So what of the handful of food ingredients that are simple chemical
substances? Simplest of all is gold used to adorn extravagant chocolates and
risottos. Gold has its own E number, signifying that it is a food additive
recognised by the European Union. However, gold passes unaltered through the
digestive system, so nobody makes outrageous claims about its origins, purity or
dietary benefits.

Not so for salt. Sea salt commands four times the price of ordinary salt.
“Slowly and simply evaporated from the water of the Mediterranean Sea,” says one
brand seductively. Ordinary table salt, too, is often evaporated from brine. Yet
Joanna Blythman in her influential book, The Food We Eat, says that sea
salt made in this way “is produced in a much more natural manner”. The former is
“pure”, the latter is “natural”. For her, the benefit of sea salt lies in its
tiny concentration of impurities. But it is still 99.999 per cent sodium
chloride. The only difference of chemical significance is that sea salt usually
does not contain additives to stop it clogging up the saltcellar, although it
does contain some organic matter.

Chefs may rave about sea salt’s “naturalness”, but really they use it because
its large uneven crystals produce a pleasurable taste sensation. Salt from other
sources cannot compete with the romance of the sea, although one brand meets the
challenge with the claim that its mined salt is “millions of years old”. What
benefit is conferred by this antiquity is unclear.

However salt reaches the table, the sodium in it increases the risk of heart
disease. So you might expect alternative products to trumpet their superiority
by citing medical evidence in their favour. But no. A product called Lo-Salt
contains one-third of the sodium of ordinary salt because it substitutes the
similar-tasting potassium chloride. Or, as the manufacturer puts it, “natural
potassium” rather than “sodium salt”. The implication that one chemical element
is more natural than another is fatuous.

Water is another “simple” chemical compound. Continental producers have long
provided tables of the concentrations of the ions dissolved in their bottled
waters. British producers have traditionally withheld this information from the
public, although it is collected for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and
Food.

British waters tend to spout purple prose: “The origin of this unique pure
natural mineral water is deep down in Toms Hill, just outside Tring, a
designated area of outstanding natural beauty adjoining the Ashridge National
Trust property in the Chiltern Hills. After its filtration period of up to 50
years or more the water is released from some 300 feet down in the 90 000
000-year-old chalk strata by way of stainless-steel pipes and hygienically
bottled and tamper-proof-sealed at source.” The gushing copy does more for Tring
tourism than for consumer awareness, and once again invokes ancient origins.

A natural mineral water, Blythman explains, must be free of pollutants. But
one of its precious “minerals” is likely to be nitrate, whether from ancient
natural sources or from modern fertiliser residues. Mineral waters can contain
more nitrate than tapwater . . .

Then there’s a paradox. Although mineral waters are sold on the strength of
their mineral content, they are bought for their purity. Some imply that they
are pure water—the mineral content apparently counts for nothing. Two
years ago, the Consumers’ Association recommended that there should be a minimum
content of minerals below which waters could no longer describe themselves as
“mineral” (Which?, May 1995). On their present levels, most brands
would fail to make the grade.

Which brings us back to the difficulties of the promotional copywriter
struggling to claim uniqueness for one brand over another. The
purer—chemically purer—our salt and water, the less meaningful are
any claims they might make to being ancient or natural. A chemical is a chemical
is a chemical. And all that glisters is not E175.

Architects who do not get much built are often the ones who have the
most to say. However, architectural theory is not like physical theory or
even literary theory, rather it is a callow, unformed discipline under which
you can head off in any direction with little or no reference to the work
of others. The two authors who describe architectural practices in these
books are poles apart but they are not engaged in a constructive dialectic.
They merely represent isolated factions within architecture today.

Peter Eisenman’s book is, among other things, an attempt to explain
why architecture can never be reduced to a matter of technological and functional
formulas. The publisher’s blurb states that Eisenman is conducting a ‘methodical,
almost scientific investigation into architectural thinking,’ but there
is no real science here.

