Tents - The Beginning of Architecture The Culture Show

Right now, as I speak, thousands of Brits are frantically packing

and, for many, fretting about their annual, and only,

stint under canvas, as they get set for Glastonbury Festival.

Camping at a music festival has become a rite of passage.

Ritual roughing-it is integral to the feeling of leaving

your normal life behind and letting go, if only for the weekend.

# No pressure... #

I, myself, have never been much of a camper and, I must admit,

throughout my career in architecture,

I've somewhat overlooked the tent,

instead plumping for brutalist hunks of concrete, the reassuring might

of bricks and mortar and the rigid power of steel and glass.

But the humble tent is not only the very first building

that humans ever created, it has evolved into some of the most

sophisticated, futuristic and hi-tech buildings on Earth.

And stitched into the fabric of all tents is a defiant streak.

They are a rebellious force, in both architecture and society, at large.

But perhaps, in an age of dwindling natural resources,

overcrowded cities and a whole generation locked out

of the housing market, a look back to our nomadic roots

and the tent, in particular, will give us some clues

about how to build a better future.

Architecture, as we know it, dates back to the end of the last Ice Age.

About 10,000 years ago or so. The big thaw brought about the advent

of agriculture. Before you know it, we are knocking up

all sorts of buildings, in which to store our food, our tools,

our animals and ourselves.

But before this monumental shift in civilisation happened,

early nomadic humans found that the skin of a woolly mammoth,

stretched over some kind of animal bones, made for a surprisingly

cosy home - one they could carry with them when they went in search

of food and water. In fact, all architecture began with a tent.

Depending on where you live, there are three types of tents -

the Middle Eastern black tent, or Bedouin tent,

spread throughout the civilised world during the Arab conquests

of the 8th century.

It takes its name from the goat hair used traditionally in its covering.

Its minimal use of wood means it was particularly popular where resources

were scarce - ie the desert.

The ger, more commonly called the yurt. The yurt's rediscovery

by the glamping set is not wholly undeserved.

These Central Asian structures are pretty luxurious, by nomadic homes'

standards, with wood-burning stoves and ornate furniture,

and today, they are still the most popular dwelling in Mongolia.

And the iconic conical tent of the native Americans - the tepee.

It is a masterstroke of design -

wooden poles lashed together and covered in bison hide.

Quick to put up and easy to transport,

when it is time to move on.

These majestic homes of the nomads

tick the three boxes of brilliant design -

simple, useful and beautiful -

and they formed a blueprint for the tent

that remains the same today as it's been for centuries.

Mike, architecturally speaking, what are those core principles that

-hold up a tent?

-Basically, you need an enclosure,

which is bent, generally, fabric, you need something to hoist that

fabric into the air, like a pole or a hoop, and then you need to tie

them both down to what is often forgotten, the ground,

-which is the third part of the system.

-That's fascinating!

So, those three things apply to a simple tent like this,

but also a tent as big as this...

MUSIC: "Millennium" by Robbie Williams

Our nation's grandest tent, the 02, or Millennium Dome,

as we called it back in '99, caused more fuss than any other

British building of the 20th century.

With a circumference of over a kilometre and 100,000

square metres under the Teflon-coated shell,

it was the biggest tent ever built.

When you get to a tent the size of this, things must get a bit more

complicated than those three core principles, do they?

Basically, they are the same.

Still fabric, poles holding it up and the ground to hold it all down

under tension, which means it is not flapping about.

So, it is a very simple idea and it is exactly the same as the mini ones

that we have all camped in all our lives.

Where did the idea come from? When you got the brief and so on,

-did "tent" first leap into your head?

-It was virtually impossible

to get out of the government any form of brief for the buildings.

We passed the point at which you could have delivered

old-fashioned buildings on the site. So, we went away thinking,

"Well, we have got to have something that goes very fast,

"is cheap to build, is a light touch on the site and that says tent."

A tent may have been the perfect design solution

for the Millennium Experience, but the British taxpayer wasn't so sure.

Do you think it is that we don't value temporary structures,

like a tent, a temporary thing?

Something that means we are not willing to spend money on it.

When you put big-scale stuff up that is temporary, there is

-a national resistance to it.

-Now, people pay to come up on top.

We are very proud of it. It was a temporary structure

and, actually, it is here 15 years later, which is probably a third

of the way through its real life, with seven million people a year

going through it. I suspect it will go on for a long time.

15 years after this was built, it's still the best tent in Britain,

if not the world. They were very sceptical about it when it was

first completed and I think that taps into the strange relationship

we Brits have with camping.

# In the summer time when the weather is hot

# You can stretch right up and touch the sky

# When the weather's fine You got women

# You got women on your mind... #

Think of a tent, you automatically think camping.

Some love it, some hate it. And it is quite possible to both

love and hate it, all at the same time.

