by Ian Martin
The Beigefield Initiative By proposing that huge areas of greenfield be redesignated ‘brownfield’ to encourage housebuilding and, further, that huge areas of brownfield be redesignated ‘beigefield’ to encourage speculation about what that might mean, young psychogeographers Osmo Kirkegrid and Poppy Cumbly-Prideaux hope to get a two-page spread in next Saturday’s Independent.
Beigedale Retirement Home, Lancashire Designed and built by Beige Retirement Solutions, this offers residents a near-maximum flexibility of visual interpretation by being virtually featureless.
Quintuple-glazed ‘merry windows’ channel a) natural light into beige resi-pods and b) semi-skimmed light into beige communal areas. The beige cladding envelope, or ‘cardigan’, turns a pastel yellow on special occasions when photovoltaic microbes and algae come to visit.
Beige Office Village, Exeter Devised strictly within the matrix of healthier live-work reinforcement principles known as ‘beige active design’, this business park makeover by Herban Squelch shows a commendably narrow focus while languidly ticking all the beige boxes. Interior and exterior grassroots strategies. Human ‘parklets’. Portable headspace. Communal trees. Networked walkthroughs. Repurposed sightlines. Connected ‘playgrazing’. Leylandii.
Milkington Beigemarket, Ely Demountable structures assembled from milk crates in a church car park for the sale of allotment-grown produce, increasing both green and beige impacts through the presence of charmingly imperfect fruit and veg.
Beige Free School, Wimbledon Ingeniously formed by installing a primary school for the energy-efficient children of aspirational Conservative parents within the shell of a publicly owned building formerly occupied by wasteful, high-calorie state pupils, this centre of academic excellence was designed by education placemoulders Artshole & Batard.
An exterior of beige Serbian larch, heavy glazing, a deep sedum roof and planted ‘beige barriers’ help insulate the building from a) financial scrutiny and b) the rest of Wimbledon.
July 4, 2013
Eurafrica: A New Bivalve of Hope
MONDAY To Celebrity Space Slam. It’s being held this year in a temporary bubble pavilion, or ‘pavobubblion’ as we must learn to call it.
The pavobubblion has been inflated, with some difficulty, inside the upstairs function room of a Shoreditch pub. As it’s a charity event nobody’s too critical of the celebrities’ genuinely stupid ideas, barked into a fawning crowd of overdressed berks.
J K Rowling slams a monologue about a floating library without newspapers. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy mumbles a sonnet to a nationalised food bank, where ‘filo money and quince ingots lie’.
Benedict Cumberbatch declaims what might have been a moving little hymn to an imagined concrete poetry tower, but by then both the pavilion and the audience have partially collapsed.
TUESDAY Reconceptualise the Isle of Grain, giving it a contemporary slow-release energy vibe.
WEDNESDAY I find myself with a few days entirely free of work, so resolve to redesign the world.
It’s worth thinking really big once in a while. It nourishes the ego AND earns valuable ‘dreaming for humanity’ points. That reminds me: must remember to hashtag any thoughts. And have the hashtag protected as intellectual copyright. And have everything I’ve just said sealed up in a hyperinjunction.
THURSDAY In the morning, bring Europe and Africa closer together with a huge Photoshopped Bridge of Possibilities. Bang. Right across the Strait of Gibraltar.
This bridge is not just theoretical, it’s inhabited. Lots of men in 21st-century clothes clutching 21st-century gadgets, but with fashionable 1950s haircuts. Which is ironic, as an utterly changed world full of men with 1950s haircuts is EXACTLY what the future looked like in the 1950s.
My Photoshopped Bridge of Possibilities will be teeming with women too. Women in cardigans and gender-irrelevant work clothes and suits of armour. Memo to Self: maybe put in little speech bubbles saying things like ‘save the bees’ and ‘fuck the patriarchy’. That stuff goes down really well with the sort of third-wave liberal men who devise theoretical design competitions.
Any bridge though is more than simply an elevated road over an obstacle. A bridge linking Europe and Africa ought to transcend engineering itself. It should soar without hauteur, exploring common ground between culturally diverse continents. It must ‘sing’ without ‘wobbling’.
