BE OPEN Sound Portal, Trafalgar Square

In one of Arup’s London offices is an array of speakers designed to help architects and acoustic engineers hear how the designs of their spaces will sound when complete. It’s called an ambisonic array. Virtual sound models for proposed concert halls can be created and reproduced using this array to give the designer an idea of how the concert hall will literally sound. The virtual model can be changed to asses the qualities of different experiences. Wouldn’t it be good, though the designers at Arup, if this ambisonic array could be experienced by everyone and become not a sterile laboratory environment but a place to experience sound? The London Design Festival and the sponsorship of BE OPEN, gave a team at Arup the opportunity to create this. Taking Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey as an inspiration for the mood of the Sound Portal, Arup created an intimidating black rubber shape that sits in the centre of Trafalgar Square but which opens up to reveal light and sky within. The facility provides the perfect environment for some of the most thoughtful and innovative recording artists in the world, including one of my favourite Tom Jenkinson a.k.a. Squarepusher I spoke to him about using ambisonic arrays and exploring sound in three dimensions.

Hello Tom
[speaking into phone microphone] Hello phone.

Can you tell us about your brief or at least the part of the brief you latched on to?
The main part of it for me was the mode of reproduction of sound i.e. the ambisonics array of speakers. In any case that’s what made it interesting because that’s something I’ve not worked with at all. I’ve only ever worked with two channels and this is nine channels.

Ambisonic technology is a bit confusing for a lay person. How would you describe it?
The ambisonic array are 9 speakers that are arranged in 3 equilateral triangles, that sits one above the other. One at foot level, one at the height of your mid rift and one above your head and what that makes available to the musician is the capacity to locate sound in a space i.e. anywhere within the confines of the portal.

How did you program the music to behave in a three-dimensional way?
There are various ways of doing it. The suggested way was to submit the files in B Format, which is an x, y, z based way of composing audio. 3 Dimensional. However I worked directly with the nine channels. There are various ways of approaching it, i was more concerned to make as an extreme use of the 3D capacity as possible.

Sound does modulate between speakers. At various points in the piece the sound does swing around the room. At other points they appear by surprise. I tried to explore a few different approaches to it.

How did you compose it?
It was written on a nylon-string guitar. The core of it and the motivation to what I did was to go a little beyond the gimmickry which i think this sort of projects might potentially suffer from. Suffering form something which demonstrates the 3D sound capacity without actually the content or the material itself being that interesting.

Like the opening of the advertisements at an iMAX?
Yes, it’s a woosh that says ‘listen the sound is going around the room!’ but the sound itself is not that interesting. What I tried to do is start form a core of a musically satisfying piece of work and build out and extrapolate for this playback system. I used a specially modified classical guitar which had separate outputs for each string which means that you can isolate notes and then place them within the nine channel system.

So you are fragmenting the sound?
Absolutely. it’s separating it into the most ireduceable elements. Normally you hear a guitar and its a composite sound but is actually several sources in addition to the sound being reverberated through the body of the guitar. In my instance I’ve got six individual strings.

What will it be like to listen to in this space?
It’s subjective isn’t it? If you are bang in the middle for my piece you should experience various formations of sound, both clockwise and anti-clockwise motion. That’s one of the things I tried to keep constant throughout the piece. A sense of rotational motion around the room but also vertical displacement to. They are all done according to set patterns that have been mathematically worked out. So although the piece is itself broadly speaking, most overtly a piece of music, I’ve extrapolated in a mathematical way.

Interior of the BE OPEN Sound Portal. Photo by Thomas Graham.

Is this a viable means of sound reproduction or just a gimmick?
It’s very much down to how it is used. Like early stereo usage was hampered by these idiotic records which simply demonstrate without being interesting in their own right the displacement between two speakers. I think there is a danger of it becoming gimmicky but there is also of it becoming a very established thing because it is so expensive.

How could this evolve into a next generation of music reproduction? What would need to happen?
I think partly that’s a commercial thing. 5.1 surround sound has taken off at home because there is a big money to be made by the people who generate artefacts in 5.1 form. There’s a strong commcerial incentive. No-one currently works in this format. It would take that kind of combined momentum of commercial interest and artistic interest. So goodness knows. I think its a fascinating thing to explore music in three dimensions, although I’m not convinced that everyone will want that all the time, as fascinating as it is as a one-off advaenture and a single experience.

 

Technology Will Save Us: part of BE OPEN SPACE at Tom Dixon’s Ladbroke Grove canal-side HQ

What’s the greatest piece of design to come out of Italy in the last decade? The Branca chair by Mattiazzi? Something by Patricia Urquiola for Moroso? It was the Arduino, a simple microcontroller board, named according to the Wall Street Journal, after its inventors favourite bar in Ivrea, a city 50 km north of Turin. Micro-controllers are miniature computers dedicated to a single programmable task and whose components, a processor, memory and programmable inputs and outputs sit on simple circuit board. They are embedded into every device around us.

Amidst the makers of felt boot and cork wall panelling at Be Open Space at Tom Dixon,  Gergely Lorincz from the British collective Technology Will Save Us explains the story: “About ten years ago in a design school, students were struggling with micro-controllers, they wanted to do something interactive. At the time, it was really hard to programme micro controllers and really expensive, so these Italian guys came up with the idea that they should make something easy to use for students and artists: not technically minded people. It became an instant success. In the last 10 years an insane amount of art installations, robots, autonomous airplanes, home energy monitors… have been made with it… You can turn a blender into a MIDI controller with it.”

