Oh! The Huge Vanity!

A double dose of me talking bolognese. The video above is me giving a lecture in Zagreb, about a year and a half ago. It is regarding monuments and olympic architecture, with a special focus on (you've guessed it) the ArseOrbit. Below is a little interview they conducted with me the next day.

Some announcements...

First off, how bloody strange is this?

I haven't the foggiest idea how on earth this occurred, and what it means...  For example, one could begin with the fact that even within my tiny little field, I can think of a great many people in my age bracket with far more influence than I... Furthermore, they seem to have gotten hold of an old cv of mine and them hyperbolically amplified the achievements (guest critic becomes visiting professor etc)... but then, hang on, what the hell have I got in common with billionaire russian teenagers who own 20 galleries and all that milieu? The mind boggles.

I can only surmise that this is an in-joke played on me by someone who knows me personally, but I can't for one second think who it might be, and I don't particularly care to find out.



Nothing Will Be Restrained - A Short History of the Tower from Simolab-Creative AV on Vimeo.

Anyway; as if one film with me pontificating about the Orbit wasn't enough, here's another. This one might be of interest to you because it's got Kapoor and Balmond talking bolognese about the bloody thing, and they manage to hang themselves without me or anyone else needing to be too harsh about it. Note also my incessant, compulsive need to compare everything to exhibition palaces and train stations...

More Olympic cash in tie in nonsense

Some more stuff relating to the Olympics then, which I'm just sure you're pleased to hear. The Olympics seems to be taking up much of my writing life at the moment, with at least three Olympic texts/talks in the last month, various articles, a talk and a number of talking head appearances. I suppose that you could say this was cashing in, in a way, taking advantage of what's going on to boost my profile. But that's nonsense, because as a critic, or at least a journalist, one isn't really supposed to just have an informed opinion about anything you feel like, but one is expected to be informed about what is going on at that point. The olympics are happening, I'm writing and talking about them a lot.

But one of the things I've noticed recently is that this sort-of passive attitude towards the Olympics is actually rather prevalent, including within some of the Olympic organisations themselves. In much the same way that Ken Livingstone thought that the investment and deadlines brought by the Olympics would be the only possible way to get some funding into East London, or indeed that in their more compassionate moments the Blairite nonces thought that the private sector's greedy dynamism would bring in enough cash to redistribute around, so many people seem to consider the Olympics a rather destructive force of nature which they are nonetheless attempting to harness to make some kind of positive change in their area.

In a way this is the flip-side of 'trickle down'; that idea that always seems to be a fairly flimsy fig-leaf for old fashioned acquisitive greed has also its mirror in the belief that one can harness a greedy force for the people. This is the logic of 'affordable housing', of section 106 agreements - there is a profit motive, but if you can skim some of the froth off of a capitalist's investment, you can do some good.

But of course that's nonsense. In the end, the Olympics, like most of these things, is a gravy train for some, with everyone else picking up the pieces. All the re-paved streets and refurbished community centres that it provides are entirely dwarfed by the rent catastrophes, removal of public space and increase in 'security' that has come with it, to name but a few things.

I got into an argument recently with a bunch of people from a certain popular PR website, who have been promoting a series of features on local Hackney designers with an Olympic theme. Never mind the fact that Hackney is but one of the Olympic boroughs, albeit the most gentrified, but my problem was the basic and rather incontrovertible fact that if you're a designer who lives or works in Hackney, the Olympics is making your life worse (unless you happen to be a property owning Hackney designer, but frankly if you are it's because you were already rich, which is a different problem).  Not only in terms of the way that it has starved arts and culture funding, upon which so many Hackney art & culture workers depend, but also in terms of the suffocating influence it is having on property and rent prices, meaning that so many skint designers are leaving the area entirely. However, pointing out the fact that promoting these people with a pageant that is negatively effecting them is a little bit hypocritical was enough to get all manner of accusations flying my way, from being a negative-ninny sniping from the sidelines, to simply being jealous of these people who are 'doing something'. 

And in a way, they're right: what is the difference between me making money writing about this mess, and these people promoting others' good works using the fact that the Olympics is around? Well, it's the difference between pointing out how pathetic this whole situation is, £9+ billion for a private park, mega-mall, luxury housing and missiles deployed everywhere, and swallowing your pride, shouting "OLYMPICS YAY!" and getting on the dirty train as it sweeps by.

