Summer whitewash

With summer came the ‘silly season’ for architecture. Anish Kapoor’s Orbit aside, Rowan Atkinson had negative responses from locals to his application to build a Richard Meier home in the Oxfordshire village of Ipsden. Some responded badly to the startlingly modern, blindingly white proposal, but luckily Atkinson’s got enthusiastic support from ‘Neighbour 10’– Lord Rogers of Riverside, and ‘Neighbour 14’ – Ricky Burdett, LSE urban studies professor. The last time I checked, both lived at least 50 miles from the proposal. I’ve never been quite clear what David Cameron means when he bangs on about the ‘Big Society’ – but over that distance, maybe this is it.

Meanwhile, 70 miles west, outside Stonehouse on the edge of the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Glenn Howells has just got permission for a £35m, BREEAM Excellent M5 service station, with ‘impressive sustainability credentials’ and looking like a mini Silbury Hill. And 270 miles north in Gateshead, demolition finally began on Owen Luder’s Brutalist 1969 Get Carter Trinity Square, a structure that could never be accused of shirking the car. John Hejduk, in his postscript to Meier’s first volume, questioned his friend’s conviction that white symbolised purity and goodness, citing Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to argue that it can just as easily be associated with fear and evil. Architect Patrick Hannay is ambivalent about some decisions the new architect made on Phase 2 of the UWE building (page 58). If a Cotswold service station is needed, perhaps an eco-friendly one is the lesser of two evils – but it will still destroy 66 acres of countryside. And Gateshead students will soon be watching the iconic Get Carter in their new dorms, part of the desired regeneration, built on the rubble of the film’s car park. Hejduk sagely reminds us that our architectural views are not all black and white, and like Captain Ahab’s pursuit of his whale and dramatic demise, we should sometimes be careful what we wish for.

Jan-Carlos Kucharek

Four sight

Secret subterranean London
Ever been on one of those ghost trains where they boost the fright by having some guy in a skeleton outfit jump out at you when you least expect it? Introducing Illumini, an art event running from 9 September in London’s Shoreditch Town Hall. Take a change of canvas pants! www.illuminievent.co.uk

Kitchenaid COMP 6610
What Masterchef never shows you are the cooks on all fours after the event wearing Marigolds, scrubbing out the fat encrusted oven with wire wool. Luckily, Kitchenaid’s latest oven has a patented ‘pyrolytic’ 500°C cleaning function that burns it off. Flamie Oliver! www.kitchenaid.co.uk

PuraVida iPhone app
It was only a matter of time before sanitaryware manufacturer Hansgrohe launched its interactive design app for architects. Probably the most useful bathroom app for an iPhone since the coathanger – mostly used to drag out the damn iPhone after you’ve dropped it down the loo. www.hansgrohe.com

William Garvey
Luxury bath manufacturer William Garvey’s small, deep Japanese baths could be a clever cultural pitch to attract the luxury, Feng Shui-aware market, or cynical recognition that in a post Parker Morris age, few bathrooms are big enough to drown a cat, let alone swing one. www.williamgarvey.co.uk

Double take: Once more with feeling?
Double Take’s concerned that it’s developing an unhealthy obsession with Sanaa’s Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne (left) that only a ‘fix’ of it may cure. Thank God then that Kazuyo Sejima has commissioned film director Wim Wenders to create People Meet in Architecture, a 3D film installation of the Centre, for the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (right). Apparently, the film ‘explores the question of how buildings communicate with their users’ – in this case, at a bizarrely acute angle. But Wenders is nothing if not acute. Architects will know him best for his seminal, angelic Berlin love story Wings of Desire (1987), although he later fell from grace with two pretentious and excrutiatingly long movies, which required some cinema-goers to be resuscitated, and were box office flops. Sanaa’s giving him a chance to redeem himself with a 3-D film about a floppy office as far from a box as one could imagine. But will it be synch or swim for Wim in Venice? Like the end to his interminable movies, ve can’t vait.