Always Amazing Value

Via @WillWiles's twitter feed I came across this article by Rick Poyner on Poundland's graphic design. It's an interesting article, or, at least, an interesting starting point, but he comes to some odd conclusions. Along the way, Poyner makes some good points about the relationship of graphics to wealth, taste and, ultimately, class. These are things that I think design critics should talk a lot more about so I don't find any of his observations problematic, despite the comments here, where it seems to be assumed that talking about class in itself is somehow patronising.

Anyway, Poyner's main point is that Poundland's growth and its move into wealthier, more middle class areas makes its brutally direct, eye popping graphic style problematic. Will new, posher, customers, used to the tasteful graphic niceties of Marks & Spencer or Ocado, be able to stomach Poundland's "proletarian" directness? Or will they need to be flattered into shopping there, reassured that it all fits into an aspirational lifestyle distinguished by lime green fonts and reusable canvas grocery bags?

Not a bad question which probes some interesting conceits about shopping habits and the way that stores play on a mixture of social mobility, snobbery and guilt in inducing us to shop there. Inverted snobbery, of course, plays its part in Poundland's success along with a slightly nauseating tendency towards pretend-slumming by people who could well afford to shop elsewhere.

But Poyner is also all over the place in his conclusions. Having described Poundland's graphics as "highly specified and refined" (which is partially true, but they're also cheap in the literal sense) he goes on to denounce them as patronising and crude. Crude possibly, but why are they any more patronising than, say, the subtle shifts in font and graphic style used to denote upmarket brands in supermarkets? Can only the 'proletariat" be exploited? And, more importantly, why would a tasteful graphic signature used to lure in the middle classes not be patronising or exploitative?

Some years ago BA used to have a budget airline called Go. Despite the fact that its no-frills cheapness made the experience of flying with it identical to that of flying Easyjet, its Damian Hurst-esque spot pattern livery and tasteful graphics made it the acceptable budget airline for the middle classes. In the same way that some people prefer flying from Stanstead over Luton, despite the fact that both experiences are equally terrible, design has an ability to lend a patina of acceptability or sophistication, an aura of class, that has nothing to do with the quality of the product or the ethics of the experience.

Poyner has, like most design critics, confused ethics with aesthetics, assuming that his taste is morally superior, more honest, more truthful, somehow simply better. But there are no truths in typefaces, only taste cultures each with their own values.

Charity Shop Architecture

I picked this up recently. I bought it from the Oxfam bookshop on Marylebone High Street appropriately enough. There is something of the charity shop aesthetic to early CZWG, an oddly assorted, mix and matched budget charm.

CZWG are an odd kettle of fish and this book catches them at their oddest and fishiest, before their work got sucked too far into the world of D+B commercialism. Commercialism – and populism – was always a strong part of their ethos though, albeit coupled with a wonky DIY aesthetic and a bracing lack of good taste.

I always liked their house for Janet Street Porter, for instance, with its ‘30’s suburban aquamarine tiled roof, graduated fill brickwork and log lintels. Inside it’s less obviously the product of a lurid 1980’s aesthetic. The EML is left unplastered on some walls, exposing the wiring behind plug sockets and the softwood timber batons holding it all up.

The authors of the book are an unexpected bunch: Jonathan Meades, Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook all contribute essays. There is a certain joy in coming across critics in earlier incarnations and I treasure my copy of Deyan Sudjic’s interior design handbook with its paeans to po-mo but Meades' involvement is perhaps the more unlikely. For all the verbal pyrotechnics of his TV documentaries Meades’ views are ultimately not that unusual, at least in the sense of what he does and doesn’t like. So it’s surprising at first to find him lurking here endorsing Piers Gough.

His short essay though is smartly prescient, suggesting both that their originality lay in their non-originality - that is in their re-use of pre-existing architectural styles - and that ultimately, for all their perversity, they would be subsumed into the era of post-modernism. This is all true although there is little that is straightforwardly post-modern about their early work.

At its best it had an eye for the quirky detail and a love of the awful pun not that far from Lutyens or Voysey and best exemplified by their Porkacabin project from 1980. In fact CZWG’s work looks now like an attempt to return to the Voysesque origins of suburbia, to the sunburst motifs and neo-deco of metroland mixed with Edwardian whimsy, a point which Meades alludes to.

There are other things to like too such as the twisted corkscrew columns of the Bryanston school extension, the rollercoaster for Newcastle Quayside designed to spell out the town’s name and the riderless horse of The Circle in Shad Thames. Then again you would have to have a pretty strong stomach to take their proposal for the National Gallery Extension and their Mile End housing is indistinguishable from trad developer pastiche.

