Does the convergence of architecture and communication media create a new genre? What is the role of narrative in creating environments that work? Peter Higgins of Land Design reflects on the importance of editorial control in creating unique experiences for users of buildings, exhibitions and public spaces.
Read the transcript below
Jeremy Myerson
I’m very pleased now to introduce Peter Higgins of Land Design Studio, who has really been at the forefront of creating in a sense a hybrid new design discipline at the intersection of architecture, new media, editorial narrative, exhibition space, and I for one am very excited to hear what Peter Higgins has got to tell us.
Peter Higgins
Good morning. I’d just like to say how scary it is to be here, after Frans yesterday who I thought was going to start doing press ups, like Miles Davies used to do during his concerts, and Tim with his stories from the valley, and James, who I said to last night, “James, you were so funny”, and he said “It’s not meant to be funny!”
And thanks for Kevin and John Thackara for inviting me because I wanted to talk about something – yesterday I began to feel that I was in the wrong conference until the last session when the chance to talk about the built environment, and that’s pretty much where I come from. What you’ll hear today is a bespoke presentation. This is not my day job. What these conferences are meant to do is to make people gather their thoughts and that’s exactly what I’ve done today, is to put together a stream of unconsciousness or sub-consciousness that has been rattling around. I’ll start with context, because context is a very important word for people that work in the worlds of – I hate the word “exhibition” actually, but I can’t find another word – “making narratives in environments,” that’ll do. I’m giving you the context of my background, which is slightly a strange thing to do, but I think it has a relevance and maybe it’ll fit in.
I was brought up in a new town, part of the garden city movement, which as we know the world watched whilst they built these towns based on Ebenezer Howard’s revelation that we could organise a city, and it’s almost treating planning as a science, as a piece of social medicine as it was called, “wizardry” it was described as, beyond the grasp of people. They made films about town planners.
I contacted the library and said, “Could you find me a photograph of my school”, and they said, “Only one of it being demolished”, so I said, “That’ll do, that’s absolutely perfect!” This school – I mean, the academies, watch out! – this was at its time a state of the art. It was named ironically after Sir Thomas Bennett, one of the architects of the town. The largest school in Europe at the time, experimental, kids went to Oxbridge, went to Slade, played football for England. We had a so-called “remedial class” which was like a cuckoo’s nest. They talked Russian, Esperanto, and the art teachers were closer to the sixth form girls than the boys were.
Because I didn’t study art in the sixth form, or at any stage at all, the only place for me when I found about architecture was the Architectural Association. Cedric Price worked with Joan Littlewood, can you imagine, a theatre director and an architectural thinker, with Cedric very interested in social possibilities, and Joan Littlewood a master of performance and theatre, which led to these guys, the Archigram Group, who drew like a dream. Rayner Banham talked about them as guys that wrote books, did work, had drawings, had slide shows, fantastic happenings with six or eight of them just working in their back bedroom drawing like this. Ron Heron especially, imagine, done with Rotring and blowing through a spray thing. An incredible impact globally on the whole world of architecture, and kind of gave us this actually.
So from a comprehensive school to this was a quite a jump cut, but it was the Swinging Sixties, and what you never know is if you’re middle of such turbulent times, such a significant cultural revolution, you don’t know about it until it’s too late. But it was very very important to me, and left its mark for all of us.
With the advent of the three day week, there was no work, so I stumbled into the BBC Design Department, where I started to understand the importance of working with the written word, with a script, not a brief but a script, where there was a structural narrative to be interpreted and transformed into space and time. There were new collaborators, there were writers, directors, the lighting cameramen, the editors, the costume designers, and there were very different ways of making drama. There was improvisation, Mike Leigh, there was contemporary drama, this was a character from a show called The Riff Raff Element, where it was a double decker bus and all of the props were sourced from car boot sales, very different from Archigram. There were adaptations – Dennis Potter, Tender as the Night, there were political pieces. You started to understand how you could put a story together, how important it was working with someone, surprisingly, as a lighting cameraman.
I also kind of worked in the world of theatre where, very different from film and television actually, 500 eyes instead of one, but at the same time, captivating. Bill Dudley describes theatre as “the upstage dream space,” where you can advance and play with time, and the downstage, where you obey the laws of physics, that’s real time. This was a back-to-front production of Merrily We Roll Along by Stephen Sondheim for the Guildhall.
