Polly Pocket: Plastic toys which open up, swivel and fold to reveal incredibly intricate, pastel pink and blue landscapes. They have the kind of beauty of Faberge eggs combined with the liberating democrasy of cheapness. If only all design could be so ingenously utopian!

The Crown Jewels: Mysterious, ancient, symbolic and very shiny. Dense with obscure meaning, they show design that is far beyond funtion: swords not for cutting peoples heads off, but representing ideas. And of course that is what design is really about. Functionalism is a refuge for designers who don’t understand either themselves or the world that surrounds them.

Tarmac: Invented by accident when a barrel of tar fell of the back of a wagon and was mopped up with ash. Tarmac is practical, mendable, and extendable in that reflects a world where everything breaks, is in the wrong place, and is the wrong size. But it also does other things too: it makes a kind of abstracted ground, like a new crust to the earth. Formed out of the left overs after refining crude oil, there is something cyclic about stuff that was once on the surface being sucked out of the ground and reapplied. The Situationists said that beneath the pavement was the beach. Reality is much more exotic.

Silk Cut Packaging:
In responce to the health warning that fag packets now carry, Silk Cut reworked their package design. The warning is printed on the lower portion of the packet. The size of the warning meant that the logo couldnt fit where it used to go. The proportions of the box left nowhere to go but up. Which leaves the logo sliced in two by the flip top lid. Right in the heart of the badge, a gaping hole opens up. Its dark and deviant, a kind of self mutilation, like Ritchie Manic carving 4 REAL into his arm.

This shift of the logo is one of the neatest, most beautiful, subtle and troubling pieces of 3D design. Its packaging design as cynically ruthless as Damien Hirsts chainsaw, and as clever and nimble as the surgeons scalpel which will one day slice open my chest open in an attempt to save my life.

Urbanists, on the other hand are ignorant useless fools who only ever make things worse. Urban planners are as ineffectual as Alan Titchmarsh pruning the Amazonian rain forest with a pair of secateurs at controling the wild uninhibited spirit which propels cities. But that doesnt stop them producing policy documents, reports, and zoning diagrams that must be an attempt to bore cities into submission.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Chuck Palahniuks ‘Fugitives and Refugees, A Walk in Portland, Oregon’ shows an alternative way to think about urbanism. The book starts with a map like the ‘Hobbit’ or ‘Wind in the Willows’. And just like these fantasy books, there are a series of adventures that take place across the landscape described in the map. Palahniuks stories are at least as strange as talking moles, frogs who drive, or wizards and trolls, but they happen to be real. It’s a map which says “Here be monsters” pointing straight at Safeways.

It is presented like a guide book, divided into sections such as ‘Eating out’ and ‘Souvenirs’. But it skews off into strangeness: ‘How to Knock of a Piece in Portland’, ‘Where to Rub Elbows with the Dead’. Palahniuks guide starts with Portlands unusual and alternative side, slides into the weird and ends up downright degenerate.

There is an absurdity in writing tourist guides to places tourists would never visit. And the postcards which Palahniuk divides the book with are equally perverse. These give snapshots of various periods of his life in Portland: Flats full of mannequin parts, tossing a jar with his teenage tonsils into scrubland, doing acid and watching lazer shows, appearing in obscure pop promos. These bits tell you about the imprint he has left on Portland. They are postcards written in the place he lives, as though his everyday life is some kind of holiday. Maybe that's part of the point: what if you could treat your own town as though you were a tourist? What if you could bring an eye for a Kodak moment to your weekly trip to the supermarket? What if the school run became an exciting adventure?

The book mythologises the everyday. It shows that you can look at the stuff that surrounds you and recognise a folk vernacular that is full of humanity. It’s part of the idea that a city is a collection of stories rather than masonry, concrete, steel or glass: All the things that don’t appear on urban masterplans. Urban designers are far to busy hatching in zones on a plan where houses are smaller than sim cards to worry about these kinds of things. How can shading and colouring in begin to explore the myriad experiences that make up city life!

If you are trying to describe a city, maps might not be only way. Maps show geography, but exclude all kinds of other information. ‘Fugitives and Refugees’ is a different kind of urban report. It shows up the life of a place through stories and personalities that would usually slip under the radar of urban planners - hobbies, interests, groups that evade history. Things like the history of drag shows, eviction courts, local recipes, junk shops, sex clubs.

Ask an architect to design a city, and they will start by puzzling over new ways of putting two paving slabs together. Architects cling to solid, silent, tedious materiality out of a terrible fear of the dirty, messy, vocal and human vitality that cities are really about.

Fugitives and Refugees’ makes me wonder about a the potential of Gonzo Urbanism. What would happen if you sacked the specialists and hired people who are in it up to their necks? Would it really be any worse if the ghost hunters, drag queens and perverts whose lives fill up cities were in charge?

First Published in Modern Painters

The song seems to slow down. I feel like i’m falling into it, feeling the nuances of the production. Neon signs give way to sodium lit half-timbered suburbia, gradually, it dawns on me: the key to the song is one precise detail. There is something about Collins’ drum sound ...

A mixture of the primitive percussive hit and something incredibly refined. As though studio technology had allowed Collins to freeze a single beat, zoom into it, navigate the peaks and troughs like a diver over the sea bed. Perfecting the intricate texture of the sound: polishing, burnishing, waxing, filling and sanding. Switching scales back to view the drum beat as an isolated object floating in space, spinning it around, feeling its texture. Whap, Whump. This is a drum beat that has been machined into sonic perfection. If you could pick it up it would feel cold like steel.

Once Collins had prototyped and perfected one of these beats, he could roll them off the production line like munitions, deploying them in groups like gun batteries.

Wham! It lands a blow to my temple. Whump! A dig deep into my stomach. Each thump the desolation of a man whacked by Fate. Energy expelled like Kubricks ape smashing a skull with a femur.

Imagine the pain Collins must have felt in order to manufacture this drum sound. Its an anger distilled. Formed as an exact sonic replica of his inner torture outside his flesh.

I can feel each synapse firing in slow motion. Engulfed by this one moment, this one sound slows till it sounds like the fabric of the universe splitting.

I stumble from the cab, bruised and battered by this AOR journey. How is it possible that such lightweight entertainment can have such a profound effect? Perhaps its because pop music is densely packed with content. Even Phil Collins.

A long time ago music, painting, sculpture and architecture shared the same subject matters: ‘Religion’ and ‘How Great the King Is’. Art managed to find secular and republican subjects. But in the drift towards secular society, architecture struggled. It became bogged down in stodgy Victorian and Beaux Art architecture. Modernist rejection of all this was understandable. Modernist abstraction was blank and white like new stationary at the start of a new term: full of optimistic possibility. But it’s drive towards abstraction purged everything - not just the boring, useless civicness it was rebelling against, but also the bright vitality of the vernacular.

Alongside the high culture of Church and Court was vulgar folk culture: vernacular, bawdy, comic, everyday, ordinary. In art and music - unlike architecture, these traditions continued. Think of all those songs about love: 96 trillion teenage tears. Pop musics obsession with romantic love is high religious devotion, multiplied by folky lust.

Pop music uses the vernacular to create radical, progressive and provocative work, AS WELL AS sweet, corny and popular. Think of these moments: Electricity zapping the Blues. Beautiful white Elvis playing black folk music. The Beatles confusing R’n'B with Irish folk. In the Black Ark in Jamaica, Lee Perry combines African folk with cosmic echoing infinity. In London art schools, vectors of rock and roll intersected with radical French art theory. Morrissey paired Oscar Wilde with nostalgic rock and roll.

This strange potion of folk, high technology, distribution and consumption spans the globe like atomised perfume. There was a moment when it was impossible to escape Chers vocoded “I believe something inside me ...” echoing down Siberian mine shafts, whispering across the antarctic wasteland. Pop teeters on the brink between a unique moment in a specific place and global hegemony.

Architects relationship to the vernacular is to patronise it as traditional, kitsch, as the lowest common denominator. Maybe they fear its wild and uninhibited nature, maybe they are wary of its ruthless directness. Certainly it is a different tradition of building. It obeys different laws to high architecture. This makes it difficult to pin down: it absorbs different aesthetics, it mutates, it shifts its subject matter.

The Pop Vernacular in architecture is everything you would never see inside a design magazine. Classified under terms like Repro, Neo, or Knock Off. Without the need for authenticity, its free to reinvent itself.

The Pop Vernacular is a both a graveyard for the old and the superseded and the spawning ground of unexpected futures. A cornucopia of architectural salvage. The Pop Vernacular draws on all of time and space. And despite its familiarity, it glows with optimism and freshness. Far from the end of history, it is the well spring of the imminent future.

Washed up on the shores of this electric ocean: rustic bird boxes, ornate plastic plant pots, carriage lamps, gnomes, reconstituted stone statues, sliced pieces of log with house numbers branded into the surface. Regency desks with LCD vanity mirrors, hard drives concealed within drawers and keyboards tucked underneath. Horse brasses. Fibre optic Indian Restaurants. Plastic coated Chinese take aways. Medieval garage doors.

To try get hold of it and examine the way it operates, let us take a specific example:

The Pop Vernacular is an ever expanding cornucopia of stuff.
Half Timbering was a vernacular construction technique that evolved in Germanic Saxony. It came to Britain with the Saxons in the 5th century BC as a mercenary army for the failing Roman occupation. By the 6th century the Saxons and other Germanic tribes controlled most of the lowlands and were expanding to the north and west.

Half Timbering is already cutting loose from being a vernacular building technology, and heading towards a role as a cultural symbol. Removed geographically from its origins but related to a sense of identity.

Celtic tradition mixes with Saxon culture. Forests had been home to the Celtic Druids. Tree spirits possessed magical properties. The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” is a meditation on the crucifixion of Christ. In it, the tree speaks: “I was cut down, roots on end .... I was raised up, as a rood ... I was wet with blood”. This personification of material suggests symbolism and identity are deep within the technology of building.

History continues ...

The last Saxon King, Harold faced the Norman invasion. At Hastings, William defeated Harold. He was crowned in London on Christmas Day 1066.

England was now ruled by a French speaking king. The Norman Lords seized the assets of the Saxons. Norman architecture begins its transformation of England with the Tower of London, the first of a network of castle-strongholds. 21 years later, 100 had been built.

Saxon identity remains distinct through this era. Folk heroes like Robin Hood emerge as the scourge of Norman aristocrats. Like Robin Hood, the timber Saxon architecture was light, quick, and friendly in contrast to the cold heavy mass of the stone military State Norman buildings. Oppressed Saxon culture gains mythology and so do its buildings. Half Timbering is the architecture of the people: the tavern and the home.

Time passes. Eventually, Henry Tudor seizes the throne.

The Tudors forged a powerful new identity for England. Mythologised as one of the glorious eras of British history. Exploration, colonisation, victory in war, and growing world importance. Splitting from the Roman church, Shakespeare and Bacon, Drake and Raleigh. The rise of British sea power brought security, riches and glory.

