 Let me start with... two landscapes. The first... because it's the melon centre- and I kind of wrongly I'm sure associate the melon centre with 18th century stuff. The first is Hansel O'Heath as painted by Richard Wilson. Wilson's Hansel O'Heath is a jawl uneventful scene. A couple stroller mid-distance. Mae rhagwyrdyddiad hwyl yn ei ffrwng ar y ffordd, dweud o gyllidio am y baen. Mae bwysig yn ymdwylltio ydwylltio, wedi newydd ymdwylltio, yn ymdwylltio ac yn ymdwylltio, ac yn ymdwylltio. Dyma i ddaeth'r ystafell cymryd a'r ddwylltio. Mae'r ddweithio mae'r fwrdd, y gallu bwylltio ydych chi'r rhagwyr ymdwylltio, ac yn ymdwylltio. The picture, as David Salkin long ago recognised, is exceptional. Not one of the moralising mythic statements found in the artist's Welsh mountain or Thameside scenes works that in his classic argument pictured a historically particular set of conditions as if they were natural raising and resolving issues accordingly. Here, in Hounslow Heath, there is something new. The diagonal of the river leads now to a blockage of the view. There is no predetermined destination. Instead, a certain kind of freedom is generated. I'm sticking close to Salkin's terms here. As Salkin writes, we are permitted to wander through the open spaces more or less at will, encouraged to imagine how these spaces might continue beyond the bounds of the restricting frame. This is possible because of the site's apparent meaninglessness. The Heath was not a piece of cultural property. One way of investing sites with meaning was to invoke the genius loci, to consult those unique spirits that made the place special. Wilson was a technical expert in this kind of identification. This makes us squirm. Of course, we now say this resort to the a priori takes a circular form, curving back from established taste through property via propriety so that not-so-elusive spirit. The genius loci is a kind of closure. It gives the landscape a kind of conservative equilibrium, whatever its subject provided it was not meaningless, that it was Twickenham, say, or Windsor, but certainly not Hounslow Heath. 200 years after Wilson's painting, some 20 years before Salkin's comments, the architectural critic Ian Nen wrote about a scene also on that old Hounslow Heath, if now a few miles from the fragment that remains of it. This is the B379, now the A3044, between Stain's and Stanwell, and I'll just read out what Nen says about it. The road runs in a narrow cutting between steep grass banks, which have sheep grazing on them to complete the surreal feeling that this ought to be in the west riding. A 132 kilovolt electricity grid line marches down the middle, and the result is a memorable discordance, so far without a contemporary repton to orchestrate it. The valley is formed by the retaining walls of two reservoirs. They are mostly inaccessible, but a footpath runs up on the eastern side to a landscape which is magnificently absurd. The foreground is all water, 20 feet above the surrounding Middlesex Plain, so that only the roofs of houses appear above it, a very unsettling effect. The footpath sets off undeterred across the middle, heading for Stanwell, full of birdwatchers. This is London's backhanded way of making a nature reserve. Over to the north between the houses and trees, the giant tails of the airliners glint as they move around the London airport perimeter track. The Middlesex landscape has been shaken up and remade by the Mad Hatter, and the result is some compensation for the 20 miles of building, most of it dreary between here and Piccadilly Circus. I think you can see in my photograph there. No, you may not be able to see, but I thought I did actually have a plain glinting as it took off. There is the Terminal 5 building is in the distance of that image there. Written in 1966, the description is consistent with the position Nan had built up in the previous decade. He was open to being surprised, such as by these reservoirs, but he was more than a seeker of topographic and architectural identities in the genius loci mode. He was more often a seeker of those identities. Look at each site individually, he wrote, feel its own character. Such identities, however, were often lost to what he called a chaotic dribble of objects, dumped down without thought and without love. This increasing with the post-war years, Nan called sub-topia. If the Heathrow area was largely one such place, here in the Stones reservoir was something else. Almost everything in Nan's description is aimed at undermining conventional ideas of landscape and notions of a nature undetermined by human presence. It's there, of course, in the grazing sheep and the reference to Repton, but these are bare vestiges of the tradition. The emphasis instead is on surreal just positions, mechanical presences, the absence of high-minded design, tantalising inaccessibilities and figures of absurdity. All are ruled by geometry, the low-level banks of the reservoirs, the perimeter track, the marching electricity poles. Geometrical landscape of this kind was stupifying and surreal. It had made something else out of the repetitious. Might the absence of conventional landscape meanings, specifically say with the flat top banks or the unsettling raised water, be somehow the equivalent of the central blocking cops of trees in Wilson's Hounslo Heath? If we go along with Salkin, then Wilson's Hounslo Heath is already a form of the anti-pitcher-esque, but loci without genius are non-place. A naen's response is an updated variation of this. A landscape made a surreal version of the modern, but whose ground base is still the draweriness of repetition and flatness. If genius is something innate, some spirit at the heart of the place, something that begets that loci, then neither Wilson nor Naen can find its expected forms in these landscapes. We might term this form of modern boredom, stuplimity, after the literary critic Sian Ngai in her book Ugly Feelings. This neologism, combining stupor and sublimity, points to the sensation that astonishment is paradoxically mixed with boredom. Stuplimity is in Ngai's words, quote, a new way of characterising an effective relationship to enormous stupifying objects. It invokes the sublime in a negative way without transcendence. Instead, the object dulls or irritates. It provokes, quote, sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitisation, exhaustion or fatigue. I have to say that this is what I felt last week when I walked along the bathro just north of Heathrow. Most important to me in aspects of my larger project is that, as Ngai explains, stuplimity reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition. That extended form might be the flatness of the Heath, the raised flatness of the reservoir, the flat extent of the airport, the encircled globe it implies, but it stupifies, too, occluding totality with repetition of the finite with bits and scraps. It seems to me that Salkin, Walsam and Nain are pointing to something about Hansler Heath and, since the war, what has taken over from it, Heathrow, its airports and environs, that has potent ramifications for how we understand this kind of peri-urban landscape and the architectures we find there. To use a shorthand here, the area is a blot or a blockage, a kind of alienation of landscape meaning. It is a disorientating absence, an airscape and waterscape, a reservoir is an incredibly large part of this area. An edge land, its features include that flatness, but also those curious vertical phenomena, planes above us, architectures