Epic Space
Page 11
Now that I have answered my critics I hope I will be left in peace to carry out my next prestigious job, a fitness centre inside Durham Cathedral.
FRIDAY Design a groundbreaking green supermarket that generates more energy than it uses.
This is achieved with a complex series of sustainable operating systems, including an innovative thermal harvester that converts human warmth into electrical power and ‘eats’ anyone who’s too cold.
Spare blood and plasma is then recycled via a ‘smart generator’.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Festival of Britain-style Tonical Nationalism 0, Niche Recessionary Concessionism 1, after extra time for going into administration.
SUNDAY Ample self-parking in the recliner.
August 16, 2012
Latest Books About Icons
Icon Origins by Mannekin von Heineken
For years people have wondered where architectural icons come from. A site in the middle of town is cleared, hoarding goes up and a few months later a massive new building is revealed.
Traditionally, the local paper encourages residents’ groups to declare ‘it’s so weird-looking, it’s like it landed here from outer space!’ Well, DID IT? This is just one of many questions von Heineken leaves reverberating in the air, unanswered.
Others include ‘Did the icon evolve with advances in technology and increasing architectural sophistication? Or, improbable as it sounds, was the icon created by intelligent design?’ ‘Is there such a thing as The Missing Icon?‘ ‘Will the discovery of the so-called God Icon reveal new secrets of the universe?’ ‘What do YOU think?’ Etc.
The Tall Story: How The Icon Narrative Changed The Way We Think About Icons And Narratives by Bobby Weavingham
A fascinating examination of the icon narrative, and the impact that narrative has had on other narratives. These include societal narratives, global architectural narratives, and the author’s own vivid interior monologues.
Inevitably, some searching questions are asked. What is an icon? What is a narrative? And what happens when they’re smashed together in a 600-page large hadron collider of a book with lavish illustrations and a lofty foreword translated from the original Catalan? Fireworks, that’s what. Polemical fireworks.
We trace the icon narrative from the early years of icon-as-cultural nest egg, through the long affluent ‘golden summer’ when the icon was popularised as an ironic investment signifier. Drawing heavily on his own research and lecture material Bobby Weavingham, Google Professor of Narrative Studies at the University of Tamworth Online, brings us up to the present day with a bump.
The ‘icon-as-merely icon narrative’ that prevails in our straitened, cautious times simply cannot endure, argues Weavingham. ‘The icon narrative is trapped in an ironic cycle of boom and bust. Architectural sarcasm may for the moment be invested in museums and opinion pieces, but what next? Can the icon rise again as the pre-eminent story arc for architecture? Only narrativised time will tell.’
The Magic Icon Book by Taiwan Derivatives Inc
Stare long enough at these mystical pictures of icons and you’ll see a weird 3-D image of something interesting. Suspension of normal vision, a sense of fun and perseverence essential!
All Icons Great And Small by Sally Puddock
Working as an impoverished young vet among bluff Yorkshire farming folk, Puddock discovered an unusual ‘psychic’ connection to animals. It was a gift that inevitably propelled her into the challenging world of architectural criticism.
Creating a two-way rapport with buildings is difficult enough, but understanding icons is a rare facility indeed. These days Puddock is of course familiar to TV viewers as the ‘Icon Whisperer’. In this book we follow her around the globe as she holds psychic conversations with world-class landmarks and reveals some surprising aspects of their personalities. The Bilbao Guggenheim is ‘testy’, the Burj Dubai seems ‘sexually repressed’, while the Shard is really not very communicative at all.
Icon Revolution! by Isabel Quankermass
‘In my excitable and menacing view, something huge and unpleasant is about to occur’, warns Quankermass. In a novelised version of her own astonishing theory, she imagines a future [SPOILER ALERT] in which all the world’s icons become self-aware, form a deadly network of egregious landmarks and destroy Earth’s defenceless skylines.
The Great iConfidence Trick by Grad Versatiler
As an idealistic architecture student, Grad Versatiler became fascinated with the icon phenomenon. ‘Everything about it. The form. The cultural voice. The application of a generic process to create something perversely less than the sum of its parts yet bigger than anything else for miles around. The designer lifestyle. The money. The power. What’s not to like?’