And all that stuff I said about the Orbit, years ago now, has come to pass. It was publicly unveiled recently, and there was all manner of public attention on the thing, with Anish Kapoor actually admitting that it was a 'deconstructed tower' (whose curves are surely generated by the spinning of Derrida's grave), and various people being sent my way for a soundbite. I've got plenty to add, and I'll send it all your way when it comes around soon, but in the meantime I took some photos of the Orbit recently, which are somewhat different to the usual ones you might see.

Because let us not forget that this thing, this aesthetic nullity, it has been inflicted upon us, capriciously, by that ruthlessly bumbling thug Boris Johnson, and the country's richest 19th century industrialist throwback Lakshmi Mittal, and we're supposed to be grateful!

And let's not forget that although it sits in that lovely new park, it is surrounded by some of the poorest parts of all of Europe.

This photograph, I think, has a rather serendipitous aspect to it. Note the resonance with the barbed wire, apt, if a little basic, but compare the Orbit to the railway power gantries in the middle distance. One thing that is most irritating about the Orbit is that it largely draws its basic language from utilitarian engineering architecture; spaceframes, tubular steel, factories, sheds, etc. It's ALMOST an aesthetic transfiguration of that world, but it doesn't work - we know that the loops came first, which were then worked upon to turn them into structures.
Perhaps this is the problem - the Orbit isn't just an inept piece of public art, indeed, I've frequently said that its ugliness is perhaps the LEAST interesting thing about it. But in its childish twists it almost carries within it a hint, a fragment of what a genuinely interesting reevaluation of the aesthetics of utilitarian structure would look like, but it seems to have been approached from every single possible wrong angle.

In the Park

Well, if you ever wanted to know what I look like, here's me talking for a short film that Frieze made about the Olympics and art.

Bad News Travels Fast...

...in an upward direction.

Back around to the Orbit

Not that long ago (6th of April to be precise), I wrote a short piece poking fun at the ArcelorMittal Orbit, that contemptuously half baked excuse for an Olympic landmark. Recently, the planning applications for the 'Mittalintestine' were submitted, which of course gave us more information than we had before (You can have a look through here...) I won't go into too much detail, because there's very little revelation of poor design concepts and half-baked aesthetic justification that wasn't abundantly clear from the outset of the project.


But actually, there are a couple of things that made me laugh in a mixture of pride and shame, at my having predicted so thoroughly the mindset of those involved. I made a couple of mentions in the previous post to the 'napkin sketch' and the notion that Anish Kapoor provided his ideas only at the very beginning of the process, before it got taken over by the wibble engineers. And lo and behold, the concept sketches as revealed in the Design and Access statement are the sort of piss-poor doodles that would be torn off the wall at any review in any art school, anywhere in the world, for wasting your tutor's time, your fellow students' time and of course your own bloody time. But no, in this case they reveal genius at work. Of course.


The other thing, which I find even more appalling, is that I basically preempted their whole rationalisation spiel. Here's what I wrote about my 20 minute cock'n'balls redesign, as seen above:

I think it not only provides an iconic structure that we can all admire from anywhere around London, but it also wryly subverts, deconstructs, if you will, the priapic certainty of the conventional tower-structure.

And here's the genius artist & genius engineer:

The design for ‘Orbit’ evolved out of a dialogue between Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond. They have been working together for over 10 years. The Artists started their creative investigation by looking at the idea of the tower in the 21st century. It should be a landmark sculpture and to be defined as such, it will provide panoramic views over London. Post London 2012 Games, it should retain its iconography against the London skyline. It should make an iconic statement about ‘Tower-ness’. They looked at epoch making towers such as the Eiffel, Tatlin, Empire State and even the Pyramids.
They could see that all conventional or classical structures want to accumulate strength and are thus stable ground based structures. Furthermore all towers are continuous in the vertical plane. This was a premise which Kapoor and Balmond wished to unravel and to destabilise.

The ghost of shit sub-Derridean thought continues to haunt aesthetics. Damn them all, the fools.

More thoughts on the 'twisted thing'

Well, it's been a few days and it hasn't grown on me one bit.

On the one hand, after the initial rush of disgust, a more thoughtful mood seemed to prevail, with some contrarians thinking that the almost unanimous panning that it got meant that perhaps the 'arcelormittal orbit' ought to be reconsidered, and that perhaps it was quite dynamic after all, what with its hints of both Eiffel and Tatlin, and the 'Tower of Babel', apparently, which is surely not a good omen.

