by Ian Martin
Right now the priority is to make the north of England more attractive to the business community of London and the home counties. Remember, we’re building a high-speed rail link. For that to be viable or sustainable or roll-outable or whatever it is this week we have to persuade the target group of ‘BMWs’ (bankers and media wankers) that it’s worth their while travelling beyond Milton Keynes. A quick refresh of the north is required:
• Fully enclosed tram system in Redcar so nobody has to look at Redcar.
• Sheffield’s public libraries converted into wine bars with retro-fitted ‘book nooks’ where young professionals with ‘hairchitecture’ can relax, shout at one another and mock the very ideas of books and silence.
• Jamie Oliver restaurant within a Tate within a Westfield shopping centre within an otherwise ignorable Carlisle.
• Enhanced weather with wifi connectivity in Warrington.
• High speed ‘hotel trains’ allowing passengers the opportunity to see the north ‘safari style’.
THURSDAY Designing a new headquarters building for Google. Stuck for inspiration, so I do a wide-spectrum search on Wikipedia for ‘compassionate fascism’.
Goldstrike. By lunchtime I’ve harvested a shitload of info on how to moderate monumentality with soft money and nursery colours. I chuck in a Spotify playlist of non-threatening hip-hop for good measure.
FRIDAY Designing a new headquarters for Wikipedia. Mind’s a blank, so I do a wide-spectrum Google search for ‘unverified provenance’.
Bingo. By lunchtime I’ve assembled enough crowdsourced architectural wisdom to bang out a prototype live-work hivemind in built form, with hundreds of interconnected cells and a big empty space in the middle. I articulate the spatial ambience with a Spotify list of easy-listening punk.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Grand Theft Autonomic Urbanism 5, Teleological Meta-Identity Cloning 5, after reciprocal cross-platform shootout.
SUNDAY Trawl through the papers in the recliner. I try to avoid international news these days. There are only so many pictures of blighted neighbourhoods you can look at.
I mean, where’s the community spirit? If on the way to the shops everyone picked up just one piece of rubble, the world would be on its way to being a better place. Selfishness and a wilful lack of understanding. That’s what’s killing us.
September 24, 2013
Supra-Heezy Ionised Piff
MONDAY Well, DUH. Doy-oy-oing. Of COURSE a new wave of Pre-Modernism is now rushing in to fill Post-Modernism’s death vacuum. What ELSE was going to happen?
I predicted all this in the early 90s, along with Britpop, both Gulf wars, the demise of the classic phone box, and the whole internet shopping thing. We’re in for another decade of bet-hedging, old-new melangey pragmatism before the proper stuff starts up again.
My advice now, as then, is to talk loudly about Baggy Urban Zoomorphism as a necessary counterpoint to Pre-Modernism, or risk sounding like a complete dick.
TUESDAY Sure, we can all sneer at an uneducated trillionaire gangster in exile, seeking reinvention by imposing himself and his fictionalised ancestry on the English countryside. But not all of us can design an inflatable pop-up castle for him, can we?
It’s the size of Blenheim but we don’t need planning permission because a) it’s classed as a temporary tensile structure and b) as I say, trillionaire.
Obviously you have to be careful early on with inflatable pop-up castles – no swords indoors, etc. – but once it’s been demonstrably inflated there’s nothing stopping you from filling it in with cement, putting proper floorboards down and so on. The current rural development regime is in many ways very much LIKE an inflatable pop-up castle, in that it has lots of loopholes moulded into it.
Next on my inflatable pop-up to-do list: a new Heston Blumenthal restaurant in a zeppelin moored over St James’s Park, called Blimp; a giant mobile gym modelled on a hamster ball; a cluster of bubble housing in a secluded, deluded part of Manchester, ironically named The Affordabubble.
WEDNESDAY Ach, I forgot to put design quality at the heart of the creative process. That’s a whole morning up the fucking chimney. I start again, and put a note on the fridge to remind me next time.
THURSDAY Honoured that Dope Gaff magazine has voted my ‘ambient urbipad’ its Sick Crib of the Year.
The judges commended its ‘top atmos … a classy finish delivers the perfect hang-work space … great for showing off to your mates at weekends or if you just be solo jamming yo’.
