It is December 2000, after eleven months of hearing how the ‘Millennium Experience’ had attracted far less visitors than anticipated, the project is making a loss and so and how we the public with our voluntary contributions are having to pay £750M for a tent. So it is time to go and experience it for myself, well actually with a friend, more a partner in crime, fellow Architect, Darren Staples whose impressions on the day gave me the title for this piece. The approach to the Dome is via the official route, public transport, train from Birmingham to London, then the Underground to the Dome, via the Jubilee line extension and its architectural stations, notably by Michael Hopkins as you enter the line at Embankment, underneath Portcullis House, the new government offices, (also attracting negative press for reasons related to cost.) The journey down to the Underground line is through a series of escalators taking you down through an immaculate concrete and dark grey steel void, with up-lighting so effective that you constantly feel like it is daylight overhead. The station itself is clean and well arranged like a modern station should be. The train journey takes you through the world of Foster (Canary Wharf) before terminating in the very blue world of Alsop at Greenwich with its diagonal columns, and suspended concourse inside the void.
The escalator journey takes you up into more of the world of Foster in the trademark white steel and glass with grey panelling arranged in the form of a serpentine bus terminal, somehow lacking in buses. The sea of red tarmac leads you to a huge bank of turnstiles and ticket booths under a white tent canopy on yellow steel columns, but strangely no queuing, is this because the negative press has scared everyone off, or is it because the system of crowd control is so efficient that everyone is filtered through without a hitch, the crowd control mechanism directs you to a large temporary cinema, which invites you to spend twenty minutes or so watching a specially made ‘Blackadder’ episode, where Edmund and Baldrick build Leonardo da Vinci’s time machine, and it all gets a bit messy…anyway enough of that. The short film itself introduces you to the Dome, and you get to see the first view of what is inside, following the secrecy that has been surrounding the ‘Millennium Experience’ for the whole year. We have heard so much about the Dome itself, either related to size, it is big, or its cost to the public, or the lack of people visiting the attraction.
The first thing that struck me as on entering is the sheer volume of people supposedly not visiting, I cannot move for people, in fact I don’t think you could get any more people in here, it is absolutely packed! The next thing that struck me was the size, big does not cover it, it is a city in here. The Body Zone, the much publicised sculpture of a nonsexual recumbent embracing couple, the organisers did not want to offend anyone, so here we are with an embracing couple of bodies probably about four stories high, who can tell in this space? With an escalator entering the elbow, with an extremely long line of people, mainly children waiting to enter.
The red tarmac surface is constant and the space has the feel of a trade fair, with stands and striking exhibition pavilions curving their way around the outside of the main path. The Pavilions themselves are designed by signature architects, Zaha Hadid, Eva Jiricina were probably the most prominent. Some of them are stunning, three to four storey buildings that would seem large in an urban situation, but here they are dwarfed by the sheer volume of the Dome. The entry to each of the exhibition pavilions is based on the concept of queuing, (a Belgian friend of mine once referred to it as our national sport) you stand in line on a ramp that is lined with images to get in. The exhibitions themselves are mainly images stuck on the walls of the pavilions, there are a few interactive exhibits. There are refreshment pavilions punctuating the spaces between the exhibition pavilions with hospitality areas on their upper levels, strangely not crowded, but this is a Saturday, maybe all the corporate hospitality takes place during the week.
On the inside of the curve are exhibitions that hug the event space in the centre of the Dome, the event space hosts two shows a day, we have arrived too late to see the first show, and the later show will start too late to get back to Birmingham (the benefits of using public transport and timing of events not being publicised), so will have to give the show a miss. The show is in progress at the moment, the press reviews have been reasonably good, the show directed by Peter Gabriel, is a kind if circus by all accounts. On walking around the Orange exhibition, on its many levels looking at the advances in technology and communications over the past century a deluge of people spill out of the show arena, raving about how good the show was, and that their friends back home don’t know what they are missing.
I have heard a lot of people saying that they did not think very much of the exhibition. On considering the exhibits from the politically correct Body Zone, Cool Britannia, a parody of British culture, The iconic London bus advertising the Great Exhibition of 1951, The intriguing Mind Zone to the Spirit Zone, being renamed as ‘Faith Zone at the last minute, as a result of pressure from church groups. The result being a cone shaped chill out space with blue light flowing in from overhead, makes a tranquil space. Around the outside are images depicting the main religions, interestingly giving the year that each one will be celebrating when the numbers changed to 2000.
Does the exhibition sum up Britain at the turn of the century? Yes, I think it does the political correctness that dominates society shows in the style of the exhibition, watered down so as not to offend anyone. The media scrutiny seems to be unjustified, and the notion that the exhibition should be removed at the end of the year seems a total nonsense. The central arena could easily host all manner of concerts, to attract specific crowds as opposed to trying to appeal to the whole population at once. Outside the dome, it is good time to look around the environmental walk, a deck that follows the tip of the Greenwich Peninsula, a lot more static exhibits telling about the local environment, local wildlife habitats, and how the project has cleaned up some of these and is safeguarding it for future generations.
Having a beer the at one of the outdoor bars, the place is filled with lots of kids playing in the playground on various swings and roundabouts, one of them is a structural model of the dome, with the twelve masts, chains for cables and a bouncing platform on the centre for the shell. It struck me that there will be an entire generation that will remember that the millennium experience was brilliant, the Body Zone, the ‘Blue Peter’ pavilion and yes it is made of cardboard, the play zones, the show at the circus inside a huge, huge tent.
As architecture? The Dome forms an icon that signifies the beginning of an urban renaissance in one of the most rundown areas of London, it does exactly what it says on the tin. The decision to host the exhibition at Greenwich resulted in the architectural intervention that we now know as the Dome to protect the exhibition from the extremes of the British weather and allow it to be enjoyed throughout the whole year. Had the exhibition been held at the NEC in Birmingham, which was an alternative proposal, there would have been no Dome and no focus of attention on Greenwich and no impetus to spark regeneration. The cost of the exhibition would have been the same, and I doubt that there would have been the number of visitors that did make it to Greenwich.
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