Next Monday evening, renowned typographer and Blueprint columnist Erik Spiekermann will join in conversation with the designers of his east London house, Ullmayer Sylvester Architects at the Royal Academy, London. It is the third and final event in the Two Stories series of talks organised by Blueprint, which look at the ways in which creative clients can affect the process of an architectural project.

Clients don’t get much more creative – or daunting – than Spiekermann. Apart from being one of the world’s leading typographers, responsible for typefaces such as Officina, Meta and an entire system of typography for the German railways, he has also worked on the development of two other house projects; one in Berlin, another in San Francisco. Fortunately perhaps, the architects were not initially aware of his huge reputation in graphic design: “When the project was well on site a friend of ours mentioned a film about Erik at the ICA – I guess then it finally sunk in” says Sylvia Ullmayer.

The project began when Spiekermann’s house, a Victorian terrace in the Dalston area of east London that he bought in 2001, started to fall apart. After finding Sylvia Ullmayer and Allan Sylvester, an Anglo-German partnership also based in Dalston, the brief he gave was particular, although not especially precise: Spiekermann would only be staying in the house for occasional visits to London while the rest of the time his son would live there. It was decided that Spiekermann Snr would have a space at the top of the house, in which he could work and live while in London. There was also agreement that the spirit of the Victorian terrace had to be respected, but also updated.

The result is a project of rigorous subtlety, entirely in keeping with Spiekermann’s own work as a graphic designer. Ullmayer Sylvester has retained, and in some cases restored, the internal rhythm of the house while opening it up to more daylight and more coherent routes between the back and front of the building. “What these houses are good at is not being grand, but being in good proportion,” says Ullmayer, “we played with existing room patterns, manipulated them and adapted them… yet the original, typical room layout can still be perceived in the ground floor, 1st and 2nd floor.” The architects also established new views through the building, for example creating a narrow window slot in the ground floor, which clears a view from the hall into the garden.

There are also touches that combine that architectural and the graphic; in particular the approach to bringing the house’s essential services into one integrated system. “The clutter of electric cables, heating pipes, radiators, sockets and new data connections has been combined, resulting in a Leitmotiv for the whole house: the lining, a tall skirting that runs through the whole house. bringing together old elements and new ones,” says Spiekermann.

The typographer says that the collaboration has made him a better client, while Ullmayer has been delighted at the ease of having a client who understands the design process inside out: “If it was halfway affordable and we could make a case for it, he’d let us do it. It was like having a patron.”

To find out more about the project – and get involved in the discussion – come to the RA Forum Unplugged: Two Stories, 7pm, Monday 15 December. It’s at the Cinema Space, 6 Burlington Gardens, London. Tickets: £7 (£4 concessions), including a drink. Space are limited, so please call 020 7300 5839.

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The latest project by Ben Van Berkel of Dutch architect UNStudio is either proof that architects and designers can find ways to weather the financial storm, or a last hoorah from a more luxurious time. Commissioned by phone manufacturer Motorola, the Time Out of Scale installation at St Martin’s Lane Hotel at the beginning of December, created an immersive environment inspired by Motorola’s new premium mobile device, AURA, which is on sale for £1,200. Both phone and installation are remarkably extravagant. The handset’s intricate craftsmanship, featuring more than 200 parts and a seamless opening mechanism – as well as the industry’s first circular display – were the inspiration for UNStudio who were briefed by Motorola to create a bespoke installation that immerses the public in an individual sensory experience.

Van Berkel says of Time Out Of Scale, ‘Taking AURA as our inspiration, the installation has enabled us to explore and deconstruct the themes of time and craftsmanship beyond what is ‘known’ and to create an ‘experience’ where anything seems possible.’ Within the installation, time is represented in the form of rhythmic changes in sound and imagery. The seamless white space with its large convex eye at one end combined with projections and music create a setting in which visitors can lose themselves. Yet van Berkel has no problems with the extravagance: ‘I feel very good about it. Luxury is not just about expense, it’s about time and craftsmanship.’

The architect sees it as a further development of UNStudio’s installation during the Venice Architecture Biennale, Changing Rooms: “One-of-a-kind projects offer architects an opportunity to break constraints and explore concepts that are both challenging and unprecedented,” he says.

