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For ever Egypt – a northern temple to industry is at serious risk

The Sheet — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:47:35 +0000

Has Leeds woken up to the fact that one of its most important historic buildings is in serious danger? The Victorian Society and English Heritage are clanging alarm bells

The threat to British industry's greatest monuments raised by English Heritage is dramatically illustrated by the partial collapse of Temple Mill in Leeds, a vast Egyptian-style monument which became world-famous within months of its completion in 1840.

Launched with a temperance tea for 2000 flax-spinners, whose facilities in the huge building included private bathrooms – cold water free, hot a penny – the building was an attempt at more enlightened employment practices and featured as such in Disraeli's novel Sybil.

Lauded by everyone from Pevsner to Sir John Betjeman, the mill has been listed Grade 1 for more than 30 years, placing it in the top 2.5 percent of the UK's built heritage. It figures both on the English Heritage 'red alert' list and in the top ten Victorian buildings at risk published earlier this month by the Victorian Society.

There is incredulity in Leeds that the city's most famous industrial monument can have reached such a parlous state that one of its 18 beautifully carved lotus pillars has collapsed, bringing down with it a section of equally ornate wall. But the lethal effects of neglect on a vast but delicate structure, which depended on constant use and maintenance, has combined with the bite of the recession on over-optimistic developers.

For all its massiveness, the mill depends on a web of tie-bars which anchor an exceptionally heavy roof of 60 saucer-shaped brick domes, each crowned by a cone of glass, to the Egyptian walls. Inspired by the Pharoanic temple of the falcon god Horus at Edfu, the system included a meadow of grass to preserve moist temperatures for the flax, which was grazed monthly in summer by imported sheep.

The fracture of a tie-bar led to the pillar collapse and left the mill like a 'wobbly table' on its forest of slender iron pillars, also adorned with lotus leaves, which double as drainpipes. Further damage is certain if other ties fail.

Stonework is also broken on the ornate gatekeeper's lodge, an extra adornment which survived when the original chimney, an obelisk inspired by Cleopatra's Needle, became structurally unsound and was demolished in the 19th century. English Heritage lists the building's condition laconically as 'very bad'.

The developers Arndale Properties have begun repair work and use of parts of the building as a cultural centre on the lines of Salt's Mill in neighbouring Bradford, an even vaster leviathan whose collection of David Hockney paintings and World Heritage Site status has been one of northern England's greatest heritage successes. Temple Mill's neighbouring, and flourishing, Round Foundry complex is a model too. But progress has been slow since the last major occupier, a mail order warehouse, moved out in 2004. The clock for crucial and ever-more expensive repairs is ticking.

Martin Wainwright

Untangling the Web: Home

The Sheet — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:19:40 +0000

Home sweet (online) home.

This weekend's Untangling the Web column explodes the concept of "home": difficult to define but easy to recognise, "home" is as different from "house" as "space" is different from "place".

More than just semantics, environmental psychologists have been trying to define the nuances between the emotionally warm and fuzzy home as distinct from the pragmatic, physical house since the end of WWII. And interaction designers have spent two decades trying to get us to make their websites our homes online.

How has the 20 years of the Web transformed what we think and feel about the concept of home? Global migration and near-ubiquitous connectivity (in many major metropolises, at least) has helped to differentiate between the physical structure and the emotional component, but as Kat Jungnickel and Genevieve Bell ask in this research paper (abstract only), is home really where the hub is?

Send your thoughts and home experiences to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk, comment below or tweet @aleksk with #home and #uttw.

Aleks Krotoski

Place Pulse: a new website rates city safety

The Sheet — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:38:49 +0000

Flash cars, swept pavements, no graffiti ... what makes us think one street is safe to walk along and another not? A new crowdsourced project can help us find out

What makes us feel safe on some streets and scared on others? Why is one neighbourhood nicer to live in than another? Which city looks better, Boston or Vienna? And why isn't there an app that just tells us how we work these things out?

When it comes down to it, we're not really sure how we make judgments on the quality of our surroundings – is it down to the architecture, the width of the street, the amount of greenery? Or are there other, subconscious factors at play on our perceptions? Does a street look nicer if there's a new Audi parked on it rather than a beat-up old Toyota? Perhaps we take in what people are wearing, the quality of the paving stones, the signage. It's often a matter of guesswork for architects and planners, too, when it comes to designing agreeable places and spaces. But the good news is: there IS now an app that can tell us this stuff. Sort of.

It's called Place Pulse, and it's more of an online experiment, run by researchers at MIT Media Lab, the Mecca of future-tech design. The experiment bit is very easy to participate in: you simply look at two street views and vote on which one has more "curb appeal".

At present, there are just three questions (which city looks safer/more unique/more upper-class?) and five cities (Boston, New York City, Linz, Salzburg and Vienna), so it's not exactly a comprehensive survey, but from the results published so far, we can at least answer the initial question. The perceived "safest" images are all from the Austrian cities, while the least safe are all in Boston. Why? You could characterise the safe places by tree-lined avenues, pedestrian areas and historic architecture. And conversely, the least safe places by empty expanses of concrete, unpopulated streets, conspicuous walls and barriers.

But what about those other, subconscious factors? The purpose of Place Pulse is not so much to come up with a league table of cities or areas, as to reveal the visual cues that make a place appear safer or wealthier. It's not gathering the data that counts – it's understanding it.

Place Pulse's software promises to analyse those crowdsourced votes (nearly 300,000 votes so far; the target is a million) and reveal the attributes that influenced them. This information will be presented as "a visual symphony of electronic data", the team promises. We'll have to wait for their exhibit at Linz's Ars Electronica festival in September to find out what the hell that means.

So how can this help the real world? One example is graffiti, says Place Pulse's Phil Salesses. City councils across the world spend millions cleaning up graffiti in the belief that it is universally undesirable, and yet in his home town of Boston there are safe, pleasant areas with plenty of graffiti. Rather than a blanket graffiti-removal policy, might that public money be better spent, say, cleaning soot off building facades, if that has a better net result?

Of course, there's a danger that this research could encourage cash-strapped city councils to simulate safe neighbourhoods rather than reduce actual crime rates. But anything that makes our cities a little less ugly is surely welcome. And a better-looking city could perhaps help reduce crime rates.

Place Pulse draws heavily on the work of Kevin A Lynch, an influential urban planner and former MIT professor. Lynch was interested in understanding the city not so much in terms of empirical data as people's mental images of it – how people navigate and read their environment. In effect, he told architects and planners that there was only so much they could do, but his work at least helped them to do it.

In the 21st century, there's a new layer to how we read a city: the electronic one. "Geo-social" devices such as smartphones, advanced mapping technologies and localised information are helping us to map places in novel ways. According to future-watchers, we're heading towards an era of "hyperlocality", when invisible webs of electronic information will define our environment as much as boring old trees and buildings. Having said that, you'd rather be hyperlocal in a tree-lined avenue than an abandoned parking lot, wouldn't you?

Steve Rose

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Europe’s biggest new monastery starts building in Liverpool

The Sheet — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:27:53 +0000

Nuns will harvest rainwater, use ground source heating and plant a wildflower meadow - while Bradford's Anglicans install the UK's first cathedral-roof solar power

Liverpool's long association with the Roman Catholic faith is taking another step forward with the building of Europe's largest new Carmelite monastery in Allerton.

The £3 million project includes the planting of 1500 trees and aims to give 30 Carmelite nuns the peace and quiet they have lost in their present home in busy West Derby.

Two big schools are expanding next door to the existing building which was an almost rural haven when the order moved in 104 years ago. Rather than risk tensions with their young neighbours, the nuns decided in the words of their prioress Sister Mary to "bow out gracefully and let the schools enjoy the area."

The move follows the opening in 2009 of Stanbrook Abbey, a new home in Yorkshire for nuns of the order of Our Lady of Consolation, whose innovations include rainwater harvesting, power from a woodchip boiler and sedum plants on a 'green roof.' The Allerton monastery (the correct name, albeit that nuns inhabit it rather than monks) features a wildflower meadow, ground source heating, solar panels and similar rainwater harvesting to Stanbrook's.

Sister Mary says

The new monastery will allow us to be much more energy efficient and the gardens will also enable us to be self-sufficient whilst protecting the local habitat.
West Derby has been our home for over 100 years and we will be sad to leave, but we felt it was time to move to a location which will be more compatible with our way of life.

These are good times for the somewhat recherche world of ecclesiastical construction. The Liverpool building firm Nobles, which has contracted to finish the new monastery in 60 weeks, also has work under way onalterations to Wesley Methodist Church in the city centre, refurbishment at Rosemount Convent and a new church hall at St Michael's and All Angels Church in Pensby.

In Bradford meanwhile, the Anglican cathedral is to be the first in the world to install solar panels to generate its own electric if not spiritual power. The £50,000 scheme on the roof of the south aisle adds to a long and curious record of additions to the Grade 1 listed building. When Royalists besieged the stoutly Cromwellian city during the English Civil War, the tower was protected against stray canonballs by enormous bales of wool, like a stone version of the Michelin man.

Martin Wainwright

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Museum peace: Japan’s Naoshima island

The Sheet — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 23:05:34 +0000

The "art island" of Naoshima is dotted with calming concrete installations a world away from Tokyo's frenetic pace. Pico Iyer enjoys a moment of serenity

Japanese cool has, for decades now, been associated with everything fast, hi-tech and jangly; it's the TVs on taxi dashboards, the control-panels on toilets, the underground universes around major train stations that keep buzzing even after a natural calamity that stunned the rest of us. And if you're looking for a world-defining Japanese art form, you're more likely to turn these days to anime and manga than to any of the country's classical painters or mock-European forms. So it was shocking for me to go to the sleepy, faraway island of Naoshima – now turned into an "art island" rich with museums and installations – and find the coolest thing I've seen in my 24 years of living in Japan. It was, in some ways, the reverse of technology.

The structures around Naoshima are super-hi-tech, 23rd-century constructions of grey reinforced concrete, with every next-generation innovation; but they take you back to the principles of spareness, simplicity and concentration that graced the haiku, brush-and-ink paintings and Noh dramas of old. Where technology makes you speedy, up-to-the-minute and all-over-the-place, Naoshima so calms, grounds and slows you that you feel as if you've stepped into a meditative shrine.

The journey to the old fishermen's haunt in the Seto Naikai, or Inland Sea, is like a journey through the past. I set out from my home in Nara on a brilliant late-autumn afternoon, the trees blazing red, gold and radiant yellow all around me. To get to the remote island involved a bus, a train, another train to Kyoto, a bullet-train to Okayama and then another local train, a slow ferry and a bus before, five hours later, I arrived at Naoshima's Benesse House, the showpiece hotel where I was staying. With each change of vehicle, modernity seemed to thin out a little and I was closer to the old. By the time I left Okayama, I was in the middle of a much earlier Japan of unmanned ticket offices and deserted piers. The faces were simpler here – two local girls, swathed in grey earmuffs, had the countenances of Noh masks – and there were few signs in English.

The train from Okayama clanked along, the opposite of a bullet train, stopping at an empty platform every two or three minutes, and as we inched past, I could see regiments of uniform houses, with grey tiled roofs, bunched against a hillside, smoke rising from the rice-paddies in front of them. By the time we arrived at the ferry town of Uno, I could hardly recall the Godiva coffee-shops and high-rises of Kyoto.

When I reached Naoshima itself, I began to feel as if I'd stepped out of time altogether, in a world so deep in the past – and so far ahead in the future – that I lost all sense of when I was. Benesse House is a stylish and sleek construction, with Bose CD players on every desk – but no TVs or internet reception – and each room individually designed by the self-taught Osaka architect Tadao Ando. Its corridors are full of original contemporary canvasses and eerie light sculptures projecting classic Japanese landscapes through the near-dark. And the effect of all the modern art is, oddly, to take you back to the transfixing simplicity of an old ryokan, or traditional inn, where simply watching the sun make stripes across the tatami mats, or figures cast silhouettes against the paper windows, becomes so absorbing you never want to leave your room.

After the Benesse Company, a publishing firm centered in Okayama, took over the southern half of the island in 1985, working with the then-mayor Chikatsugu Miyake, it called in the minimalist Ando and invited him to design a huge swatch of natural park to be an international centre of art. Rising to the opportunity – surely any architect's dream – he opened Benesse House in 1992, then created a Benesse House Museum (with hotel rooms on the second and third floors) up the road, and then built what is now known as the Oval, a James Bondian series of six more rooms for guests on the top of a mountain behind the museum, reached by private monorail. In 2004, he completed the Chichu Museum which is a 20-minute walk away.

In all my 50 years I've never seen a place as pure and elevating as the Chichu, and it speaks for the pristine futurism that makes Naoshima such a unique place. There are five major pieces – a set of Monet water lilies, a large chamber with a reflecting 6ft granite sphere at its centre by the American land artist Walter de Maria and three light installations by the American James Turrell. Rather than observing these pieces, though, you more or less inhabit them. In one Turrell piece – Open Field – you walk into a room flooded with an unearthly orange light. Then, one at a time, you step up some stairs and into another large room suffused in soothingly deep blue light. Turn around, and the people in the room behind look like art works. Turn back, and you're in a kind of dream state.

Ten minutes walk from the Chichu, I came upon a new museum, opened only last year, to show off the works of the Korean-born Lee Ufan, again in a tall, grey, windowless Ando construction in a field. One of the pieces there, a single rock placed in front of a great earth-coloured slab, with a light shining on it, looked like a moving representation of a figure praying. Walking back from there towards Benesse House, I passed 88 buddhas along the side of the road made from industrial waste. A huge cube sat on a beach, and a "Cultural Melting Bath" hot tub on the cliffs above. At one point, on the silent road framed by glowing trees and the Inland Sea, I realised I could hear water lapping against the shore from two different beaches, each in a different key.

The protected spaces and air of discerning clarity mark every detail in Naoshima. There are no pachinko parlours on the small island of 3,600 people, no video arcades, no clamorous department stores. Cars are rare and you can walk from one site to the very farthest in about an hour. If you look out to sea, you can watch the fishing boats slowly drifting to one of the quiet neighbouring islands; when you head into one of the museums, sometimes slipping off your shoes before entering a room, you're in a prayerful hush again.

While Benesse House is clearly the classic place to stay, budget-minded travellers can sleep in one of 10 Mongolian yurts on the beach 10 minutes' walk away, for less than £30 a night, or in various family-run minshuku, or guest houses, among the island's villages.

In one 18th-century village, Honmura, 30 minutes' walk from Benesse House, six old wooden houses showcase the most contemporary of modern art works. Everywhere you look in Naoshima, the locals, and visiting artists, are coming up with new projects. There's the "I ❤ YU" bathhouse in the port town of Miyanoura – where you bathe surrounded by a zany, eclectic "scrapbook" of work, including an aeroplane cockpit and a collage of erotica – and the Miaow Shima café in Honmura where you can sip coffee among a dozen sleeping cats.

Naoshima is not like anything in the west, but more an ultra-cool reference and homage to what Japan has been doing all along, in cutting away distraction and using frames and light and silence to still the mind and train one in attention.

And at a time when the modern nation has absorbed such a series of shocks, and is thinking about what grounds and steadies it, it makes more sense than ever to seek out this forward-looking shrine to the past.

Essentials

Doubles at Benesse House (00 81 87 892 2030; benesse-artsite.jpen/benessehouse) cost from £246 per night. Yurts on the beach (Tsutsuji-so Lodge, 00 81 87 892 2838; tsutsujiso.no-blog.jp/english) cost £28 per person per night. To get to Naoshima, take the bullet-train to Okayama and a local train to Uno, followed by a 20-minute ferry ride

Pico Iyer is the author of The Lady and The Monk, a novel about the first 24 years he has spent living in Japan

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The Apple has landed: Steve Jobs’ plans for futuristic new campus

The Sheet — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:00:24 +0000

Steve Jobs gave a masterclass in how to charm your local council planning meeting this week, personally presenting for 20 minutes on its ambitious plans for a new headquarters in Cupertino.

The small Californian town, which is part of the patchwork of cities that make up the sprawl of Silicon Valley, has become synonymous with Apple, which employs 2,800 people at the base on Infinity Loop.

With a very different persona to the one we see at Apple's product announcements, Jobs was authoritative but humble, and personal enough to give anecdotes about growing up in Cupertino. He was also disturbingly thin and at times seemed breathless, and when one councillor asked on Apple's no-smoking policy he snapped: "Both my parents died from lung cancer, so i'm a little sensitive on that topic."

The vision of a vast, circular building is designed to impress. Jobs told the council that through its experience building retail stores, Apple has developed a specialism in building the biggest curved pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. Jobs, who has a summer job as a teenager at Hewlett Packard when it used own the land, said there used to be apricot trees on the site and wants to plant apricot orchards. The 150-acre site will be 80% landscaped, he said.

Ground breaking will start next year and the campus will be finished by 2015.

It will be four storeys high, hold around 12,000 people and have its own auditorium. Perhaps future WWDCs will be held here, instead of the Moscone Centre? "We put on presentations, much like we did yesterday, but we have to go to San Francisco to do them."

One councillor asked how Cupertino residents will benefit from Apple's new campus in the city. "Well, as you know we're the largest tax payer in Cupertino and we'd like to continue to stay here and pay taxes. If we can't then we have to go somewhere else like Mountain View and we'll take our current people with us and the city's largest tax base would go away." He added that Apple employs a lot of talented people who end up being affluent members of the community.

Couldn't Apple at least provide free wifi, suggested the councillor? "I'm a simpleton," said Jobs. "I think we pay taxes and the city should do those things. If we can get out of paying taxes then I'd be glad to put up wifi. I think we bring a lot more than free wifi."

"I think we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world. I think architecture students will come here to see this."

Jemima Kiss

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Digital love: Manuelle Gautrand and the Gaîté Lyrique

The Sheet — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:22:47 +0000

The Gaîté Lyrique, Paris's newest theatre, is a marriage of past and future so bold it takes the breath away. Jonathan Glancey explores a temple of technology and art

Everyone knows appearances can be deceptive, but the newly renovated Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique in central Paris takes the Bourbon biscuit. From the outside, it seems as conservative as any French arts institution. Built in 1862, its slightly pompous facade makes it every inch a creation of Napoleon III's overambitious second empire.

When you walk inside today, though, a beautifully restored Italianate foyer gives way almost immediately to an ultra-modern world of pulsating, bleeping, thumping digital art, music and film. From this month, the building that in the 70s housed a circus school with elephants stabled in the attic will be simply known as La Gaîté Lyrique, an €83m (£72.5m) "theatre for the digital arts" created and paid for by the City of Paris.

In fact, Gaîté Lyrique is far more than just a theatre. Bursting with energy, it is, according to its artistic director Jérôme Delormas, "a tool box", a "place of continual evolution", a "laboratory of cultural motivations". Immediately behind the lavish marble of the lobby is a web of new spaces set across seven floors and shaped to allow the world of digital artistry to let rip.

