local business

I have a review of a new book - Down Detour Road by Eric Cesal - in this month's RIBA Journal - you can read it here. Cesal's book is a good one and asks some very relevant questions about the role of the profession of architecture post the financial crisis. Some of the same issues - namely how architects ascribe value to what they do and bring their skills and knowledge to bear on a whole range of activities - are also touched on in Amanda Baillieu's blog at BD this week, which kindly links to a post I wrote some time ago about risk. 

Needless to say, I disagree with the conclusions of Amanda's post, if not with all of the ideas within it, mainly because I regard the government's Localism Bill, like their Big Society idea, as a benign sounding sop to cover up massive public spending cuts and free market ideology. But ideas of localism divorced from David Cameron and co., and the role of architects in socially engaged design, is interesting and perhaps worth exploring in more detail here. 

Some of my scepticism about localism is touched on in this excellent article by Alex Andrews at the New Left Project, which is otherwise concerned with more pressing political concerns.

Talking Loud and Saying Nothing

Exactly. And couldn't the same thing be levelled at the recent election? In the sense that whatever anyone said, however idiotic, bigoted or ignorant, had to be taken seriously by politicians. Not simply out of some slightly misplaced sense of respect for the electorate, but because if someone expresses a concern (immigration, knife crime etc.) then that concern must be legitimate. Because to say, as Gordon Brown did in private, that no, you're wrong, your concern is based on irrational paranoia driven by media exageration, would be to appear, elitist and arrogant.

The 2010 election was characterised by a thoroughly contemporary suspicion of any form of expertise (in this case politicians) and a populist certainty in the relevance of anybody's opinion, however deluded. This is why I can't accept the disenchantment with the two party system as particularly positive. It stems from a combination of "they're all as bad as each other" faux-cynicism with a blind faith in personal freedom denuded of all political or ideological conviction. It's also why the current Labour leadership campaign is so dispiriting, with its assumption that Labour lost because it didn't listen to the 'man on the street'.* Even if the man on the street was talking total crap his fears must now shape the future of political debate.

The powerful convergence of the language of libertarianism, individual rights and consumerism has entirely drowned out rational debate and analysis.

* And this despite the coherent and successful campaign against the BNP in Barking.

No Comment

I've long been baffled by the general level of idiocy of the comments in The Guardian's Comment is Free section. Take Peter Hallward's humane and intelligent analysis of the West's culpability in Haiti's fucked economy and social structure, for example, which meets a barrage of imbecilic abuse. As Mark Fisher argues, the majority of these comments are both wilfully ignorant and simplistically unaware of their own ideological position - the default setting for all conservatives who believe that ideology is something that other people suffer from. Anyway, Mark's post has said all this better already so go read it....

Object(ion) of the Week

In the various descriptions of Gordon Brown's conference speech one small detail stuck out for me. Apparently Gordon had a full sized replica of the conference podium set up in his hotel room to practice with. Tony Blair always had one too, although in his case you can imagine it wasn't just at conference time.

It's a tragic image though, Gordon standing impassioned in his pyjamas on his fake podium, frantically rehearsing his big ideas of clamping down on binge drinking and incarcerating fallen women to an audience of three snoozing aides.

It raises some interesting questions too. Is it exactly the same as the real one or is it a mock up made from cardboard and sellotape? Does he bring it with him? And who designed it? This is an object which, along with the rest of the conference interior, carries a significant amount of symbolic weight. And yet they are rarely discussed in design terms.

Make no mistake the podium itself is a fucking ugly object, like a huge plastic mushroom with an unpleasant foreskin fold halfway down its length. The whole thing is hydraulic too so the top half actually lowers down at the end of the speech in an unfortunate display of political detumescence.

It's difficult to know where the styling is coming from. There is a touch of the X-Box display stand about it and, obviously, a lot of the pulpit, both of which are probably deliberate. Political symbolism in this country is generally pretty clunky and gauche though from the Conservative's Caran d'Ache oak tree to the Liberal Democrats golden Phoenix rising from the ashes.

At the party conferences such insipid bits of graphic branding are combined with Spearmint Rhino lighting and a love of Union Jack emblazoned plasma screens. It makes for a queasy spectacle, a mix of faux self-effacement, orgiastic self worship and jingoistic mania. I'm not sure it would be preferable if it was well designed but - the vacuous populism of the content aside - its difficult to imagine a more alienating spectacle than the modern party conference.

Still Got Love For the Streets

These various fragments are connected in my mind by recent conversations regarding the legacy of The Smithson’s ‘streets in the sky’ and how these might intersect with current ideas of public space. In particular, the Smithson’s notion of streets in the sky was based on their close reading of street life in London’s east end and therefore on an idea of public space that is used, useful but non-prescriptive. Their idea of the content of public space therefore seemed to acknowledge the various lives that might be lived within it. Crucially therefore it avoided the formalist gesture of the piazza in favour of a more subtle elaboration of the street. So….

Down and out in Paris…

At least since the1850’s when Baron Houssmann designed the wide boulevards of central Paris at least partly in order to make it easier for troops to quell insurrection, the public space of the street has also been a space of social control. Or, possibly, the lack of definition of the street has made social control of it an issue. Some seventy years after Haussmann, Le Corbusier proposed his Ville Radieuse, in many way a radical upping of Hausmann’s anti. The Ville Radieuse proposed the wholesale demolition of the centre of Paris, to be replaced by towers standing majestically in ordered parkland splendour. The justifications for this radical measure where similar to Haussmann’s stated aims: increased sanitation, clean air, light, space and the privileging of visual order. Le Corbusier justified his audacious proposal by suggesting, at least implicitly, that the radical reconfiguration of the traditional city would result in a more stable social order. Towards A New Architecture ends with the reactionary warning: “Architecture or revolution”. In some ways it couldn’t be clearer. In the formal chaos of the city are fermented the seeds of social insurrection. Architecture can design them away.