The Venice installation was a much more involved and complex project: a huge, organic piece of architectural sculpture that wound its way between the columns of the Arsenale. ‘The installation structure shows an architecture that is as supple as textile, in which floors, walls and ceilings flow into each other.’ It will be interesting to see if such experimental projects can survive a recession. Intriguingly, Van Berkel says that the Venice installation has now been bought; by an international bank that he cannot name. Clearly some people’s credit is more crunched than others.

Anyone who has been to the Le Corbusier exhibition in the crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool will have been taken by the beautiful plans and models of Chandigarh on show. We’ve already reviewed the show when it was at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein and we’re looking at it again with its extra British twist in the next issue. There are many ways to approach an exhibition on Corb of course – as many ways as there are to approach the man himself – but one of the facets of his work that is made clear is the influence of non-European approaches on his architecture. Corb didn’t just export a modernist style, he learned and adapted from different cultures. Like Picasso, he ploughed through the established hierarchies of primitive and civilized to find values and forms, which were eternal, immutable.

This inversion of traditional value systems has had an unexpected consequence in the twenty-first century. Now, though, the inversion is a struggle between those who wish Corb and his pals’ design ethos to be consumed by a caring elite and those who wish it to be for the less caring proles. Writer and architect Jonathan Nicholls and the artist Patsy Craig are working on a project called Chandigarh Catalogue, which is  is a collection of photographs, interviews, building studies and found objects used to identify and file traces of everyday life in India’s City Beautiful. The catalogue brings together these studies to consider the effects of Modernist design on Indian society and culture.

The city of Chandigarh sits on the edge of the Punjabi plain near the foothills of the Himalayas. As a result of the partition of India in 1947, the Punjabi capital of Lahore was lost to Pakistan. This picture is from an element of the project called Furniture Conversations. The pictures capture the furniture designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand in situ around the city. Anyone who visited the DesignArt exhibition in London will have seen some of this work, highly restored and available to buy at great cost, but in the Indian city, the bespoke modernist furniture is ubiquitous.

In the next issue of the magazine, you can read how the approach to conservation is changing in the city as it seeks UNESCO World Heritage status, but in the meantime, if you are interested in exhibiting or publishing the Chandigarh Catalogue or want to know more about the project please go to www.chandigarhcatalogue.com.

Critics would say that because the Stephen Lawrence Prize is the second largest architectural award in the country, it can duck the major issues of the day. With the Stirling Prize attracting all the headlines, the Stephen Lawrence awards can indulge itself in mere prettiness. The Stirling Prize, they say, has to make a statement – frequently an overtly political one. It doesn’t have the luxury of making qualitative architectural judgements. Yet what the recent annual Stirling shortlists have made clear is that assessments based on what a project means rather than what it does are, in fact, the easy options. The final choice isn’t the issue, it’s the drawing up of the shortlist by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

 Ultimately a genuine selection, based on the time honoured combination of prejudice and objectivity is made by a jury. This is not the problem. It is the fact that by then a consideration of what each building means has already been made and some seriously good architecture discounted because selecting a certain typology would send out the wrong message. Not so the Stephen Lawrence Prize. This years shortlist of the East Beach Café by Heatherwick Studio, Classroom of the Future by Gollifer Langston Architects, Cremorne Riverside Centre by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and – a real discovery this one – Glass & Timber Houses by Hampson Williams all fulfilled the simple criteria that the budget was less than a million.

 Certainly the scale is smaller than the Stirling projects but you feel that each project was selected because it delivered a great idea well. Nor is it elitist. The Sackler Crossing was a good winner – a project that slowly embeds itself into the collective unconscious, with its simple lyricism. The Stirling Prize winner looks like a decent housing scheme from the 1970s. Nothing wrong in itself but a sad indictment that we have to give such projects awards to simply show that architects can build nice houses if they are asked to. The shortlist – like the Stephen Lawrence shortlist – should inspire and amaze people.

Richard Serra at the Gagosian

This week saw the revealing of a set of three new works by acclaimed American sculptor Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery. It follows the recent exhibition ‘Promenade’ at the Grand Palais in Paris. Oddly given that his work is invariably at the heart of any debate about contemporary sculpture and its relationship to architecture here, it is his first exhibition in London since Weight and Measure at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

The exhibition demonstrates Serra’s beautiful construction of spatial architecture that challenges our perception of the way we move through sculpture. Like his greatest work, the pieces combine bold structure and form with material weathered and manipulated to perfection. ‘Fernando Pessoa’ sits beautifully within the third gallery, altering the weight and balance of the room and draws your eyes in with exquisite texture and colour.

