Municipal Analogue Shuffle Mode

The other day I went to the library. Actually I have been going to libraries a lot recently for professional reasons, but the other day I went to my local one and joined, on the evidence of an unpaid mobile phone bill, and walked back out again with 13 CD’s.

Once upon a time everyone went to the library. This was before they routinely shuffled a deck of twenty personal credit cards and had the illusory spending power of a small country. If you look at photos of, say, London in the 1960’s, the age range of cars on the street is probably around twenty years. If you looked at one now it would be three or four. Going to the library flies in the face of the logic of 21st century capitalism. The veins of consumer spending are so finely spread and run so deep that an institution not dedicated to it is like an archaic ruin, or a preserved fossil. It does funny things to your choices too.

Freed from the restrictions of having to use your own financial resources the mind can run rampant, unfettered by Added Interest on New Purchases, through lush musical pastures of delirious possibility. Constrained instead by Hackney Council’s limited spending capabilities and the arbitrary collective taste of the council employees charged with buying up what looks like the bits of Dalston Oxfam Shop not already featured, the librarie's CD collection is a bracingly random cross section through popular culture.

Basically you have to shelve any idea of going in to try to find something specific. It doesn’t work like that. Which is just as well for me as going into a music store (physical or digital) induces instant amnesia anyway. So it’s a lottery but one where a limited jackpot win awaits you every time. Freed from the need to be fashionable, niche, retro or cheap, freed in fact from almost any contemporary determinant of value, the library represents a social utopia of taste.

This is the opposite of personalised radio, which works on the basis that you might never have to hear anything that doesn’t already sound like something you have. It represents the endless refining of niche taste till your ears hurt with the over-familiarity and your brain folds in on itself. Unfortunately, I can’t get Xfm’s Personalised Radio to work on my mac, so I’m not quite sure how refined it can get.

It may be possible for instance to listen exclusively to Songs Featuring Excellent Voice Distortion (sample playlist: Kylie Minogue Put Yourself In My Place, Cher I believe, Sally Shapiro He Keeps Me Alive, ELO Mr Blue Sky) or Songs About Outer Space (The Beloved’s lost classic Outer Spaceman, The Carpenter’s Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Most Extraordinary Craft, Chris De Burgh’s A Spaceman Came Travelling) and nothing else. Or indeed Taylor Parke's Right Wing Rock. Ever. So, the choice is: the digital precision or refining your music taste into an ad campaign for the contents of your own head, or the random joys of municipal shuffle mode.

Scopic Regimes

Here’s a strange congruence of interests. Patrick Wright’s book The Village That Died For England describes the requisitioning by the British Army of Tyneham, a small village in Dorset. The village was used initially for practice in advance of the Allied invasion of Europe and lies within large tracts of MOD land where full scale war games are still played out. Although only officially ‘borrowed’ from the villagers, Tyneham has never been given back.

Wright’s book is about much more than just Tyneham, though, which he uses as a jumping off point for a meditation on English rural radicalism, pastoralism, the Picturesque, the writer Mary Butts and a whole host of other eccentrics, oddballs, political extremists, aristocrats and army flunkies. Making an unexpected cameo appearance at one point are various members of the Archigram group who set architecture student projects there when teaching at the AA in the 1970’s. Coming across like an only slightly less absurd version of Withnail and I, David Greene and Warren Chalk buzz around the place with their long haired prodigies (including young Will Alsop) in clapped out vehicles and stride into local boozers ordering quadruple whiskies.

Archigram’s interest in the dematerialisation of architecture and with landscape as a kind of serviced amenity finds an odd parallel in the controlled territories of MOD land, where vast targets sit in the landscape like giant Pop Art sculptures, and tanks roam the planes like miniature walking cities.

The controlled and territorialized landscape of military manoeuvres is like an apocalyptic version of the English taste for the picturesque. Here an enthusiasm for controlling and mapping out large areas of landscape, the scopic control required by the battleground general, is not so far from Capability Brown’s manipulations of nature for the enjoyment of wealthy landowners. Instead of Gothic follies romantically consumed with Ivy, MOD land leaves the bombed out fragments of places like Tyneham.

Gillian Darley describes in her book Villages of Vision, the vogue for wealthy landowners in the 18th century to remove unsightly houses and dwellings that lay in the way of their view of the countryside. Frequently, their country houses would end up some miles away from the re-positioned village, with only the church for company as a reminder of where the village had once been. Sometimes bits of the cottages would be retained as romantic ruins, evacuated and aestheticised according to the picturesque tastes of the upper classes. Slowly, rights of way might be opened up back across the landowners estate to encourage ruddy faced peasants to walk across like a theatrical troupe of unpaid extras. All this was according to the picturesque conventions landscape designers such as Brown and Humphrey Repton and borrowed from the paintings of Claude Lorrain where simple peasants lolled under trees and worked in arcadian splendour. The ha-ha, a deep ditch separating the landowners immediate garden from the rest of his land, allowed a seemingly endless sweep of the countryside to be co-opted into the experience, whilst controlling the movements of peasants and animals lest they stray too close.

For a persuasive but slightly terrifying exploration of the idea of the aestheticisation of the landscape of war, read Jeff Wall’s essay Dan Graham's Kammerspiel, or at least the bit on American architectural legend Philip Johnson. Wall conducts a forensic examination of Johnson’s notorious involvement in neo-fascist organisations whilst at university in the 1930’s and, in particular, his trip to Europe as a reporter following the German invasion of Poland in 1938. Wall recounts Johnson’s slavering descriptions of the burnt out wreckages of Polish villages, the smouldering remains where most of the houses had been exhumed by fire, leaving only the brick foundations and the odd chimney standing. Wall then makes a leap to an astounding reading of Johnson’s famous Glass House in Connecticut. Here, the house itself is dematerialised by its glass walls, so that the only non-transparent elements are the low brick walls on which the glass sits and the circular brick tower containing the bathroom and the fireplace. Walls’ audacious analogy suggests that Johnson deliberately evoked the burnt out houses he had seen in his youth following the blitzkrieg, and recreated them in the bucolic picturesque landscape of his New Canaan estate.

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.