by Ian Martin
There’ll be rare wading birds, exotic lichen, rescued otters and an OBE in it too, I shouldn’t wonder.
FRIDAY Press conference to launch Twitterborough as a ‘destination brand’. Everyone suitably impressed by the early bar and nibbles, and by the huge 3-D renderings of the scheme’s Intelligent Middle Area, with its glittering necklace of ‘twitterspheres’.
These are opaque foam-framed hyperglazed meet-up pods, encouraging random clouds of online chatmates to ‘coalesce together’ in the real world. Comfortable surroundings, brilliant catering on request, please ask the avatar for a brochure. They will be crammed with earnest media types just chilling out and exchanging ideas in a semi-private little world of connectivity, hysteria and despair.
I’ve opened channels to some Swiss euthanasia clinics, just to see if there’s any synergy worth exploring here.
SATURDAY Unbelievable. Our stupid executive masterplanners for the ‘electronic village’ bit of Twitterborough have submitted a very weak proposal. ‘Urban squares’? In a village? Idiots.
Their ‘frission statement’ is riddled with inconsistencies. ‘We aim to create a real community in which people will want to live different stages of their lives, yeah, which is why we’re proposing sustainable neighborhoods (sic)’.
Wrong. Firstly, we want people to be living through one stage of their life but with many serviceable aspects of that life, thanks. Secondly, it all sounds so vulgar. Nothing says ‘non-u’ more stridently than ‘neighborhoods’.
SUNDAY Newspaper review in the recliner. Good piece on Twitterborough by Darcy Farquear’say. ‘A morally ambivalent elephant in the room’ he calls it, which seems fair.
January 27, 2011
The Age of Oxygen
MONDAY I find myself getting nostalgic for the Carbon Footprint. It reminds me of a happier, more innocent age.
These days it is vulgar to mention footprints, or carbon, but I miss the communal enthusiasm, and the money. Amazing to think now that I was poised to make a fortune from my Carbon Slipper, a sort of loose overthrow for buildings that rendered them atmospherically harmless.
Of course, green architecture may yet stage a comeback – perhaps in time for the Olympics next year – but I think carbon’s had it as an architectural talking point. Who knows which element will next be fashionable? Some futurists are talking boron up, but I think we’re entering the Age of Oxygen.
‘Yeah, but what’s its oxygen take?’ we’ll be sneering in 10 years time about a building we don’t like very much.
TUESDAY I’m designing an 80-storey residential tower in the new Emotional Digital style.
Basically you just do it in the old style, then set the exterior finish software parameters to ‘ruffled’. This gives everything a more handmade look, as if hundreds of pipe-smoking artisans had bashed each unique steel panel into shape on an anvil, then hauled them all the way to the financial district of New York on a convoy of Edwardian drays.
Now I’ve finished the sketches it looks pretty optimistic, I must say. A bit like an arts and crafts Apollo-era space rocket and gantry. I’ve got these organic rivulets running down the outside, symbolising the sort of organic rivulets you find in nature.
On a whim I reset the rivulet direction of travel so they’re now going UP. In your face, nature, you haven’t got a clue about Emotional Digitalism, mankind wins again.
WEDNESDAY My old friend Dusty Penhaligon the conservactionist has started a campaign group to restore Victorian public conveniences.
Its aims are forthright and hostile: to compel local councils to produce maps of all public toilets ‘as at Jan 1895. Said conveniences then to be restored, scrupulously recreated or, if necessary, fully reversed …’
The last bossy injunction is pretty controversial. It requires the reimbursement and eviction of some chic, kooky and potentially quite outraged current occupants. A number of conveniences have in recent years fallen into re-use as:
• A community art gallery, challenging our perceptions of how poor community art actually is.
• A poetry slamming hub run by PFI verse provider Metrical Logistics.
• Minimalistic business premises for a doomed one-and-a-half-person architectural start-up called Urbanic Daydream in a weird font.
• A brilliantly innovative pied-à-sous-terre for guerrilla media consultant Dex Madmen, who told the Sunday Telegraph last May that going home to his underground crashpad near Liverpool Street (designed via email by someone in his year at Westminster) was ‘like following the White Rabbit into a fabulous hedonistic underworld’ but that he was now tired of emerging in the morning to the sound of commercial despair and the smell of human piss.