Actually what happened was that, if I could just go back, I got approached by Imagination and I really didn’t want to go, and I made the mistake of showing Gary Withers this, no, actually we were going to burn the school down, and I said I’ve got to go, we’re burning down the school. So, the job was mine, if anybody knows Gary, he was very impressed with this as a reason to have to leave the meeting.
Imagination – I don’t know who knows Imagination, there’s 600 people worldwide, they are phenomenal, and this kind of guru running it, he’s a genius. But it is the world of selling cars and communications as well as your soul, and I did learn about destination, sorry, brand, sorry, market, consumer – even more sorry, but it was important message for me that there was a kind of user out there that could be identified and could be profiled and we could do something in respect of that.
And then to Land Design Studio and another Venn diagram, I always say it took me 10 years to draw this, but it’s true, but I realise that the world of architecture, the world of storytelling and the world of communication media, which kind of came from working with Land, wrapped up in this thing called the destination which I guess was the impact of Imagination, and was pretty much how we’ve positioned ourselves in the marketplace.
Are there any architects in? Norman Foster, he’s not in is he? No? That’s fine, I can carry on. You’ll see why later.
Placemaking – there’s a guy called John Jerler who works in the States who calls himself a placemaker. He started at Disney and he claims that cities have lost their soul through segregation. That he can provide the dynamic space, fused with entertainment and experiential design. He gives us Horton Plaza in San Diego and Universal City Hall, which is a part of Universal Studios. Mike Davies says of him, “Architecture as packaging, play acting.” Huxtable says of him, “Master salesman masquerading as a guru of city planning”. But it’s up for grabs, he can call himself a placemaker.
Disney again, Celebration in Florida. “Have you ever wanted to be something bigger than yourself?” is the strapline. Chernobyl, Ukraine, Prypiat – planned and destroyed by scientists, Roehampton on plutonium. It’s a destination, 5,000 visitors a year, we were taken round by a guy with a geiger counter rather than an umbrella. He used it like a lion tamer, he would go look at that.
My boots are in the utility room, never allowed into the house. Master planning, or yesterday as we heard, servant planning – what a great turnaround. I’ve been brushed by both of these projects. The Earth Centre in Doncaster; coal mining 1863; 400 acre park 1990. 1995, £80 million from the Millennium Commission. 2001 it opened; 2004 in administration, it’s shocking. It’s a great plan, but it’s got no conceptual offer. Nobody understood what the market was and when the exhibitions or the exhibits or visitor experience was put together, it collapsed. It had no editorial control, it had no programme.
The Olympics have to be careful, but it is very much about infrastructure, land use, space planning, and traffic engineering – a long lead of stadia and aquatic structures that have to be build.
What is the legacy of this? The legacy, as with the Millennium Dome, is indeterminate, nobody really knows.
The Dome just pokes in over here. We were involved with the Dome. Nobody really knew what to do with that. Believe me, nobody knew what was going to happen with the Millennium Dome when it closed. What’s going to happen here, I don’t know. It’s going to be an urban park I guess. What’s going to happen to the stadium? The stadium has had to be designed up front, they’re big things. What’s going to happen with a 70,000 athletic stadium in East London? Is it really going to be used? Should it be taken apart and sent to Dubai and called the Olympic Stadium, Dubai? I don’t know, does anybody know? Whose on that team that’s making those decisions? My guess is presently it’s a body of spectacular, evangelical, enthusiastic people with lots of power and money, but there is no diversity, there is nobody there with a left field view on what this could be.
Outside in, no programme, no chance. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, Leibskind’s fantastic scar on the landscape, full of metaphor, symbolism, an extraordinary piece of architecture. When it was empty it was extraordinary. This is the exhibition; it’s the Diaspora, the Jewish story. It’s just been randomly chucked across the space and the interior without absolutely no sensitivity, no understanding of how it fits in with that original thinking.
My question is, how was the programme of the building developed without understanding how the story, the narrative, the all important part of this building was to tell the story and it has no relationship with the architecture. The question is, how could that happen?
We look at the Experience Music project, Paul Allen? – lots of money, Frank Geary – lots of silver card and scissors, I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, it’s extraordinary. A deconstructive Fender guitar attracts you to the building, there’s no doubt about that. Once inside, that’s it. It is extraordinary how it’s treated as a leftover space.
Nigel Coates’ National Centre of Popular Music which was again full of enthusiastic amateurism in terms of what was it going to be, and we again brushed close to this, fortunately swerved it, and we were told that there would be five storeys, and we said, “hang on a minute”, and it was coming out of the ground and there were four drums and they said “can’t you cut one in half and do something with it?” No, of course you can’t.
