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Alain de Botton’s ‘temples for atheists’ have a foundational flaw

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:08:43 +0000

Aren't believers just as likely to appreciate a shrine to perspective? And doesn't the Large Hadron Collider qualify as a rationalist temple? De Botton's doctrine feels a trifle holy

Perhaps emboldened by the success of the atheist bus, or his own Living Architecture initiative (in which top architects design desirable holiday homes), or the fact that he's got a new book to promote, Alain de Botton is now proposing a series of temples for atheists to be built around the UK.

"Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?" he asks. "It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals."

Sounds great, Alain. But what are we worshipping?

"You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," he continues. "That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective."

In order to make atheism more attractive, De Botton argues in the accompanying book, Religion for Atheists, its advocates should pick and choose from the aspects of religion they all like. So, yes to a sense of community and civic responsibility; no to persecuting gay people and abusing choirboys. And one of the things we all like about religion, especially De Botton, is the architecture, isn't it? It gets the message across far better than something like a book. Unless that book is the Bible, or the Qur'an, but certainly if that book is Religion for Atheists.

De Botton's first monument will be the "Temple to Perspective", a hollow stone tower located in the City of London, that well-known hotbed of religious fanaticism. Its height corresponds to the age of the earth – one centimetre per million years, with mankind's time on the planet represented by a gold band around the base one millimetre thick. It was designed by a young architect named Tom Greenall, who collaborated with De Botton on the book. Several other possibilities are suggested: a Temple to Love, which looks like a box whose facades are rose windows from cathedrals; a Shrine to Care, filled with little glass figurines of humans filled with blood, and so forth.

They come across like witty art installations, but would these follies – sorry, "temples" – convince any religious adherent to cross over? It's unlikely. And why couldn't a Christian or a Muslim enjoy the Temple of Perspective, just as an atheist can be stunned by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia? Architecture and godliness don't necessarily go hand in hand. The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the beautiful Cathedral of Brasilia and several other churches, laughs about the fact that he has been a lifelong atheist.

What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.

To answer De Botton's original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it's about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.

Steve Rose

Tall orders: the best film skyscrapers – in pictures

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:19:17 +0000

Hollywood is drawn to multi-storey architecture like … well, like a colossal prehistoric gorilla is drawn to multi-storey architecture. From the caped crusader posing on rooftops in The Dark Knight to Phillipe Petit's death-defying walk between the twin towers in Man on Wire, here's a selection of the greatest movie moments involving everyone's favourite phallic symbol

Plans for £80m new Design Museum unveiled

The Sheet — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:25:07 +0000

London museum's 2014 move to Commonwealth Institute aims to make it 'the world's leading museum of contemporary design and architecture'

Plans for a new Design Museum were unveiled at a press conference today in the Odeon Kensington across the road from the long-abandoned Commonwealth Institute. Jonathan Ive, the much-feted British-born designer of the iPod, iPad, iPhone and other Apple gizmos appeared, larger than life, on the screen. "Thank," he said at the end of his two-minute message of congratulations. Before he could add "you", the screen froze and the limits of nascent digital technology and design left poor Ive's face stuck in a ginormous gurn.

Happily, though, the new £80m Design Museum, scheduled to open in 2014 and housed in the early-60s architectural splendour of the Commonwealth Institute, will be a showcase of three-dimensional objects as well as digital wizardry. Britain can and will make it was the message from Terence Conran, who took to the rostrum below the cinema screen. The famous designer and entrepreneur charted the history of the Design Museum from its first home, which opened in 1981 in a former boilerhouse in the basement of the Victoria & Albert Museum. He called for design to be part of the DNA of this country – as it is in Scandinavia.

Deyan Sudjic, the museum's director, described how he had long seen the Commonwealth Institute as "the most exciting, utopian building in London", going on to highlight its future role as "the world's leading museum of contemporary design and architecture", an "active museum where new things and new ideas can happen, where research can flourish".

The Grade II* building, designed originally by Robert Matthew of Johnson-Marshall architects and crowned by a copper-clad hyperbolic paraboloid roof (realised without computers), is to be tuned up by the Dutch architects OMA with Arup as structural engineers. The interiors will be transformed by John Pawson, whose designs – whether for private houses, Calvin Klein stores, art galleries or contemporary monasteries – are never less than luminously beautiful.

The museum is on the move from its home in a former banana warehouse at Butler's Wharf, which was considered a no-go area for property development until it (and an eagerly greeted slew of Conran restaurants) arrived here from 1989.

The soaring interior of the Commonwealth Institute offers the museum three times the space it enjoyed at Butler's Wharf. It hopes for half a million visitors a year and is confident that its presence, on the southern fringe of Holland Park (close to both the Royal College of Art, where many of Britain's best designers have trained, and the world-famous South Kensington museums) will transform "High Street Ken" itself. For many years, this has been one of London's least design-conscious high streets.

With bright new galleries for temporary exhibitions as well as permanent displays, a handsome library and research centre funded by the Sackler Foundation, and the kind of atrium-like interior you expect to find in the latest shopping malls, the new Design Museum should prove to be a magnet not just for the design-conscious but curious passers-by.

None of its plans would have been possible without the help of local property development. Just as the old Design Museum was a part of Conran's redevelopment of the Victorian Butler's Wharf, so the new Design Museum will be at the core of a new residential development led by Stuart Lipton, chairman of Chelsfield Partners. Lipton has commissioned a block of flats by OMA that will flank the refurbished Commonwealth Institute. Plans for the flats were discreetly absent at the unveiling, with the new museum looking as if it will stand in splendid isolation. It won't.

"If I was a student leaving the RCA today", said Conran, who is putting up £17m for the museum through the Conran Foundation, "I'd try to team up with an engineer from Imperial College and an entrepreneur with a bit of money to makes things of quality and originality."

This is a glimpse of the future, and the big hope is that the new Design Museum will help root intelligent design – along with a new wave of manufacturing – into Britain's curiously design-resistant DNA.

Jonathan Glancey

Seville’s Unesco status threatened by 600ft Pelli tower

The Sheet — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:55:49 +0000

Spanish city could lose world heritage status over plans to build 40-storey skyscraper amid cluster of 13th-century buildings

Seville faces being added to a Unesco blacklist as building work on a 40-storey skyscraper begins to change the southern Spanish city's skyline.

The half-built Pelli tower is casting a growing shadow across one of the country's most-visited cities and over a cluster of 13th-century buildings which have been designated a world heritage site by Unesco.

In a report leaked to local newspapers, Unesco experts denounced the "substantial" impact on several historic buildings. "It is surrounded by historic conservation areas," it said. "There is an excessive and undoubtedly negative impact."

Among the buildings affected are the cathedral, the Alcázar, the Giralda minaretand the Archive of the Indies, which together make up the world heritage site.

"They form a remarkable monumental complex in the heart of Seville," Unesco said. "The Giralda minaret is the masterpiece of Almohad architecture. This will end the Giralda tower's unrivalled pre-eminence in the urban landscape."

At a meeting in June Unesco must decide what to do about the city's refusal to halt construction. Among the options is to place it on the "in danger" list, or to strike Seville off the list of world heritage sites.

The "in danger" list includes sites such as Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan and the earthquake-ravaged city of Bam in Iran.

The Pelli tower is being built on the site of the 1992 Expo across Guadalquivir river from Seville's historic city centre.

The 12th-century riverside Tower of Gold is another monument that will be dwarfed by the 178-metre (580ft) Pelli building.

Unesco has asked local authorities to at least reduce the height of the building, but pleas made over the past four years have been ignored. The organisation said it had asked the city "to halt the construction works and reconsider the current high-rise project".

"Attempts are made to offer help to places so that they can solve problems," one expert on world heritage sites said. "But there comes a time when there is no hope for that."

That time appears to have come for Seville, where the Pelli tower has already reached 12 storeys. "They are meant to be adding another floor each week," said the expert.

El País newspaper said the report had been leaked by city hall authorities, which it read as a sign that the new city council, which was elected last year, might try to lower the height of the building.

Giles Tremlett

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:25:01 +0000

Stuttgart launches a controversial redevelopment of its central station, Burgundy gets a new museum and Frank Gehry's Eisenhower memorial sparks a battle

The recession might be biting hard in Britain, but elsewhere in the world, things are clearly booming. The city of Stuttgart is so gung-ho about the €7bn redevelopment of its central railway station that it can afford not just to go ahead with the ambitious new plan designed by Dusseldorf-based Ingenhoven architects, but to demolish a large part of the existing historic building, a masterpiece by Paul Bonatz and Friedrich Scholer completed in 1928. As recently as 2009, Unesco was considering listing this magnificent building as a World Heritage Site.

The new design by Christoph Ingenhoven's team appears, superficially at least, to be rather fine. Well, have a look at this creamy Deutsche Bahn propaganda film (it's in German, but the visuals speak for themselves).

The trouble with this "Stuttgart 21" scheme is that it not only requires the demolition, starting this week, of the south wing of Bonatz's station, and the felling of 200 trees in the adjacent Schlossgarten, but it reduces the historic concourse to a meaningless architectural void, because all the important activity will take place below ground. Passions are running high: on the night of 12-13 January, 2,000 police were drafted in to clear protestors from in front of the south wing – although a recent referendum suggests that a narrow majority of local people want the project to go ahead.

A far distant fight, two millennia before the railway age – that of the 52 BC Battle of Alesia, when the Roman army under Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls – is commemorated in the fascinating Alesia Museum, Burgundy, which will open to the public on 26 March. Designed by Paris and New York-based Bernard Tschumi Architects, the cylindrical, timber-clad building rises from the spot where Caesar's army gathered. Inside, visitors will see interactive displays contextualising this critical battle. A second circular building, crafted in stone and also by Tschumi, will follow in 2015; set higher up, where the Gauls had their fort, this will house artefacts unearthed from the ancient battlefield.

While the Tschumi buildings are designed to be a subtle intervention in the rural Burgundy landscape, the design and construction company Capita Symonds has announced outlandish designs this week for the Kampala Tower, a 222m-high commercial phallus rising proudly from a new public square in Kampala, Uganda. The 60-storey tower will be the tallest in Africa – although it could just as well be built in Kowloon or Kuala Lumpur. Another country that is apparently booming in terms of new construction is New Zealand.

One architect you might think immune to recession or planning controversies is Frank Gehry. This week, however, Gehry's proposals for a memorial to Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States and, from December 1943, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe ("Ike" oversaw the liberation of western Europe that took place with the D-day invasion of France in June 1944), have made the news because the Eisenhower family feels that the architect has underplayed the president's role as a war leader.

Gehry's design is for a memorial park in Washington DC framed by large metal tapestries showing scenes from Eisenhower's roots in Abilene, Kansas. Clearly, Gehry has picked up on Eisenhower's famous quote when he said, at the height of his career, "the proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene." Susan Eisenhower has told AP that "Just about everybody on the [Washington] Mall had humble origins. But, you don't get to the Mall because you had humble origins. You get to the Mall because you did something for which the nation is grateful."

The memorial, and the Mall, are not far from Washington's Union Station, Despite a rollercoaster history over the past five decades, the magnificent station remains intact. Perhaps Stuttgart could learn from Washington, or perhaps from Eisenhower's beloved Abilene, where the local station has certainly seen more productive days.

Jonathan Glancey

A Room for London: a new installation and hotel on the South Bank

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:42:37 +0000

Liz Bird was one of the first guests to spend the night at A Room for London, a 'holiday houseboat' architectural installation on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall overlooking the Thames. It will be open for bookings to the rest of us this Thursday

Ship's log, Roi des Belges: Sunday 15 January, 2012. Time: 4pm. Weather: fine. Wind: south-westerly.

Crew safely on board and feeling very pleased with themselves, standing on the top deck sipping prosecco and waving at promenaders on the South Bank as they admire the Thames river views from Big Ben round to St Paul's. It has been an unusual embarkation, via a backstage door at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and up a specially installed lift to the roof.

Resembling a 1920s steamer and designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, the Roi des Belges interior is red-stained plywood with not a nautical blue and white stripe in sight. The spacious main deck's bow is lined with windows and a wraparound wool banquette. There's a massive bed, which cleverly converts into twin beds by sliding on runners built into the floor.

