by Ian Martin
THURSDAY The vaginal brouhaha is now at a critical level, so I decide to take it to the global media on my own terms.
I agree to be interviewed by the arts correspondent of Radio 4’s Today. I was expecting an easy ride, as I have occasionally listened to the programme and formed the opinion that its arts correspondent was a simpering tosser.
Imagine my surprise when his first question concerns my non-resemblance to Michael Fassbender. It’s clear that the Qataris are moving behind the scenes to shut me down. For all I know they have bought the BBC.
I have nothing to lose now, so I own the vagination. I say that it is a counter-patriarchal act at the very heart of the football industry (the World Cup or something is happening there at some point). A stadium that looks like a vagina is an act of reparation for all the phallic buildings throughout the world, oppressing our urban landscapes.
Of course, I get carried away with my own rhetoric and claim that vagitecture is going to be massive and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me designing everything in the shape of a vagina. I ignore the small voice in my anterior cingulate cortex telling me to shut the fuck up, and boast that I’ve now got a long waiting list of clients who want all sorts of buildings that look like fannies.
A vagina-shaped gated lido in Wandsworth. A pop-up vaginal cinema in Hackney. A magistrates court, the remodelling of a privatised local authority estate, a Great British Baking School. All shaped like vaginas. Up yours, patriarchitecture.
FRIDAY It took about seven minutes before the Twitter backlash started. I’m apparently now exploiting the female form and am no better than Hugh Bloody Hefner. Someone photoshopped my face into a vagina and it’s everywhere.
SATURDAY The twitterstorm has moved on – they’re demanding an apology from Russell Brand for something else now – but nobody wants their building to look like a vagina any more.
SUNDAY Spend the day moping in the recliner, like a dick.
November 22, 2013
A Bubble of Absence Enclosed
by Sentient Retardant Foam
MONDAY Amazing. I’ve found a glitch in the Fibonacci Series.
You know the way those ‘golden spirals’ always looked so glamorously widescreen but sort of anal at the same time? Turns out there was a clerical error at Fn-2.
Yeah, apparently the sequence copier failed to put the 2 in italic when she was transferring it from papyrus to vellum. Nobody seems to know why. Perhaps she was an innately conservative mathematician who thought it was too dangerous to give forward-leaning emphasis to a number as it was about to hit one of several very difficult curves.
Maybe in her imagination she saw how an italicised 2 might set off a chain epiphany, rendering all subsequent drawn art ‘formulaic’. Maybe she thought a perfectly beautiful Fibonacci series would instantly kill anyone who saw it.
Whatever, the result was that Fn-2 braked a little too suddenly and skidded slightly. I have now corrected the entire series, making sure everything’s in italics, and it looks a bit like a Chelsea bun. I make no apologies. Truth is beauty. The world will be obliged to behold it.
TUESDAY Spend the morning in a nostalgic reverie for the International Style.
Experience a lunchtime transition to gloomy reality. Immerse myself for the afternoon in something called the New Global Fashion For High-Yield Contemporaneity. It sounds similar to the International Style but instead it makes your heart sore.
WEDNESDAY The world of epic time and space is all a-quimble. No sooner had the latest redesign of Doctor Who detonated like an expensive firework across the digital media sky than an ideas competition for the NEXT redesign was immediately announced.
I think everyone’s scared of Doctor Who fans not being in a permanent state of volatile expectation. As per the terms of the global licensing mandate, all Doctor Who interiors must ‘undergo a refresh’ once every five Earth years or once every 100 Whovian Nanobits if you’re some weird adult with an improvised costume and a forum name.
My fixer Rock Steady Eddie and I are rock-steady ready. We spend the whole of an extended pub workshop mapping out the parameters. Time and space are an illusion. But are they the same illusion? Or are they separate but mutually dependent illusions? Or is it the illusion of space and time that is itself the illusion?
We exchange knowing, wonky looks and go our separate ways, Eddie to the bookmakers to put a monkey on What the Inside of the Next Tardis Will Look Like, and me to my studio to produce it.
