President Jimmy Carter beneath the solar panels on the West Wing.

I read White Noise recently and noticed by chance that Picador have bizarrely just published a 40th anniversary edition of Don DeLillo’s book, although it was first published in 1985. Perhaps it is the accumulated prescience of the book that is urging them to bring forward its anniversary. Certainly we are only beginning to appreciate the importance of a book which manages to give a portrait of an American academic and his relatively happy family in such a way as to depict the deep crisis in modernity. Martin Amis went someway to acknowledging its power when in reviewing the later book Underworld in the New York Times in 1997 when he referred to White Noise as “that beautifully tender anxiety-dream”.

Given that it portrays a society on the verge of collapse, how can the book still be pertinent (nearly) 40 years later? Because, firstly, that society it depicted never collapsed, was never going to. Secondly because that society is still in that anxious state nearly four decades later. In White Noise, DeLillo is one of the first writers to instinctively understand that instability, quixotically, is a condition of an affluent society that has no collective understanding of its direction: a sense of imminent collapse is the result of the material foundation of modernity suddenly being questioned. Diane Johnson in her review of the book also in the New York Times says that the book prefigures Bhopal. It does no such thing. Bhopal was a real disaster, the ‘airborne toxic event’ in in DeLillo’s book is a disaster which is being managed as if it was a simulation.

Wells Office, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, architect Malcolm Wells.

John N. Duvall writes in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, “[He] has a rare gift for historicizing our present, a gift that empowers engaged readers to think historically themselves.” Whilst he was not actively capable of clairvoyance, Duvall is absolutely correct. More than any environmental disaster to come, the book emerges from the unease prompted by the first oil crisis of 1973 , prompted by the Yom Kippur War in Israel and then the further bout of insecurity prompted by the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that preceded it. Not only did this prompt a questioning of geopolitical relationships hitherto seen as secure but it also prompted a questioning of the physical infrastructure of America itself – its roads and its housing.

Michael Reynolds, architect. Turbine House, Taos, New Mexico.
Photograph © Michael Reynolds, 2007.

Mirko Zardini, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture has posited in a series of fascinating texts and exhibitions of which Sorry Out of Gas is the most directly pertinent that the oil crisis prompted a profound questioning of the modern project. Social programmes in the West until that time were predicated on a steady improvement in material wealth, mobility and technological advance. The Oil Crisis threw that in to question. Rather than directing criticism at the unequal distribution of the benefits of modernity, from this point on, social criticism began to be directed at the pernicious effect of modernity itself. What was just a bunch of drop-outs in the 1960s is ripe in 1973 for addressing a panic in Western states.

Steve Baer, designer. House of Steve Baer, Corrales, New Mexico, 1971.
Photography © Jon Naar, 1975/ 2007.

In Sorry Out of Gas we see in architectural terms the impact of this event on planning, particularly of homes. Individuals like Steve Baer – an inventor of passive solar devices and Mike Reynolds an architect and builder of houses made of old car tires packed with dirt- creating domestic structures with features which would permit a direct relationship with nature. As much as they represent considered responses to fears over imagined shortages of traditional building materials, they also sit in remote landscapes or are hidden in the earth. There is a physical remove from social interaction. Baer and Reynolds in particular have considered the unit they are building for to be the family.

Indeed it strikes me that White Noise analyses these newly configured elations between society and family, nature and man, in a way that provides a critical tool for analysing these domestic structures. It is telling too that the American family takes the full-weight of this anxiety in the book.  “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.”

Obviously this has a political significance both in terms of relations within states and between states. Caroline Maniaque-Benton, associate professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, has written persuasively about the development of an architecture which was prompted by “a desire for autonomy from the state and its infrastructure.” And yet we also see this desire for autonomy for the wider global system of oil consumption at the heart of the US government with Jimmy Carter installing solar power on to the roof of the White House. Carter makes an architectural response against the US drift towards – what he deemed as embroilment – in the Middle East.

American President Jimmy Carter dedicates the White House solar panels, 20 June 1979. Photograph © Jimmy Carter Library.

The attempt to retreat from the wider world, the domestic turn of environmentalism, are intimated in White Noise in a way we are only just beginning to appreciate. What book and architectural exhibition is an understanding the family, far from being in a Freudian sense, the source of neurosis. It is in fact a site on to which social disquiet is projected.

Photograph from Cedric Price's archive. The McAppy project.

Fantastic news that the Cedric Price Potteries Thinkbelt exhibition curated by Barnabas Calder and designed by Alan Pert of Nord has made it to London from the Lighthouse in Glasgow. This great exhibitions reinvigorates Price’s plans and drawings as a set of instructions. Rather than conferring on the designs a value that its creator would have disliked intensely, the exhibition is instead an ambitious rethinking of contemporary infrastructure, both academic and industrial. A scale model train set showing the largest and arguably most revolutionary of all of Price’s work The Potteries Thinkbelt sits at the centre of the exhibition.

