmly established. In Kon Ichikawa’s beautiful film of the Tokyo Olympiad –the best there has been – the rising sun of Japan and the Olympic flame are linked, as if they both emerge from the same tradition; a kind of symbolism that pushes the relationship between host land and Olympic spirit beyond history. However, Ichikawa also wanted to give the relay a political narrative. After a slow intoning of all the Western countries that the Games have been held in Ichikawa shows the torch passing through Istanbul, Beirut and Tehran.  ‘The torch travels through Asia for the first time,’ says the voiceover, asserting the Oriental’s role in world sport.

The torch relay was beginning to acquire other narratives not simply of cultural primacy. It had now become a symbol of peace. The visit it made to Hiroshima in 1964 was perhaps its most important stop on that trip. This conjoining of the flame with the eternal flame of war memorials had been first suggested in 1948, when the torch stopped in Brussels on the way to London for a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was however optimistic that the International Olympic Committee could position itself at the juncture of major forces in world politics and act as an agent for improved global relations.

In addition the way that the torch bearers were perceived changed. In 1952 in Helsinki with the tradition of the torch relay now entrenched, the home nation gave the honour to Paavo Nurmi, a rotund balding 55-year-old. In 1924 Nurmi had won gold medals in five events, including the 1500m, 5000m, the 3000m team race, and two cross country events. The identity of the runner was becoming more important than his physical appearance. As TV rather than film became the dominant means of broadcasting the torch relay, the camera became less concerned with the athlete’s body as an abstracted image but with the athlete as a personality.

The montage that opens Bud Greenspan’s film of the 1984 Olympics torch relay focuses on the series of different individuals who carried the torch, in close up. There are a huge range of different skin tones and ages in the sequence. Greenspan highlights the racial mix of Angelinos and presents them as a global audience, in close up. It’s like a Coca-Cola ad with the Angelinos standing in for the global market. The inhabitants of the city had voted in a public referendum not to give public funds to the event so to survive, these Games were sold as a commodity like Coke. Less of a theatrical set-piece within a romanticised landscape, the torch relay now became a piece of television, which was broadcast as live and edited rather than staged.

As a consequence, the Los Angeles Games inadvertently made the relay harder to control. By enlisting the people of LA to represent a global audience for the sake of a commercial they brought the torch, the camera and the people closer a move which would later cause untold problems for the IOC.

In 2008, it was announced that the Olympic torch relay would no longer pass through foreign countries. And just as the British were largely responsible for giving birth to the torch relay by continuing the Nazi set piece, they were also responsible for causing its cessation as an international event.

It was probably the sight of Konnie Huq, a former presenter of the children’s TV programme Blue Peter tussling with a protestor on Ladbroke Grove that Britons most remember. The torch relay was proposed by the organisers of the Beijing Games and their British Olympic Association partners as a way of linking sporting celebrity with the common people. As a result the torch relay through London was a mix of normal folk, famous Olympic athletes and well-known faces. This gave a focus for the groundswell of protest against the occupation of Tibet, an act that had hitherto untroubled the British people at large. There was perhaps a latent sympathy with the fate of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s leader in exile, but as a protest movement it was far more popular in the United States and only really developed moment as the Olympic Games in Beijing drew near. A number of British celebrities withdrew from the torch relay citing the occupation of Tibet as a reason. Huq more used to showing British children how to make dolls houses from empty plastic bottles had already made her displeasure at the invasion of Tibet by China known but decided that she would continue with her role as torch bearer.

Rolling news ensured that her attempt to keep hold of the Olympic Torch was instantly shown live around the world creating a negative impression of the Olympics, although this was nothing compared to the unfilmed protests by the Czechs in the soon-to-be annexed Sudetenland during the first torch relay in 1936.

However, in 2008, the Torch Relay was no longer a set-piece for a remote camera. It was a live performance in which the audience was increasingly determined to be involved. The role of the torch as symbol of the Olympic movement became compromised. As ignominious as it was for children’s TV presenters to be seen brawling with an advocate of Tibetan independence on the streets of London, it was the phalanx of Chinese Secret Service men trying to prise them apart that did it for the international torch relay. The torch immediately lost the symbolism of internationalism that it had acquired in the post-war period and became an image of a single nation making its political presence felt in foreign lands. Indeed the space around the torch protected by the Chinese security effectively became Chinese territory, as British police later admitted that they didn’t know who the figures in lilac tracksuits surrounding the torch bearer were and had no control over their actions.