Tremendous. Very pleased with it, I must say. A series of four uncompromising container shed-like boxes piled up in an uncompromising heap, the urbipad was slipped into a gap in a North Finchey terrace, without any of the neighbours noticing.
The boxes, or ‘environments’, are sheathed in a variety of off-beat skins (living bark, digital lichen, vinyl albums, petrified halloumi) to give it an eclectic desirability and the neighbours, bless them, are now used to groups of admirers in skinny jeans and Edwardian tops hanging around outside to see who’s going to emerge next.
Last week the owner, CEO of a ‘grimefolk tonal logistics corporation’, had Miley Cyrus round. And THREE of Frank Sinatra’s grandchildren.
Let’s not forget the eco stuff. You’ve got to shove that in or what’s the point? So the whole unassuming stack of calmness is crowned with a sustainable ‘sky meadow’. This blends urban context and nature’s bombast with sheaves of coneflowers, echinacea, hellebore, wild strawberry, a banging sound system and a Brutalist barbeque modelled on Stockwell bus station.
The Sick Crib award is particularly gratifying as the building was designed to Vibe Code for Awesome Homes Level 8. It features ‘chill piles’ utilising a shiznit-assisted ground-source dench pump to deliver supra-heezy ionised piff directly to a quality bliss bank slumped below ground level.
One can only envy the neighbours who bask within its vibal curtilage.
FRIDAY From vibal to tidal, as I sketch out some ideas to upgrade that mysterious stretch of the Thames – the bit that actually moves.
I’ve been asked to explore ways of getting people to acknowledge the river’s existence – an important first step towards heightened awareness, increased interaction and ultimately, fond memories of a terrific day out on a mudbank including dinner in a squelching pontooned café and a trip to Gravesend and back in an amphibious bus.
Other thoughts: mysterious wiggly red line running along the length of the river. Some weird maps. A community project called ‘Edible Biodiversity’ to encourage local ‘mud people’ to nurture biodiversity by eating it, creating a perfect circle of ‘sanctuary to sandwich’.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Pre-Modernism 1, Pre-Modernism 2, after extra time and a pitch implosion.
SUNDAY Recharge batteries in the recliner by being asleep.
October 10, 2013
Insulational Rescue
MONDAY Lunch with my fixer, Rock Steady Eddie. He seems very – almost chemically – motivated. ‘We should put MORE energy into LESS energy, wanna write that down, mate, you finishing them fancy nuts?’ he gasps, excitedly.
There’s a new report on the government’s Right to Be Cosy initiative, which offers grants to hard-working householders who want to stay warm in the run-up to the next general election. It looks pretty convincing. There’s a picture of a cheerful bloke in green overalls laughing like a donkey at a hole in someone’s wall, with a bag of granular stuffing.
‘It’s not just lagging old gaffs,’ says Eddie authoritatively through a mouthful of nuts. ‘They wedge you up for like solar pumps and I don’t know, warm air recycling bins, same again, I’m going to the toilet …’ He slides his iPad over, its smeary, sneeze-freckled screen not quite managing to mask an Executive Summary.
It makes for pretty grim reading. Despite several relaunches of the scheme – variously badged ‘Feel The Benefit’, ‘Turn that Light Off’, ‘Come On Britain Let’s Save Some Energy, Yeah?’ and �
��Please Yourself DON’T Use a Passive-Aggressive Heat Exchanger Then’ – people just aren’t that interested in hooking up with private contractors trying to profit from the system.
The summary notes a ‘surprising resistance’ to cold calls from UK energy efficiency contractors mysteriously based in the Far East, offering a free home survey and also while they’re on, noticing that your PC has been infected with a poisonous virus. I still don’t see why any of this should interest me and my business associate, who has arrived at the bar sniffing loudly and zipping up his trousers.
‘Scroll down, you doughnut,’ he says, pointing me to the nub of his argument: ‘At the current rate of 13,000 homes a month being assessed, it would take 160 years to survey all the homes in the UK.’ So what?
‘So what? Say we’re energy efficiency contractors and we’re pitching for the whole lot …’ He pulls out the heavy Amstrad pocket calculator which has guided his thinking since the 1980s.
