Unbuilding Britain

"There's a revolution going on in our cities."

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.

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.



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.

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.

"From a ruin to a regeneration icon"

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:

“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!”.

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.

Oh, and by the way, Amjad Pervez is currently opening a Michael Gove endorsed free school in Bradford.


SuperCity | Picture A City: Bradford from Scott Burnham on Vimeo.

"We really do think we got value out of it"

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.

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.”

Oh, and by the way, Bradford Centre Regeneration was wound up in 2009 and the Alsop masterplan was dropped.

"Does that mean smaller apartments, and more of them?"

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.

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.”

Oh, and by the way, the Lumiere never got built, and Linfoot’s property company went into liquidation in 2009.

"It's gonna make the Gherkin look 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?

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:

“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.”

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.)

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!”

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.

"I think it's the renaissance of Bradford"

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.

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.

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.

"I think we need to ensure you are wowed and surprised."

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.

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?

More Olympic cash in tie in nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad News Travels Fast...

...in an upward direction.

More thoughts on the 'twisted thing'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Zaha Hadid Architects - Purveyors of Architectural Melancholy

I was recently back up in Glasgow for a couple of days, and in that time I noticed that the new Transport Museum is getting closer to completion. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, it promises to be a rather expensive piece-of-shit of a building, and is generally a bit of a shame.



I’ve already discussed ZHA a number of times here, often in regards to unwittingly interesting things that they’ve done, such as the accidental brutalism of LF1 and the Wolfsburg museum (which I shall only even consider visiting once it has become seriously rotten) and I suppose that this counts as a continuation of the series. The more I think about it though, the more I consider just how truly ridiculous an architectural practice they are, the more I’m beginning to think that she, Patrick and all the rest of them are geniuses after all, just not at all in the way that they would like to think that they are. ZHA are conceptual architects, not because their ideas are particularly intelligent (bet you can't wait to have PS tell us what it’s all about), but because their over-attachment to a certain architectural ideology leads to results that are so ludicrous that they tell you far more about the world in which they appear than a more serious, successful piece of architecture could. Like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, the success of their blatant shit-ness speaks volumes about the state of their field, its ideologies and economies.



"They used to build stuff here..."

So; down by the River Clyde, on a site once occupied by docks, shipyards and all the usual riverside industry, there has been quite a lot of ‘regeneration’ recently. In this ‘award winning’ district (whose grasping, blubbering website is worth a look of despair), where once stood the incredible Meadowside Granaries (some of the biggest brick buildings ever built in Europe), there are now just some ghastly generic yuppiedromes, isolated from the rest of the city by the expressway, with no shops, through routes, nothing. Just across the mouth of the Kelvin from all this is the site for the new transport museum, on a site that once accommodated a couple of ugly black distribution sheds.



Brandwagon Jumping

The competition for the building was won in 2004, after Charles Gordon, the leader of Glasgow City Council, in a typically small-minded and vulgar attempt to jump on the brandwagon made clear that they wanted it to be built by an international starchitect. So despite the legitimate and prescient public complaints of Alan Murray (“I doubt if the international architects […] will consider a £40m museum project in Glasgow as the most important in their offices”), they bypassed the considered, clever, if somewhat dull project of Gareth Hoskins, one of the leading Scottish ‘Polite Modernists’, a man who evidently knows his GKC from his KFC. It’s a shame, because Hoskins’ project had more sensitivity to the continuity of cultural context of the Clyde, was leagues more sophisticated than Zaha’s proposal, and would probably have been cheaper as well. But oh well, if you’re that committed to the ideologies of regeneration, of which Meades’ deconstruction is still unsurpassed, then any old shiny piece-of-shit will do.

So what was the idea behind the project? At first glance, which is generally all that a sight-bite needs, the building is a ‘squiggly shed’. But there must be something more to it than that, so it’s worth going and having a look at the blurb on the ZHA website, which is unfortunately a masterpiece of broken English, vagueness and non-sequitur. For example;

The level of each visitor’s understanding varies but the building and its content remain static giving a fluidity of purpose. We believe the museum’s greater ambition is to expand its cultural context, hence our placement of the museum’s content where initially there was an exploitation of the site to magnify its position on the Clyde and with the city of Glasgow. Once again presenting the museum in a unique position.

With the site situated where the Kelvin flows into the Clyde, so the building can flow from the city to the river and in doing so it can symbolise A dynamic relationship where the museum would be the voice of both.

So basically, it seems that the building is kind of like a river, because it’s situated to the side of a couple of rivers. Great. That’s the best minds in the business operating there, seriously. The building is a shed with a series of pitched roofs, much like any old shed, in fact not unlike the sheds that were on the site beforehand, except it has been twisted. That’s all. Most of the other selling points for the project are no-brainers like having the building open to both the entrance and the river. I admit that I’m not sure what the ideal approach would be, I suppose something a little more sophisticated and somewhat more relevant, but nobody asked me so it doesn’t matter. All that the client seems to have wanted was a name, and a shape.



Weak Bravado

Recently there was an article in BD about the building, whose folded roof structure was recently completed. The article is mainly about the roof, but it speaks volumes about the relationship between contemporary architects, especially icon-stylists, and the engineers who make it happen. The key quote from the article is the following:

He says the competition-winning concept they had to work with was a system of ridges and valleys, which had to be translated into a structure.

Read that again.

So this is what has happened to the Modernists’ quest for a synthesis of the Engineer and the Architect in the last 80 years. Absolute disassociation. The architect wins the competition with a shape, which the brains then have to spend time figuring out how to solve. This isn’t exactly a full circle (the negation of the negation blah blah), but this is a very strange cultural position to be in, a truly postmodernist one. Now of course the Modernists’ quest for synthesis was vulgar and naïve, and of course this quasi-dialectical teleological view of the world and its cultural expressions had to be surpassed (ha!), but is this really where we’ve ended up, nearly forty years after Pruitt-Igoe and Complexity and Contradiction? The best architects in the world as decorators, as stylists? And what’s more - all that structure, all that difficulty, all of the real work of the building will be completely clad, both inside and out, expressed only as shape.

But there’s something else here as well. The BD article talks about the ‘vast internal space’ of the building, and everyone seems bloody pleased that they’ve managed to create a column free space for the inside. But how big is that space? In the spiel on Zaha’s website they say that it ranges from 30m to 50m wide, and is 200m long. So how proud should an architect and engineer be of a 50m wide, 200m long column free space? I suppose it depends on the time you’re designing it, really. For example, if I had designed a space, sometime around 1867 that had a column free span of 73m and a length of 210m, I’d be pretty proud of myself, and I’m sure that Willian Henry Barlow and Rowland Mason Ordish were pretty proud of their work at St. Pancras. But to do that now is nothing at all special, and those involved seem to be much more pleased that they’ve managed to fix all the problems that they made for themselves, than at the actual impressiveness of the spanning-feat.



Failure, Futility, Cheapness, Genius

Which brings me onto the reasons why I think that the building is actually a work of inadvertent genius. How better could a piece of architecture signify the impossible situation of basing a theory of architectural worth on its expression of engineering, that functionalist shibboleth? For a brief, but achingly significant period in the middle of the nineteenth century, architecture and engineering really did meet, in the sense that there was a reciprocal demand for expanding the limits of each field. New technologies led to new building types, which forced engineers to come up with new structural systems. The iron and glass palaces really were as close to that perfect moment as construction could get, but by the end of the 19th century, the capabilities of the engineers had exceeded what they could be needed for. Look at the Paris exhibition of 1889; the Eiffel Tower and the Galerie des Machines were both engineering feats that totally over-fulfilled the demands that could be made of them by society; there was no need for any building that vast, and there never really would be. In a way, this outstripping of technology is akin to ‘the fall’ of functionalism; humans are incapable of living up to this ideal synthesis of technology and design, and it can therefore only ever be a case of expressing something that cannot actually be, of ‘elegant’ (or of course, cost-effective) solutions to our inadequate problems. This fracture in the conceptual foundations of modernist architecture haunts it still.

In this case, the baroquely difficult solution to the five-second long design process is a perfect example of the dead end; of the arbitrariness and bankruptcy of cultural architecture, a seductive design moment, achingly contingent (should that squiggle be 500mm to the left or not?) followed by an interminable slog of realisation, keeping everybody busy. The fact that the buildings that occupied the site previously were sheds of about the same size, albeit of a less wow-factor shape is hilarious, making this an exercise in architectural futility.



And this futility just deepens… the building is an example of ‘Google Earth Urbanism’. That is to say; all this complexity can only really be seen from directly above. Without a spare helicopter, all you are really left with is the façade, which is marginally more interesting than your typical shed, and the blank slug-like form of the ‘swooshing’ S-shape, which meets the ground with all the elegance of a squished gastropod. And the interior, well, it’s actually really difficult to find any images of the interior, it would seem that they’re not particularly proud of it. There is this video, which shows a couple of swoops through what looks to be a thoroughly boring space, populated by the usual ghost people of our glorious eternal present, looking even more underwhelmed than usual, and there are a couple of related images. It’s not that impressive, is it? It certainly doesn’t flow in any meaningful way, and the kinks destroy any chance of appreciating the length of the space. It screams of cheapness.




And the cheapness just deepens… the original images of the building showed it to be constructed from ZHA’s favourite material; ‘generic shiny’. Now, owing to the shortage of ‘Generic Shiny’, and the difficulty of sourcing it ethically, they’ve had to settle for standing seam zinc, which you may recognise from Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin and other buildings. Now, that material isn’t exactly one that remains shiny for any length of time, so in true Zaha style, the building will soon be looking very, very sorry for itself.

But then maybe that’s the point; perhaps there is no more appropriate expression of contemporary culture than a morose looking squiggly shed on the side of a once-great river. Perhaps Zaha Hadid Architects are pulling off a brilliant piece of architectural satire, melancholically mocking the aspirational world of the post-industrial cultural-landmark, bringing forth a gloriously futile, dirty and sad piece of unfulfilling architecture. But then maybe it’s just rubbish.

Venom

There's a new (old) kid on the architectural cynic circuit, and bloody hell they're good (bad).

The ghost of Ian Nairn has decided that no punches are to pulled. It's a shame that somebody needs to do this, but most of what they have written thus far has been pretty astute, in the Charlie Brooker vein. Personally, I think that it's perhaps a bit unfair to single out British architecture in particular for this kind of vicious critique, as it suggests that there is some kind of architecture somewhere else that is markedly better, and I'm not convinced of that one.

If it's true that there is now a definite full stop on the building boom of the last decade and a half then perhaps it's time to pause, take a deep breath, and admit that the architecture produced in that period has been on the whole pretty fucking terrible. Nearly every architect appears to have been on Blairite autopilot, designing barcode facades and iconic rooflines, commissioned by sub-scumbag developers who think that studio flats ought to count as affordable housing. The changes in contracts have accelerated the process towards utter obsolescence that the architecture profession has embarked upon, and have given us a generation of cheap-as-shit tin boxes for buildings wrapped in awful faux-cheery multicoloured kit kat wrappers. Well, at least there's no visible concrete though, eh? The Academy has spent much of the last twenty years pretending to know what they're talking about when they drop various French names beginning with D, organising hermetic conferences where they speak in tongues and convince themselves that there's something new and subversive about wobbly roofs, generally ignoring any of the political implications of the work that they do, while the students spend a large proportion of their short lives working themselves into the ground in the hope of proving that they're worth hiring for free...

Oh well. Anyway; Bad British Architecture is very funny, and not at all fair. People have been trying their hardest, after all...

Cackitecture

I've become somewhat enamoured recently with the word 'cack'. I like the symmetry of the two plosives, and the brittle sound when spoken, like ice breaking. I also like the fact that it describes something like this:



This is, of course, Zaha Hadid Architects. They've won a competition for a new port authority building in Antwerp.

Actually; it's a cock'n'balls:



It won the competition because apparently:

the design preserves as much as possible of the dignity of the present building as a monument, adding a new object to the site.

I'm sorry, what?
Being made into the testicles that hang beneath the new phallofractal offices is not a dignified fate for the existing building. Fair enough, lifting the new above the existing does allow the old to be mostly retained, but retention is not automatically the same as respect. There's no way the old building will ever be 'readable' in a dignified manner now, what with that member-like object thrusting out over it.

This is more honest, however:

the board and its advisors had confidence in a team such as Zaha Hadid Architects being able to further develop the project so as to achieve a high quality end result that can act as a “shop window” for the Port Authority.

Aha, the 'Brandwagon' again. This is about selling. 'Iconic' building = economic stimulus. Signature architect = investment. Architecture = advert. That's all the reading necessary, or possible here. The architectural merit of the building is precisely its imagined capacity for 'selling' the city. Now, of course, this has always been the case with architecture, but whereas there was once a notion of 'grandeur', whereby the scale, level of detail and price of materials would signify the power and status of the civic authority client, nowadays we have little more than shape, as seen in visualisations and photographs found in magazines or on the internet.

The budget is 30 million euros. That's not much, even for a 'normal' building, so the chances are that if it ever gets built, this building will quickly look rather like an unhappy shed that got lost; cackitecture, rather than the sleek, glistening cockitecture suggested from the visualisations ('what's it made out of'? 'Oh, em, shiny-white-stuff'). ZHA have previous for this sort of thing, of course, which lends a certain poignancy to their professed dynamism, but even when it's obvious that Antwerp will get a cheap, poorly built, intellectually vacant and culturally insignificant block of offices, the faith still seems to be persistent that a superficially attractive piece of starchitecture has some kind of magical effect on a civic environment, conjuring money out of thin air.

Anyway, that's enough time spent thinking about this kind of silly cack, especially as the ongoing collapse of the entire world means that this building isn't likely to end up getting built, but- as part of my pledges from new year, I'll suggest better ways of doing this kind of thing:

Now, we're not fans of Alsop by any means, but this is a less phallic, cheaper and more endearing way of doing the 'floating extension':



And this, by EMBT, is part of a far more intelligent way of preserving the 'dignity' of an existing building: