The Return of Momus

There's some good writing on Dutch oddball designer Atelier Van Leishout to be found here, somewhat astonishingly written by no longer long lost eccentric 80's troubador Momus. You have to scroll down a long way past some fairly batty stuff about folk singers, VW camper vans, Graham Coxon and a heartfelt tribute to Emmy the Great, all of which are pretty interesting in themselves, to find it. After coming across his site I am now off to search for Laurence from Felt's Livejournal.

Joni Mitchell and Rudolph Schindler: Who woulda thunk it?

Oh to be Everywhere, right here, right now.

So, I’ve been reading this, Barney Hoskins’ Hotel California. I read his book on the LA music scene Waiting for the Sun a year ago on a trip to LA and loved it so much I was even moved to listen to the Best of the Eagles on the flight home. Not a mistake I’ll make again but such is the allure that the book conjures up of denim-clad hippies in charming A frame houses dotted around Laurel Canyon that anything is momentarily possible. Hotel California delves a little deeper into that same world. It’s a great book. Dense and comprehensive but suffused with love for much of the good music and righteous disdain for the crap bits (the Best of The Eagles mainly). I must confess though to a fascination for both the era and the music which is definitively not MY music or era so perhaps it is it’s alien-ness that I find alluring. I missed punk by a few years too but inherited a lot of its hatred for the hippies and in particular the multi-millionaire hippies of LA but the sun dappled lazy utopia detailed in Hoskins’ book gets to me I have to admit.

Hoskins’ was a fan of this music at the time, began to see it as inherently ridiculous through the punk era and has now come out of the closet as a full on Jackson Brown fan. The book is both besotted and critical of this wide-eyed hankering for a utopian but elitist social utopia. It wants to be bare-chested and beflared, riding around the canyons on a moped and dropping acid with Joni Mitchell but acknowledges the decadent nihilism at its heart. For a more pained articulation of this Joan Didion's The White Album tells the story of the slide from The Beach Boys to the Manson murders from someone who experienced it first hand.

The utopian appeal of LA in the ‘70’s is of course highly illusory and best summed up in the guise of David Geffen, the books unofficial anti hero. Geffen starts a record label called Asylum and convinces all the folk troubadors and singer songwriters that he is on their side, looking after their interests, only in it for the music man, and then proceeds of course to rob everyone blind. He was able to do this because it was such a small community. Hence the title of the record label. This is the interesting thing about utopias. They want to be universal and yet they are more likely to be tiny worlds, microcosms by nature. They attempt to smooth out or dissolve the harsh bump between them and the rest of the world because they are so aware that it is there. Laurel Canyon was both a model for some sense of an alternative lifestyle and a cliquey nepotistic world that was bound to implode.

The successful LA architect Rudolf Schindler designed a house in the Hollywood hills in 1922. He built it himself, hand forming the thin concrete walls, as a house for him and his wife and another couple to live in together. The house is a beautiful and poignant spatial articulation of this arrangement and of a kind of proto-hippy social order. Two L shaped blocks pivot around a shared kitchen in a way that is simultaneously loose and highly suggestive. Each L is a mirror image of the other, as are the external spaces around them, and each drifts into the other in a way that suggests everything could very easily be swapped around and it wouldn’t matter. The external spaces are genuine continuations of the interior complete with external fireplaces and a room like sense of enclosure created by planting. The whole thing is an idyllic expression of a sense of loose connectivity and the dissolution of boundaries: social and physical. Of course it is also just one house, and one that did not last long in its initial communal couple format but it is a languorously beautiful model for how houses could be reflective of something other than the single family unit. All this designed by an Austrian, which just goes to show the power of the Californian sun. One can imagine the incestuous denizens of Laurel Canyon happily inhabiting this house: Joni Mitchell and David Crosby and Laura Rondstat and Mama Cass happily strumming away in its sun dappled spaces. In many ways it is a much more apposite and accommodating articulation of their lifestyle than the folksy traditionalism of Laurel Canyon. A genuine attempt to map out an alternative way to live through architecture.

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.