Behind is a table and chairs next to a kitchenette. A shower room and toilet – with portholes giving views of St Paul's or the London Eye – straddle the entrance hall at the back of the boat, or "stern".

The pièce de resistance is the snug upper deck, filled with London-themed books, which we quickly rename "The Bridge" and where we write up the ship's log. This weighty tome is where guests who managed to secure a night's stay when bookings went live last September (six months' worth of bookings snapped up in 12 minutes) are expected to chart their experience. Fountain pen provided.

Alain de Botton is the philosopher behind Living Architecture, the foundation which rents out unusual holiday homes and came up with the idea for the project. He put "demons", as his 3am log entry under the heading "sightings" when he stayed earlier this month. Our entry for the same hour reads: "Man, singing loudly, zig-zags across Waterloo Bridge".

Later this month, the boat will host its first "artist in residence", the multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird who will play a one-off gig via live webcast (28 January). Other musicians such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson will also perform, and writers including Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson will take part in A London Address there, a series of monthly writings and recordings .

We use our binoculars to study the faces of those beneath us on the South Bank: lovers, strollers, joggers. We are constantly drawn to the "vessel" opposite. As night falls, the opulent Savoy hotel lights up like a jewelled beacon, its crystal interiors shining out over the inky Thames.

Ship's log: 5pm. A police launch, its sirens blaring, speeds along the water, dodging the packed tourist boats. Trains rattle over Hungerford Bridge, snatches of conversation drift upwards, a saxophone wails plaintively.

Ship's log: 11.26pm. Crew retires for the night. Blinds are left untouched, but sleep doesn't come quickly. We keep sitting up and looking out at London's multi-coloured riverside.

Monday, 16 January. Ship's log: 7am. the sun has just risen. On the starboard side, The Shard pierces a pinky red sky.

Ship's log: 11am. Binoculars stowed, log up to date, crew disembarks, wishing their "trip" could have been longer.

• Be warned, the first sale of nights in the boat, for between January and June, sold out in just 12 minutes. Bookings for July to December will go on sale online this Thursday, 19 January, at midday GMT. A Room for London (aroomforlondon.co.uk, living–architecture.co.uk) sleeps two and costs £300 for a night, one night maximum

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:36:17 +0000

Blackpool gets its very own Vegas-style register office, a Scottish giant goes to the great studio in the sky, and the sad demise of two close-knit London housing estates

A week of happy beginnings and sad departures. On Thursday, Simon Garrick and Kelly Goudie from the Fylde, Lancashire, were the first couple to get married at Festival House, a dazzling new gold register office on Blackpool's Golden Mile. The £2.7m building, designed by dRMM, is one glittering part of the seaside town's £250m improvement plan that has already seen the refurbishment of the 158m (518ft) Blackpool tower and the extension of Blackpool Central Library by Bisset Adams architects.

Blackpool's "Tower of Love" register office is a British take on the kitsch wedding chapels of Las Vegas. The structure is clad in gold stainless steel shingles – it's very hard to miss when the sun's out – and boasts a tall window framing pretty much the entire length of Blackpool tower. There is quite possibly some Freudian symbolism at play here.

The chapel of the once-beautiful seminary of St Peter's at Cardross near Glasgow, consecrated in 1966 and abandoned in the early 1980s, is sadly a ruin today. This week saw the death of Isi Metzstein, co-designer of St Peter's and one of Scotland's greatest modern architects. Born in Berlin in 1928, Metzstein came to Scotland not a moment too soon: just before the outbreak of the second world war. He joined Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the long-established Glaswegian firm he was to run with Andy MacMillan; together, Metzstein and MacMillan designed some of the most challenging and profound churches in Europe.

Saddam Hussein's "super mosque" is a religious ruin in a very different mould. Work began on this vast 11-acre complex close to Baghdad airport not long before the Iraqi dictator was toppled in 2003. The convoluted story of the three huge mosques Saddam was building at the time of his fall can be found online. Here is a telling chunk:

"The Umm al-Mahare ['Mother of All Battles'] mosque on the outskirts of Baghdad has four outer minarets shaped like Kalashnikov assault rifles, and four inner minarets shaped like Scud missiles. The surrounding reflecting pool is shaped like the Arab world. The mosque also featured a Qur'an written in Saddam's blood (28 litres, said to have been donated over two years) … Al-Rahman ['the most merciful'] mosque featured no fewer than 14 domes and was scheduled to be completed in 2004. The Saddam the Great mosque was a construction site with skeletal columns, and was schedule[d] to be completed in 2015."

