over the edge

This post follows on in some ways from several previous ones about the coastline of south-east England, a place that continues to interest me for a number of reasons which keep resurfacing here. It’s in the nature of a blog too, I guess, that certain subjects are returned to again and again, somewhat partially each time.

The clip above is taken from Quadrophenia, the 1978 film based on The Who’s rock opera about mid ‘60’s mod culture. In the film’s final scene, Jimmy – it’s ostensible hero – appears to ride his scooter over the edge of the cliff at Beachy Head, on the East Sussex coast. Beachy Head is an infamous suicide spot, a place where the rolling  south downs rise up to reveal a dizzyingly vertiginous and unprotected drop to the English Channel below. It’s a highly symbolic and ideologically charged location, a stunningly beautiful stretch of landscape where the familiar, jagged outline of England becomes physically and visually legible.

The chalky white cliffs below Beachy Head are part of a landscape overwritten with various narratives of Englishness. To such an extent, in fact, that it’s hard to write about them without being drawn into murky, nationalist sentiment. Quadrophenia is interesting thought because, in some senses, it offers a counter narrative to the familiar one of heroic resistance and national pride. For a start, Jimmy is far from an establishment or conservative figure. His suicide is prompted, at least in part, by equal parts self-disgust and disgust at the rottenness of the country around him.

Beachy Head is 60 miles to the west of Dover. Along the length of coastline between these two poinyd lie the remains of hundreds of years of defensive fortifications. The cliffs are like ideology translated into geography, furiously over-coded with symbolic significance and bearing the traces of endless assertions of nationhood. Any attempt, however ironic, to summon up the plucky fighting spirit of the English is likely to make reference to them at some point.

Nike’s Rugby World cup advert from 2007 is typical, the cliffs offering the perfect location for yet another sporting re-enactment of the second world war. Likewise, Tango’s notorious 1996 advert featuring – supposedly – a middle manager from the company taking exception to a letter of complaint from a French customer, ends with the offer of a fight in a boxing ring perched on the edge of the cliffs, while Harrier Jump Jets loom up over the rolling downs behind.

I'm on the white cliffs of Dover

Thinking it over and over

And if I jump it's all over

A cautionary tale for you

Blur, Clover over Dover, 1994

It’s strange then that these cliffs – the one’s celebrated ad-nauseum in Very Lynn’s 2^nd World War anthem There’ll Be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover – should also act as a bleakly comic shorthand for self-surrender and despair. Blur’s song Clover over Dover manages to conflate the two, linking Quadrophenia and Vera Lynn in a queasy ode to both pastoral beauty and personal despair. Clover over Dover is, of course, a song from the album Parklife, Blur’s nostalgic requiem for Brit youth culture. The nostalgia is second, or, maybe, even third hand though, because Quadrophenia was itself a homage to the mid-sixties mod movement viewed through the resigned cynicism of the late ‘70’s.

Parklife itself can be read as a mapping of the British Isles, a concept album about various ideas of Englishness. It’s closing song This is a Low, uses the evocative place names of the BBC’s shipping forecast – Dogger Bank, Malin Head, Land’s End – to describe a hazy edge where the country disappears, the invisible line beyond the coast where national sovereignty gives way to International Waters. The sharp, jagged outline of the white cliffs – an extraordinarily graphic and highly visual boundary – becomes replaced in the song by an ambiguous, watery point somewhere out to sea.

While This is a Low is a kind of dreamy reverie, a half-in and half-out of consciousness lullaby, Clover Over Dover concerns a more specific and literal attempt to escape. The song’s narrator fantasises about physical dissolution and of rejecting the country’s suffocating and over familiar embrace.

Viewed from the sea, the white cliffs offer the illusion of an impressive, impregnable wall, a geological line of defence. They no longer provide a literal defence though. That too, has become more virtual than physical, manifest in racist political posturing and destructive legislation like the coalition government’s proposals for an immigration cap. Another kind of defensive unit still patrols the coast though. The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, with their disconcertingly breezy strap line “we bring people back from the brink”, regularly walk the cliff path, ready to persuade people not to jump. Or leave.

parade

A brief return to the once popular blogger's sport of pop song/architecture combinations, partly inspired by one of its inventors sending me this recently. This one is cheating a bit - but only a bit - because its urban associations are as much autobiographical as they are a definable presence within the song. I should add too that I was reminded of Hats - the album from which the song is taken - by a conversation on @owenhatherley's twitter feed.....

I used to listen to Hats during my last year of living at home with my parents and it accompanied me (via my extra large '80's style orange foam ear phones) on the way back from countless nights out in the spectacularly un-glamorous setting of Chelmsford, Essex. The parade of the title is a kind of provincial everywhere, summoning up images of late night high streets filled with Saturday night expectation. But it is also a very particular place, a street of shops and bars where I would hang out with friends in the months after finishing school, an odd, in-between period in life inflated with all the doomy grandeur of post adolescence.

One look at the official video (sadly un-embeddable) makes you realise the band may have had something more typically glamorous in mind than Moulsham Street*, but the slippage between aspirations of urban sophistication and the realities of (sub)urban life seems a very '80's theme. The Blue Nile never seemed to fit in anywhere particularly on the musical spectrum of the time though. The lush sophistication of their arrangements and the synthetic drum sound are a continuation of new romanticism to some extent - as is, perhaps, the faint hint of Americana (Tinseltown in the Rain!) - but the exquisite sense of melancholy isn't.

The whole of Hats seems infused with an attempt to summon up the ghosts of old nights out, a haunted echo of the thrills of urban life. The song titles - Let's Go Out Tonight, The Downtown Lights, From A Late Night Train, Saturday Night - communicate the kind of loneliness you can only feel when surrounded by lots of people having fun. They also seem to map out the spaces of an exhaustively familiar town, like the stations of some highly personal cross. It's unclear whether Paul Buchanan thinks that going out will save him, or his relationship, and offer some redemption, or whether this is all long since dead and he's merely remembering a distant, now unimaginable happiness.

On which triumphantly downbeat note I shall take my leave. At least for a while! This blog will be quiet for a couple of weeks now. I'm going on holiday. But not with Paul Buchanan. Expect to see the now standard issue holiday post featuring giant plastic ice cream cones, empty hover ports, abandoned nuclear reactors and seaside parades when I get back. Ta da.

* Strangely enough, I found myself defending another, earlier, teenage hangout this week with an old friend from school. The roof of Chelmsford's multi-storey car park was a great place from which to watch the cricket at Essex County Cricket ground as well as drop small, anti-social missiles on passers by below. Not that I'm recommending either, mind....

Myths Of The Near Future

Here's me in this month's RIBA Journal writing about FAT's recent Yale Studio. The image above is by one of our students, Aude Helene Jomini, and shows part of her proposal for a landscape for lorry drivers at Dover harbour. The building - one of several housing facilities for truckers - develops an architectural language out of lorry body parts and is adorned by a pair of giant klaxons.

Essex Dogs

"I was born below sea level. That profoundly affects the consciousness". Wilco Johnson.

Recently I've watched both the Ian Dury biopic Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll and Julien Temple's film Oil City Confidential, about '70's Pub Rock band Dr Feelgood. Neither Feelgood nor Dury's band The Blockheads meant much to me at the time. I was too young for their late '70's heyday for a start. Feelgood were a classic 'older brother band', hairy, sweaty guys whose grinning geezer logo my own elder brother spent his free time drawing on the walls of his bedroom. Ian Dury enjoyed some notoriety in the playground, mainly for the rudeness of his lyrics, but I never cared much for the music.



Both Dury and Dr Feelgood came from Essex though, which gave them a grim credibility for anyone, like me, who's also from that much denigrated county. And they couldn't really have come from anywhere else. Despite its global reach pop music has a specific relationship to it's physical context: heavy metal from the black country, for instance, or dubstep from the bedrooms of south London. There are both obvious and opaque reasons behind these origins, a dense correlation of coincidences that lead to the momentum of a scene.

