Jonathan

In the summer of 1996 I was living in Berlin, emerging from a long winter in every sense. Planning my return to London and studying for my diploma at the Bartlett school of architecture, I picked up a catalogue describing the various teaching studios on offer. The text for Studio 12 was brief, pithy and to the point. It was written in words that were clear like water but also slippery like ice. There was no flannel, no long digressions into chaos theory or bird migration patterns or the importance of the fold or whatever else was fashionable at the time. But neither were the words reductive or simplistic. They were simple but playful, clear-eyed but canny, the world of architecture deconstructed momentarily so new ideas and thoughts could emerge. 

The words were written by Jonathan Hill and when I arrived at the Bartlett that Autumn I joined his studio. It was a funny year. I wasn’t an especially good student….things got in the way, friendships got formed and relationships started and a little too much fun was had. I sensed Jonathan’s frustration but he remained - as he always was - a generous, tireless, thoughtful critic. His method was often tangential and oblique: he teased out ideas, probed alternatives and made elliptical, somewhat enigmatic statements. He wore his learning lightly and he never used cliches. Unlike a lot of sharp critics he really loved architecture, often surprising and unlikely kinds of architecture. His taste and views were always his own, never normative but somehow gently provocative.

Studio 12 was well on the way to becoming a legendary teaching unit at that point but it was still early days. Within the Bartlett it offered a sanctuary from the insectoid architecture that predominated, the complex welded contraptions and whimsical creatures that emerged from the workshops. Unit 12 was a space for another kind of enquiry and invention, it nursed an interest in the user and the occupation of architecture, the political circumstances in which buildings happened and the conventions of practice versus the avant-garde. Later it embraced interests in historical inflection, the baroque, the decorative and the outer reaches of post modernism…but it always did so with that enquiring, quizzical spirit that was so much a part of Jonathan’s character.

Jonathan wrote beautifully and his books pushed into fascinating areas….like that course brochure, he had a way of being both clear and richly alert to complexity. He never narrowed things down or looked for easy answers….the joy was in the search and the openness to invention, though always guided by a desire to avoid the obvious and the cliched.

After the Bartlett I would see Jonathan at events and talks and sometimes at social events. He was a friend of sorts, not a close one but someone I always enjoyed seeing. He invited me to crits and when I came to the school to give a lecture, he provided a warm and generous introduction. Jonathan was a fixture in a way, a one-man institution. if anyone summed up the best things about the Bartlett it was Jonathan, who brought an unashamed intellectualism and a subtly anarchic spirit to offset the bombast. He inspired a lot of people and influenced a multitude of practices and careers. He seemed to love the Bartlett and to enjoy his unique status within it.

The news of his death this week then came as a profound shock. He was somehow ageless and ever present. Unchanging and entirely himself. His preternatural youthfulness was part of his charm, a sense that whilst everything moved on and disappointments and achievements came and went, Jonathan was always Jonathan, fresh faced despite the years, dressed the same, and always interested, intrigued, up for a drink. He liked gossip and he kept up with a lot of people. Unlike an awful lot of tutors it felt that he really liked his students. 

He has left behind an impressive body of work, some great writing and several generations of graduates whose work and approach to architecture was profoundly and positively affected by his guidance. Thats his professional legacy. I know little of his private one though I am sure he was hugely loved and valued. He was a gentle soul with a sharp mind whose deceptively simple words revealed great depths of thinking. He was also a lovely guy.

Jonathan Hill RIP

Fat. End of.

So, we've announced our end and, surprisingly, hearteningly and for all the right reasons, it feels good. Architectural practices don't normally just stop, but then FAT have never been a normal architectural practice. That's been both a blessing and a curse of course. We've never made it easy for ourselves. 

As Charles Jencks understatedly put it in the Guardian's FAT 'obit', we "went against the tide" of British architecture. Setting up your stall in direct confrontation to the tasteful, earnest, wet-liberal mainstream was never going to make us popular. Gleefully saying how much we hated it just alienated us more. Broadsides against everyone from Terence Conran to Ken Shuttleworth to Ricky Burdett were never the moves made by smart careerists. We've even been rude about some of our current clients for god's sake. 

