Myth, memory and make believe

Homo Ludens has followed up an interesting post on Thorpeness (see News From Elsewhere, right) with another related one on the late German writer W G Sebald. Specifically his post leads from my (quite probably) erroneous suggestion that Sebald visited Thorpeness in his East Anglian travelogue The Rings Of Saturn. Seeing as I lent my copy to a friend I can't clarify this point either but maybe that doesn't matter. I think my memory of this has become appropriately Sebald-like and conflated a number of different, vaguely connected stories.

One of Sebald's other novels Austerlitz - which I have not read - concerns a historian researching European architecture. The eponymous Austerlitz was orphaned as a result of the holocaust and brought up with an assumed name in Wales. The book apparently concerns Austerlitz's reluctant uncovering of his past, although with Sebald these things are never that straightforward.

Another novel which was almost certainly inspired by Sebald and which lifts much of his tone, albeit in a more straightforward English-lit manner, is Esther Freud's The Sea House. This book also concerns a historian although this time it is a young English architectural student who becomes obsessed with a German architect called Klaus Lehmann.

In order to research Lehmann's work she moves to Steerborough which is a thinly disguised Walberswick, another seaside town on the Suffolk coast. Leaving aside the highly unlikely scenario of an architecture student disappearing for six months to research an arcane point of architectural history, Freud's book is also a personal history. Her uncle was Ernst Freud, an architect who left Berlin in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. In London Freud designed Belvedere Court on the edge of Hampstead Garden suburb, as well as the sun room of the museum in Hampstead devoted to his father Sigmund.

The Sea House is a slightly pallid homage to W G Sebald, attempting to capture some of the same ambiguous interweaving of personal and political memory. Strangely, when imagining the The Sea House the place that kept appearing in my mind was the Dutch House in Thorpeness. This building is an emigrant itself, an oddly transposed piece of art noveau sitting in its highly artificial setting on the East Anglian coast.

As Homo Ludens suggests, Thorpeness is a fantasy that uses nostalgic memory to suppress the realities of the twentieth century. Its layout is based on a three dimensional construction of the spaces of Edwardian children's fiction populated by vaguely eerie bits of half-remembered architecture.

Given all that I'm not so sure that W G Sebald would have been uninterested in Thorpeness. Its jollity is too forced and its purpose too odd for it to be so easily dismissed. It is a cock-eyed conflation of other times and places situated somewhere between myth and childhood make believe.

Blogs v cigarettes

When I started this blog it was with the intention of writing enthusiastically about things that interested me. I was getting to the point where I felt I could slip easily into a kind of cynical practitioner's world view. Call it a mid-life crisis but I wanted to recapture some of the thrill that comes with studying and discussing architecture rather than doing it. Reading the weeklies and getting enraged by them each week didn't seem a very productive way of spending one's energies.

The idea was to write my perfect architecture magazine; one third Melody Maker circa 1988, one third crappily stapled fanzine and one third Roland Barthes' Mythologies. Or rather - and being generous- roughly one third as good as Mythologies. It was never meant to be a diary of my working or (heaven forbid) personal life.

So what's my point? Well, to some extent this navel gazing has come about as a result of the recent Blueprint brouhaha. Not that I'm put off exactly but I have been wondering why I write at all?

I have, for instance, never really written about contemporary architecture. Certainly not in a direct what-I-think-about-this-new-building kind of way. This is partly because, and without wishing to sound snotty about it, I'm not all that interested in doing so. Besides, there are plenty of people doing that already. One of the reasons I like Owen's writing so much is that he's not a conventional architecture critic. His writing exists on the edges of mainstream architectural criticism, relating it to a specific political framework and a broader cultural remit that takes in music, books and art.

Which brings me to Kieran Long's point made in the comments section of my response to Blueprint's article. Kieran takes an interesting line defending traditional architectural journalism on the grounds that its mainstream position allows it to shock and surprise and therefore move the mainstream position on. Implicit in this argument is that blogs - which exist on the margins of proper, professional criticism and journalism - lack that element of surprise. They are expected to be extreme, partial, perverse, maverick etc.

The interesting about this is that it assumes a centre to architectural discourse. Even more so than Tim Abraham's article, which conceded (albeit somewhat angrily) that the critical centre has shifted. Kieran's point could be re-framed though. What if architectural criticism were not over there but over here? What if architecture were not the AJ technical and legal section, or tedious debates about 'style wars'*, and was actually something very different?

The late Robin Evans once asked a similar question when reviewing Daniel Liebeskind's early drawings. Instead of viewing them as marginal, esoteric commentaries on the centre ground of architecture he suggested tipping up the whole epistemology and viewing them the other way. What if that kind of intellectual speculation were really the centre of architecture after all and everything was marginal to that activity?

So this is what I wanted to write about, to treat the marginal as somehow central to architecture. Not to build a new ivory tower, but as a way of keeping things interesting. To attempt to reposition those things at the margins of architecture - ice cream vans, rocket ship design, motorways and Christmas lights - as not just worthy of consideration, but an important part of the discipline.

I'm aware that this is part of a tradition and has its own history, one that I happily subscribe to. This tradition might include the Independant Group and The Smithsons of But Today We Collect Ads, Dan Graham's Homes of America, The Venturis (inevitably), Robin Evans' subtle deconstructions of architectural history and Bernard Tschumi's seminal reinvestigation of early, alternative strands of modernism.

Esteemed company I realise, and of course the reality falls short of the ambition, but I have as a side effect discovered more good writing and inspiring work on the internet than I ever imagined. In his essay Books v cigarettes, George Orwell argued that reading was a cheaper pleasure than smoking. Blogs cost nothing, allowing you to circumvent the entire publishing business, should you so wish. In this lies the freedom to re-write the script. Not to subvert the mainstream, but to shift it over there somewhere.

