Architecture & Infrastructure

Empires have existed for millenniums. Squabbles over land and resources by various groups or tribes continue until eventually a dominant player emerges, subordinating its rivals and bringing order to a larger populace. To strengthen its resolve and maintain order it improves its armies. Once order exists, its armies are usually then employed on further conquest on land and resource acquisitions. Acquisitions are taken by force. Throughout time this has been the principle means of empire building, where the strong extort the weak. Subordination followed by resource drain of mineral, fiscal and human capital eventually consume all benefits of the acquired land mass and populace. The growing empire has to look further afield for new resources to acquire and exploit. This process continues until the acquired resources can no longer support the growing empire and the empire implodes and collapses returning again to smaller self-governed states. Empires acquired by force are short lived. The British Empire colonised in much the same way, with the stronger more technologically advanced nation controlling the weaker nations. British Colonial rule differed in that it partnered rather than dominated its colonies. The British Empire formed business partnerships with the indigenous elite using a countries existing controlling elite and structures to incite its order. The role was exploitive, but the countries also benefited from provisions of governance and infrastructures. An increased longevity was gained from this relationship.

The American Empire has been more subtle. Although American military power dominates every other nation by numerous factors, America was built primarily through the propaganda of media, its film industry and its adverts. The chief weapons were jeans, t-shirts and Coca-Cola, symbols of the good life obtainable within a commoditised world. Post World Wars, America not only controlled global debt, it also provided the majority of the goods that that borrowed capital could purchase. On this America grew very rich and the globalised world became Americanised adopting America’s clothes, its music, its eating habits, its skyscrapers, its finance and its governance. This was a new type of empire led by TV and media but without land acquisition. American military bases are strategically located around the globe within other nation states. America maintains peace and conformity through dominant presence rather than action, although when required they act swiftly and conclusively. American military presence lubricates global trade allowing resources to be allocated uninterrupted, a policed order. Markets are left to find their own natural equilibrium and are only policed when all else breaks down. An empire built by creating the desire for the American way of life and providing the commodities to fulfil such desires.

Empires grow slowly, the ancient dynasties of China, The Greek, The Roman, The Ottoman, The Habsburgs. These empires took hundreds of years to grow, to mature and eventually fade. Businesses took multiple generations to become fully established, The Rothschild’s, The Morgan’s, The Rockefeller’s, The Ford’s, for these industrialists and bankers it took a considerable amount of time to grow their businesses. The grandfathers of modern business, as of 2019, Apple and Microsoft are respectively 43 and 44 years old. Amazon (25) Google (21) and Facebook (15) are in their teens or early twenties. These businesses have incomes beyond many smaller countries. Empires today like businesses grow quickly. The American country can be dated from the Declaration of Independence 1776, but the American Empire is really a post war phenomenon putting it in its mid-seventies. Perhaps this stretches one’s interpretation of empire, as traditionally we consider empires within contained perimeters. We think of the world map painted pink under the British Empire, strict locations with enforced borders. The American Empire is an empire of influence. Its borders are not fenced, they are not straight lines, thresholds between inside and outside. They are not best represented by Trump’s Mexican wall. Its boundaries are permeable, they overlap and bleed into other sovereign states and cultures. It grows as its influence grows by its rate of adoption. The modern businesses listed above are also without borders permeating all aspects of societies and cultures. What empires and businesses have in common are the infrastructures that facilitate their adoption.

Networks, the control of the infrastructures and gateways are key to building any business or any Empire. Whether they were the Minoans or Phoenicians controlling the Mediterranean shipping routes in the second millennium BC, the Venetians controlling the silk and spice gateway connecting The East to The West in the fourteenth Century or the British controlling the shipping routes in the eighteenth century. All these conduits of communication facilitate trade and allow their owner to generate a rentier income from their use. America grew its commodity focussed empire through the use of magazines, radio and TV encouraging free global trade whilst all protected by numerous discreetly located strategic defence ports spread across the globe. These trade networks, when they function smoothly are often an invisible occurrence on our everyday lives. Today these infrastructures are best exemplified by the networked logistics of companies such as Apple and Amazon that make commodity culture so effortless with click to door retailing. To enable the ease of search engines, like the abilities of autonomous driving, require huge amounts of input for them to function and considerable hardware to enable procurement and delivery.

China, once the greatest empire on earth, lost out to The West through inward looking and protectionist policies. At the dawn of the Enlightenment and as the following Scientific and Industrial Revolutions took off in the West, China was left behind, losing its lead through two hundred years of stagnation. China as we all know has been catching up. Slowly at first from the 1970’s but everything changed from 09.11.1989 onwards with the fall of The Berlin Wall. China’s change of speed has caught the West off guard. Immense capital allocation delivered with direction and focus has grown China’s GDP an average 15.8% every year for the past 32 years. China was the fifth largest economy in the 1950’s sitting just above India but now sits second only to the US. China is building its new empire. Its ambition started in the 1970’s but its growth began from 1989 making the upcoming Chinese Empire barely thirty years old, younger that Microsoft or Apple and yet it is growing at such a phenomenal speed and its ambitions are truly global. The upcoming Chinese Empire is growing not by conquest but by controlling integrated networks. China’s hardware, the huge infrastructure and gateway projects and its software, the purchase of existing businesses and patents whether in part of in full, a controlling and influencing proportion of global businesses. The rights and wrongs of empires are for history to judge, it is their actual strategy and procurement, their engineering and governmental achievements on route that are of interest here.

The Belt and Road Initiative, BRI – “Purpose - to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, ending up in an innovative pattern with capital inflows, talent pool, and technology database” (Wiki) 

BRI - To create a market and build trust. This over simplification fully exaggerates the difference between an idea and the delivery of that idea. ‘To create a market and build trust’ translates to the largest global infrastructure project in world history. The delivery of which requires strategic, financial and engineering expertise at scale previously unprecedented.

China is looking to establish a new Middle Kingdom and become the dominant state in the Asia-Pacific region. To achieve this China needs to develop an educated middle class, it needs resource security and it needs to export innovation as noted in the points below. 

1 The transition from a rural to a consumer-based society

2 To increase high quality imports

3 To invest abroad

4 To innovate and develop 

In 1990 China was still largely a rural country with 75% of the population living in the countryside. Today half of China’s population are urban city dwellers. As China has opened up from a communist country of the 1970’s to a capitalist-communist country in the 1990’s the economic development has increased inequality. Educated early starters have been able to increase their economic lead over the adapting rural class. China has set up a strong educational policy with emphasis on maths and sciences and is now a world leader for the standards achieved at maths at secondary level. Asia are world leaders in academic achievement with China, Korea and Singapore leading the way. Education is key to growing both a middle class and a consumer-based society, lifting living standards across the country whilst creating liquidity for the internal markets through increased disposable income.

China has long been the factory of the world, where labour, prices and margins were all low. It grew its reputation by making other people’s goods at a fraction of the price. As China’s standard of living improves its labour prices also have increased and China now needs to move on to produce higher margin products. Increasing quality imports educates the consumer, it sets new consumer product standards and increases government revenues through churn and taxation. To improve liquidity China needs to make the transition from a country of savers to a country of spenders. Imports are also a means of international negotiation and trade. Buying from other countries wins friends and partners which are required to grow a network. Although imports will inevitably be replicated via the internal markets.

Since 1980 the industrialised world has been underinvesting in transport related infrastructure, instead seeking an export (commodities and services) orientated development model. China has pursued an infrastructure development strategy, at first at home and then by creating physical links with future trading partners. In so doing China has developed expertise in both infrastructure investment finance and in engineering and project procurement. The BRI may well be a means by which China intends to extend its influence at the expense of the US, as the two superpowers, old and new, go head to head. However, the ancient Silk Roads just like the BRI were never just Chinese, roads never travel in just one direction. The US has been the world’s largest national economy since 1871. Its 2019 GDP is forecast to exceed 21Trillion USD. In 1978 China was the ninth largest economy with a GDP of 214 Billion USD, in 2019 it was ranked second with a GDP of 9.2 Trillion USD.

