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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Bennett writing in the LRB describes it thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Renata Gutman for her help with this post. 

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.

The left-wing politician and journalist Nick Auf der Maur notes this story in his book The Billion Dollar Game. The hard-drinking hack / politico tells a story of the blighted Montreal games of popular legend. Auf der Maur bewailed the way in which democratic systems in Montreal such as they were were circumvented. The Olympics to him were an event over which hung a pall of misfortune, such as suggested by the story above. To him Montreal was created by an egotistical tyrant of a mayor Jean Drapeau and an extravagant – and this is significant to Auf der Maur – French architect Roger Tallibert.

It is hard to reconcile Auf der Maur’s extraordinary exposé of the Montreal Olympics published before the Games were even held, with the joy of visiting a truly extraordinary spectacle in the east of the city. What is significant is that the stadium is still tabboo to some. This extravagant architectural gesture built by a duo who constantly compared their endeavour to the building of the Parthenon and the Pyramid deserves to be heralded not just on its own terms but as the first of a particular kind of Grand Projet that defined the late 20^th century – formally and structurally extravagant and legible primarily as a gesture rather than as a building. It is more Calatrava than Calatrava and a very obvious result of the unfettered ambitions of Tallibert and Drapeau that even later apologists for the Games acknowledge was out of control.

And yet reading the book in the CCA archive, just hours afer having visited the megrastructure – a pool, inclined tower, stadium and velodrome in one – one realises that a narrative arcs particular to the Olympic Games defines our appreciation of the archtiecture the Games produces. Montreal defined a narrative of Olympic Games, which subsequent Organising committees have done their best to control.  Disapproval and dischord prior to the Games as costs shoot up for as yet unseen buildings. This is then followed by an alloyed appreciation of them during or immediately after the Games themselves.

In terms this is then followed by the legacy phase. This is typified by various state figures and critics engaging in intederminate economic arguments as to the true cost and benefit of the event in the aftermath which ultimately are irreducable to a result. How does one ultimately quantify the economic benefit resulting from an ill-defined changed in global perception of a place? Observing the 2008 Games in Beijing, one could see this arc established by Montreal followed closely. London is slipping into this pattern as well. The only thing that has changed is that the story is anticipated and managed in a much more ruthless fashion than it was during Montreal.

In the CCA Library is also a book by the novelist  and Professor of English Jack Ludwig called Five Ring Circus. It tells the story of the construction of the buildings through the actual event itself. Recording the opening ceremony in florid style Ludwig notes. “The Olmpics were all set to begin. With an unfinished tower. With temporary ramps and walks and staircases, wooden flooring that boinged under bodyweight and looked at  closely showed in spaces between boards an unbridled  prosepct of ground 30 or 40 or 50 fee below. A strong fresh smell of epoxy, the bonding material used to join the block in Roger Tallibert’s building plan, charged the air with an effluvium of newness.’

To Ludwig, the failure to complete the building on schedule becomes part of the pageantry of the Games. The extraordinary political battle taking place over who was responsible for failing to deliver the project on time and overspending is part of the spectacle of the event. Construction, even incomplete construction is part of the Olympic experience. There have been no greater failures in Olympic history than the failure to complete the inclining tower over the Montreal Stadium, but Ludwig reconciles this with the performances of the Romanian gymanst Nadia Comaneci and the German swimmer Kornelia Ender and pretty much shrugs it off.

For Ludwig, the spend on the Games is melioriated by its quixotic, almost poetic effect on Montreal, which becomes in his eyes forever touched by the Olympic spirit. Structures may not be finished, doping may take place but the Games took place. “In time Kornelia Ender’s every motion became part of a unique signature on Montreal space,” he says. Although the book is published in the same year as Auf Der Maur’s, the narrative has changed utterly simply becaue the book takes place after an incredibly successful event. Ludwig is able to cast his eye forwards to the future as well. ‘No matter what happens to Montreal … as result of the Olympic deficit, Drapeau will always believe that he was after all right.’

When asked by Nixon what he thought the impace of the French Revolution would be the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said it was “too early to say”. It has taken Paul Charles Howell a planning consultant and key player in the Montreal Olympic Organizing Committee some 33 year to finally put his thoughts on the event out into the world in his book The Montreal Olympics: An Insider’s View of Organizing A Self-Financing Games. By now he feels able to show that in terms of organsiation the Games were in fact a success.