There is something distinctly French in this marriage between the grandly historical and the audaciously modern. Think of IM Pei's glass and steel pyramid rising from the Louvre's Cour Napoleon, or La Défense, a district of brutal 50s towers that stands to the west of the Champs-Elysées. In the early 70s, Paul Andreu's design for Charles de Gaulle airport evoked travel by spaceship rather than airliner. In 1977, Rogers and Piano's Pompidou Centre emerged from the heart of old Paris like some sci-fi oil refinery, and four years later the TGV came snaking out from under the glass roofs of 19th-century Parisian train sheds, projecting rail transport into a new, 300kph era. Every so often architecture in France, moves suddenly, shockingly forward even though planning and conservation laws can be very tough indeed.

"The Gaîté Lyrique took eight years to redevelop. "We had to think first of the sound," says Manuelle Gautrand, architect of the new-look theatre. "There are 120 apartments in the neighbourhood, so we had to build as quietly as possible and to make sure that even when the performances are exciting, the building is completely quiet. So, each of the performance spaces sits inside walls that sit inside walls; it's like a Russian doll."

It was possible for Gautrand to build inside the walls of the theatre, because while the facade has, in effect, remained unchanged since 1862, the interior had been largely gutted. After a long decline, the theatre was closed in 1987 to make way for Planète Magique, a kind of low-rent Disneyland. Where the glistering auditorium had once stood – in which Offenbach's celebrated operettas played, Victor Hugo celebrated his 70th birthday and Diaghilev's Ballet Russes danced – there rose a clumsy great rollercoaster. Opened in 1989, the theme park closed just two years later. This grand architectural dame then stood empty until its radical transformation began.

Delormas is the first to admit that the Gaîté Lyrique is likely to appeal mostly to an audience aged between 15 and 35: "For once", he says, "it will be a case of young people dragging their parents to a museum." The programme ranges from the latest experimental theatre by the Rimini Protokoll Collective – the young German directors best known for putting Das Kapital on the stage – to music from avant-garde artists such as Brian Eno to 3D digital performances.

You can also come here simply to play the latest computer games. There are studios for artists, equipped with cutting-edge computer technology, a library that stocks hundreds of arts magazines, an auditorium for screenings and talks and, of course, a cafe, where the 19th-century architecture has been offset by funky new furniture and flying saucer-style chandeliers. In full flow – when walls dissolve into videos, three-dimensional computer-generated beings come to life in break-out spaces and futuristic music fills this enormous venue – Paris seems very far off indeed.

The interior is something of a maze; sometimes seeming like an empty warehouse, at others a box of architectural tricks. The main performance space at the heart of the building – one of a number of theatres within the theatre – is lined outside with mirrored panels. Inside, this windowless black box can be transformed into a comfortable auditorium with rows of seats that pop up from under the floor. A second, smaller space features a floor built in steel sections; these can be raised and moved around to create different sets and seating structures.

Galleries and mezzanines around the main performance spaces allow visitors to look into what's happening and, as sound, light and images spill out of performances, these become auditoriums in their own right. Dotted throughout the largely windowless building – most of which is fitted out in a hard factory-like aesthetic, as well as splashes of bright pink, gold and yellow – are colourful mobile booths where you can watch a film, play a game, read or work. Gautrand calls these éclaireuses (girl guides); the idea is that they direct visitors through the ways of this unconventional theatre. "With the help of the éclaireuses," says Gautrand, "you can find a place of your own even in all this colour and noise."

I enjoyed Gaîté Lyrique. It took me into another world. And, yet, the shift between grand Paris and the latest whizzy stuff is as abrupt as a train crash. I couldn't help feeling a little like Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle, befuddled by technology, or Lemmy Caution, the private eye in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville who arrives in a nightmarish, ultra-modern city.

Alphaville was filmed in La Défense, an area many hate, but which Gautrand loves. The Marseilles-born architect, who set up her own practice in Paris in 1993, is designing a skyscraper to be situated here. A shimmering tower, dressed in what looks like a filigree fabric but is actually multi-angled sunscreens, it will, she says, "soften some of the harder aspects of Alphaville". It will also be in stark contrast to most of the straight up and down office towers that characterise this ageing "city of the future". The project is currently waiting for the final stage of planning permission before construction can begin. Gautrand also designed the eye-catching Citroën 42 showroom on the Champs-Elysées, whose steel and glass facade is made up of giant Citroën logos.

