cosmopolitan scum

It can often seem that digital photography is actively affecting architecture. As if buildings were being made to suit a world in which we can take a lot of good pictures quickly and then ping them around the world via the internet. This is only half the story. If you look at the early paintings of Zaha Hadid we see her explore her beloved construcitivists. She does so by exploding them, fragmenting them and viewing them from multiple viewpoints. Eisenman’s work with Derrida on Chora L Works looks at ways of subverting architecture’s system of delivering a single meaning through formal play.

In this way, architecture lags behind the visual arts. Photography’s influence on early 20th century painting is now clear to us. The Cubists were creating forms which acknowldged a basic tenet of modernity, that objects were perceived simultaneously from a multitude of viewpoints. The architectural movement known as deconstructivism, which began in the 1980s, was merely an architectural rationalisation of this. Of course desconstructivism was an exploration of new technical possibilities in architecture, but it was also an attempt to escape a straightforward meaning.

Deconstructivism proffers numerous facets to the world at any one time. Look at me this way, I’m one thing. Look at me the other way, I’m another thing. The Deconstructivists sought to escape providing a clear meaning in their architecture; to be captured in one shot and interpreted. Yet digital photography has progressed to such a stage that it can capture all these moments and not only that it can provide the moment that most suits the argument of an editor or a journalist.

Does architecture try and stay one step ahead of its reader? Or should it just give in and express meaning clearly?

Bad architecture – who would have it? None of us. Who though would create a whole blog dedicated to what is supposed to be the worst of it? This guy. It all seems very straightforward.

I hate how noone ever talks about how bad British architecture really is. I hate the bastards who make these buildings. So here I am, taking the piss out of them.

Yet there is something about the quality of the images and the profusion of them, that seems rather odd. This guy is clearly being sent these pictures because they don’t seem to be gleaned from the web, suggesting he is probably already working on a journal of some kind.

I am not sure which publication it is, but I would guess it was one of those who didn’t bang on endlessly about “how bad British architecture really is”. Indeed he is probably making his living from “the bastards who make these buildings.”

What really leads me to believe he’s a journalist is the fact that he’s divorced from reality. No,this isn’t pretty, but it wasn’t made by an architect and for a engineered shed, it’s not that fucking bad.

Whether he’s a journalist or not is hardly the point. What he’s doing is passing judgement on things he’s just seen pictures of and evincing some glib little bourgeois peccadilloes along the way. “Things I hate about this building include the downpipe” – oooh, well back in the knife draw Miss Sharp. Elsewhere we get some horrendously pseudy architectural criticism.

The ashlar stonework (a solid material) walls are expressed as planes (amplifying their thinness and lack of structural intent) in a completely unintentional paradox.

Which is just utterly glib. Who says ashlar stonework has to represent thickness and “structural intent” – whatever that is? If you are going to do these things, do them properly. Go and see these buildings. Tell us what they are like. Don’t just parp away in your office in Central London over a skinny mocha, you metropolitan little f***.

The Lost Tribes of New York City

This is a beautiful little film which, no doubt, will be ripped off very shortly for an advertising campaign. Ostensibly its a groovy New York version of Nick Park’s Aardman work, specifically Creature Comforts. However, its got a lot more charm than that and it works on many levels. One thing that I love about it though is the way it acknowledges the personality of a city’s immediate architecture; the focus it places on the incidental, accidental beauty of the street and how important that is to the enjoyment of a place.

New York is really more about these phone boxes and newspaper stands than the skyscrapers. The latter are impossible to take in other than as a general presence looming over ones head. As a consequence I thought New York felt strangely quiet when I went there because of these big sentinels leering down on you from another age. The only way you can really take in a skyscraper is like this or as an image in a magazine or a book. 

It also highlights the importance of the individual personality to the history of a place. These are the people that have made New York. It’s also a brilliant piece of animation and… weirdly found through a link posted by er, Russell Brand, on his *cough* Twitter… I should hang my head in shame, I know. But hey, good film. And its made by a couple called the Londons. Good work, people.

East Lothian, 2009.