designed to be seen from above, raised reservoirs, stunted lamp posts, barriers. It's a landscape of movement, of warehouses and distribution centres, of runways and taxiways, of motorways and service roads, but also of detention centres and high security fences. Sorry, it's not moving. It lends itself to geometric abstraction. Some 15 years after Wilson's painting, the Heath was the site for the five mile baseline necessary for major general Roy's London to Paris triangulation, which was the instrumental basis of the Ordnance Survey. You see here on the, can I point this with something? Perhaps not. Anyway, is there anything I can point with? Because I don't think I can reach, but I can reach. So that is the baseline. And just a part of it, almost running parallel with it, is the Balth Road. This is a memorial to it, actually on the Heath Road peripheral road, and I'll come to that on the right in just a second. Heath Road itself is only, well, half of it is here. So the other half is there. The, quote, extraordinary levelness of the surface, as Roy put it, would also become the rationale for Heath Road Airport being here. It's runways actual and intended, and intended because, of course, as the image on the bottom right shows you, a third runway was intended right from the beginning. And that is it, that thicker line, which actually runs through Harman'sworth. I'll come back to that in a moment. The rationale for Heath Road Airport being here is runways actual and intended parallel with Roy's baseline. As a result, it's also a cut-up landscape with fragments of old farms, streams and canalised water courses. It has noise pollution and air pollution. It can be glamorous, and that's an important part of my project. But the humdrum is often only yards away. The utopian is occasionally conjured. I mean, some people have imagined that in the kind of double, in the Star of David pattern of the actual Heath Road runways. That's just a detail so you don't see it there, but you do in the larger plan. So the utopian is occasionally conjured, the dystopian a constant presence or potential. So that's a kind of indication of some of the elements of my proposed, of my project. And these are some of the buildings I will eventually be getting into. And the one that I won't be talking about today that I kind of promised was the one in the middle at the top, the Heathrow Hilton. But I want to spend the rest of this paper getting into some detail with one example. Harman'sworth, I think some people call it Harmsworth. Harman'sworth Penguin has a familiar and reassuring sound and rhythm to it. This is Penguin, the publisher, of course, whose headquarters was in that place Harman'sworth. That you can see up here in this map from the 30s. That's the bathrobe there. Penguin headquarters will be built here. And that's an 18th century map of the same area. This place, Harman'sworth, was almost entirely obscure. Actually, let's say, has anyone been there? Yes, exactly. The biggest medieval, what is called the Great Barn, the biggest medieval tithe barn surviving. And which would be threatened by a third runway, of course. So if this place was almost entirely obscure, it was also an essential part of the mythology of Penguin. One of the most prominent place names in bookish topography. It was part of Penguin's difference from other publishers that this great radical promoter of the cheap paperback, the disruptor of modern publishing, should base its editorial and publishing functions, not just its warehouses, in this little visited place on the bathrobe to the west of London. And again, if you want the precise spot, it's just below that A there. That's what we're looking at here. Of course, this is a later view from the 80s when Penguin first located there at London Airport wasn't there, because it was located there in 1937. This was all of a piece, this location, and what they did there, I would say, is all of a piece with a classic functional look of Penguin's book covers. So much was this the case that when Penguin moved back to central London in 1986, and that Harman Sweth was removed as its place of publication, it seemed to epitomise the way the great publishing house had entered into a series of takeovers and mergers. Sorry, I've got something. Losing what had been a pioneering identity then post-war, morthing into a national institution and something almost equivalent to the BBC. Instead, post-1986, post-Harman Sweth, it became just another publisher. In exploring Penguin's presence in London's periphery, which is what the rest of this paper does, I'm interested in how Penguin and its dominant figure, Alan Lane, wanted to identify their enterprise with some of the conditions of this landscape, the environment. How these were responded to in successive iterations of Penguin's architecture, and then how Penguin in a sense became captive to this landscape and had to eventually escape it. The approach offers some parallels with John Sutherland's idea that Penguin's development was a series of discontinuous phases rather than the official Penguin view of a serene unfolding of a brilliant idea. By locating Penguin in the geography of Harman Sweth by the Bath Road, opposite what would become London Airport, surrounded by cabbage fields, we learn about the peculiar conditions of this place and of their role in these discontinuous phases. Now, familiar, I'm sure to most of you, is the story of Penguin's removal from London and its first phase of rapid growth from 1937 to the war. Lane had been working for the bodily head and thinking about what publishers called the new reading public, specifically how to publish cheap editions of contemporary novels. Famously, his measure of affordability was that a novel would cost as much as a box of 10 cigarettes, and be bought in the same way. But there was a consequent issue with scale. To break even, five or six times the numbers of the new paperbacks would need to be sold as of other publishers' hardbacks. To bring this about, Lane, with his brothers Richard and John, in 1936, set up a new publishing house, Penguin, and started to sell their books through Woolworth's, through station newspaper stores, and various similar venues. Lane's business model may have been new, as also in his automatic book dispensing machine, The Penguin Cubata. There was one of these set up outside what was then Dillam's bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Less often mentioned is that it was also highly aggressive and opportunistic undercutting of rivals. Penguin's success was then based on new sites for bookselling, new markets, and a new scale of warehousing. Penguin's own histories, much reiterated, make much of how a crypt under Holy Trinity Church Marleybone was the brother's first site, a cramp yet somehow elevated space. Stock was brought in by a shoot which led from the graveyard above. Thousands of books were piled on benches in front of vaults carrying inscriptions to departed Victorians. At once warehouse, accounts department and distribution centre, the crypt was piled high with book packages for the firm's first 10 million books. This foundation myth depends on it being the prologue to an entirely different tale of order and expansion, one which is imparted distinctly modern and sometimes modernist form of rationality and impart a test to business innovation and knife to the market. This new tale is not just based on cheapness and availability of the Penguin product, but of Penguin itself as a new kind of publishing business, and