Ornament is Fine: Neon Houses, Electronic Cottages and Instant Architecture

I spent Christmas in Kent by the sea. On New Years day we walked along the sea front and then up through the quiet dark streets of the town. Lights blinked in the windows of the houses. Occasionally we came across one completely covered in lights, their roofs, walls and chimneys picked out in pulsing fibre-optic light, like a glowing, coloured drawing rather than the real thing.

Here was Archigram's electronic cottage made manifest, an instant electronic architecture sitting in a cartoon winter landscape populated by mythical creatures and flickering messages of peace and love. On one lawn a family of fibre-optic reindeer nodded their heads in unison. Two more skulked below a window in an adjacent garden with some glowing miniature bearded men for company. It's only not weird because we have seen it so many times before.



I'm a sucker for coloured lights just as I am for the flashing bulbs and painted signs of the seaside pier. It may be futile but I admire the effort and every now and again it looks like magic. Here the banal architecture is transformed into a bizarre pageant of signs, sentiment and nostalgia as sinisterly saccarine but sweetly perfect as Disney. Ordinary suburban houses aiming for the romantic uplift of Bollywood.



A single tree stood glowing in the dark, lighting up the pavement, more beautiful than any number of public art installations or other official improvements to the urban landscape.

And the next day they were all gone.

Happy new year people!

Brahms and List

Forgive the rubbish pun and for going all list based but here, in the absence of any other inspiration amidst all the social drinking and family bickering of christmas, are my favourite blogs (architecture or otherwise) of 2008. There are many others that I've enjoyed reading which aren't included, either because they have stopped posting altogether (The Impostume) or simply gone a bit quiet (Kosmograd, Candyland) or because I have only just started reading them (Loudpaper) but here we go......

Sit Down Man You're A Bloody Tragedy. Owen Hatherley's blog is the one I read the most consistently. The writing is always elegant but that isn't the best thing about it. Perhaps because he's neither an architect nor a 'proper' architecture critic Sit Down Man remains unaffected by conventional architectural wisdom. He has admirably dubious taste, being a fan of such unloved brutalist behemoths as Owen Luder's Tricorn Centre. Somebody has to be and I mean that most sincerely. As well as architecture, he writes well about pop and politics. Brutalism, techno and The smiths. What's not to like?

Things. A consistently fascinating site that is also an invaluable source of links to just about anything tangentially connected to design from Lego to celebrity cribs to (suprisingly often) the early 1990's shoegazing scene. Unlike most blogs Things is also incredibly restrained and disciplined in its format, regularly posting two or three times a week in a flannel-free style that draws out connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Totally admirable.

Pruned. A beautifully put together blog that ruminates at length on landscape issues with a particuarly strong ecological element. Fascinated with disappearing landscapes and the disastrous effects of climate change, Pruned is hugely enjoyable despite its occasionally apocalyptic subject matter.

I Like. A total joy, I Like features design, packaging, places, toys, typography and occasionally music collated with a sharp aesthetic sensibility. Also, as it turns out, a useful source for christmas presents. Stylishly laid out and with beautifuly photography, more of which is on I Like's flickr site. It also has a sister site called Nothing to See Here where Anne writes about the kind of everyday places not normally considered worthy of our attention including power stations and Poundbury.

Aloof From Inspiration. Brilliant recent posts on The Smiths and, in her previous Fan Girl blog incarnation, the wonderful Triffids. Emmy Hennings even manages to make vegimite interesting.

A456. A relatively recent discovery but exactly what an architecture blog should if you ask me. Recently featured long and in depth posts about landscape in Westerns, Madison Avenue chic in Mad Men and a fabulous recent piece on Kraftwerk videos and modernist space.

Blissblog. The first blog I read back when dinosaurs roamed the earth listening to pirate jungle stations. Blissblog's author Simon Reynolds is one of the sharpest and, of late, most perverse (Pubfunk?) music writers around. He writes with a mixture of studious precision and rapturous abandon about anything from 'ardkore to MBV to Ian Dury, thus managing to avoid like the plague any kind of critical consensus.

Entschwindet und Vergeht. Doesn't post that often but when it does E&V is wonderfully acute and enjoyably vitriolic. Wrote a fabulous post on brutalist tendencies within Zaha Hadid's work, a scathing attack on Make's Nottingham campus and also has a nice line on high tech.

The Sesquipedalist. Has been gone for a while but appears to be back. The central conceit of this blog is to look at articles and media representations of architecture rather than architecture itself. The author delves into past publications including old copies of AD and the Prince of Wales Institute's Perspectives magazine to shed a suprisingly illuminating light on contemporary preoccupations.

