Epic Space

by Ian Martin

  Solution: a mixed eight-pack of new towns. Tartanauld, Cragaloof, Heatherloch, Peaty Edge, Glengrimmond Glen Ben, Polyunsaltire, Aarg and Ecklesprechenangettaefuchan.

  FRIDAY Now I’ve told them about the SCOTLAND AYE new towns plan, the SCOTLAND RATHER NOT people suddenly want some new towns as well. Fine with me. Special rate for cash. Not those Scottish banknotes though thanks very much, people in parts of London don’t ‘believe’ in them.

  Solution: Hogwhim, Sahberdeen, Jacobeanory, Grecian Urbis, Upper Hackney, Type 2 Tablet, Kiltmist, Ooterienanny.

  SATURDAY Develop the idea of ‘new town’ into the idea of ‘newt-owned’. Curse the piddling megalomania of newts. Curse everything they stand for.

  SUNDAY Imagine a new town called Newtone, and wonder if it might be time to change our whole attitude to ‘housing’ people, in the recliner.

  August 15, 2014

  The Henge

  MONDAY Well thanks very much, ‘public outcry’. I was just trying to bring a little magic to your shitty riverside park.

  Fine. You don’t want a visitor centre celebrating the Otherness of Royalty? I’ll take it to Dubai or Mumbai or Shanghai or anywhere ending in -ai where they DO appreciate integrated genius.

  The idea was to create a thrilling building first of all, which I obviously did WELL before imagining what might go inside. Angular roof, shingled pop-up fish tin overthrow, walls made of a smart hybrid of ‘slow light’ and ‘treacly air’, windows ‘bouncing’ slowly around within the rectangles like those logos on the old DVD screensavers.

  It had AWARD-WINNING painted in dripping block capitals all over it, like a serial killer’s chilling message to the cops.

  Then an idea came to me in a dream. As I am an auteur, I quickly scribbled it down. Bingo – a concept outline. ‘Something about Royals doing something else when historic events were taking place? Maybe lose the telepathic flying bears?’

  Yes, a perfect fit for my riverside building. For example, while the Queen was on a barge sailing down the rainy Thames for her Diamond Jubilee celebrations, Prince Philip was in hospital with a urinary tract infection. Everybody knows what the Diamond Jubilee looked like, but who’s familiar with UTI procedures?

  Likewise the Prince of Wales – people would be astonished to learn what he was doing on that fateful night in 1997. And Princess Michael of Kent’s ‘Fergie wedding swerve’ at the casino.

  It’s a sad day when this country no longer values tributes to the hidden contemporaneity of our own Royal Family.

  TUESDAY Redesign the United States, giving it a wider, sedentary vibe.

  Along the Canadian border I’m proposing a notional ‘crown of specialness’ made of powerful halogen beacons, visible from the International Space Station as whimsical, twinkling fairy lights emphasising the fragile grandeur of our world but also showing that grand, fragile world how the US can still put together a kickass halogen light show, probably presented by some sun-dried cockpunnet shrieking ‘Rock and Rooooooooll!’

  Either side of the US: relaxed, post-imperial coastal borders. An enigmatic aquatic-territorial interface marked at regular intervals by Sea Nodes expressing comfortableness with our shifting self-perceptions and honouring America’s fallen heroes.

  Along the Mexican border, a spangled retaining wall.

  WEDNESDAY Day off. Potter round in the stately home of my mind, or ‘Downtime Abbey’ as I humorously call it.

  THURSDAY I’m finding that new BBC reality television documentary The Henge utterly inspiring.

  It takes you behind the scenes at Stonehenge, following the day-to-day lives of ordinary members of staff. It underlines the humanity of routine situations with quirky incidental music, a device I admit was new to me.

  We see the sun rise (‘It is dawn …’) over the iconic neolithic monument (pizzicato violins) as a pair of gorgeous, heritagey-looking ground staff arrive for another quirky day of quirky maintenance.

  One, John, is nearing retirement and has the keys to the big maintenance shed. As he unlocks it (‘First off us’ll have to water ’em droy patches, BBC Weather bain’t give ’em rain ber Froyday …’) his companion, Cassie, who’s on a placement year as part of her archaeology and wellbeing degree, stoops to fuss over a Golden Labrador (sprightly oboe).