 At the centre of the exhibition is a carefully planned, scale model showing, not just the tracks and trains to scale but the various housing typologies that Price proposed for the university. Around them is hung a selection of Price’s aphorisms juxtaposed with explanations of his own research, criticisms of other approaches (“the University of East Anglia is the Norwich Municipal Golf Course on the fringe of Suburbia”) and proclamations relating to the Thinkbelt. Calder acknowledges that one of the reasons that Price is best remembered is for his ability to provide pithy remarks that are endlessly quotable. In this exhibition however Price is seen as a far more nuanced thinker than otherwise he is given credit for.

Photograph from Cedric Price's archive. The McAppy project.

Calder and Pert have offered us Price the provocateur. As well contextualising his Potteries proposal as a major rethinking of both the transport systems bequeathed to us by mass industry and the way an academic institution works, the exhibition with its model is of course, a provocation to the viewer. This is the scale an architect can think on, it says, if – and it is an important ‘if’ – he or she understands and appreciates architecture as operating within more than just an aesthetic system, but also a geophysical as well as economic, social and political one. ‘The possible must become more important than the improbable,’ reads one of the slogans on the wall.

Price famously fought to ensure that his Inter-action Centre in Camden was not listed, believing steadfastly that the building had a purpose and once its purpose had been fulfilled it should no longer exist. Price was for pragmatism and against an architecture that crystalised dominant political or social modes into pretty shapes and thereby determined the habits of future generations. Yet his former assistant Stephen Mullen, who spoke at the opening of the exhibition in Glasgow, remembers Price occasionally allowing himself a guilty moment to focus on the visual appeal of his work. Calder also proposes a romantic appeal in Price’s collaged renderings of the Thinkbelt, although one might counter, even the architect’s own predilections for constructivism transplanted to the Potteries was a provocation – a challenge to the existing orthodoxy – rather than a piece of brutalist titillation.

The exhibition chooses an unexpected route to playing out Price’s ideas but it is by now means the only way. Another exhibition, Wish We Were Here appeared in a tight space at the Venice Biennale in 2010 and again in the AA in 2011. Curated by Samantha Hardingham, it showed a series of interviews with Price by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, which have been edited together to allow viewers to select particular passages by clicking on keywords. It also featured a couple of inspiring lectures and details from his notebooks.  Although the selections from these were not always obvious, they show the way in which Price ceaselessly, compulsively developed his semiotics.

Photograph from Cedric Price's archive. The McAppy project.

Price’s put faith in architecture as an agency for man to solve his own problems rather than garland himself with fripperies. Whilst the sensitive touch of Hardingham’s curation avoided the trap of turning Price into something he was not, Pert and Calder have appropriated his work to form a manifesto for architecture as the visible element of a system. Hardingham is writing what is ambitiously called a definitive book on Price and will appear at a symposium at the Bartlett School of Architecture to coincide with the arrival of the exhibition in London. She will appear alongside Calder, Kester Rattenbury Stephen Gage and Ruairi Glynn. It is hopefully a sign that Price’s approach to architecture as a critical mode of thinking about society will find a resurgence.

NB these images are from neither exhibition, but from Price’s archive held at the CCA in Montreal

You are an advocate of recycling came but it seemed to come from a desire to improve the standards of life in slums by keeping them clean. How did you first come to understand sustainability?
I’m obsessed with how to teach children about sustainability from the experience I had in my city with many many issues – we started always with the children. We’d teach the children how to separate garbage and they’d teach their parents. That’s why Curitiba has the highest rate of separation in the world. 70% of people do that. The idea is giving the children some way to help through a few commitments.New materials are important but its not enough, you can have a green building but you can’t imagine going from one green building to another one through a city that is not green.  On the concept of the city that we could be more effective. But you are most effective when you are relating to all the city.

You are now a darling of the environmental movement but how do you understand the word ‘sustainable’?
If a city has a good quality of life, it is sustainable. In other words if you want creativity cut one 0 from your budget. If you want sustainability, you have to cut two 0s from the budget.

[It wasn’t climate change] it was logic. First my house when I was a student of architecture, at the age of 23 years, I made a project and I made this house. I didn’t know it was sustainable but the roof had grass on it.  The fire place I use during the day and at night when I go to bed the wall is still warm.It came by logic. The idea of not wasting because one thing I like the most is silent architecture. Good architecture doesn’t have to cry ‘look at me’. That’s the difference between eco architecture and ego architecture.

