Voyage of discovery

摘要

"We got more than 500 entries but there were a lot of pods," Alain de Botton tells me as we stand on the deck of the newly completed winner of last year's A Room for London competition. It's not hard to see why. We are, after all, perched on a concrete crag of the Hayward Gallery, whose designers included future Archigram members Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton. De Botton's dream of a one room hotel, hosting a different group of guests for every night of the Olympic year, carries a strong whiff of sixties radicalism - a plug-in, in all but name. And yet the winning proposal in the competition run by de Botton's charity, Living Architecture, in collaboration with Artangel, could hardly be further in spirit from Archigam's pop-futurism.