by Ian Martin
Alas, in the sneery corners of our social networks, gentrification is simply a long and ugly word. The challenge here is to yoke the gilded carriage of gentrification to the sturdy ox of compassion.
Yes. Turn the whole thing into a righteous CAMPAIGN. The rich are OK, they own several homes. The poor are OK, they’re the ones hogging all the council housing. The hard-working middle earners, they’re the real victims here.
That’s it! A campaign to build DECENT HARD-WORKING CLASS HOUSING.
FRIDAY Tish ‘v pleased’ with the hard-working class homes idea. A mega-borough marketing committee has already agreed to replace the corporate mission statement ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ with ‘Hard-Working for You’.
SATURDAY Non-hard-working day.
SUNDAY Newspaper review in the recliner. Gratifyingly, class warfare is polarising opinion.
This makes it easier to identify those in favour of luxury apartments for the deserving middle as they’re all over on one side of the argument. For instance, a group of Liberal Democrat MPs is calling for a 21st-century successor to the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1885. Echoing Lord Salisbury, they talk of ‘thousands of families living on the artisan bread line in non-luxury dwellings where they sleep and eat, multitask, and die …
‘It is difficult to exaggerate the misery which such conditions of life must cause, particularly with all the luxury lifestyles on television and elsewhere. The depression of body and mind which they create is an almost insuperable obstacle to the action of any elevating or refining agencies. That’s why we need a Housing of the Hard-Working Classes Act 2013, thanks for listening, means a lot, yeah?’
November 8, 2012
Dysgustopia
MONDAY Great news. My competition design for a vast open-air ‘museum of death’ has made it onto a shortlist.
Turn on the actual news. Turn it off again, then avoid it for the rest of the day. Death is a serious business. I can’t afford to get emotionally involved, or to be unduly influenced.
TUESDAY A pop-up colloquium at the Institute of Plasmic Arts. Epic Space: Rebundling the Brand.
The main speaker is ‘street brand magician Yadda Bing’. He presents a rundown of the latest unbundled brand trends, then cleverly rebundles them using cognitive misdirection. At the side of the stage where the deaf signer usually stands is graffiti artist Gutsy, who gives a running summary of Bing’s synaptic journey via sprayed tag narratives and a stencilled urban ‘powerpaint presentation’.
Bing, an optimistic self-publicist who in his imagination has probably rebundled Brand Yadda Bing as a clothing line or a chain of noodle bars, seems pretty sure about his brand-trending intelligence. Members of the audience wearing hats nod gravely along. Those sent here by line managers ‘to stay plugged-in’ are listening to music instead through little white indie-buds. Summary:
1. Dysgustopia. Already trending in parts of north London, dysgustopia simply means an attraction to innovative, inedible dinners. And that, predicts Brand Yadda Bing, means a new wave of restaurants offering ‘discomfort food’ and challenging levels of service. Now’s the time to dust off those sketches of the yuppie soup kitchen you did for a laugh years ago.
2. Sonic Boomerangnam Style. Watch out for classic second-wave videogame-themed leisure destinations aimed at in-denial thirtysomething ‘Sonic Boomers’ seeking a nostalgic weekend of exploring a repetitive landscape, bumping into obstacles and losing wealth.
3. Intersectional Banality. Traditional interior designs are all about to move one place round the table, as if at some Mad Hatter’s Tea Party for fit-outs. Be prepared for business interiors going industrial, retail interiors going business-like, industrial interiors that look like supermarkets, etc., until everyone collapses in a giggling heap.
4. Aesthetic Filtering. Exciting new CGI/environmental control interfaces will enable buildings to determine ‘the way they look’. For example, the air surrounding a new office tower in a conservation area could be saturated with special ‘vintage’ molecules to make it look like a very tall parish church.
5. Generation A2 Segmentation. Architects, artists, dreamers and linguists should seek new ways of bringing together ideas such as inverted multitasking, cross-benefit social wellness, niche cliché, augmentertainment and ordinarisation in single sentences, like this.
WEDNESDAY In the morning, design a building that turns rainwater into a drug. In the afternoon, design a building that turns body heat into kudos.
