One Central Park in Sydney (Image: James D. Morgan/REX)
Event: Designs of the Year 2015, Design Museum, London
In friendly competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet Horace Smith once wrote a poem entitled Ozymandias. Shelley鈥檚 version is the one we remember, but Smith鈥檚 is compelling for another reason. He imagines a hunter traipsing through the ruins of a future London. Lighting upon a fragment of a monument, he 鈥渟tops to guess/What powerful but unrecorded race/Once dwelt in that annihilated place鈥�.
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has its monumental entries, but even the most grandiloquent of the 76 nominations at least tips its hat to the idea that the world will not sustain another great ruin, or may end up our next great ruin, unless we respond more cleverly to our environment.
, Australia, towers above its architectural competitors, literally. Clad in climbing plants by , the leading designer of vertical gardens, One Central鈥檚 overriding purpose seems to be to apologise for its very existence.
There is even a motorised heliostat mounted on a cantilever near the roof, to erase the building鈥檚 shadow. The arrangement looks terrifying in photographs, suggesting the of the 19th century when towns experimented with civic lighting.
Giant pot plants
In Ho Chi Minh City, a project called eschews apology for action, albeit of a most eccentric sort. Here, high-density living units double as gigantic containers for tropical trees. Come the rains, a sufficient number of these properties could reduce the risk of urban flooding. At least, so claim architects Vo Trong Nghia, although it sounds like special pleading to me 鈥� an alibi for the strange green dream they鈥檙e weaving, of wandering lost among giant plant pots.
(Image: PITCHAfrica)
Where rains are few, a more down to earth aesthetic holds sway. is a 10-acre school site in Laikipia, Kenya, where 4 acres of irrigated conservation agriculture are fed by 7 low-cost buildings, designed to collect and store what little precipitation there is.
PITCHAfrica鈥檚 vision extends beyond unassuming architecture to provide resources like clean water, food and sanitation on-site for its students, in the hope they will spread the word about how to manage scarce resources at home.
This vision, of an artificial 鈥渆cosystem capable of empowering and transforming communities鈥�, is shared by a great many of the show鈥檚 鈥渢echnical fix鈥� entries. Take the Blue Diversion toilet. This project, led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is an all-in-one sanitation, fertiliser, drinking-water and biogas solution. In this cheap, ugly, blue plastic toilet, nothing is wasted 鈥� not even sunlight; there鈥檚 a small solar panel on its roof.
Sticking-plaster solution
Other ideas plug in to the smog and mess of cities, and try to make daily life a little more bearable. At the University of Engineering and Technology, Lima, Peru, researchers have invented a billboard that purifies the air in a five-block radius, scrubbing it clean of construction dust and 99 per cent of airborne bacteria 鈥� it would take 1200 trees to do the equivalent work, says the team.
Another entry, , designed by Erwin Zwart with Boyan Slat and Jan de Sonneville, tackles the plastic garbage circulating the world鈥檚 oceans. Why not string barriers over the waves to catch the plastic as it moves around? Having raised over U$2 million through crowdfunding, the organisation plans to construct and test large-scale pilot projects.
This is technical fixery at its purest. It doesn鈥檛 prevent the oceans being littered: it is an environmental sticking plaster, permitting us to pursue business as usual. But why should designers have to carry the whole world on their shoulders? Designs like these could be part of a broader, political solution. The Ocean Cleanup鈥檚 barriers would be a fitting monument for our descendants to puzzle over.
Better, of course, to avoid collapse entirely, but it won鈥檛 be simple. It is easier for designers to ameliorate or even disguise problems, rather than to address them head on. Two projects built around the food supply demonstrate this neatly.
Failed lemons
Disclosed (Image: Alexander Gowers)
, by Marion Ferrec at the Royal College of Art, in collaboration with Kate Wakely, is a web-based consumer service that allows you to choose products according to your health needs and ethical preferences. Lacking vast wealth, leisure and self-absorption, I won鈥檛 be using it.
But neither am I entirely persuaded by for the French supermarket giant Intermarch茅 鈥� a series of beautifully photographed imperfect fruits and vegetables. The idea is to shift ridiculous-looking potatoes, hideous oranges and failed lemons onto the consumer, and thereby reduce food waste. But the campaign preserves and reinforces (by price offers) the very distinction between perfect and imperfect produce that caused the problem in the first place.
It is, frankly, next to impossible to imagine how we get from a wasteful here to a sustainable there 鈥� and for that reason alone, I think Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg鈥檚 design fiction is the poster-child of this year鈥檚 competition. Ginsberg has anatomised the ultimate disruptive enterprise, in which 鈥渘ature is totally industrialized for the benefit of society鈥�.
Although her fictional synthetic creatures are deliciously creepy (especially the 鈥渂iologically-powered mobile soil bioremediation device鈥�) it is her business model of saving our civilisation at the expense of the natural world, while replacing it with something better, that fascinates.
If Ginsberg鈥檚 vision comes to pass, our descendants won鈥檛 be able to puzzle at our monuments. Our monuments will be everywhere, all around them, and inside them.