But, no. It's still ghastly. On the one hand the entire commissioning process for the object has been ghastly, with its vulgar politicians, its bastard of a financial backer, and its self-whoring 'geniuses', seen from left to right in the picture above, all contributing the kind of grinningly insincere statement that nobody even begins to pretend to believe, words that are nothing but cheap oil to the nu-language PR machinery. The fact that once again it's a piece of public art which signifies nothing but its own potential to be iconic is terrible, putting it firmly into the realms of what Jonathan Meades calls a 'sight-bite', those generically unique edifices which from an only slightly pessimistic angle resemble constructed death spasms of architectural culture. Couldn't we just have a massive sculpture of Lakshmi Mittal and be done with it?

On the other hand, it is going to be rather huge - 110m high is not a small building - it's the same size as Centre Point or the Barbican Towers, for the Londoners amongst you, thus it will be visible from a LOT of places. I suppose that it will be a spectacle to climb the tower, with the views, the wind, and the strange shapes looping around you, but anything that height would have the same effect upon the visitor; it's still only a third of the height of the Eiffel Tower.

This links into what in The Architecture of Failure I call the '1889 syndrome'; the twin structural achievements of the Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower were so large that at that point engineering technology managed to surpass any of the spatial demands that had yet been made, or that yet could be made of it; that was the point that architecture revealed itself to be always pre-aestheticised, the point that any architectural dream of 'pure function' was, essentially, dashed.

In a way, the 'Arcelormittalorbit' is a symptom of this problem; and also a symptom of the problems of digital design in general. None of the images have even begun to express the scale of this object, because it is essentially scale-less.I don't think Anish Kapoor really has any idea how big it is; I suspect he's only ever seen it on the screen of a computer in the Arup office, I even suspect he's not contributed a great deal to the design at all; what we have is a doodle that has been turned into a digital shape which has then been translated into a buildable structure by some very advanced computer software. This is a process that is becoming more paradigmatic by the day, as the -supposed- vanguard of architecture resort more and more to the 'resolved shape' method of design; what the parametric revolution seems to be giving us is a terrible floundering around looking for appropriate forms to do justice to our new tools; cheap metaphors and weak symbolisms abound, 'strings of pearls', 'rolling hills', cheap nods to extinct local cultures, or more often than not, a napkin sketch. At the end of the day it's intellectually weak and more than a little depressing.

In fact, just to show you how easy it is, I've offered them a hand - this is my attempt to improve the structure, a redesign that took all of twenty minutes. Structurally it functions as a parabolic arch resting upon two geodesic domes (a homage to Buckminster Fuller), although the arch itself is made up of two separate structural objects; a web-truss and a circular sectioned box-truss, which meet at the viewing platform inside the 'bell-end'. I think it not only provides an iconic structure that we can all admire from anywhere around London, but it also wryly subverts, deconstructs, if you will, the priapic certainty of the conventional tower-structure.


click on the above picture to enlarge.
(fnarr fnarr)

Noooooooooooo!!!

Just when you thought public sculpture couldn't possibly get ANY WORSE, this appears. Looking like a shat-out Tatlin's Tower, this utter bollocks is the fault of Anish Kapoor and Lakshmi Mittal and Boris Johnson and Cecil Balmond, who all deserve to be called idiots as a result. Regarding the design, if you look closely you'll notice that there is an Anish Kapoor 'trumpet' at the bottom of the tower, from which a simple crane column emerges, carrying a staircase with a viewing platform at the top. Around this are draped some looping circular trusses doing absolutely nothing in particular. What does it mean?

Well, you'll be glad to know that the word 'iconic' appears six times in the press release.

Appalling. Truly appalling.

Decent Graffiti

It's very important, when you're 'freelancing', to get out of your house at least once a day and do something involving sunlight and the dissipation of energy, otherwise you might find yourself lying awake all night and all morning, watching as the light creeping from under your curtains turns from streetlight brown to lapis lazuli blue to emerald green before settling back to the grey we're all used to, a new day letting you know it's just waiting to go, even if you didn't take your chance to charge up beforehand.

But if you're out there, all bleary eyed and shocked that the trees are green again, you have to be careful or you might miss little details like the moron who's been graffiting power boxes along the canal next to Victoria Park in eest luhnduhn.

I might have just called them a moron, but personally I think they're probably a lot smarter than I; normally street furniture or any old utilitarian urban surface is used graphically for three things - graf, tags and polemic. Usually a political position has to be somewhat marginal for someone to feel that there is no channel open to them other than walls, but this particular person seems to identify with the current 'line' so perfectly that they just had to ejaculate it out everywhere, thoroughly confusing me in the process...

