Thrifty Business

What is it with thrift? The recession may have given it an empty kind of validity, but it's been creeping up on us for a while. Everyone seems to be taking a lot of (perverse) pleasure in faux-austerity and mock phlegmatic belt-tightening*. Articles that are only partly tongue in cheek calling us to do our bit by buying British fashion. Guides to budget holidays on the English seaside. Advice on how to shave money off the Waitrose bill by going to Netto.

Ostensibly these are reactions to both the recession and climate change, a turning back from credit financed reckless consumption. Given this, an embracement of thrift takes on a knew currency as a gentile form of anti-corporate backlash. And herein lies the rub. A persistent element of all this thriftiness is that it emanates from the relatively well-to-do middle classes. Or the Coping Classes as the Daily Telegraph likes to call them. You might almost say that it was fashionable.



Take India Knight's recent The Thrift Book. This is ostensibly about how to save money by rejecting conspicuous consumption. The book makes a straight appeal to our anxieties, both personal and ecological, encouraging us to take pleasure in being thrifty, make our own presents and grow vegetables. This is all presented as a form of healthy penitence.

Knight's previous book was in celebration of shopping so she obviously feels she has more than most people to feel penitent about. The Thrift Book is her hangover. Like a hangover the tone is self-flagellating, vaguely remorseful and comically self-obsessed. Here's the blurb:

"Feeling poor because of the credit crunch? Feeling guilty because of global warming? No Need to panic. Put down the economy mince and buy this instead. It's a blueprint for living beautifully while saving money and easing your conscience."*

Note the feeling poor bit. Not actually poor, but feeling it, much like you might feel that ankle boots are on their way back. It's a chill wind maybe, but there are ways to button yourself up and stay warm. And still look great. Which leads to the other telling part of the description which is; it really is all about you!

There is no political or social aspiration to Knight's book. It is a straight-forward palliative, something to soothe one's vaguely troubled conscience. There is not even an attempt at altruism. It will stop that annoying nagging guilt and let you get on with your fabulous life. Knight's is perhaps the ultimate decadence: an aestheticisation of poverty. Like a crumbling peasant cottage on a picturesque estate, Knight is attracted by the look of rustic chic.

She's not the only one. Take Labour and Wait, a ludicrously self-conscious shop off Brick Lane specialising in 1950's style household goods: wooden handled pen knives, galvanised dustbins and blocks of coal tar soap. All the really useful stuff. A close up of the window though reveals the affluence behind its apparent back to basics claim: it's only open half the week. Labour and Wait is like a Stuckist installation, a deliberate semi-ironic anachronism. The man behind the counter even looks like Billy Childish.

Just around the corner from Labour and Wait is a cake shop that uses Butlins' 1950's tagline "Our true intent is only for your delight", presumably to summon up the ration-era pleasures of a nice cup cake. On one level this is consistent with the strange inversion of shopping habits that has taken place over the last decade between the city and the countryside. This folding of space and time has resulted in the urban middle classes picking up their muddy potatoes from the farmers market and their Lincolnshire Poacher from the organic cheese shop while everyone in the sticks shops at Tesco.

Our cities grow odd organic appendages at the weekends, temporary infestations from the countryside that spring up to sell expensive organic vegetables to a niche market troubled by supermarkets and urbanity. There is a sort of alchemy at work here, the turning of base metal into gold, or thrift into luxury**. For coal tar soap and muddy potatoes were surely never meant to be luxury products. It takes a particularly weird intersection of class and socio-economics to make them so. And whilst Labour and Wait remains packed on a Sunday morning, my local Woolworths - that most genuinely thrifty of shops - is already a boarded up memory.

* This post takes a big cue from Owen Hatherley's recent thoughts on austerity nostalgia.

**By the way, I'm not denying the actuality of recession, just some of the perverse inequalities of its manifestation.

(Image of bristles and soap via)

The Odd Couple

British architecture throughout the 1980's was pretty much a straight fight between high-tech and postmodernism. Nicholas Grimshaw (High-Tech Athletic) and Terry Farrell (Po-Mo Allstars) were two of the architects slugging it out. Strangely enough though they had once been in partnership together. Their fifteen year collaboration (1965-1980) fell apart due to obvious stylistic differences but the fact that the two had worked together at all suggests an area of unlikely common ground. This offers a glimpse of another route that British architecture could have taken after the 1960's, one unfortunately snuffed out by the belligerent arguments of the time.

Grimshaw's refined industrial aesthetic and Farrell's postmodern eclecticism seem irreconcilable when viewed today. But Farrell's autobiography Place suggests areas where they came together. The most obvious of these was the idea of flexibility in buildings. This was a key concept coming out of the '60's when there was a fascination with temporary/lightweight structures, allied to non-hierarchical ideas of spatial and social organisation.

For Grimshaw, this meant buildings that were literally flexible; sophisticated mechanisms that could move and change over time. The Grimshaw camp within the partnership developed a sequence of supposedly repeatable and adaptable metal framed office buildings. Farrell's notion of flexibility was less aesthetically driven. He was interested in adaptable buildings too, but crucially it was the people and the function that could change, rather than the buildings themselves. For Farrell, this approach encompassed existing terrace houses and semi d's, as well as industrial lofts and old factory buildings. This idea of revitalising existing buildings through adaptive re-use led to Farrell becoming an early unlikely hero of the conservation movement.



