The Hatchet

The following is a review of 'Experimental Architecture' by Peter Cook, written by a 'Kit Pedler' and appearing in the April 1971 issue of Architectural Design:

One of the most disturbing features about the immediate future is the very real probability that people can become agreeably conditioned to accept any one of a hundred different technological nightmares. Alvin Toffler on the other hand has recently suggested that we can no longer adapt rapidly enough to a galloping future and that we shall become victims of Future Shock.
After reading this book I am in profound shock. I find that I can live in an "urban finger" the only justification for which appears to be that the complex has concrete digits. I can crawl my way into one of the convolutions of the old "bowellism", a vertical assembly of hollow concrete intestines with windows. I can surround myself with "fun places", "Instant cities" and inflatable buildings ("Mum, can we come and stay with you for a few days, somebody pricked our living room again"). Bored perhaps with the sheer brilliance of the designers, I can then walk to "plug-in-city" pausing for a quick trip in an "environmental box" or a session in a "mind-expander". Finally, having visited a friend curled up in a foetal position in his glass fibre "living pod" I can return to my own PVC pad thanking whichever guru happens to be in vogue at the time for the unspeakable perfections of my surroundings.
Architects often seem to me to be one of the most arrogant species at liberty. Having absorbed a sprinkling of philosophy and a crude knowledge of technical concepts, they develop the ability to translate what is largely impudent dogma into concrete and metal reality, and then have the sheer nerve to justify the initial idea by post hoc rationalisation. What probably started as an absolutely "sooper" idea in the intellectual wastelands of NW1 turns into a fraudulent justification for a real building where people are rather regrettably inserted.
Mr. Cook's congested text is a minor masterpiece of such rationalisation. Amidst page after page of glimpses from the obvious, there are apologies for each project variously labelled as "on-going", "myth exploding" or just "experimental". If one is simple minded enough to suppose that a house - is a dwelling place - is a home - for an individual, then Mr. Cook's future is not for you. Nearly all his explanations offer a complex reason for the relative validity of the project he is describing. One is interested to note for example that "... perhaps it is inevitable that the satellite piece of furniture which moves as an individual package will lead to the mechanised foot rather than do anything which implies a regular hierarchy (even one as loose as that of furniture: to dwelling: to location)". Do you know I never knew that before - just as law is for the lawyers - and medicine is for the doctors, so architecture is quite evidently for architects.
Amidst all the glossy verbosity of this book there is practically no mention of the gentle human frame. It appears to be a rather tiresome protoplasmic appendage, to be fitted in somewhere at the end of a designer's monument to his own frivolity.
I wish, I could believe, that Mr. Cook had written a black comedy, a private in-joke for his colleagues. Sadly, I conclude that he is serious.

A couple of things pop to mind: first of all, who is behind 'Kit Pedlar'? In the culture of pseudonyms I wonder if it's yet another of Martin Pawley's efforts, sticking the knife in in his own inimitable way. But there's more going on, because it's obviously also a parody of the shocked conservative voice that would become much louder by the end of the decade, and then would become the dominant voice by the eighties. Experimental Architecture is by no means a great book, but the sheer anger with which people would fall back on a vulgar Heideggerian notion of dwelling as an excuse to suppress anything even remotely communal or 'modern' about house building and promote reactionary notions about how and where people should live, and what the house should mean in terms of its relationship to the wider economy, is perfectly ventriloquised here.

If anyone can shed any light on this, please let me know...

Summerland

Everybody knows when the dream of modern architecture died, don't they? Depending on which side of the Atlantic you are from, there are two events that supposedly mark this particular failure out. Americans generally point to the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in 1972, most famously highlighted by Charles Jencks., while in the UK we have the May 1968 partial collapse of Ronan Point tower in east London (a quick aside - on the old black and white 'Eastenders' title sequence you can see the shadows of the Freemason's Estate just to the north of the western end of the Albert Docks). But there is another symbolic event at which modern architecture supposedly became suspect and untrustworthy, when the concrete veil was lifted and we saw modernism for the mistake that it had always been, yet it's an event that seems to have been dropped from the narrative. In many ways it is a more damning and terrifying indictment of architectural practice and negligence in the post-war period, and yet it no longer has quite the same symbolic cache as the previously mentioned events. In this post I'll describe the building, and try to explain why it's actually a more complex and in some ways more appropriate symbol for the failure of the modernist project.

'Summerland' was an indoor entertainment complex in Douglas, the Isle of Man, which on the evening of the 28^th June 1973 suffered a massive fire which killed 50 people. The fire was started accidentally by a group of children who were hiding outside smoking, with a discarded cigarette causing a small fire that made its way into the exterior walls of the building. This fire grew, out of sight, before breaking out into the main hall, and within minutes the entire building was ablaze, with 3,000 people hysterically clambering over each other to escape.

            The disaster was in many ways similar to other tragedies of its type - visitors were unaware of escape routes, while some of the doors had been locked shut by the management as a way to prevent people from sneaking in without paying. There was also a delay in the evacuation of the building, which didn't begin until the fire had already engulfed the interior - in addition to this, the fire brigade were not called for almost half an hour after the fire started due to poor safety training of the staff. In a subsequent enquiry these were the most significant factors in determining why there had been such loss of life.