The melange of essays contains a few by other writers. Some of these
are virtually unreadable and most are littered with voguish philosophy and
semiotic jargon. Eisenman’s own writing stands out as lucid but it is still
riven with contradiction. He is better at analysing the handling of space
by Mies van der Rohe than at describing his own aims. And there are moments
of breathtaking pretension. It takes quite something to turn a commission
to design a door knob into a ‘crisis of reality’. ‘Today,’ writes Eisenman,
‘the crisis of reality can be seen in the proliferation of this nostalgia
for truth.’

On this point, at least, Eisenman and Jan Kaplicky, of the group Future
Systems, would agree. The two architects then diverge rapidly. Eisenman
writes: ‘Traditionally . . . to propose a design that followed a rational,
factual programme was thought to be an authentic act. Such a response would
produce a functional building.’ Kaplicky would still follow this credo.
But Eisenman believes this is no longer enough.

On the other hand, the projects described in the book Future Systems
– a prescription as much as a practice name – ‘make possible a new belief
in the creative potential of advanced technology architecture at a time
when most architects have fled from the leading edge into irrationality
or the imagined safety of the past’.

Kaplicky is a sort of architectural Zelig, who contributed marginally
to iconic monuments, such as the National Theatre on London’s South Bank
and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. His central belief is that the building
industry is the laggard of the 20th century and could benefit from the materials
and construction techniques of cars and aircraft. This is not a new idea
and, like some other architects, Kaplicky aims to make this technology transfer
as much to energise the look of buildings as to make them more efficient
to run and pleasant to occupy. In this respect he is like Le Corbusier when
he declared that ‘a house is a machine for living in.’ As Eisenman points
out, Le Corbusier did not mean this literally but figuratively, ‘so they
built an ordinary house with all the ordinary functions and made it look
like a machine’.

Interestingly, Eisenman reckons architecture went off the rails even
earlier, not when it failed to keep pace with the Industrial Revolution
but when it stopped absorbing new philosophy in the wake of Immanuel Kant
and Georg Hegel. The thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and
Daniel Derrida has not been sufficiently exploited to enrich architectural
thought.

Nevertheless, Kaplicky is more committed than his peers to the idea
that buildings should really benefit from technology, rather than just look
high-tech. The monocoque structural skin construction that the graph Future
Systems dreamed of taking from aircraft and using in houses are more efficient
than traditional materials. There are other examples in the book where it
is clear that such an approach would have brought real benefits, although
Martin Pawley occasionally protests too much, and there are one or two white
lies told in order to sustain the romance of a technological architecture.

But despite a track record of genuine high-tech projects, including
work on the ill-starred space station and other NASA projects, Future Systems
has yet to make its mark on Earth. For, as Pawley writes, it is only in
space that ‘there could be no aesthetic objection, no conservative retreat.’

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a freelance writer on design and architecture.

Rationalism alternates with retrospection in architecture. At some times
a belief in the scientific method prevails, such as during much of the 18th
century and again during the Modern Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. At
other times – now and during the Victorian era – people look back to historical
models for the way to do things.

Thomas Markus concentrates on buildings from the first of these periods,
the Enlightenment of the 18th century, cataloguing many types, but drawing
no conclusions. He implies that today’s architects would be better advised
to follow the methods used at that time than the superficial historical
imagery and formulaic construction that are the fashion now. It is not
the building forms themselves that are important, but the patterns of thought
that shaped their final form.

Science has had a fitful involvement with architecture ever since Robert
Hooke rebuilt the London asylum that gave the world the word Bedlam in the
1670s. Although the 18th century saw new types of building – public baths,
prisons, banks – and though there were precursors, the architects and philosophers
of the Enlightenment chose to think how these buildings should function.
How they looked followed.

Markus’s book is about the meaning of buildings that may be read through
their appearance. He asserts that building forms have become hard to ‘decode’
as we blur the distinction between public and private, formal and informal,
democratic and autocratic, whether in shopping centres or corporate headquarters.
He dismisses the American architect Louis Sullivan’s injunction that form
follows function, arguing that ‘there is no immutable relation between
form, function and space’.

One cause and/or effect of this confusion is that architects, architecture
critics and building users consider the same building in different ways.
Yet without mutual dialogue, we cannot expect to see a common ground for
progress in architecture. The confusion leaves room for argument. It is
what makes architecture stimulating and controversial rather than boringly
formulaic, except in some types of construction which are hardly architecture.
The fact that, as Markus puts it, ‘we are a long way yet from generally
accepted social theories about buildings’ is what makes architecture an
art more than a science.

Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen, both architects and social philosophers,
are the best known exemplars of this theme. The rational basis for their
designs and others often found expression in the striking geometry of the
resulting buildings: hospitals with wards arranged around a central chapel
to offer patients solace; Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison where the architectural
symmetry is of a piece with the ‘total asymmetry of power’ – the warder
can see the inmates, housed in cells set in a circle around him, but they
cannot see him.

However, Markus seldom distinguishes between forms that emerged and
that were a functional success and those where symbolism and architectural
arrogance were dominant. Both Boullee’s massive drum-like 1784 design for
the French Royal library and the more modest and much loved reading room
at the British Museum use space for the aggrandisement of learning more
than for economy of function.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams has written The Most Beautiful Molecule, describing
the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, the molecular third form of carbon,
will be published next year.

Informal trials with the Earlens have been under way for two years.
In April this year, the company began clinical trials and its backers hope
the device will gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration
by 1993.

The Earlens was invented by Rodney Perkins, a doctor and head of ReSound,
and Vincent Pluvinage, a former engineer at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
They hope their invention will appeal to many hearing-impaired people who
have rejected hearing aids as ugly or inefficient. More than 1 in 20 of
the population is hearing-impaired to some extent, yet only a tenth of
these people use a hearing aid.

The Earlens has three parts, the central element being a tiny transducer,
about half the diameter of a contact lens, that a doctor attaches to the
eardrum using the surface tension from a drop of oil. The device can be
worn virtually continuously once in place and can be removed easily when
necessary, according to Pluvinage.

Clipped onto the user’s clothing is a small radio microphone. This picks
up sounds and relays them to a battery-powered coil that is worn somewhere
on the user’s body.

Electronic circuits attached to the coil convert the sound signals into
a varying current which passes round the coil. This generates a magnetic
field which in turn makes the transducer, and so the eardrum, also vibrate.
The coil is powered by rechargeable batteries that will last up to 12 hours.

Because the coil needs to generate a magnetic field powerful enough
to excite the transducer in the ear, it must be larger the further it is
from the ear. ReSound commissioned the Californian design consultancy Ideo
to incorporate the coil, its batteries and its signal processing circuitry
into a futuristic necklace.

But is could go almost anywhere. ‘It could be on your shoulder, it could
be in your earrings, in a hat,’ according to David Kelley, an engineer at
Ideo. Other possibilities include placing the components in seatbacks and
car headrests. The researchers are now working on reducing the bulk of the
batteries.

The advantage of removing these components from the ear, even at the
expense of having to make them bigger, is that the ear canal is left free.
Most hearing aids block the ear canal which can actually make the wearer’s
hearing worse, especially at low frequencies where impairment is often
less severe. Blocking the canal also means that hearing-impaired people
hear their own voices boom uncomfortably as they speak.

Readers of The Independent are reasonably intelligent, though not necessarily
more numerate than any other cross-section of society. Yet in effect, the
headline writer is presuming that these people are intimately acquainted
with differential calculus.

Only mathematics could have expressed all this information more concisely.
Let N be the number of people unemployed, and dN/dt then represents the
rate of change in their number. A negative figure for dN/dt would mean unemployment
is falling, but in this case dN/dt is positive, representing a rise in the
number of people out of work.

Bad news for everyone, and not least for the government of the day.
So, in an effort to locate a glimmer of light in the gloom of the recession,
the politicians have had to conjure up a second-order differential function,
d ²N/ dt ², the rate of change of the rise in unemployment.
This turns out to be a negative quantity, and can be used as evidence that
the economy is on the mend. Of course, if we don’t intuitively understand
the second-order function, we may not be persuaded that things are getting
better at all.

At least they are doing everything in their power to ensure that we
become more practised in the extracurricular subject of Maths for Political
Propaganda. Such sophistry is already a familiar feature of the monthly
monitoring of retail prices. No longer is it enough that we be told that
prices have gone up, or even that inflation (the rate at which prices are
going up) has gone up or down. What we must know now, it seems, is the rate
at which inflation is changing.

