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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Singapore Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010

Ballard writes at the very beginning of Empire of the Sun. ‘Wars came early to Shanghai overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yanghtze that returned to this gaudy city, all the coffins that cast adrift from the Chinese Bund.’ He places Shanghai as a city forever in the unfortunate vanguard of imperial struggle: a place over which empires fought. The book is divided into 4 parts and details the attempts of a young boy to survive the trauma of World War II. The story is framed by the collapse of Empires. The first two parts detail with the collapse of British control in 1942 and then the Japanese in 1945. The Third part is a kind of no-man’s land following the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. It is dangerous time, before the assertion of Amercian control.

The fourth part is just a chapter long. It ends with Jim watching as a group of sailors urinate down the steps of the Shanghai Club. As a succession of imperial powers have exerted violent influence over China, the hero of the book – only a boy – has survived a number of near death experiences through his lust for life and his cunning. In the final chapter he has reached a new found maturity and is able to look forward. Perhaps because he has become inured to the death around him, it takes an act of territorial pissing to prompt his comment on the future of our new superpower.  “One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge’. And yet China appears to be taking revenge on the world in an unexpected way.

The South Korean offering.

Shanghai Expo revives some of the most interesting aspects of the exhibition in a has effectively revitalised the Expo, which since the end of the Cold War have suffered a decline in popularity. Countries, such as the United States, that had ceased to participate in World Expos returned to the fold in order to promote business in a massive new market. China has risen as a global power and as a consequence Shanghai is busier and more competitive than any previous Expo.

Although I’ve been to Shanghai before, I wish I could’ve gone there for the Expo. On one level to see how political organisations have laid out their wares to the world; to see what these strange artefacts really looked like in the humid haze of Shanghai. I would have like a ringside seat at the show: in the game to make the most outlandish pavilion and attract the most amount of trade. The British Council’s brief for the designer Tom Heatherwick was to create a pavilion that should be voted one of the best in the public vote. Imperial competitiveness has been turned into an X-Factor-style vote.

Interior of the Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo

Bjarke Ingels really got this idea with The Danish Pavilion he designed. A simple ramp structure, it offers visitors the opportunity to borrow real Copenhagen city bikes, paddle in clean water taken from Copenhagen’s harbour and transported to Shanghai as balast on ships, and as Ingels himself puts it, ‘the ultimate gesture of the real deal, they can see the actual Little Mermaid at the heart of the harbour pool.’ And, indeed, there she sits, just for the visitor. That subtle whoring of the material culture of ones country wins my vote.

Of course, one should never doubt the political purpose of Expos. The Kitchen Debate at a trade fair in Moscow in 1959 was just one of those rare moments when the naked politics that operates beneath the surface of international trade exhibitions is revealed; when the suit leg is pulled up to reveal the muscle beneath. The argument between Nixon, (then U.S. Vice President) and Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959 took place as the two politicians walked around a model house containing labour-saving and recreational devices that the organisers say that any American could afford. Khruschev as usual was up for a fight and taunted Nixon about the inbuilt obsolescence of American consumerist goods. ‘Your American houses are built to last only 20 years so builders could sell new houses at the end. We build firmly.’

Bjarke Ingels introduces the Danish Pavilion to the world.

What is perhaps most astonishing though is the fact that this conversation ever took place. An American trade fair, which promoted capitalist values in the heart of Communist Soviet Union, a year before the U2 crisis? It confounds some of our most powerful memories of the Cold War and goes to show what an integral part the Expo had become in the structure of international relations. The Paris Convention of November 22, 1928 was created to regulate the organisation of international trade exhibitions. This legal instrument established the Bureau International de Expositions which is based in Paris, a body which has since then updated the Convention on different occasions in order to account for the shifts in economic, social and political trends, and most tellingly, the emergence of new countries.

I listened recently to a recording of the Archive Hour programme on Radio 4 dedicated to JG Ballard some months after his death, compiled and hosted by Will Self. The programme began with a quote from Ballard: “if we are are going to be truthful about our natures and admit that we are rather violent creatures and we enjoy violence. It might be neccesary to administer not just small doses of violence but of psycopathic behaviour; very small doses rather like the small doses of strychnine in a nerve tonic. They stimulate the system.’ Today these expos are small doses of strychnine in the flows of global capitalism; causing convulsions, creating stimulus. During the Cold War, they were even more important, providing a platform for competition and bizarrely, a frank and heated conversation between Khruschev and Nixon about who made the best fridges: ideological conflict reduced to material competition.

