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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key image in Milan this year was, as it has been before, at the Design Academy Eindhoven exhibition near Porto Romana. Ostensibly a product, it was in fact a sign, both in a literal sense and the way in which it gave an indication of the culture informing the rest of the work around it. Gero Asmuth’s sign project could be read as warning signs. A long literal landscape graphic in the long established block format of road signage shows the everyman figure holding back a tide of blue. Another shows a wave of water rising up in a ribbon to be held by the block figure in his arms. We are so used to being told that mankind is a threat to nature and consequently that nature is a threat to mankind that they could be mistaken for being a warning to man for his hubris for thinking he can control nature.

This is not the case. On one level it is very specific, the Netherlands, of course lies below sea level. You would think that the Dutch would have an acute and ready sense that much of their coastal land has been rescued from the sea by land management – the fabled dykes. Yet Asmuth contends that “few people realise how much work is involved in keeping the nation’s feet dry.”  His signs have been devised to indicate where man has intervened in the Dutch landscape. On one level, it is utterly self-evident that this would be obvious. And yet throughout what much of one sees in Milan it is clearly not appreciated.

Take this beautiful work of textile print design by the spectacularly talented Ying Wu from the RCA. As beautifully drafted and executed as the image is, it tells a story of an apocalypse; of man sheltering inside the skeleton of a giant turtle after environmental armageddon.This is not design as such. It is an art piece celebrating a moment of the thrill of impending doom – like a Mexican Day of Death piece. Indeed the logic of the picture is more in a celebration of death than any political comment. Where it goes wrong is the table beneath festooned with Coke cans wrapped in similar images. ‘You know what will happen if you don’t recycle?’ Wu appear to be saying. ‘Living inside dead turtles, that’s where.’

We aren’t able to contemplate death as our own end, it has to be mankind. At the Be Open Future talks at the Universitario degli Studia, Clare Brass of the SEED Foundation outlined her vision of how food waste could be turned into compost and how it could become a product in a token based economy. Never mind that thousands of allotment owners and gardeners already do this as part of their own informal system, but to address her fundamental belief that – and I quote directly here – “the over-buying of food is a crime against humanity”. Given that any human being who has the ability to over-buy food, does so, this criminalises humankind as a whole.

Certainly no-one like to waste money but it does seem strange that there is a language of criminality around consumption. Perhaps it is worth acknowledging that it was a misanthropic clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus that first drafted this vision of mankind as a stain upon the earth at the end of the 19th Century. His adherents have co-opted that language since. Brass overlooks the fact that food is produced by man’s endeavour in agriculture; by the human act of planting, nurturing and growing on a mass scale. If one is going to adopt the language of sin, and say that the wastage of food being a crime, surely the ability of man to support an expanding population is a virtue?

And whilst it is a perfectly valid experience to design for disaster; one wonders whether applying the principles of design to these events is in fact a means of trying to validate the profession in a time of doubt. Certainly that is the impression one gets from the cumbersome Heat Rescue Disaster Recovery project by Hikaru Imamura at the Design Academy exhibition. This storage drum contains relief goods but can be transformed on-site into a stove to burn any scraps of wood or refuse. “The availability of warmth directly improves the quality of life for refugees and offers them mental solace, as it acts as a social meeting point,” she says. To which one might say, so would a fire….

The Eindhoven show is invariably one of the best events at the Fuori Saloni; a series of ad hoc exhibitions set in temporary spaces and showrooms in the city, away from the main trade event. More than the big show at the fair ground, these small exhibitions provide an opportunity for understanding the ideas that are not only informing the manufacture of the latest products but also the manufacture of a next generation of designers. The Design Academy at its best was always able to articulate and frequently reconcile the tensions between design and its discontents. It’s students explored the dialogue between the production of material solutions to social needs or desires and abstract ruminations on the perceived shortcomings of that relationship through making things.

This year despite excellent work such as Imamura’s other project creating toys for intensive care users and Tom Loois’s App To Explore the Unknown, one felt that the school was in danger of losing sight of the first part of that equation. A salutary corrective was provided by the Japan Creative exhibition that has been made in the shadow of the Tsunami. The stand out piece on show was by Paul Cocksedge working with engineers at Pioneer to create a haunting piece which makes great use of their organic light emitting diode technology, which can shift in colour and tone subtly. There is a certain funereal quality to the Shadowtime clock in which the OLED light is diffused through Japanese paper but it is effectively a marriage between the exuberant and the restrained; the ancient and the new.

It takes a certain quality to keep making beautiful things in the face of disaster, but it is an essential attribute. Writing in the catalogue for the superb Japan Creative exhibition, Fumio Nanjo, Director of the Mori Art Museum Everyone should enjoy proposing new designs technologies production ideas or business models and then making them in to a reality. In such circumstances new possibilities for society open up naturally.” Look again at Gero Asmuth’s graphic at the top of the page and the figure of the man is actually pushing the tide back rather than succumbing to its power.

