tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59424580876669772692024-03-13T05:41:53.633+00:00entschwindet und vergehtArchitecture, music, philosophy, politics.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.comBlogger355125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-7384403049437871712021-07-23T14:25:00.001+01:002021-07-23T14:33:15.158+01:00Some thoughts on the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion<p>For a variety of reasons I have not written anything for quite a while, not for magazines, not for publications and certainly not for a book, so maybe what I’m doing here could be considered something of an exercise, a stretch perhaps. Writing this text is both a workout, an attempt to get the momentum of putting words into orders back, but also it is meant as a slight provocation, to test a couple of thoughts, having been vexed recently by some issues that I feel might benefit from being exposed to others. I don’t feel it’s worth writing whatever this is for money, partly because I’m going to be negative, and we live in a time when everything’s so hard, nobody needs the knocks, but also because I’d like to raise a couple of questions which are, if not exactly pressing, slightly more discursive than most publication writing generally allows for now.</p><p><br /></p><p>The thing that brought these thoughts on is the new Serpentine Pavilion, which, as per tradition, is currently sitting in Hyde Park. It is designed by a young architect working out of South Africa, Sumayya Vally, whose studio is called Counterspace, and she is the youngest architect who has ever been commissioned for the pavilion. The Serpentine has been running since 2000, and its mission has traditionally been to give an architect yet to build in the UK their first British commission, although that is no longer applied particularly strictly. A variety of well known architects have built pavilions there, although generally speaking there is something of a consensus that the project is no longer fresh.</p><p><br /></p><p>I visited the pavilion on a hot summer’s day a few weeks ago. I did not enjoy it at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>But actually, before I go into this, it might be time for a quick digression, on being a critic and the concept of ‘punching up/down’. I often hear it said, and I tend to agree, that in jokes, anything is acceptable if it is ‘punching up’, i.e. aiming at someone more powerful than yourself. Being rude about the powerful, well, it may or may not be efficacious, and indeed the recent history of the UK has shown how satire can be not only toothless, but indeed part of a process of trivialising political culture in general, but as a rule of thumb I think it safe to say that it is good not to be a bully. </p><p><br /></p><p>Since I started writing about architecture, I suppose I have always seen myself as being an up-puncher, given that I was young, unestablished, without connections, and the people I was writing about were at the top of their game. Indeed, some of the very first things I wrote that got noticed were polemics against some really terrible public architecture by big names: the over-priced second-rate museum by Zaha Hadid Architects in Glasgow, and the Olympic sculpture by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, to take two examples. The context for this was also that I (and a few other architecture writers better known than I) began writing at a point when the financial crisis of 2008 had wiped out a boom period of architecture, where a lot of the work had been both poor, and overly celebrated.</p><p><br /></p><p>But this was more than a decade ago, and while I would hardly say that I am a success now, it really doesn’t make sense for me to pose as an angry young man speaking truth to the powerful, when I am complacently tied up in various ways with the architecture world, from which I require employment, validation, and so forth. In my tired state, every terrible work of architecture no longer seems deserving of a hatchet job, and not every fool talking nonsense about the subject is worth ranting about. I would prefer to say that today I am more interested in looking at systemic problems, and larger questions of history, but perhaps I am just not as hungry any more, too conflicted by experiencing the problems of getting anything of quality done at all in today’s world.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, if I have big problems with this project, big enough that I want to share them with you, I also need to be aware as I write that the architect is a good few years younger than I am, is just starting out on their career, and indeed their identity is subject to intersecting forms of oppression that I myself do not experience directly. If I decide to write a work of criticism about this project, me, whose name adorns serious books on the shelves of booksellers, shouldn’t these questions, about the power I exert by complaining, and the vulnerability of the new practitioner putting their work out into the world, be at the forefront of our minds, no? </p><p><br /></p><p>Well, let’s pretend for a second that I’m capable of discussing the project as a building, on its own, as an autonomous work of architecture. Well on these terms, it’s a complete flop. At its simplest, it is a canopy on a set of columns. The canopy is roughly ovoid, and sits about five or so meters up – quite a monumental space. The columns are irregularly spaced, and are formally complex, seemingly composed out of fragments of other spaces, which fold out into a variety of different possible seats strewn around the space. It’s big, and it’s very busy – there are hints of classical forms, there are hints of quotidian architectural spaces like rooftops or garden walls, and there are all kinds of strange shapes that seem – to me – to have no discernable source. </p><p><br /></p><p>The pavilion is not really made up of materials so much as it is made up of colours – black, grey with a pinkish tint, and some minty green in locations. These colours are realised by thin panels of cork, and of a cementitious board that has ribs cast into it. As an architect, one tends to tap and bump buildings to work out what is going on behind the surfaces, and in this case, the panels are all about an inch thick – my first raps on the blocky forms let me hear its thinness, its hollowness, its general skin-deepness. It turns out that the whole thing is built with a concealed steel frame, on a large concrete pad foundation, to which all the forms have been attached. Importantly, to me at least, the panels meet each other without any form of detailing – one material stops, there’s a little gap, and then the next material runs in another direction. This, along with some strange gaps and shapes elsewhere, strongly lead me to believe that the pavilion was conceived primarily as a CAD model, using ‘boolean’ tools (subtract, intersect, etc), and was then translated in conjunction with engineers and fabricators into something that could be built.</p><p><br /></p><p>To me, in terms of architecture, this is just simply not good enough. There is no sense of order, of proportional relationships, or the basic fundamentals of architectural composition, although this is not in itself a problem, you are not obliged to follow those in the 21st century. There is also no sense of how structure can be a form of communication, can have powerful qualities of its own, in terms of balance, weight, or – fashionably – ‘tectonics’, where the intuitive sense of force and mass gives a power to the work that is non-verbal and non-representational. It’s very difficult to tell whether a design ‘process’ has been followed, and by that I mean that I do not see how the forms could be first evaluated, and then improved, iteratively. The warped truncated form of that column over there – should it be elsewhere? Should it be thicker? Taller? How does the designer judge whether each form is successful, as they go through the process? I do not think it is clear at all. And furthermore, there is no sense either of the joy of materiality, of making things well, according to their intrinsic qualities – the hollow flimsiness of the materials betrays the apparent monumentality of the spaces created, and there is no sense of joy or craft in the construction. </p><p><br /></p><p>Ok, this is harsh, but if I may contextualise a little: currently, within the realms of fine-architecture, if we can call it that, there are two quite significant lines of interest, being pursued sometimes by the same architects. One is a kind of pretentious earthiness, an ostentatious rejection of modern layered construction, attempting to use mud, stone, and materials in their rawest forms to create architecture that has something akin to the megalithic about it. It’s a kind of ultra-brutalism, in a funny way, and it is probably best represented by recent work by Anne Holtrop, or the hilariously OTT projects of Ensamble studio, who dig holes in the ground to cast against, creating latter day menhirs. The other pole is an attempt to use the thinness of modern construction almost against itself, through witty subversions of the limitations of multiple skins, as demonstrated by Lütjens Padmanabhan, whose wry postmodernism, revelling in its articulated surfaces, has become highly influential, even as they themselves are yet to build much. </p><p><br /></p><p>The Serpentine Pavilion misses both of those poles, and can’t decide whether it’s big or slight, weighty or paper-thin, and in fact doesn’t give the impression that its presence has been much considered at all. On these terms, it’s very poor work, and certainly if I’m being very critical I’d say that it’s the sort of work students often come up with before they’ve had any experience. The capriciousness of the various forms and shapes are in a way uncriticisable – there’s no logic to them, and so at the end of the day they can’t be challenged, other than in the simplest ‘do I like this or not?’ formulation.</p><p><br /></p><p>But, a very easy objection is that there’s no inherent reason why it has to be evaluated on the terms of architecture-qua-architecture, of mitteleuropean seriousness, of the long chains of the history of the discipline and its discourses. The pavilion has lots of interesting places to sit, it has a cafe, and indeed it looks interesting enough on a smartphone photo, perfect for posing on social media, and in many ways that’s all it has to do. I often worry that there is something inscrutable in caring about architecture, that not only are the things that affect those of us who care about it invisible to the ordinary person’s eyes, but also that they make no meaningful difference to the world. A lot of the architects I know create a strange personal moral mythology for their designs, I think largely to justify the energy that they expend convincing clients and authorities to do things well rather than adequately, and I feel that this masks the fact that most people simply don’t care. And nowadays, if it looks good in a selfie, then why complain?</p><p><br /></p><p>But there’s something else going on here that needs to be mentioned, and that is that the pavilion has a backstory. In press releases and short films, Vally has discussed how the pavilion is born out of attempting to convey a sense of the spaces that migrant communities experience in London, this exemplary global city, with its constant flux of arrivals and flight. To this end, Vally describes travelling around London, visiting neighbourhoods and studying spaces that various precarious migrant communities made their own, including spaces in Brixton, Dalston, Tower Hamlets, etc, and spaces such as community bookshops, mosques, clubs etc. These spaces were then subjected to, and I quote, “abstracting, superimposing and splicing elements” which then are incorporated into the pavilion. Further to this, the original concept, inevitably watered down, was to have the pavilion distributed around in these communities, various additional fragments that could act at dispersing the institutional nature of the project. This has manifested itself in four small structures built elsewhere, and also in funding that is to be given by the Serpentine to a variety of community groups as part of the project as a whole. </p><p><br /></p><p>To be honest, this sounds a lot more interesting, but I think it raises a number of additional issues. First of all is the question of understanding. It is possible to visit the pavilion and not learn anything about Vally’s interest in marginalised communities. In which case, the supposed correspondence with spaces of migration is completely absent. Would someone who worked at the now-lost Centerprise bookshop recognise its influence? Or a regular at the East London Mosque spot a translated fragment? I dare say that they would not. But even in the know, how are we meant to interpret the various ‘figurative’ elements throughout the pavilion? I am willing to argue that there’s nothing to be gained from seeing these forms in the light of the social groups that are supposed to be evoked in this way. I found myself staring at the ceiling, where a green patch extrudes in a shape that looks a little like one half of a pair of shears, and wondered, how on earth can you attach a narrative to this shape? what is it supposed to mean? If it was removed, would the project be better, or worse? There are not really possible ways to answer this.</p><p><br /></p><p>Vally’s work is engaged in an attempt to broaden the voices that are expressed through architecture, and also broaden our understanding of material, informational and cultural flows, and a video accompanying the pavilion talks of gold deposits, global trade, colonial history and modern migration, encouraging us to see their interconnections, and also to see the pavilion as somehow a manifestation of this wide ranging yet sharply focused investigation. This is very topical, and is part of a tendency of what we might call “research architecture”, which is increasingly influential in the boundary space between architecture and fine art. With this in mind you might argue that the rejection of certain conventions of architectural quality are not omissions but positive decisions in the process, and that those conventions are indeed irrelevant considerations, even tainted by their association with political domination, and I think there’s a point there, but I think the methodology also has a complicated relationship with less on-trend architectural concepts.</p><p><br /></p><p>Two projects come to mind here. One of them is the Jewish Museum Berlin, by Daniel Libeskind, what would turn out to be his only great project. It’s a one off, a building that is more like a large immersive sculpture, one in which there are multiple wall texts telling you that, for example, a sloping floor is meant to evoke the feeling of homelessness, a tiny window is meant to evoke the feeling of being trapped, the floor plan is an exploded Star of David, and the jagged windows are composed from plans of streets whose Jewish residents were murdered. Here is a project of pure form, where forms have corresponding meanings, and architectural matters recede into problems of memory and memorialisation in space. The point however is that the project relies on the wall texts to impart its meaning, because it does not ‘explain’ itself directly. </p><p><br /></p><p>The other project is the Wexner Centre for the Arts by Peter Eisenman, his first big project, a test of the architecture based around his readings of Derridean deconstruction. Famously, along with the grid that runs obliquely through the project, one end of the building features fragmentary reconstructions of a mock-castle armoury that apparently once stood upon the site. Arches are incomplete, a tower is split in two, columns don’t reach the ground, etc etc. The processes of “abstracting, superimposing and splicing” that Vally engages in are extremely similar to those used by Eisenman. His broken forms, which themselves are ‘about’ memory, culture, history, etc, albeit phrased in a very different cultural register, set the tone for a type of architecture that was rightly criticised for its wastefulness, its pretentiousness, and its inability to stand by itself without justification. I think the Serpentine pavilion is unfortunately part of this tradition, setting aside things that architecture is actually good at, in favour of trying to wrestle with questions of greater gravity, but questions that built structures are actually ill-disposed to be able to address. </p><p><br /></p><p>Which is a shame because institutionally, Vally’s ideas about community could be very powerful. The Serpentine, still associated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, is a pillar of the art world, with its fair share of complexities and contradictions. For example, two years ago, Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries, resigned after a campaign claimed she had personal connections to an Israeli cybersecurity firm whose products had been used by various governments to target journalists and human rights activists. And think, for a second, about the various times that the pavilion gets closed to the public for donors’ drinks and other such events – what do billionaires think about the communities that the pavilion is supposed to be addressing and bringing into focus? It feels that an approach much more powerful would have been to really abandon the architectural part of the project – why bother with a lackadaisical bit of Serious Architecture when it is the community connections that are important? Why not just pop up a marquee for the duration, and invite the people you wish to give voice to to come down and take part in events and discussions, even meet and challenge the billionaires, while donating the budget to them and their own projects?</p><p><br /></p><p>It’s not Vally’s fault, she and her studio have their interests and the things that they want to campaign on, and who’s going to turn down a commission like that at such an early point in their career? But I think it marks a difficult, nay, ‘problematic’ aspect of this kind of campaigning architecture, because certain unpleasant parts of the industry are being put in question and others are not. So, for example, I note the presence of Professor Lesley Lokko in the selection team for the pavilion. Lokko, an extremely popular public academic, was until recently the head of the graduate school at the University of Johannesburg, under whom Vally began teaching a masters studio. David Adjaye was also one of the selection committee, and he had previously mentored Vally as part of the Rolex Mentorship Protege Initiative. This is of course fine, there is nothing new in patronage, but I think it is at the very least worth considering which forms of exclusivity we urgently need to eliminate and which ones are still very much ok. </p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, to bring this to a close, I think the most important points are these: Increasingly I see a real hunger for architecture to engage with pressing social matters, especially amongst students, but I also see an innocence about what architecture is actually capable of, and how projects come about in the first place. Architecture always struggles against its own limits as a discipline, and it attracts people who are curious in wide reaching ways, and due to its 20th century history as a vital aspect of various political projects, there is a latent belief in a certain kind of agency that is available to an architect. But this can lead to real frustrations, in running up against a highly commodified production of space, ossified networks of success and histories that have not been challenged nearly enough in terms of occluded or denied injustices. So far, as far as I can see, this often leads to a retreat from the things that architecture is actually uniquely capable of, with a network of schools, exhibitions and biennales existing within architecture, but strangely loathing it, because of its unavoidable connections with power. The Counterspace Serpentine attempts to channel the energies of certain spaces of subjugated or otherwise vulnerable subjectivities, but in crudely abstracting them into a work of architecture, existing within the corporate art world, I think it fails in this mission. It may well be possible to square this conceptual circle, but this project doesn’t make me hopeful. </p><p><br /></p>Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-31916812747257308332014-01-14T15:33:00.002+00:002014-01-14T15:33:51.306+00:00The HatchetThe following is a review of 'Experimental Architecture' by Peter Cook, written by a 'Kit Pedler' and appearing in the April 1971 issue of Architectural Design:
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One of the most disturbing features about the immediate future is the very real probability that people can become agreeably conditioned to accept any one of a hundred different technological nightmares. Alvin Toffler on the other hand has recently suggested that we can no longer adapt rapidly enough to a galloping future and that we shall become victims of Future Shock.<br />
After reading this book I am in profound shock. I find that I can live in an "urban finger" the only justification for which appears to be that the complex has concrete digits. I can crawl my way into one of the convolutions of the old "bowellism", a vertical assembly of hollow concrete intestines with windows. I can surround myself with "fun places", "Instant cities" and inflatable buildings ("Mum, can we come and stay with you for a few days, somebody pricked our living room again"). Bored perhaps with the sheer brilliance of the designers, I can then walk to "plug-in-city" pausing for a quick trip in an "environmental box" or a session in a "mind-expander". Finally, having visited a friend curled up in a foetal position in his glass fibre "living pod" I can return to my own PVC pad thanking whichever guru happens to be in vogue at the time for the unspeakable perfections of my surroundings.<br />