Architecture In Berlin. I love this blog partly because I lived in Berlin for a while some years ago and remember many of the schemes that AIB writes about. But it is also because he writes about them with an open minded enthusiam, wrestling with liking unfashionable and often beyond the pale Post Modernism while giving a sober judgement on the early work of current stars of architecture such as Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman.

Most Sadly Missed

Part IV. The blog that got me blogging and not only because the late Sir Norman Blogster once suggested that FAT's Islington Square housing should have won the Stirling Prize (although that helped). Part IV seemed to suffer a terminal meltdown sometime over the summer which is a tremendous shame as it provided an acerbic and astute critical commentary on mainstream British architecture, a kind of alternative Building Design.

Drowned Worlds

Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. First a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices and fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were only four or five storeys high, part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon.

J G Ballard, Drowned World, 962 (quote via)

There is a beautiful and brilliant post at That Sticks and Stones Should Fall about the fascination of drowned villages as a metaphor for the presence of past lives in the present. In particular the post refers to the villages of Ashopton and Derwent that were flooded to make way for Ladybower reservoir in the Penines, a subject I have posted about before and which the author generously links to.


(Image of Ladybower Reservoir via. The church Spier of Derwent is visible in the distance)

A number of disturbing but compelling ideas are touched on in the Sticks and Stones post including the murky fascination of dark bodies of water generally (and for anyone who shares such things you should read Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water about the mysterious incident of Teddy Kennedy driving his car into Lake Chappaquiddick in the US) and submerged wrecks and ruins.

The stories of Derwent and Ashopton - and other lost villages like Graun Curon in Italy - are ghost stores, pieces of folklore that have lodged themselves firmly in the popular imagination. Google Drowned Villages and hundreds of sites and related stories come up including this film of the flooded church yard of the Welsh village Lanwddyn. Although they lend themselves to supernatural speculation these are also stories of the awesome power of technology. And in that sense the submerged spires of Derwent and Gouron have an apocalyptic quality that speaks of the capacity of technology to destroy us.


The submerged steeple Graun-Curon.

The extraordinary spectacle of Derwent's neighbour Ashopton lying below the reservoir viaduct while it is constructed - the future water level clearly some way above the rooftops of the houses - is described vividly by Sticks and Stones and illustrated in the contemporary photo below. The image summoned up here is literally apocalyptic, technology dwarfing the houses below as it strides across the valley before ultimately destroying them.


(Image of Ashopton viaduct under construction via)

Ladybower, and other reservoirs like it, were huge infrastructure projects built to feed the ever growing water consumption of city inhabitants. The expansion of homes currently projected for the south east of England together with the effects of climate change will mean more reservoirs will need to be built as well as extreme measures taken to protect us from rising sea levels. Plans for the largest new reservoir to be built in the UK were announced last year for instance, although the physical consequences are not quite as drastic as Ladybower. Meanwhile the Environment Office charts the possibility of villages disappearing into the sea.

These pragmatic reactions to climate change go hand in hand with more apocalyptic visions such as J G Ballard's eerily prescient 1962 novel Drowned Worlds or Squint Opera's recent speculative Flooded London project. Both of these imagine London destroyed by rising sea levels. Drowned worlds could either be deliberate acts of erasement in the case of Derwent or the result of unplanned devastation. Either way they are seen as the result of our unchecked desire and a paranoid sense that our faith in technology will ultimately destroy us.


(Image by Squint Opera)

This fear is most clearly articulated through science fiction and its endless speculations on how we will ultimately be the architects of our own demise. Perhaps the most pertinent image in science fiction, and one that echoes both the cover of Ballard's book illustrated above and the vanished villages of Derwent and Graun Curon is the half buried, half submerged Statue of Liberty leering out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes.



Postscript

Strangely, I can also recall an experience of the inverse of this scenario on holiday in Mexico some years ago. On the trip I visited a small village resort with some friends that sat on the edge of Lake Chapala. Like a beach resort everything about the town orientated itself to the lake. The main drag ran down straight onto a stone pier, cafes fringed the lakeside and photographs of people swimming and playing volley ball hung in the reception of the hotel we stayed in. When we walked down to the lakeside though we discovered that the water had completely dried up, its exposed bed was filled with grazing cows and the stone pier stretched out into a grassy field. A combination of industrial pollution and water consumption had drained what had been one of the largest natural lakes in Mexico.



UPDATE: I'm grateful to anonymous (see comments below) for the following link to an article on the Three Gorges dam in China which has involved the moving of 1.3 million people and the destruction of a 2000 year old town, just in case this all seemed a little parochial.