The MP4-12C on the production-line at the Foster-designed McLaren Production Centre

As the BBC former Economic Editor Evan Davis pointed out in his recent TV series Made in Britain, not only is the UK still the 5th largest industrial nation, but it reached its peak industrial production not in 1890 or even in 1944 but in 2008. Yes, Davis points out, we are no longer the kind of industrial nation which makes multiple machine parts and, although this has negative consequences for permanent, mass employment, it does have positive consequences for wage levels in the face of cheaper foreign labour. Davis argued for a specific kind of industrial manufacture in his series. Standing looking over a £180,000 McLaren MP4-12C sports car he declared ‘this is high value production and it’s what Britain does best’. His backdrop was the recently opened McLaren Production Centre in Woking designed by Foster and Partners.

A plan of the new McLaren site. The Production centre is to the south and to the north is the Technical Centre, where the Formula One team is based.

Foster’s building is a sleek, low-slung shed – is a classic recent example of a particularly British branch of architecture, that has been closely associated with the countries movement from heavy industry to small-scale high value production. The Formula One constructor and now, sports car manufacturer who will produce only 10 MP4-12C’s a day at its Woking base but then each one costs a minimum of £168,500. The car is doing well: riding a surge in car exports due to the changes in exchange rates since 2008. According to the The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, car production in the UK was up 6% in 2011, 2% more than the global average with 80% of all vehicles made in the UK destined for abroad.

The UK, particularly around the M25 was home to that unique typology that the architecture critic Reyner Banham described as the ‘serviced shed’. Buildings like the PA Technology centre by Richard Rogers, nestle into the semi-rural, off-a-ring-road landscape like the McLaren MPC. The INMOS factory, completed, again by Rogers, in 1987 is a similar type of building: its tubular steel assisted span- tension structure is supported by tension tie rods from a spine of towers. The first of them was probably the Reliance Controls Electronics factory in Swindon built by Team 4, the then Lords Rogers and Fosters with their then wives. It is hard to remember that semi-conductors were once a high-value industry but it goes to show how quickly the UK the manufacturing sector has had to move to remain high-end.

A drawing of the INMOS building, by Richard Rogers.

The originators of this approach to architecture have gone on to be incredibly successful in the late 20th century, early 21st century, particularly in the demanding field of airport design.  Foster built Beijing and Hong Kong International airport whilst Rogers designed Barajas Airport in Madrid and Heathrow Terminal 5. Both have gone on to create a whole architectural language in which the engineering is on show. In the case of Rogers this has been not just been the structural elements but also the services; pipes and conduits on the outside. Foster, meanwhile pioneered the integration of IT into the office space rather having it sit in a separate room. At his pioneering design for a temporary Head Office for IBM in Portsmouth, he also created sub-floor spaces for the wiring for computing, which is of course now standard practice.

The success in airpot design is telling, because another area in which this engineering-led brand of British architecture is in the area of logistics; not simply the way in which an architect is able to organise efficiently the construction of his building but the way in which he can provide and allow for the efficient use of its space subsequently. This was firstly useful in housing manufacturing, but it then became useful the processing of high volumes of human traffic and transport support services. It requires a design system which is not based simply on the plan and section in the classic modernist way but also a diagrammatic way of drawing, designing and thinking.

Cedric Price gave birth to this way of working out the separation of a building’s functions as well as its its actual construction in a visual language borrowed from game-theory and cybernetics.  Barnabas Calder has noted how Foster borrowed his early drawing stayle from Price. Other like Nick Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins also used this diagrammatic apporach to conceiving a building, even if they all could turn out a plan and section in the classic way.

This tradition of architecture lives on some astonishing projects today. The Halley VI research base on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica by Hugh Broughton is conceived not just as a final entity but as a programme of construction. The maximum weight the brittle sea ice that all construction materials must land on is 9 tonnes. Prefabricated modules made in South Africa to suit this limit. The Ice Shelf moves at a rate of 400m a year. Snow fall is around 1m a year. The new base has skis on hydraulic lift so it can not only be relocated when it gets to the edge of moving flow of ice, but it can also be towed out of the snow trench that has formed around it at the end of the winter. If you create a long building and place it perpendicular to the wind, the snow is dumped on the leeward side, leaving the forward side hard, and ideal for using vehicles on.

Other projects, such as Grimshaw’s designs for the Aegenerator X wind turbine show how British architects are still considered valuable parts of technically minded teams. The logic for a vertical axis turbine at sea emerges from the problems caused by the problems caused by downward forces generated when conventional turbines are scaled up. However, as Neven Sidor partner at Grimshaw, says: ‘The Aerogenerator X embodies the best in innovative engineering in Britain, and continues an illustrious tradition.’  Whilst understandable fears about the economic conditions across the world combine with the threat to our environment to create a certain primitivism in our domestic architecture, there is still another trend born of relationships with emerging technologies that continues to reinvent itself.