And that feeds into the history of Shanghai.  I’m not denying the violence that soaks Empire of the Sun, that drenches every page is still being played out, quite literally, in hidden corners of the city. But on another level, the violence has been turned into a cultural spectacle, a tool to ensure that its inhabitants remain as one. What is important about Shanghai’s redevelopment today is not the erasure of the past so much as the violence with which it is destroyed. Greg Girard’s Phantom Shanghai pictures capture this really well I think.  The revenge that Ballard predicts at the end of the book has been reeked by China not on the rest of the world, but itself. Violence, perhaps as a political strategy, deliberately hangs over the present. Indeed the construction in today’s Shanghai, outside the Expo, with its high fatality rates and occasional unexplained fires is as violent as the demolition that goes before it.

Interior of the British Pavilion, designed by Tom Heatherwick

History in Empire of the Sun is an unending succession of imperial waves. Yet, unlike the bleak series of novels for which he is best known, the novels of the 70s, High Rise,  offers perhaps the most vivid description of how to live within this world. To live like Jim: with a kind of desperate ingenuity.  One episode for me in the book frames this best in an architectural sense. Jim is in a jeep driven by a Japanese soldier and some sick Europeans looking for the internment camp. They pass Chapei ceramic works.

It’s trademark stood beside the gates, a Chinese teapot three storey high built entirely from green bricks. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 it had been holed by shell-fire and now resembled a puncture globe of the earth. Thousands of the brick had migrated across the surrounding fields to the villages beside the works canal, incorporated in the huts and dwellings a vision of a magical rural China.

It’s a truly beautiful image, bricks sequestred from a bomb damaged teapot – signficantly the drink that links Chinese and Britain in terms of trade  – being reappropriated by the workers in the factory, having been scavenged and re-used.

Throughout Empire of the Sun Jim goes from being a child to a young adult as a scavenger. He survives by scavenging and I don’t think this signficant just in a biographical sense but it it also as an artistic strategy. Ballard, it should be remembered was a great scavenger, readings scraps of technological writing and reworking it as fiction. Claire his partner tells a story of how Ballard asked his friend who worked as a government scientist to send him the contents of his bin. This story reminds me of a description in Ambit magazine of how Paolozzi would do cut-outs for his collages whilst standing over a bin.

When I read the book first for my GCSEs, I remember being told that flying is a constant motif in the book. What I wasn’t told though is that Jim ultimately becomes disenchanted with planes and pilots. Although Spielberg’s film is generally a mess, he captures this moment well with young Jim watching as a Japanese pilot goes through the kamikaze ceremony before he flies into battle with the war already clearly lost. Rather than being above the world, viewing it from an aeroplane, Ballard sees himself as a part of that world. Empire of the Sun takes us from the civilised world of the British Concession in pre-war Shanghai to the internment camps, but not as the stripping away of modernity to barbarism, as you see in Golding’s Lord of the Flies but as the consequence of our human nature. That’s not to say he thought we should shrug our shoulders and put up with our animal instincts but that we should look at modernity as a construct and therefore a means of understanding our truer natures. Although this seems to reduce the scale of human possibility, at core it affirms a deeper, humanity. What perhaps gives Empire of the Sun the highest emotive power of all Ballard’s works is that it dramatises his very own journey, at a young age, into making these profound discoveries.

Those that see no redemption in Ballard’s novels of the 1970s must surely be forced to concede that it is present in Empire of the Sun. How else could a self-confessed sentimentalist, Steven Spielberg even look at the book otherwise. Obviously he had to lobotomise the story to actually turn it into a film.  Jim’s tremendously revealing sympathy for Britain’s enemy Japan is excised as are some moments of his brutality. The director who would go on to make Saving Private Ryan is unable to think of the American service man in anything other than a sentimental way.

Tom Heatherwick called his design the - snigger - Seed Cathedral

I would add that I don’t think we should recoil from the apparently empty symbolism of the Expo because of the destruction of some lovely late 19th and early 20th century archiecture. That’s the kind of futile gesture which the young Jim in Empire of the Sun reviles the British for. However, I don’t think we should just despise the architecture of Shanghai simply for its newness either. I think we should do like Ballard does: scavenge them away and re-use them. I am reminded of Koolhaas’s proposal for a replacement to the World Trade Center in New York – a collage of iconic buildings of the twentieth century. It will certainly be interesting to see how the Chinese re-use 238 pavilions built in the middle of their city when the Expo closes in October.

