Unheimliche

I've been meaning to mention this for a while. More decay and dereliction, this time from wealthy East Hampton. Grey Gardens - a large timber clad mansion - was the subject of a 1970's documentary by Albert and David Maysles, directors of the Stones at Altamont film Gimme Shelter. The film followed the house's staggeringly eccentric owners - a mother and daughter, both called Edith Beales - and the self-induced squalor in which they lived.

The two Ediths (known as "Big Edie" and "Little Edie") let the house and gardens fall into a compellingly abject state of disrepair. Filthy, full to bursting with rubbish and home to semi-tame raccoons, it appeared in the film to be in the advanced stages of being re-claimed by nature. The Edie's themselves spent much of their time in a single room, mostly - in Big Eddie's case - in bed wearing an enormous hat.



Like the Mole Man of Hackney, the house became the subject of local authority inspections, and required extensive repairs and stabilisation. Even more bizarrely the work was paid for by Big Edie's niece Jacqueline Onassis. Little Edie's strangely stylish dress sense and odd terminology ("This is the only outfit for today") turned her into a cult figure, especially for fashion designers such as Mark Jacobs. Rufus Wainwright wrote a song about it and the whole story has recently been made into a film series starring Drew Barrymore.

What's most interesting about Grey Gardens from an architectural perspective is how it represents everything we fear most in buildings: structural instability, dirt, rottenness and the dissolution of boundaries. At Grey Gardens, nature has come creeping in over the threshold - literally in the case of raccoons - and started to overlay the carefully delineated domestic realm. The squalor here may be self-induced but that actually adds to its nightmarish quality. Grey Gardens represents a staple of horror films, the house gone to seed, a source of fear rather than comfort.

There is another more pragmatic sense in which Grey Gardens scares us and that is in the way it negates the literal value placed on houses. The insane speculative value that they generate means that their wilful neglect is an affront, an attack on our duty to carefully manage our assets and investments.

Today Grey Gardens has been restored back to its original luxury.

Village of the Damned

This is fabulously strange and creepy. More underwater wreckage, this time of the lost village of Llanwddyn in wales, flooded by Liverpool Council in 1965. The recentness of the flooding makes the images far stranger and more disturbing for me, as if the inhabitants have only just turned off an episode of Z Cars before packing their bags and leaving. The preserved cemetery suggests perhaps that they didn't make it, or refused to go.

Nevertheless the images are eerily beautiful, reminiscent of Mariele Neudecker's vitrines in their mysterious vividness. Like Neudecker's miniature landscapes submerged in water they have an air of unreality about them suggestive of some macabre model built to frighten children. In this case though the images are of a real place.



The pictures are taken from the BBC Wales website (where there is also a video), found, fabulously enough, via the Springfield School in Sheffield who seem to be doing a project on flooding and drowned villages. Don't ask me how I came across the school's website. I think it has a link back to a post I did on Ladybower reservoir but I can't find it.

Un-Titanic

Whilst lurking around on YouTube looking for suitably gruesome excerpts from Raise the Titanic (see post below) I came across this, a meticulous model of the model used in the film. This, ahem, raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of fakes, copies and models and the way that they inevitably transform the objects they depict. Models usually miss bits out, fudge the details, change materials and make mistakes. Their wrongness is actually what makes them interesting.

As a fictionalised representation of the ship following its accident the model seen above is completely inaccurate. As Murphy makes clear in the comments to the post below, the Titanic turned completely on end as it sank before breaking clean in two. The two ends of Titanic were found some distance away from each other on the sea bed. None of this was known at the time Raise The Titanic was made so the model depicted here appears - apart from its single discreetly snapped off funnel - improbably intact.

There are other extraneous details of the video too; the TV screen in the background, the white sofa and the odd bareness of the room that testify to a life spent making too many models maybe. Anyway, that is probably enough Titanic related trivia except to add that given the combination of the spectacular nature of the tragedy, its endless repetition through film and books and its cold war connections, the name of the ship's discoverer seems perfectly appropriate.