Architects often seem to me to be one of the most arrogant species at liberty. Having absorbed a sprinkling of philosophy and a crude knowledge of technical concepts, they develop the ability to translate what is largely impudent dogma into concrete and metal reality, and then have the sheer nerve to justify the initial idea by post hoc rationalisation. What probably started as an absolutely "sooper" idea in the intellectual wastelands of NW1 turns into a fraudulent justification for a real building where people are rather regrettably inserted.<br />
Mr. Cook's congested text is a minor masterpiece of such rationalisation. Amidst page after page of glimpses from the obvious, there are apologies for each project variously labelled as "on-going", "myth exploding" or just "experimental". If one is simple minded enough to suppose that a house - is a dwelling place - is a home - for an individual, then Mr. Cook's future is not for you. Nearly all his explanations offer a complex reason for the relative validity of the project he is describing. One is interested to note for example that "... perhaps it is inevitable that the satellite piece of furniture which moves as an individual package will lead to the mechanised foot rather than do anything which implies a regular hierarchy (even one as loose as that of furniture: to dwelling: to location)". Do you know I never knew that before - just as law is for the lawyers - and medicine is for the doctors, so architecture is quite evidently for architects.<br />
Amidst all the glossy verbosity of this book there is practically no mention of the gentle human frame. It appears to be a rather tiresome protoplasmic appendage, to be fitted in somewhere at the end of a designer's monument to his own frivolity.<br />
I wish, I could believe, that Mr. Cook had written a black comedy, a private in-joke for his colleagues. Sadly, I conclude that he is serious.</blockquote>
A couple of things pop to mind: first of all, who is behind 'Kit Pedlar'? In the culture of pseudonyms I wonder if it's yet another of Martin Pawley's efforts, sticking the knife in in his own inimitable way. But there's more going on, because it's obviously also a parody of the shocked conservative voice that would become much louder by the end of the decade, and then would become the dominant voice by the eighties. Experimental Architecture is by no means a great book, but the sheer anger with which people would fall back on a vulgar Heideggerian notion of dwelling as an excuse to suppress anything even remotely communal or 'modern' about house building and promote reactionary notions about how and where people should live, and what the house should mean in terms of its relationship to the wider economy, is perfectly ventriloquised here.<br />
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If anyone can shed any light on this, please let me know...Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-2630010598672065472013-12-09T18:22:00.000+00:002013-12-09T18:22:45.586+00:00Oakshott Court<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
The area behind the railway stations of King's Cross, St Pancras and Euston has been built up and destroyed a great many times since it was first properly built upon in the early 19th century. In the last few years, the area behind King's Cross, at one point a mass of goods yards, canals, factory buildings and other industrial detritus, has been receiving a high-speed makeover. Central St Martins have already relocated to a huge converted granary building, an odd but compelling mix of art factory and slick modern fit-out, and the area between is being built on rapidly. Blocks of new yuppie flats with a welcome dash of inter-war New York detailing look over a series of huge education and media buildings. The Francis Crick institute, architecturally remarkable only for its size, is having its skin attached as I write, and Google are currently revising plans for an absolutely gargantuan office block as well.</div>
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Behind Euston still feels quite neglected; it's quiet, not much 'active frontage' here, and the shops that are there are not upmarket - caffs, old fashioned newsagents, etc. But there are some surprising architectural moments that are worth looking at, one of which I visited a few days ago, in a break from reading 1970s eco-apocalypse books in the British Library around the corner.</div>
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But first, a quick glance at the Sidney Street Estate; a flash of European modernity dropped into London in the early 1930s, most highly influenced by the flats of 'Red Vienna'. Large courtyards accommodating community facilities are now securely gated off, blocked to outsiders.</div>
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But the main destination, yet again, is a Sidney Cook estate for Camden Council from the 1970s. Around the side of the Cock Tavern were a number of grey haired Irishmen, out for a cigarette break from their lunchtime pints. The price of alcohol, always a notable nightmare in London, has become ludicrous recently; it seems to be debated whether this is a major cause of the decline in pubs across the UK, but in this period of general decline it is becoming harder and harder to enjoy a pint which leaves you with pennies back from a fiver (speaking of which, for some reason I still remember a scene from <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, </i>c.1980<i> </i>wherein a character buys eight pints and peanuts, telling the barman to keep the change. "From a fiver?" he splutters; "thank you very much!!!" - even adjusting for inflation prices have still more than doubled...)<br />
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Anyway... the site is angled slightly off-cardinal, perhaps 30 degrees. The north-north-west and east-north-east sides of Oakshott court are presented as long, fairly blank, and small windowed. Doors open at the ground floor, and the upper floors cantilever over, in an obvious sign of the stepped-section so beloved of Camden Brutalists, which first appears in a Walter Gropius design of 1928 for a 'Wohnberg'; a 'residential-mountain', before appearing here and there in Corbu and others, before becoming a mainstay of Team X and their affiliates.<br />
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Meditation centres are D1 use class, apparently. Get yourself a Biglife.</div>
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The Pevsner guide to North London claims that Oakshott Court has 'forbiddingly overbearing rear parts.' I disagree; I find their sturdy regularity to be restrained and rhythmical. Unfortunately, it has to be admitted that the Pevsner guides from the last two decades are pretty poor when it comes to recognising the architectural merit of modernist housing. For every system-built block whose horrors they correctly bemoan, they also indulge in quite scattershot anti-modernist slanders; 'inhumane' etc etc. It's not bad scholarship, it's just a sign of how completely the critical landscape had changed by the 80s and into the 90s. Now, thanks to exhibitions, books, and a new generation of critics, as well as the panacea of sufficient historical distance, not to mention the deterioration of housing politics in this country, we are far better able to point out the merits of architecture like this, and hopefully in future editions of the guide we will see this rectified.<br />
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Oh hello...<br />
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What's this? Not something I've seen before on a Camden Estate, this odd drum form. It derives from a kind of Mendellsohn-ish modernism, perhaps even Art Deco, but also might be a reference to some Constructivist and Futurist examples of the idea. I hate to use the word but this is a most definitely 'dynamic' form. It's interesting because it only seems to serve the flats directly connected to it, which would seem to betray its prominence, but then we might see it as an outward gesture as well, providing a satisfyingly proud hinge around which the facades can bend.<br />
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In fact it's really rather odd that the rear facades would be described as 'forbidding', considering how in keeping they are with the existing buildings on the other side of the road; London County Council flats built 50 years before Oakshott Court. There are clear formal parallels in the linearity, the regularity, the simple grid broken only by horizontal bands and vertical pipework.<br />
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The facades terminate blankly, although this blankness actually works to convey the sectional conceit, almost as a diagram.<br />
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Spot the estate map; as so often, it functions as a basic diagram of the architectural conceit.</div>
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From the southerly corner of the complex, it all begins to make sense. The tower that hinged the two facades together at the outside is clearly the most prominent point from the other direction; from it, two wings of stepped section flats stretch out across the site, with a green space completing the square plot.<br />
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The first row of flats are sunk into the ground about 3m or so. They are maisonettes; entered from the upper level and then with a small garden to the front.<br />
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Various walkways wrap around the L-shaped block; this is at ground level, and provides entrance into the lower maisonettes (with their little plant boxes) and the lower level of the next set of flats above.</div>
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It was one of those autumn days; sharply cold, partially clouded; where the light can change from a dusty grey, shadowless and plain, to boldly shadowed, where everything is picked out in either a wan gold or a pale blue, depending on whether the low sun is occluded or not.<br />
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Communal facilities; a bench, wrapped around some planting. Who knows; perhaps in summer elderly residents park themselves here as their dogs run around the green spaces, perhaps teenagers sit around getting stoned, or perhaps, like this day, in the stingingly dry cold, it sits empty at all times.<br />
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Running up the diagonal are a series of steps which take you between the different deck-access levels. As a passed this point, I jumped as there was a young man (wearing a work uniform I might add) sitting on the steps to the right, supping on a lunchtime can of strong lager. Startled, I carried on upwards, using the other staircase. Not exactly an ideal sense of public space and safety. <br />
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You can see here that the flats have clerestory windows in the roof above them, bringing light into the deeper, more northerly spaces in each flat. At a very simple level, it's little touches like this which elevate the work Cook's Camden above other housing architecture; attempts to bring in architectural features which would genuinely improve the experience of living in a not particularly large property. That this all occurred in the aftermath of the oil crisis, amid a context of collapsing contractors and sky-ward construction costs is not the damnation some think it is.<br />
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The flats with ground level entrance are the friendliest on the site; they are the ones whose inhabitants have spent the most effort on cultivating their small private gardens, they are the ones where the buildings feel at their smallest. There is something very intimate about the scale at this point, even without masking its communality.<br />
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It seems that Mary Wollstonecraft once lived in a building on this site; although its unlikely that she lived in the Somers Town Goods Yard, which Pevsner tells us sat on the site before Oakshott Court; just yet more shifting uses around the peripheral railway lands of the 19th century.<br />
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The increased scale and stepping up towards the back of the building allows not only for the larger blocks to receive daylight, but also for the vehicular infrastructure that was necessary for any development at that point. A straight road runs through the development at ground level, lined with garages.</div>
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Think back to some of the more inept mass-housing blocks, and consider how their entire ground planes were frequently given over to garages, and how against the 'active frontage' orthodoxy that now appears. But then think about other developments, such as the Barbican or Alexandra Road, and how cars are virtually invisible there, tucked into the basement, leaving a fully pedestrianised ground level above. Then recall Highgate New Town, and how the laying off of the car park attendants created a perfectly hidden landscape for trouble, leading to the permanent sealing off of the parking garages.<br />
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Not so subtle messages hint at the fear of young people, the fear of anti-social behaviour.<br />
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I mentioned Highgate New Town before, one of the most exciting and accomplished developments by Cook's Camden. The architect for that development was Peter Tabori, who remarkably was hired by the council to build his diploma project. Tabori was also the architect of this slightly later scheme, and if you didn't know already, the obvious similarities might have alerted you to that fact.<br />
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Where Highgate New Town is mainly built from a combination of pre-cast concrete and breeze-blocks, Oakshott Court takes the same sectional principle and repeats it with brick as the main material. Also, where the earlier project makes total use of the generous slope of the site, here Tabori deserves credit for being able to artificially conjure up a similar set of steps. It appears also that the budget was clipped more successfully here; the stairwells might be very similar, but in the earlier scheme they are blessed with glazed rooflights above the doorways, providing shelter for getting home with your shopping, wheres here they are far more spartan.<br />
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A lovely lady and a grumpy man live here.<br />
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The more tightly packed blocks of Oakshott Court also mean that the expansive, bucolic character of Highgate New Town, tumbling down through mature trees, is lost in this scheme. It's definitely a little more hard-edged, with the liquid-applied roof and the underwhelming levels of planting. It's also a little more dense at this higher level as well. Still; if the interiors are anything like the ones further up the road, then the inhabitants here are blessed with excellently planned flats.<br />
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<li>CCTV cameras to be installed on the estate and response to anti-social behaviour.</li>
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(and yours truly in the reflection)</div>
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The internet isn't particularly useful in trying to find out about any other works that Tabori completed; in Pevsner North London he's given as the architect of just the two schemes that I've mentioned here. I'd be grateful if anyone knows of further information on other projects that he worked on subsequently. </div>
<br />Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-13792074818885801072013-11-12T12:37:00.002+00:002013-11-12T12:38:25.615+00:00Patrick Keiller's 'The Dilapidated Dwelling' @ the ICA, 24th November 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Patrick Keiller's film <i>The Dilapidated Dwelling</i> (78 mins, beta sx, 2000) is an examination of the predicament of domestic space in advanced economies, the UK in particular. A fictional researcher (with the voice of Tilda Swinton) returns from a 20-year absence in the Arctic to find that while the UK is still one of the world's wealthiest economies, its houses, flats etc. are typically old, small, dilapidated, architecturally impoverished, energy-inefficient and, especially, extraordinarily expensive. The film asks why repeated attempts to modernise house production have not been more successful. It includes archive footage of Buckminster Fuller, Constant, Archigram and Walter Segal, and interviews with Martin Pawley, Saskia Sassen, Doreen Massey, Cedric Price and others. </blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.ica.org.uk/39805/Film/Patrick-Keillers-The-Dilapidated-Dwelling.html">Following the film, Keiller will be in conversation with Douglas Murphy to discuss the UK's dystopian housing economy and its exploration in The Dilapidated Dwelling and in The View From the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes, Keiller's first collection of essays published by Verso Books (November 2013). </a></blockquote>
Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-58393157571229975422013-11-12T12:16:00.000+00:002013-11-12T12:16:59.490+00:00The Packington Estate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A curiosity in Islington: the Packington Estate.</div>
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I've been past this quite estate a few times, and since it is currently being demolished I thought I would grab a couple of images of it, because there's some strange things going on architecturally. First off is that it's a rather overt example of panel construction. The system used was the Wates system, and here you can see the simplicity of the large panels (in a strange, burgundy hue) and the various sketchy points where they were sealed together. Many of the systems from back around the 1960s (This estate was finished around 1970, designed by Harry Moncrief) worked with a mixture of pre-fab and in-situ concrete - the panels would be hoisted into place, and small areas where the walls and floors met would be cast on site. A lot of problems of the system built blocks were located at these points, the hasty and frequently negligent construction methods leading to cold-bridging and all sorts of issues. I have no idea how the Packington Estate performed, although the fact that it lasted this long means it probably wasn't terribly built.<br />
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It's not pretty, to be honest, although the design does accommodate quite large windows. It's a series of what are presumably maisonette blocks judging by the alternation of the deck access balconies (which, like on so many estates, used to link all of the blocks together). But look closely, there's something really odd going on.</div>
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Because the Packington has managed to pick up all manner of strange postmodern encrustations.</div>
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Worked on from 1989-94, the estate was refurbished by David Ford Associates and Islington Council Architect's Department. The additions are a perfect example of 'council pomo' - noddy hat roofs, that odd mix of yellow, red and blue brick, and a rather silly, jolly classicism. Aesthetically it's very much of the period of Thatcherite reaction, although it's an ameliorative style; the architects had little choice but to work within a certain neo-vernacular framework, but they're trying not to be too cocky or brash about it; there's no polished granite, for example.<br />
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You can see the interventions reasonably clearly here - pagodas, baubles, new vertical circulation cores, and a district housing office. Behind you can see part of the estate's redevelopment, which strangely for London includes houses specifically built to accommodate the people who currently live on the estate, which is remarkable considering how terrible the housing situation is becoming in London, especially remarkable considering the unbelievably sickening scandal down at the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle.<br />
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Can't really say much positive about the shopping arcade really, it's pretty nondescript, although it's obviously been deliberately run down as part of the redevelopment. One frequent complaint about post-war housing estates is the lack of amenities, but in many cases this doesn't ring true. Many estates had perfectly adequate sets of shops built to go with them, along with community facilities. But one thing that doesn't quite offer is, how should I say, glamour. We might look with a smile on the signage and design of 1960s bakers and grocers, but retail has come quite a long way since then, and the out-of-town shopping centre was such a massive social development in the 1980s that everyone became used to that mode.<br />
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But at this stage in commercial history, the small independent retailer has enjoyed a certain renaissance, at least in areas with a sizeable middle class. Considering that some of the more lush parts of Islington are just around the corner, can we imagine a situation where some organic deli took over one of the shops here? Personally I can't think of a single Aussie coffee shop located in a post war modernist shopping unit, just as I can't think of any estate pubs which have been hipsterified. Why might this be?<br />
