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

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

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

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

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

A drawing of the INMOS building, by Richard Rogers.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take the The Tatlin Tower as a start. The version of this proposed structure was exhibited in the Russian Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale in Paris was already the second model of the proposal in existence. Sitting beneath a portrait of Lenin, the tower by this point had already begun its strange other life: not as a realisable project but as symbolic expression of the contributions art and technology can make to revolution. At the May Day parade in Leningrad of that year a notably different Tatlin model, flatter, more elongated in plan, was put on display. The pair of latticed spirals and the cross-bracing were there but the actual form of the building had changed. Subtly the exact form of the tower had ceased to be important.

Jean-Louis Cohen suggested in his Royal Academy lecture in December 2011 that there ought to be an exhibition of all the models made of the Tatlin. This is not as ludicrous as it sounds. As Nathalie Leleu says of the Tatlin: “this lost work has been reconstructed several times and each artefact synthesises and formalises a different state of knowledge in a given form and time.”  A largely thwarted attempt by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1968 to investigate the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, used two drafts and three photographs of the first model published in 1921 to create a 1:10 scale model, This was then adapted through information gleaned from a photograph of the 1925 model, (Leleu doesn’t specify which) together with a high-angle view of the top of the first tower under construction.

In 1971, for an exhibition on the Russian avant-garde at the Hayward Gallery in London, Jeremy Dixon, among others, rebuilt a model of the Tatlin based on drawings rather than photographs of models. Making more of the arches at the base than those extrapoloted from Tatlin’s models, Dixon’s effort is effectively the one that was rebuilt in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. The project had to be remade and remade, whenever the Russian avant-garde was addressed. The French rebuilt the Tower again in 1979 for the Paris-Moscow exhibition following, but theirs was ultimately a reworking of the Swedish model. Bizarrely the Swedish model was damaged and in turn reworked according to its French copy following an insurance payout. Note that it is the model that is remade, and not just an image which is reproduced. By rebuilding it there is an attempt to recommune with the purpose, even if only for a short summer. It has been rebuilt again from Dixon’s first model 40 years later in the court of the Royal Academy in London as part of the aforementioned Building the Revolution exhibition.

The way in which the Tatlin represents revolution is not straightforward or easy. A work which originally proclaimed the social purpose of art and architecture, it is apparently purposeless. In one sense it is utterly useless because it never achieved the practical goals of housing the congresses of the Third International. Purpose was everything to the constructivists, even if that purpose evolved. The contradictions pile on with each new iteration. Not having ever lived, it lives on. The critic Nikolai Punin noted that the monument was the anti-ruin par excellence because it departed from the Classical and Renaissance traditions. This has come true more than he could have expected, not having been built it cannot be corrupted. The tower operated primarily as a cri de guerre for the constructivists in the early 1920s and still does to those who sympathise with its origins. By remaking a model, you have to re-imagine the original purpose transmuted to a contemporary world. A network of artists including Lucy Skaer are attempting to rebuild the tower in full scale in pieces around the world.

Of course, the constructivist moment is not just visited through this architectural laying on of hands. As strange as it may seem, its impact on the development of architectural practice and theory is only now being understood. We are beginning to reappreciate the role of constructivism in a wider historical history after it was trashed within the Soviet Union due to the rise of Stalin and outside because the Soviet Union was closed to the West. A lot of the disregard was based on Cold War antipathy. For example, Reyner Banham did not feel that the Constructivists warranted their own chapter in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, despite our understanding now that it is one of the major sites if not of technological then certainly of organisational and theoretical development during his book’s period of study.

It is only now that the movements intense relationships with European architectural discourse are being understood.  A story that Cohen tells illustrates this perfectly. Le Corbusier brings back the blueprints of the Narkomfin with him following his trip to Moscow. An act, according to Cohen, that helped Le Corbusier to the design of the Unite in Marseille. Constructivism was an incredibly inventive moment. This is not, as Owen Hatherley  would have it because they prefigured a number of different architectural styles, but of more fundamental ideas about spatial organisation and construction. Fundamental design innovations were made by the Constructivists which are now such important parts of our designers vocabulary for creating space that we don’t recognise it: the social efficacy of multi-storey living, the division of domestic functions in a duplex. These are ideas that Le Corbusier took directly from Ginzburg and his Narkomfin.

It must be stated that the focus on the transfer of knowledge is not intended to devalue the work performed by the Constructivists in Russia. Constructivists were not just itinerant avant-gardists but committed communists. This retelling of the influence of the Constructivists is quite the opposite. It is an attempt to readdress the subsequent critical isolation of Constructivism, partly out of ignorance and partly of ideological distaste and to show that the limited number of buildings they created – many now under threat of demolition – is in many ways in inverse proportion to their skill and influence. Daniel Talesnik is currently doing interesting work in charting the relationship between the Bauhaus Red Brigade which arrived in Moscow from Weimar (just as the constructivists were forced out of power it must be said). Their leader Hannes Meyer later emigrated to Latin America, like many others.

The internationalism of the Constructivists is important and best understood through their interest in publishing. In his book, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture, S. O Khan-Magomedov explains how the Constructivists became the dominant school of the Russian avant-garde from 1921. According to Khan-Magomedov, the Constructivists were very interested in guaranteeing the political veracity of new architecture through a focus on the aesthetics of constructivism. He relates how the Vesnin brothers won the prize to design the Headquarters for Arcos, an Anglo-Soviet trading company. When they did so, they were the only purely constructivist project of 1924. One year later, the brothers also entered a competition for the Central Telegraph Office and the House of Textiles. All of these entries were in the constructivist style.

Frightened that Constructivism might turn into a purely external and formal style, Constructivists concentrated on the formulation of a set of artistic beliefs and the foundation of an organisation uniting the movement – the OSA. The OSA established the magazine Contemporary Architecture or SA as it is known in Russian. It began with the slogan ”Contemporary architecture must crystallize the new socialist way of life.”  The way Khan-Magomedov describes it, if there was going to be a repetition of the constructivist style then they at least would ensure that it adhered to the political motive behind it. Editorial meetings had a relatively fluid membership but the eldest Vesnin sat over it all.

The magazines are astonishing documents. Although utterly seductive in appearance, the text constantly interposes on the image and asserts the revolutionary social purpose of the architects work. The traditional hierarchy of the magazine page is attacked – graphics cut over images, floor plans float in white space. There is frequent use of the signature axonometric viewpoint to drawings used by Malevich, which throws the viewer over the project. Focus pieces covered industrial architecture and small studies of work in other countries, Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, Andre Lurcat in Paris. The editors used French and German on its cover lines in 1927. Captions were translated into German even earlier acknowledging the small but avid readership the publication had in the West.

Rodchenko’s contribution is obvious in the design but compared to his other work it is restrained, and the plans – loads and loads of plans – have primacy over photography or even elevations. The organisation of the magazine meanwhile is driven towards technology. In every other magazine published before or since the technical section is in the back, to sit near the advertisers of materials who are a publishers mainstay. The technical section moved in SA. In one issue in 1927, it is at the front of the magazine. Technical skills were at the vanguard of state-led architectural production.

