by Ian Martin
Microhubs link together to form macrohubs, with the Greater London area forming one vast huburb.
FRIDAY Lunch with Rock Steady Eddie the fixer. As usual he helps himself to 18 per cent of my pudding.
Not for the first time, he wants me to abandon my principles in the pursuit of profit. ‘Look, I’m not asking you to scab. You’ve got your ideals, that’s lovely. I am merely saying I’ve got clients queuing up for hubs and spaces and nobody to provide them. I know you’d be putting your reputation at risk by strike-breaking, I respect that, we could do it under a pseudonym or whatever and are you going to finish that cheesecake?’
After all these years Eddie still thinks I’d jettison my moral convictions to make a few quid. Does he seriously expect me to become a blackleg hubmaker, a moonlighting spacesmith? When it would be much simpler to invent a new urban regeneration term altogether, and cash in that way?
SATURDAY Devise the ‘urban bulb’, a new development marketing blueprint. A successor to the hub, it’s commercial but sounds organic.
The urban bulb, a tight wad of potential, planted in the fertile soil of municipal space, one day flourishing into city apartments for people with cruel eyes and direct debit capability. Plus social benefit in the form of shops.
It’ll sound much more cheerful once I’ve tidied up my scruples a bit.
SUNDAY Form a hubbulb in the recliner.
July 28, 2011
Youthanasia
MONDAY Sketch out plans to turn a famous London teaching hospital into 3,000 flats full of people listening to BBC Radio 6 Music and doing something clever with seasonal vegetables.
Spare me the moral squeaking. I didn’t come up with the bloody idea, did I? Anyway, they’ve asked a number of urban visionaries to have a go. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with selling an NHS site to a property developer. Is there?
Gradually, my conscience starts to speckle with particulates of doubtful origin. I put the wipers on, give it a spritz, and soon my conscience is clear again.
TUESDAY Create a breathtaking glazed ‘Groundwalk’ by designing a circular corridor with lots of windows.
Now to give them something to look at. At the moment it’s a toss-up between radical landscaping or kinetic art. Maybe both. It has to be an experience. Perhaps the Groundwalk could wobble slightly, adding to the tension.
Bah. By teatime I’ve scribbled out all the experience-heightening ‘surprise factors’ on the advice of my lawyers: jets of fire, slippery floor, wild animals. It’s spatial narrative correctness gone mad.
WEDNESDAY To the RIPBA to meet new president Molly Bismuth. She’s in her trademark pink cowboy hat and brimming with energy today as ‘Aries is aligned with Ocado’.
We check out work in progress at the former Florence Hall, which is being converted into a massive, ironic bar called Epic. It’s part of Molly’s masterplan to update the institute. This basically involves redefining ‘makeover’ as a transitive verb, then applying it liberally, everywhere. There will be happy hours and music videos. The bar staff will be heavily tattooed, with hairdos that look like urban gardens.
‘I want everything to be more pop-up and FUNK-AY!’ she trills. Things are certainly moving quickly. The institute’s chief executive, Geoff Mudgeon, is cultivating an afro. During Molly’s inaugural speech there’ll be a dude on fretless bass at the end of every paragraph.
She wants to fill the trendier bits of London with ‘branded microsites’: little taster menus of world-class architecture presented by people in hats. All milling about in signature pop-up yurts with old horror movies showing, poetry slams and downloadable apps. There are, she reasons, an awful lot of young people out there. After 177 years, it’s time the institute was ‘youthanised’. We have another vodka jelly.
‘It’s about cultural synergy. Architects, especially hot young ones, spend a lot of time designing hubs during the day – then go out hubbing in the evenings! We need to totally mash that scene up with stuff that people read about in magazines. Imagine Alex James out of Blur. And his cheese. And a punk string quartet. And loads of prosecco. And some architecture in the middle. Wicked!’
Hipstertecture? ‘No no no, that’s too much …’ A vodka jelly disappears ‘… of a mouthful. My mission is to bring together cool people and architects. I’m merging hipster culture and hub culture to form a totally fresh genre of HUBSTER CULTURE!’
Suddenly the bass dude appears: boing burr ba-ba bop bop!
THURSDAY Honoured to be one of the judges for the Shit Building of the Year Award, but it’s exhausting work.
Shit buildings are once again enormously popular and this year there are more nominations than ever. The standard is incredible. In the end we decide to give the prize to the whole of Salford. Liverpool waterfront gets a ‘highly distended’ award.
FRIDAY Redesign concept of ‘redesign’, making it less enigmatic by removing quote marks.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Neo-Narcissism 5, Post-Collectivist Nebulism 0.
SUNDAY Like so many others, I relive the horrors of 9/11 by watching it on the television, as we did at the time.
Architects have had a neurotic decade. But they can feel proud that terror has finally been conquered. We all ‘feared’ that 9/11 would mean no more tall buildings. Look at us now. Extruded vertical luxury in every city!
As St Paul’s stood firm amid the burning rubble of the Blitz, so London’s giant stalagmite of wealth, The Icicle, now rises into the optioned air like an overscaled gesture of defiance to everything but itself. Yes, you al-Qaeda muppets. This is what secular democracy looks like. This is what freedom looks like. A giant fucking drip of cack.
Then I go to the pub. Later, some sober reflections in the recliner.
September 11, 2011
Slow Modernism
MONDAY Oh God, it’s Post-Modernism Revival Week. Time to dust off those architectural clichés, randomly assemble them, stand well back and look at it all ironically.
TUESDAY There is as we used to say an ‘upside’ to this nostalgia for giggling squiggling eclecticism. Anyone who was technically an adult during the 1980s is suddenly a cultural historian.
I’m not complaining. My classic book on the subject – The Winkers – has been reissued and now finds favour with a whole new generation of drawling, overdressed tossers. ‘Winkers’ of course was the collective noun in those days for post-Modernists, a reference to the way they simplified design theory by spaffing their ephemeral bollocky bricolage all over the place and then ‘winking’ to let us in on the joke. I think we were supposed to give a ‘thumbs up’ in response.
Obviously I’ve added footnotes to The Winkers, updating the original text. A lot’s happened in architecture over the last quarter-century. Summary: boom, crash, boom, crash, oom-pah oom-pah, look at us, we can do bulges and curves now and WATCH OUT WE’RE GOING TO HIT THAT WALL.
Several of the key figures in British Winkerism are dead. In one way this is sad, although it does mean we are now free to say some pretty harsh things about them.
Colin ‘Big Colin’ Redbrace, for example. At the time he was lionised by architects as their Winker-in-Chief. His blended historicism, his massive income, his five-hour lunches. The planners loved him, too. A hint of Aztec, a smattering of glass-reinforced Classical, something outré at the entrance: bingo. Another one gets the nod. By 1990 he was turning them out like sandcastles.
I am therefore re-assessing the work of Big Colin, downwards. Not because his buildings, marooned in time like those synthetic drums on the EastEnders theme tune, are particularly offensive. They’re not. Big Colin’s chunky buildings look sort of quaint, and kitsch. And a bit scruffy to be honest.
No, I am slagging the buildings off because they’re two decades old and that’s what you do. By 2025 they’ll be well ahead of their time again.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with Darcy the architecture critic. He’s thrown himself into the po-Mo Revival with methodical fervour and today inhab
its a) a boxy suit, b) a big perm.
His preposterous dachshund Bauhau’s there, quivering in a New Wave ensemble of pirate blouse and kilt. It’s a difficult look to pull off if you’re a post-Modernist dog, and he doesn’t because there’s no such thing.
Darcy’s task is tricky too. He has to rehabilitate post-Modernism in the minds of a general public that frankly doesn’t really give a shit one way or the other. After several drinks, I convince him that he should instead mourn post-Modernism for precisely that reason. Classical reassures those who like order, Gothic’s for pessimists, Modern’s for optimists, post-Modern’s for people masking their insecurities with indifference. Most of us, in other words.
Clearly the world of epic space needs to ask itself: what now? Baggy urban zoomorphism burned briefly then sputtered out. Pre-Modernism was essentially a holding movement for people expecting something exciting round the corner but unsure what it might be. So …
Why not pretend that there’s a new design movement called SLOW MODERNISM?
Like standard Modernism but with reduced air miles, a grass roof and local materials. A nice artisan Modernism, with ethical occupants and knobbly bread in the eco-larder. Also, it contracts in a satisying way: SLOW-MO. Let’s take our time, get it right, a few glasses of something cold, think organic, yum tiddly bosh.
We all nip outside. I need a fag, Darcy’s trying to get a signal on his stylish antique Rabbit phone. Bauhau, in Darcy’s nauseating phrase, ‘has to go po-mo’.
THURSDAY Announce Slow Modernism on Twitter. There’s a lot of eye-rolling from architects, and ‘oh, we’ve been doing that for years’, and then they all quietly change their profile summary to ‘Slow Modernist’.
FRIDAY Rock Steady Eddie the fixer calls. He’s put the word about in Whitehall, they love it. Watch out for a massive Slow Modernist school building programme, completion set for ‘whenever’.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Boho Po-Mo 2, Soho Slow-Mo 2.0, after irony shootout.
SUNDAY Paperwork in the recliner. Darcy’s piece in the Creative on Sunday is, I have to admit, skilfully illustrated. The ‘Slow-Mo Generation’ seem to be young architects of Darcy’s acquaintance, impeccably dressed and frowning in a forest. They all have little dogs, too.
September 22, 2011
The Irony Bridge
MONDAY I have decided to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of the age by designing a contemporary iron foundry on the south bank of the Thames. There’s a perfect site – that pointless empty patch in front of the big ferris wheel.
My proposed ironworks would be very ‘butch’: squat, dense, a place where proper things are made. Yin to the yang of the London Eye’s ‘fem’ elegance. Imagine. That famous Human Lazy Susan, its pods full of stately gawpers looking down upon the unequivocal, belching maw of real industrial revival.
I am also haughtily announcing that the style of my foundry will be ‘post-gastro retro’. I mean it will look exactly like one of those South Bank restaurants that resemble a converted foundry from the outside.
But here’s the clever part. The interior won’t be filled with air, light, jazz and loads of tetchy bastards ordering a £25 starter and some tapwater. No. It will be filled with a fuck-off blast furnace and a non-gender-specific unionised workforce turning out top quality cast iron.
Comrades, the days of effete regeneration are over. Let us now build recovery the old way, with muscular architecture and a network of artisan manufacturing bases!
TUESDAY I am in urgent talks with the Coalition about my industrial revival idea. They’re extremely receptive, as ‘talking up Britain’ is apparently now an important economic generator.
Over a sandwich lunch with ministers and their special friends, it becomes clear that my foundry proposal could theoretically be ‘rolled out’ across the country, like molten steel. It’s what we’re all calling the Heavy Craft Initiative.
The inspiration is farming. Everybody hates farmers, with their churlish attitudes, self-profiled victimhood and armed, twitchy demeanour. But everyone loves farmers’ markets, with their ugly vegetables, indie cheese and concealed weapons.
Localism in action, see? That’s why we need subsidised neighbourhood craft manufacturing. Rough, artsy steel with bits in. Crusty homebaked bricks. Organic local concrete. Thick, cloudy glass.
My Coalition mates assure me that planning permission for the foundry is a shoo-in, and that certain shadowy enterprise funds can be found. I remind them I still need local clients for the cast iron.
WEDNESDAY Now there’s a turn-up. Email from the Metropolitan Police’s Community Urbanism Unit.
They want to commission a pop-up cast iron bridge, running parallel to Westminster Bridge. ‘This would be deployed on an ad hoc basis specifically for public demonstrations, allowing the free flow of traffic in both directions via existing roads, and ensuring access to St Thomas’ hospital in the event of any collateral injuries …’
THURSDAY Lunch with Darcy Farquear’say of the Creative on Sunday. I ‘accidentally’ leak the foundry, the Met’s pop-up demo idea, and the ‘fact’ that the project already has a nickname – The Irony Bridge.
Darcy promises not to tell anyone. His preposterous trophy dachshund Bauhau remains mute throughout, clearly guilty about his own leak, which becomes slowly visible through the stylish cream jumpsuit he’s been forced to wear.
FRIDAY Work up a design statement for the Irony Bridge. This is basically an architectural pitch, so I fill it with bullshit and platitudes.
‘The structure harkens back to days of yore, with a clear emphasis on nostalgic engineering yet with a modern twist … it is conceived as a fashionable pop-up, at once temporary and contemporary. And the balance implicit in a locally cast iron bridge which is “temporary contemporary” should address any concerns that might arise from the planning or community communities …’
As a crowd control tool it’s brilliant. Kettling is straightforward. Coppers with truncheons, tasers, pepper spray and freestyle hand-to-hand combat techniques at one end. Protesters enter from the other via a turnstile until the bridge is full. Seal off with coppers, done.
There’d be a charge of say a quid per person to get onto the bridge. A small price to pay for participatory democracy, or whatever we’re calling it. Once organisers have booked the Irony Bridge for a demo, they’re going to look pretty ineffective if they don’t fill it. I reckon it could hold about 10,000 people squashed up a bit. That’s ten grand a demo before you even start talking about commercial food, drink and toilet licenses.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Modular Agnostic 1, Prefabricated Creationism 1.
SUNDAY Newspaper review in the recliner. Big piece by Darcy about heavy craft, the Irony Bridge and the rise of a ‘temporary contemporary’ style. So reliably indiscreet.
October 13, 2011
Pathetic Fallacy 1, Emphatic Delusion 0
MONDAY I’ve been asked by the Church Commissioners to rationalise their property portfolio, again.
I did all this once before in the 1980s with my two-stage ‘ecclesiastical investment vision’. It was swiftly and ruthlessly implemented. My first vision proposition was to monetise the Church of England’s premium units – St Paul’s Cathedral, for instance – by charging all atheists an entrance fee.
My second vision proposition was to sell any valuable space adjoining these premium units – Paternoster Square, say – to dead-eyed, bloodsucking commercial philistine bastards. Correction: to forward-looking urbanist developers seeking an appropriate architectural style and prepared to listen to all voices in the public debate, especially those weird high-pitched voices inside the Prince of Wales’s head squawking on about ‘homeopathic Classicism’ and ‘the humane curve’.
But now what? Today all the good sites formerly under Anglican purview are owned by hedge funds, or Wahhabist playboys. I need a five-point plan by the end of the week.
TUESDAY It’s not often I’m overcome by the
sheer emotional power of my own work, but today I am speechless with self-admiration.
I have – and suddenly I find I am holding back tears – ‘imbued architecture with the intricacy and beauty of natural forms’. Furthermore, I have generated ‘a sequence of dynamic spaces carved from the fascinating interplay between architecture and nature’.
Then I remember that the building’s just a showroom for posh bathroom products in Chelsea Harbour, and pull myself together.
WEDNESDAY Morning: think ‘beyond the pylon’ by imagining downloadable cloudtricity.
Afternoon: think ‘outside the matrix’ by imagining a ‘hologramorphic building information system’. It would combine architectural drawings, the ‘semantic web’ and a little bit of magic to create a 3-D, 1:1 scale representation of any imaginable building. You can wander around it in a weird hat and a pirate beard if you want, who fucking cares? Invite your mates in, have a cocktail reception in the simulated space, it’s only a hologramorphic building information system. It’s NOT REAL, YOU MUPPET.
Evening: think ‘over the curve’ by imagining a capsule wardrobe for a nano-bedsit. What an exhausting, innovative day. Before turning in I register patents online for the Leccy App™, the SIMBIM™ and the MollyCule™.
THURSDAY Fascinating colloquium at the pub chaired by Rock Steady Eddie the fixer. We all earnestly discuss possible redesigns for the global economy.
Man, there are a lot of conversations like this taking place in the arts and design world these days, aren’t there? Nobody’s making art or designing anything much any more (it’s technically illegal under the Coalition’s Austerity Laws) so everyone’s pitching a remodelled market system instead.
We’re all after the same things in the end. Justice, freedom and dependable sources of fee income. Planners want a steady 9 to 5, architects want three or four major jobs a year, surveyors want a packed nine months of high earning so they can go on prohibitively expensive cricket tours abroad with the Barmy Army and pretend they’re geezers.