Life, colour, emotion

In Saint-Etienne, a city south-west of Lyon, Gautrand has designed a remarkable Cité des Affaires, steel and glass government offices that snake through the city, further enlivened by three bright yellow entrances which bring a shimmering gold light into the undercrofts and courtyards.

"It is, I suppose, scenographic", says Gautrand, borrowing the language of the theatre. "The building is a densely occupied development, so I have given it, I hope, some life, colour, emotion. Also, I felt that this part of Saint-Etienne was somehow sad; if there had to be new offices here, then they had to have something special, something you cannot quantify." Whatever that something is, the Cité des Affaires is a remarkable development. "As with the Gaîté Lyrique," says Gautrand, "the modernity here is definitely a contrast with the old world around it, but it can be as playful and as atmospheric as a 19th-century operetta, too. Why not?"

So in Saint-Etienne and Paris, visitors and government officials can work and play in an ultra-modern setting that seems theatrical to its very core. Only in Paris, this bright and boisterous new world has been housed behind the walls of a historic theatre, rather as if Jacques Tati was to walk by with an iPhone tucked away in his old raincoat pocket.

France's five most thrilling architects

Christian de Portzamparc

De Portzamparc is French architecture's most brilliant intellectual. An urban planner as well as an architect, in 1994 he became the first Frenchman to win the Pritzker prize. He's working on several huge projects, including the Cidade da Música in Rio.

Jean Nouvel

Nouvel is an international star, who often represents French architecture abroad. His experimental architecture is characterised by its use of metal and glass, creating buildings that glitter.

Dominique Perrault

In 1990, Perrault delivered his signature building, the industrial, totally transparent Berlier hotel in Paris. He also designed the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, draped in metallic mesh.

Patrick Bouchain

Though he builds little, Bouchain is a pioneer, famous for his low-cost transformation of industrial spaces into cultural zones.

Edouard François

François proves that sustainable architecture needn't constrain the imagination. His environmentally friendly buildings use trees, pot plants and other living materials in their construction.

Sophie Trelcat, architecture critic

Jonathan Glancey

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Light is right at the Brit Insurance Design awards 2011 – review

The Sheet — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:11:11 +0000

Once, we thought small was the future. But the standout objects in this year's awards have all gone the way of weightlessness

The shortlist for Britain's top design award has just gone on show at the Design Museum. What ingenious or world-changing object will capture the zeitgeist this year, I asked myself as I strolled through. Last year I was one of the judges and we awarded the prize to a folding plug by an unknown student. It felt like a good decision. No famous designers, no grand narratives. It was a vote for the small and perfectly formed, for the overlooked, for the everyday.

The shortlist feels weaker this year, and I'm not saying that because I'm not on the panel. For one thing, there's less of the social and political engagement that has become the hallmark of the design of the year award. Previous years have seen it go to a laptop for children in the developing world and the Obama "Hope" poster. And while those may have been crowd-pleasers, there were entries last year forcing bankers to confront the cost of food in Bangladesh or highlighting inflation in Zimbabwe. This show falls back on the idea of design as refined objects – as stuff. On those terms, the question is which ones stand out in this land of plenty.

Any prize that aims to collect the best across the varied fields of design – from architecture to furniture, from graphic design to transport – presents its judges with an unenviable task. It feels arbitrary pitting a Renault concept car against a new edition of Tristram Shandy. Neither does it make for the most coherent exhibition. What is inspiring about this annual snapshot approach, however, is the sense it offers of watching the design world evolve. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, our material environment gets better, smarter and lighter.

Especially lighter. In the 80s and 90s, everyone thought that the future was tiny. Led by the Japanese, we assumed our electronic appliances would miniaturise until we had cameras the size of wine gums. Today, we seem to be more preoccupied with lightness. New superlight materials such as carbon fibre – of which the exhibition's delicate display system is made – allow designers to achieve seemingly impossible feats. As a material property, lightness is not just elegant, it's more sustainable. The show features no category for something called "sustainability" – a good thing because, as I wrote recently, this should be a prerequisite of all design, not an add-on label. It was certainly the more mercurial ones to which I was drawn. And so if this year's judges find themselves furrowing their brows about the task ahead, perhaps they should simply choose the lightest.

But which will the judges really go for? Let's start with the heaviest of the disciplines – architecture. The judges may quickly find themselves down to two candidates: Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and Thomas Heatherwick's wildly popular UK Pavilion from last year's Shanghai Expo. There is no social imperative here. Both are frivolous pieces of national branding, and yet both have the capacity to leave the viewer awestruck. I'm certain the judges will opt for Heatherwick to top this category, as this is not the moment to be celebrating a boom-and-bust white elephant like the Burj. However, a less orthodox and virtually weightless choice would be a series of experimental structures by the Croatian-Austrian collective Numen/For Use, which look like a silken cocoon or cobweb. You can imagine them as sci-fi architectural parasites strung buoyantly between the skyscrapers of a Miss Haversham city, its rigid glass and steel gradually returning to the chaos of nature. Of course, one hopes that it would be made of something a bit more sophisticated than sticky tape.

How about the furniture category? Will the judges be seduced by an office chair inspired by a suspension bridge, designed by the ubiquitous Yves Béhar, or a beautifully turned wooden chair by Industrial Facility? I found myself captivated, again, by the light choice – a featherweight stool by recent Royal College of Art graduate Seongyong Lee. Lee created an entirely new material by laminating wood veneer to produce a lighter, stronger and much more beautiful version of cardboard. Picking it up, it's as though the stool is full of helium. It's not just that he's created a perfect archetypal object, but a material that feels almost immaterial, and that can be used to make anything from tables to pavilions.

The only object in the exhibition that stands out as a potential overall winner is in the product design category: the iPad. So successful has this game-changing piece of technology been that it should have its own category – indeed it pretty much does, since most of the entries in the interactive design section are apps for the iPad, displayed on iPads. But it's possible that the judges will avoid the obvious, popular, zeitgeisty choice and stick it to Apple – especially since one of the judges confessed, to me, "I don't like the internet". I rather liked Ingo Maurer's Flying Future hanging light, a diaphanous membrane inserted with organic LEDs (OLEDs). So energy efficient that they last almost indefinitely, these films of organic semiconductor are the light source of the future. They hold the potential for light to be treated as a material in itself, like cloth, draped as luminous surfaces.

With the relentless march of digital technology, the graphic design section of the show seems to be retreating into a world of nostalgia. It is wonderful to see the beauty of printed books reasserted, though I wondered why so many of those here are new editions of 18th- and 19th-century novels. Ironically, the work that jumps out here does so because it's miniscule (and, yes, light): Irma Boom's Boom. The most respected book designer in the world has produced a 704-page catalogue raisonné of her work, but it's just two inches high. One doesn't see that kind of modesty often. Or perhaps it's not modesty at all, but mystical devotion to her craft. The book is reminiscent of one of those medieval miniature Qur'ans written with a horse's hair.

Of all the disciplines, lightness is most a virtue when it comes to transport. For all the talk of electric cars and high-speed rail, we are realising now that only by reducing the weight of our modes of transport so that they consume less energy can we make them more sustainable. Here, there's another clear winner: an aluminium bicycle by Dutch brand Vanmoof. I'll take it any day over the YikeBike, an electric penny-farthing that could have been designed by HR Giger and appears, like some Sinclair C5 of bikes, to be dead on arrival.

The fashion category is anyone's guess. There's a reason why the Design Museum calls on an international panel of experts to nominate all the entries, and that's because design is a bewilderingly broad field and no one's an expert on all of it. As a show, it's hit and miss and there may be no agenda, but I recommend you go and see it. There's bound to be something there that will surprise you.

Justin McGuirk

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