Juxtapositions

or,
How to and how not to counterpose old & new architecture



This stands out as one of the nastiest mixings of old and new buildings I've ever seen. Take one historic facade (17th century?) on Gun Street, E1. Resentfully obey the letter of the listed building regulations, and do your damndest to flout the spirit of them. Knock down everything behind the facade and construct cheap-as-possible student housing in the kind of brick that'll be rotten in 40 years. Don't bother to align the windows, such that residents live in the dark and can only see three feet out on to the facade's concrete backing.

Meanwhile, in the background, a property developer constructs a new skyscraper according to formulae for maximising the floorplan at the lowest possible cost. The architects have no meaningful freedom, their only choice being how to whack on some "artfully asymmetric" cladding that enables the building to marketed as "designed" and "dynamic". In this way capital is over-leveraged, architecture constructed as a commodity, and lots more lovely capital (hopefully) accumulated.



In contrast, take this remarkably sympathetic use of materials for new-ish apartments on the River Lea near Bow. For once a block that was no-doubt marketed as having gritty urban-cool "warehouse" style actually has some dialogue with the dilapidated industrial buildings beside it. Ok, the form's nothing special. But just something in how the wood has weathered; the colour of the glass; the perforated steel balconies. Hemmed in on two sides by motorways (the A11 and A12), I can't promise that this is a genuinely functional, flourishing neighbourhood. When the old warehouses get knocked down for more new development, this fragile architectural sympathy between old and new will be lost. But for a few moments, on a sunny day in April...

Back of a napkin drawings

A napkin, covered in architectural drawings, purloined from the two young men sitting next to me in the Tinderbox coffee shop, Angel, once they had left. Much as they were complaining about the ridiculous design constraints on their various projects, I couldn't but envy the bubbling enthusiasm they had for their work.

Modernism in Cansado, Mauritania - 1966, Architectural Digest

In a hotel and "cultural embassy" in the former dockland quarter of Amsterdam, I found old copies of Architectural Digest magazine from 1966, back when modernism was still modern.

I remember being surpised in urbanism school just how 'developing world' modernism really was. Paris may have been Haussmannised, but high modernism only got the chance to realise its urban masterplans in the places where city development was still somehow new - and planning legislation in its infancy. An April 1966 copy of Architectural Digest offered an amazing case study of this: from Mauritanian desert, from nowhere, the construction of a new town, called Cansado.



The magazine described it like this:

"In 1952 Milferma, a mining company, was formed to exploit the rich iron deposits in the Kedia d'Idjil mountains near Fort Gouraud. The considerable yield, in the region of six million ton a year, posed transport and administrative problems. A railway was built from Fort Gouraud to Port Etienne, 636 kilometres away, from where the ore could be shipped to Europe. Port Etienne, a makeshift conglomeration of fishermen's huts and military installations was suitable neither as a port nor as a town for the staff administering the port and railhead. It was decided therefore to plan a new town, Cansado, in the neighbourhood."



"Planning started in 1957. Homes for 5000 were to be provided in the first instance, though an eventual population of 35,000 was envisaged. The peninsula on which the new town was to be built is neatly divided between the north-south frontier between the Rio de Oro (Spanish Sahara) and Mauritania, but the coastline available, overlooking the great Levrier bay, was in any case the most protected and suitable for development. The whole consists of a soft and porous sandstone. There is no arable earth. Winds tear across the sandstone and sand erosion presents a considerable problem. Neither the temperatures nor the humidity are excessive. Rainfall is low. Dry winds are liable to cause discomfort from three to five months of the year (at its worst in August and September)."





"The nature of the site, the varied human and social forces, all have greatly affected the form of the development. Houses are oriented north-south, with few openings on the north. Materials have been chosen for their low thermal transmission. Buildings have been kept low to protect and shelter the site. But it is the different ethnic and social background of the inhabitants that has most marked the character of the town. The inhabitants of a wide and distinct origin have different needs. The Arab workers, for instance, wanted houses that allowed all domestic activity to centre around a courtyard that was altogether private. The administrative staff placed more emphasis on the need for cross-ventilation and a view. The whole was thus divided into various quarters, each with its own centre, which was related to the main one which is to be extended when the town is enlarged at a later stage."

"Seven hundred and fifty houses together with churches, mosques, schools and shops were built between 1961 and 1963. The structural system was the same for all houses - load-bearing outer walls of a lightweight aggregate concrete, identical tie beams and cross-beams, enabling all elements to be prefabricated in a temporary factory."



