fantastic journal

Loos/Lutyens/Venturi

2012-01-25T10:33:00.000Z

Adolf Loos' fondness for English Arts and Crafts architecture is well documented. Like Voysey and Baillie Scott, Loos' best known works were villas for the wealthy bourgeoisie and his designs concerned themselves with accommodating their desire for comfortable and relatively informal domestic interiors. Loos' ingenious Raumplan concept meant that he took the rambling room plus a corridor layout of the typical Arts and Crafts house and folded it up into a tight cubic volume.

His prismatic boxes contain serpentine routes travelling both horizontally and vertically as well as backwards and forwards. Visitors to Loos' houses are faced with labyrinthine circulation routes that double and triple the apparent available space. Corridors frequently double-back on themselves or bifurcate to offer two separate routes to the same destination. Mirrors and internal windows are placed strategically to both amplify and confound the sense of an unfolding sequence of spaces.

(Plan of the Loos' Villa Muller annotated to show the sequence from entry to main living space.)

Loos exact contemporary in the UK, Edwin Lutyens was engaged in a similar if spatially less radical project. His houses also took the rambling, picturesque Arts and Crafts plan but formalised it into compact courtyard typologies. The reduction in scale in many cases of Lutyens' houses from their classical and Elizabethan antecedents meant that he also folded internal and external routes back on themselves in order to achieve relatively grand promenades.

(Plan of Lutyens' Homewood annotated to show the sequence from entry to main living space.)

If the Villa Muller is generally recognised as Loos' finest example of the Raumplan then surely Lutyens' equivalent is Homewood, the house he built for his mother-in-law on the Knebworth estate. In both houses the entrance marks the start of a complex route involving ninety degree turns and blind alleys. Both have corridors terminating in blank walls before opening out to relatively grand and opulent spatial centrepieces. Both avoid an overall symmetry in the plan whilst constructing a series of intense local symmetries and dualities within it. In the Villa Muller the architectural promenade switches back and forth masking the final destination whilst revealing glances back to where you have just come from. At Homewood the route drifts diagonally across the house, extending what would otherwise be a short journey into something more complex and theatrical.

(Plan of the Venturi's Mother's House annotated to show the sequence from entry to main living space.)

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote about the lessons for modern architecture in Lutyens' designs in their 1969 essay Learning From Lutyens*. Previously Venturi had made extensive reference to Lutyens in Complexity and Contradiction, and an even more compacted and reduced version of the internal promenade occurs in the plan of his Mother's House. Here, the darkly recessed entrance again leads to a blank wall forcing an immediate ninety degree turn followed swiftly by another. Despite its spatial complexity, the entrance sequence is extended by no more than a couple of meters in all, suggesting that Lutyens' and Loos' richly paradoxical planning is applicable at a vastly reduced scale.

* Thinking about the much used and abused title Learning from..... it strikes me how clearly it reverses the implied spatial direction of Towards a New Architecture, one looking decisively forward and the other suggesting a glance back, at least in the sense that you can only learn from something that already exists. Quite so, you'd say, if it weren't for the fact that both titles could easily be swapped around - i.e. Learning from Las Vegas is also about a new architecture and Towards A New Architecture spends a great deal of time talking about the Parthenon.

On the limits of anthropomorphic machines (Part 2)

2012-01-17T14:10:00.000Z

(Image: Plan of the town of Radiator Springs from Pixar's Cars, taken from here)

The first half of this post wasn't intended as a rant against CGI, although it's true to say that the original Thomas drawings are for more subtle and beautiful than the current animations. The development of computer animation has created a renaissance in children's movies, particularly from the Pixar studio. It's interesting then that Pixar's own fantasy world creations are also most successful when operating in a similarly plausible but defined universe to that of the Railway Series.

Much of the humour and pathos of the Toy Story movies, for example, emanates from a tension between what the toys can can and can't do and from the fact that they are restricted to a series of plausible movements Their ability to stretch (Slinky Dog), disassemble themselves (Mr Potato Head) and organise military operations (Bucket O Soldiers) provides action sequences within precise physical limitations Equally important to the storyline is what the toys can't do, such as Buzz Lightyear's various heartbreaking attempts to fly. They may be 'alive' but they also only exist within a logical extension of their 'toyness'. As in Salvador Dali's Paranoiac Critical method, an absurd fantasy (of the toys being alive but still toys) is pursued with complete logic throughout.

The toys also clearly inhabit a human world although they fight for independence within it. This is in contrast to the recent Cars franchise which, interestingly, runs into many of the same problems as the new Thomas. Like Thomas, the Cars concept depends on the anthropomorphisation of machines. Unlike Thomas though the machines in Cars inhabit a people-less world, one where they have replaced the roles, characteristics and foibles of the absent humans. This conceit is wittily explored in the first film both visually (vans that look like Elvis, radiator grill moustaches that suggest redneck tendencies etc.) and structurally (a town designed by and for cars).

The action of the first film is confined to very limited spheres, essentially either the stadium in which the cars race or the isolated desert town of Radiator Springs. The choice of the town's location is important because it avoids all sorts of contradictions that would occur in a larger and more pedestrian - and thus human - orientated realm. The functions of the buildings in Radiator Springs have been altered so that the generic Italian restaurant has become a garage and the petrol station the local drive-in. This is a car-based universe and nothing breaks the logic or the suspension of disbelief required to follow their anthropomorphised autonomy.

In the second Cars film the action has become global and follows the World Grand Prix, a series of races held in well-known cities. This creates a conceptual problem in that the cities (London, Paris, Tokyo etc) need to be rendered both plausibly recognisable and consistent with a people-less universe. Subtle scale changes are made to the sizes of doorways for instance and humour is found in car based versions of human spaces such as the rough local pub 'inhabited' by taxis and delivery trucks. And although famous landmarks have been rather fabulously 'motorised' (as detailed here) it remains impossible to imagine what they might actually be for.

But the film still begs some fairly fundamental questions which threaten to derail it entirely. What happens in the mansard roofs of those Parisian apartments? Why have upper floors at all? Who are the double-decker buses for? Not only that but the cars themselves are thrown into a full-on spoof spy movie where they fly through the air, set off booby traps and engage in tyre-to-tyre combat Jason Bourne style. As the cars have become more human, moving beyond simply being machines with characters, the absence of humans becomes oddly more telling.

Not only does the construction of an alternative car based society need precise rules to work but the humour depends on the careful substitution of one set of rules for another. The way that cars move, the things that they can and can't do is very important. When they can fly through the air firing machine guns and foiling international villains their car-ness becomes far less implausible (of course) but also less important. Similarly, when they inhabit an environment whose underlying logic is clearly man-made (stairs, attics, Georgian windows etc), the suspension of disbelief evaporates.

In a sense, the moral universe inhabited by the Cars is every bit as pervasive as the one in Thomas the Tank Engine. The world of duty, obedience and responsibility delineated in Thomas is no less insufferable than the homilies about friendship and staying true to oneself in Cars. There is a confused environmental narrative at the heart of the Cars storyline too, presumably as an attempt to ameliorate the obsession with motor racing to start with. But children's stories always have an explicitly moral message. The creation of alternative worlds be they miniature, anthropomorphic or whatever, allows for the creation of precise rules and limits. These serve not only to contain the fantasy but to communicate the ethical dilemmas the stories rehearse.

The 'system' which underpins the action is a kind of machine itself, a metaphor for a functioning moral universe where things have their place and people understand their role. Tests to the stability of this universe form the narrative for individual stories, helping ultimately to reinforce the desirability of the system to start with. Character's that deviate from their roles are punished in the end and learn to accept certain limits to their freedom. This is why Thomas the Tank Engine is such a brilliant conception for children's stories. The Sodor

On the limits of anthropomorphic machines

2012-01-10T22:56:00.003Z

The following is a post that has been a long time in the writing, sitting un-finished in the "edit posts" section while I tinkered with it. I mentioned something about it the other day on Twitter and it seemed to gain enough of a reaction to fool me into thinking that it might be of general interest. I've split it into two parts because it seemed rather long. I'll post the second bit in a couple of days.

I spend an awful lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. To be more precise I spend a lot of time with someone who spends an awful lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. My (nearly) three year old son is obsessed by it; he sleeps with his Thomas trains, eats with a Thomas knife and fork and wears Thomas pyjamas. The words to the Thomas songs comprise almost his entire vocabulary. I loved the Railway Series (as the Thomas books used to be known) as a child too, although in a slightly less obsessive and merchandise saturated way. That was in the 1970's when the little landscape format, cloth-bound books already seemed like something from the distant past.

The first Railway Series story was published in 1945 and although the last one to be written by Reverend W. Awdry*, the series' original author, came out in 1972, very little about the world they depicted changed over thirty years. Since then ever more Thomas books have appeared to accompany the TV series, various spin-off movies and a terrifying looking theme park called Drayton Manor. And still the cars in the station car park are 1950's Jaguars and Rovers, the men on the platforms wear hats and the women sport headscarves.

I've spent a lot of time wondering about the roots of my son's obsession. I'm fairly sure that he's unaware of the antiquarian nature of steam trains or that the setting is nominally in a slightly distant past. My son doesn't seem to care that there are aren't any traction engines to be found anymore or that men don't dress in spats and a top hat like the Fat Controller**. In that sense the appeal of the books might genuinely be considered timeless. The world they depict is somehow complete enough in itself to form a hermetic, self-sustaining universe.

As any parent knows, children are Utopians. They construct fantasy worlds that run on rules of their own devising. These rules are often rigidly inflexible and uncompromising. The appeal of Thomas then might lie in the precise logic of an imaginary railway network. The simple rules that underpin the movement and actions of the trains might also be the part that makes them so successful. The engines themselves have very limited scope for independent action. They can move forwards and backwards, speed up and down, occasionally break down or have an accident but that's about it. They can't fight, or dance or play football or run. They don't chase villains or solve mysteries and they have no special powers. Although they have been anthropomorphised they remain far more train than human. They are in many ways merely extensions of the way that we often attribute human characteristics to machines, giving them names and celebrating their faults as charming idiosyncrasies

The engines also depend on humans for operation. In the original stories the relationship of the trains to their drivers and guards is very carefully delineated. It does not intrude so much that the trains become 'simply' machines but neither are they allowed any genuine independence. They can only deviate from the control of their human operators to a limited degree, normally with fairly disastrous results. These limitations also extend to the minimal nature of the stories where a fallen tree or a faulty turntable provides pretty much the only narrative hook. The legendarily boring nature of the stories is actually cleverly consistent with the repetitive nature of the engine's tasks. The text mirrors this, repeating simple phrases in a way that is analogous to the movements of the trains. "Clickety clack went the trucks", "We did it together, we did it together" etc.

Alongside this physically limited universe is an equally restricting moral one. Unsurprisingly perhaps given the identity of the author of the stories, the Thomas books are filled with simple pieties and swift retribution for crimes and misdemeanors. Instructions and justice are metered out by the all-powerful Fat Controller*. Sometimes they get abandoned, like Duke the Lost Engine, or decommissioned or even on occasion cut up for scrap. A bleak Victorian morality hangs over the stories allowing for sentimentality and indulgence but only up to a point and only after the work has been done. The aspiration for the all the engines is to be considered "really useful", a reward that that confirms both their status as machines and their role within an over-arching morality of duty.

The TV series of Thomas remained faithful to both the storylines and the moral universe of the books for some time. The fact that it was filmed using an actual model railway gave it in some ways an even greater degree of fidelity to the concept than the original illustrated books. If the model trains couldn't do something then neither could the ones in the stories. The wobbly, home-made aesthetic of the model railway became part of the series' 'charm', an anachronistic 1950's toy used to recreate the equally anachronistic world of 1950's steam engines.

More recently the series has been introducing new characters, partly as a way of boosting merchandise sales but also in order to create new plot lines. The relatively recent switch to CGI has produced a more decisive shift though. In contrast to the earlier stories, recent feature length Thomas' have involved the discovery of lost towns, psychotically deranged diesel engines*** and journeys to magic islands. This expansion beyond the tightly controlled constraints of the original books pushes the logic of the series' scenario beyond plausible limits.

In Misty Island Rescue, for instance, Thomas is set adrift on a raft at sea, eventually running ashore on an island that appears to be in the deep south of America. Even more bizarrely, when Thomas' raft hits the beach the engine rolls straight onto a conveniently placed set of tracks running directly out of the water. Later on Thomas discovers some kind of portal or short-cut between Sodor and Misty Island via a vast hollowed out tree trunk. In other recent films Thomas discovers lost towns (The Great Discovery), battles evil baddies (Day of the Diesels****) and travels through yet another portal to a contemporary mid-Western village called Shining Time (Thomas and the Magic Railroad*****).

These fantastical adventures cause a kind of conceptual crisis in Thomas' carefully controlled universe. His actions are no longer those of a railway engine stuck shunting trucks but of a buccaneering adventurer. The Reverend Awdry's pedantic fidelity to the movements of steam engines and railway lines is long gone. The driver and guard have become like those film crews accompanying TV explorers, something that it's convenient to forget about lest they spoilt the mystique. It's no coincidence that this capitulation to pure fantasy has come about at the same time as a shift from real-time modeling to CGI. Computer rendering allows Thomas the physical and conceptual freedom to inhabit any kind of environment in more or less any way. Thomas has moved from being an anthropomorphised machine into a human being who just happens to look like a train.

* In the original books the railway has a more complex command structure. As well as the Fat Controller (who was known pre-nationalisation as the Fat Director) there was also the Thin Controller (who occasionally appears in contemporary Thomas adventures as the bowler hatted Mr Percival), The Owner and a shadowy aristocratic figure above him known as His Grace. Various clergymen also appear with unspecified but authoritative roles.

** The Fat Controller's outfit is also interesting, being a kind of post-war parody of a Victorian capitalist. At the time of the book's original issue it must have already been extremely out-of-date. The series' role as an allegory of capitalism and the split between labour and capital is well described by Richard's comment below.

*** The Rev. W. Awdry's son Christopher continued to publish stories through the 1980's and '90's.

**** The role of the diesel engines as some sort of servant class/ethnic minority in the Railway Series books has always been symbolically highly suspect.

***** This last film is worth watching for its sheer bizarreness. Not only does it mix human action with model based animation but it attempts to fuse an American TV series called Shining Time with the Thomas franchise to utterly implausible effect. It also features a memorably awful performance from Peter Fonda.

Digging your 'zine

2012-01-04T18:08:00.001Z

I am spectacularly slow in linking to this but Elias Redstone has a fabulous site detailing what appears to be a fast growing industry in small scale, independant architectural publishing. Archizines includes the excellent recent(ish) UK based publications P.E.A.R and Block as well as a personal favourite of mine, The Weather Ring, which I might have linked to before on the grounds of its appalling front cover joke about Bernard Tschumi.

Which leads me neatly to a contribution I've made to the latest edition of Kritik, a beautifully produced Swedish architecture magazine also featured on Elias' site. Issue 15 includes an edited and slightly abridged version of my recent Berlin photo post (The Big B) where the usual "mordant observations" are allowed free reign - pdf version here.

As luck would have it I also have a piece in the upcoming issue of Quaderns where I have written about the preservation and conservation in domestic architecture. Updated link to come when it comes out but thanks to Pär Eliaeson at Kritik and Mario Ballesteros at Quaderns for the invitations to contribute.

Thanks are also due to Douglas Murphy who includes this blog in his new year's honours list at Entschwindet &Vergeht. Very kind and I shall do my best to continue bucking the alarming recent trend in blogicide. In the spirit of this see below for a new post on an old subject.

Last chance to see

2012-01-04T09:44:00.000Z

So I finally went to see the V+A's Post Modernism exhibition just a week or two before it closes, which is ironic (ho ho) given the amount of time I've spent talking about the whole thing over the last few months. After two launch events for Radical Post Modernism and various talks, reviews, articles and twitter based exchanges, the whole po-mo jamboree seems to be finally leaving town, a few fake porticoes and Doric columns left lying in the dust behind it.

The exhibition itself was a bit of a disappointment, a strange and oddly empty experience after all the preamble. It started off OK with flickering neons and images of burning chairs but it lost track halfway through and had completely petered out by the end. The best section, perhaps for obvious reasons, was the architecture room where the design of the exhibition and the material in it seemed to work together, reinforcing some of the movements formal and conceptual themes. The diagonal cut back at the end of the first room quoted the kind of spatial distortions employed by Venturi, Moore etc to smart effect. It turned out to be the exhibitions most knowing and confident moment, a point where the curators seemed to agree on what they were curating and why it might be interesting.

After the architecture room came another one almost entirely devoted to Memphis, the Italian avant-garde group of designers and architects. I'm a big fan of Memphis but in this context you only need to see one or two garishly patterned Formica coffee tables to get the point. And then came a room looking at pop music decorated with scaffolding and chain-link fencing like the sort of 1980's nightclub frequented by Molly Ringwould. This seemed both painfully literal and inexplicably naff after the clever spatialities of the first room. No excuses about post modernism being about bad taste will wash. This was sincere enough even though it was purportedly talking about manufactured images and unstable identities.

After this there was the brief respite of Factory records and Vaughn Oliver (and the happy surprise of coming across those fabulous old album sleeves) and then tea pots, tea pots and more tea pots. By this point it seemed like someone had merely dragged the Design Museum back to its original home. Nothing, not even New Order's sublime Bizarre Love Triangle could redeem the slow fizzle of the exhibition and I wandered out into the inevitable gift shop puzzled by what had been included and why.

Surely confusion is the most post modern thing of all though? Well, no not really. I don't hold with the 'it's-all-relative-innit?" school of shoulder shrugging po-mo and I see no reason why the story should be harder to tell than previous ones on Cold War Modernism or the Arts and Crafts. Perhaps eager to avoid too much 'bad' '80's architecture, the V+A felt they had to reach out to more respectable cultural objects. Hence diversions into (of all people) Annie Lennox, but nothing on genuine forefathers like Richard Hamilton and very little on Post Modern theory or its literary/theoretical cultural output.

