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...

Property porn - desire, self-loathing, and real estate

My Regent's Canal walk a while back was a beautiful but frustrating experience. For mile upon mile I passed the most desirable apartments: perfect geometry, perfect patina, perfect lifestyles on offer if you only had the key.

The key being, oooh, six hundred thousand or so? A cool million if you want a place in the Wenlock Building with its chinchilla fucking carpets... The waterfront warehouse: industrial chic in a calming canalside environment. The stresses of urban living soothed by that neighbouring touch of nature - drink your morning Gaggia-juice watching ducklings dabble past. Lateral space. Curving panoramic picture windows. High ceilings, light, and neighbours of a class worth networking with. What could possibly be nicer?

Such a lifestyle being even remotely attainable.

I do not even desire the highest end buildings (too luxury, not enough warehouse), but it struck me: this is pornography. Lusting after beauty made object, an object you cannot access in reality and yet long to own and possess. That dirty consumer indulgence of imaging where you'd put the grand piano, the cocktail cabinet, and the Andreas Gursky print, and the repeated daydreaming through particularly favoured scenarios. A fantasy life develops in which these things are yours and their lustre rubs off on to you; you become just that little bit more elegant, more urbane.

With a bacherlor/ette pad in this place, just imagine the sexual calibre of the affairs you would have...



'Property porn' is, appallingly, included in the Collins English Dictionary, which describes it as "a genre of escapist TV programmes, magazine features, etc showing desirable properties for sale, especially those in idyllic locations, or in need of renovation, or both."

It has its a Twitter account, @propertyporn.

There's even a book about it, Marjorie B. Garber's Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, where she argues:

What do college students talk about with their roommates? Sex. Twenty years later, what do they talk about with their friends and associates? Real estate. And with the same gleam in the eyes. Real estate today has become a form of yuppie pornography.

But isn't this rather a softcore kind of porn, using the word only as a cheeky reference to having fantasies? Get us, aren't we liberal and naughty? Or hasn't online pornography also created (or facilitated) the sex addict, the dopamine junkie comprehensively scrambling his ability to find pleasure in real women and real sex through consuming this parade of hyperreal silicone and coffee-creamer cum shots? Porno-driven desire all too easily feeds a well of bitterness and frustration - the porn user's misogyny, a hatred for the gorgeous young things who make like they want him on screen – but in real life really don't.

That's where I want to take this 'property porn' analogy. Fantasy-land is a dangerous place, and I want to ask what it does to us to be surrounded by beautiful architecture and beautiful lifestyles that we'll never, ever be able to afford to have.

I find myself half envious, half bitter towards that older generation (my parents) who benefitted from the Nineties and Noughties housing booms - those people who bought low, saw their equity multiply, made it impossible for my generation to buy - and, while they were at it, have us paying off their buy-to-let investments' mortgages with our rental payments. Lovely for them, of course, but this generational inequity (confined to the middle class, admittedly, but that's most of us these days) is no social good.

Through desiring these homes I cannot afford, it's also easy to start resenting my current work in social research. Ooh, an LSE 1st and I might be able to earn £25k in about ten years' time? Christ, what the hell made me pick anthropology when I could have done maths and been a banker! Each time I desire an apartment I can't imagine ever affording, my earning ability, my choices, my value to the (economic) world are measured - and found wanting. Doing something inexplicable in finance starts to look really very rational, if else so much of the city (its homes, its shops, its restaurants and pleasure) can never, ever be mine.

An article at Counterpunch comes to some similar thoughts:

How much was property porn responsible for the inflation of the bubble? Long before becoming chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, Adam Sampson did academic research on sexual pornography. He sees the two as having a similar impact:
"Pornography can make feelings and behaviours that are otherwise unacceptable seem normal. Property porn didn't invent the pastime of using houses to make money - but it gave it legitimacy."

Which is what is truly objectionable about property porn - it takes away the home, it takes away the love - and makes it a mere financial transaction.

Still life with uncollected post & the lights left on

Last night's walk provided an apt case study for recent ideas about empty properties (see here and here) - albeit in a commercial rather than residential building. This shop, once Shoe Studio, sits - of all places - on Covent Garden itself, on the corner with James Street heading up to the tube. In terms of raw footfall, this site is surely as busy as Oxford Street. Yet, like much of Oxford Street, its landlord seems to have been struggling to attract quality retailers; the no-brand Shoe Studio went into administration in March 2009, and the shop has sat empty for eight months.

They left but failed to turn off the lights - with such irresponsibility is it any wonder the store failed? But, oh, what an aesthetic abandonment. The surfaces are so white and smooth yet the glass in the windows is dirtying slightly under the carbonate trails of the rain. Stripped of any saleable merchandise there is only the rectilinear calm of the shelving and its backlit glow into the night.

Are there ghosts here? Covent Garden has quite the history but this space is too antiseptic; without occupants you might call the shop disembodied but yet it never had a soul to lose. There's a sign on the windows promising 'new collection' but the doors are chained shut.





