President Jimmy Carter beneath the solar panels on the West Wing.

I read White Noise recently and noticed by chance that Picador have bizarrely just published a 40th anniversary edition of Don DeLillo’s book, although it was first published in 1985. Perhaps it is the accumulated prescience of the book that is urging them to bring forward its anniversary. Certainly we are only beginning to appreciate the importance of a book which manages to give a portrait of an American academic and his relatively happy family in such a way as to depict the deep crisis in modernity. Martin Amis went someway to acknowledging its power when in reviewing the later book Underworld in the New York Times in 1997 when he referred to White Noise as “that beautifully tender anxiety-dream”.

Given that it portrays a society on the verge of collapse, how can the book still be pertinent (nearly) 40 years later? Because, firstly, that society it depicted never collapsed, was never going to. Secondly because that society is still in that anxious state nearly four decades later. In White Noise, DeLillo is one of the first writers to instinctively understand that instability, quixotically, is a condition of an affluent society that has no collective understanding of its direction: a sense of imminent collapse is the result of the material foundation of modernity suddenly being questioned. Diane Johnson in her review of the book also in the New York Times says that the book prefigures Bhopal. It does no such thing. Bhopal was a real disaster, the ‘airborne toxic event’ in in DeLillo’s book is a disaster which is being managed as if it was a simulation.

Wells Office, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, architect Malcolm Wells.

John N. Duvall writes in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, “[He] has a rare gift for historicizing our present, a gift that empowers engaged readers to think historically themselves.” Whilst he was not actively capable of clairvoyance, Duvall is absolutely correct. More than any environmental disaster to come, the book emerges from the unease prompted by the first oil crisis of 1973 , prompted by the Yom Kippur War in Israel and then the further bout of insecurity prompted by the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that preceded it. Not only did this prompt a questioning of geopolitical relationships hitherto seen as secure but it also prompted a questioning of the physical infrastructure of America itself – its roads and its housing.

Michael Reynolds, architect. Turbine House, Taos, New Mexico.
Photograph © Michael Reynolds, 2007.

Mirko Zardini, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture has posited in a series of fascinating texts and exhibitions of which Sorry Out of Gas is the most directly pertinent that the oil crisis prompted a profound questioning of the modern project. Social programmes in the West until that time were predicated on a steady improvement in material wealth, mobility and technological advance. The Oil Crisis threw that in to question. Rather than directing criticism at the unequal distribution of the benefits of modernity, from this point on, social criticism began to be directed at the pernicious effect of modernity itself. What was just a bunch of drop-outs in the 1960s is ripe in 1973 for addressing a panic in Western states.

Steve Baer, designer. House of Steve Baer, Corrales, New Mexico, 1971.
Photography © Jon Naar, 1975/ 2007.

In Sorry Out of Gas we see in architectural terms the impact of this event on planning, particularly of homes. Individuals like Steve Baer – an inventor of passive solar devices and Mike Reynolds an architect and builder of houses made of old car tires packed with dirt- creating domestic structures with features which would permit a direct relationship with nature. As much as they represent considered responses to fears over imagined shortages of traditional building materials, they also sit in remote landscapes or are hidden in the earth. There is a physical remove from social interaction. Baer and Reynolds in particular have considered the unit they are building for to be the family.

Indeed it strikes me that White Noise analyses these newly configured elations between society and family, nature and man, in a way that provides a critical tool for analysing these domestic structures. It is telling too that the American family takes the full-weight of this anxiety in the book.  “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.”

Obviously this has a political significance both in terms of relations within states and between states. Caroline Maniaque-Benton, associate professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, has written persuasively about the development of an architecture which was prompted by “a desire for autonomy from the state and its infrastructure.” And yet we also see this desire for autonomy for the wider global system of oil consumption at the heart of the US government with Jimmy Carter installing solar power on to the roof of the White House. Carter makes an architectural response against the US drift towards – what he deemed as embroilment – in the Middle East.

American President Jimmy Carter dedicates the White House solar panels, 20 June 1979. Photograph © Jimmy Carter Library.

The attempt to retreat from the wider world, the domestic turn of environmentalism, are intimated in White Noise in a way we are only just beginning to appreciate. What book and architectural exhibition is an understanding the family, far from being in a Freudian sense, the source of neurosis. It is in fact a site on to which social disquiet is projected.

The key image in Milan this year was, as it has been before, at the Design Academy Eindhoven exhibition near Porto Romana. Ostensibly a product, it was in fact a sign, both in a literal sense and the way in which it gave an indication of the culture informing the rest of the work around it. Gero Asmuth’s sign project could be read as warning signs. A long literal landscape graphic in the long established block format of road signage shows the everyman figure holding back a tide of blue. Another shows a wave of water rising up in a ribbon to be held by the block figure in his arms. We are so used to being told that mankind is a threat to nature and consequently that nature is a threat to mankind that they could be mistaken for being a warning to man for his hubris for thinking he can control nature.

This is not the case. On one level it is very specific, the Netherlands, of course lies below sea level. You would think that the Dutch would have an acute and ready sense that much of their coastal land has been rescued from the sea by land management – the fabled dykes. Yet Asmuth contends that “few people realise how much work is involved in keeping the nation’s feet dry.”  His signs have been devised to indicate where man has intervened in the Dutch landscape. On one level, it is utterly self-evident that this would be obvious. And yet throughout what much of one sees in Milan it is clearly not appreciated.

Take this beautiful work of textile print design by the spectacularly talented Ying Wu from the RCA. As beautifully drafted and executed as the image is, it tells a story of an apocalypse; of man sheltering inside the skeleton of a giant turtle after environmental armageddon.This is not design as such. It is an art piece celebrating a moment of the thrill of impending doom – like a Mexican Day of Death piece. Indeed the logic of the picture is more in a celebration of death than any political comment. Where it goes wrong is the table beneath festooned with Coke cans wrapped in similar images. ‘You know what will happen if you don’t recycle?’ Wu appear to be saying. ‘Living inside dead turtles, that’s where.’

We aren’t able to contemplate death as our own end, it has to be mankind. At the Be Open Future talks at the Universitario degli Studia, Clare Brass of the SEED Foundation outlined her vision of how food waste could be turned into compost and how it could become a product in a token based economy. Never mind that thousands of allotment owners and gardeners already do this as part of their own informal system, but to address her fundamental belief that – and I quote directly here – “the over-buying of food is a crime against humanity”. Given that any human being who has the ability to over-buy food, does so, this criminalises humankind as a whole.

Certainly no-one like to waste money but it does seem strange that there is a language of criminality around consumption. Perhaps it is worth acknowledging that it was a misanthropic clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus that first drafted this vision of mankind as a stain upon the earth at the end of the 19th Century. His adherents have co-opted that language since. Brass overlooks the fact that food is produced by man’s endeavour in agriculture; by the human act of planting, nurturing and growing on a mass scale. If one is going to adopt the language of sin, and say that the wastage of food being a crime, surely the ability of man to support an expanding population is a virtue?

And whilst it is a perfectly valid experience to design for disaster; one wonders whether applying the principles of design to these events is in fact a means of trying to validate the profession in a time of doubt. Certainly that is the impression one gets from the cumbersome Heat Rescue Disaster Recovery project by Hikaru Imamura at the Design Academy exhibition. This storage drum contains relief goods but can be transformed on-site into a stove to burn any scraps of wood or refuse. “The availability of warmth directly improves the quality of life for refugees and offers them mental solace, as it acts as a social meeting point,” she says. To which one might say, so would a fire….

The Eindhoven show is invariably one of the best events at the Fuori Saloni; a series of ad hoc exhibitions set in temporary spaces and showrooms in the city, away from the main trade event. More than the big show at the fair ground, these small exhibitions provide an opportunity for understanding the ideas that are not only informing the manufacture of the latest products but also the manufacture of a next generation of designers. The Design Academy at its best was always able to articulate and frequently reconcile the tensions between design and its discontents. It’s students explored the dialogue between the production of material solutions to social needs or desires and abstract ruminations on the perceived shortcomings of that relationship through making things.

This year despite excellent work such as Imamura’s other project creating toys for intensive care users and Tom Loois’s App To Explore the Unknown, one felt that the school was in danger of losing sight of the first part of that equation. A salutary corrective was provided by the Japan Creative exhibition that has been made in the shadow of the Tsunami. The stand out piece on show was by Paul Cocksedge working with engineers at Pioneer to create a haunting piece which makes great use of their organic light emitting diode technology, which can shift in colour and tone subtly. There is a certain funereal quality to the Shadowtime clock in which the OLED light is diffused through Japanese paper but it is effectively a marriage between the exuberant and the restrained; the ancient and the new.

It takes a certain quality to keep making beautiful things in the face of disaster, but it is an essential attribute. Writing in the catalogue for the superb Japan Creative exhibition, Fumio Nanjo, Director of the Mori Art Museum Everyone should enjoy proposing new designs technologies production ideas or business models and then making them in to a reality. In such circumstances new possibilities for society open up naturally.” Look again at Gero Asmuth’s graphic at the top of the page and the figure of the man is actually pushing the tide back rather than succumbing to its power.

Barnes Railway Bridge

I have been following the work of illustrator Nigel Peake since I published his student thesis in the Scottish architecture magazine Prospect just before he won a Silver Commendation in the RIBA President’s Medal in 2005.  Since then he has created a number of studies of vernacular architecture as well as thoughtful illustrated analyses of how we perceive the world around us. I wrote an essay in his book Maps in 2008 and loved his later work Sheds. However I think his most recent book Bridges – a series on the Bridges of London drawn is his best work yet. Its publication gave me a chance to talk to him about the way he views drawing, its relationship to architecture and more importantly the city. 

 When did you the Bridge drawings?
The drawings were made last year, after summer and into autumn. They were drawn by hand and in sequence to how they appear along the river.

You have abstracted the bridges into comparable frames and sizes: which did you have to abstract the most? Or was it an even process? 
I am not sure if I thought of it as abstracting. I was really just looking at the bridges in terms of their structure, form and their inherent rhythm and song. So perhaps I was abstracting them but not to make it more interesting, just as a way of understanding and drawing that process. For me, drawing is a way of working out an idea or place and so the book is a document of that.

Battersea Bridge

The Bridges of London are very much ignored even though they are essential. Why do you think that is?
I am not sure why. They are wonderful elements and when you are in London you use them all the time. It is normal now not to look or observe. Cities are incredible places that hold all this movement, colour and noise that happen all at once, but not many seem to notice.

Could you live in London? 
At the moment, no. I like it very much and always enjoy being there, but if find it exhausting as a place and that is not great for my work.  I like to take time and look at things, some cities permit that (Paris, San Francisco, Edinburgh) but I always think I am getting in someones way if I pause in London. Cities are really intriguing places for me and one walk down a street is enough for me to draw for weeks, but for now it is better to live by the sea and visit them when I need to for work.

Could you design a bridge? 
Possibly. I did design a bridge for my thesis project on Istanbul, that was a rejuvenation of the Galata bridge. I find them incredible feats especially when I see photos of bridges that are in the process of being built and they appear to be cantilevering over the water or gap, this great weight hanging.

Blackfriars Bridge

Which of the bridges do you / have you used the most? 
In my life? Probably George IV Bridge in Edinburgh [which spans from Princes Street to the Royal Mile over Waverley Station]. I’d use it going to the architectural studio on chamber street from a copy/coffee/stationary/music shop.

What is your favourite bridge? 
I am fond of inhabitable bridges but a lot of thosee existed in the past and have been replaced by more ‘practical’ bridges. Beyond that, it is the idea of crossing that is really interesting to me and most bridges make this possible.

Kennington Bridge

What do you think of the Shard? 
Last time i was in London was December 2011. I cycled through the city at night with a friend. We had no particular place to go but we ended up following the Shard until we where below it. The modern day Polaris. It was surrounded by fog and the top part was hidden and glowing in the gloom and empty. At that moment I thought it was beautiful. I sometimes prefer incomplete buildings because they still allow you to imagine a different outcome.