I reckon the bridge would be about 10 miles long, so choosing an approprate material is top of my list. I’m going for adumbrated carbon, something I just made up which has the toughness of steel and the flexibility of a medium rare steak. The bridge will perform a shallow ‘w’ as I’ve now decided the central support will be built on top of an underwater mountain which, when squinted at, has more than a hint of Atlantis about it.
‘Morocco to Spain and back again in a day’. That’s one of the slogans for my Photoshopped Bridge of Possibilities. Others are ‘Eurafrica: A New Bivalve of Hope’ and ‘Afro-European Leisure Investments®’.
FRIDAY Pushing on selflessly with my comprehensive global redesign. Still exhausted from the bridge, so I turn my mind to the more soothing non-material world.
Through the medium of drivelly pencil scratchings and images harvested from a search for ‘tossers in coffee shops’ I map out a New Geography. Land masses are divided not by archaic national boundaries but by download speed frontiers. Fast and Slow Korea have never seemed further apart.
I propose a Universal Cloud to enable some sort of Global Spring (details not important at this stage) and massive overscaled self-cooling routers marching across the Pyrenees like gormless silos (get some signature architects to design them, they’ll look brilliant, or grotesque, same thing really). Also, why not harness the natural social network of biology itself by infusing chlorophyll with wi-fi?
It’s all about the connectivity, as E M Forster would have said if he’d had access to Wikipedia before the First World War.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Incandescent Non-Contextualism 3, Compassionate Neo-Fabianism 0, after extra height.
SUNDAY Reflections in the recliner. Conclude that the world really is a shambolic mess. Maybe a retrofit just won’t do it. Tear down and rebuild, or push on with my masterplan for a relocation to somewhere else in the galaxy?
Perhaps to create truly epic space we need to turn the Ascent of Us into some sort of space epic, I muse, before nodding off again.
July 18, 2013
Masked Grans Dancing on a Bungalow Roof
MONDAY Redefine asset-stripping as ‘burlesque value removal’.
TUESDAY Sad news about the demise of one of the construction industry’s true giants – my Vertical Pilchard tower in Benidorm. It was, briefly, Europe’s tallest residential building, conceived in happier times when Spain’s economy was booming and criminals were going on holiday a lot.
Then certain killjoys pointed out that the Vertical Pilchard was a 250m-tall high-density block permanently crammed with transient Brits on a packaged piss-up for a fortnight, so it couldn’t really be called ‘residential’. I tried the whole ‘what is life but a brief sojourn upon this earthly plane we call reality’ bumjelly but the Tall Tower Verification Bureau was having none of it.
Cravenly, the Pilchard’s new owners have reduced its height by 12 storeys to make it look less empty. It’s not Europe’s tallest anything now. Bah, I yearn for the good old days when iconic non-residential towers were owned by East End gangsters.
As my fixer Rock Steady Eddie put it: ‘Say what you like about their brutal taste in architecture, them so-called villains kept the leisure development sector safe for ordinary people. They had a zero tolerance policy towards slags and nonces and planning departments. Plus they wore proper suits, none of this Coalition Casual shit …’
He has a point. The ‘financial concordium’ now in possession of the ludicrously renamed El Crazy-Potato are just faceless, greedy buy-to-let crooks with no accountability whatsoever. Despite the fact that most
of them sit in the House of Commons.
WEDNESDAY In the morning, design a ‘customer-facing service centre’ for a local authority. In the afternoon, design a ‘victim-blaming social security abattoir’ for a central government contractor.
In the evening, rough out a ‘self-congratulating hyperbolic chamber’ for my own amusement and gratification.
THURSDAY Lunch with Amy Blackwater, the extreme enviro-ecomentalist. Whatever you think of hyperactivist politics, you’ve got to admire anyone who insists on wearing a balaclava in a heatwave.
I expected Amy to be still glowing from her media coup a couple of weeks ago, when she led a plucky band of mischief-makers up the outside of the Shard to protest at the commercial exploitation of high space. She’s glowing all right, but from a combination of stifling headwear and moral outrage.
