Spillway

Splatter and Non-Splatter

2012-01-14T05:10:00.000-08:00

The Hatchet Job of the Year award is a new prize intended for "the author of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months". Why reward bad reviews? The organisers point to declining newspaper readership and the declining influence of newspaper book reviewers. The prize, they say, will help promote reviews that both informative and entertaining.

Hatchet Job of the Year is a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking. It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style. Most of all, it is a public celebration of that most underpaid and undervalued* form of journalism: the book review.

John Sutherland glosses some of the issues around the prize in the Guardian - This is a field where I am simultaneously poacher, gamekeeper and restaurant patron with a taste for wild rabbit. In my day job I commission and write reviews, including many book reviews. I am also days away from publishing my first novel, and about to get my first reviews. (I hope. Even bad reviews would be better than no reviews.) And I love to read reviews - including bad reviews, which might even have the entertainment edge**.

Although the fledgling novelist in me doesn't might have some qualms about encouraging reviewers to be negative, overall the HJOTY strikes me as a good thing. The more prizes for criticism and critical writing the better. Even if reviewers are so emboldened they start dealing out stinkers to the undeserving, that might not be a wholly bad thing. I think an unfairly harsh review prompts more debate than an unfairly positive review, and the more debate and talk around books the better.

Where I think it has gone wrong is the name. "Hatchet job" suggests ... well, it suggests what it says, someone running at a target flailing an axe without finesse, a Patrick Bateman onslaught of murder; brutal, total, gleeful, arbitrary, unkind to the surrounding furnishings. A good bad review is a lot more precise than that. It's more like a gangland execution: impersonal, precise, neat. An icepick to the back of the head, no splatter, no witnesses. The victim is no less dead but the affair is rather more civil. And I'm pleased to note that the stiletto is more evident than the machete in the shortlisted reviews. Adam Mars Jones, Leo Robson and Mary Beard all aim for the weak points, the fatal flaws, and an economy of strikes bring down the mark. Jenni Russell and Geoff Dyer have the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger demeanour of professionals. Only Camilla Long really seems to have got busy with the axe and the woodchipper.

So what to call the award, if hatchet is too blunt? Stiletto was my first thought, but that's better suited to crime writing, or erotica. Better to go with Icepick of the Year, because then we could call them the pickies, which has a delightful second thread of meaning.

* An aside. Undervalued, really? My early journalistic background was in the trade press. The better professional magazines regularly expose serious wrongdoing and incompetence in their sectors only to have their best stories lifted, often without attribution, by the broadsheets. I'm sure journalists on local papers might feel similarly. I would dearly love book reviews to have a greatly enhanced cultural status - for instance daily pages in the paper, which theatre & live music somehow get in the Guardian. But book reviews have a cachet that other valuable journalistic fields do not. A lot of people want to review books - I know, I commission a review section, and I get emails from them. I've written a few emails to commissioning editors myself. Dogged technical and trade journalism has far less lustre. I'm sure it didn't even occur to the drafters of the Hatchet manifesto.

** Especially in Fortean Times, I find - maybe it's to do with the often lousy quality of the esoterica it reviews, but when it dishes out a bad review, it really goes for it. They rate everything out of 10, and my eyes always go to the 1, 2 and 3/10 reviews first.

Radio Floor

2011-12-13T08:53:00.000-08:00

Image taken from the Flickr photostream of Sveeta Bogomolova and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

Exciting news! Care of Wooden Floors is being adapted for the radio. It will be Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 for two weeks, starting ~~(I'm told) 30 January 6 February~~ 30 January*. Naturally I'm delighted by this - it's a rare pleasure, in fact something like a dream come true, to have your work adapted for another medium and performed, and I can't wait to hear how it turns out. COWF - being largely the interior monologue of a man alone in a flat - has often seemed to me to be well suited to radio adaptation. So, please do tune in, or listen on iPlayer if you're unable to catch the scheduled broadcasts.

* UPDATE, 21 December 11: The broadcast will in fact start 30 January 2012, as originally stated, not 6 February - it changed, then it changed back. Sorry for any confusion and inconvenience. The story about the parental Christmas cards will be saved for the memoirs.

Letter I Never Sent

2011-11-22T08:42:00.001-08:00

Last week I took part in Letters You Never Sent III: Letters to Corporations at Mason & Taylor in Shoreditch. We were asked to write to a corporation. Rather than complain about malfeasance or praise a product, I wanted to think of the most corporation-y corporation I could, one which I felt entirely neutral about. And when I tried to think of a generic, corporation-y corporation, I found one name lodged in my mind - and the fact it was lodged there was interesting to me.

To: Hutchison Whampoa
Hutchison House,
10 Harcourt Road,
Hong Kong

Dear Hutchison Whampoa,

Why you? Why write to you? It's the name, I think. In this country, I'm afraid to say, most people won't have heard of you. Even if they use the mobile phone network or pharmacy chain you own here, they will mostly believe they are customers of companies called 3 or Superdrug, not a corporation called Hutchison Whampoa. But that name, it works a kind of magic – it did for me, anyway. I can't remember when or where I first heard it, but I've always remembered it. Hutchison Whampoa. It's the perfect name for a corporation. There's the Hutchison. That's a name you can trust. Solid, Anglo-Saxon, Familiar. And then there's the Whampoa. Whampoa! What a beautiful word. Faraway, even exotic, but with confident, declarative edge. I assumed it was a person, the business partner to Mr Hutchison – that's a great strength of your name, it suggests an alliance between east and west, global scope, a Eurasian colossus. However Wikipedia tells me it's the archaic English transliteration of Huangpu, the dock area of the city of Guangzhou, a gateway for European trade to China from the 18th Century. All the better. That transnational, cyberpunky edge is given a romantic historical anchor.

Yes, Wikipedia – sorry about that. As I say, you're an enigma, Hutchison Whampoa. I knew your name, but that doesn't reveal anything about what you do. That's the other great strength of the name – it's abstract, it doesn't point the mind in any particular direction, you could be be doing anything anywhere. Everywhere, in fact. That mobile phone company you own – you don't own the phones themselves. You own an infrastructure or transmitting masts, but even that's not the most important part of the business – you own a section of electromagnetic spectrum, a slice of bandwidth, a portion of the air itself. The masts are just a way of modulating your ethereal empire, making it accessible, packaging morsels of it for sale. Owning part of the air – that's ubiquity, that's proper corporate reach. And you own a chain of cut-price perfume shops, too: owning the air, the technology to broadcast across it and the means to scent it. That's comprehensive service.

Maybe you should buy a kite factory, and cover that atmospheric niche too. Maybe you already own one – is there anything you don't do? You say you have five core businesses – I like that, core businesses, one day you must tell me about all your less important flesh and pith businesses. Five core businesses, then. There's ports and related services – nice to see you're still keeping your hand in. And there's retail; telecoms; property and hotels; and my favourite, energy, infrastructure, investments and others. Are you sure that last one is just one business, because it sounds like at least three. “And others.” So modest, Hutchison Whampoa.

I hope you're not sensitive about your size – you're a $42 billion dollar corporation, have a bit of confidence. Don't infer any criticism. I like the polymathic generosity of your endeavours. It feels properly corporate – the sum of many efforts. Forgive my intrusion. Can you forgive? I am sure you can forget. Corporations are good at forgetting, and unseeing, and not being seen, and moving on. You are not your holdings. You own, you operate, you merge and demerge. It's tempting to think of you as the apex of a pyramid, but you're less substantial and more far-reaching than that. You are a grand transaction, one that has been in process for centuries, a current, a trade wind. Even surrounded by you, we don't see you. I thought you might like to be noticed, Hutchison Whampoa, this once.

Cordially, etc.

Occupied

2011-11-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

Photo by me. This post sat in drafts for ages, which is why it's a bit behind the times.

When Paternoster Row, adjacent to St Paul's Cathedral in the city of London, was destroyed by fire during the Blitz, 6 million books were consumed by the flames. For centuries, the area was the centre of London's bookselling and publishing trades - before Fleet Street, before the Charing Cross Road, before Bloomsbury. Robinson Crusoe was published there [1]. Its destruction was the terminus of that part of the site's history; the area was rebuilt as Paternoster Square, which was first a modernist office complex, and since the 1990s has been a deadly historicist Carolingian showpiece. It is home to the London Stock Exchange, now targeted by our local representatives of the Occupy movement. Unable to camp in the square outside the stock exchange - this so-called public space is privately owned, and was promptly sealed off by the police - the Occupiers have set up in St Paul's churchyard, prompting a continuing crisis at the cathedral and much public debate, which I won't recap here.

The one incursion the Occupiers have been able to make into the Paternoster complex is to stick posters and other ephemera on the pillars of its external colonnade - as shown in the photo above. I have fairly mixed feelings about the occupiers[2], so took the opportunity one evening a week or two ago to go down to the site and look around for myself. I found an orderly, friendly and essentially unobstructive protest. But I was most charmed by the informal poster-pillars, which immediately reminded me of the area's publishing history - nearby, the Occupiers have also set up a "library", and those book-covered tables seemed another connection to that past.

Recently I was at the Architectural Association, attending Thrilling Wonder Stories 3, a conference of speculation. There, Kevin Slavin gave a fascinting talking about the rise of "algo-trading" - the use of algorithms to trade stocks. You can't just buy or sell a million shares of something without undesirable market effects, so algorithms are used to break up that one big trade into many small, seemingly random trades. More algorithms are used to try and detect those programmes. So much trading on stock exchanges is now automated, and that in turn is changing where trading occurs. Microseconds can make the difference between profit and loss, so the banks of computers running these automated trades are increasingly locating themselves around switch hubs, the "telephone exchanges" of the internet. This reduces the lightspeed travel time of their commands to the market - and also moves them away from traditional financial districts. Increasing auomation, and the migration of this automation, means fewer and fewer actual people working on Wall Street and in the City - and thus Slavin compares the Occupiers to hermit crabs, taking over an abandoned shell after its previous inhabitant moved on.

What I think is most striking about the Occupation is the reoccupation of public space in the city with visible ideas. Of course the powers that preside over the City have ideas, they have an ideology. But it serves their purposes to not really advertise those ideas, so that we almost forget that they have ideology at all, and believe that they are mere innocents, "entrepreneurs" frolicking wealth-creatively in a benign state of nature, a fragile state at that, one which must not be disturbed for fear that they might just take off like deer. The City is a very strange place indeed, and has been for decades. For most Londoners, the ones who don't work there, it's just a kind of lacuna, mostly only regarded from a distance. And the City I think favours this semi-visible status, which is why it has happily driven other uses (such as the publishing industry) from its bounds, and would like to do unto Smithfield as it did unto Spitalfields. Its penetration by visible dissent isn't threatening to it as an obstruction or as a way of stopping its work - the Occupation really doesn't obstruct anything significant. The threat is connected to the possibility that is might have to explain or justify itself. We might have to think about what is done there, and how it is done. Which is, in a democratic society, a generous public service by the Occupiers.

[1] These facts from the Encyclopedia of London.
[2] Which aren't important. There has been much griping from the Do Nothings about Occupy, I don't intend to join in.

Make Room! Make Room!

2011-08-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

My piece on the hellish "rodent universes" of John Calhoun is now online at Cabinet magazine. Researching overcrowding, Calhoun built elaborate "utopias" for rats and mice, in which they enjoyed unlimited resources and freedom from disease or predation - but limited space. Once population density passed a certain point, the mouse heaven always became mouse hell, rife with violence, rape and asocial freakery. This research formed a cornerstone of the overpopulation and anti-urban doom-mongering of the 1970s - and informed fictions from Stand on Zanzibar to Soylent Green.

Here's Calhoun in one of his universes, via Wikimedia:

Shutter Island

2011-08-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

Image from photoshoplooter.

The post-8/11 city hoves into view; it galvanises, if you will, its metal carapace dull in the late summer sunshine. In response to the riots of last week (only last week?), the government's "chief planner" has asked councils to consider easing planning regulations for metal shop shutters. Pause for a moment to reflect on what British "planning", a term that used to entail a degree of thinking ahead, has been reduced to: a measure so reactive it serves as an update to the old saying "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted".

Reactive and, it seems to me, futile. One of the most arresting images of the looting that accompanied the riots was of metal shutters being yanked off shopfronts by dedicated teams of youths*, a sort of "unboxing ceremony" for those perhaps unable to derive regular doses of fulfilment from consumer technology. Of course shopkeepers have a right to not have their goods stolen, but this alteration does nothing to reduce the risk of future riots. It is little more than security theatre - allowing shopkeepers to make a feel-good purchase that will help them sleep a little easier without doing much to aid them in the event of resumed rioting.

For the neoliberals in government, it must be ideologically appealing to respond to the riots with an act of deregulation, however minor. For the rest of us, it is significant that this intervention takes place in the space between the things that are for sale and the people who want to buy or steal those things. This space is called the street - it should have other functions as well, but one of the most depressing aspects of the recent unrest was how it rammed (ramraided?) home the fact that consuming is increasingly the only thing that can be done in a street, even during a riot. This domination by commerce, and the dwindling of public space that goes with it, must be seen as one of the key causes of the riots.

Anyway, here come the shutters. My hunch is that this alteration to the rules will have most impact outside the great cities, in small towns and villages where the mob looms large only via the Mail and the Express. In most of central London, the night-time streetscape is already heavily metallised, so it's hard to see what difference will be made in those areas that actually experienced riots. The shutters are such an established aspect of East London's streets that they have prompted their own subgenre of street art. The king of the shutter artists is Ben Eine, whose giant colourful capital letters adorn scores of after-hours shopfronts in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. They're very likeable, bright and pleasant, undeniably an improvement on unadorned (or rather tag-spattered) steel, but also deeply safe. Their jolly colours and the Smarties-cap collectability of the letters give them an infantile edge; there's something sedative about them, the aestheticisation of a hardened landscape, a harbinger of hipsterisation.

Eine's shopfront graffiti is so safe, in fact, it comes with a government endorsement - a Conservative government endorsement, no less. A year ago David Cameron presented President Obama with one of Eine's paintings as a gift. The name of the painting, spelled out in those cheery vintage shuttercaps, was "Twentyfirst Century City". The steel shutter thus emerges as the perfect symbol of the Cameronian cityscape, open for business and closed for everything else. Even then, the symbol must be carefully tuned; we wouldn't want to be too edgy. "Twentyfirst Century City" was the most appropriate text Eine could find in his studio at short notice - rejected paintings included "Monsters" and "Delinquents", which would have sent quite the wrong message.

Update: I completely missed this post with some views on shutters, which has some interesting points of view on the subject, particularly in the comments. Via Sam Jacob's Twitter feed.

* Precisely the sort of coordinated effort that has in recent days been condemned as "mindless".

Space out

2011-08-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

My New Statesman review of "Out of This World" at the British Library, which I mentioned earlier, is now online.

Here's an idea for a science-fiction story. Humanity suffers a recurring bout of cultural amnesia. Bearers of the flame must restate the same ideas, and refute the same myths, every ten or 20 years. But, twist! This isn't some distant future but our own time. Such is the cultural Groundhog Day that afflicts science fiction. The genre contains much serious literature, and much serious literature should be considered part of the genre. The ghetto walls may be weaker than ever but the case still has to be made over and over again.

Read the rest.

Riot Thoughts

2011-08-09T01:35:00.000-07:00

Rough, off-the-cuff, not an expert, not an eyewitness, just a Londoner, just thinking what I've been thinking.

1. "This is criminality, pure and simple" - D Cameron. Theresa May said something very similar. Criminality, maybe, but not very simple. Criminals are not the sole source of criminality. It can be manufactured in wholesale quantities by the state and applied to sections of the population who might not actually be directly involved in criminal activities. I think most of us who live in the centre of London are aware of large groups of young people who exist in a semi-criminalised state - they are essentially close to being illegal for who they are, simply because of their age, their background, how they dress, where they live and how they carry themselves, before any crime or "antisocial behaviour" is actually perpetrated. These young people face almost unimaginable restrictions on their freedom of movement. They are policed by displacement, being moved on. The fabric of the city is increasingly built to deter and exclude them - "mosquito" sonic alarms drive them out of shops and they are unwelcome in shopping centres and privatised public space like Spitalfields. ASBOs operated spatially, banning people from certain areas. Perhaps as a consequence of this displacement and exclusion, they have become ferociously territorial, and their movement is further confined by gang allegiances and nasty little "postcode wars". (Something I've touched on before: 1, 2, 3)

2. Yesterday the containment efforts failed. At around 5pm, watching the live coverage of the start of the night's violence on Mare Street, it struck me that things were kicking off in broad daylight. The disturbances on Sunday seemed opportunistic, "copycat" - people taking advantage of the overstretched police to launch a relatively minor spree of theft and destruction. On Monday, this "opportunism" had become a strategy. A daylight confrontation meant open defiance of the police, not simply taking advantage of darkness and overstretch. It was as if, all of a sudden, groups across London realised that the police could not be everywhere.

3. It looked as if the rioters were revelling in their mobility, flowing from place to place without pattern but simply because they could. It looked like a kind of sudden freedom. Call it mob rule, call it Hobbesian anarchy; condemn these robberies, the arson, the assaults on passers-by, the destruction of small businesses. All those things were disgusting. But the kids doing them were clearly dizzy with a kind of liberation. The visible breakdown of the rule of law frightened me because I benefit from the rule of law. So do most people. But this group who wanted to rip it down, who were boasting of their desire to fight with the police, who were setting fires and snatching phones - this group clearly has a different conception of what that rule means, and (whatever "community leaders " and our political class might claim) it isn't a tiny nucleus of habitual criminals.

4. People marvelled at the stupidity of people setting fire to their own neighbourhoods. And because this behaviour cannot be simply comprehended it is called "mindless", and the rioters are called "animals". Attacking your own neighbourhood by fire and attacking your own neighbours as animals are cousin impulses, in my opinion.

5. We have done our best to make these people, our neighbours, the angry ones, go away. Now more efforts will be made to get them back in their zones, and move those zones further out into the periphery, but we're only storing up more trouble for the future. After three nights of fire, and one frightening night of chaos, people are screaming for punitive policing, which can be understood. But once the situation is back under control, punitive policing is only going to store up more trouble for the future, too. How to break the cycle? I don't know. But I know that the solution will be expensive, it will take time, and it will be hard to reduce to a slogan as simple as "bring back the birch". Difficult and complicated it may be, but we are going to have to do it eventually.

6. Those who are calling for the army to be sent in have taken leave of their senses. Unless we really are going to solidify this failure, to carve it into stone, and exclude the angry ones from the citizenship altogether, to declare them to be something more than criminals: our enemies, the enemies of the state. I don't want to live in a city in a state where that happens.

7. Fortitude now; later, along with everything else that will follow these events, let's have some curiosity, a spirit of inquiry, of exploration. Something terrible has happened in our city (and may yet continue to happen). It's damnable, deplorable, heartbreaking. But it is also extraordinary, unusual, bizarre. Slamming the door on it without studying and understanding it is a dangerous and short-term tactic. Allowing yourself to feel nothing but anger, and doing nothing but lashing out ... isn't that a little mindless? It would be nice, and useful, if we could ask London "why" without already having an answer in mind.

8. Stay safe out there.

Aliens! Fetishists! Situationists! Psychopathic mice!

2011-08-05T22:18:00.000-07:00

There's a bumper crop of stuff by me floating around in August, on a pleasingly wide array of subjects.

In this week's New Statesman (edition of 8 August) I review "Out of This World", the British Library's survey of science fiction ephemera - an exhibition well worth catching before it finishes on 25 September.

On the chunkier side, there are a hat trick of longer, thinkier essays approaching the newsstands. I'm in the first issue of new journal Transgressive Culture, published by Glyphi, reviewing Jonny Trunk's Dressing for Pleasure (FUEL), a compilation of classic fetish magazine AtomAge. I first reviewed Dressing for Pleasure last year for Icon - this is a much more in-depth look at the book, attempting to place it in a cultural context.

In issue 42 of American art quarterly Cabinet, there's an essay by me on the American ecologist John Calhoun. Calhoun was interested in the effects of overcrowding, a phenomenon he explored by building elaborate "utopias" for mice and rats. These "universes" were free of disease and predators and supplied with abundant food and water - all they lacked was space. Rodent populations inside the tanks boomed uncontrollably - and then collapsed into a vortex of rape, violence and social dysfunction. Enthusiastically taken up by the overpopulation doom-mongers of the 1960s and 1970s, Calhoun's research became the "proof" that crowded cities would mean disaster for mankind - but Calhoun's message is a little more complex than that.

More, better, utopias. Under/Current issue 06 has the theme "retro-future", a chance for me to talk about my favohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifurite world-that-never-was, Constant's New Babylon. The trouble with utopias is that they tend to be striving, efficiency-minded places. New Babylon was a reaction against that - a paradise for slackers, a world-spanning megastructure geared to wandering, idling and socialising.

And finally - Icon 099 is now on sale, featuring eight pages by me on one of the most exciting design studios in London, BERG. A conversation with BERG is like hearing a friend tell you about a brilliant concept from a science-fiction novel they just read. Only they didn't just read it, they're trying to build it. And look, here's a prototype. They're an interesting bunch, to say the least.

Found satire

2011-07-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

Accidental News of the World commentary, from Care of Wooden Floors, page 94:

Brooks ran in the gutters, seeking lower elevations.

Away

2011-07-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

The Unknown Fields expedition just touched down in Kiev. I expect to be mostly offline for the next couple of weeks, so don't expect speedy responses to emails, but I'll tweet, add pictures to Flickr and perhaps even blog as and when I can. See you on the other side.

3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Launch

2011-07-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

The Unknown Fields expedition to Chernobyl and Baikonur - fulcrum of my promised book Toxic Tourism - is steadily clearing its no/no-go checks and trundling towards the launchpad. The official launch will be on Monday with a frankly blockbusting public forum at the AA on Bedford Square, London. The line-up is simply incredible, extending beyond the participants in the expedition to include everyone from artist Paul Duffield to UFO folklorist Mark Pilkington - plus poets, sound artists, filmmakers, it really promises to be a really fascinating day. (Liam Young, Unknown Fields co-mastermind with Kate Davies, is also the creator of Thrilling Wonder Stories, so he knows how to put on an amazing day-long event.)

I'm also in the line-up, introducing my work and talking a little about my intentions and aspirations for Toxic Tourism. To give you a taster, I will be dealing with the lure of forbidden places and wildernesses, why places like Chernobyl, Aral and Baikonur tug at the imagination, and the ultimate in getting away from it all: excursions into a posthuman, postapocalyptic world.

So, please come along.

The photo at the top of this post shows the AA's 2009 summer pavilion, and is from my Flickr photostream.

Flaw plan

2011-06-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

Care of Wooden Floors is set in an apartment in an inter-war moderne block in an unnamed central-European city. During the writing of the book, I made a number of sketch plans of the apartment, the block and the surrounding streets as aids to memory or to work through specific narrative problems. Later, as I discussed the design of the book with Clare Smith, my editor at HarperPress, the idea arose that we could use one of these floor plans as an endpaper for the book in hardback.

I was enthusiastic. When I was a child, I had a weakness for fantasy novels - and gravitated towards those that had a map at the front. Tolkien must have started this tendency with his beautiful maps of Middle Earth in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A map at the front of a fantasy book worked as a kind of blurb, a promise of the adventures to come - you just knew that the mountain-ringed forbidden city or the skull-shaped island fortress jutting from a wreck-garnished sea was going to crop up somewhere. It would be a hell of a tease if they didn't. Moreover, the map is part of the escapist promise of fantasy: that you are entering a fully realised world, one that extends beyond the bounds of the story, and that even if the stinging deserts and haunted swamps are barely alluded to, they they can exist more fully in your own imaginative rendering of the world. Nowadays, my map fix comes primarily for nonfiction books of history - Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire, which I'm steadily gnawing my way through at the moment, has a fine selection throughout its 900 pages. The only work of non-fantasy literary fiction I can think of with a map at the front is Toby Litt's Deadkidsongs, although I think there must be others.

Care of Wooden Floors isn't a fantasy, but I liked the idea of a map as a tribute to those happy memories of childhood reading - and also as an expression of the rational interior-design ambitions of Oskar, the flat's owner. But I asked to re-draw the master sketch map for inclusion, to iron out some small inconsistencies in it here an there and to ensure that it was the most accurate possible rendition of the flat.

Almost immediately, I ran into problems. I already knew that the master floorplan didn't match up with my mental picture of the flat, and the way it was described in the book. That was why I wanted to redraw it. But attempts to iron out the difficulties simply created new problems. In effect, I could not draw a floorplan of the flat - it was an impossibility.

This doesn't mean that there's a mistake in the book, or that an impossible or impractical configuration of rooms is described. Although the flat is, over the course of 300 pages, described in some detail, it's not empirically described. The book isn't a blueprint. I didn't give measurements, proportions and orientations of every aspect of the building. A reader could sketch an entirely reasonable floorplan of the flat without having to resort to extra dimensions or folds in spacetime. But I'm fairly sure it wouldn't match up with mine.

What I was dealing with is three different versions of the same flat:

1. The flat as it exists in my imagination
2. The flat as described in the book
3. The flat as it might exist in the imagination of the reader.

Version 2 is based on version 1; version 3 is based on version 2. It made most sense to base a floorplan on version 2, to avoid "error". But when I looked at the result, a prominent detail failed to match my mental picture of Oskar's home. This detail is irrelevant to the plot or to anyone's understanding of the book; and it isn't described in the book, it is simply the result of reconciling two aspects of layout that might otherwise conflict. But it troubled me to commit to graph paper something that was "untrue". Fixing it threatened to raise more problems than it solved.

We decided not to include a floorplan. My own reservations were only part of this decision - it was also considered too dry a note to open on, and potentially distracting to a reader. I would much rather a reader builds up their own image of the flat from the words, rather than being guided down to exact details by a plan. But the episode has caused me to realise the protean nature of what I've written. Which is the "true" flat? All three versions are, in their way, but I have to confront the fact that my mental picture of the flat is now the least important of those versions, and the reader's version is the most important.

