Epic Space

by Ian Martin

  Step Two’s a bit of a toss-up. A few of us favour chopping it off at ground level, then using some sort of powerful supercopter to airlift it to the North Sea. Others want incremental contolled detonations from the top down, so it collapses in on itself like a jagged souffle.

  Personally I’d like to see this disgusting stalagmite of congealed capital launched into the air by powerful explosives, then land upside down on the O2 during An Evening with Derek Acorah and Sting.

  Whatever. One way or another, the Shard will be a breath of fresh air soon.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. The match between Defensive Architecture and Social Hierarchy was abandoned after a late tackle with anti-homeless floor studs.

  SUNDAY Epic space suspension.

  June 20, 2014

  Oligarchitectural Capitalism Versus Patriarchitectural Sexism

  MONDAY Honoured and delighted to be shortlisted in this year’s Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects Awards (London Housing category) for my innovative ventilated coal bunker.

  TUESDAY Blue sky drinkathon down the pub with my fixer, Rock Steady Eddie. I really value these freestyle discussions where, unshackled from our usual business agenda, we can roam freely over a range of subjects and get pissed.

  Items discussed today: if ‘all design is redesign’ does that mean that ‘all payment is repayment’? In which case who’s the creditor? And how can a building have ‘fluid geometry’ without risking collapse in a world of apparently arbitrary mathematics?

  I say discussed, it’s really me thinking aloud while Eddie reads a newspaper and talks through a mouthful of my chips. ‘Stone me, you seen this? It says here China’s used more cement in the last three years than the USA did in the whole of the 20th century! Do WHAT?’

  That IS incredible, I have to admit. It’s not just the sun that’s setting on the American Empire, clearly. And once a cement race is started, there’s no stopping it. Soon India will use more cement in an afternoon than China does in a week. Then Nigeria will use more cement in a minute than India does in a lunchtime. Israel will entirely concretise in the time it takes Nigeria to open a bag of Ordinary Portland …

  ‘It’s a mad world, chief, no question,’ sighs Eddie, now fully carbohydrated. ‘Cemental. Ha ha, your round, son.’

  WEDNESDAY British Values Charts Day. Always exciting to hear David ‘Fluff’ Cameron counting down the Top 40 at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

  As expected, Property Equity remains the Number One British Value for the 8,662nd week. Up seven places this week at Number Two, it’s Shareholders’ Dividend, while Close Ties with Saudi Arabia stays exactly where it is – frozen in fear at Number Three.

  THURSDAY Lunch with Loaf, my old friend the mayor of London. As is customary, he wears his trademark privatised cycling helmet which this week is sponsored by an investment management company (slogan: Your Future, Head First).

  As usual, we converse in Latin. At first of course I get the usual jowl-wobbling small talk. Branson’s in on Mudbank Airport, as long as it’s badged Boris Virgin International. The Ajerbaijani mafia want to buy the National Portrait Gallery. Heston’s curating a ‘scoffhub’ on the South Bank this summer and the menu’s just an anthology of atomised starters ‘in those nitrous oxide balloon thingies you get at Henley Regatta …’

  Then Loaf casually mentions that ‘a spook pal’ has got wind of some hare-brained scheme to remove the Shard from the London skyline. He doesn’t make eye contact, but would like to think this is the sort of nonsense I’d run a mile from. ‘Just casually enquiring whether anyone’s invited you, let us say, to join some rag tag and bobtail anarchist group of total bloody nutters sworn to blow up everything bigger than the Gherkin …’ It’s at this point he fixes me with his famous ‘Homerian baleful stare’.

  I go extravagantly wide-eyed and express the sort of theatrical outrage and hurt you’d get from a senior policeman at a select committee meeting. ‘I can’t believe you asked me that, Loaf! Good God!’ And with that I flounce from the restaurant. The only way I could look guiltier would be to accidentally drop a kilo of Semtex and a map of the Shard with all the stress points marked.

  Memo to self: avoid Loaf for a while.

  FRIDAY Extraordinary meeting of Space Invaders, the group convened by a mystery billionaire anarchist to destroy the Shard. Of which I’m plausibly not a member.

