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".

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

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.

Announcing "Toxic Tourism"

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.

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.

Heathrow Free Zone

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.

Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us

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.

Islands of Flickering Light

"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.

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.