  Alas, when John and Cassie attach the hose to the standpipe as usual and set off to water them dry patches, gentle disaster strikes – in the multiform of a hose several metres too short, and a waddling tuba.

  ‘Where’s that producer’s assistant?’ demands John of the unit director. ‘Someone’s been [bleep] about with moy [bleep] hose, ’em bout twenny yards too short now, ert? Oi’ve had it with you lot. [bleep] the lot of ’em …’ Here John looks directly at the camera and warns, as we hear minor chords on the piano. ‘Don’t think ’em can just stick sad-sounding piano over all this and call err heartwarming [bleep] drama, I call it a [bleep] cop-out mate.’ Cut to Cassie, cheerfully watering the parts of Stonehenge she can reach with the hose, as the Labrador bounds around some Swedish tourists (dulcimer).

  The point is, they realised the dry patches were where missing stones had once stood, making Stonehenge a proper circle (pizzicato violins). Result!

  FRIDAY Bang out my masterplan for ‘henge living’. A circular, traditional private housing development in the green belt.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football: match abandoned 1, match ‘unpacked’ 0.

  SUNDAY Circular thinking in the recliner.

  September 19, 2014

  Curse You, Buildings That

  Resemble Breasts Quarterly

  MONDAY Spend the day in a mischievous mood, thanking people for their patience. I explain that I’m redesigning their interactive experience by elevating my level of indifference to them.

  TUESDAY Ugh. Entrapment is the ugliest of all journalistic ploys and I condemn it unreservedly.

  It is outrageous that I should have to resign my post as honorary chair of the Buildings That Look Like Penises Appreciation Society. I shall be writing to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about this affair, which has been maliciously timed to cause maximum embarrassment and loss of status.

  The muckrakers and bastards of Buildings That Resemble Breasts Quarterly have much to answer for.

  Summary: a reporter posing as an attractive young building restorer contacted me via the social epic space media platform Wobble. We exchanged innocent messages about Brunelleschi’s early theories of linear perspective.

  Then late one night ‘Clemency’, who said she’d had one too many proseccos, offered to send me explicit photographs of the Hagia Sophia. I agreed, and had to admit they were impressive. In a moment of recklessness I now bitterly regret, I sent her a picture of me in a sleepsuit holding a model of the Jean Nouvel-designed Torre Agbar, in the Barcelona area.

  And so – snap! – the trap sprang shut. But what possible public interest is served by publishing such private folly?

  WEDNESDAY I have informed Buildings That Resemble Breasts Quarterly that I am putting it in the hands of my lawyer. More sniggering. Insufferable.

  THURSDAY A micro-exhibition has been curated by radical post-architectural thinkers Shayne and Molly Bellow, who are always impeccably dressed and taken very seriously.

  The Bellows have transformed a flat in a condemned Glasgow tower block, built in 1969 and designed by celebrated Brutalist architect Ernie Beatles, using ‘furniture, contents and decoration of the time’. The idea was to show how an ordinary Scottish working-class family might have lived when the flats were new and hadn’t been not maintained properly yet.

  In her ‘Notes From A Curator’, etched on responsibly sourced tie-dyed vinyl of the era, Molly Bellow writes: ‘1969 was a time of great cultural upheaval. The first Led Zeppelin album. The Austin Maxi. Much much more, just check out Wikipedia! What might a working class home of the time have looked like? We decided to find out by buying antique items on eBay marked “1969” and arranging them in the flat.


  ‘But surely, critics will say, working-class families in 1969 did not have the wherewithal to simply go on eBay, search for items made “now” and decorate their flat from scratch? Fair point. Some things would not necessarily be “unique to 1969”, which is why we have included in the exhibition a Tretchikoff print and a bottle of advocaat …’

  I applaud this approach, and pay homage to the Bellows by ‘visiting’ the exhibition on the internet.

  FRIDAY Lunch at the latest London restaurant you need to go to if you only visit one London restaurant before you die. It’s so fashionable it hasn’t even got traction on Twitter yet.

  I say restaurant. Technically it’s an ‘experiential ingestion hub’ called Denial. The premise is that consuming food, like consuming art, should be a struggle between what we think we know and who we think we are. Is this my lunch? Or AM I the lunch somehow? Is the lunch paying for ME? Am I to include starters and a pudding?