Half Timbered architecture became known as Tudor. It becomes more extravagant and decorative, its graphic intensifying. Built with the very same skills which are providing England with her burgeoning sea power, these buildings celebrate the importance and skill of timber craftsmanship. Half Timbering is imbued with military technology. The relationship between military might and architectural statement is pretty clear through Tudorbethan architecture.

Sir Walter Scotts novel ‘Ivanhoe’, published in 1791 was an embellishment of the Robin Hood story big on Saxon/Norman fighting. It leads to a fashion of reviving English vernaculars, re-mythologising stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood. This historicism is later theorised by Pugin and Ruskin, and bleeds into the Arts and Crafts movement. Arising in response to the Industrial Revolution, its ambition was to revive craftsmanship in the age of the machine. Politically, it was nascent socialism with anarchist tendencies.

Half Timbering is revived as an overtly historical style. It is used because it connects with cultural myths supporting their political position. Just like the appeal of Robin Hood to the Arts and Crafts movement: a band of men living in the forest away from civilisation, robbing of the rich to give to the poor, in opposition to the control of the state and on the side of the people. Just like William Morris’ rural company.

Half Timbering is now used as a badge of allegiance - a decorative political statement.

Arts and Crafts drifts from its Christian Socialist origins into mainstream fashion. It becomes a decorative symbol of status not politics. The country houses designed by Lutyens feature Half Timbering as part of their picturesque montaging of historical styles.

These large, Tudorbethan, bespoke homes for the wealthy became the template for the inter-war building boom. Volume building interprets the pre-war, expensive Arts and Crafts villas. Building quick and cheap, coupled with a shortage of skilled labour leads to a shift in Half Timbering from structure to appliqué. Thin timber panels fixed to the exterior of the buildings which make patterns not limited by the demands of holding buildings up.

These houses represented a way of life. These miniaturised manor houses represented safe European homes after the mechanised horror of the 1st World War. Half Timbering still carries the progressive sentiment of Ebeneezer Howards Garden Cities. A mixture of optimism and fear, built on a budget. These metroland homes were a mass market version of pre-war progressive and bohemian lifestyle.

Sometime around now, Mock Tudor becomes exported around the world. In part through Englands still large Empire, but also through the pages of magazines like Country Life. Movie stars build Half Timbered homes that lining Beverly Hills streets. Frank Lloyd Wright designs icing coloured Half Timbering with giant sized roofs in Chicagos Oak Park.

By now any vestige of a traditional notion half timbering as a vernacular building technique has been cast off. Liberated, globalised through media, it becomes an international style. Its connection is no longer with a tribe like the Saxons, a Royal Dynasty like the Tudors, a country, or an ideology.

In the same way, the stories that were once part of Half Timberings myth are remade: Douglas Fairbanks a black and white and silent Robin Hood, Errol Flynn a Technicolor outlaw. Later, Disney cast a cartoon fox Robin Hood. Kevin Costner plays a sullen PC romantic version and Sherwood Forest is stalked by denim clad, fender strummin’ minstrel Brian Adams. The folk story has less to do with Norman England and everything to do with Hollywood sensibilities. Like clouds of radioactive fallout, folk stories reach the jet stream and instantly envelop the globe.

Half Timbering continues as a means of construction, but it also gains layers of meaning throughout the centuries. At each iteration it continues the story. Tacked onto the outside of Moes Bar in the Simpsons, painted pink in suburban London like a Jamie Ried collage, the framing of a Morris Traveller, an option offered by developers in Chinese gated communities.

Half Timbering is like light from a distant star: incredibly old yet as it falls on our retina bright and new. Half Timbering has been made repeatedly new through its different incarnations. Bristling with meanings which continue to peel away from geographic place, race and circumstance.

Phil Collins drum sound was created accidentally when the talkback mikes in the studio at were left on. They picked up the signal of the other mikes which had a reverse compression effect. The recording was not just the sound of the drum, but the sound of the drum in a room. The vernacular thump of drumskin is distorted through high spec technology. The result is a sound which is both familiar and unique, human and superhuman. The sound recalls both ancient tribal drums and the sonic boom of a supersonic jet.

Architects pursuit of the original, new, and different has ironically narrowed the possibilities of content within architecture because of its fascination with its own canon. Embracing cultures outside of its own offers myriad possibilities. Here is the artist Jeremy Deller: "Warhol said that pop art was about liking things, whereas for me Folk art is about loving things." And love, warmth and humanity are unlikely sensations for modern architects to be interested in.

First Published in Archis

How many of those marriages ended without a lemon ever being squeezed? More likely the Juicy Salif was brandished like a medieval weapon: its trident legs spiked through a skull, puncturing an eyeball, blood dripping from its chromed body.

The Jucy Salifs French flair and philosophical approach is the opposite of English design pragmatism. Fearing ideas, the English retreat into a simplistic shell of style (that's flair without the good bits) and function (that's use without the complicated bits).

Don’t tell James Dyson, but I don’t need things to work any better. After all, I’ll only lose bits, break parts and eventually give up on it. His narrow design utopia is populated by people obsessing about vacuum cleaner performance - like a car bores at the golf club only more boring. The problems in my life are not the revs/minute of my washing machine. Rather, I have a Juicy Salif shaped hole where my soul should be. This existential lack is the thing that binds us all (except perhaps for Mick Hucknall and Michael Howard). Its the thing that makes us human. And consumer design - more than art or poetry - speaks directly to our soul.

Design gives us leaps of joy and answers our unfulfilled wishes. Design functions like a medieval religious relic which also sucks up household dust.

In the 90s, lifestyle programmes also began to address that feeling within us. They showed that rooms that could be nicer, gardens prettier, food tastier. Their incredible popularity threw up semi-amateur specialists: Lawrence, Jamie, Nigella, Linda, Charlie: all doing things that we do but better, quicker and more happily.

Once TV became lifestyle saturated, it has burst out of the screen into other media. First books, then cans of paint, sofas, restaurants ... And now products for your kitchen. Jamie, Nigella and Anthony Worral Thompson currently have ranges of cookware.
At the heart of these products is an idea of personality. The personality of objects that's so important for designerly appeal is here substituted for the personality of an individual. You can feel, or at least imagine a sensation of Jamieness or an aura of Nigellerliness through them. A portrait of the artist as a shiny saucepan.

Nigellas products are beautifully packaged. Their creamy coloured boxes make you feel like you are opening your wedding presents. A crest featuring a cupcake and a flowery N hints both at status and relaxation. The products have great textures, ceramics glazed on the inside and rough on the outside, chopping boards immaculate recatangles of walnut with inset stainless steel trays. Nigellas mixing bowls have an egglike profile, a blunt spout that is great for pouring. Lined up on the draining board though they take on another characteristic. Like ceramic tits - Nigellas ample chest duplicated at various scales. And pouring fourth from these mammeries is the milk of the domestic goddess: cake mix, chocolate sauce, creamy custards.

Jamies saucepans for Tefal have a professional feel, a kind of solid clangyness and balanced weight that makes you want to shake those frying onions Jamie style. The effect is subte prensence of the personality. More obviosuly, Jamies presence is hard to ignore with his autograph glinting on every handle. The obvious endorsement undermines their professional feel. It makes you look at them slightly differently. Suddenly, the scale seems slightly too small - perhaps a function of the inteded market of Lads First Saucepan.
Anthony Worral Thompson has a range of really odd mechanical products. Styled like high end hairdriers, bulbous and chromed. Of the three, they seem the least personality related. A toasted sandwich maker? And this from the guy who is a real chef.

Many of us learnt a lot about being a consumer through Steve Davis snooker cues and Paul Daniel's magic sets. With childhoods surrounded by Roland Rat mouse traps, He Man oven gloves, Star Treck power tools, Nicholas Witchal lawnmowers, Annika Rice defibrillators, and Terry Wogan rocket launchers, it’s no wonder that once we grew up we could only understand how to by things through nebulous connections to celebrities. Jamie, Nigella and Antony WTs products are grown up versions of an impulse we learnt in childhood.

First Published in Icon

Lilliput Lane make miniature models of vernacular buildings. The company was established in 1992 by David Tate, and now produce thousands of miniatures depicting buildings from the British Isles and more recently from other northern European regions and the anglo Saxon Diaspora. Lilliput quickly became the market leader in the miniature vernacular building field with collectors all over the world, Queens Award for exports and industry trophies. The company was bought by Enesco, a world-wide giftware conglomerate.

Lilliput Lane is based at Skirsgill, Cumbria, junction 26 of the M6 -  'gateway to the Lake District'. On the far side of the car park is the visitors centre. The visitors centre is called Honeysuckle Cottage. It is an almost faithful replica of a 17th century cottage in Hampshire, UK. Honeysuckle Cottage was one of the first miniatures produced by Lilliput Lane. There have subsequently there have been about 9 different versions produced at varying sizes (and prices). 

The visitors centre is an exercise in the vernacular. No camping around for its audience, this is a building that uses authentic materials and construction methods. It is the antithesis of a themed thing. Its raison dâetre is not effect or experience, but rather, document. And its dryness makes its sigh of nostalgia eloquent and complex. The insistance on using real oak beams and peg construction, its compromises in the face of building codes, the battle with the planning officer over the appropriateness of thatch, its uncomfortable neighbours the car park and dual carrigeway noise bund, its programme of shop, museum, store room and board room. In its fabric we see the struggle of making the history present.  The house is an expression of desire for the past ? not just as image, but really, really. 

These construction methods, once driven by necessity, available technology, ecology and economy are now used as a kind of hoodoo construction. Made physical like a voodoo doll of honesty and truth. Suprisingly at Lilliput Lane where one expects a crucible of kitch, the ever po faces of Middle England, Prince Charles and Modernists find themselves nodding in agreement: the enemy of civilised architecture resides in theming, with its associations of dishonesty and commercialism. 

Lilliput Lane is industrialized production, despite the claims on its packaging to be handcrafted. The original modeling is done by hand and the rest of the process involves peoples hands. Nevertheless, there is a fine line between craftsmanship and piecework. It is a product and needs to be packed up and shipped off to duty free concessions and subsequently, mantelpieces around the world.

Since Le Corbusier published a picture of a Citroen juxtaposed against the Parthenon, architects have longed for a more fruitful relationship between buildings and mass production.The allure of mass production has seemed to them inevitable and impending. Though every time an architect talks about an industrialized process or spin off of car, airplane, or ship construction, they have just completed a highly crafted haute couture building (think of Future Systems Media Centre at Lords). And because the idea is so entrenched in modernist myth it almost seems plausible. Architects aspire to mass production. Lilliput Lane aspires to be hand crafted. There is nothing architects would like more than to really be a part of the modern world and there is nothing Lilliput Lane would like more than for us not to have to be. Lilliput Lane is mass produced because its popular, high architecture isn't because its not.

Lilliput Lane is driven by the personality of David Tate. His love, regard and knowledge of British vernacular heritage has been the inspiration for the company. David Tate gives us an insight into Lilliputs R&D: he can spot vernacular architecture while really pulling the Gâs in his XJ6. And perhaps Lilliputs miniature world is akin to the rural viewed as a motion blur from the white leather lined turbo powered sat nav interior of a performance sports car. A relationship between nature and the city Peter Smithson names 'ruburb'.

