Talking Mies

Russel Fernandez very kindly sent me this. It's a collection of conversations with Mies van der Rohe dating from the late '50's to the mid '60's - i.e. his well established American years. Mies (as I feel obliged to call him) is in predictably opaque form on the whole. His answers have a stately, elegant emptiness and a refusal to be drawn on straightforward issues. There is a gathering cloud over some of his comments as he seems to detect the decline of his influence and the coming of more extravagant and expressionist buildings, but mostly he takes a fairly lofty disinterest in issues such as legacy or influence.

I was surprised by one of his answers though. This suggested that Mies' architectural approach was formed somewhat abstractly, through theory and through reading. "My architectural philosophy came out of reading philosophical books" he states at one point, contradicting much of what I thought I knew about Mies, which is that he learned architecture as a primarily practical art from his father, who was a stonemason (or so the myth goes) and that he had little time for theory.

Perhaps I was wrong - or at least a little ignorant - but Mies' architecture has aways seemed to shun words, bringing out a kind of awed silence in critics and onlookers, encouraged by Mies himself who also said: "I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good". Goodness, or quality perhaps, is assumed here to be something that eludes verbal description. Interest is equated with novelty and the superficial interest of the eye-catching rather than the deep structure of the profound. To silence one's critics is normally to trump their mere words with innefable art. But Mies admits that words proceeded, even defined, his structures.

Mies' interest in theory proceeding design seems extremely unfashionable today when architecture has put its faith in flamboyant self expression and personal signature. Mies allows that actually building buildings might have tested his theories, maybe extended them, but certainly not disproved them. It also contradicts his own teaching methods which focused rigorously on technique and technical skill and very little, if at all, on theory.

When I studied architecture in the early 1990's Mies was still - just about - held in speechless awe. Now, no one seems to talk about him at all. His work once spawned a thousand imitators but now seems impossible to replicate and the emphatic clarity of his towers has become literally unfashionable. A home grown piece of Mies on London's Pentonville Road has recently been re-clad by architects AHMM (you can see it literally being covered over here). It was always one of my favourites because it was such a perfect homage, so contentedly unoriginal. AHMM's scheme is like a cover version but with the same backing track, replacing Mies' grave voice with an altogether jollier one. Perhaps the distant rumble of theory still echoes from the structure though.

Crisis? What crisis?

The latest, sixth, volume of architecture ‘boogazine’ Verb begins with a familiar kind of declaration: “Faced with unprecedented political, social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges Verb Crisis recognises that architecture cannot carry on as usual.”

It’s easy to affect a jaded cynicism when faced with this kind of rhetoric. After all, haven’t we always been faced with unprecedented challenges? When did anyone ever say: “Don’t worry, the world’s fine as it is, lets all go back to bed.” But Verb backs its claim up, eschewing the usual suspects and focusing instead on some genuinely thoughtful and provocative work.

The book is divided into three fairly self-explanatory sections: Places, Positions and Projects. It focuses on a few key cities: Dubai, Madrid, Detroit and Tijuana. Detroit in particular is fascinating and represents the diametrically opposite problem to that of Dubai. Instead of relentlessly spiralling levels of development there is depopulation and an emptying out of the city. New York based architects Interboro Partner’s contribution not only documents this process but finds, hidden below the surface, a new kind of development occurring there.

They describe the process of what they call ‘blots’, newly vacant plots of land where the houses have been knocked down. These blots have then been absorbed (mostly through legitimate purchases) into neighbouring properties, becoming home to garden overspill, additional parking, recreation areas and, in some cases, complex architectural extensions. As the city empties little bits of ad-hoc DIY urbanism grow back between the cracks. As Interboro say, this is important “however unspectacular”. Theirs is not strictly a proposal, more a process of observing and, to borrow a phrase, learning from what is going on.

This combination of empirical research and actually looking at the city to see what it is like - as opposed to wishing it was something else – is a strong theme in all the work included. There is a valuable sense here of architects actually engaging with the processes by which cities develop, and with the needs of their inhabitants. A healthy criticism of some of the more banal thinking within the profession comes across in most of the contributions.

