The Design Line: 19 - 25 February
It’s Friday so that must mean it’s time for the Design Line. This week, the o2 Arena takes a weather beating, an investigation rumbles a fake design agency, and new quantum technology is poised to reveal the world beneath our feet.
Storm Eunice tore the Millennium Dome a new one (image: Berrely / Wikimedia Commons).
Eunice hates camping
This week saw Storm Eunice rage across Europe, taking down power lines and transport in its wake, as well as, tragically, killing at least 16 people. Architecture did not escape the storm unscathed, with many of the headlines devoted to damage done to Richard Rogers’s The O2 (the artist formerly known as the Millennium Dome). This should not be surprising. What doesn’t do well in a storm? Tents. And what’s the O2? A big ol’ tent. Six panels of the centre’s PTFE-coated glass fibre fabric roof were torn away by the high winds, leaving the poor O2 looking very raggedy and forlorn indeed – a shredded shade of its former domed glory. While the building is reported to likely be out of action “for a few months”, the good news is that the damage seems to be all hat and no cattle. “There has been no actual collapse or structural damage to the building,” said Chris Kamara, station commander for the London Fire Brigade, “but due to the nature of the canvas material which covers the O2, it has come loose in high winds and looks quite dramatic.” Fingers crossed it will be a happy camper once again before the summer.
Quantum surveying
Who doesn’t like peering under stuff? Nobody, that’s who, which was why the news that broke this week from researchers at Birmingham University was so exciting. Writing in Nature, the team revealed that it had worked with industrial partners to successfully employ a quantum gravity sensor in the field for the first time, liberating the technology from the strict laboratory conditions that it has been restricted to until now. Now, if you don’t know what a quantum gravity sensor is, you must have been living under a rock, which is ironic because a quantum gravity sensor would be able to see you under there. The technology relies upon a technique known as atom interferometry, which uses rubidium atoms and lasers to indicate local gravitational fields, which can in turn be used to detect subterranean structures with great precision. For anyone working within construction and architecture, the ramifications should be obvious – who wouldn’t want to know what they’re building on top of? “With this breakthrough, we have the potential to end reliance on poor records and luck, as we explore, build and repair,” said Kai Bongs, principal investigator at Birmingham’s UK Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing, speaking to the Financial Times. “An underground map of what is currently invisible is now a significant step closer, ending a situation where we know more about Antarctica than what lies a few feet below our streets.” Three cheers for finally knowing what lies beneath!
A forgotten Mies design has made it off the page (image: Hadley Fruits / Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design).
A lifetime later
A Ludwig Mies van der Rohe design that had languished in a collection of material held by the MoMA has been made into a glazed-wall reality at Indiana University (IU), some 50 years after the death of the midcentury design giant. IU’s Alpha Theta chapter of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity (motto: Not Four Years But A Lifetime) commissioned Mies to design a building in 1952, three years after the architect completed his (in)famous Farnsworth House. Looking at the newly inaugurated Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design on IU’s Bloomington campus it is easy to see the shared stylising DNA in the simple white frame and the expanses of glazed wall. Given that Dr Edith Farnsworth ended up suing Mies over his creation, the style might be far more suited to an educational setting than a residential one. Beautiful as Farnsworth House may be, as a holiday home its big windows were low on privacy and high on bug-attraction. Luckily for IU, architecture studio Thomas Phifer and Partners, who were tasked with updating Mies designs for contemporary use, seem to have included some nice all-white curtains.
Whitworth director Alistair Hudson has resigned over a controversial exhibition (image: Forensic Architecture).
A resigning matter
In August 2021, Goldsmiths-based research group Forensic Architecture penned an op-ed in The Guardian in which they declared that “[our] battle to restore a statement to a Manchester exhibition was really about what can and can’t be said in cultural spaces.” The show in question was Cloud Studies at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, in which Forensic Architecture shared (amongst other things) details of its investigations into violence used by Israeli forces against Palestinians, including a note headed “Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine” pinned to the entrance of the exhibition. Cue a major shitstorm. UK Lawyers For Israel (UKLFI), a British legal group that advocates for Israeli causes (and which doesn’t have a spotless track record when it comes to even-handed treatments of the Israel-Palestine conflict), quickly demanded the statement’s removal after having declared it “pure propaganda” and “designed to provoke racial discord”. In response, the Whitworth’s parent organisation, the University of Manchester, acquiesced to their request, prompting Forensic Architecture to pull their work from the gallery before the Whitworth’s director Alistair Hudson seemingly resolved matters by announcing the statement’s restoration, in conjunction with “a space which gives voice to different perspectives on the issues raised by the exhibition and help contextualise them”. Unsurprisingly, the controversy appears to have rumbled on behind the scenes, with it revealed this week that Hudson has now been asked to leave his post at the gallery following a series of further complaints from the UKLFI which “suggested that the university should take appropriate disciplinary action” against him. It is a deeply unpleasant situation, venomous with accusations that only serve to obscure the actual issues, but Hudson’s removal seems likely to simply exacerbate matters further: concerns over censorship are rarely resolved by forcing a resignation.