But there were other significant failings - ones which inevitably damaged the reputation of architects and engineers. One of these was genuine, and serious; the internal layout and the means of escape in the building were wholly inadequate for a building of its type, with a single large open staircase the only obvious route down; this staircase was overwhelmed during the escape, and half of the bodies of victims that were later found were on this staircase.

Furthermore, and in a development that brings to mind John Poulson and the image of the brown envelope-handling poltician and architect, there was a blatant flouting of the normal building regulations. The external wall that the fire started below was built from 'galbestos', an un-fire rated panelling material, chosen to save money - it was suggested that if it had been concrete then the fire would not have spread. The 'oroglas' transparent acrylic that was used for the façade and roof was known to be flammable, but somehow during the design process the architects managed to get a waiver for the material, relying on manufacturer's claims that when heated the material would soften and simply pop out of its frame, an untested supposition.  During the disaster, the oroglas ignited rapidly, greatly increasing the ferocity of the fire, and causing molten plastic to drip down onto those desperately trying to escape. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster the press developed a narrative whereby this untested and dangerous material was a major contributing factor to the disaster, and although this was later shown to be mostly untrue (the oroglas ignited late in the conflagration, and it was later realised that most if not all of the casualties had already occurred by then), the narrative of the modernist architect foisting a dangerous and untested material onto an unsuspecting and vulnerable public was a dramatic one, and one that seeded itself in the distrust of modern architecture that would fully develop in the following decade.

But beyond the horrible events of that day, the Summerland building is a remarkable building as well, both in terms of its functions but also its position within a historical context. It deserves to be studied, certainly not as a work of architecture of any note, but as an early attempt at actually building a radically new idea of the time. Outside of the tragedy itself and the historical effect it would have, the Summerland building was unique.

The decision to build Summerland was born out of demographic trends in the 1960s - the generally increasing standard of living meant that more people were taking foreign holidays, and often for the first time this included the working classes. Douglas on the Isle of Man was a traditional summer holiday destination, but it was moving into decline as the 60s wore on - it had pretty average weather and a lack of facilities or entertainment venues. The solution that was put forward by the government of the island was for a modern leisure complex to be created that would encourage tourists back to the island again. An architectural competition was held with a very vague brief (basically; "a swimming pool and whatever else you think might be useful"), which was won by a local architect, James Phillips Lomas, who presented a remarkably avant-garde design.

The proposal for Summerland basically consisted of two main phases; one was an Olympic-size swimming pool complex entitled the 'Aquadrome' and the other, 'Summerland' proper, was a massive single enclosed space into which all manner of entertainment programme was to be inserted. With a footprint of about the size of a football field, and a single 30m high roof, it was a huge, singular air-conditioned environment, designed to create a pleasant microclimate throughout the year no matter what the weather, its vastness giving the impression that it the visitor was actually outside on a wonderful summer day. The space was supported on a large truss of steel columns, with a space frame roof spanning across the top, and into this structure were inserted the oroglas panels, chosen over glass for their strength, their lightness and their ability to control solar gain.

Summerland was designed to offer the visitor absolutely everything that they could get from, for example, a Spanish holiday resort. Into the cavernous greenhouse were built a number of terraces, with programme including an amusement arcade, a restaurant, a number of bars and a futuristic tanning room called the 'sundome'.  Underneath the solarium were children's entertainment and amusements, and a basement disco. In total the building was capable of holding 10,000 visitors at any one time, a rather huge amount of people to be freely moving around in just the one complex. The interior was kitted out with a very strange array of styles, from the deck chairs and stripy canopies associated with the Great British Seaside, to the 'timber Helvetica moderne' interior style that was common at the time, to the total kitsch of the interior waterfall and 'rustic walkway' made of logs, to the crazy high-tech communications tower, and the plastic tat of the bingo hall.

            At the architectural scale the building represented a strange hybrid, a transitional architecture stretching forward but unable to escape its own time. The majority of the building was constructed in a rather unsophisticated brutalist manner - the swimming pool and the lower storeys of the solarium were almost entirely windowless concrete lumps, with none of the flair of a Rodney Gordon, another architect operating at the same time at the similar end of the commercial scale, and yet capable of magnificently bold and clever designs. The solarium, however, is an embryonic example of the architecture that hadn’t yet managed to make itself felt as 'high-tech', the steel and glass mode that has now taken over the world; the solarium was spare, structural, it receded in a way that concrete doesn't. It was an example of architecture as attempted dematerialisation.

After the fire, it is really rather astonishing that Summerland was not immediately demolished, considering the horrors that had occurred there, but it was decided to rebuild the complex in a less risky and ambitious fashion. The swimming pool had suffered comparatively little damage from the fire, as did the concrete floors underneath the solarium. Instead of the massive airy enclosure however, the replacement was a single storey box with barely any windows to the side, supported under a gloomy space-frame roof. The pedestrian bridge across the road was sliced off, and the concrete facing the sea rotted away to the reinforcements, leaving the building looking about as sorry as it was possible for a building of that period to really appear. Although apparently still valued by locals, the new, diminished Summerland never managed to maintain profitability, and it was eventually demolished in 2005.