here architecture and location become key. The crypt was near prelude to the spaciousness and flatness of Harmansworth and the idea of it as a tablo rasa, a loci without a genius. The Bath Road, also known for some of its extent as the Great West Road, was perceived in the 1930s as a new kind of modernity, arterial, light industrial, motor born. Only a decade earlier, a new section of the road had opened. By passing Brentford High Street, it rapidly became known as the Golden Mile because of its desirability as a site for the location of factories enticed by cheap land values and communication with central London. Hence, Smith's Potato Crisps, Sperry Gyroscopes, Hudson Essex Motors, Firestone Tires, Gillette, Pyrene Fire Extinguishers, McLean's and Smithcline Beecham. The church commissioners, however, owned land after the Gillette Corner, blocking further westwards development of this sort. Further west, which is where Harmansworth is, along the Bath Road near Harmansworth and Sipson, industrial development was encouraged by the opening of the Conbrick Bypass in 1929. This was the location for the Road Research Laboratory 1930, Technicolor 1936, West's Piling and Construction early 1930s and Black and Decker. You see Technicolor there in 1937, which was actually the neighbouring business concern. So, Penguins here and Technicolor is there. Just as important, of course, to another aspect of British culture, the development of British film and American techniques of film manufacture. Sorry, my list is not complete. Technicolor 1936, West's Piling and Construction early 1930s and Black and Decker 1940. This was a flat landscape of market gardens and the road was dotted with pubs and hotels that had evolved from coaching-ins as the main road, of course, to Bath and Bristol. An actor distancing from the publishing world beyond Metropolitan London to locate Penguin here was also to find cheaper land and enough of it to combine office and warehouse. The move concretised the young companies' claim to be innovatory. Much like Woolworth's, cigarettes and dispensing machines, it's aligned Penguin with the more everyday world of commerce, making it seemingly another large-scale wholesaler of industrial products. But there was an interesting and I think deliberate ambiguity about class here, one that aligned itself sometimes but not always with changing identities, locations and forms of consumption. Here to the west of the Technicolor building, surrounded on three sides by fields and with a row of trees along the road, the company built its new headquarters. One story high, sorry that shouldn't come up yet, sorry. One story high, long and low with plenty of space for expansion on the cabbage fields behind it. It was designed by Stanley Peach and Partners, specialist in factory buildings, offices and work for electricity companies. So not some well-known, glamorous central London-based firm. Although Stanley Peach, who is actually dead by this time, is quite an interesting person. Anyway, the office facilities faced the road as was conventional in bypass factories. The frontage and the facade needed rapid recognition to be a point of difference along the road. Initially, a pond was planned to the front, even with penguins, wrthling about it, seriously. In this sense, penguins were thus not unlike, say, the car for Hudson Essex Motorworks on the Great West Road, which had its equally signature terraplane, as a terraplane car, mounted on its front wall. Apart from that, the building was relatively understated, at least compared to the contemporary factories a few miles east. The golden brown brick facade was accented with bright green window frames and concrete trim, all floodlit at night. A curved canopy accented the entrance porch, its curves reversed by the low walls either side of the steps below, and then reiterated by the rounded-end corners of the facade. Above a continuous range of windows, either side of the entrance was an undecorated cornice or attic level, where the company's name, Penguin Books, was announced in uppercase Sonserif. Expansion was envisaged here, too. Another floor whose sill level would be that of the parapet level first built, where the canopy would become a balcony, or perhaps even a base for a, quote, sculptured penguin feature. The offices had a close relation to the warehouse behind. Not only were the loading docks in the front of the building set only slightly back, but within the building, the offices and warehouse were only separated by a narrow corridor. Indeed, half-glazed partitions made warehouses and offices visible to each other. And this permeability between the publisher's white-collar office functions, accounting, editorial management sales, and its blue-collar functions, storage and distribution, is also a significant feature of the publisher's public image in its first few decades. Penguin Harmon's worth, then, aligned itself deliberately with industry. Indeed, Alan Lane started referring to his business as, quote, a factory, mass-producing good books. Publistee photos created by the publisher focus on its north-lit warehouse space where books were stacked and sorted before shipping out. This, for instance, is the magazine Newsweek's image of Lane posing on some book packages. People magazine called Lane the Henry Ford of the literary mass-production line. The decidedly upper-class bystander magazine, it actually merged the same year with the Tatler, headlined its 1940 piece. The bystander visits a book factory. In fact, the bystander went further than this. In a downward sequence of three photos, the Lane brothers were shown standing at ease in front of their headquarters. Then in the middle, much of the extent of the warehouse is visible above the façade. Well, at the bottom, a dramatically-lit interior scene showed piles of book packages waiting below the steel pillars and beams of the roof. Quote, their books are dispatched to London at the rate of seven tonnes daily the caption informs us. On the next page, we get more of this kind of thing. Annie Lane on the phone in front of the map of the world, the production department defying the wartime blackout, men sorting a consignment for the army in France, a female shopper had a penguin display in a branch of W. H. Smith's, and only now, the nearest concession to what was in a penguin, George Bernard Shaw's corrections, but not to a proof to a contract. That penguin didn't actually print its books at Hartman'sworth, made a little difference to this overwhelmingly industrial image. Of course, it sent out its books to be published by other businesses, to be printed by other businesses, the printers. Controlling its own warehousing and distribution in tiny's closely in its publicity and in the architecture of the Bath Road site, it was highly unusual, even unique among publishers. The removal to Hartman'sworth was also a personal removal. In 1939, the Allen Brothers bought their own residence, a kind of country gentry's pad for bachelors, only a few miles from the headquarters building, from both of which, it would be later claimed, Heathrow the airport was an easy walking distance. This was Silverback House when the River Cone in Stamroy Moore, or when in the fourth house, that, as Alan Main's biographer described it, was a surprisingly rural oasis in the desert of ribbon development and light industrial estates. Nicholas Persner, who didn't mention Silverback in his Middlesex volume of the Builders of England series, the first one to be published, was personally familiar