Along with scamming employees, the founder of a fake design agency was found to have photoshopped himself into magazines (image: Instagram).
Fake accounts
The remote working revolution instigated by the pandemic benefited many with its opportunities to cut commute times in favour of lie-ins, but it has also opened the door to a unique new breed of scam: “jobfishing”. And it was the design industry that was the target of this strange case of employment fraud that is truly stranger than fiction. This week, the BBC published the results of a year-long investigation into Madbird, a design agency that hired over 50 people as remote workers in 2020, each of whom thought they were working for a company that was building apps and redesigning websites for an exciting roster of clients. This was no ordinary fake job advert. Madbird founder Ali Ayad said he wanted to imitate the leadership style of Elon Musk and styled himself as a lifestyle influencer with 90k followers on Instagram, where he posted photos doctored to make it appear as though he was a fashion model in adverts printed in GQ magazine. Madbird was billed as an established design firm that had been around for a decade, but its six head honchos turned out to be fake LinkedIn accounts with portraits pilfered stock photos or, in one bizarre case, a beehive-maker from Prague. Ayad had actually only registered the company – to his own London address – in late 2020, and had faked his own CV with jobs such as “creative lead” for Nike. It wasn’t until two concerned employees, worried about how no one was being paid for their work, did some digging and emailed their colleagues the findings that the whole house of cards came crashing down. A horror story for the digital age that suggests you can never be too careful when it comes to reverse image-searching your boss.
War in Ukraine
The horror of Russian airstrikes against Ukraine and the invasion of the country by ground troops has shocked the world this week, with Vladimir Putin ghoulishly announcing that Ukranian statehood was a fiction, riding roughshod over history in his claim that contemporary Ukraine’s existence was a matter of “tearing from [Russia] pieces of her own historical territory.” Amidst the grotesqueries of war, however, it was easy to overlook the digital carnage that has accompanied Putin’s invasion. A new report from UK and US intelligence agencies found that Sandworm, a Russian state-backed hacker group believed to be behind the 2017 NotPetya cyberattacks on Ukraine, had developed a new type of malware called Cyclops Blink, which could prove devastating in disrupting Ukrainian infrastructure: on Wednesday, the nation suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that targeted websites of Ukraine’s government and banks, with digital chaos prefacing the physical attacks that were to come. Similarly, fears have been raised that Russia may be able to avoid some of the worst effects of economic sanctions, the main means by which the world has thus far responded to the invasion, by relying on cryptocurrencies to bypass traditional control points such as the transfer of money by banks. It is a terrifying situation and a global tragedy: a coordinated assault upon Ukraine’s statehood that takes in both the digital and physical realms.
Carolino by Older brings new meaning to meals on wheels (image: courtesy of Nilufar Depot)
Trolley solution
Successive lockdowns saw us all adopt funky eating habits or get a little too creative with the snacks. With no one around to watch you, what’s to stop you eating dry ramen out of the packet in the bath? Design studio Older struggled, like many of us, with the loneliness of isolation in lockdown, but their creative response was to make their own companion in the form of colourful tray on wheels. Called Carolino, this “serving wagon” – currently on display at Nilufar Depot in Milan – looks like the candy-coloured lovechild of an airline drinks trolley and Cassius from Robot Wars season 2 (a wedge-shaped beast with a flipping arm made from bits of motorbikes that barrelled its way to the final until it was defeated by reversing into a pit). Danish/Italian design duo Letizia Caramia and Morten Thuesen created Carolino in an attempt to stave off boredom when they were locked down together for Christmas 2020 at Carmia’s father’s studio on the Tuscan seaside. Carolino won’t just keep you company as you trundle it around the house, the tray means that you can eat your meals wherever you please, free from the tyranny of the table. Its triangular belly even opens up to reveal storage, which would be a handy place to keep condiments and snacks. The TV dinner has finally had its design makeover.