Text copyright Hugh Pearman/The Sunday Times. Published 2nd May 1999, as "The rise of the pod squad".
It always takes a reassuringly long time for real technology to catch up with the media imagery of technology. In 2001, we still won't have a space station remotely as ambitious as the filmic version offered us by Stanley Kubrick in 1968. All our housework is still not done by cute little domestic robots, as predicted in magazines for most of the century. Glass is only now getting clever enough to do the things hoped of it by the modern architectural pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s. But one particularly 1960s dream - the pod-building - has arrived at last.
The new NatWest Media Centre at Lord's cricket ground is a shiny aluminium and glass pod on stilts by architects Future Systems. It is a 1960s idea of modernity that has finally arrived within the walls of one of the most conservative organisations on earth. You half-expect the MCC to announce that its new female members must sport heavy mascara, beehive hair and white PVC mini-frocks: its menfolk, after all, need only minor adjustments to turn them into blazered, yachting-shoed lookalikes of Patrick McGoohan in his Danger Man/Prisoner mode.
But the Lord's Media Centre is not the only example of its genre. Recently, Michael Grade's First Leisure organisation ran an architectural competition to design a new kind of tenpin bowling alley. The winning design, by Forward Architecture, is a modular pod system (some call them "podules"), each sleek pod containing six or eight bowling alleys. The idea is that you assemble these pods any way you want - stack 'em up, place' em side-by side, bung one on a railway concourse, whatever. Pod buildings are deliverable, either complete on a truck a la Portakabin, or - as at Lord's and for Grade's bowling alleys - in several large pieces on several trucks, and then put together on site. But "building" is a misnomer. You are not meant to think of buildings in this context. You are meant to think of boats, aeroplanes, spacecraft, cars, helmets, cameras - anything that is assembled or mass-produced rather than built.