These two tangents were fused in the iconic conversion of a Victorian terrace into student housing that they completed at Sussex Gardens in 1968. The project involved a clever spatial re-modelling of the existing houses as well as the addition of several pre-fabricated elements including a spiralling external tower of bathroom pods. Internally they designed movable furniture to colonise the hollowed out interior of the terrace. This project imaginatively re-used existing buildings but its investigations into prefabrication and a clip-on aesthetic got most of the attention.



Some ten years later Farrell taught a unit at the AA called Learning from Chigwell, where the students looked at Essex bungalows and semi d's for clues about successful housing (This sort of populism must have been even more crashingly unfashionable then than it is now). Farrell's own adaptations of his family's Maida Vale house were a modest version of the same investigations. The drawings for this are sweetly un-architectural, devoid of the usual spatial gymnastics or obsessive detailing that architects inflict on their families.



The interior of Farrell and Grimshaw's own offices shows the evolution of their ideas. Place has two photos; one of their joint office and another of the same space reconfigured by Farrell after the split. The earlier one is an endearingly 1970's interior; all acid oranges and brown plastic, with flexible service tubes running to individual work stations. Farrell rejigs it with kitsch surfaces and postmodern spatial illusions but retains the metal service tubes which now protrude from marble effect columns. Filing cabinets are piled up into ziggurats and garden trellising used to divide space. This is typical of the odd hybrid of high tech devices and pop classical references which Farrell pursued for a number of years subsequently.



His two temporary buildings for Clifton nurseries are the most interesting results of this fusion. The most well-known of these briefly occupied a corner of Covent Garden. Its famous temple-like front sat on a visual axis with Inigo Jones' St Paul's Church at the opposite end of the square, although half its portico was in fact a skeletal 'ghost' concealing a car park. This fragmented classical pediment fronted a lightweight tensile roof structure and an impermanent function making the classical elements poignant rather than bombastic.

If the building's slightly clunky classicism seems a bit stale today then his other nursery for Clifton still seems highly relevant. This was a polycarbonate clad greenhouse - an extruded tree shape in section - where any hint of classicism was subsumed into the cartoon pop aesthetic. The building has a lyrical DIY quality, echoing some of Frank Gehry's early Lo-fi experimentalism.



Less known well was the giant exhibition hall he designed as the temporary replacement for the burnt down Alexandra Palace. This giant shed combines high-tech materials, Archigram-esque clip-together curves and Pop Art super-graphics. It's a lovely building, a sort of super stylised Edwardiana, reminiscent of Ken Adam's eccentric sets for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.



Farrell and Grimshaw's most successful buildings was the aluminium clad Park Road flats near Regent's Park. The building used a slick, lightweight aesthetic that contrasted radically at the time with the contemporaneous Brutalist flats being built at Alexandra Road and the Brunswick Centre. More interesting are the photos of the interiors of Farrell and Grimshaw's own penthouse apartments in the building. The fact that they lived in adjacent penthouses at all is perhaps a sign of the times, reminiscent of The Beatles in Help, although their respective interiors are radically different. While Grimshaw's is straight architect pad chic, Farrell's is full of Victorian furniture, patterned rugs and a parrot in an ornate cage.



In fact, the interiors of Farrell's various houses are amongst the most interesting pieces of design in his book. Some of them are incredibly odd, featuring Egyptian columns, trompe d'oeil ceilings, antique furniture and tiger skin rugs. They have a gloomy, intensely decorated Victorian quality that must have been fabulously unfashionable for the time.



Although Farrell was seen as the defector, swept off into Jencksian postmodernism, he was arguably the one that developed the partnership's work into interesting new directions. Grimshaw's subsequent work, all precision gaskets and tension cables, developed along more predictable lines. The industrial sheds have a certain elegance, but the obsession with gadgets and mechanics seems oddly irrelevant now. His Camden Town Sainsbury's, while falling short of something like the Lloyd's buildings icy perfectionism, doesn't pull off contextual urbanism either.

The first part of Farrell's autobiography stops at 1982, which is about right for me. The slide into a straighter, more commercial postmodernism in the mid '80's means that interest begins to pall. The earlier work walks a more ambiguous, genre blurring line, fusing elements of '60's radicalism, classicism, pop art, high tech and the vernacular.

(All pictures are taken from here. Slightly outrageously without permission. Oh well.)

Urban Clearway

In 1975, or thereabouts, a Ford Anglia drove into the side of my parent's car. Fortunately no-one was seriously hurt but I have had mixed feelings about them ever since. The picture above - which paints the car in an altogether more charming light - is taken from a collection of photographs of Ford's Dagenham factory on the Guardian website (More here...).

The huge Dagenham works, which were built on reclaimed marshland along the edge of the Thames in the early 1930's, stopped car production in 2002, although lorry engines and gearboxes are still made there. The factory's hinterland consists of swathes of houses built for its former workers which, along the gloomy vastness of the river itself, now form part of the mysterious Thames Gateway regeneration project.



All of which is a long way from the suburban dreams of mobility represented in the photo at the top of this post, or even the heroic industrialism of the one above. Today, even in factories where they are produced, cars accumulate in unsold lots, like the Nissans photographed below in a driver-less traffic jam on the company's test track: a bleakly comic image of entropy.


(Image via)