UCL Occupation visit

This blog has been rather silent of late, in what is turning out to be one of the most 'interesting' periods I can certainly remember. It's so strange, as I know that if I were still a student I'd be getting fully stuck in, but I've been left sat at desks, watching the protests as they unfold on the news and on twitter, wishing that I could be counted amongst the bodies.

So on Friday after 'the day job' I finally went down to the UCL occupation, in the company of Owen and Will and Joel, to see what was going on. Through the quad, the first thing that you notice is the chalk on the walls: in this case it was the old 'the point is to change it', which to be honest rather set the tone for some romanticised-quasi '68 nonsense. Once inside the building we were shocked to see that there was a soiree underway mere metres from the occupation, filled with champagne quaffing funders, seemingly completely unaware of what was going on a couple of doors down.

Past a security guard hanging around nonchalantly in a yellow jacket, up a few stairs, and past a table of people in their early twenties, opening a bag full of beers. Then pass through a pair of doors, and any notion that this is a rag-tag bunch of bourgeois hipsters, acting out while still at Uni is dispelled. There's about 50-100 people sitting around in a circle in front of a large projection on the wall of the agenda for a meeting. There's another 50 or so people milling around the periphery. One chap is trying to push the agenda along, while a young woman to his side is constantly inking a flipchart with points being made. There are laptops everywhere - some are twittering away, others -you imagine- are liaising with one of the many, many other occupations going on at the moment. The crowd are mixed more or less equally between the sexes, although the room is almost homogenously white. When people speak up they are mostly English and middle class - this is not an equivalent social group to that seen at the protests out on the streets in the last few weeks, although it's probably fair to say that more or less everyone in the room had been out there at the protests too.

The meeting is orderly - when people agree they shake their hands in the air, which I was told is something that you could see at the climate camp last year. The air is dedicated, but not necessarily professional, which may well be deliberate. It's certainly democratic, the chairperson merely trying to let as many people be heard while also moving everything forwards. Frequently, at the end of a discussion, someone will stand up and identify themself as the person to speak to afterwards if the point needs further discussion. It's very well organised, with people performing roles such as PR liaison and so on. You could easily run a business in this fashion, for what it's worth.

The meeting is adjourned, and a lot of people move off, but there are still around 100 people around, some off at the sides, and some bringing chairs up to the table. I had arrived thinking that I would just be hanging around, getting a look and then listening to Owen speak, but I suddenly find myself sitting behind the table, having to think up an impromptu talk myself.

Owen discusses 'Student Architecture', the latest ugly property bubble to get underway. Many luxury housing projects shelved when the recession hit are now returning as student flats, in which parents of foreign students are fleeced for up to £1000 a month for rooms that are yet smaller than the yuppiedromes that the developers no longer have the confidence to build. Owen rightly points out that companies like UNITE are among the most rotten and horrible developers in the construction industry, inflicting cheap and shitty buildings onto our cities that only a moron wouldn't recognise as repeating all the worst mistakes of the 1960s housing. It's truly shocking, and yet it just keeps on going.

I quickly try to discuss the uses and abuses of 'radical theory' in architecture over the last 50 years. Inspired by my reading an article about the occupation where architecture students said that they were inspired by the radical theories of Bernard Tschumi and Colin Fournier, I ramble somewhat, but try to get across the idea that if you are a clever architecture student who wants to read political theory that deals with space, don't go looking for it in the writings of architects. I prattle on about how because of the hermetic culture of architectural academia, and because of architects self-appointed renaissance man arrogance, as well as the futile nature of architecture practice in general, architect's theory often ends up as an awkward cloak that envelops all kinds of indulgences in its arcane misused terminology. I try to put across the point that theory has become a method of furthering one's career by doing a few years of academia, with radical theory aestheticised to the point that it can no longer be used as actual critique, and rather just adds a frisson of danger and exclusivity to one's formalism. I also mumble something about reading Lefebvre or Benjamin, but then I would say that, wouldn't I? My talk drifts off into silence, lacking any conclusion.

