The Filter^

Turning the Place Over

Meanwhile, to Liverpool, where the tangible feeling of excitement about 2008 and the Capital of Culture title has exploded into a visual manifestation of sheer wonderment. Richard Wilson (no, not that one) has installed his new work, Turning the Place Over, in the abandoned Cross Keys House, Moorfields, just opposite the Merseyrail station. That the building used to house a Yates' Wine Lodge makes its cultural transformation all the sweeter, as I hope you will agree as you view a video of the work here. These pictures say more than words ever could.

The official opening of the work will be on 20th June during Architecture Week, and it will continue until the end of 2008.

Stephen Bayley on Liverpool

Writing in The Observer, Stephen Bayley begins the national  attention to Liverpool which the 2008 Capital of Culture will create. It's a nice piece threading the city to it's architecture, creating a nostalgic journey throughout the gems of Merseyside.

you are still confronted by a contrasting spectacle that is utterly Liverpool in its incongruous mixture of swaggering magnificence and dismaying tat.

Two points i'd like answered are why so many people use "Liverpool" when they're really (as Bayley is) talking about Merseyside? And will this attention "sort out" the conventional mishistory pinning Liverpool's decline on Maggie Thatcher?

When the rest of the country went Thatcherite, Liverpool whimsically went Trotskyist. The city lost its way in the tunnel of comradely love and almost failed to recover.

The Filter^ will try to bring you the insiders guide to Liverpool's cultural awakening, from multiple perspectives.

Of human life and death

But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.

Luke vi. 49.

The first time I visited Liverpool, seven years ago now, I got lost. And it was getting lost that made me stay. Somehow following the map I had been given by the university, and directing myself by the tower of the Anglican Cathedral until it disappeared behind other buildings, I managed to overshoot my intended destination and found myself on Upper Parliament Street. I was glad. I didn’t know much about the place before arriving, but here I was amid brilliant Georgian terraces the like of which I had only ever seen in London. It was not these terraces that informed my decision to come here however. It was the experience of rounding a corner off this street and finding a block of three-story, Georgian town houses gutted and blackened from attic to basement, their brickwork sprouting weeds, and buddleia where a roof should have been; the block was an apparent remnant of the Second World War.

A lot has happened to the city in those seven years. The ruined terrace was demolished in my third year of university to make way for a square slab of roughly-sown grass, bordered by drab two-storey social housing; and currently the city is undergoing the largest development it has experienced in over a hundred years. The following links will give the casual browser some idea of the scale of this work:

http://www.liverpoolvision.com/
http://www.bigdig.liverpool.gov.uk/
http://www.kingswaterfrontliverpool.co.uk/
http://www.liverpoolpsda.co.uk/
http://www.liverpool-one.com/Home

It is to be encouraged. Some of the work that is already finished is genuinely exciting. The city already feels a different place, as if it is ready to come awake again and catch up with the rest of the country. And yet, and yet…

What of the ruins? I mean this quite seriously. I am concerned that Liverpool is removing a huge part of its character and heritage by redeveloping these areas of dank, crumbling structures.
In 1825, when many of Liverpool’s finest buildings were being erected, the chaplain of George IV wrote the following on the recent work done to Windsor Castle:

Windsor Castle loses a great deal of its architectural impression (if I may use that word) by the smooth neatness with which its old towers are now chiselled and mortared. It looks as if it was washed every morning with soap and water, instead of exhibiting here and there a straggling flower, or creeping weather-stains.

The renovations to the castle caused great national debate at the time. Castles are of course central emblems of romantic thought, and yet the improvements made by Sir Jeffry Wyatville under the King’s instruction, robbed the building of much of what made it a castle. It became a tidied-up Gothic fake, whereas before it had largely been a genuine Norman pile. Liverpool is undergoing the same process in the present.

Before we go any further, we need to understand the Romantic ideal of the ruin, why creeping weather-stains might be valued more so than smooth neatness. It is not merely an arbitrary distinction, nor is it a purely sentimental notion. To do so, let us look at a little of the work of a poet, Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans (1793-1835). Here, a section from a poem entitled The Ruin and its Flowers:

Proud Castle! though the days are flown,
When once thy towers in glory shone;
When music through thy turrets rung,
When banners o'er thy ramparts hung,
Though 'midst thine arches, frowning lone,
Stern Desolation rear his throne;
And Silence, deep and awful, reign,
Where echo'd once the choral strain;
Yet oft, dark ruin! lingering here,
The Muse will hail thee with a tear;
Here when the moonlight, quiv'ring, beams,
And through the fringing ivy streams,
And softens every shade sublime,
And mellows every tint of Time—
Oh! here shall Contemplation love,
Unseen and undisturb'd, to rove;
And bending o'er some mossy tomb,
Where Valour sleeps, or Beauties bloom,
Shall weep for Glory's transient day,
And Grandeur's evanescent ray
And list'ning to the swelling blast,
Shall wake the Spirit of the Past,
Call up the forms of ages fled,
Of warriors and of minstrels dead;
Who sought the field, who struck the lyre,
With all Ambition's kindling fire!

