by Ian Martin
We need to rethink how we travel through the economic landscape, too. It is unacceptable in the current climate to have a 4×4 in second gear roaring through verdant peaks and barren troughs. Better to imagine us all on a gentle bicycle ride through woodland, embracing the cyclical nature of the economy.
THURSDAY Meeting of the Tamworth League. We have now read HBO’s small print and decide with much regret to decline their offer of media stewardship.
Although the contract acknowledges the importance of preserving the essential characteristics of Mercia, an insistence that the entire kingdom ‘be divided into 58 minute segments and include trailers for Next Week’s Mercia’ is a deal-breaker.
We resolve to approach the BBC to explore their alternative offer of a ‘low-budget reality soap opera’.
FRIDAY Road-testing the beta version of the iPad 5. Some glitches, but I’m very impressed with the smooth ‘mode-switch’ facility which will make it an indispensable tool for the self-employed auteur.
‘Portrait mode’ for looking at pictures of tall buildings, ‘landscape’ for watching Antiques Roadshow or whatever.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist apathy dodgeball. Hypothetical Attitude 0, Apolitical Turpitude 0.
SUNDAY Check emails in the recliner. There’s an ominous one from Scalesy, who’s gone up the Shard again. Only this time he’s wearing not a bobble hat but a black-feathered tricorn.
May 10, 2012
The Airpunch
MONDAY I am redefining the London property development game. Until the recession ‘the game’ had always been Monopoly: you whizzed round amassing random assets, collected GO money, nursed a futile ambition to gentrify the Old Kent Road and ultimately crushed your enemies beneath a Mayfair hotel.
But at a time of grim austerity, property developers are easy targets for idle Marxists and envious Apprentice types. So I propose changing the game property developers play to Pass the Parcel. It’s inclusive, fair, communal and – if someone reliable’s in charge of stopping the music – you get a prize at the end.
I ring my old friend Emily Simile from the Council of Property Symbologists. She’s very impressed with my idea and offers me a fee to start punting out sponsored #PassThePropertyParcel appetisers on Twitter.
TUESDAY In the morning, sketch out plans to convert a gigantic disused power station site into a football ground.
In the afternoon, design the conversion of a disused football ground into a mixed-media concert arena. In the evening, devise a biofuel power station within a disused music hall.
Pass the Property Parcel in action. I retire, exhausted.
WEDNESDAY My sheer cleverness has roiled my subconscious. In the middle of the night I airpunch myself awake from a dream in which I had swap-converted a mosque and a nightclub.
Wait. ‘Airpunch’. I’m on fire! That’s the most brilliant nickname for a skyscraper, ever! I scribble some notes, resolve to nickname my next pass-the-parcelled skyscraper the Airpunch, congratulate myself once again and go back to sleep.
THURSDAY My friend Loaf, the mayor of London, calls. Two things. What about changing the property development game to ‘whiff-whaff’, maybe attract more upmarket investors? No.
The other thing is, I can have a skyscraper ANYWHERE I LIKE IN LONDON as long as it’s called The Airpunch and Loaf gets to open it, in Latin. Done.
FRIDAY God, I wish I’d never agreed to become ‘conceptualiser, artistic executive producer, director of coherence, form commander and diseñador de espacios épico’ for a massive so-called cultural campus in a Mediterranean harbour town.
It was years ago. The world then – leafy end of the 1990s – was a more secure and dependable place. Even the newspapers were supportive of my broad vision, my haughty disdain of the humdrum. ‘The Spanish Job’ was one of the very first commissions wrangled by Rock Steady Eddie the fixer. It was supposed to establish me as a ‘global marque’. Instead it has left me the wholly innocent victim of an internet hate campaign.
Such a shame. It started so well with a glittering landmark bridge – carbonated steel, hammocked in patinated bronze. I’d pitched it as a Millennium Promenade across an underlit canal, but it was still pretty early days and there was nothing really on either side of the notional canal, so I put another landmark bridge a bit further down to encourage pedestrian flow back and forth.
When the campus nodes started to appear, everything went wrong. The Aquarium of Everyday Life, a huge lava tank with quotidian objects moving gently through transparent ‘smart plasma’, fell off its stupid fucking stilts a month after opening.