If Essex ever had a scene it was in the generally uncelebrated Pub Rock movement. Both Ian Dury's Blockheads and Dr Feelgood grew out of Pub Rock. But their differences also reflect the areas they grew up in. Dury was from suburban Essex and his music is full of caustic social observation and character studies. It seems to mimic the chatter and gossip of Hornchurch or Harrow, where he grew up. While Dury revels in the kitchen sink realism of Billericay Dickie ("Had a love affair with Nina, in the back of my Cortina"), Feelgood attempted to reinvent their surroundings. For them the bleak industrial landscape of Canvey Island, with its petro-chemical plants, mudflats and bungalows was analogous to the deep south of America. They re-named it Oil City and placed it in the Thames Delta, a mythological landscape of their own imagination.



"On Canvey Island, 1953. Many lives were lost. With the records of a football team"

Canvey Island, British Sea Power

Canvey Island is a very strange place. It is an artificial island for a start, reclaimed from the North Sea by Dutch engineers in the 17th Century. It lies below sea level and its few shallow hills are artificial too, the result of the Roman salt industry. In 1953 it flooded killing 58 people. This disaster forms the opening of Julien Temple's film. Its star is undoubtedly the bizarre but brilliant guitarist Wilco Johnson. Johnson's name is itself a piece of wish fulfillment, a derivation of the considerably more English sounding John Wilkinson. Today, Johnson is a shaven headed Essex seer with a miniature observatory rigged up on the roof of his house which beams images of the stars onto a television in his living room.

Johnson was always the romantic, slightly otherworldly figure in a band that otherwise looked like a bunch of minor villains from The Sweeney. Their music though was a kind of industrialised blues, transformed by Johnson's propulsive, almost motorik, guitar playing. Rather than the epic rhythms of the autobahn though, this is the sound of souped up Escorts tearing up the A13, or revving their way along Southend's seafront.



If you're looking for a thrill that's new Take in Fords, Dartford Tunnel and the river too Go Motorin' on the A13

Billy Bragg, A13 Trunk Road to the Sea.

The A13 - celebrated by that other Essex Boy Billy Bragg - starts off as Commercial Street in east London, passes through Barking and Dagenham and eventually peters out in the sand banks of Shoeburyness. Along the way it takes in the epic industrial landscape of the Ford Motor Works This is where Ian Dury's Billericay Dickie might have worked and where his beloved Cortina would have been made.

Feelgood were considered Essex geezers through and through. They looked like gangsters after a minor heist gone wrong, with Lee Brilleaux's filthy white suit and Wilco Johnson's machine gun guitar technique. But they were something else too. Johnson's elegant glide/strut across the stage and otherworldly stare made them far more exotic. And the music, both brutishly straightforward and highly tuned, made them as devastatingly effective as a homemade hot rod. No wonder everyone from Clem Burke to Joe Strummer admired them so much.



"I'm going down by the jetty.
Tonight the tide is high.
It's tankers in the channel laying
Flames up in the sky.

The air is full of poison
The sea is slick with grease
Somewhere in this hell on earth
I'll surely get some peace."

Dr Feelgood, Down By The Jetty Blues

Ian Dury suffered from polio, which is a water borne disease. Dury contracted it whilst swimming on a family holiday in Southend. Here the metaphors of dirt and disease behind Dr Feelgood's take on the Essex coast suddenly acquire a hideous literalness. Canvey, like Southend, was once a hugely popular seaside resort. The press shots for Oil City Confidential show the remaining members of the band posed in front of Canvey Island's Labworth Cafe, designed by Ove Arup in the fashionable seaside moderne style of the 1930's.

Seaside moderne was associated with the health giving properties of sea air and salt water, part of the rhetoric of early modernism. Here, though, it's clean white lines and optimistic curves can hardly disguise the polluted and industrialised environment in which it sits. Labworth Cafe is a pertinent object in Canvey's mythology, symbolic of a brief moment of modernity that merely exaggerates its presen isolation from the rest of the world. At one point in Temple's film, Johnson refers to Kent - visible from the shores of Canvey - as a kind of mythical, far-away land of exotic fruits. Essex continually casts itself as a poor cousin, a charmless and unlovely place with Canvey as its most remote outpost.

A shot of Dr Feelgood during their post Wilco Johnson, vaguely New Wave phase shows them scrubbed up and dressed in dandyish blazers in front of the Labworth Cafe. It's an untypical picture, with the two band members at the back looking comically uncomfortable with their new look. It suggests though that exotic flowers sometimes grow from Essex's bleak but occasionally beautiful landscape.