Do you still consider yourself an architect?
I never stopped being an architect. I started to be a politician when I got involved in the city’s issue when I was a student. We had at that time a mayor who wanted widen the streets for cars and destroy the whole history of the city. With the students we made a whole movement for a plan. They made a preliminary plan, they contracted people from Europe and Sao Paolo and in the meantime, I’d finished my graduation and they needed someone and I was contracted by the city to be one of the architects. That’s why I became involved as the city. A few years after I was director of planning of the city, a few years after [in 1971] I became the mayor, but because of the political situation I was an appointed mayor at the time.

Did that give you political strength?
No, I was a weak mayor because I could be fired at any time. I could be fired the next day. The problem was that during the military regime they were trying always to fire me because they said I had a lot of communists in my team. It was true, so I was sure that the next week I would be fired. So I decided that whatever we did we had to work fast. I can see that people supported me. They started to believe in what is going on in the city. Every time the state politicians tried to move me, I had the support of people. During this four years of my first term I had the incredible luck to have great professionals in my team, idealistic people. They were a very young staff and I was 33 years old. I knew that we had to be fast. From the weakness of my position, I made a strength. And my motivation was to improve the life of the city. I had no idea to be a politician.

As Mayor of Curitiba, Lerner initiated a transport system to deal with the growing urban population. Lerner’s dedicated bus lanes and access platforms were a huge success

What was it like governing under the military junta?
The Governors appointed the mayors so mayors at that time had some technical background. I was chairman of the Institute of architects, I was president of the urban planning commission. So I had some technical background. Afterwards when I finished my first term I went back to my office. I never thought of being a politician again. I worked in many cities in the world and when I was teaching at Berkeley, California, I got again an invitation to be a mayor again [in 1979] four years after my first four year term-ended.

The New York Times said of Curitiba, ‘the city that has been called the most forward-looking in the Western hemisphere is an outgrowth of an era that many Brazilians prefer not to look back on.’ How did you feel to be invited back to Brazil at that time?
It was a surprise because in Berkeley I had a lot of friends who had run from the political problems. I told them I had this invitation and said, ‘what should I do?’ they said, ‘Go, Go, Go’. Because at that time the country showed an opening of the regime. So I went back and I remember my last class at Berkeley. I gave a tour with the students. One of the lecturers a great friend of mine Alan Jacobs , he said, now you don’t know you were toured around the city by the future mayor of Curitiba. I had a contract. I wanted to finish my time in Berkeley. The second term was also great motivation.

During the 1970s the population of Curitiba doubled, from 550,000 to more than one million people – the highest growth rate of all Brazilian capitals. Did this knowledge influence you to do anything differently in your second term?
I came back with the idea of establishing a grass roots movement. I went every night for 6 months to neighbourhoods and asked them what are your problems and what are your needs. After 6 months, I realised I’m not changing anything. I called my staff and said, it’s a shame we’re not doing anything. It’s time to understand that. We have to understand that strategy is a balance between needs and potentials. If I’m going every night I’ll be submerged by needs and needs and needs, and I won’t have time to think on futures, on the potentials of the situation. So I decided to work differently, every morning I went to another office and we worked on the potentials and in the afternoon I put on my mayors uniform and looked after needs. And there were a lot of needs.

The Botanical Garden in Curitiba. The south Brazilian city is on a floodplain: instead of building levees, Lerner chose to protect the city’s periphery with gardens and parks

Amid all this, you were implementing plans generated by the IPPUC, the Institute of Urban Research and Planning of Curitiba.You opted to purchase the floodplain in Curitiba and made parks on it and introduce sheep to the parks to keep the grass short. How did you find time to come up with these proposals?
There were riots and there were all kinds of problems. I went to listen to the needs but with another mood because I knew we were starting to change. That was a method I used. Not a methodology. I’m a very chaotic man but I know that in the mornings I have to work on the future and then in the afternoon on daily needs. But we have to keep this balance. If I’m just concentrating on needs I won’t change, if I work only from potentials I will be far from the people. That helped me a lot.

You stood for the Partido Democrático Trabalhista for the third term. The circumstances must have been quite different I imagine…
What did I finished my second term in 1983 and I went back to work. I went to many cities. Havana in Cuba, I went to Caracas. I went to many other cities to work and at that time we had elections in 1988. [A new constitution was established in 1988]. At that time the candidate from my party, he decided to quit because he was doing badly at the polls so they asked me to substitute for him 12 days before the election. 15 days before the election but on the last 3 days you can’t canvas. I decided to run and I won the elections in 12 days.