Tates interest in the historical vernacular has echoes of the Pre-Raphelite/Arts and Crafts groupings, as does the organization of the company - the association of craftsmen like Ruskins 'Guild of St George' or William Morris' company. Ruskins childhood love of the Lake District drew him to established a kind of education centre of excellence at Brantwood on Coniston Water. Both these characters were part of a Victorian movement that acknowledged the problems of industrialization and mass production. Both were concerned with the impact of industrialization upon society, cities and the soul. 

Ruskin recognised and articulated the growing popularity of the picturesque in the 18th and 19th centuries as a reaction to industrialisation - and in particular the social and moral effects of industrialisation. He argued that the popular love of the picturesque indicates a vague desire for pastoral simplicities, and a vague dissatisfaction with contemporary life. He proposed that dissatisfaction is the natural condition of modern man in the modern cityscape and that the picturesque fills a vacuum we feel is forming within us as our morality shrinks: picturesque is about loss. The tragic narrative of the picturesque is told through the  relationship of figure to building to landscape.

Ruskins social and moral consciousness pricked the sentimentality of the picturesque, like having John Lennon perched on one shoulder and Paul McCartney on the other. Better, a 'Day in the Life' "noble form", of which Turner was his favourite example, produced by "an expression of suffering, of poverty, or decay, nobly endured by unpretending strength of heart ... the picturesqueness is in the unconscious suffering". Where the moral conscience of the artists empathises with the social meaning of the scene. Worse, an 'oble de oble da'-esq "surface-picturesque", which concerned itself with texture at the expense of emotion. Or, as John Lydon put it: "a cheap holiday in other peoples misery". Both Ruskin and Lydon recognise the political implications of the picturesque. 

While the Victorian impulse was to improve the future through social reform (using design as a media to materialise the future in the present). In an era of purpose and possibility Victorian reformers such as Morris or Ebeneezer Howard looked to create and design the society of tomorrow - to build a New Jerusalem as William Blake described. Having lived through ideologies whose roots lie in Victorian philosophy: Modernism, Socialism and Communism and still experiencing that Ruskin-esq Modern Life Is Rubbish feeling. Lilliput Lane suggests an equally creative but retro-active impulse to improve the past.  Perhaps this is a more effective way of altering our present condition: to upgrade our heritage.

Of course, the reality of Ruskins rural life is different from ours. As the Lake District exemplifies a different relationship with nature. Living standards have improved: the welfare state, transport, communication, democracy, digital TV.  Our misery is looks different. And so is our relationship to nature, especially what we do with it. Indeed, if Ruskin had still been around at Brantwood on Jan 4th 1967, his rural idyll would have been momentarily shattered by a thoroughly modern tragedy as Donald Campbells speedboat flipped while attempting a World Water Speed Record on Coniston Water. Incidently, there is a series of meaningless coincidences between Ruskin, Campbell and Lilliput Lnae: a memorial to Donald Campbell was built by a local man, John Usher, whose hobby was building miniture houses. On his death, he bequethed his home-made miniture villages to Coniston. And its now displayed at the Ruskin Museum.

EM Forster described Surrey as a 'landscape of amenity'. In these terms the Lake District is a fully serviced wilderness. There's a Coke machine at the top of the Kirkstone pass to refresh ramblers who think as far as nature goes, this is it. In the Lake District there is nothing unusual in glimpsing an ex-military amphibious vehicle behind a dry stone wall carrying city-slicker outward bounders. 

The technologies of English pleasure are scattered across the sweeping epic  hills and lake shores. Pressurised calor gas forced through a nozzle frying up a Full English, piping hot sugary tea held between twin stainless steel walls of a vacuum flask, breathable fabrics, deckchairs and caravans. A landscape populated by a thousand holidaying Reyner Banhams. The only real nature is the geographical mass of the hills casting an electromagnetic shadow across the car radio reception and mobile phone conversations.

Lilliput models are concerned with surface -  inside, solid and mysterious like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, the outside fragile and lovely like a donut decorated with hundred and thousands. The surface is intricately carved with narrative modelling. A world away from the abstraction of modernist architecture which regards space, not surface as its medium. High architecture attempts to produce meaning through the abstract manipulation of space. Though taste is the way we consume architecture. Taste sits on the surface, communicating social and political meanings. It connects architecture with a wider cultural sphere in ways which are accessible beyond the academy and the profession. Taste engages contentious issues of quality and value, matters of subjective deliberation, raising the awkward issue of class.

In Swifts 'Gullivers Travels' Lemuel Gulliver finds himself washed up on the shores of a succession of islands. And on each of these islands are autonomous worlds and societies. First miniture, then giant sized, and then just plain strange. The Lilliput Lane miniatures too have something island-y about them, rising up like a surreal atoll from their collectors polished mahogany veneered display case oceans. Perhaps this is a vision of a drowned world, preserving only the worthy vernacular heritage and washing everything else away like a architectural version of the deluvian myth. Islands connotatation of identity, utopia, difference.

When Lemuel Guliver finds himself in a land of giants, he lives at a farmers house. The farmer begins to show this tiny man as a kind of freak .. charging for views. Lemuel becomes sick and weak as his freakish size is exploited. 

To get an idea about what scale can do, lets look at something else. The Moving Wall is a 60 percent scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Three of these Moving Walls now travel the USA from April to November, spending about a week at each site.  Here, scale is a practical consideration - shrinking means its portable. But it does something else too. It makes us feel further away than we are by mimicking foreshortening, like blurred focus in a photograph. So our experience contradicts our physical relationship to the object, rendering our perception a kind of out of body moment: we are unworldly, as though we were looking at the war memorial through the ghostly eyes of a hovering spirit. 

The title of this piece is cribbed from Richard Hamiltons 1956 collage where a domestic scene is built up using pictures of products cut out of magazines. Suburban architecture works like that, except that its raw material is the past. Its historical pop. The suburban template is like a best-of compilation of vernacular-isms, full of feel good golden oldie romantic jams. A collection of picturesque killer hooks. It is thousands of years of Anglo-Saxon mythology with a car porch: an Anglo-Saxon Blues. What Lutchens and Webb compiled shot us through our sentimental hearts as cynically as any love song. And like a great love song its subject matter is loss. The suburbs bleed across the land to heal our pain. Architects only hurt themselves when they mock mock-Tudor.

What David Tate and Lilliput Lane uniqueness is the a powerful combination of extreme visual obsession and over reaching desire for love. In Ruskins words: " .....the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. .....To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, - all in one." Its also what makes it culture, not art. And if architects hope to engage with anything outside the pages of the Architectural Review, they need to start loving more.
 

Postscript:

Perhaps the most convoluted Lillput miniture is part of the Disney range. The miniature of 'Its a Small World' of which there are already 4 full size versions in California, Florida, Disneyland Paris and Tokyo. The ride takes us on a boat trip around a miniaturised anamatronic world. The boat slips along a winding stream like an underground cavern past Ireland, where robot Leprechauns play harps drunkenly, past a place that is Africa-ish where natives in grass skirts thump drums wearing bones through their noses. The denouement of the ride occurs as the boat drifts under an arch into a open plan glimmering scene where races and religions join together in a chorus of the Small World theme song swathed in white, spinning and dancing bathed in a glittering white light. This can only be a Small Small Afterlife. While the geographic scene setting has up to this point been unmistakably  precise drawing upon popular icons of national characteristics. Here we are in an unnamed place, beyond our definition or knowledge of the world. Disneys message seems to say: only in death do we escape racial, national, or religious sterotype. Through death we reach the promised land. I vote for the Blake/Tate vision: to build our New Jerusalem on earth, however small it may be.

First Published in 'Loudpaper'

Next, the camera pans down to a mini rock festival that's getting underway amongst the picturesque lawns of the Queens back garden. There's Brian Wilson rippling his fingers over the keyboard in a spasms of harmony, Elton John beamed live from the state rooms, Ray Davis in a Union Jack jacket. All You Need Is Love as the new national anthem - Sir Pauls double thumbs up a new salute,  Ozzie Ozbourne and the Queen. 50 years of monarchic memory lane played out through soundtracks and tableauxs.

The massed gadgets of Elizabeth Regina - from crown, orb, sceptre and thrown to golden coach, shiny trumpets, black mirror polished Bentleys, to scaffold stands, lighting rigs, projectors, trucks with huge ketchup bottles pouring all over giant sized eggs and chips like lumber. TV gantries, amp stacks, wires, Concorde, Hells Angels and Horseguards: technology and pageantry in synchronous salute. Its monarchy as fun, a pop post-Diana peoples monarchy in a reign of pleasure - until the next royal scandal of course.

As the roar of saluting supersonic jet rattles the crystal chandeliers hanging in the Palace, its all suddenly popping up and plugging in and zooming out Archigram.

Perhaps thatâs just as it should be, because the years other golden celebration is another solid gold hit of the sixties. Its a ... Its a ... Its ...Archigrams RIBA medal celebration!. And tonight, its the reunion show, the come back gig:  The surviving members live on stage. And the dead ones on tape, just like that time splicing Beatles reunion from beyond the grave which was number one at Christmas a few years ago.

To get us in the mood a triple screened super sixties scene setting soundtracked slideshow. A rock and roll years montage:  "One pill makes you smaller" - Thunderbirds, Polo players, Blue Meanies,"And one pill makes you tall" - Donald Duck, Kings Road, Mini Mokes, "but the pills that mother gives you don't do anything at all" Biba, Mary Quant, Martin Luther King frothed up with Expresso Bongo boho jazz, JFK, XL5, groovy chicks, pickin' up good vibrations, Arsenal doing the double, "and its high ho silver lining everywhere you go, oh baby!"

The music fades out and the screens turn to red and green and Peter Cook steps up to the stage. He preaches Peters gospel - the one that which says that Archigram was a reaction to the grey, boring architecture of 1950s Britain. A kick against the status quo. Itâs a popular and inspirational gospel. Its the one which says, as it does the RIBA medal citation and is mentioned three times in English tonight and once in French, that Archigram were the Beatles of architecture. If that's right, then I guess that makes the Independent Group Lonnie Donnigan, the skiffle pioneer whose 1950s appropriation of Black American folk music kick started the English beat group craze. 

Peters gospel though doesn't answer the question Iâve always wanted to ask. The question of what kind of kick, how hard, and where exactly it was aimed.  After all, it was a very particular kind of kick, different from the french left wing revolutionaries across the channel who very nearly brought down the apparatus of the state. Perhaps it might be answered by venturing further back in time.

With the exception of Ron Herron, Archigram were little boys in grey flannel shorts during the Second World War, the first truly gadgetized war. Only little boys, and maybe only English little boys could have loved the machines of war so sweetly. Technology, machines, and gadgets were good and innocent and liberating (in all senses of the word). Spitfires dog fighting in the sky above the Kentish landscape, tanks rolling across the Egyptian desert, D Day with the sea full of ships carrying machines and towing floating harbours across the channel. Men carrying packs, water bottles, tools and tents across the muddy fields of Northern France. Gadgets traversing the landscape to defend King and Country. Gizmos fighting for freedom and democracy.

