At aged 14 I went through quite a serious ‘military aircraft phase’ which involved a subscription to a magazine devoted to the subject, hours spent pouring over photos in books, and even going so far as to join the Air Training Corp with a school friend. The ATC is part of the Air Cadet Organisation, and is a voluntary youth organisation supported by the UK’s Royal Air Force.
Mostly, the ATC involved lots of marching up and down a school playground in a horrid, scratchy uniform made of wire wool, and being barked at by the Warrant Officer. But it did have three exciting benefits: 1) older girls in tight uniforms; 2) running around muddy fields late at night in camoflage, pretending to carry out tactical missions, and 3) gliding lessons. I stuck it out at the ATC long enough to experience taking over the controls of a glider, but the scratchy blue uniform and the marching eventually got the better of me, and I left.
The Windsor flyover [Source: Flickr user synx508]
Another thing I stayed with the ATC long enough to experience was a peculiar rumor, or fact, uttered in the back of a white Ford Transit on the way to a muddy field late one night. Passing underneath the flyover bridge of the dual carriageway which leads from Windsor to Slough, a fellow Cadet mentioned that the bridge had been designed specifically to offer Harier Jump Jets parking space in the event of World War III breaking out.
How could it be, that a familiar and deeply civillian part of Windsor, a sleepy middle-class commuter enclave on the Thames and occasional home to the Queen – the place that I had grown up in – had been planned with a mind for its tactical role in WWIII? The thought was chilling, and a bit exciting, and the image has stuck with me to this day.
So this evening, just out of curiosity, I tried something out. And then I got that chilling feeling again:
Act I. Scene III.
Interior. An architect’s office. Late at night.
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Famous Architect: We need to consider location, when thinking about materials.
Associate: Indeed.
FA: And we’ve already commited ourselves to light green curtains.
A: A tricky one. Remind me, where will this hotel stand?
FA: On the site of the old Bavarian brewery, in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg.
A: I see.
FA: The brewing of beer, and the drinking of beer …
A: … and urinating afterwards.
FA: Very good! Keep it there! Let’s stay with urine … You piss up a corner on the way home from the pub and … Oxidization!
A: Oxidized bronze!
FA: Better yet: glass-bronze – it sounds fancier.
A: Fuck yeah!
FA: The glass-bronze cladding gets urinated upon by boozed-up students and left-wingers in protest against gentrification …
A: … it oxidizes, turns green …
FA: … and then matches the curtains in the cocktail lounge.
A: Perfect.
FA: I’m not shit-hot and famous for nothing, you know.
I’ve often wondered about the fate of those spontaneous paths which cut diagonally across rectangular grassy patches. And until I’d discovered the Desire Paths group on Flickr, I didn’t even know that this phenomena even had a name, let alone that other people might be interested enough to catalogue their existence.
A desire path in the center of Berlin.
Recently, a client happened to mention that the empty plot of land next to their building (shown above) was to be turned into a kind of park, and that the desire path already running diagonally through it was to be preserved for a while – amplified even - in order to determine the course of a future, more permanent footpath.
Pretty radical stuff, all things considered. Most urban footpaths seem to have been planned by bureaucrats. The real mistake is that they are planned as formal geometric arrangements, which probably look fine-and-dandy from a hot air balloon, or in the planner’s CAD-program, but mean nothing on the ground. Desire paths are a natural reflection of human behaviour, and are fine examples of ‘swarm-intelligence’, if I might flog a buzz-word for a moment.
A path at Sussex University (and its desired route), snapped by Flickr user GeorgieR
Even worse than poor planning though is enforced stupidity: I recently saw an entire crew of men in green overalls ‘repairing’ a desire path at tax-payer’s expense. Needless to say, the grass they had busily sewn into freshly turned soil on one day, had been ground to a pulpy mush by countless bicycle wheels by the next day.
The city is a harsh environment. It’s all about adapt-and-survive. If you can’t tailor your own behaviour to the demands of sudden change, then you’re doomed.
So when the authorities deem it necessary to install inexplicable rings on lampposts, and you’re a casual metropolitan dude in need of a good old lean, then there isn’t a moment to be lost. You must sieze the opportunity immediately, stake your claim and show no mercy.
I was taken by the matter-of-fact look of this, a map provided for drivers who would otherwise try to take a short cut around the big Schönhauerseralle / Eberswalderstr / Kastanienalle / Danzigerstr / Pappelalle intersection in Berlin. Its the work of LVT Verkehrstechnik, based in Riesa, Sachsen (Germany).
The aesthetics of survival, it seems. This totally bare-bones look, meant only to communicate a set of relationships in the most diagrammatic manner, in a manner in which aesthetics are incidental.
But I wonder if it all doesn’t critically fail to actually help anyone understand anything. Like, where’s the location of the sign on the map, what does the circle signify, what’s the name of the street on the left hand side? And why’s the sign pointing directly out into the street instead of in the direction of oncoming traffic? Is the red circle the location of the road work? Shouldn’t it be an ‘X’?
I wonder if this sign actually helped anyone avoid driving down the blocked road.
