London Buses and São Paulo Biennales

Typical. You wait several months for a post and then two come along at the same time. Well, ok, so you probably weren't exactly waiting, but......

....below you'll find a couple of long-in-the-making posts for all the usual tawdry reasons. The first is a review, some twenty years after its release, of Mike Leigh's Naked. I first watched this film in Berlin in 1993, when Mike Leigh was present for a post-screening q&a. Twenty years later I watched it in the Barbican where Mike Leigh was present for a post-screening q&a. Interestingly, as far as I can remember, the questions were very similar the first time, revolving around the issues of the film's perceived mysogyny.

Whilst acknowledging this as a very valid observation, I have also tried to talk about the film in a different way. Not because it isn't important but because there are other, equally powerful and troubling aspects to it. Anyway, the review is below......

The second post is a very belated follow-on to my City of London guide, this time looking at two buildings on the London Wall, one by Norman Foster and the other by Richard Rogers. Without wishing to look like some kind of stalking obsessive, Rogers is also the subject of a recent review for Icon, which you can find here.

Lastly, a note that I will be talking at the Track Changes event at the 2013 Bienal de São Paulo organised by Crimson. The event is on the 4th, 5th and 6th of November and I will be speaking as part of the discussion "What's Your Crisis" on the 6th.

Anyway, if anybody who reads this or knows about FAT is there, come along and say hi.

Team 2

At the western end of London Wall, facing each other across a small and rather nebulous public space are two new-ish office buildings, one designed by Richard Rogers and the other by his old Team 4 partner Norman Foster. More correctly,  the buildings were designed by the firms of Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Foster and Partners.

Accreditation is important not just because both men run large architectural practices made up of numerous collaborators, but also because the buildings are from the more recent, 'late' stages of their respective careers. They could thus be regarded less as the outpourings of singular artistic vision and more as the products of well-oiled architectural machines. Given their proximity to each other though, it's interesting to relate them to key projects of each architect's 'youth', inevitably inviting questions as to who has hung onto youthful ideals the longest.




The RSH building contains numerous references to previous Rogers designs including - most obviously - the technicolour funnels of the Pompidou Centre. But there is also the bright yellow painted steel of the house he designed in Wimbledon for his parents and the meticulous techno detailing of the Lloyd's Building. And then there's that slightly uncanny way Rogers has with glass, the way that the panels seem to just float dreamily across the surface of the building, mainly in order to show off the Meccano-like structure more clearly.

With its billowy fully glazed curves,  Foster's One London Wall echoes his Willis Faber Dumas office building of 1975, especially at night when the lights inside seem to dematerialise the architecture entirely. This building is also instructive of the difficulties faced by hi-tech architects away from green-field sites and industrial estates. The compromises of tight urban sites, the odd angles and awkward adjacencies and the fact that up close nothing is actually straight or perpendicular, creates slightly ungainly monsters of buildings based on unrelenting grids and repetitive bay systems.

Fosters answer to this at London Wall - and far more successfully at Ipswich - is to cloak his rational floor plates with a free-floating curtain wall that follows the curve of the street. Both buildings thus envelop their sites, becoming both figure and ground at the same time. The old articulations of architecture - back/front, facade/interior, fenestration/wall - disappear and the buildings become almost abstract, as scaleless, and undifferentiated as a computer screen.

Unlike Willis, Faber and Dumas though there is no soft, egalitarian programme to go with this aesthetic at London Wall, no rooftop garden to playfully augment the non-hierarchical acres of lime green-carpeted burolandschaft. Instead there is just high quality, top-dollar city office space.



There are other departures too. Ponderous details of establishment conservatism have crept-in via  the reconstituted stone panels that wrap the ground level,  and the attempts at traditional massing at the corner junction. This particular corner looks onto the roundabout containing Powell and Moya's Museum of London, the spectacularly horrible 200 Aldersgate Stree (now minus its Stirling-esque cascading glass atrium) and Bastion House, one of the last Miesian towers left from the 1960's masterplan*. One London Wall adds little positive to this interesting but fairly disastrous urban scenario. 

It does though manage to connect more literally to the radical ideas of the 1960s and 70s in the form of the high-level walkways planned and partially built by the Corporation of London. There are public entrances at either end of One London Wall that lead up by escalator and lift to bridges connecting to the Museum of London and the Barbican estate beyond. Although it connects to them it's worth noting that the One London Wall also terminates these connections too. Coming from the Barbican end you are returned unceremoniously to ground level, the thrills of three dimensional urbanism officially over.

RSH's 88 Wood Street offers yet more in the way of Grade A office space. But without its stylistic twitches it would be a wholly unremarkable addition to the city. These mannerisms suggest that while Rogers developed an architectural style, Foster defined an entire design economy. One London Wall is both singularly unremarkable and the product of a vision all the more powerful for its seeming anonymity.  While Rogers has retained his liberal politics and boho leanings, Foster appears aloof from such concerns. And while Rogers has developed a key role in advising governments and politicians on policy, Foster has aligned himself with the powers beyond our democratic institutions.



* London Wall, and its rebuilding over the last thirty to forty years will have to be the subject of another post. 

End of the millennium psychosis blues

"What are you guarding in this particular post modernist gas chamber?"

"Space".

"How would you know if somebody stole it?"

The most obvious thing to say about Mike Leigh's Naked - recently screened as part of the Barbican's Urban Wandering season - is that it is a violent film and that much of the violence is directed towards women. Its themes of misogyny and women as the much-abused objects of male frustration, makes it tough going, especially as the violence is sometimes played, if not exactly for laughs, then certainly with an eye for dark farce. Naked flips disorientatingly from black humour to something approaching slapstick and back again, meaning that you are never quite sure where the encounters it depicts are heading. It is as if Leigh, determined to make a diffident kind of film, keeps snapping back to his more usual fare.

Naked's inclusion in a season of films about London suggests though that it can be read as an exploration of the city as much as human relationships. London is portrayed here with an almost apocalyptic, end-of-the-millennium bleakness. 

It's almost impossible to watch any film made in London over the last thirty years without it in some way offering a commentary - however inadvertent - on the city's gentrification, but Naked's choice of locations makes it particularly revealing in this respect.

It begins with a violent sexual encounter in a Manchester backstreet from which Johnny - the film's anti-hero - escapes in a stolen car. In a brilliant opening sequence, he drives to London through the night along an almost deserted motorway before dumping the car by the side of the road somewhere on the outskirts of the city.  Somehow he finds his way to his ex-girlfriend's flat in Dalston*. For the next few days he careers around London, taking in Soho streets, West End offices and a particularly dystopian scene below what looks like a motorway flyover.

I had assumed this latter scene was filmed below the Westway but at the Q+A that followed the film's screening, Mike Leigh revealed it, not without irony, to be Shoreditch. Appropriately enough, these days the same spot comes complete with a pair of decommissioned, graffiti covered tube trains hoisted up on to a warehouse roof and used as studios for hipster design companies

The use of buildings and settings is actually superbly handled throughout. The Dalston flat manages to be both absolutely unremarkable and highly theatrical. The curving flight of stairs up to its elevated front door adds a spatial drama to the frequent comings and goings, as well as the seemingly final departure of Johnny. And the interior, with its weak sunlight creeping in behind curtains, manages to be neither comically scummy nor particularly wholesome. Its ordinary, vaguely but not too obviously unappealing, like any number of flats you might have passed through in your time.

There are two exceptional urban scenes in the film though. The first is filmed in Soho where the camera sits closely cropped on an Italian delicatessen window late at night. There is a general sense of chaotic activity so it takes a while to realise that our attention is being directed to one person in particular. Or rather two, because Johnny, slumped in a doorway is watching the same guy as us, a frantic, aggressive young man marching up and down the road shouting for a missing girl. The familiar desperation of a place like Soho with its fleeting, potentially electric, encounters is captured brilliantly. 

Later on Johnny finds himself in the doorway of an office block, this time being observed by the building's security guard. The guard lets him in, allowing the rather brilliant exchange at the top of this post to take place. 

The two wander the corridors of the empty building, following the monotonous regime of the security guard and exchanging equally tortured theories on life, the universe and everything. As in real life, Johnny's deep cynicism and nihilistic theorising steamroller all over the security guard's vague, hopeful humanism.

A word too about Johnny, who remains one of the best, most compelling film characters ever created. The film is really nothing without him and the other characters don't come close to his complexity and disturbing charisma. This is one of the faults for the film's detractors of course, the fact that Johnny's relenetlessly bullying monologues are never challenged. He rampages through the lives of those around him, smashing away at their already fragile self-esteem and freaking them out with his elaborate, baroque conspiracy theories. 

He is strangely, eerily familiar, like someone you might have genuinely met once in a bar. He's both fascinating and terrifying company, forever waiting for the next person on whom to inflict his frustrations and formidable intelligence in order to undermine whatever weak resolve they may have formed that life is basically worth living.

There are undoubtedly some poorly drawn characters in the film too. The Porsche-driving, sadistic yuppie Sebastian seems comically absurd now, with his endless, sneeringly ludicrous references to sex. "Have you ever eaten smoked salmon after making love?" he asks at one point, as this was both the height of decadence and erotic transgression. And Clare Skinner's stuttering, neurotic control freak of a nurse is rather silly too, putting a speedy end to the madness that has engulfed her flat while she has been away in sit-com style.

* For location geeks, this is at the junction of Shacklewell Lane and Downs Park Road