It’s great to spend time in Cuba, where a daiquiri or a mojito is almost as cheap as a MacDonald’s coke, and where , frankly, the restaurant-made hamburgers are far superior than anything MacDonald’s could produce at about the same price and would, no doubt, have to ship over from Miami. 

And then to the coffee.  An expresso is a way of life in Cuba.  Starbucks’s cannot compete except on brand perception which, sadly, many younger people will fall for.  As Donald Trump has succeeded on a view of other countries destroying local jobs, across Latin America there is a view that companies such as Starbuck’s have done the same in their communities and has eliminated quality for corporate consistency.  It’s a two-way view.

Even in London, there is a move to quality, flavour, and to small niche outlets.  Macdonalds and Starbuck’s now represent a world that is in decline. 

How minimalist can an artist go in creating an artwork?  This is what American Bruce Nauman artist explored in the 1970′s with his “Natural Light, Blue Night Room”, creating an architectural white box defined by a strip of natural light at the bottom and blue artificial light at the top, which has been recreated at Blain Southern in London, one of his aims bring to “knock down” the viewer as he enters through an anonymous white door into the blank empty room where the light creates shapes and diagonals as the viewer moves across the space. 

“In the gallery, there were some skylights above one wall. I installed blue fluorescent lights below the sky lights. It messed up your ability to see the space clearly because when you got under them you started getting a lot of afterimages. Everything became a little jumpy… There was nothing else in the space. So the idea was that it would be hard to know what to focus on and even if you did, it would be hard to focus.” (Bruce Nauman).

A darkening room with shimmering prisms that appear and disappear as the viewer walks around the perimeter, creating a disconcerting experience made of only silver thread and light.  Adjacent in another darkened room at Hauser & Wirth London, with the sound of the sea in the background, two pyramids covered with blue pigment, like volcanos, are illuminated by two blue light bulbs hanging overhead “in a permanent flux of transformation”.  

Lygia Pape (1927 – 2004), the influential Brazilian artist, was active in both the Concrete and Neo-Concrete Movements in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1980s onwards, her artwork, while still remaining based in geometry, became more physical, intense and sensory, involving the intellectual and physical participation of the viewer.

“My concern is always invention. I always want to invent a new language that’s different for me and for others, too… I want to discover new things. Because, to me, art is a way of knowing the world… to see how the world is… of getting to know the world”. (Lygia Pape) 

The new President Elect in the USA has drawn attention to the complexity and differences in political views on immigration in the USA; by coincidence Los Angeles’ artist Mike Kelly’s installations at Hauser & Wirth London explore the tensions of the Chinese community in Los Angeles. 

Kelley was fascinated by America’s many diverse subcultures.  He took Los Angeles’ marginalised Chinese-American community as the inspiration for “Framed and Frame”  which recreated local landmarks in Chinatown of Los Angeles with two separate sculptures:  “Framed” is a “wishing well” in the form of a naturalistic concrete grotto with caves and caverns, cheap religious statues that can be purchased in local shops, and coins thrown onto its ledges, under which there is a secret living cave.  “Frame” is more sinister – an enclosure of steel protective fencing, brick walls and barbed wire surrounds the Chinese gate – is this a celebratory entrance gate or a prison? 

For Kelley, the wishing well projects the background of the Chinese-American community in Los Angeles (and many other communities in the US and Canada which he explored in other works), with a history of persecution and exclusion, along with cultural resilience and exchange.  The mixture of Christian and Buddhist votives and Chinese-American kitsch highlights the unique cultural mix that has evolved in LA’s Chinatown since the 19th century.

Mike Kelly was born in October 1954 and sadly was found dead in an apparent suicide in Pasadena in 2012, a sad loss to the art world.

The different experiential rooms are supported by drawings and paintings, valuable to understanding the art concepts.

The volumes of the old industrial buildings have been simply adapted without frills and complimentary industrial additions have been added at the rear, constructed from shipping containers, reinforcing the industrial chic, enabling the visitor to order a drink from one of the several bars and wander through the art and photography exhibitions and enjoy the performances and discos later in the evening. 

The idea may be borrowed from warehouse districts in areas such as Brooklyn, Buffalo, Berlin and Liverpool, but here it is done incredibly well, in part because Cubans are less precious about the disruption that such a popular cultural and music venues might cause to its neighbours, celebrating the life and vitality that results.  Cubans love music, dance and fun!