The public sector charge to manage in Swansea working with Wilkinson Air, we had this brand new greenfield museum, the first one to be built in this country. We had this opportunity to actually connect it with the city centre. The master plan developed in such a way that there was an axis that ran right the way down through the building to the waterfront. It actually bisected the building. It was fundamental and the idea was very simple. Lots of empty shops, fill them with objects, stories, the lighting, the security’s there, the only thing that wasn’t there was the ambition. The city council just wouldn’t support this. And to me it would have been a revelation to have actually made it a museum of the city, in the city, through the city.
Back onto the BBC, who should’ve known better, at Salford and at Portland Place. It’s a fantastic public service, it has been for years, having worked there you never forget it, it’s incredible. Its lost opportunity is just extraordinary and how it’s not grasped these two sites. The one in Salford has been masterplanned to death already. It’s too late really. Leftover spaces where we could put a bit of media in, we could tell a bit of the story, the legacy of the BBC, we could represent and reflect what it’s doing, what future media may be around and just where it sits and what it’s doing, and the same at Portland Place.
The question I have is why was a brief written by a project manager, and “the management”, and not a scriptwriter? Commercial imperatives. You see, the thing is it is all very well criticising, but – if I just run this very crunchy movie of Selfridges in Birmingham – at the time this was being built, we were working on a project called Millennium Point, which is in a cultural sector on the other side of the city, and we were designing a gallery dedicated to futures, it’s a science centre effectively. It’s really cut off and disassociated from the city activity. It’s a part of the way the city’s been planned and it’s been turned into those quarters, in the same way that the garden city movement segregated and set up the residential, the industrial, the retail. So that attitude to planning hasn’t really changed, and as I walk through here I used to think “Why isn’t Selfridges a science centre?”, which is very ambitious and one would say a simple idea. But it becomes a more powerful idea if you actually suggest that the only way that the developer would accept that as a piece of thinking would be if you were to say, it will change the whole nature and the function of your shopping mall, it will attract a different visitor, it will give you a point of difference, it will be something really special so it will add value.
My argument is, in terms of the simplistic critique of how (this is Selfridges) we need the developer to understand these imperatives, we can only justify the emotional impact that it may have on us if we can justify it through some sort of commercial rationale.
God is in the detail.
This is McLaren, where Ron Dennis and Stephen Bailey wrote a lovely piece: “Two astral twins foster Dennis in a bizarre architect client competition to outdo the other in an amazing but near-demented quest for technological perfection.” What I found interesting when I visited this building is that the offices are underground. The view over the lake is determined by the car display. One has to question that, this is a greenfield project and this is a café in the British museum. What sense of quality has that space got? It’s all aligned and it looks good on plan.
An urban media – there was actually a conference dedicated, it’s a biannual conference in Manchester this year, just talking about this very subject. It was fascinating; what I began to understand (this is in Taiwan, Taipei – it’s a branded façade, or Tokyo – we’ve all got these photographs which is totally uncontrolled and unprogrammed as far as we’re concerned) and Canary Wharf, entirely programmed, unbelievably sanitised for our protection. The authorship, the control of this media in our space is becoming a big issue, it really is, and the debate in Manchester exposed this to me in respect of how artists and designers or people trying to embed narrative stories of cities can use this as a medium and how they can use it and who controls it.
The special ones – well this is, as far as I am concerned, just a trawl through my images and favourite images and things that have sparked my imagination or have excited me. Patrick Geddes, who was a biologist and a geographer in Edinburgh, took the camera obscura, the outlook tower, and he actually used it to tell a story of the city of Edinburgh, and he took you down, gave you the view over Edinburgh, and then he took you down through the structure and started to deconstruct the stories of place, work, and folk through the context of that city. It was used almost like an astronomical instrument.
Favourite architects or favourite buildings – this library in Delft by Mecanoo is just an extraordinary building that just opens up with that landscape roof. There’s something about where it sits, next to a very brutalist building. You may love it or hate it, but for me it’s a very refreshing way to look at building a library.
Ito’s Tower of the Wind – this building that responds to city noise and wind pressure, as an ever-evolving changing sculptural iconic piece, which sits in the city, just above an extract from a ventilator.
Pei’s Louvre – the photograph just says it all really – this kind of juxtaposition of culture and shopping and learning, which has always interested me. This could have happened at Selfridges, this juxtaposition and the way that that sits, and the counterpoint between the two.