‘Even allowing for fluctuations in interest rates, at say five hundred quid a home, you’re looking at about … three billion pounds. Each.’
TUESDAY I offer up some possible snags to Eddie’s masterplan. Neither of us is going to be around in 160 years, for a start.
Furthermore, the logistics of carrying out an energy efficiency survey of every home in Britain? Frankly, I’ve been inside some of them and they’re horrible. Carpeted bathrooms. Weird fabrics thrown over furniture. Artificial log fires. People are idiots, their anecdotes are often long and tedious …
Eddie, however, is focused on the much bigger picture.
WEDNESDAY ‘All they’re worried about is take-up, right? Here’s my five-point plan, I’ll have a large one, cheers.’ I have to admire his logic, which as usual takes a direct path from idea to payoff.
1. Go into department of whatever and tell them we can deliver 90 per cent take up for their hippie house-warming bullshit if they appoint us sole contractor from now on.
2. Put a notice in one of the good papers that it’s all being done on an opt-out deal. If you don’t tell us you don’t want a free survey, you’re taking it up.
3. Bosh.
4. Department of whatever announces a stonking 90 per cent take-up, looks like the government’s doing something to stop heatwaves in Scotland and the sea going mental with polar bears floating tits up in it, cheers.
5. Invoice department of whatever for six billion. See 3 above.
THURSDAY Our initial approach to the department of energy and climate change is less than encouraging.
Their view is that an open market for energy efficiency contractors offers the best value for money for hard-warming householders, and also that six billion seems pretty steep.
FRIDAY Eddie refuses to be downhearted. ‘Sod this, let’s have a pop at overseas. Google “government in crisis, high energy cost, fix, sorted” and get us some cheese and onion.’
Search results: Iran, Greece and the Isle of Wight.
SATURDAY Greece and the Isle of Wight have blown us out but Iran is game. Eddie’s formally requested the addresses of everyone in the republic, an estimate of how long it would take to survey everything, and 160 years’ worth of fax rolls for an Amstrad Tonto 2000.
SUNDAY Form autonomous republic in the recliner.
October 17, 2013
An Inspector Calls
MONDAY My latest gift to the world is the invisible bedroom.
Internal walls are made of transparent ‘hard air’® blocks. The space itself is saturated with ionised nanospheric optical glanceback ‘gnobules’ (patent applied for). These trick the human brain into wanting to go to the toilet urgently.
I’m hoping my invisible bedroom will hoodwink the portly new army of government bedroom tax inspectors. Bring it on, you fat bumptious jobsworths.
TUESDAY To semi-rural Essex, where a beta version of the invisible bedroom has been created in a local authority house occupied by my old friend Amy Blackwater, the ecomentalist and recently disabled activist.
She’s been a bit down in the dumps lately, what with having to use a wheelchair, antagonising all her carers, being told she’s fit for work and threatened with financial penalties for having too many rooms. The latest indignity is being threatened with the loss of social security benefits altogether unless she takes her balaclava off.
WEDNESDAY ‘Those squares and breadheads can do one’ she says firmly when I arrive. ‘My bally is an expression of who I am. It’s my turban, or burqa. I am sick of people telling me they can’t see my face. This IS my face. And it’s wearing a balaclava, OK?’
Great to see you too. She burbles on crossly while I check the invisible bedroom, giving it a final spritz of glanceback gnobules before the inspector arrives.
Oh, here he is now, pulling up outside in his silver saloon. A few muffled bars of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ by Journey. Then the music dies, paperwork is gathered and a chubby, prematurely middle-aged G4S bedroom inspector beetles purposefully up to the front door. He seems completely at ease with his own cruel destiny, like an overweight Tarantino Nazi.
When Amy opens the door he simply holds his hand up and continues to huff into one of those ridiculous earpieces that look like a child’s kazoo. ‘Yeah, at first address now, over. Wheelie present. Roger that. Entering premises. Going offline, over. Right, love, I’ve come to count your bedrooms, yeah? What’s going on with the mask then? Been in a fire, or you in a band or something? Who’s this, your Dad?’