Learning From New Haven

More holiday snaps I'm afraid, this time from New Haven. The dashboard of this blog is a veritable graveyard of 'draft' posts and half-written rants at the moment. The photos below were taken a couple of weeks ago and will, no doubt, be added to after subsequent visits.

Eero Saarinen's Yale Hockey Rink zooms out in front of Philip Johnson's Kline Biology Tower. The latter is from Johnson's fascist architecture phase, as opposed to his fascist politics phase.

Inside, Saarinen's building really is like being in a upturned Viking long boat sitting over a frozen sea. I base this observation on my vast experience of being in Viking long boats, whether upside down or not.

Americans love quilted stainless steel. Does this material exist in any other country in quite such abundance? Does the quilting offer genuine insulative qualities, as it's usually used on hot dog and burrito stands?

Shamefully, I don't actually know who designed this. I suspect it might be Josep Luis Sert. Perhaps someone will be good enough to enlighten me.

Muscular and super-scaled 19th Century faux-medievalism dominates much of the Yale University campus.

Much of it emblazoned with industrial age heraldry.



Random, but very sweet, treasure-chest like synagogue...



"Hogwarts meets the Ministry of Information" - Sean Griffiths.



Entrance court of interesting building by little known American architect*.

Epic meeting point of AC duct, concrete column and inlaid marble floor...

Louis Kahn's take on the English Country House interior; patterned carpets, club chairs, oak paneling and oil paintings of animals...

Probably the best multi-storey in the world - Paul Rudolph's Temple Street car park.



...and at night.

Mind you, this uncelebrated multi-storey nearby is also fairly impressive, a vast constructivist machine for parking automobiles.

Rudolph's Crawford Manor housing block - the villain from Learning From Las Vegas - seen from an alley running between two clapboard houses.

And his Architecture and Art building, complete with slightly underwhelming extension by Charles Gwathmey to the right. If you look closely you can see....

....the poster for the Venturi Scott Brown What We Learned symposium and exhibition. Their final victory over Paul Rudolph? Or the other way around?

Lurking scandalously inside are the McDonald's Golden Arches from Signs Of Life....

....and some exquisite photographs from Learning From Las Vegas, hung against the tectonic fuck you-ness of Rudolph's bush hammered concrete.

The A&A building contains some truly bizarre and fabulous spaces, reminding me of Cedric Price's quip about Leslie Martin's Harvey Court building in Cambridge: "Just the middle ages with 13 amp power sockets". Which, even if you are a fan of Price, sounds just great in many ways, and a bit like Resident Evil.

Here we are in the dungeon, sorry, lecture hall where the head of a classical Ionic column is displayed on a modernist spike. The paprika coloured carpet is everywhere.

Modernist masterpiece composition in the rain: Kahn's Yale University Art gallery on the left, Rudolph's A&A Building on the right and Kahn's British Art Centre in the middle.

New Haven's premier nightspot - The Anchor bar - home to the demonic Sea Hag.

* Actually, as if you didn't know, Louis Kahn's British Art Centre.

Sweet and Tender Hooligans

What's interesting about Awaydays - the film based on Kevin Sampson's book about football hooliganism in the late 1970's - isn't the supposedly shocking violence, or the sub-Trainspotting scenes of heroin taking, but its depiction of a very particular British sub-culture.

The film does this with the obsessive eye for period detail of a Jane Austen adaptation. Only, in Awaydays, it is old school trainers and Adidas wind cheaters that are fetishised rather than Easter Bonnets and Empire line dresses. The storytelling is straightforward and the fight scenes are wholly unconvincing (I've seen scarier episodes of The Bill) but it gets the clothes and the haircuts right.

Set in the Liverpool suburb of Birkenhead in 1979, Awaydays follows the attempts of Carty - a lower middle class lad - to join The Pack, a fearsome group of Tranmere Rovers fans. The Pack's fashion sense is precisely rendered: a fusion of mod (Fred Perry T-shirts, parkas) casual (box-fresh trainers) and soul boy (white jeans) that looks startlingly modern against the backdrop of brown suits, donkey jackets and flared jeans worn by the supporting characters.