All of which made us popular with critics, students and allies similarly baffled by the timidity of much architectural culture and the sanctimonious clap-trap that goes along with it. Few of these people employ you of course, or at least not to design buildings. Throwing brick bats from behind a curious and misleading acronym made us a tricky kettle of fish when it came to clients and the accursed need to pay the rent. Some of the people who did employ us have shown remarkable forbearance, others an undoubted courage in taking us on. But I like to think we've re-payed them every time with nothing less than total conviction and commitment to the cause as well as some - come on admit it - quite good buildings.

So what were we on about? Well, initially it stemmed from dissatisfaction, maybe even an anger about the limits of architectural culture, its disinterest in the world around it and indeed in anything other than its own internal discourse. We wanted to make architecture swim in the same fast waters as other forms of (popular) culture, to have the immediacy of pop music, the currency of cinema and the savvy of contemporary art. We wanted it to be sad and funny, smart and stoopid, popular and arcane. We wanted the exquisite melancholy of sweet nostalgia and the giddy joy of the absolutely brand spanking new all at the same time. We wanted it to embrace the immediacy and absurdity of fashion and celebrate the fleeting ephemerality of taste 

We also thought architecture could be about things other than buildings, about events and actions, spaces and people. Politics even. So we did art exhibitions that moved around on plastic bags and proposed urban plans that didn't involve building anything much at all. We entered a competition for regenerating an industrial area of Birmingham that took the form of a short story and some cartoons because we thought the place was largely ok as it was. We came second. Years later the client wrote to us to tell us that we should have won.

We railed against all those hoary old modernist myths that clung on to British architecture like tedious barnacles: truth to materials, honest structures, form following function, la-dee-bloody-da. So we designed an advertising agency office that took inauthenticity to new lows. A gold-leaf covered beach hut on legs which served as an AV room, an elongated work space based on the wooden forts of Russia and a library on wheels. In a church. And all knocked-up by a Dutch TV set builder for about a fiver and treated to look older than it actually was. There's no NBS clause for any of that, and I've looked. 

Our early heroes were perhaps predictable enough: Koolhaas and Tschumi for sure, a bit of Peter Wilson, a heavy dose of Archigram and some of Cedric Price's attitude. Later though other far less fashionable influences came in. Venturi Scott Brown of course (by way of Dan Graham, another influence and a great writer on architecture),  Charles Moore and - ye gads! - briefly even Michael Graves. Partly through VSBA we also discovered a love of classicism, mannerism and the baroque, Michelangelo, Borromini, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. Soane too, especially his exquisite and sublime house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. But we also liked the sweeping, scenographic showmanship of Nash, not mention the sly wit of Lutyens and the vigorous fuck you-ness of Stirling, who of course only got better when he went PoMo.

Much of this came about through an enforced disengagement with contemporary architecture, a kind of deliberate exile. Looking back, Jencks is right. We were ploughing a very odd and lonely furrow then,  copy and pasting scratchy drawings of old churches and wooden huts and listening to Deep Purple in a messy studio at the top of an office block in Golden Lane. Eventually someone burgled us and stole Sam's Deep Purple album as well as my My Bloody Valentine ep's, although oddly they left the Rizzoli monograph on Stanley Tigerman.

Around this time, Sean designed his own house which distilled a lot of what was going on in our heads. South Park meets Adolf Loos we described it as, a surprisingly sculptural, spatially complex interior that looked like Le Corbusier had done some DIY on a London terrace house. On the outside it was clad in fake wood and painted baby blue and, predictably, a lot of people disliked it. A lot of people didn't and it undoubtedly moved us on a long way.

Then fate came to smile on us in the form of Nick Johnson of Urban Splash, Matthew Harrison of Great Places and a group of Mancunians who evidently took pity on a southern wine drinking jessie (me) and a scouser (Sean). On the way up to the interview for a job designing 23 new houses our lap top bust. So we turned up with no slides and no presentation - no pictures of our work at all in fact - and we won the job. There's a lesson there though we for one never heeded it. 

But we got to design the houses which were something of an odyssey into the heart of the English popular home. Just before we did that we curated a solo exhibition at Manchester's CUBE gallery (props to Graeme Russel, an early and tireless supporter) called - somewhat ludicrously - Kill The Modernist Within. Later, when someone looked at the houses in Islington Square, they declared that we hadn't actually killed the modernists, we'd just got them to do the planning.  

There were other don't-try-this-at-home marketing ploys. Our truly insane first website for one, with its pixellated pornography, bizarre self-deprecatory biographies and downloadable clip'n'fold grave stones, for which Sam bears by far the lion's share of responsibility. There was also the 'Konran Store' at the VandA, where we sold hand-made and genuinely hideous pottery replicas of design classics such as Aldo Rossi's coffee pot and the first IMac. Stephen Bayley's wife bought one of the former and I like to think of it ruining the otherwise impeccably tasteful interior of their house to this day.