Will comes up next and discusses the privatisation of public space, and how one can read the subtle hints of it. He utters a great sequence about how classical architecture was intended to instil deference in its relationship with its public, and how modernism - especially post-Corbusian modernism - attempted to break down architecture to a more egalitarian form-human relationship, but then ended up being attacked for the supposed 'inhumanity' of those very forms. Now we have exclusivity expressed mainly through commercial space, seeing as genuinely non-shopping related public spaces are fewer and further between. And of course, this is accompanied by an insidious and worrying privatisation of all public space.

What was most heartening however; was that after the talks a discussion ensues for what I was told later was almost two hours. There are about forty of us, and we have a very interesting exchange of ideas. A few students want to discuss the occupation as a model for 'new space'. I think, yes, of course, it can be seen as an experiment in communal living, and lots can be learned, but at the same time there has been no real shortage of short term small scale experiments of this sort over the last 100 years. One student puts it well when she points out that they cannot say that what they are doing 'works', when they know that they are only likely to be there for a week more at most before being thrown out. I agree with her, in that occupation can only exist as an antagonistic bubble within a hostile wider environment. Owen points out that there were larger experiments with communal living in the early Soviet era - the Narkomfin for instance, and that they have a lot in common with post-war housing, as stepping stones to collectivity.

Another line of criticism is that the speakers have been too negative, offering only critique, and that there is a fertile world of community architectures and so on that need to be addressed and understood. Jeremy Till is mentioned. There is broad agreement from the panel, but also concern that again, the economics of scale have to be considered - I for one am very dubious that isolated examples can spread to become common practice without being adopted by some agency that has huge amounts of capital at its disposal - i.e. the State. Owen discusses Ralph Erskine's Byker Wall housing estate in positive terms.

There are also discussions of the state of architectural education, including the suggestion that the 1 student 1 project final year tradition is well overdue being abandoned as an inappropriate and unrealistic method. There is also a fair amount of 'what is to be done'?

Afterwards there is a performance by Slade students who are in occupation next door. At this point it becomes a bit too hipster-private-view for my liking, but then the occupiers have been working very very hard and deserve some relief, and some of the sketches performed are very funny. We are kindly supplied with a glass of wine, and a number of further conversations continue afterwards.

So… what? I was incredibly heartened by the occupation, but I am also fearful. The State is, of course, powerful, and obviously doesn't plan to stand for this kind of thing. But on the other hand, our dear leaders are fucking lightweights, with a background in PR and no real history of struggle. They hardly have a mandate, and even before any of their plans have begun they are facing massive protests, and the looming prospect of a g****** s*****. Thursday the 9th is coming up, and to be honest the government is going to win their vote. But it'll be an ugly win, one which only goes to show how utterly weak they actually are. The big question is how the heat of these occupations and protests will be kept up between now and March when the unions finally decide to get fully involved.

All in all the occupiers are very serious, resourceful and committed, and I wish them all the best, along with all the myriad other occupations, instant protests and actions.

And I should add that Aaron Porter is an absolute disgrace. It is in times like these that you see who is genuinely capable of empathy and strategy, and who is only concerned with their own well-trodden miserable career path. Scumbag.

My Christmas wish is that the students, the workers and the youth find their common ground and bring this zombie government down. Please Santa?

Excuses, excuses...

