entschwindet und vergeht

Wednesday, 30 May 2012

Nachtmusik

Struggling along with musical things.

I've previously transcribed a small section of Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, which as you probably already know was put to great use by Keiller in 'London'.

But Keiller also used Brahm's Alto Rhapsody in the film, indeed, it's the very first piece of music one encounters in the film, staring across from London Bridge towards Tower Bridge, with the Celine-baiting "It is a journey to the end of the world" as the opening line. Music for Keiller frequently seems to be used with very specific meanings, the 'convalesence' of the Beethoven presumably corresponding to the cure for the 'malady' of London (as well as the script's specific reference to convalescence when Robinson first comes back out after the Tory victory), while one can draw parallels between Robinson in Space's analytical study of the aesthetics of British capitalism and the desperate job-seeker music from Kuhle Wampe.
And then the Alto Rhapsody crops up again in Keiller's exhibition at the Tate (which I CANNOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH), with a pair of headphones allowing you to listen to Kathleen Ferrier singing Goethe's tale of peripatetic woe while also looking at an image of the lichen which may or may not be a silhouette of the great German polymath.
As you can imagine, it was buzzing around in my head for a while, so I thought that I'd try to get a little bit of it down, so here are the first few bars or so. One could probably keep going but there is never enough time...

And then Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died. As someone said, perhaps the very last 'great' voice that there will be. One shouldn't be too sad - he lifted the hearts of millions and lived to a very grand old age, but I felt moved enough to quickly bash out a little Schubert song - 'An die Musik', with the final line "Du holde Kunst, Ich danke dir dafür!"

And also a little sketch I made using the sound of people milling about and drinking outside my flat, with a quasi-late romantic dressing. I'm not sure where something like this leads to, but perhaps it's the beginnings of an attempt to understand the difference between the quotidian and the romantic, with particular regard to the different poles of artistic satisfaction and metaphysical dread. Or something.

Sunday, 27 May 2012

More Olympic cash in tie in nonsense

Some more stuff relating to the Olympics then, which I'm just sure you're pleased to hear. The Olympics seems to be taking up much of my writing life at the moment, with at least three Olympic texts/talks in the last month, various articles, a talk and a number of talking head appearances. I suppose that you could say this was cashing in, in a way, taking advantage of what's going on to boost my profile. But that's nonsense, because as a critic, or at least a journalist, one isn't really supposed to just have an informed opinion about anything you feel like, but one is expected to be informed about what is going on at that point. The olympics are happening, I'm writing and talking about them a lot.

But one of the things I've noticed recently is that this sort-of passive attitude towards the Olympics is actually rather prevalent, including within some of the Olympic organisations themselves. In much the same way that Ken Livingstone thought that the investment and deadlines brought by the Olympics would be the only possible way to get some funding into East London, or indeed that in their more compassionate moments the Blairite nonces thought that the private sector's greedy dynamism would bring in enough cash to redistribute around, so many people seem to consider the Olympics a rather destructive force of nature which they are nonetheless attempting to harness to make some kind of positive change in their area.

In a way this is the flip-side of 'trickle down'; that idea that always seems to be a fairly flimsy fig-leaf for old fashioned acquisitive greed has also its mirror in the belief that one can harness a greedy force for the people. This is the logic of 'affordable housing', of section 106 agreements - there is a profit motive, but if you can skim some of the froth off of a capitalist's investment, you can do some good.

But of course that's nonsense. In the end, the Olympics, like most of these things, is a gravy train for some, with everyone else picking up the pieces. All the re-paved streets and refurbished community centres that it provides are entirely dwarfed by the rent catastrophes, removal of public space and increase in 'security' that has come with it, to name but a few things.