Perhaps they were right too. So many of the reviewers of the exhibition admitted to dislike or even revulsion at the objects on display. But are those Memphis coffee tables really so shocking? Or even Terry Farrel's TV-AM, a building which strikes me as far less nauseous than any number of contemporary warehouse conversions (and just look at its intended replacement). I've written before about knee-jerk misunderstandings of architectural post modernism but is it so hard to look at, say, the model of the Vanna Venturi House and not see a smart, sophisticated piece of architecture? How weak stomached do you have to be to be offended by a stuck on dado rail especially when it means you entirely overlook the thing it's stuck on to?

So, I left the exhibitions confused about all the fuss. Yeah, I know (Alessi) kettles and pots and all that but the interesting questions remain unanswered. Style and Substance concentrated instead on the objects and cultural fluff of the 1980's. It treated po-mo as a momentary lapse of taste, an over-stuffed interregnum before the proper business of modernism continued. Whilst comforting to some this reading is highly problematic, not least because it fails to use or even acknowledge any of the lessons learnt along the way. Not only does such a reading ignore the important developments initiated by post modernism - an awareness of the role of taste and class, a willingness to open up architecture to other disciplines, a critical re-reading of the architectural canon itself - but it allows modernism to return minus its social and political conviction. A modernism, in short, eviscerated of cultural content and prissily obsessed with refining its own limited stylistic vocabulary. What kind of victory is this?

Post modernism isn't the inevitable bedfellow of neo-liberalism of popular demonology, as both Kester Rattenbury and myself attempted to point out in our essays in Radical Post Modernism. Confining its influence almost entirely to the 1980's leads to the conclusion that po-mo is inseparable from the politics of Reagan and Thatcher. To conflate it with neo-liberalism is a classic case of shooting the messenger. As this otherwise unrelated article attests, nothing invites post modern scepticism more than its complete disavowal.

Post modernism's really interesting developments occurred in the late '60's and early '70's when it engaged explicitly with social and cultural issues and was still attempting to revitalise modernism rather than deny its relevance. The importance of post modernism today - beyond a recherche parlour game of perverser-than-thou taste - lies in exploring the avenues it opened up beyond modernism, rather than a return to pre-modernism. For that reason, historicism is probably its least interesting contribution. I don't have a problem in using historical forms in order to break out of modernism's more repressive stylistic constraints but it also leads to the new orthodoxy of Andrés Duany and co. Likewise, post modern urbanism is far more useful as an explosive critique of masterplanning than as an excuse for the spatial monotony of New Urbanism.

All museums are full of dead things so perhaps one shouldn't accuse the V+A of petrifying its subject. This is a historical show and its aim is not to signpost the future or make polemical statements. Having said all that it also feels like time to move on, start reading and writing about something else on this site. Having been half-jokingly invited to explore something called Opulent Neo-Victorian Socialist Realism I think I might actually be heading the other way, to neo-rationalism, Manfredo Tafuri and Rossi at his most miserable. Sounds fun I know. Happy new year.

Land of the fading sun

2011-12-14T10:12:00.002Z

I've been mentioning the site for this photo essay for some time now but have never actually got around to writing a proper post about it. In a sense this is Part 2 of a series of posts provisionally titled Essex Modernism which I plan to self-publish and give to my relatives at Christmas. The previous post was about Silver End, near Braintree. The subject matter is also connected to the work my diploma students are doing on planned communities and model villages.

For a faintly odd and deeply conservative kind of town, Frinton-On-Sea in Essex has more than its fair share of interesting architecture. There's Charles Voysey's The Homestead for a start, an arts and crafts masterpiece tucked away on a well-to-do avenue of pleasant but pallidly derivative villas.

The Homestead is typical Voysey - roughcast white render, slate pitched roofs and stone-dressed windows - but, appropriately enough perhaps, it lacks the sculptural audacity of Broadleys, the house Voysey built in the far more dramatic landscape of Lake Windermere. Instead it sits respectfully enough behind neat clipped hedges, its similar L-shaped plan masked by picturesque jinks and shifts in alignment.

It's still lovely though, full of subtle details like the roof slates that get smaller towards the top of the roof pitch and the heart shaped metal fixings for the deep, trough-like gutters.

Voysey is criticised sometimes for using the same palette of materials and details in any situation, regardless of context, a tendency which also made him something of a hero for the early moderns. This proto-modernist reading was one that Voysey himself fiercely resisted, despite the later near ubiquity of his architectural language. His carefully tailored and beautifully crafted houses bequeathed the mass-produced suburbia of the interwar years.

Less expectedly than Voysey, Frinton also boasts a collection of genuinely modernist housing in the form of Frinton Park Estate, a model holiday town built in the early 1930' to the designs of Oliver Hill. These houses occupy a less well-to-do end of town and are relatively modest in size, albeit with generous balconies and large expanses of (originally) Crittall glazing.

Frinton Park Estate was not a commercial success - at least not at first - so only a fragment of Hill's plan was realised as he conceived it. So, his modernist villas sit amongst random bungalows, some with art-deco inflected details but most a hotch-potch of vernacular and historical styles. Plans for designs by Tecton and Erich Mendelsohn were abandoned as the style of the early houses proved hard to shift and investors pulled out.

You could write a large chunk of the history of twentieth century British domestic architecture based purely on the relationship between the two houses above. I particularly like the fact that the owner of the house on the right appears to be upping the ante by festooning his bungalow with as much Christmas bling as possible.

The most well-known of Hill's designs is the Round House, formerly the offices for the estate's development company. Rising sun motifs adorn both the garden gate and the front door, suggesting an optimism about the whole development that wasn't borne out by events.

It now sits rather demurely behind a high hedge looking out over its suburban setting as much as the restless and spectacularly gloomy North Sea beyond.

Like the similar houses designed by Thomas Tait at Silver End, Hill's villas have been absorbed into their suburban landscape and grown trad porches and garden ornaments in a seemingly unproblematic way.

They are in a varied state though, some refurbished albeit with upvc windows and coloured render and some, like this one, given excessively gaudy make-overs.

I have no idea if the slightly outre balustrade work is original but it offers more inter-war suburban optimism, complete with a rather nuclear looking sun, incongruous palm trees. Next door was a more conservative villa featuring that 1930's suburban standby the green pantiled roof.

Elsewhere, houses have fallen into slight disrepair albeit with a hint of LA, which is a hard trick to pull off in North Essex.

Someone has started building an odd, vaguely castellated garden wall around this one too. Stick it on the roof and you might have something approaching FAT's New Islington housing.

Some of the bungalows have modernist, or at least moderne inflections in the form of yet more Crittall windows and curved entrances, forming a kind of missing link between Hill's designs and the later free-for-all of post war bungaloid development.

I became slightly obsessed by the variety of these as I wandered around, each sitting on a well manicured lawn like a model on its base. Despite their disparate styles, they had an essential similarity and mechanical repetitiveness that suggests the effects of mass production are acceptable as long as not overtly expressed.

It's possible to see both the beginning and the end of something significant in Frinton. I have written about Oliver Hill before who was by all accounts a bit of a good-time party animal who gave up modernism after the war, retreating into historical styles that overtook his earlier vision of sun-washed, utopian English modernism.

Researching this post I came across an article about a mid-century modern kind of character who has been carefully buying up and refurbishing the houses one by one. I suspect this might be one of his with its well preserved original windows and freshly painted marine balustrades.

A heavily pot-holed road runs through the centre of the estate, one end of which disappears into a heavily wooded area reminiscent of a George Shaw painting. I followed it and came across this dilapidated outpost. I wandered around it for some time trying to work out what its orginal function might have been.

It turned out to be Frinton Park Court, its copper lettering just visible through the undergrowth. Originally it had been built as a shopping centre but like much of the estate, it had been a spectacular commercial failure and closed down. In recent years it was used by a local Masonic branch but they gave it up in the late '90's and it has been crumbling ever since.

At the rear the building appeared to be close to collapse. As I wandered around it a security guard approached me and asked me what I was doing. He seemed pleasant enough - albeit with that air of vaguely malign authority that all security guards adopt - so I told him. He was mildly incredulous that anyone should be interested in the building except for reasons of arson. It turned out that he drove down from Milton Keynes once a week to make sure that no one had burnt it to the ground.

Clean up man

2011-12-03T15:39:00.000Z

As well as managing that rarest of contemporary phenomena The New Post (see below), I have cleaned up things a bit around here too. Most obviously, I've got rid of the News from Elsewhere section which you no doubt never noticed before anyway. As well as being a side-splitting pun based on the title of William Morris' News From Nowhere, this exciting feature allowed me to link to articles on-line that I liked. However I've been experiencing compatability issues between Delicious and Blogger of late which has made linking a tiresomely erratic business. More importantly, this function has been entirely superceeded by twitter so I got rid of it.

I've also updated my links to other sites to be more reflective of what I'm currently reading, which includes most noticeably the excellent group blogs on the 1970's, 80's and 90's. Recent stuff over there has included Owen H on the majesty of the Lloyd's Building (which kindly links to a piece I wrote on Richard Rogers here a while ago) and great pieces on Chris Burden, Kim Wilde and Forest Gump. Oh yes, and on the magnificent though admittedly "grandiose and absurd", Cameo.

I've also been enjoying this, partly for the title but also for some excellent period photos of Brutalist masterpieces. In a similar vein there's also this. And check out Dirty Modern Scoundrels, Grindrod's very enjoyable blog offering the recherche pleasure of looking at Old People Walking Past Concrete Murals as well as a link to the wonderful film Reyner Banham Loves LA.

Finally and in a linking state of mind, there are some great bits and pieces in tribute to the late, great Ken Russell collected at Simon Reynolds' Blissblog.

Top of the Pops

2011-12-03T15:13:00.002Z

This might seem a little self-important or, err, teacherly, but I find myself referring again and again to a few key essays on architecture, ones that I am repeatedly drawn back to or that seem to frame abiding interests more articulately than any others. So I thought I would list them here and try to explain a bit about their continued relevance. They aren't in any particular order and no doubt reflect the period during which I studied (1989-1996) although I discovered at least a couple of them since. At least three of them therefore fit into what you might call a 'critical theory' context and one with a decidedly post-structuralist bent. I'm not sure if this should worry me overly, but I guess you tend to alight on these things at fairly formative stages. I also read more generally off-topic now than I did then so this is an unashamedly architectural list. Nevertheless....

Roland Barthes, The Blue Guide (taken from Mythologies)

"The Blue Guide hardly knows the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven". Thus begins Barthes' deconstruction of the ubiquitous European travel guides. In it he unravels the deep protestant longing for exertion (both physical and ethical) that lies behind our appreciation of hilly and mountainous terrain, a "morality of effort and solitude" as he puts it. I have a trivial but autobiographical reason for particularly loving this essay when I could have picked anything from Barthes' Mythologies for this post. As an Essex boy born to parents with a deep dislike of that much denigrated and mostly flat county (don't ask me why they live there still) I have an abiding aversion to the constant eulogies to the supposed hilly superiority of counties like Yorkshire that accompanied family trips around the country. Reading Barthes' merciless exposure of the moralistic cant behind such prejudice was revelatory for a whole host of other reasons too. Most importantly it brought a deep seriousness to everyday things, a method of prizing apart systems of popular meaning that remains hugely valuable for architectural criticism today.

Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages ( taken from Translations from Drawing to Building)

Not many posts here go by without a reference to Bob Evans who I was luck enough to have as a tutor back in my second year of degree. Evans was a fabulously original architectural historian (and occasional architect) who wrote extensively on prison design, Mies van der Rohe, the relationship between projection and architecture and the social customs embedded within everyday architecture. This essay is perhaps the most perfect encapsulation of the latter approach, an elegantly constructed detective story investigating relationships between privacy and domestic layouts. Evans describes the development of the internal corridor as a mechanism of separation, one that replaced older, medieval dwelling layouts with their interconnecting rooms and consequent casual sociability. Evans goes on to relate this development to a growing fear of carnality and puritan ideals of physical separation, one that he brings forward into modernism and designs such as the House For Frictionless Living.

Miriam Gusevich, The Architecture of Criticism (taken from Drawing, Building Text)

Not a hugely well-known essay (or writer as far as I am aware) but this is a superb essay that subtly but devastatingly picks apart the canon of architecture. To be more precise, it picks apart the way that the canon of architecture is constructed and the way that it acts in parallel to the physical act of construction. Questions of architecture's autonomy, its distinction from building and the various hierarchies of criticism (critique, commentary etc.) are examined with a lucidity and clear-sightedness that never over-simplifies or generalises the argument.

Erwin Panofsky, The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls Royce Radiator (taken from Three Essays on Style)

From Panofky's Three Essays on Style, this fabulously titled and faintly bizarre essay relates the design of the Rolls Royce Phantom IV to the tradition of Picturesque gardens. Once you get the idea that the Palladian radiator set into the rolling curves of the car body is directly analogous to the designs of Capability Browne or Humphrey Repton, it's impossible to look at an old Roller again and not see it as, essentially, Stourhead on wheels. The essay has other subtleties and avenues that I am doing a slight disservice to here but its methodology opens up a whole new avenue of architectural criticism that traces the genealogy of architectural elements into other areas of design and popular culture.

Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism (taken from Sexuality and Space)

A companion in a way to the Robin Evans piece, this essay looks at the psychological complexities of the domestic interior with particular regard to Adolf Loos. Apart from anything else, Colomina turned me on to the perverse brilliance of Loos' interiors and their profound reflections on bourgeoisie life. Through both drawings and text, Colomina demonstrates the subtle ways that Loos plays out the tensions of family life as well as the twin urges towards modernity and tradition. Elaborate circulation systems, interlocking volumes, gendered spaces, secret views and reflective, mirrored surfaces are all employed by Loos in his domestic choreography, like a Brechtian drama about family life. Colomina's essay has effectively re-written the party line on Loos to the extent that virtually no description of his work goes by without some reference to it. Which brings us back to Gusevich in a way, and, cheating a bit, another essay by Colomina called Media Constructions. In it, Colomina equates architecture with criticism, or, at least, a product of discourse as much as physical construction. Criticism, she suggests, is the discursive realm in which buildings become architecture. Architects often denigrate criticism, seeing it as parasitic or secondary to the act of designing and building. Colomina shows that they are entirely co-dependent. One doesnt' exist without the other.

The Big B

2011-11-15T14:28:00.004Z

So, here it is, the much heralded Berlin photo essay. As you will see, the weather was generally lousy when I was there, excitingly cold but also wet and overcast, which didn't help my photo skills. But, you know, that doesn't matter because Berlin is fabulous however shitty the weather. I only had two full days so much was missed and the pictures taken reflect my own preoccupations, mostly with the architecture of the 1970's and '80's. I also avoided (not deliberately) too much in the way of memorials, including Liebeskind's Jewish Museum. Having said that.....

....our first stop was bang in the middle of this model of the Berlin Wall memorial at Bernauerstrasse. This is an open-air museum assembled on former no-man's land at a spot which a large number of people died attempting to cross. The photo shows the rusty site model of the area that sits at one end. The memorial prompted a discussion about the semantics of contemporary monuments. These generally employ the language of high art sculpture, an abstract minimalism which confers an aesthetic solemnity whilst avoiding saying anything too specific.

The wall memorial followed this tendency, borrowing most obviously from Richard Serra in its language of abstract lumps of Cor Ten steel although these were combined with slightly jarring information boards carrying much more didactic meaning. The metal poles that follow the line of the absent wall were also reminiscent of Carmody Groarke's 7/7 memorial in Hyde Park.

The ostensible object of our trip was to visit the defunct (since 2008) Templehof airport, where we were taken on an extensive tour that included the mile long roof of the terminal building. This is the largest area of roofing felt I have ever seen. The ridges on the darker, higher section were apparently intended to form a grandstand from which to view Nazi aviation parades. The service towers that punctuate the circular plan at regular intervals provide access exclusively to the roof for this purpose.

Loose collections of anonymous modern cars seen from the roof invited immediate Bourne style fantasies of spy assignations and cold-war hand-overs.....

.......before moving on in equally mysterious fashion.

Under the under-croft. Below the expanses of roofing felt, there is a vast, cantilevered roof awning which serves no specific purpose.

Inside, the main arrivals/departure hall now plays host to displays and exhibitions under the slightly weird title of Stage For The New. The interior is used very much as an as-found object, with arrival/departure boards appropriated to communicate display information and everything else pretty much untouched and unchanged.

Which results in a strange fetishisation of banal elements such as the baggage carousels and check-in desks and the sense that the building has literally just been vacated. I have no idea whether the redevelopment of the site - which includes a vast park designed by GrossMax - will impact on the original architecture, but it has been left largely untouched so far.

Having said that, the central section of the airport terminal has grown an odd 1970's extension in the London Bridge idiom.

As part of Templehof Frieheit's Urban Pioneers programme, a raggle taggle allotment has grown up at the Neukolln end of the runway. The massive bulk of the terminal buildings loom menacingly in the background of this and other ad-hoc, artist initiated temporary uses of the site. Some of these will continue while the perimeter is developed into a series of thematic areas including "Health and Wellness", "Smart Technologies, Production and Infrastructure" and "Multi-cultural Society and Integration". The central open-area will remain as a park.

I flew into Berlin Templehof once. The plane felt as though it was genuinely going to land on someones roof. The rental values of the Neukolln district headed in the opposite direction from the planes when the airport closed causing problems for its generally poor and predominantly Turkish population. The area also gives its name to a song on Bowie's Heroes album if that's of interest.

