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.

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.

modern archeology

I'm teaching at Canterbury again this year and have been researching potential project sites combining coastal landscapes, transportation systems and technological obsolescence. Whilst trawling the area, I came across the arcane fragment of home movie footage embedded above of the former Hoverport at Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate.

As well as being a sort of Super 8 version of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards, the footage is notable for an eerie lack of people, as if in anticipation of the port's future demise. A vacant and overgrown concrete apron is now the only remaining sign of Ramsgate International Hoverport which closed in 1982. Google earth reveals the ruins as a strange prosthetic attachment sticking out of the curve of the bay.

Aside from the various buildings - now long gone - the port consisted of a large flat concrete shoreline, a sort of artificial beach onto the which the craft slid up before settling down on its billowing black shirts, like a large hen on a nest of eggs. In period photographs the hovercraft themselves still appear incredibly modern, alien objects in the late '60s landscape, especially compared to the Austin Maxis and Mini Clubmans that would have motored gently on and off them. Given the relative size of the hovercraft to the surrounding houses they look as if they could have just carried on past the port and inland, hoovering up the potato fields of Thanet as they went.

The word Hoverport suggests something faintly incredible too, as if tit were the ground itself that rose up and transported you somewhere exotic. Rather than Calais. The operators seemed to be aware of the ambiguous half boat/half plane character of their craft too, referring to "flights" instead of sailings and dressing the crew up as natty BOAC flight attendants. Fittingly enough high aviation fuel costs in the 1970's - combined with a susceptibility to bad weather - killed off most commercial hovercraft services. Wikipedia's entry on them concludes that "except for the Solent Ryde to Southsea crossing, hovercraft disappeared from the coastline of Britain", as if they were a species of rare bird.

Appropriately enough, the former Hoverport at Pegwell Bay is now a nature reserve. It sits on a particularly sleepy stretch of the Isle of Thanet coast, just below the plateau of Manston Airport, another, almost, failed bit of infrastructure. For those of you of a hauntological bent there are more photographs and information available here, and here. From the last of these sites I have borrowed the lovely image below. There are also photographs of the port at various stages of dereliction here.

Essex Links

One silver lining of the election - along, perhaps, with the success of Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion - was the routing of Nick Griffin and the BNP at Barking. I'd been conscious of the possibility of the BNP winning the seat when I was writing my last post partially extolling the merits of that part of the world and was consequently a little wary. Barking isn't strictly speaking in Essex, but its roots certainly are. Anyway, with the vindication of the people of Barking and Dagenham demonstrating their innate decency, I can now recommend some further reading on the subject.

Firstly, Mondoadogo makes a coincidental visit to Canvey Island (please forgive the plug back here early on, that wasn't my motive in linking to Mondo's post) and takes some very nice pictures along the way and, secondly, Caught By The River has a long photo essay on the glories of the Essex coast, which begins at Canvey. Go read.

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.

In Godshill Country

I came across these pictures recently and thought I'd post them up. They're from Godshill Model Village, on the very strange Isle of Wight (which you can read more about here). I tend to prefer my miniature landscapes a bit less cute generally - check out Madurodam in Holland with its miniature miles of reclaimed polder land and container ports, or this beauty - but there's something about the overabundant landscaping at Godshill that is mildly surreal at least.

There is something inherently inherently peculiar about a model village on the Isle of Wight, mainly because the island itself is a sort of miniature version of the UK. The relationship between the two is curiously inverted in the phrase "You can put the whole of England on the Isle of Wight", which forms the starting point for Julian Barnes' slightly leaden satire on theme parks, fakes and copies England, England. In the book a miniaturised theme park version of England is constructed on the Isle of Wight and gradually starts to replace the real thing.

It's the odd, left-over bits I always enjoy the most though. The back of a pub, or a deserted station car park. It's nice that someone went to the effort of making them and getting the particular quality of forlornness, or the colour of the drainpipes, just right.

There comes a moment in every model village where the carefully contrived scaled down world is fatally unbalanced by the intrusion of a real object. Normally this is a human sized foot, or a hungry blackbird, but there are subtler signs such as super sized raindrops or some peculiarly large and unconvincing rocks.

Some suitably heroic engineering spans across the rockery and takes the railway over the algae filled lagoon. No sign of a 1:25 scale model of Richie Edwards' car nearby though...

The verisimilitude of this section of the village suffers from the size of the concrete aggregate in the road. The wind farm also sounds an oddly contemporary note in a village otherwise dedicated to representing an agreeable 1950's utopia of butcher's delivery vans and plentiful cake.

Finally, what all miniature villages need, a miniature airport. Question is, where do they fly to?