with its significance of Silverback for penguin and for the lanes. It was at Silverback in 1945 that, following lunch and a post-Pranjal's stroll in the Rose Garden, Persner and Lane first discussed their ideas for both the Builders of England and for the Pelican History of Art series. In the bystander mentioned earlier, the piece concluded with two photographs of Silverback. The intent here was clearly to show the lanes as rounded entrepreneurs, bachelors able to relax. Richard Fishers in the Cone or John and Alan are posed beside a fireplace either side of a model of their sailboat. These rural pastimes are offered as the complement to the warehouse work, just as Silverback on the Cone complements the penguin HQ on the Bath Road. One can imagine the house's other attractions, proximity to the works, without the Victorian syndrome of the factory owner living beside his premises, a kind of grafted-on landed status, a little enclave of non-modernity. The lanes certainly thought about this relation between proprietor and locality. Alan Lane had visited both Boonville and Port Sunlight and had admired the readers' digest headquarters in Chippaqua in New York State. But no such model could be followed in Hunsworth. All this then, by postmodern, the factory image, the country bachelors, the contradictions between paternalist factory owner and pop postmodernity, needs also to be understood as part of what has been called the penguin look. But as architecture's contribution to that look, it was inflected, extended and eventually brought into crisis in the very particular conditions of this locality, the road, the fields and soon the airport. Penguin's second phase is normally seen as starting after the war, from which it emerged as a national body institution, as respected in many people's opinion as the BBC. This is the phase in which the landscape that had been a point of difference of peri-urban modernity starts to become a problem, as it experiences new kinds of ultimately dystopian effects. Heathrow itself had been announced at London's main civil airport in 1944. It's filling the flat fields, the other side of the Bath Road, denorsing the village of Heathrow, diverting rivers and creating a featureless zone. You can see here more or less the layout of the runways themselves, up until of course here, that was the third runway above, with a kind of imagined central hub of buildings, terminals and control tower. Heathrow filled the flat fields, the other side of the Bath Road, denorsing the village of Heathrow, diverting rivers and creating a featureless zone. After the war, Penguin tried to expand, but had been refused permission because of the permanently threatened third runway north of the Bath Road. In 1965, without airport expansion northwards temporarily abandoned, the company pushed again to grow their warehouse premises, specifically to acquire their joining site. Their plan was a two-phase upgrading, warehouse first, offices second, each now in their own building. This represents an important moment, not just for Penguin's status and ability to expand, but also for what it says about its attitude to the site. Penguin's planning application emphasised that it required a larger floor area with full automation and wider aisles. The building planned would have a long, simple brick wall facing northwards, screaming the roadside buildings from the open land. The consulting architect elaborated further in the appeal. This building, standing in its landscape grounds, must be seen as an improvement to the surroundings and local amenities when compared with a barren unused field, an unsightly view of the airport and Bath Road development. This is the first sign of a kind of defensiveness, even disdain towards the surroundings. Penguin, when its planning appeared later in 1965, drawing upon the support of senior politicians in the Labour Government, convinced of its status as a national body. The warehouse, built to designs by our associates, is actually more interesting than this might suggest. An entirely open interior catered to Penguin's specially designed for lift trucks, where the exterior had panel concrete pillars, a brick infill and, with the V-shaped beams, a kind of elegant solution to possible further expansion. The surrounding land was re-landscaped with a mound in the south-west. That's at the bottom of the picture. A small lake to the northeast, and trees and shrubs planted so as to recreate a natural setting. A much more prestigious project soon followed, with an entirely new headquarters building, office building, also designed by our associates. And finished by 1972. This consisted of one rectangular office space, 48 metres long by 39 wide, based on a structural grid of 9.6 metres, surrounded on three sides by glazed walls. On the north side, a courtyard was placed between the new and existing buildings. Heathrow's continuing growth had created particular challenges concerning noise pollution. The noise level outside was now 110 decibels, and the level decided inside was to be 55 decibels, as context here. I can't evoke 110 decibels for you. When the Wilson committee on the problem of noise reported in 1963, it had proposed limiting noise levels for cars to maximum 85 decibels, and 94 decibels for motorbikes. Not sure why motorbikes got more, maybe it's simply because you can contain the noise so well. Here is a later strategic noise map from 2006 that shows noise levels as a series of contours. And just for reference, of course, the noises parts are around the runways north and south, and Harman'sworth and the Penguin headquarters are just there. I'm looking at another part of the project, it's looking at a school just here, which only lasted 20 years, because it can deal with the noise levels. In Arup's design, and you can see a plane that's usedfully flying over to demonstrate that, the noise problem was answered in several ways. A sandwich roof structure was with coffered ceiling inside, an interior sealed by double glazing and serviced by ceiling located air conditioning ducts, the building dug into the ground, and a 2.4 metres deep eave as the roof widely hung beyond the wall. The exterior was defensive, part smooth glazed walls articulated with mesian columns, part massive projecting roof with the beams of the interior coffering projecting assertively. These were the aesthetic overlays and trimmings of what we might otherwise describe as a container for noise mitigation. From the sealed interior, the workforce looked out onto lawns and a landscape courtyard. The latter geometrically aligned with reflecting pools, stone blocks for seating, rigidly contained areas of planting, and neat rectangles of close crop lawn, all linked by narrow stone edging and square stepping stones. It was more a place to see onto than to be seen in. The hedge outside, shielding the building from the road, added to the newly segregated and enclosed character, a world of publishing unto itself, an orderly world sealed off from the stupline effects outside. The mesian aesthetic of a structure of rationality works here as a kind of blind, not so much out facing the effects of the logic of international travel outside as seemingly indifferent or aloof from it. The mesian structure also presented the chance for a new organisation of office spatial relations, even some compensation for the spurned landscape outside. The Bureau of Unchaft, or Office Landscape, must have had many attractions to Penguin. That's a typical Bureau of Unchaft layout. Developed in Germany in