            There are a number of resemblances that I'd like to point out here. The first is a rather uncanny one; the USA pavilion at the Montreal Expo, 1967. On a superficial level, Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome has two major resonances with Summerland - the dome of the expo building was not only entirely clad in oroglas, but it too was consumed by fire, although without any loss of life. But furthermore, both of these structures were attempts to create massive interior, climate controlled and hospitable spaces for activities within. This was very much part of the utopian culture at the time, with the prospect of moon bases and the rise of the consideration of architecture in terms of serviced space rather than form and void - Banham's 'Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment' was published in 1969, for example. Indeed, it was said that the original concept for Summerland was actually a dome but was lost to cost and construction difficulties - this would seem to be borne out by Lomas' other design for a leisure complex in Hunstanton which looks rather like an early sketch for the Eden Project.

            But Buckminster Fuller's Biodome was a pavilion of science and lofty thinking, whereas Summerland was entirely an entertainment complex. With this in mind, then perhaps the greatest resonance is with Archigram. The gee-whizz consumerism of Archigram's Zoom ethos was remarkably congruent with the high-tech British seaside resort that was Summerland (even if Warren Chalk gave a patronising review of Summerland in the AJ, calling it a 'rather timid collage'); both had the same emphasis on colour, fun and consumption and the apparent freedoms that they entail. But whereas Archigram's dreams were conjured up by a group of professional men, at least some of whom were of the 'upper orders', and were populated by models and starlets, Summerland was pitched directly at the ordinary worker and their idea of a fun holiday. Furthermore - the great project of Archigram, the one that got away, was indeed a single-purpose entertainment venue, by the sea, contained in a large, continuous single serviced space, although this time it was to be built in Monaco (of course!). In this case what Summerland represents is a genuine, actually existing example of what an 'applied Archigram' would turn out to be; a concrete test of the flash-whizzy dreams of architects applied to genuine working class lives, which in this case was a fully-sealed space for children's talent shows (although it should be noted that until the disaster, Summerland was making a tidy profit). The point here is that Summerland as an idea was no less ambitious than an Archigram event-space, inasmuch as Summerland was genuinely built, genuinely used and genuinely enjoyed, rather than merely pamphleted into academia.

Finally, we can go yet further back, and here it becomes rather clear quite why I have become so interested Summerland: there is another historical building, one which synthesises the two oroglas vitrines, Fuller's and Lomas'. I am referring of course to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Here, a single seemingly immaterial interior space of a genuinely unprecedented scale was erected in 1854, with lofty ideals of education and optimism. Again, inside this envelope (or sphere, if you fancy a spot of Sloterdijk) were strewn a varied and shifting set of architectural spaces, styles and programmes. Again, the building was an attempt to create a moderated interior environment that would be akin to a constantly pleasant outdoors. However despite the ideals of its founders that it would be a place where the classes would mix, by the turn of the 20^th century it was looked down upon as a place only frequented by the aspirational petit-bourgeoisie, with entertainments and exhibits of a rather kitsch variety. And of course eventually it too would burn down.

So beyond merely representing yet another end-point of modernism in architecture, when the negligence and incompetence of its practitioners were laid bare in the most appalling fashion, Summerland actually has a deeper resonance with the architecture of modernity; it is part of the modernism of disappearance, of traceless architecture that recedes behind pure  activity and space, of environments defined by freedom. Despite its brashness, and despite the fact that even without the fire and tragedy it would probably still eventually have been a failure, Summerland was fascinating for being a genuine attempt to realise some of the dreams of its time.

Level 4 plan of Summerland (note - numbers in bold symbols represent where bodies were recovered)

Level 5 plan

Level 6 plan

Level 7 plan

Note:- This post was greatly helped by a study of the disaster written by Ian Phillips.

Soixante Huit Cumbernauld

I previously mentioned 'Between Channels' putting up a series of photographs that they got hold of, but they've really upped the ante this time, with a series of photographs of the Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, award winning megastructure and Britain's most hated building.

I'm less concerned with the quality of the architecture as we all know that it's not a great building, for various reasons, but the photos are textbook 'h---------' (which god knows seems to have descended into endless bad-nostalgia for shitty witch-related tv programmes...), the grain, the bleached colours, the emptiness, the sense of futures past... They remind me of this set of photographs of then contemporary architecture, all pristine and yet faded.

Two things stick in my mind, however: one is this image of what looks like a stunning bookshop, with that now deeply unfashionable use of timber panelling:


And the other is this image from Iqbal Alam's collection of photos:

This shows the construction of the Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, and is perhaps as close to a genuine early Archigram structure you'll ever get.