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The blandness of the shopping centre was lightly decorated by a rather charming little mural showing off the plan of the estate, enlivening one wall, even if it had been mostly hidden by the bins.<br />
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And here you see the panel construction itself - note how skinny the panels actually are. You can see the thickness of the roof, which is insulated, so I expect that the block extended further past this visible bay. Soon there won't be any of these kinds of buildings left at all, as all the last remnants of the quotidian architecture of the post-war era seem to be on their way out; in the way of redevelopment, their styles and tenure out of favour, they are vanishing in much the same way that the most neglected of the slum housing of the Victorian era vanished.<br />
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And this, the housing office, good grief. There's a lot of this architecture around, the naff, post-CZWG pomo which dominated before the New Labour pseudo-modernist style took off. This is just inept, really; the rotunda, the awkwardly angled, badly detailed roof, the banding on the brickwork, it's so half-hearted, so inane...</div>
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Well, it's hardly of serious interest, the Packington Estate. But at least those who still live here (and there are lots still here) are not going to be scattered across the country when the redevelopment is finished, like is happening in so many other places.</div>
Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-54668654279386347192013-11-06T16:31:00.000+00:002013-11-06T16:35:19.489+00:00J.S. Bach - Vor deinen Thron tret' ich - BWV 668<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/118250553" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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Here is another of Bach's organ chorale preludes, transcribed for and played on the guitar.<br />
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'Vor deinen Thron tret' ich' <i>(Before your throne I now appear)</i> has an interesting story behind it, and although I'm not really in a position to properly explain or analyse the music or its history, I can at least give some notes that help explain what's going on.<br />
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BWV 668 is a chorale prelude, meaning that it is a piece of instrumental music which takes as its main thematic material an existing song. In this case the original music that the piece is based upon is a hymn entitled 'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein', which was originally written by Paul Eber in the 16th century. The source melody (or <i>cantus firmus) </i>was composed by Louis Bourgeois, also in the 16th century. Bach had previously arranged this hymn as BWV 431, as below:<br />
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If you listen there, you'll note that there are four main melodies, each separated by a fermata (pause). It is these four which become the source for BWV 668.<br />
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Reasonably early in his career, Bach created an organ chorale prelude from this piece, BWV 641, under the original title 'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein' which I have previously transcribed below:<br />
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and as played in the original:<br />
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What Bach does with BWV 641 is create an accompaniment which is based upon the melodies of the original hymn, but then adds an ornate cantabile melodic line over the top, which I'm sure you'll agree is rather exquisite.<br />
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'Vor deinen Thron tret' ich' actually exists in two different versions. BWV668 is included in the 18 Great Chorale Preludes, and actually consists of a fragment (about two thirds) of the entire composition, copied out by someone other than Bach. BWV668a is the same piece, complete, with slight differences, which was included (under the title 'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein') in the original publication of Art of Fugue, published after Bach's death in 1751.<br />
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There is a story that was perpetuated by Bach's son CPE Bach, that his father dictated the chorale directly from his deathbed. This is now considered to be rather flamboyant myth-making, which gave the piece the nickname 'The Deathbed Chorale'. What is actually now understood to be the case is that BWV668a was a piece that was just lying around (Bach was an inveterate re-worker of old material), which Bach decided to put more work into as he lay dying, meaning that although it was not composed out of nowhere, it was still the very last thing that he worked on, and thus a significant artistic statement.<br />
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Musically it's really quite complex. It is built in four sections, all composed from fragments of the original hymn melody, diminished, inverted and contrapuntally developed. These lead into statements of the <i>cantus firmus, </i>clearly taken from BWV 641, albeit with the ornaments and floridity removed, before each time the all but one of the voices drop out for another development section. There's a certain plodding quality to the rhythm, which is pretty uneventful, but the level of harmonic interest is high. This regular and systemic feeling is common to some of Bach's large fugues, and perhaps has a certain mood in common with Beethoven's 'Heiliger Dankgesang', another piece closely linked with illness, which also builds slowly and methodically out of simple contrapuntal blocks.<br />
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As for the guitar, it's actually quite interesting how snugly it fits onto the instrument. The piece is in G major, and didn't require transposition to be playable (unlike BWV 641, which needed to be moved to D major). G major on the guitar works reasonably well if the 6th string is tuned to D, which means that a low D (the dominant) can be played open beneath the lowest G on the instrument (which thus occurs at the 5th fret). Very few notes, if any, had to be omitted, although there are problems caused by the occurrence of tones on the organ sustained over multiple bars - on occasion these have been rendered as repeated notes. The sections in four parts are particularly satisfying, although the fact that they are so readily playable on the guitar is perhaps down to the lack of rhythmic variety, rather than any particular skill on my part.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-91554470258416251092013-11-01T14:57:00.000+00:002013-11-01T14:57:11.594+00:00left unity left unity left unity<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Residual political tensions also endured between them: 'Arthur believed in fixed interest rates. I believed in floating ones. He believed in education vouchers. I believed in fees for education. We didn't ever argue against each other publicly. I was perfectly happy to argue for education vouchers in public. There had to be a collective view...' Because the IEA was trying to achieve influence? 'Yes. If you were forever bickering over nuances...' Harris made a sour face: 'The left wing were always bickering.'</blockquote>
- Ralph Harris discussing the early 1970s years of the Institute for Economic Affairs in Andy Beckett's 'When the Lights Went Out', p. 273Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-47535190415709908962013-10-29T05:29:00.001+00:002013-11-01T11:18:55.317+00:00Some reflections after flying over IraqLast night I flew over Iraq. I am unaware of when the airspace became accessible again, but I recall flying over the area in 2006, and the plane taking a pronounced detour all the way down the Persian Gulf, indeed, all the way over Iran instead. But now, the planes fly directly over Iraq. And looking out of the window, as we passed over Baghdad, a sense of blankness; what trauma, what chaos? Nothing of the recent history could be seen from 39,000ft, but of course, what would one expect to see? Perhaps one could read the growth of the city under autocratic rule from certain qualities of the street plan, but from up there there was absolutely no way of sensing History in any way. But what is odd about this is that seeing the dewy spider-web of a city at night is entirely anthropic; all you are seeing is population geography, urban density, the agglomeration of people. As I was carried over, I saw the daily context of millions of people, but nothing whatsoever of the struggles and agony of recent years.<br />
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Then, not long later, a strange sight. As the plane crept southwards, from under the edge of the wing, which obscured most of my view, an odd haze began to spread outwards, granular, dusty, like perhaps the halo of a star when photographed from space. Moving along, it grew brighter and brighter, to the point where the streetlights around it began to vanish, swamped by the glare. Eventually, the source of the light revealed itself from beneath the wings; an oil fire. Burning out into the night, this rusty blaze was easily the brightest thing I've ever seen from an aeroplane, so far away as to be nothing but a silent point of light, but easy to sense the slow pulsations of the oil as it blasted out. Then, minutes later, another fire crept into view, and another, and another. Eventually various strings of these lights could be seen stretching off into the night, interspersed with roads and towns whose nights must be constantly ruddy with the smoke and the light which floods into it.<br />
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And of course, this point is when one can see history. Not only in the sense of the sheer tangible sight of the economic and security rationale behind the wars of the last decade, but also in that nauseating apocalyptic sense; from the vantage point of those vast new planes that carry eight hundred people, the ludicrousness of scale, aisles with vanishing points, gates like ferry terminals, anthroposcenic economies of scale, I looked down at the vast petrochemical blazes, burning beacons of what drives us, seemingly uncontrollably, into a new future.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-90184697048586471342013-09-04T22:28:00.000+01:002013-09-04T22:29:27.416+01:00Some idle sketchesSo here's a couple of little musical items recently saved to disk.<br />
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One is a simple sketch attempting to evoke a certain melancholy, utilising a recording I made of the beautiful people hiding underneath the awnings as the Saturday market got unexpectedly drenched a few weeks ago. The guitar comes from a previous recording of mine, and the voice will be obvious to some and perhaps not to others. Those who recognise the speaker will probably find the whole thing too melodic, but oh well.<br />
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And then the other is a hastily recorded attempt at Bach's famous organ chorale prelude 'Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ' BWV 639. This has been transcribed for guitar and recorded by both <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FYMVgOW2XM">Paul Galbraith</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_tMjYxYTwA">Alexander Vynograd</a> on their eight-string guitars, and also by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16UpKPuIrwk">Graham Anthony Devine</a> on a standard guitar, and there's probably others I've not heard. My transcription is I suppose closest to Devine's, although I attempt to render ornaments that he leaves out, and we have differing octave shifts at various points (not to mention him being a professional and everything). Anyway, it's too loud, the tempo's all over the place, and there's squeaks aplenty, but it's done.<br />
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<br />Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-40427611209702750732013-08-29T17:30:00.002+01:002013-08-29T17:52:58.010+01:00Public Announcement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here if I may I'd like to make a little announcement. As of the end of work today, the 29th of August 2013, I will be a full time writer. For the next few months at least I will be working on a new project for <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/">Verso</a>; entitled<i> 'Last Futures',</i> it's a study of technology and nature in post-war architectural avant-gardes. In it I will be telling the story of the last time that there was any real attempt made to work towards a plausible architectural future, in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a strange period when high-technology and first-wave environmentalism were prominently discussed, before both were swept aside by the rise of neoliberalism. Now from the current age it appears tragic how so many of our most urgent crises were already under discussion back then, only to be kept off the agenda for a generation until we're now at a point where the situation already appears to be too late to save.<br />
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<i>Last Futures</i> will cut through the standard architectural histories of the period, which portray much of the experimental architecture of the time to be either hopelessly naive or impotently critical, and will demonstrate that many of the ideas and proposals of the time were more-or-less rational extensions of where things were heading at that point. I'll focus not just on paper projects, speculations and manifestos but on the more bizarrely quotidian examples of these ideas, to further stress the concreteness of these lost directions. In so doing, I hope to further develop ideas from The Architecture of Failure <i>(which you can still <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/architecture-of-failure-the">buy</a>)</i> which searched for a synthesis between romantic and modernist concepts of architecture, and how important this task might actually be for us. Expect cybernetics, drop outs, hippies, mass-housing, biospheres, space frames, situationists, countercultures, technocrats, environmentalists, dialectics, disasters and defeats...<br />
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Thing is though; it's now been half a decade since I finished my post-grad, and well over three years since I submitted the manuscript for my first book. In the intervening time a lot has happened, but it also feels as though time has stood completely still, at least compared to how fast it moved as I went through education. I basically fell into a day job as I was finishing off the manuscript, and it has taken this long for me just to be in the position to take the opportunity to write another one. In the meantime I've written hundreds of thousands of words, for <a href="http://www.iconeye.com/">Icon</a> and for all manner of other publications, I've interviewed many of the biggest names in architecture, I've visited new buildings all over the place, I've lectured across Europe, I've appeared in national media, I've built (with friends) various installations and small projects, and all the while I was working four days a week in an office. Add to that the slow background work of learning a completely different method of playing music, some really rather miserable experiences of various kinds along the way, and finally a period of being gravely ill and needless to say, I'm pretty exhausted.<br />
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Obviously one should never play the what-if game, but it's difficult to know how working at a pretty intense job while simultaneously trying to fit some kind of career as a writer around that would stand up, compared to some of the other options that were available to a post-grad architect floundering around in the maelstrom immediately after the crash five years ago. Perhaps, like some, he ought to have fled the country to doss about in Berlin, in which case god only knows what he'd be doing now, or maybe he should have dived straight into a PhD, which would most likely have had the word 'haunting' in the title, and would now be complete, giving him the rapidly evaporating academic world to thrash around in. Either way it certainly feels that in the last few years developing intellectually or critically has been almost impossible with the demands consistently made on my time. But never mind; these are worthless counterfactuals, of course I'm not doing too badly after all, and as everybody knows, <i>"This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds."</i><br />
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So for now I'll be trying to knuckle down and get stuck into this new book, and hopefully there will be opportunities to do some interesting projects in the meantime. If you're around say hello, and let's see if something good can happen even in these worsening times.<br />
<br />Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-57662303122337276752013-07-15T23:26:00.002+01:002013-07-16T20:41:12.813+01:00J.S.Bach - Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein - guitar<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F100768927" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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It's been half a year since I recorded anything, which surprised me when I realised it. I've been playing in the background, trying to keep practicing, when I can fit it into the gaps between 'real' work and life. I certainly haven't transcribed anything recently, but the other day, when working on 'Ich Ruf' zu dir, herr Jesu Christ', which has been regularly <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FYMVgOW2XM">transcribed by others</a>, I had a first listen to the full set of Bach Chorale Preludes, and one in particular just jumped out at me.<br />
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'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein' <i>(When we are in our greatest distress) </i>BWV641<i> </i>is unique amongst these organ works for its highly ornamented melody, giving it a most <i>cantabile </i>quality<i>, </i>indeed the steadiness of the accompaniment gives me the impression slightly of an operatic <i>recitativo</i>. To me it has a lot in common with the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtGhx_rBg5U">Andante from solo violin sonata BWV1003</a>, with their slow pulses and achingly sad major tonality, and of course, when <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPMeBNU9fes">played on the organ</a>, it has an unmistakably funereal air, and as the highly church-like final cadence fades out I always half expect a minister or priest to commence with a solemn eulogy.<br />
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Musically it never strays far from home, only briefly making its way out into the dominant and relative minor keys, but it has certainly hints of that same modal feeling which makes music like the Heiliger Dankgesang so very very powerful, and I'm I can hear hints of the suspensions which mean 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' makes my hair stand on end every single time.<br />
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I swapped the key from G into D, as you so often have to do with the guitar, but I was most surprised to find that the melody was thus reasonably comfortably brought into the range of the instrument. The pedal line only required a few octave jumps to fit, and luckily the important descending melodies didn't have to be broken across octaves. The inner voices required a bit more tweaking - long held notes don't really make sense on a plucked instrument, so the <i>recitativo </i>aspect is more pronounced, and occasionally the voices had to be swapped. It's also not that easy; four part harmony on a guitar never is, even at a slow tempo, so there are the usual scrapes, pauses and mistakes that come from being an amateur. But it's a most exquisite piece of music, and I'm pleased that it can be played on the guitar without <i>too</i> much fuss.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-45808413868433622012013-06-29T15:43:00.003+01:002013-06-29T15:48:52.746+01:00Unbuilding Britain<h3>
"There's a revolution going on in our cities."</h3>
By now, I would expect that you’ve all seen ‘On the Brandwagon’, a programme by Jonathan Meades from 2007. In it, he decries the ‘pseudomodern’ architecture that took over our inner cities in the 00s boom, both on the level of its pandering jollity, and also on the basically more dangerous level of what he described as “the soufflé economy”. The film is curmudgeonly negative about pretty much all the developments in built environment culture over the whole of that decade, which is perhaps why so many of us like it so much.<br />
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But I’ve dug out perhaps an even more damning document from the boom, one which is more incriminating because of the obliviousness of some of the protagonists. It’s a television programme called ‘Building Britain’. Also broadcast in 2007 (so presumably made before the first cracks appeared in the subsequently shattered world economy), it is an investigation into the differing fortunes of the neighbouring cities of Leeds and Bradford. At this point in time, Leeds was in the middle of a high rise building frenzy, with luxury flats popping up all over town, while Bradford was only just getting used to the gigantic hole that Westfield had left after demolishing a large patch of the city centre, and before building a new shopping centre for the city.<br />