I got into an argument recently with a bunch of people from a certain popular PR website, who have been promoting a series of features on local Hackney designers with an Olympic theme. Never mind the fact that Hackney is but one of the Olympic boroughs, albeit the most gentrified, but my problem was the basic and rather incontrovertible fact that if you're a designer who lives or works in Hackney, the Olympics is making your life worse (unless you happen to be a property owning Hackney designer, but frankly if you are it's because you were already rich, which is a different problem). Not only in terms of the way that it has starved arts and culture funding, upon which so many Hackney art & culture workers depend, but also in terms of the suffocating influence it is having on property and rent prices, meaning that so many skint designers are leaving the area entirely. However, pointing out the fact that promoting these people with a pageant that is negatively effecting them is a little bit hypocritical was enough to get all manner of accusations flying my way, from being a negative-ninny sniping from the sidelines, to simply being jealous of these people who are 'doing something'.

And in a way, they're right: what is the difference between me making money writing about this mess, and these people promoting others' good works using the fact that the Olympics is around? Well, it's the difference between pointing out how pathetic this whole situation is, £9+ billion for a private park, mega-mall, luxury housing and missiles deployed everywhere, and swallowing your pride, shouting "OLYMPICS YAY!" and getting on the dirty train as it sweeps by.

And all that stuff I said about the Orbit, years ago now, has come to pass. It was publicly unveiled recently, and there was all manner of public attention on the thing, with Anish Kapoor actually admitting that it was a 'deconstructed tower' (whose curves are surely generated by the spinning of Derrida's grave), and various people being sent my way for a soundbite. I've got plenty to add, and I'll send it all your way when it comes around soon, but in the meantime I took some photos of the Orbit recently, which are somewhat different to the usual ones you might see.

Because let us not forget that this thing, this aesthetic nullity, it has been inflicted upon us, capriciously, by that ruthlessly bumbling thug Boris Johnson, and the country's richest 19th century industrialist throwback Lakshmi Mittal, and we're supposed to be grateful!

And let's not forget that although it sits in that lovely new park, it is surrounded by some of the poorest parts of all of Europe.

This photograph, I think, has a rather serendipitous aspect to it. Note the resonance with the barbed wire, apt, if a little basic, but compare the Orbit to the railway power gantries in the middle distance. One thing that is most irritating about the Orbit is that it largely draws its basic language from utilitarian engineering architecture; spaceframes, tubular steel, factories, sheds, etc. It's ALMOST an aesthetic transfiguration of that world, but it doesn't work - we know that the loops came first, which were then worked upon to turn them into structures.
Perhaps this is the problem - the Orbit isn't just an inept piece of public art, indeed, I've frequently said that its ugliness is perhaps the LEAST interesting thing about it. But in its childish twists it almost carries within it a hint, a fragment of what a genuinely interesting reevaluation of the aesthetics of utilitarian structure would look like, but it seems to have been approached from every single possible wrong angle.

Saturday, 28 April 2012

In the Park

Well, if you ever wanted to know what I look like, here's me talking for a short film that Frieze made about the Olympics and art.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

The Ally Pally

I've been busy lately. One job, two jobs, three jobs at certain times. The book is now 'launched': thanks to all who came out to see me, either in London or in Oxford, they were both great nights with some lovely people there.

The last few months have been a maelstrom of stresses and various worries of one kind or another, some pointlessly conjured out of thin air but also some of them genuine concerns, not least of which was a prolonged period of quasi-homelessness which began at Christmas and will only be properly over by April. My return from Oxford recently was a strange experience in that I had nowhere to go until much later I was due to stay on the couch of a friend. With me I had a large, ugly purple rucksack filled with clothes that I had recently washed, my hard-worked leather satchel (manbag!) and a black canvas bag containing my battered old laptop and a bottle of whisky which had been given to me the previous night in Oxford after my lecture.

From Paddington, London's rail gateway to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, it's only a short walk to St. George's Fields, perhaps the most exclusive of all the London modernist estates. Gated away and hidden behind various terraces, it's very easy to not even notice that these buildings exist.

Sitting literally across the road from Hyde Park, St George's Fields were, according to wikpedia, designed by Patrick Hodgkinson (of the Brunswick Centre fame) although it's not clear that this is actually the case. Nevertheless, the buildings share an obvious similarity to the Brunswick Centre and also Stoneleigh Terrace, although in this example they are set in a deconsecrated graveyard which is verdant and introverted, rather than having a public shopping space or pedestrian street in between them.