The poetry of space, created in ‘Open Ended’ asks questions of your navigation whilst forcing you to engage with the material at an extremely personal level. You become immersed in texture and light with movement of the body becoming secondary.

In the main gallery the two huge forms of ‘TTI London’ sit within a room just large enough to contain them. Their beauty lies in the steel edges cutting through space combined with the experience of the precision-formed steel. Yet even though this experience is moving, the work does not feel comfortable within a gallery. They need space around them to allow the forms to breathe, combined with natural light and atmosphere.

Yet Serra’s work is always alienated no matter what context it stands; be that the Gagosian or the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Despite the success of Serra’s piece ‘Hwnetwo’ which sits in Broadgate near Liverpool Street station, Serra seems uncomfortable about his sculpture sitting within the city, particularly in reference to vandalism:

“I think that if the work was made with stainless steel and looked like the range of products people know from door knobs to Bentleys  [vandals] wouldn’t touch it, but if it looks like its part of the decaying industrial revolution then they are not going to get involved with how the body could actually relate to it.”

Serra’s work insists that personal expression can be made within the urban environment, the creation of contrasting spatial experience within the city would fulfil the potential of these monumental works. Whether people actually appreciate such a work within public space is unknown, as Serra says himself:

“When you put a piece in a public space people don’t care about the artist, what they are fearful of is that you are occupying space in a place they have privilege to.”

Richard Serra: Sculpture is at the Gagosian Gallery. 6-24 Britannia Street in London until 20 December.

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The Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was a 63m long, 1.2m diameter pipe, which ran between the German and Russian pavilions, an act which highlighted the construction of the Nord Stream pipe, which will connect Vybord in Russia with Greifswald in Germany, although the exact route has to be decided upon, it will run through the Gulf of Finland to the north of Estonia and through the Baltic Sea. The real pipe will cost around €8-9billion and, say supporters increase Western Europe’s energy security.

(These include former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who is chairman of the shareholders committee for Nord Stream and the managing director Matthias Warnig, a former member of the Stasi who was good friends with Vladimir Putin during the latters time as a KGB agent in East Berlin.)

The Eastern European countries aren’t convinced, seeing it as a means for Russia to exert its influence on them by controlling energy. They can carry on supplying energy to their powerful Western neighbours whilst dictating the flow to places like Ukraine. Those nations that surround the Baltic are concerned about pollution and the fact that Putin insisted that the best way to guarantee the safety of the pipe was for the Russian Fleet to patrol the Baltic.

We’re not sure why 3 Blueprint operatives, climbed through the pipe on a balmy September Sunday afternoon. They kicked in the metal grilles that had been placed at two points down it and arrived into the sunshine some 10 minutes to the sound of a German guy saying, ‘there are some people in the pipe.’ All we can say is they are unlikely to try doing it with the real pipe, which if constructed would stretch over 1,000km.

The British Council is looking for three talented young UK design entrepreneurs to take part in a two-week tour of the Indian design industry. The winner of the UK Young Design Entrepreneur 2008 award and two runners-up will visit India in early 2009, to find out about India’s design industry, from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedebad to the thriving design scenes of Delhi and Bangalore. The group will meet leading industry figures and their peers from the Indian design sector and learn, first hand, about the dynamics of the sector and how business is done there.

Applications are now open. The deadline for applications is Thursday 14 August.

For more information about the award, the tour of India’s design scene and details of the application procedure please visit: www.creativeconomy.org.uk/ukyde08

We are very sad to hear that architecture critic and author Martin Pawley has passed away after a long illness. Pawley was a unique voice in architecture who contributed to a wide range of publications throughout his career, including Blueprint and The Architects’ Journal, as well as editing Building Design and World Architecture. In February, Blueprint published a review written by Professor Peter Cook of The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism: Martin Pawley Collected Writings (Black Dog Publishing). As a co-founder of Archigram and long-term friend and sparring partner to Pawley, Cook gave an inspiring and very personal account of the writer’s talents and attitude to architecture. The review is reproduced below as a tribute.

David Jenkins, in his introduction to this book, honours Martin Pawley’s technique as a writer, pointing out that his style can range from Hunter S Thompson to that of the Daily Telegraph. This may be true in terms of manner, but it cannot conceal a special characteristic that seeps through the whole collection, namely that combination of seriousness and a certain elegance of argument that few of the current swarm of architectural writers seem able to emulate.

