Barnes Railway Bridge

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

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

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

Battersea Bridge

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

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

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

Blackfriars Bridge

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

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

Kennington Bridge

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

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

Tower Bridge

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

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

You can buy the book here. 

The last section of the ArcelorMittal Orbit is put in place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 are your views on planning?
I am very much against planning. We are now in a worldwide crisis due to overplanning. I am against overplanning. Planning means that you consider every event possible. Except an event which is unexpected and sometimes the unexpected arrives. It’s a little thing and then it grows. Its an avalanche by snowball. Nobody made a planning error. The error was that they tried to plan something which is not plannable. This is the error.

What do you think of recent plans to expand Paris?
I was asked in an interview about the president’s project on the greater Paris. I was not involved in this process because I consider it to be absolutely idiotic. That’s not off the record. Because the project was ‘how to make Paris a metropolis’. But that’s not a question of architecture it’s nothing to do with urban planning. London is largely unplanned and it’s a metropolis. Paris is a metropolis but not because of Haussman. New York is largely unplanned. Architecture is nothing to do with it. Architecture is realty speculation.

How important to you are transport infrastructures?
You came by Eurostar yes? This is good. In two hours you are in London, Strasbourg or Lyon. The metropolis is not Paris but a piece of Euronet. Including Brussels, London and Strasbourg and maybe Frankfurt. I was calling this the continent city. A city the size of a continent with a suburban network. And the subway is the TGV. The metro stops is Paris Lille London Paris Lille Brussels. That’s the reality. It’s a reality. I got a phone call from the States. Obama signed an agreement on the first rapid transit system between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This is Keynesian investment. This European metropolis could be very much advanced with the Keynesian scheme. It’s not necessary for Paris to be the centre of the hub. Brussels, and Frankfurt are already part of the hub.

I call this continent city. In the 1960s I was advancing this scheme that Europe is one super city, made up of 180 smaller cities. Reyner Banham made a joke of it, calling it Friedman’s Europe.  It is now a reality. This is particularly where I find that planning doesn’t work. Because planning goes along preconceived ideas. My continent city is not planning, it’s a potential, I don’t know what will come out of it.

If you want it, you cannot avoid the existence of an infrastructure. I don’t know what this continent city will be. The infrastructure is building iteslf up, becaue in the 60s I saw that it was. The Germans started intercitys. It was the first large scale subway network. It was a reality. People involved with planning can’t see that. I’m sorry. They are simply facts.

What do you think of the plans to extend the High Speed Rail links in the UK?
I know Birmingham by car and I know Leeds and that’s logical that they want to continue it there. I can see a time when you can go from Berlin to Paris in 3 and a half hours. Technically it’s completely possible. And it’s interesting – the other fast train system Transrapid [a high-speed monorail train system using magnetic levitation developed by the Germans]  has a big disadvantage. TGV can get out of the rapid system and can continue on normal lines. Transrapid goes on a special installation. They could get to the system but everything changes, motor system, axel everything. I saw it in Shanghai, 500km/h between the airport and the city and then you get into the city and get into a car and you are in the worst traffic jam. It’s not a network, it’s just a line. When the TGV was Paris Lyon it was OK but now that you have many lines and it goes abroad…. The Eurostar was very important. In the UK the will to prolongation is an important will.

What about the USA were there is very little rail infrastructure?
It can become a more scattered city or the hubs can develop more. I was in LA a few months ago. I got this very idiotic idea. The LA traffic is a problem. Simply take one layer of the freeway system, put on trolley buses and call it a subway. The network is there. You don’t need anything especial. It only needs a feeding duct. Take away the car pool lane and put this in its place.

Why were you in Los Angeles?
Getty was buying all my archives. The Getty is quite a respectable institution. And there was a personal reason: my daughter is living there. Getty is important because they will record my archives. They bought the first part last year. The contract was made two and a half years ago. The last part I am keeping at least for a year. Because I am working on it still. There are every year new elements.

What do you think of Los Angeles?
I don’t think Los Angeles exists. There are pieces of Los Angeles and if you are situated in Pasadena, you never go to Santa Monica. I know Los Angeles for 35 years because I was at UCLA. Los Angeles is essentially an idea, but it doesn’t exist. I went to UCLA in the 60s. I was teaching and researching there.

It has a very small downtown and the rest is scattered and changes all the time. The big movie studios they move. It’s a region in flux. And therefore for example for Los Angeles to make a real subway is quite absurd. They were making one metro line. It goes from Pasadena to the Central Station but it’s always empty, because it serves well people in certain spaces but it doesn’t irrigate the area. The freeway system irrigates the area. Therefore I think the freeway system is everything. It’s expropriated space.

Why did you leave America?
The change started with Nixon, Johnson was a presidency was a great era completed poisoned by the Vietnam War but in civil terms it was more Rooseveltian than Roosevelt. In the 60s, universities, were full of people who were simply studying because they were interested in something. They didn’t think of money making and this started slightly with Nixon and was growing and growing. After that it was the Democratic party but it was only nominal.

How did things change for you when you went to America?
My ideas didn’t change. In that period when I was going to America, the academic milieu was positive. I got far more support than here. And this was in the mid-presidency of Nixon. The grant system was altered. The Johnson era – a young person was interested, they got a grant and they went. The modern intellectual climate is the result of the period from the end of the war to the end of the Johnson presidency.

I stopped teaching in the USA in the 1970s. And then I worked for UNESCO, here in Paris but mostly in India.

Tell me about your work with UNESCO…
I started this language to communicate by bands desinees and it was quite successful. Indira Gandhi liked it so I got the possibility to work there. It had nothing to do with politics though because some of the ideas were taken over by Iran of Khomeni. They are actual practical proposals.

It was all about survival. Water policy, food policy, very low level. Not so much what government could do but what the peasant could do. This is why it worked. In India the books had 10 million readers. Not bad. It’s a self-propagating technique. It’s not necessary to print a million copies. This is a communication technique. The internet does the same thing by the way. Things creep like insects.

How did you come by this technique?
In the 1960s I was also making films. I got a Golden Lion from Venice for a film about African legends. My wife was a movie editor. So I said, why don’t I draw? I learned how to present a story. In very simple drawings. It was my technique in lectures. Three lines and you have a human. People also like it because it makes them feel that they can draw too. In India villagers would make cartoon bands about their problems. It’s great technique for the quasi-literate.

You live close to the UNESCO headquarters…
There was no UNESCO when I moved here, so it must be because of me that they moved here.

I have lived here for over 40 years. When I went to the USA the first time, my wife wasn’t too happy with the American lifestyle. So we decided that we wouldn’t stay and I was doing it by shuttle. Commuting. When the 707 started suddenly the USA wasn’t so far away – it was a sensible difference. 6 and a half hours to New York. It was less expensive for my employers in the USA because I didn’t need a standing home there. Their overhead costs were lower.

The end of the 1960s seems like an important dividing line to you…
Everything became very different. People speak about the countryside and the working class but they are both completely different concepts than before. The words stayed the same but the concepts were completely different. I don’t know if it became better or worse.

What are your main focuses now?
I am now having discussions about the way mathematics are used, and the way computers are used. Mathematics I believe is unable to describe non-regular processes. It’s impossible. There’s no mathematic language. We find more and more that it is exactly the process which is important. Maths give a fantastic end result but it has no reality. The average man doesn’t exist. It’s only really people that exist. This is not to say that mathematics that are good or bad. It is just more and more erroneously used.  It gives us very very strict rules in a ruleless world. The AIDS virus appears to change its strategy. So does cancer. It’s the same with the urban process.

