Review - "BDP: Continuous Collective"

The following is a book review that was spiked by a magazine. I thought I'd post it up here rather than letting it go to waste.



"You know more Crowded House songs than you think you do,"said the advertising catchphrase marketing the greatest hits of that long-running antipodean pop group. A simultaneously proud and yet self-deprecating statement, it suggested that there was an inherent invisibility to the band that was leaving their important yet unglamourous contribution to music easily overlooked. 'Continuous Collective', a book published to celebrate fifty years of Building Design Partnership (or BDP), attempts a very similar form of humble self-promotion, making a case for what they consider to be their easily-ignored strengths of flattened hierarchy, multi-disciplinary organisation and most importantly, a non-egotistical approach to design.
"The 'good ordinary' is a noble standard in building, because that implies the greatest good for the greatest number. Surely this is what the design of the total built environment should be about," writes Hugh Pearman, author of the volume, exemplifying the deferential attitude which primarily defines the book. This is a positive spin on what BDP currently represent, which we might uncharitably describe as the best of faceless commercial architecture in the UK. To reaffirm the image of the practice in this way it helps that BDP has the history that it does, having been formed by George Grenfell Baines in 1961 as a socialist cooperative with a practice structure including all design professions, or in Grenfell Baines' words; "Technology and Art linking together in fruitful dialectic relationships!"
To stress this utopian dimension to BDP and attempt to give it historical consistency, an essay contributed by critic Owen Hatherley examines BDP's early years in the context of the Bauhaus and other radical architectural experiments in co-operation. Siting them in the milieu of post-war collectivity, Hatherley sketches a narrative whereby BDP were at the vanguard of British building rather than peripheral workhorses. It helps here that we have such striking early works as the Preston Bus Garage, a lean terminal dominated by ribbed bullhorn profiles, easily the stylistic equal of Paul Rudolph's car park in New Haven, or the Halifax headquarters, a virtuosic smorgasbord of Corbusian brutalism, Miesian tailored box, hi-tech serviced office and proto-deconstructivist rhomboids.



However, like many architects of a certain age BDP have skeletons in their closet, most significantly the swathe of unsustainable out-of-town shopping complexes they built during the 80s. Lee Mallet's essay traces the development of BDP alongside a broad history of British capitalist culture. After the aforementioned welfare state brutalism of the 60s & 70s fell out of favour BDP had to adapt to the brash and vulgar architecture of the Thatcher era, a change that obviously pushed them far out of their comfort zone ("There were no BDP education buildings and scarcely any hospitals […] during the whole of the 1980s" notes Mallett). After suffering badly during the early 90s recession, BDP were among the leading lights of the new Aalto/Erskine influenced pseudo-modernism that will forever be associated with New Labour's pseudo-socialism.



It is the very fact of BDP's resistance to egotistical design that makes it so apposite to see them as a symbol of British architecture as a whole. "If at first the desire was to change the society, the model has also been very successful at adapting to society's changes" Pearman writes ambiguously, and it's a source of sometimes bitter nostalgia to compare BDP's work with itself, whether it be the difference between the confident, bold buildings for the plate-glass Bradford University and the polite and somewhat insipid fair of later buildings such as Sunderland University, or in the slow transition from exciting modernist graphic design to the aesthetic nullities of the pastel coloured sketches and banal renderings that we are used to now. Even contemporary design as consummately executed as the Stirling Prize nominated Liverpool 1 masterplan is tainted by knowledge that the project is a yet another insidious privatisation of public space for the benefit of commercial interests. In the last few pages the projects suddenly develop into massive city-sized schemes, signifying BDP's move into the emerging markets and their potential futures.



BDP have found themselves in the news a number of times recently: they were recently named by the education secretary and playground bully Michael Gove as the most overpaid architects of the slashed BSF scheme (a wildly inaccurate accusation), a sign of the massive changes that British architecture is once again going through, while it was recently revealed that the architects in charge of an anonymous shopping development in Preston which proposes to demolish the Preston Bus Station - recently voted BDP's most popular building - were none other than BDP themselves, a situation of sublime irony. Overall, BDP can tell us a lot more about architectural culture than we might think, and the final impression of the book is that what first appeared to be just a banal pat-on-the-back is actually a intriguing section of British architectural history.