In the 50 years since it is hard to see how a town of 5,000 - let alone the proposed 35,000 - could prosper simply from a railhead, and a port. In this age of automation, where are the jobs? The trains running from Zouerat may perhaps be the longest in the world, but what that means is all that freight only requires one driver. Nonetheless, lafraque on Flickr shows that Cansardo's buildings are still gleaming white, and still apparently uninhabited:



There is another perspective on these places, you understand. First I found these words on the Wikipedia page for Zouérat, another modernist European oasis constructed at the other end of the rail line, in land. Perhaps they will be edited out by moderators seeking to preserve an objective tone. I want to keep them. Whoever wrote them - Mauritanian or not - I think they say something:

"Zouerat is born at the end of the 1950's from nothing, at the end of the Kedia's glacis. The raw materials is transported from Nouadhibou by trucks, on the same way than the future Mauritania railway. Its plan is clear and well ventilated. Three places are made for europeans workers, commanders and executives. All the europeans houses are air-conditionned and furnished.
...
A shanty town grows around and a wall is made to separate the two cities. It is called "mur de la honte" (wall of shame) by the zouerati. The lack of houses for the mauritanians workers has gone to build new flats between Zouerate and the Kediet.

The climate is dry (no mosquito), and the most displeasing is the sand wind.

In 1976, the polisario attacks. A lot of Europeans leave and do not comme back."

And now the Mauritanian coast is another kind of modern, a nodal point of another global trade not in mineral ores but in people. They are not only West Africans: The NY Times reported in 2008 of an Italian fishing trawler towed into Nouadhibou carrying 369 people trying to reach Europe who had come from a continent away: Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Burma, India and Pakistan.

"A new route has opened up", the UN say. From South East Asia migrants fly to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, and thence to Addis Ababa. Then Ethiopian Airlines to Bamako in Mali, Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, or Dakar in Senegal. Then to the ports: Nouadhibou, Conakry, Dakar, and the hope of the the porous points in the European border: the Canary islands; Ceuta & Melilla, Spanish enclaves in North Africa, now closely walled; the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Consequently the Global Detention Project note that:

"Mauritania operates one dedicated immigration detention centre in Nouadhibou, nicknamed “Guantanamito” by detainees, which has been sharply criticised for its poor conditions (USCRI 2009; Amnesty 2008a; CEAR 2008; WGAD 2008; Reuters 2006).
...
Spain’s involvement in establishing the detention centre has raised questions over which authority controls the facility. While the centre is officially managed by the Mauritanian National Security Service (NSS), it is not governed by any regulations applicable to detention centres in the country (Amnesty 2008a, p. 24). Rather, as stated by Mauritanian officials “clearly and emphatically” to a delegation from CEAR in October 2008, Mauritanian authorities perform their jobs at the express request of the Spanish government (ESW 2009).
...
The high number of migrants taken in on a monthly basis has led to severe overcrowding, as noted by several groups who visited in 2008 (Amnesty 2008a; CEAR 2008; WGAD 2008). According to Amnesty, in March 2008 there were 216 bunk beds spread throughout the former classrooms, although only three rooms were being used during their visit. The organization reported that during its visit “a group of 35 who had been expelled by Morocco were being held in a room measuring 8m by 5m, with bars at the windows, which contained 17 bunk beds” (Amnesty 2008a, p. 21)"

So. From high modernism, to a room of displaced people in disputed state space and 1 sq m per person.

Dalston Junction station, East London line

Bleak, isn't it. Modern, antiseptic, safety-first-handrailed to funnel us in and funnel us out more efficiently – quite accidentally a beautifully smooth edge to grind a skateboard on, but no doubt they’re developing facial-recognition CCTV that’ll call security as soon as that thought even crosses your mind.

Not exactly Stirling prize-nominated Westminster station – or the drama of Canary Wharf, or the Paolozzi mosaics at Tottenham Court Road… What happened, what changed? Westminster was barely a decade ago, and no doubt built by the same private finance initiative money. Is decent architecture is only for the elites – MPs in Westminster, bankers at Canary Wharf? I understand we weren’t going to get anything world-changing at dirty old Dalston Junction, but did it have to be quite as soulless as this?

There is a realism to it, perhaps we should commend that? That, as a commuter station, it faithfully reproduces the sucking grind of the daily haul into the office, the fluorescent-lit scan-in scan-out automation that would make you feel very small and anonymous if credit card-recharged Oyster travelcards and CCTV didn’t mean that TfL knows your every last personal detail. The station has no doubt been designed using some terribly clever traffic-flow simulation software that has lots of little blue dots going down to the platforms and little red dots coming back up… And it looks like the kind of space where you’ll feel like a little dot in a big system. That’s design integrity after a sort, right?

I’m sure they’ll add plenty of advertising by the time it’s finished – that’ll brighten the place up a treat.

J'accuse: what use iPhone cities?

As far as the urbanist blogosphere is concerned, the 'networked city' made possible by the iPhone and its applications is the only thing worth talking about. The street as platform... The kind of program a city is... This is where the urban buzz is right now.