The Templehof building - designed by Ernst Sagebiel under Albert Speer's direction - is typical of the National Socialist-era buildings in being a vast, largely featureless form of classicism stripped of overt decoration and employing a brutal typological simplicity. Norman Foster apparently called Templehof "the mother of all airports" and, it's true, like the Olympic Stadium, the building achieves a kind of crudely emphatic example of the type.

The limestone on the Templehof buildings has an odd, patchwork appearance, like a form of natural camouflage, perhaps appropriately enough. Not entirely unlike.....

......Stirling's Social Science Research Campus. This is one Stirling building that I'm pretty ambivalent about. Good points: it has a completely ridiculous plan - how I would have loved to witness the client presentation when he suggested a basilica crashed into an octagonal tower as the best solution for the cafeteria block. It has his trademark horrible colours and some full-on Post Modern silliness in the Gothic arches and ruinous fragments that adorn the garden. Bad points: all of the above plus the disturbing way the various building 'types' collide at the corners which, to be fair, is much more distressing in plan than in reality.

I remember this building being reviewed in the AR when I was a student and, as was usual in the AR, they were pretty furious about it. The reviewer - who may have been Peter Davey - was virtually apoplectic about the fact that Stirling had failed to resolve the way that the radiators were positioned in relation to the ramped areas. Davey fumed about the fact that they followed the line of the cills and thus, at the lowest points, hung slightly ridiculously in mid-air. He was right; they do.

Hmmmm.

These window frames were much puzzled over too when the building was completed. How to explain their strange cill-less formation and gargantuan over-shading effect in a city not known for its excessively bright sunlight. I have two theories. One, it was a rubbish joke on the architect's name - to whit: Big Jam. Two, it was a reference to Templehof which has similarly chunky stone frames albeit ones that are almost flush to the wall surface. Knowing Stirling's legendary insensitivity and fondness for the bad taste gag, I suspect the latter.

There are the familiar mushroom headed columns and acid colours on the inside. The balustrades are an oddly straight, floral pattern though, not particularly Stirling-esque at all. They appear in various places, presumably as a straight copy of existing ones elsewhere in the building.

The original building to which Stirling's creation is attached has some of the most amazing rustication I have ever seen.

Some of which is the result of shelling and street fighting at the end of the second world war. When I was in Berlin in the mid 1990's quite a few buildings still bore extensive bullet hole damage, most of which appears to have been repaired these days.

From Stirling I took a walk to Mitte, the area where most of the IBA's 1980's housing blocks congregate. This is a veritable architectural zoo and there are buildings by OMA, Peter Eisenman, Aldo Rossi (above), Herman Hertzberger, John Hejduk and Zaha Hadid amongst others. Many of these have been described thoroughly and extremely well on the now sadly quiet Architecture in Berlin blog.

The picture above is one of two Rossi buildings that are within a couple of streets of each other. I was a big fan of Rossi as a student, especially of his early miserabilist phase. I still am really and this block isn't wholly awful with Rossi caught somewhere between the bleak melancholy of his early work and the later slightly distressing attempts at overt jolliness.

It occupies an entire Berlin block and attempts to appear as a random assortment of different buildings. Although this conceit is pursed pretty thoroughly, it only ever really appears as a number of Rossi buildings butting up against each other.

A number of courtyards are carved out of the centre and take on different characteristics. This one was pretty straight classicism though, albeit with a couple of not particularly exciting mannerist touches.

The stone cladding has been cut with a disconcerting diagonal grain making it look oddly unreal, more like a pastel rendering of granite blocks rather than the real thing. At ground level it was a bit grim it has to be said.

Very early Zaha. The renders for this - much reproduced and discussed when I were a nipper - showed a billowing, semi-translucent blue facade which on reality turns out to be a slightly cranked one clad in dirty gold panels that may or may not be a nod to nearby Scharoun.

It has quite a nice slot of space where it meets the next block though that allows access to a raised garden/plaza and some soberly planned deck access apartments.

ZHA's work has become so vastly overblown and didactic since this point that it's almost impossible to imagine her working on some practical kitchen layouts. Here, though, the obvious constructivist borrowings were still being applied to a relatively mundane programme and seem all better for it.

I was happy to see that the campaign (by Jim at Architecture in Berlin, amongst others) to save John Hejduk's housing from a fate worse than demolition has been largely successful. The two low blocks have been carefully refurbished and repainted in the correct gloomy shade of green. The gable end 'faces' still stare out lugubriously from behind their hooded lids.

The central skinny tower is still yet to be refurbished and much effort is being made with the Dulux colour swatch.

The odd, enigmatic spandrels fixed through the facade have also been retained.

Backing onto the Hejduk plot is a very hard to place building by the late Raymond Abrahim, a favourite of Kenneth Frampton and supposed Critical Regionalist. The street frontage is a strange, neo-constructivist composition...

....while the rear - visible from the garden of the Hejduk buildings - contains a much more straightforwardly modernist, curving courtyard.

A 1990's avant-garde collision occurs at the crossroads that used to be known as Checkpoint Charlie. OMA and Peter Eisenman's blocks stand on either side from each other. Neither building has been regarded subsequently as high points of their authors' careers, although I have a soft spot for OMA's, particularly as it features a bit of that Memphis derived fauz marble patterning that they used to use.

Both buildings are also victims of circumstance. Much of the logic of OMA's has been lost now that the ground floor parking and turning area for allied vehicles has been filled in with supermarkets.

Eisenman is doing his whole twisted grid thing of course, the effect somewhat diminished due to the cancellation of a park/remembrance garden that was to be constructed as an extension of the block's geometry behind.

From the area around Friedrichstrasse I wandered towards Potsdamer Platz, which contained almost no buildings at all when I was last here. Now it hosts the enormous and enormously horrible Sony Centre and a predictably nasty glass tower by Helmut Jahn. The success of architects like Jahn is a mystery to me. I've yet to meet anyone who rates him, so who commissions this stuff? The architecture around Potsdamer Platz flits between a blingy, commercial vacuity - International Westfield Moderne you could call it - and a worthy, sombre modernism.

Some of the more interesting buildings seem to be searching for the missing link between early New York or Chicago and Stalin era Soviet Realism, a very Berlin kind of meeting point I guess between early modernism and its aftermath. I've no idea who designed these two but they mine a very current seam in European architecture of a stripped back modernism with classical inflections, the kind of architecture that seems eminently suitable for European banks and expensive but tasteful hotels. Appropriately enough the one on the left is the Ritz Carlton.

These two towers epitomise the two tendencies perfectly. On the left is one of Renzo Piano's offering (of which more later) and on the right is Hans Kolhoff's very '30's NYC skyscraper. I liked the latter a lot, particularly the Alvar Aalto at MIT trick of mixing in 'bad' overfired bricks to give a subtle textuality to the precision brickwork in general.

The more I wandered around Kolhoff's building the more I admired it. I'd go so far as to say it was the best new building I saw in Berlin which is no doubt a staggeringly unfashionable thing to say in the context of German architecture right now. I've no idea about Kolhoff's current standing but fifteen years ago he was a big cheese, someone who, along with Joseph Kleihues - the director of the IBA during the 1980's - shaped the way that Berlin was rebuilt after the cold war, much to the annoyance of more obviously progressive architects. Anyway, this building is very finely proportioned, beautifully built and has a nice moment of bling on the top with a gold, pointy parapet.

Back to Piano, who must be the most second most overrated architect in the world, after Rafael Vinoly. Berlin seems to have escaped Vinoly but, boy, has it suffered from the hand of Renzo. His work around Potsdamer Platz is truly dreadful, an incoherent mess of vomit coloured, terracotta clad overstuffed blocks that together seem to suck the life out of the city.

The architecture is both incredibly fussy and strangely devoid of character, all clipped on panels and extraneous pieces of fiddly flim-flam that fail to make up for an obvious underlying blandness. Nothing quite fits together either.

The streets leading up to the mall are almost all back-of-house access for retail units, creating an arse-end urban landscape of grilled up openings and very little else. Slightly more dispiriting than the blasted cold war no-man's land that existed here before in fact.

This kind of thing seems to happen a lot too, where blocks arranged at slight angles to one another create odd alleyways to nowhere....

......or to private inner sanctums that need to be roped off.

Insultingly, the building adjacent to Hans Scharoun's magnificent library fuses his gold cladding panels AND Piano's interminable terracotta tiles to spectacularly ill-advised effect.

It's very strange, this architecture of polite banality combined with bombastic commercialism. You could say that Piano is trying hard to humanise a demanding commercial brief but that wouldn't explain the all round awfulness of the architecture. The fact that the tallest building is topped off with an illuminated sign for the fucking Blue Man Group says it all really....

Inside the mall was a wooden model which of Potsdamer Platz and the nearby Kulturforum which includes Mies's Neue Nationalgalerie.

The real thing was nearby, across a wide street from Scharoun and with Stirling's miniature collage city sticking up a candy coloured finger in the background.

I'm never quite sure what to make of Mies. I love the Barcelona Pavilion with its exquisite surfaces, myriad reflections and complex symmetries and the staggering purity and indifference to circumstance of the Farnsworth House is admirable. In the case of the Nationalgalerie though, I am usually left admiring the epic uselessness of the space, the fact that he invented a modernist language of solemnity and grandeur that is given full such reign here that to describe it as a gallery or to go there intending to look at art seems to be missing the point entirely.

Its use of space is mind blowing. Almost nothing happens in the upper part that is generally considered to be, you know, the building. Instead, Mies' vast abstract walls of marble and wood sail serenely across acres of space beneath the deep, dark grid of the ceiling. Below ground are the galleries and a sort of sunken, corporate atrium. The bookshop is tiny, completing the buildings lofty disregard for mere corporeal concerns.

Its scale and indifference to site, the way it removes itself from the city and settles behind hedges, manicured lawns and, of course, the granite plaza, is also very American and corporate and, in a strange sort of way, rather suburban. Or at least non-urban.

At the back is a slightly unsung, deeply sunk sculpture court.

Across the road, Hans Scharoun's vast golden ship of a building, the Staatsbibliothek, is birthed. From the outside you could be forgiven for wondering what on earth is going on, given the building's wilful incoherence. There is nothing that could be described as a front or a back and the entrance is completely unsung. As difficult as it is to grasp the rationale behind the loose collection of granite clad blocks that cluster around the gold panel clad hulk of the reading rooms - and as much as I agree with my late tutor James Madge who despaired of the uncomfortable angle in the middle - it is unbelievably good on the inside.

Bob Evans once said that one of Scharoun's great virtues was his lack of taste. He was spot on. Scharoun's buildings have very little in the way of decorum or restraint. In fact, they are exceptionally bling: gold cladding, stained glass, perforated metal balustrades, space-age light scoops and pistachio green carpets jostle together within a space that is more landscape than interior.

It's sheer spatial generosity is overwhelming, as is the intensity of stuff going on. Lights come in every conceivable format: hanging, recessed, globular, chandelier, coloured glass, florescent strip and backlit kitchen sink.

As if to prove Evans' point, the rather outre balustrade finials are modelled on the shape of Terry's Chocolate Orange.

A rather un-heroic shot of Sharoun's Library which nonetheless has an exciting mission-control-under-refurbishment air to it. There is simply so much space in this building that you get the impression no one knows quite what to do with much of it and so patches lie dormant or act as informal repositories for obsolescent library equipment.

Another shot which could have been of a set designed by Ken Adam for a megolamiacal Bond villain. Ordinarily, this wouldn't necessarily be a compliment in my book but there's something about the fact that Sharoun achieves this level of brilliance in casually un-showy ways that seduces.

Back outside, the dimpled gold cladding is still like nothing else in Berlin. Except Sharoun's other building, the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall, which I didn't get to go into and which sits across the road. The Philharmonic, with its epically complex circulation systems and brilliant bonkers section, was originally clad in something much more pragmatic than gold panels. These were only added in the 1980's when much of Scharoun's work around the Kulturforum was finally completed.

After Scharoun I headed to Mitte to see some *adopts Kevin McCloud voice* Exciting Contemporary Architecture. In this case it was Arno Brandlhuber's studio and gallery on Tort Strasse. Built on the site of a failed development and accepting the constraints of the existing basement and lift shaft, the building is an urbane riff on local building and planning laws, exploiting the site for all its worth and turning this into a sardonic architectural syntax.

The language is neo-Brutalist, bare concrete and industrial materials used in an artfully as-found manner. There were some nicely disconcerting spaces inside including the one above offering a sharply angled view up to pedestrians on the pavement. There was also a somewhat inexplicable chrome Barcelona Pavilion column in the office space to remind you that you can never escape the shadow of Mies....

Finally, I trekked out to the Olympic Stadium on a particularly glum late afternoon, following a small trickle of visitors through the park.

The stadium itself is a bludgeoning, parade ground piece of shock and awe. Everything - floors, walls, ceilings, sculptures and totemic clock towers - is made of the same material, a porridge-brown limestone that absorbs light and looks like a computer render of ancient Rome.

It is an utterly relentless and intimidating as a piece of architecture, as you might imagine. Expressively it inhabits the strange neo-medievalism of dungeons and dragons and certain bits of science fiction: faux flaming torches and vast fortress like steel doors have a kind of primitism that echoes the brute force of the building's planning. In amongst all this are incongruous bits of well-meaning, contemporary signage.

The stadium's current status is highly ambiguous. It is a working stadium - home to Hertha Berlin football club - as well as a museum about the 1936 games and a relic of the National Socialist era. So, information boards detailing Hitler's close involvement in the design sit alongside signage for the hospitality suites in the same way that the jaunty, high tech roof structure perches on the vast stone colosseum below.

In the Marathon Gate - the only break in the stadium's relentless oval ring of searting - sits the bronze bowl for the Olympic flame, a ceremony that was revived for the '36 Berlin games. On the day that I visited a man was selling corporate golf days and idly whacking balls down the vast steps to the running track.

The park in which the stadium sits also contains the former 1916 games stadium which for 1936 was turned into a parade ground. It is looked over by two enormous equestrian statues in the Nazi romantic-realist style and a stripped classical column adorning Hitler's grand stand.

Two further towers - one supporting a clock and the other a swastika - mark the edge of the grounds...

...where heroic, naked Aryans are depicted flinging discuss and pole vaulting.

The Olympic pool lies off to another side of the park and appears to be in working order. The top tier of stands were removed after the games but it's an impressive if desolate looking structure. By this point the sun was going down and a beer in the reassuringly unchanged Kapelle bar in Prenzlauer Berg loomed, so I off headed towards the huge S Bahn station that was also built for the games.

Once there, over the tree tops, loomed Le Corbusier's nearby Unite, which I failed to find the entrance to. It was time to leave.

A Tent City

2011-11-13T15:17:00.001Z

Art gallery

Church (multi-denominational)

General Store

Hospital

Lecture theatre

Library

University

Stuff

2011-11-10T12:42:00.000Z

While I wrestle with a lengthy post about Berlin and a short one about the worst new building in London, here are a few reviews and bits and bobs that I should link to.

Firstly, a few reviews of FAT's issue of AD, Radical Post Modernism. Steve Parnell has a somewhat terse review in AJ (£) but a longer and more expansive piece about the talk at the RA in which we took part in Architecture Review. David Rosenberg has written a not wholly complimentary but pretty perceptive review in BD (more £, unfortunately). Neither picks up exactly on our reason for writing about (and doing, I suppose) post modernism in the first place but both are surprisingly sympathetic to a revisiting of this still much-reviled architectural movement.

Interestingly, both writers attempt - for obvious reasons - to distinguish between post modernism as a critical approach and post modernism as a historical style, which is something we also do if not exactly all the time - the 'toxicity' of Po Mo being simultaneously its most useful and annoying quality. This was a point that come up at our official launch of the edition at a reassuringly packed Architectural Association last week. Having said all that, this subject, together with the seemingly endless panel discussions connected to the V+A's Style and Substance exhibition, is starting to feel like a rather well trampled path.....

Finally, a note about a personal contribution to architecture practice We Made That's newspaper The Unlimited Edition. I've taken part in their High Street Pick'n'Mix, an Exquisite Corpse style exercise pasting together a number of individual shop fronts by different designers into a fantasy high street. Mine is a kind of lopsided tribute to Sheffield's Castle Market and makes use of my latest discovery in the field of architectural representation; the hand drawing. David Knight's missing slice of Wickham's Department Store on the Mile End Road realised as a monument to the empty shop unit is particularly nice....

Copies of The Unlimited Edition are available at the Whitechapel Ideas Store and Holly Lewis of We Made That will be talking about it here.

Alternative Endings

2011-10-30T20:26:00.000Z

Over at Entschwindet and Vergeht, Douglas Murphy has a really very interesting post about a building and an event that I had never heard of. The Summerland entertainment complex on the Isle of Mann nearly burnt down in a horrendous fire in the 1970's. Douglas' post touches on a whole range of things that I've written about here before including the idea of artificial, controlled environments, endless megastructures, compressed geographies, technological failure and the architecture of escape.

Douglas also suggests that Summerland can be seen as an allegory for the end of Modernism, an alternative to that other well-known crime scene Pruit Igoe. Coincidentally over at Strange Harvest, Sam has published an amazing set of photos of the ruins of Pruit Igoe, the site now almost completely erased by vegetation.

A third, alternative, ending for modernism is posited by David Knight in his excellent analysis of Post Modern urbanism in this month's Architecture Today. Intriguingly, David grounds the rejection of modernist spatial planning within the mileu of 1970's London as described in Jon Savage's punk history England's Dreaming.

David's essay also contains one of the more thoughtful and informed descriptions of the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, which allows me to gratuitously mention a short piece I wrote for Building Design last week arguing for the couple to be awarded the RIBA's Gold Medal. Venturi and Scott Brown are nominated for the award pretty much every year and pretty much every year they get rejected. This is clearly ridiculous given the enormity of their contribution to architectural culture and only succeeds in highlighting British architecture's hopeless parochialism. You can read my argument (and Jack Pringle's reposte) here.