People got bored with the Museum of Inversions. ‘Is that it? A building full of things simply turned upside down? – Cultural Campus Quarterly.’ The Hemispheres of the World, two environmentally sealed volumes constructed separately then brought together at great cost to form a notional world of two separate halves to make a point, I can’t quite recall what, it was a long time ago, it’s academic. This unique opportunity for cultural exploration also failed to arouse any public curiosity whatsoever.
Eddie negotiated a fee arrangement that paid a proportion of the final cost for each project. If the build cost escalated, so did the diseñador de espacios épico bung. I was all for prudence. It was Eddie who wanted the silver filigree and so on. Not my fault they owe me over £100m in design fees.
Look, swings and roundabouts. A public hospital I designed has just had its budget halved so I’ll only be getting three grand. I’m not immune to economics.
SATURDAY Eddie rings. He’s registered the Airpunch in every copyright territory in the world. I think the parcel may have passed from creating epic space to licensing it.
SUNDAY Self-parcel in the recliner.
May 17, 2012
Goodbye Olympic Rebadging Task Force
MONDAY Mixed emotions at the last-ever meeting of the Olympic Rebadging Task Force.
Sadness, yes. The attendance allowance has been pretty generous for the past six years. But also pride. Our task force has met all the targets we set for ourselves, and that means a lot to us. Specifically, sizeable farewell bonuses.
There’s tremendous esprit de corps as chair Suzi Towel leads us first in prayer, then in secular reflection, then in a Mexican Wave. As we have done since time immemorial (2006) we all shout ‘yay!’ at every mention of the Olympics (yay!).
Alas, in London you’re never more than six feet away from a rat-faced blogging cynic. There’s been a lot of negative backwash lately about the narrative integrity of the opening ceremony for the Olympics (yay!) and very hurtful that negative backwash has been.
Our main task today is to rebadge the opening ceremony so that it ‘holds together in the comment sections of the media’. There’s a short pause while we all think about this for a bit. Then Canella Bagshawe from the media unit has her first genuinely inspired idea in six years: ‘We should take a few days over this. No point in rushing, and they’re obliged to pay us however long it takes, right? We ARE talking about the Olympics …’
Yay! Suzi shushes everybody while she checks with Games HQ. Her face is grave but her thumb is up.
TUESDAY Task force swansong, continued. Agreed we should make more of Dame Zaha Hadid being at the opening ceremony. Architectural Olympics, yay!
Like all internationally renowned designers who have built their reputations in this country, Dame Zaha is virtually unknown here. She is after all an architect. In the honours table she’s up there with Judi Dench and Helen Mirren. In terms of popular recognition and celebrity she’s on a par with a Preston lollipop lady.
But Zaha’s a key figure in the epic spatiality of the Olympics – yay! – and it seems a shame to waste the opportunity, so we decide to ask her to wear a massive hat. Will that be enough? We adjourn for lunch.
In the afternoon, we decide she should wear a massive hat and carry a jewel-encrusted javelin. And be accompanied by baby dragons.
WEDNESDAY We’re on to the opening ceremony itself. None of us can really
work out why it’s not ‘playing well’ in the media. Danny Boyle’s crack team of imagineers and dreamweavers have been working on this for ages. At the moment it goes:
ACT ONE We’re in some long golden summer of antiquity. The stadium is carpeted in astro-sward. Rustic extras in agricultural blouses loll about, sharing an organic ploughman’s lunch and texting one another. Playlist: Purcell, medley of chillout dance anthems.
ACT TWO A thunderstorm. Lightning. Belching mills appear. The sward is obliterated by pop-up ash heaps and cobbles. A steam engine appears, spreading chaos. Martin Amis is in the cab, smoking roll-ups and drawling jokes about anal sex through his CND megaphone, ruining everything. Playlist: martial brass band classics.
ACT THREE The calm after the storm. Bits of the old industrial landscape are now treasured ruins. The sun is filtered through strange atmospheric muslin. In the middle – a Lake of Anxiety, everyone in it together but not enough lifeboats. Flashes of the huge, world-beating creative potential for which Britain has been potentially famous for ever: haut couture, a sensory garden, a DJ wearing one headphone ‘on the decks’, football-shaped football fans, a surviving Beatle, a parade of games developers, flag-waving civil partners. Playlist: Chariots of Fire, Cockney rappers, Gareth Malone leading a naked Womens Institute choir in an acapella version of ‘Walking on Sunshine’.
THURSDAY Still brainstorming. We’ve put up a notice saying DO NOT DISTURB, WE ARE RE-IMAGINING THE OLYMPICS YAY and have ordered in some boutique fish and chips.
FRIDAY Breakthrough! Swap Acts One and Three round, we’ve got a proper happy ending. A bucolic future. Nobody over-thinking things, life just one eternal pastel-coloured picnic, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses have in their literature.
It’s getting pretty emotional now. A Mexican Wave and then suddenly we’re all singing ‘Jerusalem’ and tearing up a bit.
SATURDAY Any Other Business: invoicing. Hugs and fistbumps all round. Goodbye, Olympic Rebadging Task Force. Suzi’s already plotting a Eurovision Resort on the south coast.
SUNDAY Closing ceremony in the recliner.
June 21, 2012
Magnetic Values
MONDAY Construction work has started on my block of luxury riverside flats in London.
Zone 1, too. That’s a good zone to be in, lifestyle-wise. There will be fantastic views of Zone 1’s other luxury flats, which is reassuring for everybody.
I suppose the architecturally correct brigade would like to force people who live in luxury flats to overlook an inter-war council block or an old-fashioned ‘state school’, to shame them. Grow up, you bleating windbags, I’m being ‘contextual’ yeah? This is ZONE 1.
Now the site’s fenced off, the hard work begins. I need some marketing blurt in a nice font. Neutral to the point of meaningless. At this early stage you have to sell the ‘idea’ of a luxury flat with a posh tagline repeated along the hoarding. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Hats off to whoever coughed up ‘Live by Example’, which is jizzed around the perimeter of a similar clattered stack of real estate just down the river.
I don’t know what ‘Live by Example’ means. It is unknowable. The sub-text is probably ‘Oysters are for Losers’. I have to come up with something at least as blank. Off we go then. Destination Bathos – and Beyond!
TUESDAY Rock Steady Eddie the fixer rings. A billionaire client wants to create a unique global icon. Something ‘fresh’ and unprecedented and surprising.
Now designing: World’s Fattest Building.
WEDNESDAY Nice chilled day with my old mate Beansy the nanofuturologist. Shoes off, nuts and olives and whatnot, a jug of what he calls his ‘isotonic plus’ and some casual brainstorming. We think up a few luxury flat slogans but they all vaguely mean something, so are useless.
Beansy has a ‘bing’. Why not create an aspirational algorithm based on letting agents’ rhetoric? He activates some sort of bullshit harvester. We go to the pub while it’s processing. By the time we’re back 2,875,992 meaningless slogans have been generated. So Beansy creates another, better algorithm and we both doze off watching the cycling on telly.
THURSDAY Beansy’s anti-coherence vectoring has reduced the list of possible ‘marketing minibites’ to just 10:
‘Performance Quality’. ‘Life Exception’. ‘Deserve in Space’. ‘Magnetic Values’. ‘High + Focus’. ‘Ahead of the Post-Style Curve’. ‘A Taller Peace’. ‘Win-Win Boxing’. ‘The Reloaded New’. ‘Upgrade to You-Class’. Wait a minute, that last one looks familiar. Come to think of it, they ALL do. Whoa, so this is actually how it’s done.
I encourage Beansy to create an architectural trope algorithm. I could clean up here.
FRIDAY Oh, nice. Just when I thought my unique blend of three-dimensional street magic and ‘smart invoicing’ couldn’t GET any less fashionable. The Urban Nodality Commission has released the findings of its inquiry into the catalytic design professions. Title: Oversexed, Overpaid and Overhubbed.
Executive summary, conclusion: ‘The hub is the only building “type” to have flourished in the recession. Its twofold premise – anything can be called a hub, and a hub will make things happen – has made it hugely popular with local politicians, architectural journalists and special interest groups such as the Association of Hub Administrators.
‘However, at the current density (a median of eight hubs per hectare in built-up areas) we have reached saturation point. Furthermore the social energy fields created by each hub have overlapped and locked, creating entrepreneurial stasis.