Foreign Office, Yokahama Terminal – this landscape which rolls across overlooking the city that houses this ferry terminal, an extraordinary piece, it’s like being in a movie set.
Diller and Scofidio – sustainable or what, no way! – 30,000 jets pumping water out of the Expo in Switzerland, but if you look at their work, if you don’t know it, the way that the use media in architectural space is extraordinary. The bridge, and David Marks on this vision and idea of building something like this, which was just because of his ambition and his business acumen. Architects as businessmen.
And gardeners – well you know, Paxton wasn’t really a gardener, but I guess he claimed he was or architectural historians like to call him that, but my goodness, what a building. A lightweight structure, built in 19 weeks, funded the whole raft of buildings in South Kensington. And it worked, it had audio-visual galleries using stained glass, it had objects brought from around the world. A celebration of world cultures in a building that in itself was a celebration of engineering.
The jump cut to 2010 – Andrew Grant Associates. An extraordinary man who is in Bath, he’s a landscape architect. He won a huge architectural competition, “Gardens by the Bay,” you should check it out, and he brought together Wilkinson Air, Sterling prizewinners and Atelier One and Ten, great engineers, to put this together. It’s a £300 million project, Supertrees. This time a master plan to die for, the master plan actually contained stories of horticulture, biodiversity, ecology. It has a movement system that really works. Operationally it has two conservatories being designed by Wilkinson Air, so the cultured master plan has taken an year an a half to develop, not 10 weeks for the IOC. There are biomes that have an amazing job to bring temperate plants to Singapore, the reverse of Eden in fact, so you can imagine the engineering challenge to take the humidity and the heat, and the space that needs light. It will have a massive impact on tourism in Singapore. What they’re trying to do and why they’re investing such money is to try and extend the world time by .5 of a day.
The engineer, Alan Conisbee, had this obsession with the gasometers in Kings Cross and wanted to build an urban jungle. It was a glasshouse telling stories, the ones that we know from Eden, Kew Gardens, maybe with the odd dinosaur, not sure about that. This was never going to happen, because it was up against the commercial marketplace, residential, office and it lost the battle.
Cecil Balmond – genius. Once I saw this piece at the Tate, I just looked at it, and your jaw drops. To be fair to Anish Kapoor, my jaw dropped because I couldn’t work out how it stood up. It was an extraordinary piece of engineering.
So who makes space neatly segues into the weather project, again one has to ask, this turbine hall and the other galleries are not very good actually. I don’t think it’s a good piece of gallery design on the left hand side here, but this is an extraordinary space, and its programmed and curated and it could be in city centres. This programming and the way artists use this sort of scale could be easily adopted and shifted to city scale, it could be something that goes on the road and travels from city to city.
Thomas Heatherwick - without referring too much to the Manchester problems, but Thomas is a polymath, and he’s very clever because nobody quite knows what Thomas is. Is he a product designer? Is he an architect? Is he an artist? Is he an engineer? It doesn’t really matter. But, boy, has he sold himself, and justifiably so.
James Wines – S.I.T.E. (Sculpture In The Environment). He’s a sculptor. This is a project in Quatar, a museum of Islamic art, sadly never built. But the programme of the interior of this building, the ecology of this building, he writes books on green architecture, is very stable. The whole piece comes together as a thoughtful total integrated piece of thinking.
In China, I just stumbled on this building. It’s put together with an artist and a architect, Wang and Choo, at the Chinese Academy of Art, and as I approached the building and saw that the brise soleil was built out of recycled clay tiles – it’s just mad. There’s something left to the detailing problems on the corner there. The idea that it would be actually viewed from the tower next door is this kind of mass in the landscape. How do they do it? Is that a flat roof? I don’t know. It’s just an extraordinary collaboration of artist and architect.
Akroyd and Harvey in the National Theatre – that actually is Dan Harvey watering it, and Anthony Gormley’s over here looking in the other direction at the time, but that’s Dan on a Saturday afternoon.
The artist, the auteur, the sceneographer – back to my old days. Robert LePage, media on stage, performance on stage – he writes it, he performs it, he makes the media.
Richard Hudson, a fabulous theatre designer. And then on to film and very close to my heart, a good friend Jim Clay (Children of Men), and I know how Jim works, I know how he deconstructs the script and I know how he draws, how he storyboards and takes it back to the director and how they start to work together and how they build a team and create these environments. The guy that has just designed that is designing this on his next movie. Just an extraordinary ability to step round the needs of the written word and the needs of the director.