Then after years of mixed fortune as a practising architect and casual gardener, Versatiler changed his mind about icons. And architecture generally. Now he lifts the lid on his loathing for icons in a bitter, sparkling essay that’s sure to resonate with others who, for reasons beyond their control, have been excluded from the icon-designing jamboree. Kindle only.
Icons Ancient And Modern by Various
A comprehensively updated edition of Famous Historical Buildings, from the pyramids to the Gherkin, but with the word ‘ICON’ superimposed on all the photographs.
August 30, 2012
An Analogue Underground Cotswolds
MONDAY I’m in rapid response mode following the Chancellor’s call for ‘a much more imaginative’ use of rural land, including the green belt. Ideas so far:
• Massive airport ‘toll runway’ alongside the M40.
• Air rights created above all fields to encourage vertical thinking.
• Relaxation of gun laws in designated ‘stag zones’.
• Analogue underground Cotswolds.
• New folds, curves and creases of opportunity in East Anglian flatlands.
• Pubs upgraded to hubs, hubs upgraded to nodes.
• Security contractors G4S to smooth transition from ‘access’ to ‘trespass’.
• Wormhole to future to be constructed in Epping Forest, creating literally millions of new jobs in the future.
TUESDAY Moral dilemma. The Coalition has asked to me to project-manage a nationwide purge of council tenants who now find themselves living, wholly inappropriately, in gentrified areas of high property value.
The solution is to get rid of these ‘social squatters’ and sell their homes to the deserving rich. Part of my job as project manager would be pretending that local authorities haven’t been banned from building council housing for a quarter of a century.
Another part of my job would be to command these local authorities to build ‘affordable homes’ somewhere much shittier for their freeloading tenants.
Obviously I’ll take the gig. My dilemma is in how I should badge this process in my head, whether to call it ‘demographic cleansing’ or ‘corrective punishment’. I don’t suppose it matters.
WEDNESDAY Working breakfast with my fixer, Rock Steady Eddie. This month’s ‘no-brainer’ is communal eco-housing.
‘Green living, shared services, no-brainer,’ he says through a medley of Full English. ‘All them Guardian readers with their bloody dried apricots and their Italian lessons. What happens when the kids leave home? And the partner’s buggered off to live with someone who doesn’t mind getting pissed at lunchtime occasionally?’
I am listening to him, but also idly wondering what life would be like without him.
‘You not having that other sausage? So there they are, cash-rich with all the original features, right. But nobody to moan with about Murdoch or capitalism or dolphins with cancer, whatever it is this week.
‘They are DESPERATE to hang out with like-minded sanctimonious arseaches. Believe me, son, if there’s one thing Guardian readers love, it’s looking down on people for shopping in the wrong supermarket, or driving the wrong motor or God forbid reading the wrong fucking newspaper …�
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On and on he goes as we weave from café to pub to bookies – ‘Pony each way on Biennale Suprematist. Her form’s sketchy but she goes well on common ground, six to one, tasty odds’ – to pub again. ‘Lesson learned. Never back a nag with an architectural name, bound to be late. You finishing that scotch?’
THURSDAY I realise Eddie has a point after all. I mean, Telegraph readers like to look down on the riff-raff, don’t they? That’s why there’s a market for gated communities.
And Guardian readers like to look down on gated communities. That’s why there’s a market for communal eco-housing. I do some preliminary research and discover that it’s even more popular and oversubscribed than I thought. Eddie rings. He’s discovered the same.
‘Stand on me – they’re snapping them up off plan, mate! That must mean a deposit, right?’ We share a loaded silence. Could you, I wonder, sell communal eco-housing at an even earlier stage? It’s crazy, but in theory … ‘You finishing that sentence?’ he says, eagerly.
Eddie puts the word out via the usual channels. Guardian Personals. Posh end of Twitter. Those eco-community forums where people swap old bunk beds for a couple of bottles of decent rioja.
