The Hatchet

The following is a review of 'Experimental Architecture' by Peter Cook, written by a 'Kit Pedler' and appearing in the April 1971 issue of Architectural Design:

One of the most disturbing features about the immediate future is the very real probability that people can become agreeably conditioned to accept any one of a hundred different technological nightmares. Alvin Toffler on the other hand has recently suggested that we can no longer adapt rapidly enough to a galloping future and that we shall become victims of Future Shock.
After reading this book I am in profound shock. I find that I can live in an "urban finger" the only justification for which appears to be that the complex has concrete digits. I can crawl my way into one of the convolutions of the old "bowellism", a vertical assembly of hollow concrete intestines with windows. I can surround myself with "fun places", "Instant cities" and inflatable buildings ("Mum, can we come and stay with you for a few days, somebody pricked our living room again"). Bored perhaps with the sheer brilliance of the designers, I can then walk to "plug-in-city" pausing for a quick trip in an "environmental box" or a session in a "mind-expander". Finally, having visited a friend curled up in a foetal position in his glass fibre "living pod" I can return to my own PVC pad thanking whichever guru happens to be in vogue at the time for the unspeakable perfections of my surroundings.
Architects often seem to me to be one of the most arrogant species at liberty. Having absorbed a sprinkling of philosophy and a crude knowledge of technical concepts, they develop the ability to translate what is largely impudent dogma into concrete and metal reality, and then have the sheer nerve to justify the initial idea by post hoc rationalisation. What probably started as an absolutely "sooper" idea in the intellectual wastelands of NW1 turns into a fraudulent justification for a real building where people are rather regrettably inserted.
Mr. Cook's congested text is a minor masterpiece of such rationalisation. Amidst page after page of glimpses from the obvious, there are apologies for each project variously labelled as "on-going", "myth exploding" or just "experimental". If one is simple minded enough to suppose that a house - is a dwelling place - is a home - for an individual, then Mr. Cook's future is not for you. Nearly all his explanations offer a complex reason for the relative validity of the project he is describing. One is interested to note for example that "... perhaps it is inevitable that the satellite piece of furniture which moves as an individual package will lead to the mechanised foot rather than do anything which implies a regular hierarchy (even one as loose as that of furniture: to dwelling: to location)". Do you know I never knew that before - just as law is for the lawyers - and medicine is for the doctors, so architecture is quite evidently for architects.
Amidst all the glossy verbosity of this book there is practically no mention of the gentle human frame. It appears to be a rather tiresome protoplasmic appendage, to be fitted in somewhere at the end of a designer's monument to his own frivolity.
I wish, I could believe, that Mr. Cook had written a black comedy, a private in-joke for his colleagues. Sadly, I conclude that he is serious.

A couple of things pop to mind: first of all, who is behind 'Kit Pedlar'? In the culture of pseudonyms I wonder if it's yet another of Martin Pawley's efforts, sticking the knife in in his own inimitable way. But there's more going on, because it's obviously also a parody of the shocked conservative voice that would become much louder by the end of the decade, and then would become the dominant voice by the eighties. Experimental Architecture is by no means a great book, but the sheer anger with which people would fall back on a vulgar Heideggerian notion of dwelling as an excuse to suppress anything even remotely communal or 'modern' about house building and promote reactionary notions about how and where people should live, and what the house should mean in terms of its relationship to the wider economy, is perfectly ventriloquised here.

If anyone can shed any light on this, please let me know...

Some reflections after flying over Iraq

Last night I flew over Iraq. I am unaware of when the airspace became accessible again, but I recall flying over the area in 2006, and the plane taking a pronounced detour all the way down the Persian Gulf, indeed, all the way over Iran instead. But now, the planes fly directly over Iraq. And looking out of the window, as we passed over Baghdad, a sense of blankness; what trauma, what chaos? Nothing of the recent history could be seen from 39,000ft, but of course, what would one expect to see? Perhaps one could read the growth of the city under autocratic rule from certain qualities of the street plan, but from up there there was absolutely no way of sensing History in any way. But what is odd about this is that seeing the dewy spider-web of a city at night is entirely anthropic; all you are seeing is population geography, urban density, the agglomeration of people. As I was carried over, I saw the daily context of millions of people, but nothing whatsoever of the struggles and agony of recent years.

Then, not long later, a strange sight. As the plane crept southwards, from under the edge of the wing, which obscured most of my view, an odd haze began to spread outwards, granular, dusty, like perhaps the halo of a star when photographed from space. Moving along, it grew brighter and brighter, to the point where the streetlights around it began to vanish, swamped by the glare. Eventually, the source of the light revealed itself from beneath the wings; an oil fire. Burning out into the night, this rusty blaze was easily the brightest thing I've ever seen from an aeroplane, so far away as to be nothing but a silent point of light, but easy to sense the slow pulsations of the oil as it blasted out. Then, minutes later, another fire crept into view, and another, and another. Eventually various strings of these lights could be seen stretching off into the night, interspersed with roads and towns whose nights must be constantly ruddy with the smoke and the light which floods into it.

And of course, this point is when one can see history. Not only in the sense of the sheer tangible sight of the economic and security rationale behind the wars of the last decade, but also in that nauseating apocalyptic sense; from the vantage point of those vast new planes that carry eight hundred people, the ludicrousness of scale, aisles with vanishing points, gates like ferry terminals, anthroposcenic economies of scale, I looked down at the vast petrochemical blazes, burning beacons of what drives us, seemingly uncontrollably, into a new future.

The Future (in 1974)

- All of the below comes from 'Man and Environment', a fascinating Pelican book, of which this edition was published in 1974. Yes, 1974! It contributes to the impression that the 1980s all the way up until 2008 were all just a procrastinator's diversion from what needed to be done in the world. Now, it looks more and more like we've missed the deadline completely, and will have just hope we don't get thrown out altogether.

PREDICTION

... the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Logically, the first prediction is that in the twenty-first century Europe will become a single unit for strategic planning and administration. All over the world regional 'blocs' are evolving and no faster than in Europe, not only in the economic field but also in the whole range of social activities. In a Europe planned as a physical entity, the Scandinavian coastline, much of Scotland, the Black Forest, and the Alps and many similar areas would receive priority for conservation and enhancement. 

Perhaps most of England and Belgium would be accepted as primarily industrial; possibly southern Sweden would be the location of half a dozen new cities, each of a million population taken from the overcrowded areas of Europe. The planning of six new cities would call for new patterns of thinking, for no country in the Western world has so far attempted anything on this scale. Development for six million means deliberately setting out to create a new environment for more people than at present live in the whole of Scotland.

With the development of techniques like atomic blasting, vastly more nuclear power, and underground sources of oil and gas, it should be possible to create landscapes on a European scale. Resources could be developed in a vast and excitingly imaginative way - agricultural zones could be related to the value over centuries of the best soils and climatic conditions, fish farmed in barrages created for water supply, and hydro-electric schemes combined with new motorways.

More knowledge of the environment should lead to measures for elimination of elements like bronchitis, which are associated with particular environmental conditions. Great scope exists for the detection and control of illnesses related to the mineral and other content of soils. Biogeochemistry has already found some areas which are conducive to cancer or heart problems. Preliminary indications relate these to a wide range of environmental factos, including soil. Perhaps planning will exclude certain activities or uses from such areas or require the dangerous conditions to be remedied before development takes place.

Computerized inventory and processing of all resource information will have become an accepted feature of man's relationship to his environment. Research will increase in importance; its role in decision-making may be extended to promote the examination of basic assumptions and personal prejudices. Decisions should thus be based more on facts and known preferences and less on vague intuition. Although the imponderables will always count in respect of physical issues, many could be eliminated in the twenty-first century. Design-awareness centres will be an accepted 'institutionalized' part of the educational process as the public-health values of a high quality environment are accepted.

As more is learned about the diversity and quality of intelligence and man's potential for increasing it, so it may be expected that environmental conditions will be improved to enhance this most vital of all resources. The population pressure itself becomes the source of new qualities and quantities of human ability, provided that its growth is related to the development of man's intellect and his resource productivity, and that it is always borne in mind that he may have to occupy this planet for millions of years.

But optimism is denied by the assessments and forecasts made for the Club of Rome in its project on the predicament of mankind. This stresses the critical world situation arising from the many complex interactions between industrialization and depletion of natural resources, and between populations and food shortage, pollution, war, stress and disease. It forecasts a marked deterioration in material standards of living of western nations and contends that many of the proposed remedies may be self defeating. The Club seeks to identify and implement policies which will enable the world to make an orderly transition from a growth-based economy to an ecological equilibrium.

These aims received strong support in January 1972, when the British magazine The Ecologist, vol. 2, no. 1, launched A Blueprint for Survival. This proposed the formation of a movement for survival based on a new philosophy of life in harmony with the environment. It prescribed a comprehensive programme for the long-term stabilization of society based upon self-regulating systems and self-supporting communities.

Albert Schweitzer, too, was pessimistic. He said: 'Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'

How then to conclude? In such a vast field and with so much at stake, it is perhaps most important to emphasize man's responsibility, and to stress the challenge he faces now.