All this was relayed back home by newsreels shown at the saturday morning cinema shows. And perhaps its these these scenes that are echoed in Archigrams helmet-as-architecture projects. The Suitaloon and the Cusicle, those wearable and inflatable pieces of architecture, might just be peaceful and civilian iterations of the Tommys and GIs of Archigrams fathers generation.

More gently on the Home Front, the landscape of towns was transformed through various government policies. Dig for Victory transformed parks into vegetable patches and farms.  Anderson air raid shelters were built in suburban back gardens. Unnecessary railway journeys were discouraged by promoting 'Holidays at Home' where festivals were organised, sand poured into public squares to make urban beaches complete with donkey rides. 

Urban programmes were altered from Edwardian civic to immediate pleasure or raw utility. in ways very different to traditional urban planning. Perhaps these ad hoc and temporary urban interventions are nascent versions of Archigrams urban Tune Ups - the cheerfully collaged reworkings of public space.

This odd combination of war and fun is whats being paraded infront of the Queen. Distanced by history, the heradry and pagentry of Englands military might becomes quaint. Prince Charles in braided and lapelled ceremonial Naval Uniform hardly looks like a trained killing machine. The Horse Guards with their shiny wimples and tassles and bright red uniforms, the ornate canons equally decorative but hardly threatening. Marching, parading, about-turning and saluting. Canons fired in St James Park as a ceremonial salute. 

These are images of pre-industrial warfare, when war was a gentlemanly affair with breaks for tea time, before the devastation of world wars or targeting of civillians (relativley speaking). Its all very twee and nostalgic and, of course brightly photogenic. But of course it is symbolic of something else, something that doesnt make us feel quite so warm inside. Its a very English way of displaying the power of the military industrial complex. Hidden away are the real weapons, the nuclear war heads, the chemical weapons, the commandos and paratroopers, the SAS. Not the prosaic display of raw military might of 1980s May Day Moscow. But a subtler display which cloaks mega tonnes of destruction in the charming veil of history. The cloaking of weapons of mass destruction is in other situations not quite as cute.

Peter Cook explains how he drew 'Instant City' in the spring of 1967, and how a few week s later he saw the photoraphs of Woodstock, commenting that his version looked better. It is a cute coincidence of course, one that plays to the groovy sixties myth. But it avoids a contemporary precendent thats not quite so hip - the instant cities of Korea and Vietnam. Which looked even beter. But were much worse. Never had so much metal moved so far so quickly intent on inflicting as much distruction. Temporary cities were assembled by the sheer accumilaition of gadgets. High technology juxtaposed with jungle. In Vietnam we can see a viable alternative version of Archigram, one that validates the practicality of Archigrams project. And perhaps because of its fully formed fulfillment of plug in architeture, we should be applauding an anoymous team of Pentagon visionarys whose radical approach to urbanism was so completly fulfilled.

Of course war and modern architecture were already well aquainted. The Futurists "glorified the love of danger and violence" and proclaimed war the "hygiene of the world". Reyner Banham, Archigrams great evangelist, places the Italian Futurists as the progenitors of Modernism in 'Theory and Design in the First Machine Age'. Archigrams Futurism is different. More cynical, more knowing, more full of promise, more attractive - a  Consumer Futurism.

In tonights presentations, made individually, there are two camps. While Ron Herron, Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton imagine giant mechanised buildings of fun, the dark side of Archigram, Webb, Greene and Chalk muse on the end of building. Both sides of what David Greene describes as a "dysfunctional male family" pursue a peculiar kind of English Futurism, that, like English Modernism is stranger and less obvious than its European counterpart.

This English tradition of modernism is different: non-violent, non-revolutionary. It is a tradition with its roots in the picturesque as championed by Ruskin, the arts and crafts of William Morris, Mackintosh, and Lutyens, and the town planning of Ebeneezer Howard. This kind of proto-modernism did not want to destroy the past, but rather reconcile the past with the industrial city. 

This traditions closest political ally is Christian Socialism. This movement was a response to Social Darwinism, an ideology of social determinism based on a sociological interpretation of Darwins theory of evolution. Christian Socialism countered this purist ideology with non-ideology. Darwins science had challenged Creationist biblical truth. In place of absolute truth Christian Socialism revealed a socially progressive religious movement. A movement that was concerned with upholding values of Christian love and belief in the redemption of the soul in the heart of the industrial city. Christian Socialism exemplifies the strength of accepting contradictory world views. It offers an optimistic alternative to the dead end of ideology. Its strength is in its recognition of its own flaws. Archigrams lack of coherence is also a kind of strength. In its refusal to exclude and its willingness to include, perhaps archigram might be described as a Secular Christian Capitalist Socialism, whose gospel is a groovy kind of love.

While Futurism developed in close alliance with Fascism, English Modernism was far more liberal. It is perhaps no coincidence that the anthem of the British Labour movement (with its roots in Christian Socialism) is a William Blake poem called ÎJerusalemâ. For Blake, the New Jerusalem was a mystical/spiritual/religious vision. For the Labour movement the New Jerusalem was to be workers rights and welfare provision. The lyrics look to the future by invoking the past - and a very strange past involving the legend of  a teenage Jesusâ living near a tin mine in the west of England owned by his uncle Joseph of Aramethea. 

Many of the progressive movements of English culture around this time attempt this escape from the present to a better future by way of the past. Unlike the tabula rasa of Continental Modernism, where the future was constructed through destruction, English modernism was more forgiving, practical, cuter, nicer, and a whole lot less exciting. It was reconciliation between disparate tendencies. In Ruskin: man and landscape, William Morris: the medieval with the industrial revolution, Ebeneezer Howard: city and country. All of these movements were driven by a response to impact of the Industrial Revolution on cities and society. The same concerns are echoed in Warren Chalks dour warning "We must use technology to fight technology". Whether it is the desire to return to nature through technology, escape cities through urbanism, or to fight technology with technology.

William Morris' "News from Nowhere" is set in a sci-fi post-revolutionary future London - a London where the Houses of Parliament have become a manure store. Where children learn in a forest that has grown in Kensington Gardens. Morris' future is not so dissimilar to David Greenes Bottery which proposes a park as university, learning on the grass or leaning against a tree. This is techo-primativism, a belief that only technology can return us to a bucolic state. 

This, perhaps is the subtext of Greenes RokPlug project,  the fake lump of rock that hides a high tech network node and power supply. Designed to be placed in rural locations to enable communication and activity, the RokPlug canât help but evoke Stone Age megaliths - objects that were also  communication devices of some description, though of a supernatural kind. These pre historic stones are the first human monuments, the very first architecture. 

Julian Cope describes "The joyous and unconscious act of erecting a standing stone in response to the jubilation of learning to farm may have been the single specifically inharmonious act which has become know biblically as the Fall. For it was at this moment that humans first peeled themselves away from the Mother Earth just long enough to feel a true Separation" 

By isolating the moment architecture is invented, RokPlug takes us all the way back to when it first went wrong. RokPulg rewinds history further back than the pre industrial landscape of 'News From Nowhere' to a pre agrarian scene. RokPlug  lays that stone back flat on the ground, un-inventing architecture in a bid to regain paradise. This idea is made explicit in a later Greene project. Based on a machine called the 'City Crusher' which breaks up concrete back into aggregate. Greene worked out how long the City Crusher would take to break up the Empire State Building. A posative and optomistic way to flatten New Yorks skyline. 

These are sentiments echoed in Warren Chalks description of cityscape as a Îpornography of buildingsâ  and in Archigrams only truly revolutionary project:  Îto declare a moratorium on buildingâ, a statement proclaiming architecture not as the solution, but the problem. Perhaps the thing we owe archigram is not a vision of how architecture might be built, but that it could come apart again. That unbolting is more important than building.

Mike Webb, apparently, gets very angry when David Greene says he once lived in a shed. Even though he describes it as a very nice shed with a veranda, and in Highgate too, a very nice part of town with a great view across the city to the Surrey hills. Tonight, Webb shows slides of Temple Island and Henly Regatta project, on tape and slides the extended advertainment project "Dreams Come True"  - a fictitious company who promise to transform your mundane life into something as exciting as an advert. These projects are as graphically ambitious as Cook and Herron, but are not drawings of buildings or proposals. They are drawings about seeing. The viewpoint is not of an architect creating, but observing. One hundred and forty years before , on the other side of Hampstead Heath, William Blake used to sit in an arbour. Blakes art was driven by visions which intermingled fantasy with his everyday London life while Webbs art is about vision. 

Ebeneezer Howards response to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on cities was to recompose existing situations - the garden city equation of city + county is perhaps a precursor to Archigrams techo-pastoralism. But it is also relevant through the pursuit of pleasure. A response to cities and architecture that prevent pleasure and promote doomed existence's. The Garden City is the precursor to Archigram projects like Hedgerow City, where entire urban communities are hidden behind the hedgerows of county lanes.  Its also perhaps reworked through Mike Webbs garden shed home - where the garden, not the house is the place to live in. Projects like Hedgerow City  addressed the failings of the Garden Cities and the New Towns that followed - the feeling described by Guy Debord as "nothing has ever happened here, and nothing ever will". In Archigram projects, something is always happening - though perhaps the commodified leisure lifestyle is not what Guy would have wanted.

Continental European radical urbanism was much more overtly politicised and articulate. Urbanism for Archigrams French contemporaries the Situationist International, became barricades on the streets and a country close to revolution. The biggest influence of the SI in England was not to destroy the state, but to make pop music. 

That pop tradition had been present in the trajectory of British architecture at least since Ebeneezer Howards equation which attempted to resolve the technological present with leisure, pleasure and having a nice time. Pops big moment though was ushered in by the Independent Group in the late 50's. This collection of artists, architects and theorists explored twin interests of technology and culture. 

However the architecture produced out of the Independent Group - by the Smithsons, Colin St John Wilson, and to lesser extent Jim Sterling was oddly anti-pop: Brutalism was the opposite of fun. Though the Smithsons could claim "today we collect adverts", their architecture was more concerned with a hard edged reworking of early modernism.

It fell to those a little younger to explore the idea of popular culture and architecture, and in particular two distinct groups.

Denise Scott Brown by virtue of her time at the AA in London and Archigram through Peter Cooks neighbour Reyner Banham were exposed to the Independent Group.

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturis work explored the relationship between architecture and popular culture. "Learning from Las Vegas" is certainly in the tradition of the Independent Group. Indeed, Scott Brown suggested an article on Las Vegas to Reyner Banham (though he declined the offer). Its appraisal of signs and lights and high technology in the desert ha much in common with Archigram. Though its academic appraisal was a something that Archigram never explicitly engaged in.

At the end of the Archigram show, a slide flashes up saying "Why are you here and not watching it on TV at home", which either recalls, echos or predates Robert Venturis comment that "Americans don't need piazzas, they should be at home watching TV instead". The acceptance of attitudes, styles, cultures outside of architectural cannon is shared between Venturi Scot Brown and Archigram- when Venturi says "Main Street is almost all right"  it echoes the Archigrams acceptance of the non and un architectural. The vision that cities and buildings are ok without architects, indeed, that architects might be the thing that's wrong with them.