Ken Adam – the War Room in Strangelove. There’s a great story in Chris Frayling’s book about Ken Adam. Apparently Adam used to drive Kubrick every day to the studios at Shepperton at 30 miles an hour in his E-type Jag. Kubrick was strange, but he was a genius. He worked out that he’s spent at least three or four hours a day driving with Kubrick to and from the studio and it was very much a one-way conversation, because Kubrick was strange. He managed to get under the skin of this piece, and to understand where Kubrick was coming from. He managed to present him with these sort of sets, and being such a visual person, Kubrick did not suffer fools and Spielberg has described this as one of the greatest sets in motion picture. That’s because of the dedication and the impact and the togetherness of these two people, albeit in a very strange format.
Artichoke in London last year and now in Liverpool I think next year with the Sultan’s Elephant – an amazing event. How do you begin to organise this with the local authorities and do you ever bother? But she did, Helen Marriage did, and she goes on to do bigger and better things. They have a conference in London on Monday, the Pleasure and Perils of Large Scale Production – it’s about event. Children could ride on this, you know – health and safety? – forget it!
Clough Ellis – celebration with soul, Portmeirion – you can do it. He wanted to create this idyllic little setting and he did. It was adopted as this wonderful set for The Prisoner, one of the most experimental TV series ever made. I read that in the States there is a cult following, and nobody knows the order of the tapes. Apparently the episodes are interchangeable.
Did anybody see the Big Picnic in Glasgow? Oh you did? (to audience member) – Was it good? Yeah, I was hoping you’d say that. I’ve got the video and I’ve read about it. Bill Bryden, director, and Bill Dudley, designer have worked together for many years on the Mystery Plays. At Harland and Wolff they made the story of the guys from Edinburgh marching to the Western front, from their front rooms through to the front, and they did it in a Harlem and Wharf shipyard where they had a whole tracking seating arrangement where they would actually follow the troops. You never saw the enemy. As men were killed, they were taken away by the Angel of Mons who would come down and clip them onto herself and carry them away. They crawled under green laser light under the marsh gas, an the audience tracked this journey. The most extraordinary piece of theatre made in space, made by the collaboration of these two thinkers, the auteurs of the piece. Where are these people in our city centres? Where are they in our master planning exercises?
The digerati – this comes on to Jenny Holts we all know. I’m sure lots of you know Lozano-Hemmer; The Vectorial Elevations in Mexico City. You could log onto the searchlights onto the internet for something like six weeks over the Millennium and you could have your light show, you could get a webcam image of your curated light show. This wonderful control of technology over the internet in a public space – extraordinary thinking.
Art+Com, people that I know in Berlin that are really clever and crafted, and understand how to use media and environment. This is a project that never happened at a station in Berlin, where they wanted to wrap the grid in an LED ray. But this is not just some LEDs that randomly spray stuff at you, the idea is that the LEDs could reflect weather, raindrops. I’m not sure what the next piece does but the final piece is just extraordinary because as the trains arrive they announce themselves, so you are able to get a sense of arrival and a sense of place through the trains arriving at the station. I saw this piece and I thought how magical is this, that you get this sense of the station, and place, and arrival and departure set in space using the LED medium.
I’m not so sure about Potsdamer Platz by Realities:United, but I think this just raises the issue of who’s curating this and who’s controlling this environment of media facades. This is much more than a BBC screen just bought into the town centre in Bradford, this is much bigger and more powerful, and will we ever end up with censorship of this sort of space – an LED-free zone?
Just as a complete aside, Paul Sterman at Urban Screens did a Second Life piece where he actually shot people in real time in this space in Manchester and then embedded them into Second Life, then as a tertiary exercise, he put it onto the screen in front of them so they could see themselves operating and moving in Second Life. Be prepared – are our city centres being designed for Second Life?
And the entrepreneur – this is about a very talented interior designer/architect, Julian Paltak at Bloomberg in London. I wanted to show this because this is a straight piece of very high quality corporate design which we should expect to see. Sadly when Julian sent me the slides over, he didn’t include the things I really wanted, but they were the café and there’s a wonderful auditorium space there, and there’s a TV studio as you enter the space. It really is a kind of branding experience, but cultured and held together with this great eye and understanding of how to put interior space together.
I never met him but Roland Paoletti who curated all of these stations on the Jubilee Line – and I remember Ron Heron, when he was working at Imagination, sadly it never happened – but Poletti put together these stations, and did more than that, he put together the team that would design these stations, a whole string of architects who he knew would actually sit within this exercise promoting this new line, this brand new tube line that was going to take us out to the east side of London. But by doing this, he was the master puppeteer effectively and he let the architects run with it.
