Rough Poetry

Yesterday I had the opportunity to make a quick visit to Park Hill in Sheffield. Much has been written about this building lately and it was the subject of a recent BBC documentary following the story of its rebuilding by Urban Splash. I've been to Sheffield a few times and gazed up at its impressive bulk from the town below but I've never, somewhat shamefully, been up to look at it closely before.

Several things struck me when I did go and see it. The first is just how impressive a building it is. The concrete frame is indeed a beautiful thing - whether squinting or not - and its rhythm of single and double height openings has a tectonic vivaciousness which puts it way ahead of most comparable buildings of its period. Or any other period come to that.

Secondly, its extraordinary formal ruthlessness in maintaining a single roof datum while stepping down a steep hill throws up all sorts of vertiginously exciting spatial moments. I particularly like the way that its gargantuan scale at the bottom becomes almost intimate and traditional at the top of the hill. The concrete frame - a thing of stark abstract beauty when seen from afar - becomes a richly textured and endearingly rugged object close up.



One can see clearly how the twisting and turning plan form was intended to create partly enclosed public gardens between the blocks although these have an inevitably somewhat desolate quality today. The gaps between these areas, crossed by high level walkways, have an undeniable spatial thrill as the spaces tumble down the hill and the frame marches relentlessly on. Musically this building has been compared to the stark futurism of Sheffield's electronic pop, from Human League to warp, although looking at it now it seems to have more in common with the Krautrock of Can. Its relentless metronomic repetition and thumping low end register reveal subtle modulations the more you look at it, like staring into a very deep river.

Given all that the state of the place at the moment is deeply ambiguous. The decision to rip out not only the internal flats but the external brick and window infill panels might be justifiable on any number of less well realised housing schemes but seems particularly odd here. The different shades of stock brick give the block its distinctive Brutalist/Late Corbusien quality. Like Corbusier's Unite, the building offers an intruiging collision of machine like precision and cultivated rusticity.



Most odd of all though is the half-built half-demolished aspect of the building at present. With a bunch of earth movers - possibly pointlessly - moving muck around and the tallest section of concrete frame standing gaunt and exposed, it's possible to imagine that Park Hill is in the process of being built rather than re-built. In this state it has a bittersweet quality, both brave new world and failed vision of the future at one and the same time.

Not that this failure is necessarily a fault of the building iself. It seems, in principle, an eminently liveable place, a machine for living in the best possible sense. It's often said that buildings look best when still under construction. Certainly that's true when you see the exposed shuttered concrete bones of contemporary office buildings soon to be clad in jaunty, bar code facades. But Park Hill is heading the opposite way. Not for ever for sure, and hopefully not for that much longer, but its concrete frame whilst undeniably striking and strange with the sun shining through it ultimately looks a lot better with people living there.

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.