A photograph of Paternoster Square from a project I organised exploring the regulation of public space in May 2009. This was undertaken with the support and guidance of the Manifesto Club

During the recent protests in Greece there was a moment in which the struggle against impending privatisation became concrete. In Thessaloniki, protesters hung a large banner from the city’s main landmark, the White Tower, which said “for sale” as a protest against the government’s massive denationalization schedule, which they perceived as selling away the country’s assets. Even if this goes ahead, it is predicted that for the next 10 years Greece will go through heavy recession followed by a very slow recovery. 

It highlights a huge irony at the core of other protests taking place currently particularly  Occupy London. For while there seems to be a statement of intent in the actions name: a bold claim to a section of the city, from the very beginning the ostensible occupation has been compromised by key land-ownership issues in the City of London. Initially the protestors had attempted to occupy Paternoster Square but a company acting for the owners Mitsubishi Estate, motto A Love for People, A Love for the City took out a High Court injunction to prevent members of the public from accessing the square. This is not some trivial detail either but the key to the strange nature of the protests.

Anna Minton has written convincingly about how public spaces have been privatised across Britain, as have others like Sarah Boyes. New shopping centres like Liverpool One or Cabot Place in Bristol are now policed like older areas in London such Broadgate Circus and, the major example, Canary Wharf. She also describes however, a more fundamental history about the City of London and how its public squares, like its major buildings are in the ownership of major estates, offices set up by major landowners to govern their lands usage. She also explains that a resistance to the stewardship of these estates led to protest and a situation where public usage was tolerated and management was passed over to the public authorities.

Excellent ball control by young Abrahams under close scrutiny from the security guards of Bishopsgate Square

Much has been made of the lack of focus of the Occupy London protests. Indeed the name for the action was initially #occupylsx, or Occupy London Stock Exchange. If indeed, the focus of the protest was the bank bail out, why were they directing their energies on the Stock Exchange? The camp itself seems more preoccupied with organising itself rather than making any clear statement of intent, or explaining a political programme. The discourse of public meeting is aimed primarily at achieving consensus rather than debating values. Debates and negotiations with St. Paul’s take up much of the camp’s vaguely defined leadership’s time. In short, the reason for the camps existence is to exist.

It is odd that no-one has really commented on the naming of the disparate Occupy movements across the world with the Occupy Wall Street event as the originator. It is not a protest with a specific aim but a decision to simply enter space and exist there for as long as possible. Writing in Domus, Chris Cobb records some of the achievements of the #OWS. “Demonstrators have established an orderly free food station made out of a long row of milk crates and plastic sheeting where anyone may come to eat. They’ve also created a technology center near the middle of the park where people sit together all day doing research, writing and tweeting,” he says.

If the authorities in London and New York had any confidence this act of simple occupation, would not be a threat. And yet they still seem to find this act of occupation only to exist a threat.  If this is to be the first act of the latter’s political protest though it should be clearer. Claim private space for the public. Start with that which we fear to lose. In London we are suffering from the fact that private areas were given a veneer of public use in the early 20th century instead of being fully co-opted as public spaces. Always an issue, the economic climate has made it more pronounced.

From a series of actions performed by the staff and friends of Blueprint magazine in London, May 2009

As we found at when I was at Blueprint magazine, there is a particularly galling situation in London where the very language of public space in the city has been cynically mis-used. The sunken amphitheatre outside City Hall is the worst case to my mind: a cynical usage of an architectural typology, this  faux Greek agora, beneath the public administration of the city is in fact owned by More London, a private company. Without the public these spaces would be dead and of no-use to their owners. These spaces should therefore be owned by the public. In the ongoing retreat of the state from building, it is more important than ever.

We are moving into an era when we have to rely on private capital to build projects like the Thames River Park, then certain provisions about public ownership need to be made clear. Planning law should be changed so that private developers hand over public space to authorities. Instead of using planning gain to build extra facilities far from new developments, lets have it used to make public space truly public. If the protestors were to claim rights to the very thing they were being denied their project would have more purpose. Occupation should be a basic right rather than a form of protest.

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

I’m not one of those people who sees in every news event an architectural solution. Much of the rioting that is taking place in London, and particularly in my home borough Hackney can be put down to a combination of frustration, excuse and opportunity. The idea that it this is somehow a design issue is ridiculous. Someone said to me yesterday that the rioting was a design issue, ‘people who are designed out of policy, classes and decent housing, would clearly be angry.’ You can ignore people, but design them out? I’m not sure that’s possible.