Pawley often presents the background to his reports in a steady, almost pedantic way, so that in a 1987 piece on the Piccadilly Line train‚ we are reminded that, ‘in the case of the 1973 Tube Stock a car length of 17.8m was finally arrived at’. A 1991 piece on Stansted Airport relates the Foster structure to the fact that ‘laser-levelled floor plates of 25,000m2 are not unusual, and 50,000m2 is not unknown’. Yet his pedantry soon reveals itself to be that of an enthusiast. Pawley is never a mere bystander.

Indeed, my first inkling of him was David Greene, co-founder of Archigram, reading a small piece from the Guardian‚ which mentioned Pawley as a member of a progressive student group at the Oxford School of Architecture and we began to watch out for a potential ally. My first ever stint as a critic at the AA found me defending his spiky architecture and I seem to remember visiting a loft somewhere near King’s Cross where he had constructed a similarly spiky pad for himself in grey and black and white, an aesthetic that reflected the man himself. As Norman Foster suggests in his foreword: ‘You detect Martin’s anger, though it is often disguised beneath a mask of humour… there are people whose historicism offends him so deeply that as you read you can practically hear the wheels of the tumbrill’.

Indeed, it soon emerged that Pawley was a true and genuine believer in progress, in technology and in the thoroughness by which it should be discussed and supported. As with Reyner Banham, he became more than a mere commentator to those of us who were trying to push the boat; he would often catch us and chastise us if we were momentarily being less than true to ourselves.

His writing is quintessentially English and makes much use of anecdote and the deft choice of anecdotal events, which is always a puzzler for our American cousins (who tend to like their opinion fed to them unambiguously). It is even more of a puzzler for the real public for English criticism that now exists, readers who use our words extensively, but for whom it is both a second language and probably a third philosophical tradition. Could you imagine a New York commentator or a Paris critic describing their subject as ‘emerging like Count Dracula as (Nigel) Coates and I sit down like schoolboys at a wooden table… his suit glints with the subtle effect of man-made fibres known only to the few’? The setting, the mix of tastes, the fascination with Coates as having developed from nihilist to planner‚ is illuminated with several more such descriptions and gives Pawley’s writing that special quality that comes from someone who, after all, got into the business through being a combatant himself. I mean: a designer.

If his writing now strikes one as quite dense, quite partisan and essentially quite visual it is because he was quite visual. I put his spiky project in Archigram 5 because it was visually interesting. He became an advocate of technological architecture because he could have so easily been in there drawing it. He became such a consistent and honest critic of Prince Charles’s architectural position because he really hated the stuff as stuff and probably, like most of us, has lived through a constant lovehate relationship with the parallel English traps of invention, obscurantism, fetish, tradition and protocol. Hence his fascination with America and his sorties in and out of the

Victorian world of invention. Another English trait is to be fascinated by those with whom you most disagree, so he relishes his 1991 lunch with Leon Krier (usefully at a time by which Krier had ceased to be fashionable in London, anyway). ‘Leon Krier is an impressive figure. Observing Noel Coward’s advice to the ambitious he always dresses like a stockbroker, albeit with a white scarf, and nowadays even his wild old Abbie Hoffman hairdo has shrunk to Bart Simpson dimensions’. Such observations do not, however, prevent Martin in the same article, from pointing out, quite vehemently, the connections between rational architecture and Hitler. I have no doubt that the book will be devoured by those who still feel that technology, invention and anecdotal culture go together as the principal strands of appropriate architecture. Pushed to the wall to unfurl my flag, I am certainly one.

My realistic hope, however, is that some of these essays will get circulated back into the seminar rooms of the better schools, be treated as seriously as the dreaded Manfredo Tafuri, for Pawley shares some of his socialism but escapes the cloying European grimness of the post-Marxist critics. I really hope that his writings inspire some new generation English schoolboy or girl to make as much serious, witty, observant and creative comment about our creative world.

Image above; Pawley’s design for a Time House, 1967 

As we in Britain look again at building new towns. Blueprint announces New New Towns, a symposium organised by the Architecture Foundation, which will be held on February 20 and 21 at Rich Mix Foundation, London. We asked Peter Hall professor of planning at the Bartlett School of architecture and planning and between 1991 and 1994, the special advisor to the government in strategic planning to give us an overview of recent thinking. Peter is involved in the conference. See www.newnewtown.com for further details.