Ultimately CZWG occupy an odd and peculiarly English position. Too jokey and pop for the hairshirt tendency of UK architecture but too provincial for the wider post modern movement. They probably manage to piss everyone off. They were also always blatantly developer friendly which doesn’t help. The net to gross savvy that most successful practices developed in the late 90’s and noughties (think AHMM, Allies and Morrisson et al) was a lot less expected in the ‘80’s especially given the academic background CZWG came from at the AA.

In their early days they were a bit like a low rent James Stirling. They did, after all, happily use the term B Movie architecture to describe their work. Perhaps though it was not quite B movie enough. Not enough schlock and sheer grossness for my taste. More Carry on Camping than Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.

English Extremists: The Architecture of Campbell, Zogolovitch, Wilkinson and Gough (First published 1988)
Purchase price: £3.50

Taste Not Space

(Image via)
This is the second part of the post I started last week (on architecture and literature) before I got sidetracked by robots. Read on.....

As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles.

This passage from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility doesn't so much describe a real place as assemble an easily understood set of visual cliches. As a sentence it suggests architectures' importance as a system of signification in English literature. The role of Barton Cottage in the narrative of Sense and Sensibility is to communicate the down to earth honesty of the Dashwood sisters who come to live there and their relative financial penury. The cottage is continually contrasted with a range of other, larger houses throughout the story used to communicate the social and economic aspirations of their various owners.

The role of architecture in this instance is primarily symbolic, acting as a visual metaphor for the characters personalities. The signs and symbols of domestic architecture serve as a form of shorthand for the people who live in it. Its experience is never divorced from a system of class/social or economic value. The description of the architecture is therefore fundamentally visual rather than physical. By which I mean that the architecture is described as a series of visual signifiers rather than having any haptic or spatial qualities. Architecture acts as a kind of additional character - think of Mansfield Park or even more pertinently Brideshead Revisited - rather than as a place.



The proliferation of period dramas on UK television continues to develop these themes. In most of these dramas the architecture is both the luscious backdrop that draws us in and a crucial part of the story. The narrative plays itself out within the architecture, the endless pantomime of social and class distinction mirrored in the similar gradations of the architecture from peasant hovel to sublime neo-classical villa. The camera gazes adoringly at these interiors playing off the ornate splendor against the stilted drama within.



However, whilst the architecture is foregrounded as an intrinsic part of the narrative it is the signs and symbols of architecture rather than its physical experience that is most important. In so far as physical characteristics are described it is in a coded sense, communicating symbolic value. Although the houses are now being filmed as opposed to described they still perform the same narrative role. And that narrative is to still to do with class and social status. Taste and not space is what's important.



I would argue that UK domestic architecture is the product of this obsession to the extent that the spatial and sculptural qualities of architecture are always marginalised by a predominantly visual experience codified through literature. In this sense the physical divorce is two-fold. First in that we inhabit the buildings not physically but imaginatively through textual description but also that the textual description is itself obsessed not with the spatial properties of architecture but with a visual and codified 'reading' of it.



I'm aware that this may sound like a somewhat reactionary stance that privileges a notion that physical experience is somehow more 'real' than other types of experience. Or that it is possible to have a physical experience that is divorced and distinct from culture. But literature's use of architecture to tell stories (and to employ it as a 'silent' character) influences the way we make domestic architecture. The volume housing of the last forty years has been fundamentally historicist in style. In a reduced and miniaturised form it attempts to tell similar stories to the scenarios outlined above. The brochure descriptions of new housing employ a sign based approach to architecture both literally and metaphorically. Houses are christened, given historic names of symbolic importance, like characters in a slightly cheesy historic novel. They are in a way a little like the imagined endings or imaginary (in that they are contemporary) sequels to Jane Austen's novels that appear now and again. Or Barbara Taylor Braford. They contain the same vestiges of historic detail, long divorced from their original context and distorted almost beyond recognition in scale and material.



We still use houses to tell stories. Whether it is the porches, carriage lamps and disembodied timber frames of new build executive homes or the neo-industrial vernacular of loft conversions. This naming and quotation extends to the settings in which new houses sit where other landscape based signifiers such as duck ponds and watermills are employed as context.

The open plan arrangement of lofts may be sold on their spectacular spatial qualities but it is the authenticity of the signifiers of a previous industrial past that is the main draw. Fetishised objects such as brick signage, factory doors and ropes and pulleys serve the same role as the plastic porticos and bay windows of self-consciously period houses. These two models: the country cottage (or the shrunken stately home) and the industrial loft account for pretty much most recent housing in the UK.