Twothousandandten

Don't worry, come back! It's not another list! But it is the end of one year, and the start of a new. It's a time to reflect, to take stock, to blah blah blablah. What I will say is that on a number of levels (although not that many) 2010 was a far better year than 2009. I was employed in what amounts to 2.5 jobs for the whole year, got to write for various people, got to travel across Europe to write, got to give talks to various people, got to travel across Europe to talk to people, even got to do a bit of teaching. During this time I met a lot of wonderful people, many for the first time, and for all this I'm very grateful. As well as this, my carousing became less desperate & less fatalistic, I took better care of myself, and also some loose ends were tied up, writing a less tragic ending to one of the most horrible stories of my last three years. All in all, it was a damn sight better than the year before, although at the end of the day I'm still the same old miserable bastard.

So anyway, what follows are some collected thoughts on the year just passed, apropos of nothing, and not really in aid of anything either. Perhaps this will help me figure out what next year is going to be all about, or maybe I'm just writing this to pass the time, which will pass in any case. But no matter! Onward! Things can only get better!

WORST BUILDING OF THE YEAR!

By far the most embarrassing object to come to my attention this year was the ArcelorMittalOrbit, the ugliest, most aggressively stupid piece of public art I have ever seen, and it's not even built yet. Everything about it, from the anecdote about BoJo the Clown meeting Lakshmi Mittal in the pissers at Davos, to the clichéd sub-Derridean patter that accompanied the planning application, to the banality of the napkin sketch to the already tired digital resolution of the silly shape, nothing signified the moral and aesthetic vacuum at the heart of this pathetic little island better than this 110m tall trinket to be built within stumbling distance from my flat. ARGH!

BEST (NEW) BUILDING OF THE YEAR!
Well this one has to be a toss-up between one of two buildings, one of which I think is better than the other, one of which I actually visited.


The former is the Spanish Pavilion from the Shanghai Expo. I wrote about the Expo a couple of times this year, both in print and on the blog, as well as interviewing Benedetta Tagliabue for ICON magazine around the middle of the year. What I thought was good about the Spanish Pavilion was that it showed a mature attitude both to the implementation of digital technology / fabrication in a building, as well as to its symbolic language.
Regarding technology, rather than any quasi-avant garde-ist babble about CAD plug-ins being the generators of an unprecedented spatial complexity that enacts its very own detournément, this building was digital in that it used computers to resolve the structural gymnastics, without making any hi-falutin claims that don't stand up to expert scrutiny.
The building also understood the architectural value of formalism for the façade, functionalism for the insides.
And as for the formal language, in an Expo notable for its vacuous pop-formalism, its doily facades, its sand-dune buildings, its frankly stupid conceptualism, this building took the dumb gesture, that of the wicker basket, and made something abstracted and complex from it, referring at once to Chinese tradition, Spanish tradition and previous works by EMBT, as well as all of the other architectural clevernesses they're good at. It was good to see them get some credit, after such a long time as being 'the firm that completed Miralles designs'.


The second building was the 8 House by BIG in Copenhagen, which I reviewed for ICON. I'm suspicious of BIG, to be honest. I find the post-Koolhaas overblown functionalism to be a conceptual one trick pony (HEY guys! What's the zoning envelope? Let's just build right up to it! etc…), and of course I find Ingels' hyperactive optimism to be precisely the opposite of my own ideas about architecture, but it was excellent to see people having a go at the megastructural housing block. Basically a yuppiedrome, the 8 House put all the speculative housing completed in the UK over the last year to absolute shame. In fact, even the developer seems like Nye Bevan compared to the scum we've got over here in the UK. Depressing.

WORST EVENT OF THE YEAR!

This shower of bastards sneaked in, and already they're wrecking the place like it was an unfortunate Oxford restaurant. The simplest way I can understand the situation is that these gentlemen have come to the conclusion that the only way to improve the economic climate in the UK (meaning stimulate opportunities for 'wealth creation', i.e. profit extraction for their friends) is to roll back the rights that our parents and their parents and their parents fought so very hard for so very long for. These hooligans have looked jealously at levels of exploitation in the third world and have thought "Bingo! That's what we need!" It beggars belief.

Not only have they managed to sell the country the mind-bogglingly stupid analogy of the economy being a cupboard that has been left empty by the profligate previous government, thus we're all (i.e. just the poor) going to have to starve, but they're also in the process of destroying the state higher-education system, squeezing the poor out of the inner cities, and crippling the NHS yet further.

As an intellectual, an aesthete, and a person with a strong attachment to the notion of the universality of humanity and its suffering (phew!), I've never felt more adrift from the zeitgeist. I want them stopped. They are bastards, and they're trying to ruin it for everyone apart from them and their clique. STOP THEM!