The film is only ever partly about football hooliganism. It is also about male bonding and the way that men tend to measure friendships through the obsessive documentation of their interests: clothes, records and drinking in this case. There are no significant female characters in Awaydays, with the sole exception of Carty's sister. Significantly, his mother is dead and the film begins with a visit to her grave, an event from which Carty flees to begin his initiation into The Pack. The only other women to feature are brief objects of either lust or derision, treated as casually by the film as the men in it.

Despite this there is a lot of unrequited love about: between Carty and his sister - who idolises her brother to the point of incestuousness - between Carty and the lads on the terraces who are suspicious of his middle class manners and ultimately reject him, and between him and Elvis, the film's real hero. Awaydays is in love with Elvis, a Scouse bohemian with a floppy fringe and an immaculate wardrobe. Elvis in turn is infatuated with both a doomy rock'n'roll mythology and Saturday afternoon violence. And while Carty earns the begrudging respect of the pack, Elvis begins to drift away, lost in his flat chasing the dragon to a soundtrack supplied by Echo and The Bunnymen and Joy Division. In this, Elvis predicts the supposed end of the organised gang violence of The Pack, the period a decade later when the Ecstasy culture of the Happy Mondays and Technique-era New Order nullified the culture of the terraces.



Elvis is an art school reject, a rebellious, effortlessly cool bohemian. He mixes the Mod/Casual chic of The Pack with military overcoats and foppish scarves and lives in a cavern-like flat, the walls of which are completely covered with pop art posters and occult objects. Elvis is the encapsulation of every Liverpudlian working class rock'n'roll hero and gobby popstar ever: a composite of Lennon, Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie, Mick Head, Lee Mavers and countless other wannabees. In a way, the film is actually about Liverpool. Elvis likes to stand on the banks of the Mersey uttering profundities, in love with the city's grandiose self-image and cultishness. It is a cultishness that, for all their mutual antagonism, Liverpool shares with Manchester.

Like football hooliganism this antagonism is mostly for effect. Revealingly, the soundtrack of Awaydays veers between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, four cities caught up during the '70's (and beyond) in vicious football rivalry. As well as the Bunnymen and Joy Division, there's Magazine, OMD, The Mekons, Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League.

I watched Awaydays partly out of an interest in the territoriality of football hooliganism, the way it carved areas of the country up into warring factions. Like Orwell's continuous war in 1984 football hooliganism was never about winning. The fights were literally pointless. Neither total defeat or total victory was seriously on the cards nor was it particularly desirable. The enemy was always needed as a convenient hate figure.

In one sense Awaydays is true to this pointlessness. There are fights and retributions, but no progress or forward motion. No one wins. The crude plotting sets up a series of antagonistic face offs, a sense that one kicking always demands another. But, of course, it can't afford to be that bleak. So the end scenes have Carty walking away from The Pack, damaged but not defeated.

The films suggests that there are perhaps only two escapes from the mindless violence of The Pack: the middle class pull of career that Carty is intent on resisting and the romantic dreams of Elvis. At the end only one of them appears to be viable.

Carry on England

Travel Chaos (TM) has blighted our trip to the states, stranding myself and my colleagues in Richard Rogers' schmantzy new Terminal 5 for what seemed like decades. We ended up doing our studio presentation via skype, not made any easier by our determination to show a clip of the final sequence of Quadrophenia in the middle of it. The presentation was not without its more amusing incidents either, which I've already mentioned on Twitter.

Anyway, in tribute to a turbulent (in the wrong way) couple of days full of plucky British phlegm here's a fabulously historically confused video of Ultravox singing Reap The Wild Wind, courtesy of Enrique at A456. It features Midge Ure and co dressed as second world war airmen driving a post-war jeep around the white cliffs, accompanied by some first world war flying machines and dodgy video effects.

From an age when the more ludicrous the premise the better for music videos. Dreadful song, mind.

Thriller

Ok, so I'm happy to admit to being really quite inordinately thrilled about this. The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zero Books) is available for pre-order at Amazon. I have a contribution - about correlations between the design of Neverland and the transformation of Michael Jackson himself- in this collection of essays about MJ. Much more excitingly it includes contributions by Ian Penman, Barney Hoskins and Chris Roberts, as well as a host of excellent writers from the blogosphere including Dominic Fox, Evan Calder-Williams, Robin Carmody and Sam Davies. You could even buy a copy.