Thinking on about maps in fiction, I remembered (from reading Martin Amis' criticism, I think) that Nabokov drew maps of great books to illustrate his lectures on English literature. Here's Nabokov's map of Stephen and Bloom's routes around Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses:

Nabokov recommended that instructors draw up diagrams the setting of books to wring the maximum amount of sensual detail from them, as a route to fuller understanding of the author's intentions. It's only what is described that matters; writing is in part a matter of choosing what to describe and what not to describe. A detail that existed in my conception, but which is not described at all, cannot be said to matter at all. To suggest it in a floorplan when it doesn't exist in the text would sprain the imaginative sinews that any reader spins around the descriptive bones the author provides. That would hardly be fair or desirable.

(The hunt for Nabokov's Dublin map led me to this rather wonderful project, a detailed, annotated Google map of Dublin overlaid with a historic map.)

A Cover for COWF

2011-06-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

Care of Wooden Floors now has a cover:

I'm hugely pleased with this. It was designed by Jo Walker at HarperPress, and I was fortunate enough to be allowed along for part of the process, making up the lettering in Mr Smith's letterpress workshop.

Making up the type.

The type on a galley, about to be transferred to the press. All these years in magazine journalism we've talked about "galleys" meaning proofs that haven't yet been laid out, but this is a galley in the original sense - a metal tray for carrying type.

Making an impression from the type.

Spot the deliberate mistake. It's actually pretty hard to proofread when everything is upside-down and backwards.

Jo inspecting her handiwork. Thanks, Jo!

There's a full set of images up on my Flickr stream, and some videos were made of the process - hopefully those will be online soon too.

British Paradoxes

2011-06-13T06:11:00.000-07:00

"London, where the streets are paved with gold, and the gardens with cement", leads a Guardian article on the loss of wildlife habitats resulting from people paving over their front gardens.

The biggest survey ever conducted of private space in the capital, taken by the London Wildlife Trust, shows it is getting greyer – threatening its reputation of being one of the world's greenest cities because of its extensive public parks and gardens.

The city is losing the equivalent of two-and-a-half Hyde Parks of greenery a year from its private, domestic gardens – about 3,000 ha (7,410 acres), says the report.

Lamentable. So what is to be done? Legislation, perhaps, or biodiversity conversation areas to go with the existing system of conservation areas? But what about the Briton's inalienable right to do whatever he pleases to his home? But of course we are in the fork of a defining British paradox. We have this generalised sense of a shared patrimony that must be protected, which we sum up as our "heritage". And yet we also have this pugnacious sense of private property and natural justice, of rights and entitlements. So the very person who might complain about the loss of butterfly habitats and deterioration of streetscape caused by his neighbour's concreting of his front garden might be apoplectic at rage if the council stopped him putting up a shed in his back garden. Both sides of this paradox are of course "common sense", and reason buckles under the distorting pressure of its internal contradictions.

Similarly, everyone wants a home with a garden - surveys repeatedly show that this is the national preference. If this is what people want, then it must be right, that's just common sense. And everyone wants total protection of the green belt, and indeed all undeveloped green space. Where are these homes going to go? So we end up with absurd, cramped brick boxes on ludicrous coasters of turf - an attempt to meet a typological requirement in defiance of all reason. We very obviously share many things - our cities, our countryside, our past. And yet we despise the idea of dealing with them in a communal manner.

These paradoxes - and there are dozens like them, on everything from the "nanny state" to the BBC - are the logical outcome of 30 years of government according to the vindictive petty jealousies of the Daily Mail. They are rooted in that poisonous discourse, in which it seems every politician talks to you, personally, as an individual - you are of course responsible, hard-working, ordinary - in order to warn you about the others, the ones who are taking advantage and ruining everything. It is a mean, small-minded pattern of thought, the politics of Gollum. It has stacked this country with lose-lose paradoxes and zero-sum games, and at times it feels as if these paradoxes are about to block out all light from above and hope of change. Like when a Labour leader stands up and - instead of announcing a national programme of housebuilding, which would allow thousands more to share in the benefits of a council home - announces that "hardworking, responsible" people (like you!) would be given preference for the existing tiny number of council homes, over the "shirkers" (you know, the others).

Announcing "Toxic Tourism"

2011-06-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

It's in The Bookseller, so at last I can start talking about the second book! Provisionally titled "Toxic Tourism", it will be an unconventional travel guide to three places in the former Soviet Union: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Aral Sea. The publisher will be HarperPress, who of course is also publishing Care of Wooden Floors. Toxic Tourism will be out a few months after 2012.

This is under the umbrella of the Unknown Fields trip in July (which makes the Bookseller's use of the past tense a little puzzling). I'm hugely grateful to the AA's Liam Young, who put out a call for a writer to accompany the trip at the beginning of May, to Robin Harvie and Clare Smith at Harper Collins, and to my agent Antony Topping. So, exciting times afoot. I'll fill in some more details later.

The Latest Hallucinations

2011-06-04T05:29:00.000-07:00

I've been up to my neck in "proper writing" and neglecting the blog lately. So this is one of those somewhat unsatisfying "read me elsewhere" posts - made extra unsatisfying by the fact that a lot of this stuff isn't online.

One thing that is online is this review of a small show in Eindhoven called "The New Psychedelica". The show really scratches an itch for those of us who feel that art hasn't really plumbed to depths of weirdness offered by the digital world.

Also online is this review of Locals Only, a photographic record of California's 1970s skate culture, at men's style website Jock & Nerds.

The new issue of Icon has a long piece by me mulling what London's new crop of skyscrapers means for the city, in the company of sculptor, polymath and expert Londoner Richard Wentworth. There's also a much shorter piece by me about David Chipperfield's Hepworth Wakefield.

Print-only (for the time being) but free is The Clerkenwell Post, an attractive zine about all things Clerkenwell. It was produced by Icon's publisher and launched at Clerkenwell Design Week. If you're in the area copies can still be found - there's a piece in there by me about the Barbican.

Pretty soon there'll be a flurry of news about the novel, now a mere eight months away from publication. Only eight months! It seems like just six months ago it was fourteen months away from publication. But here's something: you can pre-order it on Amazon now.

Next week there will (I hope) be some news about the Secret Project which has been eating up a lot of my time behind the scenes.

And I will be doing more blogging soon.

Metropole and Fighting Traffic

2011-04-27T02:23:00.000-07:00

Photograph taken from the Flickr stream of Martin Tomitsch and used under a Creative Commons licence.

A man boards a plane on his way to a conference and falls asleep. When he awakes, he finds himself not at his intended destination but in a vast, unidentifiable city filled with unimaginable numbers of people. The traveller is an accomplished linguist, but he can't begin to make sense of the jabbering language spoken by the city's inhabitants. He can't even place it in a group of languages, or identify the script. Everywhere he is jostled by crowds and ignored or berated by taxi drivers or hotel staff.

This is the premise of Ferenc Karinthy's remarkable book Metropole, a classic in Hungary for 40 years and now translated into English by George Szirtes. "Nightmarish" is overused as a descriptive term in literature but Metropole has precisely the texture of a nightmare - it is stifling, desperate, lonely. The city presents Budai, the narrator, with a monolith of incomprehension and indifference. And, like a nightmare, the aftertaste of Metropole stays with you long after reading it - I have found myself thinking of it again and again, when fighting crowds on the Tube or trying to get down Oxford Street or attempting to make myself understood in a coffee shop.

Much of Metropole concerns itself with language, and Budai's agonising attempt to comprehend the scribbled, yapping mess written and spoken around him. The city would be hell for anyone, but it must be hell squared for a linguist. Budai must find a "way in" to the language, some corner of it that can be empirically understood by him without doubt, a loose thread to grab onto and pull. This inquiry is as much a decoding of the city as it is a decoding of the language. Budai identifies taxi cabs, metro stations, religious buildings and abattoirs; and he does this through architecture and design. All the time he is looking for a railway station which might be able to transport him to an airport, a frontier, a seaport, any place other than this city - spying station-like buildings he finds instead law courts and covered markets. The physical language of European cities is revealed to be simultaneously eloquent and limited.

Physical symbols - steps with yellow handrails leading underground mean a subway, a certain look of car is a taxi - are one lexicon within a city; social codes are another. Before Budai can achieve anything he has to discern social protocols such as when to queue and where to queue. He watches what other people are doing and does the same. Cities are all built on the side of a steep learning curve - they turn people into new people. New York is an exceptional example of this, a machine that takes immigrants and turns them into Americans. (Jonathan Raban's book Soft City is the unsurpassed description of these learning processes and the interaction between cities and our identity as individuals.) The city Budai is trapped in is rarely less than hostile, but without adaptation to its social codes it could be lethal.

To take an obvious example - when and where do you cross the street? An apparently simple question is in fact encrusted with acculturated with complex cultural considerations, a topic explored in detail in a very different book to Karinthy's, Fighting Traffic by Peter D Norton. Norton examines in scrupulous detail (the book is an expanded PHD thesis) the upheaval wrought by the automobile when it arrived on the streets of the American city.

"Cities treated the arrival of the automobile as they might any other emergency," Norton writes. Rather than being a seamless technological succession from one form of (horse-drawn) wheeled transport to another, the automobile blundered into a sophisticated street-level ecology. The death toll that resulted was a bona fide emergency for cities, and the way they reacted is fascinating. We know what happens in the end, of course: the automobile not only triumphs, but routs the pedestrian and the streetcar both in theory and in practise. They are not only practically driven out of a roadway that used to be shared, but their right to that space (which previously went without saying) was withdrawn. As late as 1926, there was nothing in law preventing pedestrians in Chicago from using any part of the street to do anything they wished, such as hold a conversation; the most restrictive interpretation of pedestrians' right was that cars had an equal right to the street. Try doing that today.

How did this come about? Norton examines the story from the perspective of the three main groups involved: anti-car groups, who at first had the whip hand in the debate; the police, who affected to be neutral but whose motives were in fact more complicated; and motorist groups. Part of the story unfolds at the level of public policy, as cities drafted legislation to counter the emergency and end the bloodshed, influenced by the various lobbies on either side of the debate. Given that the crisis was handled locally by scores of municipalities, there's considerable variation in response and the story twinkles with thousands of interesting facets and suggestions of how the aggregate course of history could have gone differently. A few lessons stick in the memory, though. First is that the hugely emotional, absolutist language that was used around health and safety - "surely XYZ is better than the death of a child!" - led to poor decision-making and poor outcomes for everyone. Secondly is that the police, far from being honest brokers, acted according to what was best for the police, rather than what was best for the city or it inhabitants. Segregated roadways were easier and cheaper to police than shared roadways, so the police pushed for segregation.

Still more interesting than the public policy side of the issue, and in the end more decisive, was its psychological side. New techniques for living in cities had to be explained to the public, with the different pressure groups all advertising their own interpretation of how public space should be used, dressed up in fine language about "justice", "freedom" and so on. "Success would require the best salesmanship techniques of 20th-century marketing," writes Norton. The future of public space was decided in memespace - by a battle of messages and ideas.

At first, the anti-car safety campaigners called the shots. Drivers were maniacs, "speed demons", privileged toy-owners killing children, intruders in the city. The onus was surely entirely on them to alter their behaviour to reduce the number of road fatalities. How did this message fail in the end?

Firstly, motoring groups gathered themselves under the banner of "freedom" - a potent idea anywhere, but especially in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Their conception of freedom was connected to the greater independence and mobility offered by the car, and we still see motoring groups clinging to that idea today when those returns have diminished considerably. Also, it was essential that motorists assert their own freedom over that of the pedestrian - if they could secure a concession of equal right to the roadway, then their motorised might and speed would secure the rest.

Secondly, they adopted the language of the safety campaigners - and even started to put on their own versions of the grisly tombstone-erecting ceremonies the safety campaigners used to attack the automobile, but with the message twisted to argue for segregation and pedestrian responsibility.

Thirdly, they invented something that transformed the language around the issue. They invented the jaywalker. Walking in the street at points other than crossings, was entirely normal behaviour, and rebranding this behaviour to turn it into a faux pas (or even a crime) was a masterstroke. A "jay" was a rube, a country bumpkin, someone who did not know the sophisticated social codes of the city. Car-owners, by contrast, were better-off, better educated and - here is the killer idea - better at using the city efficiently, sophisticates speeding from one point to another while jays stumbled around in the middle of the road. Standing in the street was transformed from the God-given right of the American urbanite (this was precisely the language used to defend it) into something only a hick would do.

Thus, through branding and advertising rather than legislation, motoring groups managed to make safety the pedestrian's responsibility rather than theirs, and presented themselves as the rightful users of the roadway. They took over the safety campaigns with this message and established in social convention what would later be reinforced by law.

Which explains how they secured the advantage - but not entirely how they turned that advantage into unquestioned supremacy. That was largely the fault of well-meaning safety campaigners. The road safety debate made much of the death of children, innocents, in contrast to the worldly and by implication corrupt motorists who knew more of life. But as the scales tilted to safety being the pedestrian's responsibility as well as the motorist's, the first efforts were made to educate children into the dangers of the road. Children use the street, but they do not drive. So they are exposed to years of messages about their, the pedestrian's, responisbility for safety before they learn to drive and hear anything about the motorist's responsibility. This imbalance has become a form of generational brainwashing - conditioning, anyway - that has turned the car's ownership of the street from a purely contingent social arrangement to a hegemonic natural right. Fighting Traffic is an indispensable work of scholarship, and transforms the reader's view of the city and its uses.

Theme Necropolis

2011-04-20T15:26:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared in Edge 221 (December 2010).

The sound of digging pervades Dungeon Keeper 2. Bullfrog's 1999 real-time strategy game involves the construction and operation of a dungeon and labyrinth in a gloomy underground world. There are always chambers to be excavated, minerals to be mined and exploratory tunnels to be dug in order to expand your area of play. The imps, tiny magical creatures that comprise your basic workforce, are continually scraping and picking away at the ground somewhere at your bidding. It's a pleasantly double-edged sound – industrious, but also subversive. You're eating away at the world around you, undermining, corroding, tunnelling like a colony of termites. And if your imps run out of orders and stop working – you'll see them sit against the wall and light up cigarettes – you might still hear digging. That would be the sound of one of your rival keepers chipping away at the rock in your direction, heading inexorably towards you.

Building and undermining at the same time – that's the centre of the appeal of Dungeon Keeper 2 (DK2). The player must design and construct a detailed and multi-functional underground world to perform a number of tasks, but also revel in destruction, murder, torture and slavery. Indeed, those are the tasks. This is a dungeon, after all. In other hands, DK2 could have been a recipe for dreary sadism. But Bullfrog put together a world that was all about beautiful, rich, detailed, absorbing, funny sadism.

A typical game begins with a single chamber: the Dungeon Heart. This, the core of your realm, is where your treasure is stored and is also the source of your health. If the gigantic pulsing muscle (you heard me) at the centre of this room is subjected to a sustained attack by your enemies, it will die, and if it dies, you die. So the dungeon must be built up around it: rings of defences, and facilities that will attract and sustain an army of happy, belligerent monsters. These start with a lair, which gives them somewhere to sleep, a hatchery, which provides chickens for them to eat, and a training room for them to hone their combat skills. Specialist structures like libraries, workshops and torture chambers attract specific kinds of monsters, although most of the creatures in DK2 are familiar Sword & Sorcery types. Later, swankier rooms include glamorous casinos and not-so-glamorous combat pits, which either make creatures happier by giving them R&R or make them better killers by sending them to A&E. Some of them also seem to enjoy recreation in the torture chamber, but we're not here to judge. And there's the digging – always with the digging. Chambers and tunnels must be excavated and gold must be found and mined. Pick, scrape, shovel, etcetera.

Laying out rooms and corridors, assigning functions to them, attracting employees and specialists … At this point, a particular strain may be identified in DK2's twisted DNA: it is obviously a descendant of Bullfrog's Theme Hospital, which was developed in parallel with the original Dungeon Keeper and released just months before it in 1997. So where are the patients? In Theme Hospital, the aim was to keep the members of the public who strayed into your world alive, and they mostly only died by accident. Mostly. In DK2, the roaming members of the public are tedious, bellowing heroes, representatives of the so-called forces of good, and if they find their way into your realm they need to be subjected to a deadly form of triage. Your troll-filled workshops can build traps, from simple passive defences like doors to the all-time classic: a rolling Indiana Jones-style boulder that can crush everything in its path. In between are all kinds of dangling skeletons and poison gas vents. Many happy hours can be spent ringing your lair with fiendish killing-chambers, hidden triggers and secret passages. Softened up by the traps, surviving heroes can be set upon by your creatures and beaten to within an inch of their life. Enemies are mostly just stunned if they lose a fight – while thus poleaxed, they can be dragged to a prison. There, they will either starve and rise as a skeleton to join your armies, or they can be dropped in a torture chamber, where they'll be tormented by whip-wielding dominatrices called Mistresses (a saucy element the game revels in) and become allies. Your own creatures can, when stunned, be dragged back to the lair to recover. If the imps are too late and the creature dies, they can be dragged to a graveyard and buried, later to rise as a vampire. It's Theme Necropolis.

The original Peter Molyneux-designed Dungeon Keeper had a similarly detailed internal ecology and other charms, but doesn't often come out of its box nowadays, while DK2 continues to be a treat. It's rare that a sequel can lose a talent like Molyneux and still exceed its ancestor, but Bullfrog's Colin Robinson managed it. DK2 is a vast graphical advance on the original, substituting fully 3D creatures for sprites and introducing a depth and richness to the interiors that is truly atmospheric. The player interacts with this gorgeous environment via a disembodied hand – a feature carried over from the original, which Molyneux was to re-use in Black & White (2001). The hand allows a much deeper tactile involvement in the game environment than a simple cursor. Not only can creatures and gold be picked up, encouraging slaps can be dispensed – including animals you first think are just decorative, like the chickens in the hatchery and the rats in the prison. DK2 is also far funnier than the original, with a jokey narration by Richard Ridings (see box) and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of in-game jokes and Easter eggs. Humour was a strand of Dungeon Keeper – it's at the malevolent heart of DK2. That might be its real advantage over the original game. Molyneux's original game was part of his career-long interest in bending and manipulating morality within games, from Populous (1989) to Fable (2005). 2001's Black & White, which made choosing between good and evil the central dilemma of an RTS game, could be considered the lost sequel to DK2. But what makes DK2 really refreshing is that it's less self-conscious about its immorality than its predecessor – it's just raucous good fun.

So what's the point? There must be more to life than lounging around in a luxurious underground fortress-casino surrounded by servants, treasure and leather-clad lovelies. Well, maybe. In the simple skirmish and multiplayer games, there are other keepers advancing towards you, and they must be defeated. But in the campaign game, it's the forces of humanity, moral rectitude, motherhood and apple pie that are trying to put a stop to your subterranean shenanigans. Those roving bands of heroes must be defended against while you bide your time and build forces strong enough to pursue them to their source and kill their lord so the Horned Demon can show up and claim that level's "portal gem". The keeper advances from land to land, undermining and doing battle with the resident heroes and collecting these gems. As each land is corrupted from beneath, it turns brown and withered on the campaign map - your progress is an advancing stain. All of this serves the ultimate aim of a final confrontation, in which the keeper burst forth onto the surface of an unsuspecting world ...

... Which never happens. Strangely, much of DK2 is just a set-up for a sequel, Dungeon Keeper 3, trailed within the game but cancelled early in 2000. Unless the franchise unexpectedly rises from its tomb, the keeper is condemned to toil within the bowels of the earth forever. It could be something from Milton or Dante. All that digging and undermining, only to find that you've just been getting deeper and deeper into the pit; perhaps a fitting fate for an evil overlord.

Playing in the Ruins

2011-04-02T02:42:00.000-07:00

Bronx Floors, Gordon Matta-Clark

My New Statesman piece about Pioneers of the Downtown Scene at the Barbican, mentioned below, is now online. "The sense of decay and collapse pervades this show," I say. That's a good thing.

Playstation Requiem

2011-03-30T02:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of weekends ago I bought a Playstation 3. This act brought to a close my long relationship with my Playstation 2, and I feel moved to mark its passing with a tribute. I have owned my PS2 for more than 10 years - it is, without doubt, the single most reliable piece of electronics I have ever had in my possession. It still works as well today as it did when I bought it in 2000 or 2001, and I can't remember it experiencing a single major fault. And that's in spite of the fact that it - or rather, the controller attached to it - has taken some serious button-mashing punishment. And it may yet have more days in the sun, as it still works perfectly and I'm not planning to get rid of it just yet.

But part of my sadness in disconnecting the PS2 came from an unexpected source. I found myself thinking about the console's menus. When I fired up the brand new machine, I was rewarded with a calm grey screen, across which something like a wisp of smoke was blowing, and a sound of stringed instruments, a little like an orchestra warming up. The menu graphics emerged around this wisp. Which was all very nice, but it lacked something. It lacked depth.

By contrast, the PS2's menus had depth. They were all depth, on the surface at least. Switch on a Playstation 2 and it would chime pleasingly, and once the corporate introductions were out of the way you would be ushered into the blackness of space. Standing between you and the inky void were arcane signs: the words "browser" and "system configuration" and a constellation of orbiting points of light, dancing around themselves in a ring. (See image above.)

There's no need to understand what any of that means. Consoles, unlike multi-purpose desktop computers, are mostly designed for supreme simplicity - they just work. You don't have to poke through menus and dialogue boxes to fire up a game or play a DVD or whatever, you just feed it into the disc drive at the front and it starts automatically. So, on the PS2 at least, there's seldom any need to "use" the default machine menu unless you're doing some fairly involved tinkering. It is mostly just a default space, a view of the system at rest. It's accompanied by a calming ambient soundscape - barely even close to music, just gentle whooshing, like waves against a beach heard from a distance. Rather than just a static screen that eventually switches to a screensaver, like on a desktop PC, this is an interface that is part screensaver - it has a function, but it also has no function but to be, and to show that all is well and in a state of readiness. When you do insert a disc, or select a menu option, one of the orbiting lights separates itself from the circle and drifts away, apparently receding into the blackness, an emissary into the machine.

It is a really beautiful piece of interface design, suggesting a depth of possibility - almost ulimited possibility - without simply bombarding the user with complexity. And it suggests rest without simply being static or hiding behind a screensaver. This kind of screen-based user interface now dominates our lives, on our phones, on TVs, on computers, on cashpoints, on Tube ticket machines, everywhere. For obvious reasons, the discussion of the design of these interfaces has focused on clarity and usability. The PS2 was an example of a highly developed interface where the usability has perfected itself into invisibility, leaving an open space that could be inhabited by something that was, in my opinion, beautiful.

Downtown Scene

2011-03-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

News from the world of print. I am in this week's New Statesman, on sale from today, reviewing Pioneers of the Downtown Scene at the Barbican Art Gallery. I try to put this really very good exhibition in the context of New York's 1970s' near-death experiences, something I feel the curators could have done a bit better.

And of course I continue to infest Icon, although the magazine's online archiving process ground to a halt in summer last year and is now proving difficult to restart. In the current issue I write about Voyager 1 and review the New City Reader and Beyond magazine. In the issue out next week, you can find me profiling the designer Philippe Malouin and reviewing Civil Unrest.

I'm planning a separate post wrapping up all the news related to the book when one or two things about it solidify.

Fox in the Yard

2011-03-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

It's my birthday today, and I have the day off. I was off yesterday as well, so at 10.30 in the morning I was sitting in the living room drinking a cup of coffee. Looking out over the sunlight-filled courtyard of my building, I was amazed to see ... a fox. It was standing on the wall, looking straight at me; I ran to get my camera, and it was still there when I got back.

If you click on the photo to see it full size, you'll see the fox is looking right at the camera. It's a little eerie, but also a little magical.

Fox in the Shard

2011-02-23T12:43:00.001-08:00

The Shard. Image taken from the Flickr stream of Michali_ and used under a Creative Commons licence.

This post contains a minor spoiler related to the book Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem - not enough to ruin anyone's enjoyment of it, I think, but still - you have been warned.

There is something magnificent, and melancholy, in the rumour that Southwark Council is scrambling to catch a fox that is somewhere on the 75th floor of the Shard, the Renzo Piano skyscraper currently under construction in London. It is, in fact, easy to attribute romantic, even heroic attributes to the (putative) animal. There's the dangerous charm of the fugitive, of course, still a potent presence in the British psyche as the bizarre Raoul Moat case demonstrates. And there's something else. The rise of the Shard is a PR endeavour as much as it is a feat of construction. "Shard" is an official name, not a popular nickname; it's right there on the jumpform rig. An image is going up at the same time as the building.

The fox - even as a rumour - is an unchoreographed intrusion into this careful brand-building. A rogue presence has installed itself in the highest reaches of the tower and insolently eludes the authorities. Higher than highest - the tower will only have 72 habitable floors, so if the animal really is on the "75th" floor, it is at the summit, the unbuilt point of the spike. Underdog, meet overfox. This wasn't part of the PR strategy.

So, true or not, the rumour suggests the first inklings of popular mythmaking around the new tower - the city accepting the building into its collective imagination. Phantasmic Mr Fox can be seen as a sliver of public affection for Shard. In that, it brings to mind the escaped tiger in Jonathan Lethem's 2009 novel Chronic City. Lethem's tiger continually evades the authorities; capable of demolishing whole buildings, its effects are excessive even for a big cat. Rumours, lies and conspiracy theories swirl around it - it is a symbol in a book filled with symbols. Chronic City's New York is a strange, troubled place, unnerved by its own gentrification and regeneration, marooned in introspection. The people feel they have lost something, that something is amiss, and their attention transfers to mysterious absences: the tiger and the buildings it conveniently clears out of the way, ready for regeneration; astronauts trapped aboard a space station with no hope of rescue; gigantic chasms carved by a monumental land artist called Laird Noteless (note: less); "war-free" editions of the newspaper.