  The menu lists all the items you’re not allowed to have. You tell the waiter I DON’T want the chicken livers to start, etc. They pretend they won’t bring you the food you’ve refused to order but then they do. Brilliant. Denial is run by a former architect. Of course it is.

  I’m here to meet my old mate Loaf, the mayor of London. Hoping for some ‘inside frack’ on his latest scheme to help minorities in London, called OLIGARCHITECTURALOPOLIS.

  The idea is to nurture the often misunderstood billionaire community. All Loaf will tell me is that a shortlist of imagineers will be selected on the basis of ‘1. Design, 2. Delivery and 3. Commercial drivers’.

  SATURDAY Knock out my conceptuals for OLIGARCHITECTURALOPOLIS.

  1. Half-scale central St Petersburg in Mayfair.

  2. Delivery via de-unionised delivery system, e.g. Addison Lee.

  3. Commercial drivers – as above.

  SUNDAY Keep Gherkin, etc., to self, in recliner.

  October 3, 2014

  Yipster Gentrification

  MONDAY Feeling relaxed and energised after the weekend, ready to create some life-affirming epic space. Then remember I have to do some conceptual prep for a genocide memorial, have a mood plunge and take the rest of the day off.

  TUESDAY Bollocks, I’ve just spent the entire morning reconciling disparate elements to create – as per client instructions – ‘a unified alliance of quality spatial components within a singular whole’.

  Now I’ve found a disparate element on the floor. No idea where it’s supposed to fit, and to be honest the singular whole seems to be working perfectly without it. Dilemma. Can I be arsed to take it all apart and work out where to insert this so-called ‘affordable housing’?

  In the end I decide to leave it as it is. If anyone notices I’ll just rebadge one of the other disparate elements, or blame the economy.

  WEDNESDAY Bang out a new holiday resort on the Italian Riviera. Yes, the luxury villas are high-spec but please don’t lecture me on the moral ambiguities of ‘exclusive place-making’. For all I know disabled kiddies will be staying there, and I have a headache.

  THURSDAY Propose a regeneration scheme for Hartlepool via a process of ‘gamification’. I’ve sketched in bouncy gaming platforms, giant gaming slides, a big bubble full of gaming possibilities, app-enabled wi-fi gameclouds, a rooftop gaming zone and an ongoing controversy about misogyny in the word of gaming.

  The idea is that users can explore Hartlepool via gaming consoles and don’t physically have to be in Hartlepool. This will enhance the town’s status by getting it on Google without having to install any expensive landmark art pieces.

  FRIDAY A landscape upgrading day. With one elegant drag-and-drop I secure ‘additional seasonal solar shading’ to the rear of the scheme by plopping a tree in. Bosh. Capability Me.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Austerical Mockery 3, Void Cloning 3.

  SUNDAY Media review in the recliner. Extraordinary piece in the Creative on Sunday in which Bauhau the architectural dachshund controversially suggests that hipster gentrification may actually be GOD’S WILL.

  In ‘his’ latest Woof over Your Head column the extruded little bastard declares himself firmly on the side of those ‘brave and intrepid settlers who made east London bloom’.

  I’d never thought of haughty retro-normcore couples with their off-book opinions and parents’ deposits as ‘acts of God’. But acccording to Bauhau’s ghost writer – my friend the flamboyant and controversial Darcy Farquear’say – gentrifiers are part of a divine plan.

  ‘I cannot be the only dog living in the revitalised Chutney Meadows area to be grateful for its oft-derided “hipster culture”, which has brought God’s chosen dogs to a promised land to fulfil our destiny …’ He barks on like this for some time. How hipster dogs are creating value. How they and their human associates have turned Chutney Meadows from an area of deprivation into a desirable postcode ‘by displacing poverty and its associated pitbulls, Staffordshire terriers etc, with creative energy, cultured caninity and a genuine sense of purpose …’

  There’s a picture of Bauhau and friends enjoying the tasting menu at Waggy Mama, a fashionable brasserie for dogs on Chatsworth Road. Bauhau in prescription sunglasses and a little hat, quite the king of the salon.

  His associates include a heavily tattooed chihuahua, a shitzu dyed platinum blonde, a Pomeranian in a crop top and hot pants and a miniature Yorkshire Terrier sporting a fashionable short-back-and-sides. They look quite small and trembly in their skinny fit trouser suits and taffeta wraps.

