left unity left unity left unity

Residual political tensions also endured between them: 'Arthur believed in fixed interest rates. I believed in floating ones. He believed in education vouchers. I believed in fees for education. We didn't ever argue against each other publicly. I was perfectly happy to argue for education vouchers in public. There had to be a collective view...' Because the IEA was trying to achieve influence? 'Yes. If you were forever bickering over nuances...' Harris made a sour face: 'The left wing were always bickering.'

- Ralph Harris discussing the early 1970s years of the Institute for Economic Affairs in Andy Beckett's 'When the Lights Went Out', p. 273

Some reflections after flying over Iraq

Last night I flew over Iraq. I am unaware of when the airspace became accessible again, but I recall flying over the area in 2006, and the plane taking a pronounced detour all the way down the Persian Gulf, indeed, all the way over Iran instead. But now, the planes fly directly over Iraq. And looking out of the window, as we passed over Baghdad, a sense of blankness; what trauma, what chaos? Nothing of the recent history could be seen from 39,000ft, but of course, what would one expect to see? Perhaps one could read the growth of the city under autocratic rule from certain qualities of the street plan, but from up there there was absolutely no way of sensing History in any way. But what is odd about this is that seeing the dewy spider-web of a city at night is entirely anthropic; all you are seeing is population geography, urban density, the agglomeration of people. As I was carried over, I saw the daily context of millions of people, but nothing whatsoever of the struggles and agony of recent years.

Then, not long later, a strange sight. As the plane crept southwards, from under the edge of the wing, which obscured most of my view, an odd haze began to spread outwards, granular, dusty, like perhaps the halo of a star when photographed from space. Moving along, it grew brighter and brighter, to the point where the streetlights around it began to vanish, swamped by the glare. Eventually, the source of the light revealed itself from beneath the wings; an oil fire. Burning out into the night, this rusty blaze was easily the brightest thing I've ever seen from an aeroplane, so far away as to be nothing but a silent point of light, but easy to sense the slow pulsations of the oil as it blasted out. Then, minutes later, another fire crept into view, and another, and another. Eventually various strings of these lights could be seen stretching off into the night, interspersed with roads and towns whose nights must be constantly ruddy with the smoke and the light which floods into it.

And of course, this point is when one can see history. Not only in the sense of the sheer tangible sight of the economic and security rationale behind the wars of the last decade, but also in that nauseating apocalyptic sense; from the vantage point of those vast new planes that carry eight hundred people, the ludicrousness of scale, aisles with vanishing points, gates like ferry terminals, anthroposcenic economies of scale, I looked down at the vast petrochemical blazes, burning beacons of what drives us, seemingly uncontrollably, into a new future.

The Future (in 1974)

- All of the below comes from 'Man and Environment', a fascinating Pelican book, of which this edition was published in 1974. Yes, 1974! It contributes to the impression that the 1980s all the way up until 2008 were all just a procrastinator's diversion from what needed to be done in the world. Now, it looks more and more like we've missed the deadline completely, and will have just hope we don't get thrown out altogether.

PREDICTION

... the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Logically, the first prediction is that in the twenty-first century Europe will become a single unit for strategic planning and administration. All over the world regional 'blocs' are evolving and no faster than in Europe, not only in the economic field but also in the whole range of social activities. In a Europe planned as a physical entity, the Scandinavian coastline, much of Scotland, the Black Forest, and the Alps and many similar areas would receive priority for conservation and enhancement. 

Perhaps most of England and Belgium would be accepted as primarily industrial; possibly southern Sweden would be the location of half a dozen new cities, each of a million population taken from the overcrowded areas of Europe. The planning of six new cities would call for new patterns of thinking, for no country in the Western world has so far attempted anything on this scale. Development for six million means deliberately setting out to create a new environment for more people than at present live in the whole of Scotland.

With the development of techniques like atomic blasting, vastly more nuclear power, and underground sources of oil and gas, it should be possible to create landscapes on a European scale. Resources could be developed in a vast and excitingly imaginative way - agricultural zones could be related to the value over centuries of the best soils and climatic conditions, fish farmed in barrages created for water supply, and hydro-electric schemes combined with new motorways.

More knowledge of the environment should lead to measures for elimination of elements like bronchitis, which are associated with particular environmental conditions. Great scope exists for the detection and control of illnesses related to the mineral and other content of soils. Biogeochemistry has already found some areas which are conducive to cancer or heart problems. Preliminary indications relate these to a wide range of environmental factos, including soil. Perhaps planning will exclude certain activities or uses from such areas or require the dangerous conditions to be remedied before development takes place.

