Oh My Lord, or Why I Don't Wanna go to Chelsea.

OK, so this is the scenario. An unelected Lord who has sworn an oath to an unelected monarch admonishes her son for acting undemocratically*. Lord Rogers of Riverside is backed in this attack by the Royal Institute of British Architects, an exclusive closed shop enjoying royal patronage and dedicated to advancing the cause of its members.

Various high profile members of the RIBA call for a boycott of the Prince’s speech at Portland Place. These members are happy to bear royal support but not so far as to allow one of its members to address them about architecture. Lord Rogers meanwhile accuses the Prince of not wanting to take part in an open debate and calls for an unelected cabal of constitutional ‘experts’ to limit the Prince’s powers.

Meanwhile in their battle against Lord Rogers’ designs for the barracks site, the forces of conservation have commissioned an alternative scheme by Quinlan Terry, a "Champion of classical architecture"** who was recently fined £25,000 by the ARB for destroying two listed buildings.

My colleague Sean Griffiths describes the debate in today’s Observer as “two Chelsea pensioners still fighting world war one”. In truth it’s perhaps closer to a medieval feud between a prince and a powerful nobleman. Ludicrously and depressingly anachronistic it seems to have engaged public opinion in a way that few architectural debates usually manage.

The Chelsea barracks debate abounds in ironies. It also won't go away. Like a lot of architects though I’m finding it difficult to care about either scheme. I’m perversely intrigued by Quinlan Terry’s Hogwarts style alternative if only because its form seems so dementedly unsuited to its purpose. I would love to see what some of the high-end flats might turn out like in such a layout. Ultimately though it's not a real project, more a slightly ludicrous excuse for an argument.

Unfortunately it's the same old argument. Rogers defends his scheme on the grounds that every age has its own architecture and, presumably, his represents the apogee of our one. In such a scenario, the past is always presented as a continuous uninterrupted line of development with each discrete era utterly certain of its direction. This is clearly a psychological trick designed to make us think that there is no alternative to where we've ended up.

Meanwhile supporters of the Quinlan Terry scheme hide behind the miserable barricades of contextualism in a way that makes you long for some '60's style Brutalism to come and wipe everything away.

What this debate is about ultimately is style, a debate that architects are ill equipped to fight on the grounds that they are in denial about it. No one cares really about the densities, or hard to grasp notions of what constitutes successful public space, or even the quality of accommodation being proposed. It is, as they say, a style war and architects hate talking about style.

They are desperate to shore up their status as professional dispensers of rational, sensible advice. Lord Rogers has been the designer of some of the most ludicrously style crazed buildings of the 20th century. That's what so brilliant about the best of them. It's just a shame that the Chelsea barracks scheme doesn't measure up. Otherwise I would be out there campaigning for it.

Last week while I was sitting on the bus reading an article about Rogers' scheme being canned, a man (somewhat inexplicably carrying a pair of skis) leant over to me and said; "It's a victory for common sense". You have to say that whatever it is, it isn't that.

* James Heartfield unpicks this well in this article in the New Geography.

** Quoted from this article in the Daily Mail.

P.S. For a sane description of the scenario behind the whole thing you should read this.

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.