There was great enthusiasm for our move, marking WAF’s fifth year, and the venue choice of Marina Bay Sands. Moshie Safdie has agreed to be a keynote speaker on the first morning of the Festival, which takes place on 3, 4 and 5 October.

I am en route to the Australian Institute of Architects national conference in Brisbane, so more from me next week. meanwhile, don’t run out of time with this year’s awards entries. Closing date is the end of June, with short listing judging early July.

World Architecture Festival 2012 is on the move – to Singapore, where this year’s event will take place on October 3, 4 and 5.

The venue is Marina Bay Sands, the extraordinary hotel and convention complex designed by Moshie Safdie and opened in 2011.

Our move, after four happy years in Barcelona, is partly to reflect the global (rather than European) nature of WAF. But it is also to mark our fifth year as the world’s only annual architecture festival.

When we launched in 2008, it wasn’t at all clear whether we could make the event succeed, despite encouragement from architects representing more than 60 countries who attended that first event. After all, the economic crisis, which began in the United States and spread both east and west, had begun just as we launched our first festival.

So survival has been important; economically the world is rather more stable, and of course there are boom construction markets in many parts of Asia.

Our decision to choose Singapore as a location was influenced by several factors. First, it is a hub for the huge variety of countries and communities across Asia. Second, it is an entrepot which is accustomed to dealing with people and businesses from across the world.

But most important, it has established itself as a country which has a real interest in design quality in many fields. Through the President’s Design Awards with its multiple international juries, and through the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize now in its third iteration, Singapore has demonstrated a real belief in the power of design to transform people and places for the better.

We look forward to working with the Singapore Tourist Board, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, the Singapore Institute of Architects, and DesignSingapore Council, and to making WAF 2012 a truly memorable event.

And of course we look forward to many hundreds of architectural practices entering the WAF Awards – last year we received more than 700 entries.

Good luck!

Paul Finch, Programme Director, World Architecture Festival

The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland had kindly invited me to speak at its annual fellows’ dinner, which took place in Glasgow last week. It came as a complete surprise to be made an honorary fellow myself – a real privilege.

Another recipient was the veteran Labour politician Tam Dalyell, Old Etonian scourge of Margaret Thatcher over the Belgrano affair, and the famous poser of the West Lothian question about the proper constitutional balance of responsibilities and powers between Scottish and English MPs, which has to yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

In his acceptance speech, Tam made reference to his brief relationship with the Architects’ Journal, one of WAF’s media partners, in respect of accommodation for MPs in the Palace of Westminster. This occurred after he had been elected MP for West Lothian in 1962, and found, like other newcomer MPs, that the accommodation provided was of the broom cupboard variety. There was certainly no chance of getting an actual room. So put out was Tam by this that he began, with another newly elected Labour MP, Anthony Wedgewood Benn, to find out exactly went on in which spaces in the Pugin and Barry complex, surreptitiously checking rooms and corridors and noting what they found.

Somehow, this spatial detective work came to the attention of the AJ, and Tam was asked to produce a 3,000-word article on his findings (AJ 19.08.64). This was duly published, including one revelation about a room of 640 square feet occupied by a man who the intrepid investigators had found standing in his underwear ironing his trousers. This nugget came to the attention of the Daily Mirror, which reported it with some glee, conferring on Tam the reputation as the man who had found a semi-naked trouser-ironer under the Commons debating chamber. It wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he entered the Palace of Varieties…

The only other architectural story involving trousers that springs to mind was a dinner hosted by the retiring RIBA secretary, Patrick Harrison (also Scottish), held in the library of the Reform Club. The former institute president Gordon Graham was giving the after-dinner speech from a top table that included the Russian cultural attaché. The repast was obviously of sufficient substance to cause Gordon to loosen his belt; this had the unexpected consequence, as he began his speech, of allowing (or at least not preventing) his trousers to slowly fall down, in the manner of
a Brian Rix farce.

There was nothing much he could do or say other than to pull them up and get on with his speech. The sort of impromptu witty remark, required but lacking on that occasion, was brilliantly delivered in the self-same room some years later, though not about trousers, by the late Norman St John-Stevas (later Lord St John of Fawsley, chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission and a prominent Catholic. He was guest of honour at a commemorative dinner for Punch magazine, shortly before it closed. Norman had to leave early because of a vote in the House of Lords, but was presented with a memento in the form of a caricature of himself by the Observer’s cartoonist, Trog.