The Torch Relay’s power as a propagandist tool for the Olympics and the countries that host the Games had finally become a weakness. Having brought the torch close to the lives of its audience, the audience now refused to be passive and reached out for the torch. The torch was now vulnerable to political activism and appropriately given the origins of the event this activism was inextricably linked to the politics of race.  In Beijing, the strongest argument for an end to the international torch relay, at least for future Games, came from Kevan Gosper, the IOC vice-president in charge of media relations. Strangely he showed a poor grasp of Olympic history. ‘I’m a firm believer that we had the right template in the first place, that the torch simply should go from Olympia, Greece, to the host country,’ he said in 2008. This was an absolute nonsense of course. The whole point of the Olympic Torch was that it be carried through foreign nations.

Those who followed the build up to the Games in Sydney in 2000 would have recognise the name of Kevan Gosper, however. In 2000, Gosper, a former Olympic athlete and member of the International Olympic Committee, was Vice President of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.  In the build up to the 2000 Games, Gosper became embroiled in issues around the Olympic Torch Relay. A young Greek Australian Yianna Souleles had been selected by her school’s teaching staff following arrangements made by the local parish priest and the Greek Olympic Committee, to run the first leg of the torch relay after the torch was lit on Mount Olympus. According to most media reports, Gosper was separately approached by Greek Olympic committee members who asked him to let his daughter Sophie replace Yianna. It was also likely that the Greek Committee want to ingratiate itself with Gosper, a vice-president of the IOC.

Athlete and future bureaucrat. Kevan Gosper in 1951.

What Gosper did next was incredibly unwise. He accepted the invitation on behalf of this daughter, later defending this decision on the grounds that he felt in his heart that it was appropriate for Sophie, the daughter of an Olympian to carry the torch first. The original invitee Yianna was downgraded to a later leg of the relay. Gosper argued he had not acted inappropriately. Critics however, such as Helen Jefferson Lenskyj suggested that there was a racial motive to the swap. The Australian academic suggests in her book The Best Olympics Ever?  that the Greeks invited Gosper’s daughter to be involved because of  ‘her blonde hair and blue eyes’ that made her look ‘more like a typical Australian girl’. Here we see the most troubling element of the relay – that the torch carrier represents not just a nation but also a racial type – rearing its head again.

Lenskyj may overstate the case against Gosper of course and the allegations of racial bias are hard to corroborate. Gosper may have simply reacted naively to an act of Greek politicking. It is also quite possible that the Hellenic Olympic committee preferred to subsequently argue that they had invited Sophie because she looked Australian rather than because she was the daughter of an Olympic grandee. It is possible that they thought that dealing with accusations of racism in sections of the Australian press was easier to deal with rather than accusations of corruption in their own. For Gosper it was clearly a salutary lesson.

The history of the Olympic movement may provide a rich pageant of ceremony and symbolism from which to draw strength and by which to promote itself. However that  collection of images and gestures has its own latent history, which can frequently assert itself regardless of the control of a modern International Olympics Committee, keen to make the Games socially relevant.

In fact as we shall see the more the IOC and its partners attempt to control the images the more they become problematic. For now we must wonder at how a man steeped in the history of the Olympic movement could fail to understand that a northern European running through a Hellenic landscape was a particularly charged image and one to avoid repeating.

The modern Olympics was founded in order to ammeliorate moral values across society and it has always called on the sacred role of the Ancient Games as justification for doing so. Of course, social values have changed since 1896 and different organisers have latched onto different aspects of the game and bent it to their will.  But quoting visually from the ancient Games is a constant.

This is why the Star Trek analogy is important for the torch relay, which we happily mistake for an ancient one. I have mentioned the pseudo-pagan quality of the ceremony in my previous post and how it contrasted with the overt display of Germany’s manufacturing capabilities in the design of the torch. Indeed one of the the magnesium-fueled torches devices was used to ignite a blast furnce in Essen – a direct connection between the torch and German industrial power. The British though must be responsible for creating this tradition by picking up on the torch as symbol not just of technological prowess of the host nation but fire power as well.

