What's so wrong with a bit of puerile name calling? The case for Prince Charles: Architecture Critic

There’s an article in this weeks copy of Inside Paper (sorry Building Design magazine) about Prince Charles describing a little building by a well-known architect as a “dustbin”. This is accompanied by the usual hurt but self-regarding comments by the architect. Buildings, he says, are about so much more than aesthetics. They are complex equations of function, science, art, mystique and the intensely lit aura of the architectural office. They are emphatically not able to be described as looking like something. Least of all something horrible like a dustbin. Thing is though, it does look like a dustbin. There’s no getting away from it. No recourse to sustainability jargon and stuff about embedding things in the ground gets you away from the fact that Sir Prince is right. Obviously, he’s an idiot and me as a staunch republican an’ all, he’s at the front of the queue to go against the wall generally, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got eyes. More than that, I was thinking that maybe Prince Charles is actually quite a good architecture critic. I’d take him over Jonathon Glancey any day. Describing an extension as “a hideous carbuncle on the face of a much loved friend” is actually pretty good journalism. James Stirling’s design for No. 1 Poultry which he once described as looking like a 1930’s wireless, kind of does when you look at it. Not that that makes it crap. I quite like 1930’s wirelesses. Such comparisons are seen as irretrievably dumb but are generally not much dumber than the descriptions that architects use themselves. Zaha Hadid once described her design for the Welsh National Opera House as being a like a ‘string of pearls’. Now, firstly, why is that a good thing? Secondly, how does that describe an opera house in a useful or illuminating way? And thirdly, is the reference to a pearl necklace deliberate?

Similarly, a few years ago, Ron Arad wanted to build a new house in Hampstead. He described it as being like two spheres nestling together. Lovely. A neighbour started a vicious letter writing campaign against it, as people are wont to do. He described it as “a large egg that had just hatched”. Frankly, I don’t mind what it looked like and think that people should be able to build pretty much what they want and that the planning laws in this country generally support the worst kind of petty and mean spirited Nimbyism and should be scrapped. So, Ron Arad can design what he wants. But, if you ask me an egg that has just hatched is a considerably less nauseating and far wittier way to describe a building made of up two blobs, than two spheres nestling together. Maybe I am missing the inherent poetic lyricism in the description. Quite possibly. However, I would, pending revolution etc., let Prince Charles have a go at Stephen Bayley’s column in the Observer. Just for a while.

Oh the inky blackness

Gushing Admission

Many many years ago, shortly after I had left school and started drifting through a faintly miserable job that I still have no idea even now why I did, so far was it from anything I have been interested in before or since, and, worse, one that entailed me driving every single day - in a battered Ford Escort that was eventually and thankfully stolen from a multi storey car park in Southend and used as a (very slow) getaway car in an off licence robbery - from my parents house in Essex, along the dull ennui inducing A12, through the Dartford tunnel to a small village in rural Kent (that place again) where I tore my hair out in boredom and occasionally sloped off to hang out and smoke joints in, wait for it, Maidstone. During those days, a long way from where I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be, I developed a deep and abiding love for a weekly music paper. It kinda made up for everything else. It was my Open University course and my escape. Each Wednesday I drove from the office down to the village newsagent and picked up my copy of Melody Maker. Even the site of it made me feel better. It’s glossy cover and the deep shadows cast across the faces of its cover stars strike me even now as utterly perfect, capturing the heartbreaking thrill of an exotic pop world of the Other. I can picture one cover now: the blue of a swimming pool rippling across the cover, and in the middle, in a little box with a red frame, a photo of The Pixies, my favourite band of the time. I devoured those copies of Melody Maker. The Stud Brothers and David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds and Chris Roberts and Simon Price and, later towards the end of its official glory years, Taylor Parkes and Neil Kulkarni. But really, it was those late ‘80’s writers that got me with their assquaking rhetoric and their theoretical justifications for anti-social noise and their four page essays castigating Hue and Cry.

And I wonder now is it purely nostalgia that makes me think that this sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore? Picking up a music paper to learn about George Bataille and Julia Kristeva! Reading fabulously erudite pieces on the Mutoid Waste Company! Interviews with Green Gartside about Jaques Derrida! I never understood anyone who denigrated the music press for being too pretentious. For me it was never pretentious enough, It could never be too intellectually aspirational for me. The writers had impeccable taste (so impeccable as to be of course totally, occasionally, questionable, I have distinct recollections of The Stud Brothers liking soft rock band Heart and, really, god bless ‘em for it). Quixotic, pointlessly vitriolic, funny and fabulously luxuriant writing that revelled in the opportunity and the time to go off on dizzying flights of fantasy about Public Enemy, The Young Gods, Throwing Muses, My Bloody Valentine. Even The freakin’ Mission. So I kept wondering as I occasionally picked up a copy of NME while waiting for a train in W H Smiths or bought Mojo in the airport and felt terribly old and irritated all over again by the Bob Dylan industry and the insufferable fair mindedness, that maybe MM wasn’t so great after all. Maybe it was like the Observer reviews that replaced it in the mainstream media. Reasonable, well-ish written, but dull, derivative, tediously un-pretentious. Or like the NME now, vapid and small-minded indie fare. And then I found myself in this shop in Manchester, with an hour to spare and I came across a box of late ‘80’s Melody Makers. And I read them and guess what? They were fucking brilliant. They got me into music but also so much more.