THURSDAY To Bristol, for lunch with my old friend, architect Fred Trousers. Less than a week ago he became the city’s mayor and already he’s wearing a red corduroy toga.
Until now Fred was best remembered as the former president of the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects who persuaded the government to put design quality at the heart of the procurement process. Or the entrepreneur who redeveloped Bristol’s abandoned cigarette district as an aspirational hub with contemporary flats, green business/theatre space and a Michelin-starred restaurant, Trouser’s.
Now suddenly the Peter Stringfellow of urbanism has a lot more on his plate. Instead of finishing his starter so we can both get on with our main course and have another bottle, Fred stares hard at the dessert trolley and says things like ‘I shall not but leave this city though any less but rather greater than I hath found it or be sworn to eat mine own testicles in ye porch of St Mary Redcliffe so but me God, ye whole truth and nothing but ye truth …’ Sod it, I’m having his starter.
One of Fred’s first grand acts will be to assemble a ‘rainbow consortium’ of different people with a unity of purpose. He wants to a) put Bristol on the map and b) make sure everybody’s reading from the same map.
I toast his success, wish him luck and start thinking of ways to cash in.
FRIDAY Bristol brainstorming with my fixer, Rock Steady Eddie. Agreed I’ll pitch a network of community nano-markets, a statue of Fred outside Temple Meads station and a world-class pop-up-non-stop-trip-hop pavilion.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Liberal Smartarsery 0, Trump Wisdom 1.
SUNDAY Unbundle self.
November 22, 2012
Windhampton
MONDAY I’m remodelling a gallery. Not as straightforward as it sounds. It was very poorly vamped in the 90s, and must be devamped before new work can proceed.
It will look great though. A ‘living promenade’ of synthetic jelly will connect the pollarded south wing to an adult soft play café and social media workshop. The adjoining ‘learning and growing studio’ will open into an experiential ‘art garden’, featuring improvised human drama ocurring on a path of bark chippings.
TUESDAY Bollocks. My college refurbishment scheme has been killed and lowered into an early grave. This is definitely NOT what I understood ‘shovel-ready’ to mean.
WEDNESDAY It’s time to elevate the sustainable energy debate. Let’s at least raise it above the level of ‘ooh, rural communities can see the turbines and they really hate them’.
The turbines in my new speculative project, for instance, are so huge that urban communities will be able to see them as well. This makes green energy sustainable AND inclusive.
I have conceived Windhampton as a pathfinder scheme, a new settlement dedicated to the power of wind in much the same way as Cadbury World celebrates the power of chocolate. I’ve found a perfect site, too: high up on some Lancashire moors owned by a conscientious client passionate about conservation. For years he has conserved these moors by threatening trespassers with prosecution and charging parties of ‘hedgies’ a fortune to shoot grouse.
Alas, the hedgie population has declined. Or rather migrated to more exciting shooting destinations abroad, where larger prey may be slaughtered with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. So Lord X is now planning to conserve the moors by building a massive ‘wind town’ on them.
Windhampton will have something for all the family. Children will love the wind petting farm, where they can interact
with tiny, soft plastic micro-turbines. Like their giant counterparts they are asleep most of the time, but mind those little fingers when they wake up!
Unlike previous soulless wind projects, Windhampton will have human life at its very heart, with a development of inhabited windmills. The design of these is still very much in my head. I’m imagining something like those ones you see in children’s TV programmes. Sort of a lovely pre-Industrial Revolution look, though full not of toiling millers and apprentices with rickets but vegetarian families in cheesecloth shirts, laughing around a big wooden table in perpetual ‘rambling family lunch’ mode. Yeah, maybe a few rows of those.
There’ll be a miniature gauge railway with puffer train. A wind-powered open theatre with natural ‘draughty’ air management system. And a food mall offering a range of gutsy/gusty dining options. Windhampton will also feature the world’s first wind outlet centre, selling end-of-range or slow-moving wind for domestic use.
The next step is marketing. I spend the rest of the day putting together some inflated rhetoric.
THURSDAY Bosh, looks like Windhampton’s time has come. The Chancellor is set to relaunch the North of England as an economic miracle.
A report commissioned by an independent think tank of business leaders has concluded that the North needs significant new powers for business leaders. Its message to government could not be clearer: give us the tools – i.e. billions of pounds and thousands of jobs – and we can turn the North round, so it’s facing south.
As for this new political tier of ‘metro mayors’ – I can’t be the only one hearing the MGM lion roaring every time I see it in print, surely.
FRIDAY Rock Steady Eddie the fixer has persuaded me to hurry up and finish the Megabolic Tower, an ambitious two-mile high mixed-use slab of urban endeavour for downtown Blingnang.
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘the China growth engine still packs a punch and that’s keeping the building industry very much in the ring. Let’s have it!’
Hold on, I say. Are we getting into the ring with China’s growth engine? Because it’ll flatten us if we are. ‘No, you doughnut. We’d be part of the growth engine.’ So who’s the growth engine’s opponent then? Is it another growth engine we’re ALSO part of?
He threatens to pack a punch and have it cabbed over, so I just get on with the drawings.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Cathetered Romantic 2, Pre-Op Horizontular 1, after extra meds.
SUNDAY Allow a ‘mind-wind’ to blow my thoughts randomly about in the recliner.
November 29, 2012
I Am Grand Designsy
MONDAY As usual at this time of year, I’ve humiliated myself by scanning the New Year Honours List for my name even though I’m pretty sure I would have heard something in advance.
I despise the honours system, so archaic and random and meaningless, but would an OBE for services to epic space really have killed them? I’m not letting this happen again. My New Year’s Resolution is to acquire an honour, stat.
TUESDAY Lunch with Rock Steady Eddie the fixer. ‘No doubt, son. Having a bit of geography after your name and a Lord in front opens a lot of doors. Let’s say these chips on your plate are global market opportunities and I’m an Anglophile client. Watch …’ It’s an impressively thorough analogy.
We agree the odds on my being ennobled are long. Even the more obscure honours – Knight of the Wardrobe, Reeve of the Palanquin, Underbaron of the Middle Empire – are beyond my means. ‘They want half a mil in party bungo-bungo before they’ll even put you on the list. Leave it with me …’
Oh God. ‘Leave it with me’. The four most ominous words in the English language, along with ‘it’s not very contextual’ ‘in my humble opinion’ and ‘sort of Grand Designsy …’
WEDNESDAY Plenty to think about from yesterday, so shift the bulk of my creative thinking until tomorrow.
I am, however, keen to develop the ‘Grand Designsy’ brand as an up-market graffiti identity. Spend the morning knocking out some banging posh stencils, man.
THURSDAY Design competitions. They’re a racket, a closed shop. The latest one is typical:
‘Architectualiser sought for new higher education campus in China. Haughty sense of spatial entitlement essential. Dame or Lord preferred, would consider CBE. Must have public school accent and cruel laugh’.
Nothing at all about an education portfolio or indeed any reference to professional training. It’s ridiculous, you could just get classy actors to promote your global marketing campaign.
I call Eddie. ‘Relax. I’m all over this like a 15 tog duvet, mate. Decided to make you a Companion of the Royal Lunch. See you at the King’s Arms tomorrow. Plus I’ve found us a sleeping Edwardian practice partner …’
Slightly resentful that I’m never the sleeping partner in any of these enterprises. I do, however, require a long afternoon nap as I’m out very late tonight.
FRIDAY Fast forward to the small hours, and I’m in a boutique part of north London with my old friend Amy Blackwater the environmental activist.
Unlike me, Amy has skilfully managed her public profile and is now the doyenne of stylish oppositionality. Her activism is ‘premium’ these days. She’s feted by the thinking artisan crumpeting classes. Her success rankles almost as much as the balaclava I’ve borrowed from her, which is slightly too small.
Still, she IS helping me with my stencils. We have to be stealthy, what with the CCTV. And the film crew shooting a documentary on Britain’s Most Celebrated Activist.
At one point she says, ‘I like to think of myself as more of a disquietist than a terrorist …’ while keeping a straight balaclava. Over the course of three hours we whack up the following stencils on London’s urban canvas:
• a fox in a trilby laughing at a Nando’s queue
• a rat in a onesie making lemonade and keeping calm
• a big fat gypsy cat with the dead bird of ‘irony’ in its mouth.