He needed to take his leave, but to do so elegantly. ‘Thank you for inviting me, and for giving me this marvellous caricature which I shall treasure,’ he began. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, looking at it I have to say that it does not do me justice… But then in this world, what we want is not justice, but mercy. Farewell!’

Apart from Tam Dalyell, they don’t make them like that any more.

With about 18,000 visitors this year, Europe’s biggest property event, Mipim, was busy without becoming manic. Assembled hordes of developers, funders, agents, architects and others even further down the food chain shivered for the first two days, then basked in sunshine as the Croisette began to enjoy Spring.

The London pavilion was as lively as ever with the huge central London model by Pipers the centerpiece. No mayor this year, but then there is an election coming, but plenty of talk about post-Olympic legacy, King’s Cross and the well-publicized deal that cannot be mentioned because it hasn’t happened yet: Google moving to King’s Cross with AHMM providing designs.

You might have thought the Olympics wasn’t happening judging by the paucity of logos and marketing of our wonderful park and buildings, but the Olympic authorities are cracking down on marketing by people who haven’t contributed millions to their coffers, as if our £9.3 billion counts for nothing. What a bunch of phonies.

I hope all those who have designed, built and contributed to the Games environment will tell the IOC and their pals to get lost, on the grounds that bans on publicity are a restraint of trade, and that any contract which is too onerous in these matters may well fall foul of the Unfair Contract Terms Act, specifically designed to stop monopoly bullies from pushing ordinary companies around.

Back to Mipim: the biggest new element was the impossible-to-miss Qatari pavilion. This hosted a splendid model of the massive Musheireb Properties mixed-use development in downtown Doha, with work featured by architects including Allies & Morrison, Michel Mossessian, Eric Parry and John McAslan.

The Qataris also staged a series of high-level presentations on urban design, with speakers including Richard Rogers (obviously some making up over the Chelsea Barracks contretemps has taken place), Will Alsop and RIBA president Angela Brady.

Elsewhere a host of speakers from all parts of the property spectrum discussed the widest range of subjects, from distressed property sales through debt/equity disparities to building innovation.

WAF’s UK media partners, the Architectural Review and the Architects’ Journal, were both busy hosting well-received events. The AR’s annual awards for future projects attracted nearly 180 people to its dinner in the Palais Stephanie; an excellent range of winners with Isay Weinfeld of Brazil taking the overall prize for a residential complex in San Paolo.

The AJ hosted discussion lunches on the growing significance of retrofit (hosted by engineers ZBP), and the challenges and dilemmas of creating major new developments (hosted by CapCo, which is developing Earls Court in London, one of Europe’s biggest current property schemes).

Inevitably in a London context, there was much talk about the future of Battersea Power Station, mainly centred round just how much of it might need to be demolished in order to facilitate development which would justify the £500 million price tag which is attached to the site. This one will run and run, as they say, not least because unless demolition takes place, the new owner will have to pay the cost of demolishing the four iconic chimneys – and then rebuilding them (I am not making this up).

The country of honour at Mipim this year was Germany (that’s right, there were towels on the beach first thing every morning); next year it’s Turkey. So from the leader of the Eurozone and defender of the currency, to a country which must be having second if not third thoughts about whether it wants to join up to the economic system that has chewed up but avoided spitting out Greece.

With the flood of money flowing from unstable economies to so-called ‘safe havens’, prospects for at least parts of Euroland, including the London residential market, look promising. But let’s remember that the housing market in London is about designing expensive homes for often non-residential seekers of those safe havens. The normal relationship between supply and demand is warped by artificial demand springing from uncertainty.

Let’s hope next year will see a bit more boring stability.

You might have thought that this would involve expressing a concern about how the buildings on the site are being looked after, and how new buildings proposed within it are contributing to the ensemble. Not a bit of it. Perhaps realising that the controls exercised by Westminster City Council, English Heritage, a myriad amenity groups and various other statutory and non-statutory consultees might just be doing the trick, Unesco has turned its spotlight on a quite different set of buildings and sites: those that can, shock horror, be itals seen itals from the ‘world heritage site’.

I would like to be able to say that I am making this up, but it is deadly serious. Unesco is ‘warning’ Westminster and the government that proposals for Waterloo, designed by those enemies of history David Chipperfield, Hopkins Architects and Michael Squire, will put the status of the ‘world heritage site’ at risk because the views from the site, or at least some of them, will be fatally ruined by proposals now in the planning system. Of course one major proposal for the site has already been rejected because of view impact, with no help from Paris.