We are just about to rediscover the new town, here in the UK. The government has called for the construction of up to 20 eco-towns to embody best sustainable practice in the face of climate change. But in starting to plan and build new towns, we should first learn from the experience of similar new communities over the course of the century since 1898, when Ebenezer Howard published his trail-blazing book To-Morrow proposing the design of garden cities, beyond metropolitan boundaries.

Howard argued that small garden cities (of around 32,000 people each) should be built at a minimum distance from London – outside the possible commuter range – to ensure that they would be self-contained communities for living and working. To obtain the economic and social advantages offered by larger cities, they should be planned and built in clusters linked by light rail transit: Howard’s diagram shows a larger central garden city of 58,000 people surrounded by six smaller cities of 32,000 each, totalling 250,000, though Howard makes clear that the entire cluster (which he called Social City) could be bigger.

His first garden city was started in 1903 at Letchworth, 60km north of London, the second in 1920 at Welwyn, 35km north of London. The first government-financed new towns were established after the Second World War in this same belt, between 35km and 60km from London, and two (Stevenage and Hatfield) were in exactly the same radial corridor as Letchworth and Welwyn. Today they constitute Howard’s Social City on the ground.

Ironically, Welwyn became a commuter settlement from the start, while Letchworth, Stevenage and Hatfield are now served by the same regular commuter trains that reach the heart of the City of London in an hour or less. So these early new towns were soon absorbed into London’s ever-expanding commuter belt, and a second generation established in the 1960s (such as Milton Keynes, Northampton and Peterborough) were planned much farther out, between 100km and 130km from London. But transport technology caught up once more, and today these towns are also served by trains connecting them at up to 200 km/hr with London. They have considerable commuter traffic.

Thus, in the last half-century, all these places have become part of an ever-expanding Mega-City-Region, extending up to 130km from London and incorporating no less than 50 separate towns, with a total population of nearly 19m.

The question of how to create a largely self-contained, self-sustaining and therefore ‘green’ new city in such a complex represents a major challenge. South-east England comprises the London commuter zone and no less than 50 much smaller separate commuter catchment areas. Beyond about 60km from London, these commuter catchment areas are largely self-contained, with around 75 per cent to 85 per cent of employed residents finding local jobs. Though they have excellent rail links and some of their residents use the fast trains to commute to London, these people are a small minority. These links are used for business travel into London, but the people who use them are largely employed locally; they are not London commuters.

This is a very important model, and the government has begun to explore it. Its 2003 Sustainable Communities strategy proposes a string of developments along the main rail and road corridors leading north and east of London (including some of these earlier new towns), between 70km and 130km from the capital. In their scale and distance from London, these should achieve a high degree of self-containment, though London will remain readily accessible for business meetings.

The old Ebenezer Howard model of the Social City is being reinterpreted for the 21st century. It is well illustrated by the Milton Keynes-South Midlands sub-regional strategy, which consists of a chain of medium-sized towns (three of them former new towns) along two fast rail corridors from London, separated by intervening open space.

When we come to consider the internal planning of land uses and connecting transport systems within such a planned new town, entirely different, but related, considerations apply. The first is the disposition of green space. Howard’s garden cities would each be surrounded by a green belt separating them from the next garden city or existing settlement. The resulting Social Cities diagram shows that they would follow a pattern later described by Raymond Unwin, Howard’s architect at Letchworth and one of the key founding figures of UK town planning, as ‘towns against a background of open country’.

Equally, they would be totally penetrated by green space. Because they could be planned without any concern for land values (the essence of Howard’s concept was that the land would be purchased very cheaply at agricultural values and then owned and leased out by a trust), the centre of each garden city would be a huge, circular public park surrounded by civic buildings. This was actually achieved at Letchworth. Further along, halfway between this central park and the edge of the town, there would be an internal circular green belt, or park ring, providing open space for schools.

Howard stressed in his book that these maps were purely diagrammatic and that the actual planning must be adapted to the local geography. Both Letchworth and Welwyn do contain large areas of park space, though it does not take a circular form. So, too, do the new towns planned in the 1940s, where the green space is used to define and separate local neighbourhood units of 5,000 to 8,000 people, each with their own shops and schools – an idea borrowed from an American community planner, Clarence Perry, who first developed it in Forest Hills Gardens, a planned garden suburb of New York, in 1912.