But then, inamongst this genuine anger, and despite the fact that as K-Punk so perfectly put it: 'history is starting again', there is always the looming fact that this is a systematic crisis in capitalist society, one that is of course intrinsically linked to the looming (unfolding?) environmental catastrophe. Perhaps capitalism might not collapse in the next 100 years, but it's going to get a lot more ugly, as if the world weren't already ugly enough. My wild prediction for what to expect from the next decade? Pogroms. Lots of 'em. All over the place, happening to all sorts of people. Maybe not, but something spectacular needs to be pulled out of the hat if we're going to avoid WWII levels of horror in the next generation or so (but of course, we saw WWII levels of horror in the last ten years in the Congo, didn't we? It just goes on and on…)
Trümmer auf Trümmer…

MUSIC OF THE YEAR!
Oh, it's difficult for me to talk about music much these days. I mean, it's still very very important to me, ridiculously so, but it feels strange to be a music lover nowadays. I hardly ever buy music any more, the occasional album by a contemporary artist, mostly experimental electronic-y stuff, but there's just such a hell of a lot of youtube watching, spotify listening and so on that I can discuss at length various aspects of 'the latest shit', without actually feeling any kind of enthusiasm for it. I suspect this is a very common feeling as the crisis of music consumption brought about by the internet becomes yet deeper, as the sense of discovery that once went hand in hand with finding new music vanishes yet further. I did go to see Hype Williams playing in Hoxton, for example, although I decided that I couldn't be arsed with the Salem gig at Shoreditch church.

I continued trying to practice, although business meant that certain projects I had going during the idleness of 2009 are now on the back-burner, perhaps indefinitely. This year I'd like to make recordings of some of the myriad arrangements that I have almost completed, if only to get them out of the way, to give oneself the feeling of having done something, anything!

2010 also saw me give proper time and consideration to Wagner, which led to some (what I thought were) fascinating insights into the High Romantic imagination and its relationship to technology. Verso reissued Adorno's book on Wagner, which is excellent, although I don't know if I can really be arsed reading what Badiou has to say about him in his newly published collection.

FILM OF THE YEAR!

Well, it's going to have to be Keiller's 'Robinson in Ruins', which I reviewed for ICON. One of the most striking things about this film was the way that the exquisite melancholy of his earlier Robinson films had given way to a sense of pessimistic dread, as Vanessa Redgrave read quotes of climate scientists earnestly discussing the imminent 'End of Life on Earth'.

Overall it certainly wasn't as good as the previous films - one got the sense that Keiller had turned his RCA research fellowship into a Robinson film only under duress, but I still cannot get over the breadth, intelligence and wit of his work, and I'm totally in thrall to its ability to draw out the embedded history and struggles that are latent in the landscapes we inhabit, while also making comprehensive artistic statements.

BOOK OF THE YEAR!
Accusations of clique-ness are probably well founded here, but Owen's book 'A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain' is a really stunning piece of work, a real demonstration that rather than the current standard of reactionary complacency posing as radical theorising all sheathed in unbearably turgid prose, it is eminently possible to combine architecture and politics in a work of genuine literary quality. Good for him!

Other literature that really stuck with me this year included Jonathan Littel's 'The Kindly Ones', Alisdair Gray's 'Lanark', & reading Geoffrey Hill's poetry.

BOOK OF NEXT YEAR!

In other literature news; I'm expecting that the first half of this year will see the publication of THE ARCHITECTURE OF FAILURE, the short book that I wrote about architecture, technology and weakness last year. Part history, part polemic, it takes a new look at the founding structures of modern architecture, the giant Iron & Glass palaces of the late 19th century. Instead of the triumphant expressions of technical prowess that they are generally understood to be, these buildings were expressions of a far more doubtful culture, which saw fragility, ghostliness and melancholy in their lofty transepts. This historical analysis begins to form a theory of architectural failure, a theory that starts to coalesce in the second half of the book where I apply it to three significant periods of architectural modernism, all of which have established conceptual links to these founding monuments - the 'Zoom' wave of Archigram et al, the Decon lot of the 1980s-90s, and the new generation of digiwibblists.

It will be neither conclusive neither definitive, but I would like to think that you'll enjoy it. I'll keep you posted.

Megastructures?

I have recently been trying to move my thinking on from the book, which seems as far away now as it was before I wrote it, all of 8 or so months ago. If I can summarise the book, it's either: a bunch of essays that have mostly been superseded by stuff wot other people have been writing, or if you're being charitable; it's a critique of a certain standard view of modern architecture, a critique that does its work by going back to the very origins of the concept and then working forwards until it proves that everything is basically rubbish.

What's been occupying me now is the period around the time of the emergence of the post-modern project in architecture, the early to mid 70s, before the rise of the 'new right'. Specifically, I've been thinking that I need to look back at the megastructural project (see my paean to the space-frame, my look at the LOMEX, etc...), which it seems to me was curtailed by bottom-up critique, right-ward lurch and economic recession. In the book I discuss the 'Zoom' wave, Archigram and all that sort of thing, and I discuss how it ended up as corporate high-tech. I mean, you need only look at the Lloyds building to see both the future of corporate architecture; open, ultra-efficient floor plates, neoprene gaskets and full-height glazing, service voids above and below, etc etc... But of course at the same time it's the most surreal and extravagant building in all of Britain, hesitating at the threshold between brutalism and 'Zoom', with what seems now to be the seemingly inevitable descent into the fully glazed air conditioned office building.

