by Ian Martin
For a five year exclusivity deal, a certain well-known manufacturer will pay us a small amount up front. However, we get a massive cut of profits from any Kryptogel-based development. And given that the possibilities are endless and the science proven, we are clearly going to be millionaires by the end of the year. Kryptogel affordable housing, here it comes. Kryptogel skyscrapers, hospitals, bridges …
Beansy lowers his voice and produces a blueprint for a lunar shuttle packed with – and made of – ‘Kryptogel Plus’.
Enough raw material for a large town on the Moon, virtually weightless, a negligible payload. Kryptogel could open up the entire fucking GALAXY for the human race! Tim and Dan from Global Profiles keep their excitement under control and countersign the contracts.
FRIDAY Oh dear. It now seems unlikely that the galaxy will be remodelled in Kryptogel any time soon. Global Profiles bought the rights in order to suppress its use by anyone. Apparently the concrete and steel people are not very happy about a virtually zero-cost alternative.
Still, on the bright side, Rock Steady Eddie’s earned an undisclosed ‘handling fee’ and Beansy and I have made enough to develop his matter transporter beyond the beta version. Not before time: we’ve already lost 15 cats to the capricious laws of physics.
SATURDAY Beansy and I transform into our excitable states for a night out on the non-Kryptogel town.
SUNDAY Return to my inert state in the recliner.
April 28, 2011
Zeppelins Full of Shit
MONDAY What a terrible start to the week. I’m being sued by a client who accuses me of ‘false narrative accounting’.
The job was a modest pedestrian bridge at a suburban railway station. I’m not allowed to say which one (superinjunction) but the scheme sailed through planning, thanks to a very persuasive written and visual presentation.
Unfortunately it is this very presentation that forms the basis of my client’s case.
Exhibit A: the rendering. I decided to use a slightly disturbing and surreal watercolour painting of the project, with lots of ‘blending’ and ‘splodging’. The client inspected the bridge shortly after completion and found it ‘completely unsmudged and not in the least surreal. Passenger traffic was non-amorphous, with totally clear edges to everything’.
Exhibit B: the design statement. I said the lighting would ‘weave a spell of weird psycho-illuminescent magic at night, making the bridge deck appear to levitate’. The client went back in the evening and found it ‘looking very much where it was in daylight. I thought perhaps I was not in the right mood so, after a couple of stiff ones in a nearby hostelry, I returned. The bridge deck still looked perfectly embodied, even when I squinted’.
Worse, my artistic licence expired in February.
TUESDAY Chelsea Flower Show. My hippy gardener friend Isis has won the Morally Urban Greening Prize for her provocative piece, ‘Reversal’.
She’s rebuilt a small terraced house, left the roof off and converted it into a lush, succulent, multi-layered, polyvalent mega-organism. ‘Reversal’ brings together stacked vegetable gardens, hydroponic sliding doors, a miniature energy orchard, a suspended waterfall, predictive composting and an insect ziggurat.
The back yard contains a small family shed. The idea, says Isis, is to ‘lower humanity’s expectations in line with our feelings of shame and self-loathing. We should no longer consider ourselves temporary curators of Earth’s Bounty, but janitors. It is time we knew our place, which is in the shed’.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with my old mate Beansy the mad futurologist. He’s desperate to be on the Creative on Sunday’s Cool List, an annual audit of 50 startled-looking people in jeans who’ve had brilliant, world-changing ideas.
‘I need something clever yet simple,’ he says. ‘Clockwork radio. Water purifiers. A decent garlic press. Something step-changey, game-changey, yeah? Like with the Inca civilisation. Once they started using llama shit as a high-altitude-fertiliser boom, they were off.’ I tell Beansy the world’s still waiting for a globalised solution to HUMAN waste.
Of course, Beansy has one. ‘Just cart it all over to say a) the Sahara or b) the South Pole. Carry on dumping it there, chuck in millions of seeds, loads of Dettol round the outside, let’s keep things civilised. In next to no time you’ve got a) Brazil 2.0 or b) probably a frozen mountain of human shit which, OK, is a hostage to fortune with global warming so let’s say a) to be on the safe side …’
I’m obliged to point out that visionary mentals have always banged on about fertilising the desert. That, and desalinating the Caspian Sea and turning it into a massive salmon farm. He’s not listening. ‘Now you can’t really send millions of tonnes of sewage by road. Or by sea. Wait. Zeppelins! Bloody great architect-designed airships, full of shit! Zeppelins, man!’
I don’t know. I can’t see Brazil 2.0 in the Sahara being a runner, but then I think there’s something distinctly off-putting about a big balloon full of human 2.0 heading anywhere.
THURSDAY Brainstorming with Beansy, trying to work up a prototype Hindenturd.
It suddenly occurs that he might be able to help with the false narrative charges. I mean, if a way were found to retrofit the railway station with smudged ambience and a levitating bridge we could keep all this out of the courts.
FRIDAY To Superinjunction Junction. Beansy’s brought his molecule distresser. It looks like a portable cropsprayer, not very convincing, but a few squirts high into the air produces a fine, static mist that makes everything ‘run’ in a satisfyingly painty way.
Floating the bridge free from reality has got us stumped, though. Hypnosis looks like the only option. We’ll wait for nightfall, then try some mind-control on passengers.
SATURDAY Beansy and I released without charge after questioning.
SUNDAY Lateral thinking in the recliner, then everything goes watercoloured. I dream of aerial armadas.
June 2, 2011
Velvet Smackpad
MONDAY It’s Jazz Architecture Week, and everyone’s hoping there’s no reprise of the ugly scenes we had last year in Brighton.
Rival gangs of Trads and Shockers battling it out on the seafront in a series of running theoretical debates, bringing shame upon the world of syncopated design and irritating passers-by. Adverbs were thrown. At one point harmless banter escalated into dangerous levels of pretentiousness; deckchairs were adduced as paradigms of exterior tensile furniture.
There is no place for sectarianism in jazz architecture. Whether you be a Trad, with your old-fashioned notions of symmetry and proportion and a solid 4/4 grid. Or whether you be a Shocker, producing experimental jazz architecture with a freestyling drivel of rising fifths and augmented pods on splayed pilotis.
The whole point – the whole babbeda babbeda glap bap ga-tish POINT – of jazz architecture is inclusiveness. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ jazz architecture. There is only hubbeda hubbeda GOOD jazz architecture. And babbeda babbeda squee-honk blap tss-tss wap bap ga-biddly bad.
TUESDAY Amazing evening of chops, licks, anecdotes and improvised criticism at the Jazzual Architectural Association. Marvellous impromptu lecture on the whole Italian post-Baroque, pre-bebop fusion movement by visiting professor Antonio Daddio.
Outside in the square, students have jammed together geodesic riffs and a big polypropylene drum solo to create a temporary ‘flop-up’ structure, Velvet Smackpad. The exterior resembles a giant pair of bongos. The cool jazz interior is modelled on a heroin den of the 1950s: minimalist with lots of big cushions. Everything’s suffused with the colour blue but, cleverly, on the off-beat.
There is an aural landscape too: a soundtrack of mysterious scraping, squeaking noises. The visitor imagines that he (possibly ‘she’ but NB must be goatee-capable) is in some urban jungle, the everyday noises of life transmuted into a collage of dislocated, jagged existential rage. Then he realises he’s listening to the Archigram Quintet Live in Charrette and starts clicking his fingers, randomly and knowledgeably.
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nbsp; WEDNESDAY A tour of London jazz pubs organised by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Jive. Our guide is Darcy Farquear’say and his hepcat dachshund, Bauhau.
We focus on the very earliest jazz pubs of the 1920s, when society sought to assauge the horrors of the Great War not with affordable housing for the poor but with innovative drinking holes for the hip. Inevitably, most of the original buildings survive today, not as jazz pubs for the poor but as converted townhouses for the hip.
This is exactly the sort of irony that adds 50 grand to the asking price.
Happily, the Lord Alfred Douglas in Shaftesbury Avenue survives. Darcy hoists Bauhau onto a bar stool; the hapless ‘jazzschund’ wobbles uncertainly there throughout Darcy’s little talk, quietly howling from within a miniature beatnik double polo-ended wraparound.
‘Observe the pish pish wabbeda wabbeda modulation of style. A standard 2/4 panelling is backlined by proto-boogie woogie flanging, with plenty of bass-end left hand overbabble. See how the glass, mirrorwork and mahogany is punctuated with bright, joyous stabs of hubbeda babbeda tish tish ga-drap bap brass …’
The landlord comes over and tells us ‘the weird dog’ will have to go. Darcy querulously complains that he was happy enough to serve us when we came in with Bauhau. The landlord says he inferred from Darcy’s dark glasses and painfully mismatched clothes that Bauhau was a guide dog.
Tempers fray, in a confusion of time signatures and keys, and Bauhau has a little scat accident.
THURSDAY To a jazz architecture conference: Whither Freeform Parametricism? Summary: up bup shoo-wup its psst psst psst own fuggeda fuggeda fuggeda arse.
FRIDAY Try acid jazz architecture for the first time by taking a trip into my surrealistic mental catacombs.
SATURDAY All the cats on the UK scene are at Kensington Gardens for the official opening of the annual Mellow Pavilion. This year’s has been designed by the jazz architect’s jazz architect, Scrim ‘Solid Gone’ Scrimson.
Sure, the squares and breadheads say it’s just a big box with a garden in it. Ignore them. They understand neither containment theory nor haughty culture. Scrimson mumbles an intro – ‘baba zoom, baba zoom, humdrum bubba mubbeda pff pff, two three four’ – then we all get pissed and just pure dig the ambience, man.
SUNDAY Chill out in the jazz recliner with some metabolist feedback, probably the avant-garde jazz scampi from last night.
June 28, 2011
The Molecules of Swinging London
MONDAY Idea for the restoration of a ‘historic train station’ – start calling it a railway station again.
TUESDAY To Switzerland, where I’m presenting my design for a ‘last chance saloon’. It’s actually more of an upmarket bar, and will provide a welcome touch of glamour in an otherwise pretty utilitarian suicide clinic.
It’s neo-Classical obviously – the client wants ‘firmitas, gravitas, dignitas’. Fluted pilasters round the walls. Acanthus leaves. Scenes from The Iliad in high definition watercolours, etc. But there are also cheeky touches of humour to lighten the mood for those with a one-way ticket to oblivion.
Bistro blackboards with ‘bar meals to die for’. A nautical bell that sounds last orders every quarter of an hour, round the clock. Exit signs everywhere.
The idea is that visitors can just slip away here. Not intubated in some anonymous hospital bed with moving patterns on the wall and chevronned cards on the bedside table, all ironic, Bon Voyage. No. Here they can die congenially, sipping an ACTUAL ‘lethal cocktail’ in a discreet, ultra-comfortable booth.
Obviously this gig calls for taste and discretion, which is why I’m charging slightly over the odds. However tough the economy is in the cruel outside world, suicidally low fee bids help nobody.
WEDNESDAY Redesign the political landscape, with a more ‘savage garden’ feel and an electrified fence around it.
THURSDAY Invitation to a ‘very special East End pub’ from my mate Dusty Penhaligon the conservactionist. Imagine my disappointment when I get to the pub and it turns out to be bloody DERELICT.
‘Ghost and Compasses’ the sign says still, just. The boarded-up doors are open. I enter the gloom of what once was a public bar. Looming out of the murk is Dusty, who’s brought along a carrier bag full of beer and a psychogeographer, which frankly is no substitute for a proper pub with functioning toilets.
His morose guest turns out to be the widely acclaimed, slightly ludicrous Dr Roman Whey, Regius Professor of Lost Worlds at the University of Edinburgh.
This isn’t a social invitation at all. Dusty and the nutty professor are apparently now setting themselves up as the Ant and Dec of ‘historiographical ectoplasmology’. As far as I can make out, this involves taking an area of London, collating vast quantities of information on what it all looked like in the 1960s and proving that things were better then.
Mourning and moaning, Penhaligon and Whey: one of them pining for the good old days, the other flatly opposed to any change at all. Maybe not a marriage made in Heaven, but certainly one made in the energy field created by human memory through which we may channel the past.
‘Look around you, feel the vibe …’ says Whey, his fingers combing the air. ‘This place shut in 1968. We’re surrounded by molecules from a mythical time, pre-dating the internet. A generation before Thatcher. As far as these molecules are concerned, HENDRIX IS STILL ALIVE.’ Dusty looks a bit worried and wonders aloud if we shouldn’t shut the door to stop the 60s atmosphere simply floating away.
Whey gives a little chuckle. ‘Oh, molecules from Swinging London never leave. They’re much heavier, you see. High soot content.’ Yes, I say, helping myself to a rusty can of Double Diamond, this is all very interesting I’m sure. But what am I doing here? ‘We’d like you to join us,’ says Dusty, making squinted eye contact.
‘We plan to bring back forgotten urban landscapes through the sheer power of magical narrative engineering. If we can combine Roman’s geo-psychological dowsing, my theoretical expertise in physically reconstructing the past, and your wide-spectrum sarcasm about everything …’
My mobile suddenly goes off, startling the room. Especially all the Bakelite-era molecules. I take the call outside, and keep walking, quickly.
FRIDAY A very cross Dusty calls. How dare I leave them like that? Because you’re fucking doughnuts, I patiently explain. You can’t just conjure up the past. Right, he says. See you back there tomorrow, we’ll prove it.
SATURDAY Return to the derelict pub. It’s disappeared! Instead, I’m looking at a supermarket car park.
But how? Whey and Dusty look unbearably smug. ‘Historiographical ectoplasmology’ they say, in unison. Are those WANDS they’re carrying? The Ghost and Compasses shimmers briefly as a phantom image, over by the trolleys. Spooky.
SUNDAY Recreate the past by falling asleep in the recliner, as I did last week.
July 7, 2011
Hubmakers v Spacesmiths
MONDAY Alternative Energy Day. In the morning, work up my idea for an air farm. In the afternoon, sketch out my prototype for a rain mill. In the evening, harness physical repulsion to create an innovative spiral of despair.
TUESDAY Brilliant, feel MUCH more positive after running a self-diagnostic. I’d accidentally re-set my mental definition of architecture, from ‘frozen music’ to ‘congealed self-pity’. Idiot.
WEDNESDAY Bad news. The Coalition’s brutal approach to ‘built environment delivery’ has now provoked the most serious demarcation dispute since the 1970s.
Despite frantic attempts by the Vocational Associations Congress, members of both the Hubmakers’ Guild and the Institute of Spacesmiths downed tools today and have been instructed to imagine no urban solutions until further notice.
Of course, the Confederation of British Privatisation appealed for common sense. But its emergency statement didn’t sound very convincing: ‘We would like to reassure local authorities, hedge funds and other core keyholders that plans for hubs and spaces remain buoyant throughout the country
. These will last for several months. There is no point in clients stockpiling so-called ‘micro-economic nebulae’, that doesn’t make any sense.’
As the confederation represents not so much a collective interest as more of a mist-cloud of tossers, this has now caused panic-buying. There remains not a single conceptual scheme for a hub or space in any pipeline, anywhere. Unless a way through is found, the rebadging sector is heading for a Winter of Disconnect.
THURSDAY This demarcation dispute is very serious for me. As a leading opinion-former on these matters, I have to pick a side. After much soul-searching I’ve decided to go with the Hubmakers’ Guild.
I have nothing against spacesmiths. I yield to no one in my admiration of them and their alchemy. I believe that the last decade has seen some truly astonishing, magical spaces created. Moribund areas of towns – long abandoned to the anarchic bumbling of people sitting on benches FREE OF CHARGE eating sandwiches prepared at home – have been transformed by ‘food courts’ and franchised noise rights.
Creating multi-purposed space is straightforward, but hubmaking is a specialised craft. For too long spacesmiths have undercut hubmakers with that one-hub-fits-all bullshit. A genuine hub takes risks.
It might be a business hub on the periphery of an airport, corralled by massive billboards proclaiming that ‘making your business our business is good business’.
It might be a cultural hub offering nuanced meeting spaces, specialist retailers, exhibition nodes, assorted experiences, free wi-fi and the opportunity to ‘grab a coffee and explore!’ This really is living on the edge, as anyone who’s ever grabbed a hot coffee will confirm.
Yet hubmaking has a grand vision too. Until recently everyone fatuously described London as a ‘city of villages’, even though there’s always a shop open somewhere on Saturday afternoons. Great credit goes to the Hubmakers’ Guild for changing our perception of the capital to a ‘city of hubs’.