Dialectic of Hi-Tech - response!

Well, basically, thanks to SDMYBT for responding to my last post so very quickly. In order to push the ideas a bit further on, I’ll be partly responding to him, and partly looking at another text I recently read; ‘Plateau Beaubourg’ by Alan Colquhoun, a contemporary critique of Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre (1971-7).

After the astonishing paroxysm of Lloyds, where the Marcuse-quoting Labourite gives capital the best fucking building it's ever going to have, High-Tech had the choice of going further in that direction, creating an accelerationist architecture, essentially, or of pretending that this 'changing society' was still changing for the better, and toning down the harsh elements of their architecture in favour of an ornamentalism of struts that eventually ends up in Terminal 5

This is a fascinating point. Now, normally I find ‘accelerationism’ an incredibly dubious political position, whether it be the anarcho-animist Deleuzo-Guattarian type or the trendy-gauloises-nihilism type we see a lot of about these days. Now’s not the time for a proper critique of accelerationism (not that I’d be capable of it), but on a very basic level I think that it’s the wrong conclusion to draw from the obvious fact that while modern capitalism has benefited a lot of people, developing many technologies that even communist societies would use, it is simultaneously destroying everything, including the world itself. I mean; how do accelerationists organise? What is an act of accelerationism? What’s actually the difference between Paul Wolfowitz and an accelerationist?


above: Fleetguard Factory. below: Coin Street

Nevertheless, ‘accelerationist architecture’ is a fascinating concept. What was the step beyond Lloyds? I mean, chronologically the step beyond Lloyds was the Fleetguard Factory (1979-81), which is a far more sensible (dare-I-say-it?) solution to a design problem. It’s one of those early High-Tech projects with a tension-cable roof, allowing for a lighter span and a more dynamic structural presence, most of which look rather sad now, all dirty and unloved. But there’s a couple of other projects that Rogers undertook that at least come close to what Lloyds was attempting. The unbuilt Coin Street plan (1979-83) was essentially a series of Lloyds towers running around the back of the National Theatre, except in this case they were to be used for offices and housing, with a shopping arcade running along underneath. It’s strange because it’s programmatically one of those vulgar mixed-use schemes that have dulled our cities so much in the last decade, albeit in the same astonishing brutalism-in-steel-and-glass style as Lloyds. In much the same way that we hate the client of Lloyds while still loving the building, we can imagine walking around the arcade of Coin Street, marvelling at the madness of the architecture while bemoaning the fact that it was filled with nothing more than Wagamamas underneath banks, underneath flats for the very rich.


above: Patscentre. below: Inmos microprocessor factory

The Patscentre (1982-5) and the Inmos microprocessor factory (1982-7) are ridiculously constructivist buildings with a very clear logic, although again, revolutionising the factory was never going to be easy when you’re dealing with bottom-line architecture. There’s a reason why factories are built the way they are, and there are other reasons why clients might occasionally pay for a Rogers factory. What would have been more interesting here would be the same approach being used for another programme, perhaps housing, or something urban (I don’t count Homebase or an Ice-skating rink). It’s as unlikely as ever, however.



The exhibition London as it Could Be (1986), however, shows an architectural step beyond what we saw in Lloyds and Pompidou, although it again owes masses of aesthetic influence to the constructivists. On the one hand we’re seeing the crystallizing of Rogers’ urban theories – the linear parks, café culture, pedestrian routes and high density mixed-use development (beside a redundant river, natch!) that would eventually lead to Blair-space, but we shouldn’t forget that it was a polemical project aimed at the Tory bastards in power at the time, and Rogers also expected that proper, genuine state involvement would be required to make these things happen. The Blair-space we’re now unfortunately stuck with was the right idea, built for the wrong people by the wrong people, in the wrong way. Oh well. But! Look at the audacity and genuine madness of the proposal, the suspended bridge, the flamboyant structure and massing, the wilful lack of conventional order or proportion; it’s almost a forerunner of one of those deliberately ugly unbuilt OMA projects with the blue foam blocks rammed into each other willy-nilly. As far as ripping off the constructivists goes, one should take this theoretical project over early Zaha Hadid any day, as at least here we have the aesthetic being deployed with full knowledge of its radical political overtones, rather than as a plunderable bag of shapes.


two Bartlett projects c.2004

some expressive Miralles structure.

