Epic Space

by Ian Martin

  I’m calling it Truism. ‘Right enough to be true, true enough to be trite’. It’s a credo I’ve borrowed from architecture, where trite is acceptable in a way that ‘pastiche’ can never be. In fact I think I’ll make Truism an architectural movement AND a religion, it’ll be much easier to determine an appropriate building style.

  SATURDAY Lunch with my old friend Darcy the environmental correspondent and his muse Bess of Hardwick, the only border collie in the country to wear prescription Le Corbusier spectacles.

  I explain the principles of Truism. Eclectic borrowing from the past without the irony of post-modernism. Dullness as a virtue. In due course, practitioners could become self-sanctified, etc.

  Bess seems much more impressed than Darcy. She cocks her head and pants enthusiastically. Darcy just shrugs through another drink and says he’s heard it all before. That’s the WHOLE POINT, I tell him. Bess clearly shares my exasperation and gives him an old-fashioned look over her tortoiseshell frames.

  Her cleverness is wasted on Darcy, whose outlook has been clouded by bitterness ever since he was ousted from the Creative on Sunday in favour of his former companion, the architectural dachshund Bauhau.

  SUNDAY Eschew the recliner. Take Bess for a long architectural walk while Darcy skulks indoors. She really would make an excellent ‘ambassadog’ for Truism. I wonder …

  April 25, 2013

  Human Content Management

  MONDAY As content manager for several high-profile architectural schemes, I’m looking at a pretty epic week of nipping and tucking, I can tell you.

  Content management is a relatively new and lucrative concept in the world of epic space development. As the country’s leading expert on the subject, I’m delighted to be hosting a pop-up workshop at the Institute of Plasmic Arts with guest speakers, high-production lighting and a nuanced buffet lunch suitable for vegetarians.

  Those who can, do. Those who do, popshop.

  TUESDAY I’ve always hated the phrase ‘social engineering’, with its sneery disdain for the science of compatibility.

  Now we’ve finished with all that posturing social justice business, we can surely start an honest conversation about who should be in what. No longer can the Crouch End section of Twitter pretend an urban underclass would be comfortable living in Unesco-approved Georgian crescents.

  It’s as preposterous as saying that the super-rich, who could make this country great again with the proper incentives – would be happy living on capped benefits in Levenshulme.

  As a content manager, it’s my job to make sure a building is ‘happy’ with what’s inside it. The Shard for instance is balanced and fulfilled because it contains the right people. Strivers. Havers. Goers. In a building’s guts, the right people are like good bacteria.

  And the wrong people in the wrong place are bad bacteria. All this fauxrage about ‘cleansing’ unaffordable people from our city centres just makes the splutterer seem ridiculous. In urbanism as in yoghurt adverts, a clean gut is a healthy gut.

  WEDNESDAY To the Institute of Plasmic Arts. Quite a good turnout for my content management popshop. Obviously I’ve made sure they’re the right people, otherwise it would look like I don’t know what I’m talking about.

  My keynote presentation is entitled ‘Putting People in their Place’. For maximum effect I’m presenting it in a smoking jacket and military trousers. Summary: quality content management must be at the heart of any building remodelling process.

  I glide haughtily through my slideshow, showing how crucial it is to match inhabited sculpture with what I wryly call ‘sculpted inhabitants’. This draws a knowing chuckle from the audience. I show them one of my current jobs: rethought and upgraded content for the All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, where a new architectural masterplan requires premium human fill.

  The sketches of the improved crowd for Wimbledon Fortnight illustrate how content will be pushed further upmarket, with a new blazer plaza and retractable tax status. Of course spectators will remain brand-locked (slow handclapping, flag-wearing, petit-bourgeois hairdos) but more demonstrably ‘All England’. It’s a look I’m calling ‘luxury Ukip’.

  During the informal afternoon discussion, a relaxed-looking man in a safari suit suggests that perhaps in due course units of content might be subject to some kind of validation system, like that blue tick thing they have on Twitter. A young woman in a sort of business onesie, clearly at ease with herself, makes an excellent point about ‘green’ building.

  ‘Why is there so much focus on static, passive building elements such as insulation material and glazing, and those lights that only come on in the dark?’ she clangs, to appreciative nods all round.