If the retail price index is P, inflation is dP/dt, and the rate of
change of inflation is dP/dt ². Recently, inflation has been
falling. Thus while P>0 (nothing is free, after all) and d ²P/dt>0,
at least d ²P/dt ²2P/dt
² is still negative. For the silver lining, we must differentiate
again. The third-order differential, d ³P/dt ³, is
positive. Thus, a headline such as ‘Inflation begins to bottom out at 4.1
per cent’ would tell us the value of dP/dt and also hint that d ²P/dt
²3P/dt ³>0.

It does not end with economic indicators. We buy cars not for their
speed (v=ds/dt) but for their acceleration (a=dv/dt=d ²s/dt ²),
the speed at which they put on speed. Performance buffs may also be interested
in the car’s responsiveness to the pressure of the right foot – that is,
to how fast the acceleration can be made to change (da/dt or d ³s/dt
³). It’s all a far cry from schooldays and the difficult idea
then of metres per second per second.

There are less immediately apparent aspects of this phenomenon as the
media enables us to observe events ever more closely (even to the point
where we can observe ourselves observing). In Yugoslavia, for example, we
see not so much a state of war or peace but rather we monitor the oscillation
between those two states and the rate at which that oscillation takes place.

Closer to home, one opinion poll gives an estimate of the margin one
party enjoys over another. But the string of polls around the time of the
party conference season also sought to enlighten us as to the importance
of the rate at which that margin was changing. How much better did party
X look compared with the week before? How fast were party Y’s chances improving/deteriorating?

A mathematician or an optimist might use these examples in everyday
life to show that calculus is, contrary to schoolchildren’s belief, both
easy and useful. A pessimist would dismiss it as just more of the information
overload to which we increasingly (to use the ultimate dy/dx word) subject
ourselves.

But there is another niggling worry. This phenomenon seems to have gathered
support under the present economic climate. Economists doubtless differentiate
to the nth degree every day as they go about their business of unearthing
trends both good and bad. But the rest of us only hear about such things
when they might alleviate our gloom, not when they might take the shine
off a boom. Our problem now is that we may have to brush up our differential
calculus still further if this recession drags on much longer.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a freelance writer specialising in architectural
design.

The architecture critic of the New York Times once placed an odd nomination
for his city’s greatest work of architecture. He chose not a building, but
Central Park, that rectangle of 843 acres landscaped in the 1850s to the
design of Frederick Law Olmsted and dropped smack into the middle of Manhattan.

Central Park shows the humanising importance of landscapes in locations
that lack much natural content. It also reveals the power that landscapes,
and especially those engineered by people, hold over our imaginations.

Landscaping was once the natural concomitant of architecture. Now, says
Sutherland Lyall, there is a renewed interest. He relates this to the demise
of modernism in architecture, choosing to forget the Garden City movement
and the fact that Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), Frank Lloyd
Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe well understood how to marry landscape
and architecture.

In his introduction to the book, the landscape gardener Geoffrey Jellicoe
points out that today’s business parks are an extension of the tradition
of naturalistic landscaping pioneered by Humphrey Repton and Capability
Brown. These ‘corporate parks’ have winding ‘Executive Drives’ with crystalline
glass offices spaced along them like pavilions and follies.

Landscape architecture was reborn in the US where there is more land
to play with and where corporations see it as a means of projecting an image
of power in an acceptable manner. Now it is growing in Britain too. In London,
for example, the Docklands and proposed King’s Cross redevelopment projects
both set great store by their landscaping. The South Bank arts centre, which
recently rejected an exercise in architectural cosmetics, may yet be made
more pleasant by planting on the site beside the Thames.

The developers’ interest in landscaping is prudent. It helps sell the
projects to those who must approve them; later, it helps to draw tenants,
customers and visitors and hastens the blending-in of the new buildings.

You will have gathered by now that this book is written from an architect’s
point of view. There is little on ecology or botany bar the odd list of
tree species and a stray reference to soil ph (sic), although one intriguing
reason for the absence of the botany does emerge in the author’s disclosure
that ‘contemporary landscape designers deliberately avoid having much to
do with flowering plants, which are thought to be the province of the lesser
craft of ornamental gardening’. Such petty professional rivalries-architect
sneering at landscape architect, now landscape architect sneering at gardener-are
scarcely conducive to the creation of balanced and attractive artificial
environments for the future.