China has been heavily investing abroad especially to secure resource commodities and raw materials. It has often done this in Third World countries by offering infrastructure expertise, finance and development in exchange for long mining leases. The Third World countries get ports, roads and railways for allowing China to dig in their back yards. China gets the resources it needs and much of the infrastructure it builds as payment for the leases it would have had to build anyway to shift the resources, yet for both sides this is still a win-win deal. Securing copper, iron-ore, lithium, coal and oil means that China’s development remains uninterrupted. China’s currency is pegged to the dollar and commodities trade in dollars, so investing in resource security also cushions dollar price swings.

Made in China was once a euphemism for a low-cost poor-quality copy. China is now spending money on R&D and innovation. Developing high quality products and patenting its innovations and IP. This will be a huge transition from poor quality copy-cat products to a world innovator. China is already a world leader for solar panel and wind turbine design. It also now manufactures more cars p.a. than the US and is now second only to the US in its annual output of scientific papers and its supercomputing capability. A less regulated Chinese market also allows for increased research into genetics and bio-engineering. China is a secretive country and there is much going on in the background away from the western press. This is conjecture but one should expect China to throw some surprises into the space race within the very near future.

For China, there will of course be internal friction, any empire that grows this fast will leave many behind. Access to the net combined with the leverage of globalisation means that the difference between the haves and have-nots will at first be extreme and this could create internal social and political conflict. China has strong governance and the people of China have a strong autonomous national identity, so lengthy internal conflict, even with the recent Hong Kong riots, is unlikely. China will also be aware that they were once world leaders and were reduced to an opium den in colonial servitude, a world third class citizen, from which it has taken 200 years to recover. Collectively their sights are firmly set and set very high.

As an upcoming nation state China has little competition. Its huge territory and population are considerable assets. Imports are a short-term fix as they will soon be replicated by the internal markets. It would seem unfortunate that the Chinese have rushed to emulate Western Imperialism grown on energy hungry, finite resource exploitation. In 2009 China consumed 46% of global coal production and similar percentages of aluminium, copper, nickel and zinc. A consequence of this rapid development has been China’s high level of ground, water and air pollution. A slower strategically better planned development route may have avoided all of these issues, prevention is always better than cure. There are also many aspects of Western culture that would be best edited out. Post war global values have become Americanised. In a commodity culture, possession is valued over ability, ownership over education, emphasis on the winner takes all. Excessive consumption and disposable consumerism have given us a materialist Bling culture, huge wealth discrepancy, obesity and environmental degradation. Western Scientific Enlightenment gave us a homocentric concept of our world and this we have practiced for 400 years. Today the planet desperately needs a Gaia-centric model. It would have been a far more progressive goal to have seen China lead the way to achieving this as the planet does not need a ‘more of the same, business as usual’ approach. It is time to change and the next Empire needs to lead the way. 

Fundamental to China’s ambition is the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI was set up in 2013 although its steering committee was not announced until 2015. The Belts are overland corridors and the Roads are maritime shipping lanes. The BRI has been compared historically to The Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road that connected The East to The West throughout the late middle ages. The BRI is far more ambitious and is nearer to the protected shipping lanes, ports and infrastructure that was set up to build the British Colonial Empire. The BRI is truly global in ambition and influence, it eventually will have developments and investments in 152 countries and a target completion date of 2049. The BRI will be the largest infrastructure project in world history. The project consumed 40% of China’s GDP in 2017. The project tries to address the infrastructure gap between the developed and the developing worlds and in so doing improve trade links and create markets.

The North Belt moves through Central Asia and Russia to Europe. The Central Belt passes through West Asia to the Persian Gulf. The South Belt runs from China to South East Asia to the Indian Ocean and Pakistan. At the same time the 21^st Century Maritime Silk Road, a sea route corridor, crosses the South China Sea, the South Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and via the Suez Canal on to Europe. There is further an Ice Silk Road, a Northern Sea Route in the Artic and a Super Grid that will develop high voltage electricity across the whole of the Asian Continent.

Since the 1980’s Asia and Eastern Europe have pursued export orientated strategies, this has created an infrastructure-based development expertise in bridges, roads, tunnels dams, airports, ports and high-speed rail. These are Chinese Mega-Infrastructure projects. In comparison, during the same period, the industrialised world has underinvested in transportation infrastructure.

The BRI achievements to date are impressive, from its concept in 2013, through steering committee 2015, to procurement as of 2019, this is only six years. It is already the largest infrastructure and investment project in history, it covers 68 countries, 65% of the world’s population and 40% of the world’s GDP. It has been difficult to write a text about the BRI without simply writing an endless list of projects, this would be both tedious and beyond the remit of this essay, an abbreviated list however is required to give an idea of the scale and scope of these projects. In Africa – Djibouti the BRI has provided a new port and an international airport. In Ethiopia, completed in 2015, 750 km of standard gauge railway line, connecting Ethiopia to Djibouti. In Kenya, completed 2014, 470 km of standard gauge railway. In Nigeria further railways and the facilities to access satellite TV across 10,000 African villages. In Europe The China-Britain route launched in 2017 and as of 2018 connects 48 Chinese cities with 42 European cities. This line was extended towards Vietnam in 2018. In Russia the China-Belarus Industrial Park covers 91.5 sq. km. There is a 140 km high speed rail route in Indonesia commenced in 2016. In Laos a 414 km of railway project began in 2016. In Malaysia new rail and pipeline projects have begun. There are further projects and ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In Thailand, solar parks, industrial Parks and a high-speed railway have all begun. There are two Hydropower projects on site in Argentina and numerous economic and infrastructure agreements have been signed with other countries with projects waiting to come on line. For example, instant port cities Bagamoyo, Mlingotini, Sihanoukville, Colombo, Kyaukpyu and Gwadar, Inland instant cities, Khorgos, and further railways planned for Thailand. The huge scale and scope of these projects is difficult to comprehend. Many of the above countries didn’t even have standard gauge railways let alone high-speed rail links. All of these projects move freight and people to and from China and the projects are financed by long-term Chinese loans, a very similar strategy to Post War American Imperialism. The difference is that these have all happened within the last six years.

The Karot Hydropower Project in Pakistan is typical of the agreements. The $2B project is funded by China’s Silk Road Fund and developed by The Karot Power Company which indirectly is a subsidiary to China’s Three Gorges Corporation. Upon completion The Karot Power Company will run and maintain the project for thirty years at a pre-agreed tariff rate. At the end of the thirty years the hydropower project will be transferred to the Punjab government. The project is a lease with a guaranteed return minimizing the risk for both parties but the primary beneficiary are the Chinese. There will also be collateral business opportunities during the thirty-year management period where both the Chinese and Pakistan businesses may benefit. The Chinese have been accused of Neo Colonialism and Debt trap diplomacy for many aspects of its BRI projects but this is not so dissimilar to America’s silent Empire building in post war Europe and Japan. The BRI has been called the Chinese Marshall Plan. In both the above cases at the time of the agreements, this was the best win-win solution. Could Pakistan afford a $2B hydropower plant without outside finance and expertise? Pakistan is better off for the next thirty years with a reliable energy supply upon which it could establish economic growth than it would be without this aid. Pakistan has a growing middle class. Two thirds of its population are under thirty and it is the fastest growing retail market in the world. China invests in links that can help access these markets and into which it can sell its goods.

Additionally, China benefits through these schemes from its excess capacity in the mainland, creating new markets for its goods. In Sri Lanka when the government struggled to make the repayments on the Hambantota port as payment the Sri Lankan government leased the port and 15,000 acres of the surrounding land back to the Chinese company for 99 years. This is a kind of land grab and territorial expansion that worries many of the neighbouring countries and is cause for political concern. Any port that can house and trade goods can equally be used for military purposes. There is now a Chinese military base at the port of Djibouti and one would expect others to follow to protect Chinese investments and assets. The BRI is not only about road and rail, hard infrastructure projects it is also about striking legal agreements on conditions relating to loans. There is then a soft infrastructure being put into place where China can exert its influence. 