It is a quite typical romantic view of the ruin. It is perhaps an obvious point to make, but notice that repeated ‘When’ at the start of the lines in this passage. It is a primary feature of the ruin that it connects the ‘now’ with the ‘when’, in a way that any other old building does not. I currently live in a very beautiful Georgian house, but the house remains in the now, it still fulfills its purpose. The ruin does not, it is merely a monument to the past. Or not merely, for the subject of Hemans’ poem is concerned with the way that nature has reclaimed this plot; the ‘the fringing ivy streams’ upon it, moss covers its tombs, ‘beauties bloom’ out of it. The ruin is in effect full of life; it is simply not human life.

An example in Liverpool of this is a cotton warehouse on Parliament Street. The building has for a long time been disused, and has sprouted a wall of bright purple buddleia, filled with butterflies each summer. It has subsequently become known in the city effectionately as the Buddleia Building, a name that will remain even once the buddleia has been removed.

But this is evidence of the ruin’s ideological strength. It is a meaningful name, not one picked by committee, but one given because the building’s desolation caught the imagination of people in the city. Imagination is of course what the ruin is about. In Hemans’ poem: ‘here shall Contemplation love, / Unseen and undisturb'd, to rove;’ the whole poem is about contemplation; imagining the past. When Hemans writes that ‘thy towers in glory shone’, of course she does not know that to be a fact, it is an impression created from the building as it currently stands. Equally the music, and the banners are also imagined. The ruin allows the onlooker to envisage the potential building, and in that the potential of the past.

Here in another of Hemans’ poems, The Lonely Bird, a bird’s song is made sweeter by the ruin in which it sings:

How can that flood of gladness
   Rush through thy fiery lay,
From the haunted place of sadness,
   From the bosom of decay?
While dirge-notes in the breeze's moan,
   Through the ivy garlands heard,
Come blent with thy rejoicing tone,
   Oh! lonely, lonely bird!

On its own, the bird’s song is of course lovely, but it is the surprise of it rushing from the ‘bosom of decay’, that makes it beautiful. It is that funny, archaic word (a ruin itself) ‘blent’ that informs the song, it is the combined effect of the ruin’s ‘sadness’ and the bird’s ‘gladness’ that creates beauty; it cannot be without the loneliness of the setting.

And nor can Liverpool be beautiful without its ruins, and yet the current desire is to tidy them up. The Casartelli Building on Hanover Street is a perfect example of this. It was an undeniably fine Georgian warehouse; the premises of manufacturers of nautical instruments. For years the building was a beautiful ruin. To the left here is a rather poor photograph of it from that time.

With its weather-stained stucco, and sad sagging façade, it looked like a building transplanted from Venice. And then it fell down. It was not being used; it reached the end of its natural life. All things die, even buildings.

Only the Casartelli Building did not die. It was rebuilt, or rather a building that looks virtually like it, was built in its place.

To the right, is a photograph of it today. Spot the difference. The current building uses none of the same materials or building methods that the original did, it just looks (excepting a few minor points) exactly like it. Except it has been washed clean. The yellow stucco gleams in the sun, and the left hand wall that runs down Hanover Street offers a fantasy of what its neighboring warehouses might (but didn’t) once have looked like.

It is a fantasy. It is historical pornography. It is aiming to do what the ruin does do; offer a window into the past, show what things once were like. Just as Hemans looks at the ruin and imagines by gone glories, we are meant to look at this building and do the same. Only it is a different building.

Increasingly this happens.

Below, is another development at Cleveland Square, three sides of which were demolished in the 1980s during the city’s apparent war against nice things. As part of the current redevelopment, these six shop fronts have been ‘saved’.

They’re perfectly lovely in their own way, but they’re pure invention. The brickwork, the windows, the paneling of the shop fronts, the metal balconies, are all new. This isn’t what the square was ever like; it is a Disney theme park attraction only the inhabitant mice have all been exterminated. Why are they kept at all, but to stir us into some false nostalgia for the past? They are kitsch, they are freakish, they are wrong.

The city does not need to invent signifiers of the past, it has hundreds of examples already, and in wiping out its ruins, in sanitizing its history with false images of historic chintziness, it is eradicating proof of an important fact of its history; the fact that in Liverpool for most of the twentieth century, there was very little investment and a lot of economic hardship. It is the same soap and water technique employed by George IV on Windsor Castle in the 1820s, though whereas he was at pains to hide the fact that his ancestors had been an uncivilized warring lot, Liverpool is busy painting over the cracks to hide the fact that it was ever poor.

Let us return finally to Hemans. In her poem The Ruin, the poet describes a different kind of ruin to the others I have shown in her poems here. Whereas these others portray castles that have fallen desolate, The Ruin considers a family home where ‘banners of knighthood have not flung’ but important, everyday events have walked their course:

Thou bindest me with mighty spells!
   A solemnizing breath,
A presence all around thee dwells,
   Of human life and death.
I need but pluck yon garden flower
   From where the wild weeds rise,
To wake, with strange and sudden power,
   A thousand sympathies.