Computerized inventory and processing of all resource information will have become an accepted feature of man's relationship to his environment. Research will increase in importance; its role in decision-making may be extended to promote the examination of basic assumptions and personal prejudices. Decisions should thus be based more on facts and known preferences and less on vague intuition. Although the imponderables will always count in respect of physical issues, many could be eliminated in the twenty-first century. Design-awareness centres will be an accepted 'institutionalized' part of the educational process as the public-health values of a high quality environment are accepted.

As more is learned about the diversity and quality of intelligence and man's potential for increasing it, so it may be expected that environmental conditions will be improved to enhance this most vital of all resources. The population pressure itself becomes the source of new qualities and quantities of human ability, provided that its growth is related to the development of man's intellect and his resource productivity, and that it is always borne in mind that he may have to occupy this planet for millions of years.

But optimism is denied by the assessments and forecasts made for the Club of Rome in its project on the predicament of mankind. This stresses the critical world situation arising from the many complex interactions between industrialization and depletion of natural resources, and between populations and food shortage, pollution, war, stress and disease. It forecasts a marked deterioration in material standards of living of western nations and contends that many of the proposed remedies may be self defeating. The Club seeks to identify and implement policies which will enable the world to make an orderly transition from a growth-based economy to an ecological equilibrium.

These aims received strong support in January 1972, when the British magazine The Ecologist, vol. 2, no. 1, launched A Blueprint for Survival. This proposed the formation of a movement for survival based on a new philosophy of life in harmony with the environment. It prescribed a comprehensive programme for the long-term stabilization of society based upon self-regulating systems and self-supporting communities.

Albert Schweitzer, too, was pessimistic. He said: 'Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'

How then to conclude? In such a vast field and with so much at stake, it is perhaps most important to emphasize man's responsibility, and to stress the challenge he faces now.

Worstward Ho!

Nothing much to report, apart from the accelerating downward motion of what Laurie Penny aptly calls 'kamikaze capitalism'. I for one don't really see how we can't be in line for the most ugly of outcomes, considering not only the fact that organised labour is in disarray, but also that we've got an almost 'accelerationist' government in charge. Say what you like about these vicious scum, but they're just the most avant-garde ticket in town.

Anyway; here's some deckchair shuffling.

ICON

You may know that I'm 'architecture correspondent' at Icon magazine. This month there's more of my words than usual: There's a short feature on Ball-Nogues, who are primarily installation designers out in California. They're affiliated with Sci-Arc, and I suppose that what they do is exemplary digital architecture, in the sense that it's humorous, playful, and perhaps most importantly , it's clever without being overwrought. There's also a larger feature about BIG's '8 House', a rather massive 21st century version of a streets-in-the-sky megastructure. Although Bjarke Ingels himself was (perhaps understandably) quite evasive about having his work compared to something like Park Hill or Robin Hood Gardens, the over-arching concern is remarkably similar; the introduction of traditional (or at least regular) patterns of street life into much larger structures and arrangements.


The day trip to Copenhagen was certainly a somewhat depressing one, but basically for reasons of London's continuing malady than anything else. It really is beautiful, all rugged Scandinavian civic architecture (the old stock exchange (pictured) being a particular highlight), the seemingly effortless modernism, the water everywhere, the obviously slight wealth discrepancies compared to the UK, combined with that old cliche of relaxed and healthy looking people cycling everywhere. BIG have a lovely office, even if it's clear that they're as stuffed with over-stretched interns as anywhere in less relaxed parts of the world, but they have a lovely kitchen. Even Ørestad, the brand-new neighbourhood built to the South of Copenhagen, which is still mostly credit-crunched, even this place had a sense of insouciance and life to it. Add to this the accidental stumbling upon an iron and glass winter garden, the sheer thrill of a nearly deserted airport at the end of the day (bringing to mind Mirabele, that great white elephant) and the pleasures of making the acquaintance of a charming fellow traveller, and it was enough of a pleasurable experience to put one into a really foul mood upon return.

BLOGS
Carl at the Impostume has started / is part of a new group blog abut the 70s, which is thus far excellent. There was a recent post about growth and decline, and about how the 70s prefigured much of what we've been hearing about ecological catastrophe in the last 10 years. The following passage is utterly fascinating, and worth mulling over:

Because of course, the end of growth, and consequent decline, doesn’t need to lead to starvation, anarchy, totalitarianism or genocide. Between a techno-grandiose future of plenty and the apocalypse, there lies a "third way" - decade after decade, century after century, of drab, dilapidated crapness; a distended Seventies stretching over the horizon, where it may only give way to a similarly distended Fifties, and then a Thirties and so on. This is the future most unacceptable to the Western mind, but alas the one it appears most likely to encounter.

