Floating In the High Tech Gene Pool.

The other week I took my daughter to Hackney’s newly re-opened Clissold Leisure Centre. I’ve got nothing against Steven Hodder and don’t really want to add anything to the feverish why did it leak and cost so much debate but my visit did get me thinking about the state of British Architecture. Because this building is curiously British and exemplifies a kind of stylistic cul de sac up which we seem to have disappeared. Why does so much recent British architecture look like this? This strange reduced language of gunmetal grey columns and finely formed concrete and glass? The whole of the Jubilee line looks like this, as do most new office blocks and much of Manchester and, soon, Liverpool. Other permitted materials include: red terracotta tiles (always articulated as a rain screen cladding), blue engineering bricks, glass blocks and stainless steel. These buildings are like sentences without adjectives, or metaphors or similes or shades of meaning. One. Thing. Next. To. Another. Very. Simple. Like.

Tracing the building buildings family tree helps to shed some light on why it looks and feels the way it does. I blame Richard Rogers. And Norman Foster of course, but everyone already blames Norman Foster. But before them you have to blame Archigram and probably specifically Peter Cook and Ron Herron who were the people in Archigram most literal in their love of service systems and frameworks and architecture as a super large wiring diagram. You could I suppose blame Cedric Price too but he always seemed far too sardonic and distant to really be taking it all seriously. Not, that’s not quite fair but you know what I mean. Anyway, beyond them there was of course Fuller and the more flexible, clip it together flat pack school of modernists of which Prouve was probably the most well known. But its taken the Brits with their Anglo Saxon fetish for the detail and their very English fear of appearing in any way pretentious to pare architecture down to this very puritanical strain of thought that gives us buildings like Clissold.

Buildings that are sheds, sophisticated sheds without the rhetorical power of their crude forebears, tend to be the thing in this High Tech gene pool. Plans that are diagrams, fleshed out in this barren set of materials and forms. Clissold is a classic late mannerist version of the kind of high tech pioneered by Roger’s and in turn pilfered from Archigram and Price. Up close its all shadow gaps and silicone bonded glazing. From a distance it is huge aerofoil roof sections ‘floating’ as they invariably say, on glass. Entrances are especially problematic in this genre, as they tend to be associated with old rhetorical anti-functionalist types of architecture, So, they tend to be an absence rather than a presence, a gap in the grid or a missing corner that denotes entry. For this I suppose Louis Kahn must take some of the blame, as he notoriously didn’t like entrances either. Once inside, the purity of the shed is held to be of utmost importance so rooms and interior spaces tend to be pods sheltering within the wider span. All of this adds up usually to pretty bad Urbanism (see everything ever done by Nicholas Grimshaw, but especially the poor old Sainsbury’s in Camden Town) as the big sheds can’t adapt well to circumstance and chilly and banal interiors as all sense of procession, hierarchy, surprise, layering or complexity are shunned.

So it is in the Clissold Leisure centre. A chilly, vaguely dystopian environment of stainless steel guard rails and confusing foyer spaces. But what is most striking is how utterly grim it is. The idea that you are meant to take your clothes off and enjoy yourself in here is preposterous. A moment of total bathos arrives when you (well, if you) get to the toddler’s pool where two brightly coloured mushroom water sculptures stand forlornly within the grim airport ambience of the rest of it, a grumpy nod to an alien idea of fun or gaiety. The building accommodates and accepts these pop coloured intruders the same way the receptionist in a Cork Street art gallery accepts a smelly tramp. And here is the rub; this stuff is meant to be democratic. It’s origins in a critique of the forbidding social etiquette of classical architecture, or even architecture at all, mean that it is somehow meant to provide a home for all. A dim structuralist symbolism that equates glass with institutional transparency and open plans with freedom means we get these buildings that are ideologically against comfort and pleasure.

This isn’t a plea for more humanism or false ad-hocism in architecture. Quite the opposite, I think there’s too much of that nonsense already. I would happily go to an Aldo Rossi designed swimming pool (although that would probably leak too). What rankles is that we have ended up with so much public architecture like this. Grim third cousins to the Lloyds Building without its wit and dexterity, but with its odd obsession with handrails and complicated joints. This has replaced architecture as the point somehow. I don’t think the answer is covering everything in specious decoration a la Foreign Office Architects either but perhaps a sense of architecture as a formal as well as a technical discipline where space can be positive rather than negative, designed rather than avoided.

If you are feeling unusual

Came across this excellent description of Withnail and I and wanted to recommend it. Unusally insightful and avoids both 'buff'adom and student wackiness about a film that is overly tainted by both usually. Anyway here it is.

The Architecture of Un-happiness

Review: Mike Nelson: A Psychic Vacuum.

Mike Nelson is an architect. Not professionally, but he does design buildings. Or, at least, bits of buildings. The difference is that, unlike most architects, Nelson sets out to create places that aren’t very nice. In fact they have a palpable sense of unpleasantness. Nelson’s work deals with generically low-rent spaces; places where horror flicks and Kung Fu movies might be set. B-architecture, you could call them. His installations are room sets filled with found objects that evoke seedy, familiar places: motel lobbies, dank corridors, a security guards room, a dilapidated redneck bar.

This year Nelson has been nominated for the Turner Prize for the second time in his career. Perhaps the sense of déjà vu explains why his installation for the Turner Prize exhibition has generally been seen as lacklustre. His creative energies seem to have been spent elsewhere. His latest installation, The Psychic Vacuum, is located in Essex Street Market, a vast semi-derelict warehouse on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Entry is from the street into a dilapidated Chinese take-away where dust lies thick on deep fat fryers and over plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Although this space is typically “Nelsonian”, it is in fact a genuine abandoned restaurant. From the back of it a door leads into a labyrinthine mass of interconnecting rooms constructed using junk collected from second hand shops around New York. These rooms are typically disquieting places: a deserted bar, a dank and smelly freezer room, a lonely bedroom decorated with religious icons. Eventually, this claustrophobic maze leads you out into a huge industrial space almost completely filled with sand. Somewhere under it lie the rooms you have just come out of.

Nelson’s effects are unsettling for sure, but it is his method that is particularly intriguing. Architects start with drawings that get translated into buildings. Nelson starts from the other end, beginning not just with the sensation of a space but with something even more specific. Something like the feelings evoked from the objects he uses to form rooms that then connect with other rooms like so many intense but tangential thoughts.
Architects strive to make nice, maybe even beautiful places. Even work that purports to be edgy and radical is still really shiny and clean and well put together. Only an architect thoroughly unconcerned with ever being hired again would set out to make somewhere as maladjusted as The Psychic Vacuum.

Freed from the awful overwhelming responsibility to be responsible, Nelson is actually the anti-architect. His installations constitute a strange looking glass world where all the effort, ingenuity and skill goes into making bad places. Instead of sitting down with a nice clean piece of paper trying to design a better world, he starts with all the dirty and unwanted bits of the existing one. Then he weaves these together to form a dark parody of the places we inhabit. It’s thoroughly appropriate that he has found such a large chunk of derelict real estate in the rapacious market of Manhattan. His approach is the opposite of re-generation. It celebrates decay and decrepitude. Here he even sidesteps the gentrifying tendencies of the art gallery, by making a work that blends seamlessly into its neighbourhood. It represents a non-design, the negation of improvement or re-development. It is - to reverse the title of a recent book - the architecture of un-happiness.