This new show is 'a mysterious dwelling infused with subjectivity and desire' featuring artists such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and René Magritte
From sugary sculptures to a madcap midnight cycling tour, Jonathan Glancey rounds up 10 festival treats that promise a fresh perspective on the capital
The fourth biennial London Festival of Architecture is an enormous affair, boasting some 300 events in the West End, East End and south London between 20 June and 20 July 2010. These range from the arcane and baffling to walks and cycle rides aimed at opening up fresh perspectives of the miasmic city. I've chosen seven of the best tours (there's no better way of getting to grips with London's architecture than getting on your bike or stepping out), as well as three fixed events as different from one another as St Mary Abchurch is from 30 St Mary Axe.
When I turned up to work for the first time in Canary Wharf Tower some 15 years ago, I was refused entry. A pair of jaw-jutting blokes in faux-American security outfits pointed at William, my veteran London mongrel, and said he couldn't come in. Guide dogs only, they said. This dog guides me through London (as through life), I said, hopefully. The guards only looked more aggressive. Odd, I can't help thinking, that so much modern architecture is anti-dog. My favourite City church, St Mary Abchurch, once housed a kennel-like pew especially for four-legged visitors. Luckily, dogs are still welcome in many parts of town, as well as in proper churches, pubs, cafes and offices; so it's good to see a walking tour of architecture in and around Bloomsbury aimed at dogs and their guardians. Even if your bulldog takes against the 60s brutalism of much of the University of London, or your boxer barks disapprovingly at the rebuilt Brunswick Centre, there are graceful Georgian terraces to trot past, Charles Holden's coolly enigmatic Senate House to pad through (well, the lobby anyway) and, best of all, a chance to sniff around Russell Square Gardens as well as Bedford and Bloomsbury Squares while taking in their enthralling skylines.
• Sunday 20 June, 10:30-1:00pm. Only dogs owners and well-behaved dogs need apply. £9.50/£7.50 concession. Please email tours@open-city.org.uk or telephone 0207 383 2131, Mon-Fri 9.30am-6pm (advance booking is essential).
This promises to be an eye-opening event, especially for those with green fingers. Richard Reynolds, author of On Guerrilla Gardening, will lead a 90-minute walking tour of the "guerrilla gardens" of deepest London, SE1 – not tobacco plantations founded by former Cuban revolutionaries, but pavements and urban nooks and crannies where local people have begun to plant and cultivate every spare bit of land. London's streets are in need of trees; but beans, tomatoes, marrows and potatoes (with their beautiful flowers) would make many of them more attractive, too. Central London might have lost all too many of its food markets; now, says Reynolds, it's time to take "guerrilla" action and grow our own. Reynolds would like to show you how.
• Sunday 20 June. For further details, see the Pimp Your Pavement website.
From "Greenwich to Primrose Hill to Bankside via the deserted sleeping city and the Nash boulevards" – and starting at 2am ... This solstice bike ride, organised by Southwark Cyclists, might seem for insomniacs only, and yet this is a fine time to see central London and its architecture. The one and only time, in fact; the streets are almost quiet, and cyclists can look up at their surroundings rather than down and from side to side for raw survival's sake. There is a coffee stop at 3am at Bar Italia, Soho, still almost the only place you can buy a proper cappuccino in London, and which looks pretty much as it did when it opened in 1949. Breakfast is at the Leon bar and café, Canvey Street, immediately behind Tate Modern, which is opening at 6am, specially for cyclists on this ride.
• Monday 21 June. See the London Festival of Architecture (LFA) website for further details.
Afternoon and evening walks on three days (23, 24 and 25 June) setting off from Aldgate underground station and taking in the soaring new towers of the City. Actually, the very first of these buildings was Aldgate itself, originally a Roman gateway leading into Londinium from the busy road to Camulodunum (Colchester). Until remarkably recently, the towers and spires of the churches (rebuilt for the most part by Christopher Wren) were the City's "skyscrapers"; today these modest, if sometimes exquisite, buildings seem like toys compared with the enormous towers shooting up in honour of mammon. Sadly, for reasons of business and security, it's not possible to reach the top of the latest towers by Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw, Kohn Pedersen Fox and co, although you could end this tour with a drink in the Vertigo bar at the top of Tower 42, formerly the NatWest Tower, a 70s structural tour-de-force designed by Colonel Richard Seifert and his regiment of commercially astute architects.
• 23, 24 and 25 June. Book through the LFA website.
From earliest childhood until a decade or so ago, one of the things I liked doing best in central London was feeding the sparrows from the bridge spanning the lake in St James's Park. Try this today, though, and you might wait all year. There are several theories as to where all the cockney sparrows have gone (their Parisian cousins appear to thrive); one of mine is that our new, or made-over, buildings are hermetic, defensive things with no nooks and crannies for sparrows to nest. You will be given a more informed answer from Peter Holden, who is leading this early morning walk around Bankside in search of birds and other London wildlife. The tour will also be taking in some new architect-designed nests by 51% Studio on behalf of the Architecture Foundation close to Tate Modern. Holden has worked for the RSPB for 30 years and is author of the authoritative and delightful RSPB Handbook of British Birds.
• Thursday 24 June. Book through the LFA website.
