Architecture of Failure III

Well; ever since I moved into the cupboard that has been my home for the last year, I’ve been haunted by the sounds of architecture. That is to say, nearly every morning I have awoken to the sounds of the construction industry hammering away through the ventilation grille in my wall. For the first few months it was the sounds of demolition, and now it is the sounds of erection. The site for all this activity is just around the corner from my hovel where they are building what I initially presumed to be a pile of yuppie flats, and upon consultation of the planning application turned out to be a big, tasteless lump of yuppie flats (pictured below - take a bow, Hamiltons). The developer is 'Findon Urban Lofts' who, if you follow this link would appear to be connected to a Mario Leznick, previously convicted of "securities related offenses" (don't you just adore property developers?). Anyway, what’s particularly egregious about this particular shitty pile of ‘dromes is that the building being demolished was a former light industrial complex, which had come to house a variety of artist’s studios, galleries and workshops. This is how regeneration works- like a clumsy child who, with their overzealous affections crushes their pet to death, the charms of yuppie-living in an area alongside skint ‘creatives’ nearly always throttles any chance of said ‘creativity’ occurring any longer; hence my living in a cupboard that reeks of damp.

UPDATE:- I've found out that the development is called, wait for it, waaaaaaiiiiit for it............


'Arthaus'

It's just absolutely fucking sickening, isn't it?


Due to the Mare Street Conservation Area, the developer wasn’t permitted to demolish all of the previous complex; the façade had to be retained. As they tore the building down they exposed the innards of its previous life, but I’m reluctant to describe this as the interesting part; I’m writing something about reactionary-ghost aesthetics and I’ll hopefully deal with wistful-demolition love in that piece (you know the stuff, wallpaper and fireplaces floating on a wall high above the ground). What’s really interesting, to me, about this structure is its current condition; the façade is there on its own, and is being held up by a temporary structure, which of course had to be designed. This intermediate situation creates a number of interesting effects:


One of the problems of engineering-qua-aesthetics is the paradox of selling a design that looks more functional than functional. There are reasons for this of course, I’ve heard of a quote from Foster about how if an architect speaks about aesthetics, they instantly lose the client; this might partially explain the degeneration in architecture from Hi-Tech fantasy into Solutionist ennui. In a recent piece for icon I made the following argument about Santiago Calatrava’s Liège train station; engineering architecture is often nothing other than an expensive sculpture that expressively interprets the language of engineering. The Solutionists are thus caught in a paradox; they cannot create architecture that matches their rhetoric, but they cannot speak truthfully about their architecture. But if we want to see truly utilitarian engineering in action, if you need an example of what an ‘honest solutionist’ designs, then here we have it; a temporary structure whose sole purpose is to hold a façade up until the new structure is built behind it. The specifically fleeting nature of this structure means that it must be built as cheaply as possible, without ‘elegance’ or any other aesthetic consideration, Thus, like the entrails of a building that are hidden under floors and behind walls, it is as close to ‘pure’ engineering as we can possibly get.


The next significant aspect is the collage effect that is created by the juxtaposition of support and supported. The ‘retained façade’ as architectural element is usually retained because of some consideration of its architectural merit; this is basically and fundamentally an aesthetic choice. The façade in this particular case may be rudimentary, but it is well proportioned, has been designed with an eye for detail and is a good example of an inter-war building of its type. Put simply, it is architectural. The formal relationship that is generated between the solid, detailed façade, into which effort has been put, and the perfunctory steel frame that abuts and perforates it is a clash, a discord. It is not harmonious, in fact it is a dissonance. We could say that it performs in miniature the attempted sweeping away of bourgeois academicism that was one of the intentions of early modernism, or we could say that it is like a bricolage, a juxtaposition of two incommensurable spatial logics. At the very least, it jars.


I wrote, what feels like a long time ago, about Witley Court, one of the largest ruins in Britain, which has a number of similar structures created to stabilise it. Two of the main effects I noted there are present in my local stabilised façade; the surreal effect of seeing more sky through windows, with its resultant ambiguity of envelope, and the clashes of levels of detail, ornament and of material. When juxtaposing pre-modernist architecture with modernist in this way, we encounter the clash of a logic of perforated skin (in the old fashioned sense, a solid masonry wall with thickness and ornament, punctured by fenestration), with the logic of frame. The rhythms and proportions cannot match, they make no sense together, and this nonsense is the source of much of its aesthetic power. Note also that in this case, there is little or no decay in evidence. Besides the weathering of the materials, we have very little of what we can call ruination here.