Geographer and architect John May describes the Staten Island landfill site of Fresh Kills, recently the subject of a high profile architectural competition to turn it’s vast and festering piles of trash into a new park. May raises pertinent and uncomfortable questions about architecture’s complicity in such boosterism, and its role in supplying the glossy images to go along such venal developments. He also exposes the hollow posturing of the profession, the endless posing as ‘radical’ or ‘cutting edge’ by an architectural avant-garde long since removed from any sense of social purpose.

The most impressive project included is perhaps also the most modest. Elemental Architecture’s social housing scheme in Chile allows residents to expand and adapt their homes over time. This approach allows more homes to be included simply by building less of each one and letting the residents fill in the gaps when they can afford to do so. The photographs of this project show the spaces filling up with lean to’s, diy bay windows and bolted on extensions. It reminded me of Le Corbusier’s housing scheme at Pessac after the residents had added window boxes and pitched roofs, except here the adaptations are a deliberate and positive part of the story.

Verb Crisis is deliberately un-glossy. It comes in a brown plastic wipe clean cover, like a welding manual. It is simply and straightforwardly laid out. But, if you ever wondered whether there were any architects left with any sense of critical or social engagement, or an interest in the wider political and economic realities of their practice then Verb is worth a look.

As you cycled by, there began all my dreams

Is Holidays to Wales the least rock’n’roll song title ever? It might be but then again it has stiff opposition from Distant Showers Sweep Across Norfolk Schools. Both are songs on July Skies’ The Weather Clock.*

I remember reading an interview with The Jesus And Mary Chain where Jim Reid was asked why a band from Scotland would use the American term Sidewalking for a song title. Reid replied: “Well, pavement isn’t a very rock’n’roll word is it?” **

American place names are part of the mythology of rock music. Their adoption is always a deliberate act of homage. For The Jesus Mary Chain this homage was always somehow subverted, the borrowed classicism offset by their spotty angst and sullen attitude. But, Indie music, and specifically British Indie music, has also developed a counter tradition which celebrates the quotidian and the unglamorous. Think Orange Juice in their boy scout shorts and antiquated vocabulary, or Morrissey’s 1950’s imagery and John Betjeman allusions.

This replaces the "Cars and Girls" of American rock with cerebral pleasures and deeply uncool modes of transport (see Aztec Camera's: "There's a message for us, we can get there by bus." from Killermont Street). These are pre rock’n’roll reference points, a period where the non-literary sensibility of rock music (noise, rhythm, the grain of the voice) had yet to assert itself, when holidays to Wales were still the stuff of dreams.

July Skies, with their odes to pre-Beeching branch lines and the paintings of Paul Nash, fit into this lineage. Their music has some of the qualities of the shambling c86 era and the cuteness of bands like The Field Mice, but they are more abstract, less song based. The lyrics, if there are any, are virtually inaudible and the songs are more like delicate mood pieces, somewhere between Vaughn Williams and Boards of Canada.

About as far from the Mary Chain's Sidewalks as you can get, The July Skies are more likely to be found on a cycling holiday in Norfolk, ruddy cheeked and with copies of Pevsner in their satchels. The pictures of early New Town housing in the CD booklet of The Weather Clock sum up their refined nostalgic impulses. The late music critic Iain Macdonlad once wrote that listening to Saint Etienne was like driving around Milton Keynes with the windscreen wipers on. I don’t think he meant it positively but it’s probably exactly the feeling they were striving for.

The music of July Skies meanwhile feels like daydreaming during double geography in a secondary modern school room on the outskirts of Harlow. In a good way you understand. An obscure and esoteric sensation to evoke for sure. It’s saved from sentimentality perhaps by the oblique loveliness of the music and the gentle eccentricity of the reference points.

* An album I was alerted to here and which received further endorsement from here.

** I have a theory that Steven Malkmus read the same interview before he christened his own band Pavement. The choice of such a deliberately un rock’n’roll word with all its anglophile gawkyness fits perfectly with Pavement's own skewed literary sensibility.