Many thanks to the editor Mark Fischer and to Owen (also contributing) for including me in such a fine array.

Ok, gush over. Back to business. (Straightens tie. Goes back to reading RIBA Standard Terms of Appointment).

I Wouldn't Give A Shit If Your Bicycle's In Bits

Posted here as a sort of explanation for the title of the last post but mainly because I always really loved Suede. Not quite as much as my wife, who is still a member of the fan club, and not enough to tolerate Brett's dreadful solo output, but enough to jump up and down behind Simon Price's mohawk a half dozen times or so.....

Incidentally, Brett attended the same architecture school as I did although not at the same time. Remarkably, he's actually older than me. He was known then for wearing a bright yellow suit accessorised - when he was in the college workshop - with a pair of welding goggles.

I found Suede most appealing when at their most preposterous, circa either the camp bottom waggling hi-jinks of The Drowners or the stylised trashy outsider silliness of Coming Up, an almost, but not quite, unforgivably cliche-ridden album.

To The Birds also contains one of the best references to cycling in pop, as the title of this post testifies. It's not as good as Morrissey's magisterial and heart breaking line "When you cycled by, here began all my dreams" from Back To The Old House, but, then again, what is?

Never Neverland

This may well be stretching everyone's patience but, seeing as how I am researching Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch for a slightly longer article, I thought I would post up a link to some fascinating photographs of it from the LA Times.

The follies and grottoes that populate the estate are now in the early stages of dereliction apparently, having never exactly been built to last. They're now appropriately merging into the picturesque tradition of ruins that the whole estate mimics, albeit in fibreglass and fake stone. All of which reminds me of this, a slightly embarrassing fictionalised account of Disneyland I wrote for a fantastically obscure German magazine a few years back.

Currently owned by LA investment company Colony Capital (who bought Jackson's loan on the property - a sort of superprime mortgage foreclosure) Neverland is slated to re-open as a shrine to the singer.

There is a good article by India Wright on the Architect's Journal website about the Architecture of Neverland which is worth reading too.

Sunburst and Snowblind

I Like has a short post on this lovely looking book of the sunburst motif, associated with art deco and a certain kind of 1920/30's suburbia. The sun burst was used in all sorts of places and at all scales, appearing on windows, fire places, gates and fences.

Like a lot of decorative architectural motifs it was briefly rediscovered in early post modernism, most notably in the work of Charles Moore and Venturi Scott Brown. VSBA's Abraham's House, something of a lost project in their canon, goes ga ga for the sunburst motif, extruding it through the facade and into the interior so that it becomes both decorative and structural.


(VSBA's Abraham's House)

We had a bash at it too in what we refer to now as our Sunshine Deserts meets Soviet realism moment*. There's a touch of Foghorn Leghorn in there too. It didn't make it into the final building unfortunately when the barrel vault behind it disappeared. One to be revived though.


(FAT, Image of the park including early iteration of the Hoogvliet Villa)

* Incidentally the original building used for this been tracked down by someone and photographed here.

Avenue: Notes Towards A Spatial Theory of Suburbia

How does one look seriously at the suburbs? How does one get past the lazy assumptions to understand what makes them work, as well as what doesn't?

When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took their students to study America's Levitown suburb they had to develop new methods to describe its spaces. The traditional tools of architectural representation - plans, sections and models - were supplanted by photography, film, cartoons and collections of artifacts and ephemera.

The Venturi's study was predominantly, though not exclusively, sign based rather than spatial. Their interest was in the signs and symbols of the American suburb rather than its spatial organisation. This still remains its least analysed and understood aspect from an architectural point of view. Beyond such pejorative descriptions as 'sprawl' there is no serious spatial vocabulary for suburbia.

Perhaps it doesn't lend itself to traditional forms of architectural analysis. The qualities denigrated by architects and urbanists - its formlessness and lack of spatial hierarchy - require different modes of representation. Equally the same traditional tools are instrumental in establishing the counter claims of urbanism. Or, put another way, architecture's representational and analytical tools are better at describing the positive qualities of urban because that's what they have been developed to do.