This is Norman Foster at Canary Wharf. You do really feel it’s a kind of operatic arrival before you enter the bear pit.
At Eden with Tim Schmidt – I don’t know if you’ve ever heard or seen Schmidt, I’ve never met him but when you compare this to the Earth Centre in Doncaster, he really knew about content and about visitor, because of all of the Lost Gardens that he had developed in Cornwall which preceded this, and then putting together the right architect, the right engineer, and having the presence of mind to actually attract people to look at the building process. I think 400,000 people visited this before it actually opened; it was a visitor centre of a building site. It’s not great on interpretation, it doesn’t tell all the stories I would like it to tell, but as you arrive, you’re in a James Bond movie.
The way forward, now – journalists. I just want to read a piece on this. I’ve never been to the building and the other building that Stephen Bailey reviewed which was just opened at Woking.
Architectural journalists, by and large, review buildings about two weeks before they open, and they walk around, by and large, with the architect. So what do you get? You get a review which is inaccurate, and it doesn’t give us any imagination or understanding of how the building will be used as an ultimate piece of architectural, as a mechanism. What we get is we get stuff like this. This is a museum dedicated to Mercedes Benz, the story of the cars.
“The architectural idea of threshold procession and festivals have become slaves to the arrhythmia of a structure that induces a new kind of existential condition in which progress is characterised by a series of intentional choices – which way should we go? – not sure, maybe left? Sure, OK – that looks interesting! – no way, hey, whatever.”
You need better journalism about the built environment. We need to visit buildings one year one, nothing else, I’m not interested. Get real, become a theatre reviewer – they just scurry out with their plastic bag in their mac and they venomously write what they think. They have no relationship with the performance, the performer, the director, they don’t give a shit. I think there’s a lot to be said for that.
Thank you.
The other thing we need to do is make really good television about the built environment and there are lots of ideas on how to do that. Academia – we need to teach it. I’m involved at Central St Martins with a course clumsily titled “Creative Practice in Narrative Environments” – it kind of does what it says, it’s about narrative, it’s about getting people to make sense of places, pretty much about what I’ve been talking about today, and it’s been very successful, it’s run by Tricia Austin, who’s an absolute powerhouse and the lesson you always learn is that you’re only as good as the people that are running the courses in Academia, but it’s really valuable and it’s a starting point.
And procurement – what we need, and I get involved sometimes with sitting on the back of an architectural team, sometimes just our own projects in museums, galleries – it doesn’t matter, that’s what I love, but when you sit in front of a body of people who are hiring or procuring you, I want them to know what we do, I want to know that they’re good at what they do. If you’re bidding for a piece of architecture, they will bring in six international architects to review your work – what good is that? When I was working with James Wines in Saudi, we were on a pitch to design a museum and a lot of master planning, and at the end of the week (it was run by the Rihad Development Association) the architectural board turned to the client (this is true, you can quote me), the ADA – there were three schemes, SOM, us and somebody else – and they turned to the client and said, “We’re not sure about this, we could do it.” The architectural jury actually made an offer to pick up the scheme and run with it themselves.
Recently we were interviewed on a national museum and we had a two hour interview, it was shambolic, it was awful, and there was a director of the museum and there was somebody that ran the shop and there was somebody that ran events, head of trinkets and head of knives and forks, as we said. We didn’t get the job, I walked out and said that we’re not doing the job, even if we’re offered it. Of course, we didn’t get it. I thought long and hard and I wrote to the director and I told him and my partners that they’d said you can’t do this, and I said I’m going to do it. He wrote back and said “I agree”. No he didn’t write back to me, he phoned me.