Around the time of Islington Square, Crimson arrived in our lives and commissioned us to design some kind of decorated industrial shed for people to get drunk in next to a petrochemical plant on the edge of Rotterdam. A dream commission for us. It was love at first site and a marriage made in heaven, or at least in a mutual love of new towns, post-punk pop and doing the wrong thing. 

Bigger projects came - some great ones like the BBC - but also the inevitable weariness of all those PPQ's, interviews for jobs that don't happen and competition wins that lead nowhere. We might have started to moan a bit at times. But we grew an office and some wonderful people came to work for us. We even had staff reviews and there was a CPD session once, although Sean stopped it half way through because it was too boring and no one was listening to him anymore. 

And right towards the end we got commissioned to do two of the most wonderful projects ever: a house in the wilds of the county I was born in, designed with a cross-dressing, mega-famous potter with an even-bigger love of decoration than us, and the British Pavilion in Venice with our thoroughly likely old friends Crimson and our throughly unlikely new friend Owen Hatherley. Both projects will finish next year and, together mine two of the strongest themes in our work: a critical re-engagement with Modernism and what it means today, and an embracing of narrative, decoration and symbolic meaning in architecture. So, not bad ones to go out on. 

But it definitely feels like time for a change. 20 odd years is a long time to work with yourself let alone anybody else. And collaboration can be a job in itself even before you start the other stuff. As Sean said, it's one end and three beginnings and it really feels like a new start in the best possible sense. Like much of what came about, I can't recommend it as a career strategy, but more architecture practices should consider retiring. It's very therapeutic and people even say nice things about you. Then again this might not be such a rarity for everyone else. 

The BTL snarks have given us a lot of joy of course. The person on Dezeen who said, simply"Please stop this shit" will live on in our memories. As Bob Venturi said elsewhere, you have to admire invective of that clarity. It hasn't all been about annoying people though. Actually none of it has. We've done what we've done for the love of it, because we genuinely enjoyed stuff and thought you might too. For the record, we weren't pranksters and we weren't taking the piss. We were as serious as you like, as all the best jokes are at heart. 

What comes next is enormously exciting though too. A change is as good as a rest as my grandmother never said. And architecture, we have long maintained, is about change however much we architects try to resist it. So, there'll be more news soon from me. In the meantime there's lots of people to thank who aren't at FAT now but once were...too many for here but I for one am profoundly grateful to FAT's founding fathers for giving me the leg up - I was a johnny come lately to the party and they did the hard bit - and fellow travellers and early co-authors (hello Tom and Cordula and Geoff and Sarah and others) who sometimes get written out the script and to all the fabulous people who worked for and with us as well as the clients who gave us the chance to build. That last bit is important. And mostly of course I should thank Sean and Sam for a thrilling, inspiring and exhilarating nearly twenty years.  They're quite smart, those two.

So, ta ta for now. But, watch this space. 

Hommage a Lina Bo Bardi

So today we took a trip to the wealthy suburb of Morumbi, once a rainforest outside Sau Paulo and now home to seemingly endless roads of gated mansions patrolled by security guards. Tinted windowed 4x4's and taxi cabs drive up and down its hilly streets while the only people on the pavement seem to be domestic staff trudging to work. And the occasional prostitute, doing the same I guess.

Somewhere in these hills hovers Lina Bo Badi's Casa de Vidro, the remarkabl house the Italian-born architect designed for her and her husband and their seven cats in the early 1950s. You approach it up a steep and winding driveway which makes a 90 degree turn at the end to bring you up to, or more accurately, under the house. The living room floats amongst the trees above you, perched on some fabulously skinny columns and sandwiched between two thin slabs of white concrete.

The drive carries on under this structure where a stair takes you up to a lobby that is both inside and outside the house. You haven't actually gone through a door but this slot like space is coded as interior by the placement of an abstract painting hanging on the wall in front of you. 

You enter from below basically, like a tree house, and emerge into the large, glazed living space with its random and very beautiful collection of furniture, paintings and artefacts. You can walk up to the skinny black frames of the floor to ceiling glass walls and get an intense, vertiginous rush as you gaze out through the trees at the vast city beyond.