At home China’s energy infrastructure is undergoing a profound transformation. Early growth was fuelled by oil and coal power stations, too quickly set up and poorly executed, causing well publicised pollution within its cities. To counter this China’s new energy mix will include 110 new nuclear power stations due for completion in 2030. Off the coast of Jiangsu province, the Three Gorges Sea project, due for completion in 2027, will be the largest off shore wind farm in the world. On a Tibetan plateau, in the Qinghai province is the world’s largest solar park. New hydroelectric projects include the 16,000 MW Baihetan Dam in Sichuan province due to open in 2022 and the Suwalong project on the Upper Yangtze River, its dam is 112m high and it is due for completion in 2021. To ensure that all of these renewable energy generators work continuously and at their most efficient five new pumped storage power plants are currently under construction and all of this is integrated into a new national grid. Some of China’s scheduled infrastructure will not be seen by satellite, several highspeed rail tunnels are due for completion. The Zhoushan and the Taihu tunnels are subsea tunnels that will allow trains to travel at 250 kmph. The Bonhai high speed rail link, under the Bonhai Straight connecting the cities of Dalian and Yantai will be 123 km long and in places over 70m deep. It will be over twice the length of the Channel Tunnel connecting the UK to France. Not all tunnels are for trains, a 1000km tunnel will carry 15 billion tonnes of water p.a. from the high wet plains of Tibet to the dry densely populated Xinjiang province.

China has 20% of the world’s population but only 6% of the worlds fresh water, further, most of its water is in the South and not in the North. China has built the South - North Water Transfer Project, three canals that together move 45 billion cubic meters of water from the Yangtze river in the south to the less fertile regions of the North. These canals are also used for shipping as part of the BRI. Along its rivers China has 22,000 large hydro-dams half of the global total, each dam has an upstream and downstream consequence. Large rivers often flow through several countries. New China Hydroelectric dams on the Mekong have caused issues with five poorer countries that rely on its water and fish further down-stream. There will be continuing issues with the scale and speed of these infrastructure developments. China is set for further growth and territorial/market expansion. The Chinese government provides the infrastructure to allow development and then floods the markets with billions of dollars of cheap loans encouraging entrepreneurs and business. This push for market capture that has continued for the past three decades will not slow any time soon.

China, is a member of the Paris Climate Agreement. China is both a world leader in the take up of renewables but it is also the world’s leading polluter, its fossil fuel emissions exceed all of Europe’s combined. Most of China’s carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal in new power stations to generate electricity. Many new coal-burning power stations have yet to be finished just as the rest of the world is closing them down. As part of the BRI infrastructure projects China has set aside $30bn to build coal-fired power stations in other third-world countries, including Pakistan. The world can ill afford more CO2 emissions being released into the atmosphere especially from countries where lower levels of regulation allow very inefficient and highly pollutive burning of coal. 

The environmental consequences have been made worse since 2017. Under president Donald Trump, America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, America’s trade war with China, the recent Hong Kong riots have all diverted China’s attention away from green initiatives. In 2018 all subsidies to solar and wind generation were dropped without warning and investment in these industries have shrunk 39% so far in 2019. In the mean-time the use of coal as a cheap and convenient option has increased. The short-termism, the rush to build empires sacrifices the long-term prospects both of China and the planet. The British Empire consumed, wasted and polluted through ignorance and primitive technologies. The American Empire consumed, wasted and polluted, through greed, self-obsession, power, control and wealth accumulation. The Chinese have the chance to take a new strategic approach and not to follow the errors of others and previous empires. The world no longer lives in ignorance, we watch by satellite and monitor daily the continued destruction of our planet. We are fully aware of the consequences of what we are doing and yet still ‘business as normal’ proceeds. When this approach is taken by an individual it is shameful. When it is taken by a great nation in the process of building a truly global empire it is unforgivable and the damage caused will be irreversible. The ambition, engineering and funding achievements for the BRI are extraordinary but the scale and speed of these projects, that focus solely on economics, have huge international environmental impact. Each infrastructure project, carried out in whatever country has an immediate environmental consequence. Infrastructure by its very nature generates further development along its lines of communication and this sets up huge areas as future development zones each with a further environmental consequence. The planet is a finite resource that we all share and is already over populated, projects of this scale will encourage further population growth and should be of international concern. For the rest of us mere mortals all we will be able to do is watch and monitor our forever changing planet by satellite.

Many of the BRI projects are utility projects that have little architectural or cultural quality, elementary roads, bridges and railways. I have selected images of projects that can be viewed via satellite to show their scale and that also offer quality design. All images are from Google maps, which in itself is an incredible resource for watching and supervising our planet.

1. Columbo Port City, Sri Lanka

2. Beijing Daxing International Airport by Zaha Hadid Architects

3. Beijing Capital International Airport by Foster and Partners

4. Shouhang Dunhuang CSP and Solar Park

5. Three Gorges Dam

6. Haiwan Bridge, Jiaozhou Bay China

7. The Danjiangkou Reservoir and Canal, South to North water Diversion, China

“The Modern Movement originated as a great pluralistic program attempting to rectify the spirit of the time, the Zeitgeist, catching in its initial stages in the different cultural realities of the European and American horizons. After thirty years of free experimentation, (Art Nouveau, Protorationalism, Expressionism, the modern classicism of Behrens, the creative eclecticism of Sullivan and Wright) the Modern Movement beginning in the twenties, tended to translate into a set of constraining rules, into a real orthodoxy, three fundamental dogmas:  the functionalist analysis  - as a starting point for architectural research;  the annihilation of the traditional grammar of architecture – with all its differences corresponding to places and civilisations;  the identification between architectural progress and the use of new technologies  – understood as potential generators of language.

The above quote from Paolo Portoghesi’s “The Fear of Heresy”, best surmises the convergence of the Modern Movement from the many reactions to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The three fundamental dogmas outlined above in turn become the basis for Post Modern reactions at the beginning of the Electronic Revolution. These reactions have in themselves been pluralistic, evoking eclectic exercises in classicism, semiotics, structuralism, de-constructivism, formalism and sensorialism, manifesting in a resurgence of the figurative, the fable and the myth. The Post Modern as a generic all encapsulating term used across many disciplines from literature through art, fashion, music, film, dance, design and architecture has been a period of reappraisal. The poetic, the narrative, the tactile, the referential and the metaphysical have all been explored to escape the formulaic and the authoritarian. Many of these reactions have been explored by individuals practicing in artisan studios or have been tested in the Universities around the world. Much of the work is collagist with the Electronic Revolution aiding easy access to other disciplines and cross-pollination of influences where working methods have proved a very progressive experimental environment for all disciplines. Out of this petri dish come exercises in the unimaginable, breaking the shackles of science and production to venture into the minds where fictive possibilities blend seamlessly into the real.

Memory

It is impossible to be Italian without also being nostalgic. The memories of past great civilizations whisper along the streets and cobbles of every major Italian city. Typological icons invented by The Roman Empire, The Powers of the Papacy and The Renaissance adorn many Italian city center’s and are echoed across the world as copies of copies reiterated throughout time. From this the Italian architect sees the city as a great vessel, a carrier of history and memory. Nostalgia is metaphysical, a pathway to romantic interpretations of happier and simpler times, times of clarity and order, of truth and virtue, where the sublime and the theatrical are emphasized over the pragmatic or syntactic. The great typological icons, the temple, the coliseum, the galleria, the arcade, all back drop the piazza with its on-going theatre of life. Memory, the psychic vapor that oozes from every faded fresco, eroded stucco and crumbling frieze fills the streets with an invisible but perceived memory mist. The picturesque is the Italian city, it physically exists, it is no longer the painting, it is a physical living, working, reality. The Italian courtyard, the balcony house, washing lines hanging over narrow streets, the loggia curtain flapping in the wind, the silent figurines, all bear witness. The statues, histories spectators, have watched and recorded all that has walked before them, hundreds of years of monumental events, Iconic moments that shaped the narrative that in turn became the country and its people. The echo never stops, every street whispers to the next - I was this, I did this, I am this - a relentless schizophrenic, multi faceted ghost upon a ghost. 

The Italian city can be seen as a receptacle, an accumulation of collective and individual memory. The city derived from the analysis of political, social and economic systems drawn upon by the ruling class at each relevant time, a perpetual re-concluding product. But the city can also be seen as a spatial construct, with individual responses that are an additive to an on going ‘histoire’. In each interpretation the narrative dominates, leaving its traces, its reveres, layer upon layer. The onward fight against the inevitable conclusion that all invariably returns to dust. The crumbling, the exfoliation, peeled and scrubbed, returned to its former glory only to slowly return back into the ground to be carried as dust in the wind. The empty piazza, this negative volume is a forum for reflection, a time traveller’s portal to previous worlds. This void, walled perhaps with a Fifteenth Century Town Hall, a Sixteenth Century Church, a Nineteenth Century Galleria, all punctuated with statues from every century and from many lands. At the piazza’s center a fountain what better way to represent ongoing life, here water cascades timeless and continuous through every century over dropped lover’s coins carrying their wishes and dreams of better things to come. This is the living tapestry of the Italian city.

As Venice sinks slowly back into the sea where better to explore memory and nostalgia by emphasizing the ephemeral, that even the monumental is ephemeral. The Theatre, an iconic symbol of every city, a typological giant among a cities many monuments, the Theatre that confirms a cities success, its solidity, security and culture. Rossi takes the typologically monumental and to set it adrift on a barge to visit the sinking city. The theatre here is a player that plays its part with its exits, entrances and scenes. During its short life the “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The passing of an event captured by photography in the same way that every empty coliseum and outdoor amphitheater echo with the silent sounds of gladiatorial battles, chariot races and the great crescendo of historic oratory. 

Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo of 1979, no small title for a small timber clad temporary building, offers the power of typological referencing, a form, the signifier, pregnant with the genetic heritage of its typological brothers and sisters, a reinforced collective, an authority. The Teatro here instead of solid and eternal is delicately floating and vulnerable, its height too tall to have stability, a wooden sail on a barge, timber the colour of sandstone. This is an exercise in how to take the monumental and to make it a shell of timber and paint, the inflammable, floating unstable over a murky sea, an ephemeral reminder of the transience and fragility of everything, including Venice.

Rossi wanted to recall the tradition of the sixteenth century theatrical floats from the period when Venice was the playground of Europe. The dialogue for Rossi’s Teatro would not be prioritized for actor and audience but instead with the City of Venice itself. From the outset the Teatro was to be a tower, a voluminous space and not simply a floating stage. It would speak with the city, the domes and the cupolas, the piazzas and the arcades, an architectural conversation of form and typology, of history and fragility. A tower hunched between two shoulders that would conceal two staircases, the central volume terminated with an octagon and an octagonal roof, as often in Rossi’s work tinted blue that brings the sky into the form. Just below the roof a blue band representing the classical cornice, the beginnings of a grand architecture skinned in paint and wood over a structure of scaffold tubes. Rossi’s architecture is associative, its forms are read via intellect to references of the past. It is not sensorial and it is not to be experienced sequentially as a modernist building may be. It is in itself, meditative, reflective and nostalgic. There is a need in Rossi’s work for human absence, as there is in the work of De Chirico. Human absence leaves us, the viewer, alone with the work, solitude, isolation and silence and only within these conditions can we drift through time back to spaces as yet unoccupied by the seething masses, by the here and now.

To Rossi architectural design was an extension of theoretical analysis. The architecture moves between the real city and the imaginary city, the Teatro Del Mondo sits somewhere in between, it is a gateway, a metaphorical link. With its towers and cupola it references the traditional city in which everything is solid and stationary but in the Teatro de Mondo solidity floats from location to location, event to event, a stage set that creates the stage set. The Teatro draws upon Elizabethan theatres, lighthouse structures and the architecture of Venice. A floating fragment of the city, a place where architecture ends and the world of imagination begins. It creates an architecture through action, the insertion, the intervention, forces reinterpretations of the historical fabric, an interloper that temporarily alters the landscape of a city. It invades on-going centuries old discussions and intrudes upon the comfortable fellowship of existing volumetric connections. It interrupts Venice and its scenic space, politely gate-crashing the old boys club by wearing an old school tie.

Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) 

The Surrogate Twin

Venice is a surreal island, a level plateau built on mud enshrouded by its lagoon. The Grand Canal, a truncated ‘river’ that starts and finishes as if cut from the mid section of another river from a distant land. The lagoon shelters the island. Venice is an island protected by spits and shallow mudflats and throughout its history these have foiled many a sea-based invasion, leaving antagonistic armies stranded in the shallows. Venice was originally little more than a swamp, a site chosen by the dispossessed and victimised, a marshland where its residents could reside in safety and start anew.

Early Venetian dwellings were little more than wooden huts on stilts clinging to the highest silt banks, an environment with poor natural resources, no farmland, few trees just marshes, reeds and bogs. Locally the residents could fish for crab, shrimp and silt dwelling fish. With stifling hot summers and brutally cold winters the original occupants were survivors, there to avoid persecution but also there to search out a better life, to start afresh without landlord or feudal lord. Soon they would learn to navigate their lagoon and become fishermen trading the surplus for what they needed. As their confidence grew they would venture further out into the Adriatic Sea trading along the coast of what is now Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. A natural progression to trading fish for goods or money was then to trade on the goods bought, so up and down the coasts they would travel buying and selling. With this the Venetians found wealth, their wooden huts soon replaced by large wooden buildings. Larger ships were built to carry more goods and to travel greater distances. As their success grew new inhabitants were attracted to their island home and soon it was full on its way to becoming a city. 

The larger ships carried the Venetians south down the Adriatic hugging the Albanian coast to Greece, here they would turn east eventually to reach Constantinople to trade with the Turkish traders at one end of the Silk Road. When Marco Polo returned to Venice after 24 years of travels to the East, his stories told of the huge wealth of the orient merchants who were keen for this new trade. The Silk Road travelled from China to Constantinople and the Venetians controlled all water born trade from Constantinople to the West via Venice. The areas around the Rialto developed into a market where all types of exotic goods could be bought and sold. Ships from Constantinople would harbour in the mouth of the Grand Canal and unload here at sea. Narrow boats took the goods from the ships along the network of canals and into the merchant’s houses. Venice was a port, a distribution and logistics centre but a centre like no others. The Venetian merchants houses developed into a unique type of wholesalers. Water gates at the base of the buildings open onto the canals allowing boats to access, unload and sell their wares. Floors immediately above this were storage and sales spaces. Floors above the sales spaces were domestic living accommodation. These were family businesses and the families grew very wealthy expressing their wealth in forever finer buildings. Early banking and insurance began here to aid the merchants and the infrastructure of trade developed. The Venetians were wise enough to appreciate that although their interests were personal their strength was as a collective so their ‘port’ was soon adorned with large pubic squares, churches, bridges, sculptures and monuments.

The trade routes along the Silk Road picked up ‘travellers, adventurers, explorers, rogues and vagabonds’. Service industries sprung up along route, food stalls, bars, theatres, gambling dens, dancers, faith healers, barbers, costumers, mercenaries, body guards, assassins, prostitutes, and at its terminus Venice soaked up this huge influx of cross cultural immigration that supplied these services. Intercontinental trade needs liberal conditions, in Venice, Christians, Moors, Asians and Jews all added to the mix. Their streets and their buildings an endless collage of cross pollination, an exquisite assemblage of adoption and adaption. 

When travelling considerable distances and when trade is exposed to substantial risk the best goods to ply have high value, low baulk. So trades in spices, gold, precious jewels, silks, perfumes and porcelain dominate. These suit the caravans of the land route, the rowed and square sailed ships of the sea route, the souks, bazaars and markets and the merchants houses of Venice.

