by Ian Martin
As for our new economic prototypes, it’s mostly arguing about wall finishes and curtains. Nobody wants to tear it all down and start again. Eddie summarises: ‘I’ll tell you what makes the world go round. Inertia.
‘There’s just too much fannying about involved in changing the system, innit. People can’t be arsed. I mean Blimey O’Reilly, you know what it’s like trying to sort out bleeding broadband. Imagine having to change your capitalism provider. You finishing those chips?’
FRIDAY Hallelujah. My five-point plan for the Church Commissioners is ready at last. Fingers crossed.
• Basic Holy Communion to remain free at the point of delivery, though with opportunity to avoid delays and sermons in new Communion Lounges.
• Introduce ‘Babel rights’ to allow little Waitroses, boutique housing etc to be built on top of parish churches.
• Buy-to-let almshouses.
• Admission to historic buildings via tokens purchased from private sector ‘gamechangers’ sitting at special ‘non-overturnable’ tables.
• Principle of ‘sanctuary’ to be revived but with small charge for anti-capitalist protesters playing off-ground touch with the police.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Pathetic Fallacy 1, Emphatic Delusion 0, after extra time and passive-aggressive crowd noises.
SUNDAY Catch up with my filing. There’s an interesting new report on human rights which lists China, Iran and Burma as the three most oppressive regimes in the world. File under ‘emerging markets’.
Later, ethically transfer to the recliner.
October 20, 2011
The Decadent Egg
MONDAY The planners have turned down my planning application for a pop-up mosque.
It was a ‘bouncy mega-mosque’ and looked bloody great on paper. A gigantic though modest inflatable structure with a helium-stiffened minaret. Capable of holding 70,000 worshippers either on land (urban version) or afloat in the middle of the Thames Estuary (Olympic legacy version).
Despite this inbuilt flexibility – I sought planning permission to inflate the mosque anywhere in London it could fit, thereby saving on paperwork – it has been refused because it is too big and ‘contentious’. I’m not sure what this means. ‘Likely to be opposed by people who don’t like giant inflatable mosques’? It’s absurd.
I’ll make it smaller and less contentious. Back to the pop-up drawing board.
TUESDAY OK, here we go. I’ve halved the size, emailed it off to the planners and have even paid the £3, 000 surcharge for a same-day decision.
Fingers crossed. This pop-up mosque is smaller AND it’s buried underground where nobody can see it. Plus, I’ve decreased the contentiousness by giving it a patronising tabloid nickname, the ‘Meccatracker’.
The Meccatracker is a magnetically accurate prayer hall inside a massive reinforced concrete ‘grindstone’. This doesn’t sound very demountable, but the ‘grindstone’ is built from thousands of ultra-thin folding Conquete® panels. I will reveal the actual construction process in due course, if I get planning permission.
This one holds a mere 12,000 worshippers and is suitable for any big-enough hole in the ground. Its unique Mosqnav® tracking system adjusts every three minutes to align with the verified source of project sponsorship.
Bollocks. Refused again. STILL too big.
WEDNESDAY I am putting aside mosques for the moment to design a luxury boutique world-class access space. It is, obviously, brilliant. I am calling it The Decadent Egg.
The Egg is a prototype ‘gateway presence’ that can literally be rolled out, assuming a level rolling field, to any site in the world. A spun-Kryptogel® globe, double-skinned, a ‘nodule within a podule’. It can redeem the most unappetising new building in the world with its dollop of classy garnish.
From the bleak hospitality of an aerodrome in the Caucasus to the feeble grandeur of a chain hotel in Aberdeen, the Decadent Egg ‘delivers adjunctive elevation’. You may say: ‘what are you talking about?’ I’ll tell you.
Adjunctive elevation occurs through the creation of vertical portals and analogical linkages, using inter-connecting layers of platforms to signify a dynamic, expressive mix of urban forum, windows, reception desk, human sounding board, hang-out space, niche sponsorship opportunities, ad hoc public observatory and quality piped music.
Furthermore, 3-D mapping allows the visitor to see everything from slightly different angles by sequentially standing at different ‘node points’. Incredibly, I am taking the notions of fluid architectural form and functional interaction, then mashing them up into a totally innovative blurred existence.