  Oh, hang on. Turns out the ‘human carer’ for the chihuahua with tats is millionaire cultural commentator and self-made pop-up Shayne Bellow. He’s very keen to renotionalise ‘hipsters and their stupid dogs’ as ‘mixed-species urban pioneers’.

  So this is where Bauhau – I mean Darcy – is getting his inspiration from. He’s even saying things like ‘go see Chutney Meadows, discover what can be achieved with cheap property in a rising market when God’s on your side. Virgin Atlantic are even talking about it in their in-flight magazine, bro!’

  Bloody hipster dachshunds. Bauhau reckons he’s part of a blessed canine project now and has, inevitably, baptised his neurotic tribe ‘yipsters’.

  You know, scientists reckon only an estimated 8.2 per cent of human DNA is useful. That’s 8 per cent more than you’d find in an architectural dachshund, I reckon.

  October 17, 2014

  The Dalek Clusterfuck

  MONDAY To a conference, Where Next for the Branded Townscape? Some amazing civic plans in the pipeline …

  ‘Live, Work and Breathe Matlock’. An integrated 10-year plan for the Derbyshire county town includes more housing approvals, a new business park, and all air molecules to be wi-fi-imprinted with the word ‘Matlock’.

  ‘Hashtag Biggleswade’. A proposed development to the west of the town. Four long residential terraces arranged as an italicised noughts and crosses grid, creating a smart aerial branding presence.

  ‘Brandford’. A multi-agency cross-stakeholder rebranding of Bradford to create a world-class centre of branding excellence. Every citizen of Brandford will be free to develop his or her personal brand, in the context of a growing urban superbrand, NB no ‘Russell Brands’ or other timewasters.

  TUESDAY Oh my God, I thought it was someone falling down the stairs. Just a voice on the radio saying, ‘STARCHITECTS TEAM UP FOR OLYMPICOPOLIS BIDS.’

  WEDNESDAY I’m redesigning Victorian England for television. Actually it’s an adaptation of the Victorian England I redesigned for radio. This time round there’ll be high production values and actors with multisyllabic names.

  The human element’s easy enough – gritty but well-tailored, full of existential doubt about Empire and God. But it’s vital to get the built environment spot-on or you get a torrent of abuse from influential Telegraph readers.

  My note for the location manager could not be clearer. I want all churches to be Gothic and evil-looking. All working-class housing to be slummy but pl
ucky; we’re looking for gorgeous squalor. Railway stations – stick to interiors, everyone loves a steam train. General note for all locations: lashings of industrial hurly-burly, must look great with a knowing contemporary soundtrack gushing underneath. NB – follies!

  All municipal buildings to be neo-Classical, foreshadowing perhaps the rise of totalitarianism, you never know, if this goes well we could be up to World War One by the third series.

  THURSDAY Sketch out initial ideas for a radical feminist ideas hub and meeting space. Can’t seem to get any further. Realise I’ve made it self-exclusionary. Go to pub.

  FRIDAY My old friend Darcy, the well-dressed controversialist, has written a piece for a new online magazine called, appropriately, The Well-Dressed Controversialist.

  It’s the usual swooning mix of rehashed press releases, copyright images used with the permission of whoever’s being written approvingly about, and clickbait. I wish this horrible aggregated sinkhole WAS actually ‘full’ of mischievously counterintuitive bullshit, but the sad fact is that websites can never be full. Gone are the days when you could look at the print version of the Daily Mail and think oh well, at least there it is – ‘finite’.

  I’m disappointed in Darcy. Times are tough, but this is a new low. A cursory glance at the latest additions to The Well-Dressed Controversialist gives you a pretty good idea of their editorial ethos. ‘Let’s Have More Shards’. ‘Shut Up, the North – Nobody Cares’. ‘Georgian Architecture Is Shit’.

  Some Brussels-based visual artist has Photoshopped graffiti onto photos of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Why? To ‘question its primacy in Modernist historiography’, you Brussels-based doughnut?

  Darcy’s own contribution is equally shameless: ‘Three Cheers for the Dalek Clusterfuck’. This is how journalism works now. Because Darcy’s pretending to like that appalling Dali-does-a-Rolex-ad ‘high street’ at poor old Battersea Power Station, they let the Controversialist use the pictures.