‘Twelve hours, that’s all we had!’ she barks through a mouthful of raw vegan tapas. ‘Twelve shitty hours in the limelight, and then the newspapers discarded us like a … whatever, a yesterday’s newspaper. Twelve hours! It took us that long to climb UP the bloody thing!’
Still, I say. There were only eight of you. That’s like an hour and a half’s worth of national publicity each. Amy freezes with sudden inspiration. A clump of macerated veg falls from her fork onto her plate, a nut fragment falls from her balaclava into her drink, in an epiphanic boom-tish.
FRIDAY Amy calls, muffled but excited. ‘Just to say thanks, dude. Totally following your advice for widening the campaign. I agree, if you can abseil down it, it’s too high’.
I don’t even remember saying that. I wonder if I’m now starting to tune MYSELF out during lunch with people, just to be on the safe side …
SATURDAY Incredible. The news is full of Amy’s latest stunt in her ongoing campaign, People with Altitude.
She’s formed an alliance with other activist groups for a Portfolio Day of Action to protest about the colonisation of public air, post-capital capitalism, men, the ‘cartelisation of the media’, non-sustainable buildings, the Royal Family, sexism in corner shops, Iain Duncan Smith, generically modified education, unchecked privilege and carbon.
Instead of a few angry, fit people climbing up a massive building, thousands of agreeable, ordinary people are instead climbing up very small buildings. News channels show protesters scaling thatched cottages and post-war prefabs. Slightly overweight urban guerillas risking bus shelter roofs. Wispy pro-polar bear types holding hands in a greengrocer’s awning. A gaggle of masked grans dancing on a bungalow roof, chanting ‘Weather, weather, weather! Out, out, out!’
The great thing about this demonstration is how representative it is. Very much a People’s Protest. Lots of half-hearted protesters up a ladder for a bit, or just sitting in the attic.
It makes you vaguely proud to be British.
SUNDAY Conduct my own occupation, complaining about the way things are while suspended in the recliner.
July 25, 2013
From Fenestrated Parabola
to Melty Fucklump
MONDAY I despair, I really do, again. Why can’t people and stakeholders and consumers of the delivered environment just get along?
The key to civic harmony has always been the maintenance of ‘good neighbourliness’ between buildings. When basic politeness goes out of the window, well – urbanism may as well just pack its bags and migrate to a country where they DO appreciate architectural genius and public order. Kazhakstan, say.
Admittedly the construction of my landmark London office tower wasn’t without incident. I acknowledge there were several on-site maimings, some casual racism in the scaffolders’ shouted conversations, permanent traffic chaos and occasional rubble bouncing around.
But that doesn’t excuse the latest bout of sheer bloody-mindedness from certain local businesses. Encouraged by the gutter press, they have RE-NICKNAMED my iconic tower.
It’s completely unacceptable. The building was officially entitled the Fenestrated Parabola at a very early sketch stage, to reflect its curved façade of polished steel and glass. ‘Oh, it certainly reflects all right,’ said the manager of a nearby bespoke umbrella boutique, sarcastically, to online blog hub Qubble. ‘I would say it positively dazzles.
‘By late lunchtime there’s like this fat bloody laser beam innit, penetrating the shop and – zzzp! – melting everything. We had this brilliant window display. An autumn scene with all different umbrellas and that, dancing through piles of artfully arranged crispy golden leaves. It took me and Darren bloody ages. It was, to be fair to myself, both “classic” and “classy” at the same time. I wish you could have seen it but – zzzp! – the whole scenario got totally fried by THAT flipping monstrosity.’
Cue synthetically outraged Umbrella Man pointing at the Fenestrated Parabola in a very poor picture, clearly taken without enthusiasm by the Qubble correspondent on his stupid phone.
First a meme did the rounds: Umbrella Man frying an egg on the pavement. Frying an egg on the bonnet of a Ford Focus. Frying an egg amid the macabre, blackened aftermath of the autumn umbrella inferno. Now, in an act of sheer malice, the Fenestrated Parabola has been ‘dubbed’ the Melty Fucklump by Qubble’s editorial team.
TUESDAY I consult my lawyers, who agree there’s a prima facie case for disruption of intellectual purchase, application of false nickname with intent to wound emotionally, and calumny with aggravated disparagement via named third parties, to wit Umbrella Man and his business-owning mates.