So, I really haven't written anything of length for a long time on here. This is puzzling, and of course disconcerting.
I started writing something about Chris Petit's incredible 'Content', but it stalled. It's a film which you really ought to see, if you're the sort of person who might hang around here on this blog. It is a work firmly located within the 'Architectural Melancholy' mode, experimental and haunting. I let out a sigh when reading the description of Petit as a "lugubrious aesthete fixated with the increasing intangibility of a post-industrial world" in Owen's Icon review, it seemed so tailor made to the E&V; sensibility. If I can drag my fingers to the keys properly, then I'll write up the full length thing, which was to be about investigating Petit (and Ian Penman, who collaborates in 'Content') attitude to the spectrality and loneliness of the internet, the yawning absence of a true modernity, and the troubling form of the distribution sheds. In the manuscript wot I just wrote, I touch upon the distribution sheds in terms of their resemblance to hi-tech architecture, but I never really investigate further. But if I'm serious about an 'ugly functionalism', or the 'fantastic dreariness' of Cedric Price, then I'll need to tease out some kind of meaning from these objects.

I haven't been writing quite so much outside of the blog either, although at the moment I'm fairly busy with a few interviews and even a forthcoming cross-european visit to write about a new building, which is either a work of solutionist charlatanry or perhaps the first time someone's done something new with the housing estate in a long time. There might be a few more public appearances and drips & drabs of teaching, which I'll tell you about in due course. And, if you need someone to write, I can wrote proper good word.

But I have actually been reading a lot - blogs even. My Google Reader list has been getting quite large, and actually quite depressing. Day after day certain websites throw another twenty or so press releases out into the world, a seemingly endless stream of quite-ok work, which you either like or you don't, before promptly forgetting about it seconds later. I remember the thrill of the very early days of file sharing (Napster, Audiogalaxy, that kind of thing) where two regimes of cultural accumulation overlapped for a while - the genuine joy of finding something rare, something you might have heard about but never been able to find, and the sudden abundance of anything and everything. Nowadays of course the very notion of rare culture is disappearing. We might call it democratic, but there is of course a deadening of mystery that comes from this accessibility. If we know anything about desire it is that its easy and immediate satisfaction is not particularly healthy. Or maybe I'm just losing my edge.
I've also been reading more novels recently. After going through the ordeal that was 'The Kindly Ones' I'm currently reading Lanark, which has managed already to be very moving. It's such a strange feeling to be reading about Glasgow from the perspective of an exile, albeit one only six hours away by train, but today it was so very very strange to be reading Gray's quasi-autobiographical description of attending the Glasgow School of Art. Although he's describing the '50s, it didn't stop floods and floods of my own memories hammering down on me like the storm that was battering my train carriage as I read.

Music is another thing that has been keeping me from writing here recently, although a wounded index finger had put a stop to that for a while. You might have had a listen to my Wagner / Iron & Glass thing the other day, and most of what I've been playing has been along those lines, although it has been a mixed bag. I'll probably start trying to record more of these pieces, if only to document the quite possibly 100+ nearly-finished arrangements that I've got sitting around. I suspect that most of the people who read my architecture stuff aren't particularly interested in German Late Romantic music being played badly on an instrument to which it is not suited, but those are the perils of the self-published internet after all. Which brings me to...