This text was adapted from a talk I gave at a Symposium called Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space; part of the Royal Academy’s architecture programme.

The main reason they do this is by failing to learn the lessons of Las Vegas itself. Since the book was published the city has changed fundamentally. If they had done so they may have realised that, Venturi Scott Brown’s aesethetic approach was a dead-end and that Learning from Las Vegas, far from finally being a building block for an aesthetic approach was in fact a cul-de-sac in this regard and only worthwhile as a methodology. In doing so, the two architects perpetuate the myth of Venturi and Scott Brown as a pair of social revolutionaries and that architecture which is extrapolated from commercial signage or building types is somehow ‘of the people’ more than buildings produced under a modernist agenda which speaks to our highest aspirations. They don’t look at the lessons of Las Vegas, and from this we must conclude that although this is the subject of the book which they both love so ardently, they may not have actually been there.

Because if you go to Las Vegas – and everyone in the world should – you will find that the Las Vegas which Venturi and Scott Brown describe, is, apart from a couple of sites downtown and some signs in the Neon Museum’s Boneyard, is all gone. The signs of Las Vegas – so important to Learning from Las Vegas are museum pieces. Beautiful gorgeous, sumptuous museum pieces but museum pieces. The decorated sheds are no more, their hulking forms long since bull-dozed. Caesar’s Palace and the Palms casino’s still exist but not in the manner which Venturi and Scott Brown documented them. Why should this be? Partly for the reasons, which the couple toegerhter with Steven Izenour explain the slow merging between sign and building – the evelution of the themed hotel. The relationship between shed and sign was seen as ultimately unsatisfactory by the casino owner and by the visitor. The commercial imperative of the Strip outweighs all however.

Since Steve Wynn arrived in Las Vegas the Venturi Scott Brown model has been inverted. His first venture Treasure Island – now branded Ti – certainly did fit into their model but since then he has confounded the architectural academics view of the city. As they have made quite clear, the believe that “Steve Wynn’s Las Vegas is irrelevant.” And yet how can this be? How can a man who dominated the very city they documented only some two decades later be ‘irrelevant’? How can the man who built, the Mirage, the Bellagio, the Wynn and the Encore, the man who revitalised the city suddenly act as such a turn-off to two architects who found the place such pure aphrodisiac?

Steve Wynn had very different ideas about culture compared to the Yale professors. It was Roger Thomas, Steve Wynn’s designer  who invited Andy Warhol to interview Wynn first. Warhol later made a gold picture of Wynn from a polaroid he took during the interview. So far so very Pop but Thomas later got Wynn interested in art himself. “People envision Las Vegas as a place where a craps dealer talking to a hooker about a gambler. I don’t think they want to allow us membership in the real world, the normal world,” Thomas has said. From his encouragement at the end of the 1990s, Steve Wynn spent so much time buying art from Sotheby’s that rumours circulated he wanted to buy it. In 1999 he bought Seurat’s Paysage, L’Île de la Grande-Jatte for $35.2 million. He became obsessed with Picasso. He created the Picasso restaurant at the Bellagio, designed by Picasso’s son and studded with some of the painter’s finest work.

Steve Wynn brought high art to Las Vegas and thereby inverted the expected flow between low brow and high culture that Venturi and Scott Brown had created. They had posited a Vegas where ‘the little people’ disported themselves. Architects could then extract the symbolism of this commercial activity and use it to their own ends. When Wynn started building hotels, he did so in his own luxury brand of Modernism rather than the manner ‘discovered’ and later prescribed by Venturi Scott Brown. His signature, in gold is all that adorns the chocolate glass facade.

An egoist Wynn may be but  he is no elitist. He’s there to sell people a vision of luxury – to create the ultimate holiday destination a place where people feel so stimulated visually that they lose all sense and gamble. But it shows that the concepts of high art and low art that Venturi Scott Brown thought they could circumvent are easily twisted back in the same direction. Their reading is built upon an utterly naive vision of capitalist architectural production, which sees the architect in an aloof, detached position, rather than utterly embedded within it. An understandable mistake given their own positions when writing Learning from Las Vegas. Indeed, one should be very wary of believing the idea that they were somehow mavericks. Denise Scott Brown may not have won a Pritzker and the partnership may not have won the RIBA Gold Medal but their selected works show them to have had a great deal of influence particularly within American academia, never mind the art world and civic government. What kind of mavericks would be let near the National Gallery in London?