Foxes have thrived in London in recent years - they and the super-rich seem to be the only things in the city that have no trouble finding new places to live. Their eerie calls can be heard earlier and earlier in the evening, and they appear bolder, less afraid around people. Of course it's please to think of a fox brazenly in residence in the nosebleed section of the aspiring spire, barking that three-part cry, a vulpine muezzin in the city's best minaret. The Shard is a magnificent building, and it's hugely exciting to see it rise; the fox's presence seems to say, yes, this belongs to us too. What a view it must have, if it's there. And even if it isn't there, someone has seen fit to imagine it there, and that's almost as good.

UPDATED 16:45 24 February: It was real, it was on the 72nd floor, and they caught it! You can read the story here at the Standard. Says the article: "It is thought to be the highest distance ever recorded to have been made by a fox." Carve that one into the annals of pest-control-at-height. And I like its defiant expression. It's seen things, man, things you wouldn't believe. It can go back, but it won't be the same.

Sirens, soot and strikes

2011-02-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

This was written for Edge magazine's "Time Extend" slot, which looks at the lasting influence of a classic computer game. It first appeared in Edge 215 (June 2010) and is reproduced here with permission. It expresses some of the thoughts contained in this old blog post in a more cogent and convincing way.

Eagles soar in smokeless skies and whales glide through the clean oceans. Herds of horses (or perhaps giraffes) are the only inhabitants of the lush plains and old-growth forests. The simulated world of SimCity 4 is a peaceful place before you set about building your city. Boring, though. What it needs is urban sprawl, ribbon development along blacktop highways, strip malls and Dopplering sirens, chimneys belching soot, budget crises and strikes. What it needs, really, is problems – problems that you, the mayor, can solve.

That’s the paradox at the heart of the appeal of SimCity 4. Much of the fun that comes from playing the 2003 apogee of the SimCity series of city design and management games is solving problems: relieving traffic on this avenue, removing the polluting industries from that business centre, restoring a depressed neighbourhood to prosperity. But these problems have to come from somewhere. Next to the game’s peaceful, constructive, problem-solving side, it also nurtures the darker, more complex pleasure that comes from problem-creation. The tension between these two sides of its personality is written deep into SimCity 4; as we’ll see, it’s a reflection of the real-life systems and people that led to the creation of the game in the first place.

Key to SimCity 4’s enduring popularity is the fact that it can be enjoyed on a number of levels. Effective management can be satisfying in itself, given the game’s devilish complexity compared to previous versions and its dozens of competing variables. When things are going well it can be pleasant enough to simply sit back and watch the contented populace streaming along your ample boulevards while skyscrapers sprout around them – again, something that reached its peak with the gorgeous, hugely detailed, entirely 3D-modelled graphics of SC4. But those are passive pleasures, to be enjoyed once a city has been built. First you must play the game – and its split personality means two different styles of play. You can plan ahead and build with care, tending to your city like a bonsai tree, guiding every stage of growth and clipping and tweaking until it looks just right. This approach is deeply absorbing and can eat up tens of hours of dedicated play; the quality of the graphics has always made a beautiful city a highly desirable end. But that can be a bit boring. Often, a player will just want their city to get big quickly. So indulge in SimCity 4’s kinky secret: the joy of unplanned sprawl. The city is developed hurriedly, with only the loosest plan in mind. Vast zones are laid out without much thought, in artless but easy-to-build grids, and with services added (maybe) as an afterthought. Obviously, this manner of play creates problems – but in SC4, that’s a good thing. Pretty soon, your city is a snarling deathmaze of smog, crime, poverty, dereliction and gridlock. Bliss. These problems must be fixed to keep Gotham growing, but they can be ‘fixed’ in the same haphazard way that the city was thrown up in the first place: quickly, cheaply and dirtily. Roads and train tracks can be punched through run-down inner cities without protest; new business districts can be founded on the outskirts without caring too much about the chaos this will ultimately cause on the roads. Each solution brings a batch of fresh problems.

This approach, with its swift returns and constant challenges, can be the most rewarding and most addictive way to play. Imagine that you lay out a residential district and it immediately develops into Snooty Corners, a rich neighbourhood full of attractive high-wealth houses and well-kept lawns. That part of the game map is pretty much done with – barring vandalism, there’s nothing more you need do to it, so it’s finished, dead, game over. But if it develops into Crystal-Methington, a crime-ridden hellhole full of empty lots and burned-out cars, well, game on, you’ll be revisiting there pretty soon. The appeal of creating a ‘perfect’ city may be what draws players to the game in the first place, but actually perfecting a city is a losing approach. When it’s done – admittedly after what could be tens of hours of play – what else is there to do? You can look at it, but that’s more like owning a fish tank than playing a game. Almost every game is a struggle towards completion and perfection: SimCity gives you the opportunity to reject that goal, and to revel indefinitely in play. Its creator, Will Wright, called it more toy than game. It’s a rare game that can be at its most fun when it’s played ‘badly’.

The reckless style of play can also, oddly, lead to the best results. Cities built as sprawls, full of improvised solutions and gimcrack workarounds, can be very attractive – certainly Maxis put as much aesthetic effort into the low-wealth commercial units and tenement blocks as it did into the pretty-pretty mansions and sparkling skyscrapers. But they’re also appealing, and fun to play, because they most closely resemble real cities. And it’s worth remembering that this high-speed slapdash improvisation is how most real cities grew, and are still growing.

Plus there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? Pah, build it anyway. Sure, you could spend the money on a neat little bus system, but isn’t a glistening motorway just a bit more swanky? Similarly, a vast stadium complex is always going to be more appealing to the ambitious mayor in a hurry, even though a well-funded local library network could yield better results for a fraction of the cost. Huge engineering projects will always be more fun to put together, and more impressive onscreen, than microscopic local initiatives. A mayor should be building suspension bridges and airports – leave the rest to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

There are plenty of real-world examples of civic leaders’ weakness for expensive, grandiose white elephants. But one particular figure stands out: Robert Moses. Moses, an American planner and administrator, came closer to playing SimCity with a real city than anyone else in the free world. Never once holding elected office, he wielded unsurpassed power over the city of New York through mastery of its bureaucratic machinery, diabolical legal chicanery and an eerie knack for raising vast sums of money. Mayors, governors and even presidents were forced to let him have his way. He first used this power to build colossal parks and recreation beaches, making himself wildly popular, but his attention soon turned to highways. When Moses started his career in the 1920s, New York was just beginning to come to terms with automobile traffic. He shaped the way it responded, girdling the city in an elaborate web of freeways and neglecting public transport. These new superhighways often created as many problems as they solved, rapidly choking with cars. They drove suburban sprawl and were built with little regard for the residents who happened to be in the way. More than once, Moses demolished a thriving community to make way for a road, even though a perfectly good alternative route existed. When Moses was finally ousted in the 1960s, the city had an expensive freeway network, but was more jammed with traffic than ever. It was also teetering towards bankruptcy.

Moses did a lot, but he didn’t do his worst. He wanted to slice freeways right across Manhattan itself, through some of the most expensive and crowded urban land in the world. One of these plans, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, was only defeated after a desperate struggle by a small community group led by a writer called Jane Jacobs. In the course of the campaign Jacobs wrote a book, the Death And Life Of American Cities, which defended the dense, mixed neighbourhoods that Moses dismissed as slums and encouraged a view of the city as a complex organism which needed nurturing, not drastic surgery.

Death And Life became a classic, and is still widely read. Among those who were influenced by it was Wright. He built his city sim to resemble a living thing, with scores of interlinked processes and cycles interacting over time in a complex system that the player can adjust and mould – a vision palpably drawn from Jacobs’ work, and cultivated over time into the superbly complex and organic fourth game. Ultimately, then, Robert Moses could be seen as the wicked uncle of SimCity 4, indirectly inspiring it by causing Jacobs to mount her defence of city life. To enshrine Jacobs in a game, Moses had to go in there too – we can share his satisfaction in grand projects and wanton destruction. He’s the dark side of the Force, one half of the duality that makes SimCity 4 so seductive. Planning versus sprawl; micromanagement versus megaprojects; neighbourhoods and localism versus traffic, money and power. Those opposite poles keep the dynamo of SimCity spinning even after seven years; it is still rich and rewarding because it springs from the vital conflicts in our own world.

Learning What Surface Is

2011-02-02T00:30:00.000-08:00

Le Corbusier's Weissenhof. This post is part of an effort to dispose of some longstanding draft posts that have been cluttering my Blogger dashboard.

Le Corbusier and other early modernists signposted the modernity of their buildings by photographing them with (then-)state-of-the-art automobiles in front. In the past 30 years that phenomenon has inverted, and for decades now modern buildings have been used to advertise cars. Is this evidence that car design is getting more conservative while architecture still maintained a reputation for high technology and high culture? Almost four years ago I interviewed Chris Bangle, then group design director for BMW, and asked him about the relationship between car design and building design; what he said didn't make it into the published transcript, but is pretty interesting. I came across it while doing a clear-out of old interview transcripts.

When we were doing the first cars in the 1920s, modernist architecture had already taken off. The first steel & glass skyscrapers were already done in the 1940s, and we were doing cars in the 1950s called Baroque [somethings] – so this whole baroque era which architecture had left behind a hundred years before, cars just discovered back then. We didn’t do cars which looked contemporary with a Mies van der Rohe building until let’s say the 1970s or 80s. If you look at the current 7 Series, it looks perfect against Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, which is about very classic surfaces but with very cantilevered forms – that’s were the current 7 Series is. They look perfect together. If you look at the Guggenheim from Bilbao and the C4, they look perfect together – there’s only six years between them. And now, I would say the Z4 is probably the first post-modernist car in the world today. Maybe the 5 Series E4. What will happen when cars become neo-deconstructivist? What will that be? Wow. At the same time the architectural world has switched to our technology - Frank Gehry can only do his buildings because he uses CATIA programs, which were the same programs which were developed for the car industry, and his approach to it is the same way we do cars.

However there are some real interesting differences. The scale difference alone meant that architecture never had to deal with surface before. The idea of a perfect surface for architecure is completely unknown, it doesn’t exist. I’ve had lots of talks with architects about this. It’s wonderful to talk about. You can show them a building and tell them the surface is terrible, and they [react]: “Huh? What surface?”. They don’t even see it because they’re concerned with scale and the impression of space. Cars are about surface. But slowly, slowly, architects are learning surface. I can feel quite proud now that we are having a reverse affect on architects. They will still lead because they are the social moulders of our culture, architects are. We are a component that reflects the culture, but they are the moulders of that culture. I think that’s an important distinction. We hold architects holy in that sense. But at the same time, every piece of architecture is perfect, whereas what we do is mass. And it will be interesting to see what happens when architecture becomes more and more responsive to the exigencies that cars have established and they finally learn what surface is.

Lost

2011-01-28T05:49:00.000-08:00

Detail of a photograph from Britain's Lost Cities.

This post has been sitting in Drafts, half-finished, for some months, occasionally pricking me with guilt. The book in question has been out for ages. The post also suffers from a focus problem; ostensibly reviewing the book, I often broaden focus to talk about the heritage brigade (Jenkins, Scruton, Charles, etc) in general, and unpicking the two strands of thought in this rambling post was too horrible to contemplate.

"Encase your legs with nylons*, / Bestride your hills with pylons / O age without a soul" wrote John Betjeman in the poem Inexpensive Progress. It continues, in a later stanza: "And if there is some scenery, / Some unpretentious greenery, / Surviving anywhere, / It does not need protecting / For soon we'll be erecting / A Power Station there." Betjeman's arch sarcasm set the tone for a whole generation of sneering critics of modernisation, sending it down a path towards a prose style now hopelessly mired in cliche and I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Betjeman pastiche (much like their preferred manner of architecture). But Betjeman's view of architecture was a lot more sophisticated than the narrowly dogmatic approach taken by, say, Simon Jenkins or the Prince of Wales. He had opinions that would make Roger Scruton's head spin - for instance writing to Denys Lasdun to praise his design for the National Theatre on the South Bank, that particular bugbear of the trads.

Gavin Stamp is similarly sophisticated. He's among the most articulate and forceful critics of modernist redevelopment and advocates of conservation and traditional "townscape"; these positions are usually expressed through his permanently disappointed "Nooks and Corners" column in Private Eye. But Britain's Lost Cities, his blistering assault on the path of 20th-century British urbanism (now in paperback), is full of nuance and surprises. Stamp's praise for Festival Hall perhaps isn't all that much of a shock; it is now hard to find critics of it. But Stamp is generous to other unlikely buildings: Basil Spence's university library in Edinburgh and John Madin's central library in Birmingham to give just two examples. And he ranges far off the usual rhetorical template, blaming the 1930s as much as the 1960s, and patricians and developers as much as modernist central planners.

Blaming for what? For the destruction of British cities, of course - 20 of them, from London to Glasgow via less familiar places as Worcester and Exeter. Lost Cities is larded with photographs of these cities in their former glory, like the graduation photographs of murder victims that are shown on the news. It's a grim read and appeals strongly to that odd pleasure: tombside melancholy. To look at photographs of places we cannot, can never, see for real is to feel a prisoner in one's time, locked in the bow of a ship while loved ones are thrown off the stern. The photograph keeps grief fresher longer than any other form of image. This is because it was (and is) a vast advance in the technology of memory - and as such it is probably the photograph, not modernism or the Blitz, that gave us the building conservation movement. Without the camera, the heritage movement would never have risen to its present ascendance, and would have remained the fringe pursuit of antiquarianism. It is the product of essentially modern information technology**.

Back to the Lost Cities. I should make it clear that I have nothing against conservation of existing buildings in principle, as a matter of economy and ecology if nothing else. But Britain's Lost Cities isn't intended as a collection of curiosities, it's polemical; it has a point to make, and the point is to horrify us at this wanton destruction (in the hands of SAVE et al, destruction is nearly always "wanton", the two words have been shacked up together since the 1970s and look inseparable now) and to warn us to change our ways, shake our heads at the follies of the past, treat the older parts of towns and cities with renewed respect and treat the no-longer-new-but-not-quite-so-old bits that replaced them with fresh contempt. Central to this heritage-militancy is a national loss of nerve about the New. In the minds of the likes of Jenkins, the New was a modernist invention, but in fact centuries of British architects and city-builders had faith in the New over the Old. The Georgians swept away medieval cities and the Victorians swept away Georgian cities, and hundreds of good and tens of thousands of indifferent buildings were destroyed and places changed their character for better and worse long before the modernists appeared on the scene. The idea - often repeated by the Prince of Wales and others - that previous generations tended their cities bonsai-like, with nailclippers and tweezers, is a myth. And because there aren't photographs of those pre-existing eras, just unfamiliar paintings and drawings, we don't grieve all that much. And Stamp, to his credit, sees this, acknowledging in his introduction that the railways (for instance) were terrifically destructive.

(In other places, he's less sensitive. The laziest and ugliest line that gets trotted out by the heritage tendency and trad architects is that planners and modern architects "did more damage than the Luftwaffe", and variants on this slur do make an appearance; beyond the conflation of well-meaning public policy with area bombing inflicted by a hostile power, this line whitewashes the desperate state that British cities were in before the war. And they get annoyed when the vernacular tastes of the Nazis are brought into the frame.)

But what makes the losses of the 20th century too much for Stamp to bear is the guiding idea that what replaced the eradicated buildings was inferior. Not always - I've already cited where Stamp finds room in his heart for the modernists. But throughout the book the basic assumption that the replacement townscape was inferior is so deeply ingrained that it literally goes without saying. Stamp is a hugely valuable historian and critic, and a good writer, but Britain's Lost Cities sadly falls into line with a general effort to comprehensively malign post-War urban planning. This is to forget the nightmarish challenge that Britain's cities faced in the 20th century: the urgent need to modernise housing, offices, factories, hospitals, schools, everything in fact that the pre-War laissez-faire Big Society had neglected for decades. The militant heritage tendency has made a concerted effort to make modernisation a dirty word (a work that the Blair government colluded in, by applying it to neoliberal "reform" of public services). Since the 1940s some terrible mistakes have been made in British towns and cities, particularly in the name of traffic planning, but it seems at times as if the heritage tendency wants all British post-War planning, whether well-intentioned or dim-witted, to look like a kind of baffling tantrum. Its concerns, the social woes it sought to correct (with much success - the dramatic improvement in public health after the War is down to the council house as well as the NHS), the crises is sought to forestall - these are all to be forgotten. The supposed guardians of the British past really want a dramatic fit of amnesia.

And what are we conserving? The built stock of British cities cannot be completely separated from its use. In those marvellous pictures in Britian's Lost Cities, we see town-centre foundries, Don Cossack Temperance Hotels, socialist debating halls, small factories, family grocers. The visual apparatus, signs and ads, of those places makes for much of what is charming and lively about the street scene. Bringing back those buildings would not bring back those uses. The places that have been "saved" by the heritage movement - Covent Garden and Spitalfields, for instance - have been lost in other ways, taken over by chains and corporations and reduced to prissy, security-patrolled shopping plazas. Why do we no longer have microindustry, small independent shops, public-subscription reading rooms and debating halls? How can we foster those things, and should we? These are vital economic and social questions, and the heritage industry has no answer to them; it is only concerned with artificially preserving remains. And what should we do about server farms and distribution sheds? Pre-1939 townscape could not just carry on; even Pevsner saw that, pointing to the Alton Estate as the way of the future in his recently published "lost" book on visual planning. The idea, peddled by Leon Krier in particular, that modernist planning was a sudden disastrous abandonment of a secure evolutionary path is absurd. The severity of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s to 1970s was largely the result of the fact that they had been held back for decades by the forces of stasis masquerading as "gentle evolution".

So a polemical fixation on heritage alone does not help us understand and nurture the cityscape. Take, for instance, painted advertisements. Painted advertisements and signage on buildings is a crucial element of the lost streetscapes that Stamp mourns. There are repeated calls from the heritage movement to take more care to preserve those examples of painted advertisement that survive. But the reason these paintings are so old, and dwindling, is that advertising and signage were targeted by planners and conservationists in previous decades. If we changed planning law, we could probably restart the production of painted advertisements and incite a festive riot of new neon while we're at it. The ads would be for Toshiba and Viagra rather than Marconi and Beechams pills, for the unignorable economic and social reasons that I mentioned earlier, but they would be painted and perhaps subject to Royal Fine Arts Commission approval. That way, the dwindling supply of older adverts would be less of a pressing concern.

What I'm saying is this: The best way to ensure a steady supply of the Past is to continue to manufacture the Present and the Future. The wholesale rejection of the New has completely failed, giving us only amnesia and routine philistinism. In distrusting development we have, as a country, not stopped development but ceded our ability to shape it and even plan it. In the same month that Stamp accused me of "card-carrying neophilia", my then-boss, former Icon editor Justin McGuirk, was called a neophile by Roger Scruton - and Scruton, like Stamp, believed he was pointing out a character flaw rather than drawing attention to an admirable trait, a telling fact in itself. Commenting on the coincidence on Icon's Scene page, we wrote: "[We] wonderered how [we] could be neophiliacs when so many of the new buildings [we] see are crap." The most vital question in British urban policy is how to build, and what to build; get that right and the question of heritage will be far less important, because it will no longer be a question of preserving a dwindling supply of good buildings, the supply will be kept healthy. The heritage movement has performed many good deeds, preserving some superb buildings that might have been unnecessarily destroyed. But its only contribution to a broader debate about what cities should look like is to foster the attitude that if it's Old, it's Good, if it looks Old, it's Good, and if it has to be New, then it has to look Old. That is a dead end; it is aesthetic decadence, and the stance of a deeply unhealthy, perhaps dying, culture.

Stamp's book is a visual treat and a treasury of interest, though, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.

* Betjeman has a curious kink about female beauty aids, and an even stranger suspicion of life becoming easier. From the famous Slough: "In labour-saving homes, with care / Their wives frizz out peroxide hair / And dry it in synthetic air / And paint their nails."

** SAVE Britain's Heritage grew out of an exhibition of photography.

The Architecture of Misgovernment

2011-01-26T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Arizona Capitol. Image taken from the Flickr feed of DanMacMan and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

Harpers magazine correspondent Ken Silverstein opens his account of how the crackpot radical-right administration in the American state of Arizona shows the likely tone of the new Congress in Washington DC with a bit of architectural criticism:

In 1897, when the Territory of Arizona was seeking to demonstrate its fitness for statehood, the legislature solicited bids to design a new capitol building and grounds in Phoenix. The winning entry was that of James Riely Gordon, the architect behind a number of well-regarded public buildings in Texas and Maryland. He drew up ambitious plans: an expansive dome, a grand rotunda, stately wings for each house. But funding fell short, and so the legislative wings were scrapped, and a diminutive lead-alloy top was chosen in lieu of Gordon’s more elaborate dome. Worse, in the building’s interior, a mosaic of the state seal was bungled by the contractor, who forgot to include the images of cattle and citrus, two of Arizona’s “five C’s” (the others being climate, copper, and cotton).

Despite much talk over the years of an upgrade — including a proposal from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright, who envisioned the addition of fountains, gardens, and reflecting pools — all plans were rejected as too expensive. In the 1960s, two new buildings were finally erected on either side of the capitol, one for the house and one for the senate; but these structures, which resemble Soviet apartment blocks, only made matters worse. Nowadays, the capitol’s dingy, unshaded plaza is bare save for a few small rosebushes and some patches of dry grass. The buildings themselves have been plagued by plumbing problems and leaks, making the complex “wholly inadequate” to Arizona’s future needs, according to a task force charged with studying the matter.

The general unsightliness of the capitol makes it a fitting home for today’s Arizona legislature, which is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks.

Ignore that lazy "Soviet apartment block" jibe for a moment - there's an intriguing suggestion here of an architecture of misgovernment. "We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us," said Winston Churchill while restricting the capacity of the rebuilt post-Blitz chamber of the House of Commons to less than the number of MPs. Churchill wanted the chamber to retain a sense of event in moments of parliamentary drama by forcing many Members to stand, an idea with considerable merit. But if we accept that thoughtful design can improve the quality of government or administration, surely there is also a way to design official buildings that will reduce that quality? Does dysfunction follow form? Silverstein suggests that corner-cutting construction, aesthetic incoherence and poor maintenance are the essential elements of the architecture of misgovernment; but those things are as likely to be the result of misgovernment as its cause. Or they could stem from a debased political culture like the one taking hold in the UK, where the completion of a world-class headquarters for the state broadcaster - a place that will immeasurably improve the efficiency of that broadcaster, as well as being a potential source of pride for the people it serves - is met with a dreary chorus of commenters moaning about "a waste of money". Or where the pioneer of a new model of school procurement believes that the architects of those schools have an obligation not to create "civic monuments". This is why we can't have nice things.

On Pool

2010-12-26T14:07:00.000-08:00

Over at the Bi Blog, there's a new and quite short piece by me on the theme of "Pool". I talk - briefly - about what George Orwell thought of London's suburbs. The (rather lovely) concept of the Bi Blog is that two writers riff in different directions on the same subject; my opposite number, Erandi de Silva, writes on Sunset Boulevard and reflecting pools.

High-speed Panopticon and the Thames Valley State of Mind

2010-12-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

Image from the Flickr stream of edwbaker and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

Road Wars, a cheapo Sky-made reality television show which follows British police patrols, is objectionable on a number of levels. It's relentlessly bombastic and sensationalist, from the titles to the thundering incidental music and the breathless, slang-heavy commentary. It's unashamed in this pursuit of sensation, interspersing the fly-on-the-plod reality stuff with "the best" (that is, the most exciting and entertaining) clips of police "in action" from around the world. It's essentially nuance-free, presenting a completely Hobbesian view of Britain in which a thin blue line of dedicated, calm professionals is the only thing standing between Decent Citizens and a feral, raging, incoherent, bloodthirsty underclass that commits crime for little more reason than sheer love of mayhem. It gives a pretty clear picture of what all British television would be like if the country succumbs to fascism.

And yet all these unassailable objections don't stop it being tremendous atavistic fun. High-speed pursuits, filmed by helicopters and from the dashboards of pursuing vehicles are naturally compelling and frankly I'm a sucker for them. It can't all be Rothko and Satie, dammit, a man needs candy. Before Road Wars, it was Police, Camera, Action that I found compulsive. There's something about the genre "just look at this maniac!!"

That appeal to the lizard brain aside, there's something else at work. From the speeding time-stamped panopticon of the police vehicle fleet, the landscape changes. "It heaved and merged like porridge," said EM Forster of the the countryside seen from the window of a train. "Presently it congealed. They had arrived." The landscape in Road Wars performs a similarly hypnotic, continuous transformation, but a century on from Howard's End we have a far less clear boundary between town and country. Road Wars mostly unfolds along trunk roads, a context-free exurban blur of detached houses, shopping centres and grass verges planted with scrawny saplings. This is where it is at its most natural - when a fleeing car takes a turn towards an urban centre or residential district (a "built-up area" in the pervasive jargon), somewhere with a bit of character and activity beyond the constant flow of vehicles, the reaction of the commentator is of course horror and the alarmist voiceover cranks up a notch, promising near-certain blood and chaos unless the police are able to do something, anything. There are good reasons to be fearful of a car chase through a city centre but in the landscape of permanent pursuit, the landscape of Road Wars, what resolves is a place where the pursuit can be tolerated and a place it cannot. Southern Britain refocuses as a place of flow interspersed with islands of stasis and danger.

For me, this connects with the familiar parcel of Britain that the rozzers are laying rubber over. Although it will clearly show any bit of suitably adrenalised official video, Road Wars focuses of the activites of the Thames Valley Police's "roads policing proactive unit" (Newspeak abounds). I grew up in Oxford, part of the TVP's sprawling beat, a rare British example of a city with proper banlieue. The centre was safe for the middle classes - the less fortunate were hutched in estates on the outskirts, around a ring road that was conveniently racetrack-like. These estates rioted and developed a national reputation for joyriding in the early 1990s, which might go some way to explain why the Thames Valley plod is the heavily tooled-up force that appears in Road Wars.