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Building Britain was a vehicle for Linda Barker, herself a Bradfordian, who at that time was best known for her work on the BBC’s long running ‘home makeover’ show Changing Rooms, which did much to open the doors to the flood of ‘property porn’ programmes that would clog up the schedules for most of the 00s. Indeed, Building Britain is at least partially interesting for being a reminder of a certain mood in pre-crash television, with shots of her purposefully striding down streets accompanied by obnoxious shuffle-y 90s trip hop music, which even by that stage hadn’t been properly killed off. Thankfully she’s not asking us to “join me on a journey”, and actually, over the course of the show she comes off rather well in the hindsight stakes, being rather more critical than you might expect from a presenter of fluffy daytime television.<br />
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On the Brandwagon concludes with footage of the Paris Banlieu riots of 2005, expressing the belief (partially borne out) that the regeneration industry and its massive investment in inner cities would lead to a similarly disastrous neglect of the peripherique. Building Britain, on the other hand, begins with footage of the 2001 Bradford riots, suggesting that a nadir had already been reached, and that upward was about the only direction it could go. As a further sign of things not being able to get much worse, Barker passes the Westfield site, which, half-way through 2013, is still a gigantic hole in the ground. From here on in, the pathos just gets heavier.<br />
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"From a ruin to a regeneration icon"</h3>
Barker’s next port of call is Lister Mills, perhaps one of the most significant landmarks in the history of Britain’s 21st century regeneration. It’s the project that made the name of Urban Splash, the ultimate Blairite property developer, rescuers of post-industrial and -in Park Hill’s case- post-social housing structures, reconstructors of relics of bygone social organisations as chic design conscious yuppie flats. Unlike some, I’m not sure you can consider them MORE insidious than so many other property types, but there’s something about their modus operandi, their rise from the 1980s Manchester scene, their gentrifying panache and closeness to ‘cool Britannia’ that just does it for some people. In the shadow of Lister Mills, Barker meets Amjad Pervez, of Asian Trade Link, who, with a shit-eating grin on his face dishes out some choice nuggets of regeneration patter:<br />
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“You go to Paris, and you’ve got the Eiffel Tower, you go to Egypt and you’ve got the pyramids, and if you go to London it’s the clock, but in Bradford... it’s Lister Mills!”.</blockquote>
This particular trope was actually quite common back then - it reminds me of being in Dubai before the crash, where we visited the show flat for the Burj Dubai as it was then called, wherein upon a wall we found a sequence of panels depicting the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, then Neil Armstrong on the moon, before a rendered image of the tower. Sheer hubris.<br />
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Oh, and by the way, Amjad Pervez is currently opening a Michael Gove endorsed free school in Bradford.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="283" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/6339971?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=c71841" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/6339971">SuperCity | Picture A City: Bradford</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/scottburnham">Scott Burnham</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</span><br />
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"We really do think we got value out of it"</h3>
Next stop is the masterplan, the VISION. We’re off to see the wizard, although in this case the invisible wizard is Will Alsop, and all that he’s left for us is a big perspex model and a video made by his son, Ollie. Alsop senior came in for quite a lot of flack for his Bradford masterplan (which we are reliably told cost £500,000 - my GOD how fees have plummeted since 2008), for its flimsiness, its triteness and its general implausibility. It proposed demolishing as much 1960s architecture as possible (a suggestion which hopefully now, thanks to the efforts of various critical voices, looks as clearly odious and obnoxious as it was) and replacing it with parks and new wobbly Alsop-style buildings, all accompanied by music from Icarus, one of the archetypes of mid-00’s folktronica, whose glitched up acoustic futurism is actually going through a bit of a revival. There’s obviously an irony to Alsop’s proposal to dig a giant hole in the middle of the city, but overall however it’s clear that the masterplan was intended as a massive confidence booster, not necessarily to be implemented literally but as a certain kick up the arse of the animal spirits of those who might potentially invest in Bradford.<br />
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Barker meets Maude Marshall, head of Bradford Centre Regeneration, a private company taking fees to do a job that should really have been the local authority’s. As the camera pans lovingly over the masterplan model as if it were an M&S oven-ready meal, Marshall does her very best to sound convinced that she has a chance of making it all work, spinning out deliriously naff strands of cant and gibberish: “People think Alsop’s wacky, and sure, some of the images you see are a bit organic, they are a bit mushroomy, but what they’re really saying is ‘think out the box, think what Bradford could be.’” when pushed by Barker, we get the following exquisite dribble: “It’s already going for it [...] urban village, residential market, tipping point, it’s happening.”<br />
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Oh, and by the way, Bradford Centre Regeneration was wound up in 2009 and the Alsop masterplan was dropped.<br />
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"Does that mean smaller apartments, and more of them?"</h3>
Soon, we’re in Leeds, where Barker notes, “controlling development is the problem, not encouraging it.” Barker hangs around underneath City Island, shockingly bad lumps of cynical regeneration tat, and it’s good to see that even before the crash mainstream voices were making alarmed noises about this kind of thing. But even that’s nothing compared to Bridgewater Place, a residential tower around the same height as the Barbican, a shockingly ugly building designed by everyone’s least favourite architectural hacks, Aedas. There’s a great scene though, when Michael Gardner, the project architect, is asked about the increase in units from Aedas’ initial design of 156 residential units to the developer’s in-house layout of 201. Mumbling and obviously uncomfortable at Barker’s implications of penny pinching, Gardner euphemises that “they’re able to deliver a … a more refined product to the market.” This of course was the story about the boom - developers were so unchecked, so cynical, that so many of these inner city developments are spatially far, far worse than the detested social housing of old. Sure, the construction is generally better, they don’t tend to rain on the inside, but let’s just wait till their cladding needs replaced in a few decades and we’ll see how much love people still have for them. In Bridgewater Place’s case, it’s not gone well. Nominated for the carbuncle cup, apparently nicknamed ‘The Dalek’, it also apparently killed someone when high winds at the foot of the tower lifted a lorry up and crushed a pedestrian - an accident for which liability has still not been settled.<br />
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The depressing peak of the programme has to be the next scene, a visit to the property developer Kevin Linfoot, whose firm were the ones who managed to shoe-horn 30% more flats into the Bridgewater Place development. In a scene of almost poetic quality, with shades of The Fountainhead, William Golding’s The Spire or perhaps Bigas Lunas’ Goldenballs, we meet Linfoot in a penthouse office, dominated by a 1:100 model of his dream project, The Lumiere, 170m tall, over 50 storeys high, nearly 1000 apartments, but absolutely NOT to be referred to as a ‘tower block’. Agonisingly uncomfortable on the camera, Linfoot comes across as very different to what you think property developers are supposed to be like - dominant, brash, testosterone-sodden minotaurs. He barely speaks in fact, being basically drowned out by Barker, but when he does it’s amazing: “the profit levels on this building are about half of what we usually work on” he admits, before confessing “I just think somebody’s got to do it, I know how difficult these things are to do, and I want to do it [...] I suppose really it’s something that I wanted to do for myself.”<br />
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Oh, and by the way, the Lumiere never got built, and Linfoot’s property company went into liquidation in 2009.<br />
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"It's gonna make the Gherkin look normal"</h3>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">After that pathos there’s a brief lull where Barker talks to John Thorpe, literally the last civic architect in the UK, who recently retired. However, we’re nowhere near the bottom yet, as we are about to encounter the full idiocy of Ken Shuttleworth.
“If the economy suddenly fails, Leeds will have a LOT of empty flats.”
says Barker, before instantly spoiling her insight by adding, “but one way to be recession proof, is to get the best in design.” Barker introduces Shuttleworth as “the top architect in the world”, a statement almost criminally false, when it describes the architect of the ASPIRE sculpture, the Nottingham Jubilee Campus, the forthcoming UBS behemoth at Broadgate, the Cube in Birmingham, and arguably of course the Gherkin. In the years since leaving Foster, Shuttleworth has been doing his best to make even the most boring buildings by his old boss look accomplished, as he sets out to have a firm whose usp is that they can design buildings which are both vacuously commercial and inanely flamboyant at the same time. He’s known for making some utterly ridiculous statements too (recently claiming that the Gherkin required viewing corridors of its own, the silly bollock), and in this programme I think I’ve found the motherlode. Barker interviews him in the company of some unnamed black-clad minion from the MAKE studio, stood on a bridge over the motorway looking over at the Leeds International Pool, which is to be demolished to make way for the - wait for it - ‘Spiracle’. Now, apparently a spiracle is a vestigal gill opening behind the eye of a cartilaginous fish, and admittedly it is a respiratory opening, which is ever so slightly appropriate, considering the development is one of those ones from around that time which had wind turbines stuck on the top as an oh-so-bloody-green sop, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a worse name for a development in my life, and there are a lot of offensively stupid and obnoxious developments out there. Spiracle. Spiracle. SPIRACLE. SPI-RA-CLE. It’s a spire + a miracle. A miraculous spire! ARGH WHAT’S THE POINT?</span></h4>
But I think what’s best here is if we just let Shuttleworth use his own rope to hang himself, for what he gives us is perhaps the worst possible justification for silly architecture that I’ve ever heard:<br />
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“The idea is to try and make a building which actually stands out from any other building that’s ever been built, so it’s like a circular building, but all the floor plates are expressed as wavy lines, so you get this series of poppadoms on top of the other. I think now with the Spiracle we can make a new ICONIC architecture, and people then rise to the challenge of that on other buildings - I think that’ll be great. In a way the Gherkin London is a marker that says the next building has to be better than the Gherkin, it puts its mark down, it pushes everybody up to the next level. And hopefully the Spiracle will do the same in Leeds, that’d be the challenge.”</blockquote>
My god, so architecture is basically just an excuse for each architect to wave their dick (or occasionally, tits) around in ever more flamboyant loops and shapes, in the hope that that somehow lifts the tide of all design? When people like that are described as the best architects in the world then no wonder the field is in so much trouble. (it should be noted that Shuttleworth, since the crash, has been keen to suggest that he’s against the whole ‘iconic’ building method, but this little clip is just too damning.)<br />
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As if to add insult to idiocy, as Barker waves over at the Pool building, saying “I don’t think I’ll be sorry to see it go, you obviously won’t feel sorry for it.” Shuttleworth laughs: “The sooner the better!”<br />
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Oh, and by the way, the Leeds International Pool, an excellent if -shall we say- tainted building, was soon afterwards demolished. The Spiracle never occurred, and the site is now a surface car park.<br />
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"I think it's the renaissance of Bradford"</h3>
A visit to Irena Bauman is included as an example of a practitioner offering sustainable (in the social sense) development. Not particularly interesting, it at least gives us the following interesting fence-sitting: “I think that it’s largely to do with human vanity, and greed. I don’t really want to knock developers, because they are extraordinary people, they are risk takers, they fuel the economy, they are exciting, they create possibilities, but at the moment nobody is actually looking - I can’t hear the voice of the city.” Bauman’s model is that of a responsible capitalism, which is of course fair enough, it’s a very mittel-european attitude to have, that social democratic sense of ‘diverting’ the processes of the markets and doing your best to feed them back into something like a civic sphere. It’s certainly not a very British idea though.<br />
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Commercial firm Carey Jones get a visit too, to discuss their plans for the redevelopment of the Bradford Odeon, a project that many felt was utterly necessary for the regeneration of the city, as a sort of kickstarting project. As commercial architects go, there’s not actually so much to complain about - they’re office specialists, and everything is as boring as you’d expect in that world, but at least it’s not MAKE, if you know what I mean. One choice morsel of bullshit is when partner Gordon Carey shares his spiel with Barker, trying to sell her the replacement scheme, which at that stage looks like your typically generic yawn-worthy bollocks. As far as he’s concerned, “These louvres which will be multicoloured, are reflecting the multicultural nature of Bradford”. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.<br />
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Carey Jones got hammered in the crash, but are still active, although at a staff level of perhaps just over half what was shown in the project. In 2012 George Galloway managed to take the Bradford West seat in a by-election, with one of his main election pledges to support a local campaign to retain and renovate the Bradford Odeon, which still sits derelict.<br />
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"I think we need to ensure you are wowed and surprised."</h3>
It’s all rather sad really, this story, at least in terms of how the crash has stretched Bradford’s low point into a plateau of destitution, with really no end in sight. There’s also the temptation to feel a little schadenfreude at the just deserts dished out to the clueless regeneration hack, the property developer brought low, the second-rate architect spinning rubbish about a project that would never happen. But gloating is simply not appropriate when over five years later everything is still getting worse for almost everyone. In fact, since the crash the housing market has become even more desperate than it ever was before, with rental misery increasing, and a swiftly rising drawbridge separating those who can afford/inherit property and those who can’t. Significantly, one theme that runs through the whole programme is a total disdain for the architecture of the 1960s/70s, with everyone remarking how pleased they are to be removing the concrete buildings, and Barker at one point commenting on how new buildings really need to be ‘iconic’ and avoid the ugliness of the post war developments. But actually what everyone seems to be missing is the civic purpose and social aims that fed much of the development at that time, and despite all the failures, what we genuinely need now is a programme of quality mass housing, otherwise this island will continue to strangle itself, will continue to allow the rentier class to dominate, extracting wealth without investing it back in at all. If Britain’s ever going to recover properly it needs to realise that housing does not work as a free market, and never ever will.<br />
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At the end of the day, perhaps the most depressing aspect of watching this programme today is the fact that it was obvious even back then that this way of building cities wasn’t working, but 30 years of neoliberalism had removed almost all of the ways to fight back against the ‘property owning democracy’ model, and anyway, it was all too easy to just take the money that was sloshing around and go along with everything. Now what though?Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-65420731188587825862013-06-15T14:03:00.001+01:002013-06-15T14:07:36.582+01:00An afternoon in Newcastle/Gateshead<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Work took me north the other day. I'm familiar with passing through Newcastle/Gateshead on the train, the high drama of the landscape, when approaching from the south mainly rolling, suddenly dropping away beneath the train, leaving you with that stunning view of the bridges and landscape beneath. But it's been any number of years since I last got off the train there.</div>
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I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again and again, but one of the things that is really striking about London is the lack of elevated positions. Apart from a few hills way out, the inner parts of London are flood-flat, a remnant of its marshy beginnings when much of it was neither land nor river. The normal experience of London, so punctuated by underground travel, is that of being hemmed in, with no terrain but buildings, and a sky with no real boundary to it. But coming from Glasgow, you're used to being able to see the hills that bound the city to either side, of being able to frame your location on a geological level. Newcastle seems to possess another quality entirely, where the buildings and landscape are almost hewn from the very same pale stone.</div>
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Where embankments, clifftops, facades and infrastructure fail to delineate themselves, become parts of each other.</div>
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Or occupy space in a completely inappropriate way, with the eaves of buildings almost kissing the bridges that thunder over.</div>
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I mean, what kind of thuggish futurism is this? Somewhere between the 19th century spatial adventure of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the now so reviled motorway flyover, this Jazz Age behemoth is an utter thrill to encounter.</div>
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The swing bridge over the Tyne was a project of William Armstrong, just one man who more or less embodied the 19th century. An engineer, inventor, a rational man of science, a good moral Christian, a millionaire philanthropist who made much of his money as an arms manufacturer, he was the renovator of Bamburgh Castle, a sublime medieval coastal fortress turned into a strikingly complex Victorian residence, and of course the builder of Cragside, that singular, sprawling, gadget-filled mock tudor country house out near Rothbury.</div>
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Newcastle is famous for its female population and their, shall we say, <i>frugal</i> attitude to clothing. Coming from Glasgow I'm used to seeing lines of women queuing up outside clubs on wet, windy, just above freezing evenings, each sporting little more than a vest, mini-skirt and possibly a light jacket held over their head to keep their hair dry, but elsewhere it is definitely the Tyneside lasses whose reputation precedes them. I hate to confirm stereotypes, but something was very odd while I was there - not only did the vast majority of the people out on the street seem to be at most 21 years old, but almost all of the women were totally playing up to the cliche, all out in denim hot-pants on what was by no means a warm day, while the boys all had their faded jeans and pastel coloured polo shirts on. They all seemed in good spirits, travelling in large groups, and strangely were all drifting in the same direction. </div>