  We need to get a wiggle on. This tottering excrescence of barren, sequestered wealth is actually up for a DESIGN AWARD. Once it wins formal acclaim from the humourless dickheads in brightly coloured trousers, it’s within spitting distance of National Treasure status.

  It must be destroyed before it becomes part of our cultural heritage. If Alan Bennett starts liking it we’re stuffed.

  SATURDAY Talking of cultural heritage, I bloody resent how our five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football has been Russianised. The final score was Oligarchitectural Capitalism 3, Patriarchitectural Sexism 2, but then the Orthodox Church bounced in during extra time like Conchita Wurst and overturned it.

  SUNDAY Longlistlessness in the recliner.

  June 27, 2014

  The Right to Let Die

  MONDAY Today I am huffily informing the world that if it doesn’t get a move on and provide the £463m necessary to start work on my brilliant Allotment Bridge over the river Tame I will be forced to withdraw my design input.

  I have already completed at least two days thinking and sketching time on this prestigious project, which would elevate Tamworth to the premiership league of world cities with things growing on bridges. We can’t hang around for ever.

  Unless the world of world cities with things growing on bridges crowdfunds sharpish, I’m taking the Allotment Bridge somewhere it’s going to be appreciated, like Sunderland or Mumbai.

  TUESDAY To a conference, Housing for Life and Death. The organisers have tried to keep it upbeat but there’s only so much you can do with a grim theme. Admittedly you can’t call a conference Disposing of Unwanted Pensioners in a Humane Way.

  Proceedings are conducted by a woman from ‘proud sponsors Living With Dignity Residential Logistics’. Pixie cut, radio mic, demeanour of a vet who’s telling you she’ll have to put your dog to sleep. She introduces a succession of sinister guest speakers who bring us up to date with recent developments.

  First on is a thin American designer wearing a tortoiseshell Google Glass. She talks animatedly about data-assisted living and how humane environments can ‘smart-adapt’ to the occupant.

  Basically, old people are extracted from houses much too big for them and squeezed into ‘supergreen personalised caraspaces’. Hundreds of caraspaces can then be ‘con-modulated into beehives of collective care with off-site supervision’. The deterioration of caraspace and old person is synced via the internet; when they pass away the unit can be composted with them inside and simply replaced with another.

  Next, a tanned consultant who’d struggle to get served in a pub. He outlines a forthcoming government initiative, Right to Let Die. This will encourage the release of valuable habitable space by offering cash grants to lone pensioners in social housing.

  ‘It would be wrong to call the elderly “spaceblockers” so I won’t call them “spaceblockers”, OK?’ he says, indicating a slide of a baffled-looking old woman with ‘NOT A SPACEBLOCKER?’ stamped over her. ‘This is about directing help where it’s needed most, to senior citizens who are perhaps finding life a bit of a struggle – who can blame them, there’s little profit for NHS contractors in treating old people – and who might welcome help with funeral expenses …’

  Then some frothy yuppieccino on how everyone should be compelled to retire to Wales, and how this exodus of grandparents would suck many young families there with them for the childcare and how England could then be given over to the Childless Economy.

  Then it’s some demented beard with eyes, droning about a eugenically-modified planning system. Then it’s lunch and I bolt for it, bef
ore I get any older.

  WEDNESDAY Gig on the horizon. A high-rolling Crimean ‘businessman’ has bought a few hundred acres of beautiful ancient woodland in Kent and wants to develop it as a ‘pleasure compound’.

  I’ve suggested he applies for planning permission, not to develop it but to conserve it. Then do what Crimean ‘businessmen’ do in London – keep everything above ground level and excavate a five-storey underground extension.

  THURSDAY Didn’t get the gig. Apparently some smartarse had the better idea of elevating the ancient woodland on top of a five-storey overground extension, to deter ramblers.

  FRIDAY Exciting times. Having seen bits of the Glastonbury festival on the TV, the mayor and corporation of Blingnang in China now want their own.

  Except instead of a three-day smudge of mud, fancy dress and nitrous oxide, the brief is for a permanent Worthy Farm Traditional Big Dolly Music Tent Show (full, presumably, of half-timbered people) surrounded by a business park and a new town of 200,000.

  SATURDAY Submit outline ideas for Blingnangstonbury. Have reversed the brief so that a business park is the hub of the whole thing, surrounded by an artificial ox-bow lake filled with endlessly circling drag acts, cider tents and temporary housing.