I must say that I nearly jumped out of my skin when heard about this record, and came minutes away from getting it on vinyl, despite not being a DJ, or having a turntable in my room. I'm not a huge fan of Matthew Herbert, although I appreciate his conceptual approach to music making. I generally find some of his dance/pop music to be a little bit twee at times in its mannered funkiness. But an album, part of Deutsche Grammophon's Recomposed series, that digitally re-imagines Mahler's Tenth Symphony? Mein Gott! It's almost as if they had made it just for me!
So: what is it? It's basically a recording of the Adagio first movement of the tenth symphony, acoustically situated. The only aspect of it that is recorded anew is at the beginning, which features the opening melody played on a single viola, apparently at the composer's graveside. Over the course of the next forty minutes or so, recordings of the piece are played into various acoustic settings - notably the inside a coffin and behind the curtain at a crematorium. All of the conceptual re-recordings in some way relate to Mahler's death-fixation, which is an over-stressed theme, but did of course exist.
Each re-recording changes the acoustic qualities of the record, sometimes sounding tinny, occasionally as if it's underwater. You can sometimes hear vehicles and animals in the distance. In this sense it relates strongly to Gavin Bryar's "The Sinking of the Titanic", which conceptually recreates various acoustic properties derived from the story of the Titanic and the performance of 'Nearer My God to Thee' which supposedly continued as the band sank with the ship. Unfortunately some of the Herbert recording works well, while some of it doesn't. When the piece has the high frequencies lopped-off, and one can hear the sounds of rain, it's a successful example of some of the things that I try to achieve when I write music. But when Herbert takes the gigantic 9-note chord from late in the movement, his way of destroying seems underwhelming; a throbbing noise over a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm that fails to live up to the expanded palette that Herbert seems so keen to achieve.
It also seems strange that Herbert has steered clear of hauntological territory here; he's surely not unaware of that now rather distended genre, which at its best in, say, Philip Jeck, is some of the most conceptually interesting and yet also gut-wrenchingly moving music of the last decade, but that also has the capacity to lapse into the decay-chic Wagner of Indignant Senility. But Bryars, who worked with Jeck on the most recent recording of 'Sinking of the Titanic' seems to have appreciated the resonances of crackle, of decayed media, of haunted sounds, while Herbert's is remarkably clean, mannered. It just seems that a lot more could have been done with this record - they should have gotten me to do it!

Scumbags

1. 3 gentlemen including Steven Dudderidge entered the room and read out basically the same statement with regard to our place. he then gave us two minutes or "our guards will remove you".
2. We decided since none of our demands had even been considered to sit at the back of the lecture hall and non-violently resist.
3. 9 or so uniformed security guards entered the room and proceeded to remove the protesters from the floor with force and then throw them out the building into the cold. I do not think it unreasonable to say that this is likely illegal considering these are not police officers but simply security guards. Several screamed out in pain, belts were ripped etc.
4. Once all the protester had been ejected from the room the University guards etc proceeded to begin to look through the objects that remained in the room. This I believe is also a potential legal issue.

This is the same university that fucked up Hicham Yezza, don't forget.



I've written disparagingly before about the abysmal architectural nonsense being thrown up there, and I really don't think that it's outlandish to suggest that at management level, there's an ideological connection between the commissioning of vacuous sub-blairite cackitecture and their preferred response to a bit of politics emerging in front of them.

UPDATE- There's a seminar on the 'ASPIRE' sculpture tomorrow (3rd Feb). Maybe somebody could go along and tell them what they think?

The Students are Revolting!

Birmingham
Essex
King's College London
LSE - success!
Oxford
SOAS
Sussex
Warwick

Keep it up!

Told you so...

How mainstream are our views?

ideology

What the hell is this?

If these were actually existing buildings, one could argue that they represented a certain kind of philanthropic gesture towards the indentured workers of dubai, considering the conditions that currently exist for them. If these projects had been through the admittedly swift, but capricious and ruthless process of having a building completed in Dubai then we could congratulate the designers for achieving, perhaps, the best-of-all-possible-projects.

But this is not a 'real' proposal. This is an academic, conceptual piece of design by students. This represents a sickening internalisation of ideology; if academic architecture has any value whatsoever, surely it is in its ability to suspend the normal functioning of the world in order to consider what-else-might-be, what else is possible, architecturally. In this case, the proposal gives itself with a logic of plausibility. There may be humour evident in the assumption of a fictionalised corporation, but the project is still presented as something that could exist in the real world. But of course, this projection of possible-reality always hides a suspension and in this case, what is suspended is the fact that there is no political will whatsoever to improve conditions for low paid workers in Dubai, despite the centralisation of power. So, bearing in mind that this proposal is thus entirely fantastical, the cynicism is mind-boggling.

"While this development is clearly not intended as social housing or a worker's paradise, it is committed to serving the worker's actual needs and aspires to ennoble their humble station. It could even be said, that the proposal dramatises the worker's true position at the centre of this emerging nomadic society. The development promises affordable and humane living conditions for the guest worker. At the same time, it is responsive to its surroundings and sustains property values. The strategy of an integrated separation is therefore a policy of invisible alliance."

