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. 

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.

Criticism: Not What It Used To Be

I wasn't going to respond to Tim Abraham's criticisms of this blog - along with several notable others - partly out of a fear of appearing too defensive. His article may have been a bit of a rant but, then again, I've written a few of those in my time. Besides it's always nice to be noticed. However his article has resulted in some very thoughtful and intelligent responses which I wanted to expand on.

Both Things and Sit Down Man have made eloquent rebuttals of his argument so I'll try not to repeat them here. Nina at Infinite Thought too has elegantly dismantled most of the more reactionary statements about the internet more effectively than I could. I would add though that an article posted on line and linked by Blueprint to Twitter is on slightly thin ice criticising the ephemeral nature of blogs.

But onto more positive things! Tim Abraham's article is interesting because it raises a number of anxieties about the nature of criticism and architecture writing on the web. Firstly there is the issue of who is a legitimate critic. Abrahams seems keen to establish a proper hierarchy ranging from professional paid critics on respected magazines at the top down to the unsolicited plethora of amateurs on line.

As well as the levelling out of this entirely self-serving hierarchy he has a further concern that the internet itself destabilises proper categories of artistic worth. There is, Abraham's states, "no register of what is more important than something else".

A certain paranoia seems to underpin this anxiety, a sense that one might not know what it's correct to think anymore. I would suggest that this fear is a pretty constant anxiety historically speaking and the internet is merely the latest in a long line of "worrying" trends towards a democratisation of opinion.

Things magazine's numerous links and connections can be occasionally dizzying, but they are also intelligently and critically put together. Ironically enough Tim Abraham cites Venturi Scott Brown as forbears of 'proper' critical writing. If ever there was an architectural precedent for something like Things magazine though it is surely the Venturis?

VSBA's research projects into Las Vegas and the American suburb (which resulted in the critically panned Signs of Life exhibition) were disliked by architects precisely for daring to look seriously at everyday culture in a non-judgemental way. Too much information and not enough moralising has always been the received critical wisdom on Learning from Las Vegas and Signs of Life.

Finally, and most centrally, there is the curious criticism of blogs for being nostalgic and for "giving up on the future". Leaving aside the question of why this might be the only legitimate subject matter for an architecture blog, perhaps it's the concept of the future deployed here that needs revising.

The Future is freighted with baggage, already overcoded to the point of being meaningless. Abrahams wants a declamatory THIS IS THE FUTURE sort of criticism, not realising that the desire to return to such linear certainties might itself be reactionary and nostalgic. Perhaps the future is already here? Or rather visions and speculations about it already are. It's just that they don't look like they used to.

There seems to be to be a stiff literalness at work here, a failure of imagination. It's perfectly legitimate to speculate about architecture (and its future) by looking at the recent past (Brutalism or Post Modernism) or at objects that fall outside the accepted canon of good design (Googie architecture, the Popemobile) or at other art forms (jungle, sit coms). This is a way to open up architectural debate, rather than flatten it. And looking at the past is not inherently nostalgic.

Blueprint's article exhibits a self-censoring ideology of what it's acceptable to write about, as well as a perverse fear of the possibilities thrown up by the internet. Not only is the format of internet based writing highly speculative (all those links and new connections) but a lot of the content is too. The considered response to Abraham's article by people like Owen and I.T. seems to speak too of the internet's ability to generate valuable discussion in a way that printed media simply can't.

Ultimately the blog sites that Abraham's criticises are (as Things points out) those of a more speculative and experimental nature. Their value lies precisely in the fact that they aren't looking in the same place as everyone else. Their interests may appear esoteric, eclectic or even bizarre, but that's because architectural criticism is so crowded with the same people all talking about the same old things.

Perhaps the future is not over there at all. Perhaps it's over here.

paper wraps stone

I would like to bring to your attention a stylish demolition of Primal Scream's new album in excellent on line music magazine The Quietus by Chris Roberts. "The Scream" are not the most unlikely of targets perhaps and they are certainly ripe for it but Roberts manages the task with flair and elan. The line about putting a damp cloth over your intellect is particularly fine. As is his dismissal of CSS, although I actually quite like them. I'll find it more difficult to do so now though, which is the kind of perversity I take much pleasure in.

Worryingly, I haven't enjoyed reading any music criticism so much for ages. Worrying, because along with Taylor Parkes' new Fall album review, The Quietus seems to have resuscitated the entire staff of Melody Maker from 1990. They all disappeared and now they have returned en masse like veterans from a twenty year tour of duty in the Astoria. Where have they been? How did they survive? Did they all live together, like The Monkees?*

What does this say about me? That I have atrophied into the kind of man who has no sense of curiosity about the world? That I'm looking in the wrong places? Well, there is Wire and, indeed, Mire**, but I'm not sure I enjoy them in quite the same way. I feel improved, educated, more in the know, sometimes invigorated, often inspired to go and buy something. But not quite as thrilled and not quite as uplifted as by Chris Robert's delightfully rude review of Primal Scream. I had to go back and re-read it. It's still very good.

Is the enjoyment of music linked to the enjoyment of criticism? It is for me. Somehow the critical discourse around gives it meaning and a way in that I know many people would find oddy slavish to some over intellectualised form of predetermination. Actually, it's the same with architecture. In here, a great deal of what we do stems from outrage at what everyone else is doing. That is from a primarily critical impulse (the results of which probably have a similar reaction on everyone else). For me personally words and criticism precedes creativity (horrible self aggrandising word I know). But, words, perversely, are somehow important in forming things. In the anti-intellectual climate of contemporary architecture, criticism is mostly seen as a destructive thing, a necessary evil at best. Too much theory is supposed to limit creativity. In as much as I can lay claim to any creativity, I would say that, for me, the opposite has always been true

*Apart from Simon Price, who I see at every concert I ever go to. He's a very noticeable sort of fellow that Simon Price, although it might also have something to do with my wife dragging me to an awful lot of Brett Anderson concerts.

** Actually, while writing this I have been reading the Mire again and it's actually very good.