But that’s not really enough; London as it could be is a step forward but also a very obvious step back, invoking historically radical aesthetics as a deliberate provocation. It’s actually very hard to imagine a step beyond Lloyds, a more powerful expression of building services (as previously noted; the genuine engineering vanguard of the 1960s onward), a building with a more fragmented edge or envelope, lacking even any kind of façade. There are definitely historical aspects to Lloyds – the retained façade, the roof that riffs off the Crystal Palace, the oak panelled room high up inamongst the polished steel, and of course many of its details are dependent on brutalist convention, but its belligerent, alienating, anti-classical, even anti-modernist aesthetic has rarely if ever been approached since. For hints, perhaps one might take another look at the ‘Bartlett Style’ (circa 2004) of architecture; not something I usually recommend, but within this argument it would be very interesting to see a built architecture with as much perforation and resistance to ‘edge’ as some of those frivolous student projects suggested; all those hanging wires, silly devices and superfluous lines that don’t refer to anything whatsoever, they are of the same family as the overpowering texture and depth of Lloyds/Pompidou. Or maybe one could look at the expressiveness of the Catalan Modernism of Miralles et al: the flamboyance of structure, proliferation of detail, warped contextualism and symbolic formal language; one of only a few post ‘68 styles that is worthy of the ‘high modernism’ tag, a deeply knowledgeable architecture that achieves a ‘specialness’ that, at the end of the day, we humans seem to need. But neither of these two avenues are really as interesting as that first flowering of avant-tech architecture, neither are they particularly concerned with the politics of architecture – they both tend towards the ‘ornamentalism of struts’ that Owen mentions. Maybe one should look to the utilitarian structures such as the support structure I recently wrote about, structures with almost no style whatsoever. Or perhaps we have to look to science fiction for ideas, but that’s not really been my style – I’m not a futurologist – but I’d love to hear about any future cities that could be looked at as serious considerations of this idea. At the end of the day, it’s just a shame that Rogers basically gave up, becoming a polite version of himself, with nobody really pushing the ideas further. Knowing what we know now about the iconic boom, he could probably have held onto his early architectural language for long enough that big projects started rolling in again…

I'm generally not that bothered about the sin of 'solutionism' any more than I'm bothered about the 'ethical fallacy, at least until it becomes (with varying degrees of regularity) a massive fib, or at present both a fib and a pernicious cliché.

Well; yes. Perhaps my argument was too strong there. I didn’t mention Bucky Fuller in the last post partly because Foster didn’t really begin to get close to him until the seventies; but of course any reckoning of technologically focused architecture has to deal with him… but still: one of my biggest problems with solutionism is that it basically neglects any kind of reckoning with consciousness, of both the personal and the collective type. I don’t deny for one second that any major improvements in society will have to involve learning from and utilizing the architectural methods of retail parks, supermarkets and malls, but my point still stands that if you articulate a position that is so willfully blank on some of the most important aspects of architectural culture, these gaps will be quickly filled with shit. The inevitability of this outcome is of course difficult to really ascertain, I know the astoundingly negative quality of a critique that says that a theory is only as good as its ill-use, and of course a theory can only cover so much ground; there is no all-encompassing system that cannot be co-opted or applied poorly… If you’re not careful with this you end up with the faux-consensual logic of the least-worst. Having said that, perhaps there’s an irony that I’m not properly appreciating: inasmuch as all ideas fall flat, there’s a qualitative difference between the failure of, say, the ferro-vitreous ‘palaces for the people’, the post-war utopian experiments in communal living, and an architecture whose sole ideology is that it is the most efficient and sensible solution. I refer back to Spitalfields Market – the piss-poor application of what is already a very dry rhetoric is heartbreaking - “This is nothing less than the answer to what you really want!”

Or perhaps – if you’re bound to fail, then could you at least aim high?