Technology Will Save Us: part of BE OPEN SPACE at Tom Dixon’s Ladbroke Grove canal-side HQ

Importantly the Arduino was not made by a chip manufacturer who, along with his competitors has  no real interest in promoting open use of their technologies. In 2005, Professor Massimo Banzi at the now closed Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea wanted to free design students from dealing with complex electronics so they could instead focus on its application. Together with David Cuartielles and students, he made a microcontroller that designers could use to incorporate into their work. Significantly they made it open source. Plans for it can be downloaded from the internet, although Gianluca Martino the engineer that was first commissioned to make Arduino’s still sells thousands so well conceived were the originals.

Today the Arduino is spear-heading a fascinating development which mirrors the evolution of open-source software, such as Linux or the Apache server software that runs many web sites. Open-source hardware applies the same idea to physical things. As I found, with the help of Lorincz,  a layman can use it to make a small synthesiser. In the small stand at Be Open Space at the Dock in West London, the hacker had used it to connect a distance sensor with a sound loop on his laptop. “The same technology is used to make basic robots,’ he says and lists the things you can connect up using the platform:  and others that can be connected via the Arduino to laptops and on to social media. Remote controls for Apple devices. Radio-controlled lawnmowers.

Technology Will Save Us: part of BE OPEN SPACE at Tom Dixon’s Ladbroke Grove canal-side HQ

In February 2011, Make magazine stated that there were around 100,000 Arduinos on the market. Nothing amazing, but as Phillip Torrone, the influential technologist puts it: ‘Every year I read another article about how Italy is struggling to find “their own Google” when they already have it. It’s the Arduino — they just don’t realize it yet.’ The board’s drivers and integrated development environment (IDE) works with Linux, Mac and Win so as a bit of hardware it segues nicely with the open source software that was its model. It’s light, simple and will accept information from both digital and analogue sensors.

At the moment it is still in the hands of the hackers and the artists. Technology Will Save Us for example are running workshops in Hackney, London to encourage the wider usage and understanding of computer electronics with the Arduino as their platform.  However the implications of that are expanding. In the middle of last year, Google chose the Arduino for the Android Open Accessory kit, which allows external USB hardware to interact with an Android-powered device in a special “accessory” mode. There are 500 million activated Android devices in existence and an estimated 1.3 million new activations a day.

Technology Will Save Us: part of BE OPEN SPACE at Tom Dixon’s Ladbroke Grove canal-side HQ

Whilst a busy non-hacker doesn’t have time to link their old alarm clock up to their phone, the implications for the opening up of research and development for industry is massive. The hacker community’s claim that we will all become involved in the making of bespoke technology is not – I believe – tenable or even desirable. What it does it makes cheaper the ability to explore specialist areas. Here’s Banzi himself talking about the way in which the Arduino became the platform for a 3D printing machine and a helicopter.  (It is a key technological stepping stone between the online and real worlds that that Chris Anderson has just described in this great article in the Guardian about the internet’s relationship with industrial progress.) Far more likely is the that an enthusiastic peer group will embrace the opportunity to explore ways in which the increasing power and ubiquity of the mobile phone can be put to use in our domestic lives.

The phrase upcycling is a strangely moralistic term. Rather than an object being re-used in any old fashion – old ceramics crushed into powder and used as supplement to cement for example – up-cycling suggests an act of improvement on the original, and an improvement enacted by a human being who makes something better by ingenuity. Surely in the absolute terms of an environmentalist any kind of re-use is worthwhile. Indeed as recycling is possible on an industrial scale and therefore truly beneficial. Upcycling then is more of a design term or a craft term.  It is the urban equivalent of beach-combing – there is something more exciting going on here.

According to Bernier,  the Project RE_  is an act of ‘upcycling’. I’d say that it offers something a bit more interesting than that. Much more interesting in fact. It is the best expression yet of 3D printing as an example of what Clayton M. Christensen described as ‘disruptive technology.’ Christensen later changed his term to the now more popular term ‘disruptive innovation’ because he felt that what he described initially as the way in a which technologies change initial business models was often simply the new application of an existing technology. Christensen was market focused underestimated the relationship between technology and society or certainly those technologies which are not immediately mediated by business. Indeed the hacker world which Bernier’s work emerges from suggests that ‘disruption’ itself is becoming a self-identified social status.

The most exciting aspect about 3D printing has always been the way it decentralised the site of production. Only a few people such as Assa Ashuach have imagined what that could mean on a grand scale . Many of the current projects in 3D printing Bernier’s fascinating project included are based at the domestic scale. Here is what the individual can do to provide for their individual needs. But Bernier’s project is intriguing because it imagines the possibility of endlessly disruptive technology. A technology which can continually re-think the objects around it. If we take what Ashuach and others have imagined about the contemporary scale of the project

What is interesting about Bernier’s work is that the potential scale and the versatility of the technology lies latent in his work. The lids are then clipped or screwed onto standard jars, tin cans and bottles to create new and personal objects. Huge numbers of iterations are easy to achieve as his Instructables page shows. He made 14 objects in his first collection : a watering can, an hour glass, a long pasta container, a bird house, a bird feeder, a mug, a rain catcher, a maple syrup bottle, a piggy bank, a orange juicer, a snow globe, a paint brush cleaner, a dumb-bell and a lamp.

