If we took a holiday, just some time to get away

This blog is taking a holiday. In fact this blog is taking a honeymoon. It's the old story: blog meets blog. They fall in love, marry and go on holiday to Cuba. So, no postings for a couple of weeks. Total radio silence. In the meantime, posted below are some (more) thoughts on architecture-less architecture.

All Around The World

In his book Looking at the Overlooked Norman Bryson describes the strange impossibility of the scenes depicted in Dutch still life painting. Vases teeming with exotic flowers would be painted in lavish detail despite the fact that the flowers themselves could never have existed together in that state. Coming from different continents and time zones they would flower at different times of the year and their representation together in full bloom is a perverse distortion of nature. The flowers represent both a temporal and spatial collapsing of distinctions and difference. The pictures instead celebrate a new found knowledge and power within the world, they are the product of empire. They represent a kind of virtual tourism, a sense of being, in a way, in many different places at the same time.

The gardens of Belsay Castle in Northumberland mimic in miniature the adventures abroad of their designer, Sir Charles Monck. They contain a wealth of plants plundered from around the world and planted there according to Picturesque principles so that the landscape appear as a series of vignettes, a collapsed geography of other times and other places. The owner quarried the stone for his eccentric neo-classical house from its own grounds and sculpted the holes left in the earth into scaled down ravines and miniatures caverns.

Trees planted along the perimeter increase the sense of vertiginous excess. Existing structures such as Belsay Castle itself and various outbuildings are incorporated as picturesque ruins within the tableaux. Japanese Cedars, Douglas Fir and Palms ring the edge of this Northumberland hillside. Magnolia Kobus, Cornus Kousa, Parootia Persica, Chusan Palm, Rhododendrum Fortunei and rare Orchids survive in the strange micro-climate created by the ravines and deep crevices. The garden is geographically perverse and incorrect, a shrunken world where anything and everything can exist alongside each other. The house too is historically illiterate; a strange half memory of Greek temples and Roman ruins, reassembled with wilful disregard for authenticity of time or place. The earth around it has been sculpted and moulded to form a more extreme, more beautiful, more exotic version of reality, a dreamlike space created at the intersection of trade, commerce, wealth and imagination.

Sir Charles Monck's creation is another strange perversity, an entirely unnatural phenomena built from natural materials. The garden is pure artifice and intensely immersive.

Disneyland's It's A Small World represents a strange update of these ideas. A few years ago I visited Disneyland in Florida. Mostly, I was disappointed (yes, I had expectations). It was more tawdry, less seamless than I had hoped. It had none of the sweet toothed addictiveness of the cartoons, their mix of the saccharine and the magical. Except for It's a Small World. Here, as you drift in a drift in a small fibreglass boat past animatronic aborigines, waving Hula girls, tartan trees and Mittel European landscapes, inky blackness between them, the effect is oddly mesmerising, an icky but seamlessly picturesque experience.

Someone like Humphrey Repton or Sir Charles Monck might be oddly at home here. You could imagine them, bobbing around happily in their boat, like the comically displaced historical figures in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. They could admire the way the boundaries dissolve and the space has no edges. Each fragment of the world blends into another so that there are no frontiers. Conflict and difference have been smoothed away like the gentle humps of their artificial landscapes. No careful planting to the edges, no exit signs or delivery doors or views of the visitor’s car park. Just space drifting into infinity, the ultimate pleasure garden.

David Greene too has for a long time explored an idea of the garden as a kind of anti-architecture. A limitless space invisibly wired for our pleasure. His log plug is an uncanny updating of the the Dutch still lives of Ambrosius Boschaert and others, a bucolic image that is in fact a kind of collapsed geography, a symbol of mastery over space and time. This virtual space of social and technological connection speculated on by Greene and others in the '60's has in many ways come true the through the awesome geography collapsing abilities of digital technology. A different kind of garden, an electronic one that, like Belsay, defies authentic experience, mixing it with extreme artifice. A physical and virtual experience at one and the same time.

The Death Of The Author

The image at the top of this post is David Greene’s Log Plug (one of a pair with his Rock Plug), a typically arch conflation of technology and the bucolic. Below it is a familiar contemporary version of exactly the same thing, a mobile phone mast disguised as a tree.

I was struck by the apposite way that this illustrates something I have written about before, which is the difference between art and technology, or more particularly the difference in how we experience products of art and products of technology.

The latest issue of architecture magazine Verb contains an excellent interview with architect and geographer John May who, amongst other things, manages to express this split much more eloquently than I have managed so far. His interview touches on the perceived difference between products of culture (e.g. architecture) and products of technology (e.g. engineering).

As May points out, products of technology are assumed to work in a quite straightforward, philosophically unproblematic way. That is until they ‘break’. Then they get fixed or, more likely replaced. Art and architecture on the other hand are never assumed to be either working or not working, functioning or broken. As products of culture their ‘success’ is subject to debate and negotiation, always qualified and always in progress. This is an important distinction and like most underlying values is all the more powerful for its insidious common sense.

John May points out that our assumptions about technology (and in particular the simple opposition that it is either working or not working) are naïve and simplistic. Following Paul Virilio’s notion that a ship brings with it the possibility of a shipwreck, May clouds the sense of whether technology is ever doing something as simple as working. Just as it might be working in one way for instance it may also be not working, or even causing catastrophic damage, in another. An example of this might be my new mobile phone. It is without doubt very good at picking up emails but it may also be very good at corroding my brain. Its eventual disposal will also contribute to enormous environmental problems. In what sense then could it be said to ‘work’ well? To ask this question is to sound almost infantile but is important in being able to articulate our relationship to technology.

Subtler still is the way that technology assumes a natural place within our culture, making a self-justifying space for itself. This relationship is complex and hard to unpick. Technologies greatest trick is to appear as if from nowhere, authorless and therefore untraceable. This is how engineering escapes our gaze. Whilst the architect stands in the middle of the room shouting about his/her creation – I did this! – the producers of engineering and infrastucture melt into the air, untraceable, unknowable, evading our critical judgement. We do not know how to criticise technology beyond a slightly baffled shrug or a luddite resignation that it is bound to go wrong. Beyond this we are lost, unable to assess technology as a cultural product, or to critically judge its impact on our lives.