So, anyway; Colquhoun’s essay on Beaubourg has some really prescient things to say about the problems of solutionist rhetoric. With particular significance for what I was just saying:

Once it is admitted that “functionalism” is a system of representation and not a mere instrument, then it becomes a matter of legitimate discussion as to whether the values symbolised by this architecture are desirable or not. But such a discussion is cut short by the bland statement that architecture expresses nothing but its inherent usefulness. Any questioning of its forms can then be attributed to the fact that the questioner has not yet come to terms with the “facts” of modern life.

One must never forget however, that solutionist rhetoric is something that has always been partially about relationships between stakeholders in the construction of a building – generally people want to feel that they’re getting value for money. If you went into a meeting armed with a presentation explaining the ideological system that your façade expressed, you’d find yourself without a project to finish. So one has to always be careful that one does not mistake simple business seduction with solutionism, but on the other hand that is perhaps what makes solutionism solutionism; the use of the rhetoric beyond what is pragmatically necessary for smooth dealings with clients and so on. What was that I previously said about those characters from Zizek? There is a reading to be made where the solutionist over-fondness for functionalist rhetoric opens the door for the taking seriously by others of that same rhetoric… This perhaps is neglecting the economic pressure of the construction industry somewhat, but we mustn’t also neglect the power of ideology in getting people to spend money… Going back to the Colquhoun quote, I think that it’s very important that this point is stressed against ‘pure’ functionalism. For the economic and interactive reasons mentioned above, solutionism becomes a foreclosing rhetoric, pre-emptively blocking off criticisms through a language of efficiency and inevitability.

This attitude assumes that architecture has no further task other than to perfect its own technology. It turns the problem of architecture as a representation of social values into a purely aesthetic one, since it assumes that the purpose of architecture is merely to accommodate any form of activity which may be required and has no positive attitude toward these activities. It creates institutions, while pretending that no institutionalisation of social life is necessary.

This leads us to question further; there have been radical relationships to technology before, or at least there have been more complex relationships to technology in the past. Right now, the digital manufacturing ‘scene’ has a much more complicated relationship to technology (reckoning with which is outside the scope of this piece), even beard-and-sandals environmentalism has a more subtle relationship to technology than solutionism does. I will state strongly that a pure, or at least over-invested functionalism cannot ever be adequate for the creation of architecture, as long as there is culture. Service of function is not all of what architecture, or indeed technology in general, does. Culturally, we absolutely need some kind of ‘figuring out’ of our relationship to technology, and in architectural terms, we need something better than parametric wibble and hair-shirt mud huts. The reason I bang on about Victorian ferro-vitreous architecture is because I think there is something there that is neglected that might just help figure out a few cultural problems (of architecture) in the here-and-now.

The philosophy behind the notion of flexibility is that the requirements of modern life are so complex and changeable that any attempt on the part of the designer to anticipate them results in a building which is unsuited to its function and represents, as it were, a “false consciousness” of the society in which he operates.
[…]
It is difficult to envisage any function which would require an unimpeded fifty-meter span with a height limitation of seven meters.

Again, this essay repeatedly makes points that are just as valid today. The first part of the quote presents an indictment of ‘shed-ness’, or the tendency towards blankness. This is not to say that flexibility is bad per se; the mat-building typology, or ‘roofitecture’ are both complex and interesting systems with a lot to give us, and the notion of upgrading and adaption are likely to be vital later in this century, but to abdicate responsibility for programme is not a particularly welcome thing. The second quote is a version of my ‘1889 argument’; since then, depending upon the impressiveness of engineering for the power of the architecture lends itself to a particular architectural melancholy; the hints of a larger finitude expressed by a space unfilled.

And I think I’ll just quote the last paragraph of the essay in full, seeing as it combines a number of previous points I’ve made:

But in considering whether the “symbolic gestures” are gratuitous or not we cannot just take them at their face value as an “honest” expression of the material or function of a building. The Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower were structural gestures, but carried within them the idea of structural economy and minimal effort, whereas at Beaubourg the “real” structural members are in places sheathed in stainless steel and thus appear both luxurious and larger than they actually are. Nor can the Centre Pompidou be equated with the work of the Constructivists, however strident the analogy may at first seem. For the constructivists, the expression of structure and mechanical elements was connected with a social ideology and took its meaning from this. The Centre Pompidou seems to be more related to Archigram’s work of the sixties and its meaning to be in the area of science fiction. This great machine of culture seems to have no ideological message: it presents an image of total mechanisation but makes no connection between this image and the other possible images of our culture.