But I am reluctant to suggest that we can work with this kind of thing. Eventually this façade will be backed up with a concrete framed yuppiedrome of almost no architectural, cultural or economic merit, and it would be folly to suggest that something like this temporary condition could be put to a genuine use, except as a stabilised ruin, but that is not something I tend to defend as a typology. I also don’t think it’s enough to merely ooh and ah at it, take a few pictures and then wait for it to be filled in. There is something genuine here, but I still can’t quite make it out, as I am too worried that we have here an example of deconstructivist mannerism, a pseudo-radical, wasteful game. At best we see here the power of dischord that Brutalism showed can be deeply radical (and deeply loathed), a non-proportional, non harmonic, anti-ordered architecture. But whereas Brutalism subscribed to the modernist paradigm of forging a new context (chaos becoming language through repetition of deeper structure), any architecture based upon this logic of juxtaposition can only ever be post-modern, playing registers of language off each other in the hope of a new truth.

In the spirit of speculation, however, I’ll have a look at some other examples of this kind of thing, just off the top of my head, of course. Perhaps we’ll be able to see some ways the ideas can be pushed, or not.


Wexner Centre for the Arts, Eisenman Architects, 1989
Well of bloody course. I have to admit that Peter Eisenman is sometime very interesting in spite of himself. Being a deconstructionist at heart, I have to admit I do sometimes find Eisenman’s ‘artificial excavations’ quite fascinating. It would seem that this building is the perfect example of what I was discussing above; awkward juxtaposition, the conflict of different languages of architecture, the plush and the plain. But there is way too much of everything here; it’s an art centre for starters, it’s an expensive, landmark building and the historical aspect had to be built from scratch, somewhat defeating the point. The conceptual underpinnings need explanation, which we really need to get past, and generally it’s over-blown and flabby.


Lloyd’s Building, Richard Rogers, 1986
Oh hello! What’s this? On the most avant-garde building in the UK there is an example of exactly what I’m talking about. This is the façade of the original Lloyds building, retained as part of the development. This aspect of the design is not really talked about much, and you don’t normally see this element in images. But when you visit the building, the effect of looking through the grand doors and seeing just the very bottom of the oil-rig behind is exhilarating.



Ulster Museum, Francis Pym, 1962
Sticking with the brutalism, here we have one of the most glorious juxtapositions of architectural register I know of. An extension to a stern inter-war neo-classical building, this joyously bonkers Chernikov-like composition is just sublime, although it leaves the deeper solid/void relationship basically intact. (do note that if Zaha didn’t emulate this for her Cincinnati building, then she obviously doesn’t know her architectural history).

Ok, and here’s a couple of bits of my work from my MA, where (now that I think about it from a distance) I was basically banging my head against these ideas of juxtaposition of register and collage over and over again, never able to find the escape route from indulgence and flamboyance. No wonder all my teachers were bemused; they’d both seen it all before but also didn’t know what the hell was going on, a condition not helped by my tendency to never eliminate an idea, creating projects that were thick conceptual soups, never resolved. Anyway, please don't be judgemental…




This project was an attempt to reinterpret the language of GLC housing as something radical again. Most importantly here, it involved the creation of a gigantic atrium in the shape of a shroud that would be constructed from white tarpaulin and scaffolding poles. The idea was to create a complexity that was also vulgar, rather than bespoke, and also to give the whole thing a sense of incompleteness; modernism & mass housing as unfinished business, y’see?



And this; the project that has begun to turn into a book, which perhaps was what it should have been in the first place. It’s basically a fairly standard deconstructivist premise; a building uncovered from the archives, creatively resurrected upon the same site, with a partial demolition of the buildings currently occupying that space. Again, there’s a million other ideas going on here, but just have a look at the partial demolitions and the juxtaposition of various registers of solidity and so on.