Related comment from Retail Week: Covent Garden's landlord has plans for rejuvenation (June 2009):

Many of the problems with the market stem from Covent Garden’s mass of smaller streets surrounding the main piazza and the dozens of landlords that have claimed a stake in the area since 1913 when the main estate was first sold off by the Duke of Bedford. Because there have been so many parties involved the retail offer has grown up relatively untamed, with a wide range of shops now occupying the streets.

Three years ago, Capco bought the Covent Garden Estate from Scottish Widows for £421m. Since then it has expanded its reach in the area to the point that the landlord now controls 750,000 sq ft of land around the market – which is most of Covent Garden. It is this huge dominance of the area, lacking since 1913, that gives Capco the opportunity to finally improve the offer. It has the luxury of being able to take a unified approach to planning the retail.

The places regeneration leaves behind

Just an ordinary North London road, scruffy and shabby with newsagents and kebab shops. When I moved to the City I didn't like these places, so different to the pristine market town where I grew up. But it's home now.

Even before 2008 many shopfronts were battened down or whitewashed over: longer-term shifts in economic geography than recession drove businesses out. Flats on this road are starting to be visibly gentrified - I live in one such block and there's a decent (clearly architect-driven) refurb just round the corner. But there is little demand for business here any more, only corner shop chicken shop pizza place. The odd laundrette; still internet cafes, a reminder that the internet is not exactly the great leveller; many are still economically or culturally excluded. Little more. These are some of the shops shuttered and left behind:



Blackalls Fruiterers and Greengrocers, established over 100 years. Closed now, closed at least fifteen years if its phone number began not 0207 or 0171 but 071. And the tenant just pulled the shutters down and left - the landlord has not re-let the space, has not converted into a fried chicken emporium or poundstore or fought the council for reclassification as in-demand residential. Just left.



W. Plumb the butcher has a beautiful old-fashioned sign with even a little stained glass. Where did he go? How did he feel about closing the business, about giving up hope of becoming W. Plumb & Sons, or perhaps Daughters? I cannot imagine this road with a proper old-fashioned independent butcher on it - what was it like, did it have community that extended beyond council estate dwellers? (Do they still have community, or do I romanticise? I know we middle classes have lost it.) This has always been a working class area, my block of flats one of the few visible signs of gentrification - but for it now to have a proper family butchers like this would be such a posh thing: how Highgate, how Crouch End.



Perhaps a more recent casualty - or not: Sega's Dreamcast (2001) was a failure, and the Saturn (1995) not much better, so would this branding date back to Megadrive days (1991)? I spoke to the chap in North London Models - not a brothel, a model aircraft & toy car shop, a relic still going on no visible sales at all - who dated the loss of these shops to the early Nineties and, presumably, the recession then. Further down the road there was even a bank, the Natwest form now sitting above somebody's kitchen still visible under layers of paint. Was this area once a highstreet, a community, a functioning economy? A destination? Now it is just a road for transit through to other places.

Capital markets - the economic realities of office space

Enough cultural whiff-whaff (as our Dear Leader Mr Johnson might say): the city's made of money. Made of capital, if you will. And I love money: I find it fascinating.

The Rat and Mouse is a key real estate economics blog, but its focus is largely residential property - as indeed is most newspaper coverage. Subprime residential mortgages in the US may have kickstarted the whole credit crunch - this was something I watched kick off from a ringside seat in real estate research; fascinating - but it is in fact commercial real estate that has seen the biggest falls. You thought 22% peak-to-current fall in house prices was bad? Try a 50% crash in office values.

Furthermore, whereas subprime mortgage securities may have been the catalyst of the crunch, it is commercial property that yet remains to kick the banks in the teeth. They lent too much against this sector, and have not yet written down these loans and deleveraged these securities. Savills say almost all property investment loans made between 2004 and 2007 are now in negative equity, yet banks are extending loans rather than crystallise their losses. The last couple of weeks have seen green shoots emerging in the economy much earlier than anyone really expected - Darling may have been mocked for his Budget, but now Q3 growth looks a real likelihood. Yet with these lending problems ahead, do you really want to bet against a W-shaped double dip coming up after Christmas?

What I haven't seen is much discussion of what this implies for the urban fabric. With companies cutting back on staff and the near-cessation of merger & acquisition activity, demand for office rentals is down as companies aren't needing to trade up to larger spaces. (The falling rents drive part of this 50% collapse in values discussed above: commercial property is an investment class so its value is based on its yield.) Increases in availability and affordability combined with the current mood of caution may mean that demand will hold up best in traditional centres: City, West End and a bit of Holborn. Your Victoria, Paddington and Kings Cross developments? Aren't going to get the big tenants they'd counted on, and new developments are visibly being put on hold as they fail to be pre-let before completion. Additionally with prime office space more accessible, demand for shabbier secondary offices will surely decrease. If summer is as hot as forecast, how much tolerance will there be for poor or no air conditioning? There's a lot of 1960s and 70s space that, at least superficially, looks to be beyond refurb. Yet demolition costs money, and there's little pressure for new development sites yet.



City Project says it'll be a prime summer for exploring abandoned buildings...