 The weekend before the rioting, a mini art festival was held in Hackney. This tiny but intense art festival overtakes a series of artists studios that huddles in the shadow of the Olympic site in London. Liza Fior of British architects / landscaping / art practice muf has written about how this area is one of the most densely populated areas of working areas in Europe and once a year this area shows off itself. I have discovered or got to know some of my favourite artists this way. Jeanette Barnes dynamic drawings of construction sites across London,  Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine-fueled protests against development, Julian Perry’s coastal erosion paintings in which bungalows hover in mid-air.

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

I didn’t make it this year but from reports it is clear that the funding of art, in these straightened times is being heavily influenced by the Olympics. I have been invited to go on one of several boat projects being created in the build up to the Games. A project called Floating Forest leaves from the Folly on the Flyover, beneath the A12 where I sometimes go for a jog. I’m looking forward to doing it, but a friend tells me the former studio complex at Hackney Wick has now been riven in two. Next to one studio were an artist is working on a temporary pavilion for the Olympics is another working on a project which attacks the Olympics. Next to them, Olympic-funded artist, and so on. Generally the work for or against appears to be examining the impact of the Olympic on community terms rather than wider social ones.

Eames, Charles, & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

Perhaps it is just the dispiriting scenes of opportunist theft during the riots that have clouded my view of Hackney and I try not to denigrate the sincere endeavour that has gone into this, but I’d like to point out this image I found in the CCA collection of a project by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen and ask whether we have really progressed much further in architectural terms. This was his design for the IBM Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, which opened in 1964. The pavilion created the effect of a covered garden, with all exhibits in the open beneath a grove of 45 of these man-made steel trees which were around 32-feet high.

Working for a massive corporation, Eames and Saarinen used the tree column as a conceptual device to create an Arcadian promenade; creating a world that was both of the world and separate from it. In 2012, London will be covered with temporary structures which, if recent events are anything to go by, will frequently use this tree column idea. Indeed London tends to be covered with these objects especially around the time of the London Festival of Architecture, which next year will coincide with the Games itself. I look forward to steel trees, plastic trees and probably even wooden trees sprouting up across the city.

I’m all for architects gaining experience of construction, but sometimes I wonder whether drawing something that won’t be built would not suit them and us a bit better. Hands-on experience is great but what happens when you find yourself re-iterating a form for a client, such as a festival, who wants to buy into the idea of architecture as a life-style choice: who wants you to build them a symbol of an illusory bucolic community. We have seen with the recent riots that when social forces come into play the community can disappear. So why not work less on community and more on society?

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

]]> http://cosmopolitanscum.com/2011/08/09/designing-trees-a-short-article-which-isnt-about-the-london-riots/feed/ 0 cosmopolitanscum IMG_2314 IMG_2317 IMG_2503 IMG_2404 http://cosmopolitanscum.com/2011/08/04/taking-sinclair-personally/ http://cosmopolitanscum.com/2011/08/04/taking-sinclair-personally/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:05:39 +0000 cosmopolitanscum http://cosmopolitanscum.com/?p=633 Continue reading →]]>
It is hard not to respond to Ghost Milk on a personal level. It is a book about the Olympic Games – an issue I am fascinated by – and its setting is Hackney the place where I live. On another level I am thanked in the Acknowledgements at the back of the book. This was, I think, for having commissioned an article from the book’s author, Iain Sinclair, on the opening of the Wembley and the Dome when I was editing Blueprint.

Although I still love the way he writes, I find used as a smoke-screen in his latest work for a strange poetics of place which leaves me unable to recognise the place I live in, in the book. What I love about his work, the way he reflects on an immediate reality of urban life from the fleeting to the intransigent, they way his prose style is lyrical yet somehow unmediated, the way the past informs the present, all this exists in Ghost Milk but I must admit that my admiration is challenged by the highly personal slight that Sinclair takes in the granting of the Olympic Games to East London.

Let me meet, cautiously then, Sinclair half-way then and respond to Ghost Milk on a personal level.  In the first chapter Sinclair describes walking through London Fields to the newly refurbished lido, glimpsing the swimmers through the entrance and becoming immediately dismayed. He refers to the pool as ‘excercise purgatory’.  Of course, I’ve only lived in Hackney for 3 years unlike Sinclair who has lived there since time immemorial but I love the Hackney Lido: crowded and boisterous on one hand, yet strangely able to accommodate private space and a moment to relax. A picture of that strange ability the place has to crowd you with life and distractions yet allow you be yourself simultaneously. 

I must admit that it gets busy. Many go there though just to relax in the sun. I go there to swim, which I must admit to finding a little like purgatory anyway. An expiation of sin. A payment for pleasure had but in a good way. Perhaps I am more inured to crawling up a pool in line than Iain Sinclair. One would have thought though that if he found his local pool too crowded he would be grateful that in 2013 he will have a massive Olympic sized swimming pool to go to. That is not the case.