In the middle of the space is a hole, a kind of vertical courtyard through which a tree grows and which allows glimpses of the corridor to the bedrooms behind. The bedrooms and bathrooms sit at the back of the house, small and dimly lit in comparison to the expansive and spatially undefined living room. But they have a care and meticulousness about their arrangement and detailing. 

The door handles for instance are beautiful and surreal, reminiscent - as one of my companions Damon Rich pointed out - of a pair of bulls horns when you can see both sides of the door. 

The two wings of the house - the glazed, floating front and the more traditional, ground hugging back - are linked by a vast kitchen of impressive modernity for its time. The Bo Bardis it seems, liked to host parties and it's hard to imagine a more spectacular and glamorous setting for them. 

Brazilian modernism of the 50's and 60's aspired to a level of spatial fluidity and gravity defying structure that makes European brutalism seem pretty tame by comparisonb. Flying canopies, vertiginous ramps, tilted floor planes and highly ambiguous definitions of inside and outside, make them thrillingly disorientating experiences. Bo Bardi's house takes the domestic entrance sequence and turns it into a spiralling and disjunctive vertical journey. The stairs are outside, the hallway is in an undercroft and there is a tree growing in the living room. 

As you leave, the house seems to just float away above you, hanging in the trees.

London Buses and São Paulo Biennales

Typical. You wait several months for a post and then two come along at the same time. Well, ok, so you probably weren't exactly waiting, but......

....below you'll find a couple of long-in-the-making posts for all the usual tawdry reasons. The first is a review, some twenty years after its release, of Mike Leigh's Naked. I first watched this film in Berlin in 1993, when Mike Leigh was present for a post-screening q&a. Twenty years later I watched it in the Barbican where Mike Leigh was present for a post-screening q&a. Interestingly, as far as I can remember, the questions were very similar the first time, revolving around the issues of the film's perceived mysogyny.

Whilst acknowledging this as a very valid observation, I have also tried to talk about the film in a different way. Not because it isn't important but because there are other, equally powerful and troubling aspects to it. Anyway, the review is below......

The second post is a very belated follow-on to my City of London guide, this time looking at two buildings on the London Wall, one by Norman Foster and the other by Richard Rogers. Without wishing to look like some kind of stalking obsessive, Rogers is also the subject of a recent review for Icon, which you can find here.

Lastly, a note that I will be talking at the Track Changes event at the 2013 Bienal de São Paulo organised by Crimson. The event is on the 4th, 5th and 6th of November and I will be speaking as part of the discussion "What's Your Crisis" on the 6th.

Anyway, if anybody who reads this or knows about FAT is there, come along and say hi.

Team 2

At the western end of London Wall, facing each other across a small and rather nebulous public space are two new-ish office buildings, one designed by Richard Rogers and the other by his old Team 4 partner Norman Foster. More correctly,  the buildings were designed by the firms of Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Foster and Partners.

Accreditation is important not just because both men run large architectural practices made up of numerous collaborators, but also because the buildings are from the more recent, 'late' stages of their respective careers. They could thus be regarded less as the outpourings of singular artistic vision and more as the products of well-oiled architectural machines. Given their proximity to each other though, it's interesting to relate them to key projects of each architect's 'youth', inevitably inviting questions as to who has hung onto youthful ideals the longest.




The RSH building contains numerous references to previous Rogers designs including - most obviously - the technicolour funnels of the Pompidou Centre. But there is also the bright yellow painted steel of the house he designed in Wimbledon for his parents and the meticulous techno detailing of the Lloyd's Building. And then there's that slightly uncanny way Rogers has with glass, the way that the panels seem to just float dreamily across the surface of the building, mainly in order to show off the Meccano-like structure more clearly.

With its billowy fully glazed curves,  Foster's One London Wall echoes his Willis Faber Dumas office building of 1975, especially at night when the lights inside seem to dematerialise the architecture entirely. This building is also instructive of the difficulties faced by hi-tech architects away from green-field sites and industrial estates. The compromises of tight urban sites, the odd angles and awkward adjacencies and the fact that up close nothing is actually straight or perpendicular, creates slightly ungainly monsters of buildings based on unrelenting grids and repetitive bay systems.

Fosters answer to this at London Wall - and far more successfully at Ipswich - is to cloak his rational floor plates with a free-floating curtain wall that follows the curve of the street. Both buildings thus envelop their sites, becoming both figure and ground at the same time. The old articulations of architecture - back/front, facade/interior, fenestration/wall - disappear and the buildings become almost abstract, as scaleless, and undifferentiated as a computer screen.