I came across Bernier’s project as part of my work for the excellent BE OPEN FUTURE AWARDS, part of this years 100% Design. Within the other selections were a series of stunning ceramics created by 3D Printing. Beautiful and charming and clearly novel, they are however, nowhere near as exciting as objects like Bernier’s which is a thoughtful response to industrial processes and impressively a means by which we could imagine re-ordering them.

In a month where it was announced that the first shop for 3D printers opened in Switzerland, one can now see bigger ideas forming; decentralised manufacturing, bigger than the domestic. One can imagine industrial plants of the future, added to recycling plants with much larger versions of the ABS FDM 3D printer Bernier had. They can respond to whatever waste product they are given. Or one can imagine an industrial process whereby base components are manufactured in traditional fashion whilst individual elements are made to bespoke or highly individual needs.

The social aspect of 3D technology is still the most fascinating element of its evolution.

Image from the Thames Hub: an integrated vision for Britain, published by Foster and Partners, Halcrow and Volterra

The all-to brief appointment of Daniel Moylan as chairman of the London Legacy Development Company marks a sea-change in the development landscape in London. His departure, after just 7 weeks, marks the end of an 8 year period during which the Olympics where the main architecture, construction and development story in the British capital. The fact that he has moved to head up London Mayor Boris Johnson’s proposed review of airport capacity shows that a real political struggle is about to take place over the future of London’s airports and that the Olympic Park is secondary. For a long time, Johnson’s support of the Thames Hub proposal – despite its genuine credentials as a serious alternative to expansion at Heathrow – have been seen as something of a joke. Moving Moylan – one of his most trusted advisors – to aviation policy shows how far he’s willing to go with it.  

Moylan only has ideas to argue with, albeit persuasive ones. In November 2011, Foster and Partners together with Halcrow and economists Volterra published a report which placed the airport needs in a wider context. It would be integrated into the need for  a new Thames barrier crossing that extends the flood protection to London out towards the Thames Gateway, and so the report had it, “into the 22nd century.” The barrier would harness tidal power to generate carbon-free energy. The airport would be linked into Crossrail and later High Speed rail links running further north of LOndon via a four-track, high-speed passenger and freight Orbital Rail route around London. The estuary airport, would be capable of handling 150 million passengers per annum, thus enabling the UK to retain its global aviation hub status. Although he dallied with the idea, the Olympics has clearly given Johnson the belief that this can be pulled off.

It’s not simply his ambition that’s leading the Tory grandee down this route. Johnson doesn’t want to lose votes on the back of a volte-face on the third runway at Heathrow. Moylan is being looked too to now for his fabled  ability to remove obstacles. It is to the detriment of the legacy of the Olympics that he is being dragged of it because his involvement would have given the project the direction it badly needed. His predecessor at the London Legacy Development Corporation, Baroness Margaret Ford rose to prominence in the regeneration industry as it was understood in the first decade of this century. Working with ex-industrial sites firstly on the west coast of Scotland but then in northern England, she was very much a creature of Blair’s development agencies. These were large, state-subsidised bodies which may have guilded the way for developers to frequently build the wrong kind of housing that was needed but at least got houses built.

Moylan is something else altogether. In person, the man who will help Johnson get his airport is prickly and suspicious, but he is also incredibly quick and admirably frank. Like Ford, he has spent time working in the banking sector, but unlike her he’s a Tory, a passionate free-marketeer but in social terms a libertarian, a combination that endears him to Boris Johnson who, oddly perhaps, considers himself as such. Although Moylan was rejected by Tory grandees as a candidate for Conservative party MP in Kensington and Chelsea in favour of the more fragrant Alan Clark, he was later elected to the borough’s council in 1990 and still stands as councillor for the Queen’s Ward there. It was through his position as Deputy Leader of the Council, which he took over in 2000, that his interest in public realm and planning emerged.

His interest and determination not to mention his taste are not to be underestimated. As a councillor, his greatest achievement has been the transformation of Kensington High Street, where unnecessary street furniture was  removed in a process that earned Moylan the rare accolade for a Tory councillor of an honorary fellowship to RIBA. He went on to face down the blind and partially sited by introducing the shared space scheme on Exhibition Road in South Kensington and rolling out a classy, if everso slightly bland Yorkstone-flagged top-end version of a Jan Gehl pedestrian schemes throughout his borough. He’s clearly excited by the architecture of the Olympics site however. He said: “when the wings come down, you will be able to see the real beauty of the Aquatic Centre” It now looks as if a decision on the stadium will be delayed further. Before he left Moylan claimed it had been “a difficult issue” but that the Corporation were “working progressively towards finding a solution.”  A decision expected in October may now be later.

Even during his brief spell as the Chairman of the board, it was clear that he also had his eye on the bigger prize, not unlike Johnson to whom his political fate is very firmly attached. Unlike the previous regime in Stratford, he was not afraid to emphasises the potential for employment in the 4 million square feet of office space within the park. Johnson who is ostensibly taking his place at the LLDC will no doubt concur that the model for how this will be delivered is likely to emphasise smallness. He too will be non-committal about whether he prefers a large corporation or smaller body which franchises or contracts work out largely because there is much work to be done to change the park into what is called legacy mode. But like Moylan he too will prefer a small legacy corporation in the long run.