Before you have been working very much on vernacular structures (sheds) or personal visions of discreet landscape, there seems to be a greater interest in deliberate structural form. Is that fair, and if so why do you think that’s the case?
I draw and paint things that are interest to me at that moment. But I have been spending more time in different cities and so that probably has affected me.

Tower Bridge

Which building in London addresses the river the best?
Walking along the Thames, it is almost as if a lot of the buildings along it ignore the river, as if it was a banal street. I do like it when the tide is high and you can look across with a flattened view if is as if the other side is an island.

Do you ever want to build anything? 
Yes, at first I would just like to build a wall. Sometimes I think of drawing as a lot like building. It is made up of layers, and slowly you add to it, until it needs nothing more.

You can buy the book here. 

18th Fina Visa Diving World Cup, Monday 20 February 2012 at the Aquatics Centre in the Olympic Park London. First competitive use of the Aquatics Centre diving boards.

Reblogged from citythreepointzero:

Edinburgh Castle and the Old Town, from Salisbury Crags

A question via twitter from ‘Feria Urbanism’ (hi there..): should Liverpool fear the loss of UNESCO World Heritage Site status? The question refers to Peel Holdings’ ‘Liverpool Waters’, 60 hectares of waterfront office and retail development. My reply? No – not that the loss of UNESCO status is unlikely, but that the city shouldn’t fear it.

Read more… 551 more words

Great piece on the stupidity of UNESCO status by Richard Williams.

UCI Track Cycling World Cup, Thursday 16th February 2012, Men and Women’s Team Pursuit Qualification. First time the Olympic Park Velodrome in London is used for competition.

The MP4-12C on the production-line at the Foster-designed McLaren Production Centre

As the BBC former Economic Editor Evan Davis pointed out in his recent TV series Made in Britain, not only is the UK still the 5th largest industrial nation, but it reached its peak industrial production not in 1890 or even in 1944 but in 2008. Yes, Davis points out, we are no longer the kind of industrial nation which makes multiple machine parts and, although this has negative consequences for permanent, mass employment, it does have positive consequences for wage levels in the face of cheaper foreign labour. Davis argued for a specific kind of industrial manufacture in his series. Standing looking over a £180,000 McLaren MP4-12C sports car he declared ‘this is high value production and it’s what Britain does best’. His backdrop was the recently opened McLaren Production Centre in Woking designed by Foster and Partners.

A plan of the new McLaren site. The Production centre is to the south and to the north is the Technical Centre, where the Formula One team is based.

Foster’s building is a sleek, low-slung shed – is a classic recent example of a particularly British branch of architecture, that has been closely associated with the countries movement from heavy industry to small-scale high value production. The Formula One constructor and now, sports car manufacturer who will produce only 10 MP4-12C’s a day at its Woking base but then each one costs a minimum of £168,500. The car is doing well: riding a surge in car exports due to the changes in exchange rates since 2008. According to the The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, car production in the UK was up 6% in 2011, 2% more than the global average with 80% of all vehicles made in the UK destined for abroad.

The UK, particularly around the M25 was home to that unique typology that the architecture critic Reyner Banham described as the ‘serviced shed’. Buildings like the PA Technology centre by Richard Rogers, nestle into the semi-rural, off-a-ring-road landscape like the McLaren MPC. The INMOS factory, completed, again by Rogers, in 1987 is a similar type of building: its tubular steel assisted span- tension structure is supported by tension tie rods from a spine of towers. The first of them was probably the Reliance Controls Electronics factory in Swindon built by Team 4, the then Lords Rogers and Fosters with their then wives. It is hard to remember that semi-conductors were once a high-value industry but it goes to show how quickly the UK the manufacturing sector has had to move to remain high-end.

A drawing of the INMOS building, by Richard Rogers.

The originators of this approach to architecture have gone on to be incredibly successful in the late 20th century, early 21st century, particularly in the demanding field of airport design.  Foster built Beijing and Hong Kong International airport whilst Rogers designed Barajas Airport in Madrid and Heathrow Terminal 5. Both have gone on to create a whole architectural language in which the engineering is on show. In the case of Rogers this has been not just been the structural elements but also the services; pipes and conduits on the outside. Foster, meanwhile pioneered the integration of IT into the office space rather having it sit in a separate room. At his pioneering design for a temporary Head Office for IBM in Portsmouth, he also created sub-floor spaces for the wiring for computing, which is of course now standard practice.

The success in airpot design is telling, because another area in which this engineering-led brand of British architecture is in the area of logistics; not simply the way in which an architect is able to organise efficiently the construction of his building but the way in which he can provide and allow for the efficient use of its space subsequently. This was firstly useful in housing manufacturing, but it then became useful the processing of high volumes of human traffic and transport support services. It requires a design system which is not based simply on the plan and section in the classic modernist way but also a diagrammatic way of drawing, designing and thinking.

Cedric Price gave birth to this way of working out the separation of a building’s functions as well as its its actual construction in a visual language borrowed from game-theory and cybernetics.  Barnabas Calder has noted how Foster borrowed his early drawing stayle from Price. Other like Nick Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins also used this diagrammatic apporach to conceiving a building, even if they all could turn out a plan and section in the classic way.

This tradition of architecture lives on some astonishing projects today. The Halley VI research base on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica by Hugh Broughton is conceived not just as a final entity but as a programme of construction. The maximum weight the brittle sea ice that all construction materials must land on is 9 tonnes. Prefabricated modules made in South Africa to suit this limit. The Ice Shelf moves at a rate of 400m a year. Snow fall is around 1m a year. The new base has skis on hydraulic lift so it can not only be relocated when it gets to the edge of moving flow of ice, but it can also be towed out of the snow trench that has formed around it at the end of the winter. If you create a long building and place it perpendicular to the wind, the snow is dumped on the leeward side, leaving the forward side hard, and ideal for using vehicles on.

Other projects, such as Grimshaw’s designs for the Aegenerator X wind turbine show how British architects are still considered valuable parts of technically minded teams. The logic for a vertical axis turbine at sea emerges from the problems caused by the problems caused by downward forces generated when conventional turbines are scaled up. However, as Neven Sidor partner at Grimshaw, says: ‘The Aerogenerator X embodies the best in innovative engineering in Britain, and continues an illustrious tradition.’  Whilst understandable fears about the economic conditions across the world combine with the threat to our environment to create a certain primitivism in our domestic architecture, there is still another trend born of relationships with emerging technologies that continues to reinvent itself.

A photograph of Paternoster Square from a project I organised exploring the regulation of public space in May 2009. This was undertaken with the support and guidance of the Manifesto Club

During the recent protests in Greece there was a moment in which the struggle against impending privatisation became concrete. In Thessaloniki, protesters hung a large banner from the city’s main landmark, the White Tower, which said “for sale” as a protest against the government’s massive denationalization schedule, which they perceived as selling away the country’s assets. Even if this goes ahead, it is predicted that for the next 10 years Greece will go through heavy recession followed by a very slow recovery. 

It highlights a huge irony at the core of other protests taking place currently particularly  Occupy London. For while there seems to be a statement of intent in the actions name: a bold claim to a section of the city, from the very beginning the ostensible occupation has been compromised by key land-ownership issues in the City of London. Initially the protestors had attempted to occupy Paternoster Square but a company acting for the owners Mitsubishi Estate, motto A Love for People, A Love for the City took out a High Court injunction to prevent members of the public from accessing the square. This is not some trivial detail either but the key to the strange nature of the protests.

Anna Minton has written convincingly about how public spaces have been privatised across Britain, as have others like Sarah Boyes. New shopping centres like Liverpool One or Cabot Place in Bristol are now policed like older areas in London such Broadgate Circus and, the major example, Canary Wharf. She also describes however, a more fundamental history about the City of London and how its public squares, like its major buildings are in the ownership of major estates, offices set up by major landowners to govern their lands usage. She also explains that a resistance to the stewardship of these estates led to protest and a situation where public usage was tolerated and management was passed over to the public authorities.

Excellent ball control by young Abrahams under close scrutiny from the security guards of Bishopsgate Square

Much has been made of the lack of focus of the Occupy London protests. Indeed the name for the action was initially #occupylsx, or Occupy London Stock Exchange. If indeed, the focus of the protest was the bank bail out, why were they directing their energies on the Stock Exchange? The camp itself seems more preoccupied with organising itself rather than making any clear statement of intent, or explaining a political programme. The discourse of public meeting is aimed primarily at achieving consensus rather than debating values. Debates and negotiations with St. Paul’s take up much of the camp’s vaguely defined leadership’s time. In short, the reason for the camps existence is to exist.

It is odd that no-one has really commented on the naming of the disparate Occupy movements across the world with the Occupy Wall Street event as the originator. It is not a protest with a specific aim but a decision to simply enter space and exist there for as long as possible. Writing in Domus, Chris Cobb records some of the achievements of the #OWS. “Demonstrators have established an orderly free food station made out of a long row of milk crates and plastic sheeting where anyone may come to eat. They’ve also created a technology center near the middle of the park where people sit together all day doing research, writing and tweeting,” he says.

If the authorities in London and New York had any confidence this act of simple occupation, would not be a threat. And yet they still seem to find this act of occupation only to exist a threat.  If this is to be the first act of the latter’s political protest though it should be clearer. Claim private space for the public. Start with that which we fear to lose. In London we are suffering from the fact that private areas were given a veneer of public use in the early 20th century instead of being fully co-opted as public spaces. Always an issue, the economic climate has made it more pronounced.

From a series of actions performed by the staff and friends of Blueprint magazine in London, May 2009

As we found at when I was at Blueprint magazine, there is a particularly galling situation in London where the very language of public space in the city has been cynically mis-used. The sunken amphitheatre outside City Hall is the worst case to my mind: a cynical usage of an architectural typology, this  faux Greek agora, beneath the public administration of the city is in fact owned by More London, a private company. Without the public these spaces would be dead and of no-use to their owners. These spaces should therefore be owned by the public. In the ongoing retreat of the state from building, it is more important than ever.

We are moving into an era when we have to rely on private capital to build projects like the Thames River Park, then certain provisions about public ownership need to be made clear. Planning law should be changed so that private developers hand over public space to authorities. Instead of using planning gain to build extra facilities far from new developments, lets have it used to make public space truly public. If the protestors were to claim rights to the very thing they were being denied their project would have more purpose. Occupation should be a basic right rather than a form of protest.

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

I’m not one of those people who sees in every news event an architectural solution. Much of the rioting that is taking place in London, and particularly in my home borough Hackney can be put down to a combination of frustration, excuse and opportunity. The idea that it this is somehow a design issue is ridiculous. Someone said to me yesterday that the rioting was a design issue, ‘people who are designed out of policy, classes and decent housing, would clearly be angry.’ You can ignore people, but design them out? I’m not sure that’s possible.

 The weekend before the rioting, a mini art festival was held in Hackney. This tiny but intense art festival overtakes a series of artists studios that huddles in the shadow of the Olympic site in London. Liza Fior of British architects / landscaping / art practice muf has written about how this area is one of the most densely populated areas of working areas in Europe and once a year this area shows off itself. I have discovered or got to know some of my favourite artists this way. Jeanette Barnes dynamic drawings of construction sites across London,  Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine-fueled protests against development, Julian Perry’s coastal erosion paintings in which bungalows hover in mid-air.

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

I didn’t make it this year but from reports it is clear that the funding of art, in these straightened times is being heavily influenced by the Olympics. I have been invited to go on one of several boat projects being created in the build up to the Games. A project called Floating Forest leaves from the Folly on the Flyover, beneath the A12 where I sometimes go for a jog. I’m looking forward to doing it, but a friend tells me the former studio complex at Hackney Wick has now been riven in two. Next to one studio were an artist is working on a temporary pavilion for the Olympics is another working on a project which attacks the Olympics. Next to them, Olympic-funded artist, and so on. Generally the work for or against appears to be examining the impact of the Olympic on community terms rather than wider social ones.

Eames, Charles, & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

Perhaps it is just the dispiriting scenes of opportunist theft during the riots that have clouded my view of Hackney and I try not to denigrate the sincere endeavour that has gone into this, but I’d like to point out this image I found in the CCA collection of a project by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen and ask whether we have really progressed much further in architectural terms. This was his design for the IBM Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, which opened in 1964. The pavilion created the effect of a covered garden, with all exhibits in the open beneath a grove of 45 of these man-made steel trees which were around 32-feet high.

Working for a massive corporation, Eames and Saarinen used the tree column as a conceptual device to create an Arcadian promenade; creating a world that was both of the world and separate from it. In 2012, London will be covered with temporary structures which, if recent events are anything to go by, will frequently use this tree column idea. Indeed London tends to be covered with these objects especially around the time of the London Festival of Architecture, which next year will coincide with the Games itself. I look forward to steel trees, plastic trees and probably even wooden trees sprouting up across the city.

I’m all for architects gaining experience of construction, but sometimes I wonder whether drawing something that won’t be built would not suit them and us a bit better. Hands-on experience is great but what happens when you find yourself re-iterating a form for a client, such as a festival, who wants to buy into the idea of architecture as a life-style choice: who wants you to build them a symbol of an illusory bucolic community. We have seen with the recent riots that when social forces come into play the community can disappear. So why not work less on community and more on society?

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

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It is hard not to respond to Ghost Milk on a personal level. It is a book about the Olympic Games – an issue I am fascinated by – and its setting is Hackney – the place where I live. On another level I am thanked in the Acknowledgements at the back of the book. This was, I think, for having commissioned an article from the book’s author, Iain Sinclair, on the opening of the Wembley and the Dome when I was editing Blueprint.

Although I still love the way that Sinclair writes, in Ghost Milk he has started using his stylistic verve as a smoke-screen for a strange poetics of place which leaves me unable to recognise the place I live in. What I love about his work, the way he reflects on an immediate reality of urban life – the transient to the intransigent;  the way his prose style is lyrical yet somehow unmediated, the way the past informs the present, all this exists in Ghost Milk but I must admit that my admiration is challenged by the highly personal slight that Sinclair takes in the granting of the Olympic Games to East London.

Let me meet, cautiously then, Sinclair half-way then and respond to Ghost Milk on a personal level.  In the first chapter Sinclair describes walking through London Fields to the newly refurbished lido, glimpsing the swimmers through the entrance and becoming immediately dismayed. He refers to the pool as ‘excercise purgatory’.  Of course, I’ve only lived in Hackney for 3 years unlike Sinclair who has lived there since time immemorial but I love the Hackney Lido: crowded and boisterous on one hand, yet strangely able to accommodate private space and a moment to relax on the other. A picture of that strange ability that Hackney has to crowd you with life and distractions yet allow you to be yourself simultaneously. 

I must admit that it gets busy. Many go there though just to relax in the sun. I go there to swim, which I must admit to finding a little like purgatory anyway. An expiation of sin. A payment for pleasure had but in a good way. Perhaps I am more inured to crawling up a pool in line than Iain Sinclair. One would have thought though that if he found his local pool too crowded he would be grateful that in 2013 he will have a massive Olympic sized swimming pool to go to. That is not the case.

Perhaps I should not respond on a more objective level. I should not take it personally that in parts of Ghost Milk there is a gross misrepresentation of how human agency has formed the ‘wilderness’ that Iain Sinclair loves so much. I shouldn’t take it personally that he totally misrepresents the Lea Valley Regional Park Act. However, I must admit that I do. I would argue that in actual fact this Act preserved a whole swathe of land from the Thames to the M25 for the recreation of the people of London. Far from being the jumped-up Town Councillors he describes, the people behind it were remarkable. Lou Sherman, an ex-cabbie and Communist established a Civic Trust to retain the Lea Valley. Rather than the jumped-up potentate Sinclair describes, a man who committed the cardinal sin of planning and making and building, he thought of the people of the city as a collective.