  SUNDAY Didn’t get Blingnangstonbury. Some smartarse has had the much better idea of just doing the business park and putting in a high-speed rail link to Shanghai.

  Eschew recliner and call my fixer, Rock Steady Eddie. We must find and destroy this mysterious smartarse.

  July 4, 2014

  Evil in a Pork Pie Hat

  MONDAY ‘Seriously, mate. I can only apologise for any misunderstanding or inconvenience caused by this unfortunate turn of events,’ mumbles Rock Steady Eddie humbly, through a mouthful of his own pie for a change.

  We’re in emergency session at The Parametric Tinker, a temporary craft pub in Dalston. I coolly note Eddie’s contrition and suggest he gets another round in while I bitterly ponder the situation.

  Summary: for the last month all my best ideas have been systematically stolen, to wit …

  • The Breathe Block, a giant high-density dollop of mid-luxury housing shaped like a bath sponge, celebrating the triumph of rhetoric over science with huge structural ‘air-confidence bags’ that puff out a smart oxygen-caramel mix and suck in bad carbon, trapping it in sinister ‘smoke lungs’ and (who knows?) maybe compressing the bad carbon into ethical ivory in due course.

  • An Iraqi parliament building designed as a deconstructivist hologram.

  • The Shoreditch Shitscraper, an incremental pyramid partially built from the stylish recycled detritus of metropolitan life, e.g. itsu boxes, last year’s tweed, late Britart.

  • A trio of linked Brazilian supertowers affording panoramic views of the southern hemisphere.

  • A heartbreaking ‘premorial’ commemorating the deaths of all those yet to perish in unknowable yet tragic circumstances, constructed from sad wood and stoical concrete.

  All of these and more have been appropriated and talked about pretentiously in the Creative on Sunday by a business rival. None other than the legendary Tim Hedgespam.

  Yeah, exactly. THAT Tim Hedgespam The can-doer from the 90s. Early Blair adopter. Proud owner of 365 subtly different pork pie hats. Developer, regenerator, OBE and arsehole.

  It’s not ‘officially’ him, of course. He’s using a sockpuppet. A sockpuppet in the thick sausage-like shape of Bauhau, the celebrity architectural dachshund who has been ‘writing’ for the CoS for a while now. Hedgespam is Bauhau’s latest owner, and by far the most unscrupulous. Not only has he been writing about ‘his’ ideas, he’s been selling them to equally unscrupulous clients. Bastard.

  Talking of bastards, Eddie’s back from the bar. Chasers, too. No wonder he’s penitent. The stupid idiot shared my ideas with his stupid idiot brother-in-law Legal Brian, who’s in the same bring-your-dog Pilates class as Hedgespam.

  ‘I don’t blame you for having the right hump,’ he says, generously. ‘But right now we’ve got to focus on damage limitation, fucking the lad Hedgespam up good and proper, and making sure this never happens again …’

  I tell Eddie I’m way ahead of him, swallow my scotch, tell him he’s fired as my fixer and walk out, a little unsteadily.

  TUESDAY Revenge is a dinner best served in separate courses, each with a distinct and separate flavour. For starters, I intend to separate Hedgespam and Bauhau, thus depriving the intellectual copyright thief of his adorable barking mouthpiece.

  WEDNESDAY Lunch with my old friend Darcy Farquear’say, the dandy socialite and freelance epic space commentator. He once owned Bauhau. I remember the delirious years of inseparability. The matchy-matchy, doggy-batchy, gaggy-waggy cloying sickness of it all. Darcy, like the flailing twat he is, still carries a photo of Bauhau in his wallet. A preposterous-looking quiver in a tulle fajita, with tiny biker boots.

  Darcy’s back in London, having sold his smallholding in Cumbria along with its architectural theorist-in-residence, a border collie called Bess of Hardwick. The life of a rugged farmer/cultural chronicler was never really for Darcy. Apart from the lack of decent bars and his cow phobia, he couldn’t ever grow a full beard.

  THURSDAY Ha ha ha, oh dear. An anonymous tip-off seems to have scuppered Arsehole OBE’s scheme to overhaul Tamworth’s historic Entrails Market.