The computer is a fantastic tool but it does what you embed in it. It has prefabricated functions that you don’t know and that a mathematician doesn’t know. That’s a problem. It has a security system but the biggest robberies are made by computers and they aren’t detected until long after the fact. All these things involve some necessary precaution. In the 70s we were trying to use self planning and we were trying to use a computer but it didn’t work because they didn’t know what their criteria was and a computer didn’t help them because it immediately told them what it was. ‘This is the best!’ said the computer. But it wasn’t the best. It was the best for the computer. People need to chew and re-chew and use trial and error. A computer is very good for booking a seat on a plane but not very good in helping you discover how you want to live.

 Have you been back to Budapest?
I was invited twice to do a lecture there. It’s true I was not censored. I know the language. I nearly didn’t recognise the city. Since 44 everything changed. I’ve no real desire to go there now. There’s nobody I know there. People are dying out. I am 86. There are less and less people I knew from the old periods. Here too. The older generation there are a few but they are mostly non-active. It’s an animal biological fact. It’s OK. I find its quite easy. The people who meet and talk about the old times, it’s not my style.

How old were you when you left Budapest?
I was 21 when I left Budapest. The changes started around 1940 when I was 17 with the war. In 1944 it was the Nazi occupation. There was a small movement trying to protect people and OK I was taken by the Gestapo, I survived because the Red Army advanced so fast. It was a question of weeks.

I was still at the Gestapo when the Russians were completely closing down the city and you could hear the artillery. This gave us hope. You wouldn’t have had that [without the Russians] otherwise. Many people survived exactly because of this. There are many survivors because of the Red Army’s strategies to cross the Danube at a certain point.

Where did you go after you left Budapest?
I went to Bucharest in Romania because we couldn’t immediately leave for Israel. There is many things that you can criticise Israel for but at that time immediately after the war, it was a good place. At that time the sharp conflict could have been avoided. It wasn’t clear that antagonism was inevitable at that time.

What about your family?
I have two daughters: one in California and one in Tel Aviv. Both are French. You know because one has an American husband and one has an Israeli husband. Girls follow their husbands. Well, it was a rule in certain times.

How do you work?
I work in A4 format with drawings.   I make small models. Here for example are some Shanghai Bridges. That’s another story. They are the study models. Big models are not here. You know the main road, the Nainxing Road, you arrive at the river. Did you try to cross the river? You cannot cross the river except by subway and by taxi, but there is no pedestrian way to cross the river. I found this an absurd situation. I was there in 2002. I was invited to the Shanghai  Biennale and I proposed that you continued the Nainxing Road over the river. I was invited in 2007 again and I talked about this project and people liked it so we got a political green light.

Do you feel like you have influenced people?
Corbusier used to complain about people copying him but for me this is exactly the sign of success. It’s true. Who exactly invented the Gothic style? You can start a trend. But that’s it. OK. My work influenced Archigram. But that’s OK. People should take it over and add and manipulate it. It’s an open system.

I had good relations with Cedric Price. Building is not an object it’s a process, Cedric liked very much this statement.

And how has that idea governed your own work?
When we made a project in Madras the Architectural Review asked us for the façade and there was nothing on paper, there were models of the structure just to work out whether it was feasible or not.

In the west if you are in an empty room, and I say to you, sit down, you would say where? There is no chair. If you say this in India or Japan, they sit down on the floor. It’s nothing to do with poverty, it’s a way of looking at the world. I am not trying to fight against a system. I am trying to offer alternatives. In the East it’s the peasants who look at these techniques, here it is the young architects or artists.