Howell posits the fact that what is termed Olympic defecit was in fact cost. Explaining away Drapeau’s promise to make the Games self-financing, he suggests the figure of $2bn, commonly described as a defecit after the Games is inaccurate because it involves costs such as the completion of the stadium, the later conversions to the buildings and the cost of constructing the Olympic village without taking into account its resale.

The book redresses the balance to a degree pointing out how well used the facility is but it is far from conclusive. Howell overlooks the interminable problem with the stadium’s roof and although he states the benefits that have accrued to Montreal in as persuasive a way as possible, he admits ultimately however that his account-balancing is futile. One has to believe in the Olympic goals of excellence and fraternity through competition to acknowledge the benefits. One senses today that there is no sense of shared ownership of the stadium, which is although not for the delicate or faint of heart a truly remarkable piece of architecture.

These three books in different ways suggest that the political faultlines between city, state and federal government as well as the International Olympic Committee that existed during the mayorship of Drapeau, and were frequently manipulated by him, perhaps still endure. It is possible however, for greatness to exist in this internecine atmosphere and for the various viewpoints on the Games to be right and yet somehow miss the point. To an untutored observer, Montreal possesses a certain romantic sense of ambition, thwarted in part, attained in others that is peculiar to an Olympic city. But then that self-same untutored observer could also be the kind of person that finds the sight of his fellow countryman’s name inscribed onto a wall, surprisingly moving.

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.

The Marshes as Londoners still think is a huge stretch of flat grasslands that are covered in over 60 football pitches. Not just for the inhabitants of the capital, the pitches have had a mythical status  in national football – a sign of the sport’s grip on the English imagination and national identity. Verified facts are hard come by. Myths are plentiful. Tottenham Hotspur began as an amateur club playing here in the 19th century. In 1947 the Hackney and Leyton Sunday League was founded and over 120 pitches were crammed on to the site, although it now houses half the number. The mythical status is in its very fabric. According to Johnnie Walker the League’s chairman the reason that the pitches drain so well is because ‘these pitches were created on the foundations of the rubble created by the ‘Blitz’ and the heavy bombing of London.’ Beneath its surface lies English grit.

Numerous English football players are supposed to have played here. Terry Venables – a talented player and great manager, although a total liability in terms of his financial record – trotted out here first. They say Rio Ferdinand began his career here too, on the 280 acre site. Yet as its mythical status has increased, the League has slowly contracted in size. The working men’s social clubs and youth club system that supported the weekend leagues, drawing in teams from all over London, and further afield has declined in influence. The administrators that are required to support training and league organisation are often the butt of jokes amongst players, but they are vital to keep the game going. Furthermore, changed work and social patterns, mean that men are unable to commit to playing on a Sunday. Football is still played to the same degree but not in an organised fashion; ad hoc games in the park or after work, in one of the many 5-a-side pitches that have cropped up across our cities.

Appositely the Marshes has during this process anchored itself in the popular imagination as a place of importance to amateur football, a place which symbolised a pre-lapsarian goodness in the game. Nothing summed this up better than the fact that David Beckham by the 1990s a global brand himself, had learned to play on the Marshes.

In 1997 Nike ran an ad campaign that showed Premiership footballers playing in Sunday league teams on Hackney Marshes in east London. To the tune of Blur’s Parklife, Eric Cantona, David Seaman and Robbie Fowler were seen playing alongside rank amateurs. It was one of the most popular advertising campaigns of the 1990s, showing some nice touches of humour, a clear understanding of the humour and thinly repressed violence that typifies the amateur game. It also riffed nicely on that nostalgia for all things British and blokey that Britpop bands like Blur, Pulp and Supergrass had recently returned to cultural favour. Hackney Marshes was the ultimate amateur football venue. Even when there were no games taking place there, the ranks of goal posts receding from view, covered in scraps of tapes, were apparent monuments to the games enduring popularity, neatly obscuring the fact that the Sunday League was never as popular as it was when it was founded.