the late 1950s, it had been brought to Britain in 1964 and quickly spread. Bureau of Unchaft found a middle way between the traditional serid office layout and the open plan by drawing on cybernetics and group psychology. The result, after the requisite research, typically with the survey of workers' working habits of the quote, ebb and flow of paperwork, and the application of a set of rules on positioning, was an office laid out according to groups of teams and actions, a picturescatter of bureaucratic functions with pathways wending their way between them, following the invisible, sinuous lines of workflow. As apparently random ensembles of furniture, office equipment, potted plants and screens were spread across the open space, while Harwick is apparently disappeared, though better equipment or small spatial differences were giveaways, The new progressive moral claim of the Bureau of Unchaft was of informality, teamwork, flexibility, even democracy. In all this, mitigating sound was critical. Absorbent ceiling material and water wall carpets became de rigueur. Falling cabinets were given casters, typists often grouped in a far corner. Itself, like an informal landscape garden, the Bureau of Unchaft tended also to be accompanied by landscaped surrounds, access to courtyards and grassed areas, so that equivalences were suggested between interior and exterior. Closed in by the exigences of Heathrow's pollution and the increasing busyness of the Bath Road, Penguin's new interior landscape was also a defensively sealed and service landscape, a rhetoric of non-hierarchy, Informality and creativity followed, mirroring some of Lane's own rhetoric, even as the company's identity was entering its most difficult period. So now sales, publicity, accounts, educational marketing and every other office section were in the same space, but that space was differentiated by the grouping of its movable components from relaxed to more formal layouts. While early reviewers found external noise largely quieted, the exception here was the entrance spaces. A new excessive noise pollution had arisen inside the open plan, as typists type phones rang and conversation levels rose and fell. Furthermore, while Bureau of Unchaft seemed rejigged, that seemingly rejigged the company's hierarchies, it reinstated a difference that the first headquarters building and the discourse around it had worked to lessen. White collar and blue collar, office and warehouse. Separated by plant rooms, lavatories, corridors and courtyard, they were back to their clearly democated zones. The office landscape sharply different from the picking stations and conveyor track of Britain's first automated packing warehouse for a publisher. Indicatively, the Penguin-Harmonsworth image, where it was used at all for publicity, was now of the sleek museum exterior and informal interior, whose prestige was associated with a new type, the knowledge worker, entirely distinct from the clerical and warehouse workers of the light industrial 30s factories. Penguin's third phase was launched with this rebuilding of the headquarters, but extended beyond it. It has no architectural manifestation in Hermonsworth. After Alan Lane's death in 1970, the firm was swallowed up by Lomond Pearson. In 1975, viking was acquired and the American Peter Mayer became chief executive in 1978, the tool of reforms triggered by the new economic conditions of the late 70s. Removal from Hermonsworth had become inevitable, but the late 1970s, the blue collar and most of the white collar sections of the firm had been entirely separated with the departure of the editorial production, marketing and art departments to central London. In 1998, the headquarters building was demolished and much of the rest of the site followed in 2004. Penguin had gained a status as one of the number of mid-century bodies and institutions of a kind of popular modernism. Bypass modern had used the facade as an advert embracing the speed of the road by making the factory one of a series of visual events, an epitome of the array of competitive capitalism. The Bureau of Landschaft, with its mesian container, had, however, closed up the office, making it look inward as a world in itself. In a sense, the landscape had found its genius. Its flatness had given rise to a vertical orientation towards other places that oppressed the locale. Perhaps the matter can be stated by reversing what I said earlier about stuplimity. The stuplime, the enormous stupifying object, is now no longer the featureless landscape but the objects that overfly it repetitively every two minutes and every time announcing the world's comings and goings and the locality's limitations and littleness. The supposed antithesis of shock and boredom has become the peculiar phenomenon of their effective intersection, the sense that we can never be removed from their presence. This is Heathrow's genius loci. Thank you so much, Mark. That was fantastic. There's so many things. I'm still working through all the different elements that you managed to bring in, even though it was so focused on the buildings but also on the landscape. As I wait for people to formulate their questions, I thought I'd ask one to start with. I think one of the things that really struck me about your talk but also when you introduced the research project, this idea of permeability and air pollution and noise pollution and what that has meant for the landscape itself and then also thinking now with the kind of pure landscape and the scheme of kind of blocking out or the attempt to block out, to be in a landscape but to block out certain elements of it. I'm generally quite interested in what you're finding as you work on the topic around how, well, when it's not just modern design but how did other sort of neighbours deal with this kind of permeability and what it has meant over the years as well. I think this works, doesn't it? All of the firms that I mentioned locating to that part of the bathrobe in the 1930s are gone, so that's one response. But if you walk along the bathrobe, you have this, the architectures of the bathrobe are largely kind of hotels, at least at that stretch let's say between Harmansworth and Cranford. And clearly they are built for people who won't be there very long and clearly they're built with windows for instance, so they're enclosed sealed buildings from the environment that they're actually in. They continue to be transitional spaces in a sense, not just... They continue to be transitional for the people who use them, the people who work in them, that's not the case obviously. The effects are ongoing and increasing. There are obviously over the years and this is something very difficult to actually do a chronology, a chronological description of various responses by the Civil Aviation Authority. Two demands and campaigns from various elements of the locality to somehow mitigate noise pollution. But it remains a serious problem. It's very interesting. One of the things I have done recently is to go through local newspapers quite in a systematic way. And obviously local newspapers are fascinating of course. But one of the things, and they share many things across the country, obviously certain concerns at a certain time. One of the things that really distinguishes the local newspaper, the Midasets Chronicle for instance, from newspapers anywhere else in the country is the number of articles about noise pollution. On that question of noise, have you observed any changes more recently in accordance with the fact