Over Bridges Under Tunnels: Some belated thoughts on the opening of St Pancras International partially inspired by a trip to Margate.

or how to contradict everything I said before…..

Yesterday I watched a film called Passage (Passacaille) by Andrew Cross, an oblique and fragmented portrait of High Speed 1, the Eurostar rail link to St Pancras International. It was showing at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, which is appropriate because, although it was commissioned by Camden Council, it is also about Kent, a county obsessed with defining and to some extent defending an idea of Englishness.

Cross’ film follows the line from the white cliffs through the Kent countryside and then down into the long tunnel that takes it under the Thames and Barking, Stratford, Dalston and the rest of North London until it finally emerges, backwards, as it were, into the refurbished St Pancras Station. Cross’ film focuses, if that’s the right word, on tunnels. Sometimes he points the camera down at the ground, at wild fields and mud banks and bits of waste ground or at the people in Barking shopping centre in a fruitless search for the line humming away somewhere beneath.

Tunnels carry things, often dirty unsanitary things. Hopefully they take away the things we don’t like. Sometimes they allow things to escape and sometimes they let unwanted things in. The history of the opposition to the channel tunnel is a history of people not wanting to let things in. Drawn up in the 1950’s it took several decades to get it past the UK’s fear of mainland Europe. In the 1970’s the UK went through a hysterical fear of rabid dogs from Europe. It was a metaphor for the wild slavering beast of Europe made comically real. Along with wealthy Sheikhs buying Harrods, it constituted the illegal immigrant fear of its day, a paranoia that the ultimate horror could appear at any time and take away England.

Nowhere is the sense of this fragility more evident than in Kent. Ian Fleming, that most zenophobic of authors, frequently based his villain’s lairs in Kent along the coast, as if they had already to some extent impregnated our defences. He himself had a house there, perched on the cliffs near the Godwin Sands, forever keeping a look out for invaders. Since then the coast of Kent has become synonymous with asylum seekers and their negative mirror image: illegal immigrants. In the paranoid world of the Daily Express, the tunnel is another portal for the unwanted to get through. Meanwhile, Eurostar offer some great deals in getting away for a romantic weekend and St Pancras International is hailed as a triumphant return to the heroic days of rail. High Speed 1 supports two distinct and contradictory fantasies: our yearning for inclusion within sophisticated European culture on the one hand and our paranoid insularity on the other.

Andrew Cross’ work is romantic about things people are not normally romantic about: trucks and distribution networks and Swindon for example. It’s also optimistic and a little bit utopian in its love of how things work and in no longer celebrated feats of civil engineering. St Pancras’ opening has of course been much celebrated but it is as Cross points out, the building itself and the supposedly civic and progressive values that it embodies that is celebrated and not the miles and miles of underground tunnels that he makes the subject of his film. It is almost as if the aligning of St Pancras with Paris is enough.

A delighted squeal of excitement has emanated from the middlebrow media at this chic instant connection as if, immediately after browsing though the farmers market, we might find ourselves in a delightful Parisian café for the afternoon. Trains are the organic vegetable of transport options. They have an authentic credibility that rests more on symbolic value than on fact. Everyone loves a train. St Pancras has been hugely hyped yet it shaves just twenty minutes off the journey time to Paris from Waterloo. It is a nostalgic and highly romantic idea of train travel that is embodied by the rejuvenated St Pancras. The station itself and its sky blue Victorian engineering are photographed again and again.

Meanwhile, the genuinely contemporary infrastructure that support it is ignored. No one reviews the tunnels and the bridges or the huge new town currently sprawling up around the Eurostar stop at Ebbsfleet. Just as no one celebrates the routes taken by the trucks that bring our organically grown, hand reared produce. Perhaps, ultimately, the tunnel allows us to ignore the journey and the sliced up landscape of Kent and Northern France. It collapses the difference between London and Paris. Two great Metropolitan cities are united and we can ignore the crap in between. Architects and planners who love St Pancras are always denigrating suburbia. Here it is obliterated altogether. Meanwhile, we remain suspicious of what washes back the other way.

(With acknowledgements to Vicky Richardson and, of course, Andrew Cross for their robust views on ethical food production).

Andrew Cross Passage (Passacaille) was on show at Turner Contemporary , Margate.