THURSDAY A long, busy day locked into my own hyperdriven thoughts as I bang out Doctor Who interiors to a Delia Derbyshire soundtrack.
First the Tardis, which I have designed to Eddie’s tight specification. ‘Like being inside a lava lamp but them ones with glitter in, also a few weird sofas round the walls for chilling out between leaps through time and space, what about unisex toilets but get this they’re uniSPECIES, a big fridge with everything like floating inside and it’s only the size of a matchbox, all the Tardis controls in the air so you just wiggle your fingers about and bosh, weird bits of floor that you walk on and turn invisible or naked depending what side of the watershed we’re talking about PS think glowing globules they’re always good.’
Next, a selection of alien interiors. A bubble of absence enclosed by sentient retardant foam. Solid inhabitable wood, where the molecular essence of a character can move through the grain like rot. Crudely-drawn pink cube hovering above a strange landscape ready to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination.
FRIDAY Submit my Doctor Who interiors just in time – the Monty Python lot want me to design a sustainable stage set capable of taking the live show ‘beyond death itself’. Start working on a hilarious gilded cage containing ironic comfy chairs, only to be interrupted by a call asking me to design the Christmas party at the Finnish embassy and then there’s a text seeking my resolution package for the Middle East, wait …
SATURDAY I’d nodded off in the pub with Eddie. All a dream. Wednesday to Friday was actually a dull trudge through invoices, accounts and design revisions for some buy-to-let arsehole in Cyprus.
SUNDAY Self-re-evaluation in the recliner. I’ve let Doctor Who down, I’ve let Monty Python down. Most importantly, I’ve let the Finns down. Will resolve Middle East next week.
November 29, 2013
Get a Grip, Munchniks
MONDAY I’m making Advent much more relevant this year by working for a client who’s a ruthless giant internet retailer and who’s paying me to redesign Advent.
Yeah, Advent’s getting a sheeny, omnilayered fractal shakeover. I’m importing trans-global style narratives, incorporating supramorphic cultural push alerts and reworking the Christian calendar while I’m at it.
The First Day of Advent will begin on the Sunday after Black Friday, which follows Thanksgiving or Hannukah, whichever is closest to your credit limit.
From now on Advent will, I propose, be encased in a sparkling muslin sleeve, with windows along the side that open when you’ve collected enough reward points. All pets antlered. All snowflakes identical. Compliments of the season.
TUESDAY Once again I’m on the judging panel for the Creative on Sunday’s Hot Building Material of the Year Award.
The award is showcased in the newspaper’s ‘life and property’ section Equity, so we need a building material that will look good in situ. And by in situ we mean preferably the light-drenched living room of an expanded London terraced house currently rising in value by seven per cent a month.
The Hot Building Material of the Year must be infuriatingly cheap, with a boho insouciance that makes the featured unsmiling couple who’ve installed it the envy of their social circle.
After rejecting ‘a gorgeously ostentatious insulation’ made from panels of flamingo feathers and gold leaf and a ‘safely depleted’ uranium dado rail, we decide on ‘floorboards rescued from a neighbour’s skip’. The new owners do indeed look very pleased with them, and with themselves.
WEDNESDAY It suddenly occurs to me
that – bear with me here – if we design in the present with a respect for the past we will create better buildings for the future.
Deep, yeah? It sounds so clever and insightful, I can’t believe nobody’s thought of it before.
THURSDAY Certain people were ‘shocked’ to discover recently that as much land is occupied by golf courses in England as by homes.
Oh boo hoo. Stop doing your clumsy impersonation of The Scream and get a grip, Munchniks. A golf course is a much more efficient use of land than homes, for the following reasons which should be obvious to anyone in the epic space industry.
Firstly, as per the definition of a garden as ‘an outside room’, that’s all a golf course is. One, admittedly massive, room.
Secondly, with that whole ‘one outside room’ thing still in your head, look at the number of people who use a typical golf course as opposed to, say, a typical living room. It’s not like you’ve got quartets of people queueing up to tramp across your living room at five-minute intervals all day is it, Mr and Mrs Munch?
