Suburban Frontyards International

Not the title of my forthcoming album - although if I had one it probably would be - but a fabulous flickr set. I'm particularly taken with the deadpan joys of this one.

In the absence of original post material here are some other links:

Zone Styx Travelcaard, an excellent new (mainly) music blog that I initially thought might be this man, although I've now been reliably informed is not. Good recent posts on old faves Swans and a kind of continuing conversation with Kpunk on nostalgia. I'm planning a future post (sic) that takes some of the same themes but in an architectural direction...nothing to do with grainy jpegs on blogs and everything to do with the wholly pejorative use of the term within architectural debate. It's always worth trying to pick apart something so regularly deployed as an insult.

Mammoth, a blog devoted to BIG urban, infrastructure and architectural issues.

The pithily titled Cosmopolitan Scum is shaping up well, even though he has a fairly caustic pop at the generally excellent Bad British Architecture.

Finally a sad fairwell to one of my favourites blogs. Emmy Hennings/Anwyn Crawford has not only stopped writing Aloof From Inspiration but expelled it out of the air shift and into deep space. Deleted the entire thing in other words, hence no link, as it ain't there no more. I shall miss it.

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.