High Tech Nostalgia

(Image courtesy Archigram)

I didn't mention this in my post on the white cliffs last week, but it fits in with many of the themes I was trying to write about. The image is from Archigram's Suburban Sets project, drawn by Ron Herron. The 1960's architectural avant garde of which Archigram were such an important part combined a number of interesting themes including a sort of high-tech pastoralism where architecture is reduced to an infrastructural support system for the countryside (Peter Cook's instant city), a love of gadgets and gizmos (Warren Chalk's gasket housing) and an interest in Do It Yourself (Ron Herron's Tuned Suburb).

Suburban Sets combines a number of these themes, reducing the 'architecture' to a vestigial, scenographic role, while adding a seam of nostalgic whimsy to the mix. The design posits a scenario where the house itself has been removed and the space given over to garden, while the occupant lives in an abandoned aeroplane parked in the weeds.

I was struck by the similarity of this scheme to the Team 4 hideway illustrated in the previous post. Both combine a fantasy of architecture's dematerialisation with a nostalgia for war-time technology: a fusing of the avant garde's preoccupation with anti-architecture and the childhood joys of Airfix kits.

Digging In: Inhabited Landscapes of War

Last Sunday I went to Dover to do some not particularly thorough research in advance of FAT's design studio. I'm ordering most of the images I took into a photo-essay which I will post up here shortly. The following thoughts though focus exclusively on the cliffs and their history as a landscape of defence.

Dover's white cliffs are geology as ideology, a landscape supposedly embodying a myth of heroic English resistance. There is a way though that they more literally house a history of defence. They are inhabited with a network of tunnels that have acted at various points as cannon emplacements, hospital wards and war rooms. These tunnels occasionally pop out of the cliff face as ad-hoc bits of buildings with an incongruously domestic scale. Balconies, greenhouses and Pallladian arched windows hint at submerged buildings deep within the cliff.

Sometimes they are more substantial, like this one complete with HVAC ductwork sticking out - an air-conditioned cliff - which looks like a fragment of some Victorian railway viaduct. There's a touch of Planet of the Apes about it, as if a landslide has buried some former trainshed. Or, perhaps, that the cliffs are an elaborate piece of camouflage formed from plaster of paris and fake grass propped up by a rickety timber framework.


(Images and info via)

In fact the cliffs are riddled with carved out spaces created over centuries by war and capable of housing 4000 troops. Somewhere within them is the Regional Government centre, built during the cold war in the event of nuclear attack. Radar masts and pre-radar sound mirrors dot their surface, while tele-communications thread through the limestone below.



The cliffs also house the remarkable Grand Shaft, a 140 foot deep staircase directly connecting the former cliff top barracks to the town below. This entire section of the cliff is known as the Western Heights, an interconnected series of earthworks and defences begun in the middle ages, expanded massively during the 18th century and achieving its most fabled role in the 1940's.



The cliff as secret, inhabited fortress also reminds me of the remarkable photographs of camouflaged US aircraft factories in the second world war. Here an entire Lockheed factory was disguised as a landscape by a series of vast stage set paintings of fields, dotted with three dimensional mock ups of farms and trees. Underneath this elaborate cover the factory went about its business.


(This image and more via)

Here, perhaps, is also an unlikely seedbed for all those post-war architectural fantasies of serviced landscapes: Archigram's unbuilt Monte Carlo scheme - a casino and entertainment complex disguised as a hill, Reyner Banham's Un-House, Superstudio's inhabited buildingless environments.



(Archigram. Plan of Monte Carlo Entertainment Centre via)

It exists more overtly in the gadgetry of high-tech architecture. Foster and Roger's early Team 4 house in Creek Vean included a hidden room in the hillside overlooking the Cornish coast. Not only does this mysterious, insular, space appear like the glazed bubble over a Lancaster bomber cockpit, but it is a room literally buried into the ground, a fortress of privacy and seclusion.



UPDATE:

A bit of further reading has revealed some inaccuracies in this post, for which I apologise. Dover Castle and the Western Heights are two distinct places entirely, although you wouldn't realise that from reading the above. While the castle is perhaps the quintessential image of Dover, the Western Heights on the other side of the harbour are home to far more ambitious fortifications in the form of the Citadel and the Drop Redout, two enormous 18th century fortresses embedded within the landscape of the cliff.

In fact, the Western Heights form a sort of inversion of the cliffs on which the castle sits, an enormous but invisible counterpoint. It is a truly fortified landscape where the entire cliff top has been sculpted into a system of defence. It is a schedule ancient monument although large sections of it have been destroyed. The Citadel itself - a pentagonal fortress - is now a Young Offenders Institution.

You can view it here.

The Hills Are Alive

Like most examples of high-tech architecture, Munich's 1972 Olympic Stadium can be read not only as a purely technological solution but as a richly baroque fantasy. Designed by Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto, the stadium was intended - somewhat ironically given the fact that it was for the summer Olympics - to resemble the Alps.

There are three main parts to it; the Olympic Hall, the Aquatics Centre and the enormous 80,000 seat stadium itself. All three are covered by a vast clear PVC clad canopy held up by a vertiginous network of eccentrically leaning pylons. Between them is an artificial landscape - the Olympic Park - which rises and falls so that the buildings are set into rather than on it. Wandering around it you start to realise that the peaks and troughs of the grassy hillocks and miniature mountains echo the shape of the tensile roof structure. They have a decidedly unnatural form to them, like a CGI landscape that has not been properly smoothed out.

The tent is a sort of floating corollary to the landscape and attempts to cover parts of it without interrupting the flow of space below. So, the Olympic swimming pools are placed at the bottom of a large artificial hill that continues beyond the building. Plastic seats are fixed to the cobbled setts that flow from outside to inside so that it is like sitting on a mountain side gazing down at the plunge pools below.



This theme is continued in the swooping curve of the stadium, where the speckled green seats echo the grassy hills so that the stadium is read as a quasi-natural amphitheatre. Out of this decidedly artificial landscape huge steel cables shoot several hundred feet up into the air, as well as pylons carrying floodlights stooped like stationary robots, and the enormous TV tower.



The sometimes swooping, sometimes drooping, tent structure has an almost comical quality at times. There is nothing rational about any of this despite the mathematics involved in making it all stay up. It is eccentric, extraordinary and rather fabulous. It is also - like the Baroque architecture that abounds in Bavaria - a form of stylised naturalism, a super-charged version of the real.

The stadium is also, more obviously, a continuation of the '60's dream of dematerialised architecture - lightweight barely there buildings without walls or other forms of spatial or social segregation. This lineage grew out of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome experiments, intentionally reducing architecture to nothing more than providing - in Ryner Banham's phrase - a well-tempered environment in which sophisticated noble savages would be free to roam.



This conflation of technology and neo-pantheism reached an apogee of expression in Banham's own Un-House, where he and his collaborator Francois Dallegret appear together perched on a rock, happily naked and entertained by a vast high-tech console in their transparent bubble. It is apparent too in Superstudio's Continuous-monument and Archigram's concept of the Electronic Aborigine.



The dissolution of the architecture in the Olympic Park clearly has another, not disassociated, symbolic meaning, acting as a decisive departure from the stolid neo-classicism associated with the 1936 Olympics. And the park along with its fabulous iconic graphics has become a powerful symbol of post war Germany. The design thus conflates a benignly technological utopianism with the "innocence" of the Alpine landscape. It is, in some senses, a miniature representation of the country itself.



In fact, the architecture of the Olympic Stadium is far from dissolved. But much of the ingenuity and artifice of design has gone into the landscape which has become, in effect, the building. Bits of it are sculpted into (un)natural amphitheatres while other parts are pushed or pulled to give a better view. It is an inhabited landscape. The hills are alive.

*Appropriately this faux-naturalism was pushed to its limits when the stadium hosted the cross-country skiing competition in 2006. Hot air was combined with cold refrigerated water to form icy snow within the stadium.

** BTW the photos are meant to be rubbish. They're edgy. Or something. See last post.

A Design for Life?

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Princess Margaret’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of her ear. From here a crease ran toward her lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

From Princess Margaret’s Facelift, J G Ballard

I was reminded of Ballard’s short story Princess Margaret’s Facelift (from The Atrocity Exhibition) while staring at the endless array of photographs charting the transformation of Michael Jackson’s face that have appeared since his death last Thursday.

Ballard’s cut and paste technique – the insertion of Princess Margaret’s name for that of the anonymous ‘Patient X’ in a genuine medical description of a face lift – is a provocative marriage of form and content. Plastic surgery is a form of collage practised on the body, a grafting of previously disparate features into a new composition. The disjunctive quality of seeing Princess Margaret’s name in the context of a blunt medical description is a graft itself, a similarly violent juxtaposition.

Plastic surgery though differs from collage in an important respect. Or at least it should. While collage stresses the cuts between displaced objects, relying precisely on their lack of ‘fit’, plastic surgery strives to be seamless and invisible. It’s often said that rather than making people look beautiful, plastic surgery merely makes them look like they’ve had plastic surgery. The truth though is that this is only when the surgery goes wrong, or in Michael Jackson’s case, far too far, and the surgery itself becomes the dominant visual characteristic.