By the time that Denise Scott Brown returned to England for the National Gallery Extension, British architectural culture had polarised into High Tech and Postmodernism.

Archigram had been assimilated into architectural culture as engineering, while their cultural content was ignored. Just because it looked like engineering didnât mean that it wanted to be engineering.  All those spaceframes, pipes and wires were using engineering against architecture - just as Le Corubusier used grain silos as a device to destroy Beaux Art architecture. And if engineering could be detourned to displace architecture, perhaps culture could fill its place as the things buildings could be about. 

Of course, precisely the opposite happened. Architects used engineering not to liberate us from the mono cultural tyranny of architecture, but to bind us to it more tightly. 

Engineering and technology became an escape route just at the point when architects faced culture. Architects fear in the face of the unknown and threatening as they felt the ground beneath them giving way was to grab hold of the things they knew. Thatâs why the structural aspects became so very important. It metaphorically provided a scaffold to prop up the impending collapse of architectural culture. Architects could dull the pain of RokPlug by drawing hypnotically repetitive lightweight modular structural systems in perspective. Just as youth culture turned to heroin after the acid induced free loving turned on tuned in counter culture, Architecture turned to Engineering. And became just as dependant. 

Even now, younger generations have been seduced by the phantom promises of technology as a way of progressing architectural culture. As technology enables more, architecture becomes ever more architectural - and hence less interesting. Technology has become an evasive tactic. The more architects become obsessed with walls that change shape, software that generates blobs, the further architecture drifts from real, visceral culture.  Engineering and technology are now used like cocaine. A thrill of immediacy expressed through overly excited, egocentric, yet entirely pointless expression, and fifteen minutes later an emptiness only satisfied by another line. 

In the journey from representation as drawings, poems, magazines to its built form there is a denuding of ideology, a silencing of radical rhetoric. This neutered image of Archigram lives on through High Tech - the architectural house style of New Labour. Perhaps something of its Archigram origins resonate with Tony Blairs Christian Socilaist ethos. Of course New Labours most infamous building project is just that, the Archigram inspired big tent Millennium Dome. And maybe there is an echo of Archigrams legacy of tent-as-architecture in his description of third way politics as a "Big Tent". 

On the other hand, these state sponsered monuments only look like Archigram. Perhaps the most fitting tribute would be to unbolt the Lloyds building, pack up the Millennium Dome, unhook the Millenium Bridge, and fold away the Eden Centre. To throw away these building before they become pornographic.  If Archigram taught us that architecture is just another product, we should do the most creative thing we can as consumers - throw it away and start again.

What good can come of Archigrams Gold Medal? Is it just institutionalising a once radical group. Is it a neutering of an avant guard? Or does it offer an opportunity to heal the rift in British architecture. A way to prevent the squandering of a rich, optimistic, problem solving, liberal and popular tradition. It is a moment to reconcile modern architecture with royalty and technology with culture.

The big questions that Archigram asked were (optimistically) "why not?" and (pessimistically) "why bother?".  David Greenes Bottery film ends with a question: "is this really possible?" to which his reply is "of course its possible, but is it really desirable?".

originally published in Arch + 

The Barcelona Pavilion made architecture out of reduction - of almost nothingness and vanishing. A new and opposite way from 19th century architecture, which was full of stuff. And that stuff was all about history and meaning. Modernism proposed an escape from history through abstraction - or the evaporation of meaning and narrative from architecture. The Barcelona Pavilion doesn't tell a story; rather it is intended to be an experience of material and space.

Mies' Chicago was something new, something that had only been dreamt have in pre-war Europe. Mies found himself in enormous, simple, innocent America. The cranks, and nooks and soon-to-become ruins of 19th century European cities a long steamer ride away. Europe: organic, dirty, old, riddled with History, and plunging into catastrophe. 

Four years before Mies arrived in Chicago, Americas Most Wanted Man was gunned down in an alleyway after leaving a movie theatre with a woman on each arm. John Dillinger was the dashing heartthrob of Chicago's gangland. Dillinger optimised the glamorous and chaotic romance of jailbreaking, heist pulling, on-the-run city of rooks nests, alleyways, and safe houses, of Al Capone, of no-go zones and J Edgar Hoovers nascent FBI G Men. His death marked the decline of Chicago's gangster culture which had grown up around Prohibition, supplying the liquor that the government had tried to ban, but the citizens just couldn't live without. 

Hoovers dogged pursuit of Dillinger and gangsterism was a victory of a certain kind of urbanism. One that is reflected in Mies' Chicago projects. Mies is on the side of Hoovers bureaucracy, rather than the ad hoc opportunism of the gangsters. But there is mysteriousness and an impenetrability to his architecture too, just as Hoovers bureaucracy of power was, deep down, dark and paranoid. Mies made bureaucracy into a form of poetry, monumentalising though precision and a ruthless editing of architectural possibility. 

In Robert Anton Wilsons 'Illuminatus Trilogy' - a sprawling hippy/counterculture/conspiracy epic, John Dillinger becomes a kind of super spiritual guru of the forces of chaos. His break outs from captivity are retold as a supernatural victory over matter. Dillinger dematerialises the prison walls by the power of concentrated thought - a little like the attempt to raise the Pentagon building by the Chicago led yippies and zippies. The Illuminatus Trillogies retroactive dramatisation of jailbreaks describes that weird Miesian dematerialization of solid stuff. Mies' concentration of architectural vision beams out of his eyes like X-ray vision, vaporising the corner of buildings so that enclosing walls seem only like planes, emptying city blocks so that gigantic buildings and plazas feel as lightly arranged as still lives. Chicagos history of chaotic freedom and incarceration is mutely articulated through Miesâ architecture. 

As Mies left Europe behind, he left a country and a continent full of ideological problems. America, comparatively, was new, was innocent, and was only just coalescing as an urban form. In the vernacular grid of Dodge City, perhaps Mies saw new possibilities of his formal and highly architectural use of the grid that had obsessed his urban visions. There is an intersection between an American pragmatism and an intellectual European avant guard. And this unlikely paring built big and raw in Chicago.

Having first arrived in New York, Mies was drawn to Chicago because of pragmatic issues - looser controls on architects licensing, and the offer of a job as head of the AIT architecture school. But perhaps there was something else. Perhaps Mies recognised something of himself in the flat plains and the gigantic skies of the Midwest. That strange Miesian absence in comparison to the dense narrative of his native German countryside - a sentimental and nostalgic narrative which had become central to Nazi symbolism. Perhaps he saw in a landscape made up of city grid, the flat expanse of Lake Michigan and the plains stretching out beyond the horizon a vision of nothingness that mirrored his architecture of reduction.

His Chicago projects might be read as remakings of this landscape. The Federal Centre plaza remakes the midwestern plains as a grid of tiles - a plainer plain, with a flatter horizon, and a bigger sky, with corn and dust abstracted away. The regular joints between the tiles encouraging an exaggerated sense of perspective. A big flat space for the wind to blow across. 

At Lake Shore Drive he made cliffs for Lake Michigan. As iconic and immovable as the White Cliffs of Dover but shorn of sentimental narrative, a blank silhouette against the shore.

As well as versions of nature, other projects in and around Chicago are about the modification of nature by architecture. The boiler room became the centre of the IIT campus, as it should always be if we could only think clearly enough. After all, it is the thing that enables all of these buildings to be habitable during the freezing winters. It's the heated water flowing through pipes that allows all of this architecture to happen. Itâs the thing that modifies nature into architecture. 

This idea is developed at Farnsworth House, in rural Plano in what Peter Smithson describes as "ruburb" - a mixture of rural and urban. The house is as invisible as architecture can be. A glazed box with no internal walls and a central service unit that houses all of the servicing. Essentially, it is a raised platform of temperature controlled air, with sanitation and running water held between two slabs of whiteness. As though the winter snows have been quarried like the marble of the Barcelona Pavilion. 

The Farnsworth House is nice, its cute, its luxurious. Itâs small and desirable. The Federal Centre, IIT and Lake Shore Drive are hard to like. Their beauty is almost invisible - we need to be guided to understand it. And it feels like itâs our fault - for not noticing, for not looking or thinking enough. Mies' architecture recedes behind a veil of everyday banality.

When you see the piles of dirty snow piled up on the plaza of the federal Centre, the photocopied notices sellotaped to the walls, you see the logic of architecture verses the logic of badly organised, underfunded, unenthusiastic, wishing it was on holiday life. Abstraction lapped by endless waves of dull narratives of everyday banality. The ever-growing blobs of chewing gum dotting over the grid like spits of rain before a storm. The metal detectors at the entrance to the Federal Building as additions to an architecture which couldn't foresee backwoods white supremacists or fundamentalist religious opposition to the rational bureaucracy of democracy. The A4 printouts taped to the marble elevator lobbies are additions and modifications to Mies' architecture.  Since Mies left the building, the life that fills it every day has added to the architecture. Forming like a crust over the surface of the building. Interrupting, diverting, these are part of an architecture that is entirely opposite to the completeness of Miesian vision. They are ad hoc, amateur, ephemeral, unaesetheticised, confused. From missing persons notices to gonks on top of monitors, we've made something new out of Mieses place.

Small yellow plastic cones that warn us of wet floors as the teams of cleaners that polish Mies's vision. And perhaps the cleaners are the only people who use the building in an appropriately Miesian manner - schedules of floor polishing, timetables of bathroom cleaning, the regular and precise application of cleaning products to the surface of the building - spraying, wiping, sponging, sweeping, sucking. The same regular human actions choreographed through out the landscape of the building. And what they are removing is the dirt, the spills, the crumbs that have fallen, the detritus of activity. Wiping up the coffee breaks, bits of salad dropped from a lunchtime sandwich, piss from the floor, and shit from the bowl. Straightening piles of paper, rewinding the building to its immaculate state, returning the building into beautiful Architecture.

Like Prohibition, temperance and abstinence motivate Mies' architecture. And just like Prohibition, the attempting to exclude behaviours only serves to highlight our vice. Mies' Chicago landscapes are a kind of sober architectural or urban "lack". It's only through our use of them that they become part of and engaged with the city. Perhaps we should recognise our own creative co-authorship of Mies' architecture, encourage the build up of ephemera across the surface of the buildings. Somewhere between the extremes of confused intoxication of ephemera and the rational sobriety of architecture that the essential uniqueness of these places can develop.

Mies, you cut precise slabs of marble from the earthâs crust, you rearranged iron ore into long straight lines. You took the ground and made it new. Stacked things one top of the other lined things up next to each other more neatly than anything had ever been stacked. 

Mies. Forgive us. Mies, we couldn't handle abstraction, we wrote banal stories across your plazas, around your lift lobbies. Maybe our only excuse is that we had to live. That we couldnât resist eating French Fries, that we felt an uncontrollable lust, that we were too lazy, too dishonest, too busy, too human. 