The ubiquity of the representational devices employed by architects blinds us to their partiality. The figure-ground drawing for instance has been vital in establishing how we think about the city and, in particular, the relationship between private and public space. Possibly the most influential figure-ground plan ever was Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome. Nolli's plan represents enclosed public spaces as equivalent to open civic spaces, illustrating them as white positive ground against the black figure of buildings. This technique gives the piazzas, colonnades and courtyards a compelling physicality, suggesting the convivial, communal qualities of internal rooms but on a much larger scale.



Following Nolli, the external spaces of the city are conceived as urban living rooms fostering civic qualities through the physical proximity of bodies in space. By contrast suburbia's fragmented spaces are seen as encouraging social atomisation through physical dispersal. But if the city is made of up of certain typological components - streets, squares and colonnades - then what are the suburban equivalents? The avenue, the parade and the cul-de-sac? What kinds of social spaces do these create? What civic qualities do they possess?

To begin to find out one might have to look beyond architectural representation to other art forms. Pop music in particular has a vital relationship to suburbia. Frequently this is antagonistic - a railing against suburbia's political and social conservatism - as in goth, grunge or metal. The relationship is more ambiguously affectionate in the case of the English literary pop tradition of The Kinks, Small Faces and the Beatles through to The Jam, Blur and Pulp. The fact that pop is often an escape - both literal and metaphorical - from suburbia, means that this portrayal is inevitably double edged, describing this landscape with a mixture of affectionate observation and caustic commentary.

Equally the endless suburbs of somewhere like LA have have been a key subject matter from the surf pop of the '50's and '60's through the denim rock of Laurel Canyon's decadent suburbs in the 1970's to the G Funk and west coast rap of Dr Dre and Death Row records. With Dr Dre the music's languid affluence and smooth sense of unease acts as a darkly satirical ramping up of the familiar cliches of suburban one-upmanship. The video for Still Dre even works as a satire of '50's LA pop with Dre and Snoop Dog cruising the suburban streets in retro Cadillacs on the way to the beach.



Whilst Pulp are in many ways a quintessentially urban band - and the very particular urbanism of Sheffield at that - they also brilliantly evoke an edge of the city feeling too. Jarvis' tales of adult affairs and formative sexual experiences gone wrong exist within the social mores of close knit suburban communities. David's Last Summer combines both an affectionate homage to suburban childhood and the corresponding desire to escape. Its spoken word vocal bids suburban teenage life a fond farewell, although it remains ambiguous as to whether this is as a result of growing up and moving on or something more tragic. Its evocation of the teenage house parties and exquisitely endless summers on the cusp of adulthood is hard to beat.

Walking to parties whilst it's still light outside.

Peter was upset at first but now he's in the garden talking to somebody Polish.
Why don't we set up a tent and spend the night out there?
And we can pretend that we're somewhere foreign but we'll still be able to use the fridge if we get hungry
or too hot.



These are also the spaces described by the paintings of George Shaw. Shaw paints suburbia but he also gets to the heart of its more ambiguous and difficult to define spaces; left over places, ends of terraces, undeveloped land. These places exist on the margins of suburbia where development has (temporarily) stopped and become a temporary home to all sorts of improper activities. Ignored by most people, these are public spaces for (mostly) minor acts of transgression. It is also the same dead space of Pulp's song Reservoir, which captures the unpleasant goings-on of unpopulated bits of suburban infrastructure.

But the 'proper' spaces of suburbia also lend themselves to reinterpretation. The suburban cul-de-sac is a public space as well as a piece of pragmatic development. Perhaps because of their social and economic exclusivity these spaces become home to street parties and events as well as informal meetings. The drawing below (by my colleague Sean Griffiths) is of the street where he grew up and describes the impromptu football matches that were played on it. The 'pitch' is distorted by circumstance so that the house gates becomes the goal-mouth, stretching and rotating the familiar layout. Here, ironically, is the classic figure ground plan of the city but adapted to show things that are usually left out such as activity and event.


Perhaps this is where suburban place differs from urban space. It is repetitive and formally unexciting. The architecture isn't challenging or formally inventive in the way that architects want it to be. It's what happens in it that's interesting though. This activity requires an expanded version of traditional architectural drawing to capture, one that describes places rather than buildings and content rather than form.