Perhaps I should not respond on a more objective level. I should not take it personally that in parts of Ghost Milk there is a gross misrepresentation of the Lea Valley Regional Park Act. I would argue that in actual fact this Act preserved a whole swathe of land from the Thames to the M25 for the recreation of the people of London. Far from being the jumped-up Town Councillors he describes, the people behind it were remarkable. Lou Sherman, an ex-cabbie and Communist established a Civic Trust to retain the Lea Valley. Rather than the jumped-up potentate Sinclair describes, a man who committed the cardinal sin of planning and making and building, he thought of the people of the city as a collective.

His plan, to me, was a noble one. Sinclair picks out the more outre moments. He exaggerates, he selects choice moments. At its heart the Park was an advanced piece of urban planning which has helped define the singular beauty that Sinclair so relishes in the Lea Valley to this day. The plan said that the park would “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.”
Anyone who has read Sinclair’s books will recognise this landscape as the very one that the writer relishes. I have written elsewhere about the way in which other parts of the Lee Valley have, if anything, been allowed to return to a wilderness to be enjoyed by individuals rather than a space for more organised, less conventionally picturesque leisure activities. However, the truth remains that the very aesthetic of post-industrial atrophy that Sinclair himself has thrived in was acknowledged in this plan and preserved. But surely we have a right to build on this, not flagrantly but out of necessity?

In previous works the city to Sinclair was a received object, which he enjoyed in its multiplicity. I had no problem with the games he plays with fact and fiction, but in Ghost Milk one really has to wonder about his retrospective tinkering.  He would rather see the Lee Valley as an untouched idyll when in fact the whole place is determined by man’s intervention and subsequent crafting.

Far from being the failure that Sinclair describes the Plan has been very successful. Not only preserving and retaining the industrial heritage of the place – the very habitat in which Sinclair’s imagination finds root. – it also has hardwired recreation into the valley long before the Olympics came along. In addition to football and rugby, canoeing, rowing athletics, swimming, horse-riding, skating have found home along the valley running north. I find Sinclair’s attitude to collective actitivity deeply suspect: the last to be picked at games getting his revenge.

Whereas Sinclair had hitherto constrained his critique of development to the present, in Ghost Milk he now criticises retrospectively. His remarks about Joan Littlewood and the abortive Fun Palace are dubious. The whole idea of the project was not that it would be, as he suggests like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin- a monolithic architectural object. In fact Price’s intention was the exact opposite. He thought that it should be a machine, a kit which could be endlessly reconstructed, a building in the mode of the adapatable architecture Debord and others hoped would be the end of their derives.

The intention for the fun Palace, which has admittedly been bastardised by the Olympic stadium, would have no form as such but endlessly mutate. The Fun Palace was one of the most challenging ideas from a British architect of the 20th Century. Sinclair, often economical with the truth about the present – “what needs to be true, is” as he puts it at the end of Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire – is now reinventing the past, deforming his poetics of place.

Rather than entertaining a political distrust of the Olympics his disregard for it is anti-political. At their most reductive, and in Ghost Milk I fear they are, Sinclair’s poetics are based on memory and by extension, place which for him is a recepticle of memory. If that place changes, for whatever reason, he finds a rupture in his sense of self. Rather than placing his faith in a negotiated process of change, he sees all change to the place around him as an erosion of his own identity.

I am Hackney. They have changed Hackney. They have changed me. 

Indeed whilst he plays with the past to suit himself, in Ghost Milk it is even harder  than in his other works to imagine what his vision of the future is. One gets the impression that he is against change per se. Butted up against the Olympics, which is a mighty obstacle, his stance seems to be to go against man’s ability to control and improve his own environment. He takes intellectually from the characters he meets and offers us his imagination as a transformative agent. Sinclair’s poetry though feeds on the decay of old buildings and old structures. In Ghost Milk he leaches no that which he professes to despise.

It will be interesting for me, if no-one else, to hear how Sinclair describes the Olympics as soon as they over. How will it have changed? How will it then change over time? At what stage, will their sting be lost to him? When it’s less busy at the Lido? Or when the stadium takes on a patina of age? Maybe he will never comes to terms with it. Maybe we will have to wait a few years for a new writer, fed on scraps of Debord to write books about the great romantic moment of the Games and how somehow those moments have informed the present, and how the old swimming pool is worthy of being retained in the face of all common sense because the writer attaches great personal sentiment to what transpired there.

The guides were published by Fritz Baedeker who took his father’s publishing company to Leipzig in 1872. In the late years of the 19^th century and the early years of the 20^th – the heyday of the guides – they became tremendously successful, appealing to a wave of newly enfranchised travellers, who benefited from a more regular, quicker and safer system of steam trains and ships. They were translated from German into English and other languages and were succesful throughout the colonial homelands.