Status Update

2011-10-28T16:26:00.000Z

I'm just back from Berlin where I saw some extraordinary buidings by Scharoun, Kollhoff and the little known Mies van der Rohe as well as some truly awful ones by Renzo Piano. I will be posting up a vast amount of inferior quality photos linked by facetious comments very soon.

Also of note is that the AA will be hosting a launch event for Radical Post Modernism on Monday night (that's the 31st, which is Halloween appropriately enough) and it's open to all. Link here.

Post Modern Myths

2011-09-29T10:26:00.000Z

Detail of James Stirling's Staatsgalerie: Ho ho ho. Photograph via.

In conversations (alright, arguments) about post modernism, a number of criticisms come up over and over again. Often I find myself mildly exasperated by these so in order to get it out of my system and become a less pedantic individual, I've attempted to tackle them one by one. So, here they are, the five most prevalent myths about architectural post modernism:

1. It's full of unfunny jokes (see the 'ruined' cladding on James Stirling's Staastgalerie and the columns that don't meet the ceiling in VSBA's Sainsbury Wing). Well, firstly they aren't meant to be funny. Secondly, they aren't even jokes, at least in the traditional sense. They are devices, or tactics, used to make evident various contradictory or paradoxical aspects of contemporary buildings.

2. It's superficial (see false facades, stuck on pediments, thin cladding panels etc.). The thing is, no one building is any less physically there than any other. It's a question of visual/tectonic emphasis. Peter Zumthor's thermal baths, for instance, stress mass and solidity although they are constructed in the manner of most modern buildings. Many post modern buildings de-emphasise the same things for different aesthetic aims. Superficiality in post modern architecture is a rhetorical device then, not a physical fact.

3. It's exactly the same as New Urbanism (see Seaside in Florida, Disney's Celebration, Poundbury etc.) Whilst there is an edge to pomo that undoubtedly has affinities to New Urbanism, they are by no more means synonymous. In fact, architects like Venturi Scott Brown stress their lack of sympathy for the pernicious influence of New Urbanism and its obsession with design codes and (sinisterly) polite contextualism. They are as likely to stress the importance of buildings not fitting in to their context, and of the importance of difference, disjunction and counterpoint in making vital cities.

4. It's the hand-maiden of neo-liberal capitalism (see countless pedimented banks and any building designed in the mid-'80's). Fair point, unless you also ask what current architectural style isn't the hand-maiden of neo-liberalism? At least, as the artist Pablo Bronstein has pointed out, post modernism has the virtue of shameless honesty on this question. Actually, I'm being a bit flippant. In facing up to the mechanics and effects of neo-liberalism (rather than posing behind a veneer of radical chic or retreating into a minimalist ghetto), post modernism offers the possibility of critical engagement and meaningful intervention within it. I would argue.

5. It's merely ironic (see everything by and about VSBA, Charles Moore's Piazza D'Italia and, particularly, Terry Farrell's eggcups). Irony - a perfectly respectable literary and artistic device - is here conflated entirely with a camp affectation for naffness or some kind of recherche parlour game. But post modernism, at its best, is emphatically not camp*. It is critical and nuanced, self-reflexive and engaged**. It is not, I repeat not, the same thing as cocks on bicycles sporting moustaches.

*For a thorough analysis of the differences, read the chapter entitled Camp/Non-Camp in Jencks' Modern Movements in Architecture.

** Philip Johnson, I admit, was camp. But he was camp when he was a modernist too.

Radical this, radical that

2011-09-15T09:02:00.001Z

Radical Post Modernism - an issue of Architectural Design edited by FAT and Charles Jencks - is out now. I've given a brief run down of the contents of the issue on here before so I'll refrain from doing so again. But there have already been some intriguing comments about it on-line - not least Steve Parnell's assertion that "FAT are to PoMo what the Smithsons were to Brutalism". I'll post links to any reviews, flattering or otherwise.

There's been a lot of interesting writing revisiting Post Modernism too - mostly in connection with the upcoming V&A retrospective Style and Subversion - including excellent pieces by Rowan Moore and Justin McGuirk. In the Sunday Times Hugh Pearman picked his best and worst PoMo buildings (we're in the best, thankfully) and there's been a fair amount of Twitter based argy-bargy on the topic.

All of which means that a certain amount of Post Modern revival fatigue is due to set in, if it hasn't already. Hopefully, before it does there will be a launch event for RPM. More news on that to come.....

Drawn fiction

2011-09-06T13:26:00.003Z

I read Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun recently*. The story is set in Leathercombe Bay, a fictionalised version of Burgh Island in Devon, famous for its elaborate art deco hotel and the fact that it is only accessible at low tide. The hotel in Christie's novel is noticeably more traditional in appearance and her Leathercombe Island is a reduced and simplified version of the real thing. I know this because the book begins with a handy map of the Island with the novel's significant locations marked on it.

I've always been a sucker for maps at the start of books, probably due to a nostalgia for the fantasy worlds invented in the books I read as a child. In Evil Under The Sun the map plays a structural role though. It helps to pin down the action and in a very mechanical way delimits the movements of the various protagonists. The map includes a north sign and, helpfully, the island contains four bays more or less located at each point of the compass. This fictional geography forms the basis for a stilted and theatrical plot where people's actions and the movements of the sun are intertwined (The murder, for example, takes place at Pixie Cove, a place deserted in the mornings because it faces West**). Theatrical is the key word here because, as in most of her books, Christie reduces the action to a small and confined stage set from which none of the characters can escape.

I've only read one other Agatha Christie novel and that was The Murder At The Vicarage, a book I bought largely on the strength of its sub-Magritte cover art. It too contains a map, along with two plans. These drawings form a kind of architectural set, moving from the scale of a location plan showing the village in which the story is set through a site plan of the vicarage and its immediate surroundings and, finally, a detail plan of the library in which the murder takes place. Again, the plans are intrinsic to the plot and to the deduction of the murder. The various movements of the characters and the possibility of them being witnessed depends on entrances and exits to rooms and houses. The drawings provide the factual basis against which various dubious alibis and false claims are exposed.

Like the fantasy landscapes of children's books, these drawings describe a place that is entirely consistent within its own logic. As it doesn't actually exist it can't contain any errors and whatever is drawn becomes unchallengeable fact. This is interesting because drawings play a slightly different role in architecture. For architects drawings are a source of ambiguity. Or rather, their capacity for ambiguity is a source of concern. We rely on them for accuracy in the form of surveys and dimensioned plans and we can even get sued if they are incorrect, but we also manipulate them for our own ends. Architects frequently draw things in subtly inaccurate ways in order to 'fudge' a key view or exploit the full range of compositional devices - line weight, notation, colour and shading - in order to seduce the viewer.

Even the modes of projection are unreliable. No one ever actually sees an elevation, for instance, because orthographic projection takes no account of the way that objects recede in perspective or the specific point of view of the observer. The global view afforded by orthographic projection leads architects to focus on issues of proportion and composition that make more sense on the page than in reality. A beautiful or elegant plan is only really experienced through its representation in drawing.

Robin Evans has investigated this issue in depth, looking at how various methods of drawing projection - orthographic, isometric, perspectival - have influenced and shaped the development of architecture. Evans calls this the projective imagination or, less romantically, the projective cast. Projection in this sense is both metaphorical and literal, describing the ways that we imaginatively project a space that doesn't yet exist and the way that this space is marked out on the paper, literally constrained by the lines of projection.

The truth of drawings is thus always partial and contingent on technique. The difference between an architect's plan and Christie's one is slight but significant. Her plans don't show wall thicknesses or detail but they do include things that an architect might leave out, such as objects in rooms or the movements of a person. Architects' plans rarely describe either. They are more concerned with proportion, harmony (or sometimes its opposite), construction and materials. For Christie, the drawings record actions and events. Even when these aren't explicitly drawn, they are implied by the narrative surrounding them. Because these actions are often improbable, stretching credibility to breaking point, the drawings form a kind of proof, evidence of what is and isn't possible within the logic of the plan.

Perhaps, for a novelist, drawings are more reliable than words. As a less familiar form of representation they might be regarded as less capable of manipulation. For architects, drawings frequently prove unreliable and buildings strain at the limits of what they can accurately describe. It might be interesting then to speculate on what the history of architecture might have looked like had words been the primary means by which architects described buildings. In the the construction sequence of a building, drawings tend to come first and words after. Architects describe buildings through drawings which critics then re-describe with words. Conceivably this sequence could be reversed.

* There is a good description of the book's social milieu in Travis Elborough's history of the English seaside, Wish You Were Here.

** The book could, in a generous light, be read as a satire of the cult of the seaside and sun-worship in the 1930's.

Do it yourself

2011-09-02T14:51:00.002Z

I'm boring myself a bit here, but as my meagre marketing budget has now run out, I thought I'd point out to anyone still interested in reading Fantastic Journal's fantastic DIY pamphlet, that you can download a pdf version of it from this website, absolutely free.

In other news I have a review of Simon Reynolds' book Retromania coming out in the upcoming 100th issue of Icon *trumpet salute*. This month's issue also contains a lovely birthday card lovingly created by FAT wishing Icon all the best on their glorious century.....

I also have a very short review of a book about Terry Farrell's Post Modern interiors in the next issue of Architecture Today. After that, there will be no more talk of Po Mo, I promise.

Finally, below this update post is a proper one about the irrational/rational tendencies of high tech architecture.

Around the world

2011-09-02T14:47:00.001Z

There is a split in the history of British architecture between a supposedly rational, progressive modernism and a romantic, back-ward looking traditionalism. The recent spat between Paul Finch and the TAG (Traditional Architecture Group) is only the most recent scuffle in this long running and mostly pretty tedious argument. It's a split that finds a literal embodiment in the grand railway stations of the Victorian era where vast, glazed sheds were hidden behind historicist fronts.

This neat, binary opposition requires each side to play their part and avoid straying from the party line. One effect of this is that those same glass sheds escape scrutiny for their stranger, less rational qualities. Buildings like Paxton's Crystal Palace and Decimus Burton's Palm House at Kew are clearly more than simply examples of proto-modernism, both in terms of their remarkable programmes and the spectacular forms they develop to house them.

Burton's Palm House in particular is a beautiful object, like a delicate glass ship that has come to ground on the ornamental terraces of the Royal Botanical Gardens. The glass has a greenish tinge to it which, coupled with its gorgeously curved section, gives the building a liquid appearance, like a bubble of water, or an inverted pond on an immaculate lawn.

It aligns itself with the river too, sitting at the end of a long vista marked out by Cedars and terminating on the banks of Thames. Burton designed this element too, clearing trees and moulding the landscape as if the building had sailed serenely up the gardens and executed a neat turn at the end before setting down. The view terminates in the entrance to the Palm House and the highest section of the building containing the tallest and most extraordinary palms.

Perhaps it was towed by a flotilla of swans. Now they sit in petrified form acting as brackets holding the glass down to its stone moorings. Viewed close-up they appear to be sticking their tongues out, like the flowers in Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland.

There is something Dr Who-esque about the interior, where comically obscene looking bulbs, fronds and palm trunks loom over you like stage-set monsters. Generations of horror film directors must have come here for inspiration, from the Day of the Triffids to The Quatermass Experiment.

Like the Tardis it is also much bigger on the inside. The Palm House is a space-machine, it collapses geography so that several continents fit into a hundred square meters or so of glass sitting in south west London. Like a Dutch still life brought in three dimensions, the Palm House combines plants from disparate continents and places them in implausible proximity.

The relics of classicism in the form of distended columns and vestigial bits of decoration are reduced to skeletal supports for a new kind of architecture. The Victorian desire for efficiency created incredibly spindly elements that seem barely capable of holding the weight of the building above them.

As you travel up the spiral staircase to the walkway in the roof section it becomes so hot that condensation forms instantly on the camera lens, intensifying the fusion of the architecture and the plants until they blur into one other. At this point the building could easily be a ruin engulfed by vegetation rather than a high-tech laboratory for studying plant life.

The Palm House can be seen in the context of a desire to dissolve architecture altogether. The all glass house is a recurring fantasy in architecture, literally evident in designs by Mies and Philip Johnson but also manifest in the avant-garde experiments of the late '60's. Banham and Francois Dallegret's Un-House, Superstudio's Continuous Monument and David Greene's Experimental Bottery are all examples of 'buildings' where the architecture is almost entirely absent. These projects could be termed bucolic high-tech, a kind of techno utopia where we roam - like Archigram's "electric aborigine" - irrespective of climate and unrestrained by any physical or cultural need for separation.

In such a scenario the world also becomes a kind of playground, a place where there are no longer barriers. The phantasmagorical exhibition buildings of the Victorian period as harbingers of the contemporary dissolution of space via the Internet and digital communication as much as they are prototypes for the industrial age architecture of the 20th century. They are prophets of an age where barriers of space, place and time are continuously dissolving.

Panic on the high streets of London...

2011-08-11T17:21:00.003Z

Bucking the trend I have written something for Building Design about the riots*. It treads some of the same ground as others I guess although it leads (I hope) to more interesting questions about where the riots took place and why. In particular the focus of the violence on high streets and shopping centres is both obvious (it was about looting) and symbolic. There's much more to be said here about the spatiality of the riots and their relationship to post codes, gang geography, networked organisation and gentrification.

Wouter Vanstiphout's excellent analysis of the urban consequences of the riots is also in this week's BD and we will both be taking part in an on-line discussion hosted by the magazine on Monday lunchtime. Also worth reading is Will Wiles' eloquent and thoughtful post over on his blog Spillway.

* Incidentally, it reads a little oddly because the first para has been dropped which featured John Major's infamous quote about criminality: "We need to condemn a little more and understand a little less".

Psychogeographers announce that there is still beauty in urban decay*

2011-07-27T09:40:00.002Z

Iain Sinclair divides people. To be honest, he divides me. I'm a big fan of some of his books, Downriver most specifically, but London Orbital and bits of Lights Out For The Territory too. His work undoubtedly has a degree of cultural importance. He has documented spaces and places, processes of urban change and renewal that might otherwise have gone ignored. He's also guilty though of self-aggrandisement, self-parody, cronyism (endless vainglorious cameos from tediously eccentric friends) and, worst of all perhaps, a certain fetishisation of urban decay. Like a modern day aristocrat on the Grand Tour, Sinclair seeks out poverty and destitution and turns it into some aesthetic tableau. Rusty factory units are his romantic ruins and tramps huddled below underpasses his ruddy faced yokels.

Lately he's been popping up all over the place, proselytising against the London Olympics, or promoting his latest book Ghost Milk, depending on which side of the divide you're on. He was in The Observer on Sunday sparring with former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell about the supposed 'legacy' of the games and last night he popped up on BBC2's Newsnight. The short film Sinclair made for the programme showed him at both his best and worst. There are many reasons to be sceptical and even downright hostile to the games - the ticket allocation farce, the treatment of river boat dwellers on the River Lea and the loss of allotments, natural habitats and open space amongst them. Sinclair is right to point these things out, but there are strong arguments to be made about the economic and political effect of the games and Sinclair isn't really making them.

Instead he offers an aestheticised vision of, for want of a better term, shittyness. At one point during his film he pointed to a breakers yard and declared it as good as a Joseph Beuys artwork. This is the urban hipster version of shabby chic, an effete observation that recalls the British painters of Saint Ives patronising (in every sense) Alfred Wallis. At other points he wanders around expressing exasperation at builder's hoardings causing him some minor inconvenience or rails at the cleaning up of the boating lake in Victoria Park. But these seem like the gripes of the terminal misanthrope, a Victor Meldrew-ish exasperation of life at its most petty and a hopeless railing against any form of change. It's hard when knocking Sinclair not to come across as some vapid boosterist and one can sympathise with his visceral dislike of the language (and the effects) of regeneration, but he also has that hopeless, miserable English disease of thinking the worst of everything. The Olympics will be a disaster, he seems to say, simply because everything is. Like Marvin the Paranoid Android wandering Hackney Marshes, he suggests that all new building is pointless, all attempts at planning doomed and any development always the product of base venality.

But buildings always replace other things. They are always about destruction as well as construction and we celebrate ones now that must have appeared insensitive behemoths when they were completed. As an architect it is impossible to share Sinclair's deep but affected cynicism about new building. Sure, much of it is shit but then again, most of the buildings in the Olympic Park emphatically aren't. A couple even look genuinely beautiful. And if you can't build a new urban park in a place like Stratford, where can you? And this is the point. Sinclair's vision ultimately suggests an ever tinier and more myopic introversion, a celebrating of the incidental, peripheral, neglected and marginal to the point where you can't see anything else or do anything else ever again. He's right to rail against the class cleansing inherent in regeneration projects (although other people like Patrick Wright and Owen Hatherley have done this much better and with less sentimentality), but it's hard to get away from his own bourgeoisie conceits and fusty contraryism. Whatever, his eyeor-ish traipsing around East London made me look forward much more to the 100 metres.

* This post's title is a reference to The Onion's recent and very funny headline, link here.

Advertisement feature

2011-07-25T10:34:00.005Z

Copies of my much trumpeted* book/pamphlet on DIY - A Secret History of Architecture - have arrived on my desk. I can't speak for the text of course but it looks lovely and the pictures - which are kind of the star of the show anyway - have come out well. I have no idea where it's available from in a commercial sense - probably not W H Smith's it's fair to say - but if anyone really, really wants one then I'll send them a copy.

Below this self-promotional boosterism is a genuine, 100% new post. I've also resolved to post more regularly now that my frankly exhausting trip to Australia is over and my work/family balance has been reset to somewhere like normal. The blogosphere (architecture section) seems to have had the wind taken out of its sails a bit lately what with the relentless advance of Twitter and the fact that many of the best on-line writers have become far too successful. It feels like a little life needs to be breathed into it, so if anyone out there fancies a go, now's a good time......