Thou hast heard many sounds, thou hearth!
   Deserted now by all!
Voices at eve here met in mirth
   Which eve may ne'er recall.
Youth's buoyant step, and woman's tone,
   And childhood's laughing glee,
And song and prayer, have all been known,
   Hearth of the dead! to thee.

A similar fate has befallen Hemans’ own family home in Liverpool. The house which she spent her adult life in here, now languishes as dust beneath the forecourt of a used car showroom in Wavertree, but the place of her birth, the house from which her father ran his business and where she lived until that business failed, still stands as a noble decaying structure on the city’s Duke Street. It is a rather fitting monument. The back of the house is currently visible, and offers a rare glimpse of one of few remaining examples of court housing in the city, a large bow window hanging dissolutely over a long abandoned street.

For how much longer this will be visible I am not sure, it is certain to have been swallowed up in the rush to prove prosperity within the next five years. The house itself will almost certainly be changed. It might become apartments, or a bar, or be demolished entirely. I wonder whether its owners are aware of its heritage. But for the moment that does not matter, for the moment it is a fitting monument for a much-neglected poet, for the moment;

A presence all around thee dwells,
   Of human life and death.

Eva Jiricna and the modernism of the Pet Shop Boys

I love the Czech Republic, I really do.  Please don’t gain the impression from my enthusiasm that I’ve actually been there, as I haven’t.  This is a passion by proxy, or rather a theoretical knowledge that what the former Czechoslovakia has given the world in aesthetic terms is a fascinating reflection of a nation buffeted and abused by the competing ideologies and power structures of 20th Century Europe.  This interview with famous Czech émigré Eva Jiricna in The Guardian was therefore virtually guaranteed to prick my interest, but I was still surprised by just how much I gained from it.  Firstly, before reading it I had no idea who Eva Jiricna actually was, so that was a valuable lesson learned.  Secondly, the work of this mainly interior architect over the last 25 years is, it appears to me, a vital case study in understanding the shifting forms that modernism has taken since its postwar heyday to the best contemporary designs we see around us today.   

Arriving in London in 1968 for a work placement with the Greater London Council, Jiricna was unable to return to Prague after Soviet forces had invaded the country in August, crushing political dissent and effectively sealing off Czechoslovakia to free movement for the following 30 years.  Even before this involuntary exile from her homeland, Jiricna was a restless modernist who had refused to join the communist party and was committed, against the popular grain, to the kind of avant-garde architecture passed on to her by her father.  Eva was in every way the product of her hometown of Zlin, an amazing place that had been almost totally recast as a modernist utopia in the 1920s and 30s (in part by her architect father) to serve the needs of the local shoe manufacturer, Tomas Bata.  This website tells the story in more detail. 

What marks out Jiricna’s work is the detailed passion with which she took her own practise through the 1970s and 80s.  These were dark days indeed for pioneering modernism, and, as a woman in a deeply misogynistic profession, Jiricna found it difficult to find work at all.  The way forward came through niche projects, interior work found through personal contacts. In 1979 Joseph Ettedgui of the Joseph fashion chain saw her design potential, and it was Eva’s minimalist detailing and chic sense of modernity in her Joseph shops that secured her place in the celebrity merry-go-round of the 1980s.  What followed was something akin to the drafting of a pattern-book from which contemporary designers of bars, shops and hotels still draw their inspiration.  The Jiricna style reached its 80s apogee with designs for two nightclubs, Legends and Browns.  The photographs show a style which was at once modern, ahead of the field, and yet so deeply rooted in its time that the zeitgeist seeps from every fitment, form and texture used.  I lived through the entire 1980s (too young for nightclubs, admittedly) ignorant of any sense of the excitement and modernism explicit in these designs. 

The modernism of today is, thankfully, rather more ubiquitous, confident and everyday.  The iPod is an amazing example of how quality modern design has become mainstream; Norman Foster is a household name who has realized in built-form many people’s image of the future.  Back in the 1980s, under the philistine cosh of the Thatcher government, there was a dearth of contemporary imagination as the state sought to recapture something lost rather than seek out something new.  Jiricna’s work, amongst others, bucked this trend in the murky cultural milieu of that decade.  There is a real, pulsing sense in her creations of a belief in the time in which it was conceived, a belief in contemporary materials, in modern lighting and slick, unfussy textures, but also in electronic music, new forms of expression and the art of the future.  A stainless-steel-and-glass cantilevered staircase floating through space and bathed in coloured light is as convincing a cultural riposte to Thatcherism that I’ve ever come across.

Of course these interiors look overtly futuristic, imagining a technological age that barely existed at their conception, but that is where their art lies; partly in a glamorous escape from the divisive realities of the 80s, and partly as a statement of faith in modern design and the continuing possibilities of the future.  You will no doubt see in these images familiar themes that have infiltrated today’s design culture – I imagine you’d loose count if you attempted to tally the use of back-lit translucent counters/bars and steel paneling in the modern high street and night spots.  This fact need not make Jiricna’s ideas mundane, but rather worth celebrating as contributing to the higher standards of design we all enjoy today in some areas of the public realm. 