I wanted to describe the scene I look at more than anything else. More
than people, landscapes, objects or even TV.  Especilly as it’s not
designed to be looked at full on - an operating system iis made to be
background, to be boring and incidental.

The famous case between Apple and Microsoft about the graphical user
interface was all about ‘Look’ and ‘Feel’. It struck me that I hadn't
really looked or felt properly. Is it possible to look into your
monitor in the same way that Constable looked at the sky, Titan looked
at flesh or Vermeer looked at cloth. Or is the sensation of looking
into a clean desktop the same kind of feeling you get looking into a
Rothko.

Here’s a recurring daydream: What it would it feel like if it flopped
out of the screen of my iBook. The screen bursting and the graphics
became real stuff, the wind blowing some away dust while other pieces
dropping onto the keyboard like tiny metallic charms.

OSX was kind of a shock - after the snappy, clicky world of system 9.
Up to X, the Mac had an interface of amazing utilitarian elegance - my
desktop was liberally strewn with files like a teenager bedroom floor.
Retrospectively, its the Hunstanton School of OS’s. X+ is different. It
is a graphic front end on a Unix behind: a hyper styled dashboard
attached to a junkyard of chips and wires. It is in the great tradition
of Las Vegas casino sheds - where the delivery of the experience is
very different to the infrastructure.

It is a long way from the early green text on black screens or the
Atari 2600, 8 bit blocky pixel graphics. Long superseded, but
remembered fondly as an aesthetic - just look at designers like Anthony
Burrill at friendchip.com or Craig at flipflopflyin.com. Their takes on
  superseded graphics bring nostalgia and poetry to something once
functional. In the superfast digital world they are a kind of Heritage
Institute - keeping old fashioned craft techniques alive - Prince
Charles’ of the digital generation. Alternatively there are interfaces
which explore more fantastical ways of organising and displaying
information: see the one that's previewing on Tomatos site right now.
Apples Aqua interface isn’t either. Its designed to be dull -  but a
special kind of dullness. And it is evolving qualities more like a
thing or a place.

The desktop pattern has the feel of a vapour trail with the geometry of
mucus strands. It looks cold like a cloudless January day. It looks
like you need a scarf and mittens and earlier there was a frost. If
your warm breath passed through the screen it would form clouds. It
looks weightless, like polystyrene rocks. It feels smooth, panels
sliding over each other as though coated in dry-to-the-touch WD40.

Each window, which bursts into existence with a translucent zoom out of
its file icon, has a brushed metal effect.  The edges are rounded and
lit from an unseen light above casting a soft shadow onto the windows
piled up below.  They are virtual cousins of Apple ti-Book caseing
panels. There are a few left over bits of plastic from the old iMac
range. Top left in each window there are red-orange-green coloured
glass marbles rest below cut-outs.The menu bar mimics the effect of the
translucent ribbed plastic casing. In the real world, these would be
made with snap together components in a Mexican factory.

There is a real attention to materiality - which is strange for
something isn’t made out of anything. Its pixels not molecules. But
while they might look like things we know well, they behave very
differently. The aluminium looks warm, and just a little fuzzy, like
wool. Everything has a matt softness like lead - and as bookmarks are
added, graphics are embossed like Helvetican Hallmarks. Things become
translucent when they are dragged, transmogrify from plastic to metal
as they come to front. The qualities of materials slide away from
reality like texture editors in render programs: transparent aluminium,
liquid oak, solid smoke. Slider bars rewriting the Periodic Table at
will.

This poker faced alternate reality ignores physics but obeys the eye.
Shadows fall in unnatural ways - like the multiple shadows that
conspiracy theorists see of the flag on the moon. The flawless
gradients that seem like a cartoon version of a Foster aesthetic.

The old icon of the hourglass has been replaced by new agey hypnotic
animations - the kind of thing that Avengers baddies would use to
brainwash Emma Peel. Spinning colour wheels, bars chasing in circular
patterns. Most operating systems have sought to use analogy - the
conceit of the desktop, small drawings of folders to represent
directories. Here, the icon of the hard disk is a drawing of part of
the inside of the machine - a kind of literalism at odds with its
surroundings.

The projection of the world in front of your eyes is a strange mixture
- based on the idea of desktop with pages and things scattered in
layers on top of each other. A mixture of plan, perspective and
isometric projection. Its like looking down and up and 3/4s at the same
time. My finger tracks on the horizontal pad, resulting in vertical
movements on the screen. But unlike the shock of cubism's multiple
views, this is the omicience of the beaurocrat.

Its a backdrop for whatever it is you are doing, or shouldn’t be doing.
OSX is the coming together of Apples ‘digital lifestyle’ concept. Which
is both fantastic and terrible thing, because that probably includes
downloading Huey Lewis and the News while looking at animal porn. There
is a conjunction of design, violence and pornography that happens on
the innocent screen that could be the digital hub of Patrick Batemans
life. With so many windows open it makes the Man who Fell to Earth look
positively focused. Windows  tracking all kinds of live information
across the screen, message boards scrolling up, news tickers tracking
across, windows refreshing the latest scores, all kinds of devices
connecting and updating each other wirelessly, streams of copyright
infringing data flooding your down pipe. Such a torrent of bits that
actually doing anything yourself feels insignificant. Amongst all of
this stuff its hard to locate yourself - geek-work and geek-leisure all
swirled up together integrated by iSync, patched together with
Rendezvous.

While we learn to adapt to new OSs and interfaces, they subtly
influence our relationship to the real physical things around us. There
is that strange sensation sitting with a tracing paper pad and a pen of
reaching for undo - like a phantom step at the top of a staircase.
While Milton had his daughters, I have my Voice 2 Type.

First Published in Icon

Remember the Genesis Device in Star Treck II: The Wrath of Kahn? The thing that explodes on a grey, barren moon, its shockwave leaving a trail of lush green natural beauty. Well, it was just like that, except the anti-devistation was original 501s, cappuccino, jazz, Lucky Strike cigarettes ... This Face/Conran revolution has shaped our attitude to design ever since.

I’m on the first floor of the Design Museum in the midst of Thomas Heatherwicks collection for the Conran Foundation. It’s 30 000 pounds worth of novelty design culled from pound stores, duty free shops and specialist equipment suppliers around the world. Its an array of beautiful and anonymous design: Welding masks with warthog faces, a glass rifles filled with wine, Pop Tarts, a cardboard coffin ...

Wonderful, charming, clever, witty and optimistic, these mini ecstasies of design are moments when designs ambition outstrips its material presence - where a kind of cheapskate alchemy makes more out of less in a way that would make Mies spin in his grave. They show the paucity of imagination, parochial tastes and prosaic predicability of designers.

Upstairs there is an exhibition of the Smithsons houses. The Smithsons would have loved these weird objects. They wrote things called “And Now We collect Adverts”, hung around with the Independent Group where Richard Hamilton cut up John McHales American magazines, Edwardo Paulozzi lectured on the anatomy of Donald Duck, and Reyner Banham wrote histories of architecture that ended with highways and movies. The groups interests celebrated and critiqued popular culture, thought that the popular and the mass produced belonged alongside high culture.

After the Independent Group, after Pop, after Punk there is a rich tradition of the ordinary, the everyday as high art. So you wonder what the real point of Heatherwicks exhibition is: to challenge the hegemony of taste? to critique designs relationship to function? Billed as ‘ingenious’ and ‘ideas’ it slowly transpires that the point is just this vague.

While the collection is fantastic, the curation is naive. Other similar ventures like Jeremy Dellers Folk Art Archive, Jim Shaws Thrift Store Art collection or the Venturis ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ show how difficult, deeply perplexing, and rewarding the serious study of things usually perceived as ephemera can be. Through its good-natured naivety it avoids all kinds of difficult issues. Because it ignores the context of high design connoisseurship, it lets these beautiful objects down, leaving them as curiosities. Like the show, Britain is inarticulate about design - unlike literature, music, comedy, cooking ... all of which are discussed publicly and in some depth. Just like the climax of Changing Rooms, the British open their eyes to design, blink, open their mouths and are completely unable to explain what they see.

Which is understandable, because Design is strange. It isn’t really about function - more a branch of metaphysical poetry. Design in the 21st century doesn’t need to be beautiful or functional. It needs to tell us something about the world: Kitchenware that speaks of existential angst, vanity units that probe mystery of love, executive toys that ponder mortality. Design is a way of talking that is so mute that it becomes eloquent.

There are three great traditions of British design: Moral (Hawksmoor, Ruskin, Morris, Unwin and Parker, the Smithsons ...), Stylistic (Inigo Jones, Wren, Lutyens, Pawson ...) and Technological (Paxton, Brunel, Rogers, Foster). The beauty of Heatherwicks objects suggests a crashing together of these distinct ideologies in ways that pull the blinkers off designers to reveal gigantic vistas of unexplored territory. Its just a shame that they are presented in a way which loos like a quirky dead end.

First Published in Contemporary

A British county surveyor, Edgar Hooley travelling the bumpy roads of Derbyshire came across a hard, smooth section. Curious, he asked how this patch had formed. The locals told him that a barrel of tar had accidentally fallen off a cart. To mop it up, slag from a blast furnace had been sprinkled on top. Hooley, recognising some potential in this gloopy recipy began experimenting. In 1902 he patented the process of heating tar adding slag or macadam to the mix then breaking stones within the mixture to form a smooth road surface. He formed TarMacadam (Purnell Hooley’s Patent) Syndicate Ltd in 1903 and registered Tarmac® as a trademark. But like most innovators, he couldn’t turn a big idea into a big business. He sold up to a Wolverhampton steel manufacturer who saw a way of turning furnace leftovers into cash. Sir Alfred Hickman formed a company called Tarmac, still doing business today.

Accident, not necessity was the mother of this invention. Borne out of those un-designerly characteristics of spilling and bodging, it is a sophisticated and forgiving kind of infrastructure. Its capacity for forgiveness is revealed in the scars that it bears. Scars caused by the lacerations of diggers and drills which hack through its surface. Its sophistication in its anticipation of all possible changes. Tarmac remains provisional as its dug up and patched to accommodate the alterations, improvements, mistakes, extensions and erasings. Mending and change are intrinsic to its characteristics.
Like glass, tarmac never sets completely solid. The streets are really rivers flowing with the thickest black treacle. A viscous gloop in whose depths lurk stringy wires and lumpy pipes. Like the chocolate topping on a crunchy musli bar. On very hot days you can feel its velvety softness with your heel.

The Situationits claimed that the beach lies beneath the pavement. Reality, however, is more exotic than rhetoric. Roads are million year old sludge drawn from deep beneath the ocean. Most road asphalt is a by-product of crude oil processing. Once all the valuable bits have been removed, the denuded left overs are made into asphalt. Roads are just a sticky kind of dirt, rearranged into linear patterns.

It’s like mud that’s been edited. Asphalt is an abstract version of the ground. Dark, compressed, inert and flat. Somewhere between mud and stone. Equivalent pretty much across the country – consistent meaning, regardless of local vernacular or materials. Endlessly extendable and always exactly the same. Where even now a truck and a roller are adding a three-lane bypass.