And this is a plea for moderation. Look, I know futurology is shiny and exciting, but let's put this in context. Research from Nielsen shows that 10.4 million Britons access mobile internet, which is to say over 80% of the population do not. 6.2 million people use smartphones, but this market is dominated by Nokia (44%) and Blackberry (19%), with the iPhone taking 3rd place with 17%, or about 1.05 million users. As Edward Kershaw, Nielsen's VP of Mobile Media says,

Whilst smartphones get all the media attention it’s important not to overlook what the vast majority of Britons are actually using. It’s easy to be blinded by the hype but this results in a distorted picture of the mobile market.

At a generous estimate, 1 in 10 Londoners use iPhones. This app-tastic networked interactive post-architectural futuropolis? Demographically it's white, it's rich and it's male. Now, that also happens to describe the architectural profession rather well, so it's perhaps not surprising that such a privileged perspective has come to dominate the discourse. But here's a comparison for you: the number of iPhone users in London is broadly similar to the 700,000 Londoners living in housing association properties, and the 750,000 Londoners living in overcrowded conditions.

Political bloggers may be doing a great job analysing affordable housing issues, but urbanists? Architecture bloggers? Hardly a peep. I find this deeply disheartening. Architecture school teaches the most extraordinary imaginative skills yet in such a socio-political vacuum, where the closest anyone gets to political analysis is debating whether Le Corbusier was a fascist. I know y'all want your pretty renderings featured in Wired magazine, but why not use that creativity to "augment reality" in a more progressive way than showing where's the nearest Tube station?

I live in a city of massive inequality, where millions of people are stressed and unhealthy and we struggle to imagine a way to exercise without spending £60/month at Fitness First. I live in a city where house prices are greatly determined by parents' fears of educational inequalities, and where my generation will be at the mercy of landlords for life; I live in a city where too many earn below the London living wage of £7.60 an hour. I live in a city that's fucking political, yet I read the leading blogs in this field and you'd never guess.

Now I too fail to blog about this a fraction as much as I should - do not get me wrong, j'accuse myself; I am the kid who wrote a thesis on the existential nature of dust and I got a bit excited about iPhones too. This is a polemic intended to energise myself as much as anyone else...

Anna Minton writes of the city as political and the urbanist blogo/Tweetosphere listens; plenty of academics are working on these topics although often it's crashingly dull. If technofixes are widely critiqued as a means of addressing climate change, why so much technofetishism in urbanist thinking? If you think an iPhone app can double voter engagement and make big developments more accountable, for god's sake shout about it. But hyperlocal advertising and information about the coolest coffee shop in the neighbourhood is just so much capitalist fluff, so much extra encouragement to consume; so not progressive.

Anthropologically, too, who's actually assessing the extent of the impact of this technocity on people's lives? Where's the empiricism in these blog posts? They all seem to be hypothetical or imaginative rather than ethnographic research of this technology in lived experience. Who's questioning the hype about how revolutionary these technologies are? And, among all this shiny, don't we risk losing sight of the actual, tangible, real spaces people are living in? Shitty bike lanes, muggings, litter and traffic congestion? That's why I liked the Bratton piece I linked to: at least it brought some materiality, some tactility back into this discussion.

In summary: where's the political, the empirical and the embodied in these 'networked cities' essays? One sentence mentioning a need to ensure that the wrong people (who?) don't control (how?) all that data does not incisive analysis make. Architectural theory loves its future cities, its fictional cities, its Ballard and Gibson and CAD and conceptualism. Imagination is great, don't get me wrong.

But imagination alone doesn't make the world a better place.

Design Museum: Richard Rogers exhibition

A couple of themes struck me about the Richard Rogers exhibition at the Design Museum a few months back - absence and the nature of the architectural model; and microflats and confined urban living. The latter will be another post, something to discuss in relation to my own 250 sq ft dwelling. So here I will talk about:

ABSENCE

I've mentioned the dissertation I wrote on the philosophy of dust - how, if you think about it far too much, dust is this really weird force in the domestic. Dust holds a mirror up to human dwelling, showing us back to ourselves as alien. Derrida was an influence here, offering ideas of absent presence and spectrality. And it's those sort of questions I want to ask about the architectural models displayed. What isn't there, and how is this a problem for architecture?



The idea came to mind when I was looking at this perspex-built model, and realised that there wasn't a speck of dust on it. Helen Lloyd at the National Trust has done a lot of research on visitor numbers, the dust they produce, and what this means for their conservation work. The Design Museum hae to be cleaning like maniacs to keep these models pristine (wonder if they pay living wage?). So what does this mean symbolically? It is an erasure of the traces left by people and time, when people-over-time equals life. It is a desire to elevate these models into the Ideal, to proclaim their forms as absolute truths like Platonic solids. It's a great big denial and repression of materiality, and when the practical outcome of the architectural design process is building stuff for embodied use, that's a fucking problem.