The site of the last of these is to be the home of the new $100m Iraqi parliament building. A shortlist of designers has been drawn up. This includes architects Assemblage, with Buro Happold and Al Khan as engineers – though Assemblage's Peter Besley tells me he has no idea who else is in the running as "the ministries [in Baghdad] are notoriously hard to get this kind of information from".

Isi Metzstein's finest buildings have often been labelled "brutalist", a term coined by the critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1950s. Now, one of the most famous – or infamous – brutalist monuments, the long-threatened Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, is finally on the verge of demolition. While some might cheer, the replacement housing is not exactly a cause for celebration.

Home Sweet Home, meanwhile, is an exhibition opening tomorrow that tells the story of the 1960s-era prefabricated concrete Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke, south London. Now that its denizens have been moved out in the name of "regeneration", and 4,398 new homes are moving in, what happens to former residents' sense of community? To their hopes, fears and memories? It was home to thousands of people – even though, as the curators point out, the Ferrier estate "came to be seen as the problem it was designed to solve". The curators of this moving show are photographer Anna Batchelor and designer Sarah Colson.

This week also saw the opening in Boston of the latest design by Renzo Piano – yes, the Shard guy. This is the $118m extension to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The modest, low-lying new building provides space for temporary exhibitions, concerts and education programmes. The original building, dating from 1903, was designed by Willard T Sears in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, for the collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner. It's awash with art of all kinds, from Botticelli to John Singer Sargent. Although this is prohibited, both the old and new buildings would make glamorous wedding venues, if not quite in the inimitable style of Las Vegas ... or Blackpool.

• This article was amended on 16 January 2012. The original used the term registry office. This has been corrected.

Jonathan Glancey

Skyscrapers aren’t always about corporate pride before a fall | Owen Hatherley

The Sheet — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:14:49 +0000

From the Empire State to the Burj Khalifa, skyscrapers predict recession. But not all towers are built by phallic capitalism

Tall buildings inviting accusations of hubris is as old as the Tower of Babel. The report this week from Barclays Capital merely puts an official stamp on the latest permutation of the myth, via a theory that has been around for at least a decade – the skyscraper index, which places the completion – or the proposal, it's not entirely clear – of a "world's tallest" tower as the sign of an incoming recession or financial crisis.

Empirically, it's true enough; skyscrapers were born of crisis in 1870s Chicago and New York, and most famous towers can be instantly tied to a collapse of some sort. The "Empty State Building", as the Empire State Building was dubbed, was finished in the Depression's deepest depths; the World Trade Centre and the Sears Tower neatly coincided with the end of the postwar settlement; the Petronas Towers accompanied the Asian crash of 1997. The current tallest, the Burj Khalifa, is self-explanatory in that sense, as its name – formerly the Burj Dubai – immortalises the bailout that the emirate received from Abu Dhabi when its bubble burst. Yet the skyscraper index has been around for so long that skyscraper designers are surely partly conscious of it. The largest residential tower in the world, also in Dubai, was quietly completed a couple of years ago. It was named the Index.

The reason why it is skyscrapers, as opposed to say, cathedral spires or telecommunications towers (which are frequently taller) that form the index are to do with what makes a skyscraper, and what differentiates it from a mere tower, office block or high-rise. The skyscraper came into being through a combination of innovation and accident, in a cauldron of unregulated capitalism. It became so tall because of rising land values on the tight, dense grids of New York and Chicago (the two cities still dispute ownership of the first skyscraper). It could get that tall because of two already extant inventions, the elevator and the steel frame, the latter used from Liverpool to Sheerness in the first half of the 19th century.