I once imagined a project that would sit on this island above the Arctic Circle. There are many naturally heated regions in the world. So why not have this migration? Today rich people go south for the winter. Why not everybody? There are no shanty-towns in Siberia. Only at the equator. Instead of forcing nature to behave as we want. We can adapt our behaviour to suit nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Nor has his other work in London instilled much respect. So it is a salutary reminder to visit his redevelopment of a historic bullring in Barcelona and remember that Rogers is capable of genuinely inventive, expressive architecture. Here, RSHP have plugged a five-storey shopping mall into a late 19^th century, neo-Moorish style bullring. The work done on supporting the narrow courses of bricks in collaboration with the Spanish structural engineers BOMA is nothing short of brilliant and the easy grace with which they have convert a husk of a building – an example of very specific typology – into a very workable shopping centre, without compromising their own architectural vision is truly worthy of praise. Like Madrid’s Barajas airport, it is a building that makes you smile.

Yes, Rogers may be riffing on some of his more familiar stylistic trappings – interior yellow pylons – a communications tower with more than a touch of the Dan Dare about it and one can’t help but feel that his most inventive years are behind him. However, Rogers doing a pastiche of Rogers is still great fun. Better by miles than the fussy, stylised cross-bracing and louvres of his luxury apartment blocks in London. Las Arenas is a great building. Albeit an apparently pointless one.

As Robert Hughes noted in his book on the city, written in 1987: ‘Barcelona has two bullrings, one of them fallen into semi permanent disuse, the other largely kept alive by Andalusian migrants and foreign tourists. Tauromachy has never been an obsession in Catalunya as it is further south’. The first of the buildings he refers to here is Las Arenas, which held it’s last bullfight in 1977 and last one-off concert in 1988. The second building Hughes describes is La Monumental, which still operates, and, which, since it was built in 1914 has dominated its smaller competitor. When the Rolling Stones first came to play in Barcelona they originally planned to perform at Las Arenas but moved to La Monumental because the former was too small.

A smaller version of an unpopular building type, Las Arenas wasn’t even a listed building as such. According to Jan Guell, also an architect for RSHP, Las Arenas wasn’t even listed. ‘We knew that the city wanted to keep the façade, it was placed in a catalogue for potential listing,’ he says. And yet, it had survived in dilapidated state perhaps because the ceramic-clad entrance to its deep brown brick curved façade was an appropriate architectural response to the ceremonial esplanade up to the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Even though the bullring is often seen by football-loving Catalans as a cultural imposition by Castilian Spain, quite simply the building was a grand bulwark to the sheer scale of the Plaza Espanya upon which it stands.

Yes, Las Arenas is an exercise in facadism. Imagine the Pompidou Centre being shoved into a smaller circular Battersea Power station. Nothing but the brick course remains of the original structure and yet the way in which the building has been salvaged is a spectacle. Despite the fact that it now contains a 12 screen cinema, top quality retail spaces and a spa, Las Arenas is above all an incredibly complex act of architectural salvage on a façade that was considerably off plumb after two decades of neglect.

The existing brick wall is effectively tied into position by a vertical tension bar stretcing from the top to the bottom of the wall behind the brick pilasters. This pulls together the top and bottom concrete beams to put a load back into the brickwork to increase its strength. One can question what the point of doing it was, whilst still marveling at the skill in doing it. The architecture of Las Arenas is sophisticated and honestly derived from the separate structural systems that hold up the façade and support the roof. A giant steel plate sits on the bullring auditorium walls, supported by four huge pylons, meaning that the fourth floor, which contains both the cinema and the spa, can be column free.

It provides an enjoyable visual experience for us shoppers too. The pylons, which are painted in a bright yellow, provide a strong visual signifier of the relationship between the cruciform atrium, with leisure stacked up on top of retail and the 19^th century façade. These pylons ensure that even in a retail space with little natural light, the shopper is reminded that the building he is in predicated on the structure that is holding it up. There is no moral imperative to such a device, but visually the pylons mediate between the retail space and the salvaged building. They also provide a flexible floor plan. One of the joys of Richard Rogers work has been the way his work has pushed at the notions of taste through colour, employing green for all the water pipes on the Centre Pompidou, employing yellow columns at the Madrid Barajas airport and employing Mike Davies, who always wears red.