FIGHT COMMUNISM
CLASS HATE LEADS
TO MURDER, TORTURE
GENOCIDE

riiiiiiiiight, if you say so...

NO TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

which has had "+CHRISTIAN" scrawled alongside...

FIGHT MARXISM
STOP CLASS HATE

END THE OCCUPATION
OF TIBET

I love the fact somebody has crossed out 'TIBET' and put 'EAST LONDON', which has then been followed up with 'FROM YUPPIES', ah, lovely.

BRAINWASHED INTO BEING
ANTI-AMERICAN FOR YEARS
BY THE LEFT + OTHERS

with a rather ambiguous response:
"an overemphasis on anti-americanism?
have so called progressives imposed
thier (sic) agenda on us without consent?", next to a spurting cock.

the same responder might have written this one:
"NO NO to ho chi min
democracy is gonna win
free laos
free vietnam"

NO TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

NO TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

I suppose I'm just a little confused as to their motivations; I'm partly imagining a march where all the placards read "Everything is just as it should be", "We support the elites!", or just "Carry On!"

Told you so...

How mainstream are our views?

Wandering the Wharf

In honour of the current immaterial turmoil, we went a-wandering, looking for material evidence. We were accompanied by Lady Vergeht and the textual ghost of a certain Mr. Pevsner. Our journey began on the new 135 bus route, which links Crossharbour and Old Street, and conveniently passes E&V HQ (oh, where you three years ago, oh great five minute shordeditch-doorstep link?).


The square in which this fellow sits was a good four degrees colder than its surroundings; perhaps his mood had affected the microclimate. Below his face there runs a channel, totally dry upon our visit. It is conceivable that he has cried himself out. (Also note the Neo-Classicism, the defining cultural motif of the entire area).


Day in, day out, he stares at this glass wall, until either it or he goes.


This chap has been trapped in a forcefield created by the overwhelming symmetry of the Beaux-Arts planning of the area. SOM employ corporate magicians to generate conservative ley-lines.


This totem is where the dark energy of the area emanates from. The use of stainless steel cladding is supposed to be a nod to British Hi-Tech, despite the crassness of the Pomo form. Note Pelli's buildings for the WTC in New York. It must be said that perhaps it was the best decision - pink marble would have been a sickening sight, almost too much to take. This is also, of course, Robinson's memorial to Rimbaud.


Lynn Chadwick contradicted our sexual assumptions, by revealing himself to have been a man. His figures refuse to face either the totem, or the vacuous Louis Sullivan pastiches in the background.


This abandoned cafe gave a tantalising suggestion of what may one day become of the wharf, inshallah.


The end of history.


This is the infamous Slug & Lettuce, home to braying hordes every Friday evening, recently scene of much deserved consternation, though probably not nearly enough revelation.


The only thing even remotely interesting about this sculpture is its asymmetry and off-axis positioning. It seems to act as a transgressive supplement, the breaking of the rule that allows the rule to function ever more efficiently. Otherwise it is another boring example of both a maker of small objects making a large small object, and the mistaken conflation of structural daring with sculptural content.


Outside the Foster & Partner's HSBC building, a piece of architecture remarkable in its seemingly infinite dullness, a pair of lions sit, identical to those that guard the building's Hong Kong counterpart. This one is off limits - perhaps it has sensed weakness amongst the passing bankers and has made moves to pick them off? Or maybe a despairing broker tried to feed themselves to it?


Another Neo-Classical object, this centaur wonders why it was considered witty to create him without arms, as if they had fallen off in a non-existent period following antiquity, when he was made of marble.


25 Bank street, until last week home of Lehman Brothers, sat silently and opaquely in the cold sun. There were no stains on the ground, no signs of violence. The Barcelona chairs still sat in the lobby, waiting...


And we waited a while too, but nobody jumped (it was the weekend, after all).


At first glance we thought this represented a moebius band, but it has two 'faces'. The dedication plaque in the centre reads; "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."


On the 9th of February, 1996 the IRA exploded a bomb at this exact location, killing two newsagents, who had not been evacuated in time, and causing £85 million worth of damage.




The following building will be explained in the words of its architect; John Outram.

My proposal is that Architecture can not be derived from 'dwelling' in any banal, roses-round-the-door, 'domestic' sense. To make such a reduction is a mark of what J.P.Sartre characterised as "l'homme, moyen, sensuel". Architecture is the diametric opposite of such well-upholstered, 19C, flaccidities. It is, instead, the making ourselves 'at-home' in the Kosmos. Architecture, and its only 'serious' purpose on a scale larger than the single project, is to build a general, large and civic lifespace that sets us, paltry humans, 'comfortably' situated within the Cosmos.