As with the El Cocinero, the Arts Factory is the inspiration of  X Alfonso.  It treads a careful path in terms of its art and photography exhibitions, showing both Cuban and international artists – currently including Czechoslovakian artists and jewelry design from Austria, while on the architectural front, it is showing the latest housing/living projects from predominantly German architects.  The photography exhibitions on the top floor are the best parts, innovative, varied and challenging in ways that could not have been considered a decade ago, for which the partners must be congratulated 

Payment is simple.  There is a small entry charge for which visitors are given a card onto which to charge drinks and food (maximum 30 CUC’s), saving the bars wasting time with cash and allowing visitors to settle up at the end – all so simple.

Could this happen in London?  It seems unlikely at the moment – there is not the same tolerance of noise, traffic and queues of people cheek by jowl with residential areas.  Perhaps in other industrial cities such as Liverpool where there are similar industrial warehouse arts venues such as the Cairns Brewery and Blades factory venue, though not of this scale.  Perhaps 180 Strand, an 1980’s building owned by Vinyl Factory, may come near in due course – already it runs art exhibitions and events and, apart from the new residential development at 190 Strand, there are few residents nearby to complain.  A great plus, perhaps, is that the students at King’s College London and the London School of Economics are adjacent. 

Visitors enter through a small door at the base of the chimney to climb up to the rooftop bar and restaurant level.  The climate helps, of course, with the ability to enjoy warm evenings outside for most of the year, while there are also indoor restaurant areas.  The arts theme of the adjacent La Fábrica de Arte Cubano, which can be viewed through the lofty windows of the main factory building, is taken up in the décor including the moving light installation inside the chimney itself, worth climbing up a further staircase to see, old enamel signs and arty lettering graphics on the toilet walls – what can you read here?   Furniture is contemporary including some that ironically is the same as used in Wapping Food in London, formerly also in an old industrial building, but sadly now closed.

Havana is a city of contrasts; a huge amount needs to be done, but creative partnerships between entrepreneurs such as X-Alfonso and the Cuban Government are transforming the bar and restaurant scene in Cuba and hopefully will act as a catalyst for improvement in the adjacent area. 

To compliment the historic buildings, Thomas Heatherwick has designed a modern centrepiece of two connected glass houses that appear to float on the water of the river and contain botanical plants used in the creation and flavouring of gin, with a structure of glass and steel waves which rises up and appears to twist and turn into the old buildings at high level. The two separate structures provide a humid environment for spices which from the tropics and a dry temperate zone for Mediterranean plants.

Visitors are able to learn and experience how the gin is made, wander around the perfectly clean distillery and attend cocktail classes.  There is a display of some of the cocktail glasses from Bombay Sapphire’s design competitions over the years, a shop and a café which spills out onto an open sitting area overlooking the river.  Bombay Sapphire is hoping to attract 100,000 visitors a year to the new centre.

The project is a good example of sensitive, but honest, reuse of existing buildings where the interiors have been re-fashioned for their new uses, while keeping essential features such as the roof trusses and the old doors to the vaults where the bank-notes were once stored.  New detailing is simple and reflects the industrial character of the complex while, externally, the buildings have been repaired but not restored, and thus they still retain the characteristic patina of age.  In achieving a BREEAM Outstanding rating, the project shows that environmental and architectural sustainability can go hand in hand.

It is perhaps a little disappointing however to find that the water from the River Test is not used in the production process – water is shipped in from the previous site in order to maintain the characteristic flavour of the gin -, nor is bottling done on site as this is a noisy large scale industrial process, but apart from that Bombay Sapphire is to be congratulated in bringing this old industrial site back into use with refurbishment of the old, plus insertion of Thomas Heatherwick’s conservatories at the centre.

Demolition, carried out in 2012, involved removing the ten storey tower from a constrained site while retaining the inter-war Assembly building which now tucks into Holl’s building which was opened in 2014.  Holl’s design seeks to be complimentary to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 1909 building though the outside is quite bulky and block-like, especially the way that it oversails the Assembly building, albeit it is the same height as Mackintosh’s building and is clad in a thin light material in contrast to the dark heavy masonry of the older buildings.

The exterior hides a masterful interior with studios arranged on the north side with the benefit of large northlights and offices, refectory and other support areas arranged along the south facing across to Mackintosh’s building, all planned around a sculptural central “street”, in which the staircases dive across the space from floor to floor around conical “driven voids of light” bringing light from the roof right down through the building, perhaps reminiscent of the towers on, say, Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School. .  The ground floor of the street is open to the public for exhibitions and other events, from which the public gains a glimpse upwards of the world in which the students and staff work, part of the connectivity this building achieves with the city in which it sits.

