Epic Space
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Not happy. ‘I told you not to do anything stupid …’ I protest my innocence, extravagantly. ‘Oh, really. So this isn’t you then, using Perlaastica to create exciting new artist’s impressions of an Arctic Metropolis.’
I tell him, honestly, that I haven’t been to the Arctic recently, with or without his stupid gadget. He tells me, with impressive insight, that I clearly captured the interior of a freezer and used that as the notional Arctic site. Which apparently is an unforgiveable trespass against the sacred law of genius loci or whatever.
SATURDAY Perlaastica’s back with Beansy – he sent a cab for it – and all my free trial creations have vanished in a huff, leaving a much more boring London and a massively diminished bridge competition.
SUNDAY Unchanged, in the recliner.
March 6, 2015
History Eats Itself
MONDAY Being an auteur of epic space isn’t always easy. You have to take the rough with the smooth. And sometimes you have to bring together the very rough (my fixer Rock Steady Eddie) and the very smooth (my friend Darcy Farquear’say the architecture critic and his overdressed dachshund Bauhau).
Darcy and I have thought of a pop-up idea so exquisite it’s a kind of mental torture. Post-Shoreditch. Just far enough ahead of the curve to be showing its arse to the hipster peloton.
This idea is SO good, we need to get it into development asafp, before another pair of slightly drunk acquaintances with a dog in a little hat come up with it too. If we’re to succeed we need Eddie’s fast-track mind, business acumen and underworld contacts.
TUESDAY ‘Is it a bitch?’ asks Eddie, squinting hard at Bauhau and helping himself to another of Darcy’s offal-and-rhubarb nibbles.
Eddie’s out of his comfort zone. We’re in this week’s most chictastic restaurant, an ephemeral dining experience created in a dilapidated Brighton drill hall, called SHOLDER. The twist is, the food’s done by an ageing Young British Artist and the décor’s by an aging TV chef. Also, Bauhau’s wearing leopard print hotpants and salmon-pink bootees.
‘A bitch?’ Darcy gasps asthmatically. ‘Bauhau’s utterly a boy dog, thank you very much.’ Eddie looks impressed. ‘Well he’s come to the right place innit. Brighton? Full of ’em. Waitress! Another go of them kidney phings and two more poofs’ cocktails for my paedo friends. Get us a lager top, I’m spitting feathers here. Whoa. I’m not being offensive, love, but are you Asian? I know a lot of trannies are …’
I get Eddie off the premises while Darcy stays to be horrified for all of us.
WEDNESDAY Every cloud. Eddie blamed his disgusting rainbow of phobias on some bad gear he’d had, apologised to everyone and in his humility has pitched our project to Irish Connie, London’s pop-up queenpin, who apparently will ‘bite our hands off’. He feints a biting motion and barks at Bauhau, who reacts adorably by soiling his hotpants.
THURSDAY Send our outline proposal to Irish Connie. It’s a pop-up restaurant combining the two things we secretly miss most about the 20th century: the Cold War and tinned food.
Imagine a basement diner done out like a 1980s nuclear bunker, with TINNED ITEMS ONLY on the menu. It’s as if everything really DID go tits up after Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s second single.
Staff in radiation suits and masks. Brutalist tables and chairs. Stencilled signage in Impact Bold. Rough concrete. Behind a long, heavy glass wall, a slow conveyer belt full of tinned food. You relay your dinner order via military walkie-talkie to anonymous ‘lab assistants’. With massive gauntlets and long grippers they assemble your nuclear dinner for preparation in the Heating Area.
People will love this. Think about those immersive film nights, where they pay a fortune to dress as an extra on the set of Fight Club or Shawshank Redemption, queuing up for a beating or a difficult trip through a sewer. How much more stylish to be eating food from tins and pretending you’re in a BBC Play For Today.
Eddie, Darcy and I are simultaneously excited and ravenous. Bauhau just barks excitedly, I suppose that’s his job. ‘Oh yes, darling, there’ll be tinned dog food too!’ coos Darcy.
I point out that as it’s a nuclear bunker pets must be left outside to die. Eddie cackles. Darcy bristles. Bauhau remains enigmatically stupid.
FRIDAY Thumbs up from Irish Connie. Backing secured! More good news – another of those deeply cherished live music venues that make London so very special has just had its rent quintupled, so a tasty basement space has become available.