American planners in fact developed Howard’s ideas further in two remarkable schemes which represent perhaps the finest extant examples of interpenetrating green space inside a planned new town: Radburn (1928) outside New York City and Greenbelt (1935) outside Washington DC. In both, the architect/planner Clarence Perry played a key role. The Radburn plan was the first to employ the idea of separating car and pedestrian/cycle traffic to provide safe routes for children to and from school, which was later successfully employed in many of the UK new towns.

Unfortunately, the town itself was never completed because the Great Depression intervened, and only a small part of the original design survives. Greenbelt, in contrast, was completed, and forms a remarkably coherent plan to this day. Here, the same principle of traffic separation is employed, but the pedestrian/cycle paths lead directly into a vast, circular, central park containing schools and community facilities, around which the residential areas are grouped in a giant horseshoe.

The other critical question is the relationship of land uses and the activities they house with the urban transport system connecting them together. What’s critical are the densities, especially of residential development but also of commercial development, that will underpin a viable and satisfactory public transport system in cities where the majority of households may own cars, and, related to this, the nature of that public transport system. Nick Falk and David Rudlin have analysed variations in residential density worldwide and their relation to transport. Significantly, different minimum densities are needed to support bus, light rail and heavy rail. For many types of urban development, it appears that heavy, metro-type rail, with relatively high construction costs and high minimum density requirements may not prove feasible.

The interesting point here is that, beginning with the city of Curitiba in Brazil and now on a larger scale with Bogotá in Colombia, it proves possible to develop viable high-capacity bus systems at a cost significantly lower than light rail and certainly much lower than a full-scale heavy-rail metro. Such a system, which has progressively evolved in Curitiba since the 1970s, involves seamless web interchange between high-capacity articulated buses carrying up to 270 people on express busway corridors, orbital buses running in rings, and local buses providing feeder services into local interchange hubs, with deliberate zoning for high-density development along the express radials.

This, it must be stressed, is not the only possible model. European cities such as Freiburg in Germany or Strasbourg in France have recently developed very effective new suburbs at medium-high densities along new tramway extensions, while Denmark is developing a ‘new town in town’, Ørestad, along a new metro corridor near to the Copenhagen airport and the approach to the new road/rail crossing to Sweden. Earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, Stockholm developed its famous satellite towns around extensions of a new heavy-rail metro system, the Tunnelbana, using pyramids of high-density residential development around the train stations and the associated shopping centres. More recently, Singapore and Hong Kong have done the same.

All these, and others, should be systematically examined so as to extract the lessons that they offer.This last point needs reiteration. Our new eco-towns will need to extract the positive and negative lessons learned from other major planning and design exercises over the past half-century. A second task will be to synthesise the positive lessons into a composite design vehicle. This will be a major priority before design can begin.

Is The £800 Million Station the best documentary about architecture ever made? Its certainly the best since the last Anthony Wonke documentary, The Tower was aired. The two films focus on very different projects, the former of course is the refurbishment of St. Pancras, which has just opened and the other a high-rise in Deptford as it goes through regeneration. However, both programmes exhibit Wonke’s ability to capture multiple narratives contained in one project, through exhaustive filming and deft editing.

One of the best moments so far has to be the site of poor dear Alastair Lansley bursting into tears because, if memory serves, his glazing wasn’t flush on the East facade. Even better, though was the episode screened on November 21, which gave us an insight into the working of the PR department. Some amazing moments include Paul Day artist of the kissing couple statue, called Meeting Place, being briefed to create a work of art that will ‘appear on mugs’.

Even better though was the moment when Day finally unveiled the work to the client group. His single piece of feedback was that he’d got the straps on the woman’s shoes wrong; a piece of crticism that appeared to have originated with the Director of Communications’ wife. It was also revealing about how offensive in both meanings of the word, the public relations campaigns for major infrastructure projects have become.

Here we saw photographers discussing how they wanted to reveal the ‘heroic’ but ‘naïve’ qualities of builders in their pictures. Later we got a clearly well-stimulated PR manager showing off his ACDC ringtone and emiting coital groans of delight upon seeing an article plonked in a decent position by an overstretched news desk. Ironically this cynical campaign to trigger particular emotions in the public was revealed by an excellent, honest TV documentary the media department had themselves presumably OK’ed. As Alistair Campbell will tell you, when you become the story yourself, your efficacy as a PR is somewhat diminished.