From this perspective, the photographs at the heart of the Building the Revolution exhibition can be seen as exceptional documents of architectural ingenuity rather than art themselves. (They are also a testament to the construction workers who built them. Working seasonally with new concrete technologies as Chinese workers do today, they helped produce new forms for new types of housing which have held up well even in their disregard.) The ones that make up the bulk of the Royal Academy exhibition are not essentially documents which fixate on disregard, although that disregard is clear. We are now so used to the site of ruined modernism in contemporary art that it has become a cliché; a lame cipher that gestures to the idea of a lost utopia without really engaging with the often very specific reasons why a building has become ruined.

When filtered through the lens of the rebuilt Tatlin tower it is clear that Pare’s photographs are in fact documents not of derelict buildings but appreciations of architectural ingenuity:  the split staircases at the Narkomzem, the use of the four storey corner towers on a three storey block at the Proletariat Club; it’s a catalogue of ingenuity. Pare’s photographs were first published in his book Lost Vanguard in 2007., with a foreword by Phyllis Lambert and like the exhibition, it shows the scope of the constructivist project: The Central Post Office in Kharkov in the Ukraine. The Palace of the Press in Baku in Azerbaijan. It is a programme integral to the DNA of the CCA; reinstating a vital moment in the evolution of architecture through vigorous research, commitment and, perhaps most importantly, the use of a camera. It is Pare’s greatest achievement, next to his role in founding the photography collection of the CCA.

Of course it is right that some of these buildings are retained. Clem Cecil, the indefatigable champion of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society, has done an incredible job in convincing a new generation of wealthy oligarchs that they have a role in conserving the architecture of the Constructivists. This is the only strategy open to the conservationists and it’s a parlous one. For example, the oligarch who was supporting the Melnikov House withdrew at the first sign of the economic downturn. There are truly great works and one would hope to see some of them remain as examples of the way this group of architects practiced. However, the strongest heritage that the Constructivists offer contemporary architects is their exemplary practice.

I didn’t know Isi Metzstein as well as those who worked with and studied under him nor, of course, his family. Two days after his death now, there will be individuals he worked alongside at the Glasgow School of Art who will be remembering his insights and his put-downs – he was a master of both – in a way I never can.

Indeed I met him on only a handful of occasions in the later years of his life. I remember in passing the day I drove him around the central belt of Scotland for a design award in a mini-bus listening to him – in his mid 70s – besting John McAslan in their every exchange and giving harsh but fair criticism of the projects we saw.

However, growing into the world of architecture in Scotland in the early years of the century, the discovery of the work and teaching of Isi and his closest working partner Andy McMillan was, once unearthed, a life-changing discovery. If a German Jew who escaped on the kinder transport and a working class Scot could achieve as much as they did from evening classes and learning on the job; if they could improve not just the material culture of an often forgotten corner of Europe but in addition the quality of its critical discourse, then, well, we all needed to raise our aims.

The novelist Alasdair Gray popularised the quote, ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’; a phrase that eventually was inscribed into the wall of the Scottish Parliament. However, in architectural terms, it is the work of Metzstein and MacMillan to whom the words best apply. Like Gray they saw the world around them as it was and as it could be. Like him though they were correctives to the vague aspirational culture, which couldn’t differentiate between the two,  that dominated the late 20th century in Scotland like elsewhere in the UK.

And whilst Metzstein and MacMillan, like others of their generation, worked and studied nearly every hour they had, they were also clear about the importance of reading and debating about what they read in coffee bars as a means of furthering their understanding of architecture. Influenced hugely by the work of Alvar Aalto they learned about his work in magazines. When I hear people scoffing at the damaging effect of magazines have on the creative imagination, I always think of Metzstein and MacMillan pouring over an Aalto project in the AR in a Glasgow cafe and how an understanding of the logic at work there perhaps went into the striated brickwork of St. Bride’s in East Kilbride or the complex fenestration of Sacred Heart in Cumbernauld.  How they took from Corbusier in a book the urgent logic of the plan and applied it to a small church in Bo’ness.

These designs were unique, brilliant, Scottish but engaged in a fascinating dialogue with the work of the greats of European Modernism. Not afforded the same chances as other architects at that time to work on civic projects they got a chance with the Church and in turn turned them into civic institutions operating within the new towns of the period. Through working for a Jack Coia at Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, a man who had friend in  the Catholic Church, they were given an opportunity and they seized it with both hands.

Their masterpiece of course was St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross and visiting it in its dilapidated state was a pilgrimage for young Scots, only some of them architects. To understand how such a great building could be conceived and assembled, and then be left to crumble was a vital lesson for a whole generation. To study it changed the way you looked at architecture and a growing appreciation of of its worth created a bulwark against mediocrity and inferiority in Scottish cultural life at the beginning of this century.

Isi was reputedly a tough critic as a teacher and he may have made a few students cry. But I’m sure these students went on to realise that professional life was much harsher than a tough call on their academic work. He in turn took the harshness of the way his work was disregarded for a good two decades with equanimity and he never made much of the exacting way he learned his profession. He also urged many more on to higher and better things, making them laugh a great deal as well. His daughter Ruth found consolation in this after her father’s death. She said: ”I’m just so pleased that so many people really appreciated him and responded to his insatiable drive to stimulate and amuse.”

photograph by Jonathan Root.

What is unique about the casinos and hotels of Las Vegas is not their gaudiness of that they have stories attached to them. No, the unique thing about them is the huge difference between the story that was planned for them at the beginning and the often violent myths that define them after their short lives are over. It is almost impossible to read the famous sign for the Stardust casino as a celebration of the nuclear tests that took place in Nye County about 100km away from Vegas during the 1950s, but that’s exactly what it is.  There’s one of many about Howard Hughes, who as he slipped into insanity on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn, bought the Silver Slipper casino so he could reposition its famous neon sign so it wouldn’t keep him awake at night. Although the casinos are demolished after 20, 30 years, the stories pile up like sediment: the latest venture is always a means of viewing the ever growing history of Las Vegas. The strip may stay forever young, but the pile of stories grows higher.

The past is now to be viewed through shards of glass of CityCenter, an $8 billion, 1.8 million sq m casino resort built in just 5 years. designed by the architects of corporate America: Pelli, Viñoly, Foster, and Kohn Pederson Fox.

A panorama of CityCenter from the Strip. Daniel Libeskind’s shopping centre Crystals is in the foreground. Helmut Jahn’s Veer Towers are immediately behind

What is new about CityCenter is its claim to permanence. Helmut Jahn, architect of another tower on the site, compared the skyline of Las Vegas to a collage rather than a profile like Chicago or New York. ‘Until now, the memory of Las Vegas’ skyline was graphic; our goal was to make it architectural,’ he says. An engaging falsehood, but a new one at least.

Never has a casino resort had such grand architectural claims made for it and this comes from the top. Jim Murran, CEO of MGM Mirage, developers of the project claims he once considered a career in architecture. When it came to CityCenter, he exercised his interest. ‘I knew that world-class architects could make an experience that was meaningful and immersing,’ he said. References to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s book Learning from Las Vegas come thick and fast from the publicist, scribbled down by food and hotel writers from LA and New York. (There’s a cocktail critic around here somewhere).

When Las Vegas expanded in the 1940 and 1950s, the casinos were sheds and the hotels simple blocks. The signs became everything. Venturi and Scott Brown also predicted the coming of the building-as-sign or as we know it now, the themed hotel. Luxor along the strip is a themed Egyptian hotel in the shape of a pyramid. Even Belagio, MGM Mirage’s most luxurious and most recent building before CityCenter is still vaguely themed on 19th century Italy. CityCenter, so the argument goes, is somehow three-dimensional compared to everything that has gone before; urbanism rather than resort building.

Yet, Las Vegas is designed to bamboozle and bewilder. Here architecture is just one device to deliberately confound the judgment of the gambler. Sunlight is kept out of casino floors so you can’t tell how long you’ve been losing money. Hotel lobbies are difficult to navigate so you come up against the slot machines, black jack tables -  saggy-faced old timers losing their years savings. The casino bosses want you lost in space and time. And isn’t just the interiors that perform this trick on you.

During the 1990s the major hotel and casino complexes built along the Strip, were all themed. The Paris casino is dominated by a half-sized Eiffel tower; the Venetian by a replica of the Doge’s Palace. Inside you can ride a gondola along swimming pool blue canals. It’s fakeness reveals itself in fantastic ways.  Your safety belt strapped around you, moving slowly over, crystal clear water 1m deep, your gondolier sings Louis Prima to you. A helium balloon bounces gently against the surface of the painted sky. It is as if the hoteliers absorbed the lessons of Hunter S. Thompson and took the simple fraudulent glamour of the 1950s – the Rat Pack and so on – and added halucinogens. You don’t need to take drugs in today’s Vegas. The place has taken them for you. Las Vegas absorbs its own myths – like lysergide onto blotting paper.

So how can CityCenter be somehow more honest than what has gone before?

For a start CityCenter is not a city centre. Certainly there are small urban moments to it largely at the various access points to the Libeskind designed shopping centre called with a brilliant Las Vegas logic Crystals.

The Golden Nugget was built in 1946 in the downturn area north of the Strip. It is one of the oldest casinos in the city and feels like it

There’s a small plaza between it and the hotel Aria, which has a Henry Moore in it. Like a forgotten corner of Cincinatti. There’s also an entrance onto a raised walkway that connects to a bridge across the strip – like getting to the Metro in Dubai. But that’s about it. Everywhere else feels like a resort compound albeit a very high class one. Crystals is a stunning mall with canted cross beams dominating a undulating cave-like roof but to suggest that it provides a retail centre for Las Vegas, which according to the US Census Bureau is one of the fastest growing in the USA is ridiculous. If you thought Libeskind’s version of deconstructivism couldn’t be debased further you need to see the spotlights casting fake sunlight from angular windows in Las Vegas. To cap it all, the angular interior has to fight with the first bizarre version of green design, Las Vegas style: an angular vegetable parterre in the middle of the concourse, a double height interior treehouse in the shape – it very much appears – of a cock and balls. Dominated by top end brands, like Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Tom Ford and Versace, this is not where the two million people who call Las Vegas home are going to buy their underpants.

It is as much an expression of the casino culture as Ti  or Mandalay, albeit with a mildly self-deceiving twist. At the opening of  the new branch of Tiffany’s, we wandered into a set by Matt Goss – formerly of boy band Bros and now managed by Robin Antin, the woman who established the Pussycat Dolls. Goss, in Dean Martin style pork pie hat did some ex-Brat pack numbers and shook hands with the Brits who recognised him.

CityCenter’s novelty is to include luxury condominium blocks. The residential part of the development provides serviced apartments for wealthy out-of-towners, high rolling gamblers who visit the city several times a year. Film producers from LA. Real estate millionaires from New York. A wealthy Arab gambler bought 42 condo units for $60m back in 2006. It’s not just the economic climate that keeps the department blocks from feeling empty, it’s the fact that they will be occupied by the super-rich for short periods of time. The talk is of Arabs and the Chinese: people from countries full of glass towers. Las Vegas – you have to admire them – is commodifying . The ‘road’ through the site, is just a hotel driveway, new to Las Vegas perhaps but part of the established architectural language of luxury hotels elsewhere in America. Most deceitful of all is the People Mover, a monorail system that snakes through the plaza. It looks like a piece of pioneering transport infrastructure but it is little more than a spectacle of urbanism. Separate from any network, it takes the congenitally lazy from one side of the site to the other, without connecting into any wider system.

Excalibur casino is the soul of modern Las Vegas. Its fairytale exterior was modeled on Mad Ludwig’s castle in Bavaria. Madness on madness

So in terms of its espoused urbanistic role CityCenter is a fake – a hollow gesture to urbanism in search of the top top dollar. Jahn’s claim that it is an architectural statement in a city hitherto hooked on graphics is more interesting, if utterly disingenuous.

To suggest, that Las Vegas’s skyline is two-dimensional is wrong. Those lucky to arrive at Las Vegas at just the right time of morning, as your plane taxis passed the southern end of the strip, will see the sun will glint on the golden glazing of the Four Seasons Hotel, part of the Mandalay Bay casino complex. A tripartite tower block, it has 43 storey and 3,300 rooms but seems so much less. Gold leaf was used on its glazing. Beneath the jagged maw of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, snow covered until the mid-Spring, it looks like a delicate confection. Is it a beautiful bit of architecture? Yes, I think so. But then could that be because it’s next to a really big and stupid concrete pyramid…When you walk into that and realise that the 4,400 hotel rooms are inversely stacked around the interior of the pyramid, your whole register of architectural possibility shifts permanently. Any city that is able to commodify the Dubai skyscraper as it does at CityCenter is capable of anything.

And no one has confused things more than Steve Wynn. Like an inverse Venturi, he has co-opted high culture into the Strip. He built themed hotels and then in the last, the Belagio, hung Picasso’s in them. In 2005, as he was going blind, he closed the era of the themed hotel with the eponymous Wynn, a super-styled luxury modernist hotel. This elegant curve of a tower, in chocolate tinted glass and gold bands announced itself as a step change for Las Vegas. Venturi and Scott Brown turned their backs on Vegas in disgust at this wanton aspiration. Still, Wynn who had won over the art crowd by his assiduous purchases of Impressionist art, was stung by the architectural critics who attacked him for his pretensions. ‘You see if they don’t start building crescent shaped buildings around here now,’ he said. Wynn is still a hero around these parts. Drunk after seeing a Matt Goss set at the Palms Casino Resort, we take a taxi and gazing at the squiggle of Wynn’s signature, smudged on the rainy skyline, we facetiously wonder aloud who would win in a fight between Wynn and Donald Trump. The taxi driver takes our proposition at face value. ‘I think Wynn’s a strong guy, he could take Trump straight on, but Wynn’s got poor peripheral vision and Trump might be able to take advantage of that.’ Indeed Steve Wynn suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease which affects peripheral vision. Whoever believes Las Vegas is drenched in irony, hasn’t been.

Although it is the progeny of MGM Mirage ostensibly, the CityCenter is an extension of Steve Wynn’s model of Las Vegas glamour. Indeed much of MGM Mirage used to belong to Wynn until they bought him out in 2000. The CityCenter is a result of his thinking about the new direction of Las Vegas, a compound full of different buildings rather than a monolith. Of course there is a lot of architecture at CityCenter. It appears to be seven different structures. The Veer Towers by Jahn, rise out of the rippling aluminium roof of the shopping centre, Crystals. To the south of the site is a classic modernist hotel tower by Foster that stands apart and as yet unfinished at the very corner of the site. Due to poorly poured concrete that proved too costly to fix, MGM Mirage were forced to lop 21 floors from the top of the building. The tower is still a success: a slender volume in banded blue glass. Other projects are less successful: a bland, Viñoly-designed, (and ,yes) crescent-shaped 1500 room hotel that is articulated as three thin volumes; a 47-storey W-shaped plan hotel by KPF.

Individually the architecture, the Veer Towers aside, are pretty standard.  As part of an ensemble though the towers, playing their clever games at reducing their obvious mass, have an impact. Indeed the CityCenter is an ensemble orchestrated by one executive architect Gensler and built by one contractor Perini. Nor does it entirely lose its status as graphic design. The CityCenter provides little skyline. Like Vegas of old, it works best at night, when it looks like the photograph of a huge neon sign at the point of detonation. The skyline of Las Vegas is a collage – a predominantly graphic rather than architectural experience.

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Las Vegas began to the north of the strip. The first casinos grew up on Fremont Street. Binion’s is still there. The Golden Nugget too. A short walk away to the east stands the Neon Museum’s Boneyard. A holding pen for a collection of neon signs gathered together in the 1990s as themed casinos took over from the decorated sheds. Run by a small charitable organisation put together by civic, historical minded artists, the Neon Museum set up the Boneyard in 1998 and have been slowly restoring signs and putting them back into the city’s fabric since. The Silver Slipper that so offended Howard Hughes stands just outside the yard now. Yet so many signs were lost. Rather than dismantling them before the casinos were demolished, they were detonated at the same time.

The Neon Museum though has rescued a few. There’s the signage from the Moulin Rouge, the first desegregated casino that opened in 1955 and was co-owned by boxer Joe Louis. The sign was designed by the great female neon designer Betty Lewis who also designed the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign. The casino was only open for a matter of months but during its short life Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, and Louis Armstrong performed often. Indeed the story goes that when white entertainers started going there, the casino was shut down by the Mob. The Boneyard is Las Vegas’s library and museum; one which charges thousands to people like Elton John and Tim Burton to use as a backdrop and then feeds the profit back into restoration.

This is where you will find, the Las Vegas you thought still existed before you first arrived. If feels, like a Neon Area 51, containing a whole alternative history to America. Indeed the real Area 51, a secret US military where the U-2 plane was tested and where conspiracy theorists believe the American government have stashed alien craft, can be seen from the Boneyard across the valley. Yet the Boneyard is also a repository of personal histories. Guided tours are packed with those who came to Las Vegas before the 1990s looking for memories of their visits. A couple from Fort Worth in Texas, pose in front of a sign salvaged from the wedding chapel they were married in. They are delighted to find it, delighted to find any part of the town that they recognise. Asked how they feel to have the places they remember so largely erased, they respond with quiet awe rather than regret.

Sitting in the small office in a community centre across the street, is the Neon Museum’s part-time operations manager, Danielle Kelly. She describes the CityCenter as the ‘Death Star’ and referring to the difficulty of getting in to the structure as ‘the Vatican on the Strip’. (Indeed, in an interview in Business Week, Jim Murran the CEO of MGM Mirage has also referred to the resort as the Vatican but he was referring to the metaquartzite stone flagging of the interior.) Kelly though admits that whilst she doesn’t like the CityCenter, Las Vegas as a whole needs it to be successful. Even in a city with an expanding population, working in ever diversifying industries such as tertiary education, gambling-led tourism is still the big business. CityCenter employs 12,000 people. Its failure would be catastrophic also in terms of the image of the city as a dynamic place that successfully reinvents itself.

In her book Winner Takes All – a history of contemporary Las Vegas, The Wall Street Journal columnist Christina Binkley writes: ‘Las Vegas initially had nothing going for it, except its willingness to be bulldozed. And imploded and bulldozed again into resurrection.’ For this reason, nothing is more deceptive than CityCenter’s sustainability credentials. Whilst all but one structure on the site has achieved Gold LEED certification, Las Vegas is a city, which renews itself repeatedly. The most optimistic prediction of its life is 50 years. It is likely to be less. Even the famous Dunes, where Sinatra played, only made it to 38 before it was demolished. Hilariously, the main claim to sustainability of the Beso nightclub co-owned by Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria Parker, which is part of CityCenter is that the Swarovski crystals in the chandeliers around the dance floor were made from the curtain at last years Oscars. Any theory based on the architectural devices it employs is likely to become junk just as quickly.

There is a Las Vegas beyond the Strip. There is a local life that is bubbling around the tourists and away from the strip: amazing little bars with singing barmaids, a dynamic music scene, old-fashioned pool bars were you can while away whole afternoons.

The Strip though continues to commodify everything; sex, history, politics – all for your fun, all for your entertainment. It’s like a machine that you put values into, and get pleasure out the other end. Why should late modernist tower blocks and urbanism be any different? Why should the urban spectacle of Shanghai’s skyline or Dubai’s be any different? You have to admire the bosses of CityCenter for identifying the architectural preferences of their new customers in the Far East and China: spectacular glass clad towers, throwing them through the blender and then pretending that they’ve made an urban gesture. If you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one, and the real nature of CityCenter almost disappears in its size. It isn’t the end of Las Vegas, of course. There are still mavericks in the game, still enough lunatics with frontier spirit to keep the manic energy of the Strip going, in recessions more than ever. Meanwhile the city is accruing a fascinating jumbled material history from the carnage. The days of the themed hotels such as Excalibur, New York New York are numbered. One day, in a decade or so, a miniature Eiffel Tower will be demolished or saved by a museum.

The last section of the ArcelorMittal Orbit is put in place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Map of the sites to be visited by the Torch Relay in 2012

As the organisers of the London Olympics propose ever more stupid stunts that the Olympic Torch must perform during the Olympic torch relay – zip-wire over the Tyne, abseiled down a tower in Grimbsy,  taken in a steamer across Lake Windemere, we should wonder why it is being kept so busy. As it is being shown a good time round the tourist spots of the United Kingdom no doubt being fed traditional ice-cream all the way, perhaps we should reflect on quite why the torch is being given a stay-cation rather than a holiday abroad.

Take a look at a map of the torch relay route and you may be surprised for not noticing one important fact. It is only being run in the UK. This is very rare in Olympic history: a host nation generally allows the torch to be run through different countries, other than Greece before it arrives in the host city. This has come to symbolise a degree of fraternity amongst nations, but which due to important historic reasons is fraught with tension. As we consider why the Torch Relay for the 2012 Games is being run solely within the UK, it is worth remembering a couple of things: 1. The relay was devised by the Nazis and born from a racist and aggressively expansionist world-view. 2. Despite the more peaceful world we live in the Torch Relay continues to be problematic and before the Athens Olympics in 2004 proved to be hugely problematic because of a racial dimension.

In 2008 the International Olympic Committee already highly sensitised to criticism of it which had racial overtones ran its last international torch relay i.e. a relay that passes from Olympia through a number of foreign territories before arriving at the host city. One cannot help but wondering what Kevan Gosper thought when was given the task as Head of IOC’s press commission to defend the torch relay in 2008. In 2004, he had accept an invitation on behalf of his daughter to run a leg of the relay extended by the organisers of the Greek games, in place of another Australian girl of Greek extraction. Both the invitation and his acceptance were construed as having over racial overtones.

Yet on April 11 2008, Gosper was defending the relay on the 7.30 Report on ABC in Australia saying that: ‘the torch stands for goodwill, international understanding, celebration of the Games’. He stated that it should not be the focus of protests against China. Yet as we saw here in London, the Torch ceased to represent the Olympics and was identified with China.

It is certainly easier to credit now but anti-Chinese sentiment at the time of the Torch Relay was strong in the UK. Certainly there were very real disagreement with China’s occupation of Tibet at the time but a general feeling of unease went further.  At the time, the general economic strength of the country was seen as a growing threat. Just as the Chinese saw the Olympics as a means of showing their new economic confidence in a benign way, so the West, in particular, saw it as a sign of the threat of China. Criticisms of China’s role in Tibet often slipped into sinophobia. To environmentalists, China’s industrialisation became the focus of excessive criticism from Western countries who were just as guilty of polluting the atmosphere. Everything from the air quality in Beijing to the amount of steel used in the National Stadium became a stick with which to beat the Chinese. More explicit criticism was made of China’s role in funding Janjaweed militia forces in Darfur in Sudan.

Map from the BBC showing Olympic Relay route for 2004 in Asia http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7005984.stm

The Olympics became embroiled in this. Writing in The Guardian early in 2008, Simon Tisdall invoked the ghost of the Berlin Olympics by stating that ‘not since the prewar era have the games assumed such a key role in the assertion of the virility, potential, and sense of entitlement of a nation reborn.’ Tisdall went on to say that the Olympics structures are ‘deliberate architectural projections of national power.’ (If you take one thing from this blog, it is that EVERY Games involves an assertion of the virility, potential and sense of entitlement of a nation reborn’ and that EVERY Olympic structure is a deliberate projection of national power whether it is done overtly or not.) Nothing shows how protests against the Chinese were based not on pro-Tibetan or pro-democratic sentiment on anti-Chinese feeling than the response to the earthquake in Sichuan. On May 12 an a quake measuring 8.0 on the richter scale hit Wenchuan County in Sichuan province killing around 70,000 people. For China it was a tragedy. For the International Olympics Committee it changed everything.

On 23 May 2008, USA Today reported that ‘China’s deadly earthquake may have saved the Beijing Olympics.’  Quoted in the article was Gerhard Heiberg, a member of the IOC’s executive board member and its marketing director.‘I’m sorry to say it, but this [the Sichuan earthquake] has turned things around,’ he said.  And indeed as images of devastated areas of Sichuan were broadcast around the world and president Hu Jintao made great capital of going to the quake region, protests about. China’s state-controlled media allowed uncharacteristic openness and permitted 24-hour earthquake coverage. The Chinese government drew praise for its quick earthquake response.

Live news of the earthquake broadcast on large screens in downtown Beijing, May 2004

On May 20, the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Zamiska interviewed Jill Savitt, director of Dream for Darfur campaign which had been protesting China’s support of the Sudanese government.  “The tone of advocacy has to change because of the earthquake,” she said. “It would really be unwise and unstrategic to continue to pound on China and not to realize that there have been hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed and wounded. It would be foolhardy.” Gosper, the poor Australian who was destined to watch as the real world crashed into the Torch Relay, cautioned that the IOC “in principle tried to avoid ceremonial events referring to tragedies around the world.” However, given that he’d had such a hard time keeping the issue of Tibet out of the Torch Relay, he seemed to relent a little. “On such an issue that has affected a host country, I believe that the president of the IOC would have a very open mind and listen to the advice coming from Beijing organizers,’ he told the Associated Press. As it was Lin Hao, a nine year old from Yingxiu in Wenchuan County led the Chinese national team in and no explicit reference was made in the Opening Cermony. But by that time the damage had been done. It wasn’t until March the following year that  the International Olympic Committee (IOC) scrapped international relays. By that stage organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have already said they had no plans to take the torch outside Britain. “We have always said the primary focus would be on a domestic torch relay whose main purpose is to excite and inspire the UK in the build-up to the games. We planned to take our lead from the IOC and are very happy with this decision as it mirrors what we were intending to do,” said a London 2012 spokeswoman. At this stage the IOC made a strange claim. IOC executive director Gilbert Felli told the BBC that: “After the (2004) relay in Athens, which was the first international relay,we came to the conclusion it was easier for the torch to stay inside the (host) country.’ [My emphasis]

Totally untrue of course. As we have seen the Torch Relay was created as an international event. Without a shred of irony, the Official Report to the Games of 1948 notes that: “In September, 1946, the Organising Committee decided that the lighting of the Sacred Fire should be carried out by a Torch kindled in the traditional manner at Olympia, in Greece, and carried by relays of runners across Europe to London.” Owing to the armed struggle against Communist insurgents in the north of Greece the flame went from Olympia to the coast at Katakolon, thence by Greek warship to the island of Corfu. From Corfu which had become a centre for British operations in the Mediterranean during the recent war, H.M.S. Whitesand Bay, a frigate of the Mediterranean Fleet, carried the Flame to Bari in Italy from whence it was run through, Foggia, Pescara, Ancona, Rimini, Bologna, Parma, Piacenza and Milan. Then the flame was run through Switzerland into France to Poligny, Nancy and Metz, then Luxembourg, Belgium and back into France to Lille and finally Calais. It was carried across the channel on a destroyer called. H.M.S. Bicester which had harried and destroyed Italian submarines and German U-boats in the Mediterranean throughout the war.  The British made certain that the Torch Relay was run through the lands in Europe which their armies had only recently liberated from fascism. If Lene Riefenstahl’s film had shown the torches progress through the Balkans, as Ian Sinclair puts it, like  ’an invasion rehearsal’, the British ran it through the same lands like a second victory parade. Far from being dominated by an idea of austerity as the BBC suggests here, the second torch relay was all about triumphalism.

"The torch pursued a quick path through an unstable Europe" - image courtesy of the BBC.

Each organising committee had chosen the route for its relay and an international route communicates a narrative of national identity very clearly, in a negative way or a positive one. For the Mexico City Olympics the Torch folowed the course of Columbus`s first voyage to the New World, ‘thus’, according to the offical report, ‘symbolizing the union of the classic cultures of the Mediterranean with those of America’. The three principal intermediate points along the Route of the Torch were Genoa, Italy, birthplace of Christopher Columbus; Palos, Spain, the port from which he embarked on his first voyage of discovery; and the island of San Salvador, where he first touched in the New World. The torch arrived in Barcelona in Spain by sea and was then run 1,286 kilometres across Spain to Palos. A man caled Cristóbal Colón Carbajal, a direct descendant of Columbus, carried it on the last leg.

Map of the Torch Relay for the 1980 Olympic Games

The overall length for the Torch Relay route  for the Moscow Games in 1980 was 5,000 km including 1,170 in the territory of Greece, 935 in Bulgaria, 593 in Romania and 2,302 in the USSR. This had the added bonus of promoting communist solidarity with its south-western neighbours. Open athletics events were organised along the route to coincide with the torches arrival. Around the burner for the torch the words “Olympia-Athens-Sofia- Bucharest-Moscow” were worked in metal. For other Olympics such as 1976 in Montreal or 1984 in Los Angeles, it was just run within the nation hosting the Games only. This appears to have been through no other reason than it offering an opportunity to raise the profile of the coming event within the host nation – to drum up a few ticket sales and, certainly in the latter case, increase the revenue from sponsorship. From now on this will be the case for all Games. What has happened to the Relay is that the original intension of the Relay to prove the hegemony of the nation to which the torch is being run, had been placed back on it, by protestors. Carl Diem and Leni Riefenstahl wanted to show that the culture of the Ancient Greeks was being adopted by the Third Reich. I don’t believe the Chinese Government were trying to do anything as crass. And yet that is exactly what protestors believed the Chinese goverment were doing reacted to it accordingly. They were only able to have an impact because the way in which this setpiece, originally created for film, was recorded. Rolling news made a pageant derived from classical sculpture into a painfully long, event that is impossible to defend from intervention by individual agents and therefore impossible to choreograph. And if you can’t choreograph something, you can’t control its meaning.

Map of the sites to be visited by the Torch Relay in 2012

The Olympic flame will arrive in the UK on Friday 18 May 2012 and will travel around the UK for 70 days, arriving in London the weekend before the 2012 Games begin. 95 per cent of the UK population to be within a one hour journey time of the Torch Relay and it will visit every local authority. 8,000 torch bearers will be selected with over half of the places expected to go to young people. Sebastian Coe, Chair of LOCOG said: ‘The London 2012 Torch Relay will connect people and places; young people to sport and the UK to the rest of the world. We will be working closely with villages, towns and cities the length and breadth of the UK to ensure that as each community welcomes the Olympic Flame, they do so in a way that is unique and special to their area.’ Martin Green head of ceremonies at LOCOG has privately said, that the Olympic relay doesn’t need to be held throughout the world because we have all the nations of the world here in the UK, which is, to be generous, evasive.

The real reason we are not holding the Olympic Torch relay is because the International Olympic Committee are scared that everyone else in the world will express their feelings about the UK in the same way some of us expressed our displeasure at the Chinese through the agency of the torch relay. The degree to which LOCOG is controlling the image of the UK abroad is setting whole new standards within the Olympic movement.

This is part IV of an investigation into the history of the Torch Relay.

Part I can be read here
Part II can be read here
Part III can be read here

Axonometric of Helical Stairway part of the‘Entertainments Palace’ on the site of the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, London. Originally ‘failed’ as student final thesis project at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Michael Webb was born in Henley-on-Thames in England. Along with his fellow members of the Archigram Group, Webb has contributed more than any other British architect to the wholesale revolution in architectural drawing that took place in the 1960s. Co-opting techniques and approaches from advertising, graphic design or pop-art, Webb together with his fellow Archigramers Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Compton, Michael Webb, David Greene and the other one rethought the role of architecture, as a facilitator of modern life rather than a picturesque backdrop. He has gone on to consistently push and reconsider the manner in which architecture is presented at drawing stage. I spoke to him at the CCA where he was working on his current project. 

View of Henley Regatta from a postcard showing finishing lines and lines of perspective

You are working on a project whilst you are at the CCA that is based on a postcard with an image of Henley Regatta on it. Tell me a bit about the postcard.
I found it in November 2010 on the internet along with 500 other images of the regatta. The source was a company that markets old postcards. It’s actually the card and not a reproduction of it. And there is a message on the back that was from a young crew man to a young woman at the Blandford School for Girls. It should have been romantic but it wasn’t. I’m sure she would’ve wanted something a bit racier from him, as it were.

It’s a fascinating conflation of nostalgia and futurity. You’ve taken a rigorous set of technical approaches to perspective and sections applied to a pastoral scene of extreme Englishness.
Ah. The hats women are wearing – rounded hats with a broad brim – would suggest that it is the 1920s. But the stamp on the other side has the head of George VI on it, which would suggest it was 1936 after the abdication.

How have you addressed the image?
I am a romantic soul but strictures imposed by the Anglican church and school training make romanticism acceptable only if it is trammeled; contained within a rigorous mathematical or philosophical corset. If you happen to think of the postcard view of the regatta as an elevation rather than as a perspective then you can move things around and not violate any law of perspective. So if you move the umpires launch forward to the front of the image, it would appear much smaller because you don’t change the size when you bring it forward. So the guys rowing would look to their right and see a tiny little boat there with old men in it. I thought that image would be very funny.

A very small version of Michael Webb's current project

But then that’s not that you’ve done with the oil painting?
A suite of drawings, elegiac and interpretive in nature, that depicts the regatta course at Henley-on-Thames does not fit neatly into any known category of architectural endeavour. Though authored by an architect…me, a perusal of the suite might reveal, if anything, an interest in the more arcane areas of perspective projection.

The photographer has exposed the film at the precise moment the prow of the leading boat touches the finish line. For eternity will the winning team savour their triumph and the losers the ignominy of their defeat.

I feel irresistibly drawn along the lines of course markers to this point. I want to journey to the point of infinity. Allowing a moving point to represent my progress…is the journey to be understood as a 2D traversal of the surface of the photographic emulsion or as an incursion into the 3D space of the regatta course depicted in the photograph?

…

Daybreak by Maxfield Parrish

Is it normal for you to spend this much time on a piece?
The method by which it is painted involves a long time. I love the work of the American illustrator Maxfield Parrish. He loved to paint paintings of mainly naked asexual young people disporting themselves in some idyllic environment. In the 1920s or 1930s he was very popular and many houses in the US had a print of a particular painting he’d done which was set on a terrace with classical columns in front of a lake with mountains on the other side of the lake. So ideal. And I saw one of these in the flesh and it was full of light in beautiful gradations of colours and all without the single evidence of a brush stroke. To hell with modern art and Picasso. Maxfield Parrish is skill without invention… it is quality kitsch.

A hotrod from the 1960s. Air-brushed. Nice.

But your picture doesn’t look kitsch.
That’s because the subject matter is quite different. His would take all about a year, because you would have drying time of your oil paint to worry about. Can’t put another layer of paint on top of a layer of paint before about a week. A huge number of layers as well. In fact that’s where the beauty of it builds up, you get all these layers on top of each other.

It was a technique rather like all the crazy hot-rod artists from California in the 1960s. When they’d do a car they’d probably put on about 24 / 25 layers of paint but they’d put one layer on and they’d hand rub it. Even the finest sandpaper would be too rough, so you’d have some sort of powder, you’d rub it with a cloth and it makes the paint incredibly smooth. Then you’d put another layer of spray paint on 20 times and in the end you’d get this amazing layer. They have this depth to the colour, which is amazing: with great transparency and depth.

…

This guy Maxfield Parrish wrote about oil paints and he said you can never mix paints together. He said that if you wanted a grey and you mixed white and black you would get opacity and you would lose transparency. You get to wait a week or two to dry. The worst thing you can do is start too soon and then you start disturbing the layer beneath. Forget it if that’s happened.

Did you ever use airbrush techniques with your drawings for Archigram?
I started using airbrush and I didn’t enjoy that at all. Now some people do amazing things with it. You only have to look a those illustrated books of World War II fighters and bombers you find displayed in book stores.

I was trying to use airbrush on illustration board. I bought an airbrush and a compressor. But if you were spraying, and someone nudged you on the arm or you had a spasm, you screwed it up and there was nothing you could do about it. Airbrush is a very hair-raising experience. You don’t enjoy doing it. Unless of course you’d done so many that it becomes second nature.

What was the technique used for generally?
You could work on a small scale with the smallest ones, for jewellery and also for photo retouching. A friend of mine was teaching at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and his brother was a retoucher, using an airbrush and he was doing very well at it and from one year to the next his business was wiped out because Photoshop was invented. Think how easy it is now to take the rubber stamp tool and remove a hair from a girl’s face… And they would have had to mask it off course, go through all this rigmarole to do the same. It’s a sort of tragedy that airbrushing went though; a revolution in drawing.

Elevation of car ramp system from the Entertainments Palace

Funny that the term has entered into popular usage and yet we no longer use it…
There’s an airbrush tool on Photoshop, isn’t there? Do we still use the term to airbrush something out? We do don’t we… They were invented in the 1920s for commercial work. Archigram started using them in the late 1960s and the early 1970s after forsaking coloured overlays.

Tell me about who owns the Sin Centre pictures now.
Niall Hobhouse. He commissioned Cedric Price to do some farm buildings, knowing that it was unlikely any buildings would get built. He told me he said in desperation to Price there’s a museum in Bath, you could help me design that. Price went away and came back 5 days later saying, “Dear Niall do you realise that there are already 18 museums in Bath?” So nothing ever happened.

Entertainments Palace, Leister Square (The Sin Centre), EW Section, Michael Webb, © Archigram 1961-63

When did you finish the Sin Centre project?
I started on the Sin Centre in 1962. It was my thesis projects. But I’ve done a few drawings on it between then and now. I did a few for a show at Cornell in 1990 or maybe later. I’d done some drawings in the 70s. There are two types of artists: some I think do a project and never think about it again; others, for example Schubert when asked how he composed said, “I finish one piece and begin the next.” Brahms kept revisiting early stuff and trying to improve it. I’m like that. I can’t bear to let something go…Hence this harking back to what I’d done quite a few years back.

Why did you go back to it?
Maybe it is also vanity. I felt the initial drawings I’d done didn’t do the project justice.  They just didn’t capture it. There were ideas that I hadn’t mange to express in the drawings. So yes, the reason I kept going back to the project is vanity. Vanity and a wish to be thought of as a virtuoso; neither are particularly worthy attributes to have.

But also the models were destroyed I believe.
Yes, Model No. 1 is not around any more… Landfill somewhere near London. In bits. Not extant. Decidedly not extant.

The second model was much better; but it still wasn’t good. It was done in 1964.  That didn’t last either and could very well be occupying that same landfill as the first model. It went on view at the AA and I had little cars to scale, and some rotter pulled them off when no one was looking.

of 90 Deg. And Elevation of 270 Deg. of Circular Car Ramp, Entertainments Palace, aka Sin Centre by Michael Webb, aka a member of Archigram

What is so good about the current model?
The current model has attached to it sheets of 0.005 inch thick stainless steel. It’s called shim stock and you cut it with a special guillotine. The idea was that the sheet metal would look like an airplane wing. When I designed the Sin Palace I’d been fascinated by the precision and beauty of an aeroplane wing… the beating it took. Whenever the flaps of the spoilers deployed and how they sill managed to be perfectly down flat afterwards. By contrast when Gehry uses metal sheeting it seems merely decorative.

…

The third model has been made over a period about 15 years and it’s still not completed. And it never will be. It’s too complicated. It’s got to be the scale of Matchbox scale. It’s about 1:57, that’s the average scale of a Matchbox car, but they do vary.

What did you think of the 3D computer printing technology?
Hmmm. Mixed. The curves of the stairway had a corduroy texture you had to apply epoxy filler to get smooth. Still rough but I’m not all that impressed with the current quality of 3D printing. Given that on my model many surfaces had to be covered with epoxy. It doesn’t seem to work at small scale. There are tubes sticking to which the rest of the stairs are attached. There’s a subtle joint worthy of Conrad Wachsmann but the computer printer couldn’t handle it. I had to drill holes and insert a brass tube and attach a strut to the tube.

Konrad Wachsmann's hangar project for the USAF. You don't hear about him much anymore

Could you tell me a bit about your admiration of Wachsmann?
Yes you don’t hear too much about poor old Konrad Wachsmann anymore. Interesting guy: he started off in Europe and went to US and did a project for the US Air Force designing giant hanger to house and protect B52 bombers. The structure of theses hangers was huge: a giant space frame composed of aluminum tubes and ingenious designed joints. It was more like jewelry production than construction, so fine and delicate were the joints. Of course, a labourer, an employee of a building company or a steel fabricators, their tool of choice is a sledgehammer. When they’d hit a joint it shattered, so it was never taken seriously and it remained a beautiful model. Space frames all told are a bit of a lie. No matter what structure you use it helps that it’s thicker in the middle than the ends due to the transference of loads. Space frame doesn’t let you do that because they’re of uniform depth throughout.

An Immelman turn

Tell me about the staircases in the Sin Centre.
Probably wouldn’t work but, hey… How the escalators turn was modeled on the Immelman turn – world one fighter ace maneuver. If say an English Sopwith Pup, a biplane fighter, was following a Fokker Wolf, if the pilot of that Wolf was one Max Immelman and he’s being chased, he’d climb up and rotate as he climbed. He’d then dive repeating the same move. Lo and behold! The chap in the Sopwith Pup would suddenly see Immelman in his rear-view mirror.

What is this? 

Entertainments Palace, Leister Square (The Sin Centre), Membrane Roof, Front Elevation, M. Webb, © Archigram 1961-63

It’s a lines drawing. If you are developing a floor surface that is constantly changing angle, especially if you have a ramp in one place and a ramp going the other way so you have twisted floor plates. There is a connection and the way a lines drawing is made of a ships hull, which includes sections taken through the ships hull and at right angle to the axes of the keel and to the waterline. So you get three planes that you can work out the subtle and beautiful shape of the hull.

When was the building first published?
By Kenneth Frampton in November 63 in Architecture Design. Thank you Ken! Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui came after that.

Looking up the double-helix staircase at The Chateau Chambord in France

Where did you get the idea for the Double Helix ramp?
Of course this was about the time that Crick and Watson had developed their vision of the double helix DNA molecule, but I’m not sure if I was fully aware of that. I was familiar with the double helix staircase at the Chateau Chambord in the Loire. They beat me to the draw by about 300 years.

I note from your description of the project in your thesis the following line: “maybe the transatlantic displacement of the idea is inept, but the only time you get to do something really nutty is when you are student.” What did you mean by transatlantic?
Going to America I suppose.

How did you first get to America?
I was offered a job at Virginia teaching in 65 and I took it. That was because David Greene had gone there with the help of an intermediary Ken Doggett, and he’d gone there and they liked him and they thought if he’s like this then I must be like him, and they discovered to their chagrin that I was not like him.

Was there a natural drift towards the USA for Archigram?
All of us in Archigram were rather fascinated by America or at least that which we took to be America. America was Bucky Fuller and Wachsmann and a land of drive-in architecture, a lifestyle that involved families moving house much more than in Europe. It seemed then that America was the future and it was a bright future. I remember Churchill in one of his wartime speeches quoting a poem by Hugh Clough, ”Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth.” One of the final lines talks about light coming through western windows. Churchill used that in one of his wartime speeches, gently hinting to the US that they might want to join in the fight against Germany.

Although in a very different way, we looked to US similarly for redemption. The future was to be seen in America.

Is that still the case?
I’m afraid to say that I think the situation has been reversed. UK seems to be more modern. When you arrive at Heathrow, you can arrive and take a fast train to London. When you get to JFK, you take a train and you have to change at Jamaica station before you can do anything else.

Francois Dallegret's illustration for Banham's A Home is not a House.

What were the influences leading you to look to America?
Part of the awareness came from Reyner Banham. I read A Home is Not a House so many times I could almost quote it verbatim. I was just intrigued by this argument that when your homes contain so much gadgetry, so much wiring, for heating, ventilation ducts and so on, why have a house to hold it all up? He makes a case that the developing lifestyle of moving quickly and never spending more than 5 years as was becoming the case in the USA is better accommodated by an inflatable enclosure than a permanent house.

This was architecture appropriate to the US, far more suitable than period colonialism. He praised drive-in and talked about that a bit. It was so influential on us, I tell you. But then one realised that the mobile home is no more mobile than the ranch-style split-level. Well it could be mobile but it wasn’t. If one has pleasant fantasies about another country, one shouldn’t certainly go there and one certainly shouldn’t live there.

So why did you decide to stay in the USA?
Given my gradual realisation of who I was – that comes in ones 20s and 30s, too late perhaps for that first major mistake one makes – I decided I basically wanted to sit at home and make drawings. I hate to say it, but the US system of higher learning allows one that. I would have found it much harder in the UK rather than the US. I also felt that the others in Archigram were a bit to close. I needed a certain distance. On the other hand to share the same place producing drawings would have helped. There’s always a flip side.

How did the other Archigram-ers operate or relate to the USA?
David Green was already in Virginia Tech. Warren Chalk was teaching over here too. Ron Herron went to LA – he was at UCLA for 3 years and worked for César Pelli.

Logplug - A speculative design for service sockets for mobile and temporary living in landscape settings.

How did the reality of America influence Archigram’s work?
David Green, I think was affected by America quite deeply. If you look at his Rok-plug, Log-plug project you can really see it. If you married the motivation behind the Hudson Valley School of painters with us, you got this project. They were painting the wilderness of North America in the mid 19^th century as a means of preserving it. Sometimes you have a whiff of smoke coming up. The iron horse is racing across the landscape… If you put together that sadness about the disappearance of the natural world plus the high tech stuff we were interested in you have that project. It is the working out in drawing form of the nation that Banham had started to address in A Home Is Not a House. David’s project is a plastic log that in a rural or park situation provides an access to networks of supply pipes. That’s a direct influence of America filtered through Banham and drawn by David Green.

How about the others?
Ron was more attracted to the brashness and cockiness of the USA; what Americans like to describe as that ‘can-do’ attitude. He liked the America were you asked someone how they were, and they’d say “great” whereas in the UK they’d say “oh y’know bearing up.”

You get much more times to oneself and you are very adequately compensated. I’m also fond of US students by and large. There’s a certain enthusiasm there. I particularly like the enthusiasm of the younger students. Yet I even found the world-weariness of the older students interesting. They’d learned how to play the academic game but they still worked hard. You had a few nuts, of course, and a few hopeless cases but you have them anywhere.

Do you regret leaving in England ever?
Yes. Sometimes I regret forsaking England. I think some English émigrés feel far more English in America than they ever did at home. There’s nothing I like more that to watch public broadcasting channel and see an English program. If you want to love a country the best place is to be out of it. You remember the good things when you are away. If I want to love England then I stay in America. But I can see that is selfish. I suppose a part of me feels like I should go back and create Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

I’m still very English. I couldn’t become a US citizen, which reminds me I’ve got to renew my green card. A customs official said to me recently, “you’ve been an alien longer than I’ve been alive.”  That’s dubious again because you live in a place but you can’t participate in the governance of it.

There are some architects that are form givers, Kahn, Corbu, who create a system of form in building. We didn’t do that. What we did was to visualise the lifestyle that seemed to be developing and show an architecture that would not only stand alongside it but also enable it. Some of the most classic drawings that were done by Ron and Peter one has to say. Amazing drawings where 75 percent of the image is of a photograph of lovely young people who these days are looking jaundiced and curling up at the edges.

Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz, Raumstadt, 1959. 700 x 700 x 1350 mm. Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans, France. Photo by Philippe Magnon via Megastructures Reloaded

Then up in the corner is a space frame roof borrowed from Schultze-Fielitz in the top corner. You never hear that name much. Yona Friedman used that Space Frame idea and Konrad.

We tried to introduce it into the Montreal Tower. It was a huge tower that Archigram proposed where we borrowed Bucky’s idea but the way that the triangulation of the panels coming off the towers in a flowing form reveals the lack of understanding of the geodesic and structural implications of geodesic forms. Mind you Fuller didn’t understand it. What he says domes can do is not what they can.

How did Archigram change drawing?
If you think of the sort of drawing one was expected to do prior to the beginning of Archigram there was very little projection or experimentation in projection. If you had a figure it should be modest and there merely to indicate scale, certainly not to occupy three quarters of drawing surface. We were a breakaway but on the other hand if you look at Richard Hamilton, “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” you can see where we got the idea from. Richard Hamilton was an interesting guy. He was one of the Situationists. The Appealing picture is a collage made of magazines and it shows a very conventional, even cheap looking, living room. Bathing beauty and a muscle man posing; huge biceps and then out of the door and there’s a beautiful marble staircase leading to the floodlit cinema entrance. It is a beautiful dream-like picture. Archigram’s drawing style derives from that.

Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Why we needed it was to show an architecture appropriate to our period of time. It was an exciting period full of experimentation, bright colours, casual sex; it was the spirit of that period. That was put into those drawings – particularly those by Ron, Peter and to an extent Denis. It wasn’t really about showing new architecture it was about showing the building is in itself fun and exciting and is perhaps merely a backdrop to what is going on. The big thing is the fun times and the architecture that merely enables it but doesn’t determine it. The view of architecture prior to that was that you live according to the dictates of the building you are in. You are inventing a life and the architecture allows you to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rendering showing the Temenos project in Middlesbrough

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

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

Temonos under construction on Teesside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A model of ArcelorMittal Orbit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.