WEDNESDAY Settle out of court. Luckily the Parabola’s owners – Qatari Space Invaders Corporation – haven’t been unduly upset by all this unpleasantness and have generously undertaken not to flounce out of the London buy-to-let market, a move which might have triggered an acute shortage of affordable homes.
Meanwhile, the ‘offending’ elevation has been covered by temporary sheeting bearing the message ‘We would love to be able to show you our amazing façade for the Fenestrated Parabola that everyone’s talking about but apparently certain people simply don’t like sunshine! We hope you’re HAPPY NOW.’
It’ll only be up for a fortnight, after which the trajectory of the sun (the real culprit here, let’s not forget) will render things non-controversial again.
THURSDAY Unbelieveable. Qubble has a follow-up piece, illustrated by a photo of Umbrella Man pointing at the temporary sheeting and laughing at the ‘clumsy passive-aggressive tone’ of our public apology.
I call Hisham from Qatari Space Invaders. Once I explain exactly how Qubble and Umbrella Man are disrespecting his honour, the honour of his kingdom and of his financial subsidiary, he too hits the roof.
‘This will not stand,’ he rasps. I can hear something snapping in the background.
FRIDAY I consult my lawyers, who agree there’s a prima facie case for besmirchment of standing, articulated ridicule and vexatious libel (inferred, occasioning actual psychological harm).
Plus, Qatari Space Invaders have now announced they’re mounting a hostile takeover bid for Qubble, with a view to moving operations overseas. The settlement fee is waived in lieu of Qubble’s mental capital.
Umbrella Man’s been given his marching orders too. QSI are buying up the whole street as part of a ruthless and ingenious plan to excavate and then build an underground Dickens World. Obviously I’ll be pitching some initial ideas, including a Fagin’s Cellar silk handkerchieferie and an online merch cluster provisionally called The New Curiosity Shop.
SATURDAY Five-a-side theoretical football. Steroidal Parabolicism 5, Calibrated Hystericism 0, after extra legal advice.
SUNDAY Achieve inverted parabolic status in the recliner.
September 12, 2013
The Strategic Mentalising Unit
MONDAY Still cantilevered from last night’s Comedy Architecture Awards afterparty.
Some great nominations this year. Lots to laugh at. But everyone agreed there was a worthy winner. Callbach and Peipwerk’s ‘Reveal House’ explores a contemporary narrative of mistaken identity with a
new twist on the spiral staircase, and an imposing neo-Classical double-entendre up the back end.
TUESDAY Bollocks. Just looked over my two big problem-solving gigs from yesterday and realised I got them completely mixed up. According to my notes we should be arming postal workers and privatising Syria. Oh, unless that’s right.
WEDNESDAY Meeting of the government’s Strategic Mentalising Unit, a freestyle think tank convened to posit the unknowable.
I’ve been co-opted to help with Operation Stitch-Up, an ambitious programme to reunite the north and south of England for the first time since the 1966 World Cup.
Of course it’s all a bit of a pantomime. The Coalition thinks it can win the next general election by persuading everyone that the two halves of the country give a flying toss about one another, and that the best thing to do is award billions to a consortium of Tory donors to make the trains go faster.
This stuff is just for the punters. Behind the scenes, I’ve won tacit approval for my Reboot of the Seven Kingdoms masterplan – a return to traditional eighth-century values via a federalised UK.
Under the 7K2 Initiative, an economically cleansed London would be the centrepiece of New Anglia, a vast gated leisure and retail complex full of unsmiling people who look a bit like Jodie Foster. Meanwhile, cultural and administrative functions would move to a restored Tamworth, capital of New Mercia, where preparations are already well underway to create a Staffordshire version of Brasilia but with ale and pies.
And what shall be the destiny of New Wessex? That is a question of interest only to the four tribal leaders of The People of The West, whose beaded hair and timeless, loose-fitting garments are eloquent of an ancestral magic mediated these days through craft shop franchises, ‘surfer-turfer’ cuisine and hedgerow management. Nobody gives a fuck what happens to New Wessex, is what I’m saying.