Food for thought, I reckon. Will have to come back to it, however...

'British' High Tech

Waiting for a train, I recently bumped into a chap I once worked with. We had a chat, and of course when you speak to an architect these days you invariably have to talk about the recession. Based upon his experiences of the early 90s, he suggested that the British architecture scene would come out of this particular trough in a stronger condition. He also mentioned that, in the early 90s, the only two acceptable styles that one could build in were either Pomo, or High-Tech.


Since ‘Pomo’ declined as the dominant force of corporate architecture, High-Tech has been the architecture of choice for business. If there was a block of offices built near you in the last twenty years, then it was probably constructed in this style, the UK’s main contribution to architectural culture of the last generation, always to be associated with the names of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. I’ve been thinking about these two a lot since I visited the ‘First Works’ show at the Architectural Association recently. ‘First Works’ was an excellent survey of ‘critical’ or ‘experimental’ practice from the period 1960-80, although somewhat spoiled by the AA’s incessant self-aggrandisement. In amongst all the usual suspects of ‘radical’ architecture (Hadid, Libeskind, Koolhaas etc…) was a little project by Foster and Rogers, as half of Team 4, the practice they set up with their respective spouses after studying at Yale. If now it seems strange, considering the ubiquity of the style with which they are associated, that these two architects would ever be included in a list of ‘experimentalists’, it wasn’t always thus; the successes their style has achieved have to a certain extent masked the strangeness of their work when its smothering influence wasn’t quite so pervasive.


But oh! How pervasive it has become! Not only the rise of the airport, but the decline of the factory, the all-conquering supermarket and the vast swathes of shimmering glass that house the only people who make any money any more… These typologies and social changes have all been draped in the garb of British High-Tech. I’ve been trying to get my head around this success for a while now – any regular readers will know about my notion of Architectural Failure, and in this instance there’s an almost perfect example of the concept. To briefly explain: the prototypes of modernism in architecture, the iron-and-glass buildings, were primarily built for a number of functions; department stores, exhibitions, glass houses and railway stations. It’s no secret that the British High-Tech architects were deeply influenced by the Victorian ‘engineer-geniuses’ who constructed these proto-modernist edifices, and a strong claim for a direct lineage from Brunel (stood as ever in front of that massive chain) is often made. But this inheritance is problematic, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the utter banality of the contemporary spaces created by our current architects. Just one example; any of you living in London might have experienced Foster’s refurbishment of Spitalfields Market in East London. A more terrifyingly blank, spiritless and depressing space I have yet to experience; this is a version of the city fit only for the smiling ghosts of computer visualisations, a purgatory of Giraffe restaurants and Walkabout bars, ‘media walls’ and used-book stalls that only sell new books by Alain de Botton, all cast in the gloomy shadow of some of the most generic commercial offices you’ve ever seen. When you think that this is the best that humanity can offer itself after a million years of gasping struggle and agonisingly slow cultural development, well…

But that’s enough hyperbole. The only question I’m really grasping at is this – if, despite superficial appearances, British High-Tech is not the unproblematic cultural successor to the Iron-and-Glass buildings of the 19th century, then where does it come from? A couple of texts I read recently have greatly helped to frame this problem.


One of these texts is Architecture and the Special Relationship, by Murray Fraser and Joe Kerr, which makes a very convincing case that, far from being the unproblematic re-enactment of Victorian engineering, British Hi-Tech is born of a naïve dream of an America which never existed. The case hinges around the fact that Rogers and Foster met each other doing their post-grad studies at Yale in the early 1960s, becoming friends and then colleagues. Feeling liberated from the stifling economic, cultural and historical environment of Europe, they studied under Paul Rudolph and John Johansen, travelled around the USA visiting buildings (something they apparently never did while in Europe) and paid particularly close attention to the educational buildings of Ehrenkrantz, early examples of ‘system building’. The lightweight architecture and simplistic rhetoric of this American scene is in marked contrast to the agony, mysticism and weight that you can see developing in European modernism at the time.