Grim Prospect

This post is perhaps more in the line of English Buildings, but there are some odd coincidences that make me want to write briefly about this building. It's by Oliver Hill, architect of the recently refurbished Midland Hotel in Morecambe, and it is, or was, called the Prospect Inn. It is on the Isle of Thanet which is the bit of Kent that sticks out into the Straits of Dover starting at Whitstable and ending at Ramsgate and with mostly potatoe fields in between. The Prospect Inn sits next to a roundabout overlooking Manston Airport in a particularly bleak bit of landscape.

A few years ago I wrote a review of a book on pub design in which Hill's inn featured. Built in 1938 it is one of the very few pubs ever to be designed in a modernist style. I became vaguely obsessed with its plan, which is eccentric to say the least, especially the biomorphic toilets which stick out from the sides of the building like slightly floppy ears. They are also on opposite sides of the bar area and you need to go outside to get to them, suggesting a playful spatial joke on the courtship rituals of friday night drinking. It also featured some rather lovely floor graphics - long since gone - and a stripped back arts and crafts style fireplace which is still there.

After lying derelict for some years (you can see some pictures of it in this state on mark.ed's flickr site here) the Prospect Inn has been refurbished, mostly pretty horrendously and with a new Holiday Inn tacked onto the back. This has been designed in a sort of pre-fab industrial style with bull-nosed escape stair protrusions that it's just possible to imagine are intended to be sympathetic to Hill's design.



Early modernism in the UK was often associated with leisure uses but these were mostly of the slightly hairshirt, self-improving kind such as lidos and health centres, so the Prospect Inn was also rare for having a populist and hedonistic function. Not that you can imagine much in the way of hedonism happening on this bit of the Isle of Thanet, which is presumably why it closed down. Now the new hotel serves the expanding Kent International Airport.

Oddly Hill also designed an estate of modernist houses (see this fabulous flickr site) in Frinton-On-Sea, a slightly sinister village on the Essex coast that until five years ago didn't have a single pub, and which has a number of bizarre local bye-laws including one forbidding ice cream vans. I know this because as a child Frinton was the nearest bit of seaside to where I grew up so I spent a lot of childhood summer days there. Years later as an architecture tutor I set a spectacularly unsuccesful design project there based on the town's endless battle to keep out the modern world*. Somewhat shamefully, I was completely unaware of Hill's work there at the time.



Anyway, I realised the other day reading this book that I had passed the Prospect Inn a number of times and not realised. So, today I took some terrible photographs of it in the rain while my wife stared out at me from the car in disbelief and my ten day old son slept on in blissful ignorance of his father's nerdish behaviour.

Finally, here is a period picture (via) of the serpentine wall that is still there along the roadside, along with a beautiful pub sign which is a miniature version of the building, which sadly isn't.

* Frinton-On-Sea was recently the subject of a BBC documentary about the resident's extraordinary conservatism. Unless I dreamt it, which is possible, it is also the temporary home to a number of ex-Radio 1 DJ's. who are starting a digital radio station there in tribute to Radio Caroline, the 1960's pirate radio station which for a while broadcast from a marine fort just off the Isle of Thanet. The original Radio Caroline pirate ship was anchored off the Essex coast in the early '70's and, somewhat bizarelly, washed up on Frinton's beach. Perhaps the residents feared a counter cultural invasion and have stepped up their vigilence ever since.

Drowned Worlds

Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. First a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices and fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were only four or five storeys high, part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon.

J G Ballard, Drowned World, 962 (quote via)

There is a beautiful and brilliant post at That Sticks and Stones Should Fall about the fascination of drowned villages as a metaphor for the presence of past lives in the present. In particular the post refers to the villages of Ashopton and Derwent that were flooded to make way for Ladybower reservoir in the Penines, a subject I have posted about before and which the author generously links to.


(Image of Ladybower Reservoir via. The church Spier of Derwent is visible in the distance)

A number of disturbing but compelling ideas are touched on in the Sticks and Stones post including the murky fascination of dark bodies of water generally (and for anyone who shares such things you should read Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water about the mysterious incident of Teddy Kennedy driving his car into Lake Chappaquiddick in the US) and submerged wrecks and ruins.

