by Ian Martin
It is of very little consolation to think of those other imagineers of epic space, furiously discovering that Shanghai has a Hobbit Bar or Beijing’s getting a giant virus petting zoo, but it is of some.
FRIDAY Frosty meeting with Darcy and Bess. Obviously I’ve withdrawn my Museum of Piracy from the Looks Nice Award. I have also engaged a cheap solicitor to copy someone else’s legal strategy in pursuit of an infringement of intellectual copyright claim against the museum pirates. All that remains is to decide whose fault it was.
I blame Darcy. Darcy blames Bess. Bess remains inscrutable, but she’s definitely avoiding eye contact with me. I swear to God I’m beginning to think – not for the first time – that the plastic arts are too important to be left to the pets of the practitioners of the plastic arts.
SATURDAY My fixer, Rock Steady Eddie, is actually pleased about my pirated piracy museum. ‘What do they say? Imitation’s the most flattering form following function, yeah?’ I despair.
SUNDAY Become shadow of former self in recliner.
January 24, 2013
Five Versions of Me
MONDAY Tweaking the details of Moon Base Beta, the construction site for my lunar new town.
The first thing to do is to get basic regolith printing equipment up there. A module will land close to the Sea of Tranquillity and stay inert for a couple of days, adjusting to the space-time difference and ‘settling in’.
Then a tubular module’s remotely unpacked from mission control, inflating a dome-shaped Clerk of Works office in balloon form. This balloon is then overlaid with moon glue and dust tiles, as simply as you’d create a papier-mache globe. Once the lunar office has been built, we’ll print a table and chair for the robot Clerk of Works and some humanising touches, such as a printed vase of flowers and a mug with ‘You Don’t Have to Be Lunar to Work Here but it Helps!’
Once that’s signed off, the robot Clerk of Works can be printed and programmed to oversee the construction of the construction workers required to print out the lunar new town itself.
At this stage it’s undecided whether the settlement will be a luxury destination for space tourists or an overspill camp for asylum seekers and those unable to afford affordable housing, so we’re deferring any architectural decisions for as long as possible.
TUESDAY Another existential crisis looms. I entered a poorly regulated design competition several times using multiple identities in order to increase my chances of winning.
The competition was for a ‘signalisation marker to re-stimulate interest in Tamworth’s exclusive Millennium Quarter’. This former scrubland and municipal tip on the outskirts of the town was designated a ‘corporate internet village’ back in the late 1990s, when liberation from the twin tyrannies of social responsibility and the dial-up modem was a distant dream.
Despite new local authority infrastructure, some off-book lunches with exotic puddings and a brochure comparing Tamworth’s Millennium Quarter to London’s Docklands, nobody came. Now the feeling is that if the right marker can just be built it will attract business investment, as a bird feeder attracts sparrows.
I’ve entered the competition five times. As myself, as my friend Darcy’s border collie, Bess of Hardwick, as my fictional twin brother, Ramone, as the metarchitectural dachshund, Bauhau, and as a design collective called Apptecture. God, I hope I win as myself. Otherwise the paperwork’s going to be a nightmare. My marker variants are:
• A giant abandoned sofa in idealised form, apparently being lifted off the ground by a big balloon to symbolise the triumph of the human spirit over illegal fly-tipping, made from recycled, illegally fly-tipped materials.
• A ‘geometric tower grid’ of uncertain theme, calculated to act as a structural aperitif for anticipated investment in the area and incorporating spinning biscuits of light to help the observer ‘visually digest’ everything.
• A retro shuttered-concrete ‘urban collar’ overlayered with a necklace of trees, to stand as an exemplar of growth and renewal in both the abstract and vegetative senses.
• A half-scale trompe l’oeil office tower, with miniature people etched into the glass skin and looking hopefully out, with a sort of glowing bulb at the top to underline the importance of puzzled thinking.
• An elegant tapering tower of fondled steel with the word ‘MARKER’ written up the side in Helvetica.
WEDNESDAY Oh God, the five shortlisted schemes for the marker competition have all been designed by versions of me! Unfortunately in a situation like this, when the quality of entries is so high, there have to be losers. Four of them will be yours truly.
THURSDAY Phew. I’ve won the marker competition as the non-existent design collective. Spend the day inventing my team.
The boss will be the real me, obviously. I’ll have a grouchy old-timer who once did prog-space council housing for the GLC. A sassy young graduate with crazy ideas about how we might live in a post-coherent world. A down-to-earth design technician who turns out to be a Scientologist. A bluff conservative who shmoozes all the deals but who has lost his soul.
FRIDAY Toying now with the idea of having someone who can ‘get the job done’. Decide to make him a young, pitiable genius forced to work in an Indian draughting camp.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Styled-Out Catastrophism 1, Ironical Horrorism 1, after extra time and emotional deadlock.
SUNDAY Collect myselves in the recliner.
February 7, 2013
Kenny Axe-of-Wrath, Meet
Julie Bloodbath
MONDAY It is with great solemnity that I take up my new role as the coalition government’s temporary Common Sense Tsar.
I look forward to bringing my unique approach of lunch-based conciliation to several so-called ‘intractable’ problems facing the built environment in the next few days, after which my probationary performance will be reviewed and rewarded with a permanent post, I hope.
By mid-morning, my Common Sense Tsar inbox looks pretty full. I take a calm overview and award myself a long lunch.
TUESDAY If there’s one thing history has taught us it’s that peace is better than war. How ironic that some of the longest and bitterest battles between developers and conservationists have been fought over the future of historic battlegrounds themselves.
Even unwarlike historic sites have become battlegrounds. The bloody Battle of Stonehenge dragged on for generations and still nobody is entirely certain what the occult formation of ‘visitor centre within car park’ originally signified.
Today I have arranged a truce between some particularly entrenched battlefield opponents. On one side, high speed train enthusiasts who want to drive a railway through the ancient site of the Battle of Morsen Lewis in Oxfordshire. On the other, the powerful cultural guardians of Sponsored English Heritage, who definitely don’t want that to happen.
After three courses and several armagnacs, both parties agree to cease hostilities, which have included very nasty physical threats and carefully orchestrated sulking. I feel a warm glow of achievement, which later turns out to be armagnac-inspired dyspepsia.
WEDNESDAY So yeah, my newest common sense solution is a high-speed English Battles Circle Line which instead of accidentally bisecting key battlefields does so deliberately.
The line would plough right through the middle of Bosworth Field in Leiestershire, through Yorkshire’s Marston Moor and then on through all the major centres of historic carnage in England.
New transport and heritage interchanges would stimuate the creation of exciting new ‘battle destination experiences’ designed in a historically contemporary style with plenty of graphic scenes of violence, restaurants, etc.
This solution also allows the train people to stop worrying about being murdered by single men in their twenties who have full beards and big swords with girls’ names.
THURSDAY Seek reconciliation between two hugely influential Mercian warlords. Kenny Axe-of-Wrath, direct descendant of Axe-of-Wrath the Baby-Eater
who according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles ‘did perish through consumption of tainted pudding’. And Julie Bloodbath, whose ancestor Bloodbath the Man-Butcher went on to become something of a cliché.
Both are claiming air rights for the proposed new Tamworth ‘health service providers outlet centre’ which will replace the existing NHS hospital’s A&E, maternity and intensive care units. Their argument is that all air above the site was consecrated during the reign of Offa and therefore is one of the spoils of war.
After an eighth-century lunch (charred boar, trough of mead) everyone agrees to call the Battle of Tamworth Infirmary a draw. Mr Axe-of-Wrath and Ms Bloodbath will split the equity stake in all retail, leisure and entertainment opportunities above the new community wellbeing and lifestyle hub.
FRIDAY Reconcile the North-South divide with an ornamental coast-to-coast ha-ha.
SATURDAY. I’m officially off duty today but such is my dedication to common sense that I act as a voluntary tsar at the pub.
Not just any pub. The Bride of Russia is located in a four-storey basement extension commissioned by my friend Dmitri the oligarch for his Kensington mansion. It’s a great recreated pub. The Victorian fixtures were rescued by Dmitri’s diligent team of salvage hunters following the break-up of basement pubs recreated in the 1960s from original features rescued from Victorian pubs bombed during the Blitz.
Dmitri argues that this makes The Bride of Russia ‘double fucking historic’ and he would very much like retrospective planning permission.
Dmitri’s other guests include his architect, Django Liberace, and Colin Trout, the outsourced planner in charge of objecting to dangerous excavations in residential areas then inevitably agreeing to them. The evening begins predictably enough with the planner as a common enemy of the client and architect.
But by midnight everyone’s gone all in vino veritas in the luxury solarium and it’s clear that the planner isn’t the architect’s enemy. The client is. It’s the client who through sheer force of wealth forces the architect to design exactly the kind of morally unsustainable, egomaniacal bullshit that same architect would vehemently oppose as a neighbour.
Or even abhor as a passer-by in a beret.
I seem to have caused more problems than I’ve solved here, but sometimes that’s the nature of common sense.
SUNDAY Reconcile self with recliner.
February 14, 2013
Diana Princess of Wales Laying
a Wreath at an Accident
Blackspot Wearing Sunglasses
Plus She’s in a Wheelchair
MONDAY Redesign the Vatican, giving it a ‘fallible pathos’ Latin overmantle with a terra cotta bossa nova twist.
TUESDAY Spend the day looking at everything in the entire history of art and architecture with a quizzical gaze, then wondering what’ll be next in little Twitter thought-fragments, then turning the quizzical gaze on myself, then settling on a pastiche of myself, then exploring the high-density interior of my fridge in an existential journey of snack-themed enablement.
WEDNESDAY Jamming out some contemporary beats for a bijou six-storey alpine apartment block, like a boss.
The alpine block is in Swiss Cottage, so is hugely contextual already. Obviously it will set new benchmarks in sustainability and innovative design, that goes without saying. I’m not an idiot.
Just as the humble alpine hut defies harsh weather conditions, so my exquisite inhabited crag will be sticking two fingers up at its environment. Asymmetrical profiling and iris-recognition software will minimise residents’ exposure to the cold, harsh staring of passers-by and the heavy snowfall of fast food flyers that can make the Swiss Cottage climate so inhospitable.
Conserving Earth’s Natural Resources is at the very top of my list. There’ll be loads of ethical spruce and fir involved, for a start. Also, building materials will have to conform to some sort of ‘green quotient’ which will probably have its own sticky label and EU directive.
I will minimise wasted space simply by minimising space generally – indeed, restricting it to an almost unliveable standard – ensuring it definitely all gets used.
THURSDAY Lunch with my old mate Gutsy the graffiti artist. He seems remarkably sanguine about the recent removal of one of his works from the outside wall of Sound for a Pound, a discount variety shop in Tamworth.
‘Diana Princess of Wales Laying a Wreath at an Accident Blackspot Wearing Sunglasses Plus She’s in a Wheelchair’ has mysteriously turned up for sale at a Moscow auction house. I think Gutsy may be in on it, for cash, ironically. ‘Easy come, easy go, my lover. Plenty more where that came from …’
Another stencil – ‘King Kong on Top of the Shard Swatting Away Architecture Critics in Microlights’ – has already taken up the vacated space. Suddenly, works by Gutsy adorn every Sound for a Pound shop in the country, regularly disappearing into the international art market to be replaced by a stencil with approximately the same value.
Inside the shops you can buy blank Gutsy postcards with a red ‘bought’ sticker for a pound each. Gutsy’s even considering a Sound for a Pound ad campaign in which he’s seen breaking into one of the shops and stealing a selection of bargains.