* By me pretty much exclusively.

London loves

2011-07-25T10:34:00.004Z

This week's Building Design has an article celebrating (or rather "defending") the Sainsbury Wing designed designed twenty years ago by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. That a small-ish gallery building, albeit on a prominent site, completed over two decades ago should still need defending is itself pretty instructive. To a large extent the Sainsbury Wing was caught up in the cross-fire between architects (or at least the modernist majority of architects) and Prince Charles and the emblematic demise of ABK's previous scheme for the site. But that alone doesn't account for the visceral dislike the building conjures up for architects. Venturi Scott Brown may have inherited something of a poisoned chalice with the Sainsbury Wing commission but they still managed to add a toxic brew of their own.

As Ellis Woodman notes in BD's article, the building was memorably described at the time as "picturesque, mediocre slime" by the Architectural Review, a spectacular and, it has to be said, impressively venomous piece of criticism. Robert Venturi even admitted to a perverse respect for the rhetorical skills of British architecture critics in an essay recalling his building's poor reception. In BD, Denise Scott Brown offers an eloquent and reasoned explanation for the Sainsbury Wing's design process. This description has a level of lucidity that most architects would struggle to get anywhere near, but what most struck me about it was how the building's much discussed 'contextual' qualities come across less as stuffy traditionalism and more as a kind of love-letter to the city of London.

Rather than simply being about 'fitting in' - always a pretty miserable and reductive constraint on new buildings - the Sainsbury Wing's genuflections to the surroundings are more like a vividly recollected montage of the city in which it sits. The clubland of Pall Mall, the art deco of Leicester Square's nearby Odeon, the neo-Egyptian ornamentation of Leo Sullivan's office building on Shaftesbury Avenue are all recalled There's also, of course, Lutyens (the grand stair and internal 'external' wall), Soane (the galleries) and Wilkins, the architect of the National Gallery, whose stolid, unremarkable classical details are cut-up, collaged and represented on the crooked facade of VSBA's extension. And this is the thing that critics like AR's Peter Davey with their impressive levels of invective failed to spot. Because the building uses languages derived from non-modern sources, no one noticed the radical things that were being done with them. Go back and look at that rippling facade again and you will see how very odd it is, how the huge, dark openings at ground level look as if someone has cut random chunks out of a classical elevation. You will also notice the strange, ghost windows that come in and out of focus and the single, fluted corinthian column that sits, seemingly randomly in the middle of the elevation and which Denise Scott Brown likens to the plastic pin holding together a club sandwich.

What probably baffled Venturi and Scott Brown most about reactions to the building is that the English architecture that formed the basis of their love-letter to London - the mannerism of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, Soane, Lutyens and, later, James Stirling - would so appall contemporary English architecture critics. Ultimately, these brilliant architects were all, in a way, outsiders. Because mainstream English architecture is nothing if not literal, suspicious of illusion and theatricality and pragmatic to a fault. Paradox, perversity and visual wit are present in the history of British architecture, along with vulgarity, brutality and the grotesque, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. Venturi and Scott Brown's heroes were the wrong ones. Not only that, but by using them deliberately wrongly, by mixing them up and playing them off against each other, they compounded the original crime and offended the straight traditionalists into the bargain.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Scott Brown's 'defence' though, is her description of the building as a backdrop, not just to nights out in London's West End but to political protest and to the civic space the building overlooks. This is a remarkable statement not least because it downplays the formal significance of the building in a way that architects very rarely do. Scott Brown's nuanced understanding of the political role of civic space and the importance of people and events in shaping urban experience cuts across architecture's obsession with form and iconic signature. In the best sense then the building fits-in, making a contemporary contribution to the city that is subtle, critical and knowing, but also gentle, generous and self-effacing at the same time. The more you look at the Sainsbury Wing the richer and more compelling it seems. But you also don't have to look at it at all.

Non-alterations to a suburban house

2011-07-11T02:59:00.006Z

Appropriately enough in a week when I've been discussing the secret lives of ordinary homes, J G Ballard's infamously normal semi-detached house in Shepperton has appeared discreetly on the market. A news story in the Independent (first tweeted by architect David Knight) led me to a quick search of estate agent Haart's website where the 1930's crittal windowed semi-d is for sale, a snip at just £319,950.

Both the Independent story and the advert have a lot of inadvertently amusing things about them, not least the comment from a neighbour that "I doubt many people will have heard of him", referring to the best-selling and highly influential novelist who died in 2009. But the thoroughly ordinary nature of the advert is entirely appropriate to the myth that built up around Ballard's life. The fact that he lived a life of improbable anonymity in suburban Shepperton has been the subject of endless speculation by admirers of his extraordinary and futuristic writing, almost to the point of overkill.

Writers like Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis, along with countless others, have attempted to find meaning in Ballard's choice of house and his ability to live there quietly with his three children, as if it were a form of ironic commentary on his early science fiction writing. Its absolute ordinariness has itself been described as "Ballardian", a shorthand for the inexplicably strange aspects of contemporary life that seem to pass us by almost unnoticed. Such writers seem to long for Ballard to have lived in a high-rise overlooking the Westway or even a travel lodge on the edge of an industrial trading estate.

Image: Alterations to a suburban house, 1978, by Dan Graham.

Ballard's writing has never been about suburbia particularly either, certainly not in the English lit tradition of satirising the lives lived there. So what else can be gleaned by looking at pictures of the house on Old Charlton Road? That Ballard wasn't much of a gardener? Or an enthusiast for DIY, given the original Crittal windows and authentically 1930's front doorway.

But the house's significance is always held to lie in what it's not rather than what it is. It seems to resist analysis, offering instead a stunningly blank container that, like the artist Dan Graham's Alterations to a suburban house, merely reflects our projections back at us.

Ballard was a rarity in English writing, a conceptualist who used avant-garde techniques of collage and displacement to make startling and disturbing work. My favourite example of his writing is Princess Margaret's Facelift (taken from the Atrocity Exhibition), a short story of sorts which substitutes a minor member of the Royal Family's name for an anonymous 'patient x' within a medical textbook description of a plastic surgery operation. And here might be a key to the lack of symbolism to be found in Ballard's choice of house. Like the textbook that forms the basis of Princess Margaret's Facelift, his language purports to have no obvious marks of authorship. It is transparent and seemingly without value, or signature.

Given that, his house might have been just another everyday fragment adopted for convenience, a sampled piece of the ordinary life. Then again he may just have liked living there. It would also make an odd kind of sense that, as seems likely, someone who has indeed never heard of Ballard might choose to live there. Or, perhaps, following Ballard archivist Simon Sellers suggestion, an international group of enthusiasts will club together to buy it and, like the fabulously rich autobiographical interior Sir John Soane's museum, the house on Old Charlton Road's utterly normal spaces will be studied for elusive and opaque meaning for centuries to come.

Bon voyage

2011-06-30T19:14:00.002Z

Ok, so I'm off to Australia on Monday where I'll be speaking at this event in Adelaide on the 9th July. I'll also be giving another lecture on behalf of the Australian Institute of Architects in Melboure - details here.

My presentation at Flux is called Do The Wrong Thing and will form a sort of anti-manifesto, or a a list of things NOT to do as architect as a way of responding to the conference's theme of Architecture In Crisis. The Melbourne lecture will perhaps be a slightly more straightforward description of FAT's recent and ongoing work.

Anyway, I'm very excited by both and looking forward to seeing some of the architecture of Melbourne, which looks very interesting indeed. Hopefully there will be some posts about it all when I get back.....

Architect Revenge Fantasy

2011-06-24T13:40:00.000Z

As some sort of inter-blog marketing plug to draw your attention to Owen Hatherley's splendid looking new book on Pulp, here's Cocker and co performing a personal favourite of mine, 59 Lyndhurst Grove. It's another of his bored housewife/bourgeoisie skewering revenge fantasies as well as a thoroughly unfair misrepresentation of the life of an architect.

Looking Out Through Green Triangular Windows*

2011-06-16T12:50:00.003Z

(Drawing of Terry Farrel's Comyn Ching Triangle development, London - by Pablo Bronstein)

Pablo Bronstein's exhibition at the ICA - Sketches for Regency Living - is well worth checking out. I've reviewed it for next month's Icon but I'm a little late to the Bronstein party and have only just come across his fabulous little book, A Guide Post Modern Architecture in London.

The guide - which includes hand drawings of Po Mo high-points Charing Cross Station and Number 1 Poultry, as well as a photographic index of Po Mo tropes such as green triangular windows and glazed corner turrets - is introduced by a short but very interesting essay by Bronstein explaining his enthusiasm for an otherwise thoroughly reviled period in architectural history. Reading this essay is a faintly eerie experience for me personally, with its unintentional echoes of the conversations we have had in the FAT office over the years, not least in the perverser-than-thou parlour game of choosing one's favourite horrible building from the '80's.

Bronstein's justification for his love that dare not speak its name is arcane but worth repeating. His enthusiasm is rooted partly in Po Mo's shameless desire to please - all those clip on bits of pop ornamentation - and the thoroughly gauche way it goes about it. Like '80's aspirational pop music, Bronstein sees the bathos in all that straining for an ultimately elusive glamour. The fact that it represents the victory of Thatcherite consumerism only serves to remind us of a time when commercialism still had a fight to win. Post Modernism, for Bronstein, is an earlier, cruder and therefore more likeable form of naked venality. It did at least have the decency to be crass, or, at least, to obviously want to be loved. Since then, commerce has adopted a tasteful, almost invisible hipness that makes it all the more insidiousness.

I'm not entirely sure I buy all of this and my own interest in post modernism is for an earlier and more potentially dissonant form, but what does seem true is the extent to which capitalism has spread its fingers into every area of life since. Po Mo monumentalised a grotesque, grasping commercialism and this, bizarrely, gives its buildings a certain appeal today. They made a virtue of cheap, gim-crack populism in much the same way that Bronstein's other favourite period - the Regency London of John Nash - also did.

(Site plan of the proposed development of Broadgate, the UBS building is shown in red, via @mwhitfield80)

All of which is relevant to the recent non-listing of the Broadgate complex, set to be buried under a vast new UBS office building designed by everyone's least favourite architect Ken Shuttleworth. The arguments for and against the listing of Broadgate are, inevitably, flawed on both sides. But like most arguments about listing they are only partially about the aesthetic merits of the building under discussion. So people resistant to the blithe, commercial ruthlessness of the City of London and its habit of threatening to up and leave every time any form of control on its activities is hinted at - find themselves (as Will Wiles has pointed out) supporting the preservation of an earlier phase of privatised, commercial development.

The architecture of Broadgate has never been considered particularly wonderful but the argument for keeping it is more about urbanism and the relatively generous, public spaces the buildings create between each other than for the architecture itself. In fact, the clip-on stone facades and chunky travertine detailing have been put forward as a reason NOT to list them. In such situations, English Heritage occupies a position not unlike that of the European Union, that is as an occasionally useful balwark against the ambitions of right-wing administrations.

I'm no tub-thumper for conservationism, but in general I think buildings should be retained if possible. I also loathe the term fit-for-purpose and the dishonest way that it has been used to justify tearing down buildings that are still perfectly serviceable. English Heritage are clearly the last line of defence against a ruthless commercial logic that seeks to extend its opportunities indefinitely and has thus found in this instance, supporters who aren't particularly big fans of 1980's architecture.

Following Bronstein's logic, Broadgate can be seen to hail from a more innocent age, one where commercialism attempted to conduct itself according to some notion of the common good, or abide by some rules at least. So the (lost) battle for its listing represents a nostalgia for something no one ever expected to be nostalgic about. We are now reduced to mourning the civic values of 1980's architecture....

* The title of this post is taken from Pablo Bronstein's introductory essay in A Guide To Post Modern Architecture In London.

Inside Out

2011-06-13T23:28:00.001Z

My long post about Loos and Venturi was really about incidents of exterior architecture on the inside. Here's another example: Edwin Lutyens' fabulously bizarre hallway at Little Thakeham (via).

Raumplan walk through

2011-06-09T21:30:00.000Z

Interiority Complex

2011-06-07T12:37:00.000Z

This is a post exploring connections between the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and Adolf Loos. It was going to be about Charles Moore too but that seemed too much for one posting, so perhaps that will go in another, subsequent one (you have been warned). It concerns miniatures, dolls houses and inglenooks too, all of which will be familiar to anyone who's visited this blog a few times. I actually wrote something similar a few years ago, before I started blogging and had an outlet for such things so in a way it predates much of what I've written about here since.....

Interior view of the Tucker House, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, 1974.

I'm looking at a photograph of a room in a house designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The room is in the Tucker House, a tower-like timber cottage they designed in upstate New York in the mid-1970's. In the centre of the picture is a study desk and on it can be made out a copy of the Japanese architecture magazine GA Houses. The cover of the magazine features another house designed by the couple, the famous Vanna Venturi house completed in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, in 1961.

Blow up of the interior of the Tucker House, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Tucker House, 1974.

The presence of the Vanna Venturi House within the later house is interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, because it predates and therefore prefigures all the houses that came after it, Venturi and Scott Brown never really escaped from its legacy. It is probably both a blessing and a curse to design so hugely influential an object. Secondly - as Robert Somol has noted elsewhere - there is a correlation between the flattened, almost two dimensional facade of the Vanna Venturi House and its ubiquity in architectural books and magazines. It is as if the house was designed for that one iconic view of the front facade, its elevation appearing as flat as the pages in which it is reproduced. The house is in other words already a kind of representation of architecture even before it is reproduced in photographs.

Exterior of Tucker House, Venturi and Scott Brown, 1974.

The photograph of the Vanna Venturi House brings the mediated image of the couple's work into the physical interior of one of their later houses, where it is photographed again. We are effectively seeing the real design and its virtual dissemination at the same time. It's a very knowing situation in other words, one where the relation of the Tucker House to VSBA's oeuvre as a whole and its role within it is wrapped up in a kind of tight-knit ball together.

The GA cover acts as a souvenir or a miniature of the real thing, like a model of the Empire State Building displayed on a sideboard. It's interesting too then, that there is another miniaturised representation of architecture within the Tucker House in the form of the fireplace which is actually a small version of the house itself. So, the house contains a miniature representation of itself as well as a miniature representation of an earlier house by the same architects. The circular window of the house has been replaced by a mirror too so that it forms another reflection of its larger host. All this self-referentiality might seem of little consequence, not much more than a cryptic parlour game where it not for the fact that it keys into something much more interesting about the psychological aspect of houses, particularly in relation to modernity.

Interior of Tucker House, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, 1974.

For an explanation of this we need to turn to Adolf Loos, an architect who formulated an extremely subtle understanding of the role of architecture in relation to the modern condition. For Loos, writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the house performed a number of contradictory roles. In order to protect us from the alienation of our contemporary urban lives the house needed to become a kind of sanctuary. Atomised in the new city, the modern man and woman needed to retreat behind the psychologically calming walls of their suburban villa. For Loos this led to a dramatic split between the public and private persona of both the owners and the house that they lived in. While the exterior was blank, offering an appropriately sober anonymity, like a well-cut suit, the interior played out much darker and more revealing characteristics.

Adolf Loos, reading seat, Moller House, 1927.

Beatriz Colomina has investigated these split aspects of Loos' work brilliantly, also noting how he occasionally breaks his own rules at decisive points by expressing the most private parts of the interior on the outside. Thus the inglenook seat of the Moller House - which Colomina likens to a theatre box - projects out in front of the otherwise mute facade facing the street. It is as if the seat of Loos' impeccably cut suit has split right up the seam and revealed something we were never meant to see.

Adolf Loos, Moller House, 1927.

For Loos, the condition of modernity suggested that we need to keep our demons well hidden, played out within the private spectacle of the domestic interior. Which suggests an immediate paradox in that Loos' interiors become, to some extent, a representation of domestic life in themselves. His intense, interlinked space read almost like a densely plotted novel about family life. Tensions between men and women, husbands and wives, friends and lovers are not just suggested but enabled through his carefully choreographed interiors. Not only that, but their subsequent dissemination and fame meant that these interiors were actually anything but private. Colomina's revelations about the careful way that Loos used photography to control the representation of his architecture suggests that he was highly aware of this.

Which is partly where his relationship with Venturi and Scott Brown comes in. VSBA are one of the most media conscious of architects. Their use of writing, photography and polemic have made them extremely effective propagandists for their own work. As Somol has suggested, their obsession with the reproducibility of architecture - that is, its ability to be represented in magazines, books and lectures - has led them to develop a design approach in which the facade is the dominant element. Following Loos, the Venturi's understood that the facade not only spoke in the traditional sense to the physical space around it but also to an extended media space of books, photography and, subsequently, the internet.

For the Venturi's the facade becomes the main expressive feature of architecture, an almost pure piece of information to be broadcast. This idea is taken to literal ends in their early design for the National Football Hall of Fame (or the 'bill-ding board'), where the facade takes the form of an enormous scoreboard, as well as in subsequent projects employing LED's and electronic signage. The tensions of site, context, taste, budget and history are then played out on these surfaces to form a tense compacting of information both physical and virtual.

Venturi, Rauch, Scott Brown, National College Football Hall of Fame (1967)

The standard critique of their work is that this schism results in 'mere facadism', the subordination of three-dimensional spatial possibilities of architecture to two-dimensional sign based ones. This ironically rather superficial reading suggests too that Venturi, Scott Brown's work is the polar opposite of Loos who was perhaps the first architect to posit space as the real medium of architecture. Following this it would seem reasonable to say that whereas Loos plays out a rich spatiality behind a blank facade, VSBA hide their mute 'shed' behind a decorated exterior. But VSBA's interiors are actually very subtle and spatially complex things. Take the Tucker House with its complex, enmeshed volumes interconnected by a coiling staircase. It's actually a little like a Loos house, in fact, a simple cubic mass out of which has been carved a three dimensional spatial puzzle.