Transplanted into the confident environment of the USA, it was here that functionalism began to gradually become solutionism – just take this quote from Rogers;

Returning to Britain to set up our first architectural practice (Team 4, comprising Norman and Wendy Foster, Su Rogers and myself) we realised the importance of the American experience where the architect is a genuine problem-solver rather than a mere stylist. We understood that the traditional European approach, constrained by cultural and formal conventions, could never meet the needs of a changing society that we were going to try to serve.

Basically, in a statement like this you have a complete and utter denial of the ideological aspect of architecture. I mean; if this attitude hadn’t been so damaging in the long term you could find it endearing, this ludicrously naïve faith in the benign nature of technology, this abdication of responsibility… One of the most pernicious things about the Solutionist narrative is the idea that by declaring something insignificant, it will just go away; but time and time again in architecture we see that the cheerfully optimistic dismissal of mere trifles such as ‘style’ or ‘culture’ or ‘form’ leads to vulgarity and re-appropriation. In a mission statement like that above, one can read all kinds of premonitions; not least the impending post-modern concern with meaning and communication.


But of course one cannot merely dismiss culture and form; there has never been an insignificant building. I’ve pointed out a few times before how postmodernist architects are equally capable of working with languages of technology, and in a very Benjaminian way I think it’s vital that if architecture is to improve at all as we move further into this horrible century, the architect will have to negotiate a new cultural relationship to building technology (but that argument is for a manifesto, not these shabby notes). Architecture and the Special Relationship locates the ‘fall’ of British High Tech in one of Team 4’s very first buildings; the Reliance Controls factory:

What was most distinctive – and novel – about Reliance Controls was the fact that the structural forces acting on the building were expressed by a series of slender (and soon widely imitated) steel diagonal cross-braces between the external columns on the two main facades […] The idea of diagonal tie bracing had its first outing over a century before, in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 […] In fact, only one bay on each of the long facades needed to be braced to stabilise the frame against lateral collapse, but Team 4 deliberately opted to have every bay braced, for aesthetic effect […] Tony Hunt was again the engineer, and he pointed out this structural anomaly – as well as others – but visual styling won the day. Hence the Reliance Controls scheme also marked the point at which the structural rationality proclaimed by High Tech architects lapsed into exaggeration and expressionism – i.e. at its very birth.

A number of things are going on here: Tony Hunt is mentioned - he represents a further aspect of British High Tech – the proliferation of excellent engineers in the UK in the 1960s. This is where British High Tech most resembles its 19th antecedents; almost purely in terms of the skill of the engineers involved. However, as I’ve argued before, from at least 1889 (the Eiffel Tower, the Galerie des Machines) engineers had effectively solved the problem of creating any space that human activity could possibly ever require. Although Arup, Hunt and others would definitely push the boundaries of their discipline, it would be mainly in terms of the integration of building systems rather than the limits of scale; a technological revolution half way towards the most recent digital one; revolutions that are less impressive architecturally with every recurrence. The fact that High-Tech could never induce the awe of the original large engineering projects is perhaps one of the reasons that it had to aestheticise itself from the beginning; in place of transcendent size it had to focus on elegance and rationality, both of which are firmly aesthetic considerations.

However, the British High Tech aesthetic is as much born of a melancholy sense that post-war Britain had been left behind by the USA, economically, technologically & culturally, as it is by anything else. Its ludicrous optimism is at least partially performative, born of rationing and the end of empire, as well as being an all-too-gullible internalisation of American innocence. In fact, one can easily see some early High-Tech as just another form of postmodernism, born of just as much internal conflict between stories of progress and crippling doubt as anything Pomo would throw up - Architecture and the Special Relationship certainly allows for this reading, although it doesn’t go as far as I do:

High Tech was at root a vision of what US post-war architecture could have become, indeed should have become, if only American architects hadn’t lost their nerve and succumbed to pessimism and post-modernism.