Your parents were Polish Jews born in L’viv who left for Brazil in the 1930s. What did they think of your political career?
I remember my father he didn’t like to have me in politics. So he asked me, ‘Are you going to run?’ And I said, I’ve just written a statement saying I’m not going to run but the anchorman of the TV was a friend of mine and he refused to read it. So he said, you will have to run. We made a meeting and my friend asked many friends there to help me to say ‘no’. So there was a lot of people in my office. All my friends helping say ‘no’ and a good friend of mine a psychiatrist he doesn’t know anything about politics he said to me, ‘I don’t know what party you belong to even but my feeling is that you have to think what is going to hurt you more. Running and losing? Or having the chance to win and not running?’ and I said ‘OK I’ll call my wife and said I’m going to run. Lets do it.’ And I won the elections. I won the election and there was a big difference between being elected and being appointed. You were stronger. You have a mandate.

You devised a system of a large central avenue dedicated to two-way rapid-bus traffic (flanked by slow lanes for cars making short local trips) and, a block over on each side, one-way avenues for fast car traffic. When you started the service, it transported 54,000 passengers daily and it now transports 2.5m people a day.
I was involved more and more with a city but we were able achieve these things because we were a team. My successor was a guy from my team and I was elected governor and re-elected. Together we won 6 elections in a row. After 2002 ok its time to leave.

Bigger cities like Bogota in Colombia have borrowed your idea for buses. The Chinese are looking at it for their inland provincial cities. It’s come to the attention of Europeans as well, through networks like the United Nations Environment Programme’s Climate Neutral Network. You still are clearly involved with city planning in a consultancy capacity…
I feel free to go to other cities and not have political meetings. But I have one party – the city. I think that the city is the last refuge of solidarity. So many countries they have a very pessimistic approach about cities. Many political decision makers they don’t take the city as being important. They see cities as part of the economic problem. The city is economic activities and human settlements, economy and people. Every time you separate economy from people you have a disaster. A city is a structure for living and working together.

A bust stop on Avenida Parana. Extended bus-stops allow passengers to enter the buses quickly

Many cities separate people into rich and poor. If you want a city that is human mix urban functions, mix incomes, mix religions, mix ages. London is a great city because of this. Many cities have rich ghettos or poor ghettos. You have people who are living outside the cities who work in the cities – what’s the big dfeal in living outside a city? I really believe the future is the city. It is said by many may important people and I agree that this is going to be the century of city. The more a country has a generous view of cities, the more generous view it has of its citizens.

What is the core of your working philosophy?
I’m obsessed about the idea of starting. You cannot have all the answers. If you are trying to wait for the answers you would never start so you have to have the courage to start. That’s all innovation is – starting. It’s like a trajectory. You start you have to give some space to people and they will correct you if you are not on the right track. So you don’t need to have all the answers. You can write a whole treatise on how to swim, move your arms and legs simultaneously, but at the moment you dive in the water, oh its so simple. When I was a teenager I used to read treatises about sex. A few years after I realised its not so difficult all you have to do is dive in.

How do you communicate that philosophy today?
There is one thing that I think is important. When I’m going to a city I ask the political decision makers, or politicians or just the inhabitants about their city.  They start with ‘the problem is education, health care, safety or whatever. After I’d say ‘yes, but what’s your dream?’ And some of the people that you talk to they don’t have a dream. The dream is solving the problem but this is not a dream. I’ve got so many answers though. From the governor of a city called Perm in Russia. Close to the Urals and Siberia beyond. This governor a wise man, and after when I asked him what his dream was he said, my dream is that the young people will want to stay in this city and not go to Moscow. Now that’s a dream.

Because a city that has a dream, and can transform that dream into a scenario that the majority can understand, they will help you to make it happen. What is the problem is the lacking of communication between decision makers and planners, planners and people, most of the planners think they have their whole life. First they want to to do  their Phd and then they have their whole life. But politicians have a mandate. He has to do something. I think many cities are making efforts but still they are taking too much time. That’s why I call what I’m working in ‘urban acupuncture’.

The Bossa Nova Park in Rio, which will feature a museum by Lerner.

What is urban acupuncture?
Sometime you can see a focal point and you work very fast and from this point you can create a new energy and you can help the whole process of planning. It’s not instead. It’s too help. It’s the same process as acupuncture. I realised after being the Mayor of Curitiba that this is what we did.  And with acupuncture, if you take too much time it will hurt you.

I’ve left politics and I’m working now with this idea. I have a small team and we’re going to some places and we stay there for 1-2 weeks and we do a charette with local planners or city planners or students or everyone. We listen to people and leave one or two ideas. If they like it, they can use it. If they don’t, there’s been no loss of time and no loss of money. We just charge for the trip and our fee. I don’t want to waste my time talking about big contracts. But I’m still working like crazy as an architect.