Unlike Willis, Faber and Dumas though there is no soft, egalitarian programme to go with this aesthetic at London Wall, no rooftop garden to playfully augment the non-hierarchical acres of lime green-carpeted burolandschaft. Instead there is just high quality, top-dollar city office space.



There are other departures too. Ponderous details of establishment conservatism have crept-in via  the reconstituted stone panels that wrap the ground level,  and the attempts at traditional massing at the corner junction. This particular corner looks onto the roundabout containing Powell and Moya's Museum of London, the spectacularly horrible 200 Aldersgate Stree (now minus its Stirling-esque cascading glass atrium) and Bastion House, one of the last Miesian towers left from the 1960's masterplan*. One London Wall adds little positive to this interesting but fairly disastrous urban scenario. 

It does though manage to connect more literally to the radical ideas of the 1960s and 70s in the form of the high-level walkways planned and partially built by the Corporation of London. There are public entrances at either end of One London Wall that lead up by escalator and lift to bridges connecting to the Museum of London and the Barbican estate beyond. Although it connects to them it's worth noting that the One London Wall also terminates these connections too. Coming from the Barbican end you are returned unceremoniously to ground level, the thrills of three dimensional urbanism officially over.

RSH's 88 Wood Street offers yet more in the way of Grade A office space. But without its stylistic twitches it would be a wholly unremarkable addition to the city. These mannerisms suggest that while Rogers developed an architectural style, Foster defined an entire design economy. One London Wall is both singularly unremarkable and the product of a vision all the more powerful for its seeming anonymity.  While Rogers has retained his liberal politics and boho leanings, Foster appears aloof from such concerns. And while Rogers has developed a key role in advising governments and politicians on policy, Foster has aligned himself with the powers beyond our democratic institutions.



* London Wall, and its rebuilding over the last thirty to forty years will have to be the subject of another post. 

End of the millennium psychosis blues

"What are you guarding in this particular post modernist gas chamber?"

"Space".

"How would you know if somebody stole it?"

The most obvious thing to say about Mike Leigh's Naked - recently screened as part of the Barbican's Urban Wandering season - is that it is a violent film and that much of the violence is directed towards women. Its themes of misogyny and women as the much-abused objects of male frustration, makes it tough going, especially as the violence is sometimes played, if not exactly for laughs, then certainly with an eye for dark farce. Naked flips disorientatingly from black humour to something approaching slapstick and back again, meaning that you are never quite sure where the encounters it depicts are heading. It is as if Leigh, determined to make a diffident kind of film, keeps snapping back to his more usual fare.

Naked's inclusion in a season of films about London suggests though that it can be read as an exploration of the city as much as human relationships. London is portrayed here with an almost apocalyptic, end-of-the-millennium bleakness. 

It's almost impossible to watch any film made in London over the last thirty years without it in some way offering a commentary - however inadvertent - on the city's gentrification, but Naked's choice of locations makes it particularly revealing in this respect.

It begins with a violent sexual encounter in a Manchester backstreet from which Johnny - the film's anti-hero - escapes in a stolen car. In a brilliant opening sequence, he drives to London through the night along an almost deserted motorway before dumping the car by the side of the road somewhere on the outskirts of the city.  Somehow he finds his way to his ex-girlfriend's flat in Dalston*. For the next few days he careers around London, taking in Soho streets, West End offices and a particularly dystopian scene below what looks like a motorway flyover.

I had assumed this latter scene was filmed below the Westway but at the Q+A that followed the film's screening, Mike Leigh revealed it, not without irony, to be Shoreditch. Appropriately enough, these days the same spot comes complete with a pair of decommissioned, graffiti covered tube trains hoisted up on to a warehouse roof and used as studios for hipster design companies

The use of buildings and settings is actually superbly handled throughout. The Dalston flat manages to be both absolutely unremarkable and highly theatrical. The curving flight of stairs up to its elevated front door adds a spatial drama to the frequent comings and goings, as well as the seemingly final departure of Johnny. And the interior, with its weak sunlight creeping in behind curtains, manages to be neither comically scummy nor particularly wholesome. Its ordinary, vaguely but not too obviously unappealing, like any number of flats you might have passed through in your time.