If plastic surgery is collage(n) then, it is more digital Photoshop – striving for seamlessness – than analogue cut and paste. Which makes Jackson’s face, along with all those other celebrities with their grotesquely distorted features – a real life version of the website Photoshop Disasters. One’s first thought on seeing a picture of his face towards the end of his life was: can it really be like that? But if his face became a dreadful mistake, what was he striving for?

Someone once said that Jackson wasn’t using surgery to turn himself white but to turn himself into Elizabeth Taylor. Certainly his shiny black bob, white skin, red lips, pencilled eye brows and heavy make up were undeniably feminine. His tiny triangle of a nose (itself a prosthetic, like a little piece of white chocolate Toblerone* literally stuck onto the void where his old nose used to be) was a caricature of female desirability. His clothes were equally fascinating, mutating from the pantomime military dictator look noted by Owen Hatherley, to the bling and badge encrusted blazers of his later years that made him appear like an ageing millionairess tottering around her Miami Beach condo.



Jackson was grotesque not only because his surgery appeared to have gone so wrong but because he no longer bore any resemblance to who he had been before. With his exorbitant wealth and lack of any kind of reality check he had gone further than anyone else in re-designing himself. There are few precedents for this so perhaps it's not surprising he got it wrong.

Stephen Marquardt - a prominent plastic surgeon in California who specialises in rebuilding the faces of crash victims - has attempted to analyse the proportions of the human face in order to help his patients choose their new features. His analysis concluded (somewhat fortuitously) that beauty in human faces was based on the ratio of proportion developed by Pythagoras, the golden section, which was used as the compositional basis for classical architecture and painting. Marquardt produced overlays of ‘classically’ beautiful faces such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to illustrate how the proportions of the features related to the golden ratio. The only problem with this is (as Robin Evans has noted in different context in his essay Translations from Drawing to Building), the golden ratio assumes a flat surface - such as a drawing or a façade - to work. Dr Marquardt’s overlays treated his faces as if they were flat screens seen perfectly head on, with no allowance for depth or perspective. Importantly Marquardt’s analysis was based on photographs of movie stars and not real faces.


(Image taken from this article in Discover magazine)

A few years ago I reviewed an exhibition of Playboy magazine covers from the 1950’s to the present. What struck me was not so much the way that the design of the magazine had developed over the years but how the designs of the bodies within it had. As the settings and scenarios of the shoots became less elaborately staged the bodies had become more so, pumped, primed and almost literally pneumatic. Their disparate body parts had been grafted like a pornographic version of a police identikit image**. Here was a reversal of Dr Marquardt’s analysis, faces and bodies designed to be viewed through the flat pages of magazines or television screens.

If plastic surgery has a precedent in design it might lie unexpectedly in the picturesque gardens of the 18th century. These gardens were three-dimensional collages based on flat images; in this case the allegorical 17th century paintings of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Objects and landscape features such as lakes, groves of trees, ruins and follies were lifted from these paintings and grafted into the English landscape by designers such as Humphrey Repton. Although highly artificial these gardens were intended to be seen as seamless extensions of the ‘natural’ landscape. In essence they were surgical enhancements; a nice little ravine here, a charming waterfall there.



Today these experiments in re-designing nature occur even more invisibly, in a seam that runs from the reshaping of the countryside for aesthetic pleasure to the development of genetically modified plants and biological cloning.

Which brings us back to the real horror that Jackson’s face evokes. His features were like some picturesque garden that had gone horribly wrong, one where the artificial lakes had dried up and the land begun to rot and fester. Parts of his face had literally died, cut off from their blood supply they had started to turn black and fall off revealing the crude mechanism that held them together. For Jackson was a cyborg, a result of science as much as nature.



The fear of artificiality that runs through all arguments against humans ‘playing god’ ignores the fact that nature itself is a cultural product, the necessary counterpoint to the artificial. The ‘natural’ is impossible to locate except as the inverse of everything else. As Donna Hathaway has argued in her "Cyborg Manifesto", we are all already cyborgs, attached to machines, networked together. Plastic surgery merely makes evident the degree to which we are products of culture rather than nature.

And with that we are alone.

* And, like a piece of Toblerone, melting in the Californian sun.

** In his notes to The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard describes medical textbooks as a “vast, dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame”. He describes the two as being on a “collision course”, a multiple pile-up that has indeed occurred over and over through tabloid descriptions of Jackson as well as a litany of lesser stars such as Jordan, Jodie Marsh etc.