But you are also working on some more conventional projects too, aren’t you?
I’m doing a project for a park dedicated to Bossa Nova containing a museum. I was friendly with the people who made the history of Bossa Nova. All the poets and musicians. I was a great friend of theirs so I know the whole story. So now I’m going to do a project that tells the whole story. Bossa nova is the sound track of Rio.

The 1.3m-long Dockdock has been designed by Lerner as a publicly owned feeder vehicle for public transport.

I’m working also on the transport projects for the Olympics in Rio. I’m working on city projects on acupuncture but always acupuncture that is transmitted to architecture. It couldn’t be a better city for the Olympic Games because the landscape is fantastic so all they have to do is – they don’t need special effects. Nature is the special effect. They don’t need someone shooting an arrow.

Do you have a preference for particular modes of transport?
I don’t say which system of transport is best. It depends on the city but what I would say is that if you have a subway it should be a smart subway, if you have a bus you have to have a smart bus. Smart taxi. You have that. Smart bike, Velib in Paris that is beginning to happen. Smart car should be a car where you are not owning the car. I have designed a car and we have made the third prototpye. Next week I’m going to run my car in Rio. It’s the smallest car in the world. 60cm by 1m30cm. ¼ the size of the smart car.

Now I’m going to run the car in the city and see if there are people who are interested. Because I realise one thing, that I’m fascinated about the idea of quick changes. I don’t want to break records but I think you have to be fast. For many reasons: 1. To avoid your own bureaucracy. 2. Once the political decision is made, you have to do it fast or it becomes a family lunch on Sunday with everyone discussing everything. 3. To avoid your own insecurities. Because you have great ideas and then you start to worry. Or think. This is such a great idea – it can’t be mine. If your idea is not perfect, someone will do it better. It is more important to start down the road and meet that person. I am not a car designer or designer of street furniture. But I like the idea of low cost things.

Yet you worked as a Governor of the state from 1995 to 2002. Where you not able to work on a much bigger scale with a much bigger budget?
When I was Governor we organised the world games of nature in 1997. It was the only year that we don’t have world cups or olympics game. I realised that we had natural resources in my state, like the big waterfall. And a big hydroelectric plant, the biggest in the world. Where you can have the strongest example of the streght of man and nature. We organised in six months the world Games of Nature. We had 60 countries, and 120 TV channels. And I didn’t spend a cent in stadiums and arenas. It was nature. Ballooning, rafting, climbing everything in nature. It was an incredible success.

Curitiba's growing traffic problems. Evening rush hour along Av, Visconde de Guarapuava

And have you applied some of your ideas to other areas, other cities?
If you have a city, or a part of a city which is run down, it will take a lot of time to restore buildings. That’s why I designed a portable street. We had a place in Sao Paulo where no-one wants to live. It’s called Crackland in the city – it’s really sad seeing the kids there who are taking crack. During the day though there isn’t too much of a problem, because there’s a lot of people but at the night time the place is a mess. Despite being a vibrant place during the day no one wants to live there because it is abandoned to crack users in the evening. If you could bring street-life maybe the owners of the buildings will start to restore by themselves. So the idea was putting a portable street in the area on Friday night and moving it on Monday. We worked with this idea for 2 years. So now we are working on the portable street. It’s been really successful and now we are going to use it in Rio.

And abroad?
In New York I proposed colouring the steam that escapes from the subway on special days. It’s very easy to do. The city is not just traffic and buildings. It’s light, sound everything. I had a friend who was a great tuner of conversations. He was a great guy. If you start a bad story he moved it on. He was a good tuner. I like the idea of being a tuner of the city. In Brasilia you have a great formal example of modern architecture but the way people commute in and out of the city is chaos. It needs tuning.

There was a Japanese guy who came from Osaka to Curitiba. I didn’t know him because he didn’t speak portoguese and he didn’t have his professional certificate. But I hear that there was this Japanese gardener who knew everything. This guy he knew everything about gardens after I heard his story a few years after I invited him to be director of gardens at the city, then the secretary of environment in the city and then at the state level so he can make a park in two months. When I was relected so I called my team, and said would you want to take this position or that position again. Everyone would say ‘Thank you Mr. Mayor for your confidence. I’m very honoured that you have put your faith in me.’ So I called him up. His name was Hitoshi Nakamura and I said to him, I want you to be my Secretary of Environment, and he said, ‘Uh-huh’ and put the phone down. He’s a crazy man.

This is just the first and most obvious visual link between the small town and Ignalina, the nuclear power station that it was built to service. It stands just 8km from this town of high-rise blocks inside a ring road. When the second reactor unit was completed in 1987, the station was the most powerful in the world. A grid stretched out from it across the flat lands of the Soviet Union’s Baltic dominions; one building providing electricity to 8 million people in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia and Kaliningrad, an eastern enclave of Russia.