A quick flip through brings a further surprise-little greenery leaps
from the pages. There are more barren paved plateaus than rolling swards.
Many projects are quite tiny, ‘pocket parks’ built on what is known in the
trade as SLOAPs, or Sites Left Over After Planning, that by their very name
signal the low priority still often accorded to landscaping.

Some of the best projects-not the most grandiose but the most natural-seeming
and least forced-come in a chapter where the architecture and the landscape
have been planned in harmony. A British example is Stockley Park, a new
business development near Heathrow airport. Another, the NMB Bank in Amsterdam,
goes so far as to bring insects and birds into its indoor-outdoor landscape
to create a limited ecosystem. There are no further details on the trials
of running such a complex environment, however. And in general there is
little in the way of specifics on costs, maintenance, structural engineering,
soil science, conservation, and land-use management.

If you set these objections aside, several of the landscapes have undeniable
appeal. In one such garden of earthly delight in the South Bronx, there
are tiny fountains safe for children to play in. Anyone who has seen New
York kids larking around in the spray of an illegally turned-on fire hydrant
on an oppressive summer’s day will recognise the inspiration for this.

Among the grander visions is a park over a Seattle freeway, a cheeky
inversion of the old modernist principle espoused by Le Corbusier that had
the roads flying over the landscape. And in Valencia, they diverted the
river that was prone to flood the city and filled a stretch of the dry river
bed 8 kilometres long with formal gardens and neoclassical embellishments.

Many of the illustrations show spaces that must be beautiful and inspiring
to experience. The integration of nature and architecture has always cast
a spell, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Central Park of its
modern equivalent. If this book encourages architects and developers to
continue in the same vein, it will have done a service to our built environment.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a freelance writer with a special interest
in design and architecture.

KARL SABBAGH does not like architects. From hisrepeated facetious descriptions,he
clearly believes they are alldilettantes: ‘Most people havesome idea of
what an architect does. . . he or she prepares remarkably neat drawings,
using very sharp pencils, that make one’s house look like something in House
and Garden.’

Unfortunately, the architects of this 47-storey skyscraper, Worldwide
Plaza in New York, do little to dispel the notion. American commercial architecture
is becoming so strongly segmented into various specialisms that it is indeed
turning the architects into mere dressers offacades. They rely on subcontracted
detailed design from component suppliers and outside structural, mechanical
and services engineers. It is one reason for the bombastic banality of most
office towers in the US.

Worldwide Plaza is no different. Contrary to the implication in its
name, it has mean little offices, their size determined by the building’s
grid of support columns. Some of them are more than 18 metres from a window.
This is in marked contrast to the ‘grandiose and Palladian’ lobbies. The
six lowest storeys were the architect’s ‘only chance to create an interior
as well as an exterior’. If Sabbagh were a sharper critic, he would see
this as an indictment. It is not his mission here, but he might legitimately
have raised a plea on behalf of the hapless workers on floors 7 to 47.

The project may be large, but on no account is it ponderous. It is built
according to the ‘fast-track method’ whereby the design is nowhere near
finalised as construction goes ahead. This hair-raising procedure may not
be the ideal building process, but it makes for a great story. So does Sabbagh’s
ability to put the individual’s view. He also paints a good picture of the
griping, vanity and sycophancy that surface during any business venture.

Sabbagh points out rightly that buildings are the creations of a team,
although, for the purposes of telling his story, most of the mentions go
to a few key players. He has a scientific background, yet he does not examine
how technology can improve the building process and the buildings themselves.

The architects, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, sought to create a very
New York sort of building, with a granite base, a brick shaft, and a pyramidal
copper roof. It is pure nostalgia. I was amused imagining the consternation
when one of the prospective tenants came along needing a satellite dish
on the roof. Everyone was clearly relieved when the 1987 stock market crash
prompted hiswithdrawal. It amazes me that anyone in the 1980s can build
a New York skyscraper incapable of carrying a dish, but Sabbagh lets the
tale pass without comment.