So after all this, another comparison – if brutalism is the modernity of a Schönberg, emancipating dissonance in the hope of cementing a new common language, then the effects I describe here are perhaps the architectural equivalents of the spectro-aesthetics we’re all surely by now so tired of discussing. Unable to either exorcise nor live up to the past, we create new complexities and abstractions from revealing the complicity of the historical in its own disappearance. This, at the very very least, is a step above ruin-worship.

The Ozymandias Complex

The dusty fata morgana of the winter garden, the dreary perspective of the train station.

- Benjamin, Arcades Project.

People have recently been talking about Victorian fantasy architecture. Coincidentally, we went down recently to have a look at Crystal Palace Park, down in South London, such being the opportunities presented to a euphemistically-titled ‘freelancer’. It was perhaps the first day of the year with weather that could reasonably be described as pleasant, after what has been a very cold and awfully dark winter, much more so than most. We took some photographs, but the sights that we were presented with were somewhat problematic, full of cliché. Whereas some journeys one might go on present an opportunity to evaluate a space in a creative fashion, this particular journey was different, it felt pre-aestheticised. This does not mean, however, that we didn’t find objects and situations of interest on our journey.

It should be noted that we arrived at a distinctly picturesque crepuscular hour.


The first thing that strikes you is a certain sense of Paris about the park, what with the dominance of this industrial structure, a television tower built in 1956. A diminutive Eiffel, visible from those rare places in London where the distant comes into view, the tower is a most significant South London object; it’s the second tallest structure in London, and is likely to remain so, as more and more tower projects are cancelled.


Although the television mast may make allusions to Paris, there was another strange connection to be made. The symmetry, scale and the grandeur of the remains was recognisably the same as that one finds at the Parade Grounds of Nuremburg, Albert Speer’s gigantic setting for Nazi festival, where the Cathedral of Light was enacted. There is a reading to be made where the Cathedral of Light can be seen as the end point of Iron and Glass, perhaps the end point of Architecture, the completely immaterialised place of communal-event making, taken to its grandiose, sublime and intangible limit. Any further along that line of reasoning and you’d have to see Fatima as architecture.
Here, as at Nuremburg, there is also that faintly unpleasant sense of the space constructed with ruin in mind, the guilty pleasures of gloopy Romanticism. The picturesque spectacle of human endeavour fighting its valiant, doomed battle against nature always seems to fit the particular sentimentalism of Victorian architecture all too snugly. It is death made safe, but it is also a delusion of grandeur, of upstarts believing they are worthy of similar cultural duration as that of antiquity, with just as much culture to bequeath as Athens or Rome ever had.


This was once the main transept, which only existed as Paxton decided to incorporate some elm trees that had originally stood in Hyde Park. It’s actually not at all clear where exactly the Crystal Palace stood in the park, I have seen but one map, a panoramic one at that, which shows the palace in situ. It seems to have stood just inside the park, to the immediate north of where the Albert Hall and Royal College of Art now stand.


The Nave; looking north.


The Choir; looking south.
The use of church terminology is entirely apt, for the building was both in plan and in section an ecclesiastical structure, with a vaulted Nave flanked by buttressed aisles. And this is where one should look to the theorising of someone like Viollet-le-Duc: away from the puritanical arguments of a Pugin, moralising the pointed arch as a way out of eclecticism, Viollet-le-Duc (who entertainingly gets a very hard time from Proust in the Recherche) recognised the gothic as a structural method, the functionalism of its day. In fact, perhaps the gothic builders were the hi-tech architects of the day, wedding a fetishised structural expressionism to a theological message: 500 years ago, the church, in the last century the gods of Capital.


There are a few forlorn sculptures still standing around, actually rather nasty reminders of Imperial attitudes; this chap appears to represent 'the Arab'. See the Albert Memorial for better kept examples.



And there are still a number of sphinxes dotted around. This is another reading of the Crystal Palace, one of the most obvious, that of the vile backslapping of an Imperial power. But despite all of the vulgar accoutrements, the exhibition palace as a typology has a rather mournful pedigree. Whereas the train stations, department stores, libraries museums and greenhouses who took on the new industrial methods of building often survived and are still to be found, although their dreamy qualities are more often than not tempered by the being hidden behind a vulgar Victorian edifice, the exhibition palaces, so impressive at first, were usually disastrous failures given just a short while. Due to the popularity of these temporary structures they were often purchased for permanent use, the Crystal Palace being an obvious example. Often they were then recommended for utilisation as locations for the recreation, stimulation and perhaps improvement of the common man, at which point they became almost worthless financially. The Crystal Palace lurched from crisis to crisis, as did many of the others palaces in London such as the Alexandria Palace or the Albert Palace (which survived less than a decade, about which more one day). The attempts to make plateaus out of the singular events of the exhibitions became mournful failures, long before they had any chance to become ruins.


Here we look down the entire length of the Palace. At the time of our visit, there were a few groups of school children hanging around, a number of young lovers’ picnics, dog walkers, footballers and kite flyers. There is a campaign to have the Crystal Palace rebuilt, an endearingly loopy idea. There have also been attempts, even planning applications made, to use the space for all kinds of commercial ventures; vulgar proposals for cinema complexes and the like. Thankfully that will, in our current predicament, be off the agenda for at least the time being. Surely this blankness is the most telling and appropriate use of the space, a grassy terrace dug into the hillside, flanked by crumbling fragments? It really isn’t quite a ruin, although of course one can have one’s ruinophilic fun here:


For there are indeed points where the ivy grows, where the stones decay and collapse, where all things pass.


Where nature takes over, making things secret, occluding the logic that we try to bring to space, asserting its overwhelming power.


But really, what is that worth? One can certainly take a kind of pleasure from sights like these, but what can they actually do for us? I’ve written before about ruins, as many have, but at the time I was trying to find out if one could abstract the code of the ruin, if one could achieve the same effects without the wide-eyed gooey quasi-Romanticism that has come to surround it. I saw the ruin as some kind of supplement – as long as there are ruins somewhere that one can visit for a picnic, and spend a little time marvelling at transience, without it being too traumatic, it means that the simulation of permanence can run more smoothly elsewhere. But now of course, we have ruins everywhere, empty houses, unfinished buildings, towers and monuments, ‘on hold’, shells, ghost buildings; and they’re not helping at all. They are not failures that can be identified with, they cannot be reclaimed.


These are the only fragments of the Crystal Palace that have been left, a series of column bases.
I think that the emptiness of the space is perhaps its most interesting feature. There is a sense here of having missed something – of an occasion that has definitively passed. This sense is not new, one only has to think of the people who used the Roman Forum as space for their lime kilns in the medieval period, but there is something scintillatingly traumatic to our psyche about the vast under-utilised space, created for social gatherings that will never fill it, that resembles the attraction that the ruin had for the 19th century. Despite anything one might say about postmodernism, it is the case that our societies are still predicated around forward linearity, growth. This is an outlandish statement, yes, but capitalism, as everybody knows by now, requires a constant supply of new material, and if it has to overcode a social space, then it does. Every organisation that has to function in this paradigm has to perform progress (conservatism usually only exists to secure more favourable dynamics of accumulation); this is why we still cannot really fathom the idea of a decaying body, a finite, weak planet, or perhaps, at the far end of the scale, the knowledge of extinction. This is another argument, however.
All I suggest is that the under-utilised space, the space created for an event that fails to achieve its potential, the space of a gathering that can never happen again, is perhaps a particularly traumatic space for us now.



The park is also home to some rather remarkable modernist artefacts. This little brute is genuinely ruined.



And a wonderfully basic set of benches, wood shuttered, wrapped in a silvery bit of timber, with plastic moulded seats. Gently heroic.


Joseph Paxton.
There are many possible contestations over the legacy of the crystal palace. Can we think of it as the first ‘modern’ building? It would seem that many do just that. What is Paxton’s legacy? The hi-tech types would put him alongside Brunel as a genius of the new engineering mindset, of the egalitarian technocracy of functionalism. The modular construction of the palace, the opportune use of the latest technology, the refinement of design, the flexibility of construction, or the loose grid to be filled with any old programme, these are all shibboleths of hi-tech. But then, the Crystal Palace was deeply inspired by plants, there is an anecdote about the origin of the façade as having come from Paxton studying a lily; this biomorphic engineering would make him a proto-parametric bore. In a way it doesn’t matter, because the significance of the building is tied to far more than just its success as a piece of structure, and Paxton had very little to do with that.

In a way, my argument is that there is a trace of something in cultural objects that mark certain transitions between a Romantic view of the world and a Modern one. There is a trauma there, a glimpse of something, if not progress, then at least potential. As Benjamin says;

This perplexity derived in part from the superabundance of technical processes and new materials that had suddenly become available. The effort to assimilate them more thoroughly led to mistakes and failures. On the other hand, these vain attempts are the most authentic proof that technological production, at the beginning, was in the grip of dreams. (Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.)

Thwarted dreams, as always. What can we do?




This is a gem of a building; The Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, designed and built by Leslie Martin at the LCC between 1954-64, although now with an uncertain future.
Here we have an alternative modernity; this is High Modernism, where structure is fetishised, but in a bespoke, mannered way, represented here by the pre-stressed concrete frame, an expensive and by no means easy technique to use. As far as functionalist rhetoric goes this is a fail, not a true functionalism, but has there ever been a true functionalism, except perhaps that of the shed or the silo. This is of course a very large question, look at Lloyds of London, which screams engineering, calls out functionalism, (it even has a direct reference to the Crystal Palace at the top of its giant room), and yet is utterly bespoke.
Nevertheless, this whole complex seemed to be in very good shape, considering.


This is for Owen, who is worryingly veering towards an emancipatory theory of the cantilever. Note that beneath the roof we essentially have a small fragment of Corbu’s Palace of the Soviets.



That glorious axial emptiness again.





And then some wonderful quotidian modernity, reaching in and out of the trees, a forgotten future, complete with lime stalactites.




And of course the real reason to visit the park is to see the dinosaurs. Grade I listed, don’t you know. It is interesting to note to what extent contemporary palaeontology now accepts the level to which dinosaurs were feathered. They should digitally remaster Jurassic Park to show what velociraptors actually looked like: 1 metre high chickens.


Romance.

Dinosaurs.

GROVELLING UPDATE: Anyone with the slightest bit of inside knowledge would have been able to tell me that all the photographs I took of the absent interior were actually taken from the space in front of the palace, which stood 50 meters west of where I thought it did. What an imbecile; I now have to go back to South London.

The Ghosts of Liverpool Street Station

So, here's a thing; the Spectacle does 'Flash-mobbing'. This is as pathetic as it comes, taking an activity supposedly defined by its being impromptu and then rinsing it in order to sell some fucking phones, but it's just what one would expect.

I encountered this event, in rehearsal (yes, that's right, there were rehearsals for this, how fucking spontaneous can you get?). I was on my way to catch a train from Liverpool St. Station at 4am one day, recently. Approaching the station, one could hear the sound of music, and then slowly the dancers came into view as I descended the escalator. It was unbelievably cold, and the hundred or so people rehearsing were all wrapped up warm, with plenty of ankle warmers etc... One would have thought it was a flash-mob, apart from the fact it was being filmed and directed from up on the balcony. I thought it was perhaps a bollywood film in rehearsal, but then came to the conclusion that it was probably some stupid advert...

But the event wasn't all wasted, as it managed to provide us with a moment of sublime beauty. After walking along the platform to the early morning train, I stood leaning from the train door, listening to the music and the shuffling of the dancers. I was about 150 meters away, the music at that point was Strauss' 'Blue Danube Waltz', and the acoustic was terrible. It finally answered positively the question: how badly does an iron & glass palace reverberate? The answer is: outstandingly badly. The sounds were muffled, the high frequencies were lost, and each sound hung in the air, drifting slowly away. It may well be the only time I get to really hear music being played in a crystal palace with the appropriate level of surrounding silence, and it was incredible, a very special haunted concert. It took me back to this, which I still haven't revealed properly to the others, but perhaps will someday. The music is the E&V rendition of the Albert Palace Grand March:




But then, I was also reminded of this, from back in the Britpop day. It's Mansun's 'Taxloss':