I just want to finish with two pieces and the reason for this is to put our money where our mouth is and say, well this is how we’ve done it in a modest way, this was at the Play Zone at the Millennium Dome, where we didn’t have a brief, we wrote our own in the end which was great, and it was an arcade of digital possibilities of play, it was an ironic arcade. We worked with Ars Electronica, Gerfried Stocker – who was fantastic, who opened his database and I got to meet Masahi Nishimura, all the stars and their multimedia lab, Paul Sermon, and it was what the Dome was meant to be, the playground of the future. It anticipated Nintendo Wii and all the Microsoft stuff. It was there, it was cutting edge, it was media art, and it was displayed in a way that was reflected in this building with a structure that was fit for purpose – horrible expression – but there we are on the plan, all of these outrigged cones were actually containing data projectors, and provide the opportunity for us to do what we did. There’s a little clip of the kids’ room, this was seven years ago, working with Nearlife, and this was an interactive space – I talk a lot about interactivity, but if you look at this, this sets the standard really. The kids are being tracked, the system knows where they are in the room, there are four projectors outrigged, you can’t see the projectors – just a couple of walls, the monkeys come to life in the room, they steal the notes from the bird, who’s flown out of the picture, the monkeys steal the notes, the kids get on the bed, the bed becomes a boat, and the bird says to the kids “Paddle with me, let’s get the naughty monkeys.” So the kids are now paddling down the river, left and right, measured through infra red, we know where they are, we know what they’re doing, and they’re paddling with the bird. The bird is flying with them.
Eventually they pull into the side of the river and they have to dance with the monkeys to try and get them (this is on the radio! – can you imagine this) to drop the notes so that the bird can fly in and get its voice back, an eight minute sequence for four kids. So they dance with the monkeys and the silly monkeys drop the notes and the bird flies away. So this is interactive architecture, and also it’s a way of saying how architecture and engineering can be built to support the use of media, how the media can be written as it was in this case by a BBC scriptwriter, and how we could build all of this in respect of the business plan, on time, on budget with the right visitor numbers.
Finally, this piece here, which was in the Expo pavilion for Aichi in Japan. The story of the brief in Japan was a typical brief, was nature’s wisdom – it’s always about sustainability, water, cities, next time Shanghai – this time nature’s wisdom. So we chose a partner, we went to the Natural History Museum and said, “Give us some examples of how man, British scientists, have learnt from nature – gekko’s feet, sticky feet, honeycomb structures, season biodiversity, sharkskin, Speedo stuff made out of sharkskin, a fantastic system for the blind where the blind can actually feel tactile forced feedback through a cane, so the cane using the technology from the bat.
We built an environment and the environment was in a tin shed. We built seven interactives – see those leaves, they are quite important and the interactives are picking up all of those things. So this was the word “bee” and a pendulum and it filled the honeycomb of the Eden project, so bee, honeycomb, architecture. 45 second interfaces on these interactives. A page turner which was about the seedbank, about seeds and collecting and biodiversity, which was a virtual page turner, 45 second interface. 25,000 people a day through a space about 500 square metres.
Sharkskin – just make the sharks swim. Theatrical projection, lighting changes, pieces of theatre, makes the sharks swim. Graphic panel on the back, website, 1,000 words when you go home. Communication media tracked. This is the bat cane transferred into this platen that you just move, and there’s objects in space that are projected onto your hand. It was as if the hand was picking up, replicating the tactile force feedback from the objects in space. So trying to explain through interactivity simple concepts.
Tidal energy which was one I didn’t have. This is a handle which is the moon moving around the earth, it’s an orrery which draws the tide and leaves messages behind.
All the time, there’s a soundtrack and interactivity and communication media and the ability to move 25,000 people a day through this space.
This is a gekko, this is a little model and you make the gekko climb over the gherkin. We didn’t get permission to do that, I’m sorry Sir Norman. So there you go, that space was a 14 minute experience and reflected a very simple story and narrative.
To wrap up, who makes place? – well as you can see, I’ve got ideas of lots of people making place, space, urban place. It’s not just architects, engineers, masterplanners, it’s actually – the word sustainability’s used and I talk more here about intellectual sustainability and the new practitioners, the intersectors – not so much intersectors as interlopers – they need to be at the top table and help us in that quest.
Jeremy Myerson
Wow! – that’s all I can say, fantastic exposition really – you know, who’s space is it anyway? I think I would rather have something designed by Peter Higgins than any number of signature architects. Really fantastic.
We’ve got a couple of minutes for questions before we move onto the next session, so any architects in the audience who want to come back at Peter?
Gentlemen there….
Audience member 1
Harvey Water from North West End College – how do interlopers get to the top table? – how do they break through ceilings?