I sign each one ‘Grand Designsy’ using Farrow & Ball’s new Yellowist range.
Later: pub. Rock Steady Eddie’s found a chemistry student in Hull called Abby Downton who for £500 cash will be photographed in period costume to front our new global marketing campaign.
‘Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber … Abby Downton Top Class Spacemakers can turn your dream into an aristocratic reality!’ We’ve even got an emblem: two beagles in sunglasses flanking a chevronned pier.
More good news. My old friend the Prince of Wales, the highest-profile toff I know, has agreed to have nothing to do with the project, so that’s a major potential embarassment avoided.
SATURDAY Lovely. Pop-up hipsters are now desperate for a customised Grand Designsy stencil on their gaff. I plan to take their money, send them a ‘Beware of the Media Wankers’ stencil and tell them to spray it on themselves.
SUNDAY New Year’s Reclination.
January 10, 2013
I Sense My Enemies Massing
Like Simpering Starlings
MONDAY Brilliant. My Museum of Piracy has been short-listed for a Looks Nice Award.
Or as the organisers insist, it’s been ‘short-sighted’. It’s got a good chance of winning too I think, as the other five short-sightees are rubbish. Here they are, in no particular order of merit.
• The Nano-Monsters Science Discovery Centre in Sheffield, featuring a giant virus petting zoo, designed by Atelier Neuroburo.
• Boo Hoo Hoo Design’s ‘atheistic thinking pod’, an annexe to the multi-faith prayer room at Manchester Airport, incorporating a ‘pondering booth’ for agnostics.
• A pseudo-Georgian avatar exchange in Kettering, designed by Urban Jizz.
• The Hobbit Bar in Notting Hill, a fantasy landscape interior where all bottles, glasses, furniture and bar staff are twice normal size. Designed by Archiptextur.
• ‘The house that turns into a car that turns into an office that turns into a bathroom that turns into a costume that turns into itself!’ desi
gned by Haus of Kar and currently parked in a lay-by near Coniston.
TUESDAY The Looks Nice Award is my first nomination of the year. Gratifying, of course, but also a bit embarrassing.
I mean obviously it’s great that the judges like the Museum of Piracy’s ‘swashbuckling exterior, with its popular aerial plank-walk and rigged façade’. They admire the inside too. The Davy Jones’ Hamper restaurant and Treasure Island gift shop are both highly commended. There’s even wry approval for the unique visitor charging system, though that had nothing to do with me. Entrance is free but you have to pay a ‘ransom’ to get out.
It’s embarrassing because the Looks Nice Award is sponsored by Cutting Wedge magazine, a trade publication aimed at the blatantly vulgar commercial sector. And the judges are my old friend Darcy the architecture critic and his border collie, Bess of Hardwick. I can already sense my enemies massing on Twitter like simpering starlings, devising some sarcastic hashtag about cronyism and swapping jokes about my weight.
Alas, the Looks Nice Award can’t be fixed. It’s dog-driven. Darcy simply takes Bess round to look at new architecture. If she likes the building, she barks. It’s then ‘short-sighted’ along with half a dozen other buildings. Darcy and Bess go back to have a proper ‘long look’ at them all and the one that provokes the most tailwagging is the winner. Looks Nice Theory is incorruptible.
WEDNESDAY Or is it? I mean, if someone were to distract Bess with a chewy snack or jingling toy outside the Museum of Piracy, would that boost my chances? How unethical would it be?
I wonder if the same idea’s now occurring to my fellow shortsighted auteurs. Yes, perhaps when Darcy and Bess go back for their long look I should, as a sort of moral imperative, be present. Encourage tail-wagging. Level the looking-nice playing field.
THURSDAY Irony on the high seas! A pirate version of my Museum of Piracy’s being built in China!
Worse, this clone-sharking is being explicitly encouraged by Cutting Wedge. Their latest Special Pirate Issue has an editorial IN PRAISE of design piracy, which it says expresses the buccaneering spirit of the age. It’s PROUD that the pirated piracy museum was featured in enough detail in the previous issue to make it easier to copy.