Thirdly, a golf course is a place for quiet contemplation, a place to find inspiration. People going on about how many executive homes you could fit on a golf course should pause for a moment and ask themselves where architects and planners might actually BE when they’re mapping out that new development of luxury residential investment. That’s right. On the GOLF COURSE. OK, maybe in the clubhouse. But you can’t have a clubhouse without a golf course. Or maybe you don’t WANT architects and planners to have somewhere civilised to chat and think, is that what you’re saying?
Fourthly, and clinchingly, golf courses are green. They’ve even got the word ‘green’ in the … map thing. How many black redstarts or frogs or badgers have you got in your so-called ecological houses? None.
I rest my case, and by the way am definitely in the market for any golf course-related public inquiry work.
FRIDAY Boom. I’ve been appointed chief visionary for the Independent Scotland we all hope is just around the corner.
My new Scottish Design Guide will promote a rugged, swirling architecture, full of tartan grids and exquisite details with the word ‘wee’ in front. I want to nurture the ‘soul’ of Scotland, which is why I will be encouraging value growth and engineered well-being. Plus a land bridge to Scandinavia.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Regenerational Colonialism 1, Resurgent Caledonialism 2, after penalty spellcheck and the discovery that theoretical football was actually invented in Caledonia.
SUNDAY Media review in the recliner. The Hot Building Material of the Year coverage in the Creative on Sunday looks good, but now the police are worried it might lead to a spate of floorboard burglaries.
December 6, 2013
Laughable Bear in a Frock
MONDAY ‘Animals. Now that’s a client base worth cracking you mark my words, can I have them chips, got any wi-fi on your mob?’
Rock Steady Eddie, my fixer, is explaining how the ‘charity game’ is changing the nature of client funding by jabbing at my phone with a sausage. ‘Everybody loves a donkey sanctuary, I get that. But this is off the hook, son …’
This year’s Times Animal Rich List is out. There’s always something new. The richest animal in Britain this year is Caspia, a three-year-old Siberian bear owned by Iain Duncan Smith. She has her own apartment in Pimlico and a reading age of five.
I laugh cruelly. There’s a photo of her arriving at the Royal Academy’s Nativity Concert for Cancer Research in a gown designed by Daniel Libeskind. She looks fucking ridiculous. The gown’s exquisitely tragic, cut on the bias but to little effect as she’s mostly on all fours. And the shoes! Really, heels? Up those steps?
‘Laugh all you like, mate, but it may interest you to know that this Caspia has a disposable income of about three million sovs a year. Tax-deductible too, IDS knows how to play the system. It may ALSO interest you to know that this laughable bear in a frock has just been revealed as a leading affordable home provider working in partnership with Bristol City Council. This bear is a potential client now. Think about THAT while you’re getting another round in.’
TUESDAY Oh my God, Eddie’s right about the donkeys. People are giving so much money to this sanctuary in Dorset that even when admin and overheads are deducted each of the 14 donkeys is worth north of two mill per annum.
They’ve all got AGENTS now. None of this ‘cameo on CBeebies for a scratch behind the ear and a bucketful of carrots’ rubbish any more. They’re pros. And they’re planning a chain of sanctuaries called Nuzzle and someone’s got the corporate design gig and it isn’t me.
WEDNESDAY Eddie and I work our way through the Potential Animal Client list.
Mr Breezy, an oligarch’s parrot, holds 51 per cent of the shares in a leisure development company.
A hedge fund ruthlessly buying up arable farmland in Gloucestershire has for the first time appointed a pair of swans – Tony and Carmela – as joint procurement managers.
A swarm of bees owned by former Coalition arts minister the Hon. Anaeas Upmother-Brown are now the collective head of innovation at Sainsbury’s.
Eddie tells me he’s not stupid. ‘Some of these appointments are strategic. Some might even be a front, we don’t know. I see that dog you used to knock about with is Number 87 on the list …’
Indeed. It gives me no pleasure to discover that my former acquaintance, the preposterous architectural dachshund Bauhau, is now head of the Bartlett school of architecture. AND running a hugely influential atelier in Shanghai.
Curse him and his ridiculous clothes … Eddie’s snapping his fingers. ‘Come on, son, focus. We need to concentrate on these gannets. And puffins.’