The author is better at giving accessible explanations of technical
matters. There is a simple recap of the electrochemical series, something
the designers could have done with as they contemplated fixing copper roof
panels directly to an aluminium frame. It took expert advice before they
came up with an appropriate detail using insulating washers and gaskets
to prevent the corrosion that would have resulted from the two metals’ contact
in a damp atmosphere.

Sabbagh is good, too, on professional deviousness, as he tells of the
deliberately ugly initial proposal presented to the planning authorities
as a bargaining ploy; of the leave given to build higher in exchange for
‘community benefit’ in upgrading the local subway station; of the ‘hostage
floors’ that the authorities would prevent being occupied until the subway
improvements were complete.

He gives a good precis of the relative merits of cast iron, steel and
concrete. He also describes in clear language static and dynamic wind-load
tests and computer modelling to determine how the ‘stopping’ and ‘express’
lifts should best serve all the floors. He introduces us to the debate on
the intricacies of bolted versus welded steel beams and the problem of the
concrete of the lobby walls and the marble lining that covers it.

A curious weakness is the low priority given to the role of computer-aided
design. We are told that the architects used their ‘sophisticated’ (aren’t
they always?) system to take ‘fly-through’ tours of the graphic image of
the building, but this just shows us that they will not read their own plans.
This is CAD as a presentation technique, not a design tool. Despite talk
of unsung heroes, there is little discussion of the engineering of services
or space planning. There is no mention of how the designers might plan to
prevent the ‘sick-building syndrome’. There is nothing on cabling or on
how, when tenants move in, they might adapt the building to their needs.

Best is the sustained sense of organised chaos, the sheer necromancy,
that still often plays a large part in putting up a massive modern building.
The slump test for concrete, for example, involves tipping some out of a
bucket and seeing how far it slumps from a sandcastle shape. That building
regulations require 40 to 50 people to be on-hand as the stuff is poured
shows just how low-tech a material it is. As Sabbagh comments wryly: ‘A
knowledge of textbook management procedures, architectural design skills,
engineering measurements and logistical flow charts was as useful as an
Italian cookery book when faced with the realities of buildinga skyscraper
in New York in 1987.’

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a journalist with a special interest in architecture
and design.

My first impression was disappointing: so ignore the bubbly but tasteless
exhibition of British graphics, sponsored by Perrier, as you enter, in which
design heroes peer owlishly from displays and endorse the work of their
friends. Ignore, too, the trinkets in the Design Review, a changing exhibition
of new products and prototypes that are mere styling exercises.

Take care, however, to separate these exhibits from the products of
genuine design innovation. Two that stand out are the Norton P55 sports
motorcycle designed by Seymour Powell and a pair of Sony headphones. The
enclosure of the Norton bikes mechanics gives it the imagery of a Porsche,
but also reduces the escape of noise and improves aerodynamics. The caption
says the design reduces the investment needed for the manufacture of subsequent
models, but, infuriatingly, does not elaborate.

The headphones exploit biotechnology research at Sony, using a natural
cellulose fibre for the diaphragm (though why this is a good thing is unexplained).
The outer shell of each ear-muff is made of wood, a material normally associated
with handmade small-volume expensive craft goods. But this wood is designed
by computer and shaped by machine in a process of mass-manufacture. There
is none of the arty preciousness that is objectionable about crafts and
products today, yet the quality is just as good. New fabrication technologies
may herald a return to old-time standards of quality and materials, something
that should please consumers and makers.

Elsewhere there is a collection of 20th-century objects – shavers by
Braun, typewriters by Olivetti, the Citroen 2CV and so on. The highlight
is an encyclopedic bank of Macintosh computers on which visitors may call
up information on designers, manufacturers, products and countries. All
museums should have such a facility.

The main feature is the inaugural exhibition, ‘Commerce and Culture’.
This takes a quizzical look at our perceptions of value and creativity,
many of which are now challenged by technological change. One exhibit is
a basic monochrome hologram of a Viking helmet. When large-scale holography
is perfected, there will be no need to take the risk of displaying the real
thing. By then, however, the hologram could be sent down the phone line
to your home. Such advances, say the exhibitors, threaten the sanctity of
the museum as a storehouse of unique masterpieces.

