The rusty nail

We approached Broadcasting Place from the south, crossing over the trench of the A58 via a broad footbridge which boasted some epic puddles the like of which I haven’t seen for years: really huge expanses of water showing signs of developing their own weather systems. It was like crossing the moat of a castle, where, due to some epic bureaucratic balls-up, water had been allowed to flow through the point of entry, rather than in a defensive channel.

Our trajectory is important to note, since it afforded us with a head on view of the building’s iconographic twenty-three floor tower, which has been skewed into five jutting sections. As with the rest of the development, it is coated from top to bottom with pre-rusted Cor-Ten steel panels, which have turned a rich reddish ocre since their installation.

Accelerated decrepitude (foreground); decremental accoutrements (background)

Allow me to digress: a while back I was listening to a BBC radio program, the topic of which I’ve meanwhile completely forgotton, but a detail has stuck in my mind and is vaguely relevant here. It concerned the role that oxygen plays in the ageing process, in particular the involvment of reactive free-radicals in cell degeneration. The interviewee underlined the paradox that living organisms are reliant upon oxygen to live, but that ageing is nothing more than a symptom of long-term oxygen poisoning.

The architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, explain that the use of pre-rusted panels was inspired by the surrounding geography, and that the patterning of the windows were concevied as a cascading waterfall. But I’m beginning also to see some kind of sweeping economic analogy alluding to the corrosion of Northern England’s industrial base, and its replacement by the financial service sector. Leeds’ canal-side millhouses aren’t rusting anymore, they’ve been converted into luxury lofts for a town facing £15 million of budget cuts. Meanwhile rust has been turned into a medium for housing students across the road from the pastorially named concrete hulk that is Woodhouse Lane Car Park, which has been retro-fitted with nets to catch would-be suicide candidates.

Woodhouse Lane Car Park: where the rustic meets the rusty

There’s a deep sense here of something earthy and primitive. The whole site makes me want to strap on some headphones and listen to Sun O))). A big rusty nail poking out of the ground, adjacscent to a highway dug deep into the ground like a gash in the skin. Associated with tetanus, rusty nails are not the cause of the disease, but their jagged surfaces make a great home for the Clostridium tetani bacteria which do. And the taught rigidity of Broadcasting Place, caught mid-spasm, wrapping itself around Blenheim Baptist Church and the Old Broadcasting House, resembles the painful contortions of a tetanus sufferer.

Opisthotonus in a patient suffering from tetanus. Charles Bell, 1809 [Source]

But in the midst of all this very worthy, unabashed angularity, I’m kind of tickled to find traces of the humdrum in some of the detailing. A canopy opening out onto the central courtyard looks tawdry: like a remnant from late 1980s municipal leisure pool architecture.

However, the emergency lighting in the courtyard, has a plasticky, off-the-shelf cheapness that I kind of dig in the context of this post-industrial hurt-zone. It’s an honest bit of pragmatism that pulls the rest of the ensemble into line: as though reassuring the onlooker that there’s nothing particularly special going on here: just a genuinely good piece of architecture going about its job, its posturing nothing more than well-dressed efficiency.

In 2010, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat voted Broadcasting Place as its Best Tall Building Overall in its annual awards program, beating the Burj Khalifa in its own innaugeration year.

With thanks to Zoë for showing me around.

A teenage-quad-bike-hooligan filter

The filter shown above is one of several which have been erected to protect Cross Flatts Park (in Leeds, England) from rampaging teenagers on quad-bikes. The park must have been pretty badly hit by this rather obscure problem, since the construction definitely means business: even walking through the thing feels alarmingly close to an impending decapitation. The two angled bars would definitley put a dampener on any plans for a midnight motorbike romp, but look as though they might just about accomodate someone in a wheelchair. Which can’t be said about the following all-too-common fixture of German supermarkets:

A consumer-rush/wheelchair filter

I have never understood why a turnstile is necessary at the entrance of a supermarket. I have never seen the uncontrollable mob of foaming-mouthed consumers for whom this useless construction has been installed. The turnstile blocks the flow of customers and requires absurd acts of coordination to move through with a trolley, children, or shopping bags. Psychologically speaking, the turnstile is a way of telling the customer to please fuck off. Particularly so for consumers in wheelchairs.

For this reason, the supermarket turnstile was awarded the annual Betonkopf (“Cement Head”) prize in 2007, by Germany’s Brandenburg Association for the Disabled. The main culprits were, naturally, crap-supermarket chains Aldi, Netto and Plus, the latter of whom, according to the Association, have failed miserably in removing the turnstile from their existing supermarkets, and still insist on fitting them into newly built stores.

This correspondent can confirm, meanwhile, that semi-crap-supermarket chain Kaiser’s have removed turnstiles from at least one refurbished store in Berlin, have not fitted them to another newly built store. Pleasing for customers not in wheelchairs, and probably the dawning of a new era for people in wheelchairs.

Incidently, turnstiles belong to a group of architectural fixtures called “baffle gates”. The German word for this is the utterly horrid “Vereinzelungsanlage”, which means something like “isolation system”. To end on a lighter note however, I feel inclined to include the following image, found on Wikipedia. It is the common ancestor of all baffle gates: the stile. This particular stile is an ingenious three-way filter allowing humans and dogs to travel in two directions, whilst obstructing the movements of sheep.

A sheep filter

Compare it to the standard solution for illuminated road signs:

Seeing it for the first time, I thought it must be some new devious method of hiding CCTV cameras in familiar objects. Recently I read that that there is now one CCTV camera in England for every 17 people: that’s around 3.5 million cameras, or roughly 15 cameras per square kilometer of land.

There was no camera. Just an LED. It’s a pleasing change, but one has to wonder how large a role aesthetics played in its development: the structure seems to have been informed by organic design, but the simplification of form has surely reduced manufacturing costs. The modern light source would rarely need to be replaced and would consume a fraction of the energy of a standard bulb.

But what kind of organic design are we talking about? It looks like a big droopy dong. And that’s just damned funny.