the urban picturesque

(Image; Allotment holders on Clapham Common, 1940. Via)

Our cities are growing. Growing, that is, in the horticultural sense. Recent years have seen a minor infestation of urban gardens and inner city allotments, typified by MUF's recently opened Dalston Barn (formerly Dalston Mill) and Union Street Urban Orchard on London's South Bank. What both these projects have in common, along with a certain ad-hoc, DIY charm, is a desire to invert urban/rural distinctions and bring aspects of the countryside into the city.

The gently anarchic quality of both - along with the concept of urban farming and guerrilla gardening generally - represents a curious fusion of contemporary concerns with deliberately rustic and antiquated imagery. An understandable suspicion of global agribusiness and a desire to find more sustainable methods of food production has manifested itself in re-enactments of street parties, village fetes and rural festivals.

Over the past few years there has been a general revival in the imagery of the 1940’s and '50’s. Cup cakes, coloured bunting and coal tar soap now pop up as luxury products at inner city Sunday markets and in faux-hardware shops*. Just as the intense restraint of a John Pawson interior ultimately speaks of wealth and luxury, the vogue for plain and simple pleasures reveals the nuances of well-healed gentrification. In the current context, posters exhorting war-time stoicism are as grimly ironic as a hereditary millionaire encouraging self-sacrifice and frugality.

But beyond the mend-and-make-do language of all this, it's also possible to see a kind of reverse-urbanism at work, a desire to remake the city into somewhere with the qualities of a rural village. I’ve written before about the strange inversion of contemporary consumer habits that results in people like my own village dwelling parents bemoaning the death of the local butcher whilst shopping at Tescos, while those self-same butchers pop up at the foodie markets of inner London. The cultivation of inner city scraps of land as allotments and urban farms could be seen as simply another manifestation of this phenomena. But it also echoes the colonisation of inner city bomb sites as public allotments during the second world war and another poster campaign rallying cry: Dig For Victory.

(Image: Garden built out of a bomb crater, London, 1940's. Via)

Muf's urban farm sits within this strange constellation of ideas. For a start, it's in Dalston, probably the most ubiquitously fashionable suburb of London right now, positively overflowing with mustachioed hipsters and newly connected up via the East London Line. The barn itself slips into an odd shaped plot opposite the ELL’s Dalston Junction station, over which loom the new residential towers of Dalston Square. It is a deliberately open-ended structure, ambiguous in both form and use, but very beautifully made.

It's also not immediately obvious why it's referred to as a barn. Barns are interesting, but they don't often look like the one in Dalston. No one would see them as a building typology with inherently civic, or even public, qualities either. Real barns - that is ones with animals and farm machinery in them - are, effectively, light industrial sheds; part warehouse, part distribution centre and part factory. And yet here, curiously, one is used, albeit in a highly aesthetised form, to denote civic qualities.

Such a conflation of rural and urban typologies is intended as a gently surreal gesture obviously, one made more so by the presence of people tapping away on their ipads under the building's chunky timber awning. There are deliberate echoes too of Archigram and, in particular, David Green’s dream of architecture as a kind of bucolic, high-tech paradise, a networked countryside of hidden data cables and robot gardeners.

(Image: David Greene, Archigram: Log Plug)

But, why is the countryside being imported into the city at all? Does it represent an optimistic opening up of urban spaces to new uses? Or, conversely, does it represent a fantasy of the city disappearing or returning to nature? The concept of nature in Muf’s Dalston project is clearly different to that of the Victorian legacy of urban parks and green spaces. It suggests both use - a working landscape - and a creeping reclamation, a deliberate ambiguity between urbanity and rusticity that includes, at least on some level, a return to the cult of the ruin.

Ruins exert a strong, psychological pull, a reminder of death, decay, the ends of things. The allotment gardens of war-time London existed amongst literal ruins. Today’s versions exist in more ambiguous ruins, in the spaces between regeneration and redevelopment. Diller + Scofidio and Renfros’ Highline urban park in New York, touches many of these buttons too. In colonising a disused freight railway, the park represents both the erasure of industry by leisure and the reclamation of the city by nature. Intriguingly, Piet Oudolf - responsible for the planting on the High Lin - described the project as "...a reconnection with something lost", placing it firmly within the cult of the ruin.