• An ironic and technically illegal opium den run by gap year chancers pretending to be doing voluntary work in Vietnam.
• A stag night venue called Gents.
I think Dusty’s idea of a public convenience renaissance is charming but misguided. Not for the first time I ask him – where does it stop? Are we supposed to return all Victorian hospital buildings to their original state? What about the staff? Are they supposed to revert to primitive anaesthetics and pleats in their clothes?
As usual he shrugs, says yes, takes a drag on his roll-up and squints into the distance.
THURSDAY Rock Steady Eddie the Middle East fixer rings. An ideas competition is about to be announced by Saudi Arabia’s royal family, who have been watching events in Egypt and elsewhere unfold with some interest.
The brief is to ‘refresh’ the kingdom as the wider region enters a period of profound change and modernisation. Eddie recommends removing all large public squares, women and the internet.
FRIDAY To a lecture at the Institute of Plasmic Arts: Whither Art of the Subconscious Mind?
Summary: a) who knows; b) still, check out these amazing images.
SATURDAY A fascinating tour of abandoned London Underground stations. Afterwards we all go for a drink in an abandoned pub, my imaginary friends and I, like the melancholy bastards we are.
SUNDAY Reconfigure self for the new Emotional Digital Age, in the recliner, by watching Casablanca in 3-D.
February 18, 2011
A Multi-Dimensional World
MONDAY Teaching at Tamworth School of Architecture. I’m much more interested in hearing students’ ideas about the world than in imposing my own reactionary Weltanschauung, which can be quite intimidating, especially if barked.
I’m all for young people working up their charming ‘theoretical urban interventions’. The perilous journey from Concept to Sketch defines the student’s unique view of things – how they think about form and mass, how to express an aesthetic quality in caption form, the meaning of light, etc. Also, it’s less work for me and leaves time for a proper lunch.
I say ‘teaching’, I’ve actually been asked by the school’s CEO to help with their rationalisation of student resources, i.e. students. Brutal times call for ruthless measures. There’s to be a cull of underachievers and/or low payers. They want me to sieve the students, so that they’re left with just the ‘M&Ms’: motivated and minted.
TUESDAY Meanwhile in the wider world of Arts & Ents & Life & Style, there’s anxiety about the sudden crisis of confidence in the 3-D film industry and the impact this will have on architecture.
In recent years it has been easy to persuade young people that the world of epic space is ‘supercool’ as it a) provides the backdrop for human drama, in the manner of a top-end videogame and b) you can see architecture in 3-D, at any time, without complicated spectacles. If there’s a strong enough swing back to 2-D in cinemas it could drag the plastic arts along with it via a treacherous cultural undertow.
A two-dimensional world? That would mean practising (and teaching) architecture as a form of surface decoration applied to software-designed, articulated boxes. Architects would be merely exterior wallpaperists. Nightmare.
Next thing you know, we’ll all be wearing 2-D glasses to flatten out the built environment. Let
’s see how Londoners manage on their hired bicycles THEN.
WEDNESDAY Seminar. A dozen assorted students, plenty of nervous energy yet somehow limp and deconstructed.
I decide to set up an ironic mood by opening several bottles of Mateus Rosé. It’s a trick I learned years ago: you can get middle-class young people pissed more quickly if they think it’s some kitsch homage to Working Class Posh. Plus, if they’re architecture students, two glasses and they’re wankered.
I ask them how many dimensions they’d have in an ideal world. The conservative hipster majority, after some consideration and hair-fiddling, stick with the three we’ve got. A very serious young man with writing on his hooded top reckons one dimension should be all the world needs, that way there’d be enough linear reality to go round. A young woman, a bit tipsy and pedantic, points out that time is a required fourth dimension, as without epic time there can be no epic space.
After more wine and omnispection, we tentatively construct a world where up to 12 dimensions are allowed but you have to have planning permission to go above five, with the usual disclaimers about lost property.
THURSDAY I ask the students to imagine ‘King’s Cross, 2111’. What kind of morphoses might we see, and why, and will they be weird-looking?
The notion of transport – might that be supplanted by some kind of futuristic thinking? Will phrases such as ‘commuter’ and ‘flat white’ and ‘unmetered air’ be archaic and unknowable? How will people ‘walk’, and will pavements be like sluggish smartplasma travelators, maybe even veering off into the air?
Will new materials allow us to build up into the ionosphere, perhaps connecting with a geo-engineered deep space energy mantle thrown around the Earth like chainmail armour? What non-diegetic music do we hear in our heads in 2111 – STILL synthesisers, really? How will the new things of one hundred years hence fit in with the old things of now? Is it OK to anticipate a zeitgeist, or does that totally spoil the future?
Their first hurdle: writing ‘King’s Cross 2111’ at the top of a page and working out where the apostrophe goes.
FRIDAY Some great ideas: ‘travel pills’ to get around, layered space, soft buildings, people coded into data streams, buildings that resemble hedgehogs and cakes.
Decide one-dimensional guy should be retained – he’s got a trust fund – and the rest dumped.
SATURDAY Can’t teach, so do.
SUNDAY Go four-dimensional in the recliner by remaining in it all day.
March 24, 2011
There Is No Rationalism but Rationalism
MONDAY Long lunch with Darcy Farquear’say, architecture correspondent for the Creative on Sunday. The preposterous Bauhau, his neurotic dachshund, sleeps fitfully under the table in a Zaha Hadid canine onesie.
Darcy’s bored these days; there’s less and less architecture to write about. And also pretty cross with himself: when he mentioned the slowdown to the Creative they decided to expand his roving brief to accommodate cake shows and graffiti.
There’s nothing he can do about it, of course. The flow of new architecture is slowing in accordance with Coalition Restrictions, and not expected to pick up again properly until about 14 months before the next General Election. Darcy will be all right. He just needs a Big Theme he can saddle and ride like some bucking yet pretentious cultural bronco for a few months.
‘It has to be a design idea that people will buy into, and don’t suggest paywalled architecture. What about … a hivemindset, mm? Combinable singularity, a way of looking at the environment, a detached retina if you will …’ I won’t. ‘Something smart and fashionable, but not too intellectually challenging. Something that chimes with the times. And doesn’t cost anything …’
Bauhau’s woken up and apparently wants to ‘go wee-wee’. What a humiliation. Crammed into haute couture AND given a toddler’s voice. I tell Darcy I’ll have a think about his Big Theme, and order more drinkies.
TUESDAY Opposition to my jaunty mosque in Tamworth grows by the day. Oh, they SAY their objections are architectural – the dome’s too sparkly, the ultra-contemporary glowing minaret’s out of whack with the surrounding non-listed 70s buildings and so on.
Some people mutter darkly that the protestors are cloaking anti-Muslim prejudice in aesthetic objections. I agree, some of these seem flimsy – YES the millions of tiny mosaic mirrors will dazzle viewers into temporary blindness so DON’T LOOK AT IT WHEN THE SUN’S OUT, IDIOTS.
But their fear goes deeper. It is a fear of religion. They’re scared of the sacred. Whoa, wait …
WEDNESDAY Meet Darcy in the pub. Atheism, I tell him, there’s your theme. It’s this year’s liberal must-have, this season’s lava lamp. Bauhau’s napping on the floor, dressed nose to tail today in some sort of Stella McCartney strudel. ‘Yes!’ says Darcy. ‘God is dead!’ Dog, however, is risen and bursting.
THURSDAY Field research. A depressing conference called Redeeming a Godless World. It has been organised by the Association of Atheist Architects, a bunch of self-satisfied tossers glowing with ineffable smugness.
Much of the morning session is devoted to refurb. Turning churches, chapels and manses into more meaningful vehicles for our shared sense of wretchedness: nightclubs, public houses featuring Giant Jenga, little flats with no cupboard space.
Everyone pays tribute to the lying shit Blair who despite his own ostentatious holiness did more for the humanist cause than almost anyone else in those difficult years after 9/11.
