GORKY’S SUMMERFOLK is the answer to a programmer’s prayer. Well, any programmer who, like Trevor Nunn, happens to have (a) a crack ensemble of 20-odd actors ready to animate a large canvas, and (b) the perceived obligation to put on plays that possess some millennial dimension. As will the cowslip slippers that stop fallen arches in dairy herds and improve milk production. There will also be a scale model of Norman Foster’s Reichstag in Berlin.Chairs that double as lights made from traffic bollards, bongo drums, JCB diggers, bridges, artificial skin and computerised limbs for landmine victims, even a condom – these are just some of the products that the New Millennium Experience is deciding whether to showcase inside the dome or not.. The New Millennium Experience has bagged 50 or so of the more dramatic or amusing Millennium Products to display inside the dome The Rolls-Royce jet engine made in titanium will be inside. If they walk away having thought about a small change that will have benefited mankind obliquely rather than directly, gently, even subliminally, it will have been worthwhile.”On a pleasant evening sitting on these rubberised ramparts the spiral could be a good place to reflect on British ingenuity and the showcasing of it. Its architect Fletcher Priest used the Golden Section in its design, a naturally harmonious division of a line or plane discovered in the 11th century by Leonardo Fibonacci, one of the greatest mathematicians of the Middle Ages who first popularised the modern Arabic system of numerals in use today.Keith Priest also used the Fibonacci Sequence to create his spiral.

This is the series of numbers in which each one is the sum of the previous two (1,1,2,3,5,8,13…). The geometry may be complex but the spiral is simple to construct. “It’s nothing they couldn’t have done in the 11th century,” Keith Priest says He’s rather New Age in his thinking. “Remember that when people get to the spiral and the Meridian Line at Greenwich, they will have come via the dome. Andrew Burns, of engineer Buro Happold, has ensured that it won’t blow away.So much for the technology Then there is its form. It looks a bit like the swooshy Millennium Product logo but in real life, by the end of the year, it will assume the same harmonious proportions as the nautilus shell it so strongly resembles. It is also one reason why the twee suburbia envisaged for the surrounding Millennium Village, by architect Ralph Erskine, has hit problems and will not open in time for the millennium.The Design Council polystyrene spiral sits lightly on the landscape on a windy bend in the river near the reed beds that recycle water for the dome’s lavatories.

For a year before the dome was built, experts cleaned up the industrially polluted Greenwich Peninsula, which had been owned by British Gas But large areas of the site cannot support foundations. That’s why the Teflon- coated dome, anchored by masts and enough rigging to win the America’s Cup, was designed to sit so lightly on the ground. Building this project without having to sink foundations into one of the most contaminated sites in Europe is the Design Council’s fashionable stab at urban regeneration. Neil Cassens, Director of the Science Museum, who is known as the godparent of the Design Council zone on the dome site, calls it a “long overdue tribute to British creativity which spells out the message that the UK is still a world-class pioneer in funding business and industrial solutions.”It has taken a lot of sleuthing to select a thousand Millennium Products such as agricultural and medical innovations to computers and heavy industry by way of bridges, buildings, JCB diggers, lifeboats, trains and enough refrigerators to put a new spin on Cool Britannia.The pounds 500,000 project has to be self-funding, so visitors will only get to see some of these items if the manufacturers sponsor audio-visual clips on the stand or pay to house their products in clear pods to be buried in the boardwalk.The spiral will be constructed from polystyrene bricks, its chunky ramparts will be wrapped in rubberised athletic track made from recycled car tyres – another British patent – and rendered inside with Portland Stone.However, this installation, by architects Mike Fletcher and Keith Priest, is, like the Design Council itself, rather more substantial than it seems.Astonishingly, it has no foundation. It consists of an open-air ramp spiralling 75m along a gentle two-metre incline.The Spiral of Innovation, as the Design Council calls it, will display the names of a thousand selected innovators of products and services in British industry. www.bbc.co.uk/proms. The Millennium Dome at Greenwich keeps spawning clones.