Epic Space

by Ian Martin

Darcy then imagines what he MIGHT say if he didn’t like it, e.g. the unaffordable investment housing looks like a Dalek clusterfuck, the whole thing’s an affront to the idea of a high street, it’ll be full of wankers etc and then offers his own counter-argument.

  Apparently he likes the boldness of the ideas, and the vision. And the money. ‘The critics can carp and parp as much as they like – it’ll still cost EIGHT BILLION POUNDS, so excuse me if I don’t fawn over your frankly irrelevant little social housing refurb struggling to make it into seven figures. London is all about glamour, and what could be more glamorous than an icon being forced into humiliating submission by anonymous international shareholders?’

  Hang on, maybe Darcy’s being sarcastic. If he is, and The Well-Dressed Controversialist hasn’t noticed, he may have pushed forward the boundaries of online journalism another inch.

  SATURDAY Reimagine Venice. No idea why.

  SUNDAY Invent opposition to the idea of recliners, write piece ‘In Defence of the Recliner’, in the recliner.

  October 24, 2014

  Honeycombed Privatised Air

  MONDAY The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given us all a stark and final warning about carbon emissions.

  As if that’s not scary enough, I’m actually reading the report in a pub beer garden. It’s uncomfortably warm in the November sunshine. Butterflies and spring flowers everywhere. In the fields beyond, sheep and birds are on their third and fourth families of the year respectively.

  Dilemma. Of course we must reduce our carbon emissions to zero. On the other hand economies such as China’s and India’s are driving new wealth the old-fashioned way, with coal and poisons. And with filth-powered wealth comes great responsibility but also quite a few lucrative gigs.

  It is time we all faced up to the terrible reality. We have a moral obligation to take a stand on this, which is why I for one will be dismissing the IPCC report as racist at the earliest opportunity.

  TUESDAY Redesign the North, giving it a new dynamic focus by reducing it to Manchester.

  WEDNESDAY As part of the new government initiative to pretend it’s doing anything useful at all to solve the housing crisis, the department for business solutions, delivery and skills is about to launch an appeal for construction specialists.

  This is even less interesting than it sounds. My fixer Rock Steady Eddie has the heads-up. ‘To be honest, son, I thought they were looking for consultants and contractors too. Turns out they just want someone to construct some specialist bullshit so it’s ideal really, you finishing that sandwich?’

  He hands me the draft release. ‘The Department seeks the construction of a sloganised housing action plan. The proposed plan will exist as a temporary measure until the next General Election and must require neither resources nor complex thought …’

  Eddie gives me one of his see-there-you-go looks. ‘Yeah? Right up your Strasse. Just roll out a couple of yards of that smartarse guff that sounds as though it means something but it doesn’t and nobody cares, whatever, hope follows hype, trope follows tripe, all that mincemeat – bosh, we’re golden.’

  THURSDAY So glad the Human Rights Act is still in place, because I intend to take Kensington & Chelsea to the cleaners if they carry out their threat to ban so-called ‘mega-basement’ development.

  It is an assault on my basic freedom as an auteur. How dare these pettifoggers interfere with my bespoke subterranean visions for discerning, ultra-rich clients? Let’s be clear. The planner’s job is to accept my genius. Or at the very least, to nominate a sum of money that will render my genius acceptable. It should not concern a planner what potential misery may be caused to other ratepayers in the execution of an inverted mini-skyscraper underneath a modest garden. It is nobody’s business but my client’s.

  And spare me the panic about replacing dense, heavy clay beneath our streets with honeycombed privatised air. These sunken mansions are creating value where none existed. They are residential equity mines. That makes me a HERO, surely.

  What are planners planning ‘for’ these days anyway, if not their own redundancy?

  FRIDAY Think I’ve cracked the government’s zero-budget emergency housing action plan. As is customary, it’s in five parts.

  1. A serious-minded-sounding pledge to make ‘decent housing’ a ‘genuine priority’ after the next election.

  2. A significantly extended Notional Mortgage Allowance so that first time buyers can borrow even more from parents or commercial lenders for a deposit, if they need to.