that reducing noise as well as fuel consumption is a major determinant of aircraft design? It's a bit of a nerdy question I suppose. But it certainly seems to me that from what I gather that aircraft are a lot quieter than they used to be, although there's more of them. Yes, there are more. When I said two minutes, I stood under the landing flight path as it went into the northern runway last week and it is two minutes. But I don't know about how airplanes themselves may be developing. Obviously there's word of electrical powered planes. But the kind of mitigations that have been put in place are to do with restrictions on night flying. That are to do with when they can put in here my technical knowledge is severely challenged. The noisy parts of the take off and landing are at level. Obviously you had particular problems with jambos coming in 1972. Concord was I think 75. We're dealing with an increasing size of planes and an increasing number. But I bow to someone else's technical knowledge. Hello, can you hear me? This is possibly more an observation than a question. But there's a certain poetics about this, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But it felt almost at one point as though it was an architectural history as told by J.G. Ballard, who was of course local to the area as well. And it would be great to see his responses against some of the architectural responses. Yes, although he was on the south side, well away from the flight paths. And actually one of the things about going through the local papers is, and I'm not sure here if local papers around the country are similarly obsessed. But I mean, for instance, the other day I went through, let's say, half of 1966 issues of Middlesex Chronicle that comes out every once a week. So 1966, six months there are, I don't know, something like 10 front page stories about car crashes, each of which has an image of a car crash. There's a real car crash pornography going on here that obviously Ballard is not the first person to see us on. The local papers are using it much as they're using other kinds of terrible pictures. I mean, the quality of back and white photography and newspapers at that time is just God awful. But they add to the sense of the kind of the awfulness of car crashes. Anyway, getting away from architecture again. I've got them out for a good, so bad luck everybody. Thank you, Mark, that was terrific. You started in the footsteps of Ian Nair and one was thinking about that generation seeing this as the exemplar of absolutely everything which is wrong without planning. And I suppose you might also be in that, I thought you were starting off as a wasteland flannar and this was going to be a sort of all about slow places left over after planning. But I suppose one of the things that was surprising, then I wonder if this is part of the project more that this is actually an area which is a locus not of the left over but actually a huge planning effort. And I wonder if that is going to be sort of part of the project more generally. And within that I want to talk to you at some point about gravel pits. About what? Gravel pits. Gravel pits, yes. That last point of course, there are huge things in this landscape. Not just the airport but reservoirs. This is the major supplier of London's water. The sheer amount of land, at some point I must do a kind of calculation of the proportion of land between the M3, M4 and M25. The remains of Heathrow has a heath to the east of that. And just see what is the proportion of land given over to reservoirs in this area because it is enormous. And of course we saw my images of the stains of reservoirs. But you have to get above to see the reservoirs. You see them from the plains of course. But if you are travelling around at ground level you don't see the reservoirs. All you see are those the Alps of Middlesex. The flat embankments. I have to admit at this point I grew up in just south of the airport. Those were my Alps. So I did a fair planning. Now you make an interesting point about the amount of planning. It's about what it means as a public imagination. It hasn't been planned. It's waiting for its capability ground. But obviously, and with CroLabs, this is a place where people say, OK, this is going to be a ground. That's going to be a green metal dust. And it seems that your story of penguin is telling something. It is a hyper controlled plan landscape. So... Everything within Heathrow, I mean Heathrow is the size of Oxford. Everything within Heathrow is hyper planned. And it changes rapidly of course. You've got a hyper plan, very, very simple. Not road layout, but hyper plan layouts. And buildings have to be located very specific parts of it. But then it gets renewed rapidly. So it's hyper controlled. But then what happens around it? And of course, one of the things that may typically be Wales is kind of arterial development in the 30s. Non planned, yeah? Well, first of all, can I just start on a purely peripheral point that we're talking about in there. As I recall, he is actually buried. I'm not sure whether it's his own request because somebody else's poetic notion. He's actually buried in a church yard immediately under the flight path. As he's very apesite, as he was himself a pilot. He's buried right under the flight path into Heathrow. Anyway... Thanks for that statement. The plan layout. The green belt issue. That's something you will be specifically looking into. But I think it's worth remembering that I think the airport itself probably is stupid, but much of the hinterland I think is probably formally designated green belt. It is. And it's often instanced as exactly the sort of area that makes up a nonsense of the notion of green belt because it's gravel pits and reservoirs and airport related industries, which has no sort of obvious claim to preservation status at all. Yeah, the county of London plan, is that 1944? Three. Yeah. Well, actually it's 44. The one that... Or is it the greater London plan? One that does with the areas beyond Metropolitan London, as it were. Is that the county of London plan or the green? County of London, isn't it? That's 44 because the government has already decided using wartime powers to designate the Heathrow area as an airport, as a civil aviation airport. And it deliberately used, as the aviation minister later admitted, deliberately used those wartime powers because it knew it would receive great resistance if it waited until after the war. Thank you, and this is an absolutely fascinating project. And I was just wondering if you would kind of incline to relate it to perhaps some of your earlier work, particularly on imperialism and architecture, because as you were saying earlier, this is an edge land, but it's also a literal border land, a border, the most busiest border of the UK now, not a port, like a port of London or Southampton, which are all kind of declining, almost in parallel with Heathrow's inexorable rise and continues to rise and it's just been reclaimed the title of Europe's busiest airport, I saw. And so, do you see this as a space in London that is claiming a new kind of globalised, capitalised, not just modernity, but a kind of post-empire imperialism as Britain tries to remake its place in the world in the post-war settlement that is a bit looser in its colonialism, but is still trying to hold on to that claim of empire in a different way? Yeah, there are all kinds of resonances with the work I've done before. I mean, just mentioning BEA and BOAC, we all remember those, named