Projects like the High Line and Dalston Barn could be seen then as a contemporary manifestation of the picturesque movement, the overlaying of an artfully staged naturalism on existing buildings. Picturesque landscapes like Stowe Gardens in the UK were reclamations too, informal clumps of trees and vegetation planted over the rigid axial routes of earlier Baroque gardens. Such fantasies were not confined to rural locations either, as Joseph Gandy’s highly ambiguous paintings of John Soane’s designs for the Bank of England attest. Visions of cities reclaimed are a staple of science-fiction too, of course, from J G Ballard’s Drowned World to the overgrown ruins of Washington DC at the end of Logan’s Run. These post-city visions serve to expose the hubris behind human civilisation and denote its underlying fragility. But the post-city is not only a science fiction fantasy. Contemporary Detroit stands as every urbanist’s favourite dystopian vision of the post-city returned to nature, a city where whole tracts of former houses lie in ruins, covered in weeds.

(Photo: James D Griffieoen, Feral Houses, The disappearing City)

The image of the city reclaimed by nature is both a fantasy and a nightmare. Its contemporary usage is a bizarre mix of pragmatic common sense and despair. There are interesting echoes in all this too of the work of Lebrecht Migge and Adolf Loos in the 1920’s Settlement movement, the re-housing of people displaced by the First World War. Migge’s eerily prescient 1918 Green Manifesto and his proposals for inner city cottages with allotment gardens are being re-discovered as offering plausible ideas for urban agriculture today.

(Image: Self-sufficient garden for one family, 1925. Lebrecht Migge. Photo from Adolf Loss: Works & Projects)

In a recent Evening Standard piece, Kieran Long intriguingly described the kind of ground up, small scale urbanism of Dalston Barn as an example of David Cameron’s Big Society made manifest. Appropriately, the project's economic viability balances on a mixture of local government funding, volunteer help and the benign tolerance of the nearby Sainsbury’s, who own the land.

The present government's enthusiasm for cutting back the state and (supposedly) replacing it with small-scale, local philanthropy can be read as revealing a preference for rural rather than urban values. The scrapping of Regional Spatial Strategies and the promotion of local empowerment in decision making, can likewise be seen as part of a sustained attack on coherent urban planning and civic minded design. Cameron's Big Society model is an essentially pre-modern and anti-urban one, reliant on assumptions of a fair and benevolent society existing beneath our present one.

Opposite Dalston Barn, there once stood Dalston Theatre, originally a cinema and later the Four Aces Nightclub. In the '90's the building played host to Labyrinth, a club devoted to the emerging jungle and drum and bass scene, before it closed for good and lapsed into decay, a genuine urban ruin. It is easy to see Dalston Barn in some ways as a replacement of sorts, an ambiguous new growth amongst the ruins of a previous civic urbanity.

(Image: Still from Logan's Run of the reflecting pool in Washington DC as a ruin.)

* As I've been gently reminded, FAT's bakery in Heals has a certain, Keep Calm and Carry On vibe, albeit mixed with Op-Art floor patterns and a certain degree of abstraction. Nonetheless, it can't be denied that it sells cup cakes.

"This Means Something!"

"I figured it out, that's all. Will you just listen?... Have you ever looked at something and it's crazy, and then you looked at it in another way and it's not crazy at all?... Don't be scared. Just don't be scared. I feel really good. Everything's gonna be all right. I haven't felt this good in years."

I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind again the other day. It's a fabulous film in many ways, imbued with an almost lyrical technological optimism. Despite coming from a golden age of cinematic science-fiction, it's completely different in tone to anything else from the period. While Star Wars, for example, can be read as an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire, Close Encounters is a plea for tolerance and understanding. Even the military appear relatively benign in it.

It can also be seen as having another, more unlikely, sub-text; one about issues of representation and communication. The film's central character is Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfus). Following a close encounter with an alien spaceship Roy becomes obsessed with visions of a strange, mountainous formation. He notices this shape everywhere: in the folds of his pillows, in the blob of aftershave in his hand and in a mound of mashed potatoes on his plate.



He starts to create maquettes of it in clay which become ever larger and more elaborate. Eventually, having alienated his entire family to the point where they move out, he creates an enormous model that fills his entire house. To make this model he ransacks the garden for materials, chucking them through a broken window into the living room to the horrified bemusement of his neighbours.

The resulting model is an utterly fabulous object, a grotesque assemblage of mud, vegetation, rubble, furniture and bits of string. It is both mimetically accurate (as we and Roy will later find out) and highly expressionistic, as if created by a bizarre hybrid of Robert Smithson, Jessica Stockholder and an acid-crazed model railway enthusiast.

Just as Roy is nearing the completion of this extraordinary object he realises what it means. The TV that he has blaring in the corner of the otherwise devastated living room has a news report about a bizarre shaped rocky outcrop in Wyoming. Roy looks at the footage of Devil's Tower and then back at his creation. He sits down in shock.



In some senses Roy is like a typically Hollywood-ian depiction of the artist: a half-crazed, anti-social lunatic in search of some intangible truth. Except he isn't an artist. Nor is he mad, just a little intense. And the film also wants us to take him seriously. His sculpture, as he repeatedly explains whist making it, really does mean something.



The film is obsessed with issues of representation and non-verbal communication. The famous five-note score that the scientists use to communicate with the aliens, for example, effectively replaces speech. The chief scientist is a Frenchman (played by film director François Truffaut) who makes no more than one or two gnomic utterances and is accompanied throughout the film by an ineffectual translator. The fact that none of the Americans can understand him seems to imbue him with some special understanding of what is going on.

Roy can't communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it. And he's not alone in his obsession. Another character - Gillian Guiler - is also obsessed with Devil's Tower. She draws it over and over again. In a brilliant scene the two of them converge on Devil's Tower aware that it's the location for the alien spaceship's landing. Trying to work out how to scale the mountain Roy reveals that his knowledge of its topography is vastly superior to Gillian's. "You should try sculpture next time", he deadpans.

In making a plea for tolerance the film also seems to implicitly reject language, as if our primary means of communication were somehow ultimately a handicap to understanding. Language seems to dissolve during the film, becoming ever more useless until it dissipates into the abstract lights and sounds used by the scientists to communicate to the aliens. It is, in many ways, an anti-logocentric film, a celebration of the non-verbal and the techno-haptic.

A Small Disaster

Via Den of Geek (who also has an excellent post on the role of the corridor in Science Fiction movies) a fabulously wobbly and unconvincing scene from the film Superman. In it a model village is seen being engulfed by water - supposedly from the Hoover Dam but more likely from a leaky tap - while Superman looks on, disgruntled.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome

Note: The following is a rough and ready sort of mini-essay about theme parks and artificial environments. Specifically it is about the anxieties and fears of such worlds explored through science fiction. It is also looks at the spatial/architectural characteristics of such places.

Westworld

The cult 1973 film Westworld, starring the fabulously strange Yul Brynner, is a classic piece of techno paranoia. The film depicts a futuristic world where intelligent machines develop a will of their own and turn on their human creators. But it is also about another kind of paranoia: the erosion of authentic experience through the creation of artificial or virtual worlds.

Westworld is set in a theme park called Delos which is divided into three historical zones: the Wild West, pre-Christian Rome and medieval Europe. Each zone is populated by robots who act as adversaries, sexual partners, drinking buddies or whatever else the human visitors require in order to have a good time. The guests - of whom there seem to be remarkably few - behave according to a crude, secondhand understanding of their chosen period, chasing after comely whenches in Medievalworld or starting bar-room brawls in Westworld. Behind the scenes an army of technicians programme, monitor and repair the robots.



The film makes heavy weather of the issue of authenticity from the off. A TV reporter appears in the opening scenes to tell us how real, genuine and historically convincing the zones are. Soothing female voices reiterate that visitors will be immersed fully in their historial epoch just as if they are really there. As well as a fear of losing control of technology, the film's underlying anxiety is the artificiality of the simulated experiences Delos offers.



The most obvious simulacra are the robots themselves which are physically indistinguishable from humans. This immediately implies a cruelty and amorality in the various ways that guests. abuse them. But the entire theme park is also a simulated, pre-programmed experience. implying a comparable abuse of nature*. The landscape of Westworld is the spatial equivalent of the robots: an image of nature overlaying a subterranean warren of blinking computer screens, cables, switches and technicians that maintain the illusion. In switching between the lab coated technicians and the theme park the film emphasises the prosthetic quality of this landscape.

Delos is presented as a completely immersive space with no sense of the exterior world. Guest arrive via plane where they are bathed in audio-visual simulations of the coming experience. Delos itself has no edge or obvious limits. The fact that it is actually located in the desert helps to blur this boundary when one of the guests escapes. This idea of an artificial environment that is hermetically sealed but whose limits cannot be gauged is a crucial aspect of all immersive worlds including the classic theme parks that Westworld satirises**.



Like the picturesque gardens of stately homes, theme parks are carefully composed to appear limitless. Boundaries with the outside world are dissolved through the artful placing of screens of trees, the arrangements of buildings and the use of ha-ha's.*** Arrival and departure is carefully regulated so that the park acts as an island, an environment that cannot be approached any other way than by the official route. In this way no sense of the outside world is allowed to impinge on the illusion.

A recurrent anxiety about theme parks is that this carefully controlled environment denies us the ability to act independently. To visit somewhere like Disneyworld is to take part in a minutely choreographed experience where little deviation is allowed from the script. This is most apparent in the rides themselves where the same experience is repeated for each guest exactly, ad infinitum, like a Fordist approach to having fun. But it also occurs in the landscape between the rides where boredom, lethargy or other forms of deviant behaviour is frowned upon. Cast members constantly coax visitors into immersing themselves more fully into the concept. These cast members, like the technicians in Westworld, have their own separate circulation system from the public, appearing fully dressed and smiling as if from nowhere.



Logan's Run

Logan's Run (1978) is set in a post-apocalyptic society. This society is - for reasons that become sinisterly apparent - entirely populated by attractive under 30 olds who live in an internal and artificial world. This world appears to its inhabitants to be limitless but is in fact contained within a series of vast interconnected domes, a kind of Buckminster Fuller dreamscape full of fabulous Brazilia style monuments connected by swooshing monorails.

The anti-hero Logan's understanding of the fundamental inhumanity of this society only occurs when he escapes its limits and realises that a world exists beyond it. This outside world contains only one inhabitant, an ancient old man somewhat bizarrely played by Peter Ustinov, who lives in the overgrown ruins of Washington DC.





The idea of a dystiopian world contained within a hermetically sealed dome parodies the utopian qualities the same structures assume within architectural discourse. Here the transparent, infinitely expandable dome stands for a kind of democratic, non-hierarchical space. It is an idea that runs through architecture from the early expressionists, through Buckminster Fuller to the '60's avant garde of Cedric Price and Archigram and on into '80's and '90's High Tech. The glass dome represents an anti-architectural fantasty of a physically dissolved building, reduced to providing (in Reyner Banham's words) a well-tempered environment.

Arguably, such spaces are derived from the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, another spectacular representation of the world within a single vaulted space. Exhibition spaces are not meant to have positive qualities in themselves. They are assumed to be both formally and literally transparent. And yet like the vitrine in contemporary art they are loaded with siginificance. Ironically the supposedly formless, transparent dome has become a symbol of immersive artificial worlds from Fuller's proposal for roofing over Manhattan to the Eden Centre. The glass dome is like a giant specimen jar. It is an object that contains species and objects we wish to study. The anxiety of science fiction like Logan's Run is that we have become the objects contained under the glass.



The Truman Show

Peter Weir's film The Truman Show is set in a fictional world created for a real time television show about its one genuine inhabitant, the eponymous Truman. As we discover at the end of the film, this world is contained within a vast domed environment. It is like an inverted panoptican, or a giant petri dish, with the whole world looking in. The film exploits a contemporary fear that all our lives are simulated, somehow no longer real but insperable from mediated experience. It also echoes Donna Haraway's arguement that we are all already cyborgs, prosthetically connected to the machines that we use.

One of the interesting things about the film is that this artificial experience is located not in a futuristic Blade Runner-esque environment - the familiar cinematic landscape of our fears - but in the genuine Floridian town of Seaside. This cheerful piece of New Urbanism - home to buildings by Leon Krier and Steven Holl amongst others - plays to architectural fears of artificiality and authenticity as well as a more popular suspicion that overtly cheerful and perfectly manicured places mask something sinister***.

When Truman discovers the truth of his artificial existence, he attempts to escape and comes up against the limits of this world in a scene of exquisite poignancy. Escaping by boat he drifts on and on under a perfect blue sky until he floats up to and then, gently, bumps into the edge of the dome that encloses the giant set. It is as unexpected to us watching it as it is to him. He slowly gropes his way around the edge until he realises that this is indeed the absolute limit of his world.



* The term nature is taken here at face value although it too is an artificial construction to some extent.

** Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crighton and is in some senses a forerunner to Jurassic Park, a film about another themed environment and another gross misuse of technology. Jurassic Park is the ultimate theme park, a genuine island of artificial species.

*** A ha-ha is a ditch which provides a physical barrier which doesn't disrupt the view.

**** If the film were made in the UK it would be set in Poundbury.

Final note: I would like at some point to extend this to look at game space and virtual worlds like Second Life.

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.