Camping can be everything from the soggy and uncomfortable staycation

some of us endured as kids,

to a blissful, life-affirming experience, bringing us closer

to nature - the perfect escape from the stresses of modern life.

Either way, it's a choice we can make - to camp or not to camp?

But many don't have that choice.

For them, life under canvas is the last resort.

The tent still provides the most effective solution

for dispossessed or disaster-stricken refugees.

And its ability to provide shelter away from home

also makes the tent a vital weapon in political dissent.

From the anti-capitalist tent cities of the Occupy movement,

to Brian Haw's ten-year anti-war vigil in Parliament Square.

And these recent canvas sit-ins owe a debt to the mother of all

tent protests, which came at a point in modern history

when our entire human existence seemed under threat.

32 years ago, this RAF base here at Greenham Common in West Berkshire

became the site of the longest-running protest,

or peace camp, in British history.

This was the height of the Cold War. The fear of nuclear annihilation

was almost palpable, so when the decision was taken to locate

US cruise missiles right here, their sights set on Communist Russia,

direct and physical action seemed to be the only way to object.

It was time to set up camp.

There was a lot of women living here. The winter of, kind of, '83-'84,

which was at the peak of the protest, there were 100 women living here.

Sasha Roseneil,

now a professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London,

left school in 1983 and came directly to Greenham

to join the camp.

Woman had tents scattered, kind of, all over. It was quite spread out.

Why did you have to choose tents as a way of living

-and expressing your protest?

-Early on,

at the beginning, there were a couple

of caravans and they were situated outside the main gate.

But quite early on, they got evicted, they got seized by the state.

After that, everything became much more temporary.

If you were being evicted every few hours,

-barely you could even have tents.

-It must have been quite a wrench

to move from a settled life - the stuff that we all tend to have -

-to being almost a permanent nomad.

-Well, I was 17. 17-year-olds

-are remarkably...

-Adaptable.

-Yeah, adaptable, and it was an adventure,

but also, it felt like the most important thing to be done

in the world at that moment. It really did feel, to me, in 1983,

like the world was on the eve... the brink of nuclear war.

We are here to make people aware that this base is preparing to take

cruise missiles, which will kill everyone man, woman and child, possibly, on the planet.

It's part of wanting him to grow up in a safer world.

It's part of wanting him to have an Earth to live on.

The peace camp at Greenham Common became a symbolic

and often literal battle ground of a conflict between the state

and a generation coming of age during the nuclear arms race.

The humble tent, it seemed, was the vital barrier keeping the bombs at bay.

Protest camp has become quite a common form of protest now.

There were the anti-roads protests, which were very close to here,

and then the Occupy movement.

They've used similar kind of... going to the site of contestation,

living outdoors, making a kind of statement by being there.

I love that idea of the tent being an enabler, the temporary

lightweight structure being an enabler for this kind of protest.

And it doesn't take up ownership in the way that if you build a house,

you're taking root on the land, whereas a tent is

just digging very slightly into the ground, a few inches really.

Or even just sitting on the ground,

so it's not making a claim to property

in the way that building a house is.

The 19-year occupation of Greenham Common endured long after

the last missile was removed from the site in 1991.

This wasn't the first time that the powerful but peaceful

presence of the tent has triumphed

in the face of a dominant and fortified regime.

I'm now heading to Stuttgart, the heart of Vorsprung durch Technik,

and also the home of one of architecture's great heroes.

A man who believed the tensile structures in nature could be used

to rebuild post-war Germany

and show the way to a lighter, brighter future for the world.

I always wanted to be an architect.

My father was a sculptor and a stonemason. My grandfather too.

So that's quite clear, my start into architecture.

Frei Otto's ambitions in architecture

were nearly thwarted in 1943 when he was drafted into the Luftwaffe,

becoming a fighter pilot in World War II.

Near the end of the war, Otto was captured

and held as a prisoner of war near Chartres in France,

where he was put to work repairing the various temporary structures

on the site, using as little valuable material as possible.

I was a soldier who lost the war.

And we never wanted to lose the war.

But we never wanted to make a war.

After the war, I like to find a new way in the future

to make a real revolution in architecture.

Remaking Germany as a peaceful country.

Frei Otto often said that his experience as a prisoner of war

told him that we should build with less material.

Thinness, lightness and another realm of geometry,

typically the double curved dancing thing

instead of the rectangular,

very strong, concrete masonry type.

Hitler had fused the classical grandeur of ancient Rome

with monumental modernism for the buildings which would be

the cornerstones of the Third Reich.

The likes of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin

and the Zeppelin field arena in Nuremberg reflect

how the totalitarian rule of the Nazis

was expressed in the sheer might of their brand of fascist architecture.

What was wrong with the architecture of the past

that you wanted to change?

It was not showing the new kind of thinking

of the '50s and '60s.