Loos' houses hide their decorative interiors behind strikingly modern walls. The severe, white stucco boxes contain classical ornamentation, richly veined marble, thick velvet drapes and chintzy fabrics within. This split was decidedly problematic for the early moderns who found Loos a little difficult to locate. Only subsequently was the psychological complexity of his work understood as articulating something more revealing about the condition of modernity. VSBA's houses seem to start from the other side. They smuggle modern spatial dynamics into what appear at first to be quite traditional objects. Walking into the Vanna Venturi house, for instance, one is struck by both how modern, almost Corbusian, it feels and also by how strange it all is. The conflicting stair, chimney and entrance have an early modernist sensibility, like a Cubist collage there is a dissonant jumble of recognisable fragments that never settle into anything like normality.

Interior view of the boudoir, Villa Muller, Adolf Loos, 1930.

And like Loos, the area of biggest tension is the wall between inside and outside. The spatial forces of the interior push out into the carefully ordered external facade. And again like Loos, it is as if the dis-harmonies of family life make their presence felt on the idealised representation of architecture of the exterior. The facade of the house belongs to the world, to magazines and books and culture, while the interior belongs to the private realm. But they are not entirely separated and both impact on each other.

Just as the private realm pushes out on to the exterior, the public world makes its presence felt on the inside. Venturi Scott Brown appear to set up carefully staged hymns to private family life that are invaded, as it were, by architecture. The photograph of the Vanna Venturi house within the Tucker House marks an intrusion of the public role of architecture into the interior. Equally, the presence of a miniature model of itself within the heart of the Tucker House brings the public exterior inside and acknowledges that family life is part of a system of representation too. The architect's conscious and artful arrangement of the elements of a traditional house is revealed as exactly that at the point at which immersion within the illusion should be complete.

View of the living room looking towards the internal window of the boudoir, Adolf Loos, Villa Muller, 1930.

Like Loos, the presence of another, smaller house within is both cute and unsettling. In Loos' Muller House, the boudoir at the centre of the plan nestles within the structure like a miniature version of the host. This room has an internal window that overlooks the main living room, allowing the occupant to spy on the goings-on around them. But viewed from the other side, the room itself becomes the object of view. The window sits within a white painted cubic wall just like the external face of the house. Both Venturi Scott Brown and Loos use the figure of the Wendy house, the house within a house, to make a decidedly uneasy relationship between the private and the public realms and between the conflicting demands of modernism and tradition.

Interior view of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's own house in Philadelphia.

Loos makes a more literal appearance in one of Venturi and Scott Brown's interiors. His name is an unlikely inclusion in a frieze of famous architect's adorning the dining space of their own house in Philadelphia. It is a fan's list, a chart run down of the couple's favourite architects stencilled onto the walls like a formalised version of the pop groups one might write down as a teenager. It is also another self-conscious playing out of the public history of architecture within the private house.

Best In Show

2011-05-28T21:11:00.000Z

Canterbury School of Architecture's end of year exhibition opens on the 10th June. This year's post graduate studios have been looking at the south-east coast, focusing on issues such as rising sea levels, the planned privatisation of Dover port, "localism", the contemporary relevance of oyster production, obsolete infrastructure and energy production.

Come along if you can....

Alt History

2011-05-23T12:59:00.003Z

More announcements of activities elsewhere. The first of these is an extended essay/mini book entitled A Secret History of Architecture, part of a series published by the Academy of Architecture and Urban Studies in Nuremburg. My contribution draws on previous posts on this site about the history of Do It Yourself manuals and interior design hand books. The essay suggests that these books - found in various junk shops and libraries over the years - form a kind of parallel history of architecture, an unofficial version of events that reveals changes in how we live. Disko 25: A Secret History of Architecture will be available in a couple of months time as part of a set of five or six other booklets. My thanks to Silvan Linden for the invitation to contribute and for his patience while I worked out what to write about.

Along with my fellow FAT colleagues and one Charles Jencks, I have co-edited an upcoming edition of Architectural Design revisiting the thorny issue of Post Modernism. Entitled Radical Post Modernism, it revisits that much derided movement, suggesting that instead of the hoary, fake-pedimented pantomime villain of popular derision, Po Mo actually contains a latent criticality, a set of under-explored tactics and methodologies. Another kind of secret history then or, at least, an unofficial version of a very familiar one.

As well as helping to edit the issue, I've contributed an individual essay called Questions of Taste. This explores similar issues to the Secret History booklet, but from a more explicitly political point of view. The question of the title is approached via the issue of class and draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau as well as Venturi Scott Brown and Herbert Gans.

Pre and Post Modernism

2011-05-15T15:39:00.006Z

Appropriately enough, the current exhibition of James Stirling's archive (see last post) is housed in the extension that Stirling designed for Tate Britain in the mid 1980's. This is a building that epitomises the problem Stirling poses for many architecture critics who struggle to reconcile their enthusiasm for his early buildings with his lurch towards Post Modernism in the 1970's. Many of the visual tropes employed by him here - primary shapes, loggias, vaguely classical forms, lurid green windows - all became screaming cliches of Po Mo, appearing on all sorts of truly terrible buildings in the same way that the bar-code facade does today.

The exterior of the Tate extension is an odd thing to be sure. The shallow pond that used to sit in front of it has been removed, making the timber loggia oddly disembodied and slightly pointless. I always found this element difficult to gauge though, its chunky timbers decidedly lacking in visual wit or flair.

The exterior is a collage of materials that relate - in a diagrammatically very literal way - to the buildings around it. This is post modernism's contextualism taken to a neurotic level. The idea that a building should mutate to reflect the materials, forms and scales of those around it is here turned into an arcane parlour game that should - but doesn't - result in the complete dissilution of the contemporary building. It is a kind of mirror in fact but one that provides a very distorted reflection of the buildings around it.

An interview between Charles Jencks and Stirling about the Clore once appeared in Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. The section in question went something like this: Charles Jencks; "Looking around the Clore I counted some sixteen different contextualisms". James Stirling: "I would hope that there were more than that". Which is funny on at least, oh, sixteen different levels.

The fact that the building is anything but contextual isn't really a problem. An obsession with 'fitting-in' bedevils architecture and ignores the reality of cities with their mix of styles and scales. At the Tate, flagrantly out of place elements, like the previously mentioned green windows and industrial objects, pop up all over, precisely to make clear the bogosity of all that stone cladding. The building thus managed to please no one when it opened - neither conservationists, classicists nor modernists - which is possibly its greatest virtue. 'Round the back it all gets - a la Robert Venturi - very plain with beige engineering brick and some pseudo industrial detailing. This has echoes of Stirling's more hi-tech past as well as referring to the pop coloured boiler flues of Richard Rogers. I was impressed by the colour coordinated hosepipes though.

It is the interior and, specifically, the entrance sequence that provides the real drama though. This is one of those fabulous Stirling promenade architecturales, a sequence of stair, mezzanine and walkway which seem to propel the visitor through space. Fragments of architecture - Corbusian spiral stair, John Soane archway, Aalto-esque staircase - appear like archaeological fragments along this route. The plan is Beaux-Arts classicism inflected by modernist spatial tricks, a small-scale interior version of the elaborate circulation system found in Stirling's Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

This space was dismissed as "shrilly amusing" by John Allan in his somewhat fogeyish review of Stirling's exhibition. The supposedly "adolescent" colours are vital of course, just on the right side of revolting and helping to keep the whole thing oscillating on the edge of good taste/bad taste. I agree that the galleries themselves are a bit dull though, neither being a full-on historicist theatre-set like VSBA's Sainsbury Wing, or jarringly modernist as one might expect from Stirling.

Just around the corner from the Tate is a bizarre, late '30's social housing scheme by Edwin Lutyens*. Amazingly given both how many times I have visited Tate Britain over the years and the fact that I'm a big Lutyens fan, I had never visited his Grosvenor Estate housing before. It doesn't feature in many (any?) books on Lutyens either, partly because it is so untypical of his work.

In a way, the Grosvenor Estate is a subtle reversal of Lutyen's normal work. His houses tended to take an ostensibly traditional form - Sussex manor house, classical villa etc. - but twisted them into forcefully sculptural and geometric forms. Unexpected collisions, spatial contradictions and formal juxtaposition subvert the solid references, without actually entirely overwhelming them. At Page Street the reverse happens. An essentially modernist typology - the zeilenbau housing block - becomes inflected by classical and Beaux-Art elements.

The most striking of these elements is the chequerboard patterning, a fragment of medieval or Gothic decoration blown up to enormous and highly graphic proportions. This device actually prefigures any number of much more recent housing blocks covered in gratuitous pattern or large scale decoration to relieve the tedium of repetitive units, including, most obviously, AHMM's Dalston Lane scheme. Lutyens' pattern is more subtle than might first appear though. It can be seen either as applied pattern or as absence. The white squares of stucco applied to the brickwork reveal the method of the building's construction and make an oblique comment on the supposed poshness of stucco over brick facades.

The flats are arranged in a series of U-Shaped blocks that create courtyard entrance areas. These are very nice spaces, beautifully kept and - on the sunny afternoon that I visited - very well used. Around the courtyards run open access decks - the sort of simple and efficient circulation system used extensively at the time but now pretty much verboten for reasons to do with both snobbism (its considered a bit infra-dig) and paranoia (they wouldn't get past Secured by Design).

The columns to the open, courtyard elevations form both a colonnade at ground level - affording a level of privacy or bounded space to the ground floor flats - and a variegated rhythm at higher levels. From the courtyards the blocks manage to be both visually dynamic and spatially intimate - a neat trick.

The pattern also gives the blocks a very odd, ambiguous scale, both big and small at the same time. As Owen observes, they come from the same playfully surreal late Victorian/Edwardian sensibility evident in Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. That a large scale, high density housing scheme could conjure up such whimsical references is in itself pretty remarkable.

Both Stirling's gallery and Lutyens' housing can be seen as peculiarly British in character, full of witticisms and whimsical details that negotiate the complexities and contradictions of their location and brief. This is not wholly a compliment though in that both can be seen to resist the full implications of modernism choosing messy compromise over revolutionary zeal. But both are also saved by a lack of restraint, or to much good manners. Stirling's eye-watering colours, intellectual references and chutzpah and Lutyen's audacious wallpapering of a whole district mean that they avoid being merely charming. They also bookend modernism to some extent, two buildings at either end of the modernist timeline. Of the two though, Lutyens' building seems to offer the most in that he solves a still modern, contemporary typology brilliantly.

* Owen Hatherley recently wrote about this on his Urban Trawl blog too. Apologies to him, you and anyone else for any similarities in either the form or content of this post. It's coincidental.

Work/Non Work

2011-05-14T20:48:00.001Z

I've written some Proper Architectural Criticism in the form of a review of David Chipperfield's new Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate. I'm officially the 150th person to review this particular building but the first to include lyrics by Chas'n'Dave in the process. My review is in the current issue of Architecture Today, indeed it graces the cover. Thanks to AT for the kind invitation....

Almost as properly, I've reviewed the current exhibition of James Stirling's drawing archives at Tate Britain for Icon issue 96. It's not online (yet), but you can always buy a copy of the magazine. It's full of good stuff, as usual.

Finally, an announcement for anyone who reads this in Australia. I know there are some because I've been invited to speak at Flux 2011, a student architecture congress taking place in Adelaide this July. I'm greatly looking forward to this, despite being a terrible traveller, and would be interested to hear from anyone likely to be at the conference or anywhere near Adelaide or Melbourne at the time. And if anyone wants a lecture on the weird and wonderful work of FAT then please get in touch.

Facing Birmingham

2011-05-08T21:04:00.011Z

I'm indebted to Travis Elborough - author of Wish You Were Here: England On Sea* - for pointing me in the direction of this bizarre Cliff Richard vehicle.

As well as fans of Sir Cliff, Take Me High may be of interest to historians of post-war modernism in general and Birmingham in particular. Along with the Milton Keynes shot Wired for Sound video, Take Me High also marks him out as an unlikely - and unwitting - documenter of 20th century urbanism.

If you can take the clip above it's worth struggling through this opening section too, both for the pay off line at the very end and the fact that it reveals him using an electric shaver and drinking champagne inside a Mini Clubman. Presumably this was the height of middle ranking executive glamour in 1973.

Finally, there is an autobiographical reason for posting these clips. With our school project near the International airport starting on site, I too am having to "face Birmingham"....:

* Travis will be giving a talk about Wish You Were Here at Pages bookshop in Hackney on the 18th May.

Essex Moderne

2011-05-04T21:24:00.005Z

Silver End is a small village in Essex about ten miles from where I was brought up. I'd never heard of it though until I moved to London and started studying architecture. Sitting in the university library improving myself through modernism I came across a picture of Silver End, a starkly lit black and white photograph of a row of white rendered villas. The conflation of modern architecture with the highly familiar landscape of Essex came as a shock to me, like discovering a staid relative with a remarkable and glamorous past. Architecture like this didn't belong in the muddy, flatlands of Essex with its wattle and daub farm houses and suburban cul-de-sacs.

Last week on a trip home to see my parents I took a detour to have a proper look. The houses I went to see make up only a small part of the village, a single avenue of small semi-detached pairs with one or two larger villas dotted around. Silver End was built in the mid 1920's by the Crittall window company as a model village, an example of philanthropic garden-city planning. It was based around the Crittall factory along with a village hall, church, department store and a number of architecturally less adventurous houses.

The homes designed by Scottish architect Thomas Tait are an odd, hybrid form of early modernism. White stuccoed walls, flat roofs and, naturally, metal framed Crittall windows are combined with art deco elements, making them appear like small, domesticated versions of industrial buildings like the Hoover factory. The two houses designed for the factory managers are the most ornate and sit slightly apart from the terraces for the workers. While one of these is still beautifully kept, standing back elegantly behind its perfectly manicured lawn, the other appears in an advanced state of decrepitude, mostly hidden behind a large, overgrown hedge. A tatty St George's Cross hung behind an open window.

In the Easter sunshine the houses looked surprisingly ordinary, not nearly as alien or exotic as they did in that old black and white photo. The slightly crumbling render, abundant planting and domestic garden paraphernalia have domesticated them, blending them into the landscape.

They're interesting though not just as an isolated example of early modernism, but as an important piece of social history. Gillian Darley describes Silver End in her book Villages of Vision as "...a notable monument to well-employed capital and social vision". In this they are clearly a close relation to the Bata housing in East Tilbury, another example of "social vision" and philanthropic capitalist planning in Essex. There are other enclaves of modernism in the county too including Oliver Hill's Frinton Park Estate, although being by the sea this last development is somehow less unexpected. Its expansive views and air of chi-chi upward-mobility are part of a different tradition of seaside modernism.

Ultimately what appeals about Silver End is precisely its ordinariness, not just in the sense that it occupies a familiar part of the world for me personally but also in the sense of what it has become. Its neat hedges and re-painted facades, its garden knick-knacks and ad-hoc modifications suggest an alternative history of British domestic architecture. I can't locate that first photograph I saw of Silver End now. I have no idea what book it was in or when it was taken. If I could it would be interesting to contrast it with the houses today. Like the well documented resident modifications of Le Corbusier's houses at Pessac, it would show modernism and domesticity - or radicalism and conservatism - coming to some strange sort of accommodation with each other.

You can take the Costa Brava....

2011-04-22T12:44:00.004Z

Two short photo based posts, bracketed together because they're both about the Kent coast. The first is yet another visit to Margate, this time involving me masquerading as an architectural journalist and attending the press launch of David Chipperfield's new Turner Contemporary (I've reviewed it for Architecture Today). The second trip is to Dover, this time in the company of the nice people at DAD who gave us a tour around town revealing some nice buildings I hadn't seen before. The quality of photos for this second section is generally abysmal. Apologies, but I forgot my camera and made do with the one on my ailing iphone. So, without further ado....

The new Turner Contemporary is visible the moment you step out of the Maxwell Fry designed train station...its windowless sheddy form making it an oddly scaleless object in relation to the rest of the town.

Closer up it there is another, slightly less refined and much smaller shed in front of it.

As part of the gallery's initial exhibition, Daniel Buren has installed a window graphic that evokes the kind of sunrise that you will never experience looking out in real life, as the building faces due north.

Mirrors at the either end infinitely extend the effect.....

....as well as the building itself.....

....doubling the kind of contemporary paraphernalia that even the staunchest minimalist can't edit out.

I'll leave any further comments about the building for the review, but suffice to say it's about art, with a capital A.

Once out of the gallery we were free to wander the streets of Margate, where not everything was boarded up B+B's and down-at-heel seaside pathos.

19th century streets in the sky. The bridge connects two parts of Margate's Old Town Hall, which until recently housed a museum, one of those fabulously weird collections of musty waxworks and random artifacts. It's currently closed.

I'm a sucker for a gable. And this is a good one, and comes with a cute little friend for company.

Nice upside-down window surrounds.

Olly Wainright spotted this first I think: where life meets art and life is rhythm, to paraphrase Warren G.

This slightly dilapidated camera shop had a great sign with a lovely font and a straightforward approach to retail branding.

The sadly, defunct wooden rollercoaster of the former Dreamland amusement park was visible across this expanse of tarmac as we headed back to the station.

Arlington House, Margate's one and inevitably unloved tower block had some quite cool, Vorticist things going on with its rippling facade. Oh I supposed I'd like to live there would I etc.etc.

So, we left Margate, back home to waspish commentary in the Groucho club no doubt. In the foreground is some public art that was helpfully labelled as "Public Art".