The stories of Derwent and Ashopton - and other lost villages like Graun Curon in Italy - are ghost stores, pieces of folklore that have lodged themselves firmly in the popular imagination. Google Drowned Villages and hundreds of sites and related stories come up including this film of the flooded church yard of the Welsh village Lanwddyn. Although they lend themselves to supernatural speculation these are also stories of the awesome power of technology. And in that sense the submerged spires of Derwent and Gouron have an apocalyptic quality that speaks of the capacity of technology to destroy us.


The submerged steeple Graun-Curon.

The extraordinary spectacle of Derwent's neighbour Ashopton lying below the reservoir viaduct while it is constructed - the future water level clearly some way above the rooftops of the houses - is described vividly by Sticks and Stones and illustrated in the contemporary photo below. The image summoned up here is literally apocalyptic, technology dwarfing the houses below as it strides across the valley before ultimately destroying them.


(Image of Ashopton viaduct under construction via)

Ladybower, and other reservoirs like it, were huge infrastructure projects built to feed the ever growing water consumption of city inhabitants. The expansion of homes currently projected for the south east of England together with the effects of climate change will mean more reservoirs will need to be built as well as extreme measures taken to protect us from rising sea levels. Plans for the largest new reservoir to be built in the UK were announced last year for instance, although the physical consequences are not quite as drastic as Ladybower. Meanwhile the Environment Office charts the possibility of villages disappearing into the sea.

These pragmatic reactions to climate change go hand in hand with more apocalyptic visions such as J G Ballard's eerily prescient 1962 novel Drowned Worlds or Squint Opera's recent speculative Flooded London project. Both of these imagine London destroyed by rising sea levels. Drowned worlds could either be deliberate acts of erasement in the case of Derwent or the result of unplanned devastation. Either way they are seen as the result of our unchecked desire and a paranoid sense that our faith in technology will ultimately destroy us.


(Image by Squint Opera)

This fear is most clearly articulated through science fiction and its endless speculations on how we will ultimately be the architects of our own demise. Perhaps the most pertinent image in science fiction, and one that echoes both the cover of Ballard's book illustrated above and the vanished villages of Derwent and Graun Curon is the half buried, half submerged Statue of Liberty leering out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes.



Postscript

Strangely, I can also recall an experience of the inverse of this scenario on holiday in Mexico some years ago. On the trip I visited a small village resort with some friends that sat on the edge of Lake Chapala. Like a beach resort everything about the town orientated itself to the lake. The main drag ran down straight onto a stone pier, cafes fringed the lakeside and photographs of people swimming and playing volley ball hung in the reception of the hotel we stayed in. When we walked down to the lakeside though we discovered that the water had completely dried up, its exposed bed was filled with grazing cows and the stone pier stretched out into a grassy field. A combination of industrial pollution and water consumption had drained what had been one of the largest natural lakes in Mexico.



UPDATE: I'm grateful to anonymous (see comments below) for the following link to an article on the Three Gorges dam in China which has involved the moving of 1.3 million people and the destruction of a 2000 year old town, just in case this all seemed a little parochial.

Back to the Futurism

A little while ago I wrote a post exploring connections between the Futurist art movement, a pre-war British racetrack and the phenomenon of the World Land Speed Record. This is a kind of postscript to that. It concerns another fatal world record attempt, another wreck and another strange conflation of futurism and the picturesque.

John Ruskin, proto-Socialist, inspiration for the arts and craft movement, patron of Joseph Turner and opponent of all things industrial lived in a house called Brantwood overlooking Coniston Water in the Lake District. The Lakes are a quintessentially English landscape, seemingly natural and wild but actually carefully managed and designed. Ruskin loved them and spent his last years living at Brantwood. He rebuilt and extended the original house constantly, adding turrets and deliberately ad hoc elements of a slightly wilful ungainliness. The house was both a reaction to industrialisation and to the purity of neo-classicism.

Ruskin would also spend hours walking the landscape, painting rocks and waterfalls and passing clouds. He was a keen rower and would take his rowing boat, the Jumping Jenny, out on to Coniston Water from the jetty he constructed at the end of Brantwood's gardens. Ruskin's veneration and aestheticisation of the Lake District was intrumental, however inadvertently, in the construction of a mythical English pastoralism.


(Waterfall, near Brantwood, by John Ruskin)

There is a Ruskin Museum in Coniston which contains a collection of his writing and drawings. Alongside Ruskin's work though there is another exhibition devoted to Donald Cambell who died attempting the World Water Speed Record on Coniston Water in 1967. Donald was the son of Sir Malcolm Cambell, an aristocratic racing driver and several times holder of the World Landspeed Record. Sir Malcolm had constructed a series of cars, all of which were called Bluebird, that began as eccentrically primitive vehicles and evolved into outlandishly shaped machines devoted to pure speed.



Donald Cambell also achieved the WLSR in 1964 at Lake Eyre in the ultimate derivation of Bluebird. This was a car of astonishing beauty, a continuous wave like form, a piece of rolling landscape in itself. It can be seen in contemporary photographs as a tiny dot travelling at 400 mph across the vast salt flats of the dried up lake bed. In a previous attempt the year before, rain had fallen on the lake for the first time in 20 years and the car had to be rescued to avoid it being submerged.



Donald Cambell devoted his life to an obsessional desire to be the fastest person on earth. Not content with the WLSR he attempted the same feat on water and built a hydroplane boat called Bluebird K7. In 1966 he took the boat to Coniston Water, the long linear shape of the lake lending itself to speed, like a natural drag strip. The following year during a record breaking run the boat flipped over and ploughed back down into the water and Cambell was killed.





There is something compellingly odd and alien about this blue jet streaking across the waters of Coniston. It is the same conflation of the futuristic and the antiquarian that occurs in science fiction.  In 2001, the wreck of Bluebird was salvaged from the bottom of the lake and is now being rebuilt. The photographs of the salvage boat show Ruskin's former home of Brantwood looking on in the background. 

It would be easy to see the absolute modernity of Cambell's boat as the antithesis of Ruskin's beliefs.  Or its wreck as a monument to modern hubris. The Lake District is a product of modernity too though, a cultivated wilderness designed to feed a growing consumption of the countryside as leisure pursuit. The countryside itself is an inversion of the city as much as the other way around.  The two are mutually supportive concepts. The wreck of Bluebird, dragged from the bottom of the lake seems to come from an alien world, although it as ingenious and natural as the lakes themselves. 

 

A Very British Futurism

Fillipo Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in 1908, in which he declared:

"We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for."

The Futurists' celebration of speed, machinery and death is one of the odder trajectories of early Modernism. Curiously, the now derelict motor racing circuit of Brooklands in Surrey echoed in a peculiarly British way the same obsessions.



Brooklands was an obscure piece of early Modernism, or more precisely Futurism, a cousin to the equally dramatic testing track on the roof of the Fiat Lingotta factory in Turin. It was built in 1907 and comprised a huge concrete bowl, a banked oval around which cars – themselves monstrous early 20th century inventions with aeroplane engines and proto stream-lined bodies – would hurtle in a Marinetti like celebration of the violence of technology. It being England and the early 20th century, Brooklands combined this pointless bravery with minute social snobbery, coining the term “The right crowd and no crowding”.



One of the most famous drivers to race at Brooklands was John Parry Thomas, a part time inventor and engineer who became a professional racing driver. Thomas lived in a cottage within the perimeter of the track, the still centre of the kind of perpetual motion machine he might have attempted inventing. Parry became obsessed with achieving the World Land Speed Record and he built himself a car called Babs in which to achieve it. Babs in fact started life as the Highham Special, built by Count Zborowski, an absurd Marinetti like figure responsible for the original Chitty Chitty Ban Bang.



Babs was a bizarre looking creation with a long stretched tail that looked like the exaggerated suggestion of speed of a child’s drawing made manifest. Or a futurist sculpture. The car was a literal embodiment of speed and a machine dedicated to the task of achieving the World Land Speed Record. The WLSR was a kind of Futurist happening, a celebration of power, speed, macho glory and, frequently, death. Parry achieved his ambition of being the fastest man on dry land but died on the Pendine Sands in Wales during an attempt to regain the WLSR. The vast chain that drove his car flew off and partially decapitated him as he drove at over 120 mph. The car was buried where it stopped, in the sand, only to be dug up in the 1970’s and reconstructed, an eerie relic of sorts.



Brooklands was also an airbase and home to aeroplane manufacturers Vickers and Hawker. It was requisitioned during the second world war and badly damaged, mainly by the MOD as they sought to camouflage its highly distinctive oval form from German bombers. Since then, it has remained a partial ruin, its broken up and overgrown concrete hidden by a circle of trees within the Surrey stockbroker belt. It is now owned by DaimlerChrysler Ltd, its outline interrupted by new housing, light industrial developments and the Mercedes Benz heritage centre. Sections of the banking survive, a strange Ballardian ruin lurking in its suburban setting.

The Village That Died For Derbyshire

This photograph is taken from a BBC film about Ladybower reservoir made in the 1960's and on show here. The reservoir was formed in 1943 by flooding the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, including the two villages of Derwent and Ashopton. The church spire of Derwent could be seen when the water level was low. Unfortunately it was later demolished destroying the fabulous surreality of it looming out of the water.

It's a disquieting picture, an eerie combination of utilitarian infrastructure and apocalyptic imagery. It has the absurd quality of a fake, like those photographs of fairies and ghosts beloved of the Victorians. Perhaps it even is a fake, although the church tower was genuinely there.

A number of villages were flooded as a result of the need for water supply in cities likes Derby and Sheffield and Ladybower is one of three in the Derwent Valley alone. As a child I remember a story of one near the village where my parents lived when they were first married which had subsequently been drained leaving the remains of the village once more visible.

This process was like a 20th century version of emparking, the removal of unsightly villages by 18th century landowners as they sought to sculpt the countryside around their houses into three dimensional versions of classical paintings. The remains of these abandoned villages were co-opted into this vision as romantic grottos and ruined cottages.

At Ladybower though the reason behind these dramatic spatial transformations of landscape was ostensibly benevolent although its results were no less violent. Indeed, in a strange reversal of this history the stately home of Derwent Hall was also flooded. Its remains are still visible during low water levels so that it has become its own romantic ruin.



The resulting reservoirs are a hybrid of nature and machine, hugely impressive feats of engineering disguised as natural lakes, their water towers and viaducts rendered as medieval castles and Palladian bridges. The same surreal mix of futurism and picturesque fantasy that occurred in Victorian structures like Tower Bridge and in the science fiction fantasies of Jules Verne.

Looking at early photographs of the reservoir infrastructure, the elegant gates and stone balustrades are like the entrance to the landscaped garden of a stately home. But the home itself is no longer there and lies in fact in ruins on the water bed. The landscape and its villages has been dramatically reconfugured not as a result of the aesthetics of 18th century painting but the abstract dynamics of 20th water supply.

Picture above taken from the Francis Frith archive

The work of architecture in the age of reproduction.

The degree to which reconstructions of buildings is seen as either sentimental kitsch or authentic rebuilding depends largely on the perceived value of the original structure.

Last week I heard Jamie Foubert make an interesting presentation (at this event) regarding resurrected buildings. I was reminded of it in connection with the current, rather odd, campaign to reconstruct the Festival of Britain Skylon.

Resurrections of buildings can take a number of different forms. Sometimes they are the realisation of something that was never actually completed to start with, like Charles Rennie Macintosh’s House for an Art Lover, built some 90 years after he designed it.

Sometimes they are actually the original article but displaced from its original context, such as the reconstruction of London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Sometimes they are precise reconstructions of a building that was demolished such as Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona.

All these re-buildings raise interesting questions about authenticity. Are they all, to some extent, fakes? In art authenticity historically lies within the mark made by the author. Can a building, which is never the product of a single author and can take years, even decades, to construct ever be simply a fake?

For Modernism reconstruction is always a problematic act. Architecture, it assumes, should be an immutable product of its time. It derives its authenticity through its very newness. In his talk Foubert attempted to re-categorise his examples into authentic and in-authentic examples of reconstruction based on familiar modernist tropes: honesty of construction, appropriateness to function, proximity to original site etc.

So, the architects of the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction would no doubt claim authenticity of detail and location to justify their recreation although, technically, Arizona’s London Bridge could make an equally legitimate claim. In this instance, dislocation in space is assumed to be more inauthentic than dislocation in time.

This dislocation in time has another effect, which is to enshrine the buildings perceived meaning within that of a particular era. The Skylon, for instance, is still synonymous with the Festival of Britain and the post war Labour government that sponsored it. Reconstructing the Skylon, it is suggested here, is inappropriate because its absence is a more eloquent testament to the reasons it was removed. It's political meaning would be effaced through reconstruction.

Reconstructions are also interesting then because it is in their absence, rather than their presence, that buildings seem to gain a purity of meaning. Jonathon Hill has argued that the Barcelona Pavilion achieved its iconic status precisely because it was dismantled. This is not simply because it became more poignant but because it could only be experienced through the rarified medium of photographs and architectural history. It was never sullied through (mis)use. To connect back to the bastardised Walter Benjamin title of this post, it retained its aura. Buildings that disappear are like rock stars that die young: they leave a beautiful corpse. They never grow fat or old or lose their edge.

Free from contamination by the present, the Skylon still represents the possibilities of British Modernism and post war socialism. Whether you want to recreate it - re-released and digitally re-mastered – or celebrate its absence, Skylon’s meaning seems clearer than if it were still here today.

Like A Motorway

Things magazine had an excellent piece recently about the way that the architectural media effectively elevates a tiny percentage of our built environment into 'Architecture'. Huge amounts of buildings are completely overlooked, as they do not fit into this narrow picture.

I was thinking about this recently in relation to Forbes.com's guide to the world's biggest car parks. Here is a building type clearly unlikely to make it into Architectural Review and yet, equally clearly, a ubiquitous and vast part of our built landscape. Most of the pictures are aerial photos, not the preferred viewpoint for most architectural photography, but probably the only way to capture the huge scale of these buildings/landscapes. The link takes you to number 6 in the hit parade; Disneyland's Mickey and Friends Parking Structure, which may or may not have been designed by Richard Meier.

Equally, the epic achievements of civil engineering tend to go almost unnoticed in contemporary conversations about our environment. Presumably as engineering they are somehow not considered products of 'culture' and are therefore not to be talked about by cultural commentators. There is a sense here that while art is fundamentally wilful, a product that has an author, who can therefore be criticised, engineering (and by extension all technological products) is logical and author-less, somehow the inevitable outcome of abstract forces operating outside our judgement.

This belief in the inevitability of the products of a technocratic culture, combined with the architectural media's distaste for the realities of our built environment, means that large portions of it go undiscussed, invisible to critical judgement. Even the smallest house extension can become the subject of extensive debate within architectural magazines, while vast tracts of land are sculpted into motorways and bridges and tunnels without comment, save perhaps for debates about the ecological issues involved.

This also means that the products of engineering not only go relatively undiscussed within a wider culture but can also be utterly hideous and no one would care. This is not an argument for Santiago Calitrava to design every footbridge in the country (quite the opposite. Not only do I not like Santiago Calitrava but I also consider something like the concrete bridges of the A1 quite beautiful, partly because of their municipal lack of pretension) but an observation that our critical faculties seem always to be trained on the same little spot, the same ant hill of rarified activity.

In his book Scale Will Self writes that the bridges and flyovers and cloverleaf junctions of our motorway system will one day appear as the ruins of an ancient civilisation. The notion that motorways represent some kind of cultural achievement has long evaporated from our consciousness. The heroic images of the opening of the M1, and the plummy voiced public service films advising people how to drive on these strange new multi lane highways that went with them are a product of an age less schizophrenic about the impact of technology, less scornful of its manifestations.

"The English Motorway system is both beautiful and strange" sang Black Box Recorder. Indeed, so bring on more reviews of infrastructure and motorways.

Scopic Regimes

Here’s a strange congruence of interests. Patrick Wright’s book The Village That Died For England describes the requisitioning by the British Army of Tyneham, a small village in Dorset. The village was used initially for practice in advance of the Allied invasion of Europe and lies within large tracts of MOD land where full scale war games are still played out. Although only officially ‘borrowed’ from the villagers, Tyneham has never been given back.

Wright’s book is about much more than just Tyneham, though, which he uses as a jumping off point for a meditation on English rural radicalism, pastoralism, the Picturesque, the writer Mary Butts and a whole host of other eccentrics, oddballs, political extremists, aristocrats and army flunkies. Making an unexpected cameo appearance at one point are various members of the Archigram group who set architecture student projects there when teaching at the AA in the 1970’s. Coming across like an only slightly less absurd version of Withnail and I, David Greene and Warren Chalk buzz around the place with their long haired prodigies (including young Will Alsop) in clapped out vehicles and stride into local boozers ordering quadruple whiskies.

Archigram’s interest in the dematerialisation of architecture and with landscape as a kind of serviced amenity finds an odd parallel in the controlled territories of MOD land, where vast targets sit in the landscape like giant Pop Art sculptures, and tanks roam the planes like miniature walking cities.

The controlled and territorialized landscape of military manoeuvres is like an apocalyptic version of the English taste for the picturesque. Here an enthusiasm for controlling and mapping out large areas of landscape, the scopic control required by the battleground general, is not so far from Capability Brown’s manipulations of nature for the enjoyment of wealthy landowners. Instead of Gothic follies romantically consumed with Ivy, MOD land leaves the bombed out fragments of places like Tyneham.

Gillian Darley describes in her book Villages of Vision, the vogue for wealthy landowners in the 18th century to remove unsightly houses and dwellings that lay in the way of their view of the countryside. Frequently, their country houses would end up some miles away from the re-positioned village, with only the church for company as a reminder of where the village had once been. Sometimes bits of the cottages would be retained as romantic ruins, evacuated and aestheticised according to the picturesque tastes of the upper classes. Slowly, rights of way might be opened up back across the landowners estate to encourage ruddy faced peasants to walk across like a theatrical troupe of unpaid extras. All this was according to the picturesque conventions landscape designers such as Brown and Humphrey Repton and borrowed from the paintings of Claude Lorrain where simple peasants lolled under trees and worked in arcadian splendour. The ha-ha, a deep ditch separating the landowners immediate garden from the rest of his land, allowed a seemingly endless sweep of the countryside to be co-opted into the experience, whilst controlling the movements of peasants and animals lest they stray too close.

For a persuasive but slightly terrifying exploration of the idea of the aestheticisation of the landscape of war, read Jeff Wall’s essay Dan Graham's Kammerspiel, or at least the bit on American architectural legend Philip Johnson. Wall conducts a forensic examination of Johnson’s notorious involvement in neo-fascist organisations whilst at university in the 1930’s and, in particular, his trip to Europe as a reporter following the German invasion of Poland in 1938. Wall recounts Johnson’s slavering descriptions of the burnt out wreckages of Polish villages, the smouldering remains where most of the houses had been exhumed by fire, leaving only the brick foundations and the odd chimney standing. Wall then makes a leap to an astounding reading of Johnson’s famous Glass House in Connecticut. Here, the house itself is dematerialised by its glass walls, so that the only non-transparent elements are the low brick walls on which the glass sits and the circular brick tower containing the bathroom and the fireplace. Walls’ audacious analogy suggests that Johnson deliberately evoked the burnt out houses he had seen in his youth following the blitzkrieg, and recreated them in the bucolic picturesque landscape of his New Canaan estate.