Not to make stiff buildings,

but to make flexibility in structures.

In 1964, after completing his architectural training,

Otto founded the Institute of Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart

and began a programme of pioneering new research.

What was the core philosophy behind the Institute?

This philosophy at those times was the search for the minimum weight.

Once you reach that goal, it evolves to be relatively simple and clear.

It typically deals with complicated materials, etc.

Frei Otto dedicated his career

to studying the mathematical purity of structures

that occur in the natural world.

He discovered that the physics of coral reefs, spider webs

and particularly soap bubbles held the answer

to constructing the most efficient buildings.

We have used many models from nature to develop new structures.

Look to the shells.

And to the natural nets.

Like spider webs and so on.

It always seems to me there are certain people

in the history of architecture and engineering

who have this very strong, inner, driven vision

that comes from their early experiences.

And his passion for simplicity and following nature instilled in me,

personally, a fascination for the purity of structure

that you can get in a tent, in a tensile form.

And of course I think he did the same for so many other people

because he was inspiring us

with projects like the Munich Olympic Stadium,

to strive for what he was showing was possible.

Otto's greatest ever tent

and a breakthrough in his project to build a new Germany is

the web-like structure he developed with fellow architect Gunther Behnisch

to cover the Munich stadium for the 1972 Olympic Games.

For the first time since the age of the nomads, the tent was back.

# Breathe

# Breathe in the air

# Don't be afraid to care... #

-Do you remember visiting the stadium?

-Definitely.

-What impact did it have on you?

-Something I'd never seen before.

It was like...

I always think, when a poor farmer in the 12th century came first time

to a big city and saw one of these Gothic cathedrals,

he probably got a deadly shock.

And at those times, when normal people first went to Munich

and saw that, they couldn't believe it.

This was breathtaking.

The Olympic stage showcased

the Stuttgart School of lightweight architecture to the world.

And from the ashes of World War II, an exciting

and credible field in architecture was born.

It was astonishing how quick was the speed

that the ideas were reaching over all the world.

Tents are very old, 2,000 years and more.

But that they can be used as houses, as bridges, this was new.

It was a wonderful time.

What is your greatest achievement?

I really don't know

if I am far enough away from my time of beginning.

Of course, I am now an old man, having great success.

What shall I have more?

Because what we really did with this new evolution

was to enlarge the possibilities to make a kind of paradise.

As Frei Otto set about redefining Germany

with elemental mathematics and ground-breaking engineering,

back here in swinging '60s London,

a maverick new collective of British architects,

calling themselves Archigram, came of age with their own

unique take on a lightweight utopian future.

The '60s was very productive. There was a lot of architecture going on

and when people like me graduated there was plenty to do.

But it all was sort of concrete-y and solid and...

good quality but ploddy.

A lot of technology had been developed in the Second World War -

lightweight materials and things on the end of wires and tents.

And we were the children of that.

-REPORTER:

-Archigram thinks architects should stop making

bigger and better boxes and get down to the real business

of architecture today, which they think is survival.

In rejecting their "bigger and better boxes"

of the incumbent generation of architects,

Archigram soon began experimenting with tents.

The tent is a room and that makes it "architectural".

The tent is thin - that makes it intellectual and extreme.

The tent is also the extended raincoat.

The tent is also the extended duvet.

I'm going to go out now with an umbrella in my pocket.

It is, in effect, a tent. It just doesn't have sides to it.

I mean, down the street here there are little coffee vans

that you have the gadget machine and then you have the van

and then you have the tent that comes out.

And that's like Mike Webb's Cushicle.

The Cushicle was described as

"a single, fully outfitted living unit".

It was a mobile structure in two parts -

a chassis with personalised appliances

within an inflatable envelope.

The Cushicle never went into production.

In fact, none of Archigram's designs

made it much further than the pages of their artfully handmade magazine.

But this didn't matter. To Archigram the tent was an intellectual idea.

It represented an alternative to the established norms,

a device with which to poke the status quo.

We used to say, "This'll upset them."

We never said who the "them" were but we know exactly who they were.

They were the kind of philistine...

straight up and down, "Let's keep it all calm, let's keep it all cool,

"let's be reasonable," people. And we would just say...

"This'll upset them."

So, you could say there was a degree of, dare I say it, aggression.

And I think there should be a bit more aggression now.

There should be people doing naughty stuff just to piss the others off.

Archigram's inventions are now cherished

by the architecture establishment,

and Sir Peter Cook is one the highly regarded practitioners

and teachers in the profession.

But the houses being built in the '60s and '70s

failed to reflect his progressive vision.

And during the '80s and '90s the momentum was lost in the pursuit

of alternative, lightweight, temporary architecture.

Not just here, but in Germany, too, where Frei Otto's dream

for a tented paradise for all began to look increasingly unlikely.

People somehow lost the belief in the future.