There are two exceptional urban scenes in the film though. The first is filmed in Soho where the camera sits closely cropped on an Italian delicatessen window late at night. There is a general sense of chaotic activity so it takes a while to realise that our attention is being directed to one person in particular. Or rather two, because Johnny, slumped in a doorway is watching the same guy as us, a frantic, aggressive young man marching up and down the road shouting for a missing girl. The familiar desperation of a place like Soho with its fleeting, potentially electric, encounters is captured brilliantly. 

Later on Johnny finds himself in the doorway of an office block, this time being observed by the building's security guard. The guard lets him in, allowing the rather brilliant exchange at the top of this post to take place. 

The two wander the corridors of the empty building, following the monotonous regime of the security guard and exchanging equally tortured theories on life, the universe and everything. As in real life, Johnny's deep cynicism and nihilistic theorising steamroller all over the security guard's vague, hopeful humanism.

A word too about Johnny, who remains one of the best, most compelling film characters ever created. The film is really nothing without him and the other characters don't come close to his complexity and disturbing charisma. This is one of the faults for the film's detractors of course, the fact that Johnny's relenetlessly bullying monologues are never challenged. He rampages through the lives of those around him, smashing away at their already fragile self-esteem and freaking them out with his elaborate, baroque conspiracy theories. 

He is strangely, eerily familiar, like someone you might have genuinely met once in a bar. He's both fascinating and terrifying company, forever waiting for the next person on whom to inflict his frustrations and formidable intelligence in order to undermine whatever weak resolve they may have formed that life is basically worth living.

There are undoubtedly some poorly drawn characters in the film too. The Porsche-driving, sadistic yuppie Sebastian seems comically absurd now, with his endless, sneeringly ludicrous references to sex. "Have you ever eaten smoked salmon after making love?" he asks at one point, as this was both the height of decadence and erotic transgression. And Clare Skinner's stuttering, neurotic control freak of a nurse is rather silly too, putting a speedy end to the madness that has engulfed her flat while she has been away in sit-com style.

* For location geeks, this is at the junction of Shacklewell Lane and Downs Park Road

Bulletin

I

(Image: Neo-Plotlands village, by Jason Le Mare)

As this old blog has shown renewed signs of life lately, I feel justified in writing one of those look-what-I've-been-up-to posts, especially as there's a fair few things to mention.

Most notably I have contributed an essay to the RIBA's Building Future's series on the future of the village. In it I speculate on what a 21st century version of the planned and utopian villages of previous centuries might look like and what kind of economy it might be based on. My essay also serves as an introduction to the diploma studio I ran last year. The work of students in the unit is featured in a separate photo-essay.

There are also excellent and provocative essays by Daisy Froud, Matt Wood and Iain Watt.

I've also contributed an essay to the latest issue (no. 3) of the wonderful Block magazine, edited by Rob Wilson. I originally wrote this piece on the subject of architecture and money a couple of years ago now and it's only just seen the light of day which explains the fact that all the statistics in it are from 2011. Nonetheless, it's no less relevant I hope and the rest of the issue is, as usual, beautifully produced and well worth reading.

Incidentally, Rob interviews me about the house that FAT have designed with Grayson Perry - currently on site - for his other publishing venture, the on-line Uncube magazine. You can read Grayson's thoughts and inspirations about the project here.

Last but not least in this vulgar round of trumpet blowing, there's a review of a fabulous collation of architectural models on film from last month's issue of Icon available on-line. In next month's issue I'll be reviewing the RA's Richard Rogers retrospective and on here I'll be relating my attempt to find and photograph the lovely steel framed house and studio he designed in the Essex countryside early in his career.

For anyone who isn't sated enough by all that, I'll be speaking out loud and in public at Frome's newly minted Architecture Club (motto: the first rule of architecture club: talk about architecture club) on October 1st. 

And finally, following my previous post about Matzine's Jargon debate, there is a no-doubt highly embarrassing film of the whole event available to view here.

The 15 Step Anti-Jargon Programme

The other day I took part in a very enjoyable debate on the subject of jargon organised by the lovely people at Matzine. Along with Dr Crystal Bennes, I was on the anti side of the To Jargon Or Not To Jargon divide. We lost, mostly due to the formidable debating skills of our opponents @daisyfroud and @indyjohar. Despite this, I thought I'd post up what I read out on the night.......

15 Steps To A 100% Jargon Free Life

Getting off jargon isn't easy, but carrying this list with you at all times can really help. It's a handy list of words that you should avoid if at all possible. Try eliminating them from normal conversation first and if you feel confident extend the ban to professional situations such as crits and presentations. 