SATURDAY Irish Connie says our proposed restaurant name – Cool War – isn’t mimsy enough for today’s discerning wankers. She suggests TIN-TINS, which will chime but not infringe. Sorted.
And ‘fun designers’ East Algia are on board. Their recent underwater pop-up diner, Rejection, served food that had been partially digested and then regurgitated by dolphins, still warm.
SUNDAY Planning tasting menu in the recliner. Watney’s Red Barrel. Tinned nuts, olives. Pre-mixed margarita. Little can of muscadet. Tinned Bismarck herring. Fray Bentos steak pie, giant marrowfat peas, big tin of gutsy claret …
Cor. Put on some Shostakovich. Have tinned lunch.
April 3, 2015
The Twelve Step Plan
MONDAY Open mic night at the Institute of Plasmic Arts. Here, brevity is gravity. And I am briefer, more plasmic and artier than any of those other epic space sucker MCs, even if I DO say so myself.
On the big screen side by side are projected images of a Modernist piloti and an iPad stylus. I shout ‘GENRE SMASH!’ The echo subsides. A silence. The audience considers. Does this mean anything? I remain on stage, implying that it most certainly does.
A sudden eruption of cheering and wild applause. I drop the mic, walk off stage. Boom. Done it again. Idiots.
TUESDAY Alas, genre smashes don’t always work. Example: my visitor centre at a certain exquisite County Durham castle. Status: ‘Especially Historic’. You can imagine the paperwork.
My clients decided to cut costs by squashing the energy centre and the faith garden into one single innovative landscape. Now the bindweed’s gone mental and the place is full of religious windbags. Well done, ‘holistic budgetary thinking’.
WEDNESDAY I’m reinvigorating a London ‘tourist magnet’ famous for its live music venue, ramshackle cafés, sprawling outdoor market and canal culture.
Tourists can always spend more. Land can always work harder. But it’s of paramount importance that we preserve the area’s character. Relax. That area character will be very carefully removed, lump by grimey lump, put carefully into a preservative skip marked FRAGILE – ‘CHARACTER’ and then whatever.
THURSDAY My fixer Rock Steady Eddie now has a lucrative sideline. He’s a brownfield development planning consultant to philanthropist-developers keen to put something back into whatever community they’ve acquired a plot of land in.
The ‘something’ they usually want to ‘put back’ is high-density luxury apartment blocks aimed at either the overseas investment market or at domestic grim-faced dog owners in pastel jumpers who’ve just cashed in their pensions. The ‘journey’ of a brownfield development planning consultant has 12 billable stages:
1. The developer, having acquired a brownfield site with the intention of improving the neighbourhood for purely sentimental reasons, appoints a planning consultant to show everything’s above board and totally legit.
2. Consultant conducts a thorough lunchtime site appraisal.
3. Developer astonished to learn there’s a pub still operating in the middle of what he assumed was an abandoned car park, created in the wake of heavy German bombing in 1943, when plucky Brits defied the Nazi menace, etc.
4. Consultant’s details appear at the bottom of a press release referencing the dark days of World War Two and the bravery of ordinary, aspirational people huddled in bomb shelters, dreaming of a future free from tyranny with access to high quality lifestyle signifiers in the heart of the sexy city with great wi-fi, transport links, the lot.
5. Developer applies to have
historic pub removed from site, citing a report from the planning consultant warning that we live in uncertain times and that the building could literally fall down at any moment.
6. Planning authority refuses permission to demolish, thereby encouraging busybodies to have it listed for its special cultural interest as the only functioning public house left in a five-mile radius, all others having been erased or converted into ‘luxury pubpartments’.
7. Planning consultant’s supplementary application warns that neither the local authority nor the historic buildings people have seen the developer when he loses his temper; furthermore, they would really not like him when he’s taken a drink.
8. Pub accidentally demolished by a coincidental anthology of heavy machinery in the early hours. Landlady narrowly escapes in her pyjamas.
9. Developer, as surprised as anyone else, promises to investigate and directs all enquiries to planning consultant.
10. Planning consultant unavailable for comment.
11. Developer, guilty of illegal destruction, is fined the equivalent of three months rent for one of the 42 luxury flats he’s now developing.