Hello Mr Mackenzie

I originally linked to this excellent post at Infinite Thought in the adjacent News From Elsewhere column before I realised I had a couple of things to add.

The first is about the Barbican. Apart from the obvious fact that it still - unbelievably - looks like the future when you walk around it, there are three things I love about the Barbican. The first is that the people who live there go to the cinema in their slippers (although this could equally be seen as appallingly smug it has to be said). The second is that if you visit one of the flats in, say, Cromwell Tower, and walk into the triangular lift lobby it feels exactly how I imagine entering the upper deck of a very large space ship would, were I ever lucky enough to go on one. Or, at least, if I'm ever there I'm hoping I might bump into Servalan from Blake's 7 (pictured above having lunch in the Barbican canteen). And thirdly, I always imagine that - following Ballard's High Rise - the whole place might break out into an upper middle class warzone at any moment. Most of the combatants of which would of course be wearing slippers.



Oh yes, and the staircase pictured above (photo half inched from IT's blog) in Islington's Bevin Court was once - Indie fact fans take note - featured on the sleeve of an album by Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, on which the current editor of Blueprint played the violin. Allegedly.

UPDATE: The editor of Blueprint informs me that although having some tenuous connections with reality, the above is not strictly speaking true. She actually played violin on one of McCarthy's, albums and the photo shoot in Bevin Court was for her regular band the James Dean Driving Experience. Apologies for any inconvenience or embarrassment caused.

Make Mine A '99: A Brief Design History of the Ice Cream Van

Is there is a more absurdly wonderful piece of vehicle design than the ice cream van? Part restaurant, part piece of street theatre and only a little bit van, they have few precedents. Milk floats, whilst amusingly slow and anachronistic, aren't really in the same league. Burger vans and hot dog stalls are closer but they tend to come linked to an event or side attraction and they have a depressing air of the prosaic in comparison to the exotic flamboyance of the ice cream van.

They are fabulous creations based on prosaic utility vehicles that have grown wings, grilles, lights and special effects. They are covered in stickers of impossibly exciting looking things to eat in the shape of rockets and cones and clam shells. They have lurid paint work and ludicrous names on backlit signs. Sometimes they have giant plastic ice cream cornets mounted like bull's horns in case there's any doubt what they're selling.



The origin of the ice cream van lies in the nature of the product. Ice cream's tendency to melt means that you have to eat it at the place of purchase, or keep it frozen. Before home freezers that meant that the ice cream had to come to you. This simple fact is enough to create an entirely unique genre of vehicle. Ice cream vans are mobile shops, nomadic buildings that can pop up anywhere. They follow us around, suddenly appearing by a deserted beach, at the top of a mountain or lurching merrily around a suburban cul de sac. Their arrival transforms the spaces around them, shifting residential streets into spontaneous events and pavements into instant cafes.



Because they move around they make noises - jingly, sing song noises - to let us know they've arrived. These tinny mating calls match the exotic plumage of the vehicles. On the Flickr site Ice Cream Vans - from which most of these photos are taken - there is an exciting sounding link to The Technical History of Ice Cream Van Music Systems. It doesn't quite live up to its title but it does quote a Professor Alan Earnshaw who has apparently "researched the topic widely". The speakers are pointed down at the road in order to disperse the sound apparently.

According to the Music Thing blog there are very few companies still making ice cream chimes. One is Micro Miniatures in Staffordshire who make the Harmony 64 chime player which can play 3 note harmonies. Standard tunes include Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (oddly), the Neapolitan Wedding Song and Ride Of The Valkyries. Music Thing also links to here where you can download MP3's of traditional Mr Softee chimes.

In the evolution of the ice cream van the '50's and '60's now seem a particularly fertile period. The designs from this era are by far the most baroque. Bedford Vans, Ford Anglia's and even Mini Clubmen were stretched, cut up and spliced together to make weird hybrid objects. These were vehicles with bits of architecture as well as refrigerators, serving counters and cartoon appendages attached. They are like mobile examples of Googie architecture, or the result of a bizarre design collaboration between Tex Avery and Alec Issigonis. Most endearingly their DIY qualities are always clearly visible. These are prosaic vehicles straining to be something else, home made pieces of wishful thinking trying to summon up some magic at the side of the road.

Images via