by Ian Martin
A young intern has materialised to take a Polaroid picture of Tub. As part of his rigorously documented life – he is a most fascinating subject – he insists on being photographed every 15 minutes. ‘This is absolutely nothing creepy at all. The Polaroid interns are on a rota, it is not as if I keep one special intern at my house or hotel to take photographs of me every quarter-hour. And what really is so weird about a person asleep or defecating or masturbating or whatever? Are we to sweep these things under the polymolecular carding? No, we are not!’
The table-clearing accelerates sharply and the Polaroid intern disappears. I tell him that I totally get the nano-science and the giant map and all that, but why is the project called ‘One One’? If it’s a 1:1 scale map, what on earth has happened to the colon?
‘Ah, this is the heart of the matter, you are correct’. He leans in and lowers his voice. ‘The colon is dead’.
FRIDAY Still in shock, frankly. Unpunctuated Epic Space: Imagination Beyond the Colon. No, it’s unthinkable.
SATURDAY In Denial: A Continuing Struggle with the Absent Colon: Further Thoughts on Architecture’s Cantilevered Language of Deferred Articulation.
SUNDAY Media review in the recliner. Tub all over the papers with his call for ‘colon cleansing’. Ugh.
December 8, 2011
Pudding Gateshead
MONDAY Design an urban nebulus. Key transport nodes linked by synaptic pathways of space. Socio-neural clusters organically formed into sustainable hubs of excellence.
All a bit vague at the moment. I’m allowing it to develop naturally in my mind as an elasticated mystery.
TUESDAY To the Royal Institute for the Protection of British Architects, which is marking the Queen’s diamond jubilee with an eclectic exhibition of thrones.
There’s the Jacobean extravagance of the Throne of the Apocrypha, a hypergothic masterpiece on loan from Sir Elton John. And there’s the grim humour of Throne Up, an installation by the republican collective Gertcha. This is merely an aircraft ejector seat, with a frozen turkey sitting in it to make it art.
My favourite is the reclining Throne of Games, built perhaps with younger princes in mind, with its integral PSP screen and snack pouches.
WEDNESDAY I’m on the shortlist to rethink Gateshead. Intellectually this is a massive gig, even if none of my proposals will ever be realised.
The client, Gateshead Legacy Delivery Corporation, wants to ‘imagineer a contemporary live-work-visit destination with world-class vision and a pronounced cultural overbite’.
Funds will not be immediately available to implement any masterplan, but as my fixer Rock Steady Eddie says, ‘Money’s bollocksed now anyway, who even knows what money IS any more? This is cultural re-bloody-generation. It just has to look tasty in one of them investment catalogues they leave lying about in the first class lounge at Abu Dhabu International, you finishing those chips?’
Eddie and I are trying to brainstorm in the pub. Not the ideal environment for focusing on creative solutions for a major northern conurbation. On the other hand, pub lunch.
‘Look, imagine this table is Gateshead, yeah?’ A young man in an unnecessary charcoal apron is clearing the table. ‘See how all these whatever, remnants of the past, are being swept away …’ ‘Everything all right for you gents?’ murmurs Apron Lad as our plates disappear. Eddie pauses and squints at him.
‘You tell me, son. This …’ he indicates the crumb-covered table ‘… is Gateshead, right? A clean slate, once you’ve wiped the bloody table obviously. It was always in the shadow of Newcastle, where all the good shops were. Then they phased out the mining and the industry. They created Europe’s largest council estate in the hope that it would form some sort of whatever, critical mass, and suck in new economic opportunities but these turned out to be mostly landscaping, art forgery, tobacco smuggling, eck cetera …’
The table has been wiped. All that remains are our two pints and the condiments tray. ‘And here coincidentally are Gateshead’s primary cultural whatever, indicators: Angel of the North, that flour mill they turned into an art gallery, plus I think there’s some concert hall, probably looks like a cruet set, designed by the lad Foster. Forget your concrete towers and gritty carparks. All that gangster film stuff’s in the skip. Name of the game these days is cultural capital …’
‘Would you gents like to see the pudding menu?’
Now Eddie definitely doesn’t like to be interrupted. There’s a silence you could put a hat on. Eddie makes gunfingers at Apron Lad and for a moment I think he’s going to punch him. Instead, he turns the gun into a gesture of approbation and smiles. ‘Puddings. That’s it. Brilliant. Yeah, bring us the menu, son …’
THURSDAY Work up New Gateshead using Eddie’s Cultural Pudding Theory. Summary: forget starters, the days of cultural regeneration appetisers have gone. Forget the main course, heavy industry’s never coming back. If you just have the pudding you can have several.
He’s definitely on to something. I rethink the area as a gigantic dessert trolley, filled with cultural assets … wait. Why not make them LOOK like puddings? An arts centre conceived as a trifle. A big vanilla slice of local heritage experience. An assortment of accessible artworks scattered like petit-fours across the town?
FRIDAY Submit my proposals for Pudding Gateshead. Particularly pleased with ‘Tateshead’, a notional complex of Tates jumbled along the south bank of the Tyne like cheese and biscuits.
SATURDAY The Gateshead people hate my cultural puddings. Apparently I have ‘besmorched’ their dignity with my analysis. Fine. I want nothing more to do with shitting Gateshead. Let them eat fucking cake.
SUNDAY Form a cultural pudding in the recliner.
February 9, 2012
The Collide-O-Scope
MONDAY Create a 300,000m2 ‘dream plaza’. Wake up from afternoon nap and create an ordinary one.
TUESDAY Afternoon tea with my old friend Isis de Cambray, the magic arborealist.
Pretentious landscaping remains a buoyant sector. The idle rich are never satisfied. Isis built her reputation on extravagant garden design, but now the global kleptocracy is keening after a new authenticity. ‘Poverty chic is my fresh jam!’ squeaks Isis, with no hint of irony. The hip end of the billionaire garden market now wants to capture the vitality of the dispossessed. Those marvellous peasant environments. The ‘excitement of having nothing’.
I recoil in disgust. Is this what she’s doing now? Turning misery into some fucking playground for bankers and celebrities? What next? Will she start designing contemporary plantations in blackface? She shrugs. ‘Please yourself. I thought you could use some moonlighting. Cash in hand. The idea was that you’d be my mysterious gnarled old English landscape architect, Austerity Brown …’
I maintain my look of disdain, but help myself to another scone.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with architecture critic Darcy Farquear’say, who seems in a grave mood even after his fifth Dubai Wallclimber.
His preposterous dachshund Bauhau is oddly subdued too. Instead of yapping like some miniature pterodactyl every time someone says ‘post-Modernism’, he just gazes forlornly at His Master from within a slouchy yet elegant canine cocoon coat by Tommy Hilfiger.
Maybe he and Darcy have had a row. Two more Dubai Wallclimbers are slammed down on the table. ‘Make the most of it,’ snarls Darcy. ‘Good times don’t last forever’. Bauhau gives a little whimper and, for the first time I can ever recall, Darcy invites the ‘little bastard’ to shut his ‘stupid whiney trap, you’re giving me bloody neuralgia …’
THURSDAY Assemble some preliminary thought-collages for my Surrealistic Wardrobe. It’s actually a museum, not a wardrobe. I’m calling it a wardrobe to challenge public perceptions of surrealism, and museums.
Building elements will be deliberately unreconciled, so everything looks incongruous and sinister. Counterintuitively, there will actually be a ‘wardrobe’ theme to the museum throughout, with full-length mirrorglass and paintings on giant coatha
ngers and all the shit you’re never going to look at anyway scrunched up and stuffed to the back. There will be a magnificent entrance – or WILL there?
The Surrealistic Wardrobe is just what it’ll be called for the next two weeks. Then the project title will be words selected at random from The Concordance of Surrealism. For instance, from Monday March 5 it will be called the Urtastic Gourd. The following week, the Collide-O-Scope. Then the Ghastly Veil, the Rocking-Horse Ultimatum, the Meniscus of Emptiness, Poundlandia. Etc.
Yes, I’m going to be pushing some boundaries with this, as well as challenging public perceptions. These are basic criteria for European funding. Obviously I won’t be challenging my OWN perceptions. That would be madness. Someone’s got to keep a straight head.
FRIDAY Spend the day as ‘Austerity Brown’, the celebrated poverty landscape architect.
By teatime I’ve knocked up an impressive Garden of Contemplation for a client living in the posh, Chinese bit of Tibet. Five exquisitely unkempt acres of scrubland, with gorgeous little inhabited follies constructed from wooden pallets and corrugated tin. The centrepiece is a traditional English bonfire constructed from antique furniture and floorboards. There’s even a gutsy, earthy vegetable patch. Memo to Self: find out where to source growing vegetables.
SATURDAY Slight nausea, and inflammation of the conscience. God, if I’m coming down with something I really hope it’s not poverty.
SUNDAY ‘Media oversight’. Essentially, reading the papers in the recliner. I leave Darcy’s weekly essay in the Creative on Sunday until the end, as I’ve almost always heard it before in the pub.
Imagine my astonishment. The standfirst reads: ‘In his final piece as the Creative’s epic space correspondent, Darcy Farquear’say reflects on some of his most successful guesswork …’ Bloody hell. He’s OUT. I skim through the cut-and-paste Darcy memories, held together loosely in a valedictory ragbag, to the end. ‘And so I say, a little tearfully I confess – à bientôt!’ Then my jaw drops a little further. There’s a postscript.
‘Starting next week in our Love Life section: Under One Woof, a lighthearted look at the built environment with our resident style dachshund BAUHAU …’ Darcy’s been laid off and is ghosting for his DOG? This will end badly …
February 16, 2012
A Strange Glint
MONDAY A day of watercolours. Particularly proud of a winter landscape I shall call Ghostly Carbon Footprints in the Snow, in order to give it added emotional value.
TUESDAY In the morning, I’m struck by a quote from eminent academic Manny Lauda. He criticises young architects entering competitions, claiming that they ‘seem to think ordinary life processes are too boring to merit attention’.
He’s right. In the afternoon, I redesign the human digestive tract.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with Bauhau the dachshund, the new architecture correspondent of the Creative on Sunday.
Bauhau seems to have grown in confidence, if not in stature, since taking over the role from his companion, the forlorn and neurotic scribbler Darcy Farquear’say.
Of course Darcy’s actually ghosting the stuff – trivial, skittish takes on the built environment tagged Ground Zero – but for him anonymity is the ultimate humiliation. On the picture byline it’s not his but Bauhau’s optimistic face cocked inquisitively at the reader.
Still, every cloud. Freed from the yoke of sneery cynicism, Darcy’s writing style as a dachshund is a revelation. His tone is celebratory and generous, I tell him. Half a second too late I realise I’m talking to the dog. Darcy flares. ‘Yeah, brilliant work Bauhau, you little shit. How’s the novel coming along? Oh, I forgot, you CAN’T TYPE BECAUSE YOU’RE JUST A FUCKING DOG!’
A waiter gently asks Darcy to keep his voice down. Diners do not want to hear aggressive and bullying behaviour towards dachshunds. Bauhau calmly looks up at me from his fancy offal starters. He has a strange glint in his eye, as if to say ‘yeah, maybe I AM writing a novel’.
THURSDAY To the West End for the preview of an exciting new musical about crazy, sexy Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, called Steampuncular!
In common with most bourgeois commentators, I make it a rule never to see any theatre production with an exclamation mark at the end. Steampuncular! is the exception that proves the rule, and a reminder not to break it again in the future.
On paper the show is brilliant. Pugin the Gothic colossus re-imagined as Sid Vicious in a top hat and waistcoat, cursing and gobbing his way through the salons of 19th-century London, tearing up the architectural playbook, getting pissed and shagging everybody. Russell Brand is an inspired choice for the lead role, and Adele looks and sounds fantastic as the Queen.
But the whole thing relies far too heavily on gimmicks. From the special effects – at one point Pugin flies above the rooftops of Rome destroying Classical buildings with a laser cannon – to the tedious music hall-style songs.
The sight of Pugin and chorus prancing across the stage, all Cockney braces and hobnailed boots, singing ‘Don’t Call Me Mad or Bad, I’m Just a Medieval Genius’ convinced me not to return after the interval drinks.
FRIDAY Redesign Northern Ireland, giving it a ‘nuanced, heritagey, ethnic’ feel.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Stylistic Interregnum 4, Festival of Britain Retro Jubilee 2.
SUNDAY Newspaper review in the recliner. Bauhau’s latest despatch from Ground Zero is an impressive experiential hymn to something called ‘Splashion’, formerly Bradford town square.
It’s a massive pool with complicated fountains and seems to be a popular success. There are convincing pictures of Bauhau yapping gaily through the shallow water in what looks like a haute couture wetsuit. As an architecture critic ‘he’ loves it.
If Darcy had written this piece, he’d be disdaining the whole enterprise as a vulgar bid for tourist cash. He’d be moaning about the ephemeral nature of visitor attractions and pitying Bradford for its loss of dignity. He’d also be chucking in phrases such as ‘haptic imperative’ and ‘urban melisma’. As a dachshund, he’s so much more agreeable.
‘Woof! A large dead public space transformed into a fun day out with the kids? Woof! YES! Let the metropolitan elite whine like circular saws, who cares, Splashion’s all about a communal sense of civic pride and I for one won’t be relieving myself in it. Apart from anything else, it would be anti-social and might result in a fine for the apparently still-unnamed individual who looks after me! Woof!’
Bauhau also seems to be in favour of the Olympics. And Damien Hirst’s eco-town. And the Prince of Wales. I wonder if he knows what he’s doing?
February 23, 2012
The New Pop-Uption
MONDAY Reputation matters. It’s very important to me to avoid the charge that I am ‘pandering to an artistic elite’, whatever THAT means.
My latest ‘vibrant arts-based community’ – a theatre created from smart-matrix CGI, gossamised platinum and spun gold; 1,000 serviced apartments with armed, handsome security staff; a six-star hotel with funicular shuttle; approximately 280,000m² of tax-notional office and retail cash waiver, and a nightclub called Loco Bunga – is located on a (very) modest island in Russia, for example.
TUESDAY Redesign Liverpool with an inflatable waterfront development. This will give maximum flexibility in the future as it can either be puffed up to look more menacing than its historic neighbours, or floated away by sulky corporate windbags.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with my old friend Darcy Farquear’say, freelance architecture critic. I don’t think he’s ever been this scruffy or had stubble like that since the late 1980s.
And for the first time I can remember there’s no Bauhau the dachshund. Darcy and his quivering overdressed muse have been inseparable for years. Alas now Bauhau’s riding a small dog popularity thermal thanks to films such as Tin Tin and The Artist, Darcy rarely sees him – despite ghosting his popular architecture column in the Creative on Sunday.
‘He’s never home these days. I blame t
hat bitch of an agent. She’s his plus one, now for all the swish happenings, he’s staying over at her place a LOT …’ Darcy’s posture’s gone too. I ask him if he’d considered sabotaging Ground Zero, Bauhau’s weekly sideways canine look at the world of the built environment.
If Darcy started subtly changing Bauhau’s personality from yappy populist to gripey bastard … well, sooner or later he’d say something controversial and the liberal vigilantes of Twitter would demand his sacking. ‘Yes, I’m sick of this humiliation,’ says Darcy with resolve. ‘From now on, I’m going to be a totally different dachshund.’
THURSDAY A brainstorming day. If I could just think of something clever to turn Battersea Power Station into, some crazy geezer in sunglasses might pay me to DO it.
The trick is to keep things exciting yet vague. I’m going for ‘iconic destination where visitors can live, shop, browse, gaze, graze, booze and go up the chimneys on a thrilling sky walk for £75’. Someone in Qatar will LOVE the sound of that, you watch.
FRIDAY Huge day for the Royal Institute for the Protection of British Architects. Its ruling body on matters of moral destiny, the Noble and Most Ancient Council of Artful Contrivance and Brand Identity, has gathered to discuss a proposed change of name.
RIPBA president Molly Bismuth wants to replace the word ‘Protection’ with ‘Pop-Uption’.
Of course opponents claim that pop-uption isn’t strictly speaking a word and furthermore would expose members of the institute to ridicule and sharp banter in the workplace, especially on building sites. ‘May I see some credentials please?’ ‘Yes, here is my card. I am a member of the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects’. ‘Please proceed, ha ha ha: pop-uption’. The sniggering alone could fatally undermine the profession’s dignity.