‘Show us your ID,’ demands Amy. ‘For all I know you’re just some fat knobhead with a clipboard.’ There’s an uneasy silence while he fishes out and flourishes his inspector card. ‘OK, Pussy Riot? Now, let’s count your fucking bedrooms.’
Man, it was worth every tedious second developing the hard air/gnobule prototypes with my nanotechnologist mate Beansy, just to see Fat Bedroom Cop’s face wrinkled into a Martian landscape by unaccustomed brainwork. ‘It says here this is two-bed …’ ‘Well how many bedrooms can you SEE?’ I can hear Amy say. I’m inside the locked bathroom.
‘Can I use your toilet?’ ‘No. It’s engaged. You’ll have to go down the pub’. ‘I’m desperate!’ ‘Sorry love, that’s the way the world is. You brought this on yourself …’ I can hear Fatso ringing in to say Amy’s house is one-bedroom and that he needs the toilet and he’s going to the pub, over. Then a loud crack. Then silence. Then Amy humming ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’.
THURSDAY This is the worst day out with Amy since that time I helped her with her animal laboratory thing. I was always against the firebombing, it was a late work by the Smithsons.
But burying a bedroom tax inspector in Epping Forest is worse. Dead people weigh a TON.
Yesterday’s just a blur of gloves and fingerprint removal and driving the car to the pub and walking very quickly back, then heaving the body into the boot of Amy’s car – ‘don’t look at me, I’m in a bloody wheelchair’ – then discovering this is the THIRD inspector Amy’s murdered since the legislation came into effect earlier this year.
And to think my invisible bedroom was conceived as a force for good.
FRIDAY Amy’s interviewed by the police. Inspector Morose has been listed as a missing person and they’re trying to trace his final movements. There’s a faint smell in the hallway still from his last involuntary toilet break. Feel a bit sorry for Amy, who’ll no doubt be blamed.
SATURDAY Moral dilemma. Maintain the invisible bedroom, or remove the incriminating invisible evidence?
SUNDAY Lie low in the recliner, waiting for a knock on the door.
November 8, 2013
Owning the Vagination
MONDAY Oh no, I’ve accidentally designed a sports stadium that looks like a vagina. In my defence, it was an experiment in parametric neuroscience. The facts are these.
1. A quarter-page ad appeared in the Qatari version of Exchange and Mart. Anonymous, box number. ‘Looking for kick-ass parametric neuroscientist, into 3-D auteuring/procuring world-class soccer hub capable of deli
vering at the highest architectural level, men only, please send photograph.’
2. My fixer, Rock Steady Eddie, responded with a compelling Wikipedia-sourced pitch explaining that I specialised in ‘curvitecture, which enters the brain via the eyes, stimulating the anterior cingulate cortex and making people all emotional, thereby enhancing the visitor experience and widening the whatever, aesthetic offer’ and attached a photo of Michael Fassbender.
3. ‘We’ got the job, avoiding all contact with my client by submitting a forged doctor’s note and a covering letter from Eddie explaining that I had ‘a rare condition which has left him allergic to sunlight so he just lives and works in the dark like the Elephant Man or a French novelist, sorry for any inconvenience this may cause’.
4. I designed the stadium using the latest voice-to-space app, telling my laptop that I wanted the building to collate the latest building design trends in movie blockbusters and cough up an amalgam. It must be organic, futuristic, art nouvesque. Wavy. Curvy. Tough. But NB must NOT attract giant alien lifeforms or explode in a spectacular fireball of flame and matter.
5. The renderings were released in an upbeat press release and now everyone thinks it looks like a vagina. Curse this voice-to-space app, I should have done it the old fashioned way with manually inputted data and aeronautical modelling software.
TUESDAY My Qatari clients make matters worse by refusing to acknowledge that the stadium looks like a vagina. ‘Rather, the design reflects the smooth lines of a traditional pearl divers’ dhow.’
WEDNESDAY Now ‘pearl diving’ has gone viral as a sexual euphemism, and there is a great clamour for me to speak on the issue. On the advice of my lawyer (Eddie’s brother-in-law Legal Brian) I therefore issue a holding statement making it clear that I have no problem with a sports stadium looking like a vagina, feigning surprise that anyone else might.