We’re selling ‘notional eco-homes at the pre-conceptual stage’ in beautiful countryside locations throughout Britain. Everything framed by the Chancellor’s new ‘dare to dream’ approach. A group of soulmates find a nice spot for an eco-community, then they pay me and Eddie to ‘think it up’ and we’ll take it from there.
FRIDAY Whoa. Bunch of retired lecturers, jazz musicians and amateur botanists want a zero-carbon hamlet ‘with views of Stonehenge’. Eddie’s warned them that will require a Platinum Thinking Package but they’re still keen/dim.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Ironic Copying 2, Ironic Copying 2. Match abandoned, twice.
SUNDAY Platinum downtime in the recliner.
September 6, 2012
Little Stripey Crestfallen Moons
MONDAY My old friend Loaf, the mayor of London, has refloated the idea of an ‘international mudhub’ in the middle of the Thames Estuary.
That’s all very well but as conceptual director for the project, Muggins here has to work out the logistics. You can float the idea of a floating airport but at some point you have to work out how to float the airport itself. Apart from floating a #FloatTheAirport hashtag.
It is not, as some have blithely suggested, just a matter of tethering a shitload of pontoons or industrial lilos or whatever to the riverbed, then waiting for the world’s long-haul traffic to arrive. That’s ridiculous. This is about civic ambition on a national scale.
My new masterplan envisions a floating airport tethered to the ENTIRE COAST OF BRITAIN. Like a giant M25 but for aeroplanes. People will say it is mad, of course. They’re playing right into our hands.
Because suddenly an airport that only stretches from the Isle of Grain to the Isle of Wight seems a lot less ridiculous. And after that, one that merely fits the Thames Estuary like a contraceptive diaphragm will seem just about right.
TUESDAY Dear Chinese media: my Blingnang skyscraper does NOT ‘look like big pants’. It looks like a pair of skinny-fit jeans. I would never design a building to look like underwear. Apart from ‘The Loungerie’, my Leeds nightclub that looks like a stuffed bra and knickers, but in my defence that was for a bet.
WEDNESDAY Sketch out proposals to double the size of Moscow. Putin’s queuing up to ‘lead the cranes’ dressed as topless-construction-worker-by-day-topless-assassin-by-night.
THURSDAY To Westminster for the mournful departure of the Hon. Aeneas Upmother-Brown.
He steps down today as Culture Minister with special responsibility for architecture, bed and breakfast hotels, hospitality boxes at major sporting destinations, online ticketing systems and humane circuses.
Over the last two years, despite this broad portfolio, Upmother-Brown has been a powerful presence in the world of epic space, in no small part due to the personal swarm of bees that accompany him everywhere.
They’re here tonight, at this low-key drinks party on the newly refurbished Aviva Members’ Terrace, in slow orbit around his head like little stripey, crestfallen moons. Occasionally he despatches them with a murmur to ‘mingle’ among us but to be honest their heart isn’t in it.
Perhaps they will miss the ministerial perks – the official saloon car, the early morning hivemind sessions, the abundance of flowers everywhere – more than their master will.
It’s no secret that his departure was a little fraught. The Cabinet reshuffle was an excuse to move the prestigious bed and breakfast hotels sector to Business. Upmother-Brown felt slighted, and bees are notoriously sensitive to mood swings. There were apparently ugly scenes in a Downing Street stairwell, with one junior civil servant ‘stung into inaction’ in several places.
What’s also becoming painfully clear is that there’s no love lost between the outgoing minister and his successor, Gavin ‘Gavvers’ Quinly-Spread, a smooth Tory bombshell lionised everywhere as the Fashionable Face of Capitalism. ‘Oh don’t misunderstand us,’ says Upmother-Brown, his winged shroud of bee-blur suddenly rising in tone to a minor third, ‘I have always found Mr Quinly-Spread to be a most clubbable fellow [buzz]. Yes, a most clubbable fellow [BUZZ] indeed …’
FRIDAY Back to the Member’s Terrace for a swish cocktail party. A big banner welcomes ‘Mr G Q-Spread’ to the ministry.
His amended portfolio now includes architecture, destination branding, spiritual renewal, fun-run licensing, Bestival, television baking programme development, cultural equity management and ‘popster economics’.