12. Developer draws line under whole affair and moves on, having learned life lesson; all enquiries to planning consultant, who remains unavailable for comment.
FRIDAY Spend all day with Eddie in an undemolished pub, where he is unequivocally and relentlessly available for comment.
SATURDAY Jazz Architecture Huff Posts. ‘Fuck You Man, I’m Not a Goddam Starchitect’ by Frank Gehry’s Middle Finger beats ‘Iconicity’ by Patrik Schumacher and his Identical Haircuts by 357,000 page impressions.
SUNDAY Self-pretentionise into a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, in a recliner.
April 17, 2015
Not Being Funny but Black People
Don’t Do Gardening, Do They?
MONDAY Democracy is broken. Our two-party system has silted up. A resigned sense of deadlock, torpor and inertia hangs over everything. Party strategists are utterly failing to reach a disengaged and apathetic electorate. There’s panic at the top.
So that’s PERFECT. One person’s panic is someone else’s built environment advisory gig at three grand a day plus VAT and a proper lunch.
TUESDAY To Spearmint Rhino, where a private room has been reserved in the name of ‘Michael Green’.
Conservative party leader Grant Shapps is there in a wig and fake moustache, looking like a 70s footballer at ease with his sexuality. It’s a clever disguise; Grant could easily be a Spearmint Rhino customer. ‘Welcome to our thinking cell!’ he squeaks. ‘Let’s scrum down and spank out some one-liners!’ He keeps disappearing for half an hour at a time.
My cellmates are all about 80 years old and seem to be in a permanently bad mood. There’s a medievalist scholar opposed to everything after Durham Cathedral, a weird Mussolini superfan smelling strongly of scotch, and some doddery architect who once converted Margaret Thatcher’s pantry into a neo-Gothic CIA bedsit. Lunch is at Rules, where we scribble some coordinated Tory pledges on a spanking paddle.
Summary: dispose of all public assets including local authorities; incentivise housebuilders with subsidies and peerages; grant ‘futurospective’ planning permission for everything submitted after May 7; Beatrix Pottery design guidelines to attract overseas investors; get some hip-hop Tories to rap about our ‘property-owning democracy’.
WEDNESDAY To a simple giant open-plan kitchen in Hampstead, where an unnamed, intensely relaxed billionaire is in absentia hosting a ‘policy pitstop’ for the Labour party.
Most of the people here seem to have very slight connections to the built environment. If I didn’t know better, I’d say a lot of high-end development in central London was funded by laundered cash from gambling, petrochemicals, prostitution, tobacco and drugs.
My fellow ‘policy possibilisers’ (most are in their 30s, tiny radio mics attached to their contoured faces) seem in a terrible hurry to get back to whatever it is they do, so we’ve wrapped by lunchtime.
Summary: a new garden city for every actual city; simultaneously increase and reduce infrastructure spending; boost the affordability of everything by 20 per cent; declare hundreds of thousands of acres of scattered brownfield land to be a single entity, confer a personality upon it, then somehow publicly shame it into creating new housing.
THURSDAY The Liberal Democrats are holding their emergency thought-processing day in a converted Routemaster. Perhaps it’s a metaphor. The mood’s definitely depressed on the lower deck, a mood tinged perhaps with a nostalgia for antique relevance. They’re smoking something upstairs, but nobody’s laughing.
We all work in silence on our laptops, emailing our thoughts to an unsmiling ‘conductor’. At the end of our shift he dings the bell and issues purchase order tickets.
Summary: network of ‘allotment cities’ with an engorged Cambridge concentrating mostly on vegetables; new network of housing suppliers to be encouraged through collaboration, partnership and shout-outs on social media; a Green Buildings Act to reverse climate change all the way back to the Renaissance, anything’s possible, believe.
FRIDAY In the morning, I join an SNP ‘brainhoolie’ via videolink. Summary: a completely new built environment for the whole of Scotland, called something tabloid-friendly like ‘The Great McOver’; Donald Trump to become National Design Laird; 21st-century building types, e.g. nanocrofts, microvillas, tinyments.
In the afternoon, a freestyle ideas jam on Google Hangout with the Greens. Summary: forge a spiritual consortium with the spirits of the wind and sun; an end to roads, airports and all unnecessary additives in building materials; new elvish space standards; more fibre in visual arts.