With his boss partly coerced and partly drawn to the Thames Hub strategy, Moylan who has been on the board of Transport for London since Boris was elected mayor is also finding remit his remit dramatically widening. Moylan now finds himself going very much against the grain of thinking at the top of the Conservative party as he takes up Johnson’s battle against Heathrow expansion but he’s a man who burns with a hitherto thwarted ambition.

Using the Olympics to present an image of the host city has come a long way since the poster for the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, United States. This simply showed a map of the USA with an arrow on it pointing to the words Lake Placid. It was, however, the first time the Games had been used as a tool for tourism – a notion that is now an integral part of the Olympic package and for which the language of spatial design forms a key component. The aim by designers has been to place key events within the working heartland of the city so that select images of London’s architectural highlights will be beamed to audiences all around the world.

Back the bid campaign using Thames Flood Barrier.

London is of course already well known to the world. In 2010 5.7m people chose to holiday in the city, a fact which makes the art of presenting it in a fresh way a challenge: something more sophisticated than hurdlers photoshopped jumping over Tower Bridge or diving of the Thames Flood Barrier which were used by London in the bid for the Games. The answer, and the key to the genuinely innovative approach ultimately used by the organisers in London, is in the judicial use of temporary structures placed within the existing urban fabric – far beyond the Olympic Park itself. The brilliant Shooting venue by Magma architecture takes an event to Woolwich. This structure will be taken down and rebuilt in the East End of Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games in 2014.

Woolwich Shooting Venue, by Magma Architecture

The idea is a development of the way that previous Games have used the host city as the backdrop to an event but with fresh, and more deeply developed, flourishes. During the diving in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics a camera tracked a divers fall, effectively giving the audience at home a of tantalising view of the city’s downtown sights. Architects and master-planners Populous, the team in charge of overlay for London, has deliberately used a series of temporary structures to reconfigure famous backdrops for different events.

Diver, Barcelona Olympics, 1992.

They’ve placed a 6,000-seat auditorium within the confines of Lords Cricket ground, where the archery event will be held, so that the apertures between the stands deliver a view that juxtaposes the famous old Lords pavilion and the futuristically styled Natwest Media Centre, designed by Future Systems. It takes one of the most celebrated pieces of modern architecture in the city the first all aluminium, semi-monocoque building in the world and sets it in a new frame. As such, temporary structures reframe London for a global TV audience.

The Archery venue at Lords Cricket Ground in London

Jeff Keas, a sport facility designer with Populous, asserts that the design team for the temporary structures were interested in creating structures that have “integrated memories of the city”.  This idea reconciles two elements that have traditionally been very distinct in tourism campaigns for visiting London: the historical and the very modern. It is concept that Danny Boyle continually riffed on throughout the Opening Ceremony in terms of music and costume, (Victorian urchins running around metal beds to a Mike Oldfield soundtrack) but has rarely been acknowledged in terms of the visual image of the city’s architecture. Presenting the ancient and modern together, in close juxtaposition, is a fairly honest and fair reading of what makes London special as an urban experience. Though it is not necessarily an easy message to communicate quickly to a global audience.

The temporary architecture of the Games, therefore, reconciles the potential contradiction of London. Rather than attempting to explain how this complexity makes the place exciting, the organisers are physically showing it. It’s for this reason that the modern, sexy game of beach volleyball is taking place on historic Horse Guards Parade. Like Greenwich, it’s the Palladian and the Modern, except here the modern is provided by bikinis rather than towers by Pelli, Foster and HOK. More than just a gimmick, it is a means of using space to explain the intoxicating, slightly disorientating contrasts that make the British capital so unique. Indeed, what is so clever about the tactic is that it has been rolled out with some consistency while exhibiting no small respect for the past.

Greenwich Equestrian Venue. Canary Wharf in the background.

Keas describes the thinking behind the equestrian arena at Greenwich, “one of the underpinning elements of this site is the grand axis [a central boulevard around which the architecture is symmetrically arranged], which was established in the 1600s when [British architect] Inigo Jones built the Queen’s House, and the Royal Naval College was built around that.’ Although it has taken a great of effort in terms of respecting the existing historical fabric, the temporary structure has been aligned on this grand axis. The main camera view of the open-ended equestrian venue will have the Queen’s House in the foreground and Canary Wharf behind. The modern and the ancient: London at its best.

This approach of exploiting and emphasising the urban layers of London is derived from looking at both traditional and modern stadiums. The amphitheatre at the Acropolis was open at one end, as was the first Olympic stadium of the modern era in Athens. The Pirates Baseball stadium in Pittsburgh, USA, is another example. In each of these stadiums, ancient and modern, the city was brought into the field of play without obviously detracting from the sport itself. The buildings drew attention to the city, rather than operating as expressive objects themselves.

Pirates Baseball Stadium, Pittsburgh, USA.

In the case of London, the result is a series of structures that act as framing devices: a means of orientating and allowing the TV viewer to “read” the city around the buildings. It is an approach that places a duty on the viewer to read a complex image quickly. Given our increasingly sophisticated appreciation of images of different cities – particularly through facilities like Streetview – it is, I think, a real success. Using unspectacular architecture to make a spectacle of architecture.