Not that the blackened peripherique had the slightest impact on us in the centre; it might have been on another planet. Central Oxford was well suited to cycling. When I reached driving age, I had no need to learn, and never took lessons. But for friends of mine in more isolated places like Old Marston and Whytham, the driving licence was a necessity - they learned right away. As soon as they did, my sense of living in a city weakened perceptibly. Piling in a car at the weekends, we could go bowling in Aylesbury, or go to the waterslides at the Oasis centre in Swindon. Southern England suddenly felt curiously Californian, or what a Oxfordshire teenager's perception of California might be. For about a year it was a boundaryless autopia, a free zone of leisure and consumption, a kind of paradise. (Then I went to university.) Road Wars suggests this endless Californian Thames Valley of A-roads and motorways, out-of-town leisure parks and grass verges, where the discrete towns and cities melted into a more general, more modern state of mind. Localism? Give me unlocalism. Adulthood seemed to arrive the day I no longer felt confined by place.

Just Look at Those Trees

2010-11-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

It's been quiet because I've been extraordinarily busy. But offline I'm on the newsstand in three different places at the moment. The new-look Icon (issue 090, December 2010) has my long profile of radical French architect Francois Roche. Roche, an interesting fellow at the best of times, was extraordinarily candid, so it's worth a look - as is the rest of the redesigned magazine. I'm also in Edge 221 on the subject of Dungeon Keeper 2, and in the 22 November issue of the New Statesman talking about Twin Peaks' 20th birthday. It's still damn fine.

The Leyton Roar

2010-10-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared in Smoke: A London Peculiar #16 and is reproduced here with permission.

Someone is fighting a lonely war against noise on the Central Line. The shrill tone that announces that the doors are closing is too loud for them, or too high-pitched, or both. They scratch their complaint into the doors: Excessive Door Noise; Noisy Doors Cause Deafness; Too Loud. Always the same hand, the same terse concision. How long has this been going on – scratch-scratch-scratch attrition on one side, deafening psy-ops on the other?

Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, part of the Central Line has lost its voice. Perhaps the anonymous vigilante of quietude is pleased, but it’s really a cause for sadness: The Leyton Roar is gone.

At its furthest eastern reaches, between Epping and Debden, Central line trains roll through actual countryside – fields, cows, hedgerows. Heading west, towards London, the city composes itself out of fragments. Scattered semis link arms into terraces, playing fields shrink and evaporate, urban pressure closes in around you. At Leyton, the gathering density pushes the line underground.

As if to make it clear that Leyton is a threshold, there is an enormous, crowded Catholic cemetery next to the station. Graveyards are traditionally placed at a city’s edge, for hygienic reasons and to satisfy their demands for space. The approach to the tunnel mouth has none of the flamboyance of the cemetery, but there is a grave quality to it: the long downward slope is like the ramp leading into the tomb of an ancient civilisation. This sense of the monumental is reinforced by the rising filthy retaining walls, bruised pink like the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing or Delhi’s Red Fort, or the exhausted moquette of older Central Line seats. The portal itself is modest, stained with decades of abyssal grime.

This eastern entrance to the city used to be far more impressive, though, for it had an aural architecture too: The Leyton Roar. When a westbound train entered the tunnel, a powerful wave of air would blast through the carriage with a high-volume shriek, loud enough to silence any conversation and surprise the unsuspecting: people would be cut off mid-sentence, or roused from their newspapers. Even for city ears accustomed to tuning out announcements and the Tube’s general background thunder, this noise was impossible to miss. It was a signal, a portent, an apocalyptic howl that far exceeded the usual Underground cacophony. Like a triumphal arch or a gate, it announced that the train had entered the city. And now this landmark is gone. Now, there is simply a dull whoosh when the train slips into the tunnel. No one looks up, and conversations continue.

The sudden disappearance of The Roar unnerved me. Why had it gone? The trains were the same, the tunnel was the same – how could the sound of the journey change so dramatically? These changes are important. If such a noise made a sudden appearance in a routine journey, it would give pause for thought; its disappearance might be more subtle, but is no less significant.

I e-mailed the Transport for London press office. A month passed without reply. I e-mailed again. This time, there was a response, from Benedict Pennington, head of the London Underground press desk. “I believe the difference you will have noticed will be as a result of track and ballast replacement,” he wrote. “This involves removing all the rails and aggregate which the rails sit on, and replacing them with continuously welded rails, rather than blocks of jointed rails. This would alter the ride noise on board our trains.”

That wasn’t wholly satisfactory. The Roar hadn’t seemed to be a product of the ride noise of the trains. But if the removal of the aggregate meant there was now more space, then maybe the train would be less like a piston smashing against a wall of pressured air as it entered the tunnel, resulting in a quieter passage – maybe? “Track ballast replacement” – it was shaped like an explanation, and filled the hole where an explanation should be, but did not really explain anything.

Once a day I still listen out for The Leyton Roar, and listening for a sound that isn’t there breeds a kind of super-sensitivity – it’s as if there is now a negative space where The Roar once was, a new space of quiet carved out of the Tube thunder, in which creaks and sighs that would otherwise rush past unnoticed suddenly stick out; and that thickening in the ears, that perceptible increase of air pressure against internal membranes, that movement of blood in the darkness – a new roar.

Meanwhile, the scratch marks still appear on the doors: Noise Pollution; Inappropriate Door Noise. Somewhere out there, the Noise Vigilante is still at work.

C.O.W.F. in The Bookseller

2010-10-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Bookseller has a story about the news:

HarperPress buys its lead literary title for 2012

HarperPress has pre-emptively bought the debut novel by Will Wiles, the senior editor of architecture and lifestyle magazine Icon. Publishing director Clare Smith has bought world rights, excluding North America, in all languages to Care of Wooden Floors from Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton. The book will be HarperPress' lead literary launch title in spring 2012.

The publisher said the book was about a friendship between two men who do not know each other very well and how a tiny oversight can trigger a chain of consequences.

Smith said: "Dark, funny and compelling, this novel takes your breath away with its extraordinarily distinctive writing. The voice is unexpected, constantly, but consistently conveys a universal human experience that pulls the reader right into the world of the narrator. The entire team fell passionately in love with the book. We could not be more delighted to be publishing Will."

Tara Hiatt, HarperCollins' head of international rights, will handle translation rights at Frankfurt.

Strangely, seeing the whole business reported as news like this makes it feel less real. But I'm seeing the unfolding reaction from the under-real environment of a Paris hotel room, after a 6am start and about 800 espressos. Anyway, between this and the outpouring of congratulations on Twitter and across my various email accounts, my cup runneth over.

ON EDIT: Here's the text of the press release from HarperPress:

Extraordinary New Voice for Harper Press

On the eve of the Frankfurt book fair, Harper Press is thrilled to announce the acquisition of a distinctive new literary talent. Clare Smith has acquired World rights, all languages, excluding N.America, to Care of Wooden Floors by debut author Will Wiles, in a pre-emptive bid.

Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about a friendship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.

Will Wiles is senior editor of Icon, the monthly architecture and design magazine, and he lives in London.

'Dark, funny and compelling, this novel takes your breath away with its extraordinarily distinctive writing. The voice is unexpected, constantly, but consistently conveys a universal human experience that pulls the reader right into the world of the narrator. The entire team fell passionately in love with the book,' said Smith. 'We could not be more delighted to be publishing Will.'

Care of Wooden Floors will be published as the lead literary launch title for Harper Press in Spring 2012. Tara Hiatt, Head of International Rights at HarperCollins, will be handling translation rights. The agent is Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton.

"Care of Wooden Floors" to be Published by Harper Press in Spring 2012

2010-09-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to be able to announce that Harper Press, an imprint of publishing giant HarperCollins, has bought the rights to my novel, Care of Wooden Floors. Needless to say, I'm thrilled - in fact, I've been walking on sunshine, barely able to think of anything else, since I first heard of the offer early this week. The ink is barely dry on the third draft and it's sold. Publication is due in spring 2012 (although of course this may change).

Here's a description of the book, written before I had completed the first draft. The short version: a man is given his friend's beautiful minimalist flat to look after, with disastrous results. It's a small, strange tale of accidents, friendship, pathological neatness, death and wooden floors.

Updates will follow.

The Image Accumulator

2010-09-26T00:30:00.000-07:00

This is part of Tim Maly's 50 Posts About Cyborgs, a collaboration between blogs celebrating 50 years of the term "cyborg". Here, I'll be talking about David Cronenberg's film Videodrome, and there'll be some description of sadomasochism. Consider yourselves warned. It's also an imperfect effort to bring together thoughts on a number of subjects, and as such has a slightly unfinished feel. For that, my apologies.

What is the secret of the Videodrome signal? Not its origins or its meaning, which are the objects of James Woods' quest in David Cronenberg's film Videodrome (1983). I mean the secret of its shiver. We get the shiver when Max Renn, played by Woods, is introduced to the signal by his colleague Harlan. The signal was sniffed out by the pirate satellite dish operated by Renn's cable network - Videodrome is a brutal sadomasochistic television programme apparently emitting from Malaysia. Nothing but torture and snuff, filmed in a studio with walls of wet clay. Wet clay - absorbs sound, and it can be electrified. How's that for a deviant architectural detail? You have to love Cronenberg. An illicit television programme, operating beyond the reach of any risk of penalty and specialising in savagery, is a sinister enough premise. And then he goes and throws in a baroque, left-field detail like walls of wet clay. It just emphasises the otherness of the signal - the fact that it is a product of thought processes that are not like ours. We think.

Videodrome.

And there's the shiver. An illicit television programme. Something we aren't meant to be seeing. But it's right there, on the spectrum, just waiting for an ear cocked in its direction. It's inherently fascinating. Broadcast television is a rigid, hierarchical, top-down, hermetic system, a trumpeting modern edifice. Underneath a veneer of raucous diversity, it's monolithic and monopolistic. Breaches in that monopoly are at once unnerving and exotic - such as the sinister surrealism of the Max Headroom signal intrusion incident (video).

Finding this hotline to depravity, Renn does what any sensible person would - he pirates the programme and puts it on his own channel. He also becomes obsessed by it, and discovers that not only is it not faked, it is also being broadcast from no further away than Pittsburgh. As Renn gets closer to the source of the signal, he suffers from terrifying hallucinations. His television warps, swells, pulses and erotically reaches out towards him; his abdomen splits into a maw like a VCR cassette slot; he learns that the signal has a direct physiological effect, causing brain tumours. It's a product of the military-industrial complex: weaponised television, designed to destroy the minds and bodies of undesirables.

Body horror is of course what Cronenberg is best known for. The director had previously shown the boundaries of the body collapsing (most memorably in 1975's Shivers) and mind control (in 1981's Scanners). But Videodrome is I think the first proper foray into cyborg transgression - the merging of flesh and technology, a catastrophic breakdown in the separation we take for granted.

Or do we take it for granted? It makes sense that the vector of this breakdown is a broadcast signal. We are, as a species, not entirely convinced that visual information has no power over us - photosensitive epilepsy is of course real, and Videodrome-like mind control has seeped into urban legends, always a good barometer of modern pathologies. (The arcade game Polybius is a particularly fine example of this line of mythmaking.) We feel sensitive to the non-visual electromagnetic spectrum around us, even where it doesn't affect us - witness the pseudoscientific health scares over mobile phones, phone masts, electricity pylons, "electrosmog". Television was the first electronic love-object, the focus of an extraordinarily widespread devotion. As a consumer item, it has consistently adopted different strategies to get closer to us - reproducing, breaking out of the living room and into different rooms in the house, and also attempting a more intimate connection. First it experimented with miniaturisation (portable TVs, pocket TVs, wearable TVs); now its preferred method is immersion, giant screens, clearer images and sound, refining the purity of the signal rather than its portability. The relationship of the 20th-century consumer to the television signal has always been a kind of romance - a ferociously close but off-balance, sadomasochistic romance. Renn is simply acting out the atavistic dream-journey of the 20th-century consumer - he is getting inside his television, letting it get inside him, finally breaching that air-gap and bathing in the electromagnetic spectrum. In an ecstatic climax within the film, when all the distinctions between reality, television programe and hallucination have disappeared, Renn finds himself inside the orange chamber with the wet clay walls. There, he whips a television; on the screen, Debbie Harry's lips moan and cry out approvingly.

Clear-eyed and unsentimental as always, JG Ballard was on top of this relationship. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), contains the shadow of Videodrome - it's filled with giant screens, with broadcasts, with violence as entertainment. While the discourse around social change was mostly fogged with petty conservatism, Ballard saw deeper psychological instincts and pathologies being acted out in our relationship with consumer goods.

In fact, too few things are bad for us, and one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes. It's curious that these puritans strike such a chord - there is a deep underlying unease about the rate of social change, but little apparent change is actually taking place. ... Real change is largely invisible, as befits this age of invisible technology - and people have embraced VCRs, fax machines, word processors without a thought, along with the new social habits that have sprung up around them.

-- JG Ballard, notes to "Death Games (a) Conceptual", The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard, one feels, would have approved of Renn's self-destructive line of enquiry - his advice in The Atrocity Exhibition is that we should "immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim"; he thought there should be more sex and violence on television, seeing it as a powerful catalyst for social change. Videodrome is a thoroughly Ballardian film. And Renn really does immerse himself in himself - his tool for becoming one with the Videodrome signal is the Image Accumulator, a kind of helmet; in this helmet, reality, television and hallucination are the same non-judgemental flow of electrons.

The Image Accumulator.

The Image Accumulator is profoundly reminiscent of works by the German artist Walter Pichler. Attempting a critique of television, Pichler combined the device with prosthesis and architecture, fashioning "rooms" that are in fact helmets with integrated televisions. Pichler exposes the dependence in the relationship with television, its total demand on the user - the helmets are not convenient or liberating, they are blinding and immobilising. He gives us the cyborg endgame of devotion to television. But the astonishing thing about his helmets is that they manage to be appealing - they have the finished surface of consumer products, and despite ourselves we're curious about what's inside, how the experience works. The risk of course is obvious - it's not that we'll find these absurd contraptions uncomfortable and debilitating, that's a given; the risk is that we'll find the payoff worth it for final oneness with the signal, the warm umbilical with the machine, and that we'll come to forget we're wearing the helmet.

"Portable Living Room", Walter Pichler, 1967

"Small Room Prototype", Walter Pichler, 1967

Children of the Bunker

2010-09-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

This is part of 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

The Mark 3 Travel Device.

The end of a thousand-year war. Two races locked in the embrace of murder-suicide. Technology in reverse. Attrition on a planetary scale: every living thing, every scrap of life-sustaining environment, must be destroyed to deny it to the enemy. The triumph of nihilism, genocide as business-as-usual. Few Doctor Who serials have even come in sight of the creative peak represented by Genesis of the Daleks, Terry Nation's 1975 story. Throughout its 47-year history, Doctor Who has continually shown a frustrating lack of economy with its own reserves of imagination, flinging away fascinating concepts after only the briefest examination and then eking out unoriginal stories far beyond their natural life. The series had a routine disregard for its own continuity even before the baroque absurdities of the post-2005 "New" series. Genesis of the Daleks is different. An extraordinarily powerful scenario is thoroughly explored, and the existing Dalek timeline is enriched and extended with what is essentially a super-prequel.

As the name suggests, Genesis is the beginning of the Daleks. What's striking about it is that it feels like an ending. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker, arrives on the planet Skaro at the tail end of a millennial war between the Thals and the Kaleds, two sets of humanoid aliens. The world is devastated by centuries of atomic and chemical warfare. The armies of the two races are reduced to ragged bands of skirmishers with mismatched, salvaged equipment, the detritus of a technological civilisation that has all but totally unravelled. The combatants are in regression, on the path back to the bow and arrow. The exhaustion is palpable.

Technology in retreat.

On arrival in this apocalypse, the Doctor is informed by a senior Time Lord that, in the distant future, the tyrannical cyborg race known as the Daleks has come to dominate the universe. This outcome must be prevented, so he has been sent back to the moment of the Daleks' creation to interfere with their development - either he must snuff them out at birth, or intervene to steer the race in a less belligerent direction. There have been too many times when the Daleks were thought to be defeated and came back stronger than ever, like a hospital superbug. The Doctor has been sent ad fontes to pre-empt a Dalek universe. Even the possibility of a Dalek universe is too great a risk to take.

This might sound like Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine, but a viewer familiar with the Daleks' later exploits is immediately on the Doctor's side. The Daleks are near-perfect villains, "gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them" in Jenny Turner's beautiful description from 2006. They don't just talk like Nazis, they talk like the angriest, barking, spittle-hurling Schutzstaffel creep; they are Nazis reduced to their perfect essence, in a wheeled tin can. Tinned extract of Nazi. At the moment the Doctor arrives on Skaro, we already know a little of their origins - inside their armoured shell, the "real" Dalek is a degenerate mutant, just a ball of squealing, mucus-covered malignancy. If you had one under your foot, your instinct would be to stamp down, hard. They are bad news. Wipe them out before they do any harm? Sure.

But our trip to the nursery with a flamethrower can also be educational. What could cause that kind of debasement? What sort of florid developmental trauma could lead to that sort of galaxywide psychopathy? If this is the child, what are the parents like?

Trekking across the devastated surface of Skaro, the Doctor and his companions see, in the distance, the first sign that civilisation of some kind is still operating: a domed city. They encounter a network of trenches - manned by corpses - and the entrance to a bunker. They are surprised by a raiding party, captured, and led into this underground world: the Kaled headquarters.

Inside the Kaled bunker.

Terry Nation does not play down the parallels with the Nazis. Although the Kaleds are exhausted, near total defeat, down in the bunker they're still bleating on about huge offensives and Wunderwaffe that will bring about victory. Armies are confidently moved about a situation map, although from the depopulation we've seen on the surface it's clear they represent handfuls of soliders, if they exist at all. Peter Miles plays the security chief Nyder, an SS officer down to his Iron Cross, licking his lips over lines like "The Kaled race must be kept pure!". Great faith is placed in the charismatic chief scientist Davros, promiser of the Wunderwaffe, the man whose genius has kept the Kaled war machine going, and apparent source of the Kaleds' racial rhetoric.

Nyder. The parallels with the Nazis are not subtle.

This is the first appearance of Davros, a recurring character in later Doctor Who serials, inextricably tied up with the Daleks. We, the viewers, know that the wonder-weapon he is promising is the Dalek, and his appearance tells most of the story of this creation. Davros is crippled, confined to a transport device that resembles the lower half of a Dalek; he is blind, able to see only through an artificial eye mounted on his forehead; a single withered arm operates the switches on the chair that allow him to interact with the world around him. The Daleks are, it is immediately clear, simply elaborations of the cyborg technology that has kept their creator alive. He introduces the Daleks as the "Mark 3 Travel Device" - obviously he is sitting in the Mark 2. The Dalek is presented to the Kaleds as the only possible way to survive: it is designed to travel over the toxic surface of the planet, and will accommodate the "ultimate" form of the Kaled race - what the race will mutate into when the chemicals and radiation in the environment have completed their work. Davros has, for experimental purposes, hurried this process of mutation along on a few test subjects, and the results are not pretty. The Kaleds only have Davros' word that his test subjects are really the genetic destination of their race, but their chief scientist has brought them this far, and his own state (ruined, but alive and pugnacious) is a kind of guarantee - a sort of Hitlerian brinksmanship, which says "I'm prepared to go this far, to sacrifice this much, why aren't you?"

Davros: proto-Dalek.

The Kaleds are quite captivated by Davros, and impressed by the obvious potential of his creation to wreak victory, but they are not yet so far down the step-free path to Dalekhood. There are qualms, doubts, power struggles. Some of the scientists, quite understandably, don't much like the idea of ending up as one of Davros' future-slugs. It's not necessary to relay the entire plot here: there is much (too much) toing and froing across the wasteland between the Kaled dome and the Thal dome, many captures, escapes and recaptures, a lot of intrigue and moral calculus, some unintentionally comic encounters with giant polystyrene clams, and eventually the Daleks are unleashed and do what they do best: Ex-ter-min-ate, Ex-ter-min-ate. What's fascinating about Genesis is the way it explains so much about the psychology of the Daleks and how they ended up as such compelling villains, simultaneously terrifying and pathetic, "utterly evil and utterly childish" in Turner's phrase: "What is ‘Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!’ but the most notorious command of the 20th century, done as a comic turn?"

The Daleks confer with their creator.

The childish edge is key: the Daleks are erratic, hyperactive, prone to tantrums. Their debasement could also be seen as under-development. In Genesis, Davros orders chromosomal alterations to the mutant Kaled test subjects. A scientist objects that the change will mean significant defects: No compassion, no conscience. Not defects, says Davros, enhancements! Deficiency is passed off as improvement, just as a slimy residue is being passed off as the apogee of the Master Race. Alongside under-development, the Daleks' hysteria and insanity also has an edge of claustrophobic panic, almost a horror at its own situation, trapped in a metal shell. Their superiority compex is Napoleonic, based on inferiority.

The Kaled super-race.

So they are trapped - just like the Kaleds, just like the Thals, confined to their bunkers, unable to venture out onto the planet they're fighting over without gasmasks, radiation detectors, helmets and other technological enhancements. The bunker can be seen like a kind of super-Dalek, the dome of the head poking above the surface of the planet, while the remains of each race desperately operates the controls inside. The Daleks are the products of the psychosis of the bunker.

Going further back into the rear of the fortification, you meet once again the system of staggered nearby defenses, with its small firing slits—one along the entrance axis, the other on the flanks—with low visibility, through which the immediate surroundings can be seen, in a narrow space with a low ceiling. The crushing feeling felt during the exterior circuit around the work becomes acute here. The various volumes are too narrow for normal activity, for real corporal mobility; the whole structure weighs down on the visitor’s shoulders. Like a slightly undersized piece of clothing that hampers as much as it enclothes, the reinforced concrete and steel envelope is too tight under the arms and sets you in a semiparalysis fairly close to that of illness.

That's Paul Virilio describing a Nazi-built fortification on Europe's Atlantic Coast ("The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers", The Morning News 2 February 2009, an article distilling the ideas laid out in Virilio's classic Bunker Archaeology) - the kind of structure that the Third Reich put its faith in as its manpower dwindled and defeat started to press in on all sides. Internal volumes too narrow for corporal mobility, the structure weighing down on the shoulders, semiparalysis close to illness - it's inescapably Dalekoid. The Dalek vehicle, the "Mark 3 Travel Device", can be seen as a sort of mobile, personal bunker, complete with its own raging, raving Hitler inside, screaming and commanding. It even looks like a pillbox, with the slits at the top, the swivelling weapon, the domed top.

The Doctor does not destroy the Daleks in Genesis. They keep coming back, again and again - hardly a surprise, as they are in many ways a more powerful creation than the Doctor himself, a perfectly tied knot of 20th-century pathologies, one that is for the time being quite at home in our own century as well. They're a warning about desperation, about wonder-weapons, about giving away too much for victory. Genesis of the Daleks is full of destruction and evil, but it ends on a resoundingly humane note. The Doctor plants explosives in the Dalek nursery , among the specimen jars containing the Kaled mutants. But when given the live wires that will trigger the detonation, he can't bring himself to do it. It's a striking moment - the Kaled blobs are after all, helpless, no matter how bellicose they might be. The Doctor agonises, and chucks away his chance, endangering the whole universe just to prevent himself sinking to the Daleks' level.

Genocide anxiety.

Rather than destroy the Daleks, the Doctor settles for blowing up the entrance tunnel to the underground complex, setting back their progress a few centuries, hopefully enough to tilt the scale of history against them. The Daleks are left to trundle about the Kaled bunker on their own, shrieking and plotting. Even after they dig their way out, they will never, ever escape.

A Wild New Gig

2010-08-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

Hunter S Thompson, 25 March, 1969:

Dear Jim [Silberman, Random House] ...

Are you ready for the death of print, books, and magazines? The whole weird future was laid on me tonight by a professor from UCLA Journalism school. The only missing link, he says, is a process for editing video-tape without computers ... and after that it's a whole new ballgame: No more Hollywood, no more book publishers, no more magazines ... I never paid much attention to Marshall McLuhan, if only because he's basically incoherent & needs about five editors. But the forecast I heard tonight is ominously clear, the underground backstairs line from UCLA ...

The real new journalism. He offered to turn me loose with a sound-sync video-tape machine the next time I get to L.A. No bigger than a typewriter, combining the roles of script-writer, director, editor, producer, and ... yes, even publisher. Tape-cassettes instead of book covers, video-tape receivers instead of magazines or newspapers. Jesus, it boggles the mind. The next time I get to NY I'd like to talk about it; this is a wild new gig. Are you into it? Why not ponder a tape/book experiment? To hell with the undiscovered editing process; that's inevitable anyway. Why not learn to use the tools before they're perfected? Do you have any screening rooms designed into that new building? Send word ...

Hunter

1969!

(This is extracted from Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-1976, the second volume of HST's collected letters. Which is absolutely golden stuff, a book well worth getting.)

Saint Jane

2010-08-18T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Pelican edition of Death and Life, with cover by Germano Facetti.

A spectre is haunting urbanism - the spectre of Jane Jacobs. The American-Canadian writer and activist died in 2006, but she continues to exert influence over the urban debate, primarily via that dreary federacy of messianic dovecote enthusiasts, the "New Urbanists", who have taken her up as a kind of guiding prophet. Outside the ranks of the Kunstlers and Kriers, there is a great swath of architects, thinkers and writers on the city who have read Jacobs and hold her in high regard. With a touch of embarrassment, I should include myself in this latter category. Not being an architect, I was an auto-didact in urban theory. When I came across a Pelican edition of Jacobs' best-known book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a second-hand bookshop almost a decade ago, I had never heard of her. But I loved the Germano Facetti cover design, the back sounded interesting enough, and the price was right, so I took it home.

At that point, my reading on urban theory had been scattershot, based entirely in what I found in 2nd-hand bookshops: Corbu, Lewis Mumford, Thomas Sharp, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, an odd band who had given me all sorts of interesting ideas and imagery, but nothing very coherent. What they had in common, more or less, was that I didn't really enjoy reading them all that much, and had mostly got through to the end in a spirit of patient self-improvement. I picked up Jacobs, expecting more of the same, and instead ploughed through it in a matter of days. If nothing else, she taught me that book-length urban theory could be hugely entertaining, and since then I have sought out books about the city with enthusiasm, as opposed to a worthy sense of I-really-should-know-more-about-this. (I haven't read The Economy of Cities which I understand unwisely broadens some of Jacobs' microcosmic conclusions, which is probably why its profile has declined in recent years while that of Death and Life has done little but improve.)