all those abbreviations. The distinction in civil aviation between the company that would deal with Britain only and the company that would deal with overseas is quite an interesting distinction made very early on and I think that I've got many responses. I mean, obviously, one's dealing here with an industry that is inevitably globe encircling, as it were. So you're going to find in those kind of destinations, as it were, inevitable that there are manifestations of kind of interest and influence, but also, of course, you're going to find something whose significance is such that it has to burst the bounds of the mere local. But there are other interesting connections here, which I think are going to be very difficult to prize open, because of course, I mentioned early on that, one of the things about this landscape, of course, is detention centres. I mean, for instance, I think it's called the Colmbrook Detention Centre, it's actually Harmansworth really, is very near the site of the Penguin headquarters. If you enter the building, or so you can enter it under certain conditions, one of which is that you sign official secrets out, so you can't talk about what you've seen inside it, which means architectural examination of it, quite difficult. There are reports, historic reports. One thing that I am thinking about doing is that there's, in the cluster of buildings in the middle of the airport that Frederick Gibbon designed in the 50s, well in the 60s, largely actually, one of them was the Queen's building, and I think there might be something quite interesting to say about the Queen's building as both a place of great glamour, because the roof was a viewing platform, you'd go there. Lynne Need was telling me that she used to be taken there as a child. You've been there. You can tell us to view the plains coming in, it's a special experience. So that element of glamour has to be part of this, but apparently in the ground floor of the same building was a detention centre. So can something be made of that? Well, you know, I'm going to see. So what I'm saying is that maybe something can be done by, in a sense, doing it historically, rather than trying to do it in terms of contemporary detention centres. We have a few questions from the audience. Thank you. Yes, I have a question. I'm just relaying a question from Anne-Marie Achurst, who says, thanks for this terrifically interesting talk, Mark. Am I right in the assumption that the deep historical imagination is willfully discouraged in this peri-urban modernity? And then Anne-Marie asks, if so, would you expand this model to contemporary examples like the free ports currently developing along the motorways and rail lines that concretise global capitalism where historic heritage value impedes development? So is that point about, is the deep historical imagination willfully discouraged in this peri-urban modernity? I'm not sure if it's willful, because that would imply people thinking it through and doing it. But I think it happens as a consequence of the nature of the environment that I've been talking about. And it's quite interesting, though, where some historical markers are laid down, like I showed the little memorial. It's an upended cannon and a little pluck to the General Roy's baseline. Rather florm, actually, little monuments, there's another one at the other end that I haven't seen, which is in five miles away, anyway, in somewhere like Hampton. Anyway, I can't recall now. So these kinds of things can happen. The buildings I've so far been studying are buildings that are going along with Anne-Marie's point, in a way. I don't remember exist. There are plenty of buildings from the 30s that continue to exist, housing, right underneath the... right beside the runways. There could be an interesting study of the demography of that housing, actually. For instance, in terms of its value, it must be kept very low. Housing values must be kept very low in those parts of the environment. So I'm getting a bit away, but there are certain buildings that do continue. Certain types of buildings that are coaching in are equivalent in the airport hotel. But, of course, you're not heading west or into London. You're heading up there and out somehow. It's a very interesting question with implications, that I think, for conservation. Conservation of airport buildings as well. Alan Powers isn't here, but I know he was signed up to come, but he might have some interesting ideas about that. Can I, again, enjoy the privilege of having the mic in my hand to ask a question, Mark, which is about... I'm intrigued about your project as a whole as you envisage it. Is it that you're going to be looking at these buildings and these buildings and structures operating just around the perimeter of Heathrow just beyond the airport itself and try to explore that edge land beyond the airport? I'm thinking about the things at the link, all of those together, or the arguments. Or are you going into the airport as well? I'm still uncertain about how you see those two. Inside and outside. Just as if you live in Cranford, you very likely are an airport worker. You're probably a baggage loader or a cleaner or something like that. So it's just important for me to look inside as outside the airport and to some extent to deal with the sense of barrier landscapes as well. But I'm not quite sure how to do the barriers yet. Yes, inside and outside, largely the inside buildings I haven't started yet are still edging my way around the periphery. And just to build on that, what you see is the argument between your story about Penguin and the story of the airport space. It's quite self-contained in a way, your arguments about the Penguin story and about its building and architecture. But then the relationship of that story to the airport and to the other buildings around that you'll be looking at, I'm still trying to work out in my head. I wouldn't say it's self-contained because of course as the second phase and the third phase, as I described them, of Penguin's presence and its departure, do map onto a history of the airport in the sense of its increasing use and increasing problems of actually working and living around it. So to take one example, the noise control map that I refer to, I actually switched from some work that I'm doing on a Cranford school just yesterday because I suddenly thought, oh yes, I could use that in this to explain the noise issue and relationship to Penguin. I see that, thank you. I was wondering if I could pick up and ask about the points of defensiveness and various different forms of defensiveness and also building upon, actually, talking about Ballard and another question about... Sorry, it will be short, I'm not going to ask too much. It seems like it picks up a lot on, especially in Millennium People, which I'm curious as to whether you are actually... because in your previous work, I believe on the book on empire and modernism, you wrote a little bit about fiction in relation to architecture, at least I think it was in the introduction, so maybe I can't remember. A large part of that is about the bombing of a bomb going off in Heathrow Airport and so I was wondering about the links between different buildings in this landscape with regards to security, that there seems to be actually quite like a thread going through of fence lines around reservoirs, around prisons, the Official Secrets Act around the airport. Is there a point where that changes? I mean it seems like, at least in terms of noise pollution with the Penguin