The first privateers to venture into space will be looking for goods to trade. Asteroid mining will probably be one of the early businesses to be established. Small towns, space shanties, will settle on the asteroids they are mining and with time these settlements will grow attracting the many subsidiary industries that feed upon a primary industry. Not unlike the growth of Venice the asteroid towns will soon attract ‘travellers, adventurers, explorers, rogues and vagabonds’ all looking to get rich quick, to escape the established regime, to seek out a new life. 

Billions of years ago asteroids and planets were accreted from the same starting materials. The stronger gravitational force generated by a planet pulled all siderophilic (iron-loving) elements into their cores during the stages of their molten youths, leaving the surface crusts depleted of such materials. On earth asteroid impacts have re-infused the surface crust with these valuable elements. Typically these include metals such as gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and tungsten all with considerable economic and technological value. On asteroids due to their lack of sufficient mass and gravitational pull these elements may often be found lying on or near the surface, easing their discovery and recovery. Of these asteroids there are several Easily Recoverable Objects (ERO’s) and Near Earth Objects (NEO’s) that could feasibly be reached and mined. 

Asteroids are categorized by their spectra into Types. C-Type asteroids have a high abundance in ice and therefore these asteroids would have a significant infrastructure role in space. C-Type asteroids would be logical bases on which to set up space depots to provide, water, fuels (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen) and ingredients for fertilizers (organic carbon and phosphorus). In time Ceres would be a logical C-Type asteroid (now classified as a dwarf planet) for such an infrastructure base. Space fuels, water and food from the C-type asteroids would support the mining outposts on the S and M-Type asteroids.

S-Type and M-Type asteroids contain numerous metals including rare metals. As soon as trade between asteroids and between asteroids and earth commences subsidiary industries would grow along and around the new trade routes opening a new frontier. At present economic rather than technological conditions have prevented space initiatives, development and progress. However, as of September 2016, there were 711 known asteroids with a market value exceeding US$100 trillion and it is only a matter of time before the equation tips towards the economically feasible. The vastness of space contains an economic vastness of resources, although the total mass of the asteroid belt is only 4% that of the moon, asteroids are resource rich.

Early asteroid mining may well resemble the Privateers of the Fifteenth Century. Pirates on the high seas backed by National Governments. In a world that had yet to be claimed and with all eligible parties fighting for their share, this was a very grey area for any form of legislation. Earth has drafted The Outer Space Treaty and The Moon Agreement that outline laws and procedures with regard to space and space mining but only a few countries have signed these and as the prospects become more feasible the rules will change. It will be corporations backed by investors and not governments that will fund early space exploration. The East India Company immediately comes to mind, controlling key ports and Trade Routes, the gateways, will be the desired path of most corporations, to encourage anyone with a bucket, a spade and spaceship to ride out, stake a claim and strike gold.

The early days of space mining may well be Gung Ho but just as Venice was the initiator of this essay, by establishing trade and controlling the gateway to the Silk Road, out of the swamp grew an amazing rich and diverse city. There will be space cities equally magical, their stories told by Marco Polo astronauts. But just as Venice had its day, its day also passed. Wars with Turkey lost the Venetians control over Constantinople and with it control of the Silk Road land route to the East. Soon Columbus would discover the New World and Vasco Da Gama would round the Cape of Good Hope establishing a sea route to India. Venice’s monopoly on Eastern trade would be broken and its oared galleys were now outdated and of little use on the open seas. I see no reason why the rise and fall of future space cities should be any different. According to CNEOS, "It has been estimated that the mineral wealth resident in the belt of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would be equivalent to about 100 billion dollars for every person on Earth today." It is difficult to imagine the asteroids belt being left untouched forever, dwindling terrestrial resources may well force our hand. To fully explore space we would need resources beyond those that could be supplied by Earth. 

An important test bed for mankind’s ambitions for space would be with our own moon. The moon’s surface is believed to be rich in cobalt, iron, gold, palladium, platinum, titanium, tungsten, uranium and the gas helium3. Water has been discovered at the poles which would be used either to sustain life or split and be used as a fuel. The moon could also function as the earth’s lifeboat housing data stores of information including genetic, technical and historic should an asteroid ever fatally hit the earth. How many more years will we wait for the first moon base?

The Surrogate Twin

North West of Hong Kong in the south of China where the Pearl River spreads its fingers into The South China sea lays a level land of canals, estuaries, deltas and silt banks. These rich soils connected by a labyrinth of waterways would eventually grow into the great trading port of Canton. Since the 16^th century Canton had been connected to the west through trading with the British, French and Portuguese and in the process inheriting a tapestry of cross-cultural influences.

Sheltered and fed by the Baiyun mountains to the north, the Pearl River Delta is formed by the convergence of three major rivers, the Xi Jiang (West River), Bei Jiang (North River), and Dong Jiang (East River). The flat lands of these alluvial deltas are crisscrossed by a network of tributaries and distributaries forming a natural network of communication conducive to trade. Inevitably a people at one with the navigation of these terrains thrived, a boat people that were as happy on land as they were on water. To live, work, eat, sleep, sail and sell, a composite synergy of activities on one floating platform. Floating villages formed, together moored to the banks of trading towns. The transition from land to floating communities lost within the density of it all. 

These romanticized images perhaps could only be formed from a European perspective, where history and culture are so intrinsically intertwined they are read as one without differentiation. Canton, now Guangzhou is today an economic powerhouse, much of its former history has been erased, first by the Communist Party and of late by the onslaught of Capitalism. The Guangzhou International Finance Centre, an exquisite 21^st century tower at the heart of a thriving metropolis could not be further removed from trading dry fish under a bamboo canopy off the deck of a sampan. Yet each generation stands on the shoulders of those that preceded it, upon the accomplishments of others, knowledge is passed down reappraised and assimilated. 

I am soon off to Guangzhou, perhaps to collaborate with a truly 21^st century company with an expanding commercial empire, a logistics machine that opens a new shop every four days, an impressive trajectory even in these heady days of online globalization. But when in Guangzhou as I walk among its four lane highways, dwarfed by its 400m towers and lost within its multi million population I will be searching for the scent of Canton, searching as only a romantic can for the essence of what makes something unique. Only by identifying the ‘what and why’ that makes a product special can one hope to enthuse others to enjoy and share in that same experience. My romantic walk may well be just a day dream on the plane as the reality of the 21^st century dynamism of this Chinese economic hub will hit next week and my schedule leaves little time to muse a thousand years of history. Idealised and naively romantic this may be, but to extract the essence of what is Chinese is the objective of my visit. Only by selling what is Chinese to the West will a Chinese company be successful, neither undercutting nor imitation will have longevity in a crowded market. So somewhere under the layers of what now is the metropolis of Guangzhou the cultural riches of a hidden Canton are waiting to be rediscovered. 

The Surrogate Twin

Images left to right, 1 Canton River, 2 Canton Style, 3 Flower Boats, 4-6 Busy Waterways, 8 A Wedding Bride.

It is 1881. The Belle Époque is at its peak, midway between the Prussian War that ended in 1871 and the First World War that was yet to commence in 1914. The peace and optimism of the intervening years produced a flourish of engineering and artistic achievements with Paris at the epicenter. Café society, opera, fashion, cabaret, philosophy and art attracts the talented and this invigorates Paris with energy and productivity.

Two centuries prior in the Royal Courts at Versailles the only way to get ahead was to get noticed and then to slowly work ones way up through the ranks via friend, family and favour. The gardens, the courtyards, the corridors and the bedrooms were where the business of promotion and patronage were discussed. The principal destination and ultimate objective, was the kings bedroom, where all matters of importance or of State were decided. Lifetimes could be consumed waiting for your chance to be presented. If you were female, life at Court was considerably more difficult. The female courtesan was expected to be a woman educated in the arts of dance and singing. Her role was to provide entertainment and companionship to the rich and powerful, from this she could gain independence, wealth and access to education and the affluent Court society. Options for females during the Renaissance were few. Women of nobility with a rich dowry may have been able to achieve a political marriage to a powerful partner but a woman without lineage, dowry or independent means had few opportunities and the Courtesan route was often the chosen career path. There have been many famous courtesans but inevitably considerably more not so famous ones.