One of the conditions of Lithuania joining the EU in 2004 was a promise to decommission the Soviet built station and indeed the first of the massive RBMK 1500 water-cooled reactors was shut down in 2005. The process of decommissioning it though has become complex, expensive and potentially disastrous for the economic stability of teh whole regions.  In 2008, sensing a change of heart in Europe over nuclear power prompted by fear of global warming – the Lithuanian government petitioned the European Union to allow them to keep Ignalina. A hastily organised referendum showed a majority were in favour of retaining the plant, even if the 50% turnout wasn’t reached to make it binding. In December 2009 the plant stopped producing electricity.

Brigita Dauniene, Director of the Information Centre at the plant, holds out little hope. She pauses before she uses the phrase ‘so-called Chernobyl style reactor’ but she can’t help use the phrase. Every nuclear power facility is dogged by the disaster but Ignalina more than others. The twin reactors were built to produce the same 1500 MWe of power in the same way. Despite this fact, the second reactor unit came on line after Chernobyl, an event which, so the town’s people say registered little on their geiger counter. When they say they don’t have faith in their unique civic measuring device, they have good reason as to why.

Despite, the huge work that has gone into cleaning up Ignalina and a 2004 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which stated that Ignalina was as clean and as safe as any Western nuclear power station, its closure is more than likely. In Visaginas they are remarkably sanguine about the prospect of Ignalina. ‘We don’t expect much but we will see what will be the outcome,’ says Dauniene.

Visiginas exists solely because of Ignalina. It was built to service the station. An umbilical chord links the station to the town; 10km of shiny new aluminium pipes, which provides hot water free of charge to the city. As one drives from the plant into the town, the pipe vaults the road in places disappears into the woods. Somewhere through these woods lies Belarus – still in the grips of anachronistic Soviet totalitarianism. Condoleeza Rice called it “the last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe”.

Belarus shows what strange relationships are expressed by pipelines in this part of the world. The former Soviet state was brought back into a loose federation with Russia by its president Lukashenko in the 1990s. This hasn’t stopped huge disputes taking place between the two countries. In January 2007 the Russian state-owned pipeline company Transneft stopped pumping oil into the Druzhba pipeline which runs through Belarus.  According to the Russian company, Belarus was siphoning the oil off illegally. This caused consternation in Germany and Poland which relied on oil coming through the Druzhba pipeline. According to Belorussian authorities, Russia had ceased paying a transit tax for moving oil through Belarus. This had in turn been imposed after Russia doubled the price it charges Belarus for gas supplies. It was a fascinating stalemate: who actually owns a pipeline, the country who pumps stuff through it, the country who buys the stuff at the other end or the country it runs through?

This story is of course foremost in Lithuanian minds as they consider closer reliance on Russia for energy. Instead of sitting at the heart of their own energy network they are a staging post on the Russians. It’s a power dynamic that is sadly familiar to them from their days as a vassal state of Russia.

Nothing comes from the east except trouble. In Visiginas there is no need to head in that direction. Indeed it is financially beyond many as the visas are so expensive with Lukashenko retaining a Soviet style control of his borders. As such the town does not benefit from any trade with its neighbouring nation. Indeed, there is no ostensible reason for a town to be here other than the plant. What is remarkable is the fact the local inhabitants are upbeat. I meet Elena Cekiene, the town’s Director of Education ‘even with the second reactor closed we only have about 6% unemployment here,’ she says. Cekiene is organiser of their Country and Western music festival. A friend of mine who has attended the country festival in the town says it is an incredible sight. A slice of Americana in the heart of darkest Europe. The first proto-festival was held in August 24 1991 and was nearly cancelled due to the putsch a few days earlier in Moscow. As the founding organiser Virgis Stakėnas puts it, “Fortunately madmen defeated. Fortunately no one lost the will. And the festival was held.”

The festival helped Visiginas change. Indeed the festival was called Visiginas before the town was. In 1991 it was still name Snieckus after the leader of the People’s Soviet in Lithuania during the Soviet Occupation. Indeed, The town has a far higher than average percentage of Russians living in it. As Cekiene puts it many of the inhabitants over the age of 40 cannot speak Lithuania which is the only official language of government. For these fact and a memory that it was off-limits to normal citizens during the Soviet period, means that Visaginas was a pariah town, built at the same time by the same people as the power station. Despite this link Cekiene believes that the town can outlive its demise. ‘A businessman from Vilnius has opened a cement factory here and is renovating one of the tower blocks. He’s selling them for the same price as you would buy in Vilnius,’ she says.