The source of the 'river of time and space' rises in its characteristic icon of a cave set within two mountains. This is the circular fan situated between two halves of the pediment - that have been deliberately split to register their division. From here the river flows downwards -registered by the blue (watery) bricks split by strips of lighter yellow. This river flows between the giant trees of the forest (nave) embodied by the main capitals with their foliate capitals. The forest, in its turn, is flanked by the enclosing 'battered' walls of sedimented brick which embody the 'mountains' that finally define the Vallery of Community, that is the ultimate spatial figure of the Architectural medium - equivalent to the dominating Vitruvian function of 'Commoditas'.

Having 'tumbled' down its 'valley' the 'river of space' passes under the 'gateway' to the Valley - embodied by the exaggerated white masonry surrounding the dark green entrance door. From there it flows outwards, towards the gate to Stewart Street, or the river Thames on the side of the 'levee'. It was not practical to inscribe the figure of the 'delta' which lies outside the 'gateway-door into the building'. Nor could either the street, or the River, be inscribed with the figure of infinity with which one may recall their 'bounding' identity as the 'death of the valley of community' by dispersion into the Ocean

We confined our work on the Vitruvian dimension of 'Venustas' - or the 'conceptual environment', on the outside. Even so, when the structure, whose iconography we have so engineered, is merely a large shed whose sole physical purpose is to pump dirty water from storm overflow sewers back up into the river Thames. One may well ask "What, then, is the legitimacy of our 'display'?

A simple answer, not entirely without weight in a 'free country' is that Ted Hollamby, Chief Architect-Planner of the LDDC, sole authority at that early time of its development, wanted it. Prime Minister Thatcher, with her drive to suppress all forms of 'government' decreed that the LDDC would only build infrastructures - roads, sewers and so on. It would not be allowed to 'express' its suspect 'liberal' and by implication Socialistic, culture by building anything above ground. The Isle of Dogs would be a monument to the ethic of 'commercialisation'. The three Pumping Stations were Ted Hollamby's only chance to introduce some 'quality'to the gruesome diet of British Developer's Drivel that marked the early years of Docklands.

There are still hints of a past here, it pays to leave artifacts of previous modes of production, to leave material relics.


We quenched our thirsts in a pub that has gigantic yellow skylons sticking from its roof. It was populated by a strange mix of local red-faced eastenders and two meter tall russian girls who had arrived by speedboat.


An incitement to occupy.


And finally, the walk ended at Robin Hood Gardens, looking strangely dignified in the setting sun.


The estate suffers most from its location. It is flanked to the east, south and west by busy roads, and thus has been hidden behind sound barriers that remind one of Virilio's bunker. But whereas a church has an eschatological link to military outposts, a home doesn't wish to speak 'war'.


As we passed, we surmised that there was a hybrid game of football/tennis going on in the sunken games pit, judging from the balls that flew above the parapet. Perhaps it was a spontaneous counter-unique sport to Eton fives?


The visual language of RHG is interesting, for representing a definite attempt to speak Modernism with a post-Corbusian dialect. The five points do not exist here, and there are no formal references to purism. Whereas most 'Brutalism' speaks fluent Corbu, from bullhorn profiles to shallow concrete vaults to ondulatoires and so on, we have here something not more, nor less ordered, but differently organised.


An atlas ought to be compiled of all the estate maps of London.


The buildings seemed casually indifferent to their uncertain fate.


A typical conversation runs as follows:

A: Modern Architecture is ugly.
B: Why is Modern Architecture ugly?
A: Because concrete is a horrible material.
B: Why is concrete a horrible material?
A: Because it is grey.
B: (Kills self).

And then home, as the sun finally set on what may well have been the last day of the 'summer'.

Lovely Penguins

In response to Owen, I thought I'd point out one of my two favourite penguin covers (the other being Beckett's 'Malone Dies', black cover with grey type and a Giacometti skull drawing, of which I cannot find an image). Technically this one is a Pelican, but I think that's actually more appropriate to the discussion. The two main bits of information I can remember from 'Dying' are that a) only a very small proportion of people properly gain consciousness on the day that they actually die, and that b) generally the most physically distressing thing about dying is the difficulty in breathing that comes near the end.
Hooray for egalitarian educationalism!