The disembodied elements of period detail borrowed by new build houses are often perverse and bizarre. Their weirdness is easy to miss due to the overfamiliarity. The frequent spatial paucity of the houses these elements are applied to though is emblematic of an obsession with the signs and symbols of architecture.* Housing is primarily viewed as a symbol of social value rather than a functioning object: a sign for living in rather than a machine. In this sense the kind of houses illustrated below might be seen as the bastardised offspring of Austen and a literary culture obsessed with social aspiration communicated through architecture.

* I should probably state the obvious here which is that much of my own work has been in trying to do something interesting with a lot of the same material.

Confessions of an Interior Designer

I remember seeing a clip once from a late '60's DIY programme in which a plummy voiced man advised viewers how to cover up their Victorian panelled doors with MDF sheets. Twenty years or so later there were similar programmes telling us how to rip them back off again. All of which is to say that interior design is a fickle business, subject to the whims and cycles of fashion. Dangerously shallow waters for the tastemaker then. It's easy to look a little foolish in retrospect.

These two books published in the late 1970's and written by (now Sir) Terence Conran are a fabulous case in point. There are many odd and inadvertently amusing things about them, but not everything can be put down to the fact that the 1970's themselves were inadvertently amusing.

For a start much of the text is written through a moist haze of soft core eroticism. No, really. A lot of it seems utterly unnecessarily priapic, as if the author might be over compensating for the self perceived lack of machismo of writing about bathroom fittings to start with. Semi or completely naked ladies crop up everywhere; taking a shower, lying in a wicker armchair in sun dappled soft focus, lolling around on the bed having champagne breakfasts.



There are chapters on how to make a Seduction Den, special features on water beds (illustrated by a naked woman reclining on peach satin sheets. One can almost hear the author physically restraining himself from referring to her as a 'dusky beauty'), and such continental exotica as bidets and the use of musk.



The Seduction Den chapter is particularly enjoyable and worth quoting at length:

"The dedicated playboy or girl may decide to invest in audio-visual equipment. In this highly erotic room, its bed surrounded by a velvet cushioned lip, sexy music and blue movies help to create a den for unbridled lust."

Pragmatic advice is also to hand:

"Fur on the floor is not practical, but a thick absorbent carpet is an adequate substitute."

There's something slightly unpleasant about the use of the word absorbent there, but nevermind, the author goes on undaunted:

"A large mirror is in keeping, as are big bottles of scent, aftershave or talc, and, of course, a bidet."

Of course. And make those bottles big.



Someone called Bonnie Molnar turns up to tell us more than we might like to know about her sex life, and something she refers to disturbingly as getting "a good thumping". An erotic bedroom, she informs us, should be comfortable:

"You owe it to yourself and to your complex female sensuality to make it so."

Ah the mysteries and complexities of female sensuality. So much deeper than the man with his concerns for absorbent carpets. How to give it material expression? Will a wicker armchair meet the requisite combination of bohemian informality and gypsy passion?



Not to be outdone Roger Barasel tells us about his formative sexual experiences with chuckling male bravado:

"My first sexual encounter was, in fact, not in my own bedroom but my parents' spare bedroom, then occupied by the Austrian au pair (cultural exchange I believe it's called)."

Hats off to you Sir!

And the design? There is much to scoff at and, alternatively, much to enjoy especially if you like super graphics and loud colour schemes. Which I do. The 1970's may be the decade that taste forgot (or is that the '80's?) but who wants too much good taste anyway? I think I prefer the Robin Asquith era Terence Conran to the overly respectable version of today.



Post Script

Interior design has always been the fickle, flashier, younger sibling of architecture. While architecture strives for timelessness, interior design is happy to engage in the ephemeral. Architects have spent the last hundred years stressing structure, materials and space. Commodity and firmness more than delight. Interior design deals with ornament, decoration, colour and fabric - the aspects of buildings that Modernist rhetoric dismissed as unnecessary, extrinsic to the ineffable substance of architecture. Literal frippery.

They are also the aspects of architecture historically given feminine characteristics. Similarly, the persona of the architect - serious, professional, aloof - is seen as distinct from that of the Interior Designer: more often a woman, and if not then foppish, camp, quite possibly gay. Whilst the architect strives to be taken seriously as a professional, the interior designer is happy to splash the money around.



But they're not so different. Ultimately, Charles Jencks' endorsement of Post Modernism (published in 1977) went the same way as Terence Conran's seduction den. The current tropes of fashionable architecture will inevitably end up as someone's skeleton in the portfolio. Anything that claims timelessness is probably motivated by a fear of seeming ephemeral. The distance architecture puts between it and interior design communicates its ultimate fear that they aren't so far apart. The caricature of the interior designer is a mirror image of the architect.