In Dover I visited the former Post Office sorting depot where I found this impromptu bit of bricolage. It seemed both artfully arranged and, close up.....

...oddly poignant. Do all the empty bags go to Upton?

"This box is for odd shaped post cards....".

A nice assemblage of the brutalist BT switchboard building and the crown green bowling club....two of the very few things that make one proud to be British. There was also a touch of Stirling's Florey Building in Oxford about the BT centre's patent glazed, cranking facade.

Which was interesting, because there was a touch of early Stirling, or perhaps James Gowan, in the K College building nearby. The chamfered corners and vaguely castle-like massing, are a particularly British strand of post-war architecture, modernism with the rough edges smoothed off. It's a sort of modern medievalism encapsulated in Cedric Price's quip "Just the middle ages with 13 amp power sockets".

How it is again...this time with a giant K on the lawn and some nice sculptural external staircases. This building and a whole number of interesting bits of 20th century architecture form part of a guide book and walk produced by DAD and artist Nigel Green.

If you look hard you can see a very, very small model of Stonehenge in the middle of this abandoned car park. It's just behind Burlington House, another much hated seaside tower block which has become the unfortunate villain in the town's ongoing attempts at regeneration (a typical internet forum thread of local dislike of the tower can be read here).

This is where people start and finish the North Downs Way - if they head inland - or the channel crossing if they head the other. The information booth is helpfully and very deliberately placed to totally obscure the artwork that marks this point.

Elizabeth Taylor's London

2011-04-16T19:30:00.005Z

As a belated tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, here's a clip from her 1963 television film about London. It's a bizarre piece, mostly featuring an immaculately coiffured Liz wafting around her apartment in a white ball gown reciting poetry and reminiscing about her London childhood, albeit with a slightly glazed expression.

It's worth sticking with to hear the extraordinary way she manages to pronounce Tooting Bec towards the very end. The John Barry scored TV special records London just as the post-war gloom was starting to lift and therefore makes a nice companion piece to recent posts on here about Ian Nairn, Geoffrey Fletcher and Antonioni's Blow Up.

Play Mistley for me

2011-04-04T12:38:00.004Z

Straying into English Building territory, here's a short post about some architectural stuff I came across in the wilds of Essex. Over the weekend I drove through Mistley, a small town on the Essex side of the River Stour estuary. Mistley has a lot of interesting architecture, including a number of large and imposing brick built wharf buildings and some pretty terraces of Huguenot cottages. The warehouses in particular have an industrial scale and presence that's unusual for this part of Essex, a landscape mostly consisting of small-scale farm buildings and commuter belt housing.

Mistley is perhaps more famous though for its connection with Mathew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General who pioneered the horrific practice of drowning women accused of being witches and who was memorably played by Vincent Price in Michael Reeeves' fabulously creepy 1968 film. As if to shrug off this association, the town attempted to reinvent itself as a fashionable spa resort in the early 18th century. The Architect Robert Adam was commissioned to design the main spa buildings but only managed to realise a fountain and a church before the project was abandoned.

Adam's enlightenment Classicism was clearly unpopular with the superstitious East Anglian witch drowning folk and the church was partly demolished in 1870, leaving only a pair of classical pavilion-like towers. These were retained as navigation points for boats on the Stour - at least according to indefatigable internet fact-checker @langrabbie* - and a 'new', appropriately medieval looking, neo-Gothic church was built instead on a nearby site. The twin towers remain as appropriately picturesque ruins in the graveyard by the river's edge.

Adam's original design was an odd one though, with the towers sitting at either end of a single-storey, barn-like central section with a large pedimented front. Strangely given the obvious lack of local enthusiasm for the building that led to its demolition, care was taken to complete the towers as stand-alone elements. Their columned portico and cornice line now stretches around all sides when originally it only appeared to feature on one. This makes the towers appear like two independent pavilions, giving rise to the faintest suspicion that the middle section was never actually built at all.

Also, in the church yard is a vast, Egyptoid tomb, the sort of object in which one of Doctor Who's adversaries might have been imprisoned for eternity. I intend to have a replica of it constructed in the event of my own demise.

One final thing. Mistley it turns out, is also famous for its swans. It has an awful lot of them. As we drove out of the town we could see them everywhere, not just on the river but on the grassy banks and waddling along the side of the road, seemingly oblivious to the traffic. Given their slightly grotesque numbers, their location in a small town by the water and the fact that I really, really don't like very large winged creatures, it felt a little bit like Hitchcock's The Birds. Well, kind of.

* Although I wonder, why keep both?

historic hipster urbanism

2011-04-01T22:00:00.006Z

Does one need a spoiler alert for a 45 year old film? Depends on whether you've seen it I guess but, anyway, if you haven't seen Blow Up and you think you might like to, the following does give the entire game away.

I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up again the other day, a film I've not seen for many years. The first time I saw it I must have been quite young - early teens I suspect - and I found it fairly mystifying. Why was no one saying anything? Why did the characters seem so casually unpleasant to each other? And why did so little happen for such large amounts of time?

Most of these questions are still pertinent, although I'm less mystified and much more admiring of it now. Apart from anything else, Blow Up is a fascinating historical document. From the opening scene in which a jeep full of students drive around the raised plaza of the Smithson's recently completed Economist Building, to the brand new curtained walled office blocks rising up over London Wall (detailed here) to the positively Dickensian looking doss house from which the central character first emerges, the film describes the collision of an old, Victorian London with 1960's modernity. Interestingly, it is almost exactly contemporaneous with the film of Geoffrey Fletcher's The London Nobody Knows and Iain Nairn's London, both of which document similar themes.

Blow Up revolves around Thomas, a jaded fashion photographer who accidentally witnesses a murder. The drama of this plotline is underplayed however and his discovery occupies a relatively small section of the film. Much of what happens around this central conceit is unnecessary from a strictly narrative point of view but vital in establishing the milieu in which Thomas lives. Not only that but it locates the event in its proper place within Thomas' fairly shaky moral universe. Permanently slightly drunk and a bit frazzled, he's too self-absorbed to see much of what is going on.

Instead he spends large amounts of time wandering around his studio complex, gazing blankly at assistants, beautiful models and a woman - played by Sarah Miles - who might or might not be his wife and who is having a non-committal affair with a painter living next door. London is experienced as a backdrop to Thomas' frequent trips out in his car, a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud equipped with a CB radio which he uses to bark pointless instructions to his assistants. A seemingly trivial sub-plot involving an antiques shop and the purchase of an aeroplane propeller keeps intruding into the main story, literally breaking up the narrative with slightly comical banality.

Most obviously the film is about images and illusion. Thomas only discovers that he has witnessed the murder once he examines a reel of film that he shot in a park earlier that day. The murder is never actually seen, but is reconstructed through a series of still photographs. Most of the characters seem to wander around barely noticing each other, especially Thomas himself who breaks out of his pampered torpor only when taking pictures. A glazed amorality hangs over the whole proceedings. Having discovered the murder, Thomas isn't moved to report it or express any particular outrage at what has happened. The photographs that reveal this mysterious event are primarily valuable to him as images for a book he is working on.

The ongoing visual joke of a group of mime artists provides Blow Up with its one pat moment, the closing scene when Thomas watches them pretending to play tennis and - having shed some of his earlier cynicism - 'sees' the imaginary ball they are playing with*. Otherwise the film maintains its cool throughout, never really revealing much about what is happening or why. Antonioni's seeming casualness of plot and framing - both of which are actually beautifully judged throughout - echo Thomas' life so that we construct the events much as he does as a series of disparate but connected images.

Blow Up is also almost comically sixties of course and intended clearly as a self-conscious record of an era. Jimmie Page's first band The Yardbirds appear in it, for no immediately apparent reason. Other celebrities of the day - including the model Veruschka - make cameo appearances. But these 'real-life' appearances only add to the ambiguity. They are both real, in the sense that they genuinely exist in the world beyond the film, and unreal in the sense that they aren't really connected to the rest of the storyline.

There's also fun to be had spotting unlikely guests at the sixties party such as Janet Street Porter (seen dancing in the club where the Yardbirds play) and Peter Bowles who plays Thomas' Andrew Loog Oldham-esque agent. Infamously, Thomas' character is based on David Bailey and the film's casual misogyny might be intended as a critical commentary on Bailey's lifestyle or might simply be a lazy reflection of the era. It's difficult to tell. Like the characters in it, Blow Up is determinedly opaque, as too-cool-for-school as the hipster London it depicts.

Blow Up is a kind of conspiracy theory movie where a partial and unstable 'truth' is constructed through the obsessive re-examination of the facts. The body in the bushes remains as one possible explanation of what Thomas has witnessed. Like any good conspiracy theory though, it's never clear if we should believe it or not. Conspiracy theory in fact undermines the idea of any single version of events, acting as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy for doubting Thomases everywhere.

Blow Up is also the subject of its own conspiracies, endless speculations about its motives and meanings. The locations used in it have become the subject of the sort of ceaseless archiving that the internet specialises in. The park in which the murder is witnessed has taken on a particularly mythical status - a fictional rival to the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza - at least partly because - unlike everywhere else - it appears unchanged from when the film was made. In this way, the stills of Blow UP are as endlessly pored over as Thomas' reel of film.

* Having thought a lot about the film since writing this post (and having been forced to in a way by the comments below) I have to say that I misread the final scene badly and don't in any way do it justice with this description. Several things strike me now that didn't then. Firstly there is the status that Thomas enjoys as a successful photographer which conveys an authority on his examination of the photographs. We are inclined to believe his theory that they contain clues to a murder for precisely this reason.

Secondly, there is the issue of the missing body, the 'object' that would solve the murder, or at least definitely prove that one had taken place. Without it the only 'proof' is the one grainy photograph remaining after Thomas' studio is burgled and Thomas' own memory of what he has seen. He is an unreliable narrator, or at least an unreliable subject of an unreliable narrative. The mimed tennis game thus presents an entirely new take on the proceedings, suggesting that Thomas's account of events, the evidence that he has seen, is highly suspect. We tend to trust objects rather than images but objects are representations too. The absent ball and the absent body have an equivalence but their absence still allows events to be constructed entirely around them.

In general, this post suffers from not nearly enough thought and a slight dismissiveness in tone which I partly put down to the blogger's disease of simply wanting to say something, fill up space in case everyone goes away forever!

#26March

2011-03-27T22:00:00.004Z

As Jon said on yesterday's march against the cuts, the political placard is a wonderful thing. There were literally thousands of them thronging central London, fabulous home-made efforts that had taken minutes or, in some cases sometimes days to assemble. It's a largely unsung piece of design the slogan on a stick: supremely simple and direct, a real-life speech bubble proclaiming exactly what you think to everyone around.

Even better though for me, were the beautiful official union banners that marched along in front and behind us, huge heraldic coats of arms but with the serpents and suits of armour replaced by factory buildings and post boxes and the names of organisations so often dismissed as archaic or irrelevant in today's casually exploitative world of precarious work.

I was too caught up in events and too busy enjoying the company of friends, brass bands playing Prince Buster and the incredibly good natured crowd to take too many photos but here are a few of those union banners anyway, plus one of a rather excellent cardboard tank - complete with solar-thermal panels attached - that sat in a quiet corner of Hyde Park. It's occupants looked very jolly, happily blasting out some very grubby techno and waving at admirers.

The depressing aftermath passed me by - partly because I left for home around five-ish - so I don't feel qualified to comment on it other than to echo the weary sentiment that the reporting of yesterday's astonishing expression of anger and solidarity has been woeful. A quick scan across the front pages of the papers in my local newsagent this morning was enough to send me home wearied by the cynicism of the mainstream media.

The appalling right-wing bias of our media is so ingrained that one risks being mocked for naivete for having not fully accepted that this is simply the way the world is. But it needs to be consistently pointed out because the reporting of yesterday's event effectively alienated half a million people, implicitly discrediting their right to protest. That's how bad things have got, when that many people protest and their views are dismissed.

Some people have written some sane assessments of yesterday, so go read them too.

UPDATE

I have a piece expanding on some of the above in Building Design magazine, where I'm this week's guest blogger. I wrote it before some of the more shocking revelations about the arrest of UKUncut's protesters though. I should also point out that I have zero sympathy for the black bloc of anarchists who hit Piccadilly at the same time as UKUncut, both from a tactical and a political point of view. In short, they fuck it up for everyone else and achieve nothing into the bargain.

More productively, this is an excellent piece by Dan Hind suggesting new ways forward for the opposition movement.

In defence of functionalism

2011-03-22T22:52:00.011Z

Disclaimer: The following are some slightly random, no doubt rather jumbled thoughts about function and use in architecture. Some of the conclusions might seem a bit rich coming from a Po Mo enthusiast, but there you go.

Is there a more unfashionable term in architecture than functionalism? Like the similarly reviled 'facadism', it is usually prefaced by the pejorative adjective 'mere'. To be functional is to be drab, cheap and unexceptional. "It's functional, put it that way", someone might say about an unloved or unlovely bit of design.

Despite this most architects would sign up to the idea that good buildings should be functional. But functionalism on its own is rarely seen as enough. Architects justify their work by referring to other things; qualities of space, material or abstract values to do with composition or light. This is where the art of architecture lies we believe. Functionalism is a kind of degree zero, the base camp from which we begin our ascent to more noble achievements. But what if it weren't? What if the art of architecture lay in how well a building worked, in how competently it went about its business?

What does it mean for a building to be functional? Buildings aren't like machines. They don't 'work' or 'not work'. When they fail it is usually in small, localised ways that might impede the smooth operation of what happens in them but doesn't stop it entirely. Buildings provides spaces in which other things - machines and people - do the work. Which means that buildings that declare their functionality overtly usually do so by trying to look like a machine.

(Image: Valerio Olgiati, National Park Centre, Switzerland)

It's interesting in this respect to look at the work of Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati. His buildings have a typological autonomy and disinterest in function, appearing aloof from practical, pragmatic concerns. Take the staircase of his National Park Centre building, pictured above, a willfully perverse doubling of function that seems to confront the visitor with a disorientating equivalence - the opposite of pragmatic spatial organisation.

Olgiati's work* seems to be about the opposite of functionalism. His double stairs are functionally redundant, useless even. They appear extravagant and wasteful. Waste can mean different but connected things. Is it something we no longer want that needs to be discarded? Or is it something that, like Olgiati's staircase, isn't necessary to start with? Is waste the rubbish we expel or the excess that we desire?

The word waste permeates our culture right now. It is the mantra of the coalition, who maintain that the state is inherently wasteful. Money can be saved if we cut out waste, we are told, even though doing so is largely a euphemism for literal redundancy. Human waste in other words. And waste is also the inevitable by-product of capitalism, which creates desires for things that we don't really need: luxury waste.

Writing in the late 1970's, Bernard Tschumi defined architecture as "useless" but "radically so". For Tschumi, architecture's lack of necessity - its excess - was its most vital quality. Tschumi's formulations deliberately cut against the functionalist justification of International Style modernism. He was attempting to excavate a different legacy, one that drew on surrealism, Dada and futurism and explored the irrational, the erotic and the psychological experience of architecture. He cited André Breton's statement that "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all" and referred to spaces of murder and obsession.

(Image: Co-op Himmelblau, JVC New Entertainment Centre, Guadalajara)

Of all the so-called deconstructivist architects of the '80's, Tschumi was the only one to declare an explicitly political agenda. Yet his words led to an embrace of excess and extravagance in architecture. Deconstructivism proved to be an architectural style unsuited to anything but large, vanity projects and the opulent excesses. It's functional redundancies, pointless complexities and indulgent whimsy were radical only in the most childish and attention-seeking sense. It is another form of luxury waste.

Perhaps we should look again at the 'value' of function. In attempting to describe what they do as adding value to buildings, architects hope to make themselves more valuable, at least in commercial terms. Commerce seeks to locate the value of objects so that it can sell them. That is, their value is an external one applied retrospectively to the object. In a sense, how those objects actually work is unimportant. Similarly, the genuine complexity of buildings is assumed as a given, the easy and unglamorous part. But what if the really valuable thing about buildings was the way they work, the genuinely useful things that they do? This would require a shift in our thinking, one which is perhaps more political and economic than aesthetic. Architecture should be useful. Perhaps even radically so.

* I should point out that I really like Olgiati's work and think that his particular relationship to function is an ambiguous and interesting one.

To the cry of compete

2011-03-13T22:39:00.007Z

Two recent architecture competitions have caused some grumblings on Twitter, as much for the sheer number of entrants as anything else. Living Architecture’s A Room For London attracted a staggering 500 entries while the comparatively low-key Ullswater Yacht Club competition had over 180.

Ullswater’s entry is the more remarkable because of the comparative complexity of the brief, the need to make a site visit to a fairly inaccessible part of the world (and I don’t just mean that it’s not in London) and the fact that it had technical issues such as flooding to deal with. A lot of work in other words for 180 practices to expend with such poor odds of winning.

How exactly do you assess 180 entries? If as I suspect, the answer is that a good 100 of them get short shrift and are chucked out for choosing the wrong font size or having funny colours, then you have to question the viability of an “open” competition. To whose advantage is it to have so many entrants, so many redundant schemes, so much professional skill expended for no reward? Clearly not the architects involved. Economically it made absolutely no sense for 179 of them.

I recently reviewed Eric J Cesal’s excellent book Down Detour Road and it has some very useful things to say about this issue. Cesal has an MBA as well as an architecture qualification and so is able to apply some basic business models to the methods architects use to win work. And the competition system is revealed by these as an unequivocal act of commercial suicide.

Like turkeys voting for Christmas, architects still defend them though. My recent-ish Dear Other Architects post imploring architects to stop entering open design competitions gained some enthusiastic comments but an awful lot of criticism as well. Two particular strands stood out. The first was that competition itself is a good thing, a necessary stimulus to excellence and innovation. Implicit in this is some notion of artistic natural selection, a belief that the talented will out. Losers should stop whingeing and up their game, essentially.