‘The Urban Nodality Commission firmly believes it is time to call at least some of these hubs something else, in an attempt to unlock social energy fields and stimulate flux …’
Brilliant. So the arse falls out of the hub game just as I’m about to sign off on a community hub, a Hub of Reconciliation, a digital hub, a fashion hub, a ‘pop-up pub-hub’ AND a post-Conran furnishing hub called Hubitub, all in the same shitty Leicestershire town.
Back to Beansy’s.
SATURDAY We run the architectural trope algorithm, which has been modified to filter out all hub-related shenanigans. Excitingly, a ‘prototrope’ emerges from the wine-dark sea of data, like a mud skipper flapping about ready to be the next big thing.
Goodbye hub, hello PIN. A pin sounds more focused, thinner and cheaper than a hub. We’re thinking it could just be like a smart bollard or a community pole. Put a pin in the neighbourhood, come back to it later.
Might start work on some kind of ironic ‘drawing pin’ for architects.
SUNDAY Upgrade to Me-Class in the recliner.
August 2, 2012
The Chapel of Notre Dame du Marmalade
MONDAY Knocking out a few rough building ideas for Rio 2016.
So far I’ve got a doughnut-shaped velodrome, a main stadium that looks like a wok and an aquatic centre that draws heavily on the timeless form of the pilchard.
Not sure about the Olympic Village yet. I wanted to go with a ‘hip favela’ feel, but you know how people like to play the ‘cultural sensitivities’ card.
TUESDAY Talking of which, I’m designing a ‘women-only city’ in Saudi Arabia. It’s actually a smallish industrial estate, but that doesn’t sound as dramatic.
A ‘women-only city’ gets you top sidebar in the tackier online papers. According to my fixer Rock Steady Eddie that’s now the premier showcase for quality design. As he always says: there’s no such thing as bad controversy.
He’s urging me to start talking up the hospice I’m working on as a ‘death camp’, and to rebrand the luxury bachelor apartment commissioned by a hugely respectable Middle Eastern prince as a ‘sex hutch’.
WEDNESDAY To the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects, where a noisy protest is in full swing.
President Molly Bismuth is in a defiant mood. So are members of staff. They all have paper hats with their names on. ‘For too long we have suffered the ignominy of obscurity!’ she shouts. ‘We will be gagged and muffled no longer! It is tim
e to stand up and tell the world who we are and what the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects actually does!’
There’s an extended pause. I slip away from the silence, back into the bustling street.
THURSDAY You know, internationally renowned architecture critics can sometimes come across like a prissy cartel of mewling wankers. Especially when they’re having a go at me.
This time their criticism is especially harsh and unjust. I took enormous care when designing the new visitor centre at Marmalade, in eastern France. Modernist colossus L’Obscurier created his masterpiece here: the breathtaking anarcho-Catholic Chapel of Notre Dame du Marmalade. Of course I know how sensitive a site this is. I’m not a fucking buffoon.
My visitor centre has been made extra-discreet by being scattered across the hillside, so that from a far distance it looks almost semitransparent. Throughout the design process I asked myself constantly: ‘If L’Obscurier were alive today, would he approve of this commercial effloresence erupting all over his vision?’ It’s a tough question to keep asking yourself. Over and over, I kept toughly answering myself, ‘Yes, this is brilliant. L’Obscurier would have bloody loved this. Well done, carry on.’ So, critics – game, set and match to me.
Some of the niggles are frankly laughable. My new structures ‘impact’ the landscape, do they, speccy prick from the New York Times? I suppose you’d like to keep the Marmalade Chapel a cosy little secret, visited only by you and your pretentious friends every now and then. Are ordinary people not allowed to see this masterpiece too? Are they not allowed a roof over their heads while they buy tickets? Are they not allowed to eat, or shop, or adequately park? The project brief called for a ‘cost-negative’ visitor centre and that’s what the client has got. A sacred place first and foremost, but also a focused money-spinner.
‘Out of scale’, is it, bald dickhead from Die Welt? You don’t even know what scale I was working to, maybe it was supposed to look 110 per cent ‘normal’ size. ‘Disembodied’ is it, pompous shitballoon from Le Figaro? I’ll tell you what I’d like to see disembodied: your stupid hat-wearing head! ‘The vertical mullions clash horribly with the horizontality …’ SHUT UP FAT MAN-EGG FROM CHINA DAILY, YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE MULLIONS UPSIDE DOWN.