It’s not hard to evoke the spirit in which these admirable designs were conceived.  Picture a person with rather larger hair than is acceptable today, clad in something black with an unnecessarily chunky and low slung belt, standing on one of those staircases whilst clutching a primary coloured cocktail and feeling the music…

In a west end town, a dead end world
The east end boys and west end girls
West end girls

The Iconography of Wembley

Some may call me a killjoy, well probably most people would, yet I have absolutely no hesistation about being perturbed about Norman Foster’s design for the new Wembley stadium.  As this excellent audio slideshow from the BBC shows us, Foster began with a perfectly wonderful functionalist device – a series of masts to hold up the roof from above in order to avoid visual obstructions from pillars below – and then made the limp intellectual leap from practical masterstroke to egotistical icon-making by joining up the struts of the masts to form an arch.  This is an arch which has already been commandeered as Wembley’s new identity but which forms no genuinely practical use, as far as I can see.  The iconic features of the original 1930s stadium were of course the twin concrete towers at the main entrance, evoking the Byzantine and pseudo-classical influences that so informed the work of Britain’s master of colonial architecture, Edwin Lutyens.  I’m the first to admit that these towers served no practical use, either; aside from their internal stair their external form and decoration were surely conceived principally as a visual signifier for the whole stadium development. 

Nevertheless, the unnecessary demolition of the towers in 2003 represented the self-conscious putting-away of a well-established icon in favour of a new idea.  With this idea in the hands of Norman Foster, a committed modernist with an impeccable record of beautiful buildings forged from high-tech solutions, one might have expected something less overt in the finished product.  The subtext for Foster’s design must have been an overwhelming desire to replace the visual familiarity of the old stadium with a new iconography.  So, we are given an instant icon, we are even told it is an icon.  The new arch may well be an innovative structure, but it’s philosophically lazy and raises questions about the selfish and wasteful desire to destroy in its totality the heritage of the old stadium.  This is a building in thrall to the concept of the makeover and is squarely part of that culture of newness at all costs which globalised capitalism has fashioned in its own image.  I only hope that football fans attending the first match at the new stadium grant at least some thought for the memory of the towers now lost forever as they gawp at the wonder of their new icon.            

Loyd Grossman meets Tom Bloxham

Oh, the crumbs of culture can be very meagre indeed in the English provinces.  Slicing for Liverpool a thin, crusty shard of insight from his generous loaf of celebrity came Loyd Grossman, wafting into Screen Two of FACT like the shogun of culture he is, come to save us all from our ignorance of the wealth around us, come to ‘celebrate’ Liverpool’s architecture alongside a man who has done so much to save that architecture.  Loyd comes to Liverpool a lot, he no longer impresses me.  For me, Tom Bloxham was the draw here.  Expensive suits and inexplicably white-blond hair belie someone with rather more ingenuity than the average businessman.  Someone with taste; a patron of quality architecture, no less.  His property company, Urban Splash, is almost a household name, at least in North West England.  Liverpool, of all places, was the city that became the beachhead for the steady invasion of ‘Manhattan’ loft-living, now to be found from Newcastle to Clarkenwell.  Concert Square started it all.  The impact of this trend on British culture has been negligible, but in architectural terms there is indeed much to celebrate.  Continental café bars may soon descend into the violence-and-vomit hell of drinking barns, but a well converted building remains true to its design.  You could term it industrial gentrification, I guess, as opposed to the residential kind where the brave middle class take what were beautiful houses in beautifully planned inner districts, lick them with paint and, waddayouknow, create beautiful houses again.  From the very start of Urban Splash, Tom Bloxham saw amongst the genuinely gritty filth of the city some amazing buildings that demanded new life.  Now much imitated by brainless corporations but never, as far as I’ve witnessed, bettered, Tom Bloxham and Urban Splash have a special place in my tiny pantheon of heroes.  I know it’s small in there Tom, but go on, make your self comfy.  Ask Jonathan Meades for a cheesy ball.      

Moscow Unrealised

May the unrealised plans of these monumental buildings serve as a reminder that it is right and proper to build innovatively without destroying the historically valuable past. That which history has given us, both good and bad, is our undeniable heritage, and we must accept it as it is. Yet we should not forget the lessons history has taught us, for upon this hinges the future of Russia.

Unrealised Moscow is a fascinating collection of the architectural plans of projects in Moscow, 1930-1950.

The Shocking Truth About The Frauenkirche, Dresden

Dresden, that phonetic allusion to human catastrophe (dread, dredge, dead…somehow grey and hopeless), symbol of the eye for an eye posturing that left the whole of the Europe blinded by hatred and violence in the Second World War, has raised the stakes in an architectural game that is leaving a questionable mark on western culture.  The city’s baroque cathedral, the Frauenkirche, has been reconstituted, rematerialized from the void into which it disappeared into on the night of February 13th 1945 when British bombers reduced Dresden to smouldering ruins.  A large photo story published in The Guardian on Monday was clear in its celebration of this act of time travel by the German people.  The former and future Chancellors were present at the opening of the new – old? – Church at the weekend, along with leading clergy and the people of Dresden whose collective will apparently fashioned the building into existence.  At a time of fundamental change and uncertainty in Germany, when its economic and political structures that served it so well in the post-1945 world are under pressure to an unprecedented degree, when the country does not even have an official leader due to the fiercely fought yet inconclusive general election, this ceremonial act was held by Germany’s constitutional President to be a harbinger of hope for the German nation, a moment for unity in which the problems of the present could be subsumed into a collective pride in national achievement.  It took the physical mass of a building to provide the German state with something to rally around, a mascot, if you will, to cheer both the political class and the masses by creating a mood that there was something to be grateful for.