And the link between Brutalism and high-tech is very important. Not only were Foster & Rogers taught by Paul Rudolph while at Yale, but one of the most interesting things about Archigram is to look at what they were doing in their early years - the 'bowelism' and the hyper-brutalism. Now although these kind of projects already betray the aestheticisation that basically spoils Archigram for me, the gee-whizz attitude of those who don't really think that things are so bad, y'know... I want to take them more seriously at this point just before they slide right off into whimsy. Where could this have led?

I'm considering putting together some kind of proposal regarding this research, although of course there's no money in it anymore, but basically the idea is something along the lines of a parallel history where the future didn't necessarily occur as predicted, but where it certainly wasn't rejected in the way that it actually was. As I've mused before - what if the Yom Kippur war hadn't happened and the oil crisis hadn't occurred? What if North Sea Oil had been nationalised? etc.etc. The resulting research would be part textual critique, but would also include the design of near-historic buildings from the hypothetical past.

I'm afraid at this stage it's going to have to take the form of an 'inspirational images' type post, I'm far too busy to actually do any of it justice right now, but you never know, maybe one day!

Can Architecture Fail Better?

This weekend just passed I spent in Warsaw, in a hotel just on the edge of the massive square under the Palace of Culture. I don't possess a camera these days so there was no way I could really make a documented journey that I could share with you, but of course Owen has already done so rather bloody well. I must say that I really enjoyed my coffee outside of Powisle station, ruminating on certain particularities of Warsaw pact urbanism, which I've picked up in previous travels to Poland, the Czech Republic, East Germany and Slovakia. Such features include the width of the pavements, always generous, the unfussy borders between pavements and grass / shrubbery, and of course the accentuated distance between buildings. Top that all off with a windswept plaza and you're really somewhere.


My reason for being there was a talk to be given at the Museum of Modern Art, which awaits its eventual relocation into a building by Swiss architect Christian Kerez. I've previously interviewed him over the phone, and his English sounds uncannily like that of Werner Herzog's, which was eerie to say the least… I must say I'm impressed with his Warsaw project, which has hints of the best of post-war Brazilian Brutalism, and I hope that when it is realised it is as good a building as it appears in the drawings and renders.

Anyway, I'd like to share with you my notes for the talk, which I ended up kind of ad-libbing in the end. It's an early attempt to push ideas a bit further than they go in my book, but at the same time is a little bit of an elucidation into some of the ideas contained in it. Please forgive the conversational tone.

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As you may have noticed, we are at the current time experiencing a new period of ruinenlust. But the subject of this passion for ruins is modernism; many of the 20th century’s experiments in changing the spatial patterns of politics, aesthetics and life still exist, ever more poignant due to the faded urgency of their expressions of tomorrow. The ruins of modernism figure heavily in the work of contemporary artists such as Jane and Louise Wilson, Cyprien Galliard, Tacita Dean, or Jeremy Millar. To that you should add the new book by Owen Hatherley, and the recent film by Patrick Keiller 'Robinson in Ruins'.
So there are a number of strands of what we might call ruin-thought currently at work. To these I would like to add my own area of research, which in a very clichéd way might be described as a history of the future.
I too am interested in the ruin, but in my research the ruin has cometo signify something more abstract than the abandoned and the decayed. I might be able to talk about the 'abstract ruin', but I think that a better word to describe my research is perhaps the word 'failure'. To me, 'failure' is a word which describes not only its literal meaning, not achieving one's goals etc… but also a certain way of seeing.
One might call it 'urban romanticism' perhaps, or maybe 'architectural melancholy', but it refers to, and is drawn to a certain active repression of negativity in architectural culture, a repression that one can uncover through the examination of fragments. I contend that this constant repression is not only a process of aestheticisation but is also a politically charged repression as well. Hopefully I can give you a few examples here tonight.
I will look at a number of different types of building and discuss ways in which this 'failed' condition appears in them. What I will be trying to tease out is a certain 'radical weakness'.

Iron and glass palaces

I will start from what are often attributed as the very beginning of modern architecture, the iron & glass palaces. Made possible through the development of industrially mass-produced cast-iron and plate glass, these buildings evolved from the construction of small orangeries attached to the sides of aristocratic housing till by the middle of the 19th century they had become the largest enclosed spaces in the world, accommodating massive exhibitions, huge displays of flora, as well as covered shopping streets and railway stations. It is not to exaggerate to say that they accommodated some of the most significant changes in ways of life that were occurring at the time; the birth of consumer capitalist culture, the beginnings of mass transit and mobility.


Perhaps the most famous of these buildings is the Crystal Palace, built in London in 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, which in the words of Prince Albert, was "to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived." the Crystal Palace was a gigantic web of mass-produced iron & glass, a vast display cabinet containing over 100,000 exhibits, ranging from industrial machinery to raw materials, from fabrics to furniture. Over 6 million people visited the exhibition in six months, one of the most significant early moments in mass culture.