  ‘The most efficient environmental improvement you can make to a building is to tear out old content and install new, ecologically sound inhabitants. Green subsidies should go straight to where they have the greatest impact: hardworking property-owning taxpayers, via their accredited content manager’.

  We all applaud Onesie Woman, the exciting future of our craft and mystery, and ourselves.

  THURSDAY Content-manage the remodelling of BBC Television Centre. Out go the raggedy-arsed creative types with their ‘rehearsals’ and their serendipity and their Daleks and their nervous energy.

  Into the swish new apartments and hotel rooms come emotionally continent grown-ups with a shrewd appreciation of iconic location and the buy-to-let market. The famous TVC ‘inner circle’ will be open to members of the public, and I am already planning auditions.

  FRIDAY Remodel St Paul’s cathedral, giving it a more inclusive façade. Content rethinking ideas: retain communal froideur, increase appearance of concern and civility. NB NO JUMPERS.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Cascading Monetarism 3, Capillary Microfunding 0, after overnight bank recount.

  SUNDAY Manage contents of recliner, decreasing self-awareness to the point where I’m self-content managing in my sleep.

  May 2, 2013

  A Critical Stream of Piss

  MONDAY A mysterious cabal of leisure investors has asked me to ‘remagine’ the world of snooker.

  Their briefing paper Thinking Outside the Crucible puts the case for a future snooker venue in general – and I have to say quite negative – terms. ‘Something that doesn’t look like an illegal boxing arena inside. And that doesn’t remind you of municipal swimming baths when the camera follows the players back to their dressing rooms’.

  Understood. Seriously, I’m all over this gig like a luminescent shroud. Yeah, I’m thinking powerful fusion: retro Saturday Night Fever dancefloor meets Tate Modern Turbine Hall. The spectators like puffins, lofted into balconies and boxes, kept well away from the interviews with past champions and any temptation to gurn and wave in the background.

  That’s another thing. As well as conceptualising a contemporary snooker colloseum, I’m also applying my content management skills to design a better audience to fill it.

  OUT: bloated middle-aged men dressed in synthetics. IN: oligarchs, art geezers, Middleton types, tax swervers, all in natural fibres.

  TUESDAY In the morning, watercolouring and soft-pencil scribbling. In the afternoon, 3-D abstract bronze printing and spatial software modelling. In the evening, conversion of synaptic energy into pure creative impulse, then an early night.

  WEDNESDAY Rethink the notion of ‘British artists’, making them more conscious of their economic leverage and putting imaginary little red stickers on their chins.

  THURSDAY Knock out proposals for the world’s first self-aware Permanent Tallest Building.

  Organic expansion packs would be stored in the top five storeys, their release triggered by a GPS alert of any encroaching second tallest building.

  FRIDAY My friend Darcy the architecture critic is away for a few days, staying at a ‘boytique hotel’ in Bratislava. He insists it’s fieldwork for an edgy new niche heritage show he’s presenting on the Euro lifestyle cable channel Hefty Poppa.

&n
bsp; ‘Stop looking so sceptical,’ Darcy says, avoiding eye contact. ‘Niche-ritage is totally a word. So is boytique. We’re looking at the whole gay boutique ideology stroke phenomenon in a sort of shallow yet comprehensive way AND we’re travelling across Europe in a pink Cortina Mark 2 and for your information the show’s called Boutiques Roadshow so can you look after Bess or not?’

  Bess of Hardwick, the architectural border collie and Darcy’s muse, looks at me pleadingly through her tortoiseshell spectacles and gives a little bark. Of course I’ll look after her. She’s much better company these days than Darcy, with his passive-aggressive headwear and self-pitying blouson.

  Darcy’s mind is elsewhere, possibly Bratislava. ‘They said Guide Dogs Only. I explained Bess was very MUCH a guide, helping me through the everyday socio-cultural labyrinth. They accused me of winding them up. Whatever, it’s moot, the insurance is ridiculous …’

  Bess and I leave him to it and go off to laugh at some gritty urban brasserie in Kensington she’s reviewing for the Guardian. I’m her official scribe this week so I just scribble down what she’s thinking to type up later.