As to why these non-load bearing walls, merely tacked onto the frame, needing little craftsmanship, easily prefabricated, were so seductive to developers – well, one theory has it that the first skyscraper coincided with a strike of Chicago building workers. The towers were invariably offices, often for financial institutions, so were uniquely closely pegged to boom and bust. It bears repeating that in the middle of all this, nobody had ever deliberately intended, let alone "designed" the skyscraper – it was an effect, not an expression, of unstable financialised capitalism. This is, incidentally, one reason why the 1945-79 period was heavier on famous residential high-rises than luxurious corporate skyscrapers, at least in Europe.

Of course, there were soon attempts to consciously create skyscrapers, to make them into coherent pieces of architecture; in the 1880s, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan aimed to make of them a "proud and soaring thing", stripping off prefab baroque and applying his own original, deliberately height-emphasising ornament – but this "Chicago school" was always outnumbered by the mere stacking of Venetian, gothic or baroque detail up to 50 storeys. The result was the weird, retro-futurist towers that now appear as fascinatingly cranky as all obsolete technology, although at the time they were the ruthless expression of unmediated commercialism.

A couple of decades after Sullivan, Le Corbusier tried to create a becalmed "Cartesian skyscraper", largely for housing, leaving green space rather than traffic canyons underneath it. Not sufficiently flashy, the Cartesian skyscraper was eventually given the lumpy, prosaic English name of tower block. Accordingly, if you look at the current south London skyline, the ludicrously overpowering, overscaled, overpriced Shard is a skyscraper in its purest form; the Guy's hospital tower, next to it, is a mere high-rise. It's made of concrete, it's inexpensive and, worst of all, it serves a useful function.

All the record-setting buildings seem to have been equally useless, no matter how seductive their architecture. In the late 1940s, eight very tall skyscrapers in Europe were built, the tallest in the continent for three decades. They didn't coincide with any crisis, any financial exuberance, though their steel frames caked in pseudo-historical ornament immediately evoked 1910s New York. They were, respectively, housing towers, a university, a couple of ministries, a hotel and a "palace of culture"; the point was to build them, not what went in them, but in the process, the skyscraper stopped being stacked speculation. These skyscrapers, in Moscow and Warsaw, were an expression of ruthless dominance, but had certain curious differences. Some were and are open to the public. They were supposed to stand as points of orientation in the city, carefully planned. They were surrounded by squares and public space. Stalinists over stockbrokers might not seem like much of an improvement, but these ex-record breakers might remind us that the skyscraper need not be a combination of corporate phallus and crisis prediction instrument.

Owen Hatherley

Rome’s Colosseum restoration sparks inquiries into contract

The Sheet — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:06:05 +0000

Shoe firm Tod's had struck a €25m deal to fund restoration, but this is being investigated

Italy's most visited monument, the Roman Colosseum, is suffering from "about 3,000 lesions", a government minister said last year. Sometimes, bits fall off, as did a chunk dislodged by a pigeon on Christmas Eve.

But the chances of the aged patient receiving emergency surgery receded on Wednesday when it emerged that Rome prosecutors and the Italian audit court had each launched inquiries into the award of a contract for the funding of restoration. In January 2011, the luxury shoe firm Tod's announced it had struck a deal under which it would put up €25m (£21m) for the cleaning and strengthening of the arena where gladiators once grappled with wild animals – and each other.

Tod's obtained the right to use the image of the Colosseum until two years after completion of the work. But the company's founder, Diego Della Valle, promised not to exploit his sponsorship for commercial purposes, saying he was happy just to give something back to his country.

The agreement has nevertheless been a subject of controversy ever since. And, on Monday, Italy's competition authority was reported to have condemned the procedures used.

According to a consumer group that lodged the original complaint with the authority, an inquiry found that Tod's should have been made to organise, and not just fund, the project; that it had been granted sponsorship rights for too long; and that rival bidders had not been given enough time to top its offer.

But the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, warned: "If, with €25m of private cash available, we don't get work under way now, we cannot then complain if parts of the Colosseum collapse."

John Hooper

The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin’s stage-managed show?

The Sheet — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:27:03 +0000

Young Russians no longer pay homage to him, but the Bolshevik leader 'lives on' in a carefully choreographed show of solemnity inside a Moscow mausoleum. But for how long?