Remember: these are 'gateway words' that can easily lead to you becoming addicted to meaningless verbiage. It includes words that I use myself. I describe myself as a recovering jargon abuser. But with the help of this list I'm slowly getting better........

1. Space. As in; “This is a really contemporary space”. Translation: I quite like this room.

2. Map/Mapping. As in; “I’ve been mapping this contemporary space”. Translation: I’ve drawn a plan of the room.

3. Programme. Especially when pre-fixed by ‘cross’ as in; “I’m really into cross-programmed space.  This vertical trout farm on Mars* is still a bit boring. Maybe it needs an experimental theatre attached to it".

4. Interrogate. As in; “I think you really need to interrogate this building in section”. Translation: I can’t think of anything else to say in this crit.

5. Problematise. As in; “This upside-down staircase really problematises the concept of vertical circulation".

6. Challenge. As in; "This upside-down staircase really challenges preconceived notions of up and down".

7. Calibrate. As in; “The threshold is carefully calibrated to express a sense of transition from public to private spaces”. Translation: This is the front door.

8. Boundary: As in; “The junction dissolves the boundary between inside and out”. Translation: It’s glass.

9. Blur: As in; “Their work blurs the disciplinary boundaries between art and architecture”. Oh hang on, I think that’s one of mine.

10. Disciplinary: See above.

11. Practice: As in; “Writing is my form of spatial practice”.

12. Praxis: See above, but far worse.

13. Theorise: Example; “Sorry I’m late, I’ve been busy theorising my praxis”. Translation: I’ve been reading my twitter stream.

14. Liminal: As in; “My spatial praxis is very concerned with mapping liminal spaces”. Translation: I live next to an industrial estate”.

15. Territory/Territorialise/De-territorialise: As in; “This is my attempt at de-teretorialising the ideological function of jargon through challenging preconceived notions of language with respect to spatial and theoretical praxis”.

* Props to Alastair Parvin

Holiday Reading

"You are from Kent?" she said, 'maybe you can answer me this. Why are old things so important in England?'*

My wife laughed when the book arrived. It seemed almost too right for me, as if someone had suddenly perfected one of those Amazon consumer profiles to an eerie, unnerving degree. There was that title for a start, the Elliot misquote that could be a description of a certain kind of blogospheric writing with its hyper-links, digital jump cuts and chance virtual encounters. 

More fundamentally there's the subject matter. Connecting Something With Nothing is an anthology of writing about the south east coast, a place we have spent the last five or six years exploring. A flick through the essays within it reveals familiar place names and obsessions: Pegwell Bay, New Romney and the Wantsum Channel, long-since silted up harbours, nuclear reactors, muddy estuaries and rusting neon signs. My kind of holiday destinations basically, the sort of places I drag my family to on bitingly cold new year mornings or rainy bank holiday weekends.

The contributors list offered up some  familiar  names too, names recalled from Twitter encounters and even in a couple of cases, Actual Real Life. All of which is to say that I was quite heavily predisposed to like this book, almost to the point where it could only disappoint, like an over anticipated night out.

Fortunately such perverse worries turned to nought. There are some great things in Connecting Nothing With Something.  Kit Caless' lyrical evocation of ordinary pleasures in un-lyical places is genuinely moving. I liked Salena Godon's bracing poems about teenage love affairs and filthy fishermen too,  as well as her suitably salty tale of teenage mayhem in 80s Hastings. Rowena McDonald recalls a more awkward adolescent experience in the Sussex town of Newhaven.

Adrian Self's contribution is both enigmatic and funny, a kind of miniaturised version of W G Sebald if he'd had a sense of humour. It takes the form of notes from an imagined audio-art project, a parodic psychogeographic derive that is more of an eventful walk around the block.

Owen Booth's short story is highly entertaining and faintly peculiar, a fictionalised account of a young Richard Burton's antics while filming Green Grow The Rushes in New Romney in the early 50s. I enjoyed this tale of illicit drinking, smuggling and sex so much I sought out the film on YouTube, which is considerably more enjoyable to watch if you've read Owen's short story first I imagine.

There is a similar tone to much of the writing here; memories of adolescent lives in burnt-out seaside towns that are still fresh. The voice is generally sophisticated, sceptical and aloof but also prone to nostalgia and an unspecific sense of loss. Many of the pieces suggest a rapprochement with places almost forgotten about over the last few years, places now indelibly linked with (recently lost) youth.

