cosmopolitan scum

Of course, the assessments we make of higher education institutions reflect the priorities
not just of the bodies that produce them but the cultures from which them come. The
Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by Shanghai Jiaotang University weights its assessment such that 20% of the score comes from how often staff are published in either Nature or Science. The rest of the score is based on number of prizes and number of citations. The Times Higher Education World Rankings (THEWR) stopped working with partner education company Quacquarelli Symonds in 2010 because of a disagreement over methodology and the emphasis on peer review which constituted nearly 40% in the results.

The Times also explained that they had split with QS, which still produces a globally
respected ranking of international universities, because the Humanities were
underweighted. So just as Chinese education prizes the manner in which a student
reproduces knowledge, so the Chinese system of evaluating weights the success of
universities by the degree to which its staff are cited. The THEWR from 2010 onwards
increased the criteria of assessment from 6 to 30 to include details such as the payment of staff. (Although reputation still accounted for around 34%.)

The result was interesting. In October 2012 the BBC reported that the THEWR
showed how British universities were slipping down the rankings. Although the UKs
top institutions still ranked highly, the table’s authors warned that many UK universities
faced “a collapse in their global position within a generation”. And yet a month earlier the
BBC had reported the more positive story that “UK universities take four of six top global
rankings,” following the back of the QS findings. Very similar methodologies can produce
wildly differing outcomes.

What is perhaps most revealing about the systems is what they omit. There is little focus
on the study of the humanities, even in the THEWR ranking let alone the actual studying
of art, not as an artefact but as something to create. Whilst science – it is believed – can
be coded and assessed, creative studies cannot. Indeed when art colleges attempt to
do so, they fail. Christopher Frayling talking on BBC Radio 4, on 19th Novemer 2012
attempted to justify the arts education on a quantifiable effect for the economy. Fortunately he was up against Ron Arad, a former Be Open collaborator, who
explained that he was interested in teaching people how to think.

Indeed it is more important for the research should reflect the traditions, trends,
methodic, perhaps political views and social structure of every school and the region in
general. It is with this in mind that BE OPEN is preparing the rating of the best high schools for arts and creative activities across Europe. Be Open are hoping to find the places where children can be prepared for the best art/design higher education. This will also require a description of the different educational systems in Europe but what is most important is the creation of a comprehensive and transparent methodology.

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 with some sub Nairn-y nonsense 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.

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.

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 the Bejing CCTV tower 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.) The adjacent TVCC building 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.

And the rush of people to ascribe apocalyptic significance to the TVCC fire in Beijing gets longer and longer.  People. Sometimes things catch on fire. Only if its a community bonfire is it done for your spectacle. Only if you are a pyromaniac is it done to punish the hubris of the object’s creator. I take it we’re not blaming the vanity of the Australian state for this fire?

No? I thought not.