Before moving on to the specifics of the case, let’s just remind ourselves how it is that Unesco comes to be concerning itself with proposed developments in a highly regulated western city which are not themselves in, or even close to, a ‘world heritage site’. The answer is very simple: developing countries with real world historical buildings and monuments, like Egypt and its pyramids, became fed up with the demands Unesco kept making on them to do this or that. How come, they asked, Unesco never made demands of the same sort on developed countries?

Unesco began looking round for cities and sites in developing countries that they could have a go at. One consequence of this was the last government’s crazy decision to call in Rafael Vinoly’s ‘Walkie-talkie’ office development in the City of London. This had been given a full planning permission by the City Corporation, and although English Heritage had raised objections to the design, it had not gone so far as to ask for an inquiry. Enter Unesco, with some menacing noises about the Tower of London losing its ‘world heritage site’ designation, plus an impending international conference on heritage in New Zealand, and our department of culture went weak at the knees and ordered a public inquiry.

The threat to remove ‘world heritage site’ status from the Tower of London had cropped up earlier in respect of Renzo Piano’s ‘Shard’ scheme at London Bridge, which can be seen from the Tower (it is not directly opposite and is on the other side of the Thames). The planning inquiry inspector was having none of it.

Even earlier, at the Heron Tower inquiry, the inspector was clear in his report which recommended allowing the development, that just because you could see a building from a conservation site did not mean that the site itself had become soiled goods.

The attempt by Unesco to reverse this finding is now evident in Liverpool, where development on the Wirral waterfront is said to be jeopardising the city’s waterfront ‘world heritage site’ opposite. Now we have the same proposition in respect of Parliament Square. This needs a robust response. That might be along the lines of: we have built and looked after our heritage for centuries, without the benefit of Unesco telling us what to do or how to do it. We are going to tell our tourist boards to get off their knees, and our ministers will stop quaking when you call.

To use an old-fashioned London phrase: why don’t you stick it up your jumper? And remember Waterloo!

Paul Finch

On my recent travels (Barcelona, Istanbul, Paris, Cologne and Singapore), what has struck me is the similarity of great cities to each other,
This is inevitably reflected in attitudes towards architecture and planning which give clues as to the aspirations and desires of the city itself.

In some ways World Architecture Festival resembles a Games: people from around the world meet in a host city, compete, celebrate, and return home richer for the experience, even though it is inevitable that only a minority of participants can be winners.

Taking part is important, not least because WAF can be such a rich source of encouragement and inspiration. We will be announcing details of this year’s event shortly and we look forward to renewing acquaintances and friendships, and making new ones, later this year.

Paul Finch

As it happens, the WAF completed building of the year award went to another Barcelona building, the extraordinary Media-ICT landmark in the ‘22@’ Poble Nou regeneration area. The winning building, designed by Cloud 9/Enric Ruiz-Geli, has addressed head-on the question of Co2 emissions, long-term sustainability and efficiency of performance by rethinking just how an office might work with no design holds barred.

The appearance of the building is extraordinary for several reasons. ETFE cushions, which inflate with nitrogen during very hot weather provde an extra façade layer. Luminous paint, inspired by jellyfish, replaces night-time electric lighting. The parametric design has minimised non-usable space, and the structural and services design is based on complex distributed patterns rather than centralised systems.

The final ‘super-jury’ which picked the building, Jo Noero, Michael Sorkin, Kongjian Yu, and Tim Macfarlane, of course had to take on trust some of the claims made for the building, since long-term sustainability will only be proved by time. I was reminded of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s remark: ‘Better a fertile error than a sterile accuracy’ (made before he wrongly validated the Hitler diaries!). Even if the building turns out to be less successful than hoped, its scale of ambition and the symbolic nature of its design will guarantee it a place in the canon of architecture.

It is always refreshing to see presentations oozing with confidence and optimism, and it was not the only one emanating from a Barcelona local during the festival. The new chief architect Vincent Guallart (pronounced why-art), appointed three months ago by the new nationalist ‘centre-right’ administration, gave delegates an inspirational insight into the new planning thinking informing the city’s future, which is radical and public-minded.

Some of the ideas being pursued had echoes with the Media-ICT building, for example in thinking about distributed networks rather than central control. Guallart, who previously ran the Institute for Advanced Architecture in Catalonia, intends to extend the work of Cerda, whose 19th century plan invented the idea of urbanism in the modern age, by taking the city down to the sea to a greater extent than before, also extending the ideas behind the masterplan for the 1992 Olympics.