But it is Las Vegas that prompts these remarks and and it is Las Vegas that is the most revealing. Visiting it today, one wonders, why did they chose here? Even if we accept the academics definition of ‘the little people’, why should we extrapolate an architectural strategy from ‘the little people’ at play? Why is the Las Vegas Strip a more significant model to extract an aesthetic approach than say the people at work or at home? Today, just as it was yesterday, the commercial model of Las Vegas is to provide a world far removed from the quotidian experience. It is a fantastic fun-filled, place that provides laughs as much as occasional confusion and despair. (Especially towards the end of a week long trip!) The commercial approach is to bring people in, give them cheap hotel rooms, stun them with spectacle and then get them gambling and losing money. Why would this be a good model for a quotidian urban experience? Las Vegas is part of an international capitalist system. It has its role. It’s not a nirvana, a portal into the soul of the common man.

Holland and Griffiths also fail to realise that the Las Vegas has expanded since Learning from Las Vegas was written. Since writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson picked over the city’s entrails to define how the American Dream died, the town has become a city. We need to look to the work of art crtic Dave Hickey to identify the unique cultural life here, one which confounds the Venturi Scott Brown’s approach. Hickey’s wife, the astonishingly named Libby Lumpkin, was the first curator of Steve Wynn’s gallery at the Bellagio. Prompted by this unique cultural insight and his own arrant disposition, Hickey developed the thesis that museums ought to be privately funded. Paraphrasing Thomas Paine, he says governments should deal with our wickedness, not our pleasures. He subsequently extrapolated the argument that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on a direct, one-to-one relationship between the viewer and the image. Once we allow meaning to figure into a work’s value, we become slaves to institutions that are in the business of mediating this meaning to the masses. He singles out universities for special opprobrium. It’s a contentious view but one which shows how the city has rebelled against the role allotted to it within art academic discourse.

Learning from Las Vegas remains an interesting historical document of a moment in Las Vegas’s fascinating history. It also stands as important model on how to collect and assimilate architectural research, which as Charles Holland points out, many other architecture books have built upon, but his idea that Nothing is more laughable than the idea of Venturi Scott Brown are social revolutionaries is laughable. In Learning from Las Vegas we find a constructed concept of the ‘little people’ and a self-conscious relationship between that body and the bourgeois academic architect. This is why the book has been generally sidelined as a model for architectural production, although it has become a means of framing research.

In July 2007, Hilary Clinton, then a candidate for US President proposed a no-flight zone over Darfur, to prevent the Sudanese government from bombing their own citizens. It was an attempt to call to a halt what has been described as the first genocide of the 21st Century. At the same time though, scientists from Boston University made an astonishing discovery beneath the ground of Darfur, which had from 2003 to 2007 been the site of 200,000 killings in a brutal civil war.

The scientists from Boston discovered an undergound lake the size of Lake Erie. It looked like a problem solves. A UN Report on Darfur that year had concluded that “exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered.” Of course things aren’t that simple. Getting the water out would be a problem. Then there is the history of Sudan; a tale of conflict between different racial groups, between farmers and nomadic tribes; between Arab and Christians.

That is why a group of Polish architects H3AR have proposed a building that allows access to underground waters through the application of water pumps but also acts as a cultural exchange point that promotes the coexistence of the three different religions and languages in Sudan.The form of the by water tower is inspired not by a symbol of the African savanna – the baobab. The building would not just house water pumps and a treatment plant but also a hospital, a school and a food storage centre.

It’s a great idea: a serious project but one which also makes a political proposition to the elite of Sudan. As the article in the New York Times makes clear. The racial and social conflict in Darfur is a result of the attempts by the Khartoum based elite to retain power. They created armed guerilla groups to hold potential rebels at bay. These guerilla groups then act as a de facto army eradicating the populous rather than those who might just threaten the government. These towers might never be built but they stand as a provacative alternative to the existing power relationships in Sudanese land-usage.

This is the text of a phone interview with Bill Baker, structural engineer on the Burj Khalifa and partner of S.O.M, on the day after the Burj Khalifa was inaugurated.

What was the launch like?
It was a pretty amazing launch. For structural engineers to see all this fire coming of your building is pretty shocking but it was an incredible event. There was this tremendous sight of sky-divers coming down. I couldn’t tell whether they were jumping off the building but I was told later they weren’t base-jumping. Then there was a light fountains. Then they had the lighting off, then spotlights. Then all the fireworks coming off the tower. It was incredible.

