Batman: Death by Design

Rebuilding Gotham City's Wayne Central Station, commissioned by the Caped Crusader's dad but now crumbling, was never going to be straightforward, what with crooked union bosses, a femme fatale conservationist set on putting a stop to the demolition, and the disillusioned son of the original architect who is not all he seems - not to mention Kem Roomhaus, a Dutch celebrity architect 'frightened of his own genius'.

Oddly overlooked by the book review pages of the architectural press, this recent graphic novel from DC Comics is a lot of fun.  It is dedicated to Hugh Ferriss, and the look of a lovingly realised Gotham is very much that of 1930s New York - an obvious but successful choice - it's much less easy to imagine Batman swooping around in, for example,  the glassy, 1960s fantasy architecture of Tati's Play Time.   And if you are to stand a chance of making a story involving architects into a page-turner, best not to set it in a multi-disciplinary consultancy, or a Mad Men style corporate environment - the architects in this story are characters more at home in the world of superheroes - lone Nietzschean geniuses in the mould of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark.  Nevertheless, there is room for the odd bit of throwaway professional practice dialogue such as 'the stresses on the structure were improperly calculated' - Paul Newman, as the architect in Towering Inferno, got to deliver comparable lines.

All of which gets one to wondering whether the world isn't ready for a graphic reimagining of The Honeywood File  - surely a Hollywood blockbuster in waiting.

Flat white in New Bond Street

No horror vacui here in New Bond Street, where beautifully made flat white sheeting covers a large scaffold in a single taut piece, interrupted only by a neat vertical slot for hoists on each floor - a refreshing, palate-cleansing change from the banality of those 'instant pastiche' scaffolds that offer you a picture of the building behind.  If only all new buildings had as much care and thought put into them....I hope the thinking included consideration of wind load in a gale, though.

Architecture and dermatology

The architecture of some types of building has become more and more about skin, and less and less about substance.  A rash of recent new buildings in the City of Westminster demonstrates an interest in patterned surface treatments to the elevations.

On this new office building in Buckingham Gate in Victoria (above), sandstone cladding is decorated with swirling patterns of (3D) gouge marks, its inspiration appearing to be somewhere between the abstract and the figurative.

On a weird new building in Oxford Street that is nearing completion (south side, near Marble Arch)  the glass and metal panel cladding system includes decorated panels that seem to have a similar aesthetic intention, this time in 2D only, and heading more towards the world of geometry.

And next to Edgware Road tube station, possibly the apotheosis of this trend, at least in Westminster - this time more purely geometric -  a cut and paste update of random pages of Owen Jones' 'Grammar of Ornament', perhaps.

What's going on?   An interest in surface decoration, now very fashionable, is a respectable aspect of architecture with a long history stretching back via Semper and Owen Jones all the way to prehistory.

That great modernist hard-liner Adolf Loos regarded decoration, exemplified in his mind by tattoos, as the last resort of criminals and degenerate aristocrats. The cerebral delights of abstraction were seen as an advance on the 'horror vacui' (fear of nothingness) of the savage mind.

It's certainly true that some recent patterned buildings must have engendered regrets in the cold light of day, as one assumes many tattoos do, after seeming a good idea at the time.

But you don't have to be a savage to think that the world is a more pleasant place if buildings have 'more to see when you get closer'.  It happens in most traditional architecture, whether high or vernacular.  The lack of it is one of the complaints that has always been levelled at 'modern' buildings, for example in critical reappraisals of the 'International Modernism' that swept the world in the postwar period when aesthetic interests appeared to align with the desire to do things cheaply - which gave us, for example, Victoria Street of the 1960s.  To do a Mies or Corb wasn't cheap, but to do a knock-off was.

The 'more to see' can come from the bits and pieces of the building itself - something you get in the best buildings of Richard Rogers or Michael Hopkins.

But delight in the elaboration of construction is a poor fit with an age of austerity, with unitized construction, with the world of design and build, value engineering and procurement by project manager rather than by client as patron.  

One can't help reflecting, considering some of the recent examples of 'dermatology as elevation', that while sophisticated details are expensive ('No money no detail' - Rem Koolhaas), decoration is cheap.  The trouble is, it often looks it.  But it doesn't have to.  If we are not to get buildings of substance, and visual interest is to come mainly from 2D surface decoration, then it deserves as much attention and talent as might be put it to beautiful details.

Plotland Arcadia on the Sussex coast

 

To Winchelsea Beach on the Sussex coast for Sunday lunch in one of the ‘plotlands’ houses built here, and elsewhere along the coast of Essex, Kent and Sussex – in the 1930s, just before effective planning legislation arrived in England.

The story of how these marginal areas came to be built on is told in Arcadia for All - The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward (1984).  Colin Ward described the plotlands in a 2004 article as ‘those places where, until 1939, land was divided into small plots and sold, often in unorthodox ways, to people wanting to build their holiday home, country retreat or would-be smallholding. It evokes a landscape of a grid-iron of grassy tracks, sparsely filled with bungalows made from army huts, old railway coaches, sheds, shanties and chalets, slowly evolving into ordinary suburban development.’

The story is a quintessentially English one, with all the tensions of today’s planning system present in embryonic form, overlaid with themes of town vs. country  and middle class vs. working class (East Enders buying plots from farmers and upsetting the settled communities nearby with their sometimes ramshackle buildings).  Although the pressures to regulate were presented as mainly to do with roads and drains, there were also objections to the generally untidy look of the strip development that resulted, and to the unsuitable type of person who came to live in them.  But even in the 1930s, there were those who defended what was being created as having an interesting and distinct character of its own.

Colin Ward’s anarchist sensibility let him to sympathise with the plotlands pioneers, who without being hampered by regulation, created environments that are, of course, highly sought after today.  Now there is development pressure, and at Winchelsea Beach, at least – which I suspect has always been at the more salubrious end of the plotlands spectrum – the original shacks, some by now more or less collapsing, are gradually being replaced with slightly larger architect-designed replacements, most reflecting to at least some degree the spirit of the originals.  But  taken together, in their newness and conformity with regulations, these new houses are resulting in a change to the character of these remarkable places - the suburbanisation referred to by Colin Ward.  And it can't be long before the money being invested leads to pressure to replace the potholed gravel tracks with proper roads (though come to think of it, perhaps the excuse to get one's Tonka-toy-style SUV muddy is part of the attraction?)

Time to declare a few conservation areas to recognise the special character of the plotlands?   What an irony that would be.   

Fifty Shards of grey and a pimped up porch

It’s been Shardmania week in London. 

A previous post noted how the Shard reflects different weather conditions.  Much of what gets written about buildings of this kind in the national press is a reflection of prejudices and preconceptions about other things - projected onto the subject building like the attention-seeking lasers that marked the Shard’s inauguration.

The build-up to Thursday’s display, for example, included an intemperate (and ill-informed) rant by Simon Jenkins in Tuesday’s Guardian, claiming that the pointy tower ‘seems to have lost its way from Dubai to Canary Wharf’ and has ‘slashed the face of London for ever’. 

At the other end of town, and the other end of various kinds of scale (sublime / ridiculous? - but which way round?), the recently completed visitors’ entrance to Kensington Palace – initially refused planning permission by Kensington and Chelsea Council  –  prompted former RIBA President Jack Pringle’s memorable accusation that Prince Charles was  "pimping his palace with a puffed-up porch”.

If you’d prefer to live in a twenty-first century state rather than the Ruritanian / feudal model of our country that has been in evidence through the course of the Jubilee (yes, I’m with Jack on this one…), then you’re not going to go for a neo-Regency porch, however elegant; and if you don’t like outward and very visible signs of foreign wealth taking over from the home-grown variety in our capital, then the Shard is going to upset you, and you are never going to be able to consider it an architectural masterpiece. 

Little of the discussion of either project is really about architecture or urbanism.   This is something that cloud capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces will always have in common – along with the fact that neither of these particular projects seems a very good fit with the mood of Austerity Britain, which is better represented by the New Boring movement. 

London should learn from PlaNYC

To Lend Lease's London HQ to hear a talk by Adam Freed, Deputy Director of Sustainability in the New York City Mayor's office.

Their city plan, 'PlaNYC' (nice plan, shame about the name) has a lot that London could learn from, in respect of what is planned and how they propose to achieve it:  sustainability-led, progressive, interventionist series of programmes and initiatives concerning development, transport, infrastructure and energy, driven by an ambitious City administration with powers and budgets that London's Mayor can only dream of.

One of the most surprising aspects was the extent to which this felt like 'big Government' - delivered by a Republican Mayor in a country where if you suggest that poor people should be provided with state health care, you are branded a Communist.    Impressively, the programmes seemed designed to benefit disadvantaged outer parts of the city at least as much as Manhattan, where the high profile successes such as the High Line and Times Square are located.

The tone was one of can-do pragmatism rather than ideology or political manouevring.  It was the American architect Daniel Burnham who said 'make no little plans', but while in the UK masterplans and strategies are expected to have an 'overarching vision', in NY there seemed to be a distinct lack of windy rhetoric and a strong desire to actually get on with things.  Our London Plan programme is all about telling other parties what they can or should or can't or shouldn't do - the NY equivalent seems to be more about doing things.  If a developer there builds affordable housing - yes, they have that too - he can put more flats on his site.  A bit like what happens in London in practice in some cases, but our plan doesn't actually say that anywhere.  Americans are be better at cutting to the chase - codifying things to allow progress without endless negotiations.

London's administrative and political structure is dysfunctional, and our Mayor is right to seek more control over infrastructure and other things.  Mayor Bloomberg puts some of his vast personal resources into particular  public programmes - a modern version of the bread and circuses of the Roman Emperors, perhaps. Our Mayor was born in New York City, and appears to know a lot about the Roman Empire - if this summer's circus works out well, expect a stronger push for more control.

Becoming

These new houses under construction in South Kensington looked interesting out of the corner of the eye - something novel, striking, a bit edgy for SW7 perhaps? 

But on getting things into focus, it became clear that the cladding isn't on yet.  In this neck of the woods we can expect something bland and tasteful to cover up the interesting looking and pleasingly arranged array of fixing brackets that can be seen today. 

Buildings often look more interesting under construction than when they are finished.  Berthold Lubetkin complained that Owen Williams' (and Sir Robert 'Concrete Bob' McAlpine's) beautiful in situ concrete frame for the Dorchester Hotel was ruined once William Curtis Green's dreary cladding went on.  And the probably apocryphal story of the exchange between Colonel Seifert and Richard Rogers ('When are they getting the scaffolding off that Lloyds building of yours?' 'When are they going to finish off the top of your Nat West Tower?') concerns two very different buildings that (maybe) have in common a deliberate aesthetic of 'work in progress'.  

The sales strapline on the hoarding here is 'there is a story behind these walls'.  God knows what they mean by that, but probably not the brackets.