What is it like visiting this TV strategy in reality? Equally dramatic in terms of the view and strangely reassuring otherwise. As I and my family have experienced this weekend, there is a peculiarly English quality to temporary seating. They are strangely familiar to us. Not that I have been to it but the Badminton Annual horse trials for example, require around 14,000 tiered seats including half of which is covered. The Queen allows around 5,000 temporary seats on to her land for the Royal Windsor Horse show. Tennis tournaments at Queen’s and Wimbledon are augmented annually by temporary seating. Take any so-called elite sport,  such as show-jumping, rowing, polo, and you will find a home for temporary seating: the more rarefied the guest, the more likely that their annual hurrah will be hosted on temporary seats. The more popular the sport, the more permanent the structure.

Indeed the London Live viewing spaces introduce the Festival infrastructure to the viewing of sport. Huge areas of public parks blocked off with security fencing with stages and burger vans inside them. In Victoria Park, the last 3 summers have hosted music events on the very site where the free TV screens now stand. Some would question what the value of passing through ‘airport standard security’ as the tannoys boast to stand and watch TV in the invariable damp. However, they exist due to a co-opting of the rental and organisational systems that deliver music festivals. The London Olympics is being delivered by a massive ramping-up of the rental market that festival and small scale sports events are used to buying into.

So as the song says: “over the past few years to the traditional sounds of an English summer, the droning of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow, has been added a new noise.”  The clang of high heels on metal struts, the gentle shuffling of the queue, and the occasional beep of the door frame metal detector. To this clumsy, clanging kit we are used to, a new high-tech system of security has been added. It is the world of the posh portable toilet writ large. Basic, modular structures but with Kardean flooring, solid wood doors and toilet partitions with oak skirting. Mozart piped-in to a plastic box. Posh loos don’t just provide luxury they also provide a frisson, a chance to queue. It’s not the most progressive way of doing things. It doesn’t take the chance to reinvent how a system operates, but I like the pragmatic reinvention of something that already worked well in an unofficial culture on a smaller scale.

This short film essay looks at how man has built and talked about elemental architecture forms since the Tower of Babel. It takes the viewer inside the ArcelorMittal Orbit for the first time as well as placing it in historical context. I made it with Simona Piantieri, who I first worked with on her film about the Shard. Less about the merits of the structure itself, I like to think that it asks important questions about how we judge architecture and art in a modern society.

Policeman Wenlock Figurine.

Some people saw it as symbol of a military state’s collusion with the corrupt forces of international sport. To me it looked very much like a penis dressed as a policeman. When I read in this Guardian article that the heavy weight of oppositional satire was being brought to bare on a wee Wenlock doll, dressed as a policeman my heart went out to it for the first time. Certainly I had not warmed to the pair of scrotal cyclopses that had been chosen to represent London until that point but when you read him being attacked by rabid killjoys like Games Monitor guy who sees in it a symbol of our violent police state, my heart leaped to his defence. Perhaps there was something to like about this clear attempt to get us to think of policemen and sexual organs at the same time.

(One word about that article, which reads largely like Games Monitor itself. Qualifying the budget of the Games, Stephen Graham writes: “Major infrastructure projects such as Crossrail, speeded up for the Games, are factored in, the figure may be as high as £24bn”. Crossrail will be completed in 2018.) But placing budgets aside and thinking about poor priapic Wenlock as he stands before me, I’m driven instead to be more sympathetic to him and wonder instead: how did we end up with a cock dressed as a cop representing our city?

With the Olympics it is always worth comparing the present with your favourite from the past. In 1988, Disney produced a special broadcast called Mickey’s 60th Birthday. One of the guests who appeared was Misha the Bear – the mascot for the 1980 Moscow Olympics – a recognition by the best known animation studio in the world of the enduring impact of a character created to represent a sporting event. It was the animation version of Henry Kissinger turning up to one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s charity galas. It was the cartoon form of two grizzled campaigners of the Cold War smiling across old battle lines and a few drinks and magical testimony to the way Misha had transcended the Games.

Misha the Bear

This little bear is delivered in the classic style of high Soviet sentimentalism, but then he is meant to be. Created by Victor Chizhikov, a children’s illustrator twenty years, to me is not simply an act of propaganda that makes it so successful but because it is a successful piece of mascot making that touched people way outside Soviet borders. Commerically it did well in Soviet Russia. Over two million Misha dolls were sold, more than the Waldi at Munich in 1972. The latter was designed by the German graphic design great Otl Aicher and was the first official mascot. Far from being a completely commercial decision it was an attempt to soften the rigorous high modernism of Aicher’s graphic treatment for the Games. It was partially successful. It mediates Aicher’s remorseless use of Univers and provides a bit of light entertainment, much in the same way a sadistic uncle might occasionally do a conjuring trick. It has all the fun of the responsible wooden toys sold in Habitat in the 1980s that you were forced to play with while your parents looked at beds they couldn’t afford.

Waldi, Olympic Mascot 1972

Why was Misha able to develop a life of his own? Because he emerged from a narrative rather than simply graphic culture; first from Russian folklore and then through the sentimental animation of the Soviet Union. Like all good elements of Olympic design, it related to a cultural tradition beyond the Olympics as well as the Olympic tradition itself. Furthermore Chizhikov wasn’t commissioned to create a graphic device but a narrative. In the closing ceremony in 1980 a giant inflatable Misha was carried into the Luzhniki Stadium carrying balloons. Another figure of the mascot was created in the stands by the crowd holding placards above their heads. At the appropriate moment, certain members flipped over their placards thereby animating their Misha and making it cry. The inflatable figure was then allowed to drift off into the sky. TV footage shows grown men and women sobbing. Misha did the job of a mascot by turning everyone into children. Seb Coe still looks slightly dappy when Misha’s name is mentioned.