Wherever possible doors are held back or eliminated through clever fire engineering so that the studios and other spaces flow off the central street enabling transparency and views out of the building, in particular through the two-storey refectory space which has a roof garden at the level of the studios in Mackintosh’s building opposite, and interchange between different art and design programmes.   The use of light and space hides the fact that this is a tightly-packed and efficient 12,000 sq.m. building, with architectural episodes within the studios with staircases leading to informal study and meeting areas and with a sustainable ventilation solution through the central street and the light cones that minimises space used for ventilation plant.

Holl’s other building in the UK is Maggie’s Centre Barts, which, although it replaced a 1960’s building, has been highly controversial in terms of its relationship with the historic buildings designed by James Gibbs.  It has similarities to the Reid Building in that the exterior does not reflect the interior, it is designed to contrast with the historic adjacent buildings and the primary focus is on the interior with a central space through which natural light will flow, housing the circulation (a curved staircase) with spaces opening off of it. Here too there is a roof garden, in this case on the top floor, with flowering trees open to a large room for yoga, Tai Chi and meetings.

Holl has brought an international quality of architectural design to the Glasgow School of Art and to Glasgow.  It sets a challenge is for Glasgow University on its new campus to maintain the quality that has been achieved with this building and the new City of Glasgow College campuses and for the Glasgow to ensure a high quality of design to its new housing and community regeneration, following the demolition of many of the post-war residential tower blocks.

The world moves around in circles.  Glasgow, with the highest concentration of residential flats in the UK, has a new 21^st century strategy to demolish many of these post-war tower blocks and replace them with thousands of new homes across the city in a way that is much more traditional and much more sustainable.  Since 2006, a quarter of the city’s high-rise housing has been demolished. While politicians and the media celebrate the death of a high-rise as progress, communities are again being split up and scattered as if those lessons of the 20th century have been forgotten, along with large-scale demolitions in Dalmarnock for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.   

Photorapher Chris Leslie has been recording the disappearance of housing schemes from both the 20^th century and the 19^th, where the lessons of good community projects to reuse housing as Assist in Govanhill seem to have been lost.   Leslie asks the question: “No one can argue with the fact that Glasgow needs regenerating, or that a “renaissance” could usher in positive change. But does this renaissance have an end-game, or is Glasgow poised for an endless cycle of demolition and new-builds? In 50 years, will we be witnessing the same dispersal of local communities and whole scale demolition of the houses we are building today?” 

With this new regeneration, has Glasgow learnt the lessons about listening to communities and providing long-term sustainable and affordable housing in which those communities can grow, prosper and slowly change, rather than be subjected to disruption and redevelopment?   

“It’s not the actual building itself. It’s all your memories, that’s where I was brought up, that’s where I was made” (Finlay in the Red Road flats)

The year was 1965 and my first experience of secondary school was the newly-built Allan Glen’s School in Glasgow, no doubt smelling of fresh paint, all modern and light, while the adjacent dark old building was being demolished (Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a student at an even older building).

Today, as with much of Glasgow’s twentieth century development, that “new” Allan Glen’s School has now itself been demolished, a victim of changing demographics in the area which meant that the school closed in 1989 and the buildings became an annexe to the Glasgow Central College of Commerce, which then merged into the City of Glasgow College.  Today, an educational use continues on the site with the newly opened Cathedral Street campus of the City of Glasgow College, and a connection will remain with Allan Glen, whose endowment enabled the foundation of the original school in 1853, through a new STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Academy within the City of Glasgow College.

Showing what excellent quality can be achieved through a Private Public Partnership (PPP), the new Cathedral Street Campus – which is the size of a small university – is part of a strategy for a £228 million consolidation of several sites across Glasgow onto two campuses, one here at Cathedral Street and another on the south bank of the River Clyde, this latter being one of the finalists of the Stirling Prize to be announced this week.  Overall the College has around 40,000 students, many of them part-time and 1,200 members of staff.

Designed by Michael Laird Architects and Reiach and Hall, the two new campuses have been delivered by the Glasgow Learning Quarter consortium led by Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, with other consultants including FES, Arup Scotland, Hulley and Kirkwood, Rankin Fraser and Graven Images, and must represent one of the largest such investments in Further Education, to the credit of the Scottish Funding Council, Glasgow City Council and the College itself.

This campus building transforms some of the stereotypes of Further Education by creating an environment which would do credit to any university, one of the aims being to encourage students who have the ability to continue into higher education – perhaps to Strathclyde University just across the road.  The large central atrium space provides the hub around which the teaching and learning facilities are planned, making wayfinding easy and enabling interaction between students from different disciplines, with many informal learning spaces spread throughout the building.  Teaching accommodation runs in a ‘learning ribbon’ connecting specialist areas across the campus.

