More Rocket Baroque

I've been meaning to link to this excellent essay by Naomi Stead for a while, since being alerted to it via Things magazine. Things quite rightly pointed out my ignorance of Reyner Banham's essay on the "Rocket-baroque" phase of the ice cream van when writing my previous post on them. 

Stead's essay on Banham looks at the relationship between his infatuation with ephemeral products of pop culture and his status as an architectural historian. She explores a number of extremely pertinent issues to do with the transient nature of design journalism (and even more so now, blog writing) and the aspirations to timelessness of the historian. Most intriguingly she suggests that it was Banham's immersion in the here-and-now, the seemingly throw-away quality of his prodigious journalistic output, that made him such an important historian.

Banham's interest in ice cream vans* lay in their seeming invisibility to design critics. His attempt to trace the "Rocket baroque" phase of their stylistic development was part of an ongoing project to bring a critical sensibility to everyday objects that generally went overlooked. Ice cream vans are part of a vast landscape of commercial objects that are designed and manufactured away from the glare of art and design culture.

These objects were therefore denied a history, a history that Banham's critical writing was instrumental in uncovering. It was Banham's interest in the objects that resulted from the intersection of pop culture, consumerism and technology - rather than high-art architecture - and his attempt to develop a critical language for looking at them that made him such an interesting and pertinent writer. 

Whilst the outlandish and grotesque designs of custom car owners are hardly invisible, they do exist outside any accepted realm of 'proper' design. Or proper design criticism. In comparison to ice cream vans even they are a marginal enthusiasm, a narrow genre for the most part equally oblivious to notions of good design or, especially, good taste. For which, if for no other reason, they should be celebrated. 

Banham probably wouldn't have approved of the technological redundancy of these vehicles, or, perhaps, their limited, elitist appeal either. Certainly they test the notion of functionality to its limits, some of them only just about capable of being driven and only then to the next prize show. In this sense they are very interesting, 'pure' expressions of design free of commercial or functional constraint, despite their bastardised quality. Classic car shows are pedigree competitions for mongrel design.

Despite the owner's claims to originality and the cliched rhetoric of freedom and self-expression that runs through the custom car world, they are in fact all developed within tight aesthetic constraints from which deviation is frowned upon. And they are un-changing. Like corn dollies or crochet they are an art form that is not moving forward. 

The designs are based on a limited number of types: the elongated limo, the jacked up old timer and the dragster recur. As do the flame paint jobs, lavish amounts of chrome and outlandish projections of the male sexual imagination that adorn them.

Despite, or because of, this they are also fabulous objects, fusions of 50's comic book art, pseudo-medievalism and Rococo ornament. Like the dogs at Crufts they are bred to the point of perversity and beyond. And like dog breeding, along with tattooing and fantasy art, custom cars are, ultimately, a design backwater, a sub-cult with their own incrementally evolving language. A bit like architecture then in some ways.

So, below is a brief photo-essay - partly in tribute to Banham's fabulous Rocket Baroque - of the custom car vernacular. All photos are from this site.

* See his essay Sundae Painters, in A Critic Writes. 

Dependency Culture

Here, for anyone who missed it in Icon, is my review of Jeremy Till's book Architecture Depends.

Jeremy Till has a neat spatial metaphor for the aloofness of architects from society. The School of Architecture at Sheffield University (where Till was until recently Dean) is located in the Arts Tower, a twenty-storey block that sits on a hill overlooking the city. The tower uses a paternoster lift where open compartments move up and down in a continuous non-stop loop. Jeremy Till suggests that architecture is like the occupants of this building: removed from the life of the city in an ivory tower, constantly moving but going nowhere.

I read this section of Architecture Depends whilst on a train to Sheffield to give a lecture in the Arts Tower. This is the kind of bizarre coincidental relationship between theory and the everyday that I imagine Jeremy Till would enjoy. His book contains a number of similar anecdotal stories that run like a parallel narrative alongside the main more academic text. These stories - frequently amusing and often self-deprecating - highlight the discrepancy between architecture conceived as a perfect, timeless object by architects, and architecture as part of the messy reality of our lives as experienced by everyone else.

This is Till's central thesis: that architecture constantly resists its own dependency on the outside world. Buildings have lives beyond their designer’s control. Not only are they formed out of a mess of compromises (despite the supposedly clarity of the RIBA Plan of Work) but they are also subject to constant change once built.

They get lived in, added to, refurbished, neglected and sometimes demolished. Their official function - office, house, museum - is disturbed by an infinite number of smaller unofficial ones. People write on them, fall in love in them, break up outside them and ignore them. Till contends that architectural theory actively resists these contingencies, preferring to believe in various versions of the autonomy of architecture and the architect instead.

My only criticism of this well written and entertaining book is that in order to discredit the figure of the autonomous architect, Jeremy Till has to make us believe in him in the first place. Much of the book is taken up with the construction of this straw man. Fragments of architectural theory from figures as diverse as Vitruvius, Le Corbusier, Ruskin and Sigfried Gideon are lifted out of history and corralled into this enterprise.

Yet I suspect these architectural myths are considerably less stable than Till allows. In a sense he is (over) stating a truism. The Barcelona Pavilion may have been conceived as having little to do with the everyday but that doesn't stop it from being rained on. Buildings simply ARE part of the everyday whether architects like it or not. The question then becomes how different are they when this fact is foregrounded in the design process?

The one concrete (well, straw) example Till offers here is ironically enough his own house. The self commissioned private house is one where the architect has the greatest control and autonomy. The radical qualities of his own design - the straw bale construction and 'messy' planning for instance - depend on exactly the kind of precise formal control that he admonishes architects for craving. If this is the everyday, then it is a highly refined version. If this is mess then it is artful dishevelment.

A meta theory of the everyday is an inherently risky business. In some ways it attempts to wrestle control back from all that contingency. So whilst this book hits most of its targets and successfully satirises the self-image of the architect, Architecture Depends depends itself on a model of architecture that is to a large extent wishful thinking.

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.