In visual terms the torch of 1948 was the perfect example of the British snatching back their ownership of classical civilisation. Ralph Lavers was the perfect candidate to design the torch for 1948. An architect but also an archaelogist of some renown, Lavers took inspiration from classic Greek and Roman lamps. On the other hand, the torch was the acme of contemporary techological inventiveness.

According to The Official Report  of The Organising Committee For The XIV Olympiad, The Fuel Research Station of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which was founded during the First World War was asked to design a suitable container and to recommend a fuel by the Organising Committee. The Fuel Research Station decided to use hexamine in tablet form as the fuel, housed in a perforated canister. In order to make the flame from the hexamine luminous, 6 per cent naphthalene was incorporated in the tablets. Air holes were put in the fuel canister so that, even in a strong wind, the fuel would last for that time. Make no mistake. It was designed to present Britain as a technoglically advanced nation.

The Report is drenched with the rhetoric of technological pride. It recounts that:  “to ensure economy of production, the size of tablets had to be similar to those in commercial production, but these were not large enough to ensure the required burning time if all in the fuel pack were lit on ignition. Eight tablets were therefore placed on a central rod, the bottom three being carried in a cup in the holder; as the top tablets burnt away, these were gradually fed up by a spring. To keep the fuel, which readily absorbed moisture, dry under all weather conditions it had to be kept in an airtight pack which would burn completely, leaving no residue to choke the air holes in the canister. A thin nitro-cellulose casing to hold the eight tablets was specially made for the purpose.”

In addition, the British added the tradition of improving the theatrical potential of the final torch: the one that is carried by the final runner in the Stadium and used to light the Olympic Flame. In 1948 the organising committee opted for a magnesium flame in order for it to be seen across the Stadium, even in sunlight. Carrying burning magnesium obviously requires an added degree of protection, and a stainless steel holder was therefor required. This also was designed by Mr. Lavers and made by E.M.I. Factories, Ltd. The candle, which was designed to burn for ten minutes, was supplied by Wessex Aircraft Engineering Co. Ltd which had provided wind direction smoke generators to the British military during the Second World War.

As with the torch relay as a whole, what began as a piece of Nazi propaganda, became in the hands of the British, a tradition. Successive torch relays have used this means of simultaneously showing off their industrial capabilities and finding a way of reinvigorating a toga-clad charade invented by a Nazi with a Jewish wife. The ceremony of the relay became an important means of establishing the Games as an event with roots in the birth of civilisation. However the Torch – in strong contrast – had to be radically reinvented every four years to highlight the relevance of the event. It was the one object that had to be updated. By the time the Winter Games kicked off, twice every four years. In 1960, for the Squaw Valley Winter Games, the torch was designed by John Hench who won an Oscar for Best Special Effect for developing the hydraulic giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

For the 1988 Seoul Games, the Korea Explosive Co., Ltd were given the job of making over 3,300 torches. 3 different designer submitted 13 different designs to the organising committee which eventually chose a Brazier submitted by Prof. Lee Woo-song of Sookmyung Women’s University. In addition mobile cauldrons in which the flame would lie in state overnight during the torch relay were created. The cauldrons, 1.65m high and nearly1m in diameter, used propane gas as fuel and had a strong resistance to wind and rain. The cauldron could be fixed on to ships and could remain burning at speeds of up to 30 knots an hour. South Korea is not just a place where cheap watches are made, was the not-too-subtle claim of the torch. We make series bits of kit here.

But the technological claim of the torch was not always pre-eminent in later Games. Other symbolic claims where made by later torch designs. In 1992, for the Barcelona Games, Andre Ricard who designed coffee machines for Gaggia and Moka created the torch. Whereas Seoul at the time wanted to highlight South Korea’s role as a technical innovator rather than just a place where cheap electrical goods were knocked out, the Barcelona Games were part of an attempt to return the city to the pantheon of great European cities.The general effect of the Barcelona torch was to convey to the viewer that the city was a stylish place – the kind of place you might drink an espresso at a pavement café. It looks like the kind of bottle-opener you’d buy for the man who has everything.