On the one hand the Great Exhibition was a way of symbolically demonstrating Britain's lead in the industrial race, but at the same time it was an event that was born from elite fears of insurgency; conceived in the wake of the failed European revolutions of 1848 and the Chartists revolt, a fear of the working class was a prominent accompaniment to the exhibition. However, not only did the Exhibition help to placate working class anger, it also united the aristocracy and bourgeoisie behind the banner of free trade, inaugurating a new regime of spectacular capitalism: Walter Benjamin wrote that at the Great Exhibition "the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value".


It is frequently thought of as the definitive example of proto-modernist architecture, the work of an engineer-genius who defined a new language of prefabrication and minimal regularity. Overall these iron & glass buildings ushered in a whole new regime of spatial qualities. Compared to the prevailing mood for beaux-arts eclecticism, massive, monumental, a language belonging to the initiates, the weightlessness and lack of conventional language made these buildings highly controversial. For many there was no way that they could be considered architecture at all, examples of 'mere engineering', unsuitable for existing in cities. Very soon aesthetic cowardice would prevail and iron and glass buildings would be constructed behind monumental masonry facades, (take, for example the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, which marked a return to Beaux-arts aesthetics, and about which the modernist Louis Sullivan would remark: "The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer")

It is not at all difficult to understand the transition from the great exhibitions on to buildings such as shopping malls and other such vast commercial spaces, but there is far more to them than that.

First of all, there were a number of more utopian views of the Crystal Palace. One can be found in Chernyshevsky’s novel ‘What is to be Done?’. In a celebrated passage the Crystal Palace (which Chernyshevsky visited in 1859) appears to the heroine in a dream; functioning as a symbol of a peaceful socialist future brought about through rationalism and technology. (Later, Tatlin's monument to the third international would be described by the critic Victor Schklovsky as being “made of iron, glass and revolution”) The transparency, lightness and rationalism of iron and glass was seen by many radical critics in the early 20th century as a forward looking counter to the eclectic styles of the bourgeoisie. (See German Expressionism, or Siegfried Giedion etc...)


A less avant-garde attitude was that of the well meaning 19th century concept of 'improvement', whereby the lower classes were to be given access to culture in the hope not only of improving their lot, but also reducing the risk of working-class discontent. When the Crystal Palace was rebuilt after the exhibition was over, its owners were adamant that this massive building would be used as a space for, as described in its charter, "the illustration and advancement of the Arts, Sciences and Manufactures, and the cultivation of a refined taste amongst all classes of the community." Try to imagine a building that housed a massive concert venue (20,000+ capacity), with a series of museum spaces in which various architectural styles were rebuilt and mimicked, along with gardens, displays of art and sculpture as well as an art & engineering school. It basically contained every artistic and cultural activity that you might think of, all contained within a gigantic display case.


But far from the glorious monument it is often remembered as, the Crystal Palace itself lurched from crisis to crisis, never actually living up to its lofty intentions, and never managed to make any money, prompting the following comments:

"Glass, as we know, is an excellent non-conductor of heat; it is possible that it is also a non-conductor of coin & prosperity."

It slowly became dilapidated (like so many other buildings of its kind) and eventually burned down in 1936.

I recall a visit to the Crystal Palace during a summer in the mid 1930’s; it presented a most woe-begone picture, peeling and sun blistered paintwork, the glass grimy, ironwork encrusted with rust and stonework suffering from erosion. Overall was a film of black dust that seemed to invade everywhere.

And against monumentality, weakness is, perhaps, one of the defining characteristics of the palaces and their culture. From the very simple sense that compared to all architecture that had gone before the palaces looked as delicate as a spider’s web, “the most fairy-like production of Architectural Art that had yet been produced" ethereal, almost completely transparent, to the worries before the Great Exhibition that the building would collapse at the first heavy wind, to the very word ‘Crystal’, with its connotations of the fragility of glass, to their susceptibility to fire and collapse, to their pathetic fights against commercial decline, we should stress the strong narratives of weakness that attend the culture of the iron & glass buildings.


Eventually, nearly all the iron and glass buildings of the 19th century were demolished, or were destroyed, victims of neglect and a number of other conditions.

“these buildings vanished from the mental horizon like a fata morgana, like a shimmering soap bubble that could not survive the forces of the times and burst into tiny pieces."

Now, at this point I would like to note various other buildings with these qualities, failed, ruined architectures, bearers of the qualities that couldn't be allowed to happen.

HANNES MEYER'S LEAGUE OF NATIONS PROJECT


Perhaps the next time that a pure aesthetic of this kind would appear would be in the work of the most radical left-wing architects. Takes Hannes Meyer, head of the Bauhaus from 1928-30, who was fired by the fascist mayor of Dessau for donating money to striking workers, and who would design buildings for trade unions as part of a collective practice with his students. His competition entry for the League of Nations (1927, unbuilt) made great play of the egalitarian overtones of modularity and repetitive units; compared to Le Corbusier’s heroic modernist entry to the same competition Meyer’s was rough and full of radical commitment, with a gigantic steel & glass dome over the assembly. Critic Kenneth Frampton makes the connection explicit: referring to Meyer’s radically democratic deployment of prefabricated units and the privileging of process over composition, he wrote that
“All unity is now seen to reside not in some pre-ordained static ideal, as in antiquity, but in process itself, as made manifest through the proliferation of rationalized technique in response to changing need. Hannes Meyer’s design for the League of Nations building of 1927, with its systematic modular assembly of components, clearly intends little else but such a manifestation. In this respect one can hardly overlook its significant derivation as technical method from Paxton’s Crystal Palace." This is a very strong deployment of the aesthetic, naked prefabrication coming to stand as a metaphor for socialist organization.