Architects in London, or those hoping to find work in London, have faced very hard times indeed over the past year or so. Few practices have got away without making staff redundant. Chetwood Architects is making a fully serviced room available to architects at its office at 12-13 Clerkenwell Green, opposite the Marx Memorial Library (where Lenin published Iskra) and the Crown Tavern (where the revolutionary was joined for a beer by a young Stalin in 1903). Up to six architects at a time will be able to use the Green Room for a week "to showcase their work, arrange/prepare for meetings and interviews in a relaxed coffee-house-style environment". Employment exchanges have never been quite so alluring. A "prominent display space in Chetwood's front window will showcase selected drawings and designs", says the practice, and given that London is always on the look-out for fresh talent, seats in the Green Room will doubtless be in great demand.
• From Thursday 24 June until a year afterwards. If you believe you have a legitimate reason to use the Green Room, contact Geoff Cunningham.
Stephen Bayley – author, critic, curator, bon viveur – leads a bicycle ride through French-influenced London. The tour starts at Michelin House, Fulham Road, the curiously delightful and beautifully restored former headquarters of the Michelin Tyre Company designed by the engineer François Espinasse in a flouncy art nouveau style that belies its radical ferro-concrete structure. From here, Bayley (astride his single-speed, Korean-made, North American Cannondale Capo bicycle) will lead his designer team to Westminster Abbey "to see the influence of Reims, Amiens and Chartres", to the Wallace Collection and its French art and furniture, to Ernö Goldfinger's "homage to Le Corbusier" in Piccadilly (French Tourist Office, 1956), Jean Cocteau's murals in Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place, the French Church in Soho Square and One New Change, a massive new office block by Jean Nouvel in the shadow of the dome of the very English St Paul's Cathedral. Those who survive Bayley's banter and the worst of London traffic will be rewarded with champagne.
• Saturday 26 June. Book through the LFA website.
LFA invites the adventurous on this "saccadic stroll" led by Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics at London's Birkbeck College. Saccadic has something to do with seeing things in a fast-cut way – you're welcome to look it up too – and I think the idea, rooted in Restless Cities, a book of essays published earlier this year by Verso, is that city life is so full of fleeting images, occurrences and ideas that it can be unnerving to walk the streets – or, of course, it can be a wonderfully mind-blowing experience. Anyone who offers you a fresh way of looking at London has to be worth 90 minutes, and I'm sure Leslie will have dreamed up ways of stirring the imaginations of anyone willing to walk on the quasi-philosophical side.
• Sunday 27 June. The LFA website offers no details, but the walk starts at 3pm in front of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Brendan Jamison has sculpted a copy of Tate Modern in sugar cubes. This sort of thing (such as ships in bottles in Trafalgar Square, or the Forth Bridge reproduced 1:1 scale in matchsticks) is always fun. Built on a scale of 1:100 (the chimney is 3.3ft high), Tate Sweet comprises no fewer than 71,908 cubes – or 52bn individual sugar crystals – that have taken three months to assemble. Other sources tell me that these figures should be revised upwards to more than 80,000 cubes and 60m crystals. Whatever the truth, there is enough sugar here for all the tea served in London in about an hour. I think. If you would like to see how he made this extraordinary architectural confection, Jamison will be running family workshops alongside the model on Saturday 3 July (NEO Bankside pavilion, Hopton Street, opposite the Turbine Hall entrance to Tate Modern). To register for a place, contact neobankside@camronpr.com or call Hannah, Ross or Lizzie at Camron PR on 0207 420 1700. If you attend one of these, you might just want to ask Jamison why on earth he did such a thing in the first place.
The V&A's contribution to LFA is this hugely enjoyable exhibition featuring seven imaginative new buildings, each one specially commissioned for the seven miles of corridors within this glorious South Kensington museum. From a fairytale Japanese teahouse on stilts to a pavilion made of geometric acrylic panels in the guise of a computer-imagined tree, here are miniature buildings designed to provoke and delight the imagination.
• At the V&A Museum, London, until 30 August.
Gallery: The V&A museum in London invited 19 architects to submit proposals for small structures to be built full-scale inside its walls
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 10 June 1958
From tomorrow an exhibition showing the projected new capital city of Brazil will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dover Street, London. Brasilia, which is to become the seat of government in 1960, at present consists of vast site works and two nearly finished buildings, the "Residency" and a hotel.
Since this city, six hundred miles from the coast, will normally be approached by air, it is one of the few projects of which a model can give a realistic view. First of all a map locates the city and offers data of latitude, longitude, temperature, altitude and the object of the whole operation. The far end of the gallery is filled by a progress photograph of Oscar Niemeyer's Residency building, showing the marble clad pilotis (columns) with the silhouettes of steep waves, locally known as "Oscar's Cardiograph". Niemeyer was commissioned by the President to put up the buildings pending the result of the preliminary competition for a broad planning idea.
Brasilia was first thought of seriously in 1823 and received legislative reality in 1946. In 1956 the development corporation was formed and President Kubitchek invited Niemeyer to prepare sketch plans for the city. On the architect's advice, however, operations were held up while the competition was held and judged by an internationally constituted jury. Lucio Costa's broad scheme was adopted.
Costa's idea for the city is a plan shaped like a bent bow and arrow. The bow, the residential area. The arrow, the legislative buildings. Whether a capital city for half a million inhabitants can spring fully armed from the designer's brain has yet to be seen.
First reminding oneself that the concrete will be seen against deep blue sky and red earth, one can consider the Residency, with its spiral concrete chapel, and the saucer and the dome of the Plenary Assembly Hall, whose silhouette dominates the roof of the congress building. One can question the wisdom of using the same pilotis shape as at the Residency for the Supreme Court and Government buildings, but here at right angles to curtain walls, or the political implications of siting Congress and Senate under one roof.