Barnes Railway Bridge

I have been following the work of illustrator Nigel Peake since I published his student thesis in the Scottish architecture magazine Prospect just before he won a Silver Commendation in the RIBA President’s Medal in 2005.  Since then he has created a number of studies of vernacular architecture as well as thoughtful illustrated analyses of how we perceive the world around us. I wrote an essay in his book Maps in 2008 and loved his later work Sheds. However I think his most recent book Bridges – a series on the Bridges of London drawn is his best work yet. Its publication gave me a chance to talk to him about the way he views drawing, its relationship to architecture and more importantly the city. 

 When did you the Bridge drawings?
The drawings were made last year, after summer and into autumn. They were drawn by hand and in sequence to how they appear along the river.

You have abstracted the bridges into comparable frames and sizes: which did you have to abstract the most? Or was it an even process? 
I am not sure if I thought of it as abstracting. I was really just looking at the bridges in terms of their structure, form and their inherent rhythm and song. So perhaps I was abstracting them but not to make it more interesting, just as a way of understanding and drawing that process. For me, drawing is a way of working out an idea or place and so the book is a document of that.

Battersea Bridge

The Bridges of London are very much ignored even though they are essential. Why do you think that is?
I am not sure why. They are wonderful elements and when you are in London you use them all the time. It is normal now not to look or observe. Cities are incredible places that hold all this movement, colour and noise that happen all at once, but not many seem to notice.

Could you live in London? 
At the moment, no. I like it very much and always enjoy being there, but if find it exhausting as a place and that is not great for my work.  I like to take time and look at things, some cities permit that (Paris, San Francisco, Edinburgh) but I always think I am getting in someones way if I pause in London. Cities are really intriguing places for me and one walk down a street is enough for me to draw for weeks, but for now it is better to live by the sea and visit them when I need to for work.

Could you design a bridge? 
Possibly. I did design a bridge for my thesis project on Istanbul, that was a rejuvenation of the Galata bridge. I find them incredible feats especially when I see photos of bridges that are in the process of being built and they appear to be cantilevering over the water or gap, this great weight hanging.

Blackfriars Bridge

Which of the bridges do you / have you used the most? 
In my life? Probably George IV Bridge in Edinburgh [which spans from Princes Street to the Royal Mile over Waverley Station]. I’d use it going to the architectural studio on chamber street from a copy/coffee/stationary/music shop.

What is your favourite bridge? 
I am fond of inhabitable bridges but a lot of thosee existed in the past and have been replaced by more ‘practical’ bridges. Beyond that, it is the idea of crossing that is really interesting to me and most bridges make this possible.

Kennington Bridge

What do you think of the Shard? 
Last time i was in London was December 2011. I cycled through the city at night with a friend. We had no particular place to go but we ended up following the Shard until we where below it. The modern day Polaris. It was surrounded by fog and the top part was hidden and glowing in the gloom and empty. At that moment I thought it was beautiful. I sometimes prefer incomplete buildings because they still allow you to imagine a different outcome.

Before you have been working very much on vernacular structures (sheds) or personal visions of discreet landscape, there seems to be a greater interest in deliberate structural form. Is that fair, and if so why do you think that’s the case?
I draw and paint things that are interest to me at that moment. But I have been spending more time in different cities and so that probably has affected me.

Tower Bridge

Which building in London addresses the river the best?
Walking along the Thames, it is almost as if a lot of the buildings along it ignore the river, as if it was a banal street. I do like it when the tide is high and you can look across with a flattened view if is as if the other side is an island.

Do you ever want to build anything? 
Yes, at first I would just like to build a wall. Sometimes I think of drawing as a lot like building. It is made up of layers, and slowly you add to it, until it needs nothing more.

You can buy the book here. 

18th Fina Visa Diving World Cup, Monday 20 February 2012 at the Aquatics Centre in the Olympic Park London. First competitive use of the Aquatics Centre diving boards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reblogged from citythreepointzero:

Edinburgh Castle and the Old Town, from Salisbury Crags

A question via twitter from ‘Feria Urbanism’ (hi there..): should Liverpool fear the loss of UNESCO World Heritage Site status? The question refers to Peel Holdings’ ‘Liverpool Waters’, 60 hectares of waterfront office and retail development. My reply? No – not that the loss of UNESCO status is unlikely, but that the city shouldn’t fear it.

Read more… 551 more words

Great piece on the stupidity of UNESCO status by Richard Williams.

UCI Track Cycling World Cup, Thursday 16th February 2012, Men and Women’s Team Pursuit Qualification. First time the Olympic Park Velodrome in London is used for competition.

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.