The Margate contributions coalesce around the role of teenage sub-cultures - skin-heads, punks, mods and rockers alongside its cheerier, cheesier reputation for cockney knees-ups and Chas'n'Dave. Iain Aitch - curator of Margate's Hidden Youth Culture History - contributes a good, short essay on Margate's recent half-hearted attempts regeneration while Gary Budden describes a personal revelation at the Turner Contemporary exhibition Nothing In the World But Youth.

Art and regeneration loom large too in these accounts, especially in the two gloomy but still grand towns that bookend the collection. Margate and Hastings are like mirror images of each other with their mysterious pier fires, shiny new contemporary art galleries and histories of drinking, drugging and escape.

The book and its contributors are more than aware of the contradictions, the dubious nature of the role of art in a regeneration industry seemingly fuelled by middle-class property speculation and cup-cakes. And yet, undeniably both towns have acquired two fine new public buildings after years of mostly shonky and careless development, buildings that draw day trippers and 'staycationers' in the best seaside tradition.

These conflicts have become intertwined so that it is now virtually impossible to separate artists and writers drawn to forgotten or overlooked places from the boosterist language of the regen. agencies that are themselves now confined to (New Labour) history. Iain Sinclair after all has a flat in Marine Court, Hastings' extraordinary cruise-liner like art deco block of flats. Psychogeography has become inseparable from the inevitable clean-up campaign that follows in its wake, property speculation on the back of obscure interests and arcane modernist fictions.



I should say at this point that I'm a part of the problem.  A DFL (Down From Londoner) if ever there was one. My wife and I bought a house in Deal a few years ago. Spending time there is partly about escape and partly about a nostalgia of our own. My father spent his childhood in Deal and my wife was brought up by the sea, so for both of us it connects back to something for sure.

The seaside represents a place where the usual rules don't apply, a holiday from normal life. But the British seaside is indelibly and unavoidably about the past. The stories in Connecting Nothing With Something situate themselves in this illusory and highly ambiguous space. For people born there - and most of the writers in this anthology were - the coast is somewhere to escape from rather than to, small towns with big social problems and only one direction out. Or two if you are feeling particularly bleak. But then, as the stories also make clear, such places drag us back too, exerting a powerfully nostalgic pull. Like boats borne back ceaselessly against the tide, as someone once said.



* Taken from Old but Somehow New, by Kit Caless.

Connecting Nothing With Something: A Coastal Anthology is available from Influx Press here.

Slim Slow Slider

Well, this quick-fire blog post thing didn't work too well. And the Richard Rogers post will have to wait until after I have visited the RA exhibition, which, incidentally, I will be reviewing for Icon. So here's another short post instead on the architecture of the Square Mile....

This is a bit of an oddity really, but well worth checking out if you are in this particular neck of the woods*. St Mary at Hill not only has a pleasingly strange street name but is home to a very peculiar collection of buildings. Three in particular stand out because of the way in which they interact and integrate with each other. 

The short, shallow hill is dominated by St Mary at Hill itself (herself?), an originally medieval church rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. Its official address is Lovat Lane, but the real frontage - if you could call it that - is on St Mary at Hill. The facade is deeply strange, featuring a blocked-up Venetian window, a broken pediment and a very large, hand painted sign bearing the churches name. 

Odder still is the entrance which is through an unsung opening in a very mannered, late-Victorian structure off to one side. This building has a completely asymmetrically grouped array of windows which can be only partially explained by the fact that it abuts the church and effectively hides the courtyard behind.

The archway leads to this courtyard and the entrance to the church itself, which features a collection of circular openings of diminishing scales. This intersects with the main entrance from Lovat Lane and the cleverness of Wren's arrangement - which effectively buries the church amongst its neighbours - becomes clear.

To the left of the church is another opening marked appealingly enough by a small, slightly sinister skull and cross bones hovering in its pedimented doorway. This leads to a stepped passageway that appears to lead off to Lovat Lane but which was gated on the day I visited. 

The cream stucco of the church frontage spreads across this adjacent building as if to claim a bit of it for itself, with the result that the spaces behind the facades of these seemingly discrete buildings slide into each other ambiguously. No great shakes perhaps, but there's some, y'know, complexity and contradiction going on here for the mannerist geeks amongst us. 

Inside, there is a rather beautiful and not very mannered at all Wren interior.