Study of the housing section reveals that the community unit is 3,000, each with its own primary school, market and church. Overlooking from flat to flat has been strictly avoided and services have been considered carefully even at this outline stage. Each community is screened by a grove of trees. Architecturally one of the most interesting experiments is the use of immense horizontal platforms to produce monumentality.
A teahouse on stilts, a tower of books, a woodland shelter – seven one-off buildings have taken root in the V&A's galleries. Jonathan Glancey gets a sneak preview of a striking new show
Finding a fairytale Japanese teahouse sprouting from wooden stilts in a corridor of the Victoria and Albert museum is an unexpected yet curiously apposite experience. Unexpected, because this bewitching structure is one of seven brand-new, imaginative and full-scale buildings installed through the museum's galleries this week; and apposite because this glorious Victorian pantechnicon is so jammed with curiosities that Terunobu Fujimori's Beetle's House looks almost part of the furniture.
It's not immediately obvious, but there is a powerful thread animating and holding together these seven buildings, commissioned by the V&A's curator of designs, Abraham Thomas. The thread is made of what I'd call resistance – architectural resistance to the ever-growing world of buildings that look as if they have been designed by computers and built by robots.
Like Fujimori's teahouse, each building has been designed both as an escape from the world of one-dimensional, globalised architecture, and as a means of expressing what can be done with a paucity of materials and a wealth of imagination. These are not mere installations but solid buildings (you can walk into and through them), placed within the museum in a way that enhances their architectural host and its kaleidoscopic collections. From the top of a timber book tower, for example, named The Ark and designed by Rintala Eggertsson Architects (a Finnish-Icelandic team based in Oslo), you look across a wall of books and the frame of the tower itself into the hushed reading room of the National Art Library.
Even better is a plaster cast of an ad-hoc living space in Mumbai, squeezed between a warehouse and the architects' office (Studio Mumbai). Walk in, look out through the chutes and slits that pass for windows, and a cast of Michelangelo's David stares you in the face. It's an odd conjunction, and yet this beautifully cast house, with its shadowy, shoulder-high alleys, narrow stairs, shrine for contemplation, sleeping platforms and internal courtyard wrapped around a plaster-cast tree, is at home amid the V&A's haunting Victorian reproductions of Renaissance marvels.
No architect had a hand in the original Mumbai building, and yet an empathetic local firm has been inspired by its improvised architecture. And there is much to be learned from it: the way its narrow, shady corridors open on to a courtyard where the dazzling Mumbai sunshine is cooled by the canopy of a tree. While poor in terms of electrical and mechanical services, a house like this has more soul and beauty – accidental as well as deliberate – than almost any new home in a modern British cul-de-sac. Sadly, the original Mumbai house has been demolished, but its genial spirit now lives on alongside Michelangelo's David.
Bijoy Jain, who founded Studio Mumbai in 1995 after studying in St Louis, Missouri and working in Los Angeles, has said he is confounded by the mysteries of modern India. He is fighting his own architectural resistance movement against an India in which, as he says, local people are trained to speak in faux-British accents in call centres, while highly trained structural engineers email drawings to overseas contractors to realise expensive buildings (some of them designed by British architects) on the cheap. He designs modern Indian buildings. Like all seven architects contributing to this show, he believes in working with his hands as well as his mind and eyes.
Elsewhere, two very different architectural studios – one from Tokyo, the other from Stavanger in Norway – show how computer-aided design and construction can be used to craft new forms of building, combining the most sophisticated man-made and the rawest natural materials. Sou Fujimoto's Inside/Outside Tree, growing from a landing outside the museum's architecture gallery, is a transparent shelter built entirely of sheets of acrylic polygons, held together by white plastic cable ties. Designed with the help of a computer, the structure is based on that of a stylised tree cut from an imaginary cube. If this sounds a little arcane, the result is enjoyably ethereal – especially when the afternoon sun floods through the high windows behind and sets the structure aglow.
Out in the museum's John Madejski Garden, Helen & Hard Architects (based in Stavanger) have created a building named Ratatosk, after Ratatoskr, a mythological Nordic squirrel. This is made from ash trees that have been split apart and then milled by a computer-driven machine. This curious forest building is currently an empty shelter, but it would make another fine teahouse.
Small Spaces is a modest but inventive exhibition with a powerful message about the importance of nurturing local architecture, whether working with traditional materials or the very latest technologies. Architecture should be led by imagination and skill rather than by slick imagery and marketing. Clearly, those of us who believe this have a long fight on our collective hands, but in the design and making of the V&A's seven small buildings, we have at least the beginnings of the necessary ammunition. When this show closes at the end of the summer, I hope the museum keeps these buildings in its capacious fold. The curators haven't yet made up their minds. But even when they become historic curiosities, these buildings will have something worthwhile to tell us.
The legendary Paris gallery now has a regional outpost. Will it live up to the name? Jonathan Glancey takes a high-speed train to find out
This is a very strange fish. What first strikes the eye about the Pompidou-Metz is its bizarre, undulating roof. This complex structure, made of no fewer than 10 miles of laminated spruce and larch, is an extraordinary creation, drooping over the concrete, steel and glass core of the building in a seemingly random fashion, as if a passing bird had dropped a giant floppy hat on its head.
