cosmopolitan scum

Jonathan Glancey repeated a few familiar myths about the Berlin Wall when he wrote about it recently. He wrote that  ’what remains of it are a few graffiti-spattered stretches of concrete for tourists to snap one another by’. Certainly much of the actual Wall itself is gone. The East Side Gallery is indeed spattered with graffiti but then how better to treat the last long stretch of a structure designed to keep people apart? (There is surely a whole dissertation to be done about graffiti on the Wall and how it has influenced the art form across Europe.) I’m not trying to do Glancey down. His piece makes a wider point about walls in cities  but the fact is there is more to the Wall today than a ‘ few graffiti-spattered stretches of concrete’.

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it’s hour come round at last, slouches towards Stratford to be born?

As its name suggests, the Ordnance Survey grew out of a military operation: specifically the attempt to control the Highlands of Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1746. A military engineer called Lieutenant Colonel David Watson was charged with conducting the survey under the command of the Duke of Cumberland. The map, which also features a standardisation of spelling and naming, hangs today in the British Museum in London – a picture of how a subjugating force learns about the terrain it must occupy and then conveys that information.

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In the book The Damned United, David Pearce looks at the life of Brian Clough through the prism of perhaps his greatest moment of failure: the famous 44 days he was in charge of Leeds United before being sacked ignominiously. Reading the book is like being trapped inside the head of an alcholic, bent on global domination and a thoroughly good read it is too. The recently releaseed film turns Clough’s hatred outwards and fixates on the relationship he had with Don Revie, the previous Leeds manager; a man who Cloughie considered a cheat.

Colm Meaney does a brilliant version of Revie as the cold-hearted, corporate dullard, letting his wafting syrup do most of the talking. He’s the villain of the piece, the major crime being his midweek hatchett job on Derby County before they play Juventus in the European Cup. In the film this epic battle looks just like it was ripped from another adaptation of a Dave Pearce book, Red Riding, which focuses on violent crime in Yorkshire during the 1970s. Derby went on to lose to Juventus 3-1 in Turin.

Boo. Leeds. Boo. Revie. Hiss.

So well done, Richard Corbett MEP for choosing this as the time to set up a petition to have the Cup Winners Cup Final of that very year handed to Leeds despite the fact that they were beaten 1-0 in the final by AC Milan, because, he says, the ref was dodgy. “Few doubt Milan bribed the Greek official,” he says on his website. Not the best of timings. I wasn’t even born when this happened but the people of that generation I’ve spoken to say Leeds and Revie had it coming. And given the fact that the team he’s championing have just been presented as the biggest villains even in British football, I don’t fancy his chances much.

Check the video above. One dodgy penalty decision seems to be the main cause of complaint. Nice use of Zorba the Greek music.

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.

Reading through Hackney That Rose-Red Empire  it is clear that Iain Sinclair doesn’t feel as if the Olympics was ever able to add to the urban fabric he so brilliantly evokes. It is clear from what is currently happening that it won’t be a good piece of city-building but could it have been? Or is the Olympics ultimately redundant as a piece of infrastructure building. Even Barcelona the city we constantly evoke as a positive Olympics experience is a dubious example. Montjuic, the heart of 1992 has a desolate feel, dominated by Montjuïc Castle where they shot Republicans in the 1940s. Only now its got a bloody great spindle in the middle and a football stadium named after one of those shot Republicans which no-one wants to inhabit. (Espanyol are moving out of town to a new purpose built stadium.)

It is amazing to see a construction site going at full tilt in these troubled times but the psychogeographers perhaps are right one feels without really being able to qualify that Will Self’s words at the end of his article in the Observer Monthly nearly two years ago.

London is too big, too old and too anarchic to have its future determined by the Blair regime’s Six-Year Plan. They may make compulsory purchases, tarmac over the sports pitches, roust out the travellers’ encampments and tidy the urban detritus under their magic finance carpet, but very quickly it will all come tumbling back, the steely weeds of a city that has defied everything that god, men or even planners can throw at it.

There are some beautiful images in Laura Oldfield Ford’s exhibition at the Hales Gallery. But some even more pertinent ones in issue number 10 of the excellent Savage Messiah zine which really capture the idea of the place as it will be when the crowd’s empty and its entirely governed by security guards in a constant struggle to keep out the artists, the ravers and the homeless. I find that argument considerably more compelling than EDAW’s recently released vision of the area in 2040. (Watch out for frankly terrifying road safety ad at the beginning of the clip.)

In his book Non-Places which has just been republished in a second English language edition, Marc Augé describes the current dominant aesthetic of architecture as “an aesthetic of distance that tends to make us overlook all the effects of rupture”. I hadn’t really understood what he meant until I watched EDAW’s video.

I am all for critics and theorists divining deeper social currents in the architecture we build. I am all for people bemoaning stalled projects as a symbol of a recession. Blimey, I don’t even mind it when people find a symbolism in the architecture we destroy.

But what makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is saying a fire is the sign of a greater economic malaise. (Now if it had been burned down by militant anti-capitalists there would be a significance. But it clearly wasn’t.) People who come up with this crap have spent too much time in front of a computer. The TVCC was not just about the production of an image, it was a building with a far more interesting story to it than the symbolic significance they’ve ascribed to it. The TVCC and the CCTV were built by Chinese State Television –  a new, public access HQ and studio complex with an adjacent hotel and museum. Why does the destruction of the smaller part of it by fire symbolise the end of a capitalist led construction boom in the West? 

Chinese construction may have slowed but give it 2 years. And the price of iron will be back near $100 a tonne and the medium sized towns of China will be experiencing the development boom that Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have.