Building, there's that defensive posture begins because of sound. But is there a way that, I don't know, one might relate those, because it seems like those two defensive postures come about at a similar time. Defensiveness of sound and defensiveness to, I guess, violence. International terrorism, you could say. I mean, obviously that, the first real effects of that, the first real measures to increase security, to deal with that, I think probably are in the 1970s, to do with so-called PLO terrorism. And obviously they increase with every different form of terrorism affecting air travel. So now you have, of course, extraordinary interior landscape as you enter terminals, between entering the terminal and getting to the inside of the airplane. There is a really interesting book, actually. Oh, God, I forgot the name of the writer. But it's called Extra-Territorialism. The Extra-Territorial? Yeah, it's a Columbia literary theorist. Came up last year. Incredibly good on this. No, no, no, not her. No, she's in Arfield. No, it's a Columbia University literary theorist. I can find a name of it for you. So there are those kind of exponential increases in security within the airport. But there are other kinds of threats as well. Bring it back to Ballard, you see. I mentioned car crashes, but what about plane crashes? You know, I mean, because, actually, until 1972, which is an important event in Heathrow because it's the year of the Stain's Air Crash, which is still the largest non-terrorist, sorry, has the largest fatalities of a non-terrorist crash in Britain. Until that year, there had been 10 crashes of planes in or around Heathrow, going back to 1954, I think. And as well as plane crashes, you have these other kind of forms. I mean, it's a very violent landscape. So you have things dropping from planes. I mean, the military chronicle is great, but, you know, Mr Cernso woke up and found that his greenhouse had been smashed by lumps of ice coming from a plane. You know, I mean, this kind of violence from the air is extremely apparent in the kind of collective, can we talk about collective consciousness of the area? Perhaps we can if it's embodied by a local paper. So various threats and forms of violence, I think, somehow need to be written into a project like this. Thanks. I had one more question. I have a few, but I'll ask one more. I think you mentioned utopia twice in the talk and I think so much of this is a dystopic landscape in some sense, and we're thinking about landscapes of violence and edge barriers and that sort of thing. I think I'm quite curious as to where in your research project the kind of utopic structures come in and also how that, you know, sort of maybe translates into what was set out as a utopic idea and what happens to it. I'm just curious about how important that is in the project. I see that largely going back to the point about the airport as a highly planned zone. You know, I see that largely in terms of Frederick Gippard's work, designing airport terminals. You know, I see that largely as a kind of, also to do with the kind of, you know, the grammar extraordinary kind of things about air travel as they're brought home to plane spotters and, you know, people who regard the airport as a kind of zone of freedom, you know, and it's important in the, you know, one way it's embodied is in the kind of architecture that Gippard designed. It's embodied, of course, in the layout for Heathrow. I mean, you know, Heathrow is a very flat landscape. That's why the airport's there. But it also permits a kind of rigidity and abstract geometry that I was referring to. You read too much in men and everything seems, you know, subtopian or dystopian. It's time. Yeah, thanks for the fascinating talk, Mark. I was just thinking about that noise pollution diagram and I guess I have a specific question about that and then a more general kind of drift of thought from that and just wondering, like, when those kind of diagrams or maps first started appearing and when noise pollution was kind of described or theorised and regulated, did it coincide with the development of Heathrow to an extent or was it much earlier? But from that, you know, it made me think about the kinds of visualisations that you're grappling with and this, you know, there's a kind of, yeah, a kind of slipperiness or a kind of abstraction to them and thinking of what other sources of visualising the invisible might be flowing through this, you know. Penguin's location being about being able to strike London as a kind of strategic distribution place, thinking about distribution networks, logistics and visualisations that might surround that or thinking surrounding that that might have existed at the time. Flight paths, those things that we don't see but, you know, now very familiar with those maps of flight paths and how they become a kind of emblem of globalisation in a way but I wonder when they started first appearing and being popularised and they used in posters and things like that, aren't they? So, yeah, just thinking about that kind of idea of abstraction and what architectural history kind of can bring to these kinds of invisible visualised things. Well, sometimes, of course, architectural history itself can't bring us enough, I would say. And that's why I more often call myself an art historian because I use visual material that goes well beyond what song architectural historians accept as their kind of metio, yeah? So, yes, I've been interested in using those maps in which you have those red lines that show planes encircling the world. You know, they're a kind of utopia, aren't they? The world is a smooth place of passage. You know, you can get on your plane and land anywhere, really. But going back to the initial question, the first thing about when there's noise pollution maps, first of all, I don't know, Otto will tell you that it was only two weeks ago that I sat beside him in the IBA library and said, what do you know about noise pollution? So, I'm building something up very quickly. I'm a very noisy reader. It wasn't meant to be directed at you when I was in the library, Otto. But that map was 2006, and that was one of a sequence of reports commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority itself of independent researchers but reporting to the authority. I suspect... Does anyone know the answer to this? I suspect they don't go that much further than that. Although, obviously, the idea of noise contours is an interesting kind of way to picture what you call the invisible, because it takes what we already understand what a map can do. Contours show us steepness or relative flatness. Noise contours show us relative loudness or relative quietness. Of course, there's an interesting thing about noise as opposed to sound here, which I see is rather a similar opposition to things as opposed to objects. In that, noise is something uncultural, something we don't want, we cannot. It's waste, it's something we don't want, whereas sound is something we want. Acoustics is the art of controlling and containing and directing sound, isn't it? I think that idea about noise is quite important, because technically, how those noise amounts were produced, I think you'd need a... What do they call noise scientists? Is there a name for them? I think you'd need a noise scientist to tell you that. I think we might all have other thoughts and questions, but we do have a reception right next door. If you'd join me in thanking Mark and thanks to all of you for coming and asking questions.