This still does not acccount for the way they have retained to this day a slightly sinister quality; both on a personal level and a geopolitical one. Characters in EM Forster novels, before they have their epiphanies which turn them from repressed stuff shirts into modern sensitive individuals, rely on their Baedekers. In 1942, the Luftwaffe launched a series of air attacks on historic British cities, identied in the Baedeker guides as having cultural signfiicance. These were called the Baedeker raids.

Tentatively picking through the Baedeker guide to Egypt published in 1898, one can quickly see why the guides have developed such a reputation. In this guide the city of Alexandria is treated like a list of ancient artefacts. A quick guide to hieroglyphs is the major graphic to the guide apart from the maps. The guide draws the reader to museums and ancient sites, away from markets and places of simple interaction. The textual elements of the city are heightened; hieroglyphs are deciphered, contents of museum are listed exhaustively.

Furthermore the editor of the Baedeker is forever convincing the reader to stay detached from the people of Egypt. The Preface boasts that the guide has succeeded in ‘supplying the traveller with the necessary information regarding the country and the people he is about to visit, in protecting him against extorion and in rendering him… independent of outside assistance.’ The extraordinary quality of the Baedeker text is to divorce the traveller from other sources of information.

Fragile the books may be but the text is fearsome. One realises quickly that Baedeker isn’t as much a guide to the country but to the iron will of those who wrote it. Place Mohamed Ali in is described with some relief “as the great centre of European life in Alexandria.” With embassies and western churches, the editor of Baedeker describes it as an enclave of civilisation in an unruly city. (An aside in the book suggests a vist to an adjacent cotton-market which would be especially interesting ‘with an introduction to a cotton exporter.” The trade upon which European supremacy is built is never far away.)

This separation is ultimately enforced in the text though along racial lines. Under the title Bakshish, we read that “the average Oriental regards the European traveller as a Croesus.” The guide goes on to recommend that if that traveller is being troubled by an Oriental vendor he should “use the word rûh or imshi (‘be off!’) in a quiet but decided and imperative tone.” A chapter entitled “Intercourse with Orientals” – snigger – contains the instruction “Orientals attach no value whatever to their time, the European will often find his patience sorely tested.’ In fact, the whole project of talking to Egyptians is so fraught that the editor advises that ‘intimate acquaintace with Orientals is to be avoided.” Don’t trust the world. Trust the book.

There is a particular reason for my interest in the guide to Egypt published in 1898: one which helps provide an interesting critique of the Baedeker and explains its enduring fascination. In his introduction to his book of short stories, Slow Learner, the novelist Thomas Pynchon confesses that one of his technical strategies for writing was to pillage factual details from the Baedeker guidebooks. “Loot the Baedeker I did,” he writes. “All the details of a time and place I had never been to.” Of particular interest to Pynchon was the guide to Egypt from 1899, published  a year later than the one in the CCA, which he confesses to having pillaged for a short story, but which I posit also ended up being useful in the writing of V..

The narrative of V, published in 1963, involves two characers. Benny Profane a contemporary beatknik. His victimhood is contrasted with a character named Stencil who is described by George Plimpton in his review in the New York Times that year thus: “He is active as opposed to passive, obsessed by a self-imposed duty which he follows, somewhat joylessly — a Quest to discover the identity of V., a woman’s initial which occurs in the journals of his father, a British Foreign Office man, drowned in a waterspout off Malta. The search for V., a puzzle slowly fitted together by a series of brilliant episodic flashbacks, provides the unifying device of the novel — a framework encompassing a considerable panorama of history and character.”

In V. we find the actual guide to the city followed closely. On Alexandria we read in the second entry in Baedeker under Alexandria that ‘the chief cafes are to be found in the Place Mohammed Ali’ and sure enough, the first mention of the city contains a meeting between two of the pursuivants of the mystical V. scheming at a café on Place Mohammed Ali. Yet we quickly begin to see that for Pynchon, the Baedeker is more a springbroad to an imaginative exploration of how place is perceived rather than simply a technical guide on how to replicate a sense of place. (Although it clearly performs this task as well.)

Take the episode in which Pynchon imagines what the proprietor of a café on Plac Mohammed Ali callled Aieul thinks of the tourists.

‘Let them be deceived into thinking the city something more than what their Baedekers said it was: a Pharos long gone to earthquake and the sea: picturesque but faceless Arabs; monuments, tombs, modern hotels. A false and bastard city; inert – for “them” – as Aieul himself.’

This remark is actually more complicated than it first appears. Pynchon’s character is here suggesting that the readers of Baedeker are trapped into their understanding of the city. They can be aware of another real Alexandria beyond the Baedeker but that other city does not exist or cannot exist for them. So totalising is the Baedeker view of the world that it crushes the potential even to think beyond it. 