All of this freshly pressed blackness flows on to the horizon. Crisp and clean and unspoilt. Glistening like overnight snow, only blacker and harder. As full of the promise of love as wedding cake icing. So beautiful and textured that you want to step barefoot onto this unspoilt world. Forests of signposts, hosts of golden yellow sodium lamps for the Wordsworth of the highway – deeper in poetic loneliness behind the wheel of than the lake district ever permitted.

A brand new skin for the earth. That makes the world look newborn, so that it can’t be anything but innocent. More wonderful than the ancient craggy, scuffed planet beneath. Perhaps the real modern poets are those who create these landscapes: The Capability Browns of the motorway system, the Gertude Jekels of the parking lot. Driven by desire to reclaim earth as an unspoilt paradise. Highway engineers who dream of being naked Tarmac Adams in a Tarmac Eden.

First Published in Contemporary

Guilty after bingeing on R'n'B videos, MTV bolemicaly sticks its fingers down its throat and throws up sharp, self critical TV bile: Beavis and Buttheads poignant badly drawn insult-your-audience; Celebrity Deathmatch plastacine reality TV satire; Jackass' life-as-art DV stunts. At its best, MTV is as direct as Damien Hirst, as wise as Warhol and as prophetic as Orwell.

Cribs is the closest MTV gets to a design show. As one of the standout shows on a global network with an audience of 1 billion, it's the most popular architectural media · ever. Perhaps us architects should momentarily swap those ungainly Harvard Guides for a remote control.

More accurately, the genre is reality/celebrity/design. Music stars, actors and models show off their homes in 5-minute segments followed by a Steadycam. The camera swoops, zooms, and wobbles with a first person POV - like a horror movie monster interested in interior design.

Unlike the carefully framed view from the Hello sofa, Cribs worldview is casual, informal and anti-glam. It's dirty, amateur porn to Hellos airbrushed Playboy. Raw, real and as authentic as design media gets. Celebrating luxury while undermining it with ordinariness.  Just hear that lonely clunk of spoon on bowlful of Froot Loops echoing down marble lined hallways. 

Cribs shows homes that warp ideas of houses. Houses that are endlessly extendable like the abdomen of a super stretched limo. At the exotic end of the scale:

Tommy Lee: A Starbucks franchise installed in his home studio (complete with mugs and other merchandise); Zen garden for meditation; disco floor for all-night parties; an unobstructed view from bed to shower. 

Missy Elliot: Giant chrome lettering spelling Missy stacked in a pond in the middle of her living room; Lamborghini furniture; fish tank armchair; submarine style door flanked by reconstituted stone Etruscan uplighters; a Ferrari converted into a bed with a remote controlled trunk full of choicest sneakers. 

Sebastian Bach, Skid Rows ex lead singer: a fountain with a foot-high bust of Gene Simmons head, tongue extended, viscous red fluid pouring from its gaping mouth. Quote: "I wouldn't feel complete unless I had a ceramic contraption that puked blood 24 hours a day."

Outkast: a home pole dancing set up.

Despite this freakish exoticism, Cribs are modelled on ordinary, everyday suburbia  -  just super-sized, and hothoused into a gigantic ordinariness. Suburban sensibility with the scale of a Palazzo.

Cribs shows us the conflict between wonder and emptiness that's at the heart of our relationship with our homes. When Snoop, wandering around his house opens a door, looks around and says " ain't seen this wing before", he's not so much lost in the supermarket as adrift in domesticity.  Aren't we all confused and confounded by our own homes (as much as we love them)? From the dusty fondue set at the back the kitchen cupboard to the useless wardrobe towering like a beast of prey.

Cribs shows us homes as vulnerable, exciting, pointless and egocentric places. Variously cute, futuristic, modernist, but always deeply human. And humanity is the bit that architects struggle with. Style is the interface between our identity and design. For architects however, it is the obsession that dare not speak its name ? despite being their primary means of categorising "good" and "bad".

Here is Rem Koolhass' executive lounge rage at (bad) contemporary aesthetics: "13% of all Junkspace's iconography goes back to the Romans, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney - neck and neck - 3% Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan." Me? I'd probably bump the Art Nouveau for "Jungle Hut" or "Space Gothic". 

Junkspace is a linguistic derivative of other modern junks, particularly food. Apparently, it smothers old-fashioned (healthy) architectural space like spray-on cream. My secret shame is how good it tastes.

Most Cribs have glittering kitchens with high end cooking equipment. Fridge contents: Cristal and frozen pizza. This diet is straight out of my new Deleuze and Guattari themed restaurant - 1000 Platters. On the menu is Prousts "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu" in Alphabetti Spaghetti. And don't miss the Roland Barthes Valentines Creole menu: Lovers Dis Course followed by Lovers Dat Course. If you've ever enjoyed poached salmon at 35,000 feet above the spawning pools of Nova Scotia you too will wonder at the possibility, let alone the desire for, authenticity.  At least in the old Modernist sense.

Mythical rockband riders demonstrate the magical transformation of something very ordinary. Demanding trays of only black jellybeans brings conneseurship more often associated with delicacies to everyday sweets. The lesson? It's not what you want, but the way that you want it.

These fantastical explosions of domestic architecture written large, bold and fast are radical experiments in housing. They explore complicated suburban individualism. Cribs use an architectural language that might be described as Pop Vernacular. At a guess, Cribs homes are 30% Spanish, 10% New England Colonial, 5% Modern, 20% Mock Tudor, 5% renaissance, 5% Elizabethan, 5% Roman. Not junk, but carefully selected elements from all of time and space. Liberated from their functional origins - local materials, skills, climate, traditions - they become powerful ciphers for individual identity. The Pop Vernacular is happy to work with all kinds of un-architectural languages: cute, nostalgic, homely. It's consumerism made into architecture. Plural and expansive, global and inclusive: An inverted International Style. 

While architects communicate with their own esoteric literature (like this article), generations of clients are enjoying something completely different. Is it a traditional high/low culture divergence? A way of conveniently dismissing differences in architectural cultures? Perhaps there is an architecture explores rather than reinforces taste cultures. Armed with a Harvard Guide and a remote control, the next season of Cribs will be truly fantastic.

First Published in Icon

Resident Evil Zero is an entire landscape of this Inigo Jones meets Indiana Jones mechanised-historicism. It's the prequel to the Resident Evil series that began seven years ago on the Playstation. This is its latest incarnation, exclusive to the GameCube.

Here is the scenario: A crack team of SAS style troupers are heading towards Racoon City to investigate reports of a series of bizarre deaths. Their helicopter crashes in a forest, where they find an overturned truck, and dead soldiers. Investigating the crash site, you find a derelict train that's right out of Agatha Christie, apart from the Day of the Dead Zombies. After killing the zombies, the train crashes in a tunnel, where you escape through a sewer then climb up a ladder into the hall of a mansion thatâs part Psycho, part Phantom Manor and part Miss Haversham.

The game doesn't really have a plot, more a great big heap of non-contextual scenarios: bio-tech gone wrong, zombies, giant centipedes, graveyards, guns, knives, napalm grenade launchers, fountains, and crazy monkeys. Like a shredded copy of the Greatest Hits of Horror squashed into a dense lump of concentrated Super Scenario. 

In a game like this the plot doesnât matter. Its atmosphere which is where Resident Evil excels from the moment the first Zombie lurches towards you. All  rendered darkly beautiful in a fixed camera cinematic style by the Gamecubes graphic engine. 

All of this atmosphere and scenario is arranged as a sprawling architecture - a house and its grounds. It looks like a normal bit of spooky mansion architecture, but really it's something different. Everything is divorced from what its supposed to be: the dining room, kitchen, library become scenarios to play out the action, not places to eat, cook or read. The house has been entirely de-programmed - the opposite of modernist Form Follows Function. Resident Evil reveals an extended idea of function spiralling over the horizon to a fantastical resolution. 

The narrative and the media drag the plan into all kinds of unusual situations: from Victorian hall to electrical torture chamber via a secret door, taking a lift from a graveyard to an underground library, through a hole in the ceiling to a laboratory, down a gantry to a cablecar· The architecture is unravelled into a single smooth and continuos ribbon  of Victorian mansion, mineshafts, lab complex, giant shark tank. A landscape which dissolves the normal hierarchies of architecture. Bedrooms and graveyards, caves and kitchens, conservatories and sewers, sheds and mortuaries become equivalent - you're as likely to sleep in a graveyard as bury a body in the kitchen; cook in the sewer and shit in the kitchen.

The logic of the game design makes this feel normal and natural, when objectively it's as freakish as a collaboration between Foreign Office and Lutyens.

Throughout the game, there is real attention to detail to make things look old, dirty, broken. Each footstep across a carpet sends up a plume of dust, the paint is blistered, the concrete. But itâs a beautiful dirt - a kind of sickly picturesque. Ruskin identified picturesque as the passing of time on an object. In Resident Evil the plants encroach, staircases have collapsed, pipes have burst, insects crawl. Everything is on the cusp of becoming a ruin , dying, or undead. It evokes the architecture-as-landscape of Superstudio through the eyes of a macabre romantic. The game shows us a new kind of picturesque which recognises the romance of a train crash and has empathy with the sewer. The games concluding cut scene shows the mansion blowing up. Massive destruction as an accelerated picturesque - a building fast forwarded to ruin. Like Vin Diesel starring in a James Cameron remake of Michael Landy s 'Break Down'.

Resident Evils gothicness runs deep. The relationship of technology to the body is at heart. The t-virus which causes genetic mutation, the bio experiments, the rooms carpeted with seething, crawling leeches, the machines that are part of the architecture. The whole place is assembled as a kind of Frankenstein architecture. It is a gothic reworking of the house as a machine for living in - where the distinction between what is living and what is a machine is blurred. It  recalls OMAs Bordeaux  house, or at least Crimsons Wouter Vanstiphouts description of it: "Rem Koolhaas feverishly imagined architectural potential in this particular family life. He saw the limp lower body of the husband, being supported by a whole arsenal of trusses, carts, belts, diapers as architecture. He extrapolated this in a single huge heavy-duty contraption that provides the man with a way of moving throughout the house. Subsequently this contraption was made into the houses organisational core". 

Resident Evil says that everything is connected - not just space, but time too. A continuum of history and the future thatâs all the same place, an English Heritage Futurism.  Somewhere in Resident Evil, the fear of the past disappearing and the terror of anti-humanist future meet. It's a place where Prince Charles and Marinetti could scheme together. Like the genetic research that has gone so horribly wrong in Resident Evil, the game suggests that there might be zombie architectural ideologies just waiting to assembled and reanimated.

First Published in Icon

Last years strangest TV event saw Derran Brown nearly blowing his brains across the floor of a Jersey barn playing Russian Roulette. It was great to watch. Meanwhile David Blaine was slumped in a perspex box, hung on a rope from a crane in front of London's City Hall. While these new magic guys were exploring their own limits of endurance, one of the satin clad masters of showbizzy conjuring was, with symbolic synchronisity, being dragged across his Las Vegas stage in the jaws of an albino tiger.