(Indeed the international success of Misha – its cross Cold War appeal in particular – has not been lost on the organisers of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 who have completely ripped it off. )

What makes Misha so powerful is the sheer schmaltz of it that even Reaganite America failed to match 4 years later. Unexpectedly the Los Angeles organisers  went for Sam, the bald eagle. It could have been so much better, because it was designed by a Walt Disney cartoonist. Yet it was such a flagrant image of American chest puffing even though it was in a cartoon. Every one outside the united states was instantly switched off byan eagle dressed in stars and stripes, called Sam. The kind of thing that Nancy Reagan might see printed on her husbands underpants before she climbed into bed with him.

Sam The Eagle, Los Angeles 1984 Olympics.

This was something of a propaganda defeat to the Americans. A shame because animation was in fact one of the cultural ways in which Russians and Americans managed to communicate with each other at the height of the Cold War. Despite the boycott of Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries of the 1984 Los Angeles games, a group of pioneering animators created a miniature festival of animation within the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. Tale of Tales was chosen as the best animation film of all time. Directed by one of the most famous Russian animators, Yuriy Norshteyn who also made the astounding Little Hedgehog in the Fog, Tale of Tales is a complex story of hope and endurance with a little wolf in it. Americans bowing down before the superiority of Soviet sentimentality.

The Americans learned no lessons from this episode. The worst mascot ever made was the terrifying Izzy which was created for Atlanta 1996. This wasn’t an anthropomorphised animal, but an animated ‘thing’ which reminded many people of a really angry blackcurrant. Its name is supposed to have evolved from the question, ‘what is he?’.

Izzy, Mascot for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Of course, creative teams are looking at an ever shrinking stock of wildlife to choose from, but the recourse to indeterminate ‘things’ is generally ill-advised. The gormless club-footed twins, Athena and Phevos for Athens 2004 were particularly annoying. Although they were meant to refer to ancient Greek dolls they are just avant-garde graphic artist art scribbles – first pioneered by Javier Marischal with Cobi but less successful.

But while Cobi at least had a personality, it strikes the wrong note when compared with Misha. Marischal suggested that his Catalan Sheepdog designed for the Barcelona Games was inspired by Picasso’s interpretations of Velazquez, 58 pictures inspired by Las Meninas currently held in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. This is a claim that one must take at face value, although having seen Las Meninas I was struck more by the rigorous way Picasso had used Velazquez as a testing ground for the synthesis of multiple viewpoints in the high modernist fashion rather than creating handy source material for a cartoon dog.

Las Meninas. After Velazquez by Picasso

Cobi was relatively successful in terms of the way it made claims for Barcelona as a centre for European culture that – during Franco’s reign – it had been kept cruelly apart from. Yet  fictitious characters become memorable because they emerge from narrative drawing cultures. They have to be produced by this to gain independence from it. Misha was the epitome the way Russian folk stories were used to appeal to a new mass audience through motion pictures. The sheer charm of Misha offered a way into a cultural understanding rather than simply a way of generating revenue for licensee sales. These revenue streams are a vital component for the new global games.  Using the value of the dollar in 2000 as a constant  the Olympics scholar Holger Preuss estimates that the money coming into the organising committee of the Munich Games was $5million. For the Athens Games in 2004 it was $85million. But then given that a huge purpose of the Games is also to offer an insight into the host city or nation, a generated cartoon form is not going to tell anyone anything other than here is a place that doesn’t understand story-telling.

Go Wenlock. Go Mandeville. Go on.

For whilst London has done the hard-edged stuff well – the urban masterplanning, the landscaping for the park, the secondary stadiums such as the Handball arena and the Velodrome – but it has failed to do the soft stuff. Wenlock and Mandeville are nothing but animated ball-bags.  Yes, a certain history has been forced on them. Their names refer to the Shropshire village where an early version of the Games was heldand a hospital which pioneered work with paraplegics. Michael Morpurgo was charged with giving them a back story in which the mascots are fashioned from globs of metal by a retired steel worker from Bolton called George. It is a bonkers post- rationalisation of design-by- committee. The online game on the 2012 website, in which you can dress your Wenlock and Mandeville in clothes of your choice, says more. Give these figures some personality, some life.

The reason for this failure is in my opinion, due to a failure of nerve in the face of youth. From Seb Coe down, the Olympic delivery agencies are in constant thrall to the idea of ensuring the Games are attractive to the young people, particularly those of the East End who they have mythologised as the ultimate beneficaries of the London 2012 Games. However, – and here we should look to that bloody logo again, they seem to think that these young people have wildly different values to their own and must therefore be ambushed with bright colours and angular forms or scrotal sacks on legs.

Some of the graphic uses to which Mandeville and Wenlock have been put do have a certain manic attraction. One might expect this though if you were to animate a one-eyed drop of steel but they emerge from no illustrative tradition or even a recognisable design vocabulary. At least the five figures of the Beijing Games in 2008 were legible as manga-esque readings of Chinese mythical figures.   The Chinese figures – which upped the permissable number of mascots to astonishing 5 – was not just a canny act of marketing it also gave the impression that there are an awful lot more Chinese than Greeks or Australians or anyone else for that matter.

But little Mandeville and Wenlock, who manage to be both phallic and sexless, are not even legible within the tradition of gaming. The stout characters of Mario and Sonic were wrought from the limitations of technology during the 1980s and grew as characters as bitrates quickened. Conjuring up an image that looks a bit like it could be a computer character is not quite the same.

