Familiarity Breeds Contempt
Yet another horrendous piece of graphic design plops through the mat of the poor benighted inhabitants of London’s Olympics boroughs and yet again they as one recoil at the hideosness of the logo. (A hideousness which I want to explain but not reproduce, largely because it makes any page or any screen that it sits on look skewed or cranked.) At the time it was launched, the consensus of course was that the logo was bad because it tried to be youthful, as the comments to this Guardian story at the time make clear. This is certainly the case. The colour palette is bright and vibrant, the pink and yellow is particularly redolent of eighties children’s TV graphics. To continue in a more generous vein, the shadow effect is pure 80s retro which recalls some of the work in Dazed from around the beginning of the decade.
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‘A glowing tribute, Mr. Kidd’
I’m watching the screen. James Bond, his linen jacket hooked over his shoulder on his finger, walks towards us through a sunken courtyard and then a set of glass doors. It’s Diamonds are Forever and he’s about to have a tustle with the female assassin/acrobat team Bambi and Thumper. Except he’s not. The subtitle Elrod House, Palm Springs, California appears on the screen and we realise that this isn’t about James Bond but about the building he is in. Just at the moment when Sean Connery is about to get into a scrap with two semi-clad would-be assassins we cut to Connery as he is today; balder, still a star. He’s holding the remote control which, we suppose has just curtailed our enjoyment of the fight. This is a documentary about architecture but Hollywood is in contol.
Got That Ring of Confidence
This is the plan for the recently completed terminal at Indianopolis Aiport. It’s built in the “midfield” area of the present airport, between the two main runways. The heart of the terminal building is a a central gathering point whose circular shape is deliberately intended to recall the shape of the City’s central public space, Monument Circle. It’s even grandiosely called the civic plaza and is even supposed to provide public event space and enable visitors to sample the character of Indianapolis and the region. It’s topped off with a 61m diameter skylight. The total area of the new terminal is 111,000 square metres. It’s got 40 gates, 10,000 light fixtures and its building from 11,000 tons of stell. It’s got 10 moving walk ways, 23 Elevators and 10 Esclators and 40 departure/arrival gates. The Indianapolis Airport is designed by Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, Inc. otherwise and better known as HOK, the company that used to own HOK Sport which designed the Emirates Stadium and has just changed its name to the frankly daft Populous. Indianopolis cost $1.1 billion to build.
Unfamiliar Playing Ground
Some people find the future boring. But in Seattle, the future looks pretty exciting. Not because of the backdrop of sci-fi speculation symbolised by the Space Needle, but because set within that backdrop is the Seattle Public Library; a building which affirms ones faith in the future. To some people architecture is a straightforward case of aesthetics, a code to signify certain social moments, or political movements which for better or worse are long gone. If you take that approach you could imagine a new public project in the city riffing on this post-war futurism in a cack-handed postmodernist kind of way.
How does it do that? Rem Koolhaas has said that he writes architectural scenarios. This may seem apposite but if we look at how his early work is represented in film, then we can get an idea of why this later public building works so well. In Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s film Koolhaas Houselife we see an apparently critical view of The House in Bordeaux, a seminal project by OMA completed in 1998 seen through the eyes of Guadalupe Acedo, caretaker and cleaner of as she fulfils her daily chores.
These Boys Take Some Beating
They could’ve just said, ‘we pay engineers well in Norway and value their contribution to society’ but they didn’t. This instead is how they advertise for young engineers on the other side of the North Sea. Hydro is a global, integrated aluminium and hydroelectric power company which is as old as the Norwegian state itself. In the early twentieth century when the company was founded Norway was one of the poorest nations in Europe. Now thanks largely to the way it has managed its power resources, distributed its wealth and invested in light and heavy technology, it is one of the richest. Our wealth from the North Sea was used to fill in for the decrease in taxation revenue and increase in our tax burden prompted by the decision to let heavy industry go to the wall and de-regulate our financial markets ; the very system which has just reared up and bit us in the knackers.
