Dome truths

It was 50 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The result was a popular masterpiece. Thirty years later, a less accomplished, tone-deaf group of individuals collaborated on the Millennium Dome, and the result was an expensive, sniggerable calamity. For a while, I was one of them.

Of course, it was not really a ‘Dome’ at all, since a dome is a sophisticated self-supporting masonry structure and this was just a big, stupid, hemispherical fabric tent. But ‘Millennium Tent’ did not have rhetorical resonance sufficient to burnish the already very bright and shiny egos of its perpetrators during the Blair Dawn.

In any organisation, lots of stuff goes wrong a lot of the time, as Murphy’s Law states. But here was an organisation where — remarkably — everything went wrong all of the time. The problems began with that signature tent by Richard Rogers.

So far from being an intelligent response to a carefully considered client need, its design pre-existed anybody having a clue what to put in it. And, conceptually, it was out-of-date even before it was erected on a toxic bog in Greenwich: tensile structures were the stuff of Archigram dreams when Rogers was a student.

I took the call one Friday afternoon in 1997 when lounging in my Chelsea office, looking at the river and toying with an espresso. It was Bill Muirhead, one of the founders of the original Saatchi & Saatchi, who had, with an adman’s impressive guile, manoeuvred himself into being an unpaid adviser to the millennium project.

‘You know about that design stuff,’ he breezily said. I was as surprised as anybody by the offer, but it came with lots of money as well as generous assurances about autonomy. Later I told my wife and she gave me a you-must-be-mad look, so I promptly accepted.