  3. Tougher penalties for local authorities who falsely claim they can’t afford to house their tenants in high-rent former council houses that they had to sell cheaply and which they now need as they can’t build any new council housing, because there must be no return to the dark days of the 1970s.

  4. Greater incentives for the private sector to do everything it can for hard-working people to get on the housing ladder, including knighthoods and redeemable ‘tax miles’.

  5. A new Reward for Innovation scheme to encourage impressive new housing construction targets through competitive thinking.

  I’m calling the pop-up plan ‘More Homes for Better People’, which has a harmless yet inspirational ring to it.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Promulgated Defabulism 4, Attenuated Flaneurism 58.3, after on-pitch anomalies and disquiet in the matrix.

  SUNDAY Temporarily house self in recliner.

  November 7, 2014

  Twirly Atlantis

  MONDAY Design a new agnostic contemplation space for a major retail destination centre, in a certain Arab state that wishes to remain anonymous.

  I’ve gone for injection-moulded Gothic which OK is double the average person’s retrovisionary intake, but if you can’t comfort-gaze in a shopping centre, what’s the point of life? Yes, that’s certainly something to ponder, isn’t it? And where better than in an injection-moulded Gothic space flooded with natural light and artificial air.

  After it’s built, half the contemplation space will be deliberately ruined by professional devastators. This will significantly enhance the visitor experience, as ruins are known to amplify musings about the human spirit triumphing over the melancholy of an unreachable past.

  To be honest, the user experience isn’t a major factor. My clients – it would be unprofessional to call them deeply religious debauched autocratic misogynist fucking scumbags – simply want the space to act as a human flytrap for agnostics, so they can arrest them and then lock them up.

  And please don’t tell me I have no business working for these people. One of them plays online polo with the Prince of Wales. Another’s been on Top Gear.

  TUESDAY All Soho is braced for a week of preening insufferability. The Creative on Sunday has been named Magazine of the Year by the Epic Spatialist Association.

  Worse, Darcy Farquear’say and his appalling dachshund Bauhau have jointly won Architectural Writer of the Year for their stupid Woof over Your Head column, in which Darcy giggles about some new building, pretending to be Bauhau. All Bauhau has to do is remain continent while his picture’s taken.

  Just looking at them in their identical hip-hop lamé coatigans makes me want to heave. ‘This award is really for the readers, who like us simply adore epic space …’ ‘Rrrak!’ ‘Thanks to everyone who voted, it’s terribly humbling …’ ‘Yupyup!’ ‘I like to think we bring a new international style not only to architectural criticism but to the PRESENTATION of that criticism …’ Oh ha ha whoops! Bauhau’s style is suddenly incontinental.

  WEDNESDAY What’s the biggest problem faced by innovators and revolutionaries? Thieving bastard copycats. You’ve got a limited amount of time before someone nicks your idea and makes a fortune.

  That’s why I’m helping my mate Beansy the nanofuturologist to finalise some deals quickly to exploit neogen – the intelligent self-replicating supergas that’s better than oxygen and can bend the laws of physics.

  N
eogen autosynthesises so fast, an asthma inhaler’s worth can fill the Louvre in 20 minutes. It’s an inspiring thought that neogen may serve the arts in this way. Our beta run at the Louvre demonstrably increased the alertness of the punters, who absorbed art 17 per cent more quickly and spent nearly 20 per cent above average in the gift shop. Neogen also sharpens the appetite. The Louvre canteen did a roaring trade, and ran out of baguettes by half past ten!

  THURSDAY Beansy and I are a bit worried that a certain Japanese construction company could discover the formula for neogen and replicate it for their innovative Twirly Atlantis project.

  Twirly Atlantis proposes bypassing spiralling housing costs by creating an alternative and actual housing spiral, fixed to the ocean floor, with individual affordable flatpods all joined up together like frogspawn. The one flaw in the Twirly Atlantis theory is this old-fashioned idea of creating power with ‘methane-producing micro-organism factories’. What? Wake up, Japanese innovators. Where do you think you are, some trippy 1980s sci-fi cartoon?