What a thoroughly disconcerting idea.  Mascots, being imbued with a sentiment that recalls an important moment, a message or an idea that provides comfort and inspiration during challenging times, can be useful things.  We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, reliant on these keepsakes, physical icons of our past that we look upon with fondness and draw pleasurable memories from.  Times have to get pretty bad for us to look towards objects rather than people to help us through tough challenges, but sometimes mascots are the best and only option, like during exams when we are on our own.  Soft toys, football scarves and the like are all harmless enough on an individual basis, but just look at what happens when cultural anxiety and a sense of crisis is multiplied exponentially to the level of a nation.  The talisman has to become larger than life if it is to paper over the chasm-like cracks of trauma, so that in Dresden’s case it is felt necessary to build from scratch an incredibly ornate cathedral to an original 18th Century design.

Let me count the ways that this is oh so very wrong.  Most importantly, the cathedral is a big fake.  Who wants a fake mascot?  There was nothing left of the original building after the RAF had done its worst, save for two stumps of walls that were retained by the Communist authorities in East Germany as a testament to the brutality of war.  It’s crucial to appreciate that this was no restoration job, a simple retouching of frescos singed by a firebomb or sourcing sandstone to replace the west wall that collapsed.  There was no cathedral before 1990 when work started on construction, just a tasteful monument to the old building.  What the pictures show us is a completely new piece of architecture that happens to have used old photographs and plans in its construction in order to create the illusion that the old cathedral has been rebuilt.  It really hasn’t; this is just a twisted facsimile that amounts to a collective self-duping on the part of those that conceived the building.  I could dress up as my grandmother, do her voice and say the phrases that make her memorable, but it sure as hell doesn’t make her any less dead.  There is another level of wish fulfilment in action here that makes the overarching fakery even more sinister.  There is an implicit sense in this project that 18th Century trends such as rococo/baroque architecture and the socially unifying effects of organised religion are still – or at least jolly well should be – cultural aspirations for any civilised society.  It’s all too depressingly conservative.  ‘Let us’ you can hear the Project Committee say to themselves ‘make a statement of faith in the art, culture and religious fervour of the past, so that this rebuilt cathedral stands as a symbol of reconciliation and defiance against the horrors of violence.’  It all sounds so reasonable when you read it back to yourself.  But think about it a little longer; go on.  Think harder.  Are you there yet?  Yes, that’s right, the whole project is an exercise in the most reactionary piece of nonsense you could possibly imagine. 

Architecturally, the authorities of Dresden have betrayed all hope in the possibilities of contemporary design by falling back into the sureties of the past like a pensioner diving underneath a wartime eiderdown topped with an embroidered woollen blanket on a nip January night.  It’s a cosy image, and undoubtedly this is a beautiful cathedral in its own, richly layered way.  This is an irresistible wedding cake of a building that announces its purpose as cultural and tourist icon from whichever angle you view its betwizzled dome.  It certainly passes the silhouette test, the successful passage through which means a building can be readily recognised at dawn or dusk and, henceforth, is photographed and published ad nauseum, using those very conditions in order to add to its allure.  Perhaps the fine architecture achieved in the Frauenkirche is enough to redeem it, and perhaps my views are doomed to stand alone amongst those of the thronging well-wishers who can see nothing but a beautiful edifice and a victory of creativity over destruction.  Perhaps, perhaps, but my disquiet will not budge.    

In a broader cultural sense, the new church acts to deny the 60 years that have elapsed since its destruction.  What better denial of all the things which disturb Germany today than to imagine that no mistake is irreversible, no past inaccessible to the determined coward.  For we can mend the broken toy, make it good as new by spending vast sums of money, but we can’t erase the memory of the brutishness that trampled the item, of the pain and grief that follows the end of something dear.  By replacing its toy, has Dresden really dealt with its pain, or its past?  Have wartime destruction and 50 years of communist rule been forgotten now, an embarrassing legacy requiring an elaborate makeover to make the city feel more like the rest of Germany?  Where, in all of this, is a belief in the present and the future?  President Köhler saw the fundraising efforts across Europe that produced the 180 million Euros required for the ‘rebuilding’ as akin to the generosity of the “18th Century visionaries” who helped build the cathedral originally.  I concur that the past is indeed a rich source of cultural and intellectual inspiration, but not at the expense of the present becoming a slavish pageant with little meaning of its own.  I do not see a building at ease with or celebrating the past, but one profoundly disturbed by it.  There is no reconciliation here; how can there be when there is nothing to be reconciled with?  The cathedral is no longer lost, it is there just as it was before 1945, and so all the difficult tasks of grieving, of coping with the reality of the world, are made moot.  It’s an easy way out, a childish escape from the challenge of dealing with trauma head on.  A true act of reconciliation would have been braver, with none of the overt sentimentality implicit in this building.  I really do hope this church stands for centuries and becomes all the people of Dresden wish it to be, but the underlying truth of the building will nevertheless remain. I fear, however, that the potency of collective amnesia will be enough to mask that truth.

The BT (or Post Office) Tower

The BT Tower recently celebrated its 40th birthday.  There is perhaps no more potent symbol in the whole of London of the values of public service and technological innovation that so characterised the 1960s in Britain than this building. In the bluish heat of our own communications revolution it becomes all to easy to ignore the achievements and utter pluck of another age, of a time in which Harold Wilson’s Labour government believed in public investment in such buildings and faced the future with a determined, steely gaze. Today’s Labour government, facing the present with a furtive, duplicitous sneer, has derived no small amount of fame from its own interest in the uses of communications, in all senses of that overused word.  Pagers, of course, were the devices so beloved in the heroic age of the spin-doctor, used to spectacular effect by the Labour Party machine both before and after the 1997 election victory to ensure that all players on the Westminster stage were kept ‘on message’ so as not to perturb unduly the already-petrified horses of Middle England.  Emails have rapidly replaced personal diaries and papers as a source of the kind of explosive revelations that can destroy careers and keep the tabloids fed for days, most famously in the case of Jo Moore and Stephen Byers at the Department of Transport whose leaked electronic notes proffered the opinion that September 11th 2001 was an unmissable opportunity to ‘bury bad news’.  All sorts of government services can now be accessed and used in some way online, from asking NHS Direct if your headache is actually a brain tumour to paying for your tax disc.

The change in the 40 years since the then Post Office Tower was erected goes a little deeper than the rapid evolution of communication technologies and the swapping of names and fascias on the side of the building.  Aside from the fact that the present Labour government isn’t now at all the same sort of institution that would use political capital and taxpayers’ money to invest in such a major piece of public infrastructure (or at least one with such an evident, worthwhile utility - something fatuous would be just fine), a more fundamental shift has occurred.    Government has changed from a provider of telecommunications (and its attendant structures) to a user.  The privatisation in the mid-80s of the General Post Office’s telephony offshoot, British Telecommunications, began the process of liberalisation and competition in the sector that is finally beginning to justify itself with rival companies being granted control over the most important telecoms wires – those that stretch between your home and the local exchange – to provide a genuine alternative to the former monopoly provider, BT. I welcome this competition with gusto, especially as it has enabled me to see that doing business with anyone other than BT is a stressful waste of time and a lesson in incompetence and stupidity yet to be rivalled by any other provider of a private service I have encountered.  Wanadoo and Bulldog take note.

In the new world order of privatisation, deregulation and competition, I am, however, moved to ask the very unfashionable question of ‘who is in control?’  The BT Tower was built because of a pressing need to process telephone data, terrestrial television and satellite broadcasts through a nodal point in Britain’s telecommunications network.  BT still owns the tower, obviously, and large swathes of the fixed-line network are still owned and managed by BT whether or not the data being carried on it is destined for one of its customers.  So the network, largely, remains in monopoly hands with regulation from the ever light-of-touch Ofcom.  But it is not in public hands, and the broader question remains at large.  If no single party can lay claim to the ownership and management of the telecommunications network and there is no commercially disinterested public body involved in the decisions regarding major infrastructure, can telephony ever achieve such beauty again?

The architecture of telecoms certainly reached its aesthetic apotheosis with the building of the Post Office Tower.  Where now mobile phone masts are placed, sheepishly and unattractively, on the tops of tall buildings, or else disguised as monkey puzzle trees in more sensitive rural locations, the Labour government of 1965, under the auspices of the GPO, took an unapologetic stride into the future with its sleek, modern mast in the heart of central London.  There was, presumably, no reason at all why the functional need for such a tower couldn’t be fulfilled by a structure in an outer suburb of no repute, or perhaps in some forgotten stretch of Essex along the Thames estuary where only some forlorn marsh birds would have noticed its arrival.  Instead, there was a self-evident and noble attempt to make flesh in the most prominent position imaginable a vision of a modern Britain, communicating efficiently and with contemporary flair both within its own borders and with the rest of the world. 

The architects (Eric Bedford and his team at the Ministry of Public Building and Works) were exceptionally bold in their usage of motifs now closely associated with a particular brand of 1960s modernism; most memorably, perhaps, the circular shape of the plan, but also the materials of gleaming steel, opaque glass, roughly-textured mosaic and, not least, the integration of functional elements of the structure into the overall aesthetic result.  Indeed, it is the satellite dishes clustered in their white and dove grey colonies of various sizes that strike one most vividly, for there can be no denial of utility in this building.  On the contrary, it is in the modernity and cultural ambition explicit in a telecoms-mast-made-skyscraper that gives the BT Tower its authenticity, its integrity and its aesthetic value.  So honestly is this a functional structure, and so honestly a statement of public confidence in modern architecture, modern communications and a modern society, that it must stand in value alongside the finest examples of 19th Century engineering in the capital – the railway termini, the sewerage system, the Underground, the public baths, gasometers, glasshouses and innumerable other innovations that were conceived in the public good and remain for our admiration to this day.