Owen Hatherley has alerted me to the closing, in 1997, of the escalator access to the roof of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The democratic pretensions of the Pompidou lie both in the rhetoric of flexibility implied and in some cases made possible by its technology and, more tangibly, in the moving streets in the sky offered by the escalators that ride up its side. Even streets in the sky need policing. Too much freedom is clearly a bad thing.

…and London

“…if we would court their presence, we have only to take care that they find multitudes living in lanes and alleys in which there is no drainage, or in which the drainage is inefficient, where open cesspools and accumulated heaps of a filth unnamable abound.’

In this quote from an 1847 letter to the Times regarding the ‘rookerie’ slums of London, it's not clear whether its people or diseases that are being referred to.

The late, great Robin Evans wrote that the demolition and redevelopment of London’s rookeries, ostensibly motivated by the desire to improve sanitary and hygiene conditions was also motivated by a fear of what the rookeries bred. It was felt that their congested spaces and visual inaccessibility made them the natural home of immoral acts. Their back alleys and complex warren like configuration made them hard to police, but, more than that, was seen to actively encourage a similar covertness of mind and behaviour.

Regent Street is one of the few pieces of formal urban planning in London. This fact is often seen as being to the detriment of London and its inability to think strategically and ambitiously about urban space. The medieval street pattern is somehow evidence of a lack of clarity and vision. When John Nash designed Regent Street he employed the classical colonnade to front his crescents and villas. The colonnade is a device ideal for loitering. It offers shelter and a space to wander and stop to talk. Knowing this, but fearful of the vagabonds and vagrants who would hang around the front doors of the residents of Portland Place, Nash made a cunning modification. He removed the section of street immediately under the colonnade and replaced it with fenced off steps to the basements of the houses. The colonnade thus became a symbol divorced from its function of offering shelter. Not only did Nash provide visual order to the chaos of central London, but he designed out the possibility of undesirables hanging around in them. Nash was the polar opposite of his contemporary John Soane. Contrast the efficient order and social engineering of Nash's terraces with the dark perversity and bewildering labyrinthine passages of Soane's own house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Up, down, turn around, please don't let me hit the ground.

Some 130 years later another large area of London was cleared and re-planned: the South Bank. Here though the much criticised lack of legibility, their lack of traditional urban clarity, lends the spaces a looseness of interpretation. They may not move but, like the original intention for the Pompdiou, the terraces and aerial walkways of the South Bank encourage a a kind of exhilarating freedom of movement. Leading up, down, all around, the buildings become a kind of landscape to be climbed on and over as well as through. Adrian Forty has noted the inherently democratic nature of the plan of the Royal Festival Hall. He suggests persuasively that the enormous foyer space that occupies almost the entire ground floor is a truly public space because no reason or justification is required to be there. The design of this space means that far from being simply a feeder space for the main event, the auditorium or the ticket qeue (which is after all what all public buildings have) it is the main event itself. It is one of the most generous and open and uncontrolled spaces in the city. It is an extension of those other streets in the sky of the Southbank, a square in the sky maybe, but also, with its carpeted walkways and stairs, more like a living room in the sky.

Standing in the Way of Control

The visual and spatial order of the idealised city is also a tool in the production of a corresponding social order. I have written before about Gillet Square in Hackney and its received and idealised notions of public space. These spaces anticipate similarly idealised notions of behaviour. As an architect involved in designing new housing I am told that public space should be surveyed and bounded. Cabe’s Building for Life standards and the police’s Secured by Design guides both attempt to design out spaces which could be used for loitering or anti-social behaviour. This is common sense and eminently reasonable. Like all common sense and eminently reasonable things it leaves little room for the unreasonable and the illicit. As a teenager going to school in suburban Essex, spaces for loitering and anti-social behaviour were exactly the spaces I sought out. These were the spaces of illicit activity, places which only teenagers and other people not engaged in ‘proper’ activities can hang out. Improper, unsupervised, visually un-surveyed spaces.

The painter George Shaw has documented these kind of in-between and left over spaces – allotments, garage lock-ups, the bits of scrubland left over when new estates are built – the kinds of places no one designs. In its loose fit, its lack of identity and its formlessness these spaces allow certain things, things designed out of the rest of our environment, to happen. They serve a kind of purpose and are home to something. The conventions of urban design, seemingly benign, are also driven by a desire to purge, to clean up. The social neuroticism of the John Pawson interior occurs on an urban level too. The Smithson’s streets in the sky at least seem to contain things. French film stars mainly but also prams, people, milk floats, football games, the detritus of life. The urge to clear away, to sweep unmentionables out is a profoundly strong one in architecture.

It’s hard to make a case for bad design, but equally hard to escape the notion that too much ‘good design’ might be bad for the soul. Architects and urbanists, tragically, are never allowed to get down with their bad selves. They always feel the compelling need to improve, to sort out problems, to make the world better. Sometimes though, its better when its badly designed. When its a bit wrong.