Peter Higgins
Through writing, through teaching, through media – I’m really serious when I say there needs to be a TV programme about the built environment. It’s possible – you could use Google Earth, you could fill a studio with Google Earth, you could walk the city, you could cut to buildings, you could do interviews, you could get people to understand what the concept of city town planning is. Nobody knows – who goes to planning meetings? Nobody knows, it’s just thrust upon us. So I think we need to get people to be able to engage with city planning and understand it and articulate the language that we can actually confront our politicians and our planners with. Do you know the other thing? – it’s about contacts, getting in the right place at the right time, which is a lot of what our business and all our businesses is about. When you look at it, how do you market yourself? The best way of marketing yourself is having somebody ring you up and saying, can you come, we’ve got a job at Christi’s, there’s a mate of mine who’s working who said, “Come and see the MD”, and we did a big fit out for Christie’s. So I guess that what I’m saying is that there’s got to be a subculture for us to penetrate, so that we get to speak to the right people. I could knock on a door of Argent, when we were looking at urban jungle; I was there with them and it slipped through my fingers. Singapore is happening, Singapore is a wonderful example that we can put on a table and say, that’s how you do it, that’s how you integrate these processes, these professions in an interesting way, lead by a landscape architect, isn’t that fantastic? But we need somebody to write about it, to celebrate it, to understand it, to articulate it. But it’s a good question, and I think that’s pretty much why I’m here, to start the ball rolling.
Jeremy Myerson
OK, one more question? Gentleman there, Guy Julia?
Audience member 2
I’m Guy Julia from Leeds Metropolitan University. Thanks, that was a really interesting, stunning show, and it made me think, this is just really a reflection I suppose, rather than a question. Made me think about this issue about places or spaces or buildings which have content and places and spaces and buildings and environments and so on which are content-less, and I came to this conference slightly worried that we were going to spend a lot of time talking about the difference between design skills and design thinking. We’ve done a bit of that, and that’s been ok, but also there seems to be a divide which seems to be emerging through some of the speakers, and I think in your discourse, is this idea of design with content and design which is empty. I was struck by you talking about the Millennium Dome, which reminded me also of the Iraq War, this idea that you create something without any sense of its future purpose and the future impact of what you are doing. Beyond that, there’s been some speakers I think who have been slightly ideologically vacuous, I have to say Frans Johansson was and I think James Woudhuysen was as well. So I wonder if we can think about this idea of there being design which is about content and design which is politically charged in the sense of its longer-term social purpose and design which isn’t, and I wonder if you have any reflections on that.
Peter Higgins
Well I think the big issue for me is that envelope, architecture, wraps content. It could be a hospital and the content is easily deliverable from the science of putting together a hospital. Where it starts to drift is when it becomes less determinate. A hospital has a functionality that can be drawn to diagram. Schools don’t, the academies – I’ve tracked the academies, they are a great day for architects to just dream on, and believe me they dream on alone, because they are the impresarios, they understand people, they know about education, they know how to build academies. I would challenge that and say, no they don’t. Even more so with museums of course, the Jewish Museum should never have been built without a programme of what stories were to be told in it. If anybody had taken me to that building, even retro-fit it, I would have just done something straight down the middle of those spaces, those scars; don’t touch them, don’t go near them. The programme of something like a museum which is a place of informal learning, the connectivity of envelope and architecture, is absolutely fundamental, but I would say it’s the grey areas, the shopping malls. If I could convince somebody who’s building a shopping mall to build an informal learning centre, a science centre, which may be about food, it might be about lifestyle, it might be about sporting injuries – all of the things that I’m going to go and buy, I could go and learn about them, I could learn about wine or the ph value of some perfume before I go and buy it – yeah! – it’s called a science centre. It’s dedicated to the science of shopping. Shopping’s an interactive activity. If I can convince somebody that that’s worth doing, then that’ll happen, so when we talk about content, it’s determined by the degree of science or emotion that that architectural mechanism is supporting.
There’s just one more thing – there’s a bag here, I just wanted to show you…here it is. Did you notice the walls surrounding the garden on the outside and the walls on inside of the Expo pavilion? They were cut out leaves, there were six indigenous British leaves that were cut out of the ply, it was a very cheap little project. What we did is we gave them away, so as a memory of the building you could take a piece of the building away with you. You could take a leaf away. We sold this as an idea at the pitch and then we did the arithmetic and realised that we needed about 50 buildings so we had to do them in card.
What I’m really saying is, what’s that do to with architecture? What that’s to do with experience designers? It’s a souvenir – why not? Why can’t we do that? – from understanding the architecture, the communication media and the souvenir, and really what I think the discourse of this conference is about is opening people’s ambitions and eyes as to what really is possible, because yesterday’s talks about how to train people to imagine, or the process of ingenuity, is extraordinary because I could never sit down and explain that, but I think that if you’ve got it, and you have it, then really celebrate it and extend it.
Thank you very much.