Why has magic turned its back on over trickery? Maybe its the same reason we want our cookery shows filmed with shaky hand held cameras, our comedy to look like fly on the wall documentaries, our pop stars selected and transformed in full view, our homes to look like old warehouses exposed brickwork, and our cars complete with rugged all terrain engineering. We like the feeling of the truth, the sensation of verite. It makes us feel closer to the action, like there is less in the way. We like events rather than staging. It makes us feel a little bit real-er.

The ever expanding mass of leisure and entertainment is desperate to hold our gaze. It’s our attention that they can sell on to advertisers. In its exhaustion of trying to keep our attention, it has turned to things which were once the hallmarks of the shocking avant guard. 8 hour film of the Empire State Building? - try this 44 day long magic trick! Want to trust an audience with deadly weapons? - try squeezing the trigger of a magnum against your temple on the say so of an ordinary member of the public!
We like this unusual feeling of reality because it bridges the big gap between ourselves and the world played out through media: the politicians who pledge their honesty, elections that verge on the fraudulent, wars that are fought for obscured reasons. The real world is like a conjurers card table: riddled with trap doors, secret passages and hidden compartments.

Its not about real truth - its more to do with feelings and sensations. “The Office” isn't any less staged than an old Two Ronnies sketch. Jamie isn’t any less a lifestyle Nazi than Fanny Craddock. Politicians don’t lie anymore than they always did. And TV is still just a box in the corner of the living room despite all its Reality.
A world characterised by lack of absolutes that spirals like a conspiracy theory out into an ungraspable infinite number of relative truths. With magic, we feel close to the truth, precisely because it is being hidden from us. This difference between what we know and what we don't know is ‘magic’.

Magic is unique. It invites us to guess how we’ve been fooled. It wants us to look for the join, to discover the trickery. It lets us think about truth and lies. And these new magic stunts lets us do that in a way that makes sense of the modern world. Their references are things teetering on the cusp between credibility and snake oil.
Derren Brown describes his act as ‘a mixture of applied psychology, magic, misdirection and showmanship’. Part mystic, part motivation coach speaking management consultant.

A concoction of self help books and mysterious leathery magic volumes. His goatee beard signals ‘trendy’ but something in the way its is clipped also says ‘mystical’ . Like the Temple of Apollo at Delphi reincarnated a trendy reception desk for a Soho production company.

When David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear you just knew it was a camera trick or something equally sneaky yet obvious. But now we’ve seen the Twin Towers disappear for real, it’s somehow lost its spectacular appeal.
David Blaines TV shows explore the opposite kind of places, the streets - associated with real-ness by everyone from the Situationists to Dr Dre. David roams around everyday locations like a mystic: a sort of hadi-cam Jesus. Blains slight of hand is the style of presentation - what looks like raw amateur footage - unstaged, spontaneous, with a sheen of undoctored truth. We know enough not to trust glossy images, that digital versions of Kate Moss are dissected and reconstructed like beautiful Frankesteins. But we have yet to really believe that the same is true of low res images too.

“Above the Below” was the portentous title of Blaines last trick. Above was David, in a perspex box for 44 days, without any food. Below was a restless crowd looking up: shouting, teenagers screeching at each other, dads swearing at their sons. It’s here that Paul McCartney flipped out, his thumbs aloft attitude turning to vicious paranoia as he turned on his own PR agent.

For his previous stunt, Vertigo, he stood on top of a 100 ft pole for 35 hours like a human triumphal column: a piece of civic design turned to flesh. And the props for ‘Above the Below’ have their own architectural language. With a water pipe in, and a funnel headed soil pipe out. Raw plumbing which recalls the Brutalist detailing of the Smithsons Hunstanton School. New Bruitalism was a fundamentalist interpretation of the Modernist gospel. It stripped architecture down to its raw, uncooked truth. Truth to materials, honesty of construction, and functional clarity.
Hanging like a lost elevator next to a City Hall. This kind of glass-as-democrasy architecture is like the magician who passes the trick to the audience for inspection. “Look” it says “there are no secret chambers”. “See”, it smiles “there are no shadowy figures”, “you can see everything, so nothing untoward can be happening!”. The rhetoric of open and transparent operation of government is translated into open and transparent architecture.

Up river from the GLA is Pugins and Barrys Houses of Parliament. An entirely opposite idea of a building for democracy, and an opposite kind of architecture. Its Victorian Gothic Revivalism is full of the mystery of the Dark Ages. With neo-medeavil conspiracy lurking in its shadowy alcoves and intrigue creeping through its passages it is more a Haunted Houses of Parliament. Planned by a Classicist (Barry) and styled into Gothicness by Pugin. Its aesthetic, its plan, its structure and construction at odds with each other. In comparison to City Hall, it is incredible that it was once regarded as appropriate setting for the seat of government. Perhaps, lurking behind the picturesque facade, there is dry satire. Which is more realistic representation of political life?
The idea of fakeness, of illusion, of trickery is, on the face of it, an anathema to contemporary architecture - still deeply in thrall to Modernism. But beneath the rational, sleek surface writhes an occult magic. You can see it in the descriptions of things that ‘float’, concealed lighting which makes things glow, sensations such transparency all hint at trickery. And just like magic tricks, they are not really floating, glowing or disappearing.

Perhaps the vestiges of this architecture as magic is the motivation behind the detail that has made the world look modern: the shadow gap. A shadow gap is the opposite of a skirting board. A skirting board is a strip of wood used to cover up the gap between wall and floor, so that the uneven edge of the plastering can be neatly concealed. The shadow gap resolves the same detail, but does it with out overtly concealing anything. Concealment is dishonest, and architecture hates to deceive. It is formed with a small metal angle that supports a piece of plasterboard. By holding the 12mm plasterboard sheet 10mm above the floor, it allows the plasterer to skim coat the board leaving a sharp finish. Visually, the effect is to make the junction between the wall and floor disappear - the depth of the plasterboard casting the junction into shadow and obscuring all but the lowest angled views. While it apparently dispenses with artifice (the concealing strip of wood), it uses other attributes to conceal. Classic magicians craft.

Architecture likes thinks of itself as innocent, without meaning, without ideology. Standing naked, and natural unadorned below the rolling clouds. Like the schmaltzy self help-ism: just ‘be yourself!’ - which is exactly what I’m scared of. There is something more hopeful in the Victorian assemblage of history. An optimism and a belief in the clarity of truth and authenticity that only fiction can create.

Back on the Las Vegas stage, that bouffanted, overblown, lounge fraud Roy is in the jaws of his big white tiger Montecor, desperately trying to beat him off with his microphone (it’s usually Siegfried that gets beaten off by Roy).
The trick bit back, fangs plunged through Roys perma-tanned neck. Raw natures revenge at all this artifice, its camp incarceration in the Mirages Secret Garden. Meanwhile, the wind blows dust from the desert over strip. Wouldn’t Vegas make such a beautiful electric-ruin, buried in the dirt? Caesars Palace as an electric Pompeii, high fat snacks petrified on its counters. The Venizia flooded as its sea levels rise, its malls silently populated by schools of Angler Fish gliding through the deep plan. Paris with burning barricades along the corridors, cobblestones in one hand and souvenir mugs in the other. mini-Nazis marching under the mini-Arc de Triumph, rebadging the slots with three swastikas for a jackpot payout.

These might seem like implausible fantasies. A long time ago, people wanted architecture which made you feel lots of different things. Including fear and loathing. It might seem hard to imagine in our relaxed era, where leaders wear open necked shirts, chinos and loafers. An era where we want buildings to be lit with warm spring sun, smell like roasted coffee beans, sound like bubbling brooks and feel like stone worn smooth by the sea. It is left to other forms of culture to explore these more sinister emotions.

Architecture once was explicit about the power of the state, the threat of religion, the warning of prison. From the dark gothic awe of the middle ages to the indifferent megastructures of the welfare state . These were buildings that told you where you stood - and told you what society thought of you. Remember, next time you step over the threshold of a friendly new building that misdirection is the main trick of any illusionist.

First Published in Contemporary

The Flaming Lips live show is all confetti, mirrorballs and rabbit suits. The stage is a collage of corny moments and phoney props. The band lined up in a flat hierarchy flanked by troups of dancing animal suited. A screen behind that shows mini-films and close ups of front man Wayne Coyne from a mike mounted camera as he waggles puppets, cracks blood pellets and puts himself through the mangle of entertainment. Giant sized coloured balloons bounce off the audience and around the Apollo with slo-mo physics.

None of this would look out of place on Top of the Pops circa 1979, but there's  an intensity that transforms it, like John Donne backed by Legs & Co. Dry ice engulfs the stage till you can't see anything but a big fog, cut through by torch beams waved like kids in a forest. The furry animals emote like a mascot school reunion. Their show transforms hollow stage gestures  - balloons pregnant with meaning and Mexican waves profound. 

Like the Teletubbies scripted by Becket and directed by Sergio Leone its an off kilter cuteness, peaking with Wayne singing Happy Birthday to people in the audience (Joe, Katie, Vicki, Tim, Katherine and Christina tonight). Its like Dada doing Disney Character breakfast birthdays. And perhaps they were never meant to be so different. After all, Walt hired Dali to make "Destino" : "the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before" (shelved in 1947, post huminously completed 2003, DVD release 2004).

Most art is made by excluding everything else in the hope that such severe editing will bestow some kind of concentrated power. The Lips music is made in the opposite way: out of piles of other stuff. Its a fermenting hooch of American Folk music  - country schmaltz, hip hop beats, Detroit techno squelches, blues guitars. acid rock amongst others that give off a hazy fume, distorting sound like a aural mirage. An interstellar folk music. 

The Lips make songs that sound like they have fallen apart and have been carefully reconstructed - so that they are also lumps of sound stuck to each other. Their 1997 album Zaireeka explored this idea of music as sound assemblage. Released as four CDs designed to be heard simultaneously by lining up 4 CD players and sprinting around the room pressing play. The bands recordings were an approximation of what the listener would hear. The amateurish/provisional not-quite-resolvedness is part of their unique sound. It amplifies emotion. Coynes cracked vocals are like looking at a faint star from the corner of your eye. You can hear it in the shows big finale, 'Do You Realise': like the Six Million Dollar Man in bionic mode, slowing down makes it feel faster. 

The Lips make squewed pop music. Their view is slanted in a way which reclaims kitsch and pop from those who dismiss it as a dead end. The Lips show that a magic realist pop can be deep, tragic and optimistic. A soundtrack to inexpressible human experiences: the delight of sunbeams, the primordial wonder of existence, the mystery of death. It is an aesthetic at once emotionally raw and warmly cuddly - brutalism draped in fairy lights. An avant guarde that wants us to love each other. 

This is what pop architecture could have become if Robert Venturi had blown his Yale Prof $$$'s on heroin and acid in a Las Vegas motel - a psychedelic difficult whole. Or if Madelon Vriesendorp was the architectural guru her ex-husband became. Her Delirious New York pictures ( e.g.: Empire State and Chrysler buildings sprawled post-coitally with a limp Goodyear blimp co