It's a really rather strange situation - modernist housing like this is routinely decried as being inhumane, 'brutal' etc etc, and yet people are more than willing to pay ridiculous sums to live in them, when someone like me or perhaps you, who genuinely appreciates architecture like this, hasn't a hope in hell of ever being able to afford it. It's an infuriatingly tantalising problem, in that London's modernist housing is simultaneously reviled and desired, degenerate and luxurious. Standing there in the mews lane that you see above, carrying all the possessions that I required to get by for another week or so, I saw a father pushing a pram into the gate which he then shut behind him, and felt utterly crushed by London's mute resistance to special pleading.

But one shouldn't write these things just to moan about silly problems.

Eventually, after a quick lunch in one of those identikit Australian-style coffee shops seemingly everywhere now, all flat-whites and butternut squash, I boarded a bus, one of the very first that came along. I had the vague urge to travel north, but for what reason I wasn't sure, perhaps something to do with achieving some altitude and looking back down. The lack of terrain in London can sometimes feel oppressive - not only because of the inability to see further than the next set of buildings, but also in the very monotony of its flood plain - London can seem like an artificial environment, without topography. Eventually after maybe half an hour's motorised drift I began to pass through streets I didn't immediately recognise (always a privilege when you've lived in London for years and haven't frequent opportunities to wander like you used to), before emerging in Muswell Hill.

And then a tiny glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye suddenly made perfect sense, so I disembarked and headed towards the Alexandra Palace.

A guilty feeling - I've may have written a book about iron & glass architecture but until that day I had never visited Alexandra Palace, one of the last surviving beasts of that era. It'll be up to others to judge whether this is a terrible omission on my part, however the actual visit felt like a complete vindication of the arguments from the book. Strangely, it also reminded me of another visit to another building I'd made and written about, at what now feels like a remarkably different time in my life, of which more later.

The Alexandra Palace was not a particularly original building when it was conceived, not only because iron & glass fever was already well under way, but because it was literally recycled, being built from the remains of the 1862 International Exhibition, held on a site which is now occupied by the Natural History Museum (indeed, the dismantling and recycling of iron & glass buildings was remarkably common and is perhaps something that I should have paid more attention to in the book). The 1862 Exhibition was the inevitable let down after the glory and back slapping of the 1851 Great Exhibition, with the architecture unappreciated, the finances in the red and the establishment still in mourning for the death of Prince Albert. It took ten years to resurrect this exhibition building as a 'Palace for the People' up on Muswell Hill (at that point a number of miles outside of London, to be accessed by a newly built railway), and it wasn't ready until 1873.

And, like so many other iron and glass buildings, it was brought down by fire, not even two weeks after it was opened. Reconstruction began almost right away however, in a typically Victorian gesture of bravado and arrogance, and it took just around 2 years to complete again, to a modified design.

This rebuilt palace lasted until the turn of the 20th century, when it had to be rescued by the local authority as it was due to be sold for redevelopment. In this it was both typical and atypical of iron & glass buildings, as all but a few of them were lost around the turn of the 20th century, unable to earn their keep, perhaps too utopian in their attempts to entertain, inform and 'improve' their audiences. Instead, the Alexandra Palace would carry on, with its mishmash of entertainments struggling to properly occupy its vast spaces.

But then one thing that makes Alexandra Palace quite so architecturally interesting is the fact that it partially burned down again in 1980, necessitating yet another rebuild. This, combined with various adaptations over the years (including the adding of a BBC transmitter), mean that it has become a smorgasbord of different architectural methods and styles ranging over a 140 year period - something that hasn't really happened much since the middle ages, when cathedrals took over a century to complete and their design was passed from mason to mason across generations.