Nike though became infatuated with this endless stretch of grass, laid over the rubble of the East End. In 2006, as the sportswear industry prepared itself for the World Cup, Nike again tried to identify itself with grassroots and returned to Hackney Marshes. This time though,  Nike produced trainers, footballs, T-shirts, shorts and tracksuit bottoms that not only boasted the name Hackney Marshes, but also an exact copy of the council’s logo surrounded by the words The London Borough of Hackney. The Hackney logo was sold on limited edition goods around the world According to the Guardian, a Hackney council employee saw it in a shop in Manila.  In September 2006, the sports brand agreed to pay £300,000 in an out of court settlement to Hackney council for copyright infringement. Even before the Olympic Games arrived on its doorstep, the Marshes represented the fault line between two very separate ideas of what sport is: a universal pursuit and a global commodity.

Adidas also came a cropper here. In September 2010, as part of a publicity stunt by Adidas, Lionel Messi was flown to an area considered to be the spiritual home of English football by helicopter. The organisers had teased fans of the player with messages on a social networking sites but had not banked on the excitement caused by the arrival of Messi, at that time FIFA’s Player of the Year. When Messi stepped out of the helicopter on his own with a kit bag in hand he was immediately surrounded by fans. Addidas had planned to introduce Messi for the final ten minutes of a match. However the security was utterly unprepared for the levels of excitement and the diminutive Argentinian had to be bundled into a van by his minders and taken to a signing event elsewhere in the East End. Global football brands 0, Hackney Marshes 2.

But whilst global brands have been confounded in their use of the Marshes as a trope for grass roots or football as the truly global game, it is not because the ‘community’ resisted it. It’s because their vision of grass roots was contrived and bogus in the first place. One can see the traditional role of the Marshes as a site of London-wide, organised recreation eroding – a testimony to the fading role of social organisations, created by workers for workers. Old changing rooms have been replaced with a new Centre, which not only provides new facilities for football but also a cafeteria and spare rooms for teaching spaces. The hope is to capture passing trade from walkers who will enjoy the newly landscaped wilderness. Leisure is changing its shape and reshaping the Marshes: pitches, a symbol, of organised leisure, being replaced by wooded rambling areas. The architect for the centre works for the established design practice Stanton Williams makes this clear: ‘we wanted a community-based sports facility that related to nature,’ he says. The gabion wall and cor-ten steel reference what another architect William Mann has described as the Bastard Countryside of the Lea Valley.

It is an old theme for the Lea Valley. Back in the early 60s a Civic Trust was established to promote and preserve the strip of land which the Marshes is effectively the foundation of. Their founding document declared:  ‘it will be a playground for Londoners against the background of London. This background – power stations, gas works, factories, railways, houses and flats – must be accepted and acknowledged in the landscape theme.” Even as organised football’s role was declining the idea of an industrial bucolic, one which Mann first notes in Balzac’s work, was being formed. This is precisely the landscape which writers like Iain Sinclair and Will Self have so adored for its apparently untrammeled qualities. Important to note however that even this aesthetic of an apparently unimpeded beauty was first conceived and then managed, albeit in a much much more light-handed fashion, before the Olympics arrived – in their eyes – to ‘ruin’ it.

This is the culmination of a general reappraisal of Ruskin’s attitude to Venice, the city which the English art critic assidiously catalogued. Ruskin’s paternalist approach to the place, his championing of particularly its Gothic architecture provides an insight into the way in which architectural theory develops and dissipates. The exhibiton at the Biennale features a small section curated by Robert Hewison author of the extensive biographical work Ruskin in Venice, which was published earlier this year. The book is a fascinating examination of the relationship between Ruskin and the city, a cataloguing of the mythlogical relationship Ruskin developed with the city and a brilliant deconstruction of it.

The relationship is based primarily on the Stones of Venice, Ruskin’s major work about the city which forms forms an immense contribution to the further establishing of architecture as an art. It is the product of detailed observation sustained at the highest level over a number of years, not to mention the fruit of a closed reading of its history. That is not though the main reason why it intrigues us today however. Nor is it because of his own rather sad personal life. For the more notorious sections you’d have to visit Kensington to the see house where his wife Effie went to live with John Everertt Millais or Coniston, in the Lake District where he passed his troubled later years. Venice instead is where Ruskin propounded his theories and in turn found them confounded.

In positing Venice as a text, which could be read, he in turn went on to decipher it. In doing so he extrapolated from his readings, an impassioned defence of the Gothic as the morally superior style of architecture in Europe. He traces its origins and finds Venice at the heart of its pre-eminence. His argument is that the Gothic is produced by master-builders, dedicated in their tasks to a collective sharing of their skill, often in the direct veneration of God, but not exclusively so, working in semi-autonomous units throughout Europe.