SATURDAY Ukip Policy Awayday. I say ‘awayday’, that’s what Ukip’s director of environmental policy (Alex ‘Gyppo’ Thompson) calls it. Conjures up the early days of team-building when you could smoke indoors, and homosexuality was just a phase people went through.
What today’s actually about is a bunch of gung-ho Rotary Club types getting half-timbered all day in a Thanet pub. Every now and then ‘Gyppo’ scrawls someone’s brainspurt on the ‘I’m Not Racist But …’ whiteboard. ‘… herbaceous borders make good neighbours … not being funny but black people don’t do gardening, do they?’
Summary: Make sure everything’s CAPPED. Immigration, social housing, golfers, cultural ambition, tweets.
SUNDAY Apolitically reclined.
May 1, 2015
The Bees Have It
MONDAY Recalibrate my optimism, bringing it into line with new five-year projections.
TUESDAY I’ve reconfigured Britain for foreign investors: Scottish Nationalist, Scottish Tearooms, Northern Powerhouse, Northern Shithouse, Worst Midlands, Eacist Midlands, Value Wales, Premium Wales, South West Land Bank, Non-Dormitory South East, First Class Coastal, Second Class Coastal, Help to Buy Home Counties, Qatar, All Rights Reserved.
WEDNESDAY Still, good news that the Hon. Aeneas Upmother-Brown has returned to government. His erudite and humane approach is in welcome contrast to the coarse and venal character of so many Conservative ministers. Also, he’s a long-standing acquaintance of mine so if there ARE any low-hanging gigs I might be in with a shout.
Upmother-Brown is back in the department of entertainment, this time as Minister for Pop-Uption. Key role. Pop-ups represent the fastest-growing sector of British culture, according to the latest figures from 2011.
Pop-up is a framing mechanism for a wide range of monetisable cultural offshoots – architecture, niche dining, community dating, Brighton wankers selling gin cocktails from the boot of their classic Morris Minor. Its influence cannot be overmetastated.
THURSDAY Of course, whatever the Hon. Aeneas Upmother-Brown does, he’ll always literally be overshadowed by his swarm of pet bees.
Bees have been his constant companions since the days of Cool Britannia, when people and bees could exchange cheeky banter at Number 10 parties in the company of luminaries such as Peter Mandelson, Ben Elton
, the drummer from Elastica and Fat George the Namibian White Honeybee.
Today I’m at a Service of Remembrance and Hope organised by the Commonwealth Apicultural Association at Heathrow airport. Politicians, beekeepers and opinion-formers from across the world have gathered with their swarms to mourn those who have fallen and to resolve to build a better future. An optimistic requiem hum fills the prayer centre.
Later, everyone’s buzzing as we shuffle and bank our way into the chartered plane. Milan – here we come!
FRIDAY Milan Expo. The UK’s pop-up pavilion has so far been ‘under the radar’ because of the recent electoral unpleasantness.
It’s a brilliant pop-up, but was kept quiet in case it was seen to be championing the values of Conservatives who were, after all, the clients. Technically so were the Lib Dems, but their extinction seems closer than even the bee community’s so bollocks to them.
The Hon. Aeneas Upmother-Brown addresses an expectant crowd of media and business bastards. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he says, the hovering commonwealth of bees behind him falling respectfully silent, ‘we are here today to honour British pop-up ingenuity.
‘This pavilion explores a series of landscapes travelled by the honey bee’ – here the bees do adorable little jazz hands – ‘showing how pollination is vital in feeding the planet. And how we must address this global challenge …’ The sublest of movements within the bee-cloud suggests a corporate determination to improve things.
‘The centrepiece of this marvellous creation is the Hive, a cuboid lattice structure inspired by the honeycomb’s form …’ Here Upmother-Brown unzips and steps out of his ‘suit’ to reveal a bee costume. The crowd murmurs. The bees softly sizzle. ‘Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this incredible space comes alive through light and sound to mimic a beehive. But … have you ever witnessed thousands of bees mimicking an … incredible HUMAN space?’
The buzzing umma swirls into action. Specks of iron in the air, snap-magnetised – whoosh! They converge into an unmistakeable thicket of spires. ‘Behold! The Sagrada Familia!’ Gasps.