Two hundred years and two Republican Revolutions had passed between the Royal Courts and the Belle Époque. An aristocracy and the upper middle class have now replaced the Royals, a Nouveau riche of industrialists and financiers that now hold political and fiscal power. However, The Belle Époque was only Belle for a small percentage of the population. In Paris two thirds of the people still lived in poverty.

In 1881 Degas unveils La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans to the shock of the critics. The wax model of a fourteen year old would be ballerina defied the classical laws of beauty expected by the Academies of the day. Wax as a medium was also an issue of contention, sculpture should be made in marble or bronze, lesser pieces perhaps in terracotta, but wax was the medium of the medical profession or the arcade. The Little Dancer was a peculiar thing, created from a steel frame, covered in clay then covered in wax, dressed in real clothes. The sculpture of a young girl posed in the fourth position right leg forward, hands behind her back. She wears a real tutu and ballet shoes. She has a wig of real hair and a fabric bodice both overlaid with wax, half real and half sculpture. Wax emulates reality with wax stockings complete with wrinkles. The whole figure two-thirds life size was to be shown on a plinth in a glass case. Offered as a specimen, reality captured and encased, a pose, an expression, hermetically sealed, straight from the dance class and into the art gallery. Degas was 45 when he began work on the Little Dancer and he rarely left Paris with the city as his inspiration, he was a painter of modern life. Degas came from a wealthy banking family, had no wife, no known mistress, no children, he was a loner, the voyeur that would paint some of the harsh realities of the Belle Époque. 

Dance was one of the few opportunities available for young poor women. Girls as young as ten were apprenticed to the ballet school, they were known as the ‘little rats’, as if ‘little rats’ could ever be a term of endearment. This Little Dancer was a real person. Her name was MarieVan Gœthen from Boulevard de Clichyin Montmartre. She was the middle of three sisters who all became dancers. Marie turned fourteen in 1879 and Degas drew Marie numerous times before he decided on the position of the sculpture. Degas was an artist trained in the classical tradition, to draw the body naked and to clothe it later, to draw with line and to clothe with colour and he drew Marie naked and clothed. One can imagine the naked wax sculpture before it was dressed. Not quite a pet, or a doll or a sculpture. 

The Little Dancer was first to be shown at the 1880 Impressionist show but was unfinished, famously leaving an empty glass case in the midst of a gallery for a month. It eventually premiered in the 1881 Impressionist show. When unveiled the shocked audience did not see a dancer but instead a prostitute, ‘une fleur de la gouttière’. The sculpture was compared to a monkey, a primate, a criminal, a medical curiosity. It was accepted that teenage working class ballet dancers were expected to pay their way through school with patronage or favours. Their clients were the wealthy season ticket holders, the men in black with top hats that haunt many of Degas’ pictures. These were the privileged few that had access to Le Foyer de La Danse at the heart of the Opera House. Le Foyer de la Danse was a kind of gentleman’s club that only men and ballet girls could enter. After two hundred years of progress the clandestine and illicit workings of a Versailles plan have simply been rotated 90 degrees and can be clearly seen in the Opera House section.

Charles Garnier built the Paris Opera House between 1861-75. The Opera house is of an opulent Beaux-Arts Second Empire style with extravagant Neo-Baroque details. The commission was won by open competition from 170 entrants. A commission Garnier won at the age of thirty-five. Built at the time of the Emperor Napoleon III the Paris Opera was to be an extravagant national symbol and monument. The Opera was always to be a meeting place of the rich and powerful, housing ample foyers, corridors and alcoves for private meetings. Yet the Paris Opera House has an unusual plan and section and these reveal a lot about the society that created it. In the heart of the plan and section, located directly behind the stage is a huge ornate room that serves as a mirror to the society that created it. The Foyer de la Danse was a space designed specifically for the meetings between the dancers and the wealthy patrons of the Opera. A space where a young dancer may find a patron or finance for favours that would help pay her way through training. This was not a space for a discrete casual meeting, the meeting that may have taken place in the bar or restaurant. Here it has been formalised, monumentalised at the heart of the building. This gentleman’s club is very much part of the internal mechanism that is the Ballet and also very much part of the society that supports it.

From a twenty-first century perspective this formalisation of exploitation is beyond belief, especially when the space has such scale and ornate embellishment. In the Paris Opera house Le Foyer de la Danse sits within the upper hierarchy of all its spatial types. In the city the Opera House is typologically within the upper echelons of public buildings. In Paris in this post revolution, post republic building we see revived the age of the Courtesan. Except here, in this public building, unlike the respected Courtesans of the Royal Courts the women are replaced with desperate fourteen year old girls that have little option outside of dance to make any life for themselves. Here the established relationship between the vulnerable and the powerful is formalised and adorned in Baroque splendour, built into the heart of a public building, vetted through councils and competition. The space of the Foyer de la Danse sits unashamedly, architecturally, central to both the plan and the mechanism that financed the ballet. In the pictures of the Foyer by Degas the dancer is the point of focus, the opulent space recedes and the men in top hats hover and haunt. The drawings are the reality sketched over the grand illusion proposed by the architecture. An architecture that is representative of a system that had changed little since the Royal Courts of Versailles.

Things did not go well for Marie Van Gœthen after the Little Dancer was unveiled. She first began missing classes that in turn incurred fines. Eventually in July 1882 she was sacked. Marie had been known to frequent Le Chat Noir, a notorious bar where her elder sister had been charged with theft and was now in prison. Marie’s younger sister Charlotte, would continue in dance at the Opera for the next fifty years eventually becoming Professeur de Danse. Nothing is known of Marie Van Gœthen after 1882.

Images from left to right 1-4 Degas, Little Dancer, 5-7 Palais Garnier 

The Surrogate Twin

Termites and Butterflies

The Amitermes Meridionalis also known as the Magnetic or Compass Termites of Western Australia build their tower homes aligned to the sun. The termite mounds are elliptical in plan. The termites build the long axis of the ellipse north south; this aligns with the sun offering the smallest solar exposure with the narrow edge of the nest fronting the midday sun. The east and west facades of the nest are expansive and maximise morning and evening solar gain. The base of the termite mound goes deep underground, sometimes as low as the water table; here temperatures are low and stable. The sidewalls of the nest contain ventilation shafts that have a two-fold purpose; they insulate the inner nest from the sun whilst allowing the escape of hot air vertically up through the vents in the sidewalls. As the stack effect of heated air climbs the vents, cool air is drawn in at the base or from the voids created below ground. This form of natural solar ventilation helps maintain the lower and steady interior temperature of the nest that is required for egg laying and fungus farming.

Iridescence may not always be caused by pigmentation but by structural colour. Structural colour is a microstructure that refracts rather than reflects light. Structural colour is produced by microscopically structured surfaces that interfere with light. This is one of several photonic devices used by animals to induce and enhance colour. Some butterfly wings and birds feathers being common examples. e.g. a peacocks feathers are pigmented brown but reflect and refract iridescent blues, greens and turquoise. Morpho butterflies appear coloured with metallic blues and greens by using structural colour and not pigmentation.

The Yoko Towers are a generic office type designed to be located within the equatorial belts. The office towers are flattened spheroidal forms that align north south, presenting their narrow facades to the noon sun. The perimeter enclosure has two distinct layers. The inner skin is double-glazed. An outer tertiary skin has a thirty per cent photovoltaic frit allowing light through whilst collecting and converting solar energy. There is a 1200mm gap between the inner double-glazed skin and the outer tertiary fritted skin. This gap collects passive solar gain through the tertiary skin and uses the stack effect between the two skins for venting the internal offices. Deep below ground are the cooling tanks. Water is drawn up, to and through waffled ventilated concrete floor slabs combined with chilled ceilings. Air is drawn through these floor slabs by controlled vents that open onto the heat stack created behind the tertiary skin, this in turn cools the offices.

The building in section consists of six floor stacked ‘villages’ that each sit on a double height communal zone. The double height communal space is a water garden with excessive planting that assists to humidify and oxygenate the six floors of offices that sit directly above it. Below ground a huge cooling plenum and water storage space serves the water gardens. There are several stacked villages in each tower. The offices consist of a vertical series of concrete waffle floors enclosed by a double glazed skin. The external wings of the tertiary skin enclose the passive solar zone and heat stack that vents the office waffle floors. The heat stacks are in turn vented at roof level. At night or when the towers wish to retain heat, the vents at the top of the heat stacks are closed and the gap between the inner and outer skins becomes an insulating barrier. In plan the service cores are moved off centre to the façade that faces the noon sun forming a thermal defensive mass by day and a heat sink by night. The Yoko Towers apply the lessons learnt from the constructions of the termites. 

The outer photovoltaic fritted skin converts the suns energy to electricity. Each floor has its own battery storage, distributed where required throughout the plan. The localised battery storage is fed during the day by the sun and at night by low cost electricity. Electricity is also produced via turbine generators driven by escaping air at roof level at the top of the heat stacks. The outer skin of the building attempts to mimic the structural colouration of a butterfly’s wing. In 1991 when the project was conceived, glass could not be etched at a micro scale so a coating was applied to attempt to achieve the equivalent colour refraction. It was assumed that the coating could be choreographed through controlled wave interference to refract light within a prescribed colour range. Exact intonation of colour would depend upon the lights direction. At night when the office lights are on and the skies dark, the refractive skin reverses to emit coloured light. The image is of an early maquette of the Yoko Towers with the offices against a night sky.

This project like many other personal projects included within the diary text were completed in my twenties and early thirties. Unfeasible at the time of conception the projects deserve review, as many of the ideas from which they evolved are as relevant today as they were unpopular when first drawn.

The Surrogate Twin

Images left to right. 1 Compass Termite Mounds of Northern Australia.  2 Yoko Towers.

We are off to visit the Caravaggio exhibition for a second time. As we turn the corner to approach Trafalgar Square from the west the low winter sun hits the National Gallery hard on its face; the lights beauty stops us in our tracks. The low sun brought relief to the moldings and cornices, adding definition, warming the yellow Portland stone whilst articulating all of the details of William Wilkins façade. It was a rare opportunity to fully appreciate a London building so often hidden by English overcast skies. Ruskin’s Seven Lamps promptly came to mind, Venice at sunrise or sunlit cobbles in a sleepy Italian hill town….but then there was a pause as I said that light had travelled 149 million miles to hit that façade. We Googled the travel time, light travelling at 186 thousand miles a second took eight minutes to travel from the sun to the National Gallery.

It is difficult to comprehend space speed and distance, 149 million miles in eight minutes, 18.6 million miles a minute. We understand space-time only from speeds that we regularly experience, long distances are most frequently experienced through car travel and this forms our all-encompassing concept of scale. At 60 mph, a mile a minute, quite fast and a legal speed, London to Bristol, 120 miles is 2 hours, London to Manchester, 210 miles is 3.5 hours. If we had lived in the 18^th Century our all-encompassing concept of scale would be the horse and carriage with a speed of approximately 6 mph, London to Bristol 20 hours, London to Manchester 35 hours. Our experiential conditioning of space-time prevents us from fully comprehending our insignificance within the universe.

A light year, the distance light travels in a year, is six trillion miles, again a meaningless number, even more incomprehensible when written 6,000,000,000,000 miles. Our VW Golf is happy at 60 mph. one light year at VW Golf speed is 100,000,000,000 hours or 47,915,668 years. So in our VW Golf, assuming we would need a couple of sandwich breaks it would take 48 million years to travel one light year. The nearest star to the sun is Alpha Centauri 4.4 light years from earth, the Golf’s not up to it.

There are approximately 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, if, assuming 10% of them have planets, there are 30 billion planets in our galaxy alone and there are over 100 billion known galaxies in the observable universe. Our concept of space-time is so wonderfully inadequate and our present ability to cross such distances is so far out of our reach that it will be some time before we can ”boldly go”.

If Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is correct and that energy and mass are interchangeable, speed of light travel is impossible for material objects that weigh more than photons. The energy needed to move a material object at the speed of a massless photon moves to an infinite requirement as it approaches the speed of light. Warping space to move an object instead of increasing its kinetic energy is a purely theoretical solution to the problem although one adopted by many science fiction writers. Star Treks warp drive is a scalable measure using the formula v=w³c where v is velocity, c the speed of light, and w the warp factor. Therefore warp factor 1 is the speed of light, warp factor 2 is eight times the speed of light (2³) and warp factor 3 is twenty-seven times the speed of light (3³). Warp factor 10 theoretically reverses time.

Discovering the means by which to cross such colossal distances will be the equivalent to the wake up that followed the Hellenistic astrologers proof that the world is spherical and not flat. (The world as a sphere was conceived by the Greeks in the 6^th century BC and proven in the 3^rd century BC). Until we are able to cross such immense space-time distance our only interplanetary explorers will be Hollywood movie stars, the occasional Vulcan and of course the suns photons.

Images 1-7. The National Gallery at Sunrise. 7 Robert Venturi’s Post Modernist Trace.

The Surrogate Twin

It is a point of national embarrassment that UK politicians are famous for their endless indecision. Brexit has further diverted valuable political time away from more urgent global concerns and these include: Climate Change, how to reduce the UK’s dependence upon fossil fuels especially the immediate reduction in the use of coal and UK infrastructure, the need to replace and update the UK’s outdated Victorian infrastructure. The two concerns are inter-woven; infrastructure and the decentralization of the UK energy supply should be tackled holistically. Decisions of this type are long term and should be made outside the remit of the four yearly political cycles. The Infrastructure Commission is a start and one hopes that they will have the power to do more than just churn reports.

Fortunately for the UK the most qualified to provide infrastructure solutions have their main office at Riverside on the Thames. So when Foster and Partners offers the UK a solution to its infrastructure problems the UK would be wise to listen. Foster and Partners have been consistently providing quality infrastructure solutions for decades their CV is beyond reproach. Thames Hub is Foster’s solution and although strategically I differ on how best to deliver this, (see the 2014 letter to City Hall copied below in the postscript) the UK needs to make this call. An airport is the gateway to and from a country. As a building type it is beyond a pure utility, a machine of logistics, but also is a built representation of a countries values and ambitions.

Foster’s early approach to airport design was to capture the excitement of the pioneer open grass airfields. These were little more than tents around a field but the sequence of arrival, boarding and the visual connection to the planes has been a generating concept even in the largest and most complex of Foster’s airports. The ground plane is kept clear and uncluttered, all air conditioning and services are removed from the roof scape and ceilings and natural light floods the forecourts. All of the mechanisms that make an airport work are below the ground plane and out of sight. This enables the mechanisms that facilitate the utility component of an airport to be contained within an efficient lower level metaphorical black box whilst freeing up the ground plane and the architectural component. This concept is not new and can be seen in Mies Van Der Rohe’s Berlin National Gallery but applying and delivering such a concept with clarity to extremely large and complex airport projects is no small achievement. It is this clarity from concept to execution that makes Foster and Partners apt at infrastructure design. As a design consultancy they have the ability to assimilate huge quantities of data, statistical, political, financial, engineering, architectural, logistical etc. and from it deliver a coherent, rational, achievable and poetic conclusion. Additionally to this Foster and Partners are able to see further opportunities and potentials that can be incorporated into a fully all-inclusive design solution.

To be able to do all of this and still deliver an architectural poetic is extremely difficult and very few practices attain such skills. The gem of the gems is Beijing airport as it not only resolves the complex issues of airport design but it is also has incredible culturally site specific personality.

The images above provide seven reasons why the UK needs to replace continued indecision by making the right decision so that she can remain a country of ambition and conviction.

The Surrogate Twin.

Postscript. Letter to the London Mayor 080914,

The past year has seen the debate over how to improve Britain’s airports fall into unproductive disarray with each protagonist fighting for his corner. Business, Contracts, Licenses, Capital allocation and Politics have taken all clarity from the underlying problem of how to prepare Britain’s infrastructure for generations to come. This is most apparent in the fight for individual airports and not how best all airports may serve the countries needs.