I don’t see little Wenlock dressed as a cop as a deeply ironic comment on the militarisation of a city. Before the G4S debacle, the militarisation of London was more about showing off the military at a time when the current government was cutting spending on the armed forces rather than an attempt to subjugate a vassal population. (Indeed Londoners were already pretty acquiescent despite the moaning). The increase in police presence too is more about showing a presence despite the reality of cuts. The fact that little willy Wenlock is dressed up as a policeman is indeed more about cloaking a strange phallus that we arrived at by committee in something familiar. Giving him a cop uniform is a more an attempt to make him recognisable than anything.

If the mascot is a chance for a city to show its soft side to the world, then it is perhaps no wonder I feel sorry for poor little Wenlock. That penis-shaped policeman? He’s us, man. He’s us.

To go back to Sinclair for a moment. In Hackney That Rose Red Empire he conducts an interview with another self-proclaimed psychogeographer, Will Self about the wedge of park land driven into the dirty north-east of London. After visiting the Olympics site, Self declares ‘this is an idea of America imposed on human topography that is so much older and more ancient, confused and anarchic. It has the air of imposture.’ It is a criticism derived from walking – an act that Self deems political – following the real contours of the land is more rewarding, more intuitive than imposing a new human order on top. Building, creating, doing, making: all the most positive aspects of human endeavour is here reduced by Self to the act of an imposition.

How can ‘psychogeography’ have come to this? At the recent Spatial Perspectives conference in Oxford, Henderson Downing, an expert on the writer, reminded us that Sinclair had seen the revolutionary potential of appropriating space in an open way at the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation happening at the Roundhouse, contrasting it with the buildings regular tenant Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 – what Reyner Banham described as “a cultural soup kitchen approach for the underprivileged”. Through this event Downing suggests we can see Sinclair’s relationship with a movement which didn’t just analyse what was happening through a spuriously scientific process of wandering and recording, but, focusing on the profession of psychiatry, proposed an alternative.

To look at how pyschogeography has come down to a straight literary rejection of human endeavour as somehow an invasion into the natural world, one needs to look further into the roots of this pseudo-science. It is of fundamental importance to remember that it was created in the 1950s, as part of a strategy for imagining new architecture. Of course it was picking up on earlier strategies, but these were generally literary or philosophical. In the mid-19th century, Baudelaire’s flaneur wandered the streets observing society with detachment. The surrealists introduced the idea of allowing the subconscious to control associations made during these perambulations. Walter Benjamin focused on the arcades of Paris as a text through which recent history could be deciphered.

La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877.

Yet it was Debord who loved to dream up terminology for the ephemeral, and defined psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’ This was about how the built environment was ordered not simply about writing its history. Debord and his cohorts gave psychogeography a quasi-scientific status in order to oppose Corbusian town planning. It was posited as a technique which would contribute to creating “a city of modifiable architectural complexes, their appearance changing ‘totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants’.

However, although it was devised as a way of creating a total architecture in which technology would play a great part in the post-war year, psychogeography now no longer has a goal for aiding the right kind of architecture, but instead to criticise development per se. As the contemporary psychogeographer walks amidst the wreckage of industrial economy we only get occasional glimpses of the author’s ideal world. Sinclair for one refers to the ‘wilderness, wild orchards, allotments [and] back rivers’ of the area as ‘sites of unimproved imagination.’ The Manor House alotments were to him a greater  achievement than the planning and building of the park, and yet the artist Julian Perry surely hit the right note when he celebrated the organic impermanent nature of the alotments in his stunning Shed series.

Shed 54 and Rhubarb diptych, Julian Perry, 2007

There seems to be, at times, a general antipathy to any kind of change in the Lea Valley psychogeographers. Elsewhere, Self has written that the Olympic Delivery Authority, ‘may make compulsory purchases, tarmac over the sports pitches, roust out the travelers’ encampments and tidy the urban detritus under their magic finance carpet, but very quickly it will all come tumbling back, the steely weeds of a city that has defied everything that god, men or even planners can throw at it.’ Self, the son of a planner, sees in architecture the hubris of mankind. There are some buildings I have seen where I would agree with him, but generally I love architecture because it frequently shows me mankind achieving its loftiest of ambitions.

There are certainly areas where I’d criticise the Olympic Park: planting a shopping centre at its entrance would be one of them, failing to deliver the architectural ambition of the Aquatic Centre would be another one.

Sinclair meanwhile in his more recent work Ghost Milk, Sinclair gives us a more explicit attack on what he calls grand projet specifically including the London Olympics. There is a certain irony to this. In the book he attacks the Lea Valley Regional Park Act, a piece of legislation passed in the early 60s that preserved a whole swathe of land from the Thames to the M25 for the recreation of the people of London.

Sinclair’s work, particularly Ghost Milk, has attacked the whole role of planning and building the Olympics. In the book he provides a stinging critique of the role of Lou Sherman the Mayor of Hackney in 1961. Sherman founded the Lea Valley Civic Trust, a body which created a plan for the very area in which the Olympic Stadium now sits; this plan prioritised the needs of a working class that was now being afforded greater leisure time.

Far from being the jumped-up town councillors that Sinclair describes in his book, Sherman, an ex-cabbie and Communist, together with colleagues in Hackney, were able to devise a plan to retain the Lea Valley as a park.  The Civic Trust prepared a report in 1964, at a time when it was held that the forces of science and technology could be harnessed to galvanise the British economy and to determine the qualities of a future, leisured era. As Laurie Elks has recorded in Hackney History: “The normally conservation-minded Civic Trust – in an episode which it would perhaps rather forget – put itself briefly at the forefront of this futurist credo.”

The plan for the park said that it would “be a playground for Londoners against the background of London. This background – power stations, gas works, factories, railways, houses and flats – must be accepted and acknowledged in the landscape theme.” Anyone who has read Sinclair would recognise this as the landscape that Sinclair so beautifully evokes, although unsurprisingly he is resistant to the idea that the Lea Valley has been landscaped by man as much as formal garden.

Lee Valley Plan 1964. The plan for the Temple Mills Park area from Tottenham Hale to the Eastway.

Despite also disagreeing with her rejection in its entirety of the Olympic development, I also really admire the work of the artist Laura Oldfield Ford who shares Sinclair’s love of the Lea Valley’s landscape. ‘I’ve always been drawn to Hackney Marshes, in a way these post-industrial ruins are being reclaimed by buddleia and convulvias and ivy,’ she says. Her work reflects that detail of interest. I remember seeing her exhibition at the Hales Gallery in London in 2009 which was full of passionately sketched documents of the area around the Olympics Park. I walked around the park with her and interviewed her. ‘I’m chronicling a drastically changing landscape that I feel is important to document,’ she says.

Oldfield Ford’s motive is not simply documentation however. Like Sinclair, she believes master plans cannot be imposed and felt that was the message she would give to the Olympic developers if they would listen. There is, of course, an irony here. The Lettrists and Situationists in 1950s France objected too in a hysterical, frequently drunken manner about city planning in the Corbusian fashion, whereas Oldfield Ford herself seems to be mourning its demise. Another irony is that the modernist post-war highrises were themselves imposed by a highly competent bureaucratic class of architects. The Situationists were attacking the very rigid imposed set of structures that the Lea Valley psychogeographers think of fondly.

Stratford city 2013, Laura Oldfield Ford

There is a real irony too in the fact that a structure such as the Olympic Stadium which i write about in my book, The Stadium, should arrive in the Lea Valley. Adaptable architecture, as the Stadium professes to be and the artistic strategy of psychogeography were born in the same womb, of course. The short but seminal text Formulary for a New Urbanism, written by Ivan Chtcheglov imagines both the strategy of searching for the original conceptions of space in the “magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors” but also an adaptive architecture which will endlessly relate and reinterpret this. The Olympic Stadium, as I explain, is a long way from being a satisfying resolution of this project.  Indeed the Olympic Park could be seen as the demise of both strands of psychogeography.

In an article in the New Statesman quoted by Henderson Downing in his evocative, perceptive paper, Banham suggests that Cedric Price’s Fun Palace is a singular unending adapting circulation route between performer and audience; a truly revolutionary proposition. What is even more pertinent to the Olympics is that he contrasts this with the then newly built Crystal Palace athletics stadium. What Banham doesn’t take credence of is that sport is both a professional and amateur mode of expression. We may not break down the literal barriers when we watch sport – we prefer to watch an elite group display their skills – but when we play the game in our space we are participating in a continuum of the same expression. Sport, its detractors, always fail to realise, is a mode of self expression.

Yet on a technical level, the Olympic Stadium albeit in a charming, amenable way – is a travesty of this tradition too.  The designers had the opportunity to incorporate a technical means of making the stadium adaptable – moving stands on a hydraulic platform. They chose not to, for political reasons. The stadium’s mechano kit-of-parts aesthetic suggests it will adapt. It will but only if you consider spending £50million pounds on removing the upper tier of stands as ‘adapting’. The reason this plan was devised  go to the heart of the dilemnas of the Olympic authority which wants to host a major world athletics event, and then exist in the East End of London at a scale more commensurate with its quotidian appeal. The fact that the stadium probably won’t be scaled downwards but will become a football stadium is a further blow to this strangely conservative vision of adaptability.

Basketball Stadium, exploded diagram, Wikinson Eyre

However, I would say that if one puts aside the stadium and reject Banham’s insistence that these structures should permit the intermingling of performer and audience, there is much in the Olympic Park to be impressed by. Wilkinson Eyre’s Basketball stadium is made entirely of rented parts, devised as a structure and as the culmination of an economic system by the architect Wilkinson Eyre. The shooting venue by Magma Architecture at Woolwich will be reused in Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games in 2014. I would suggest that the architectural aspect of psychogeography has proved to be more useful than its reductive literary aspect.

Shooting Venue, Woolwich by Magma Architecture. Photo by http://deptforddame.blogspot.co.uk/

From its very inception there is a tension in psychogeography between its artistic and quasi-scientific function which its proponents tend to smile about and overloo.. They bolster their activity with the rhetoric of research, but then defend their product as an art.  address the built environment yet put aside the thorny issue that London needs to expand to provide housing for its current inhabitants and must do so within the given political and economic structure.  Despite it being a fascinating and ideal means of navigating and artistically describing the way in which a city grows, it has proved to be resistant to it. Downing believes that Sinclair writing still contains a radical programme, I can’t see this and indeed without the Olympics to protest against, what will become of their increasingly conservative programme?

MY BOOK IS AVAILABLE TO BUY HERE. 

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.