THURSDAY A quick day trip to Lister Craigs, a group of volcanic islands off the Ayrshire coast. Some nature conservation trust has just bought the lot – via a massively oversubscribed crowdsourcing initiative – to secure the future of Europe’s largest gannet colony. The islands are also home to a shitload of puffins.
There’s not much to see. A ruined castle here, some cottages there. It’s mostly birds. ‘We need to find out what they want and then take their demands to the new owners innit!’ shouts Eddie, struggling to light a fag in the whooping gale.
FRIDAY The young people at Ornithol seem surprised when we turn up without an appointment and brandishing a client wishlist. Eddie is adamant.
‘Can gannets and puffins get along? Do you care? Cos it’s all a bit Sunni and Shia up there, mate. You need to get an income stream going, peace and prosperity, yeah?’
They seem less hostile to the ecological five-star gambling and hotel development than we’d expected, although of course we do propose preserving a lot of the landscape. Maybe for them securing the absence of Eddie is enough of a result for now.
SATURDAY Eddie calls. ‘Fancy a quick one down the Gannet and Puffin? Wire transfer’s come through …’
SUNDAY Conserve self in recliner.
December 13, 2013
Extended Prison Break
MONDAY It doesn’t look like it’ll be a brilliant Christmas, to be honest. I’m being done for accessory to murder.
My counsel, Legal Brian, is brutally candid. ‘They got you bang to rights, mate. CCTV, witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, confession. I don’t know if you play poker at all but as evidence goes, it’s a full house.
‘My advice? Plead guilty but sort of look innocent and hope the courtroom artist doesn’t chalk you up like a kipper. Swear to God, half the time the judge is just checking Twitter on his phone, it could go either way, we did say cash, right?’
Legal Brian is the brother-in-law of Rock Steady Eddie, my fixer. Eddie has been anything but conspicuous lately. I’m getting Brian’s Mates’ Rates obviously. But it’s still going to cost more than sixty quid for what now seems like pretty flimsy counsel, if I’m honest.
TUESDAY On the other hand of course he’s dead right. All advice is irrelevant. My dear, reckless, stupid acquaintance Amy Blackwater has now cheer
fully claimed responsibility for the deaths of ‘at least’ four ATOS assessors.
She hasn’t always been such a handful. I remember her in the pre-balaclava days, before she embraced angry ecomentalism. An easy-going archivist at the Soot Association, chronicling the rise and fall of particulate carbon as a cultural signifier.
Then something happened, nobody knows what it was, and everything changed. Amy became a snarling avenger, passionate in her many animal- and vegetable-related campaigns, meticulous in the calibrated severity of vengeance she meted out to a hitlist of absolute tossers. She became an anarchivist.
I admit her latest campaign overstepped the mark. Her temper’s got much worse since she became a wheelchair user, and I think the sheer indignity of being bullied by the DWP’s thick, spiteful agency bouncers was too much. You can’t excuse murder, even if the victims were horrible sadists trying to hit targets for witholding benefits from the most vulnerable people, you know what? Sod it, you CAN excuse it.
Obviously like all sane people I drew a line at her plan to shoot Iain Duncan Smith in the face, though I’m not saying which side I drew it on.
WEDNESDAY Text from Rock Steady Eddie: ‘Best keep our distance til all this shit blows over dubais coming up again ill be staying at the burj whateverthefuck take it easy son yeah r s eddie.’
THURSDAY Amy’s been sentenced to a long stretch in a private prison. I’ve heard it’s pretty grim, despite being designed by chartered architects. She’s been invited to upgrade for an extra grand a month, which would pay for someone to help her in and out of the wheelchair occasionally.
After lunch, my doctor’s note – from Medical Sonia, another of Eddie’s family finds – goes down badly. The judge sounded quite sarcastic, reading it out in a Radio 4 Cockerney drama voice.
‘Please excuse Ian from prison. He had one of them Fugue States, I don’t know if you’ve seen Breaking Bad but like what Walt had in that. Yours, Dr Sonia Kedgehog MDMA.’