Mind you, they can’t get enough of our football on their TV so I suppose these things even out…
I Always Feel Like…
It would be foolish to deny that our public space is increasingly regulated. With Community Police and increased TV surveillance, we not only feel that we’re being watched more, we are being watched more. But in what way exactly? Derm’s series of beautiful prints of CCTV cameras highlights an ambiguity however. Derm’s caught these cameras in isolation or abstracted them to form a floral pattern. He’s not just highlighting their existence but turning them into a beautiful shape. He no doubt hates what they represent but he’s separated them from their intent and, blimey celebrated them as part of our urban environment. Stunning. The series called, Focal Range is in a variety of media including photography, spraypaint and screenprinting.
Read the Manifesto Club’s briefing document on the Hyper-regulation of Public Space if you haven’t already. It is an important document because it highlights the fact that we are losing our autonomy and that this freedom to act is being taken from us by stealth. The opening of the document bears repeating:
Over the past few years, there has been a massive growth in restrictions on drinking in public, including: the ban on boozing on London Tubes and buses, brought through by new Mayor Boris Johnson on 1 June 2008; 613 designated areas of the country where drinking is restricted by local authorities; Scottish bylaws banning drinking from many town centres, beaches and beauty spots; and a ban on bring-your-own (BYO) alcohol at summer music festivals. Similar regulations have been brought through on beaches and town centres in New Zealand and Australia, on San Diego beach in the USA, and in city centres in the Czech Republic.
But what the document also suggests is that we have a responsibility to ensure that we resist the attempts to prevent us from using our public space as we see fit. It asks us to concentrate not on the CCTV’s but the frequently confused application of dubious by-laws. I’m not a believer in a conspiracy of observation. If you want to know how I think we’re being watched, I think it’s part of a clumsy attempt by the authorities to reassure themselves and us, not a big brother style era of government. By watching the watchmen, we’re slowly beginning to understand the psychology of surveillance.
David Aaronovtich has questioned the statistic that we are viewed by 300 cameras on average on the way to work and shot this film with people from Liberty. As he points out at the end, it’s a bit pointless trying to count cameras when you don’t even know if they’re pointed at you. However his comment that cameras reflect our fear of crime rather than our morality gets to the heart of the matter.
If we accept that there is no conspiracy of surveillance, that the array of agencies who own CCTV are as incapable of co-ordinated action on an individual or group then why do we fear them? Why not make pretty of them? We have nothing to fear but some cameras which often aren’t on or even attached to anything. And a slow mission creep by security guards and quasi-policemen.
Catch Focal Range at the Pageant Store in Edinburgh. But hurry, the exhibition runs until Sunday 24th May.
Moving along nicely
I still think that it’s going to be a bit silly when its finished and its wrapped in muslin or whatever. Good to see that the death of the UK construction industry has been somewhat exaggerated.
North vs South VS East vs West
Good ol’ Igster has become the darling of the London Paper and BBC London AND the Metro with this lovely little film, which turns Google’s Streetview into a narrative device as opposed to an orientation device. Tellingly Igster created the film first, taking about 6 hrs to record the footage. Then he sped it up around 1500%. It was only then that the he wrote the song and recorded it with friends as a bit of a laugh.
I’m not a huge fan of the song but the video is brilliant. (It might be worth turning it down.) Without wanting to get too BLDGBLOG about it, the film imagines what it would be like if the underground was overground, which is a nice inversion. It’s a lovely bit of wish fulfillment too speeding through the city. It also neatly references the London to Brighton series of films, which began in 1953 with a 4 minute time lapse of the journey, then went down to three minutes in the 1980s. And then two minutes a bit later. Igster’s journey though was never undertaken by a single individual. It is the result of one individual finding his way through the exhaustive photographic work of a whole fleet of photographers.
Despite having several branch lines, the Northern is still the spine of the city’s transport infrastructure north to south and much improved on the dark days of the 1990s. It would be strange to have it split into two separate lines as was planned, although this does seem to have gone on the back-burner since Crossrail was announced and the Olympics development got undeway. It seems as if London is becoming increasingly divided along its east-west axis by planners rather than its north-south one as it still the way most of its inhabitants do, I think.