Indeed Pynchon goes on in V. to  refer to Baedeker Land and Baedeker World. In V. we meet a disgraced vaudevillean actor Maxwell Rowley-Bugge. (Pynchon is forever focusing on smaller apparently incidental characters who he gives an interior life and an outlandish name – so you remember him.) Pynchon goes on to describe Rowley-Bugge as:

a sort of vagrant who exists, though unwillingly, entirely within the Baedeker world – as much a feature of the topography as the other automata: waiters, porters, cabmen, clerks. Taken for granted. Whenever he was about his business – cadging meals, drinks, or lodging – a temporary covenant would come into effect between Max and his “touch” by which Max was defined as a well-off fellow tourist temporarily embarrassed by a malfunction in Cook’s machinery.

He is a fly in the ointment – a character who sustains himself by sustaining the idea that the tourist system operates seamlessly.

As I have said, what is suprising about the Baedeker is how ruthless it is in instructing its reader how to construct and view Egypt. It is a construction of the exotic or Oriental world from an unashamedly imperial western position. I can see why Pynchon went for it. He is interested in exploring the characters that prove the inbuilt contradictions of power structures. The mission to find V. is perhaps legible as a conspiracy theory which is ultimately self-confounding but which questions received versions of early 20^th history as an early review of the book in Time suggests.

His critique of Baedeker is to say that whilst it records relentlessly and exactingly, its system of representation – totalising I have called it – fails to represent human reality. Pynchon is a good guide to Baedeker guides, which are effectively a ruthlessly efficient system of cataloguing place, that deliberately stymies the individuals ability to interpret and enjoy the place autonomously. It’s like being given a library and told what to think of it by the librarian.

This harsh environment was described in the brief for an international competition which was won by Hugh Broughton Architects who created a modular system of monocoque units on hydraulic jacks that can survive the most perilous of conditions.It is a typically bold move by the British Antarctic Survey: a fascinating, dynamic institution who has cleverly used architecture and design to further its aim to explore and scientifically examine the most uninhabitable corner of the globe.

Halley VI also represents the union between two of the most well regarded facets of the United Kingdom’s industry: design and scientific research. The Halley Research base was made famous by the British scientists who whilst working here in the 1980s made one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the modern age – the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer, which led directly to the banning of CFCs. Yet as the project manager for the complex construction of the base on a shifting ice flow told me: ‘the Antarctic is no place for jingoism.’

Instead Halley VI is both a symbol and a product of the way in which Britain is playing a key role in the unique ecology of collaboration that exists between the 47 nations who have an interest in Antarctica. For example, Halley VI is clad in glass-reinforced plastic (GRP). The cladding must cope with typical winter temperatures of -20 degrees centigrade. Although it has been wrought into new forms to provide top class research and accommodation space for the British base, Hugh Broughton Architects were able to study the way GRP dealt with the conditions through studying Neumayer-Station III, a German base that had used the material. Broughton who is also designing a facility for Spain has adapted and used the same material. There are numerous instances of this kind of collaboration throughout the project.

Indeed the only way that any base can be sustained in Antarctica is through both formal and informal systems of international collaboration. Informally, scientists will stay at foreign bases if they need, for example, to take ice samples in their vicinity. They stay with each other throughout the winter. Scientists from one nation will place fuel in strategic refueling positions to help teams from other nations. Their lives literally depend on each othe

On a formal level, the Antarctic Treaty System creates consensus about how to keep Antarctica pollution-free as well as free from any arms. Halley VI sits within a truly neutral space. The first two articles in the main treaty in the system state that the area should ‘be used for peaceful purposes only’ and that ‘freedom of scientific investigations and cooperation shall continue’ within the continent. One senses that the increasing number of scientists from an increasing number of nations on Antarctica is caused as much by a collective desire to have a presence should that system change as much to enjoy it now.

In the mean time though, the very reason for the base’s existence – scientific study – is also dependent on an international structure of peer review and contributing evidence. As Newton put it, ‘If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Nowhere on earth reveals the truth of this statement more than Antarctica.

There is a peculiarly English quality to temporary seating. The Badminton Annual horse trials require around 14,000 tiered seats including half of which is covered. The Queen allows around 5,000 temporary seats on to her land for the Royal Windsor Horse show. Tennis tournaments at Queen’s and Wimbledon are augmented annually by temporary seating. Take any so called ‘elite sport’ i.e. one normally played by a very few rich people, which is granted a moment in the sun, such show-jumping, rowing, polo, and you will find a home for temporary seating: the more rarefied the guest, the more likely that their annual hurrah will be hosted on temporary seats.

