Baxter

I dunno, you nip off for a couple of days to, say, have a baby* and all manner of exciting things happen on the interweb!

First, and as if to rubbish my suggestion that he had packed up and gone home, The Impostume returns with several quite brilliant posts, the best of which is his glorious tribute to Abba. No mention of Hey Hey Helen, however, my favourite Abba break up song, particularly for its glam rock guitar, barrelling piano chorus line and the finely balanced morality of the line; "...the price you paid, to be a woman of today".

Some of this seems a response to a slew of posts at Simon Reynold's Blissblog, including this one on The Sweet.

A456 has this fascinating look at the problems of object classification when it comes to planes.

Mockitecture has a highly amusing series of comparisons between buildings and songs, my favourite of which is the collision of Peter Eisenman and Prince.

Lastly, there is a fascinating (if rather stilted) interview with the late great Charles Moore to be found down the left hand side bar at No2Self. I'm also loving Rob's AD covers, (following The Sesquipedalist's example) including the wonderful Post Modernism lift-off one linked to above (complete with perceptive Charles Moore review of Charles Jenck's Language of Post Modern Architecture -must be Charles Moore week, as he also gets twinned with Soul Train in Mockitecture's Arch/Music post) and an earlier and rather lovely Milton Keynes one.

I've learnt my lesson on billing future posts as they tend to be the ones that I never finish, but I will be up and posting properly soon........possibly.

* Yes, he (Baxter) has arrived! Many thanks for the kind words, especially from people I have never met (but now feel I should). I promise that's the last you'll hear about it. Very bad form to go on so.....I'm still a little delirious in case it isn't obvious.

Public Service Announcement

Fantastic Journal is having a fantastic baby so there might be an, ahem, hiatus for a while. Expect erratic posts at strange times on the halucinogenic properties of In The Night Garden and the techno-haptic quality of Fischer Price toys.......

The Estate We're In

These two books, ostensibly vastly different, actually form a kind of weird odd-couple double act in articulating current attitudes to houses and housing. Note that houses are a different proposition than housing here. Aslet's book - The English House - is emphatically about the former while Hanley's is about the latter.

Houses are popularly characterised like people - as individuals with foibles, eccentricities, charm (or otherwise) and character. Housing on the other hand is usually characterised as faceless, bureaucratic and anonymous. While houses are supposed to foreground individual craft in construction housing reputedly employs the techniques of Fordist mass-production. Strangely the success of developers like Wimpey or Barratt over the last twenty to thirty years has been in promoting an image of the former while actually employing the latter. If modernism's dream of mass production has ever come close to fruition in architecture it is certainly not in the guise that we expected it.

Aslet's book positions the house at the heart of (English) social history and organisation. This is important because, for him, the history of the house reinforces a particular conception of Englishness. Not only is the (rightful) social order seen as mirroring the gradation of houses running from the grand country residence to the rural hovel, but this order is seen as strangely impervious to overhaul. Any attempt to change the natural order is viewed as both doomed and - in that great term used by all people trying to bury their ideological agenda below a layer of common sense bullshit - social engineering. So Aslet ignores most of the 20th century out of a mixture of political distaste and architectural disinterest. At the point at which modernism and large scale social housing arrives Aslet departs, only returning for a brief coda on, of all people, Laurie Chetwood. In between he leaves a great big hole.

Lynsey Hanley's book describes the hole. Estates is about housing; collective, large scale, repetitive housing. Good though it is it too seems trapped within a standard (if understandable in her case) aversion to modernist architecture and its supposed inhumanity, and a belief that personal identity can't be cultivated or inscribed within collective housing developments.

In some ways the values and attitudes prevalent in Aslet's book contaminate any conversation or approach to the issues highlighted in Hanley's. We cannot disassociate houses from their symbolic value within an economy. The success of houses is seen to lie almost exclusively in two areas: in their ability to articulate our social and economic aspiration and in their speculative value.

Posted below then is my review of Clive Aslet's book, slightly improbably to be found furtively loitering in last month's issue of Icon.