Designers, it seems, seldom stop to think about such advances. This
is the criticism levelled by the museum at the designs for a telephone booth
commissioned from prominent design firms by Mercury Communications. ‘No
designers responded imaginatively to the technological challenge,’ the commentary
notes.

These are arid times for design in its full sense. But the museum does
little to improve things. Labels don’t say how much exhibits cost or how
well they work. There is nothing about what need led to a product, how its
design developed, or how it is made.

For a museum so aware of the contradictions inherent in its existence,
it has missed the opportunity to dispel the superficial cult that surrounds
today’s ‘designer’ goods. The matt-black view of design lives on, but for
those who wish to dig deeper, there is substance as well as style here.

*Butlers Wharf, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD. Open on Tuesday to Sunday
from 1130 to 1830.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a freelance journalist with a special interest
in design and architecture.

THE Honkong Bank, designed and built between 1979 and 1985, is probably
the most structurally and scientifically innovative large building in the
modern world. It broke conventions and cost ceilings with equal abandon.
It is a skyscraper unlike any other: dramatic interior spaces replace the
tedium of identical floors stacked one on the top of another and cascades
of natural light penetrate its depths. It was built in a new way that will
set the practice for the 1990s and the next century; the builders assembled
precision-made components from factories around the world, fitting them
to minute tolerances at high speed on a cramped site manufacturers have
made products in a similar manner for many years. With the Hongkong Bank,
the architects Foster Associates and structural engineers Ove Arup and Partners
have shown that buildings can be, too.

In its method of construction, more than its materials, the Hongkong
Bank is a technological triumph. It is this orchestration of the construction
process that has seduced modernist architects everywhere.

The fact that Foster has been labelled a high-tech stylist is unfortunate.
No one would call a car designer ‘high tech,’ they all are. It should be
the same in building. Norman Foster and architects like him perpetuate the
confusion however, by incorporating gratuitous technological excesses into
their buildings, and the Hongkong Bank is no exception.

In Hongkong Bank Stephanie Williams captures the dedicated enthusiasm
that seems to have infected all who worked on this project. Her rip-roaring
narrative tells the tale of people who knew that they were putting up the
most exciting building in the world. It helps to be, as Williams clearly
is, a believer. But this is no great hardship. A glance at a few of the
construction diagrams and photographs of the finished work show that the
Hongkong Bank is very special. Anyone who has ever worked in an ordinary
high-rise building will lust for its generous spaces.

The Hongkong Bank appointed the structural engineers, however, long
before it had its architect. In search of an architect, the client toured
some Foster buildings and spotted their faults. But Foster’s pitch convinces
him that he will get the benefit of the latest technology. One of Foster’s
proposals was to use the heat generated by computers to warm the building
in winter, but this should hardly be seen as ‘high tech’; heat has to go
somewhere after all.

Some uses of technology, (planned exterior lasers to show the Han Seng
index, typhoon warnings or Chinese New Year decorations) are for reasons
of glamour. Others are more appropriate such as the use of steel in place
of concrete for more effective occupation of the site and to enable the
owners to extend building upwards later. But the priorities are still architectural
more than technological. ‘They wanted the steel to be on view for all to
see; its proportions had to be satisfying; and structurally it had to stand
up,’ Williams writes.

There are several instances where a ‘high-tech’ solution was needed
only because of a prior aesthetic judgment. Given a brief to produce the
best with money no object, this is not surprising. With the choice of a
steel frame, for example, Foster then wished to encase the entire frame
in smooth aluminium panels. These would keep people but not the elements
away from the steel. So, unusually, the building’s fire protection had to
be both waterproof and maintenance-free. A research programme by Wimpey
and British Steel gave the steel a fireproof barrier coating of fibre cement.
Later Foster found an engineer’s solution for mullions to hold tall glass
panels in place so attractive that he caused further design headaches by
decreeing that they should be turned through 180 degrees and put on view,
not hidden inside.

William is frank about these victories for aesthetics over practicalities,
but never really explores the conflict. This is a shame because it is precisely
this battle that enriches the work of Norman Foster. It is what makes his
buildings both expensive and exciting.