Blogging is interesting because it allows you to temporarily re-cast the familiar categories and hierarchies of architecture. Suddenly the lines of demarcation are up for grabs. Free of the dreadful need to appear reasonable and sane, it allows you to speculate for a moment that architecture isn't that at all, it's this!


* And Vicky Richardson has a point about the dreadful apolitical response of architects to the Prince of Wales.

Avenue: Notes Towards A Spatial Theory of Suburbia

How does one look seriously at the suburbs? How does one get past the lazy assumptions to understand what makes them work, as well as what doesn't?

When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took their students to study America's Levitown suburb they had to develop new methods to describe its spaces. The traditional tools of architectural representation - plans, sections and models - were supplanted by photography, film, cartoons and collections of artifacts and ephemera.

The Venturi's study was predominantly, though not exclusively, sign based rather than spatial. Their interest was in the signs and symbols of the American suburb rather than its spatial organisation. This still remains its least analysed and understood aspect from an architectural point of view. Beyond such pejorative descriptions as 'sprawl' there is no serious spatial vocabulary for suburbia.

Perhaps it doesn't lend itself to traditional forms of architectural analysis. The qualities denigrated by architects and urbanists - its formlessness and lack of spatial hierarchy - require different modes of representation. Equally the same traditional tools are instrumental in establishing the counter claims of urbanism. Or, put another way, architecture's representational and analytical tools are better at describing the positive qualities of urban because that's what they have been developed to do.

The ubiquity of the representational devices employed by architects blinds us to their partiality. The figure-ground drawing for instance has been vital in establishing how we think about the city and, in particular, the relationship between private and public space. Possibly the most influential figure-ground plan ever was Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome. Nolli's plan represents enclosed public spaces as equivalent to open civic spaces, illustrating them as white positive ground against the black figure of buildings. This technique gives the piazzas, colonnades and courtyards a compelling physicality, suggesting the convivial, communal qualities of internal rooms but on a much larger scale.



Following Nolli, the external spaces of the city are conceived as urban living rooms fostering civic qualities through the physical proximity of bodies in space. By contrast suburbia's fragmented spaces are seen as encouraging social atomisation through physical dispersal. But if the city is made of up of certain typological components - streets, squares and colonnades - then what are the suburban equivalents? The avenue, the parade and the cul-de-sac? What kinds of social spaces do these create? What civic qualities do they possess?

To begin to find out one might have to look beyond architectural representation to other art forms. Pop music in particular has a vital relationship to suburbia. Frequently this is antagonistic - a railing against suburbia's political and social conservatism - as in goth, grunge or metal. The relationship is more ambiguously affectionate in the case of the English literary pop tradition of The Kinks, Small Faces and the Beatles through to The Jam, Blur and Pulp. The fact that pop is often an escape - both literal and metaphorical - from suburbia, means that this portrayal is inevitably double edged, describing this landscape with a mixture of affectionate observation and caustic commentary.

Equally the endless suburbs of somewhere like LA have have been a key subject matter from the surf pop of the '50's and '60's through the denim rock of Laurel Canyon's decadent suburbs in the 1970's to the G Funk and west coast rap of Dr Dre and Death Row records. With Dr Dre the music's languid affluence and smooth sense of unease acts as a darkly satirical ramping up of the familiar cliches of suburban one-upmanship. The video for Still Dre even works as a satire of '50's LA pop with Dre and Snoop Dog cruising the suburban streets in retro Cadillacs on the way to the beach.



Whilst Pulp are in many ways a quintessentially urban band - and the very particular urbanism of Sheffield at that - they also brilliantly evoke an edge of the city feeling too. Jarvis' tales of adult affairs and formative sexual experiences gone wrong exist within the social mores of close knit suburban communities. David's Last Summer combines both an affectionate homage to suburban childhood and the corresponding desire to escape. Its spoken word vocal bids suburban teenage life a fond farewell, although it remains ambiguous as to whether this is as a result of growing up and moving on or something more tragic. Its evocation of the teenage house parties and exquisitely endless summers on the cusp of adulthood is hard to beat.

Walking to parties whilst it's still light outside.

Peter was upset at first but now he's in the garden talking to somebody Polish.
Why don't we set up a tent and spend the night out there?
And we can pretend that we're somewhere foreign but we'll still be able to use the fridge if we get hungry
or too hot.



These are also the spaces described by the paintings of George Shaw. Shaw paints suburbia but he also gets to the heart of its more ambiguous and difficult to define spaces; left over places, ends of terraces, undeveloped land. These places exist on the margins of suburbia where development has (temporarily) stopped and become a temporary home to all sorts of improper activities. Ignored by most people, these are public spaces for (mostly) minor acts of transgression. It is also the same dead space of Pulp's song Reservoir, which captures the unpleasant goings-on of unpopulated bits of suburban infrastructure.

But the 'proper' spaces of suburbia also lend themselves to reinterpretation. The suburban cul-de-sac is a public space as well as a piece of pragmatic development. Perhaps because of their social and economic exclusivity these spaces become home to street parties and events as well as informal meetings. The drawing below (by my colleague Sean Griffiths) is of the street where he grew up and describes the impromptu football matches that were played on it. The 'pitch' is distorted by circumstance so that the house gates becomes the goal-mouth, stretching and rotating the familiar layout. Here, ironically, is the classic figure ground plan of the city but adapted to show things that are usually left out such as activity and event.


Perhaps this is where suburban place differs from urban space. It is repetitive and formally unexciting. The architecture isn't challenging or formally inventive in the way that architects want it to be. It's what happens in it that's interesting though. This activity requires an expanded version of traditional architectural drawing to capture, one that describes places rather than buildings and content rather than form.