The chief architect was also able to say that the mayor has put architects at the ‘top of the pyramid’ in promoting new ideas to set a pattern for the next few decades, while delivering individual projects within shorter timescales. These will include bring nature into the city rather than the city endlessly expanding into nature; transforming city blocks into energy generation centres as part of an energy self-sufficiency programme; building affordable housing and city-owned sites; and developing a ‘smart city’ model which combines design with environmental thinking, operating systems, infrastructure and ICT.

Three competitions for strategic projects have already been announced, and one sensed that the old Barcelona of Pasqual Maragall, and the spirit of Martorell Bohigas Mackay (celebrating their 60th anniversary with a fine exhibition at the Collegi d’Arquitectes) is back.

Actually MBM’s has never been away, proof if it were needed being provided in their latest city building, the magnificently cantilevered design museum on the big roundabout near Jean Nouvel’s tower. David Mackay gave a keynote presentation at the festival, tracing the work of the practice through dictatorship, revolution, democracy, world Olympic city, and now a vibrant location for continuing experimentation. What a story, and how removed from the idea that history can merely comprise information or data. As he said, neither are useful without knowledge; he might have added that knowledge can also usefully be tempered by wisdom, as his own lecture elegantly proved.

Of course even if things are tough in many places, they are not tough everywhere. To some extent this year’s entries, the most since 2008, reflect changes in financial health and some long-term rebalancing of world economic structures.

But it is worth remembering that even in hard times, there are tens of thousands of buildings created every year, and WAF only touches the surface of that quantum. The good news, however, is the quality of what we see, and the fact that nearly 300 architects and designers will be coming to Barcelona to present really fine work is testimony to the resilience of the international profession.
So if you were wondering whether to come along, don’t hesitate. We have a rich layer cake of events, parties, talks and award entry presentations, something for every appetite.

For those of you already committed, we look forward to seeing you next week. you should have some good tales about architectural talent to take home.

So attracting 5,000 architects was something of a triumph for Yoshio Ogura and the team from the Japan Institute of Architects that made it all happen; apparently nearly 2,000 of the delegates came from overseas, though there was scant representation from the UK. The honourable exceptions were Angela Brady and Ian Pritchard from the RIBA, keynote speaker David Adjaye, and a little team from World Architecture Festival. We organized a preview of shortlisted WAF awards entries from there region, courtesy of the excellent Uchida group, who designed the exhibition and staged it in their headquarters building near the UIA event.

Rafael Vinoly’s Tokyo Forum, still magnificent, was the main venue for the congress, whose main theme was ‘Design 2050: Beyond Disaster, through Solidarity, towards Sustainability’. The main hall was packed for the opening ceremony, attended by the Emperor and Empress, and the final keynote lecture by Fumihiko Maki. There was a wealth of lectures and seminars, including a brilliant keynote by the artist Christo, a good trade exhibition, and jolly social events, including a reception on the 52nd floor of the Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills.

On that very floor was the best associated event of the congress, however: the Metabolism exhibition exploring the extraordinary rise and rise of the group of young architects, including Maki, Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurakawa, who took architecture by storm in the 1960s and 70s, before going their individual architectural ways. The nearest equivalent in Europe was Archigram, whose own major exhibition took place in the same venue on its world tour a few years back.

‘Metabolishm: the City of the Future’, at the Mori Art Museum, is about as good as it gets in terms of exhibition presentation. Drawings, laboriously hand-made 40 years ago, have been digitized and computer programmed so that, for example, city-scale construction sequencing now looks effortless as it appears on giant display screens in a series of huge rooms featuring drawings, models, films, magazine extracts and so on.

One intriguing thing about metabolism was is connection to international design thinking, symbolised by a World Design Conference held in Tokyo in 1960, that is four years before the Tokyo Olympics marked the return of Japan to global acceptability after the events of World War II. That 1960 event saw delegates from across the world meet to discuss the dilemmas facing architecture (the British delegate was Peter Smithson). That sense of internationalism was alive and well at the UIA last week, where the key issues concerned ethics and the consequence of architectural activity on the environment; the whole question of sustainability in relation to energy use; and the role of architects in rebuilding communities and neighbourhoods in the wake of natural disasters of the sort recently experienced across Japan.

There were other subjects discussed; I was the only non-Asian to attend a talk by veteran engineering professor Mamoru Kawayuchi, ‘Structural truth and deception in Japanese architecture’. This revealed, among other things, that Bruno Taut’s analysis of the Ise shrine, which concluded that it was an expression of structural honesty, was quite mistaken. In a masterly series of images he showed other examples of what he described as the ’spaghetti paradox’ ,where it is not the fork holding up the pasta but the pasta holding up the fork – because both are made of plastic. In the case of the shrine, no plastic was involved, of course, but what was holding up what was far from straightforward.