The focus on a language of efficiency is something that has worked both for and against Hi-Tech. Inasmuch as it was never really genuinely about efficiency, as previously argued, Hi-Tech was vulnerable to being undermined by the very principles it championed, applied faithfully this time. Architecture and the Special Relationship states that one of the reasons that Hi-Tech failed to get much built initially in America was because it was too bespoke and expensive. The very same American ‘can-do’ attitude that influenced ‘High Tech’ so much actually manifested itself in the speedier and cheaper working methods that would come to Britain (in pomo clothes) with the architects of the Canary Wharf development (SOM & KPF etc), and would eventually morph into Design & Build contracts and PFI. These streamlined and efficient legal structures have accelerated the descent of architects from their previous standing as socially-valued ‘Professional’ persons, towards a job that we might call ‘exterior designer’. This is not necessarily a negative development, but the contract revolution has also led to some of the most worthless buildings we’ve seen, mean bastard architecture, not even fit for the render-ghosts.

In Patrick Keiller’s film ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’, he frequently compares the architecture of housing, reliant as it is on ‘wet trades’ (bricks & mortar, concrete), with the standardised, rapidly assembled architecture of retail, especially car-accessed retail. Keiller is very much a product of the time he was educated (mid-1960s), when a radical ‘lightweight’ attitude to architecture was in the air, all tension cables and neoprene gaskets. Foster and Rogers are of course the heroes of this, but there’s also Bucky Fuller and various others. But Keiller’s frequent lingering shots on Tesco stores really hit home; these generic, banal and (if you’re anything like me) depressing structures are like those characters from a Zizek anecdote; they obey the law far more strictly what the Big Other requires of them. A Tesco superstore, with its boring white structure, its boring white spaces and its boring bottom-line materials; this is the pre-fabricated High-Tech future. I’m deeply ambivalent about this situation – a superstore is genuinely the truth of the High-Tech rhetoric, one could even picture it as a socialist’s dream come true, but of course, it might well have been what was demanded, but it certainly wasn’t what was wanted. So, for the umpteenth time, we get to that old mantra of Dr. Lacan: “Don’t give me what I ask for, because that’s not it”.

To be continued…

Architecture of Failure III

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

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


'Arthaus'

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


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


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


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


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



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

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


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


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



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

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




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



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

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

the Infomart Uncanny

One of my main theses, if not my main thesis, is that the 19th century iron-and-glass building is even now one of the most significant phenomena in architectural culture. If you’ll allow me a cheap metaphor, their reflective surfaces act as prisms that have the potential to refract our understandings of modernity, technology, commerce, ideology, power, history, etc… They are not empty signifiers like the Ode to Joy, another problematically iconic 19th century cultural achievement, but they can be and have been seen in different ways at different times.

Regarding technology, the link between the Crystal Palace itself and Hi-Tech architecture is a strong one; there is a very powerful and settled image of the Victorian Engineer-Genius such as Paxton or Brunel as the forerunner of our giants of architecture, Foster, Rogers, Balmond, via people like Buckminster Fuller and so on; what at another point I would like to properly define as the ‘Solutionist’ narrative of twentieth century architecture. But even a figure like Brunel does not possess a clear identity when it comes to modernity; his futurism is simultaneously regarded with sickly nostalgia for the ‘Great-ness’ of Britain (sandwiched as he was between Winston Churchill and Diana Spencer in that horrifically vulgar 2002 BBC poll).

Another example of this strange forwards and backwards straining of modernity is the Infomart building in Dallas, Texas. Completed in 1985, slap bang in the middle of the most horrid phase of Pomo architecture, it is a pastiche of the Crystal Palace. Like much postmodern architecture it combines the cheapness of then-contemporary commercial construction techniques with ‘historic reference’, although in this case rather than generic historical signifiers like keystones or pediments there is actually only one source of reference. As the building is large, square planned and generic, this reference is achieved mostly through the detailing of the curtain wall along the façade, although it features a few small vaulted rooms and a single large atrium that comes complete with a replica of the Crystal Fountain from the CP (made by the same company, Barovier-Toso). The building certainly doesn’t achieve the dizzying internal vistas and rhythms of the original.