  What a SHAME. Hedgespam had been quietly working up a scheme for some shadowy global investors, keeping the outside of ‘Old Gutsy’ as it’s known locally but scooping out the good bits to make way for bag shops and semi-furnished equity.

  Now it’s been rejected by the secretary of state, conservationists are dancing on its grave and Rock Steady Eddie has partially, anonymously redeemed himself.

  FRIDAY Darcy has lodged a suit against Hedgespam in the Chancery Court of Canine Paternity, alleging misappropriation of mastery over an architectural dachshund.

  SATURDAY The Creative on Sunday are terminating the impenetrably arch Woof over Your Head column. Having Darcy and Bauhau back in my life suddenly seems a small price to pay for Hedgespam’s downfall.

  SUNDAY Plot-thickening in the recliner.

  July 18, 2014

  Rough Concrete and Mulleted Genitals

  MONDAY The ‘silly season’. An ideal opportunity to clear that irritating backlog of unfinished signature new towns from my tottering to-do pile.

  They’ll never get built, so I can make them as ambitious and deranged as I like. No cultural context. There hasn’t been a genuine ‘new town’ since 1972, when the experimental Spumley in Hertfordshire was completed and immediately began to look old-fashioned.

  Designed by radical naturists Alison and Dick Fabble in their trademark ‘Arts and Crafts with a Heavy Groove’ style, Spumley caused a sensation at the time. The bold combination of Corbusian grid and social nudity was dismissed as ‘flapping, dangling gimmickry of the very worst kind’ by influential style magazine Architecturalisme et Couture Oui Oui.

  Urbanists now come from all over the world, disembarking at Spumley’s ‘park, disrobe and ride’ stations to see for themselves how Perspex, Formica, rough concrete and mulleted genitals have survived four decades of indifference and gentle mockery.

  Many of us remember this most emphatic of Britain’s new towns from Michael Portillo’s documentary Shock of the Nude, in which the broadcaster and former Tory minister strode authoritatively through Spumley’s healthy and efficient streets, his probity blazoned by a comprehensive railway timetable and a quizzical expression.

  TUESDAY When politicians moot a 21st-century new town it’s either to distract us from something or to promote themselves. If you’re a Liberal Democrat, both.

  I’ve been asked to knock up a generic new garden city by LibDem Policy Hot Tank. ‘Basically, we don’t give a shit what it looks like,’ says the refreshingly honest brief. ‘What we’re after is something that appeals to the affordable housing brigade, so could you put some rough-looking types in the pictures, with tattoo
s, holding carrier bags? Also something that appeals to homeowners so maybe also some semi-detached villas with Ocado vans and little girls in straw boaters?

  ‘We just want to float it in general terms really so we can offer compensation to any Tories living next to it. That way everyone’s happy when it doesn’t get built and we’re very much part of the next Coalition government, yes?’

  Solution: Photoshop some Googled residents of Newcastle into cut-ups of Berkhamsted.

  WEDNESDAY Controversial billionaire artist Dorian Gubb is a genius, of course he is. You can’t argue with Charles Saatchi. Not in public, anyway.

  The leading light of ‘Britprop Art’, Gubb revolutionised painting by getting other people to do it for him, then revolutionised installations by getting other people to do those too. He’s made a fortune and for tax purposes wants to convert a sizeable lump of it into a new town.

  That’s where I come in, with my intuitive understanding of the artistic mind. I’ve sketched out an ‘affordable settlement’ where all the houses are cut in half, the community centre’s full of flies swarming round cow carcasses, the roads are covered in dots and swirls and even a garden shed NOT encrusted with diamonds costs £750,000.

  We’ll submit this to planning, whip up scare stories in the press and get it rejected. Then Gubbo will shrug extravagantly somewhere in the Maldives, agree to have it redesigned in the style of a luxury starter home estate and bosh, job done.

  THURSDAY The SCOTLAND AYE campaign wants me to design eight new towns to ‘help avert a potential housing crisis’. Maybe they’re expecting severe overcrowding when everyone on the mint-spectrum from ‘oligarch’ to ‘benefits tourist’ moves to the most fashionable region in New Europe. Or maybe they’re being conjured up in order to be ‘at risk’ if the other lot wins the referendum.