It’s a much younger crowd than last night, hairier and thinner. In a breezy address, GQ signals a style change. ‘For too long, our listing process has been a bee-driven lottery …’ An obvious dig at his predecessor, who would commission balsa wood models of buildings nominated for preservation. If bees were happy to inhabit it: listed. That’s why Milton Keynes shopping centre (‘communal and busy’) got the nod.
‘So from now on, listing will be sorted by my mate, bloody good bloke and former business partner Johnny. Johnny?’ Johnny responds with a casual wave to the crowd. Then he ‘gunfingers’ the minister, making a little ‘chk’ sound.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Incrementalism 1, Gurgling Metastasism 10.
SUNDAY Float idea of self in recliner.
September 13, 2012
The Jockular Campus
MONDAY It’s absolutely heaving at London Military Building Fashion Week. The trends are clear, though.
Out: ‘Anti-terrorist design’. In: ‘Retaliation-proof’.
TUESDAY Redesign Hull, making it more meaningful and nostalgic with a Larkin retrospective and an Instagram slideshow.
WEDNESDAY To San Francisco, with a heart full of dread. I’ve been provisionally appointed ‘space stylist dude’ for Facebook’s new headquarters. The money’s fantastically good. Alas, the clients are punchable spindly millionaire dickbrats.
Yes, I’ve ‘flown in’ like some fat British seagull keening for someone’s discarded lunch, but don’t judge me. I am here to WORK. I am here to agree a PROJECT BRIEF, so that both sides know what everyone’s talking about in terms of space, style and dudity.
Nailing the brief is essential. Let’s face it, Britain and America have a ‘cultural disconnect’. Admittedly the phrase ‘cultural disconnect’ is understood, with resignation, on both sides of the same ocean. It’s a shared cultural disconnect, which makes it even worse. I say sausage roll, you say corndog, I’m not entirely sure what a corndog is, let’s call the whole thing off, I’ll email you.
The clients want an extra 50,000 m² of ‘cool, fluid space’ and so far all I have is a photograph of freestyle notes scribbled on the back of a Marvel comic by Facebook Head of Thinking, Spak Hungstrom:
‘Maybe like the apartment in the movie Big? Starring Tom Hanks? But with 21st-century games and shit and whatnot … would be W
AY COOL to have like 1980s pinball machines etc actually from the movie on site!! ? ! Retro chill. Right? RIGHT? So what do we call this new cool, fluid space? HQ? Nuh-uh. Same-o lame-o. Old Europe. Needs a COLLEGE feel. The Facebook … Campus? Boom, keep it LITE yo. Animal House! Is jockular a word? BOOM THINK JOCKULAR CAMPUS DUDE J’.
God Almighty. This gig already feels more ‘crèche’ than ‘campus’ and I haven’t even got to the brief-setting meeting yet. I’m led through genuine medieval doors bearing the crayonned legend ‘THOUGHT JAM’, into a vast open-plan refectory space, all polished wood and cultured glass. Difficult to know which one is Spak. I never find out.
‘No names in the thought jam game, man …’ says someone behind my sofa, and this sets the tone: a brisk churn of anonymous non-hierarchical hipster toddlers, all wearing tailored jeans and antique T-shirts. I was expecting beer and sandwiches but oh no: bloody juice and jellybeans. It’s so noisy, too. Indie drivel bleating out, and some weird film being shown on the two-storey height wall. It looks like Norse gods clattering each other in some endless balletic death-battle.
‘Green roofs are kinda … cool?’ murmurs some hypertanned geek, to his Xbox. ‘Cool. Cool-cool-cool!’ says everyone in unison, absently miming a complicated handshake.
‘There could be a jogging trail up there. Different levels. Awesome platforms, and you pick up stars and … boom, sucker! Feel my MACE OF WRATH!’ Ah. That explains it. The wall screen is showing what’s on Teakgeek’s Xbox. ‘Modded Tekken with divinities. Elephant dude with the laser arms is like, whoa. Kick-ass!’
Hell is, specifically, these other people. Plus, there’s fucking nowhere to smoke as usual.