Indeed the clang of high heels on metal struts is as much part of our sporting summers as rain, champagne and a fleeting interest in sports normally reserved for a wealthy elite. This is the culture that gave us the posh portable toilet – basic, modular structures with Kardean flooring, solid wood doors and toilet partitions with oak skirting, Mozart piped-in to a plastic box. Posh loos don’t just provide luxury they also provide a frisson, a polite means of introducing lavatorial humour. Very very English.

The designers of what the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games calls the overlay, i.e. the temporary structures will have to face down the posh loo question in the coming months. Temporary facilities will be one of the most striking factors of these games compared to others. 270,000 temporary seats will be used at the London Olympics, that’s compared to150,00 used at Sydney and 60,000 used at Athens. In fact the Games will see the largest number of temporary seats used at an event ever, more than the last three Games combined. There is a very English reason for this and it isn’t the one being put about by LOCOG which features the two dread words of these games, ‘sustainability’ and ‘legacy’

Although Britain is going to become a Titan of temporary seating, this isn’t the reason either. It was estimated in 2007 that the existing stock of temporary seating was between 120,000 and 130,000 seats. Temporary seating owners feared that the Organising Committee would buy up stock and then release it back on to the market afterwards, creating a huge glut of stock and a sharp drop in profits. Quietly LOCOG have been working with seat manufacturers to the degree that the entire stock of temporary seating in the UK will be overhauled in line with demands of the Olympics. Britain is hoping to turn its love of posh loos into a major export industry.

The real reason is that, like we did last time the event was hosted in London, we are thinking of optimising the income of foreign currency. We are never going to make a profit as we did in 1948, given that we’re spending around £10billion on a major regeneration project, but we can still pull in a few tourists to off-set the loss. Allies and Morrison’s design for the equestrian venue in Greenwich Park is an absolutely brilliant example. Set on the main axis that Inigo Jones created through the Park, just above the Queen’s House that he also designed, the temporary seating is open on three sides, providing an impeccable view of the equisite Palladian setpiece, for the TV cameras. Canary Wharf looms high in the background. It is less an act of architecture more like an act of photography; telling the lens which way to look.

It’s being done to brilliant effect at other venues. At the Lords Cricket Ground, archers will be permitted to shoot over the hallowed wicket with temporary seating banked up on either side of them. Given permission by the International Archery Federation to change the rules regarding the orientation of the range, the stands will sit in the outfield with the camera directed towards the Future Systems media centre and the traditional pavilion. Temporary seating is being used to create a TV image of London as an interplay of the old and the new. For the same reason we will have Beach Volleyball on Horseguards Parade. Like Greenwich, it’s the Palladian and the Modern, except here the modern is provided by bikinis rather than towers by Pelli, Foster and HOK. It’s the aesthetic of the posh loo on a grand scale.

And why not? Individuals like John Barrow from Populous, Paul Appleton at Allies and Morrison and Alex Lifschutz are rather excitedly looking at how to host a party during the Olympics. They are looking to the Badmintons and Wimbledons for ideas: as well as street parties like The Mayor’s Thames Festival, as well as how to create spots of entertainment with temporary awnings, screens, and yes, loos within a huge park. Given the debacle with the stadium, it is exciting to hear about the fun-focussed design of genuninely temporary facilities, rather than structures that look temporary but aren’t.

If you travel to the east of Kreuzberg you can see houses that were cut off by the the structure hastily built in 1961 but belying the entrenchment of the Cold War from ten years earlier. There has been no attempt to stitch up the loose ends of the urban fabric. Not far from this site, where the Wall made a small incursion along the Flutgraben, in the heart of the dreamy Schlesischer Park is the watchtower of the Schlesischer Busch command post which looks out on nothing today but strolling families, the occasional jogger and just to the west some of the most well appointed railway carriage / camper van squats in the world.

It is a standard shock for the visitor to realise that the wall didn’t travel perpendicularly through the map of Berlin north to south separating east and west as ordinal absolutes. The watchtower at Schlesischer Park is quaint testament to this. It’s almost cosy in its dimensions – its only 10m high. Across from the park to the east is a former barracks for guards. On the roof there still exists the gantry planks upon which the guards used to patrol. Inside the building, Raumlabor a German architecture and art group still inhabit what they took as a squat back in the day. Around them a playground of bars and clubs has been plugged into the old military complex. It is owned by one entrepreneur who threatens the tranquility of a number of great studios, testament to the changing economy of Berlin. Nearby is also a builders merchants yard who is cannily useing the wall to his own ends:

Yup. The former Anti-Fascist Protection Wall is now retaining aggregate. You don’t need to know how many individuals were killed from 1961 to 1989 to know that this is somehow life affirming.

Nor do I find the kitsch of Checkpoint Charlie cheapening.  It’s only if you think that 1989 was simply a case of knocking down a bit of concrete that you should be offended by what goes on there now. If you need reminding that the Wall was a symbol of something else more important then you should watch this amazing documentary on the BBC . Sorry for those that are late or live outside the UK but this was one of the best bits of documentary work done by the BBC in recent years.

Indeed the moments where the Wall is remembered in somber fashion are strangely unsettling. The chapel of reconciliation is particularly strange point.  The construction of the Berlin Wall put the adjacent, 1894 redbrick neo-Gothic building right in the middle of the no man’s land  making it inaccessible. In 1985 the GDR demolished it. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the property was returned and a new church was consecrated. It is a generous and humane piece of architecture:

But then, as much as you can applaud these ideals: why build a memorial to the Wall? What makes a more powerful statement about what the Nazi holocaust: the remnants of Auschwitz or the laudable but abstract Eisenmann-designed series of monoliths? That’s not to denigrate what Eisenmann did but to understand that within the remains of the built fabric of a structure of repression one can understand the logic and the illogic of a regime. This to me is the fitting memorial to the Berlin Wall:

These pictures were taken by Dan Dubowitz. He’s got a shed load more of brilliant stuff. There is another great exhibition going on right now which follows the Wall all the way around West Berlin… A great lead image which makes the exhibition look like its well worth a trip up to Glasgow to the Lighthouse… If that’s not been demolished too.

In an era when cartography has become a digitised operation; when maps are constructed apparently incontrovertible digital measurement, it is hard to believe that the act of depicting a world is also an attempt to possess it. Mapping is not merely about measuring though a fact that is explored in Brian Friel’s superb play Translations.

The play focuses on the relationship between the army engineers mapping Ireland in the early half of the 19th Century and the local Irish. In the play the act of mapping is compared to the act of translating. Stuffy Captain Lacey struggles to explain in English to a group of Irishmen what a map is.

‘A map is a representation on paper – a picture – you understand picture? – a paper picture – showing, representing this country – yes? Showing your country in miniature – a scaled drawing on paper of – of – of…

The audience begins to wonder, how can you make an accurate map when you can’t even explain what one is? Mapping and naming are closely associated activities. With Captain Lacey travels Lieutenant Yolland who must standardise the names, a task which proves to be largely beyond him, largely because the history of the places he must name are so complex, so typically human.

This act of naming is as important a part of mapping as the surveying. Indeed these roles often conflict or undermine each other. Whilst map data is open source in the USA, in the UK the Ordnance Survey still controls the data. In an irony that wouldn’t be lost on Brian Friel, they also fund a research group called Vernacular Geography, which looks into how people name parts of their city. It is a way of keeping up with the citizen’s imaginative understanding of the city around them and a way of maintaining the authority of their maps.

One of the first maps that Peake I remember seeing is the one that opens JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. This map is a huge statement of intent. It asserts, what the writer Will Self has called ‘the primacy of the imagination’. The map, created by Tolkein himself, insists on the artists right to creative an entire universe for himself and his audience.  Yet Tolkein’s story reveals the tension that can exist between this grand statement and reality.

The Lord of the Rings to all but the terminally deluded is a thinly-veiled parable about the politics of a declining empire; his elves are aristocrats, his orcs are mercantile capitalists and his hobbits are the rural proletariat.  Having created such a vast map, such a vast canvas for his imagination, Tolkein is incapable of keeping the act of imagination going and must in the end pour the entirety of his reactionary political views into it.

Will Self’s Book of Dave may seem an unlikely comparison to Tolkein’s masterpiece of faux folklore but it too opens with a map, created by the cartoonist Martin Rowson. The map depicts a future England that has been flooded. This world is the setting for half of the book. It is a future society that has been extrapolated from the embittered rantings found in the diary of a contemporary London cab driver which forms the other half.

Dave’s writings are political in the sense that they turn his inner misery into a semi-political diatribe. Rowson’s map – although not integral to the text – is a joke on how we map the world through our beliefs. Yes, in narrative terms, there’s been a huge flood which determines the landscape but Rowson’s work whether he’s aware of it or not is making a satirical play on the way we map out new worlds only to fill them with our the political crimes of the past.

An artist like Nigel Peake however, makes maps that are playful, evocative, humane. Their scale and their rhythm raise these personal reminiscences to the level of art. Peake uses ink pens to draw lines that simultaneously conjure up a world and circumscribe it. He uses tracing paper, mylar and hot press 300 gram water color paper, as well as cartridge paper, graph paper and card. He works on kitchen tables and in attics. His maps are simultaneously an act of imagination and an act of ordering. His book Maps is beautiful… But then I would say that…

ALL IMAGES BY NIGEL PEAKE.