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I later found out that they were all going to a music festival that was on that day, but it was a very odd experience, like something out of Logan's Run where everyone over thirty is dead and the youth do nothing but frolic.</div>
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Lord Foster, Foster and Partners... what is to be done with them? The man and his firm have been so influential, have innovated in so many ways that it's almost a shame to be forced to hate some of their shitty buildings, but there's really no excuse for the Sage Gateshead to look like some kind of digitised maggot.</div>
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Overall the banks of the Tyne are one of the most complete examples of post-industrial regeneration, speculative culture, historically aggressive upmarketising. I was heading to the BALTIC centre, originally the flour mill, now of course converted into a large gallery. It doesn't need explanation, this regeneration lark, because by now it feels like we're in a whole new world entirely. It's been more than five years since the economic collapse began, and, you know, depending upon who you talk to this collapse may well be the 'big one', a perfect storm of money and work and food and technology and weather and everything, that'll certainly not eliminate the advances of modernity, but will choke off access to them for all but the tiniest little sliver of the super-elite, with the rest of us fighting for scraps outside the gates. But even the optimists concede that it's the worst economic crisis in a whole century, with still no real sign of anything like normality approaching any time soon. With this in mind, the last decade's optimistic post-industrial reclamations for culture already feel so very far away, a paradigm-shift ago.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXAEqBywUt8">A Matter of Life and Death</a><br />
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The millenium was a whole 13 years ago now, for example.<br />
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And can you see that blue and white and red thing popping up there on the horizon? That's the tallest building in the Byker development. Designed by Ralf Erskine, it might well be one of the most significant housing developments of the late 20th century, at least in Britain. Beginning construction at the turn of the 1970s, it spent over 20 years on site, with Erskine famously opening a community office for residents to take part in consultations regarding what would get built there. At the time the development was commencing it was totally against the grain for being colourful, brash, decorative and perhaps 'unserious', but its design was still effectively late-modern or brutalist in terms of massing and formal conceptions (deck access and so on). By the time it was complete it was abnormal for not being ironically vernacular, and indeed for being newly built social housing at all.<br />
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But twenty years later, after the millenium, the Erskine design language - through the bastardisation of his work at the Millenium Village down in Greenwich - would feed into one of the dominant modes of building housing in the UK. The pseudomodernism, IKEA modernism, CABEism, call it what you want, the apologetic materials and stunted massing, the attempts to pass off Britain's zombified culture of rentierism as European civic living, it was so often dressed up in a cobbled together garb which unfortunately owes much to the experiments begun here.<br />
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And for a shocking example of this you need look no further than the devilish blocks built behind the Baltic. Tactless, shoddy, aggressive in their attempt at 'blending in', there's nothing to recommend them. In their total crassness they act as little symbols of the problems of the British attitude to housing, and to the rudderless funk that British architecture found itself in in the last decade.</div>
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But that said, the BALTIC itself was nice enough, with slightly vertiginous external lifts or wide open mirrored stairwells, and with a number of large, perfectly functional gallery spaces. At the very top there is a restaurant, which if I'm going to be thoroughly snobbish, looked to be one of those places which are so unsure, so slightly ashamed of their location that they pander to a strange notion of cosmopolitan classiness that has nothing to do with the place they belong to - overdressed staff, clingy service, a strained-stylishness to the design. Growing up, Glasgow was full of these places, London has none. At the bottom, the cor-ten steel was looking a little more grubby than it usually ought to, and the gift shop wasn't particularly large. It reminded me of Meades' talking about the glut of galleries in his <i>On the Brandwagon, </i>and about how there simply isn't enough good art to go round for every single city to have a massive Tate-style branded art space. But though there is a truth there, it is manifestly unfair - why the hell shouldn't every city have a contemporary art space? Why should you have to get on the train to London for anything at all, let alone to see some post-post-post-Duchampian conceptualist from Croatia? Furthermore, it's manifestly unjust for places like the BALTIC to face a 100% cut in funding, cruelly forced by directive from the callous shire-dwelling scum who 'lead' us now.</div>
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Downstairs, in the ground floor cafe, my neighbours were conversing on nihilism and sourdough bread. Perhaps it's the same everywhere after all.</div>
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And from one form of obnoxious contextualism...<br />
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...to another.<br />
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Pictured here are a number of the drifting young people I mentioned above. At this point I was almost pushing against a tide of them as I walked up the hill further into Gateshead.<br />
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The arse-end of a Foster blob, skips and all.<br />
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The crowds of young men and women were in good spirits definitely, but there was definite evidence of their <i>commitment to the derangement of the senses.</i><br />
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Of course not.<br />
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A little up the hill, an example of the 19th century civic architecture that is so notable across the north of England and in Scotland. A limestone or sandstone Edwardian Baroque, robust, confident, unpretentious. This building is now marooned on a traffic island.<br />
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Here it looked as though a building had slid into the ground, leaving some kind of metallic trail in the air behind it, almost as if there's a lever that can raise or lower the facade at will.<br />
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In my hand is a postcard I bought in the gift shop at the BALTIC. It shows 'Trinity Square', better known as the 'Get Carter Car Park'. I am standing in a position that a few years ago would have shown the image depicted on the card. Behind it is what sits on the site now, a Tesco super-development featuring housing, mega-market, underground car-parking and retail units. I can still recall seeing the car park from the train in past visits, appearing just as a series of horizontal black shadows against the sky, perched at the top of a hill, appearing for all the world like one of the Northumbrian castles that dot the shores nearby - Bamburgh, Lindesfarne, or the dramatic, potent ruins of Dunstanburgh.<br />
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The Trinity Square development was designed from 1962-7 by the Owen Luder Partnership, in particular by Rodney Gordon, that debonaire playboy brutalist, one of the real architecture personalities of the era (along with but for different reasons John Poulson). Gordon died recently, but not before he had to suffer the indignity of many of his best works being humiliated and then demolished (including the 'Dunston Rocket', a gloriously barmy tower a few km to the west) . Working at the rough and ready commercial end of the industry, Gordon still managed to design and construct some of the most dramatic and masterful buildings of the post-war era, a true British brutalism comparable, as Meades says, to the insolent braggadocio of Vanbrugh. But by the end of the century the work was popularly loathed and despised, piss-stinking, rain-stained, a hellish artefact from the foolish attempt at social modernity that Britain tried and failed to achieve. Let's not go over this again, the amount of breath wasted and keyboards worn down rehashing the arguments for and against brutalism hasn't really got us anywhere.<br />
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And with the Tricorn centre gone, the Dunston Rocket gone, the Milford Towers in Catford awaiting demolition (by Tesco, again), it almost seems like there's a vendetta against Owen Luder buildings. But that's not the case - indeed, the very commercialism of their programme has worked against them. As far as Tesco are concerned, there's no aesthetic or cultural argument being made for demolition in these cases. What has now been built on the site of Trinity Square is at least five or six times bigger in terms of floor area, with units specifically configured for contemporary retail usage. It's a utilitarian, commercial decision that leads to demolition in these cases. But what happens when these plans are made is that architectural experts and aficionados point out the significance of the buildings, their importance to the history of our cities and their high quality in terms of design, and make the case for preservation. To counter these objections, all the councils (who are almost invariably in favour of redevelopment, for obvious reasons) and developers have to do is mobilise the latent public dislike of concrete architecture and turn what is nothing more than a numbers game into a crusade to rid our cities of these symbols of poverty and misery. It's worked before, and it will probably keep working, although the ongoing battle for Preston Bus Station shows that in this world of austerity, the fight for preservation has a stronger hand than it used to.<br />
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To this day, the site of the Tricorn Centre is still just a flat car-park. Not so for Trinity Square, where redevelopment appears to be around 80% complete. But just look at how bad this design is, with its silly tinfoil hats, its jolly multicoloured tiles, its half-hearted stone cladding, its Arial Bold signage.<br />
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its further examples of crass, tired, pointless contextualism (red brick! limestone! it matches, look see!)<br />
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Although across the road, THIS is still there, for some reason. Oh, what happened to the cheap metal-clad, round detailed architecture that tried so hard to cling onto brutalist principle when the tide was turning towards post-modernism and pastiche? It's not an easy kind of building to like, but is interesting for its links to both styles, as well as its affinity with big-sheds, the true architecture of post-containerisation capitalism.<br />
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Too many materials? Stupid roofs? Silly colourful cladding? Privatised public space? Quasi-policemen everywhere? Nobody is going to fight for the preservation of these buildings in 40 years time when the guarantees on the materials have all run out and the wafer-thin stone panels have fallen from their sockets.<br />
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Some more festival-style shops still exist, perhaps because of their simpler design being more amenable to conversion and internal refurbishment.<br />
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And some handsome terraces, perhaps a little to grand for worker's housing, now seemingly home to solicitors and other professional offices.<br />
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Think of what's now missing. And when you consider that take-over attempt in Peckham, where a bunch of posh, white, fabulously well-connected young people want to turn a car-park into a permanent arts space, there could have been something much better done with a partial redevelopment of Trinity Square.<br />
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It was time to go. Tower blocks across the country nowadays are so often covered in noddy hats and external insulating render, in various different friendly colours, that it can be quite odd to see examples that appear to have retained their original sombre colours. I suspect this one might have been tinted, but it's certainly not had the facade re-worked or over-clad. It stood rather lonely on the sides of the grand slope down to the river, with a verdant pathway approach from the centre. Probably not so nice to walk down at night, especially not with youths hanging around in the park, but I imagine the views from the top are something else.<br />
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Elevated concrete walkways. It's a shame how something so placid, such a sensible improvement in management of transit, such a simple concept as the raised walkway, how it became such a seemingly terrifying thing. With those staircases it becomes almost akin to moving around in an abstract sculpture, all dramatic mass and poised line. But of course there is a sense of being trapped, of being vulnerable to whoever comes along from the other end, but that is by no means a given, and we don't go ripping up Edinburgh despite the genuinely dangerous nature of the lanes that slice across the old town.<br />
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Here was another estate, largely boarded up. Low rise, stepping down the hill, nestled in the curve of the railway and the busy main road, it -again- occupied that grey area between post-war modernism and postmodern detail. Massed almost like a boxy De Stijl composition, all cubes seemingly interpenetrating with themselves, it nevertheless had classical porticos tagged onto the outsides.<br />
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It's very possible that the doorways are a later addition inspired by the work up at Byker. There was almost nobody around, although there were still houses in occupation.<br />
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Who knows if these things are effective, but there's something chilling about their perfunctory design quality and the sheer painful depth of mental state into which they are meant to intervene. Someone connected to me took their life by jumping from a bridge, their empty car was left half way along, and there were witnesses who recounted what happened, but their body wasn't found for quite a long time afterwards. </div>
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And across the bridge. At one point you would have been able to see the Dunston Rocket from here, poking up to the left of the image. Gone.<br />
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Di Dodi Die<br />
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And from here you would once have seen the Trinity Square Car Park. Gone. Along with no certain amount of civic confidence.<br />
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I swear this walkway was an unpleasant experience. About 1200mm wide, with cars passing at 60 miles per hour to one side and a 40m drop to the other, and the bridge being perhaps a mile long, it's the stuff of pursual nightmares.<br />
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MAJOR MIXED USE DEVELOPMENT (or not, perhaps)<br />
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And with more time I might have gone up to see that tall one on the Newcastle side, which looks quite exciting to me.<br />
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And back to Blairism. This concoction is one of those science museums that were built up and down the country in the last decade or so. copper clad, irregular, a mish-mash of shapes, it's got pseudomodernist brandwagon written all over it.<br />
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And this kind of bollocks again. This is exactly the kind of rubbish that Erskine was the unfortunate trailblazer for. Many materials, many colours, huge massing pretending to be a collection of smaller buildings, poky windows, a paucity of ambition.<br />
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Pictured to the right appears to be Newcastle's gay quarter, all one street of it.<br />
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Huh?<br />
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And I should have known they'd have a Charles Jencks DNA sculpture in there. Always interesting, always wrong.<br />
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And getting ready to go home, there was a great addition to the genre of 'buildings within buildings', this little British High-Tech pod of shops. Shades of Richard Rogers and his factory designs, with the ringed columns and tension cables, and charming with its filleted corners and sleek shininess. I'm told it's going to be removed, as they're 'upgrading' i.e adding more shops to the station.<br />
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And a train went through, laden with coal, probably from the Port of Tyne. Of course, time was that Newcastle was a coal city, but that's pretty much all gone now too, and one can't help but reflect on the way that the decline in civic modernism, and the sense of pride that went with it, was tied in with the decline in industry, the further and perhaps final centring of the British economy in London. Let's go ahead, be vulgar and stress the connections between industry, pride, social democracy, abstraction and modernism, and conversely speculation, rentierism, 'gentlemanly capitalism' and classicism, deference and so on. It makes sense. </div>
Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-56212153347269998932013-03-18T23:07:00.000+00:002013-03-18T23:13:12.624+00:00Summers on the EstateOne striking thing about the East End of London is how much it as physically changed form in the last 20 years. At around the time that the warehouses and lofts of Shoreditch were being rediscovered by the art crowd, Hackney Council was engaged in a huge programme of destruction, as various housing estates were demolished. Nowadays there are large areas you can walk through where the Victorian terraces give way to a strange, oddly suburban landscape of semis, apologetically detailed, measly in scale and generally nondescript. More often than not, if you scratch the surface you find that you are walking through an area which was at one point a large and notorious housing estate.<br />
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Despite all the much-discussed gentrification, there's probably still a large majority of people for whom the names Trowbridge, Holly Street or Nightingale conjure up memories of concrete towers, crime, drug addiction and squatting, and all the other cliches of the 1990s. One such estate, perhaps more notorious than most, for reasons we'll get to below, was the New Kingshold Estate.<br />
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Take a look at the image above. It shows the limits of the New Kingshold Estate. If you're a Londoner you'll note the northern edge of Victoria Park at the bottom - today an area of high house prices, twee delis, baby yoga and all that nonsense. If you look at the area within the red line you'll see it is mostly pitched roofs and gardens. Indeed, the housing looks like this:<br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/41845311@N06/6890151508/" title="Handley Road, Kingshold Estate, London E9, March 2012 by Cybermyth13, on Flickr"><img alt="Handley Road, Kingshold Estate, London E9, March 2012" height="375" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6211/6890151508_c221d1dd21.jpg" width="500" /></a>
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Which I'm sure everyone would agree is pretty boring as far as housing goes. It's almost trying <i>not</i> to be seen. But up until 1995 that very same street looked like this:<br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/41845311@N06/4124712581/" title="Handley Road, Kingshold Estate, South Hackney, 1993 - 4 by Cybermyth13, on Flickr"><img alt="Handley Road, Kingshold Estate, South Hackney, 1993 - 4" height="335" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2604/4124712581_54c978586c.jpg" width="500" /></a><br />
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Or - good grief! - like this:</div>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdb1/3218470454/" title="kingshold estate e9 1987-1999 by chrisdb1, on Flickr"><img alt="kingshold estate e9 1987-1999" height="261" src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3114/3218470454_2b180ed225_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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But of course if you didn't know, you wouldn't know. The New Kingshold was just one of a great many housing estates now demolished, caught up in the maelstrom of political and cultural attitudes to housing from the 1960s to the present day. But one thing that made it particularly famous was its starring role in a 1990 television documentary called "A Summer on the Estate".<br />