The Winter Games however, have attracted the most outrageous and overtly propagandist of torch designs. The French hired Philippe Starck to design a typically phallic effort for Albertville in 1992. The torch for Lillehammer meanwhile was extremely thin so it wouldn’t go out when it was delivered in dramatic fashion by a ski-jumper. Best of all was the torch for the Turin Games in 2006, designed by Pininfarina, the famous car design company. Overseen by Andrea Pininfarina the chief executive of the company himself, a legendary designer who also worked on the Ferrari Enzo supercar as well as less exciting car designs for Hyundai, Daewoo and Ford, the design was inspired by both a ski and a mountain peak. The torch was around 2.3kg -well over twice the weight of the torch for the Beijing Games. Each athlete who carried it, felt the burden of showing the world how dynamic Turin’s automobile design industry was. Pininfarina himself would die two years after the games when he was knocked off his Vespa by an elderly driver who failed to cede right of way.

Yet another horrendous piece of graphic design plops through the mat of the poor benighted inhabitants of London’s Olympics boroughs and yet again they as one recoil at the hideosness of the logo. (A hideousness which I want to explain but not reproduce, largely because it makes any page or any screen that it sits on look skewed or cranked.) At the time it was launched, the consensus of course was that the logo was bad because it tried to be youthful, as the comments to this Guardian story at the time make clear. This is certainly the case. The colour palette is bright and vibrant, the pink and yellow is particularly redolent of eighties children’s TV graphics. To continue in a more generous vein, the shadow effect is pure 80s retro which recalls some of the work in Dazed from around the beginning of the decade.

Through time though, we’ve learned the real problem with the graphic design. The real problem is that this is not a piece of graphic design. The real problem with the logo is that it is a still from a piece of animation. Watching the promotional video to the logo for the umpteenth time, we watch pieces of dynamic colour flowing through London, parts of which form the ultimate logo, which arrives quivering at the Games. The logic behind the design is the logic of regeneration. Like Freddie Mercury in the It’s a Kind of Magic, streaks of life and colour will fly through London and turn a grey world into a colourful one, which is a typical piece of vanity, that we are beginning to expect from Locog, the Games organising committee.

Bizarrely for its dismissal at the time as infantile, it is also the most overtly political of logos. Not only is it self-consciously highlighting the Games as an agency of animation; bringing colour to a supposedly dead space, it doesn’t represent the Games itself. It is a vehicle for creating the significance of the Olympics as one particularly perceptive observer noted at the time. Typically this person came from outwith the field of design. Oh for a Lance Wyman.

In the mid-Sixties, a young American industrial designer, Lance Wyman was given the task of creating the graphics for the Mexico Olympics in 1968. He used the hieroglyphics of the country’s pre-Columban architecture to create a system of legible yet recognisably Mexican logo designs. (See above.) The 1968 Games were the first to be fully televised to a mass audience. Wyman was not aware of the huge leap in mass communication his work would be part of but because of its strong fundamental principles, the design provided a backdrop to the drama of Bob Beaman’s massive triple jump, the Black Power salutes of the American athletes and the dramatic unfolding of a major sports event. The Games of 1968 are still referred to as the Graphic Games. Not bad for a 29-year old.

As for Wolff Ollins’ 2012 design, it provides none of the identity or sense of place or sense of history required of Olympics logo design. There seems to be little faith in the event in itself providing the excitement and too much in the impact the Games will have on the physical fabric of the city. Tessa Jowell calls it “edgy.” Certainly the jagged edges fight with the principle of the original Olympic logo. The font that the word London is rendered in is, frankly, an embarrassment. When you place it on any page it immediately fights with the grid layout of pictures and text. I imagine that editors in the print media will be less inclined to use it as a result. Wally Ollins, partner of the Wolff Ollins practice is a truly thoughtful and clever advertising executive who helped plot Seat’s re-emergence as Spain opened up following the death of Franco. I’m not sure though whether the practice in which he is partner are designers. They were after all behind  the hugely unpopular BT “piper” logo. Which lasted from 1993-2001. Unfortunately we’ll have to put up with his latest forever.