cosmopolitan scum

Reading the early reviews of the American Folk Art Museum in New York makes you realise that there was a crushing logic to the decision by MOMA’s board to selected Diller Scofidio & Renfro to decide whether any parts of it could be preserved. Such a perfect architectural storm had blown up following the announcement that the large art museum was going to demolish its tiny neighbour. In turn, MOMA’s decision to punt the problem back to the architects had a certain ruthless aspect to it. And not just any architects. After their work on the Lincoln Center, DSR have established themselves as a practice to turn to in order to reconcile conflicting architectural ambitions that have historically dogged a project.

Continue reading →

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

After the first weekend of the Games, it’s already becoming clear that the relationship between the city and the event is working well. This is partly because half the population of the British capital has apparently been scared into going on holiday, making the DLR and Jubilee line relatively clear for Olympic tourists. This generous act has left the rest of us and the visitors free to enjoy the sport and, for the design geeks amongst them, see how adaptable architecture has been embedded into the city with subtlety and no small amount of humour (in contrast perhaps to the main stadium itself – see this for more details!). Indeed, I would argue that the main stadium aside, the 2012 games is a triumph for temporary and adaptable structures. London is seeing 270,000 temporary seats used, more than the last three Olympics combined and in doing so the organisers have created what I want to argue is an uniquely British experience both to the TV viewer and to the spectator and one which grows out of and capitalises on our culture of sport and entertainment.

Using the Olympics to present an image of the host city has come a long way since the poster for the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, United States. This simply showed a map of the USA with an arrow on it pointing to the words Lake Placid. It was, however, the first time the Games had been used as a tool for tourism – a notion that is now an integral part of the Olympic package and for which the language of spatial design forms a key component. The aim by designers has been to place key events within the working heartland of the city so that select images of London’s architectural highlights will be beamed to audiences all around the world. Continue reading →

Policeman Wenlock Figurine.

Some people saw it as symbol of a military state’s collusion with the corrupt forces of international sport. To me it looked very much like a penis dressed as a policeman. When I read in this Guardian article that the heavy weight of oppositional satire was being brought to bare on a wee Wenlock doll, dressed as a policeman my heart went out to it for the first time. Certainly I had not warmed to the pair of scrotal cyclopses that had been chosen to represent London until that point but when you read him being attacked by rabid killjoys like Games Monitor guy who sees in it a symbol of our violent police state, my heart leaped to his defence. Perhaps there was something to like about this clear attempt to get us to think of policemen and sexual organs at the same time. Continue reading →

Having written a short book analysing the architecture and urban plan of the Olympics,  I’d like to address some of the other criticism about the Olympic development.  I have taken issue with Iain Sinclair on this blog before, not just his new book Ghost Milk but also the older, much better book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. However, I’d like in the face of a widening interest in the unqualified acceptance of the term psychogeography elsewhere, widen this debate. For me the Olympic Park and the Lea Valley has become not just the site of a major development a but a place in which the conservative nature of what we take to be a radical criticism of architecture is being revealed.

To go back to Sinclair for a moment. In Hackney That Rose Red Empire he conducts an interview with another self-proclaimed psychogeographer, Will Self about the wedge of park land driven into the dirty north-east of London. After visiting the Olympics site, Self declares ‘this is an idea of America imposed on human topography that is so much older and more ancient, confused and anarchic. It has the air of imposture.’ It is a criticism derived from walking – an act that Self deems political – following the real contours of the land is more rewarding, more intuitive than imposing a new human order on top. Building, creating, doing, making: all the most positive aspects of human endeavour is here reduced by Self to the act of an imposition.

How can ‘psychogeography’ have come to this? Continue reading →