But how perfect an example of architecture as a self-legitimising activity! The Informart was built as the ‘world’s first successful technology community’, and is specifically filled with telecoms companies, IT, software companies and so on… Housing an industry that was still very young, and whose future significance was not at all guaranteed, the building uses the Crystal Palace in a ridiculously ideological way:

INFOMART opened in 1985 as a permanent trade center for the information technology industry. Covering 1.6 million square feet, the building was modeled after London’s Crystal Palace, the site of the first World’s Fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851. Like the Crystal Palace, INFOMART Dallas is a stunning landmark whose bold design and elegant seven-story atrium reflect the forward-thinking purpose for which the building was constructed. For this reason, England’s Parliament has declared INFOMART Dallas as the official successor Crystal Palace.

Now, quickly passing over the most obvious error (England doesn’t actually have a parliament, let alone one that would need to judge an ‘official’ successor to the CP), there is another significant fail; much as it is easy to understand the attempt at channelling (conjuring?) the historical power of the first ‘World’s Fair’ building, akin to digging up the bones of a giant so that one can attempt to stand on their shoulders, the Infomart building wasn’t modelled after the Great Exhibition at all. The multiple vaults are rather copies of the ill-fated, sprawling melancholy of the Sydenham Palace of 1854, a building which -despite being constructed from the same iron and glass as its earlier incarnation - was a much more complex and uncertain building than the shed of 1851. This has a historical echo in the fact that the Infomart was for a long time considered a failure, a “a huge silver and white elephant.”

There’s another level to the unintended significance of the Infomart building. It may well have been seen as pretty damn modern at the time, but this was only a couple of years after Beauborg & Lloyds, or Willis Faber Dumas and the HSBC building. The supposedly egalitarian transparency of British Hi-Tech was not yet the all-suitable architecture of choice for commerce that it would later become. In retrospect the Infomart building looks doubly dated- both explicitly historicist and also now deeply unfashionable, part of a stream of design that ran dry. That one of the first physical gestures of the new immaterial landscape of the digital age would be so awkward, so insecure, is perhaps apt.

“If Infomart is a cultural symbol at all, it surely represents high tech’s lack of self-confidence, its ambivalence about the present and the future, and its consequent neet to establish close ties to the past. Infomart’s intriguing façade thus remains merely a façade.”

Howard P. Segal, The Cultural Contradictions of High Tech, in Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism, 1994


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Historicist Hi-Tech

Now of course the bridge is one of the most virtuosic of engineers' structures. There is perhaps a tendency to assume that utilitarian structures are semiotically blank, have no significance, solutionism at its most pure. But of course, it's never really as clean as this.


Take the Milau viaduct in France, designed by Michel Virlogeux and Foster's. This is big, it's big, it's unbelievably big. It's also blank. Over 300 meters high, stripped down, almost minimal, if anything that bloody big could be said to be minimal. It makes a virtue of its simplicity, its lack of fuss, its attention to function.

But of course, you can see that it has Foster's written all over it, the type and shape of concrete, the curved section, the guard rails, we recognise in them an architectural language just like any other. There is only so far you can follow the logic of functionalism before you're left with purely aesthetic choices. In which case, the architect just covers their tracks with solutionist rhetoric; you see, it absolutely HAD to be this way.




But here's an interesting thing. This is Francis Soler, Jérôme Lauth and Vincent Jacob's entry to the same design competition. Francis Soler is one of the new ornamentalists, his Ministry of Culture project in Paris is covered in a perforated latticework that is reminiscent of Guimard, and this project is remarkable for its attempt to invoke a previous language, in a structure often thought to be purely functional. Don't forget how massive the span and distance of this viaduct is, and think of the effect of this filigree structure when viewed from the distance. And of course, it's steeped in history, it's an evocation of Eiffel, transforming his bridges and towers into what is simultaneously a work of post-modern reference and hi-tech trickery. It's also a little reminiscent of Nouvel's Institute of the Arab World, also in Paris, what with its super-tech responsive mashrabiya.


Basically, a project like Soler's, both unprecedented and also entirely familiar (uncanny, perhaps? maybe not...), a project like this undermines the Hi-Tech insistence in the ideological emptiness of solutionism.