But there was no simple condemnation of deception or applause for truth from the professor, because, in the words of a Japanese writer he cited, ‘Art lies somewhere between the two thin lines of truth and deception’. A nice sideways view of the architectural orthodoxies being absorbed by the 5,000 in Tokyo.

Like architecture itself, architectural education is a fundmentally optimistic activity concerned with better futures, and most of the audience at an impressive symposium on global architectural education at the RIBA last Friday came away in good heart, though with much to discuss and debate.

Entitled Architectural education: Global difference? Speakers from Europe,  Africa and South America shared thoughts and criticisms, beginning with Neil Spiller, the new Dean at Greenwich University, London. His ‘clarion call for variety’ was based on an admiration for the ‘naivete and bravado of youth, the lifebloof the architecture school’, but on condition that the school was a meritocracy, that self-realization on the part of the students could not be achieved thorgh spoon-feeding, and that there needed to be a combination of the empirical and the poetic if a productive sensibility were to be achieved.

The attitude of staff and the profession as he would like them were outlined, with an emphasis on engagement, on recongizing the need for beneficial change, and a realistic attitude to the future rather than ‘visions’. Though repulsed by the idea of students as ‘oven-ready turkeys’ just right for practice, he neverthelsss insisted that schools should deliver a sound technical education. Dogma was out (eg parametricism). We had to combat the marginalization of the profession by some clients and indeed other professions. Marinetti was cited: ‘Every generation must build its own city’; and he concluded with a suggestion that schools needed traction in finding a way forward: ‘The well oiled student is the key to our future’. Well you know what he meant.

Vittorio Lampugnani, from ETH in Zurich, demonstrated why he is so highly regarded as a historian and critic, with a deft examination of what kind of architect do we think education should be helping to create. Vitruvious was on hand to help, with a definition of huge range which inclueed being a mseter of the art of building, but also educated in music, geometry, astronomy, astrology(!) and law.

His conclusion was that the architects had to be an intellectuals, that is to say people who could be reflective about their own time and their own activity. He agreed about the need for technical mastery, but suggested that you achieved this by learning moethod, not recipes, so that you were mentally equipped to deal with inevitable change

His reminder that Frank lloyd Wright, Corb and Mies ‘learned their trade very carefully’ was evidence that ‘there is no genius without fundamental knowlege’. For him that knowledge had to include history because that was the discipline which allowed an understanding of the changing relationships beween architects, architecture and socieity. He believed in the design studio both as a ‘didactic reconstruction of professional practice’, and as the occasion for the synthesis of the technical and the intellectual, where the logical evoltion of design could be discussed and progressed.

Concluding the first half of the event was the now-veteran David Dunster, teacher at Kingston, the Bartlett and Liverpool University. He began with a story about how a head of school had railed against staff who were ‘incompetents protected by tenure’, against budget cuts, and about the general inmpossibility of running a school these days. it turned out to rlation to the Texas A&M school in the 1950s. Does nothing change? Apparently it does, since he then reminded us about Lord Llewelyn-Davies, who ran the Bartlett school in London in the 1960s on the basis that (a) teaching is about facts and knowledge imparted by teachers; (b) that there were no facts and knowledge about design; and that therefore (c) design could not be taught. That view of the world was rejected by people like Bob Maxwell, former Dean at Princeton, who was in the audience and received generous praise from Dunster. Maxwell had argued that what you needed to teach design was a ‘coherent diactic structure’.

Whether that is what you get these days was open to question, on the basis of Dunster’s scanning of architecture school websites. He thought Yale, Oxford Brookes and Greenwich were pretty good in  nailing their intellectual colours to the mast. However, of 25 he looked at, not one showed an inaugural by a head of school. Many claimed they were good on the basis of their research record rather than their success in teaching; some cited where students ended up working as evidence of their quality.

He wittily ridiculed  claims made through use of ‘weasel words’ like ’sustainable’, ‘appropriate’ and consistent’, on the grounds that thee words have no negative that coould conceivably be used in these circustances, and were therefore meaningless - though he didn’t mention whether or not specific teaching about energy, climate or carbon were a good idea. A bad idea, in his view, was the unit system because it suppressed discourse and disagreement in favour of the single (teacher’s) voice.

A good final point was the importance of architectural education not simply being about teaching architecture, or pretending that all students are great designers. There was a wider responsibility.

More about this subject after coverage of the UIA conference in Tokyo next week, with perspectives from Columbia and South Africa.