  We stand across the road to get a better look at the façade, all assymmetrical blobs of smoked glass and skeins of terracotta nova, apparently held together by oversized knuckles of butch steel clamping. Words have been puked randomly across everything. ‘Eat’ it gasps, weakly. ‘Think. Live. Share.’ It’s as if the place is daring you to go somewhere else.

  Bess looks at the brasserie quizzically through her weeny Corbusian lunettes, straining her leash in its direction. ‘Arch!’ she cries. ‘Rough! Rough! Grrr! Arch! Crit! Crit! Rough!’ I agree. This brasserie DOES look like it was designed by some wanker for a bet.

  We cross the road to get a better look. Through the wibbly-wobbly glass we see people looking icily at their surroundings, predisposed to complain … oh no. Bess has taken her criticism to the next level by PISSING UP THE DAMIEN HIRST BIKERACK.

  She pants conspiratorially at me. It’s like we’re sharing a joke. Ha ha ha! Is that what’s happening here? I piss on the Damien Hirst bikerack too, then we leg it.

  SATURDAY Take Bess to park with ‘the bag’ and ‘the glove’. Like her, I disdain the mundane layout of much of our recreational spaces. But today I do not follow her critical lead in this matter.

  SUNDAY Contentment in the recliner, reviewing the newspapers with Bess in her scaled-down Olympic ‘bird’s nest’. Nice to have a growling companion.

  May 9, 2013

  Obituary: T. Dan Hooker

  T. Dan Hooker, the legendary blues modernist and last of the ‘Thames Delta Brutalists’ – has died at the age of 92 after a long battle with obscurity. He will be best remembered for his 1965 hit ‘Proposed Mathematical New Town Near Greenwich’.

  He leaves behind several women to whom he has done unspecified wrong, and countless brainchildren, including a mysterious unfinished sketch for a ‘floating atheistic working-class city to be moored above Bath as both an idealised modern community and a lofted remonstrance’.

  This theoretical project illustrated Hooker’s status in the world of epic space as a doomed visionary. As he himself admitted many years later, getting planning permission for any floating city would be hard enough, let alone one above Bath. ‘The sanitary arrangements were way sketchy, to say the least, man,’ he is reported to have chuckled.

  In 1958, much of Britain’s new post-war architecture looked timid and provincial. With its snooks and tripery, its skiffled brickwork and New Elizabethan drapery-pokery, the built landscape seemed mired in nostalgia, a world away from exciting developments in Europe. There, architects were experimenting with Oxygenated Modernism: a new and shocking style, all backbeaten concrete and visceral walling.

  Then came the Great British Brutes Explosion. Inspired by the global wave of raw petrified music, exciting new architectural combos appeared. The Kipling & Cavendish Modern Lookers. Sir Andrew de Montclerc & his Chartered Jelly Surveyors. The Fincher & Fincher Palladian Bluesdaddies. And in the vanguard, T. Dan Hooker & the Draught- busters.

  Hooker and his fellow ‘betonistas’ ripped the scene apart with their flyovers and tower blocks and French cigarettes. Their plugged-in civic approach electrified a young generation of beatnik planners who’d seen nothing like it. Hooker’s credo – ‘Fight Squares with Squares’ – later encouraged rebellious 60s students to tear up the hippie rulebook and design everything to a 12-bar grid instead.

  ‘Think of an inhabited structure as a blues song …’ he memorably told the audience at the 1967 Architectural Association Folk Building Festival. ‘Make your first pencil line rough and honest, from the heart, maybe a little self-pitying. Unique, personal. Yet within the parameters of the style, so it’s generic …’ In the famous clip of his performance, Hooker’s prowling intonation is brilliantly backgrounded by Marty ‘Slim’ Panatella on syncopated slideshow.

  ‘So you want a unique, personal, generic first line. But also just the same as everyone else’s first line. This is blues modernism, not bloody abstract painting. Something that sits nice on a four-beat system build plan, you dig? Of course you dig, ha ha, a foundation is absolutely vital for all art forms and nobody wants to see a good plan come tumbling down …’ Here Hooker breaks off to wail on a harmonica for a couple of minutes, the audience riveted – indeed the front row laminated – with his audible, heartfelt saliva.

  ‘Then you make your second line. Just repeat the first line. Exactly the same. Exactly the same. Then the third line, same length, make sure it rhymes, you’re done. You be drawing the blues and no mistake, marvellous stuff and in the noblest of Vitruvian traditions.

  ‘Say you’re doing a council block, keep it simple. Repetition’s the key. You can have your main riff on the ground floor, put in a lift and then you can keep the riff the same but move up to the fifth, back down again, up to the seventh and back. Repetition, basic riffs, solid structure, boom. Nota bene, no portable gas cylinders allowed ANYWHERE inside …’

  But as soon as it had blossomed, blues modernism faded and died. A fickle popular culture had moved on from amplified Brutalism to so-called ‘prog architecture’ in the 70s. Now buildings were expected to walk, or squeak, and to be inhabited in drawings by men in flares and moustaches and severe women in weird costumes.

  ‘I guess T saw the writing on the wall,’ said former blues modernist colleague Manny Boyes in a 1989 interview with Stomped Concrete Quarterly. ‘His built gigs always attracted a lot of graffiti. Then when the Tories got in it was all about the environmental determinism, man. Cats saying our riffs leading young people astray and whatnot. T quit the life. Moved down to Hastings, became a driving instructor. We lost touch. Man, I guess we all lost touch …’

  A memorial service for T. Dan Hooker will be held next week at a South Bank undercroft.

  May 16, 2013

  Little Gatsby

  MONDAY Finish the sketches for my latest reconciliation of architectural dynamism and ‘found landscape’ – a freshly-squeezed organic village.

  Set in hundreds of acres of outstanding Hampshire beauty and recently liberated by the Coalition’s common sense rural freedom fighters. Yes, freedom at last from the shackles of Stalinist town and country planners, with their suffocating spools of red tape and their case law and their dandruff.

  It’s bloody great, too, being able to write your own environmental impact assessment these days. Executive Summary: NO PROBLEM.

  The proposed village, Little Gatsby, is an extended loose-fit cluster of double-specced ‘resipads’ in the grand tradition, i.e. the enlightened patronage of bourgeois futurism.

  Each resipad is uniquely framed in locally sourced glass and steel. Each includes a signature open atrium tiled in a turf-and-sod mosaic. Each has its own thrillingly sinister roof of sliding Teutonic plates.

  I have taken bourgeois futurism, piped in enough green electricity and wi-fi for a medium-size business park, drizzled over a bit of balsamic et voila: Connectivi
sed Nouveau Ruralism. My clients are upmarket developers Flatwhite & Keenwagh, whose mission is ‘to deliver quality homes set in exclusive countryside locations for people who deserve the best’.

  Our masterplan deploys what I’m calling Luxury Settler Theory. Build an outpost of gated entitlement, sell the units off plan, build the next outpost with the deposits and so on. In ten years, there will be a necklace of outposts with an invitingly large void in the middle.

  Once all the satellite organic villages have been established – Little Gatsby, Lower Gatsby, South Gatsby, Gatsby Dene, West Gatsby, Gatsby Meadows, New Gatsby, Gatsby Hollow and Gatsby Platinum – it would be absolutely unthinkable NOT to develop a rural new town at the vacant centre. Linking them all, like a benevolent spider’s web.

  The name of the great central settlement is still to be decided. Something swanky and opulent though, obviously.

  TUESDAY Drinks with my old friend Dusty Penhaligon the conservactionist. It’s a chance to catch up, and also to rehearse my lines for what I hope will be a rubberstamping public inquiry into Little Gatsby.

  Dusty’s a jihadist on the subject of building anything ‘new’ at all, anywhere. He’s currently appearing as an expert witness for campaigners trying to sink what seems to me to be an utterly blameless gigantic enclosed international leisure destination, golf experience and retail nebulus (‘Mega Scotia’) in the Cairngorms.

  ‘Very, very reactionary climate at the moment,’ he drawls, quaffing real ale from a tankard with his name on it. ‘And that suits us down to the ground. We’re not blocking the proposals per se. In fact, we’re arguing the site SHOULD be developed. But that all development should conform strictly to indigenous heritage guidelines and original use patterns. So we’ve drawn up plans for a scattering of sheep farmers’ crofts. Not the modern pretend ones, with plumbing. Proper ancient smoke-clogged ones that give you TB …’