The tower retains its role as a reminder of a more culturally ambitious time, perhaps even more ambitious than the Victorian epoch that spawned so much of the technological innovation that laid the foundation for our continuing progress.  There remains, in both the form and continuing use of the building, a loud echo of the zeitgeist that was imbued into its very construction.  The Space Race that was such a driving force in scientific inquiry may not have included Britain directly, but 1965 was the very heart of an era in which all developed societies were intent on exploring both the theoretical boundaries and cultural impact of new technologies. The architectural historian Reyner Banham, writing in the late 1950s, writes how western society evolved from the effects of the Industrial Revolution into what he describes as the ‘First Machine Age’ when, at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, every strata of society began to be affected in their everyday lives by the practical, physical applications that earlier industrial innovation had wrought – cars, telephones and electric lighting being in the vanguard of this ‘new’ revolution.  The Second Machine Age was, by the 1960s, gathering its own momentum as computing and communications pointed towards an almost invisible technological future, one in which wealth generation depended on the networks and machines we could not see rather than the fossil-fuelled brutes we could; belching road traffic and gargantuan factory machines being merely a legacy of old technology.  Microwave communications were an exciting strand of these new technologies – but what form can be fashioned from invisibility?  In the fine tradition of Modernist thinking, a practical need was translated into positive action so that the physical demands of high frequency radio – that the waves had a transmitter and receiver – were met in a sublime fusion of function and form. 

Here is a building that proclaims its usefulness by its slender, tall, dish-studded form, and yet in being so confidently a mast becomes also an evocative symbol, more powerful than a mere tool.  Symbolic of a socialism rooted firmly in contemporary thought, of a political ambition for the public good, the tower is monumental in very many ways of a dormant political philosophy and now distant cultural milieu.  Built in its cylindrical form because it was noted that the buildings which survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb explosions were mostly circular (able to deflect the force of the blast by their aerodynamic shape), there was an intention of permanence in the building, a hope that a nuclear atrocity need not disrupt government communication and the furtherance of British interests and values in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  The hoped-for permanence has lasted 40 years to date, and an English Heritage Grade II listing order on the building two years ago will no doubt aid its future survival (at least in the face of non-nuclear threats), but the physical legacy of the tower is but a mausoleum for the ideas that fashioned it. 

In the economy of the future, indicated today by the phenomenal success of companies such as Google, eBay, Yahoo! and all the other dotcom miracles that create jobs, wealth, technological innovation and a sense of progress, what place does architecture have?  The real architecture of the future is in the software that powers my writing and electronic publishing of this piece, and in the microchips that help run it all.  There are, of course, labyrinthine layers of physical infrastructure that underlay the electronic shop window of the web-based commerce and technology, but I doubt there is a will to make any of this beautiful.  A warehouse, a building to house a computer server, a low-rise office block in Silicon Valley – none of these structures need to be well designed because they don’t have a public, they need communicate no message.  The ultimate products of our own machine age are screen-based, and so long as customers respond well to their web experiences then the companies that provide them will surely make money.  The desire of the public sector to contribute positively to the built environment appears to have dwindled alongside its abandonment of technological innovation to those parties who prioritise commercial success over the public good.  It is certainly in the public good that the world around us all, the reality beyond the screen, is beautiful in a way that does not deny our needs but neither denies our humanity.  Useful technology made beautiful for all is what the BT Tower achieves, and its example should be followed.

London Open House Weekend

Have you ever wondered what it was like inside those buildings you’ve always been curious about, always had a subconscious admiration for?  London Open House Weekend is an attempt, and a brave one, to turn the private architectural wealth of the capital into a public pleasure ground of built delight.  I was there for last year’s event and managed to take in the pretty stupendous foyer of the Daily Express building, Fleet Street.  I also attempted to get inside Norman Foster’s 30, St Mary Axe; a foolhardy ambition on a weekend when the entirety of good-design-loving Londoners come out to play with the architectural goodies laid out for them like toys on a soft, wipe-clean mat.  The queues for the Gherkin that day challenged those at an All Bar One somewhere in the City on a Friday night after close of trading.  Tiring, by now, of the prescribed programme on offer, myself and my companions took in some long, admiring glances at the outside of Richard Rogers’ Lloyds of London building, just around the corner from the Gherkin-mania, and then promptly decided to drop out of the programme and make our own pilgrimage to a non-authorised architectural gem at 2, Willow Road in Hampstead.

What is it that troubles me about the Open House idea? I suppose it is the sense that what we are offered as visitors is sanctioned, packaged and organised to the extent that none of it feels like genuine discovery, and so the delight one might experience from seeing inside an essentially private building is dissipated amongst the crowds, ravenous for the next voyeuristic thrill.  On the rare occasions I find myself in the role, I hate being a tourist, and this is tourism writ large with a desperate, agitated edge.  In tourism we are usually being sold something – a location, an experience, some sort of socio-cultural signifier that will justify (and, indeed necessitate) working 40 hours a week for 47 weeks of the year to pay for it – but here the punters are treated as tourists just for turning up to experience the interesting design that exists outside of Next, or garden centres, or wherever it is that people spend their weekends. 

And then, when it’s over, when have finished queuing and being marshalled and following the brochure for the weekend, we go home and carry on with our lives.  What are we left with?  Well-designed public buildings that we can access for free on any day of the week?  Some, yes.  Workplaces that have been built thoughtfully with the function of our jobs and the importance of aesthetic engagement in mind?  For the lucky few, perhaps.  Homes that lift our spirits simply by combining beauty with cosy familiarity?  Hmm, that really does stretch credulity in the case of the majority.

Contrary to all melancholic appearances, I do think the Open House Weekend is a good idea insofar as it exposes the best of architecture and design to public enjoyment, hopefully inspiring a few people along the way to think more critically about their built environment.  For those of us with a passion for this sort of thing it does, however, feel like rationing.  Six hundred buildings accessible over one weekend a year does not a revolution make.  And make no mistake, a revolution is what we require whilst planning authorities and popular taste persist in thinking it quite acceptable that every patch of green and brown land be used up on execrable housing like this.  Exposition to good design must be more of a priority to educate people in the ways of taste.  Yes, there is so much good architecture in London and elsewhere in Britain, but it is all but invisible to those whose lives are spend in a ricochet between office block, suburban housing estate and retail park.  The good should be exposed to all, for free and far more often.  There are battles to be fought to prevent the further globalised blandification of Britain’s cities, and the more people there are on the correct side, the better. 

The RIBA Stirling Prize 2005

Celebrating its tenth year of promoting the very best in British architecture, the Stirling Prize will be awarded live on Channel 4 on Saturday 15th October.  2004 was a vintage year for the prize, with the high profile and deserved winner of 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin (pictured, left).  The 2005 shortlist of six is enough to brighten my gloomiest architectural day, and I can honestly say that I’d be happy for any of the candidate buildings to win.  The bookmakers favourite is apparently the Jubilee Library in Brighton which is, according to Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian, that very rare bird - a Private Finance Initiative building that actually works and is beautiful. 

A surprising omission from the final shortlist was the Sage Gateshead, Norman Foster’s graceful armadillo of a symphony hall on the Tyne.  Eliminated in the first round of inspections by the judges, perhaps the presence of the Stirling Prize-winning Gateshead Millennium Bridge just next door prevented the ever-exciting Newcastle/Gateshead from taking a shot at the top architectural prize again so soon; perhaps the category of ‘brilliant new building for an important institution’ had already been allocated in the shortlist to Eric Mirralles’s confusingly wonderful Scottish Parliament building; or perhaps Norman Foster is only allowed one nomination, and his admittedly superlative McLaren Technology Centre was thought to merit greater recognition.  After all, industrial design can use all the encouragement it can get.

Plaudits are due to Channel 4 for providing the prize with something approaching the media profile it deserves; following on from last year’s precedent the winner will be announced live on air towards the end of a programme that consistently demonstrates just how well contemporary architecture works on television.

The Filter^ ARCHITECTURE

My purpose in becoming the editor of a new architecture section for The Filter^ is to make my own contribution to raising the profile of an under-reported form of art. The buildings that surround us have the most amazing power to delight, to depress or to assault the senses, and much of this power is covert.  It is my full time occupation to read about, critically observe and write about buildings from the past, and when my work is discussed with friends and acquaintances there is an almost universal interest roused within them – people are interested in buildings, often on a subliminal level.  Such is the secret force of architecture.

I hope that in blogging around the subject, such secrecy can be unbundled to provide a public venue for informed debate.  It is natural that I have developed my own taste in architecture and I will not be reticent in putting forward my views on particular buildings, trends and styles.  However, it is not my goal to craft a regular polemical rant but instead to publish my considered views on a range of architectural topics in a balanced and useful way; useful, because an understanding of architecture can become the starting point for exploring an exciting range of ideas in other fields.  Architecture is art, underpinned by strong creative impulses; architecture is politics, expressing through its forms both clear and elusive messages about the person and society that creates it; architecture, perhaps above all, is emotion, created to engage with our aesthetic sensibilities, with our ideas of beauty, even with our sense of morality.

I’m looking forward to committing some of my thoughts on architecture into words and, hopefully, receiving some responses from whoever chooses to read those words.  In using the web as a medium, I’d like to think that the two-way flow of communication it affords and has always promised will come to be used in a real and constructive way.  I hope you enjoy what I have to say, and I do hope you’ll share your thoughts with me.

A flicker of life from The Filter^ REVIEW

As the circadian rhythms of the academic year begin to stir in my bosom, I have summoned The Filter^ REVIEW from its summer slumber with some thoughts on Virgin Trains.  Take a look here and refamiliarise yourself with our fine sister site.