At the time, I lived in a basement flat in Pimlico. I worked from home. From the desk where I read and worked, I could see feet passing on the pavement outside. I could stroll out during the day and visit the market on Tachbrook street, which had a book stall. I knew the names of local shopkeepers. It was, when I had money, all very comfortable. Westminster council was on its never-ending crusade to fuck up everything with vast shiny office buildings. Jacobs had an obvious appeal in this context. Since then, I've learned a lot more, but much of what she says about the folly of monolithic single-use zoning and the importance of mixed activity on the street, still seems to me to be self-evident.

She has remained on my mind since, popping up from time to time in both expected and unexpected places. I recently read Joe Flood's account of New York's 1970s organisational meltdown, The Fires (review scheduled in Icon 088). Flood has a criticism of some form for nearly everyone in 1970s New York - except Jacobs, who floats, omniscient and benign, above the crumbling city. This kind of veneration obviously grates with some people. In an essay in The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz complains that the writers Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin are hopelessly in thrall to Jacobs in their recent accounts of NYC, and that Jacobs' description of the city was a mirage - if it ever existed, it was only for a split-second in the city's life.

Jacobs, Schwarz complains, presented a "transitional and unsustainable, if golden, moment" in the life of a certain neighbourhood as an ideal, and in doing so distorted our whole idea of the urban good life. This critique was picked up by Kosmograd: ever since Death and Life, urbanists have been attempting to conjure a steady-state Jacobs Moment in neighbourhoods globally, and always end up with a runaway reaction on their hands: gentrification. Working-class communities and affordable housing are swept away, and the district ends up as a "bo-ho theme park". Jacobs' "sentimental ... matronising" opinions have precious little to offer a world that is throwing up such terrifying urban environments as the FoxConn complex in Shenzhen.

When I first read Schwarz and Kosmograd's essays, my first instinct was to spring to Jacobs' defence. She was a lone voice raised in defence of a certain kind of community. That community was worth defending - the contemporary notion of what constituted a slum was a nonsense, a nonsense that was being used as a tool for massive and wholly un-progressive urban clearance and social engineering. This clearance was not the comprehensive redevelopment and state planning that took place in the UK - Moses-manner planning was an unlikely and grotesque, wholly corrupt, public-private aberration, one that sadly proved repeatable within the USA; imagine PFI joint ventures crossed with the LDDC and given untrammelled power, and you get a rough idea. At the time Jacobs wrote, gentrification and yuppification were inconceivable: New York would continue to experience the flight of the middle classes for 20 years after the publication of Death and Life. Industrial New York might not have been pleasant, but its destruction was a man-made disaster: the city deliberately dismantled its blue-collar manufacturing base in pursuit of white-collar employers, and almost killed itself in the process. (Flood details this insane policy in The Fires.) So Jacobs has nothing to offer the inhabitants of FoxConnopolis - she didn't have much to say about the Gaza Strip or Dubai, either, because she was writing about local issues in the 1960s. Jacobs could not be held responsible for what has been committed in her name by the New Urbanists and their insipid watercolour view of the city. Also, wasn't a lot of the disdain for Jane a distaste for her (American, rather twee) literary style? And the book has this great Germano Facetti cover. Don't you see?

In other words, Leave Britney Alone.

That was my first instinct, but thought better of it. For a start, I didn't particularly want to write an ode to Jacobs and place myself in the company of the Nurbanists. Secondly, it wasn't long after the ArcelorMittal Space Tangle controversy, and I didn't want to get into an argument with Kosmograd again, given that he's one of the most interesting and perceptive architecture bloggers in the UK, and I'm generally behind him 100%.

Anyway, the cult of Saint Jane is developing into a menace. It's worth mentioning that Death and Life is not really (or not wholly) an attack on modernism. Besides the Moses approach to planning, Jacobs is primarily arguing against decentralisation, "decentrists" such as Mumford, suburbanisation, Howard's "Garden City", monolithic zoning, and residential monoculture. Although the organic, dense, city seemed chaotic, Jacobs argued, it could be understood; it had hugely complex systems, and the systems worked. In suggesting this, she was making the case that the technocratic city-as-diagram planners in the Moses mold were not replacing a chaotic lack of system with a working system - they were replacing a working system with a dysfunctional system. Many of Jacobs' ideas (particularly to do with mixed uses) can and should be safely integrated into modernist planning. Indeed, they have been - compare the mixed housing and culture of the Barbican with the Lincoln Center, a Moses project that Jacobs complains about.

However, in deposing the Moses planning priesthood, Jacobs cut the vestments for a new priesthood. "You have misunderstood the city," she says, "and I understand it" - as Kosmograd says, this equation meant that by bearing the relics of Saint Jane, the Nurbanists can set themselves up as the only people who understand the city, and swaddle their agenda in authenticity and legitimacy. They claim to be the people who understand the city, who tend the guttering pilot light of "vibrancy" that keeps it alive.

They are wrong. I am not going to presume to have a deeper understanding of Jane Jacobs than the Nurbanists, and attempt to snatch the relics back - they are, frankly, welcome to them. We are never going to move forward if we get bogged down into a recondite dispute about "what she really meant". But Jacobs appealed to me because it chimed with what I saw in cities and what I liked about them - and the Nurbanists have no idea what this quality is. Their agenda for "neighbourhoods", "contextuality", "walkability", is fundamentally anti-urban. These qualities aren't necessarily bad in themselves - but combined in pursuit of the singular Nurbanist vision, they mean the vivisection of the city into un-urban cells. Taken to its conclusion, "walk-to-work" ideology means cottages clustered around the mill. While a short commute is desirable, in a neoliberal world this would severely limit social mobility and the overall broadening of horizons that is the best the city has to offer. If people wish to live within walking distance of their workplace, they of course should be able to. But basing a housing system on proximity to workplace is not progressive - or at least it is not as progressive as cheap, plentiful public transport and cheap, plentiful rented accommodation. The FoxxConn workers live in and around their workplace.

The Nurbanist vision of carving up the city in this way is as diagrammatic and retrograde as Moses' planning - and, similarly, it's an assault on the complexity of the city, the city's ability to generate its own fabulously complicated internal patterns that defy cursory inspection. The emphasis on little neighbourhoods, the stoop, local shops and walking distances, the "human scale" only tells part of the story of the city - after all, these things can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole. Elevated highways, crowds, tall buildings, interconnection and confusion - these things can be to some people dismaying and unpleasant, but the awe they strike is the overture of accepting the condition of living in a city. The Tube roundel is vaguely holy to Londoners - intensely reassuring - because it is a sign of connection with a system of vast complexity and importance. (The religious meaning of the Tube is a subject I keep meaning to write about at some point.) Nurbanism stems from a fear and hatred of the modern city as it is - a hatred that is ideological, that cannot and will not be shown that there are reasons to like the neon snarl of the cities we have, and their inner flows and surges. This is a terrible frame of mind for a group concerned with urban planning. Jacobs, at least, liked the city, and liked it for factors that cannot be found in small towns.

Death and Life is parochial and highly idiosyncratic, a product of particular times and specific circumstances; as its critics say, a poor basis for general policy. Jacobs herself, though, can't really be blamed for making broad recommendations on the basis of her own experiences and beliefs. The trouble is that there are not more Jane Jacobs, more voices in the urban debate, giving different views of city planning from their own experience. It is mysterious to me that Jonathan Raban's Soft City - a book written out of love for and interest in the city, hugely perceptive about how cities work, without policy recommendations, simply a plea for what is valuable about the city as a huge civilising machine - is not venerated in this country. Anna Minton's Ground Control is the only really outstanding contribution to the urban genre in recent years, although of course I have high hopes for Owen Hatherley's New Ruins when it comes out. The mutations of cities around us, from Shenzhen to London, certainly do need new narratives.

Airport Dream

2010-08-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

Copenhagen Airport. Image from my Flickr stream.

Other people's dreams, like other people's holidays, can be fascinating to hear about, but often they're tedious with a capital Zzz. So I'll keep this brief. Writing a review of the Christopher Nolan film Inception (scheduled for icon 088), I've been thinking about dreams. This has had a curious effect: either I'm dreaming more vividly, or I'm just a little better at remembering them at the moment.

Last night, it was an anxiety dream by the numbers, but it had interesting architectural overtones. I was at an airport - I had a flight to catch. I believed it was Gatwick (my wife flew into Gatwick yesterday), but the terminal building looked more like Rogers' Terminal 5 at Heathrow: a vast shed with a curved roof. I had checked in (somehow) but needed to get into the building to get through security and to my gate. But I couldn't find the door. At street level, the terminal building was an endless inscrutable wall of heavily fritted glass and anodised zinc. I found openings, but they where the exits or service entrances of shops, guarded by security. It was an utterly inhospitable landscape, clearly the wrong place to be, but I had no choice but to continue trekking around the endless perimeter. Eventually I ran into colleagues or peers who I knew would be catching the flight, heading to their gate (suggesting that the trip was work), but I couldn't follow them because there was something I had to do first. Also, they had coffee, and I wondered where they got it from.

That's all. Because it wasn't directed by Chrisopher Nolan, the dream did not deliver a vast surge of catharsis. At no point did I see or hear a plane. Hey, I didn't promise this was going to be worth reading.

Bookscape

2010-08-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

A tatty former bookcase, now long gone, replaced by a wall of IKEA conformity. From my Flickr stream.

Earlier today I read, and enjoyed, Stewart Lee’s column on the pleasures and pains of compulsive media collecting. I am something of a hoarder myself; I won’t go into figures because it’s just so much dick-waving and because Lee certainly has more than me. Suffice to say that I pick up a couple of new or second-hand books pretty much every week and rarely throw anything out. Even taking a Tesco bag full of rubbishy Mission Earth and Harry Turtledove books down to the charity shop is freighted with sorrow. Then there are the box files of clippings and ephemera. I wouldn’t say this is “collecting” because that suggests aims, parameters, a sort of directionality, but it is a dedicated amassing of stuff. What is this behaviour? An immature attitude to mortality? Almost certainly. But while we’re scrabbling together crumbs on this dirtball, permit me to scratch an itch.

Now, when the subject of bookshelves comes up in discussion online, bookshelves filled with books, there are two recurring counter-positions. These positions directly contradict each other, so just putting them next to each other goes some way to refuting them.

“Aye, you may have a lot of books, but I bet you haven’t read all of them!”

And

“What’s the point of keeping a load of books you’ve already read?”

Having erected my pair of strawmen, I will now knock them down. In some quarters it is clearly considered pretension to display books that you haven’t read. This of course makes no sense. It shows a misunderstanding of why people would want bookshelves at all – showing off is just a fortunate secondary effect. The great pleasure of owning bookshelves half-filled with unread books is that you can always find something new to read. Having finished a book, I can immediately move on to another. There is no realistic prospect (thank god) of running out of new things to read. This is the heart of having a home library, however small: pleasure on tap.

Moving on to phantom composite internet moron remark number two, “what’s the point of keeping a load of books you’ve already read?” Well, there is of course the reference value – being able to look something up, to find a source or a quote or something. And there’s the pleasure to be had from re-reading. One of the Great Prophets of my personal cosmology is Jerry Seinfeld, but on this point we disagree. He (or at least the long-running-NBC-sitcom version of him) was never a big reader, and was certainly not a re-reader. In one episode he mocks George Costanza for wanting to retrieve some books from an ex-girlfriend’s house: “When you read Moby Dick the second time, Ahab and the whale become good friends!” This position suggests that the only pleasure to be had from reading is the revelation of plot, which is of course nonsense. Plot is of course an incentive to keep reading, but the real pleasure comes from language and character. Even plot twists can be savoured more than once – the first time might have a monopoly on the thrill of realisation, of having your view of the story transformed, but subsequent readings can revisit that thrill as memory, and offer the pleasure of examining the workings of the twist, like admiring a piece of craftsmanship or inspecting a puzzle box to see how it works.

More profoundly, both of these positions stem from a misunderstanding of how reading works. They see books as being binary objects – something is either read, or it is not read. This isn’t true (and not simply because you can read half-way through something and then stop). Pierre Bayard’s excellent book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read explains this beautifully. Bayard’s book is often misunderstood (mostly by people who haven’t read it, but also by many of its reviewers) as a bluffer’s guide, a manual for literary bullshitting. It isn’t. Instead, he talks about the imperfect nature of reading – even when we read a book thoroughly, it’s impossible to acquire a full mental picture of it, our view of it is inevitably going to be imperfect in some way. Rather than a binary state of books that are “read” and “unread”, all reading is a sliding scale of unreading – books we haven’t read but know something about, books we have read in part, books we have read and forgotten, and so on. Bayard aims to break down a taboo: to give some value to unreading by revealing that all reading is unreading.

Reading isn’t really an act of consumption at all – it’s not like ticking off a checklist or working through a bag of crisps. Both of the positions I mention in this post treat reading as a kind of scorecard, but really it’s more of a continuum. To read is to constantly build and furnish a mental environment, with (for me at least) no particular great aim in mind. So it’s hardly surprising that the continuum of reading can manifest as a physical environment. Books are a landscape to be occupied and enjoyed, not a set of individual states to be reached.

This Isn't Concrete, Honest

2010-07-16T05:45:00.001-07:00

From an ad seen on BD's website:

What an improvement! But who is the advert for? AluMing, leading manufacturer of plastinated aluminium cladding? Prefabricated Brick Panel Marketing Board? No, it's "This is Concrete", a marketing initiative of the Concrete Centre. Further pictures of the transformed Ashburton Court show it to be clad in a number of materials - brick, metal, timber, render, the kind of jumble that's depressingly common in bog-standard 21st century British architecture - anything, in fact, but concrete.

The Concrete Centre should buck up and defend the beautiful material it is in the fortunate position of advocating. It's hard to imagine this kind of self-loathing marketing strategy used for another product. "Drink Milk! If you put enough chocolate syrup in it, it's almost like you're not drinking milk at all!"

Vegas Baby

2010-07-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

This was written back in March, about my January trip to Las Vegas. Sadly it lost its slot in the magazine it was written for, and has after some months in limbo found its way to the spike. So here it is. Photos are from my Flickr stream.

“We rode around from casino to casino, dazed by the desert sun and dazzled by the signs, both loving and hating what we saw, we were jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins,” said the architect Denise Scott Brown of her first visit to Las Vegas in 1966. At that time, the Nevada city was already a byword for pleasure-seeking and sin, but it was architecturally unexplored territory. Scott Brown's trip, with her husband and partner Robert Venturi, was a fateful moment for their profession. They would return two years later with a whole class of Yale students to study the place in detail – the result, in 1972, was Learning From Las Vegas, a book that scandalised the architectural establishment simply by paying attention to the unique, dizzying landscape of the Strip in the desert.

More walkable and urban than you might think.

Today, Las Vegas still has the ability to jolt the first-time visitor. It announces itself in an almost sickening moment of existential shock. From Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to CSI, culture has furnished such a detailed mental picture of Las Vegas that it's almost unsettling to discover that the place is really real. It's like discovering that Narnia really exists. But it's a different wonderland to the one explored by Venturi and Scott Brown 40 years ago. The Las Vegas of Learning From Las Vegas was a low-rise landscape punctuated with spectacular signs. Now, the buildings are the spectacle. The Strip is a procession of architectural set-pieces unlike anything else on Earth, from the high-rise turbo-classicism of Caesar's Palace and the Luxor techno-pyramid to the inimitable imitations of Paris, New York and Venice. There are Disney turrets at the Excalibur and a working volcano at the Mirage, eruptions hourly. In a neat plutocratic pairing, the metallic-brown Wynn resembles an 1960s executive desk-top cigarette lighter, while the gold-clad (literally, gold) Trump is pure Benson & Hedgefund. The Circus Circus, one of the Strip's more venerable hotels, mocked as the screaming nadir of middlebrow bad taste by Hunter S Thompson, is now positively dowdy by comparison.

CityCenter. Helmut Jahn's Veer towers are centre; the blue building at right is Norman Foster's Harmon. Below the Harmon, Daniel Libeskind's Crystals mall.

In the midst of this menagerie is a new beast, bigger than the others and strange in comparison: a gleaming cluster of towers called CityCenter. This is the latest reinvention of Las Vegas – the newest form thrown up in this extraordinary melting pot of atavistic leisure, consumer surrealism, and corporate hypermoney. “Hypermoney” isn't an exaggeration. This project comes festooned with superlatives and eye-popping stats, but among the most impressive is the fact that it's the single largest private development in the United States. $9 billion – or $11 billion, depending on who you listen to – has been plonked down on the roulette table here, just as the ball skips towards the double-zero of a global recession. A joint venture between resort corporation MGM Mirage and Dubai World, the horribly troubled investment wing of the government of Dubai, the CityCenter project has persistently flirted with crisis and bankruptcy, and against the mounting odds opened for business early this year. Whether it succeeds or fails, it's a fascinating new mutation in a place that has been an urban laboratory for half a century.

The Veer. Cesar Pelli's Aria hotel is the curved building below.

CityCenter isn't just a name – it's a statement of intent. The project is described in the plentiful, excitable publicity material that surrounds it as a “city within a city”, a “new urban core” for Las Vegas. 18 million square feet of space over 67 acres is divided into half a dozen hotels and casinos – a Mandarin Oriental and new brands with somewhat abstract names including “Aria” and “Vdara” - in an thicket of towers, most of which are so aesthetically restrained by Vegas standards that they would not stand out in Canary Wharf. These are arranged around the most striking buildings in the complex, the leaning Veer towers and a shopping mall by Daniel Libeskind that goes by the name of, and shape of, Crystals. Libeskind is just one of the starchitect names involved in the project: Foster & Partners designed the Harmon hotel, Rafael Vinoly was responsible for the Vdara and Cesar Pelli contributed the flagship Aria. It goes far beyond manufacturing a simulacrum of a city as a decorative theme, in the same manner as the New York, New York next door or the Paris across the Strip – it wants to be a genuine “urban environment”. As well as the mall, it will have a residential population, a density of construction similar to Manhattan, and it is designed to be walkable, linking up with neighbouring casinos in a web of promenades.

A "street" within CityCenter, leading towards Crystals.

That's a world of difference to the Las Vegas Venturi and Scott Brown discovered 40 years ago. Then, Las Vegas was new and extraordinary because it was designed entirely with the car in mind. At the roadside were the lavish neon signs intended to lure motorists into comparatively modest modernist buildings set back away from the street behind a forecourt of parking. Pedestrians were not encouraged. Once you had parked, the mob-backed management was not going to make it easy for you to stroll over to one of their competitors down the street. The interiors were dark and confusing – it's still hard to tell if it's night or day in most Vegas casinos. Little was permitted to divert from the gambling. But when the architects were compiling their study of this unique landscape, it was already changing. The eccentric aviation mogul Howard Hughes also pitched up in Las Vegas in 1966, installing himself in the top floor of the Desert Inn. When the management tried to eject him (Hughes what could be called “hygiene issues”, and his penthouse wasn't cleaned once in the four years he occupied it) he bought the hotel. Then he bought another, and another, until he had bought up half a dozen resorts.

Crystals, with the Harmon behind. Libeskind is here a kind of Las Vegas entertainer, still belting out the same old repertoire of former hits, but flatter and fatter than before.

Hughes' spree ended the mob's stranglehold on the ownership of casinos and greatly improved Las Vegas' reputation, painting it as a playground for tycoons. Perhaps more significantly, it opened up the Strip to big business, paving the way for corporate ownership of casinos. Since then, the corporations have shaped Las Vegas in unexpected ways. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Las Vegas flirted with becoming a family-friendly destination, a trend that didn't last but which kicked off the spate of super-themes, where the branding of a hotel was extended to become a form of entertainment in itself, from the Treasure Island's scheduled pirate battles to the New York New York's skyline and rollercoaster. Steve Wynn, the billionaire local power broker who developed the Mirage and the Treasure Island, followed them in 1998 with his master stroke, the Bellagio, a hugely luxurious hotel-casino that reasserted the city's status as a destination for high rollers.

And the Bellagio pointed straight to CityCenter. Ironically, Strip's new-found friendliness towards the pedestrian over the automobile isn't the result of enlightened planning or a sudden appreciation for the so-called “new urbanism”, which stresses the value of compact neighbourhoods. It's the result of the concentration of corporate interests into a near duopoly. Two corporations – MGM Mirage and Harrah's – now own the vast majority of all property on the Strip. They are no longer motivated to keep visitors in one place because they own most of the other places – indeed, both companies have suddenly taken an interest in public transport, after a fashion, building tram and monorail lines to ferry punters between their properties. It's an urban landscape drawn like a company org-chart, with different corporate holdings linked up by micro-rail and footbridges.

At CityCenter, lower-scale visitors are essentially extras in an fabulously expensive display of Potemkin urbanism – as they stroll between the fountains, the public art and Libeskind's mall, they're providing the traffic and energy that will give the new district a sense of urbanity. This is for the benefit of the upscale residents – the super-wealthy who will be buying the condo vacation homes in the Veer towers, the Harmon and the Mandarin Oriental. CityCenter isn't obviously themed – indeed, the abstract nature of the branding of its hotels gives them a slightly unnerving lack of conceptual context, like seeing an animatronic stripped of its fur and reduced to a swivel-eyed cyborg. But there is a kind of theme. In a way it's a distillation of the idea of the “world city”, familiar to the residents of London, Paris and New York, where it can feel that the bulk of the residents are there just to provide a lively backdrop for multi-homed mega-rich non-dom top tier. The genius of Venturi and Scott Brown's study of Las Vegas was to show how this unique place in Nevada could teach us about every place – a lesson that would only work if one approached the subject without moral or aesthetic judgement. CityCenter is the same. This glittering enclave is a model of how a globalised elite is re-shaping the idea of the city, and how the rhetoric and practice of walkability, public art and vibrant urbanism can comfortably serve corporate monoculture as well as it serves the healthy metropolis. Like the rest of Las Vegas, it's a genuinely fascinating and exciting place – but also not a little scary.

Support Your Local Zines

2010-07-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in Smoke #16 waxing psychogeographical about the Central Line. Specifically, I've written an elegy for the Leyton Roar, an important part of the Underground's aural architecture, which disappeared in mysterious circumstances some time ago. If you're not familiar with Smoke, it's a quarterly(ish) zine about London, with fiction, humour, photography, illustrations, and short observational pieces. You can get it in Foyles, the Tate Modern bookshop, places like that - but I'm horrified to read in an announcement this month that fully half of the shops that used to stock Smoke (and zines like it) back in (say) 2004 have now closed, including Borders; obviously their sales have suffered. This apocalyptic state of affairs has forced them into a major retool, and it looks like they're toying with a new format or direction. I look forward to seeing it, but the news is a horrific reminder of just how bad things have got for independent culture in the city.

I was due to discuss some of the problems facing print, and the evolution of electronic media, at the British Creative Exchange event "Creative E-Zines & Design Publications in Progress". However the event has now been called off, because the chairman was injured in a car accident yesterday. Those of you who had already bought tickets should be able to get them reimbursed fairly quickly. The BCE tells me that they may reorganise the event at a later date.

Air Rage

2010-06-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Image from my Flickr stream.

Filed under "I really shouldn't read the Standard, still it's right there on the seat next to me and sometimes Kieran's in it BLOODY HELL SO ANGRY":

The new owner of Gatwick today dropped London from its name and pledged to wipe out all links with its BAA past.
[...]
The name will be written in the form of an italicised “signature” rather than in the uncompromising “Rail Alphabet” Helvetica font used by BAA since the Sixties.

Mr Wingate said: “We have done the logo in the form of a signature because we want the airport to feel very personal and that we absolutely care about passengers having a good time going through the airport.”

The new owner, investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners, unveiled a new look that it claims will “rekindle the original spirit of taking a flight — we want to make people enjoy it.” Much of the change is cosmetic but aimed at finally ridding Gatwick of its state-owned Seventies heritage.

"Gatwick drops London in £1.5bn revamp", 21 June 2010

The point of Helvetica is that it is neutral. It is extremely legible. It is not subject to cultural bias, regional variation, and the vicissitudes of fashion and corporate identity. It is designed, painstakingly designed, to create standardised signage. Standardisation might not be exactly sexy but it is extremely useful if you want to avoid the world being a confusing racket. "Uncompromising", damn right it is. It is also international, part of the global language of airports, flight, travel - exactly the kind of spirit that this cloth-eared rebranding exercise apparently wants to tap into.

Sure, it's only the logo, there's no indication that they're going to sweep away the whole glorious sign system developed by William Pereira and others. But that crack about "ridding Gatwick of its state-owned Seventies heritage" shows the dangerous prejudices in play. The spangly, gaudy, deliberately confusing world of the British Corporate Pleasure Environment yawns wide, an aesthetic scraped out of the more alarming malls and bars. Let a thousand defective touchscreens blossom. I had a disheartening experience while travelling through Heathrow Terminal 4 last month - wanting to check if my gate had been called, I the back of a cluster of flatscreens attached to a pillar. Thinking "Aha, flight information", I walked around to see the screens - and they were all ads. They were all ads on the next pillar as well. I had to hunt for info. The departure board is to the airport user what the altar is to the cathedral congregant. The boards should be magnificient, huge, dramatic centrepieces of the lounge, and reproduced on a smaller level everywhere in every side chapel, shop and cafe. That list of names! The world awaits! It's beautiful as well as useful. But I had to hunt. and you can see the same dreary though processes at work - "what this place needs is to be much less like an airport, and much more like Westfield".

The plans, they say, hearken back to the golden age of plane travel. I've been thinking and reading about that golden age recently, partly in connection with my article about the Boeing 747 in the July Icon. This golden age certainly existed - it ended when air passengers chose inexpensive mass transit over luxury boutique travel. That is a choice worth remembering. But one of the characteristics of golden age was service, something that I do not feel will be well served by scrapping check-in desks and replacing them with touchscreens. It might be very efficient - I've had mixed experiences with self-checkin - but it's not exactly personal.

"We want to make people enjoy it" - that note of coercion is a little worrying. And this emphasis on pleasure is equally unsettling. It's the Corporate Pleasure Environment again, endlessly pestering you to relax and chill out and treat yourself and so on, forever reminding you of what a great time you're having and see how it's just like Sex and the City until all you want is to be left alone. Want to make people happy, Gatwick? You can't. Want to help people enjoy the airport? Minimal queuing. Clear signage. Information accurate and prominent. Clean. Efficient circulation. Plentiful seating that you don't have to pay for by buying a coffee. Your italicised logo isn't going to make the tiniest jot of difference to anyone.

Video Screens Announce Departures

2010-06-13T04:42:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas airport. Image from my Flickr stream.

On the airport after the arrival of the Boeing 747:

Something was lost. In the jumbo era passengers became oblivious to the outside world, moving through concourses that were double-glazed and super-insulated to muffle the roar of jet engines. Conventional points of entry and transition disappeared. Glass doors opened automatically at the command of seeing-eye photo-electric cells. Moving sidewalks, escalators, and baggage conveyors whispered hydraulically. Departure lounges became shadowless holding tanks, saturated with Muzak and fluorescent lighting. Video screens, first introduced in the 1970s, glowed dimly with arrival and departure times. The experience was ersatz and vacuum-sealed from beginning to end.

From Naked Airport by Alastair Gordon, Chicago, 2004 (partially quoted in my article on the 747 in this month's Icon).

On the tanatorio, a Spanish morgue:

One might expect this to be a solemn place. But, with vigils going on for up to twenty-six dead, all neatly arranged in adjoining cubicles, the tanatorio bustles like a railway terminus. First-timers might think they have stepped into a small airport terminal. Groups of people mill about. A TV monitor tells you which corpse is in which cubicle. A cash dispenser sits in the middle of the foyer. Another machine produces prepaid phone cards. There is, inevitably, a large bar-cum-restaurant doing brisk trade. I even have friends who, because of its extended opening hours, have used it for the last drink on an evening out. A new tanatorio, I notice, has just been opened in Madrid. It advertises on the radio with the slogan "the most modern tanatorio in Europe".

From Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett, Faber, 2006

BP: Beyond Pensioners

2010-06-11T04:25:00.000-07:00

As oil continues to gout into the Gulf of Mexico, another victim has made an appearance beyond dead fish and poisoned pelicans: British pensioners. According to yesterday's Daily Telegraph, the spill - and the American government's reaction to it - is hurting them terribly. "BP's position at the top of the London Stock Exchange and its previous reliability have made it a bedrock of almost every pension fund in the country, meaning its value is crucial to millions of workers," the paper reported. The story continues with these chilling quotes:

"We need to ensure that BP is not unfairly treated – it is not some bloodless corporation," said one of Britain's top fund managers. "Hit BP and a lot of people get hit. UK pension money becomes a donation to the US government and the lawyers at the expense of Mrs Jones and other pension funds."

Mark Dampier of the financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown said: "[Mr Obama] is playing to the gallery but is not bringing a solution any closer. Obama has his boot on the throat of British pensioners. There is no point in bashing BP all the time, it's not helpful. It is a terrible situation, but having the American president on your back is not going to get it all cleared up any quicker."

Neil Duncan-Jordan, of the National Pensioners Convention, said: "Most ordinary people would not have thought that BP would have an impact on their retirement but if BP's share price goes down then their pension pot goes down.

"Most of those pension funds are invested in the default option, which is stocks and shares, and so if BP goes down the pan then their pension pot goes down the pan."

Can a pot go down a pan? That pressing question aside, this whole argument is nonsense. Pensions might be affected by BP's tumbling stock price, but pension funds are in the business of risk management - that's all they do, or all they're supposed to do, just as BP is supposed to manage oil drilling is a reasonably responsible manner. The implication of these remarks is that BP should be immune from political or popular sanction or criticism, and to politically hurt BP is to launch an assault directly on pensioners. This is the logical outcome of the worship of "the markets" - a form of corporate fascism, the conflation of corporations, state and people, in which an attack on the FTSE or its larger members constitutes a direct assault on the Volksgemeinschaft.

The outraged tone taken by the fund managers here is extremely familiar. It's the voice of Milo Minderbinder, a character in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Milo runs a syndicate, which comprises a number of generally crazy money-making schemes, and in which "everyone has a share". An elegant piece of circular logic allows the syndicate to get away with almost anything:

"Milo, how do you do it?" Yossarian inquired with laughing amazement and admiration. "You fill out a flight plane for one place and then you go to another. Don't the people in the control towers ever raise hell?"

"They all belong to the syndicate." Milo said. "And they know that what's good for the syndicate is good for the country, because that's what makes Sammy run. The men in the control towers have a share, too, and that's why they always have to do whatever they can to help the syndicate."

"Do I have a share?"

"Everybody has a share."

Everybody has a share, so what's good for the syndicate is good for everybody, what's good for the syndicate is good for the country, and what's good for Milo is good for the syndicate. Why, anything else is simply unpatriotic. Even the Germans have a share, so eventually the syndicate is being paid by the Americans to attack a bridge while being paid by the Germans to defend it. Milo starts flying German planes, and is horrified when an effort is made by the American authorities to confiscate those planes.

"Is this Russia?" Milo assailed them incredulously at the top of his voice. "Confiscate?" he shrieked, as though he could not believe his own ears. "Since when is it the policy of the American government to confiscate the private property of its citizens? Shame on you! Shame on all of you for even thinking such a horrible thought!"

"But Milo," Major Danby interrupted timidly, "we're at war with Germany, and those are German planes."

"They are no such thing!" Milo retorted furiously. "Those planes belong to the syndicate, and everybody has a share. Confiscate? How can you possibly confiscate your own private property? Confiscate, indeed! I've never heard anything so depraved in my whole life."

His tone of voice is familiar, isn't it? It's the same aggrieved wail of the fund managers, the banks, the hedge funds. Eventually, the syndicate bombs its own airbase, and Milo has gone too far. He is made to reimburse the government. But the syndicate has been making unearthly profits, and everyone benefits, and the government is a democracy, and therefore made up of people who have already benefited, so really the government doesn't need to be reimbursed and the benefit has already gone to the people. Even when it's fouling its own nest and screwing everything is sight, the syndicate is good for everybody and good for the country. That's the Minderbinder logic being used by the defenders of BP.

Update: This post has been reproduced on the New Statesman's Cultural Capital blog, with the volksgemeinschaft stuff trimmed out.

I Am One

2010-06-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

Today is Spillway's first birthday. Looking at the stats, I see I've posted more than 60 times, so managed to keep to my target of "about once a week". Yippee. A definite highlight was being among the Bygone Bureau's best new blogs of 2009. More of the same sort of stuff to come. Thanks for reading.

Belgrade Pomo

2010-06-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

I was in Belgrade, Serbia, last week for Belgrade Design Week. It's a brilliant place and I'll try to do a longer blog post on some of the interesting buildings I saw within the next few days. Meanwhile here's one oddity which I found particularly provocative. (My thanks to Murphy for suggesting that it get a blog post to itself.)

While taking a directionless stroll through the back-streets around Knez Mihailova, a main shopping street, an interesting glass silo caught my eye.

I went in for a closer look (clik on any of these images for a larger version) and found a rare bit of Serbian post-modernism attached to it. Belgrade doesn't have a terrific amount of architecture from the 1990s, for the obvious reasons, and consequently not a lot of pomo. But here it is in all its glory, completely with tiny balcony, wilful asymmetry, classical detail and a zigzag like a page layout from The Face in the 1980s. It's also clearly taking cues from the Tito-era apartment block on the left. But this is nothing.

Wait a second ...

Blimey.

Now that's something. Generally speaking this kind of plastic-glass, styrofoam-masonry jokey pastiche makes me want to vomit my eyes out, but there's a lot going on here. Look at the way the roofline of the glass atrium pick up on the pediment of the window above the cornice. Just below the cornice, look at the leftmost of the smaller windows. See the way the square of the window-panes in that window merges with the larger panes of glass in the atrium structure. Boss. It's a horrible building, but at the same time there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from its layers. I certainly stopped and stared for quite some time.

Heathrow Free Zone

2010-06-04T02:00:00.000-07:00

Noise footprints around Heathrow. Image from the BBC.

The proposed third runway at Heathrow airport has been scrapped, and there will be no expansion at Stansted or Gatwick. Viewed purely in environmental terms (as it probably should be) this is the right decision, and hopefully it will increase economic pressure on the coalition government to do something about the lamentable state of rail travel within the UK (hollow, cynical laugh). Nevertheless, like most green initiatives, it is mostly just a way of buying us time as we make the transition away from a fossil fuel economy. There will come a time, hopefully in the relatively near future, when kerosene-burning aircraft are supplanted by hydrogen-burning aircraft (or a similarly clean technology). When that time comes, the debate on air traffic, like the debate on road traffic, will start again almost from scratch. We will find that the economic case for a lot of currently very unpopular infrastructure - runways, motorways - is back and stronger than ever. So for Sipson, the village that would have been obliterated to make way for the Third Runway, the reprieve might only be temporary.

So I wasn't surprised to read a letter in the Evening Standard suggesting that homes and public buildings are built around Sipson to make a Third Runway an impossibility forever. It's a bizarre view to take, given that the Sipsonians already complain that their lives are made hell by the airport. Sure, why not move in more residents, plus a load of hospital patients, sixth-formers or whatever? But there's some very strange thinking around Heathrow (and, to a lesser extent, the other large airports - but no airport is problematised like Heathrow, being both huge and embedded in the city).

If we were starting from scratch, Heathrow might not be the best site for London's main airport. However, we're not starting from scratch, and Heathrow has been an unavoidable fact on the ground for half a century. Large jets have been using it since the 1960s. It's horribly noisy, the traffic around the airport is a nightmare, and air quality is low. But this didn't happen overnight and it's not going away - there's no prospect of a technological fix in the short term and the airport's closure is just a fantasy of a few hardcore NIMBYs and green activists.

Given that it's a longstanding and persistent condition, it sometimes troubles me that the problem of noise around Heathrow has not corrected itself “organically”, as people move away. Obviously there are people living inside the Heathrow noise footprint (as illustrated above) who cannot move away because of their economic circumstances – either simple poverty or the knot of obligations and unfreedoms that come with being a “flexible” worker in our economy. But that cannot account for all of the population: many of these areas are prosperous. Presumably there is also a great deal of British stubbornness and inertia involved, not a negative force in itself, but it can come in the form of a peculiar denial of reality – the villagers of Sipson still maintaining their vision of a village idyll long after their Domesday settlement found itself up against the security fence of one of the world's largest airports, surrounded by London. This is understandable in the elderly, but you have to be fairly old to be able to remember life before Heathrow (where the modern jet engine was first heard half a century ago). Alongside this is Britain's bizarre secular religion, the cult of house prices, which holds that the value of one's home must always go up, and that impediments to this divine accumulation of grace are against nature itself.

I don't mean to condemn any of this behaviour, or to say that the people who live around Heathrow have no right to complain because they are free to move away if they please, or because they enjoy the benefits of cheaper housing. The area around Heathrow is a “zone of sacrifice”: the value of the airport to the city and the country at large is so great that the severe loss of amenity in the area around it is easily tolerated by those who aren't resident in its immediate vicinity.

But is there a more creative approach that can be taken to the noise footprint? What we have here is a readymade zone – an area held slightly apart from the rest of the city, with unusual hazards (the noise and pollution) and unusual advantages (the airport itself, its value as an economic engine and transit hub, the vast tangle of infrastructure that surrounds it. This area is ripe for experimentation. The ideas here aren't serious proposals; they're more an effort to show what kind of imagination could be applied to the Heathrow Zone.

Travel launchpad. Give residents within the HZ airmiles, to allow them to get more use out of the airport. Make the neighbourhood a destination for outward-looking youths; tie in with local universities.

Emporium. Limit sale of airfreighted flowers and luxury foodstuffs to the HZ, turning it into a global Covent Garden and destination for seekers of the exotic. Let souks and flowermarkets bloom in Hounslow. If people cannot do without their airfreighted goods, let them at least buy them in the areas impaired by air travel.

Data entrepot. Saturation wifi coverage. Data havens.

Free zone. Reduced restrictions on drugs and vice and incentives for an artistic population to move in, to create a west London Weimar Berlin. Legalise indoor smoking.

Transition burb. In the environs of the headquarters of British aviation, a massive source of carbon emissions, create a chain of neighbourhoods devoted to experimentation and training aimed at a post-fossil-fuel future – government research, but also small-scale architectural and social experimentation, retrofitting houses and teaching useful skills, funded by the airport. The alliance between Sipson residents and Greenpeace during the battle against the third runway might have represented a temporary alignment of interests rather than a lasting sympathy, but perhaps a more general compact could come of it.

Idle speculation, really. Nevertheless, the area around Heathrow is already a zone in a number of important and overlooked ways – it has different rules, different conditions, and an unusual and provocative relationship with modernity. It's a considerable area of interest, one that has under-explored potential.

PoBa

2010-05-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

1111 Lincoln Road, by Herzog & de Meuron. Image taken from the Flickr stream of www.urbancityarch.com and used under a Creative Commons licence.

At a symposium on "Ballardian Architecture" at the Royal Academy a week ago, journalist and Ballard expert Chris Hall said something rather intiguing about Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road. Lincoln Road is a multistorey car park in Miami - Edwin Heathcote covered it well for icon in issue 081. Hall suggested that Lincoln Road could be considered "the first post-Ballardian building in the sense that they've taken a liminal structure of a car park and made an art work out of it".

This remark was very striking, not least because it's an excellent description of Lincoln Road. Rather than decorating or attempting to hide the multistorey car park, Herzog & de Meuron have made it highly assertive and expressive. It is beautiful and dramatic; in the words of Herzog, it's pure Miami Beach, because it's "all muscle without cloth". "Modern. Fast. Adaptable. Sensual," promises the website (emphasis mine). Muscular, unclothed, sensual, it wants to be sexy.

A sexy concrete multi-storey car park! What could be more Ballardian, eh? Except, as Hall noticed, this isn't really a Ballardian building - it's a post-Ballardian building. It's not a subconcious expression of the kind of pathologies that Ballard explored - instead, there's something janglingly concious about it. It's a place that knows exactly what it's doing. Alongside the car park, the complex has boutiques (Nespresso, Taschen), offices, art installations, offices and apartments (including one belonging to the developer - shades of Anthony Royal, to borrow Hall's observation). These functions "activate" the car park space, stitching it back into the city, dragging it out of alienation and liminality. (Not a new or unique strategy, just an under-used one - Owen Luder included a rooftop restaurant in the Trinty car park in Gateshead). But this is not a mixed-use complex that includes a car park - the car park is to the fore, out in front, the building's centrepiece. As well as regenerating a run-down part of Miami, the ambition is to regenerate and rehabilitate the whole car-park typology. Lincoln Road confronts the architectural and cultural hang-ups about multi-storey car parks head on. It is unafraid of being "Ballardian". It is unafraid full stop. It is a bold, glamorous, 21st-century building.

This success is very heartening, and gives us a chance to look forward to what else might be achieved with "post-Ballardian" architecture. There is great value in revisiting a large number of highly useful but allegedly "discredited" typologies - multi-storey car parks, elevated motorways, streets in the sky, megastructures. We should be rescuing them from blanket dismissal and looking afresh at their advantages and their potential success; re-examining what was exciting, sexy, positive about them. If their built manifestations failed, we should be unpicking why they failed, rather than simply discarding the typology. My colleague Owen Hatherley's book Militant Modernism makes excellent progress in this direction, and is perhaps a post-Ballardian architect set text. I realise in retrospect that I was indulging in PoBa re-examination when I tried to describe what I like about Beech Street in an earlier post. The importance of this line of inquiry has also occurred to me in connection with a long-planned but still largely formless post on Steven Holl and megastructures. Proceeding typology by typology, a systematic look at the potential for post-Ballardian architecture could make for a stimulating series of posts - or even the basis of a book. It's certainly worth further thought.

The Ruins of Oxford Street

2010-05-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

Old advert revealed by Crossrail works on Oxford Street. Image taken from the Flickr stream of John O'Shea and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Like space, London is curved. It sits in a bowl-shaped valley, curving it one way, and the river adds its own magnificent curves. This curvature throws up unexpected views - you find yourself in west London looking at the City with south London somehow in the way. These surprise alignments are probably the reason the city is such a super-locus for the psychogeographers. They are also an essential element of the city's guile. Even familiar places can suddenly look at you with a new face. Wait, you can see the Telecom Tower from here? But ...

On Saturday, I went for a long stroll, walking an indirect route from the Royal Academy (where I had been attending a symposium on JG Ballard and architecture) to Centre Point. Nearing Oxford Street, I remembered a DVD I wanted to buy, and decided to pop into HMV.

I was surprised to find that it no longer exists - it's among the shops being demolished to make way for Crossrail. I've been through the area on numerous occasions recently, but never really took in the extent of the works; so surprising was the removal of HMV that I took a walk around the nearby streets to see how the city had changed. The entrance to Tottenham Court Road Tube station on the south side of Oxford street is now a faintly absurd toy - I never before appreciated what a bad match the 1980s perspex-looking porte cochere was with the decorative stonework around it. Now the surrounding building has been removed, leaving just the stone arch and the porch, it's a outstanding architectural oddity. An old painted advert, for Veglio's restaurant, has been revealed (more on old adverts, "ghost signs") in a forthcoming post about Gavin Stamp's Lost Cities). Standing just off the Charing Cross Road, I saw a striking brutalist building that was completely new to me - except that it wasn't new to me, it was the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, seen for the first time from the south, and at an unaccustomed distance.

My grandmother was in London during the Blitz. She remember how strange it was to have the city transformed nightly, with new views opened up. I'm struck by how much of our image of the city is made up not of the buildings that we can see, but what they obscure - they city behind the city.

Updated 25 May to add:

The Festival of Britain opens new views of London. "This chaos made a vantage point for London to admire her finest profile; visible before to few, seen by fewer, the 'North bank from the South' is now a sightseer's dream." Image from www.fulltable.com, via Things.

Everything That's Ever Happened To Me Happened Right Here

2010-05-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

The Market Estate, Islington, days before its demolition. From my Flickr Photostream.

The most moving thing I've read in weeks, courtesy of the London Evening Standard. This piece, a look inside London's gang culture by Tony Thompson, is largely the Standard's usual lawnorder handwringing and scaremongering. But, touring the ganglands of Croydon with a young guide called Radar, Thompson captures an amazing moment:

"I love my ends," he says, his voice thick with emotion. "I can't explain it. People say, 'How can you love a street or a block of flats?' but it's where I come from. It's my roots. Everything that's ever happened to me happened right here. No one can take that away from me, ever. I won't let anyone take it away."

Beautiful. This is civic pride - an earnest attempt to take pride in something, at any rate. It puts a new complexion on the gangs and territorial gang warfare as systems of belonging. And Radar's love for his neighbourhood seems infinitely more genuine than a political establishment that dishes out ideas like Britishness days, "community payback" and national youth service. There's something here that's potentially a powerful force for good, a voice being drowned out by foghorn demonisation that goes almost unchallenged in the media.

(An aside: Radar is/was a member of the "Don't Say Nothing" gang which, by a strange coincidence, I've mentioned in print before, while reviewing China Mieville's book The City and the City.)

Mo' Moses Mo' Problems

2010-05-13T15:28:00.000-07:00

Confirmed sighting: I'm in issue #215 of Edge, which has just come out, taking about SimCity 4, urbanism, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. It's a long piece that takes some of the ideas expressed in this rambling blog post from a while back and expresses them rather more cogently. I express some of the pleasure that comes from playing a game badly, deliberately creating problems for oneself, so there's something to fix down the line.

An alternative approach is something like this: Magnasanti, a dystopian megalopolis created by exploiting the game mechanics of the earlier SC3000 to their maximum. (I'm grateful to Jim Rossignol, who first showed me the video.) There's an interesting interview with Magnasanti's creator here.

Learning From Phoenix Nights

2010-05-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been watching Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights on DVD. I had completely forgotten that it has a nice little summation of the road-sign-building relationship described by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour in Learning From Las Vegas. The scene in question starts at 0:35s.

Radio Alarm

2010-04-26T04:16:00.000-07:00

A 500-word short story written on a plane using an idea destined for another project. This was written for the Campaign For Real Fear competition, where it didn't get a place on the longlist. Because of the hugely unsatisfactory last line, I imagine. Or because I screwed up the formatting of my entry, which I did. Or any number of other reasons. Photo from my Flickr stream.

Around the time he stopped drinking, he started seeing the bottles. They had probably always been there, left in the gutter outside his building, but now he noticed them. Just soft drink bottles, Coke and Pepsi mostly, but filled with yellow liquid. It was easy to imagine what this fluid might be, but hard to guess why it was being bottled and abandoned like this. The question preyed on his mind.

Many things troubled him like that. He had cut out the drink one hundred percent, the coldest cold turkey. His days were filled with slow clocks watched with a racing pulse, and anxieties that clawed at him. The nights were worse. With no drink to knock him out, he had forgotten how to fall asleep. Instead he lay in bed, between sheets that felt filthy even when clean, sweat on his face and the palms of his hands, back taut like a bow. As he stared at the ceiling, stained sodium-orange by the streetlights, terrible thoughts came to visit. Every twinge was the warning sign of painful and terminal disease. He would fail, continue the fatal trajectory the drink had shown him.

In this limbo, jaws clenched, small distractions became intolerable. The radio alarm was worst. It was old, and in its senility it had become promiscuous. When it was quiet, and he lay next to it, he heard soft voices emitting from its yellowing plastic shell. The radio was off, volume at zero, but still there were the voices. Often it was the jarring electronic bleating that comes from a speaker before a nearby mobile phone rings. Only turning it off at the mains, killing the clock, could silence it.

Presently he was able to connect the interference with the bottles. It was minicab drivers parking in his street off the main road late at night between their calls. The alarm picked up their radios, and they were leaving the bottles in the gutter after filling them in their cabs. After that, when he heard the radio alarm crackle and voices speak across the electronic gulf, he would go to the window and find the parked car, its driver visible in the light of the dashboard, waiting out the night with him.

One night, after a day spent watching his hands quivering and feeling his heart tighten, an electrostatic bark again broke into his sleeplessness. He listened to it hiss and rip, longing for a second's rest. With the clock past three, he crossed to the window.

The street was empty.

Returning to bed, the static was joined by a voice, quiet and insistent. Angry, sick, he pulled the plug from the wall. The digital display went dead. He closed his eyes.

Still the voice went on, repeating its message into the night. The plug lay on the floor, but the radio alarm spoke, buzzing and whistling through space. "You will die, you will die, I am patient, I can wait, you will die.”

Ewww'll Be Sorry

2010-04-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

Kosmograd's thoughtful and provocative post about the ArcelorMittal Orbit earlier today has reminded me that I promised to return to the subject, talking specifically about the structure and not about its imagery or the reaction to it. As Kosmograd says, the Orbit is a little more palatable when viewed side-on as a model, and not through the trippy Tim Burton-esque lens of Arup's absurd renders. From that perspective, it is possible to make out something almost Tatlinesque about it.

But there the constructive comparisons with constructivism must halt. I'm still not a fan. I hate what this monument represents (the thought of visitors in 2052 traipsing past a display praising Mittal's "vision" and "generosity" makes me sick to my stomach) and I dislike it as a form; its structural loops and swirls don't really appear to stretch the boundaries of the possible so much as show off how easy it is for us to build something unusual at this comparitively modest height. Still, K'grad's chiding of instant snark make me feel like I have little new to add to what has been a spectacular outpouring of denigration and disgust on the part of the commentariat, so I'll leave it there.

There is, however, something else going on, something that I think is interesting. Over the past few weeks I've tried to confront and interrogate my own distaste for this structure, feeling very uncomfortable about my dislike for it. The root of this disquiet is now clear. A lot of the Orbit's defenders - or at least the wait-and-see contingent - have made the point that many much-loved buildings and structures (the Eiffel tower, to take Kosmograd's example) were opposed and derided when they were new. This is true; indeed, it's a point familiar to modernists justifying groundbreaking structures to a conservative audience. Pugin and Barry's Houses of Parliament were widely hated. Pugin himself deplored the ugliness of the Victorian city against the beauty of the medieval city. So it goes.

I realised that I was frightened of being caught on the wrong side of history, of being one of the reactionaries who booed Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. This is not healthy. My only motivation for revising my opinion would be so I did not look like a stick-in-the-mud in the eyes of a future generation of Londoners who hold the Orbit to be magnificent, and who are proud of it as a symbol of their city. Obviously I would prefer to be on the side of the bold, the brave, the new.

But in this case that would be dishonest. As it is, the prospect of the Orbit rising over the East End fills me with gloom. Once the thing is up, perhaps familiarity will soften it. I don't know. Familiarity is the magic ingredient here, though. Come 2052, if the Orbit is still standing, I'm sure many Londoners, perhaps the majority, will like the Orbit and feel proud of it. This won't be an aesthetic judgment in most cases - it will simply be a product of familiarity, of being used to a structure and associating it with their home city. There's nothing wrong with that reaction, but we shouldn't lie to ourselves about it now out of fear of being caught on the wrong side of that future consensus. I wonder if the Orbit's defenders are (consciously or not) writing themselves into the desirable role of the visionary, farsighted minority who saw the potential of this structure when the herd around them pooh-poohed it; and if so they are acting against their own aesthetic judgement. (I don't mean to malign anyone in this, my own experience related above tells me how strong this desire can be.)