This is the big objection that, coming from a social sciences perspective, I have with architecture. It's not about fucking form. The arrangement of pretty shapes and lighting in space (whether in the model or the actual construction) is... method, means to an end. What actually matters is the effects of these forms: environmental impacts, the responses and feelings that buildings elicit from people, the social interactions they enable or proscribe. But the architectural model stops half way through that process, reifying what's secondary to built space (i.e. form) to the sole signifier. It's exactly a monumental arrogance on the behalf of the architect, this desire to deny the fact that every single person's use of the building is a form of interpretation and thus authorship, and to claim this creative generation for themselves alone.

To be sure, I know that architecture students are now trained to think seriously about inhabitation and use and radical architecture - and that's great. Sometimes the results aren't so abstract as to be incomprehensible and useless: even better! But these traditional models ignore all of that, and by being shown in this museum they're being called definitive architecture. NO.



This is a model of the Millennium Dome. What does it say? Everything it tells us is in the absences. The failure of the Dome project was that it was planned as a model (and reconstructed at 100x the scale as the same); that its contents went in because they seemed educational and a good idea in theory, and theory only. The model is white and sterile; the Dome was never planned as living breathing processual space, somewhere that could encourage culture rather than just displaying it dead and fixed. Was its handling of multiculturalism and Britain's hybrid and colonial history also pristinely white in the sense of racially normative? Sure there was PC, but that's not real inclusion. Planned as an unpeopled model, the only participation the Dome allowed was consumption, the only way we could express what we thought of the place was by where we chose to queue. And then they put this model in a museum like it is a good thing?

I want to look for people who are modelling and planning architecture in other ways than these perspex and plastic tombs, ways that bring what matters about the discipline (that is, staging social life) in from the beginning. Suggest things to me...

New York, New York

Twelve days ago I went to New York for the first time. I didn't visit for the sake of the city at all - hell, I wish it didn't exist - oh, let's just say it separates me from someone, someone who's pretending for the moment that the City isn't the one true place to be. Nevertheless, this is enough of a someone that I would consider leaving my beloved City for his - so while I was there (and because I lack the money, and because I'm an anthropologist not a lousy tourist!) I was thinking about how NY operates as a place to live. A few comments on its urban space and architecture, to begin with:

The Bowery was one of the streets I liked the most, even as gentrification starts to go too far. (The less said about the hotel these days the better.) It let me take a satisfyingly evocative (cliched) photo, and still seemed to carry a few ghosts.



The Bowery hosts the New Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the very few bits of proper, committed new architecture I found in the city. (I didn't go even as north as Midtown, though, so I accept I may have missed a bit! Then again, no-one was trying to convince me that the Upper East Side was a happening place to see...) The rainbow 'Hell Yes' on its side didn't exactly 'fit' as such, but the building had a scale and a rhythm that worked well. I liked its texture, I liked its balanced imbalance, and it proided a fitting space for its gallery purpose.



One of the other rare bits of serious new architecture I saw in NY was Tschumi's Blue Building on the Lower East Side - I failed to get a decent picture, but thankfully the New York Times did. Apparently, "its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings." No no no! It's just a bog-standard tower block that happens to be wonky. It's a monolith of glass and steel that doesn't speak to any grittiness or disorder; it seeks to be a singular landmark rather than dispersed or multiple; it's blocky, aggressive, still fucking phallic. This longer review is more astute when it observes that the asymmetric form is all about maximising the square footage, i.e. capital-with-a-capital-C. If I gave a shit about the Lower East Side, perhaps I'd cry.

Oddly enough for America, New York's best buildings were its old ones, with their fragile rusty balconies and sense of speaking in harmony with their neighbours. I was surprised to find that the city had a facility for elegant decay, something I associate strongly with Mediterranean cities and perhaps Latin America. Paint peeled, graffiti layered on top of posters, the sidewalk fallen apart fit to break a leg... Unexpected, but quite beautiful in its anti-statist way. Sea air helps, too, I suppose. I'd thought Coney Island might have this quality but instead it was sadder than that, surrounded by housing estates and derelict land, an illustration of New York's segregation and deelopment rows. Shame. (Fucking enormous seagulls, too.)



Further commentary in another post regarding the 'suburbanisation' of New York and other suggestions as to why I didn't feel it was somewhere that worked very well. But as a teaser, I like this comment by Rocco Landesman, a Broadway producer:

But I think there has been a delibidinization of our city, I really do. ...In terms of public planning there’s been a kind of prudishness, a kind of social and political correctness that’s gone on.

Sex and the City, now there you go - and now that's such a topic for this blog, too!
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