It isn’t the colour in the interior though nor the retention of the façade that makes Las Arenas a truly exciting building though. It’s the roof space. Above the plate that sits on the walls of the bullring is a shallow grid-shell dome constructed from short lengths of glu-lam timber beams, punctuated by an oculus. A beautiful dramatic interior space, it is surrounded by small cafés and then a wide terrace, which is already a popular spot for a promenade for Catalans, who can view their hitherto foreboding National Art Museum at something like an equal level as well as Montjuic beyond. Even better though is the sprung running track that is suspended beneath it, part of the spa complex.

The only point at which the development ceases to be so adroit is the proximity between the bullring and the Eforum office development, a 5,500 sq m office block that is part of the same development. The six-storey building, a two-storey plinth of retail and restaurants with the four storeys of office above, is divided into two narrow buildings with an oblong plan. The building creates a perfect Barcelona street on the east side; simple office blocks all jazzed up by thin aerofoil-style brise soleils on the office block and coloured cranked tripartite columns. Although it no doubt makes the whole expensive refit of Las Arenas financially possible, the whole block feels too tight to the bullring.

Partly as a means of balancing the project, against this bulk to the east, RSHP has built what it calls the communication tower. It’s actually a column that supports a lift shaft that rises up from the metro station. This has been articulated into a Skylon-esque tower with a rotating sign. It is a fun sculptural moment in which Rogers acknowledges the retro chic of his coloured-duct functionalism. It’s a bit of fun – a gesture to all the miserablists who think buying a jumper from a department store is morally wrong, although it is a sign that Rogers is harking back to the years in which he first practiced – giving us a kitschy vision of 50s futurism. His model for a tower in the Summer Show at the Royal Academy suggests that this Eagle Comic futurism is not a one-off however, and you could imagine the appeal of this aesthetic palling after a couple of iterations.

Still, it beats the stuff he is building in London. Even the fans of RSHP’s One Hyde Park project, of which there were only a few, felt the need to excuse themselves in order to compliment the £500m development. In the current economic climate praising a development in which a 3-bedroom apartment costs £15m is simply not in good taste.  Rowan Moore, writing in The Observer noted that: “the bigger question is whether we should be outraged by this defensive enclave for the super-rich.”  Moore, decided that he wasn’t going to be outraged, although many where.

The question is set to linger. The first block of the Neo Bankside development: immediately adjacent to Tate Modern has completed, containing apartments that sell within a more modest £1m to £5m bracket. Perhaps this is Rogers only real means of delivering his Livingtone-friendly vision of high-density living, believing perhaps that if he gets the rich to re-populate the city centre in high-rise apartments, the poor will no doubt follow. He’s unlikely to convince many people with his argument given that the Neo Bankside towers are designed almost exclusively to maximise the views of its inhabitants. An architect’s practice says more than his preaching.

This is a great documentary by the film-maker Simona Piantieri, which I contributed to. I think she gets a great range of voices who actually provide an insight into the building. I think I’ve modified my views on it as a consequence of watching. It helped me see beyond Renzo Piano’s spin to appreciate what a great building it might actually be.

During 1858, the summer was unusually hot. The Thames and many of its urban tributaries were overflowing with sewage; the warm weather encouraged bacteria to thrive and the resulting smell was so overwhelming that it affected the work of the House of Commons. The curtains of the house were soaked in chloride of lime. Members considered relocating upstream to Hampton Court. Plans were made to evacuate to Oxford and St Albans. In typical London fashion, heavy rain finally ended the heat and humidity of summer. However, a House of Commons select committee was appointed to report on the Stink and recommend how to end the problem.

Bazalgette designed an extensive underground sewerage system that diverted waste to the Thames Estuary, downstream of the main centre of population. Six main interceptory sewers, totalling almost 100 miles (160 km) in length, were constructed, some incorporating stretches of London’s submerged rivers. Three of these sewers were north of the river, the southernmost, low-level one being incorporated in the Thames Embankment. The intercepting sewers, constructed between 1859 and 1865, were fed by 450 miles (720 km) of main sewers that, in turn, conveyed the contents of some 13,000 miles (21,000 km) of smaller local sewers. Construction of the interceptor system required 318 million bricks, 2.7 million cubic metres of excavated earth and 670,000 cubic metres of concrete.

Gravity allows the sewage to flow eastwards, but in places such as Chelsea, Deptford and Abbey Mills, pumping stations were built to raise the water and provide sufficient flow. The Abbey Mills Pump Stations is probably one of the greatest pieces of architecture ever created to house water treatment. It was designed by Bazalgette, together with the architect Charles Driver and completed in 1868. By building a Byzantine, brick shrine, rather than a modest envelope, the engineer glorified waste management.

Today this sewage system, with the Pump Station as its crowning glory is being honoured in a clever, yet subtle way by a new sewage facility, designed by architect John Lyall. Although Lyall has worked on infrastructure projects before – particularly memorable is his Floating Fire Station on the Thames and his underground station at North Greenwich – the Pudding Mill Pumping station is a radical departure. Although a project like the Fire Station owes a debt to early Rogers with its exposed steel members and a corrugated cladding, Pudding Mill is dense and concrete. It’s less Hi-Tech and more Steam Punk, taking its cue from not just from brutalism but also from a decorative, Victorian tradition.

Lyall has scored reliefs of Bazalgette’s beautiful plans for Abbey Mills into the concrete paneling of his own pumping station. We too should glorify the civilised way we deal with out waste, it subtly says.  It promises to provide a solid yet, texturally rich gatepost to the Olympics.

Not the V&A - a laboratory designed by Snøhetta for Marintek near Trondheim

Great to see Snøhetta’s work on the shortlist for the V&A’s satellite building in Dundee. One sincerely hopes that architect like Gareth Hoskins can take something from the collaboration and start designing more exciting buildings. Of course, Snøhetta are a practice with a huge experience of working with landscape and seascape and were it not for the fact that they are perhaps too well known internationally for this kind of work, they would be a shoe-in. Also, the sheer scale of the National Opera House in Oslo shows the scale they like to work on. Their challenging scheme for the Turner Contemporary art centre in Margate was aborted in February 2006. Snøhetta’s scheme which thrust the gallery into the pounding surf, suffered from spiralling costs leading to the council to legal proceedings in 2008 to recover £5.8 million in design costs.

This project however, scoops the lot for ambition – a brilliant bold reinvention of the relationship between human habitat and seascape. This speculative project is called the Deep Ocean Laboratory: part of a research centre for Marintek, one of Norway’s most important marine technology companies. The Deep Ocean Laboratory is located to the central off the coast of Norway near the harbour of Nyhavna, close to Trondheim. It is part of a wider move to redevelop Nyhavna as The Knowledge City of Norway – a centre for technology and research. The proposal has been created to attract investors but it is a genuine projects. Marintek, hope to realize the Centre within 10 years from now with The Deep Ocean Laboratory – around 16 000 sq m in size – at its heart.

The entrance to the Marintek Deep Ocean Laboratory

Below is a picture of the project proposed for the V&A. Anyone who has been to Dundee will know that the north bank of the Tay is pretty exposed. In technical terms, Snøhetta, with their experience of building a huge opera house in even harsher conditions, have the experience to do the job. That said, all the shortlised projects have a great deal of potential.

Snøhetta's proposal for the V&A in Dundee. Working with Scottish practice Gareth Hoskins Architects

]]> http://cosmopolitanscum.com/2010/09/30/northern-seascapes/feed/ 0 cosmopolitanscum Marintek Oceanlab aerial credits and copyright by MIR Marintek Oceanlab entrance credits and copyright by MIR VA_Dundee_boards individual.indd