This innovative blurred existence I will call ‘authentricity’. The authentic reassurance of affordable luxury in an easily readable generic style. It sounds like the opposite of authenticity, but it isn’t.
THURSDAY Try the heritage approach. Submit my ‘midi-mosque’ for planning permission.
It’s a retro plug-in prayer space, compatible with all pre-1995 power channels. Holds 500 worshippers in a matt black pop-up cardboard tube. Dry bar with free wi-fi. Would easily fit on a defunct petrol station or library site.
The minaret’s invisible within a slender cardboard tube, which has a brick veneer and looks like a chimney. Pick the bones of contention out of THAT.
FRIDAY Ugh. Turned down on three grounds. Firstly it was ruled ‘unsustainable’; cardboard is apparently not a ‘local’ material.
Secondly, they hated the chimney: ‘visual misrepresentation under the Aesthetic Trades Description Act 1894 (to wit, not a chimney); contravention of the Passive Air Act 2002 (to wit, promoting the inference of airborne smoke)’.
Thirdly, the entire scheme ‘breaches the Common Law of Contention Governing Lawful Assemblies of Mohammetans 1067 (by encouraging same)’. I think this is pretty bad, to be honest, discriminating against mosques on the basis that they contain Muslims.
But not as shocking as the cardboard thing. Thanks to Amazon and the supermarkets, cardboard is now an abundant local material, surely. Bastards!
SATURDAY Invent the iMosq, a single-use numinous helmet for individual worshippers. Keep it to myself this time.
SUNDAY Large lunch, then push the limits of tolerance in the recliner.
November 10, 2011
Remagination
MONDAY I have entered a government-sponsored recovery design competition. They’re looking for a massive infrastructure and housebuilding programme, ‘asafp’.
Start thinkstorming. By teatime I’m surrounded by crumpled paper and all I’ve written down is ‘£100 billion should do it!’ Though in fairness I have underlined this, twice.
TUESDAY Making progress on my recovery initiative. I’ve drawn a pastoral landscape. On the left, wind turbines and Glastonbury. On the right, sustainable development and acres of arable investment opportunity.
Across the horizon I’ve written ‘Aims and objectives: boost growth, create jobs!’
WEDNESDAY Definitely taking shape now. I’m playing around with the idea of using private sector capital funding to build new power stations, rented housing, hospital gift shops, toll pavements, etc.
It’s a novel and daring approach. I call it the ‘design, build, stand and deliver’ procurement system.
THURSDAY For my proposals to be credible they have to demonstrate at least a notional source of money.
That’s it, exactly – notional! Theoretically there’s a fortune out there, it’s just locked up in complicated pension funds and whatever. Those who carry the burden of wealth are feeling nervous about spending at the moment and who can blame them?
Under ‘funding’ I just put ‘if we build a framework of stable regulation, it will come’. I’m so confident that I DOUBLE the proposed investment. The cynics can sneer all they like. £200 billion theoretically buys a bloody lot of construction.
FRIDAY My friend Darcy Farquear’say the architecture critic has ‘scored a couple of invites’ to the prestigious 4R Awards tomor
row night. Do I want to go?
Darcy is not a 1970s San Francisco pimp. When he says he ‘scored’ invitations he simply means he’s been sent them by the PR company retained for the event. Also, I’m assuming the organisers have a strict no-pets rule, and that I’m a last-minute replacement for Darcy’s architectural dachshund Bauhau.
Still, I’m in. The 4R Awards (Retreat, Rebadge, Remagine, Relaunch) is an important annual celebration of what architects can achieve when they focus their considerable creative powers on a worthy subject. Themselves.
SATURDAY A glittering, tittering crowd at the mid-range London hotel where Awards Night is taking place.
It reminds me of the old days, when architects gathered to give each other prizes for brilliant buildings, although my memory’s not what it was and I may have invented that.
Tonight, the prizes are for architectural excellence in the redesign and re-use of architectural practices. Which, let’s face it, is no less important than designing mobile protest kiosks, ‘urban respite spaces’, culture hubs and clothes shops. Architects aren’t the stuffy old deadheads they used to be. They are an integral part of the knowledge economy. Any profession that allows the neologism ‘remagine’ to attach itself to them like a brainless limpet deserves all the success they can garner, even if that success is restricted to peer recognition.
Darcy chides me for being a curmudgeon. He’s wearing a three-piece swagged hemp suit, retro neon wrestling boots and a lumberjack hat, so I weigh his judgement carefully. It’s free drinks for the first hour, and my mood soon lightens. I raise a glass to epic space: ‘Architect, design thyself!’
Façade of the Year goes to Manningham Downham Architects, who reduced staff at their Leeds head office from 52 to 4 last month but have kept them moving about near the windows, so nobody’s noticed.
Best Website Award. The winner is Unique Design Logistics/Central-BANG for an innovative ‘reversible’ web presence. The homepage invites visitors to click on either ‘Unique Design Logistics’ or ‘CentralBANG’. One whisks you off to a profile page where they’re looking trustworthy in suits and hard hats. The other offers tieless dudes looking at skateboard videos on an iPad. ‘Twice the integrity, double the options’ is their motto, in both versions.
The Special Award for Colon Efficiency goes to :r::D::a: (the firm formerly known as Radon Daughters & Associates). Since the multicolon rebrand :r::D::a: have registered a 22 per cent year-on-year increase in stationery output. An intern is solely responsible for checking that potential clients, service suppliers and news editors spell it correctly, and for answering the phone. ‘Colon lower case R double colon upper case D double colon lower case A colon, how may I help you?’
SUNDAY Retrofit self into recliner by waking up and discovering I’m already in it.
November 17, 2011
It’s the Sulk I’m Really After
MONDAY Issue a statement denying rumours that I am to curate next year’s Tamworth Biennale.
Of course I understand how these rumours started. I started them. What I DON’T understand is why nobody takes them seriously. In order to spare myself further humiliation, I have now withdrawn my name from the shortlist.
TUESDAY Already regretting counting myself out as biennale curator. I had some dazzling, innovative ideas. The theme was to be ‘Epic Space as Contemporary Drama’.
Instead of ‘pavilions’ or ‘rooms’ I proposed an interlinked network of stages, upon which various architectural performances could occur. I thought I’d keep it loose to allow creativity to flourish. Even when I was only ‘rumoured’ to be curating, there was huge interest in this idea.
One nation, which has to remain nameless, wanted to use the event as a sort of trade showcase. A team of actors in black polo-neck jumpers would build a stylish urban apartment from scratch and then live in it, listening to jazz and watching thrillers with subtitles.
Mostly, though, the exhibits were drearily predictable. A luminous field of tents in the shadow of a hologram cathedral. Shakespearean actors on a revolving stage, declaiming extracts from European planning law. A stage left meaningfully empty, that we may infer our own sense of what architecture means. A weird conga of ‘disenfranchised youth’ weaving around dangerous obstacles in a parable about space syntax. Tensile environments. A polished concrete and glass ‘allegory’. A lighting rig powered by the cast’s breath. A high-density boutique, its curtilage extended by 500m using ironic disco music and aromatherapy.
Never mind, there’s always next year. Plenty of time to plant rumours about my curating something really shocking at the Victoria and Albert Museum say, then complain about being monstered in the tabloids, then withdraw sulkily. I think in the end it’s the sulk I’m really after.
WEDNESDAY Sketch out my masterplan for a new airport in the middle of the Thames estuary. There would be bobbing executive lounges and no smoking anywhere in London.
The coasts of Essex and Kent would effectively be converted into duty-free malls. Fingers crossed.
THURSDAY Meeting of the Olympic Rebadging Task Force. Games minister Suzi Towel in the chair. As usual, after prayers and apologies for absence, she leads us in a Mexican Wave. In keeping with these solemn and unostentatious times, the table-wave angle is kept under 40 degrees.
It’s not the only concession to recession. Now whenever anyone says the word ‘Olympics’ we merely murmur ‘yay’ in grim approbation.
First item on the agenda is the matter of how to create a ‘fulcrumic’ public space between the shops and the new security barrier – apparently the FBI is now allowed to erect some horrible ugly ‘people filter’ on the site without the benefit of our design competition expertise. No matter. This fulcrumic problem is really tricky because the space has to be both a hub AND ‘evolve over time to become an enticing destination’. After some discussion we decide to rebadge the space as ‘pivotal’, allowing it to move with the times.
The next item on the agenda is the Thing. The massive steel monument being built by – and to the glory of – a billionaire political donor. We need a nickname, and sharpish. It’s important that the nation embraces the Thing, but it is so genuinely horrible that nobody likes it. So far (luckily) none of the nicknames – the Sex Trumpet, the Skein of Shit, the Whirlyfuck – has stuck.
Now though its ‘shape’ is becoming apparent. It looks like a giant pound sign lashed to a post, waiting for some legendary dragon to come and devour it. As a narrative on global capitalism it’s great, but we’re not sure this is a route we want to go down. We decide in the end to contract the nicknaming out to a Daily Telegraph columnist and grudgingly accept the consequences.
Marvellous lunch, though everyone’s careful not to enjoy it too much given the state of the economy. But there’s still much muted excitement about the legacy we’re building here, over pudding, for the 2012 Olympics. Yay.
FRIDAY Design a Museum of Tolerance just to wind up the haters, man.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Picturesque 2, Photoshop 4.
SUNDAY Nod off in the recliner. Horrible dream about 95 per cent mortgages being used to ‘create wealth’. Ugh. The lying shit Blair was in it, too.
November 26, 2011
One One
MONDAY Redesign the Eurozone, giving it a dark ‘old-fangled’ look, with Gothic tracery and an enveloping mist.
TUESDAY Bad news. My smart housing scheme for Blingnang has been cancelled. It doesn’t make any sense – how can a construction boom simply STOP?
Shame. I’d proposed bio-sensors for all the rooms, allowing occupants to tell with one tap on an app if they were at home or not.
WEDNESDAY Design something on a tricky corner site. It’s to be called ‘Vector 6’ for maximum flexibility as the client’s not sure yet what it’s for. Fine with me. My motto these days is ‘Long life, loose fit, vague project title’.
THURSDAY Pub lunch with my old mate Tub Hagendaas, the metarchitect’s metarchitect. Tub really is in a class of h
is own: he’s the only one who knows what a metarchitect is. And this is his power.
Tub’s on a world tour at the moment. Each country he visits is required to host a massive retrospective of his work while he potters around in the countryside, gathering data for a new project called ‘One One’. This will involve the creation of an ambitious 1:1 scale map.
He stares mournfully at the remains of his pub lunch – that is, practically all of it as he’s on a strict garnish-only diet at the moment.
‘This map will be a map of all the countrysides in the world. When completed, it can be briefly overlayed onto the real thing …’ Here he gives me one of his withering stares to signal that of course he’s not that stupid. ‘… very briefly I mean, we do not want to see the stifling of the crops or the suffocation of the livestocks or the peoples of the Earth.
‘This map, OK, this unsolicited skin or membrane, is then slowly raised into the air by sky cranes, the various peoples of the countrysides of the Earth perhaps cheering, throwing their hats into the air, I don’t of course wish to be prescriptive. Rather, I wish to be postscriptive. The map or skin or membrane – manufactured from polymolecules which have been teased out through a nano-carding process to produce something quite unprecedented …’
He stops for a moment. Imperiously holds up a hand to prevent further interruption. Retrieves a small recording device from a pocket and speaks into it. ‘Reminder. Check with lab for any progress at all on polymolecular carding’. He replaces the device, remembers something and pulls it out again. ‘Elsa. Please find out if my silver jumpsuit is ready for collection from the dry cleaner’s. Thank you.’
I take the opportunity to slip off to the bar to get another round in. When I return Tub is engaging a weary-looking member of staff in conversation about his lunch. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t want your lunch in the end but I just need to clear the plates away …’ ‘Is this not symptomatic of a society ill at ease with its own detritus, its own waste and filth, its … yes very well, hurry up please’.