In the book, and in a recent article for Icon magazine, I make the argument for a notion of 'abstract ruins'. What is meant by that is that many of the aesthetic qualities that are appreciated in the ruined building are to be found in the architecture of iron & glass: fragmentation, disjunction, foliage, fragility and lightness are just some of the associations brought forth by 'the Ruin' that are present in these buildings, with the crucial difference that the iron & glass buildings were built like that, were fully functioning even as they embodied such incomplete formal languages.

Also in the book I utilise the existing distinction between 'pure' iron & glass, eg the Crystal Palace, where above the foundations the building is entirely ferro-vitreous, and 'mixed' construction, where iron & glass is held back behind more conventional masonry structures. This I understand to show a certain retreat away from the extreme dematerialisation of a Crystal Palace towards an architecture more in tune with Victorian attitudes to monumentalism, and is played out in the fact that 19th century railway stations were invariably stuck behind eclectic classical masonry buildings which integrated their vast transitory spaces back into the existing architectural logic.

According to this conception the Alexandra Palace is a step backward, as it was initially a highly composed ensemble of masonry with a typically ecclesiastical arrangement of iron & glas galleries behind; unlike the Crystal Palace which shocked the public and the critics with its very fragility and lack of monumentality, the Alexandra Palace could be easily compared to the heavyweight confections that were common in the late 19th century despite the lightweight hi-tech environments behind its bricks and stones. But on visiting I was taken aback by just how strange a building it actually is now, a strangeness that one wouldn't find at Kew, to take an example of a surviving 'pure' iron & glass building.

I was fortunate enough to come across the great hall when a door was being held open by workmen, and an event was being set up inside. The shadows that pass diagonally across the translucent surface are those of the actual structure of the main hall, which was rebuilt as a large but simple triangular trussed structure after the 1980 fire. The strange fabric here seems to serve three purposes: it blocks excessive solar gain from the glazed roof, it creates a mimic (a ghost, even!) of the form of the hall that existed before the fire, and it no doubt has acoustic benefits as well - the Crystal Palace Company had to install a large canopy above its orchestra after their first Handel festival because the space was so reverberant as to be near-useless as a concert hall.

And then that emptiness that I've identified again and again and again - being drastically overwhelmed by a space that is too large. As I've said before; ruins generally have it, Crystal Palace Park has it, the vast axiality of its layout highlighting the void where the palace ought to be, and Alexandra Palace has it - the large pub with only two patrons, the empty halls, the huge spaces in front of the building with only a couple of people strolling around: it's as if the 'windswept plazas' that are such a cliche of criticisms of soviet architecture actually present themselves whenever there is an egalitarian spirit guiding construction.

Apparently the ongoing financial woes of the Alexandra Palace have much to do with an overspend on the rebuilding after 1980, meaning that even now it has the Damoclesian sword of redevelopment hanging above it, but it has to be said that the palace was looking in pretty bad state...

... with brickwork spalling, with car parks running up against the building in places and large areas including what should be main entrances gated off and inaccessible.

Large expanses of windowless dingy wall made it seem almost like a medieval fortress, having not been cleaned for a long time, ill-used, unloved.

With windows frequently blocked off, covered over, looking for all the world like a dilapidated country house.

And when I had that thought, I realised something: very soon after I started writing this blog-thing, indeed one of the first serious posts I wrote at all was about a ruined country house in Worcestershire that I had visited named Witley Court. What interested me there were all the different spatial strategies that had been enlisted in the service of making that dangerous and derelict building into a stable, safely enjoyable ruin. I explored these, and wondered about identifying and deploying these strategies in architecture that wasn't in a real sense ruined. What had been unconsciously nagging me as I walked around the Alexandra Palace was that it felt uncannily like walking around Witley Court, a juxtaposition five years and all manner of events later, a memory of a beautiful day seen from the wrong side of time. Having just come to the end of a years-long period of dull anticipation for the launch of the book, the conception of which was born with the initial attempts at writing seriously about architecture of which the Witley Court essay was one of the first, there was something timely about this revelation, something appropriate in its sudden welling up, some kind of symbolic cyclicality which was patently false but was a gentle little phantasm to entertain briefly.