Up until the very end of his life there remained in this favouring of the Gothic; this transmission of God’s word through the tactile language of stone, a mistrust of the centralised authority of the papacy. Although Ruskin was raised as a Protestant by evangelising parents in the 19^th century, he found the same sense of brotherhood in the work of masons in the late medieval period. To him, the Renaissance was not a period in which mankind evolved but, instead regressed morally In Venice he found the apogee; the proof of Gothic tradition’s moral superiority. The Ducal Palace of Venice was the central building of the world, he writes in The Stones of Venice, not it must be noted for its purity but because of its mixing of ‘the Roman, the Lombard and the Arab’.

Why should this talk of the Gothic and morality engage us in the present day? Because the focus of Ruskin’s argument, is not ultimately the evils of the Renaissance or even Catholicism, even though he rails at ‘the Papists temple… the danger and evil of their church decoration.’  The real enemies for Ruskin were democracy and industry. As Hewison makes clear in his excellent book Ruskin’s real intellectual master was Thomas Carlyle, who he considered a second father. Of particular import on Ruskin’s thinking was Carlyle’s comparison between Bury St. Edmunds in his day and in the 12^th century. Through this juxtaposition, Carlyle extrapolates the need for an industrial aristocracy: a noble feudalism, which will protect the working man. Ruskin went along with this.

The Stones of Venice, published in the middle of the 19^th century, is a late flowering of a benign feudalism. Is there any reason why it should capture something apposite about the early 21^st century? Yes but in a very particular way.  One can see in Ruskin – poor, troubled, impotent Ruskin- the epitomy of our own quandaries in the face of industrial progress. Richard Sennett addresses The Stones of Venice in his book The Craftsman. He writes  ’a “flamboyant” worker [the quoted adjective is Ruskin’s]; exuberant and excited is willing to risk losing control over his or her work: machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents.’

Sennett gets at the core of Ruskin’s preference for the Gothic tradition. It permits the stone-mason to dictate scale and structure rather than the neo-classicisal approach which lends itself to political grandstanding and overly ornate detailing. Ruskin’s relationship with Venice though goes beyond that. Although he evokes the texture of the city wonderfully, it really is hard to put aside the biographical fact of Ruskin’s own disgust at human sexuality once you have learned it. There is in his descriptive powers, which are tremendous, a real sensual enjoyment of evoking the city. He writes at his best a little like Gerard Manley Hopkins or – another Victorian ascetic – Emily Dickinson. (I actually blushed when I read him describe the shafts in the church in Torticello.)

Yet whilst he loved the place for itself, it was to him the paradigm of an earthly empire. Venice wasn’t simply Venice. Nor was it simply the crucible for its ideas but an active barometer for the British Empire. ‘Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones of mark beyond all others, have been set up on its sands, the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second the ruin; the Third which inherits their greatness if it forget their example may be led through prouder eminence to destruction.’ If the British Empire fails to learn from this book, well don’t go blaming me, Ruskin suggests.

It’s certainly an impressive opening gambit for a book.  Whilst it would be amusing for a while to consider the idea that the British Empire did indeed collapse because not enough people built Gothic arches in small groups of dedicated disciple-masons, this is not the time. What is worthwhile noting is that the measure of Venice becomes in Ruskin’s rhetoric a measure of the British Empire. In later life, he would posit that the lack of regard for England’s demise amongst Americans was just deserts for their disregard of Venice.

And yet within this first statement in The Stones of Venice there is an assertion that the British should care for the Italian city. In his writings and his later insistence on the right method for restoring St. Mark’s there is more than a faint whiff of Elginism. A book produced by the artist Wolfgang Scheppe is being published by the British Council compares the notebooks of Ruskin with the work of Alvio Gavagnin – a working class photographer from Venice who worked on the Vaporetti. For 20  years he and his wife, Gabriella made systematic archive of Venice, which Scheppe now has compared to Ruskin’s. The appropriating of Venice as a work of art has become Venetian. It is a bold assertion to host within the Biennale.

Because Ruskin also helped create the Gothic revival in British architecture at the end of the nineteenth century and effectively created his own demise: the radical anger to his nostalgia was unable to sustain itself in the transmission. In 1872, he left London for the Lake District. The letter he wrote at the time sums his predicament up:  ‘I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this and Bromley; and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of Madonna of Health or of Miracles. And one of my principal notions for leaving my present home is that it is surrounded everywhere by the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making.’

Liza Fior, director of the art and architecture practice muf  have chosen the title Villa Frankenstein for their pavilion at the Venice Biennale. What Fior has done though is acknowledge the archetype in this relationship. To anyone who has reccommended a specific beach in Cornwall to a limited group of friends only to return to find a guest house with a facade they don’t approve of standing above the cove, to anyone who has recommended a campsite and then found it swamped two years later and felt that the world has somehow accelerated in an inconvenient way: Ruskin is your man.

Ruskin it must be remembered contributed to guidebooks, and although Stones of Venice is a serious tract on the moral purpose of great architecture, it was also published in several Traveller’s Editions within his lifetime. His book St. Mark’s Rest intended as a sequel to Stones of Venice is a guidebook itself and, although there may be some sarcasm in the subtitle ‘written for the help of the few travelers who still care for her monuments,’ there is also some truth.  As Hewison writes “Having declared the death of Venetian architecture and the absolute impossibility of restoring a building without destroying it, it was he who helped to save the west front of St. Mark’s for posterity and the crowds to come.’ Even though he by his own argument the building would cease to have vitality and be beautiful.

We can clearly sympathise with this predicament, even if we must acknowledge that it is the inevitable concomitant of social progress. We should be careful though of taking too much of Ruskin’s theories to heart.  Ruskin rebelled against the Enlightment view of the builder craftsman as master of technology. For him the craftsman was a Romantic archetype. He believe that craftsmen should demand what Richard Sennett has called  ‘a lost space of freedom’ in which they could experiment. He saw that the rigours of the industrial age, as they operated, worked against free expression and was a stern and able critic of these forces. But this does not make him a radical or indeed a pioneer.

Ruskin ultimately becomes a tragic figure because he failed to acknowledge that the very process of industralisation which he so abhorred was improving the lives of so many; that by making their own associations through their shared role in industrial production, the individuals themselves would in turn benefit.

What the Commonwealth Pool gives is space and an unassuming architecture upon which can be grafted the needs of Edinburgh’s citizens. When I was a child, the dramatic mezzanine, which thrust out over the submerged pools contained a café, which served chips that could be smelt from the entrance. Today it is a kids soft play area. I remember when they put the flumes in which snaked outside the building and briefly into the wild landscape of Holyrood Park. I remember when they took them down again. In the room were the weights room now stand, I did judo. Badly. For a month. This space was designed to be used and reused and changed. It will close soon for a full refurbishment and reopen in time for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014. A civic space for Scotland as well as Edinburgh. 

Almost as telling and certainly a companion piece to Baseman’s langorous, touching piece about Colquhon is an adjacent interview with Euan Colam, the project architect from RMJM for the building. It’s a fascinating encoungter. Here you have a London-based artist who says that he ‘loves modernism’ interviewing an architect who can’t really understand how anyone can ‘love’ something that is so self-evidently the right way of approaching architecture. ‘I don’t quite know what you mean about the experiment of Modernism,’ he says at another point. A dour Scot schooled in the tradition of High Modernism with very little time for contemporary attitudes, which sees Modernism as a thing, a fetish relational object in itself, to be protected at all costs, indeed to be totemised in order to somehow conjur up again the political relationships which allowed it to flourish in the first place. (If only this were true.)

Baseman is smarter than that: more of an artist. He’s captured the importance of civic Modernism by encouraging us to remember that Modernism is about the play of space and light; a considered act by a designer rather than a fashionable aesthetic or a banner to wave in order to re-invoke a more familiar political relationship between state and individual.

Dan Dubowitz’s latest photography exhibition starts at Fermynwoods next month. These pictures predominantly of youth camps from the fascist era grew, as Dan’s projects do, out of a series of road trips. The pictures from this particular series were taken along the Tuscan and Emilio-Romanian coasts of Italy near where Dan now lives.

The pictures speak for themselves. The fact that these buildings are still standing shows the rigour with which they were made. They were important components of the architecture of Italian fascism. Children living in the big cities would be removed here for a summer of good air, marching about and spoon-fed indoctrination. The exhibition has already been shown at the Architekturgalerie in Weißenhof, near Stuttgart. There’s a book of the project due to by architect Patrick Duerden who is also a curator at Fermynwoods.