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.

Support Your Local Zines

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

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

Air Rage

Image from my Flickr stream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Screens Announce Departures

Las Vegas airport. Image from my Flickr stream.

On the airport after the arrival of the Boeing 747:

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

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

On the tanatorio, a Spanish morgue:

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

From Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett, Faber, 2006

BP: Beyond Pensioners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do I have a share?"

"Everybody has a share."

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Am One

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