While I don't really have much hope of being able to express how that strange temporal neatness felt, I can briefly explain how it manifested itself through reference to the 'architectural tropes' of creating ruins that I had identified previously.

What about the use of one type of structure to support another? Seen here is a steel beam holding masonry walls apart after they have lost their roof structure, a disjunctive substitution of structural method, switching materials and structural behaviour seemingly capriciously.

This can also be seen in the rough juxtaposition of the TV tower which seems like some kind of growth out from what used to be a water tower, and makes no real attempt to resolve itself with the existing building. Its strange 30s bay window and its spindly pylon just simply do not belong to the building, yet have been there since 1936.

Or how about the space frame that covers this one-storey tent-like addition to the building in the area that was most recently burned out? You know how much I enjoy a good space frame.

This image I think is worth a close look - see the steel structure holding up the external wall at this goods yard, and note the awkward way in which the cabin spaces nuzzle up against the wall. This triple structural system both resembles the ruin-space of Witley Court, hold up masonry walls that have lost their lateral support and are in danger of fallling in, but also puts me in mind of the rudimentary futurism of Cedric Price, who in 2007 I wasn't familiar with but who I would later discuss in the book. Price seems to me to be who Richard Rogers would be if Richard Rogers actually behaved according to his own rhetoric. This compelling an-aesthetic that you can see here is akin to the quality in Price's attempts at real architecture that I called 'deliriously dreary'; Frill-less yet exciting.

Then the openings and coverings of various areas that were once perhaps proper openings, now completely out of their original functional contexts...

Not quite inside, not quite outside, industrial-type walkways sneaking in and around the building.

(I hope Reyner would approve)

And then of course that old mainstay of the ruin aesthetic, the window which frames only sky, which creates screens rather than envelopes, a kind of indefiniteness of where the building ends, a fragmentary condition.

And I suppose that's what it comes down to in the end; fragments. What the stabilised ruin and the overwhelmingly compromised iron & glass palace have in common is this inability to tell a comprehensive architectural statement, this conflict between different elements and methods, this language of incompleteness. But in the fragment is the potential for a different kind of completeness, an alternative. One of the main reasons that the physical language of ruination is interesting is not because of its mournful aesthetic posture, but because it is one of the only ways that architecture is able to express the sense that things could be changed, could be different. Ruins have this sense of fragmentary spark, and I hope that in the book I have convincingly argued that iron & glass buildings have it too. What I found at the Alexandra Palace was that in its current state the palace managed to merge these two different ways of achieving the same aesthetic condition into one massive lonely environment.

And we'll have to wait to see what the next 5 years will bring, I suppose.

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

At Long Last!

I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but there are two events coming up in the next week which you may or may not be interested in.

Firstly: tomorrow, the 23rd of February, there will be a little launch party at Daniel Blau Gallery on Hoxton Square, and it would be lovely to see you if you wanted to pop down.

Secondly: on Tuesday the 28th of February, I will be giving a talk about the book as part of the Zero Books Lecture Series Oxford. The talk will be at 5:30pm in room 10b at the Taylorian Institute, Oxford.

Maybe see you there!

Friday, 3 February 2012

Adrift

Och, it's hard, it's hard. Time is a valuable substance and it's hard to hold it. Activity swells up and sucks it in like a dry sponge, and this writer's life is rather desiccated at the moment. I suppose it's to be expected, what with the struggles that are ongoing, but it can't be denied that we're all getting less for more. This blog, this strange vehicle for something or other, has been spluttering along ever more slowly and now appears to be grinding to a halt, drying up, vanishing.

In the meantime, here's some pictures of Ashington House, Bethnal Green, by Noel Moffett, c.1970.