The second strand was that my observations about pointlessly long hours spent on projects that earned no fee painted me as a venal philistine, interested in money and not art (if only). Both these criticisms reveal some interesting if depressing attitudes prevalent in architecture, not least the fact that the profession can hold two seemingly irreconcilable prejudices in its collective head at the same time. Funny really, how devotion to the artistic cause can sit happily alongside neo-liberalism.

In truth, architectural competition culture fits a model of ruthless market fundamentalism perfectly. In its combination of long hours, use of unpaid interns and endemic short-termism, architecture is a flag bearer for the kind of ‘precarious employment' favoured by extreme capitalism. Working long hours for little or no fee in order to win work drives down wages and increases the ‘hire and fire’ tendencies of architecture practices. Firms ‘employ’ unpaid interns to do work on competitions because that’s the only way they can afford to undertake them. This in turn undervalues the work of all architects. If large amounts of design work are worth nothing, then what part of the job can architects legitimately charge for? Simply put, doing work for free is inevitably a bad idea - as this excellent diagram points out.

This all has a very contemporary relevance. The coalition government's plans to repeal laws protecting employees of small business will be music to the ears of some avant-garde practices. It's interesting too how the self-harming tendencies of architectural practice resonate with Mark Fisher’s analysis of market driven neo-liberalism in his recent book Capitalist Realism. Fisher is interested in how the mobile, transient and unprotected workforce that capitalism increasingly demands leads to serious mental health issues. The coalition government's sole 'growth strategy' is based on eroding employment rights and increasing job insecurity even further.

I'm aware that an architect whingeing about low fees might seem pretty small beer, or even in bad taste when compared to say, 50,000 people being sacked from the NHS. But I believe that all work should be remunerated and that to think otherwise is the preserve of the financially privileged. Architecture increasingly relies on artistic myths to justify various forms of exploitation. This is doubly ironic because architects tend to disavow getting rich as a motivation for what they do whilst happily assisting other people in their efforts to make money.

Because their motivation is primarily artistic* and because they have little or no business training, many architects are simply very bad at asking for fees. This leads them to devalue what they do in particular and all forms of cultural and artistic work in general, as if they are a luxury bolt on to society. No one suggests this is true of accountancy or legal advice, both of which are assumed to have some primal necessity for human existence.

The unsuccessful entries to the Ullswater competition that I've seen involve a level of technical competency that no other profession would consider giving away for free. They go way beyond 'pitching' - something that almost businesses are involved in at some level - to constitute a form of unspoken voluntary work on the client's behalf. And this is the point. In their eagerness to work, in their desperation in fact, architects are prone to being endlessly exploited. In turn, they exploit others further down the food chain, abandoning the principle that work should be remunerated or labour protected from exploitation.

* I'm using these terms pretty much at face value however naive they sound, in order to make a point. So, don't shoot me.

things

2011-03-09T20:40:00.002Z

In tribute to the ever wonderful things magazine, and also to this recent discovery, here are some....things. Culled from Terence Conran's 1975 The House Book, currently being scrutinised thoroughly for a longer piece about the history of DIY I'm writing for elsewhere (more on that to follow) and possibly the source of another post too. You've been warned.

Back to the old house

2011-03-07T21:59:00.034Z

Normally I don't post things here that have been commissioned for elsewhere, but I thought I'd make an exception in this case because this short piece hasn't appeared online. It's from the last issue of Icon and is a review of the recent Channel 4 series The Room That Made Me. Incidentally, the latest issue of Icon is out now featuring, amongst other things, a short rant by me about The Sunday Times. Anyway, here 'tis.

“Imagine going back to the house where you grew up”, said the portentous voiceover to this four-part TV series, “and finding everything exactly as it used to be”. Frankly this happens to me every Christmas, but for the participants of this programme life had clearly moved on, at least in a literal sense.

The House That Made Me was a curious mix of childhood nostalgia, pop psychoanalysis and interior design history. Like a home makeover programme in reverse, it recreated the former homes of various British celebrities, aiming to trigger a Proustian rush of association or elicit fresh insight into their complex psyches.

Four celebrities of diminishing renown took part with very differing results, mostly depending on their current state of mind. In both former pop star Boy George and disgraced TV presenter Michael Barrymore’s case this clearly wasn’t good. Their much-publicised personal traumas and involvement in pretty unsavoury events meant that both appeared to be looking for some kind of redemption.

For people of Boy George’s age, the long shadow of 1970’s interior design allowed some easy laughs at clashing geometric wallpaper and star-burst clocks, not to mention an overabundance of ash trays and elaborate drinks dispensers. But there were more interesting stories to be found too. The role of technology in the home, for example, was telling. For Boy George it was his Dansette record player, for Barrymore his prog-rock synthesiser and for R&B singer Jamelia it was watching MTV that made home-life bearable. Each of these offered a kind of portal, a route out of typical teenage lives to something far more exciting.

They also revealed a subtle territorial battle acted out within the family home. Comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar’s front room was largely out-of-bounds to the children, a sacrosanct space for entertaining guests only. The level of his parent’s self-effacing hospitality was also revealed by the presence of tricksy cigarette dispensers and a drinks cabinet hidden in a globe, despite the fact that they neither drank nor smoked.

Surprisingly, Bhaskar was the most interesting participant. His childhood in 1970’s West London was overshadowed by the rise of the National Front and the racially motivated riots in nearby Southall. He revealed a touching friendship with the white family who ran the fish’n’chip shop next door, an unlikely pair of surrogate parents with whom he would sit day after day eating bags of chips. His own home included a genuine Leopard skin mounted on the wall and various other stuffed animals including a crocodile, all squeezed into a tiny first floor flat.

There was an aspect of the homes that wasn’t mentioned at all though, a (non-stuffed) elephant in the room. This was the sticky issue of class. The recreated rooms revealed something very specific about the participant’s background and the relationship of social class to housing. Revealingly, all the participants came from working or lower-middle class backgrounds. This was evident not simply in the size of their house or the number of children sharing a bedroom, but in the way the rooms were laid out and the expectations of how people behaved in them. There were very few books or ‘high’ cultural objects in evidence and decorative objects tended to be cheap, mass-produced items like the ubiquitous ‘crying-boy’ painting. Furniture was predominantly new rather than inherited and all of it was thrown out when interior fashions changed or the family moved house.

To talk of class in design and architecture is to invite charges of snobbishness. But to ignore it seems disingenuous, part of a wilful refusal to see the social and economic factors that shape our environments. Clearly these issues were too personal, or perhaps political for a programme as prurient as The House That Made Me, and they remained inferred rather than spelt out.

Moscow revisited

2011-02-28T22:36:00.002Z

This is very old but I forgot to link to it at the time. It's a short piece about the Moscow underground for Building Design, so it will be hidden behind a vast iron curtain of capitalist exploitation (a pay wall), unless you have a subscription.

Given that, I've decided to use this as an excuse for posting up some more b-sides and outtakes, this time of photos I took of Moscow above ground, during a blazing hot week last summer.

There's a lot of this sort of stuff plonked around Moscow, office blocks that are too much to stomach even for the staunchest of Po Mo apologists. This one is truly remarkable in its vulgarity. There are turrets and rotundas and mirror glass and disturbingly skinny columns and various shades of beige render and it must have several hundred rooms in it without any natural light. A triumph of sorts.

An apposite contrast to this, a view of the sadly neglected and falling to pieces Narkomfin communal living block which appears to have a massive street lamp attached to it.

There is a Mad Max quality to much of Moscow. It looks like a European city but the social niceties associated with that are disappearing in a heat haze of anarco-capitalism....

...such as the distinction between pavements and streets. There is, apparently, a massive shortage of parking spaces in Moscow. Not that you'd notice. More shocking Po Mo in the background.

I have no idea what this is, but it's fairly extraordinary you have to admit.

We popped our heads around a doorway and found this, a fabulous confection of multiplying occidental domes.

We paid due tribute to Melnikov and his fabulous Bakhmetevskaya Street bus garage, a supergraphic adorned rhomboid with an impressively complicated roof structure. It now houses an art gallery and an irritatingly fashionable cafe.

Superior fontage.

Nothing much to say about this shot, but the screen never flickered into life.

A sign offering helpful instruction to the architect.

Beautiful baroque super-impositions of surfaces, an architecture of phenomenal rather than literal depth.

While much of Moscow is dilapidated and crumbling, the Kremlin is immaculate, almost unreal in its spotlessness. The carefully tended lawns lends it a further element of unreality.

Interesting displacement of windows 'round the back of Saint Basil's.

This is the entrance gate to the Kremlin. It's a wonderful thing. The top section is particularly nutty, like a brick and plaster tiara. The bit you can't get to has lots of doorways and openings and the bit that you can doesn't.

This superb building is also opposite the kremlin. It's the Manege, built originally as a horse riding arena but now an exhibition centre famous as the venue where Krushchev denounced degenerate (constructivist) art. I like buildings that have too many of any one thing, as if the designer has overdosed on the 'multiple-array' tool in CAD.

More typography really, this time of a neo-cowboy vernacular. We watched England crash out of the World Cup in a bar somewhere inside the adjacent building. We were the only people in there, which was just as well. It seems an eternity away now, which, from a footballing point of view is no bad thing.

A guide to the not so modern buildings of London

2011-02-22T19:17:00.001Z

So, Elly brought a pile of old architecture magazines into the office the other day. There is something interesting about the architectural obsessions of previous decades, something that helps to put present concerns into perspective too. This is particularly true of the recent, but not too recent past.

This particular recent past was the late '70's and early '80's, a period of intense ideological differences in architecture when the modernist consensus began to fall apart and rationalists, post-modernists, late modernists and high-techists were disputing what form architecture should take. It's hard to imagine the Architects Journal of today tackling major trends in global architecture with the seriousness and depth of their 1982 issue called Architecture Now. That's not meant as a criticism of the AJ particularly, more of architecture in general, which has long since floated up its own alimentary canal of introspective relativity.

In amongst the magazines was this guide to recent buildings in London. It struck me particularly because it offers a snapshot of British architecture at exactly the point when the certainties of post-war modernism began to fall apart. Douglas Murphy has called the typical British architecture of this period 'Brutalomo', a transitional style where the muscular, sculptural qualities of Brutalism start to be inflected by post modern references and neo-classical ordering systems: think James Stirling at Runcorn or Gillespie Kidd and Coia at Robinson College, Cambridge.

AD's Guide To Modern Buildings In London (1965-1975) takes the form of a pocket book, complete with maps and routes for the hardcore architectural trainspotter (me). When I began studying architecture one of the first books I borrowed from the college library was Christopher Woodward and Ed Jones' A Guide to the Architecture of London, which I read slavishly while traipsing around the city inspecting more or less everything in it. This guide - written by Tom Jestico and Charles McKean - has an immediately familiar tone then, where the patrician tones of people convinced of the noble values of modern architecture are tinged with doubt, aware of the looming backlash. Unlike Woodward and Jones' book, it only features building built over the proceeding decade though, making it a revealing snapshot of a specific moment in British architectural history.

One of the big questions provoked by flicking through it now though, some thirty five years after it was written, is which buildings featured would make it into a contemporary guide. And for what reasons. There is, for instance, a large amount of very positive coverage given to Thamesmead, now largely a lazy byword for failed utopian aspirations. Neave Brown's Alexandria Road housing and Patrick Hodgkinson's Brunswick Centre receive pretty unequivocal praise too, as you might expect. although these buildings have been re-evaluated (and gentrified in the case of the Brunswick) of late. In general it was still a period of heroic social-housing schemes and mega-structures, a time when Lyons Israel and Ellis' Queen Elizabeth Hospital building on Hackney Road could be described as 'ingenious" and the East Wing extension of the Natural History Museum as "decorative".

Norman Foster's career was in its infancy as well and two of his early buildings - a warehouse in Thamesmead and the Fred Olsen Centre in Millwall, are featured. Impressively, the former seems to have actually invented the generic industrial shed aesthetic if the text is to be believed. "Its bright blue corrugated skin is simply wrapped over a steel frame' say the authors, "doing away with the traditional elements of roof, walls, eaves etc." Is it true that there were no crinkly tin wrap around sheds before this?

James Stirling's Gloucester Avenue housing (described here as a "functional, but ugly block of flats by a famous architect") merits a brief mention but has since fallen off the map entirely As to a large extent have the rash of architect's own housing built in Camden in the '70's. Take a walk down Camden Mews today and you can experience a similar impression to the one created by this book, a sense of architecture unaffected by any desire to be cheery or even particularly immediately accessible, but also losing the confidence to map out a future. The neo-vernacular was creeping in, manifested in small scale, low density, bricky housing schemes and in the slightly terrifying Hillingdon Civic Centre, a building that I still can't quite get my head around.

The London of this book looks slightly dour, a little glum and probably all the better for it. Big buildings built of brick and concrete, heavy mass and dark shadows predominate. Odd ones by Foster and the formative Farrel and Grimshaw partnership point to a flashier, less substantial future, where architects try much harder to be liked and where commercialism becomes more or less completely unchecked. This in a way is architecture's post-punk period, a period of invention and the pursuit of divergent strands of interest after modernism's various major convulsions. After it came more corporate visions counteracted by the powerful hallucinations of nostalgia.

this is a gateway

2011-02-17T14:48:00.000Z

A few pictures from a brief trip out to the strange ship container and big shed landscape of West Thurrock.

Actually, this first photograph is of Rainham marshes and an oddly elegant, timber clad water tower sitting on the edge of a large pile of landfill. The top of the ladder offers a view of the Thames. Below it is a rusty metal box that presumably arrived at some point by barge and never left.

Another box but a very large and very blue one. The graduated fill effect of the bands of colour make it dissolve rather beautifully into the murky blue sky.

Lurking nearby behind a hedge was another extraordinary object, one that might have just landed, a few spurts of steam still escaping from its exhaust pipes.

On closer inspection it turned out that it had come to ground in an old church yard and was a big, hissing chemical plant for Proctor and Gamble. If only the Lloyd's building emitted real steam too.....

The churchyard belongs to St Clement's and is maintained by Proctor & Gamble as a nature reserve. Hugh Grant fans might recognise the church as the location for the funeral scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Unable to find footpaths 142 - 169, we followed number 141 to the Thames...

....where this fearsome creature stood idly by. It is intended to scoop coal off barges on the river but can also be used to defend London from an attack of giant reptilian creatures.

To the east, the Thames stretches out past Thurrock itself and on to the container port at Tilbury, one of the three largest in the UK. Tilbury is the gateway to the UK for products not people, although it is also home to something called the London Cruise Terminal. A LOT of stuff comes in here: you can read some mind boggling statistics about exactly how much and what here.

Everything about the river is vast at this point; an unremittingly sombre landscape of sheds, ships, pylons, grain chutes and roll-on roll-off container trucks that operates outside of the public gaze. The logistics of how our culture feeds and supports itself is of very little interest to us it seems. It is allowed to exist in an autonomous space, completely unrepresented in mainstream culture.

birthday

2011-02-06T20:52:00.002Z

World's Largest Cake image via

I'm afraid this is another post about other people's posts. I have an excuse though which is that my wife and I have just had another baby - a beautiful girl called Nancy (named after the female sleuth, obviously) - so there's likely to be an extended blogging hiatus while we get to grips with our expanded family.

But the strangely blissful days of paternity leave do allow some time for reading - normally at odd hours - so I can draw your attention to some good stuff out there, even though many of my regular haunts have sadly gone rather quiet of late.

First up, the fabulously but utterly correctly titled Is Localism Bollocks? post at new-ish blog Jones the Planner. After all the mealy-mouthed complicity of the RIBA and the 'architects can get a slice of the local action' advice of BD, AJ etc., it's refreshing to read someone who knows what they're talking about telling it like it is.

Jones also has what looks like being an interesting series of posts on various city walks, including this one on underrated Leicester.

Mr Matt Tempest has a blog, mostly about Berlin and with a nice line in homages to communist era-design, especially this beautiful bit of pre-cast concrete mere-facadism. I tend to miss this stuff much more than the soon to close Tacheles from my time in Berlin, especially as I lived for a while on Alexander Platz, home to the finest collection of patterned pre-cast concrete facadism.

The Bi-Blog, as well as being bravely named given the way the internet works involves one-time FAT employee E. Sean Bayley, always a man most likely too who now gone and has. I linked to it recently via Will Wiles' contribution but it's consistently worth checking out. The format is simple - two pieces are commissioned on the same very loosely defined topic - but the results are invariably fascinating and nicely tangential. I've chosen to steal the image at the top of the post from this one, for obvious reasons.

Finally - and I've been intending to link to this for ages - there's Rheomode, an excellent blog and research archive written by Jon Goodbun (Full disclaimer: he once stole my last fish finger). Jon's forthcoming AD on the issue of scarcity looks like being a lot of more vital to civilisation than mine which will just feature lots of garish buildings and post modern sillyness. So far, though, no posts about the Style Council (in-joke).

I'm never quite sure whether to link to political stuff on here although I spend a good deal of my time ranting about it on Twitter. Somehow that seems OK although it tends to lose me followers who have offered to make me lots of money on the US stock exchange. Anyhow, this post on Paul Mason's Idle Scrawl blog has already done the rounds of that infernal micro-blogging site (which incidentally makes perfect sense if you aren't at work and have sporadic moments of being able to engage with the internets) but is a tremendously acute piece of speculation on current goings on nonetheless. AND, it mentions Deleuze and Guattari on the BBC Newsnight website and you don't get that from Jeremy Paxman. In an increasingly parched and barren cultural climate this is cause for celebration at least. As is Nancy, of course. Goodnight....