Looking at the Overlooked

I'm not the first to say it but speculative housing schemes are very odd places. The one pictured here (in fuzzy mobile phone technicolour) is made stranger by its moribund credit crunched status, but even so its pretty peculiar. What is its genealogy? Where do these forms and materials come from? Why does so much of the country look like this?

It's hard for architects to get past their visceral hatred of this kind of stuff in order to actually look at it. I'm not going to try and defend it here on populist grounds but I am interested in why so much of the world looks like this. Estates like this are a strange confluence of taste, economics, received wisdom and something altogether less easy to define. It is not simply that it is cheap, or efficient because in some ways it is neither, but then a certain pinched meanness is evident throughout.



The ruthless application of market principles often leads to illogical weirdness. So here the bits of buildings that architects usually fuss over, such as things lining up or random eruptions of services and lighting conduits, are left to run amok. The builder's standard details combined with the aspirant tropes of a debased Georgian/Victorian pattern language result in all manner of deformities. Bits stick out, lumps protrude, a pedimented doorway collides with a band of expressed stone.



One could approach something like this not as a moral arbiter of taste or an offended aesthete but as a detective trying to establish motive. Somebody somewhere designed this and design always involves active choices however restricted. It's not the headline issue of historical pastiche that is most problematic, or even the kind of urban design ambition to make CABE shiver, but the sheer peculiarity of the design once you start looking at it.

This is default building, the everyday everyday rather than the rarefied everyday beloved of architects. You could describe it as a kind of slang architecture - full of malapropisms and tautologies - in comparison to the received pronunciation of contemporary modernism, although this makes it sound more exciting than it actually is. It is also the reality of much Bad British architecture, although rather than a poor piece of design by a practice trying hard to be interesting, here the services of architects have probably been entirely dispensed with.

From A Morning Train

Last week I attempted (or at least contemplated) the highly complex and technically ambitious project of twittering a photo essay from the train via Twitpic. Not being very technically savvy I soon gave up and read Private Eye instead. Here are the photos I took (from my phone hence the outrageously poor quality /what I like to think of as a Gerhard Richter-esque painterly quality) as the landscape flashed by, together with requisite mordant observations.

The English countryside is in a mess. It is neither green nor that pleasant on the whole. Generally understood to be charmingly unspoilt, it is in fact unnatural and being redeveloped all the time. The best place to view it is from a train window. Trains pass through the back end of everywhere, giving you the worst, most interesting viewpoint.



Very little open countryside is actually countryside. Vast pylons march across it. Reservoirs are sunk into it. Piles of debris, bricks and old agricultural equipment lie abandoned in it. As do burnt out cars, coaches infested with weeds, strange shacks, empty warehouses, tarpaulins covering mysterious bundles of materials, slag heaps and soil tips. Red and white candy striped tape flaps between timber poles, marking out the lines of new roads.



Trains pass through this liminal zone, a not quite there space between cities and villages. Houses march relentlessly out into it, their higgledy piggledy outlines forming an advance party into the green belt.



Motorways, canals, bridges, B-roads and adhoc car parks collide on the edges of towns as if designed by an insane Hornby model maker. Something about the view from a train, - elevated above the usual eye level - removes the landscape from reality. Tiny cars inch along country lanes. A tractor plods across a field. A 4x4 stops at a level crossing.



Huge sheds loom out of the middle distance guarding their mysterious contents. Small farm houses sit dwarfed by groups of crinkly tin barns containing piles of grain or thousands of chickens. Patches of concrete suggest where other buildings might once have been, structures phased out by advances in agribusiness. A bent piece of corrugated iron held down by bricks is home to a pig.



Power stations, factories and warehouses all follow the railway. Loading bay numbers flash by from a distribution centre. Pallets of blue circle cement are moved from one place to another. A skip is filled up with copper tubing.

Just outside Stevenage an advertising mast looms into view. TK Maxx, Old Orlean's, a Vue cinema, Halfords, Tesco and the conference centre. A business park appears like a pleasant oasis.

A van sits on a patch of concrete by a town's edge. Ubiquitous cheap apartment blocks, clad in brick and pressed metal look out over a landscape frequented by teenagers and others excluded from mainstream leisure activities. Scraps of torn up pornography get caught in the branches of a tree.

Electricity pylons are quite beautiful and mostly go unnoticed. Above the ploughed fields there is the constant hum of electricity. If you are lucky, you get to see a wind turbine too.