In Moscow at this time every year the debate resumes about what to do with Lenin's body, which, contrary to the Bolshevik's wishes to be buried next to his mother, has lain in state in Red Square since his death on 21 January 1924. Last year, Prime Minister Putin held an online poll in which 70% of participants felt his body should be buried. That result yielded no decision either way (no doubt because it was not the one Putin had hoped for). Nevertheless, when I found myself in Moscow just before Christmas, I seized the opportunity to pay Lenin a visit while I still could. What I encountered was part reliquary, part freak show – and an impressive work of experience design, as stage-managed as anything in the London Dungeon.

The experience begins with a procession along the wall of the Kremlin from a set of metal detectors at the very entrance to Red Square. In Soviet times, a 100m-long queue was a permanent fixture. Today, the queue has disappeared but its infrastructure – a chain cordon – remains, as I discovered the hard way. Not seeing the way in, I stepped over the chain and soon met with a policewoman charging at me and blowing her whistle. Finally inside the mausoleum (having been sent back to the top of Red Square) I was respectfully stomping the snow off my shoes when I was violently shushed by a guard. All of this is part of the choreographed solemnity that includes the prohibition of hats, cameras, talking, hands in pockets and lingering. Because, despite the morbid voyeurism of wanting to see the body of a man who died 88 years ago, this is not a freak show; it's a piece of political theatre.

The mausoleum itself was designed by Alexey Shchusev in 1929 to replace a temporary wooden one he'd erected within days of Lenin's death. Made of marble and granite, it is a series of concentric cubes resembling a step pyramid. Shchusev shared the suprematist Kazimir Malevich's belief that the cube symbolised eternity. Since his masters, known as "the immortalisation commission", were using the latest technology to make Lenin last forever, his tomb was to be a kind of Mecca. And not withstanding the irony of a secular political system creating its own saint, there is something of Mecca about it, processing around the body the way Muslim pilgrims process around the cuboid Ka'aba.

Or at least there should be. But I found myself alone inside the chamber – alone, that is, except for two guards and Lenin himself – and not so much processing as gawping. It is one of the most impressive rooms I've ever entered, though this is only partly down to the architecture. The black granite floor and walls, with their red marble lightning motif, communicate such density you feel like you're at the heart of a mountain. But most of the impact comes from what is inside this container: the bizarre sight of this embalmed body lying there like a bald Snow White in a black double-breasted suit and polka-dot tie.

The atmosphere is one of incredulity. Is that waxy thing Lenin at all, and if it is, how is he in such good condition? Only a blackened fingernail hints at the deterioration of an actual body. As to whether he is real or fake, the answer is of course both. For as solid as the architecture is, it is merely a stage set. The real architecture of this would-be religious experience is the framework of chemicals that keeps Lenin's skin firm. The scaffolding in the cells of his face is a solution made up of potassium acetate, glycerol and alcohol, in which he is routinely bathed. All that marble and granite is merely compensating for the frailty of Lenin's mortal body.

Similarly, whatever the atmosphere in the chamber, the only thing that matters is inside the glass sarcophagus. Designed by Nikolai Tomsky, the purveyor of socialist realist statues to public squares across the Soviet Union, it echoes the ziggurat shape of the tomb. But more importantly, it conceals the machinery that regulates the climate around the body to 16 degrees and 80% humidity – just as in a shopping mall, the air conditioning is more important than the architecture.

The same team that looks after Lenin has reportedly been embalming North Korea's Kim Jong-il, continuing a fine communist tradition that has included Stalin (briefly), Mao and Ho Chi Minh. The motives of the communist ideologues in preserving Lenin as their prophet in perpetuity are clear. What this pickled body has to do with modern Russia is less so. The younger generation no longer pays homage to it. Boris Yeltsin wanted to bury it, but Putin had no wish to dispose of this pseudo-religious relic. In fact, just as he has sanctioned the continued fortifying of Lenin's skin, Putin has created his own cult of the body. He has made a show of his judo skills and posed topless for the cameras. In contrast to the semi-real Lenin, Putin is the "muzhik", or the "real" man. But is he? Rumours abound that Putin's expressionless face and smooth skin are down to Botox and plastic surgery. It's almost as though the more outmoded a politician becomes, the more artifice is required to keep him fresh.

Justin McGuirk