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Theatre: I would commission a season of international collaborations around the environment, all to be made carbon-neutrally. Low-tech theatre would be the order of the day. Robert Lepage needs to do something without video anyway. Cinema is trickier. We can have enviro-films, of course, such as Hubert Sauper’s ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’. But we might all suffer eco-overkill and get that perverse desire to go out and buy a Hummer. So I’d rather take a leaf out of the Charlton Heston movie ‘Soylent Green’ and show people films that remind us just how gorgeous our planet is. Murnau’s ‘Tabu’, Michael Powell’s ‘A Canterbury Tale’ and Chen Kaige’s ‘Yellow Earth’ would do for starters.

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For the pièce de résistance, the enormous Barbican conservatory that houses a plethora of stunning tropical plants would be transformed into a theatrical walk-through experience by myself and Icelandic company Vesturport. The visitor walks through a vast subterranean jungle in which dead orchestral musicians, masterpieces of twentieth century painting and overpaid arts consultants float by in flooded Perspex boxes. A world after the deluge where art no longer has a place.

Guy Booth: Why I hate it
I fancied a flat in the Barbican. But I hate the place; dumped in London like a gigantic concrete Club Sandwich with fancy skewers sticking out of it. I can’t find my way in. I grub round the edges; purple brick cliffs, a tunnel of fumes and groaning buses. I hobble upstairs that outscale me, tiptoe down gritty walkways like an ancient Egyptian grave robber tapping the walls of a pyramid’s gut.There it is! The piazza paradise; the postwar mega-dream that was never more than a film noir of simulated modernity. The grey, flat water, the Cloacae Maxima feature that any moment might vomit a madras of raw sewage. Stark brick platforms, terraces like railway tracks, acres of hammered concrete, dreary names. St Giles Cripplegate born again, forlorn in a desert of pigeon muck like a gothic dinner trolley.

Awful!I’ve designed a city. I know exactly how they did the Barbican. It’s exciting, urban design. You’re part of a vast team – every sort of professional: intellectually stimulating! But people are statistics, at most drawn figures on superb graphic visuals.

I hate the Barbican because it misses out on people – and it shows!
Booth is working on a TV adaptation about Victorian architect Sir Charles Barry, a TV film about the clash between ancient and modern Welsh culture and a second novel about the decline of Western society.

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