And they replaced that by a belief in today,

so it was consumerism.

The cars got bigger, the clothes got more expensive,

there was more holidays, etc, etc.

All those advanced technologies asking for lightweight, etc,

they more or less disappeared, with a few exceptions.

People wanted heavyweight... they didn't want efficiency,

-they wanted to flash...

-Nobody talked about efficiency.

It was about sensationalism.

The tent has found an occasional place in this era

of building bigger, higher and more expensive.

Take Kazakhstan's Khan Shatyr, for example.

It's the tallest tent in the world, and gives the citizens of Astana,

the second-coldest capital city in the world,

some relief from the elements outside its vast tensile walls.

"Khan Shatyr" means "giant tent".

It's a big entertainment centre. Predominantly it's about shopping.

It's also got fun things - events, rides, and so on.

And then right at the very top, inside this giant roof,

there's a beach and waves and it feels like you're in

a Mediterranean climate, if you like, a Mediterranean life in Siberia.

This kind of extraordinary structure has echoes of the civic ambition

of the Frei Otto era.

But it does little to further the use of tents

in everyday architecture.

We are not using the resources

of earth in the best way.

We are using still too much material. Cities are burning.

The tent will not disappear.

It will come when it's necessary

that they MUST come.

So for the past 30 years the tent been something of a poor relation

to conventional architecture.

But maybe today with global environment in such a state

and human habitat in crisis,

as a population soars, maybe right now is when we should look again

at the sustainable, flexible, lightweight strengths of the tent.

I think the idea of less permanence is something we should be exploring.

The world's changing around us.

We're now international in every sense and I'm sure we should have

things which are more mobile.

We wouldn't demolish so much.

We wouldn't need to demolish houses because they don't suit us any more,

because within that space we can adapt.

I think a lot of young architects are afraid

to move outside the societal norms. They're literally scared.

They know that these materials exist, they know that they could,

but they're a bit nervous to want to be seen to be eccentric.

And the technology is not the difficult bit.

The psychology is the tricky bit.

Do the next generation of architects have the guts

to buck the conservatism in their industry,

risk being branded eccentric, and build the tents of the future?

We set a challenge to two groups of young architects.

The brief was simple -

can you imagine the return of the tent in everyday architecture?

And how will your plans reduce the damage we're doing to the planet

and help house a swelling global population?

Thank you, Peter, for joining us to have a little glimpse

into the future and to see if there is future for the tent.

We're going to kick of with Milo. Tell us about your project.

OK, my project is called Tensile Utopia

and it's essentially a project that tries to occupy invisible spaces

within the city.

This kind of system is a tensile system that kind of anchors into

the existing context and provides itself with a means of inhabitants.

It kind of moves away from the idea of the tent being the canopy.

It kind of moves towards how tensile, as a material,

can be used as planes

and how they can form shapes and volumes of shapes.

So it's providing a system that's very affordable,

cost effective, adaptable, and it's continually changing.

I think it's very good to have things that use not the perfect space.

I mean, so much architecture in the past, and even in the present,

sort of waits for the ideal situation.

I think that's a real way of using energy, using time,

using money, is to say, "Let's not wait for the perfect situation."

Let's move on to Patch and Alice.

Our basic idea is an inflatable community,

an inflatable shelter which adapted in response to external climate,

and the daily functions of the day, and it all...packed into a backpack.

We thought that maybe to touch on the housing crisis

you could apply that to an urban scape.

This is the kind of idea, as you can see from the backpack,

that it's very transportable.

It could be used overseas in crisis situations.

There's no dividing line between something of city scale

and something back pocket scale.

Again, conceptually, very interesting.

Most architecture stops, it says, "This is a house. This is an office.

"This is a block. This is a city."

Oh, dear, we have to stop and think between each of them.

It's great to see both projects sort of use underused patches of land

in the city, which, certainly in big world cities like London,

is at a premium. So they're very pragmatic but also utopian.

I love how both of them are a little bit naughty

and a little bit kind of counterculture.

I think that's truly in the spirit of the tent.

So, maybe there is a future for the tent after all.

A future slightly grander maybe than just being another disposable

structure chucked in the back of the car

on the way to the latest festival.

Maybe it could solve our environmental crisis.

Maybe it could solve our housing crisis.

But only if we harness the technological and utopian history.

And only if we think of them again as a home.

Just as our nomadic ancestors did thousands of years before us.

MUSIC: "Tent" by Bonzo Dog Band

#I'm gonna get you in my tent, tent, tent, tent, tent

# Where we can both experiment, ment, ment, ment, ment

# Yeah, yay, it's so convenient, ent, ent, ent, ent

# Let's take a taxi to my tent

# Oh, yay, my love is so inscrutable

# In a stoic sort of way

# But, by baby, it's as beautiful

# We'll dance the tango in my tent. #