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This, unfortunately, just needs to be seen. The sheer misery which the people featured in this programme are obviously going through is difficult to watch. From the head of the tenants association nearly killing himself with stress as he fights for the rights of his fellow residents, to the soft-touch alcoholic unable to intervene when his 'friend' attacks him and his family, to the images of the decayed scalp (yes, <i>really</i>) of an elderly man whose rotting corpse lay undiscovered for weeks, it's really harrowing to see people live like this. And the architecture gets it too - the asbestos-ridden partitions, the maggots, the cockroaches, the boarded up flats, it's quite obviously a shit-hole.</div>
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But there's more going on; the programme sympathetically depicts the community activities of a group of squatters, acting as an underground housing association for those in need, walking local dogs, keeping children occupied and attempting at least to help clear up the previously mentioned dead man's house. The battles against the council to have something done show both how hamstrung the councils were when being mutilated by Thatcher's tories, while also depicting their ineptitude and general disregard for the people on their hands.</div>
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The second programme isn't much easier, with the story of the woman for whom the inability to have something done about her cockroach infested flat contributed to a nervous breakdown and the disintegration of her marriage a particular horror. But there's more going on again - nobody would begrudge these people the joy they exude when the towers are finally brought to the ground, but these very same people are well aware of the problems of what will come after, with the council barred from constructing new council houses and the questions of belonging and ownership that come with them. Indeed, many people express a genuine love for the estate, with the memories they had deposited there since they were built in the 1960s, their hatred being focussed on the problems of maintenance and neglect and general disregard shown to them by those in power. </div>
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In fact, the whole thing is a remarkably balanced view of all of the problems that showed up in these neglected housing projects; for every well-built Barbican there was a Freemason's Estate, and the fallout of that period of ultra-high housing targets, unproven pre-fab technologies and a sometimes fatally corrupt construction industry is plain to see. The war against local government is hammering these people, pawns in a game to turn everyone into a little tory landowner, and their desperation just to have any say at all in what happens to them and where they live is tragic. </div>
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And yet, and yet... look at us now, in a housing crisis that's battering all but wealthiest echelons of society, a housing crisis leading leading to the people forced to live in 'super-sheds' in the back gardens of these very new-build terraces, where being able to afford to rent even just a <i>room</i> of one's own is becoming more of luxury for young people even into their thirties, a housing crisis with a shortfall in construction of around 100,000 units a year, with new 'luxury' flats often smaller than even the shoddiest of the system built blocks, one can't help but think that if something, anything could have been done to bring estates like these up to proper standards, then that would have been so much better than what we're faced with now.</div>
Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-81526717817141526622012-12-21T13:49:00.000+00:002012-12-21T13:49:25.204+00:00Some notes on Bach.<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8796130856499076" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If it’s alright with you I’d like to share some notes on Bach.</span></span></b><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8796130856499076" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8796130856499076" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are a few little interesting historical anomalies that mean that there’s something really rather interesting about playing J.S. Bach on the guitar. The first is the fact that the guitar is a classical instrument which only really became ‘serious’ in the 20th century, meaning that its repertoire is a) distinctly limited, and b) mostly rather lightweight, decorative stuff, even at its peak only rising to a kind of banal romantic whimsy. This has led to the guitar being a predominantly solo instrument: not being part of the romantic orchestra and not having many significant ensemble parts written for it, guitarists generally perform alone, like pianists. Furthermore, if the performer finds the general repertoire uninteresting, then they are forced to play transcriptions of works for other instruments; this has become an integral part of playing the instrument, which my amateur attempts at Chopin’s preludes attest to.</span></span></b></div>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8796130856499076" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8796130856499076" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As far as Bach is concerned, there are two things we might note; one of which is that as a Baroque composer, the instrumentation of his works are somewhat malleable- there were far more different instruments in common usage back then, and a great many works are orchestrated for whichever musicians happened to be at court at that time. Furthermore, there are a number of instruments which are somewhat unclear - the mystery five stringed cello from BWV1012 for example, or the debate as to whether or not Bach even wrote music for the lute, or rather the gut-stringed harpsichord called a lautenwerk that he certainly owned a couple of. It seems that there is a certain ‘interchangeability’ to Bach’s music, where, especially with its famous logical consistency, not to mention his own habit of transcribing, it lends itself to being moved from instrument to instrument. </span></span></b></div>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8796130856499076"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So with this in mind, I’ve recently been playing Bach almost exclusively (bearing in mind any playing at all has to fit in the cracks between Job 1, Job 2, freelance work, not dying, and all the other things I regularly struggle with), and have alighted upon a ‘core’ selection of works to play. Yet another auspicious aspect of Bach’s music is his writing for solo instruments, for so long dismissed as mere studies, but then so unbelievably influential over new music in the 20th century. It is these that form the basis of what I’ve been playing. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lute Suites BWV995-1000</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I mentioned above, the suites for lute were almost certainly not written for the actual lute, and are actually keyboard music with a lighter polyphonic texture than usual, and I generally play the transcriptions for guitar by Jerry Willard. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV 995 is Bach’s own transcription of Cello Suite 5, BWV1011 with added voices, and so I consider it part of that work.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV996 is a Suite in E minor, with some very challenging three and four part writing, with the initial Presto and final Gigue really impressive. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV997, another suite, is most notable for a long, powerful minor-key fugue.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV998 is the serene Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, a beautifully majestic mini-suite which is an absolute joy to play, especially the fugue and its slow build-up of its three parts. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV999&1000 are a prelude (akin to a minor key version of the prelude of BWV1007) and a fugue that is based upon the violin fugue from BWV1001, one which was a favourite piece of Julian Bream. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As well as all these, BWV1006a is Bach’s own elaboration of 1006 for the lute, which is best played in place of 1006.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Violin Sonatas and Partitas BWV1001-1006</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where the lute suites are often richly polyphonic, the violin works are much more varied - a great number of them are composed of single lines, where all harmony is implied, while on the other hand, there are a number of pieces which utilise all four strings on the violin, giving serious polyphony. I generally play Tadashi Sasaki’s transcriptions, which maintain all the original keys.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1001 in G minor has an incredible prelude, all ornament and lugubrious harmony, a real joy to play, including just the most exquisite deceptive cadence near the end. It’s followed by a fugue, a siciliana and a solid presto. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1002 is rather long, and contrasts a series of dance movements with Doubles in single lines. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1003 was transcribed by Bach himself for the harpsichord, and so there is a version of much thicker texture and ornaments that the performer can pick and choose from. This sonata is completely dominated by the Andante, a piece of unbelievable spiritual calmness and power, one which Bach actually made worse by elaborating it for the keyboard. I was lucky to hear this played by Frank Peter Zimmerman as an encore this summer at the proms, Mein Gott!</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
</span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1004 is the D minor partita, which is most famous for the Chaconne, which completely dwarfs all of the movements preceding it, for good reason: without hyperbole, it’s one of the most incredible achievements in all music, grandiose, tortured, passionate, sweeping, emphatic.</span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gEXN8pLYf5I" width="480"></iframe></span></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1005 is another sonata, with a gigantic fugue as its second movement. What is most exciting about this one though, I would say, is the faltering, heartbeat-like prelude, building from near silence into glorious, churning, four-part grandeur.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oPfZVflJdp0" width="480"></iframe></span></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The prelude of BWV1006 is a guitar favourite, and for good reason. Its effervescent, joyous, rolling rhythm creates a wonderful web of sound that is ideally suited to the guitar, and as I’ve mentioned, there is a ready-made Bach transcription for multi-stringed instrument. In my opinion, however, the rest of the suite can’t really match up to it, despite its charm.</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suites for unaccompanied cello BWV1007-1012</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s a little bit harder to do these ones justice, such hallowed works, inextricably tied to Casals and his grainy, over-romantic resurrection of what were once simply practicing etudes. The least polyphonic of Bach’s solo instrumental works (not counting the flute partita), they are also the most awkward to transcribe. Unlike the violin works, which can literally be played off the stave in the original without edits, the cello suites have to be completely transposed in order to fit the guitar. Furthermore, decisions have to be made as to how to treat the texture of the pieces - the guitar, charming though it is, simply cannot compete with the cello in the power of a single line, and so the suites can sound naked in a lot of places if they are not dressed up. However, that opens cans of worms about how much tinkering one is allowed to do to the beauty of the original. I’ve encountered a variety of approaches, and I think it depends upon what each of the suites demands in its own logic.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KX1YtvFZOj0" width="480"></iframe></span></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyone knows BWV1007! It’s got to be one of Bach’s most famous pieces, recognisable from a million recordings, the background of a innumerable films and so on. I play a transcription by John Duarte, which has become a classic in its own right. He fills the texture out considerably, making for quite rich and challenging pieces, which I think suits the jovial nature of this suite.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bWyrxAZCOhA" width="480"></iframe></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1008 is the opposite - sparse, melancholic and vulnerable, to me it sounds better with its nudity emphasised. I haven’t found a satisfactory transcription of this one, so I’m working on my own at the moment, which I’ll probably continue editing as time goes on.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/W_z8NRbVXTY" width="640"></iframe></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1009 also has a satisfying edition transcribed by Duarte, with slightly less added texture but still a rich and open sonority is achieved.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/zoUg43g-YYw" width="480"></iframe></span></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BWV1010 is proving slightly tricky. The transcription I’m working with happens to be in the same key as BWV1009, and despite me not playing one after the other, I feel that they ought not to be structured in this way. I’ll have to have a further think about this one.</span></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XEN-Xhx8aDA" width="480"></iframe></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I mentioned previously, Bach himself filled out BWV1011 into BWV995, and this is excellent help in deciding how to go about playing the others. This is the home of the sarabande, that timeless single melody which sounds like it could easily have been Webern. It’s hard to achieve the same gravitas on a guitar, but it’s worth trying.</span></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9yfqEl4TCdg" width="480"></iframe></span></span></b></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></span></b>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course, BWV1012, the mighty end to the suites. This is particularly challenging, featuring quite a lot of passages of incredible speed and difficulty, written as it was for the mystery five-string cello (which some believe might have been more like a viola!). Again, I have no decent transcription to work with, so I’m editing it myself. The highlight just has to be the overwhelming, titanic prelude.</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So overall that’s eighty-three movements and almost five and a half hours of music to play through (I haven't included the flute partita because I don't know if I can be bothered at the moment). It’s very comforting music; in turbulent times, both worldly and personally, there’s something steady and firm about Bach’s formality, his a-historicism and pre-modern sensibility, that seems like the right thing for me now. I’m still working on transcriptions but I have much less time for that now. We’ll see what happens, but I’m quite keen, if I get bored of this regime, to start really working on some of the more modern C20th guitar works, of which there’s reassuringly quite a lot. On the other hand I have some transcriptions of Bach's keyboard music (including some quite infamous Well Tempered Clavier transcriptions) which if I'm feeling very confident about I may try to work on in future.</span></span></b></div>
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Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-39951001524487743182012-12-17T11:42:00.000+00:002012-12-17T18:01:56.219+00:00Owen, Dezeen, photography, criticism and its decline, etc etc<br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.0648702576290816" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>[EDIT - For some reason I lost the second paragraph of this piece when I originally posted it - I've now put it back in]</i></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the last week there was a very minor spat, which although silly, does point to some interesting difficulties in the way that architecture is mediated these days. It concerns two very different approaches to how we discuss buildings. It started with Owen Hatherley writing a blog for the Photographer’s Gallery, about modern architecture and photography. Overall this focussed upon various topics close to Owen’s academic work; critiques of Neue Sachlichkeit, constructivist photography and the influence of black and white photography on the design of early modernist buildings. It’s all very interesting, and you can read it <a href="http://thephotographersgalleryblog.org.uk/2012/12/10/photoarchitecture1/">here</a>. </span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it’s Owen’s opening gambit that’s of interest here. In it, he laments that the current archi-porn websites Dezeen and Archdaily “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #262626; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">provide little but glossy images of buildings that you will never visit, lovingly formed into photoshopped, freeze-dried glimmers of non-orthogonal perfection, in locations where the sun, of course, is always shining” - a situation he describes as “disastrous, a handmaiden to an architectural culture that no longer has an interest in anything but its own image.” While I generally agree, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that there still needs to be a proper discussion of super-photographers like Iwan Baan (who recently jumped into mainstream media by taking that image of Lower Manhattan blacked out after the storm), but that will have to come some other time.</span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Within a day however, Dezeen posted up <a href="http://www.dezeen.com/2012/12/12/architectural-photography-owen-hatherley/">a link</a> to this very article, summarising its points, under the headline of ‘Architecture “no longer interested in anything but its own image”’. Rather cleverly they’d found a picture of Owen being all vain and Bowie-ish, thus somewhat hoisting him by his own petard. Underneath, Dezeen editor Marcus Fairs did actually respond, saying “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than being "utterly distastrous [sic]" for architecture, sites like Dezeen are a powerful new platform for presenting and discussing architecture in new ways, in front of far bigger and more diverse audiences than the old magazines (and their hermetic writers and critics) ever managed to reach. It's a huge opportunity.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, Dezeen’s posting up of Owen’s criticisms is amoral recuperation - as a web-business, anything that gets them ‘hits’ is good, so it matters not a jot whether Owen’s right, because it only makes them stronger - and one can imagine them laughing away in the office at the irony of their choice of picture. But it’s also very symptomatic of where ‘criticism’ is at the moment. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #262626; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Owen has never made any secret of his distaste for these sites, although he luckily doesn’t need to keep a close eye on them - my RSS feed is constantly plugged into them in case there’s a press release that I haven’t received. In fact, frequently I’ll receive an email from a PR, and within half an hour or so it’s up on both Dezeen and Archdaily, wording unchanged; which certainly undercuts the journalist’s traditional information privilege. But at the very same time it also wipes out the role of the expert journalist in giving context and narrative to these unconnected images. So on the one hand you have the democratising effect of internet culture, but as we have seen in other fields, this causes a sagging in quality, and I certainly find most of the stuff that gets posted up there depressingly banal.</span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But both Owen and Dezeen are successful - now that Owen basically doesn’t blog any more, he’s occupying a very traditional niche of the writer/journalist, creating long arguments spread over hundreds of thousands of words. On the other hand the archi-blogs have been traditionally devoid of original thinking, but neither Dezeen nor Archdaily are as blank as they were before; for example, Archdaily now has columnists and short original articles, but they are often of cringe-inducingly low quality. Dezeen generally doesn’t speak in its own voice, but the massive increase in filmed interviews that they post up means that there actually is a rather high level of debate being conducted on the site, channelled through Dezeen rather than directly created by them. I certainly applaud this, it's certainly great to have access to people discussing their work, but I have to say that it’s also dangerously flawed. Fairs has made an incredible success of Dezeen, which now has all manner of pie-fingers, selling watches, organising events, pop-up shops, sponsoring various events and even appearing in global branding campaigns for Apple. But at the same time it buys into a rather sickly language of web-entrepreneurship, all ‘creatives’ and ‘content’ and assorted bollocks. It sails close to some very negative practices too; recently it <a href="http://www.dezeen.com/2012/08/14/stepney-green-design-collection/">got involved</a> with a property developer in the East End of London, inviting local ‘creatives’ to submit work which would eventually adorn the lobbies and spaces of a new block of yuppiedromes in the extremely poor neighbourhood of Stepney Green. I personally find this horrid; you can’t claim to be celebrating ‘creatives’ while at the very same time contributing to the forces that make their lives difficult, you can’t promote the East End design scene while simultaneously assisting in its being wiped out. </span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So while Owen is very lucky to be in a position of disseminator of expert knowledge, creating original ‘content’ of intellectual and critical quality, it’s an incredibly hard life, getting harder by the year, as the traditional media model sinks ever deeper. Dezeen have found a platform that works, that financially sustains itself, but it doesn’t necessarily perform a useful role in terms of understanding, historical context or, of course, critique. Is the only way forward from here an ongoing obliteration of culture’s independence from PR?</span></div>
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Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-10945154646950014532012-11-30T01:07:00.001+00:002012-11-30T01:07:42.201+00:00The International Anthem<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F69382424&show_artwork=true" width="100%"></iframe>
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I have created a new international anthem, to be played at all public events, everywhere, from now on.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-67047014280320156482012-11-27T20:47:00.001+00:002012-11-27T20:48:58.602+00:00The Future (in 1974)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i>- All of the below comes from 'Man and Environment', a fascinating Pelican book, of which this edition was published in 1974. Yes, <b>1974!</b> It contributes to the impression that the 1980s all the way up until 2008 were all just a procrastinator's diversion from what needed to be done in the world. Now, it looks more and more like we've missed the deadline completely, and will have just hope we don't get thrown out altogether.</i></div>
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<b>PREDICTION</b></div>
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... the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.<br />
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Arthur C. Clarke</div>
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Logically, the first prediction is that in the twenty-first century Europe will become a single unit for strategic planning and administration. All over the world regional 'blocs' are evolving and no faster than in Europe, not only in the economic field but also in the whole range of social activities. In a Europe planned as a physical entity, the Scandinavian coastline, much of Scotland, the Black Forest, and the Alps and many similar areas would receive priority for conservation and enhancement. </div>
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Perhaps most of England and Belgium would be accepted as primarily industrial; possibly southern Sweden would be the location of half a dozen new cities, each of a million population taken from the overcrowded areas of Europe. The planning of six new cities would call for new patterns of thinking, for no country in the Western world has so far attempted anything on this scale. Development for six million means deliberately setting out to create a new environment for more people than at present live in the whole of Scotland.</div>
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With the development of techniques like atomic blasting, vastly more nuclear power, and underground sources of oil and gas, it should be possible to create landscapes on a European scale. Resources could be developed in a vast and excitingly imaginative way - agricultural zones could be related to the value over centuries of the best soils and climatic conditions, fish farmed in barrages created for water supply, and hydro-electric schemes combined with new motorways.</div>
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More knowledge of the environment should lead to measures for elimination of elements like bronchitis, which are associated with particular environmental conditions. Great scope exists for the detection and control of illnesses related to the mineral and other content of soils. Biogeochemistry has already found some areas which are conducive to cancer or heart problems. Preliminary indications relate these to a wide range of environmental factos, including soil. Perhaps planning will exclude certain activities or uses from such areas or require the dangerous conditions to be remedied before development takes place.</div>
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Computerized inventory and processing of all resource information will have become an accepted feature of man's relationship to his environment. Research will increase in importance; its role in decision-making may be extended to promote the examination of basic assumptions and personal prejudices. Decisions should thus be based more on facts and known preferences and less on vague intuition. Although the imponderables will always count in respect of physical issues, many could be eliminated in the twenty-first century. Design-awareness centres will be an accepted 'institutionalized' part of the educational process as the public-health values of a high quality environment are accepted.</div>
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As more is learned about the diversity and quality of intelligence and man's potential for increasing it, so it may be expected that environmental conditions will be improved to enhance this most vital of all resources. The population pressure itself becomes the source of new qualities and quantities of human ability, provided that its growth is related to the development of man's intellect and his resource productivity, and that it is always borne in mind that he may have to occupy this planet for millions of years.</div>
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But optimism is denied by the assessments and forecasts made for the Club of Rome in its project on the predicament of mankind. This stresses the critical world situation arising from the many complex interactions between industrialization and depletion of natural resources, and between populations and food shortage, pollution, war, stress and disease. It forecasts a marked deterioration in material standards of living of western nations and contends that many of the proposed remedies may be self defeating. The Club seeks to identify and implement policies which will enable the world to make an orderly transition from a growth-based economy to an ecological equilibrium.</div>
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These aims received strong support in January 1972, when the British magazine <i>The Ecologist, </i>vol. 2, no. 1, launched <i>A Blueprint for Survival. </i>This proposed the formation of a movement for survival based on a new philosophy of life in harmony with the environment. It prescribed a comprehensive programme for the long-term stabilization of society based upon self-regulating systems and self-supporting communities.</div>
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Albert Schweitzer, too, was pessimistic. He said: 'Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'</div>
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How then to conclude? In such a vast field and with so much at stake, it is perhaps most important to emphasize man's responsibility, and to stress the challenge he faces now.</div>
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Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-68394462290533742542012-10-15T23:07:00.001+01:002012-10-15T23:07:57.186+01:00Concrete and Longing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm literally running out of London avant-garde council estates to visit now; I've probably been past most of them, and after this post I'll have written something about all but one of the classic Camden estates. Indeed, in the picture above, here I am at Stoneleigh Terrace, on one of the ever-more sodden days we live through, off to see a two bedroom flat on Open House weekend.<br />
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Apparently a rather famous young architect lives round here, and occasionally shows their flat off, but they weren't doing so this time. The flat that was being shown was just lovely though, almost calculated to instill florid envy, with its complete set of Pevsners, its upright pianos, its stacks of vinyl (Schoenberg on the top!), and it felt beautifully cosy to sit and look out through the dark stained timber windows at the torrential rain, so close and yet so distanced. Sigh...<br />
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A couple of new interesting things were learned though; the majority of the tenants of Highgate New Town are still local authority, which is very heartening to hear. Secondly, I had never noticed the clever detailing at the cemetery end of the estate, with large open picture windows looking across the graveyard, a delectably romantic touch.<br />
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Less welcome was finding out that a large underground car park beneath the buildings is completely blocked off: one of the casualties of the 70s oil and financial crises that so effected the construction of the estate was the cutting of caretaker staff, which meant there was nobody to stop the drug-taking and fire-setting that went on down underground. Eventually the council's response was to just block it off.</div>
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Now, if I were running a unit in one of the weird and wonderful architecture schools in and around this fair city, I can hardly think of a more interesting site for a project than a large unwanted underground space underneath an experimental modernist housing estate next to a very large and very famous cemetery. That is, if the students were interested in creatively wrestling with the overlaps between romanticism, high-modernism, socialism and decline that it inevitably suggests.</div>
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But anyway, I'm getting a little carried away there. Not long ago I found myself heading towards Alexandra Road, another Camden council estate, perhaps the best known one, and one where I had previously visited a flat as part of open house weekend a few years ago. But if you approach from the north, before you reach the estate there's actually another example of modernist housing that you pass by, complete with raised walkways!</div>
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As usual, it's worth quoting the Pevsner guide in full on this one:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">... the ABBEY ESTATE, planned in the early 1960s by <i>Austin-Smith, Salmon, Lord Partnership</i> for Hampstead Borough Council, but not built until 1965. It consists of an ungainly group of three coarsely detailed twenty-storey towers, a grossly ugly multi-storey car park and a pair of eight-storey slabs...</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">... They are awkwardly linked by bridges across Abbey Road and Belsize Road, a half-hearted demonstration of the 1960s concern with pedestrian segregation, for the convenience of the traffic clearly comes first...</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> ... Slabs and car park have unrelenting horizontal aggregate-faced concrete bands to their upper floors. Shops, a health centre and a community centre (refurbished 1991 by <i>Neil Thomson </i>Associates) provide a little relief at ground level. </span></blockquote>
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Personally, I think that is more than a little harsh - the slab blocks here have got quite a few nice things going for them, the aggregate is actually rather golden and warm, and there is more than a little drama in the massing of the staircases and communal functions. The slabs also look out at each other rather than over the busy road, and last but not least, there is a piano shop in one of the commercial premises.<br />
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But of course, the star of the show is obviously Alexandra Road, the most dramatic re-interpretation of the classic high-density working class terrace in London for sure, perhaps in the world, perhaps. <br />
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Super-dense, arranged around a long curve of the railway line out of Euston, with most buildings facing into a pedestrian street, it once again banishes cars to a lower level.<br />
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But the section, oh! The section! The ground floor flats have a balcony that sits just about a meter and a half from the pavement, yet is separated from it by a moat, a sheer drop to the car park. This creates a wonderful proximate but 'safe' feeling; a resident on their balcony can feel safe from strange passers-by, but can also provide a sense of sight, of presence on the public street itself, in that Smithsons / Jacobs-ian fashion. Further flats are stacked up backwards each with a balcony, stepping back partly to increase light, partly to mitigate bulk, and partly for the sheer bloody joy of it.<br />
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How's this for a funny bit of detailing? A spot of concrete repair where the <i>artiste</i> has scratched faux-wood grains into their work.<br />
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Early photos of the estate show it clean, and crisp. Obviously over the years the concrete has gotten much older, although it's still quite obviously of a better grade than in many places. The balconies have all grown up as well, plants are everywhere, and many of the communal planting areas have tropical plants in them, giving a distinctly mediterranean feel to the place. </div>
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The little cat you see there was very friendly. Up it came to say hello, cautiously sniffing before demanding its chin be tickled. As I crouched down towards it, it even decided to jump up onto my lap as if I was on a sofa, rubbing its face deep into the sleeve of my jumper, before becoming distracted by a passing pigeon and bounding off to ineffectually stalk its quarry. </div>
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And all the while you could hear the bouncing sound of some turn of the millenium UK 2-step music, all skittish off-beat drums and lolloping bass. It was difficult to tell where it was coming from, presumably it was one of the flats, but no, eventually it became clear that someone was down in the basement car-park having a little rave to themselves.<br />
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This estate is also still mostly inhabited by local authority tenants, the lucky bastards!<br />
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And, to be honest, it's been a while since I've been in a place that had such a mix of Londoners. I've been here for the best part of a decade now, and have always lived in the East, in a few different locations, although my god! you'd think it was actually called<i> 'Huckneigh', </i>the sheer saturation of home counties accents you hear there now: shut your eyes and you could be walking through the beautiful limestone market town of Preening Shitbury, but <i>anyway</i>... </div>
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... while I was there I saw a couple of hipsters, a few old fashioned geezers, some muslim families, various other families of all different backgrounds, some elegant elderly types. The point is not some facile multicultural one, more a <i>multi-class</i> one. There were people who were obviously of very different economic milieu, but they all had a bloody great place to live, whether they were on social rent, had exercised the right-to-buy, or were renting off some buy-to-let creep or whatever. It's not full communism but it's far better than where I am now, and far better than most places. It felt like what London ought to be about.<br />
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And to be honest, it's not even really about the dramatic design, but about various lovely details, such as the sliding partitions at the kitchens, the full-height doors creating genuine spatial variety, the intimacy achieved even at such density. Look at the balconies there; there's built in planting there; you could grow all your herbs, some veg, it's just such a nice little touch, something you just can't do in 'traditional' housing unless you've got a garden, but here it's built into every single flat. It's just <i>well-designed. </i><br />
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And unlike many housing estates, you can still have access to the upper floors here. I wonder if people have asked for them to be closed off; nobody cared that I was up there for a while, and everywhere public is so visible that I can't imagine there being a great vulnerability to hiding, sneaking and pouncing up there.<br />
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Here you see the smaller of the two main rows of blocks, which are just two maisonettes deep. From here you could see a number of cats lounging around on the roof, confronting each other, balancing along the concrete panels. It's also clear just how 'seen' the main street is, how closely watched the public space is, and what with its regular benches set into the low walls, I'm not sure I know many more homely public space in London.<br />
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And here, to go back to the question of style, you really get a sense of the drama, the rugged beauty of the composition, the 'architecture' part of the project. <br />
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Stretching off, a genuine 1970s megastructure, a single monolithic entity, a massive object yet completely separable into its constituent parts (which themselves are separable). It may not be plastic and plug-in but the logic is most certainly there in spades.<br />
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But here's a funny thing. It's true that Alexandra Road went way over-budget, but of course that had an awful lot to do with the collapse of the 1970s leading to bankruptcy for many contractors (even after their free-for-all in the system building scams of the 1960s), and Alexandra Road got bogged down as many other schemes did. I also recall Patrick Keiller talking about his time working for an engineer on this scheme and talking about how the concrete work on site resembled the scene of some kind of trench war, an experience that put him off 'wet trades' in construction to this day. But the real test of a magnificent design of this type, if you are easily blinded by the artistry of the building, is how it copes with its budget being slashed. What you see above are extra units pasted onto the side of the original scheme, built in breeze blocks and standard components, by different architects.<br />
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Another of the peripheral buildings, looking ever so romantisch.</div>
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But oh!!!<br />
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There's something funny here; you can see the roads that run under the building to the yard round the back, beside the railway tracks. But look at how narrow the columns are, look at how spartan the grid appears! There's something very very out of joint there, a sense of massive, tottering weight, despite the fact that one understands the principle of the frame. It makes you realise that in contradiction to what I wrote a minute ago, there is a sense of the 'plug-in' to this scheme, there is a feeling that it could keep going in, that you might be able to slide one of the flats out like a bottle from a rack.</div>
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WANT.<br />
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<br />Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-32577049992916275292012-10-13T16:47:00.001+01:002012-10-13T16:47:26.508+01:00Mahler - Kindertotenlieder 1/5<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F62843624&show_artwork=true" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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It's about time I tried to squeeze one of these out.<br />
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Mahler's <i>Kindertotenlieder</i>, (Songs on the Death of Children), have to be the apotheosis of a certain conception of Romanticism in music; there's probably nothing out there more bleak, more morose, more histrionic, perhaps no more extreme example of the quintessentially romantic intertwining of natural phenomena and emotional states. But at the same time, it is also one of the first proper stirrings of musical modernism, with its introduction of the stripped down chamber orchestra at the very height of the trend towards musical gigantism, and its frequently barren, wandering counterpoint laying the seeds of the second Viennese school's sound world and texture.<br />
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Composed between 1901-04, there are five songs in the cycle, settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, on the death of his own child. The one that I have transcribed here is the first, "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n", with the text as follows:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><pre><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein!
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein!
Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken,
Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken!
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!</span></pre>
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Which translates as:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Now the sun will rise as brightly<br />as if no misfortune had occurred in the night.<br />The misfortune has fallen on me alone.<br />The sun - it shines for everyone. </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">You must not keep the night inside you;<br />you must immerse it in eternal light.<br />A little light has been extinguished in my household;<br />Light of joy in the world, be welcome.</span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><a href="http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=92036">(from here) </a></span><br />
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The music itself is of remarkable contrast, beginning with a weightless counterpoint in diminished harmony, before chromatic rises and falls lead to an emphatic D minor. There are the usual Mahlerian major to minor modulations, and a more lush, textured section with a typically romantic arpeggiated harp part. The climax is a tempestuous passage which slips sideways between chords before dropping back with resignation into the main theme.<br />
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Transcribing it for the guitar is both simple and bloody difficult. The fact that the piece is in D minor means that it's well suited to the instrument's own sonority, and didn't require transposing. However, in order for the piece to make sense on its own, and also perhaps to abstract it a little from its more 19th century connections, I have also decided to render the vocal line as part of the transcription. In the more spartan passages this is not really a problem, but in the more complex section this adds a whole extra voice on what is already quite a tricky passage, with at least three independent voices requiring expression. You can hear that it's not exactly easy to achieve, although as usual a more skilled player than I could probably get more out of it. As with many transcriptions there are points that require artificial harmonics, in this piece more so than usual, and getting the guitar to do justice to the dynamic range of the piece is not easy either. That said, I'm quite pleased that it has been possible to play the piece without chopping huge amounts of sound from it, so it's at least a small success.<br />
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As you can imagine, the undecided straddling of the romantic and modernist views of the world appeals to me greatly, so I hope you find that I haven't butchered it too much.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-13753700245134647602012-10-09T14:23:00.002+01:002012-10-09T14:23:10.403+01:00Doughnuts on Spikes<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FMPXmnK8G8E" width="480"></iframe><br />
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Well how about this then? Apparently it was the BT Tower's birthday yesterday as well, but let's look a little bit beyond the nostalgia for a second, I think there's something worth considering here.<br />
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<b>A Series of Transmissions</b><br />
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Have you ever seen how much the BT Tower looks like an echo of the water towers from the Crystal Palace? Designed by Brunel, and showing him up to be somewhat lacking in architectural skill, they carried the water for the ruinously expensive fountains that Paxton created for the park. Apart from that the towers had various other programmes incorporated; the art and engineering college from the Crystal Palace occupied some of the internal floors, while the south tower was the setting for some of John Logie Baird's initial television broadcasts - he maintained a transmission station and broadcasting suite there until the towers were demolished after the fire in 1936.<br />
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In 1936 a TV transmission station was set up by the BBC to broadcast from the Alexandra Palace in the north of London, another massive iron & glass palace built in the mid 19th century exhibition fever.<br />
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The Alexandra Palace transmitter was superceded in 1956 by the Crystal Palace transmission tower, which occupies a site within the footprint of the original palace, within meters of where the north tower once stood.<br />
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Which leads us to the original tower/restaurant hybrid, the Eiffel tower of 1889. In my book I discuss it thusly:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">It might be stating the obvious, but the Eiffel Tower is the most significant material product of the world exhibitions that still exists. Despite being as temporary as any other exhibition structure, despite the vociferous opposition to its very construction in the first place, and despite the frequent collapse of other attempts to make permanent structures out of the exhibitions, it still stands proudly over Paris. Two specific things mark it out from any other 19<span style="font: normal normal normal 8px/normal Helvetica;">th </span>century exhibition structure; one, it is an almost sublimely useless piece of architecture – it barely encloses any space at all. [...] The other thing that marks it out is its verticality – rather than being an enclosure over a large area of ground, it is mostly open structure. We can perhaps suggest that this allowed it to seem important long into the twentieth century, with the rise of the skyscraper as the technological limit of building. In fact; it was the tallest ‘building’ in the world for almost forty years after its construction.</span></div>
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With that, I closed off a whole line of enquiry. My investigation blocked off the question of verticality and went on with the vast ground-covering exhibition palaces. But there's definitely something about transmission towers with restaurants on top; I may well come back to this typology.<br />
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Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-45079977646283810522012-09-24T12:17:00.003+01:002012-09-24T12:25:18.019+01:00Chopin - Prélude op.28 no.13 in F sharp<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Another installment in one of my slowly moving background projects.<br />
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This is perhaps the most sentimental of the préludes: if we're being a little harsh we must admit that it's pretty saccharine. However, it is not without interest; the slippery chromatics in the base are satisfyingly complex, the major key cousin of the super-chromatic étude op.10 no.6, while the trio features two somewhat jazzy II-V-I progressions with a delicate stress on the major seventh in the melody. Furthermore, the trio features some interesting modal harmony, which sounds surprisingly modern if listened to closely.<br />
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The transcription presents a couple of challenges; the chromatic line at times fits perfectly under the hand and at others is rather uncomfortable, and as it is played mostly on the lowest strings you can hear that I've had trouble preventing squeaks and creaks as the left hand voicing shifts around. There are also a couple of polyrhythms, one is 5 over 6: a challenge to achieve in both hands at once. In the trio, the ornamental melodies necessitate leaving a rest where the piano's left hand part should be, and overall it should be played far more smoothly than I've achieved here. Lastly, the high notes in the last few bars are played as artificial harmonics, which presents its own little challenges, although is in keeping with the way it's played on the piano.<br />
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Only time will tell if I ever get the chance to finish these all off, it'll probably take at least a few years and who knows what will be happening then. There are ten done, there's a good few that are written but need to be thoroughly practised, and we'll see if I can make rudimentary recordings as we go along. I'm pretty shy about showing the transcriptions themselves, but maybe at some point I'd like an expert to have a look at them.<br />
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Anyway, more architectural stuff to come...Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-88092791174831695322012-08-27T23:13:00.001+01:002012-08-27T23:13:15.244+01:00A Trip to NW3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Another brief wander was gone on. This one was certainly not a drift, as it was guided by a certain Mr. Pevsner, whose guide to North London (not yet updated in the latest round of re-edits) was given to me by my father recently. Thus it was an opportunity to head up to a part of London (namely Hampstead) that I had spent very little time in at all, and deliberately see buildings, in this case modernist houses that I'll never ever ever have even the slightest glimmer of a fragment of a smithereen of a fleck of a hope of living in.<br />
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But to be honest, I simple wasn't prepared for the strangeness of the experience of the architectural experience of visiting one of the lesser known examples of the Camden avant-garde of the 1970s, the Branch Hill Estate, by the great Scottish Corbusian architects Benson and Forsyth.<br />
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It's certainly not easily found, the Branch Hill estate. Based upon the description of the perambulation from Pevsner, we had to descend from a pond (once used to wet the throats of tired horses) at the very top of the hill, passing through a meadow after the pavement vanished, and then deducing that the little hidden driveway beside a terrace was actually the route down. Then, nestled into hillside of pronounced slope, surrounded on all four sides by a thickness of trees, the tell-tale white render and black window frames became visible, the signature details of a Camden Council brutalist estate.<br />
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But I have to say that this was the very weirdest one I have ever encountered. Neave Brown on Alexandra Road is a fantastic abstraction of the density and massing of your typical 19th century estate housing, while Vincent Tabori's effort near Highgate Cemetery plays wonderful games with garden landscapes. But while those might both be formally more exciting, I've never encountered an estate arranged in such a strange fashion as this one.<br />
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Even Benson & Forsyth's work over at Maiden Lane (which like no other place in London allows you to imagine that you are in a city in continental Europe), is nowhere near as ridiculously set out as this. </div>
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Because the Branch Hill Estate is arranged as a grid, a ruthless grid. Take a look at the map from the first image; apart from perhaps the Heygate Estate map, with its long black streaks, this is perhaps the most unique of all the layouts of housing estates in London. Each of the 21 blocks on the plot takes up what is basically a square. These are divided into 2 units each, meaning that this is a block of semi-detached houses, stretched out into a quilt, a mat, rather than a terrace. Each house is entered from the side, and linked in one direction by staircases, and then in the other direction by straight walkways. </div>
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Flats are organised with 2 bedrooms at the lower level, with a large open plan kitchen/dining space, a living area and one more bedroom above. The lower bedrooms have a courtyard, albeit a small one, and most of these were highly verdant. But look at the images above; there are bridges that run across from the upper floor of each building...</div>
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... which lead onto the roof of the one below. So each house has a roof terrace which is set above the house below it on the slope. I, for one, think that this is a lovely gesture of communal spirit; assuming that the heavy concrete frame construction is adequate for sound insulation (and it should be, considering there are gardens placed above), then there's something incredibly touching about an estate of such apparent gridded rigidity actually harbouring a complex and ambiguous differentiation of property boundaries.</div>
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At the top of the hill there you can see the Branch Hill Lodge, which was an existing large house on the hill. This was bought by the council in 1965, and is now an old people's home. The grounds are what became the site of the council housing beneath. </div>
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There's something hilariously incongruous about the design of the estate; the strange mediterranean hill-top impressions, the brick staircases, the high-grade concrete, the white paint everywhere, it's almost a joke to stumble upon this in such a seemingly <i>Ennnnnnglish </i>part of London. </div>
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An abstraction, not of some Georgian or Victorian typology as found elsewhere in Camden, but a Sicilian hill village, misinterpreted and translated into a leafy suburb.</div>
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But there is something else about the estate, another slightly unsettling sensation, that is palpable as one walks around. If you believe people who claim that bad design can make you vulnerable to muggings, that a certain layout of buildings and open space necessarily lead to failed neighbourhoods (or vice versa, certain layouts and arrangements necessarily lead to vital, thriving neighbourhoods), and this includes supposed empiricists like Space Syntax, as well as anecdotalists like Jane Jacobs, then Branch Hill Estate just makes no sense at all. It should, by all accounts, be a stabber's paradise. Its narrow lanes, with blind corners every few meters and a plethora of possible escape routes for a ne'er-do-well, should be teeming with junkies and gangs. If you believe that spatial environment is everything, then this block should be the worst in the world; it breaks every single rule. </div>
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But no, it's just lovely. Quiet as a mouse (although not completely, there were a few people passing by as we walked through), and with what one can see of the interiors appearing to be as seductive a living space as one can envisage, there isn't even the slightest <i>hint </i>that this place is anything other than a wonderful little secret village.<br />
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But, to slightly expand; there are probably a few counter-arguments that could be made to explain why this estate isn't a dump. On the one hand, it's in Hampstead, for God's sake. I've no idea what the figures are, but I'd be willing to bet that there may well not be a single unit in the Branch Hill Estate that remains under control of the local authority: that the right-to-buy open-plan modernist houses in Hampstead was too good an opportunity to ever miss. Wealthy neighbourhoods, by and large, have lower crime rates, whether the houses that make them up be made of concrete or of brick. </div>
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On the other hand, it's isolated. Being so very very cut off from the outside means that there's probably almost no through traffic, whether vehicular or pedestrian. This I have mixed feelings about; this estate may be high density and it may be unashamedly modern, but in urbanistic terms it probably has most in common with your suburban cul-de-sac. It may be hypocritical, but I'm tempted to look the other way on this one.</div>
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Now I'm perfectly happy to accept that were this estate to have been built in a down-on-its-luck area in South London in the 1970s, then its fate may well have been very different (Maiden Lane was pretty notorious, from what I have heard). But the only thing that this proves is the tautological point that nice areas tend to be nice, no matter what the style of their buildings. Let us not throw the proverbial babies out with the bathwater here, but at the end of the day, the social performance of a neighbourhood is mostly due to its economic fortunes. Ignore these in favour of some panacea based on how many small shops there are or how few blind corners there are to hide behind, and you're basically trying to sell us snake oil.</div>
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(Just too lush, too gorgeous!)</div>
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But perhaps I should make a further economic point here, one that concerns the project for modernist housing in general. We have to admit that the Branch Hill Estate was a financial mess during construction; problems on site and the complicated nature of the design meant that the budget was subject to massive over-runs. A familiar story, especially for Camden Council estates, but with Branch Hill and others now listed buildings, with people like me traipsing around staring at them hungrily, we must ask what the significance of this is. When you look at the mass-housing buildings from the heroic post-war period, one rule of thumb seems to be glaringly obvious; the buildings that have survived to the present day were frequently the ones with bespoke designs, while those most swiftly removed are frequently the system-built, pre-fab panel construction buildings. Obviously there are exceptions to this (in Glasgow, Basil Spence's Hutchesontown flats are long demolished but the Red Road Flats are only just going down), but a general rule seems to be that if you build it properly, if you spend the money on it in the first place, then it's worth keeping. Indeed; this is the same for every generation of building; we love our Georgian terraces because the slums were pulled down, we love our Glasgow tenements because the single-ends were torn down. Now; we love our Balfron Tower at least partly because the Freemasons Estate was torn down.</div>
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Does this mean that a lesson to be drawn is that architects should attempt to spend as much as they possibly can, that budgets are irrelevant to the task at hand? Of course not. Architects need no extra help in rendering themselves redundant to the modern construction industry. But perhaps the lesson here is that there might just be a secondary economic effect involved in successful estates, that it is not quite enough to have wealthy residents, but that if it's designed thoughtfully, and built properly, then it will be worth it in the long run.</div>
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And to tell you the truth, it was somewhat agonising walking around the Branch Hill Estate, with its beautiful woodland, its seclusion, its large open interiors, its massive roof terraces, its large windows and narrow alleys, its all important sense of adventure, experiment and of course modernity.<br />
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Because one had to drift away...<br />
<br />Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-46633201769924183332012-08-04T12:23:00.002+01:002012-08-04T12:23:59.658+01:00Oh! The Huge Vanity!<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/o_F0fOtIvkE" width="560"></iframe>
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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.<br />
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<br />Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5942458087666977269.post-58545226212077511762012-08-04T11:43:00.001+01:002012-08-04T11:50:56.621+01:00Chopin - Prélude No.21 in B flat, op.28<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Another prélude; this time the slinky and oceanic No.21.<br />
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This is the ninth I've 'finished'. I think the transcriptions themselves are alright, but obviously my technique isn't really up to scratch for some of them, and it's doubtful whether any of the super-difficult ones (no.5, no8, no.16 (!!!), no.24) will ever be possible for me to play. I'll keep going though, see how far I can get.<br />
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Hope these are enjoyable in some way.Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658628800390775081noreply@blogger.com0