For an outsider it is hard to imagine Visaginas existing without the nuclear power station. The imagery of nuclear power gives the place the only character it has. In front of the dreariest 10 storey blocks, climbing frames re-enact the drama of the neutron leaving the atom. The seating on the whirlyig mimics the diagram of electrons circling the nucleus.  The kindergartens and the schools of Visaginas no longer come out of the budget of the power station as was the case in Soviet times, but the link is strong. Visiginas shows how closely embedded nuclear power is into the living fabric of this country and by extension every advanced nation which uses nuclear power. We may ignore the natural disaster of a tsunami, to concentrate on a vastly exaggerated threat of a man-made one but what happens when our own fears lead us to slowly destroy a place.

Without the manic energy of the nuclear vocabulary and you have little else in Visiginas. The wider national economy is going to be less without it to and indeed Europe’s power supply as a whole is going to be lesser without nuclear power. Germany made a startling retreat from nuclear power following the limited contamination caused by Fukushima. Visiginas is a microcosm of that retreat. For the next 25 years, the town will earn some employment – at least 1000 – from the power station as decommission continues, to a point according to Dauniene, where the power station is returned to a ‘flat piece of grass.’ Regardless of whether you think nuclear energy is a long-term proposition or not, the alternative facing Lithuania is stark. They have a Soviet built reconditioned gas-powered station between Vilnius and Kaunas ready to fire up when Ignalina goes dead. The nuclear energy produced by a Soviet built power station and closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency would surely be cleaner than a gas-fired power station.

Yet the very fabric of the town to which Ignalina is linked provides reasons why we in the West would like to to do away with it. Visaginas is a monument to the double trauma caused by nuclear and Soviet power. We know that the power station was designed by NIKIET (Scientific Research and Nuclear Facility Designing Institute) a Russian organisation that still exists. We probably won’t ever know who designed the town, because archives for it were either retained by the Russians or destroyed when they departed.

According to Cekiene, the same military engineers that built the power station built the town. Where the forest start at the very edge of the town lie piles of plattenbau covered in moss. Building blocks for an expansion that never came, they now look like strange tombs. A graveyard. At the power station, the machine that retracts and adds power rods to the reactor core has the same stork painted on it that flies over the town centre. These climbing frames, express delight at the creativity of mankind but also in their manic aspects a great fear. The playgrounds represent the same atomic age dilemna as characters in Marvel comics: Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, and Dr. Octagon, although they do so inadvertenly. In these characters there is a manic energy and a warning against hubris. Science can be your downfall as well as your liberator, they say.

Yet in their dilapidated state one can see what damage there is in fearing mankind’s power too. As the climbing frames rust the whole process of decommissioning begins to unravel as well. This year, the Lithuanian energy minister Arvydas Sekmokas announced that although 60% of the money allocated to the disassembly of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant has been spent, without anything to show for it.

According to the Centre for Eastern Studies ‘Some of the storage facilities being built by [Russian-owned firm] Nukem Technologies were to be used for the needs of the new nuclear power plant which Lithuania is planning to build next to the old one. Although energy production at Ignalina has ended, the fuel must remain in the reactor because Nukem has failed to build the storage facilities which were expected to be completed 3 or 4 years ago. Nevertheless, it has been paid remuneration for the work (without imposing default penalties) as has the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development for handling the fund.”

This farce is beginning to have a serious affect. Nukem Technologies is going to asking for extra money to complete the job. Lithuania’s deputy minister of energy resigned on 6 September 2011 and the project is facing a financing gap of €1.5 billion for the second phase after 2014. Electricity has begun to rise in price. The government itself predicted a 30% increase during 2010. Reuteur’s reported in 2010 that analysts believed Lithuania’s GDP growth would contract by 1–1.5%, and increase inflation by 1%. Furthermore Lithuania will have to rely on imports from Russia, which as neighbouring Belorus has found is a sure means to be back in the old colonial powers thrall. The perceived threat of nuclear disaster is more damaging than any real disaster.

Whilst Visiginas is a fascinating product of a historic moment but together with the power station to which it is umbilically attached, it is more than a historic artefact. It is a problem that relates to the most pressing issue of our time: how we define clean power and how we provide it.  Ignalina provides electricity to 8 million homes. Will knocking it down and pretending it never existed really solve our energy problems?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 .

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 Modern Olympic movement’s fascination with it is based on a misinterpretration of the Ancient Games. Because most of our understanding of the Ancient Olympics comes from statuary and poetry, it was believed by Baron de Coubertin that they should somehow feature as competitive elements. Indeed it was only at the very end of the Olympics lifespan that poetry was introduced and only then in very dubious circumstances. In A.D. 67  Emperor Nero, who was devoted to Greek culture, visited Olympia and took part in the Olympics. He took part in the Chariot races and although he fell off his Chariot, still got awarded first prices for all the events, by the judges, which when he was murdered in Rome a year later were taken away from him and his records were erased as if he never participated in the Olympic Games in Olympia at all.

The reason we know about Nero’s antics was because he added poetry to the roster of events that received medals. And the poetry that was written and commended invariably described and praised Nero’s aggrandising actions.

When Baron De Coubertin revived the Olympic Games, he was dedicated to art being included in the modern Games but was only able to do so for the Stockholm Games in 1912 when he finally convinced organisers to include medal competitions should be held in the fields of art and poetry. However, the Swedish Royal Academy and Society of Arts rejected the idea of a competition, explaining: ‘with regard to a competition in painting or sculpture … the principal motive is, purely and simply – art’. Their inference was that here art was being co-opted at the service of promoting an ideology.

Their concerns were borne out by the awarding of the gold medal for poetry to the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, for his frankly rubbish ‘Ode to Sport’.  The first stanza of which runs:

O Sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life.
You appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing
Which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence,
Like the radiant messenger of a past age,
When mankind still smiled.

From then on the Olympics movement has always tried to co-opt art for propaganda or PR purposes.

As Gompertz mentioned on Today this morning, medals were handed out for art, but only in the seven Games held between 1912 and 1948. After the London Games in 1948 they were stopped. The unedifying site of gold and bronze medal being handed out to two different proposals for sports complexes in rural Finland in the town-planning category at the London 1948 Games was perhaps not what subsequent Games organisers wished to repeat. Yes, art and the Olympics co-exist but glancing through the medal winners, there is only perhaps two works of art worth savouring and these are both on a sporting theme. Indeed sport as a theme is obviously ubiquitous and ultimately unsatisfactory.

As the century progressed however, with art asserting its autonomy from the state ofr from ideological imperatives particularly from the 1960s onwards, the relationship grew farcical. The mutually unsatisfactory relationship could not have been made more clear than during the Corridart debacle at Montreal in 1972 when the Cultural Olympiad was torn down days before the Olympics because the Mayor felt it didn’t portray the city in a good light.

As Christian Redfern has expertly explained in Canadian Art, the aim of Corridart was to link the city to the Olympic site. The idea was that along the 5.5 km Sherbrooke Street the artist and architect Melvin Charney with a modest budget even then of $386,000 would turn the street itself into an art happening. “All along the route were sections of bright yellow scaffolding that held photographs showing the history of the street and its people. Large orange hands attached to the scaffolding pointed at galleries, architecture and other permanent Montreal landmarks. Inserted into this streetscape were 50 to 60 art installations and two stages that were scheduled to host over 700 performances,” she writes. Art works responded directly to the city. 

(Interestingly some terrible proposals are in existence for London 2012 in which  screens will stand along the road from Aldgate to Stratford which blatantly shield the visitor from parts of London deemed unpalatable by visitors. The exact obverse of Corridart. )

The noble intention of the Corridart exhibition however was to bring art to the city and highlight the value of the city itself to both visitors of the inhabitants itself. Riffing on a painting in the National Gallery in which an Iroquois points out to Samuel de Champlain where he ought to found Montreal, Corridart featured a number of Mickey Mouse hands pointing out famous institutions and landmarks. Unbelievably these very institutions, including the art galleries, objected. Drapeau declared that he was ‘shocked’ ‘humiliated’ and ‘insulted’ by the event. Charney believes that by its very nature of showing the city as it was and celebrating it as it was, the art got in the way of the real event and the grand-standing of the mayor.

Charney told Redfern: “The whole show was put up with the cooperation of the city of Montreal. City representatives were sitting on all the main committees. It was up for a week before it came down. What is interesting to me is when it came down. It came down right before the Olympics opened. So what one saw in the newspapers you saw “Corridart” coming down and the Olympic flag going up. And Drapeau was back in the news, four months after having the Olympics taken away from him.” Since that time the Cultural Olympiad has operated as PR for the Olympics pure and simple.

As far as London is concerned things aren’t much clearer. Evan Davis tried to ascertain this important definition on the Today progame this morning. “What is the Cultural Olympiad?” he asked. Tony Hall, the chair of the Cultural Olympiad board replies: “The Cultural Olympiad is something that we said we’d do after the Beijing Games. It’s been a programme up and down the country involving people in small ways and some big ways in cultural and artistic activity.” Which is as clear as mud. I would argue – as a fan of the Olympics as an event – that the Cultural Olympiad, is effectively UK arts funding redeployed to promote the Olympic Games and I would further argue that history has shown us that art, as distinct from graphic design or architecture, has no place in the Modern Olympics.

Images contained are of work that featured in Corridart. Most of it was destroyed.

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.