Friday, 27 January 2012

Saturday, 31 December 2011

A partial reading list from 2011

I use Google reader, which means that I have a big long list of posts that I was too busy at the time to read, but which I went back to later. The following list is of some of the most interesting things I read in the last year, by no means exhaustive or even remotely comprehensive, but hopefully of interest nonetheless. In a year in which some of the best voices online stopped writing at all, for whichever and whatever reasons, then it's nice to know that some people were still working, discussing and working out ideas in that now-decrepit medium.

Between Channels
This unnamed blogger has been sharing with us their collections of vernacular architectural photography from the post-war period. Dusty & lugubrious, their hoards of images are glimpses of the frequent surreal drabness of Britain's social democracy experiment, of frequently beautiful marketplaces and new town shopping centres.

Stevenage and Wembley 68
Concrete
Covered Markets of Olde England
Friars Square Shopping Precinct (part 2)

The Medium and the Message
Technically this isn't really a blog, in that it is the online page where BBC employee Adam Curtis posts up notes from his researches, but that's not such a problem when it is so relentlessly interesting. In 2011 Curtis became pretty controversial amongst the left for his sprawling, ludicrously ambitious, but frequently tenuous 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace', but he also regularly posted up fascinating archive videos dredged up from the BBC archive, reflecting upon the various unfolding shocks of the year.

Sadat's Dat
The Curse of Tina (I)
The Curse of Tina (II)
Dream On
The Ghost of the Colonels

Fantastic Journal
It wasn't really a good year for architecture writing online, as output slowed to pretty much nothing more than a dribble. One bucker of that trend was Charles Holland's 'Fantastic Journal'. Charles managed to keep the 'mordant photo essay' flame alive, as well as various posts which were great reading, including a really great piece on the palm house at Kew Gardens.

This is a Gateway
Guide to the Not So Modern Buildings of London
Pre and Post Modernism
Around the World

Bauzeitgeist
Another trend-bucker, Bauzeitgeist was both reasonably new and reasonably prolific, with some excellent analyses of American architecture, and also, perhaps more useful for ignorants like myself, of African architecture and urbanism. Strong, systematic and frequently excoriating.

Container Stores
Guardian of Guangzhou
The Corporate Parks of Kevin Roche

Charnel House
Speaking of systematic; nobody has has been providing more in-depth architecture writing than Ross Wolfe. A brilliantly generous scholar of early Soviet architecture, he has been posting up all manner of essay, research, analysis and image scans, which if you can give it time is unsurpassed. However, if ultra-left purism is not your thing then you might find his frequent arguments and intellectual hatchet jobs a little hard to digest, but it's more than offset by the density of the academic work.

At the Intersection of Nature and Architecture -Modernism’s Response to the Alienation of Man

Bat Beam Bean

Once a week, Giovanni Tiso publishes an essay on all manner of topics, although with a particular focus on technology and memory. I simply cannot recommend his writing enough.

The Decades

A consensus amongst those I know seems to be that one of the only positive developments in blog-writing this year was the institution of the decade blogs:

and what will be left of them? (1970s)

Faces on Posters / Too Many Choices (1980s)

Up Close and Personal (1990s)

With a rotating cast of writers and an open editorial policy, if you want to find idiosyncratic and intellectually exciting historical and cultural analysis I don't know of anything better right now. Sometimes it can be utterly off the wall in ways only blog writing could ever be (the Heideggerian implications of Level 42, anyone?), but that is said as an entirely positive thing.

The Unlikely Lads

Last Words

If you can remember the 1990s you weren't there

As a Good Socialist I'm Going Where the Money is

The Punctuation, was Weird

The Dining Room in the Oil Rig

And last but not least...

The Future (according to Google)
XKCD's utterly terrifying graphical representation of the googlemind's vision of what is to come.

Friday, 30 December 2011

Collected Icon Articles : 2011

In the interests of neatness, here are links to all of my Icon stories that have been posted up online in 2011. There are more not shown here that are buried in back-copies of the magazine (and a few more recent issues), and furthermore there are longer, more involved articles which are unlikely to be published online any time soon. But if you like reserved, bite size reviews of buildings and architectural ideas, then here you go: