by Ian Martin
But Ms Bismuth is adamant. ‘We are here today, gathered in our vestments of truth and honour, some in ceremonial hats and sparkling notions, to make the most momentous decision in our institute’s history. Should we remain fossilised, with our heads up our past? Or rather should we grasp the new pop-up reality and look the future in the eye?’ Here she slaps a thigh, makes a ‘pop-up’ gesture and growls briefly.
After lunch, those eligible members still awake solemnly file in to vote. It’s a tie: two-all. There’s a short debate, then agreement that the change of name shall be observed until the standing-down of the incumbent president.
‘Hail, the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects!’ cries Ms Bismuth. ‘So say we all!’ answer the three remaining conscious members.
SATURDAY Pop up the pub.
SUNDAY Bauhau’s column in the Creative on Sunday is very bitter this week. ‘Hey, anybody here heard of Wang Shu? No? Well, he’s just won the Pritzker Prize. Really? What’s THAT, you ask? Yeah, welcome to the twilight world of architecture, where genuine talent is crushed and the merely fashionable is promoted and fawned over by witless giggling fannies …’
There are already over a thousand online comments, overwhelmingly positive. Poor Darcy. New Bauhau’s a hit.
March 1, 2012
19th-Century Brickdust
MONDAY ‘Residents’ are a right pain in the arse, aren’t they? Let’s be honest, ‘residents’ are just a random assortment of people who happen to live in the same area.
But as soon as I submit a planning application to replace a totally nondescript clapped-out Victorian two-storey building with a massive lump of retail space and a stunning 18-storey block of flats – FIVE OF WHICH WILL BE TECHNICALLY ‘AFFORDABLE’ BY THE WAY – suddenly there’s a coherent community with all sorts of shared bloody visions, and some hurtfully expressed reservations about my methodology.
If I had my way local residents’ objections would be admissable only if accompanied by documentary proof that the bastards actually know each other. It is frankly outrageous that a meeting of residents can be called and then HIJACKED for the first quarter of an hour by people simply introducing themselves!
And they call this democracy.
TUESDAY Plenty to think about today. The so-called residents have now joined forces with the Heritage Brigade.
Embarrassingly, one of the heritage brigadiers is my old friend Dusty Penhaligon the conservactionist. We’ve been on opposite sides of the argument before, of course.
There was that Wesleyan chapel I wanted to replace with a big department store shaped like an amoeba. The Edwardian arcade I planned to turn into a ‘boutique vertical village’ and private rare bird sanctuary. And the straggly old almshouses that should have made way for my enormous Museum of Natural Light, a glazed truncheon of aesthetic authority in an otherwise trivial, cowering suburban setting.
In each case Dusty, and the sheer scale of my ambition, and OK the laws of physics, conspired to bury the scheme. It didn’t stop us shaking hands afterwards and having a pint. This time it’s different. We have more emotional investment. Dusty’s reputation as the man who can stop anything new being built anywhere is at stake. And I’m on points for each non-affordable flat sold.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with Dusty. ‘Yeah, nothing personal mate but I’m going to be publicly calling your scheme an overscaled horrendous pile of shit,’ he says, cordially.
Oh well, I say, it would be a boring old world if we all liked the same things. I fetch two identical pints from the bar. ‘It’s not just’ he says, ‘that it’s big and ugly, cheers. It disrespects the historic area and has a completely non-contextual materials palette …’
We exchange a meaningful glance. What a top bloke Dusty is. He’s obliged to oppose the scheme whatever it looks like. But he’s just satnav’ed me through the valley of the shadow of death, avoiding traffic black spots and residents.
THURSDAY Spend the day rearranging my credentials. I need to make myself more ethical and appealing to those wine-tasting sour-faced bossy cockplungers who’ve emerged as the opinion formers within their newly discovered ‘community’.
Ugh. Just the idea that we craftspeople of epic space must put up with this. It seems incredible that in the 21st century professional placemakers can still be stereotyped as disconnected narcissists. Whatever happened to trust? Fine. I’ll dissemble then, if that’s what it takes to mollify Jamie Oliver’s Army.
By teatime my CV includes an organic orphanage, a green hospice and a Bridge of Peace between North and South Korea.
FRIDAY Residents’ meeting. I reveal the redesign, which omits the 18-storey block of flats. That’s now Phase 2, which can always be reannounced if necessary.
I have reduced the ‘retail space’ to two storeys and rebadged it as ‘boutique local commercial community shopping with potential for “farmers’ upmarket”. Think potatoes with dirt on and stallholders dressed like Mumford and Sons’.
That goes down well. Then I reveal that the new building will have ‘a classic Victorian form and mass’. The cladding will incorporate a light dusting of genuine 19th-century brickdust, recycled from the pulverised building it will seamlessly replace. Honestly, I say, you won’t notice even the tiniest change in the historic landscape.
Plus £50 worth of Ocado vouchers for every household, subject to availability.
There’s a show of hands. All are in favour except Dusty, who surreptitiously gives me a scowl and a wink.
SATURDAY Pub with Dusty. Drinks are on me, as I’ve just had a cheque from the client’s administrators. I’m a community hero, Dusty’s reputation’s intact. We raise our glasses and toast the plastic arts.
SUNDAY Take up temporary residence in the recliner.
March 8, 2012
The Certification of Public Space
MONDAY A few months ago I awarded myself outline planning permission for a controversial ‘mind farm’.
It wasn’t easy. Part of my consciousness had serious objections to having unsightly ‘mind turbines’ in a picturesque part of the mental landscape. But the stark reality is that conventional thinking resources, fossilised for as long as I can remember, are finite. Alternative means of converting thought into fee-generating energy are urgently required.
After a lengthy private inquiry the objections were emphatically overruled. My mind farm is now fully functional, harnessing those gusts of lateral thinking that otherwise would be blowing aimlessly around my hippocampus like litter in a car park.
Of course the scoffers and tossers were sceptical. ‘Lateral thinking may have been an earner in the 1990s, but who pays for that sort of thing now?’ Well, scoffers and tossers, I’ll tell you. The government’s Public Responsibility Unit, that’s who.
TUESDAY To Westminster, for a thinking breakfast. Technically it’s under the auspices of the Public Responsibility Unit. Physically it’s under the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in a spartan PFI dining room grudgingly converted from a wartime bunker.
Every politico with even a glancing responsibility for the built environment is there, including architecture minister the Hon. Aeneas Upmother-Brown. He is accompanied as usual by his swarm of pet bees. Their choral hum elevates the seriousness of the situation, which is spelled out for us by their master.
‘I have the latest polling results here and they make appalling reading, mm. According to our sample of Coalition MPs, only 32 per cent think the public can be trusted with public space. And only 17 per cent think the private sector is getting the support it deserves from shoppers and pedestrians. We need to re-imagine the whole notion of public space, mm, before militant members of the public start organising unpleasant dissent. Ah, my precious bees. Consider the frailty of humankind, mm. Now, spatial opinion-formers begone! Only one of you will be chosen for this special task …’
Oh yeah. Also in attendance: every rival I have in the field of architecturalised narrative consultancy. No such thing as teamwork here. We’re
all bastards, all in it to win it. Luckily, my head is full of mind-farmed inspiration.
WEDNESDAY Internal brainstorming, tossing new ideas for public space back and forth within myself. By close of business I’ve rejected pay-per-view architecture, premium strolling lanes in historic cities, monetised queuing and a human congestion charge based on body fat density.
THURSDAY Prep for my presentation tomorrow. Psych myself up by remembering that everything wrong with the private sector is the public sector’s fault.
FRIDAY Eschewing PowerPoint and props I speak from my heart, to the bees.
Advertising is everywhere. Public space, once innocent and unblemished, is now slathered in ads. These corporate messages cost a lot of money to make and display, but some may be unsuitable for children. This is an issue of parental responsibility. Adults who do an excellent job in the home, monitoring what their children watch on TV, simply abandon this filtering process in the outside world.
Let’s say a father is taking his young daughter into central London. During even a shortish journey through public space she will encounter posters depicting horror, terror, armed violence and sexual objectification. This is all very well for the father, but wholly unsuitable for the little girl. It’s no excuse for the father to say he didn’t know what the public space was like, he’s been there before.
I propose we remove all ambiguities with a Certification of Public Space Bill. Summary: grade the civic environment in exactly the same way that films are classified. It would then be parents’ responsibility to keep their children away from X-rated environments such as public transport, high streets, evangelical churches, etc., and to accompany them when required (PG), e.g. in pubs. As with gated communities and privatised town centres, public space certification would help keep people in their right place.
Everyone in the room, even the buzzing swarm, looks impressed. To the clear annoyance of the unsuccessful consultant thinkers, I am appointed to reframe public space in the minds of the British people.
In your FACE, the part of me that objected to the mind farm.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Autobranded Egotism 6, Introverted Altruism 0.
SUNDAY Self-contextualise in the recliner.
April 5, 2012
The Blard
MONDAY Amazing start to the week. I’ve been commissioned to redesign the internet.
Details of my appointment are being kept vague at the moment to avoid any legal confusion as technically nobody owns the internet. It’s everybody’s. This late-Soviet economic model is good news for my clients, about whom I can say nothing, except to confirm they are an international consortium with headquarters inside a defunct Micronesian volcano.
Oh, there are commercial empires ON the internet, just as there were once commercial empires on the high street. But like USSR gas reserves, the internet is without value until some commercial warlord in boot-cut jeans buys it and announces it’s worth a fortune and then moves to a luxury fortress in London to avoid being killed by sinister robot wolves.
The opportunity is here and graspable. Any volcano-based consortium with vision is thinking about how to refashion the internet. I am proud to be helping to push things along with my literally priceless cyberscape architecture skillset.
TUESDAY Morning: design an eggbox cathedral. Afternoon: design a dried pasta primary school.
WEDNESDAY Because the internet is so vast I’ve decided to simplify things by thinking of it in terms of an English urban regeneration master-plan.
First, I will carry out a psychogeographical audit. Then, I will ‘quantify the investment offer’. Then I will divide the internet into designated quarters. Then I will get a Taiwanese rendering agency to bang out some optimistic impressions of how the internet might look in the future.
There will be balloons, and people will be the shape of spring onions, and the parents will be pointing and the children will be laughing. Or are my critics suggesting that in the future of the internet there should BE no children’s laughter?
THURSDAY I’ve entered a design competition. Residential skyscraper at the happening end of Hackney. Hapney. Predictably, so has everyone else. Got to pull something pretty special out of my 1963 hipster briefcase.
The competition sponsors want to ‘create interest in the skyline’. I think this means ‘make people look up’. You could do that by having someone shouting from a roof, but my guess is they want a landmark building.
As ever, this competition will be won not by innovative engineering or ‘design flair’ or environmental sucking-up but by strength of nickname. After a few hours on my mental scribbling pad I’ve got the vague shape: elegant vintage brickwork turning in on itself with brown shades and an ickle hat. Maybe call it The Torqued About.
No, sod that. Let’s make it as tall as the Shard, turn the ground floor into a retro arcade full of farmers’ micromarkets and vinyl record shops and ironic racism. Yeah, done. The hipster skyscraper. Call it The Blard.
FRIDAY Sketch out my internet do-over. The cyberscape topography will remain the same, obviously. Best to avoid expensive cyber-geo-engineering works. All outlying desert and tundra, wildernesses and porn oceans will be unaffected.
The internet’s built-up bits will be completely rationalised. I’m proposing a vibrant global ‘town centre’ where everyone who really matters – heartless young people with disposable income – can congregate in a giant Mall of the Internet.
All the useful stuff will be housed in a utilitarian Learning Quarter at the cheap end of town, where scholars and weirdos and wikipediaphiles can go, good riddance.
Beyond this, a curtain-twitching suburbia for Twitter and Facebook and all the other defensible-space new urbanist networks where people mind your business for you and swap stories about kooky pets.
My favourite bit is the Heritage Quarter, where I plan to preserve all websites retaining original pre-1995 javascript features. Gathering together random lumps of our collective history into an ‘internet destination’ will be big business, if the real-world parallel’s anything to go by.
Summary: more interactive, more interfactive, porous, passive-aggressive but with your initials in the foam, not the Wednesday night Channel 4 thing, but not the Friday night Channel 4 thing either.
Yeah, you mumble, but will it ‘cost’ anything to be somewhere on the internet, in this cyberscaped future? Idiots. Ask yourself if it’s costing you to be wherever you are now lol.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Architectural Feminism 2, Patriarchitectural Madmenism wins, the score’s irrelevant, sorry that’s just the way it is.
SUNDAY Have a little lie-down in the pop-up recliner.
April 19, 2012
A Cross-Vectored Media Partnership
MONDAY As one of the founding members of the activist group Enemies of the Shard, my mate Scalesy the urban trespasser has led some pretty high-profile derision.
He famously sneaked up to the top of the Shard in his bobble hat and took a picture of himself pulling a face. Since then he’s been outspoken in his bobble hat about corporate gigantism and the hypocrisy of ‘the design industry’.
Recently Scalesy mocked the architect’s claim that this grim, over-sized capitalist silo will in fact be an ‘actual town of 8,000 people’. Oh really, he sneered in his bobble hat. Will there be a primary school there? Dentists? Housing association flats and a parish church and a cottage hospital? Idiots.
Now they’ve asked him to become mayor of the Shard, on quite a generous stipend. I don’t want to speculate but I can definitely sense some moral flexibility bobbling about.
TUESDAY Under cover of the night I hurry to an emergency meeting of the Tamworth League.
Aye, I hurry as people have hurried since the eighth century, when Oversight of England was cruelly plucked from the socket of ancient Mercia by the treacherous and incestuous barbarians of the South.
We have assembled in solemn accordance with the Old Ways to discu
ss a branding opportunity. A mighty power from across the Great Sea has pitched an exciting cross-vectored media partnership. The terms seem quite reasonable.
It would, however, have an impact on our masterplan to revive the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, to wit a kingdom of London enclosed by a Great Wall and the rest of England led by a saucy, slightly pissed Mercia. Imagine a densely packed salad bar sequestered within a realm of pies.
The partnership deal would require us to rebadge the region ‘New Mercia brought to you by HBO’s Game of Thrones’. Now the Tamworth League already receives certain considerations for having inspired the blood-sluiced porn version of our early history, but the new arrangement effectively transfers governance of the region to a cabal of executive producers based in Los Angeles.
Ancient rights to be transferred from the Tamworth Council of Elders to ‘Todd Spielman, Show Runner’ include pannage, judicial beheadment, charcoal burning, human pruning, estovers, turbary, tribal slaughter and all town and country planning regulations.
It’s not ideal, but these are bleak times. And our geo-political restoration programme desperately needs major sponsorship, now the deal to sell off most of Cheshire to a Saudi consortium has fallen through.
WEDNESDAY I have been asked by an epic space collective to rethink their business model.
What a terrible state it’s in. I don’t think anyone’s looked at it properly since savage Modernist dinosaurs ruled the earth. Everything’s very ‘boom and bust’. Mountainous terrain. Lots of uphill struggles, sunlit uplands and then jagged, treacherous cliffs.
Of course I can’t redesign economics – that’s a closed shop and membership costs a fortune – but I can psychologically re-landscape the business model at least. Out goes the old-fashioned notion of ‘up and down’. In comes the new model of ‘round and round’.