  Idiots. As ever, attack is the best form of defence, which is why we’re nicking their inhabited spiral idea and filling it with neogen. It’s the perfect gas, so much better than micro-organic methane. As well as being wi-fi-enabled, capable of producing clean electricity and self-aware without being completely ‘up itself’ it doesn’t smell of amoeba farts.

  FRIDAY Push skateboarding forward yet again by allowing the transgressive nature of ‘street skating’ to shape the municipal skate park I’m designing in full compliance with health and safety. That obviously makes it ‘lamer’ so I put in some landmines but that will mean it’s STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE so they’ll have to break-and-enter in a ‘streetwise’ way, I hope everyone’s happy now.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Low Fidelity Cultural Reconciliation 0, High Linear Equity Boosterism 2.

  SUNDAY Spatial contemplation in the recliner. Slightly disturbed at horizontal massing, so reconfigure entire form down the pub.

  December 5, 2014

  Austerity Christmas Human Turducken

  MONDAY The Creative on Sunday have asked me to do something polemical for their Wise Howl spot.

  Every week an influential cultural animateur throws down a sketch or a poem, a photographic composition, a micro-essay or whate’er-ye-will. It doesn’t really matter as long as it chimes with some topical outrage, and the spectrum of howled liberalism is pretty wide these days.

  I can’t tell you what I’ve designed. There’s an embargo until Sunday. But believe me it’s as hard-hitting as anything else you’ll see in the Wise Howl spot, which is on page 7 nestled between that snarky literary gossip column and an advert for some weird anthology of fairtrade chutneys.

  TUESDAY To the Institute of Plasmic Arts. Fascinating lecture by Ross Kemp on environmental determinism, focusing on the link between late Modernism and gangsters, called Bad Manors.

  WEDNESDAY Amazing TV documentary – Schama Chameleon – featuring an immersive Simon Schama on top form, exploring the evolution of social housing in period clothing and pissed on whatever they were having at the time.

  Particularly moved by the animated account of slum clearances in Westminster and the advent of model Peabody estates, delivered by a ginblitzed Schama in top hat and rakish trousers in one long shouted take before he lurched out of shot into what sounded like a pile of buckets.

  THURSDAY My fixer Rock Steady Eddie and I are offering civic authorities a special deal on all rebrandings for 2015. We’re calling it the ‘1+1 Affordable Masterplan Package’.

  Eddie’s copywriting has both vigour and economy. ‘Attention all mayors, business development managers, urban custodians etc! Got the “inner shitty blues”? Struggling to secure that vital inward investment because your town centre’s like the set of a zombie film? Need a professional team with the traditional know-how and contemporary expertise to unlock the romantic potential of wherever it is, no place too small, you’ve tried the rest now try the best?

  ‘Then look no further! URBISTO has been delivering top quality solutions to the communities community since 2011. From as little as £20k, URBISTO can turn around perceptions of your urban location like THAT! Also, new for 2015! Rebrand one area no greater than 10 square kilometers, get another area no greater than 10 square kilometers rebranded HALF PRICE! Come on, these prices won’t last for ever, we’re not MENTAL OR ARE WE LOL!’

  Surprisingly perhaps, we’ve already had a few enquiries. Not one person so far has asked us what the ‘1+1’ in our affordable masterplan package means. Well, we recognise that a powerful visual narrative must be at the heart of every successful rebrand. That’s why we always shoot the target location at night, from a £100 drone flying through £1,000 worth of fireworks.

  Honestly, everywhere – anywhere – looks fucking great.

  FRIDAY In the morning, embrace the self-employed festive spirit by sticking a bit of tinsel to my MacBook and calling it ‘Lapland’.

  In the afternoon, decorate my freelance subconscious with imaginary paper chains. Very dusty but there’s no point in cleaning, I’m the only one who ever goes in there.

  SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist horticultural blow football. Verdant Life-Affirming Bridge Full of Dark Woodland with Dense Undergrowth 6, Muggers’ Paradise 0.

  SUNDAY Lots of warm, gratifying feedback for my Wise Howl piece, which I’ve solemnly captioned ‘Austerity Christmas Human Turducken’.