More sighs...

MAKE architects have just completed the UK's largest public sculpture, which is 60m high, and sits in the new Jubilee campus of Nottingham University (the same university that doesn't mind students being arrested and held for a week without charge, don't forget).

The sculpture has a number of traits that make it exemplary of contemporary public art, or 'culture architecture'.

It has a symbolic height.
As seen in projects such as Danny Libeskind's 'Freedom Tower', the symbolic height (or the symbolic angle, or symbolic line, or symbolic shadow, or symbolic cladding etc...) is a feature of contemporary architecture that only exists within the P.R. space of the work. People are generally not good judges of exactly how high something is, so the significant height is only useful if there's a plaque beneath the object, telling you exactly how the work is to be interpreted. It is however useful in a presentation to the client or the planners, who have to make a decision between various different flavours of the same architectural shit. There's a definite cultural aversion to the idea that the viewer/user might be able to use their imagination and make their own associations and connections with an object in space, for example, the Jewish Museum in Berlin is festooned with cards and panels telling you exactly what the uncomfortably sloping floor is supposed to remind you of, and what you should be thinking about that. This is fair enough for Libeskind and a building of such cultural weight, but on the other hand, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh has exactly the same issues, which goes a long way to ruining the experience of what is a building deeply concerned with the imaginative response of the user, with someone constantly informing you that "we believe that Enric Miralles was thinking about shortbread when he designed that bench over there, and those light fittings, we think, represent a haggis". This corporate symbolism is everywhere - cladding materials that 'represent' the absent industry of a site, everything has to represent some kind of 'value'. Even in this current project, MAKE talk about 'the theme of nature being drawn through the site', primarily because there are two ponds nearby. This method of minimal 'referentiality' should be compared to the naively heroic abstraction of postwar public art and architecture, with the positive universality of their solutions, and should be seen as an entirely vacuous gesture of lending what are negatively generic solutions the veneer of a contextual relationship.

It is the tallest sculpture in the UK.
Until the next one is built, that is. In fact, there is a hilarious page on the website devoted to the project which allows you to compare the size of the sculpture against a series of (smaller) sculptures from across the world. It's not as big as this though.

It's 'iconic'.
And we all know what that means.

It is funded privately, rather than by the university or the state.
In fact, in a hilarious return of Victorian values, it's been funded by an anonymous philanthropist.

It is called 'Aspire'.
Now this is not just appallingly bad nu-speak, but it's a vile pun that takes on even more of a stench considering it was chosen in a public vote of students and staff at the university. The sculpture sits in a campus that is home to computing, education and business studies, (probably soon having a department of studies studies I imagine), and the name, rather than evoking some noble human spirit of endeavour and self-betterment, is actually much more like a barked ideological order - like ENJOY in the millenium dome, the spatial imperative is to ASPIRE! WANT! ACHIEVE! GET!

It's only fitting that what is essentially a very large, shiny column that supports nothing is considered the best physical evocation of the spirit of contemporary higher education.

The end, end, the end...

I know it's a cliche, but sometimes it really feels as if all of my worldly experience is already contained in this bloody film.

Diploma Lingo Bingo

with apologies to C.D.



A new game, for two players.
1) decide to visit an Architectural Exhibition (student or otherwise).
2) before entering, draw lots to decide who takes the first turn.
3) take turns to select polysyllabic, vaguely theoretical words one would expect to see in the exhibition.

The words used may vary from exhibition to exhibition, but will generally be along the lines of:
parametric, reflexive, responsive, deforming, pataphysical, intensive, rhizomatic, algorithmic, generative, smooth, &c.;

4) first person to collect all their words gets taken out for dinner afterwards...

Show, don't tell.

A few tiny grains of e&v;'s work will be on show at the Royal College of Art from Tuesday the 29th of January as part of the interim show, and will be visible for two weeks. Come down and make your presence felt.