Under Blair’s Fag Terror smoking disappeared from pubs overnight. Many non-believers saw cigarette smoke as a metaphor for the Holy Ghost. How easy to eradicate! Those stupid ads on buses: ‘Thank you for not believing in God’, ‘The best way to stop believing in God is never to start’, ‘Protect children: don’t let them absorb your belief in God’.
Now faith, like smoking, exists primarily outside: trudging Jehovah’s Witnesses and those evangelical nomads who pop up occasionally in the market square shouting bits from Leviticus.
In the afternoon, delegates discuss the criteria for atheistic design. Top of the list is amending insurance policies to ‘Act of Earth’. Lots of reflective glass, obviously. No Freemasonry business. ‘Smart columns’ by Christopher Hitchens, etc. All details certified God-free. No more infinity pools. A saturating ethos of ‘yes, we’re certain, this is as good as it gets, so fuck off and get on with the rest of your lives, yeah?’
FRIDAY Darcy leaves a message. ‘Built environment – not a prophet exactly, but definitely a graven image? Spiritus Loci? Talk later, Bauhau’s had an accident …’
SATURDAY Hatch plan with Rock Steady Eddie the fixer to launch a directory of Atheist Designers and to change my trading name to Aalto.
SUNDAY Newspaper review in the recliner. Read Darcy’s piece – ‘Towards a New Emotional Secularism’.
I still think Agnostic Revival, a sort of pagany Pugin, has more resonance among the open-minded but Darcy’s not interested in them. There is No Rationalism but Rationalism, is his new motto.
April 7, 2011
How Kryptogel Will Change the World
MONDAY Big week ahead for me and my old friend Beansy, the nanofuturologist. The patent for our latest invention is imminent.
It builds on the theoretical success of ‘hard air’, a revolutionary building material we came up with a couple of years ago and then shelved for commercial and legal reasons.
It seems so primitive now: add ‘lumpening hydrates’ to ordinary air, thereby ‘caging’ the molecular structure via omnilateral desublimation. It was the perfect sustainable local material. Air is everywhere in the world, duh.
But the sceptics and the haters killed it off, saying it was too mad an idea, too ‘fictional’. Despite the massive ‘hard air’ table we were DOING THE PRESS CONFERENCE AT. Idiots. This time, we’ll be stealthier.
TUESDAY Great, the patent’s gone through. Beansy and I now own the rights to ‘Kryptogel’.
Essentially, it’s hard air infused with nanogel and kry
pton. I mentioned to Beansy that these were the top two Google search results for ‘innovative building material’ and wondered aloud how you might combine them. Boom – he’d cooked up the first batch in his nanotechnology lab by teatime.
You ask what Kryptogel can do. I answer with a silvery laugh: what CAN’T it do? It’s so light you can hardly feel it, so translucent you can barely see it. So malleable and versatile you could craft a model of the Palace of Versailles from it. So tough you could get an elephant to stand on that model of Versailles and it wouldn’t even buckle.
This is because Kryptogel molecules form ‘geotastic non-bucklyballs’ when the material is in its inert state. It looks like phantom frogspawn, without the tadpole dots.
It’s much less accommodating in its exciteable state, although it is incredibly squashable. You can compress all the Kryptogel you’d need to build a bungalow into a lump the size of a takeaway pizza although OK fair enough it would be one of those Family Feast ones.
From now on it’s plain sailing specification-wise for the world’s epic space community. Kryptogel is going to change everything.
WEDNESDAY Beansy and I bring very different skills to the Kryptogel skills matrix. Rock Steady Eddie the fixer also brings his rugged take on things to a late lunch at the pub.
‘So. How much of this fancy polystyrene would you need to make a decent sized eco-town?’ Beansy says that would require a proper manufacturing plant and blah blah logistics, who cares, I’ve drifted off to get another round. When I get back Eddie’s already ‘tickled up some geezers on the blower’ and it very much looks like we’ll be licensing the manufacturing rights. Kryptogel is GO.
THURSDAY Meeting with two guys from Global Profiles, a patent clearing house for the world’s construction community. After some small talk, mostly me and Beansy making the same self-deprecating joke about getting older and having a global profile ourselves these days, ha ha, the contracts appear.