This nervous desire to second-guess posterity feels like a new phenomenon, a product of the modernist supremacy slipping into the past and the immense power of the "they laughed at Columbus" meme in a relativist age, or part of the same queasy cultural acceleration that means some artists and comedians now see outrage as a form of acclaim. Maybe it doesn't exist, and I'm projecting my own insecurities onto the critical scene. Still, if it is out there, I think it's worth marking it down as undesirable - it's as weary and irrelevant to today as knee-jerk appeals to historical precedent. It is looking into the rear-view mirror not to see the road behind but to see what the kids in the back seat are doing. Keep your eyes on the road.

Shock of the Ewww

2010-04-01T02:00:00.000-07:00

Architecture is consumed at walking pace, but nowadays architecture criticism takes place at the speed of light. First impressions can be an important part of building a picture of a building when approach it on foot or in car, but when a digital image of a proposed building flashes over the fibre-optics and plops into one’s inbox, or Twitter feed, first impressions are about all you get. Zap, there it is, all buffed and ready, showing what is presumably its best side, with no intriguing glimpses over rooftops of approaches over lawns. “Hmm,” one says, or sometimes “Wow!”, and depressingly often “Eww”. And that’s all you get – you don’t proceed to consume the building, to explore it, you’re already done, the image is burned onto your mind like the floating blob left in the eyes by a camera flash. There’s some text, but that mostly is just an attempt to serve up a selection of adjectives that you might want to use in your story: “Vibrant”, “exciting”, “dynamic”, and of course “iconic”.

When I opened the emailed press release containing an image – that is, one (1) image – of the Anish Kapoor’s design for the ArcelorMittal Orbit, my immediate reaction was “fucking hell”. Instant and powerful dislike, coupled with instant horror: not a bad reaction to a work of art, but much less desirable in a structure that I think will be visible from my bedroom. The first visual impression I got was of a fountain of gore, the flying sanguinous strings that accompany the chestburster’s emergence from John Hurt, or the various hideous transformations of John Carpenter’s The Thing. This was accompanied by a strong reminder of the bonus buildings from Simcity 2000, which were a little too cartoony, bright and unrealistic. So I joined the chorus of disapproval on Twitter, where people were being most entertaining in their denigration. A number of blog posts have been composed attacking the design, from Hugh Pearman’s fairly thoughtful assessment to (Icon’s own) Douglas Murphy’s cri de couer.

There is of course something disreputable about this instantaneous critical consensus – seeing a render and popping over the Twitter to trade witticisms about it with one’s peers. (It is, however, no less reputable an activity than its tedious sister, contrarianism.) I rolled my eyes somewhat when it was the American Embassy getting Twitter-savaged, and the pleasure I derived from watching the Space Tangle getting a virtual kicking yesterday seems somehow unclean.

One of the things I like about Icon is that it doesn’t trade in renders. We only report on buildings when they’re finished. (Renders do pop up in profiles of architects, though, to show projects they have in the pipeline or never completed, but that’s rather different.) There’s not much that can be usefully said about a render because a building can look dramatically different when it is completed – I say one or two things about the magical world of renders here. It’s dangerous to write off a building on the basis of a render, but it’s equally foolish to praise it. You have to make it clear that you could be wrong.

This is especially the case with a bizarre image like the one that popped into my inbox (pictured above, the most widely-circulated view of the Orbit). Renders, being marketing material, come with certain implicit features that we can safely infer – that we are seeing the building in the best possible circumstances, from the best possible angle. Look at the Orbit render: the angle is impossible, as if we are viewing from an adjacent high building, with a curious wide-angle (almost fish-eye) effect. This unlikely aspect is sandwiched between two planes that are unreal to the point of being positively hallucinogenic – an acid-trip-in-Nevada sky and a great apron of what I assume is concrete; across this fair field, folk appear to be gravitating towards the Orbit from all directions, untroubled by queues, ticket booths, chicanes and the sort of honkytonk distractions that I’m sure will fill the Olympic park. It’s a e-number-loaded confection of an image, created solely to provoke a rush of sensation, that indeterminate thrillshock of the unexpected. That glandular burst of sensation has already served its purpose when it curdles into “like” or “dislike” – and the building hasn’t been used for the first time, it has used you for the first time, it has made its first and most important demand on your recently upgraded fishbrain. Coming out of that experience, a direct neural interlace with a marketing computer, with a bad taste in the mouth is only natural.

(I hope to follow up with a second post with some thoughts about the Orbit itself, but I'm out of time.)

YIELD

2010-03-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

2m40 - Un Blog Impactant is a splendid enterprise. I first saw it on Metafilter a week or two ago, and on my recommendation we're including it in the online picks in the May Icon (083, out in a couple of weeks). It is focused, with pleasing specificity, on a single location: a particular tunnel near the Place de l'Etoile in Paris. This tunnel has a low clearance - 2m 40cm, funnily enough - and regularly scalps oversized vans that attempt to pass through it. 2m40.com simply posts photographs of the results (wreckage, emergency vehicles*, gawping crowds) along with fairly droll commentary in French.

This kind of accident clearly happens in this particular location a lot - presumably the blog's author saw it often before he came up with the idea of immortalising the comeuppance of careless van drivers. And it seems to exert a kind of hold over passers-by, who appear in many of the pictures to be thronging around the accident.

Image from 2m40.com.

The Metafilter thread about the site is also interesting, with contributors showing that there are other similar sites, such as this one from the USA. Mostly, of course, roads are designed to minimise the possibility of accidents. But some roads happen to create the perfect conditions for an accident. It's all geometry - trajectory, speed, momentum, lines of sight, incline, camber. To which we can add "human incaution", itself a vector.

In the UK, roads that generate a unusually high number of accidents are referred to as "accident blackspots"; in the film Withnail & I, there's a scene when the protagonists pass a sign warning of an accident blackspot. Signs like this are erected in the knowledge that driver inattention in a key component of these accidents; they're intended to spark a greater awareness of the urban, to jolt drivers out of complacency, to change the vector of incaution, inattention. They say: This landscape is not as it appears.

Look at that. "Accident Blackspot"? These aren't accidents. They're throwing themselves into the road gladly. Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness.

- Withnail & I.

The accident-ready landscape has other visual cues as well: a layer of burned rubber left by many tires on the road, scraped barriers, forlorn bunches of polythene-wrapped petrol station flowers attached to railings and signposts with zip ties, ghost bikes. In his essay "Third World Driving Hints and Tips", PJ O'Rourke comments on the custom in some countries of indicating a crash fatality with a roadside cross - if you round a corner at speed and find yourself confronted by a sea of crosses, he writes, you're done for.

This site offers aerial views of some UK accident blackspots - intriguing little images, inscrutable in their banality, with their hidden pattern of death and destruction. Complicated junctions, bringing together traffic of different speeds from different and unexpected directions, seem to be the rule.

The Integrated and Permanent Accident

I recently finished reading David Nye's book When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (my review will appear in Icon 084). Central to Nye's history is the idea of the "integrated accident" (a la Paul Virilio): the invention of the plane was also the invention of the plane crash. A blackout presupposes the existence of a power grid. As a parallel track to this worthwhile bit of reading, I have also been playing quite a lot of a video game called Burnout - specifically, Burnout 3: Takedown and its successor Burnout: Revenge.

Burnout is an astonishing amount of fun to play. It is ostensibly a driving/racing game, pursuing sports cars around beautifully rendered urban and mountain scenery. But as opposed to a game like Gran Turismo - which is all about precision and a nerdish delight in mastering the physics of driving - Burnout rewards recklessness. To earn speed boosts and rank increases, you have to take absurd risks in traffic and at the same time attempt to smash your rivals off the road. The atavistic joy that comes with slamming a rival into a concrete bridge support cannot be demurely stated. And if one of your rivals manages to splat you, you still have options - holding down R1 triggers "impact time", which slows down time and allows you to steer your flaming wreck into the other competitors. Crashing is the most important element of gameplay - accordingly, the crashes are rendered in extraordinary detail; not so much realism as blockbuster-hyperrealism. With this in mind, you begin to see how the different landscapes have been built to facilitate spectacular accidents with conveniently placed ramps, barriers and pillars. This is clearest on the "crash mode" levels, which involve nothing more than accelerating into a busy intersection and trying to involve as many vehicles as possible in a spectacular pile-up.

The "crash mode" levels thus take on a feeling similar to the opening scenes of the dismal UK medical drama Casualty, in which there is some fun to be had trying to guess the nature of the accident that will land the unfortunate bit-players in hospital. The innocuous intersection, with your car idling in a side-street, contains all the elements of the "perfect" crash - over that ramp, bounce off the bus, across both lanes of the freeway and into that big rig. Kaplooie. The accident is all there, it just takes the human vector, the player, to tie it all together. Across the rest of the game, individual crashes run into each other in chains of destruction. Discrete "crashes" run together into a vast, continuous, permanent accident in which every vehicle and every inch of road is somehow involved. Living near a main road strewn with the fragments of shattered brake lights, as I do, sometimes real life looks a lot like that as well.

Of course all this relates to JG Ballard's Crash, and Vaughan's accident-reenactments. It would make an interesting exercise, I thought, to appriase Burnout from a Ballardian perspective - but sadly Matt Bittanti got there first , and with far more style than I could muster [download "crash.pdf" for the results].

Thanks to Simon for drawing my attention to Bittanti.

* The French for those revolving lights on top of police cars is "gyrophares". Isn't that great?

The 21st-Century Equivalent of William Morris Wallpaper

2010-03-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns, part of Decode at the V&A.

There might be a bit of a lull in the blogging for the next week or two - I have a rather heavy workload. In the meantime, here's a self-indulgent selection of a few bits and bobs that have been published or archived online in the past couple of weeks, and that I haven't mentioned before.

"The Warcraft Civilization is the outcome of two years of research, including more than 2300 hours playing the game. Bainbridge has simultaneously run dozens of characters (who he winningly refers to as 'research assistants') across a thorough cross-section of servers, races and classes, and he has played to the maximum skill-levels attainable; he also hosted Azeroth's first-ever scientific conference. And even if Warcraft does not become a permanent part of our culture, Bainbridge says, it's essential to study it now. If, decades hence, researchers want to examine World Of Warcraft, they can restart the servers and run the software, but they can't provide the hundreds of thousands of players distributed across the world that make the game what it is. This is a book that demands to be taken seriously. It's all so promising – heavyweight academic, neglected but fascinating subject matter, bold claims to support – but Bainbridge almost blows it." - Review: The Warcraft Civilization (for Edge Online)

"'An architect, and this might sound negative, has to be capable of manipulating people as the sculptor is capable of manipulating material,' he explains. 'Because that is essentially our building material – it’s getting other people to go along. But also there’s a lot of incorporating input from the outside – I realise that there’s this like entourage of decision makers and if you can, in a zen-like way, make their forces the driving force of a project, you’re much more powerful as an architect.'" - Profile: Bjarke Ingels

"Digital technologies are highly disruptive – all around us, their effect is revolutionary, upsetting industries and social systems, changing the way we work, play, live and think. But Decode doesn’t feel very revolutionary or dangerous – it’s pretty and entertaining. Despite its subtitle – “digital design sensations” – there’s little that’s very sensational about Decode, nothing that hits you at gut level and makes you realise that the world’s going to be very different. Individually, these pieces are all perfectly meritorious, although it should be said that a few weren’t working when I visited. But when the work on show is taken as a whole, its focus on aesthetics and making the raw, terrifyingly abstract world of data and the network attractive and seemly, makes it feel similar to the bourgeois Victorian decorative arts that took inspiration from nature. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of William Morris wallpaper." - Review: Decode

"Even though they never came to trouble the surface of the planet, the projects are still “masterworks” – it says so right on the cover. Actually breaking ground is beside the point now that digital technology has advanced to the present state of the art. Authenticity is overrated in a digital decade, where we can fight wars over non-existent weapons and billions of pounds can dematerialise in minutes." - Review: Unbuilt Masterworks

"'Standing before costly objects of technological beauty,' de Botton writes, 'we might be tempted to to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we might grow stupid through admiration.' Instead, the writer chooses to be awed, and he’s right to be. It leads to the best part of the book: in the middle of the night, he is taken out to the end of the south runway and stands reverently on the portion of the tarmac where planes touch down, the focal point of the whole extraordinary enterprise. It’s a near-religious site – certainly, more prayers are offered there than in any church in the land." - Review: A Week At The Airport

"Starck is magnificent on screen, like some eccentric bright-feathered predator which grips its prey in a death-hug, dissolves it with kisses, and puts the bones on the next Eurostar." - Review: Philippe Starck's Design for Life

Icons of the month: the barcode, the book (written in retro-speculative manner for Icon's fiction issue) and, appropriately enough, Blogger.com.

The Exoderm of the Edifice

2010-03-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

Image taken from the Flickr photostream of Simon & Vicki and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Graham Robb has written a fascinating article (subscribers only, sadly) in the new LRB on the subject of Michael Camille's new(ish) book The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity. Robb writes:

As Michael Camille points out, gargoyles bear the brunt of the weather: they are part of ‘the exoderm of the edifice’, eroded by the water they channel away from the building. They were never intended to last, which might account for their flippancy or irreverence: they were temporary, decorative items; like court jesters, they could express unpleasant truths. The other projecting sculptures, known as chimeras, have no such excuse, and no one knows for certain in what spirit those fish-lipped mutants, flesh-tearing ghouls and masturbating demons were produced. Camille supposes that the medieval artist, ‘in order not to be unnerved by the evil eyes of the devils he was called upon to carve, often ridiculed them’. If so, the devils had the last word: was it really a fearful, superstitious artist who carved the little imp in the central portal (one of Viollet-le-Duc’s favourites), whose tongue protrudes in concentration as he buggers a king with a stick?

"The exoderm of the edifice" is a great phrase, perfectly capturing Camille's meaning: the outer skin, which flakes away. It is fascinating to consider that medieval masons might have been farsighted enough to consider parts of their structures essentially disposable; that they considered the long-term decline and ruination and restoration of the buildings they worked on. One thinks of the (sadly apocryphal, as discussed in this Quiet Babylon post) tale of the New College trees. Entire lines of masons, passing on the same skills in an unbroken chain of apprenticeship to maintain the same buildings, which in a state of permanent renewal - looking at the ancient cathedrals as things that are continually restored rather than subject to periodic total restoration, one can see the masons' scaffolding as being part of the structure itself, like the window-cleaning cranes on top of modern office blocks.

My own theory about pre-modern architecture (which I've nursed privately for years safely away from malign influences such as evidence or research) is that its standards of craftsmanship were partly a response to the longevity of building projects against the short lifespans of their workers. Many of the workers would never live to see a great building finished; if they were going to spend all their life toiling over one particular flying buttress then, by golly, that buttress was going to be the finest thing you ever saw.

Returning to the Robb piece, it's a real shame it's behind the LRB subscriber wall because it really is a splendid read, covering Viollet-le-Duc's "restoration" of Notre Dame and the pathological relationship of that church's gargoyles with the city of Paris. Pick up a print copy while you still can, or order one. Robb ends with a sad look at a more recent restoration which eliminated much of the threat from Notre-Dame's stone animals, giving them playful expressions and smirks in line with the Disneyfication of the gargoyle.

The piece has some personal meaning to me. I grew up in Oxford, home to one of the finest collections of gothic architecture outside Germany. Gothic was my first architectural love - and I mean proper medieval perpendicular gothic, not the prettified gingerbread version beloved by the Victorians. (I'm not writing off all Victorian gothic, some of it is very fine, but much is frankly regrettable.) My childhood memories are populated by blackened walls, spiky skylines and gargoyles, which my parent delighted in pointing out. Oxford has its drawbacks as a place to live, but it was a magnificent laboratory for a child's imagination, and in retrospect its clear why I fell upon the work of Mervyn Peake, MR James, Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft when I did.

But something terrible happened to this crumbling, mysterious Oxford. It was cleaned. In the 1980s and early 1990s a tide of restoration swept the city and college after college disappeared under scaffolding only to re-emerge gleaming and transformed. University College and Magdalen were particular shocks. They no longer looked particularly old. Oxford today looks, bizarrely, a far younger place than it did in the middle of the 1980s.

Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us

2010-02-26T04:02:00.000-08:00

I was in the Independent yesterday, mounting a weak defence of a heavily defended building.

A 30m-wide "stand-off zone" will make the new US embassy stick out like a sore thumb. "It could have been a lot worse," says Will Wiles, senior editor at Icon architecture and design magazine. "We already knew that security was paramount in the design – it's a big factor in the Americans wanting a new building in the first place. Any design would have this 30m setback, defined by the blast radius of car bombs."

This "stand-off zone" is one part of what's called "hostile vehicle mitigation" or "HVM" - a field of building I'm pleasantly well informed about, having attended a conference on designing for terrorism last year*. There are such things, for instance, as armoured trees; a growing tree can absorb steel bars that will help it stop or slow a rogue vehicle. These hostile vehicles are the car- and truck-bombs that give security planners sleepless nights and twitchy days. As I told the Indie, they're the reason the Americans have decamped to Nine Elms (they wanted a site with the necessary space for the defensive zone). The defensive zone itself was always going to be heavily landscaped, because if vehicles can just drive into your stand-off it's not much of a stand-off. And so all this "it's a fortress behind a moat" talk is old news - that is what the Americans wanted and what Kieran Timberlake has delivered. It's what all the other architects delivered as well.

Kieran Timberlake's winning design for the new US Embassy in London.

I don't see anything particularly fortress-like about the building itself, although the vaguely Corblike pilotis do suggest the hem of a skirt raised against scurrying al-Qaeda mice. Its apparent isolation and aloofness are products of the defensive zone. The contradictions built into the brief must have been impossible - welcoming but defended, open yet closed, War is Peace. This inscrutable International Style Cube is a suitably ambivalent response to that. A winsome and civil bit of Scandinavian modernism, all civic manners and democratic openness, would have been duplicitous to the point of being highly sinister. As I said to the Independent, but they didn't quote: "The symbolism seems rather appropriate to me: a shining city on a hill, surrounded by the most formidable defensive network ever known." And that skin also has potential. A complicated double-surface like that, with its brise-soleil, makes me think of fractals, and the way they contain a small area within a long boundary. It's as if the surface of the embassy has the potential to cover a far larger building, perhaps up to the street edge, but the building has shrunk back. Forgive the simile, but it's like the wrinkled skin of a detumescent penis. I mean that in a good way. Really.

New security structures outside the existing US Embassy's building in Grosvenor Square. Image from the embassy's own Flickr stream.

Duplicitous to the point of being highly sinister. I had to visit the American Embassy on Grosvenor square to get a media visa shortly before Christmas last year. Interfacing with the State Department's bureaucracy is an unpleasant and intrusive business at the best of times, whatever their efficiency and politeness (and they were efficient and polite). But progressing through the improvised security perimeter outside ~~Arne Jacobsen's~~ Eero Saarinen's embassy building was frankly dystopian. Part of a London square was militarised, with heavy hard defences. One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realise that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we've fallen in 10 years.

The new embassy is at least designed with these contradictions in mind, and is consequently fascinating. It's worth taking a step back to really admire what we're looking at: a building designed with explosions in mind. A shape formed by the manipulation of spheres of destruction. It could be the first London building built with attack from the ground in mind since the Second World War. (It's also a testament to the extraordinary power of terror: the fact that a few hypothetical malcontents with A-level chemistry and a driver's licence can race to the head of the queue ahead of a whole gang of other diplomatic considerations.) So, what new forms are these? Going back through my notes from that terror conference is a dispiriting experience; the bureaucratic jargon like "hostile vehicle mitigation" and "exponential decay of blast effect" does not exactly induce good cheer. There are some aspects of HVM that might give pause to Londoners. Firstly, it doesn't stop attacks, it just makes them more difficult and limits their impact. Secondly, it's primarily meant to protect facilities, rather than people. Obviously some people are protected into the bargain - I'm not saying that to make some Spartist the-Yanks-care-more-about-their-office-furniture-than-the-lives-of-honest-cockneys point, it's just a fact of life. 30m stand-off will prevent a truck bomb causing massive structural collapse, but said bomb could still cause horrific death and injury. Thirdly, HVM only protects the one facility, not the buildings around it. The plans for the new embassy show new glass blocks surrounding it at street's edge. Will they still be glass when they're built, I wonder.

That's something important to bear in mind: the effect of the new embassy's security measures extends beyond the perimeter of the embassy itself.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chapter 1; emphasis mine

The HVM landscaping creates what can be called a "hard zone" of security. There are also nested "soft zones" of security in and around the building: the sight arcs of CCTV cameras, the streets on which you are more likely to be stopped by police or prevented from taking photographs, maybe a "no-protest" radius around the building like the one around Parliament (now scrapped), no-fly zones. The electronic haze of listening devices and broadcasting devices, security down to the ions in the atmosphere. And there are the streets on which one may feel uneasy and prefer not to linger.

The now-scrapped Parliament no-protest zone. Image: BBC.

The hard defences of Kieran Timberlake's new embassy don't bother me in the slightest. They are obvious, they invite an architectural response, they can be well-mannered and attractive, and they are in their way honest. (I'm reminded of the temporary barricades around Parliament here - unattractive black slabs that were partly reclaimed when people started sitting on them to eat their lunch.) The new US embassy has the potential to be one of the most interesting buildings in London, and I would love to visit it once it is finished (although it's possible I'm now blowing my chance). Hard zones aren't such a big deal - no one complains about the Tower of London, a fortress behind a defensive setback on the Thames. It's these CCTV-covered, drone-overflown soft zones that we need fear. Although ID cards might not be here yet, ID card culture is. We face the slow advance of soft-zone ambivalence, that creeping sense of being unwelcome on the street, a desire to look over one's shoulder. Soft zones are easy to introduce and difficult to shift; they exist in the mind as much as in the city. A bollard is just a bollard, and it can't strike half as much fear into one's heart as the sudden sense that one has brought along the wrong piece of paper.

* "Places Not Fortresses: Can and Should we Design for Terror?", New London Architecture with the Association of Consultant Architects, at the Building Centre, 27 January 2009.

From Sea to Shining Sea, By Sea

2010-02-21T07:39:00.000-08:00

Florida's Overseas Highway. Image taken from the Flickr stream of jbaccile and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Reading N_O_R_T_O_N's superb post about the freaky roadside architecture of Branson, Missouri ("What Vegas would be like if it was run by Ned Flanders," according The Simpsons), I was struck by a strange Sunday-afternoon fantasy. Specifically, I was marvelling at the willingness of Americans to drive distances that would make Europeans weep. It occurred to me that this nonchalence could be an essential part of the American psyche, a denial spawned in response to the enormous size of the 48 contiguous American states. The vast expanses of land that America was fortunate enough to find itself in possession of at the end of the 19th century are as much internal as external - they have manifested themselves in the American mind. There's that expansiveness, that ambition, that generosity, that optimism that comes with the frontier ...

Anyway, this caused me to wonder: What if, instead of purple mountains and fruited plains, European explorers had instead come across a vast archipelago of islands, an Atlantic Indonesia between Canada and Mexico? This is a wholly pointless bit of counterfactual speculation ("How would the Second World War have worked out if Stalin could fly?!") but it made for a pleasant weekend reverie, so I'll share it anyway.

My thoughts started in New York, essentially an offshore archipelago-city in itself - of the five boroughs, only one, The Bronx, is on the American mainland. It is a place geographically and socially defined by its bridges and tunnels - down to the expression "bridge and tunnel" used by Manhattanites as shorthand to describe (unsophisticated) non-Manhattanites. The view of New York from an approaching ship is already an iconic American image; one can imagine it applied to all American cities. New York is matched, on the West Coast, by San Francisco and its surrounding cities - not an island-chain, but still a place defined by waterfronts, bridges and tunnels. Boston, similarly, is a peninsula. These are beautiful places; the American mode of city-building could have thrived in Columbonesia. Consider the Florida Keys, an island chain transformed linked by the 127-mile Overseas Highway - a bridge-causeway that could be read as transforming the islands into a single megastructure or the world's largest inhabited bridge.

The way that America's rivers served as conduits for the settlement of the West shows how the straits in Amernonesia could have carried pioneers west - paddle steamers completely supplanting railroads as the engines of expansion.

More from the Keys. Image taken from the Flickr stream of jbaccile and used under a Creative Commons licence.

But what of the roadside architecture that America's wide-open (contiguous) spaces have inspired? Among teeming thousands of islands, it's pleasing to imagine a vibrant wharf-front architecture springing up - eye-catching decorated sheds and Long Island Ducks designed to draw in visitors from the traffic streaming long the Interstate sealanes. Wharf-front architecture and decoration is the ancestor of the gaudy Great Sign and googie structures we know today. PLaces like Nyhavn and Bryggen can be read as the Las Vegas Strip of the ocean-going age, best understood from a boat as the Strip is best understood from a car. Hanseatic gabled architecture is the grandaddy of the decorated shed. One can easily and happily imagine it propelled into the 20th and 21st century - Wan Chai with Venturian characteristics.

I Have Always Relied on the Strangeness of Crowds

2010-02-17T15:22:00.000-08:00

An Angelyne billboard in Los Angeles; Angelyne is a model/actor more famous for her self-promoting billboards than for her modelling or acting. Image taken from the Flickr Stream of Thomas Hawk and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Simon started it, by asking Peter on Twitter what he thought of a writer's attempt to "crowdfund" a book - soliciting small donations from a large number of people in order to cover her living expenses while she turned out the deathless prose. I contributed a few off-the-cuff remarks, as did Tims Maly and Maughan. Tim Maly has done a superb job of gathering together the key points here - or at least the key points as they stood on 14 February, because since then the entire business has continued to bubble and spread like the instant pudding in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Tim followed up his heroic bit of Twarchiving with a more detailed post summarising his position, opening a new front of discussion in the comments; Peter (D Smith, nonfiction book critic for the Guardian) a post of his own; Michelle Pauli on the Guardian's books blog also joined in, bringing a vastly larger audience with her and opening a third front in her own comment section; and, perhaps inevitably, the author in question has struck back (in the comments on the second Quiet Babylon post and the Guardian piece). Meanwhile, it's still being discussed on Twitter.