Now of course the building is crude, and lacks a certain sophistication compared to Le Corbusier's more celebrated entry. But there is a certain charge to the rudimentary grid and its deployment, and considering the function of the building, the political message that would be put across can be seen to be almost unbearable; there is not a political organization that one can imagine that would be able to send the message that their power is prefabricated and generic.

CEDRIC PRICE'S FUN PALACE

British architect Cedric Price was in some ways perhaps the ultimate ‘functionalist’ - he had the required faith in technology and the belief in a changing society, but compared to his contemporaries Buckminster Fuller, Archigram in the UK and the various radial architecture groups at that point, his projects were based on a level of analytical rigour that was a world apart from his fellows.

Price was well known for commitment to indeterminacy, his aversion to style, his absolute rejection of monumentality and detail. Bearing in mind that a non-aesthetic is still an aesthetic, if we examine Price’s built work we can begin to see remarkable parallels with the iron & glass palaces, with their immateriality and their un-ruined dilapidation.



Price’s Aviary at London Zoo (1961-) is a spacious wire tent, so immaterial as to be almost non-existent. Filled with trees, it was intended to be quickly removed once the birds had made their permanent home, but is still standing, dirty yet proud.




His famous ‘Fun Palace’ project is very similar to the system of courts we discussed inside the Sydenham Palace; a minimal superstructure was to be filled with a shifting set of fragmented spaces for various leisure purposes. But while the courts of the Sydenham Palace were nominally static, the Fun Palace was to be structured in such a way that it could be reconfigured at any time. The Fun Palace has become a very significant project, highly popular with those in the art world with a passion for interdisciplinarity or relational aesthetics etc. For this reason I think it's important to not let it be an intellectual plaything of jet-set curators justifying their own patronisingly class-less and whimsical collaborations. In fact, contrary to the repeated injunctions, I think it's vitally important to consider the aesthetics of the fun palace, consider what kind of political and ideological message a building of its kind expresses. In fact, until recently there was an opportunity in London to do just that.




The InterAction Centre (1976-2003) was a scaled down version of the ideas from the Fun Palace. A lightweight and stripped down frame was constructed into which containers and other industrial objects were inserted to create an evolving and adaptable set of activities. Again, the comparisons to iron & glass are telling; the spindle-like frame, the sense of potential for expansion and contraction, the incomplete spaces made up by fragmentary units within, the dirt and grime that collected around the permanently-temporary structure, all these things were visible in the Crystal Palace, while the programmatic concerns of activity & delight were modern versions of the ‘people’s palace’. Price built little, and would probably reject this assessment of his work, but I suggest that what you can see there is an example of what a genuine future would look like, if the revolutionary change of the late ‘60s had been more successful. Dirty but not ruined, dream-like and un-monumental – Fantastically dreary.

BIG SHEDS


Now of course one might see certain tendencies that are currently active; it's true that the exhibition culture of the late 19th century did lead to the shopping mall capitalism, and also true that the culture & fun palaces as described before also provide roots and glimpses of the worldwide phenomenon of the contemporary art museum, There's another, more hidden route that these histories lead forward to. I'd like to talk here about LSSB's, or 'Large Single Story Buildings', or otherwise known as 'Big Sheds'.

These are possibly the most exemplary buildings of contemporary capitalism, functioning as distribution centres for goods. These buildings occupy space with high infrastructural density, and are perhaps the closest things to 'pure' architecture that exist any more. They are very difficult to love, almost entirely lacking in aesthetic reference points, significantly, these structures are almost entirely ignored by the architectural press in a manner that cannot help bring to mind that manner in which iron and glass architecture was ignored. Although they were described by the late British critic Martin Pawley as 'the architecture of the future' in 1998, this was not necessarily a recommendation. These buildings represent some of the only spatial manifestations of globalised capitalism, moments in the networks of container ships, automated container ports and so on. They are rare points where immaterial capitalism 'touches down'.


But if they have been ignored by architects themselves, they have been approached by artists. Patrick Keiller's 1997 film 'Robinson in Space' goes in search of the spatial qualities of contemporary British capitalism, expecting to find decline but instead being confronted with the blank faces of a then-thriving culture. Distribution parks built on former coal mines, the cheapest and most efficient spaces possible. More recently, Chris Petit's film 'Content' (2010) also attempts to aesthetically approach these almost entirely blank spaces. In the words of Petit, the big sheds 'render architecture redundant'. Is it possible to look to these buildings with a similar eye to those that saw fragments of the future in iron & glass?