When did you learn that the name of the building had changed from the Burj Dubai to the Burj Khalifa?
Apparently it’s a fairly recent change.  I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I found out when they announced it at the ceremony. I knew the height because that’s my field, but I didn’t know about the name, because, well that’s not my field. I’m standing here on the plaza and there’s a plaque which has the date. Monday January 4 on it. It says “His highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Makhtoum Vice President of the UAE , ruler of Dubai, commemorates the inaugaration of the Burj Khalifa, named after the Presidents of the UAE Sheikh Khalifa.’

How did the Burj Khalifa begin?
We were interviewed on March 1^st 2003 by representatives of the developer. Emaar came to us because we did the Sears, John Hancock Tower, and the Jin Mao tower. These people from Emaar came to us and we went to NY and met some Canadians that were working for them and they interviewed us. We did a 2 weeks design competition. We won and we were up and running. The selection was relatively fast.

How does the competition design compare with the final building?
There are similarities [between the final design and the competition winning design] but not a lot. They have 3 wings and there are tendencies for set backs in the original design. But the core buttress system alllowed us fleixibilty. It was just as important in construction as in the completed stage, because it is self-stabilising as you go up. Everything holds up everybody else. Totally necessary. Centre core can’t go too much ahead of the wings for reasons of stability.

The shape was refined tremendously however. We spent a lot of time in the wind tunnel in order to achieve the final form. The competition was not overly precise. The height of the tower was around 550m in competition although other iterations had it much lower. Our drawings weren’t matching becuase were doing it quickly for the competition So our idea for the first building was that it was only about 10 m taller than Taipei 101 . Now it is 300m taller in fact.

How high was the building planned to be when you began construction
The plan was around 700m when we began construction but then the clients wanted us to make it taller and it kept going and going. The client just kept asking us to go higher and higher. We got to the point were we had one model and we realised that because of what we’d built already we couldn’t achieve any more.

Did you tell the client you couldn’t build any higher?
We came to arrangement.

What do you think of people that see the Burj as a symbol of folly?
I think all skyscrapers are symbols of hope and dreams and optimism. People who build skyscrapers are optimistic about their times and their future. Skyscrapers are dreams rendered in steel and concrete.

How are the occupation rates?
Actually very good. At the very bottom you have the world’s first Armani hotel. Then from 19 to 108 it is residential. All that residential has been sold several years ago. The top 37 floors are corporate suites with relatively small footplates for individuals who want to office space and almost everyone. There are 160 floors. Every zone has a a mechanical floor. Several bands of mechanical floors which is why the numbers don’t add up!

How long will the Burj’s record stand?
It could last a while or could happen 5 years. There’s nothing under construction that could surpass it. There are several proposals around at the moment which could though. Like what? I can’t really say anything about them or where they are. In general the places are active are China and the Middle East. That’s were the future of the skyscraper is.

Will they use the core buttress system?
Core buttress system is a very good one. We have some other ideas for how we might do something different. If you want to get a great deal higher, you have to look at a adapting the system.

What are you doing today?
I’m attending a conference relating to sustainability and generally trying to recover. We celebrated extensively, me and the gang who worked on the project. We all got together in a bar in the environs of the tower.

Building Number 10, Hu Jia Lou Public Housing Project West

Wang Di was born in Beijing in 1963 and has seldom left the city in the following years. His experience and his photography fundamentally problematises our western understanding of what is traditional in China’s capital. ‘I didn’t manage to catch a glimpse of the ‘old Beijing’ that people have been talking about,’ says the photographer. The first round of urban refurbishment in the 1950s had turned the decorated archways and the old City Wall Gate into history, rarely to be glimpsed even in text books. According to Di, during the Cultural Revolution, when everything old was supposed to make way for the new, it was difficult to find even a photo of those things.

Di says: “The ordinary architecture in my mind, such as the mass-constructed Russian style offices and residential buildings of the ’50s, the simple housing of the ’60s and during the Cultural Revolution (they are shabby both in form and in function because of the extremely tight budget), and the generic residential condos that sprouted up in the ’70s, made stronger marks in my visual memory than the so-called Ten Great Buildings or other famous urban landscape. They were directly relevant to my daily life, and deep down in my heart, they constituted some of the warmest images of this city.”