Since everyone else is talking about it, I'm keen to clarify my own position (for my own benefit as much as anyone's), but I'll try to keep it brief. It's a difficult subject though, combining the emotive and subjective fields of art and money, and every time I type a general point, a host of exceptions pop up like Oompaloompas with icepicks and gouge holes in it.

I don't have any antipathy towards Zandt herself, or her venture - the real question is the value of crowdfunding as a general model for publishing. And I think it makes a very bad model. Writing and fundraising require very, very different sets of skills, and in some cases those skills are mutually exclusive. Writing is a solitary business; writers should not have to build communities around themselves in order to support their writing.

The community that Zandt has built is just one of the reasons she's a special case - she also has a deal already, a tight deadline, and the kind of profession that allows one to take three months off. These factors are not common and mean that crowdfunding might work for her while not working for other people.

More important than that is the fact that raising money from book sales (rather than crowdfunding) works. Risk is acceptably distributed between the parties involved, and a fixed contribution, the price of the book, gets you a fixed return: the book. The return-on-investment in the Zandt model is lousy; you only get a "free" book if you give more than $100. There are far better models than that - I like Robin Sloan's Kickstarter, for instance, which offers a sliding scale of contribution and reward. I like it this way - I think it is healthier for writers to think of themselves as producing works for sale, rather than having an artistic hobby and a lifestyle that has to be supported. Selling books supports the writing as well as the writer; crowdfunding just supports the writer. I strongly believe that writers do deserve to be paid for their work - the idea that paid artistic output is obsolete because true artists would continue to work even if they had no expectation of reward is an insulting and repellent aspect of the internet's (mostly otherwise admirable) open-source culture.

To take a step back, what do I mean about crowdfunding supporting the writer but not the writing? So many of the great books have been written by trainwrecks: drunks, junkies, wifebeaters, wifeshooters, boors, holders of insane and disgusting views, mooches, liars, cheats, sloths, reprobates, the list goes on and on. The history of literature is littered with patrons getting dicked around by writers - and vice versa. I wouldn't want to fund Malcolm Lowry's lifestyle, but I'll happily buy a copy of Under the Volcano. The work is what matters, but this funding based on no upfront writing - not so much as a list of chapter headings or an elevator pitch - naturally attaches attention to the author. Look at the unpleasant way that attention has adhered to Zandt's lifestyle, appearance and manner. The work is worth something; that's what we should remember in an age when a distressing number of people seem to believe that books should be free (or next to free) and writers should fund themselves through unrelated work or tipjars and T-shirt sales. Book presales - "buying a copy" before the thing is written - is a model I could imagine, but I would still prefer that the publishing copy handled that risk in the form of an advance. That, I think, is what publishing companies are or should be for.*

All that said, here's a strange thing. I don't have any trouble with an actual charitable appeal by an author - for instance, if a writer said they're going through a financial blackspot and need £5000 to keep their house, I would chip in (if I liked the author). Because that's charity. Replacing the income from book sales with systematic charity in the form of crowdfunding is the beggarisation of literature.

* Here's an idea for redistributing the risk in publishing - crowdpledging. How about a publisher says "get 1000 people to say they'll buy a copy of your proposed book, and we'll give you a contract?" Could that be made to work?

Islands of Flickering Light

2010-02-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

"Night Flight", taken from AMD5150's Flickr stream and used under a Creative Commons licence.

My recent post about Jonathan Littell's book The Kindly Ones was long enough, and yet I still don't feel that I quite did justice to the Stalingrad sequence. The chapter stays on my mind, particularly its unrelenting opening. The Kindly Ones is full of powerful, regularly horrific and surreal, imagery – a lengthy blog post could be written about its treatment of underground (excuse me, U-bahn) stations, but it would be spoiler-heavy – so what was it that made Maximilien Aue's flight into Stalingrad so haunting? This post won't return to The Kindly Ones in depth. What I want to do instead is tie together the Stalingrad sequence with a number of other scenes from books and films, and with any luck compose some general conclusions about technology, civilisation, infrastructure, power and what might be called islands or pockets.

So what follows is a kind of chain of connected phenomena.

1. In my previous post, I talked about the encirclement of the German armies at Stalingrad as a sick technological joke. What kept the “kessel” alive for the brief time it held out was not resupply from the air – which never even approached adequacy – but the promise of resupply from the air, specifically Goering's vain boast that the Luftwaffe was up to the job, pending eventual relief on the ground. The hope is that normal service will shortly be resumed. And when Aue arrives we're treated to a picture of 1940s high-tech in a state of advanced stress: the airfield, surrounded by wreckage, under constant bombardment, the Wehrmacht radio trucks clustered together, aerials maintaining an electronic link with the outside world, the HQ in snow-covered rail cars. These details are unusually memorable and moving, and I think that the reason is their precarity. These technological sinews keeping the kessel alive are extremely precarious and vulnerable.

Sketch of the "Kessel", the pocket of surrounded German troops at Stalingrad.

But the situation in the kessel is also evocative because the place is a world in its own - a microstate struggling to keep alive, with its own self-contained hierarchies and infrastructure, albeit starving and in a state of terminal collapse.

2. In James Cameron's film Titanic (discussed recently over on Fantastic Journal), some of the most moving shots are when we see the crippled ship from a distance, surrounded by dark, empty, freezing ocean. It is an ember on a sheet of black ice. As it sinks, there's a moment when we see the desperate situation in the electricity generating plant - men frantically throwing circuit breakers amid total chaos as the rising water consumes and shorts the ship's electrics. They are trying, in the face of inevitable failure, to keep the lights on. We have not hitherto seen the ship's power plant, and of course we don't see it again. Up until that moment, the lights are just background - they're a given, implicit, or as Peter Sloterdijk would say, they are latent. Then we see the desperate men in the power plant, and they suddenly become explicit - we see the precarity of the ship's lights. And then the lights go out. The ember goes dark.

It's a critical moment in the death of the ship – in some ways as important as the moment when it breaks in half, or the moment when it finally disappears beneath the waves.

Again, here, the ship is microcosmic, a high-tech product of Edwardian civilisation, and a self-contained world. Its sinking can be seen as a period when the denizen of that microcosmos attempt to keep it running – power, lights, class system – in ever-harsher conditions, until the moment of disappearance.

3. In High Rise, JG Ballard presents us with a giant tower block that is designed as a self-contained city for its residents, complete with shops, banks, swimming pools, schools, health clubs and so on. (Le Corbusier aimed in this direction with the Unite d'Habitation, and to connect it with the previous item, it 's worth remembering that he was drawing on the design of Edwardian ocean-going liners.) Following the logic of their building, the tower's residents reject the outside world and set about pursuing arcane tribal wars. As conditions in the tower deteriorate, the power fails on many floors - patterns of blackness across the facade of the building, and flickering lights, are recurrent motifs in the book. The air-handling, garbage and water infrastructures also decline, or are weaponised by one floor against another. The habitable pockets inside the building break apart and shrink. At the end of the book, it becomes clear that the disintegration that swept through the tower has started in another building in the same complex - its lights are going out.

Of course, the news that visitors were stranded on the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa recently by a lift breakdown brought this story to mind.

"City Afire", taken from BWJones' Flickr stream and used under a Creative Commons licence.

4. The George Romero film Land of the Dead isn't great, but it has its good points. In it, civilisation has been wiped out by a zombie apocalypse, but some survivors have managed to form a basic society in the middle of the city of Pittsburgh, protected on three sides by rivers and on the fourth by an electric fence. And there's a fortress within this fortress, a gated community housing the elite. Again, a precarious island of light in an ocean of dangerous darkness. Of course Romero's earlier Dawn(s) of the Dead have a similar premise, with survivors holed up in a shopping mall - a perverse island of consumerism, with power and light, surrounded by savagery. In the 2004 remake of Dawn, this isolation is driven home by the survivors' communication (by whiteboard) with a man trapped in a nearby gun store. He's only a street away, but might as well be on the moon.

5. The remade Battlestar Galactica exemplifies the sort of mood I'm talking about. Battlestar concerns a ragged fleet of ships housing the few tens of thousands of people left alive after a devastating attack by the robot Cylons. From the very first moment, everything in the fleet is on the brink of running out - water, power, fuel, ammo, fighter ships, pilots. Scarcity is a more pressing menace than the pursuing Cylons, and much of the drama in the series comes from the fleet's internal political difficulties as it implements rationing and a kind of war-socialism while attempting to keep up internal democracy. It is fabulously claustrophobic and tense - at times it's Das Boot with spaceships.

6. In the new Stephen King novel Under the Dome - which I haven't read - a community in New England is cut off from the outside world by a myterious dome, and swiftly reverts to barbarism. The plot is strangely similar to the fate of Springfield in The Simpsons Movie; indeed, Springfield's steady decline is one of the stranger things about that film, being uncharacteristically dark for The Simpsons - a haggard Kent Brockman informs the populace of rolling blackouts. (Similarly, I sometimes find myself idly wondering what would happen if my apartment building, or the train carriage I'm in, were suddenly cut off from civilisation. This - on the scale of an apartment building and a single house respectively - is what happens in the films REC and Right At Your Door, but they don't quite fit into this post. Will Self has written entertainingly about this, in an essay in which he imagines that he is trapped in the Eden Project on a day trip by an ecological catastrophe and he and his fellow day-trippers have to organise a feudal society - a lottery-funded Battlestar Galactica.) (Actually, there's another Stephen King datapoint: The novella The Mist, in which New England townsfolk are trapped in a supermarket by a dense fog containing horrible creatures. The generator that is providing the supermarket's electricity become highly important.)

7. I recently flew over the Isle of Man at night. The whole island was visible from the plane window, towns and roads lit up. That whole place could be powered by a single generating station, I thought, a closed system - but a precarious one. Then I considered my only situation, in a plane thousands of feet up, warm and comfy but only foot away from the screaming breathless nothing. Precarious.

So what does all this amount to? I've long had an interest in end-of-the-world dramas and tales of besieged cities; I think what it might amount to is an interest in seeing technological civilisation under stress, or to see technological civilisation pared back to the barest possible minimum. This kind of situation exposes the workings of the machine, the sinews holding it together; the "threads" that gave Mick Jackson's nuclear war drama its name. Seeing a microcosmic part working (or failing to work) exposes the workings and the vulnerabilities of the whole. It also exposes those "givens" or "latencies" at work in our society: we expect the lights to stay on, we expect water to come out of the taps, we expect there to be food in the shops - we expect these things so totally that we don't even think about them.

Pocket Utopias

2010-02-05T02:05:00.000-08:00

Kanakee Ward, Kanakee State Hospital, Illinois, from Christopher Payne's book Asylum. (Via)

Ruins are seemingly inescapable nowadays - here I am reviewing a beautiful book of photographs of America's decaying mental hospitals. Here, and here, are the details of the book itself.

I was given a pleasingly generous word limit for the piece, which of course I used to the full, and I'm not surprised that an unlucky sub has had to cut it quite a bit. That's all for the best, but here's a paragraph from the original with some interesting details:

These hospitals were built at an extraordinary pace from the middle of the 19th century until into the 20th century. At the time, alternative treatment for mental illness was non-existent – madness was a route to destitution, imprisonment and early death. Reformers campaigned for the construction of homes for the mentally ill, and American states – frothing with prosperity and neophyte civic pride – competed to build them bigger and better. The clamour, crowds, pollution and disorder of urban life were thought to contribute to insanity, so the new hospitals were built outside towns and cities on open land. The designs were utopian – they included gardens for rest and pleasure, and agricultural land so that the patients could work. Many hospitals were self-sufficient. The buildings were, for the time, high-tech, with central heating and gaslight – in period photographs, they could be mistaken for resort hotels. Hospitals were, after the 1850s, generally laid out according the “Kirkbride” plan, with a central block for administration and staff quarters, from which stretched two long wings, one for each sex. Self-sufficient, highly centralised and controlled, removed from the depredations of industrial civilisation and minutely organised according to sex, class and condition, the Kirkbride hospitals were 19th-century pocket utopias.

(Some very repetitive writing there, and the rhythm isn't great. Drat.)

There were two striking elements to this part of the story for me: first, that cities and urban life were thought to cause or exacerbate madness, and second the conscious utopianism of asylum design. The anti-urban taint to the philosphy behind the hospitals is interesting. And as the asylums are total environments – in contrast to other 19th-century institutional buildings, such as prisons, schools and workhouses, they provide for every aspect and stage of a person's life – there is unparalleled scope for turning them into little models of a perfect world, a “pocket utopia”. With that in mind, it's possible to see in greater detail their appeal to 19th-century social reformers.

A hospital on the Kirkbride plan.

Those two strands, then, connect in my mind these giant asylums with the Garden City Movement. There's that same hygienic concern with separating people from the malign influence of the big bad city and reconnecting them with the healing powers of the rural landscape. And there's also that stifling clerkish utopianism: the winged Kirkbride plans of mental hospitals have the same organisational impulse in them as Ebenezer Howard's compass-drawn plans for garden conurbations, orderly orbiting planets in a universe set right.

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City concept.

In between the suburb-planets of Howard's garden cosmos, what do we see? Insane asylums, homes for waifs, epileptic farms, homes for inebriates. The social debris of the 19th century, and the casualties of industrial society, being looked after – but also out of the way. It's a mistake to write off these reforming instincts as pure anti-urban prejudice, as the 19th-century city was undoubtedly an unhealthy place to live. But the 19th-century concern was social contagion as much as poor housing or air pollution. Mentally ill people were seen as a potentially destabilising force while in the cities – their removal was for the health of society as much as for their own good. The Garden City is the world run as a Victorian hospital.

Imagining the Nazis

2010-02-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

Part of an anti-fascist photomontage by John Heartfield, via this Flickr feed.

Controversy is a strange thing. Unlike rage or disgust, you can't feel controversy – it's not an emotional response to a work of art. It is, at best, an abstract, group phenomenon, a manifestation of the hive mind, something that you can take part in somehow (details are hazy). At worst – and I think this is the case nine-tenths of the time – it is entirely contrived, imagined, a Jabberwocky invented by yellow press that can pursue targets that aren't actually causing any rage, disgust or hurt feelings. Controversy is a red herring – either the problem is something else (the thing in question is revolting, hurtful, dangerous or whatever) or there is no problem.

Over Christmas and the New Year I read a controversial book – Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a fictional memoir of an SS officer closely involved in the Holocaust. An attempt to get inside the head of a Nazi genocidaire, The Kindly Ones was feted in France and condemned in Germany and by the influential Michiko Kakutani in the USA. A delightful miasma of ill-repute surrounded the book when I picked it up in the spring of 2009 - I then proceeded to ignore it on a shelf for some months, intimidated by its length - more than a thousand pages of closely printed hardback.

It took about a month to read - far more time than I'd normally have to devote to a book - but the effort was worth it. It's superb, and I think it's a fairly safe bet that its reputation will grow in the coming decades. Much of its content is revolting: the protagonist, Maximilien Aue, is personally involved in mass-killing of Jews in occupied Russia, and later in the mechanised slaughter of the extermination camps in Poland. He's also a sexual and moral degenerate, possessed by incestuous desire for his sister and sexual hatred of his Mother. It's not easy to like him, but spend enough time in any character's company and (if they're well written) you will at least begin to understand their patterns of thought and the how they see the world.

And Aue is superbly written. The book has its off-passages, where it drags, but at its best it is magnificent. Aue is not a front-line soldier - he is in the rearguard, theoretically charged with military security but in fact among those responsible for exterminating large chunks of the civilian population of the Soviet Union (mostly the Jews). The opening third of the book, 1941-1942, cover the helter-skelter early successes of operation Barbarossa, and for Aue the pestilent absurdities of turning the mystic hatred of a handful of daydreaming bigots into actual "actions". Much turns on the practical question of how to kill very large numbers of people efficiently: and with minimum human cost to the killers. (That's the Nazi state all over - institutional mass violence coupled with soppy-stern nannying.)

In the Caucasus, where the Wehrmacht's advance finally runs out of steam, Aue become involved in steadily more crazy hair-splitting over the questions of which nationalities should be exterminated and which should be considered potential allies – an attempt to fine-tune racial boundaries that is totally in the realm of pseudoscience, given that the whole notion of distinct races is doubtful. One character is able to voice this view at one point – in context, the moment is utterly shocking, as the story is told from the point of view of a man whose entire job is identifying and “dealing with” racial differences. Although Aue is insane – possibly at the start of the book and certainly by the end of it – he's also lucid, and makes his case. Of course he can't come close to justifying the business to the readers, but instead he stirs up clouds of relativism (at the time Aue is writing his memoir, the Vietnam war is being fought, giving opportunities for a lot of “are we really so different” talk) and attempts to show the logic of the actions where it exists. He doesn't harbour any particular hatred of the Jews; instead, for him, the “problem” is all logistics and linguistics – and efficiency, as he is at the perversely humane end of the spectrum of Holocaust engineers: if such a group is subhuman, better to use them as slaves than to waste resources snuffing them out, no? Senseless killing bothers him because it is senseless, not because it is killing.

Anti-fascist playing card, via this site and the Bibliodyssey Twitter feed.

With its involved (pseudo-)academic debates and bitchy rivalries, for a surreal moment The Kindly Ones feels like a campus novel, with the occasional interlude of ultraviolence (a rhythm that reminds one of American Psycho). This moment is cut short when Aue is sent to Stalingrad.

The Stalingrad sequence is astonishing - an awe-inspiring symphony of human misery, pain and violence that I think propels Littell's book from the merely good to the great. When Aue arrives, the German armies besieging the city have already been encircled, in turn, by Soviet armies. Inside the encirclement, the “kessel” (cauldron), conditions are beyond terrible. The imagery of Aue's arrival in the kessel is haunting – it is snowbound; an ominous mountain of wreckage overlooks the airfield, which is under constant artillery fire; a cluster of radio trucks; a line of railway carriages, buried in snow, serving as a field office. The railway goes nowhere – the airfield and the radio trucks are the only link with “civilisation”. Indeed, the airfield – and Goering's vain promise that the trapped armies could be supplied by air – is the only reason the kessel does not collapse immediately. The promise is that 1940s high-tech (in the form of radio and Junker aircraft) can redeem the situation – but it is doing is prolonging the agony. Many of Aue's (savage and strange) experiences in the city take place in the structures of modernity: theatre, factory, department store.Although it's not written as such, the Stalingrad sequence of The Kindly Ones feels like a mockery of the whole idea of technological civilisation. Having read Antony Beevor's superb book about Stalingrad, I was interested to see exactly how Littell could do justice to the real story of the battle there – but he succeeds, superbly.

There's much else - Stalingrad doesn't even take the book to the half-way point - but this isn't a review or a summary, more a sweeping together of loose ends of thought. Back to the matter of controversy. It's now 65 years since the defeat of Nazism. There is a desire, an understandable desire, to screen off the Nazis from the imagination - to keep them in the realms of heartless supervillains or comic butts of jokes, rather than flesh them out as human beings. It is somehow feared that a book like The Kindly Ones, and a character like Aue, makes Nazism thinkable again. Aue, for all his insanity and despicable traits, says "hey, see things my way", and if we read to the end, we've given him a hearing. And some believe that they shouldn't be given that hearing at all.

It doesn't matter if this is a reasonable position or not - given time, the special cultural status of the Nazis is going to crumble. We're fortunate that the first fruits of this cultural thaw are extremely high quality: The Kindly Ones and Downfall are superb. The "angry Hitler" remixes on Youtube are a sign that the dam is bursting, but luckily standards have been set quite high.

Two Very Short Stories

2010-02-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

Houses in Ixtapaluca, Mexico. Image taken from the Flickr photostream of jmb1977 and used under a CC Licence.

[These are two stories written for the Ballardian/Savoy Books microfiction competition, the results of which have now been announced. Stories written for the contest had to explore Ballardian or Savoyard themes. "Live-Work" got an honourable mention. The second story, "Unruins", was inspired by the above image, first seen on this Things post some months ago. It's now the basis of a longer, more elaborate project, to be announced at a later date.]

Live-Work

“After the crash, all the money went out of urban renewal,” said the property developer, Maxinalon. “This warehouse conversion was slumming itself anyway, so ...”

He had moved in the dealers and the people-traffickers. The live-work units were now meth labs, and the niche coffee outlet was a burned-out husk. The redundant creatives had adapted marvellously, because the hours were flexible.

To the sound of the exhausted police beating down the period-feature, iron-braced doors (wires trailed from the smashed entryphone), Maxinalon smiled a smile that was all percentages. “We’ve exhausted the potential of regeneration; the future is obviously degeneration.”

Unruins

The machines were still moving somewhere on the surface of the mutilated planet. They still extruded the epoxycrete frames of suburban houses, open at both ends, windows gaping. In some places, the land was eight deep in rapid-rendered family homes, jumbled in the upper levels as walls intersected with pitched roofs and the detritus of civilisation. Pictures from the ocean floor were discouraging. The hunting party had found a pocket of stale air in a second level subdivision. A car radio was embedded in the wall, and snarled the signals of new lifeforms emerging in the unruins.

All is quiet

2010-01-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the lack of blogging of late - it's only a temporary state of affairs. Proper service will be resumed in the coming week.

Rage for the Machine

2009-12-23T01:29:00.000-08:00

The Machine at Marly was built on the Seine river in France in 1684. A series of gigantic wheels in the river, it drove pumps that carried water uphill to an aqueduct. It was for a time the largest work of integrated machinery in the world. To find out more about the machine, I strongly recommend an click around this interesting little site, which is where I first discovered it. The story has a number of fascinating little corners - for instance part of the machine, a wooden tower, was moved to the Paris observatory after it was no longer needed on the site. The astonomer Cassini (of Saturn fame) used it to mount long telescopes.

The recycling of the tower by Cassini serves as a good example of the varying use of parts of the machine. It was built to supply water to the palaces of the ancien regime, a monstrous misuse of resources typical of absolutism, but by 1963 parts of it were being used to generate electricity. But I came across the site about it while looking for something else entirely (a picture of a spillway to accampany an end-of-year post), entering via the page of images of the machine. For a time I couldn't tell what the machine was actually for, but that didn't decrease my interest. It made me think of this aside from a recent LRB essay on the work of the eccentric Russian poet Daniil Kharms:

One visitor to his apartment reported seeing a contraption made of bits of metal, wooden boards, springs, a bicycle wheel and empty jars; Kharms said it was ‘a machine’, and, when asked what kind, replied: ‘No kind. Just a machine.’

No kind, just a machine, a line that for me nicely justifies a lot of modern art and poetry. It doesn't have to do anything. But coming across the Marly site also reminded me that machines are interesting in themselves. When I was young, I had a collection of "Technic" Lego, which could be used to build quite complicated machines. The difficulty, for me, was always trying to think of what I could build with it - and so I would build complicated apparatuses of gears and settings and pistons that didn't actually do anything.

I suppose this was a kind of kinetic scuplture; I saw what I believe to have been a Tinguely at a very early age and was delighted by its shuddering motions, its noise, its mischievous lack of utility. Duchamp compared watching the spinning of his "Bicycle Wheel" to watching the crackling of a fire, a really effective analogy for that kind of pleasant, purposeless absorption in the processes of a moving object. It's the same kind of idle pleasure that comes from watching a machine in motion, regardless of its purpose. The Science Museum has changed a lot since I was first taken there as a small child, but I'm reassured to see that children haven't changed as well - amid all the apparently enthralling touchscreens, the object that still really holds the attention is the gigantic working steam engine. It doesn't do anything, it the sense of drive any productive machines or generate any power, but that doesn't seem to put anyone off. It's really a giant version of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel.

All this, I suppose, connects back to the constructivists, who were (Duchamp aside) among the first to describe and advocate kinetic art, and Vladimir Tatlin's tower, mentioned previously. The Bolshevik avant-garde liked the idea of kinetic machine art, hymning as it did industrialisation and modernity rather than dead Tsarist heroes and saints, but purposeless art was a little too wasteful, bougeois and decadent for them. The sculptures Tatlin proposed would actually be useful - his Monument to the Third International, the tower, would contain a congress hall for the Bolshevik world government as well as offices and a boradcasting centre. Smaller monuments could serve as loudspeakers or platforms for speeches.

Purposeful sculpture isn't so farfetched. Minus the Bolshevik ideology, there are a couple of instances in London. The statue of James Henry Greathead at Bank includes a Tube ventilation shaft in its plinth. And Rodney Gordon's brutalist Faraday Memorial at Elephant conceals a London Underground electricity substation. I like how appropriate these uses are, given Greathead's connection with tunnelling and Faraday's connection with electricity.

The Faraday Memorial. Image taken from the Flickr stream of a shadow of my future self and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Runways, Rhizobia and Revolution

2009-12-17T03:48:00.000-08:00

X-Plantation 11 by Hubert Blanz.

Issues 075 and 076 of Icon have now been archived online, plucking a handful of pieces by me from the obscurity of print and into the bright lights of the internet. There's an interesting little news story about Francois Roche's biopunk house-meets-bacteria farm, "I'm Lost in Paris". Another news story covers David Kendall's "Always Let the Road Decide", a photographic project following migrant labourers as they travel on foot along and around Dubai's superhighways. And I wrote a short introduction for a gallery of Hubert Blanz's amazing X-Plantation images.

Looking back, Kendall and Blanz's images have a lot in common - they both reveal an edgeless nightmare wasteland only safely crossed by machines.

Vladimir Tatlin and his tower. (Not actual size.)

Also: my article on Tatlin's Tower for the Icon of the Month slot. Proposed in 1919 but never built, the Monument to the Third International still casts quite a shadow across architecture, just as this Kosmograd post makes clear. It's a fascinating structure and an interesting story, so enjoy.

Also: reviews of the V&A's Telling Tales exhibition, the film Chevolution and China Mieville's The City and the City, all of which I've mentioned on this site before.

Proposal for a Swiss Belltower

2009-12-14T04:56:00.000-08:00

In the light of this unpleasantness. Pardon the crudity of the sketch. I don't know about design virtuosity - this is more sarcasm in built form, or the Oxo Tower's dodge around advertising rules. But maybe defiance is better.