  It’s a stark portrait of retro-engineered misery. At the heart of my artisanal, hand-drawn exploded axonometric: a battery-farm manger containing a quivering dachshund wrapped in swaddling clothes. ‘Perhaps he has been abandoned by some heartless buy-to-let landlord …’ I have written above the bleak scene, in wobbly pencil.

  We pull out to show the manger crammed into a food bank full of hapless people looking at tinned food. We pull out further to reveal that the food bank is itself crammed into a former public library, now a charity shop full of appalling old clothes and dead peoples’ trinkets, staffed by tattooed women made to wear electronic tags by the Tories just because they’re fat and they smoke.

  We pull out further and discover that the charity shop is inside Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre. Instead of a punchline, which would turn my Wise Howl into a joke rather than an excoriating satire on social policy, I have written the web address for Shelter in wobbly pencil at the bottom.

  Peace. Goodwill. Have a great one.

  December 12, 2014

  The Worm Is Cast

  MONDAY Redesign London’s luxury housing bubble, giving it a tremulous, panoramic aspect.

  I’ve created a ‘rainbow effect’ by breaking the white light into discreet bundles of graded luxury colour spectrum molecules. These can be monetised immediately or sold on the international bubble markets, creating stable and theoretically infinite bubble yield, year-on-year, no problem.

  TUESDAY To a pop-up conference – The New Grotesque: Defeating Terrorism With Satirical Architecture.

  For years, we designers of those buildings at risk of terrorist attack have been derided by liberal auteurs who are above this sort of thing, as well as by the bitter losers who didn’t get the gigs. Oh yeah, our defensive, hyper-secure architecture was so ‘funny’ wasn’t it, with its boring concrete berms, its tiny reinforced scaredy-cat windows, its dead buffer zones, its Stalinist landscaping.

  Yes, everyone’s had a right old laugh, haven’t they? Well, who’s laughing now? It’s clear that a terrorist target can be anything – a railway station, magazine offices, a UN school, a coffee house. So apparently the laughter/ architecture of liberal apologists/defenders of democracy must now be offensive/defiant. In the midst of all this cultural and intellectual chaos, one thing is clear. Architects are to blame. It is time to:

  a) apologise to the world for the tiny percentage of architecture responsible for terrorism and

  b) show the terrorists we cannot be cowed, by producing satirical and repellent architecture.

  Qu
ite how architecture might non-accidentally take the piss out of anything but itself is a conundrum, which is why this conference has been hastily arranged in an old snooker hall at £240 plus VAT, get your own lunch.

  Plenary session ideas: when designing a mosque, put ‘subtle jokes’ in; terrorist entrances in museums, lined with deterrent art works; some kind of gun-jamming technology incorporated into all wi-fi; live Twitter feeds on exterior walls with hashtagged fenestration; pretend ‘multi-secularism’ is an architectural style; contextualise everything to the point where the building might ‘externalise its self-loathing’.

  Summary: oh for fuck’s sake just put the word ‘satirical’ in front of everything, e.g. Classical, drainpipe, luxury, public space, fee, development, ethics, skyline, Islam, façade.

  WEDNESDAY I’m reworking the concept of the beach hut. A design competition is looking for ‘a wry take on the classic hut which also tells a story about mortality’. I’ve sketched out a series of disconnected huts to be erected several miles inland, each containing its own miniature beach. What does it mean? Who cares?

  THURSDAY Those fickle bastards at the Royal Society for the Protection of Worms (RSPW) have withdrawn their backing for my brilliant yet apparently controversial Soil Tunnel underneath the Thames.

  Up until yesterday the RSPW had been broadly supportive of the proposal to create a ‘journey through earth and history’. The Soil Tunnel will allow bored Londoners and genuine people alike to immerse themselves in the mystery beneath our feet, interacting with the loam and clay of our shared geological narrative in an exciting and literally groundbreaking way.

  But the bastard worm people have turned. The RSPW moans that ‘the new, worm-positive habitat we had so fervently hoped for will clearly not occur’. As far as I can gather the stupid pillocks expected the tunnel to be filled with soil, users somehow wriggling their way from one end to the other. Perhaps in special ‘worm suits’, who knows? Idiots. Why would I have mentioned ‘pedestrians’ if people COULDN’T USE THEIR FEET?