Interior of Building Number 15 of 4th Road of Jiu Xian Qiao

For a generation of Chinese the demolition of this unassuming architecture creates a rupture of memory and of identity, even if people  would prefer to forget the past. Of course the rapid economic development in the past ten years or so has drastically changed the look of Beijing. Ordinary buildings are often the first to be bulldozed in the mass urban demolition. The situation has direct effect on the basic living environment of Beijing and the way individuals identify with it. Di says he now worries that he won’t be able to identify with his home city some day, without ever having left it. ‘It’s this fear that prompted me to photograph these buildings and this fading Beijing in my memory, a city that belongs to me,’ he says.

Public Kitchen on the West in Building Number 2, Hu Jia Lou Public Housing

Yet it is not simple nostalgia at work here. The Chinese built these buildings to established Soviet principles of square footage would be allotted per capita. Ideologically, these were equivalent to the new Soviet architecture. They were designed for functionary organs of the national government, and built upon Soviet ideals of community. For the large part they weren’t popular, at least in Beijing, because they exceeded the average income of commoners. They were also as much of an imposition in their time as is the current wave of Westernisation. In their time, they were a symbol of power for the new China. They were the new Beijing. Half a century later, and things have changed. In his novel Discussions With our Daughter the writer Wang Shuo describes the city’s Soviet architecture: ‘whoever wants to see the fundamental changes that have happened in China over the past several decades, I take them to west Beijing to see how the former cornerstone of the regime lives nowadays.”

West Side of the North Section of San Li Tuen

Nostalgia is not always an option. Some people want to see these buildings torn down for what they represent.

The Abbey at Vaals by Hans van der Hejden

As Alan Power describes it here: ‘Van der Laan made his own number sequences in order to achieve a wider range of combinations and possibilities.’  The nature of this number sequence is key to our understanding of the architect however. It wasn’t a conceptual approach nor was it as Powers puts it ‘the kind of mystical essence or absolute truth’. According to Dom Hans van der Laan, the essence of architecture lies in its proportion. His architecture is based on his discovery in 1928 of the Plastic Number, a system of measurement and proportion he developed, partly as a consequence of finding the Golden Section too limiting.

Powers is wrong though to see this as arbitrary. Van der Laan certainly sought to replicate a sense of order; not a divine one perhaps. He was a good monk and knew that no mere mortal could achieve heavenly order. However he could achieve an order which in its earthly purity praised the greater divine order. For Van der Laan the creation of a module which dictated overall formal relations at a grand scale in his architecture was not just about creating rules to work by. He stuck to his rule in his practical way of course, which explains the astonishing ascetic rigour of much of his interiors. The Refectory of the Abbey Sint Benedictus Berg is not a place in which to indulge pleasures of the flesh but to remember the divine. But they are hymns to a great order.

The Abbey at Vaals by Hans van der Hejden

Van der Laan built a small number of buildings mainly for church purposes. His architecture conveys in its unique relationships an imposed order. It’s hierarchy is not absolute but generated, as Powers rightly says, from the natural world. Before his death, he had become an influential figure to a pan-European minimalist movement. And yet what has happened to his influence is interesting. Certainly one cannot look at Chipperfield’s work without thinking of van der Laan. The regularity of the pillars.

The creation of a formal set of rules. However if we look at another area where van der Laan’s work has most been felt in this country, namely biq’s beautiful redevelopment of the Bluecoat we can see that van der Laan’s main influence has been to help architect’s impose rules on existing structures. Whereas as van der Laan, created monastic structures, an architect like David Chipperfield has used van der Laan’s example to impose order on dilapidated structures.

If one looks at either the renovated part of the Literary Museum in Marbach am Neckar or the Neue Museum in Berlin, you see rules extrapolated from the original ne0-classical principles of the project and abstracted to a minimalist principle and imposed again on a disrupted built fabric but sensitively. Indeed the new built section of the Literary Museum is oppressive in its Van der Laan like rigidity, an over historicised rationalisation of the classical order like the worst of Aldo Rossi.

If one looks at Biq’s stunning work at Bluecoat, here they were able to rationalise a Georgian school which had been destroyed and rebuilt in adhoc fashion for over two centuries and impose an order onto it in sensitive fashion. One thinks in particular of the colonnade down the large gallery. It’s been influenced by van der Laan clearly but it’s not a new build. Fragments of the old wall line are exposed at the end of the corridor.

The Abbey at Vaals by Hans van der Hejden

Powers idea that Van der Laan’s rigid order is not absolutely intrinsically connected to his ascetic religious convictions is misguided. Perhaps in a desire to confirm his wider influence but he needn’t have worried. Anywhere where architects impose a minimalist order on a disrupted urban fabric, his influence will be felt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALL IMAGES BY NIGEL PEAKE.