Found Objects continues to be excellent, and I was very flattered to see something wot I did pop up on the site. Thanks, (mostly) unknown hauntologists!

I wrote something about Cory Arcangel before, where I noted his ability to tease out the utterly abject side of internet culture. Well, he now has a blog dedicated entirely to 'sorry I haven't posted in a while' blog posts. It's hilarious and abject, which is a delicious combination.

FILM

I've seen Patrick Keiller's new film, 'Robinson in Ruins'. I'm due to write a review of it, but I'll most likely write something on here as well, perhaps at length. It's going to be abject.

TALKS AND WALKS
E&V; is due to be doing a bunch of walks and talks in the next couple of months; I'll let you know what happens.

BOOKS
I'm currently reading the correspondence of Samuel Beckett. I feel like I'm 19 again.

Dialectic of Hi-Tech - response!

Well, basically, thanks to SDMYBT for responding to my last post so very quickly. In order to push the ideas a bit further on, I’ll be partly responding to him, and partly looking at another text I recently read; ‘Plateau Beaubourg’ by Alan Colquhoun, a contemporary critique of Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre (1971-7).

After the astonishing paroxysm of Lloyds, where the Marcuse-quoting Labourite gives capital the best fucking building it's ever going to have, High-Tech had the choice of going further in that direction, creating an accelerationist architecture, essentially, or of pretending that this 'changing society' was still changing for the better, and toning down the harsh elements of their architecture in favour of an ornamentalism of struts that eventually ends up in Terminal 5

This is a fascinating point. Now, normally I find ‘accelerationism’ an incredibly dubious political position, whether it be the anarcho-animist Deleuzo-Guattarian type or the trendy-gauloises-nihilism type we see a lot of about these days. Now’s not the time for a proper critique of accelerationism (not that I’d be capable of it), but on a very basic level I think that it’s the wrong conclusion to draw from the obvious fact that while modern capitalism has benefited a lot of people, developing many technologies that even communist societies would use, it is simultaneously destroying everything, including the world itself. I mean; how do accelerationists organise? What is an act of accelerationism? What’s actually the difference between Paul Wolfowitz and an accelerationist?


above: Fleetguard Factory. below: Coin Street

Nevertheless, ‘accelerationist architecture’ is a fascinating concept. What was the step beyond Lloyds? I mean, chronologically the step beyond Lloyds was the Fleetguard Factory (1979-81), which is a far more sensible (dare-I-say-it?) solution to a design problem. It’s one of those early High-Tech projects with a tension-cable roof, allowing for a lighter span and a more dynamic structural presence, most of which look rather sad now, all dirty and unloved. But there’s a couple of other projects that Rogers undertook that at least come close to what Lloyds was attempting. The unbuilt Coin Street plan (1979-83) was essentially a series of Lloyds towers running around the back of the National Theatre, except in this case they were to be used for offices and housing, with a shopping arcade running along underneath. It’s strange because it’s programmatically one of those vulgar mixed-use schemes that have dulled our cities so much in the last decade, albeit in the same astonishing brutalism-in-steel-and-glass style as Lloyds. In much the same way that we hate the client of Lloyds while still loving the building, we can imagine walking around the arcade of Coin Street, marvelling at the madness of the architecture while bemoaning the fact that it was filled with nothing more than Wagamamas underneath banks, underneath flats for the very rich.


above: Patscentre. below: Inmos microprocessor factory

The Patscentre (1982-5) and the Inmos microprocessor factory (1982-7) are ridiculously constructivist buildings with a very clear logic, although again, revolutionising the factory was never going to be easy when you’re dealing with bottom-line architecture. There’s a reason why factories are built the way they are, and there are other reasons why clients might occasionally pay for a Rogers factory. What would have been more interesting here would be the same approach being used for another programme, perhaps housing, or something urban (I don’t count Homebase or an Ice-skating rink). It’s as unlikely as ever, however.



The exhibition London as it Could Be (1986), however, shows an architectural step beyond what we saw in Lloyds and Pompidou, although it again owes masses of aesthetic influence to the constructivists. On the one hand we’re seeing the crystallizing of Rogers’ urban theories – the linear parks, cafĂ© culture, pedestrian routes and high density mixed-use development (beside a redundant river, natch!) that would eventually lead to Blair-space, but we shouldn’t forget that it was a polemical project aimed at the Tory bastards in power at the time, and Rogers also expected that proper, genuine state involvement would be required to make these things happen. The Blair-space we’re now unfortunately stuck with was the right idea, built for the wrong people by the wrong people, in the wrong way. Oh well. But! Look at the audacity and genuine madness of the proposal, the suspended bridge, the flamboyant structure and massing, the wilful lack of conventional order or proportion; it’s almost a forerunner of one of those deliberately ugly unbuilt OMA projects with the blue foam blocks rammed into each other willy-nilly. As far as ripping off the constructivists goes, one should take this theoretical project over early Zaha Hadid any day, as at least here we have the aesthetic being deployed with full knowledge of its radical political overtones, rather than as a plunderable bag of shapes.


two Bartlett projects c.2004

some expressive Miralles structure.

But that’s not really enough; London as it could be is a step forward but also a very obvious step back, invoking historically radical aesthetics as a deliberate provocation. It’s actually very hard to imagine a step beyond Lloyds, a more powerful expression of building services (as previously noted; the genuine engineering vanguard of the 1960s onward), a building with a more fragmented edge or envelope, lacking even any kind of façade. There are definitely historical aspects to Lloyds – the retained façade, the roof that riffs off the Crystal Palace, the oak panelled room high up inamongst the polished steel, and of course many of its details are dependent on brutalist convention, but its belligerent, alienating, anti-classical, even anti-modernist aesthetic has rarely if ever been approached since. For hints, perhaps one might take another look at the ‘Bartlett Style’ (circa 2004) of architecture; not something I usually recommend, but within this argument it would be very interesting to see a built architecture with as much perforation and resistance to ‘edge’ as some of those frivolous student projects suggested; all those hanging wires, silly devices and superfluous lines that don’t refer to anything whatsoever, they are of the same family as the overpowering texture and depth of Lloyds/Pompidou. Or maybe one could look at the expressiveness of the Catalan Modernism of Miralles et al: the flamboyance of structure, proliferation of detail, warped contextualism and symbolic formal language; one of only a few post ‘68 styles that is worthy of the ‘high modernism’ tag, a deeply knowledgeable architecture that achieves a ‘specialness’ that, at the end of the day, we humans seem to need. But neither of these two avenues are really as interesting as that first flowering of avant-tech architecture, neither are they particularly concerned with the politics of architecture – they both tend towards the ‘ornamentalism of struts’ that Owen mentions. Maybe one should look to the utilitarian structures such as the support structure I recently wrote about, structures with almost no style whatsoever. Or perhaps we have to look to science fiction for ideas, but that’s not really been my style – I’m not a futurologist – but I’d love to hear about any future cities that could be looked at as serious considerations of this idea. At the end of the day, it’s just a shame that Rogers basically gave up, becoming a polite version of himself, with nobody really pushing the ideas further. Knowing what we know now about the iconic boom, he could probably have held onto his early architectural language for long enough that big projects started rolling in again…

I'm generally not that bothered about the sin of 'solutionism' any more than I'm bothered about the 'ethical fallacy, at least until it becomes (with varying degrees of regularity) a massive fib, or at present both a fib and a pernicious cliché.

Well; yes. Perhaps my argument was too strong there. I didn’t mention Bucky Fuller in the last post partly because Foster didn’t really begin to get close to him until the seventies; but of course any reckoning of technologically focused architecture has to deal with him… but still: one of my biggest problems with solutionism is that it basically neglects any kind of reckoning with consciousness, of both the personal and the collective type. I don’t deny for one second that any major improvements in society will have to involve learning from and utilizing the architectural methods of retail parks, supermarkets and malls, but my point still stands that if you articulate a position that is so willfully blank on some of the most important aspects of architectural culture, these gaps will be quickly filled with shit. The inevitability of this outcome is of course difficult to really ascertain, I know the astoundingly negative quality of a critique that says that a theory is only as good as its ill-use, and of course a theory can only cover so much ground; there is no all-encompassing system that cannot be co-opted or applied poorly… If you’re not careful with this you end up with the faux-consensual logic of the least-worst. Having said that, perhaps there’s an irony that I’m not properly appreciating: inasmuch as all ideas fall flat, there’s a qualitative difference between the failure of, say, the ferro-vitreous ‘palaces for the people’, the post-war utopian experiments in communal living, and an architecture whose sole ideology is that it is the most efficient and sensible solution. I refer back to Spitalfields Market – the piss-poor application of what is already a very dry rhetoric is heartbreaking - “This is nothing less than the answer to what you really want!”

Or perhaps – if you’re bound to fail, then could you at least aim high?


So, anyway; Colquhoun’s essay on Beaubourg has some really prescient things to say about the problems of solutionist rhetoric. With particular significance for what I was just saying:

Once it is admitted that “functionalism” is a system of representation and not a mere instrument, then it becomes a matter of legitimate discussion as to whether the values symbolised by this architecture are desirable or not. But such a discussion is cut short by the bland statement that architecture expresses nothing but its inherent usefulness. Any questioning of its forms can then be attributed to the fact that the questioner has not yet come to terms with the “facts” of modern life.

One must never forget however, that solutionist rhetoric is something that has always been partially about relationships between stakeholders in the construction of a building – generally people want to feel that they’re getting value for money. If you went into a meeting armed with a presentation explaining the ideological system that your façade expressed, you’d find yourself without a project to finish. So one has to always be careful that one does not mistake simple business seduction with solutionism, but on the other hand that is perhaps what makes solutionism solutionism; the use of the rhetoric beyond what is pragmatically necessary for smooth dealings with clients and so on. What was that I previously said about those characters from Zizek? There is a reading to be made where the solutionist over-fondness for functionalist rhetoric opens the door for the taking seriously by others of that same rhetoric… This perhaps is neglecting the economic pressure of the construction industry somewhat, but we mustn’t also neglect the power of ideology in getting people to spend money… Going back to the Colquhoun quote, I think that it’s very important that this point is stressed against ‘pure’ functionalism. For the economic and interactive reasons mentioned above, solutionism becomes a foreclosing rhetoric, pre-emptively blocking off criticisms through a language of efficiency and inevitability.

This attitude assumes that architecture has no further task other than to perfect its own technology. It turns the problem of architecture as a representation of social values into a purely aesthetic one, since it assumes that the purpose of architecture is merely to accommodate any form of activity which may be required and has no positive attitude toward these activities. It creates institutions, while pretending that no institutionalisation of social life is necessary.

This leads us to question further; there have been radical relationships to technology before, or at least there have been more complex relationships to technology in the past. Right now, the digital manufacturing ‘scene’ has a much more complicated relationship to technology (reckoning with which is outside the scope of this piece), even beard-and-sandals environmentalism has a more subtle relationship to technology than solutionism does. I will state strongly that a pure, or at least over-invested functionalism cannot ever be adequate for the creation of architecture, as long as there is culture. Service of function is not all of what architecture, or indeed technology in general, does. Culturally, we absolutely need some kind of ‘figuring out’ of our relationship to technology, and in architectural terms, we need something better than parametric wibble and hair-shirt mud huts. The reason I bang on about Victorian ferro-vitreous architecture is because I think there is something there that is neglected that might just help figure out a few cultural problems (of architecture) in the here-and-now.

The philosophy behind the notion of flexibility is that the requirements of modern life are so complex and changeable that any attempt on the part of the designer to anticipate them results in a building which is unsuited to its function and represents, as it were, a “false consciousness” of the society in which he operates.
[…]
It is difficult to envisage any function which would require an unimpeded fifty-meter span with a height limitation of seven meters.

Again, this essay repeatedly makes points that are just as valid today. The first part of the quote presents an indictment of ‘shed-ness’, or the tendency towards blankness. This is not to say that flexibility is bad per se; the mat-building typology, or ‘roofitecture’ are both complex and interesting systems with a lot to give us, and the notion of upgrading and adaption are likely to be vital later in this century, but to abdicate responsibility for programme is not a particularly welcome thing. The second quote is a version of my ‘1889 argument’; since then, depending upon the impressiveness of engineering for the power of the architecture lends itself to a particular architectural melancholy; the hints of a larger finitude expressed by a space unfilled.

And I think I’ll just quote the last paragraph of the essay in full, seeing as it combines a number of previous points I’ve made:

But in considering whether the “symbolic gestures” are gratuitous or not we cannot just take them at their face value as an “honest” expression of the material or function of a building. The Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower were structural gestures, but carried within them the idea of structural economy and minimal effort, whereas at Beaubourg the “real” structural members are in places sheathed in stainless steel and thus appear both luxurious and larger than they actually are. Nor can the Centre Pompidou be equated with the work of the Constructivists, however strident the analogy may at first seem. For the constructivists, the expression of structure and mechanical elements was connected with a social ideology and took its meaning from this. The Centre Pompidou seems to be more related to Archigram’s work of the sixties and its meaning to be in the area of science fiction. This great machine of culture seems to have no ideological message: it presents an image of total mechanisation but makes no connection between this image and the other possible images of our culture.

Food for thought, I reckon. Will have to come back to it, however...