Shutter Island

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".

Lost

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.

Saint Jane

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.

This Isn't Concrete, Honest

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

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.

Air Rage

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.

PoBa

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.

Everything That's Ever Happened To Me Happened Right Here

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.)

The Exoderm of the Edifice

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.

A Zone of One's Own

My review of Anna Minton's book Ground Control is at long last up on Iconeye.com. But the delay* hasn't made it any less timely - I fear its subject matter is only going to become more and more relevant. It cover the sorry (and under-examined) story of what has happened to Britain's cities under the fluttering banner of Regeneration - a selloff of public space, the erosion of ancient civic rights, the self-destruction of local democracy, the rise of gated communities, and the astonishing extension of police powers into every aspect of the lives of people who have mostly done nothing more than make other people feel uneasy. It's sickening stuff, and Minton has done a good job of bringing it all together in one book.

What Minton makes clear - although she is never wholly explicit about it - is that the decline of urban liberty is a largely spatial phenomenon. Control over the city by the authorities - increasingly private authorities - is arranged by carving the territory into zones and policing individual access to those zones. As I say in the review, things like ASBOs and dispersal orders are spatial in effect. "Order" in the city is being enforced by depriving certain groups and individuals of access to certain areas.


Zones are going to be a very important part of the future. Their use has cropped up in a number of books I've read recently: Keller Easterling's Enduring Innocence, Mike Davis' Evil Paradises, and The Invisible Committee's infamous The Coming Insurrection. (These are all heartily recommended reading.) This is what The Coming Insurrection has to say on the subject:

The unmanned drone that flew over Seine-Saint-Denis last July 14th - as the police later confirmed - presents a much more vivid image of the future than all the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives us a clear indication of the road we're headed down. Territory will be partitioned into ever more restricted zones. ...

I don't agree with what's advocated in The Coming Insurrection, but as an analysis of the present situation, it's often extremely insightful. A future of privately owned city centres and gated communities is no future at all. This extraordinary story from the United States (via) is a sample of why privatised, gated estates don't deserve the name "community".

*The book has been out for a few months; my review was originally slated for Icon 076 but became snarled in a scheduling problem, and held for 077, when it finally had the ignominy of being bumped to make way for Mr Philippe Starck's Design For Life.

The images for this post came from my Flickr stream.

Urbanism Sells

Is this the first time in history that "Fragrance: Urban" is seen as a positive thing?


And the expensive Danish modern furniture shop Boconcept has taken to asserting its urban-ness. It's something that I've been noticing more and more. Take Nespresso, for instance, the cartridge-based coffee system from Nestle. (Link will start music playing; mute speakers.) It could be argued that Nespresso is fairly strongly attached to the city, as it's hard to imagine its capsules being retailed outside major conurbations. (You can order them online, though.) Nevertheless, this year it launched Citiz (again, music), a Nespresso unit intended to be specifically urban.


I wrote about Citiz for Icon 071 (May 2009). The design, by Antoine Cahen, is interesting enough. What's most interesting are the identifying "urban" features: it has a small footprint for small kitchens, its name is spelled in a way that suggests collapsing educational infrastructure graffiti tagging, its colour pallette is "urban", and its profile intentionally resembles a skyscraper. This similarity in profile is heavily pushed home by the unbelievably slick animated introduction to the ">Citiz website, which is really worth watching. Skyscraper, maybe, but with that rounded top and gleaming metal it's Beaux Arts, Deco or 1980s Pomo - a Chrysler or Singer building, or the old Barclays building on Lombard Street - nothing with unfriendly Miesian corners. Nespresso hired semioticians to consult on the Citiz; they pushed "humanising" features, making the controls more like a face. It's truly strange how things end up looking the way they look.

I'm straying, however, from the main thread of this post, which is the use of the word "urban" in a marketing context. Over the past 10 or 15 years, it has been presented as an indicator of the success of urban renewal that city centres have again become desirable places to live and that Thatcherite slur "inner-city" has lost its sting, replaced with some of the marketing I've shown above. Urban became young and hip - urban was marketable. Have a look at the website of Urban Living, an estate agency that claims to have been among the first to recognise emerging demand for "dwelling in the city". White-painted and modern! Central! Urban!

When we're told a thing is something, we're also being told that that thing is not something, and therein often lies the fib. Look at the use of words like "natural" in the context of ads for things like shampoo and food - it invites the mind to think "not artificial, not processed, not unhealthy". And therein lies the fib - so-called "natural" products are often all those things.

So when we're told something is "urban", what is it not? Rural, yes, but more importantly it is not suburban, and it is not the world of small towns and dormitories. "Urban" is not those things - it makes a broad claim to a certain level of vibrancy, cultural activity and hipness. The marketing usefulness of the word "urban" works both ways - estate agents like the one linked above, regenerative property developers such as (obviously) Urban Splash, and the government's own regeneration initiatives trumpet urban-ness.

It's a tendency that seems deeply rooted in anxiety about the places these organisations are involved in building and selling. As Jonathan Meades says in the wonderful On The Brandwagon, these places are very often central, but not urban. They're modern suburbs, exurbs even, with limited community or cultural activity, but situated in the urban core. They're insulated bubbles of dormtown deadliness dangerously injected into the bloodstream of the city. The connections, interdependency and social capital that have defined city life are absent, perhaps even purposefully minimised. Regeneration, Meades concludes, means no rioting within the ring road.

And inside the riotless entryphone zones, we have rootlessly mobile "young, hip, urban" professionals listlessly buying FCUK bodywash, Boconcept sofas, and Nespresso Citiz coffee machines in an effort to reassure themselves, yes, this is the city, we're urban, we really are. Like fresh, like natural, it's a vast marketing fib.