His plan, to me, was a noble one. Sinclair picks out the more outré moments of his plan. He exaggerates, he selects choice moments. At its heart the Park was an advanced piece of urban planning which has helped define the singular beauty that Sinclair so relishes in the Lea Valley to this day. The plan said that the park would “be a playground for Londoners against the background of London. This background – power stations, gas works, factories, railways, houses and flats – must be accepted and acknowledged in the landscape theme.”
Anyone who has read Sinclair’s books will recognise this landscape as the very one that the writer relishes. I have written elsewhere about the way in which other parts of the Lee Valley have, if anything, been allowed to return to a wilderness to be enjoyed by individuals rather than a space for more organised, less conventionally picturesque leisure activities. However, the truth remains that the very aesthetic of post-industrial atrophy that Sinclair himself has thrived in was acknowledged in this plan and preserved. But surely we have a right to build on this plan, not flagrantly but out of necessity?

In previous works the city to Sinclair was a received object, which he enjoyed in its multiplicity. I had no problem with the games he played with fact and fiction, but in Ghost Milk one really has to wonder about his retrospective tinkering.  He would rather see the Lee Valley as an untouched idyll when in fact the whole place is determined by man’s intervention and subsequent crafting.

Far from being the failure that Sinclair describes the Plan has been very successful. Not only preserving and retaining the industrial heritage of the place – the very habitat in which Sinclair’s imagination finds root. – it also has hardwired recreation into the valley long before the Olympics came along. In addition to football and rugby, canoeing, rowing athletics, swimming, horse-riding, skating have found home along the valley running north. I find Sinclair’s attitude to collective actitivity deeply suspect: the last to be picked at games getting his revenge.

Whereas Sinclair had hitherto constrained his critique of development to the present, in Ghost Milk he now criticises retrospectively. His remarks about Joan Littlewood and the abortive Fun Palace are dubious. The whole idea of the project was not that it would be, as he suggests like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin- a monolithic architectural object. In fact Price’s intention was the exact opposite. He thought that it should be a machine, a kit which could be endlessly reconstructed, a building in the mode of the adapatable architecture Debord and others hoped would be the end of their derives.

The intention for the fun Palace, which has admittedly been bastardised by the Olympic stadium, would have no form as such but endlessly mutate. The Fun Palace was one of the most challenging ideas from a British architect of the 20th Century. Sinclair, often economical with the truth about the present – “what needs to be true, is” as he puts it at the end of Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire – is now reinventing the past, deforming his poetics of place.

Rather than entertaining a political distrust of the Olympics his disregard for it is anti-political. At their most reductive, and in Ghost Milk I fear they are, Sinclair’s poetics are based on memory and by extension, place which for him is a recepticle of memory. If that place changes, for whatever reason, he finds a rupture in his sense of self. Rather than placing his faith in a negotiated process of change, he sees all change to the place around him as an erosion of his own identity.

I am Hackney. They have changed Hackney. They have changed me. 

Indeed whilst he plays with the past to suit himself, in Ghost Milk it is even harder  than in his other works to imagine what his vision of the future is. One gets the impression that he is against change per se. Butted up against the Olympics, which is a mighty obstacle, his stance seems to be to go against man’s ability to control and improve his own environment. He takes intellectually from the characters he meets and offers us his imagination as a transformative agent. Sinclair’s poetry though feeds on the decay of old buildings and old structures. In Ghost Milk he leaches on that which he professes to despise.

It will be interesting for me, if no-one else, to hear how Sinclair describes the Olympics as soon as they over. How will it have changed? How will it then change over time? At what stage, will their sting be lost to him? When it’s less busy at the Lido? Or when the stadium takes on a patina of age? Maybe he will never comes to terms with it. Maybe we will have to wait a few years for a new writer, fed – God help us – on scraps of Debord to write books about the great romantic moment of the Games and how somehow those moments have informed the present, and how the old swimming pool is worthy of being retained in the face of all common sense because the writer attaches great personal sentiment to what transpired there.