Coated in fibreglass, the roof has been shaped as much for practical reasons as for aesthetic ones – to keep sun, rain and snow at bay. It is, I can't help thinking, the building's best and most redeeming feature. Up close and on the inside, concrete, steel and glass take over, while every glance upwards allows another view of this glorious timber form.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris, opened in 1977, is one of the most visited art galleries in the world. So it makes perfect sense that it should choose to expand – creating this regional outpost in Metz, north-east France, a short, sensationally fast (1hr 25mins) TGV ride away from the capital. The Pompidou-Metz, rising up as if from the ocean like a great conch, was meant to open three years ago, but such experimental architecture rarely goes exactly to plan, and I suspect that roof might be to blame. It is now seven years since the design contest was won by a team comprising Shigeru Ban (Tokyo), Jean de Gastines (Paris) and Philip Gumuchdjian (London). Their curious new building, due to open next month, is just two minutes walk from the town's magnificent central station, designed like a castle by German architect Jürgen Kröger in the early 1900s.
Just as the original Pompidou was designed to reinvent a large area of central Paris, so the Pompidou-Metz forms the centrepiece of the city's amphitheatre quarter, a district formerly given over to industry. It is, by any standards, an important building: much cultural pride rides on its curving shoulders, locally and nationally. And for Metz, a city not on the regular tourist beat, here is a chance to reinvent itself.
So does the new gallery pull it off? Beneath that hat, the building at first feels all over the place, its galleries, cafes and intervening public spaces rushing off in all directions. Fishier and fishier. Yet some sort of logic does start to emerge. You enter a lobby, with the usual cafe, bookshop and so on, before entering the forum, a soaring space for displaying large-scale installations (since the advent of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, every gallery needs one). Above and through this vast space, three huge concrete tubes crisscross, with windows at either end. These are the three principal galleries, reached by stairs or lift in the central 77-metre tall tower, which stands like the mast on a ship, skewering your attention. Each space has been carefully crafted to offer framed views of the city's monuments, including Kröger's fairytale station.
What curious galleries these are: concrete corridors in the air relying, to a great degree, on artificial lighting in an era when it has become commonplace for galleries to demand diffused daylight everywhere. Ban points out the advantages: these galleries are entirely free of columns, or any other interruption, so offer seamless spaces for showcasing art. In any case, this is meant to be as radical a building as the original Pompidou, which stunned the world with its own big idea: wearing its insides outside, it looked for all the world like a brightly painted North Sea oil rig.
The architects were well aware of the extraordinary story of Metz itself when putting their design together. Perilously close to the border with Germany, Metz has changed hands many times. This sense of flux invades the fabric of this new building – in the sense that nothing is wholly certain here and anything, culturally, can happen. Even the funding reflects this flux: although fundamentally a French project, the €69m (£61m) Pompidou-Metz has also been funded by the EU.
Five centuries of masterpieces
Its tall tower leads up to a rooftop cafe-restaurant, a viewing gallery, and a studio intended for live performances, particularly of an experimental type. From up here, the building looks and feels more like the big top of a circus, with views out to new landscaped gardens planted with cherry trees. Throughout, though, this is a strange and ambivalent building. It has the feeling of being a book of bits rather than a considered, tightly edited volume. This may be the point: such spatial oddity and aesthetic uncertainty goes, I think, to the heart of the Pompidou-Metz project. The idea here is that anything might go – that art, architecture and curatorship is an adventure rather than an ordained or highly governed experience.
Like its predecessor, the Pompidou-Metz will take some getting used to. Much, of course, turns on the quality and variety of what goes on show; the first major exhibition will be an ambitious attempt to find out what makes a masterpiece by displaying 800 art works drawn from the past five centuries. What is for sure, though, is that the gallery is not some opportunistic franchise, there to cash in on the Pompidou name, but an art centre in its own right, intended to have an identity very much its own.
Although the product of team work, the design bears many of the hallmarks of Ban, an American-educated Japanese architect celebrated for his work with unexpected materials: houses made from recycled paper tubes, a museum made from 156 shipping containers. Ban has the knack of conjuring inventive buildings from very little. The Pompidou-Metz, and certainly its roof, is very much his kind of structure.
Ban describes it as a "crustacean". When I look back at this provocative new building from the gaping mouth of Metz-Ville station, sunlight flashes off its roof, making it vanish for a moment – as if it had slid back into some primordial sea.
From Venice to Vegas: Other gallery outposts
The idea of creating branches of established museums is not a new one. In 1969, Peggy Guggenheim handed the collections in her Venetian palazzo to her uncle Solomon, making it a European outpost of his famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum in New York. London's Tate opened its first regional outpost, Tate Liverpool, in 1988, in a magnificent warehouse given a makeover by James Stirling. Tate St Ives, designed by Evans and Shalev, followed five years later.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the regional Tates are all galleries with their own special characters, collections and displays; it would be unfair to call any of them clones. But what has changed in recent years is the idea of the museum or gallery "franchise": a branch of the Guggenheim, Louvre or Hermitage borrowing shows, most of its ideas and content, and, most importantly, its name from a parent institution.
Since the 1990s, the Guggenheim has opened new branches around the world, even in Las Vegas (a failure: it closed in 2003). Las Vegas was also host to the hybrid Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which closed in 2008. Frank Gehry designed the eye-popping branch in Bilbao, while future Guggenheims are under construction in Guadalajara, Mexico (due to open in 2011) and Abu Dhabi (Frank Gehry again, 2011). The first major Louvre branch, a giant mushroom designed by Jean Nouvel (below), is taking shape in Abu Dhabi for 2012. In London, the Victoria and Albert museum is preparing to venture beyond the confines of South Kensington: the first V&A "abroad" will be built in Dundee, Scotland.
In architectural terms, the danger is that these can be expensive, over-the-top projects, parachuted into far-off countries without the subtlety that comes from architects working within the confines and discipline of cities they know well. Given carte blanche, there is a tendency to design something a little too wilful or impermanent.
In 2007 Simon Roberts set off in a motor home with his old and unwieldy 5x4 field camera to travel through England and record the natives' leisure pursuits. Collectively titled We English, the large-scale prints form a series of petrified tableaux in which grouped figures, set against local landscapes, appear as stills from a theatre of the absurd. There's the Mad Maldon Mud Race, a birthday picnic in some Grantchester scrubland, and golfers dwarfed by the cooling towers of Ratcliffe on Soar power station. The images are compositionally still and appear almost spooky. It is Roberts's contention that what we do in our leisure hours says more about our national identity than what we do at work.
National Media Museum, to 5 Sep
Robert Clark
The Victorian artist Frederic Lord Leighton made his name mixing classicism with a swoonsome, pre-Raphaelite sensuality; an aesthetic that reached luscious perfection in his painting Flaming June. Perhaps the most outlandish example of his Romantic opulence, however, is Leighton House, created for the painter by the architect George Aitchison as a palace for art. Reopening after a multimillion-pound facelift, this bijou Holland Park pad features 22-carat gold-leaf domes, a silk-lined picture gallery, and the Arab Hall, designed to flaunt Leighton's priceless Arab tiles. Though his art collection was auctioned off on his death, an exhibition including works by Delacroix, Corot, Constable and Tintoretto helps mark the occasion.
Leighton House, W1, from today
Skye Sherwin
Filmed at Harewood House, Paul Rooney's Bellevue follows the disorientated ramblings of a character who, while attending an ad company's focus group, becomes possessed by the spirit of a 1930s failed jazz musician voluntarily incarcerated in a New York psychiatric institution due to his history of chronic alcoholism. The piece, also alluding to the novelist Malcolm Lowry's alcoholism treatment at New York's Bellevue Hospital in 1935, deals with themes of addictive indulgence and inspired escapism. As per usual, Rooney displays a knack for combining workaday banalities with hints of poignant psychological undertow.
Harewood House, to 20 Jun
Robert Clark
You might say Mark Wilsher is all about team spirit. For his current project, The Yesable Proposition at the artist-run space Outpost, the artist, curator and writer has taken his exhibition budget and used it to make minor gallery improvements: a new toilet seat, a kettle, a magazine subscription for the staff. Meanwhile he'll be printing a book of essays, doing a gallery talk and organising an artist discussion group to spread the word. It's what he calls a win-win situation: he gets a show and the gallery gets new door handles. But there's a steelier critical edge to Wilsher's sense of fair play. This continues the artist's interest in applying business plans to art, a model all too familiar one might think, from arts-based regeneration schemes, where culture is forced to take the place of real government investment.
Outpost, to 21 Apr
Skye Sherwin
The Things That Happen When Falling In Love is a photo, film and text installation by the New Delhi-based, three-person collaborative group Raqs Media Collective. The collective – writers, researchers and curators as well as artists – are known for their evocative way of juxtaposing found and newly filmed footage, of combining the prosaic with the poetic, of assembling together photographs and text for free-association reverie. Matters of industrial global displacement are overlaid on intimations of emotional vulnerability. This installation – while dealing with love and loss, of ships-passing-in-the-night nocturnes – takes as its thematic anchor a series of photographs documenting the massive Swan Hunter shipbuilding cranes being transported down the River Tyne to be reused along the west coast of India.
Baltic, to 20 Jun
Robert Clark
Visitors to Frieze art fair a few years back might remember Martin Honert's towering polyurethane bearded giants. Based on his recollections of sideshow attractions, they were realised with an exacting, cool-headed attention to detail. Clearly, while the reclusive German artist's subject matter is rooted in his childhood, his concerns are far from mushy self-absorption or confession. Instead, he works a complex riff on formal questions such as scale and realism, treating memories as if they were readymades. Yet Honert fashions his painstaking works in his studio: a time-consuming business that makes his shows scarce. His first UK outing in a decade includes an installation of his school dormitory bedroom.
Bloomberg Space, EC2, Fri to 15 May
Skye Sherwin
Until July 2009, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, originally constituted by the colonial British in 1860, criminalised same-sex relationships. This political fact, alongside the personal fact of being diagnosed as HIV positive in 1995, has set the context for Sunil Gupta's brave and pioneering photographic work. Gupta titles his exhibition The New Pre-Raphaelites, after the British Victorian artistic brotherhood of like-minded romantic souls. The necessarily closeted history of Gupta's gay life encouraged a camp photographic theatricality comparable with scenes of so many pre-Raphaelite paintings. There's the same posed intimacy, the same exquisite attention to detail, the same air of almost painful sensitivity and aesthetic elegance. But ultimately, there's also the underlying atmosphere of illness and mortality, to set all that posing in a quite touching perspective.
Aberdeen Art Gallery, to 15 May
Robert Clark
In our lightfooted globalised times, the effect of migration on artistic sensibility can be a tricky thing to map. Featuring the work of five UK-based artists – Pavel Büchler, Ergin Cavusoglu, Margarita Gluzberg, Marysia Lewandowska and Lily Markiewicz – originally hailing from eastern Europe, this show moves between cultural pinpoints, universal references and personal concerns. Büchler's light projection of a situationist slogan harks back to his rebellious art student days in Prague. Gluzberg's old '78 recordings of birdsong, communist speech and capitalist-minded lessons in Russian warn of traps laid by cultural convention. As Cavusoglu's moody video installation depicting a foggy border zone between France and Spain suggests, displacement is an ambivalent experience.
Calvert 22, E2, Fri to 13 Jun
Skye Sherwin
He was the anarchist of 1980s design, but the technical wizardry in his current London show feels over-polished and out of touch
Unless you die young, it's difficult to be a hero for ever. Heroes are commercialised. They succumb to what Norman Mailer called "exhaustion of the will". Or they simply go out of fashion. And that's what happened to Ron Arad – or at least, that's what we thought had happened. But the Israeli-born, London-based designer of bold, sculptural furniture has never been more ubiquitous. In the last year, a major retrospective of his work has bounced from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently landing at London's Barbican.
Arad is one of the design world's few nameable stars. Most people will probably know his Tom Vac chair (1993), a rippled plastic armchair on steel legs that once abounded in cool restaurants. Or perhaps his bestselling Bookworm bookshelf, a flexible ribbon that holds your books in a spiral. But these are merely the outward signs of his commercial success. He also works as an artist, selling one-off pieces for sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as an architect and teacher. Over the last decade he has been hugely influential at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the Design Products department until last year. Arad wasn't interested in teaching people how to be professional industrial designers: he wanted to teach them how to think for themselves, and a generation of designers graduated wanting to work just as he did – as a designer-maker, free from the technical constraints set by manufacturers.
To understand Arad the hero, visitors to the Barbican show should head straight up to the mezzanine galleries to soak up his early work from the 1980s. There they'll find a stereo and speakers encased in concrete, which look as though they've been hauled off a building site or hacked from a sea wall. Can you imagine a rougher envelope for all that delicate technology? So much for the precious, garish styling of the designer decade. Arad, recently graduated from the Architectural Association, had broken out of architecture to do his own thing. His work was raw and muscular, but also rich and clever.
It all started with an old leather car seat bolted to some scaffolding pipes. The Rover chair (1981), an emblem of Britain's fading car industry spliced with some DIY high-tech structure, was an instant punk icon, the furniture equivalent of the Sex Pistols' ransom-note typography. Before Arad had even noticed any connection to the prevailing counter-culture, Jean-Paul Gaultier was knocking on his door to buy six. He went on to hammer metal into clunky thrones such as the Tinker chair (1988), and turn looped steel sheets into a parody of your auntie's upholstered armchair in the Well-Tempered chair (1986). It was visceral stuff, and what's more, it looked like he was having fun.
Fast forward two decades to this show, and you see the Rover chair again – except this time it's made of flawless chrome. The sheer shininess of it epitomises everything that went wrong with design in the noughties. Galleries were falling over themselves to produce ultra-expensive limited editions for a growing collectors' market buoyed by the economic bubble. You want your chair in Carrara marble? You got it. The bling world of design-art was too often about expense for the sake of it. It was an upgrade of materials, but not of imagination.
None of that is Arad's fault. He had been blurring the distinction between design and art for decades, and we should thank him for it. It's not boundary-crossing that's the problem, it's the fact that the edginess of Arad's work has been replaced by a flabby, over-polished mannerism. It's too slick. Take a series of recent rocking chairs called the Voids (an apt name): no doubt they are technically impressive, but whether they're made of tiger-stripe acrylic or lacquered aluminium, there's no disguising that the designs are utterly vacuous. His architecture is even worse – this exhibition gives him so much credit for also being an architect that you wonder whether the curators have actually looked at these buildings. They're heinous: scaled-up, self-indulgent gewgaws.
Arad has been an early adopter of new materials and technologies – he used rapid prototyping (a method of 3D printing using plastic resin) to make a series of fruit bowls, and he incorporated text messaging into a chandelier for Swarovski – but often abandons them before he's achieved anything of substance. The show is a celebration of his magpie ingenuity, but you won't find much under the surface. Arad's work is all technique. It's pure expression through materials, form and movement. That means you can only judge it using taste. One of his giant rocking chairs (he loves rocking chairs) or overblown bookcases will bring someone a sudden jolt of pure joy, while the person next to them will retch. He's the design equivalent of Marmite.
The superbness of it all is part of the problem. It's so bombastic that it doesn't leave you any room to be you – Arad is too busy blinding you with who he is. There is no sociological dimension to his work; it's not about people, it's about him.
The reason why this show feels out of touch is that we've moved on. Sure, Arad helped erode the boundaries of design, but which boundaries are we interested in? If design is going to rediscover its sense of purpose, it has to crossbreed with other disciplines, from biotechnology to healthcare. The most interesting contemporary designers are already crossing those thresholds; Arad, though, feels like he's been left far behind.
Tour the condemned housing block in north London, where more than 75 artists have transformed its empty rooms and flaking walls into colourful works of temporary art
It was the most famous house in Georgian England, but for some it was a sham and an architectural failure. Amanda Vickery considers its eccentric creator Horace Walpole
If you are an aficionado of architecture, you will know Horace Walpole as the creator of Strawberry Hill (1747-90), in Twickenham, west London, a flamboyant experiment in Gothic revival, forerunner of all those Victorian town halls, churches and stations which define our townscapes. You may also remember him as the author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first gothic novel, initiating a spooky literary genre still going strong.
Connoisseurs of Georgian culture recognise the voluble Walpole as a catty commentator on fashionable society. With 48 volumes of his correspondence in print, historians can rely on him for a gossipy opinion on most topics from adultery and chandeliers to wigs and Whigs. Hardly a party was thrown without Walpole on the sidelines taking sly notes for the amusement of posterity.
A new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London throws the spotlight on the peripheral observer and showcases the peculiarity of his taste. It restages Walpole's eclectic collection and evokes the dense interiors of his summer retreat, Strawberry Hill, as a curtain raiser for the reopening this autumn of the freshly restored house itself.
According to Michael Snodin, curator of the exhibition, Walpole "as a lively and incisive commentator shaped the way we see 18th-century politics and society. As the most important collector of his time he created a form of thematised historical display which prefigured modern museums. And Strawberry Hill was the most influential building of the early Gothic revival."
Walpole (1717-97) was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, and Catherine Shorter, daughter of a timber merchant. His parents were estranged even before his birth, the young Walpole remaining with his adored mother in the London house on Arlington Street in Piccadilly, avoiding Houghton – the Norfolk palace raised by his father as a monument to power.
After a conventional education (Eton and Cambridge topped off with the grand tour), Walpole became MP for Callington in 1743, where he never set foot. Effete and feeble, he bore little resemblance to his hearty father. Still he remained loyal to Whig politics and accepted sinecures worth £2,000 a year, bankrolling his "career" as a connoisseur and gentleman of leisure.
To us, Walpole appears decidedly peculiar – etiolated, fastidious and affected – and even in his own times he was considered singular. The writer Letitia Hawkins remembered a pallid aesthete tripping everywhere on his toes. "His figure was not merely tall, but more properly long and slender to excess: his complexion and particularly his hands of a most unhealthy paleness . . . he always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy, which fashion had then made almost natural . . . knees bent and feet on tip toe as if afraid of a wet floor."
Though Walpole had a penchant for the company of old ladies and unmarriageable or disgraced noblewomen, he evaded matrimony, remaining to his death aged 79 what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. Instead he drew about him a collection of highly cultured "dear friends"– men of sensitive taste but lesser background, who shared his obsessions. Walpole had an especially fraught and jealous relationship with Thomas Gray, of the famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", whom he met at Eton and took with him on his European tour.
Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal – sodomy was a capital offence – but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness.
Walpole's biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual. George Haggerty ponders the mystery again in the collection of essays that accompanies the exhibition. Walpole and his close male friends "did not identify themselves and were not identified by their contemporaries as sodomites, although several of them were known to feel desire for members of their own sex". Walpole's life-long correspondent, the Florentine expatriate Sir Horace Mann, was labelled a "finger-twirler" by the diarist and social commentator Hester Lynch Piozzi.
A romantic and erotic camaraderie is detectable among the aesthetes, archly expressed in interior decoration and antiquarianism. Anachronistically, but plausibly, Haggerty sees a camp sensibility at work. Strawberry Hill was to be the playground of affectation, a stage set on which Walpole performed his life, and an irresistible resort for his special friends.
Strawberry Hill was in fashionable Twickenham, a two-hour carriage drive from London, but enjoying some rays of royal glamour from nearby Richmond Palace and Hampton Court. The bosky Thameside bristled with the stately dowagers Walpole so admired, while the illustrious poet Alexander Pope had lived less than a mile away.
In 1747, Walpole leased a nondescript suburban house (built 1698) from Mrs Chevenix, a famous seller of trinkets. "It is a little plaything that I got out of Mrs Chevenix's shop and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw." In modern terms, the house is palatial, but by the standards of Georgian magnificence it was dinky.
"Lord God! Jesus! What a house!" cried Lady Townsend on an early visit. "It is just such a house as the parson's where the children lie at the end of the bed." As the second home of a fashionable gentleman who had a thoroughly classical headquarters in London, it was free from the rules governing the design of houses in town. Walpole set about Gothicising and extending, transforming the villa into "a gingerbread castle", "a Gothic mousetrap", a "paper house". He likened his adventure to that of Lord Burlington's pioneering of the neo-Palladian in miniature at nearby Chiswick House: "As my castle is so diminutive, I give myself a Burlington air and say that as Chiswick is a model of Grecian architecture, Strawberry Hill is to be so of Gothic."
Walpole dated his interest in the Gothic from seeing King's College chapel as an undergraduate at Cambridge, constructed when "Art and Palladio had not reached the land nor methodised the Vandal builder's hand". He was hardly the first to pursue an antiquarian interest in British history or to admire the melancholy dignity of old cathedrals. The Gothic was seen as one decorative idiom among several, suited to informal rooms and garden structures. There was already a pseudo-Gothic summer house in Vauxhall pleasure gardens.
Plenty of nobles lived in crumbling houses, finding romance in heraldry and ancestry, old tapestry and stained glass. Gothic was a ready decorative choice for private chapels, especially for Catholics anxious to assert the continuity of the old religion. It also appealed to women with a strong sense of dynasty. The widow Lady Oxford began a fan-vaulted dining room at Welbeck Abbey in 1742, while Lady Pomfret built a castle-style house on Arlington Street in London (Walpole's own road) in the late 1750s.
Pretentious as he was, Walpole did not claim to have revived the medieval single-handed. He wrote to Mann in Italy for "any fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything", reassuring him of "the liberty of taste into which we are all struck". With papier-mâché friezes, Gothic-themed wallpaper, fireplaces copied from medieval tombs, a Holbein chamber evoking the court of Henry VIII, Dutch blue and white tiles on the floor, and modern oil paintings, china and carpets throughout, Strawberry Hill was hardly a faithful recreation of a medieval manor. Walpole wanted theatrical effect, atmosphere and "gloomth", not a time capsule. "Visions you know have always been my pasture . . . Old castles, old pictures, old histories and the babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one."
The Gothic era he plundered seemed to encompass all the centuries before Inigo Jones (who transplanted the principles of Italian renaissance architecture under the patronage of Charles I). Any period from the dark ages to the Jacobean was ripe for plagiarism.
He made no doctrinaire claims. "I do not mean to defend by argument a small capricious house. It was built to please my own taste, and in some degree to please my own visions." Ever delicate, he admitted, "In Truth I do not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience and modern refinements in luxury."
Teased by Mann as to whether the garden had to be medieval to match, he ruled "Gothic is merely architecture and as one has a satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one's house, so one's garden on the contrary is to be nothing but riant [cheerful] and the gaiety of nature." But the garden still had to be picturesque. After a lecture on the ideal effect of the trees, the local nurseryman sighed: "Yes sir, I understand, you would have them hang down poetical."
Strawberry Hill was a confection, a mock-castle of a fake dynasty complete with a reproduction baronial hall, flourishing the arms and images of putative crusader ancestors on the ceiling. Through his mother, Walpole claimed descent from Cadwallader of Wales. The house became a museum to Walpole's expanding collection of art and relics, such as Queen Bertha's comb and the hair of Mary Tudor in a locket, though he was "outbid for Oliver Cromwell's night cap".
Snodin insists on Walpole's originality as a collector. He merged two pre-existing but distinct traditions – that of the virtuoso connoisseur seduced by art of all sorts, but also the antiquarian fascinated by historically significant objects (such as the spur King William drove into the flank of his horse Sorrel at the Battle of the Boyne). By 1797, Walpole had amassed at least 4,000 objects, not including scores of prints, drawings and books. The only things Walpole didn't collect were natural specimens and scientific instruments.
The diversity of Walpole's museum is recreated in the V&A exhibition, from 16th-century miniatures and sumptuous Reynolds portraits to Cardinal Wolsey's red hat. Which are Snodin's favourites? "For sheer glamour it has to be the gilded armour of Francis I, but one of the most curious objects is the black obsidian mirror used by the Elizabethan necromancer Dr John Dee to call up spirits, though Walpole didn't realise that it was originally used by the Aztecs in the human sacrificial rituals of their 'god of the smoking mirror'. We are still looking for some of Walpole's most famous objects, such as the jewelled dagger of Henry VIII."
Walpole wanted his objects to be admired. He gave personal tours to posh visitors, but left his housekeeper to herd the hoi polloi, for a guinea a tour. "'Tis the most amusing house I was ever in," remarked Lady Mary Coke, "so many pictures and things to help one to ideas when one wants a fresh collection; entertainment without company."
Walpole even produced a guidebook on his own printing press to initiate the cognoscenti, though inevitably he tired of traffic. "I keep an inn, the sign the Gothic castle," he moaned. "Never build yourself a house between London and Hampton Court. Everyone will live in it but you."
He introduced an advance booking system: "Every ticket will admit the Company between the hours of 12 and 3 before dinner. The house will never be shown after dinner nor at all but from the first of May to the first of October." And a final proviso: "They who have tickets are desired not to bring children."
Walpole was aggrieved to discover that visitors love to touch. "Two companies have been to see my house last week and one of the parties, as vulgar people always see with the ends of their fingers, had broken the end of my invaluable eagle's bill, and to conceal their mischief, had pocketed the piece."
At his death in 1797, the house passed to his cousin's unmarried daughter, Lady Anne Seymour Damer, a celebrated sculptor, and then to the Waldegraves, the family of his great niece. In 1842 the contents were sold off in the auction of the century, most never again seen together until now. (There was a small exhibition in 1980 with no international loans.)
Thanks to Walpole's publicity, Strawberry Hill was perhaps the most famous house in Georgian England, and inevitably fuelled voguish medievalism. But for Victorian purists such as Pugin, it was a sham. For modernists, it was an architectural failure of ghastly influence. BS Allen's Tides in Taste (1937) concluded that "reluctantly but inevitably one is reminded of the flocks of flimsy, starved houses that have sprung up since the war".
Wherever you stand on mock-Gothic, Strawberry Hill delivers unrivalled access to both ideas and design. It is an exceptionally rich document – so rarely do original house, perspective views, objects, commentary and letters all survive.
For the architectural historian Charles Saumarez Smith, the house is important "not just as an oddity, much visited and admired, but because it was a presage of the way interiors would be used in the future, as a conscious instrument of personal expression, exploiting history to evoke a particular mood: Strawberry Hill was to become a private castle, an escape from time, a place of retreat."
Snodin agrees. "Walpole's cultural legacy was to pioneer a kind of imaginative self–expression in building, furnishing and collecting which still inspires us today. I suppose one of the take-home messages of the exhibition is: why not try it yourself?"
Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 (020 7942 2000), from 6 March to 4 July. www.vam.ac.uk