In Wolverhampton somebody – and here Gutsy avoids eye contact – has stolen an entire Sound for a Pound shop, leaving only a vertical slab bearing the stencil ‘George Osborne in a Onesie Decapitating a Tramp’. A more appropriate building is expected to appear behind it shortly.
FRIDAY In the morning, create a ‘forgotten space’. In the afternoon, have to do it all over again.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Radical Femgineering 8, Third Wave Memenism 0, after spatial regendering and own goals. Radical Femgineering now goes through to a quarter-final seminar at the Royal Institute of Patrician Arts, provisionally titled ‘Ladyspace: how women are baking delicious epic spacecakes the whole family will find irresistible’.
SUNDAY It’s the first Sunday of Lent and the cravings are becoming severe. This year I have given up GPS.
I have consequently rendered my familiar, knowable world a wilderness. By denying myself a verifiable location on the Earth’s surface I hope to mortify the flesh and, come Easter Sunday, appreciate the higher power ‘up there’ that looks over us, and guides us.
It does mean I’m often late for meetings and daren’t venture into the countryside. But it has allowed me to examine myself deeply, via the medium of watercolours, and has encouraged a ‘rough and ready’ non-GPS approach to site-specific design. For Lent, I am simply pointing vaguely at where my latest masterpiece should be built and handing over the detailed stuff to an intern who – I AM SHRILLY PROUD TO SAY – will be paid in due course and is allowed time off for lunch and the toilet.
Spend most of the day reclinered, suspended in spiritual horizontality and pointing sort of north.
February 28, 2013
The People’s Centre for
Cultural Transmution
MONDAY To Blingnang, China’s fastest-growing urban megabulb, to push the professional development envelope.
Capitalists and communists alike have reservations about how this ‘hybrid economy’ works but I can honestly say the plasmic arts are much the same all over the world. You know, they have a saying in Blingnang: ‘A stranger is just a contact you haven’t bribed yet!’
TUESDAY Things have changed since my last visit. Most of the ‘itinerant rurals’ who gave Blingnang’s historic quarter such character have disappeared, along with the historic quarter itself.
From this ashy rubble will rise a new People’s Centre for Cultural Transmution. The client’s being quite vague about what will actually occur there, and my Chinese agent’s being quite vague about who the client is. Although, I discover during lunch, my Chinese agent seems otherwise alert.
‘In Mandarin my name means One Who is Steadfast as Rock, but please call me Edward. Here, let me help you with that pan-fried shrimp and golden noodles. And should we tab another bottle of this excellen
t rice wine to your hotel room, which I believe is 1516, thank you, waiter’.
OK, I don’t know what a centre for cultural transmution is. I do know, however, that the conceptual design fee is substantial, the building is to be fortified, the style guide is ‘Queen Victoria goes to Swinging London’ and the top two storeys will accommodate some kind of ‘internet trace blocker’.
Obviously I have misgivings about this project. But come on. Moral certainties are a luxury these days and, like oysters, can actually CAUSE serious internal misgivings if they turn out to be ‘bad’ moral certainties.
Yeah, sod it. Resolve my misgivings by cladding the cultural transmution centre in a neo-Classical sheath, with faux-marble fluted pilasters and ‘dolly bird’ caryatids.
WEDNESDAY Edward and I are at Blingnang Freepitch. It’s a weekly event held at a swanky digital tea house, where spatial artists and clients of discernment mingle without obligation in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and venality.
I play the old ‘Invisible Tower’ manouevre. Tell a high-rolling client you have detailed schematics for the world’s tallest luxury mixed-use tower. Two miles high, fashioned from materials so innovative nobody’s heard of them. An articulated ‘hard air’ core with suspended floorplates of ‘spectraluminum’ and walls of translucent ‘smart jelly’. Advanced light management plus magnetised atomic gap alignment equals ‘building that blends seamlessly into its environment’ and a new post-contextual global planning prototype.
Then you ask them if they’d like to see a rendering, they say yes and you slip them a blank sheet of paper. At this point it can go one of several ways but it usually helps if they have a sense of humour in the broadest sense, or if they’re drunk.