Historically the two principle airports of Gatwick and Heathrow have developed South and West of the capital. This has been due partly to the available space and sensible location of the original recreational and military airports and later reinforced by surrounding affluent and educated market catchment areas. These conditions have changed dramatically as demographics have moved east along the Thames corridor. The building of Stansted acknowledged this demographic shift and for two decades London has been served by three airports Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted all working together. Each airport provides an overlap with its neighbours in catchment area and services provided. The triangulation of the airports around London and the influences on the areas beyond has provided a balanced infrastructure organization. However this balance has now dramatically changed as population density increases along the Thames corridor replacing redundant industrial sites and disused quarries with housing, offices and retail centers. The growth eastward will continue for decades to come and the balance of the serving infrastructure needs to accommodate this. 

There is of course an additional need to better link the North with the South with an improved railway spine to revitalize the ’Industrial North’ that has been neglected by successive policies favouring service industries over manufacturing industries. There is also a need to link and encourage collaboration between the main university and research centers of Cambridge, Oxford and London as the UK’s IT, Robotics and Biochemistry development and procurement has fallen behind the US and other developed nations.

Looking at how to best improve UK airports without having to steer through the thick political fog one may well note the following points:

It is understandable that UK politicians have neither the confidence or the finances of the Victorians………..the Empire is long gone.

Increasing flights to Heathrow is at best unwise. Heathrow is a major international accident is waiting to happen.

There is only one London airport that was designed from the outset to accommodate growth and potential future increase in flight traffic and that is Stansted.

And arrive at the following conclusions:

Stansted should be allowed to increase capacity as this would provide the most efficient short-term fix.

Simultaneously Thames Hub to be developed as a two Phase scheme with 50% of the proposed scheme developed as Phase one.

On completion of Thames Hub Phase One flights to Gatwick and Heathrow would be diverted to Thames Hub.

Thames Hub Phase Two to commence.

All flights from Gatwick diverted to Thames Hub and Gatwick closed and the land re-developed.

On completion of Thames Hub Phase Two the majority of flights from Heathrow diverted to Thames Hub. Heathrow to continue but with much reduced capacity. Heathrow could be developed as a new short haul airport west of the reservoirs with its existing buildings and land re-allocated for industrial/office use.

The then three remaining airports of Thames Hub, Stansted and Heathrow would be better balanced to serve the infrastructure needs of future Britain. Valuable land re-claimed from Gatwick and Heathrow would contribute to infrastructure funding.

Not using Foster and Partners to develop a credible infrastructure plan could be the UK’s greatest mistake.

Engineering High Tech Architecture continues the V&A’s 1960’s revolution theme across many of its current exhibits. Foster, Rogers and the Arup engineers discuss the collaborative projects of the early days of High Tech Architecture. The talk was an informal discussion as opposed to a lecture explaining engineering issues and how they were resolved so in some ways disappointing. However, there was a powerful naïve optimism to the early 60s and 70’s architectural movements. Architects almost straight out of college landed huge competition wins and established themselves as the ‘Rock Stars’ of architecture. All architectural students, myself included, would have pawed endlessly over their projects so each project is very well known. The evening was without doubt nostalgic, like watching the Rolling Stones play a pub gig in 2012. Superstars all in one room, you could ask them questions, shake their hands, scream Beatles style (though no one did) or sing along. The stories of the early projects have been told so many times the responses, punch lines and musings could have been pre-quoted by most of the audience. I guess we were all fans saying thank you one last time. The evening was warm and heroic, the speakers had all lived such influential and fantastic lives and together had achieved so much.

We didn’t leave with improved knowledge but it was an evening we would never have missed. A salutation and a big thank you to Lord Foster, Lord Rogers and the Arup team.

The Surrogate Twin

Synthetic Landscapes should be read 1 through to 4.

Landscapes in extreme environments are heavily nursed. Central pivot irrigation provides the most common form and these create surreal circular patterns that are seen clearly from above. The simple technology, invented by Frank Zybach in the 1940’s, consisted of a boom sprinkler system fed from a central point. The interlocked booms can be 500m in length, these rotate about the central point so a 500m length would create a 1km diameter circle but an 800m diameter circle (400m boom) is the common norm. The sprinkler booms are supported by trusses, these in turn are supported by wheeled towers driven by electric motors. The outer edge of the boom, the perimeter of the circle makes a full rotation every three days. Water is evenly spread and the outer edge of the boom travels at a faster pace than the inner parts and therefor covers a greater area. Holes that distribute the water from the boom are correspondingly larger towards the ends of the radii. Central pivot irrigation best suits large areas of flat land and are often located over subterranean aquifers. The more efficient systems employ hoses that deposit the water directly onto the ground next to the plants and cutting evaporative losses that are high. Central pivot irrigation systems can use hundreds of gallons of water per minute but are still considered to be more water efficient than traditional farmland in specific locations. However by allowing farming to exist in areas where climatic conditions would not normally support farming, pivot irrigation quickly depletes underground water supply. It makes no long-term ecological sense to continue using central pivot irrigation in arid regions without controlling evaporative loss and better sustainable management amongst farmers. The aesthetics however are seductive; lush green circles carpet the desert sands creating extravagant geometries that can be viewed from space.

Vertical landscapes, Green Walls or Living Walls are indoor or outdoor vertical gardens. The vegetation grows on substrates of either loose dirt in trays, felts, woven mats or polyurethane sheet media. The media used is dependent upon wall height, scale and location but all consist of a grid system that has a feed of water and substrate panels. The walls are high maintenance, earth needs to be replaced at least yearly and matting panels every three years, replacement requires disrupting both the established aesthetics and planting. Vertical Landscapes using structural media have become increasingly popular as a means of covering large vertical surfaces and fifteen year life spans have been achieved. As the benefits of the vertical planting become better understood and with increased use further efficiencies will incur, including assisted natural ventilation of buildings.

Vertical Landscapes are of interest at the larger scales and could function and offer positive for both the built and the urban environment. Cities are heat sinks, acres of concrete paving, roads and walls all of which absorb solar radiation and re-radiate the absorbed heat allowing a heat build up in cities. Vertical Landscapes can help negate the affects of the heat sinks associated with building materials. Urban areas lack adequate green space, green walls can humidify, add oxygen, remove carbon dioxide and lower ambient temperatures. On a building they could help recycle grey water, shade and humidify, assist and filter ventilation, encourage biodiversity and increase habitats. Green walls offer an addition to the architectural vocabulary of the façade, increasing its depth and its texture.

Hydroponics has a history of over 300 years and is a method of growing plants in water without soil. The plants are drip-fed mineral nutrient solutions that can be from organic waste products such as food waste, fish waste and manures. One advantage of hydroponics is the efficiency with which the plants roots can have constant access to both oxygen, water and nutrients, taking as much or as little as required. Excess water can be drained, aerated to eliminate anoxic toxins, supplemented with minerals and recycled back to the plants. Although hydroponics may use a static solution culture a continuous flow nutrient film is preferred it is easier to manage and can obtain higher crop yields. It is possible to grow plants using aeroponics where the roots are fed with nutrients via an atomizing mist. A wide range of plants can be grown together in this way as each plants microclimate can be finely controlled and pathogen spread can be greatly reduced. Aeroponics uses 65% less water than hydroponics and produces a greater biomass. There are available a wide range of substrates and nutrient feeds but the method of feeding is consistent. The hydroponic mechanised landscape offers an unusual aesthetic potential.

These mechanised, highly serviced, landscapes may have a much greater role in a post-industrial urban environment. Automation, robotics, micro drones may soon be cost effective gardeners fussing over rooftops and facades. Responsive systems moving in and out of the sun, opening and closing, moving to allow light through or clustering to prevent hard rains reaching ground. Systems that capture sunlight, wind and rain and hold and release these when required, turning rain into humidity, turning solar into coolant, modulating its own microclimate. In this system architecture is not a pre-determined form but instead a conclusion to a series of responses set around a desired environment.

In conclusion, a landscape of choreographic intensity.

The Surrogate Twin