The campus building is built on steeply-rising ground with two storeys between the Cathedral Street entrance and the upper central reception entrance located at the top of grand landscaped stairs, both leading into the spacious atrium which is the heart of this huge building and will soon to have a new urban park outside.  The new campus is thus bringing new life to the area north of Cathedral Street, which has been rather run down, and should act as a catalyst for further redevelopment and urban revitalisation, something which the College aims also to achieve in its Riverside Campus south of the city centre.

The College recently merged into the new City of Glasgow and the 1969 building has now gone, being replaced with the new Riverside Campus, opened in 2015 which, quite rightly has been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, (the results of which will be announced this week).  The new campus demonstrates an exceptionally high quality of design and construction to provide 21^st century learning and teaching environments through a Private Public Partnership (PPP) delivered by the Glasgow Learning Quarter consortium led by Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd as part of an overall £228 million consolidation of the City of Glasgow College from several sites across Glasgow onto two, which have both been completely redeveloped for the 40,000 students and 1,200 members of staff.

Designed by Michael Laird Architects and Reiach and Hall, the new building sits on the riverfront with activities on the river itself, and is planned around a new public square which is part of a city strategy for a new landscaped route from the Gorbals to the riverfront, bringing people into through the College, with a ground floor atrium space that is accessible and open, with security set back from the main space, a similar philosophy to that seen at the Cathedral Street campus. 

Spaces flow through the building as the architects have sought to meet the brief in a way that is sustainable, minimising mechanical plant and its associated space demand, and questions the need for walls to separate different activities, such as in the main engineering workshop, thus allowing light and volume to flow, creating a much more pleasant environment, which is more spacious and more flexible, with many spaces throughout the building for informal study, project work and meetings. 

Continuing this theme, all the spaces in the building (with a few exceptions for technical reasons) have daylight and views either into the full-height atrium or out to the city of Glasgow itself, thus connecting the building with its urban hinterland.

The engineering facilities provide a range of engines and systems, including, on the one hand,  a working engine room of ship and, on the other, a state-of-the-art 3D 360 degree simulator of a ship’s control room to enable students to experience different seascapes around the world and react to different scenarios of weather, emergency and other situations here within the College itself.

The new campus includes residences for international students and, like the College’s Cathedral Street Campus, has the potential to act as the catalyst for the revitalisation of the area in which it sits which, while located only ten minutes away from the shopping areas of Argyle Street and the St Enoch Centre, had become a little of a no-man’s land.  Having stayed at the nearby Premier Inn on occasions (because it had a car park – a great boon), the walk into the City Centre was not very pleasant; hopefully with the new campus and the proposed new landscaped connection to the river, this will improve and other things will follow.

The photograph of the “Muscovite Eiffel Tower” by Pavel Golovkin is one of twelve of the best photographs selected from “Aperture” in New Scientist which has, for five years, published challenging, news-worthy and beautiful photographs of nature, space and technology here on Earth.

The ambition to explore and control space and to develop nuclear technology is reflected in Edgar Martin’s photograph of the dressing room at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre with empty gloves and space suits awaiting their occupants and Danila Tkachenko’s photographs which reflect back to the Cold War, including the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 aircraft designed to take off from water and destroy US submarines, of which only two were ever built in the 1970’s, while Enrico Sacchetti has recorded the two mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope on the top of Mount Graham in Arizona as two eyes looking out into space – two 8.4 metre wide mirrors which collect and combine light as if a single 11.8 metre mirror, making it the largest optical telescope in the world, used to examine dust particles around far-distant stars and planets to understand their atmosphere.

Going up into space and looking back at Earth, the European Space Agency’s Sentinels have taken stunning photographs of different landscapes arising from farming and other activities and of climate change, often unconsciously creating unique artistic images.

In the USA, grids are created by land divisions of modern farming while, in an entirely different environment and climate, agriculture clusters surround the Liwa Oasis in United Arab Emirates with use of drip irrigation and greenhouses and, in Saudi Arabia, a landscape of circles is created by the central-pivot irrigation system around wells, while the sand seas of the Namid Desert, a popular tourist area, create a sculptural landscape around the dry riverbed of the Tsauchab.

In colder environments, there is a different agricultural landscape in the snowy environment of Kazakhstan ploughed in the 1960’s while Antarctic Peninsula has become one of the key research areas on climate change as the ice shelves shrink and break up into icebergs. 

Meanwhile, up in space, ESA astronaut Tim Peake gives a quick wave to NASA astronaut Steve Kelly carrying out electric maintenance and DIWATA 1 – the first Filipino micro-satellite launched from the International Space Station in April 2016, one of its roles being to monitor climate change.