Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (’pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist’s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

Regent’s Park, London. Late 20th Century.

Dansey Place, in all probability, behind a Chinese restaurant

I remember being interested in quietness, and of wanting to avoid clichés of the ‘pulsating, chaotic city’ kind. I’d come across the photography of Paul Barkshire, whose black and white photos of London were unpeopled, meditative and strangely timeless. He made the early 1980’s look like the early 1880’s, and seemed to have a knack of coaxing the inner village out of the metropolis. I wanted something similar. Super-8 cartridges contained 15 meters of film, and at 18 frames per second were good for three minutes of film. This was to be my defining restriction. The film I wanted to make wouldn’t be cut, it would just be grafted togther. This could just as easily be attributed to a prediliction for Andy Warhol as it could to sheer laziness.

The author (left), and his sister drink 60p cups of tea

My sister and I went to London together to make the film. I had four sites in mind, conjoined by the idea of descent, or diminishing space: Regent’s Park, an alleyway in Chinatown, the inside of a cafe, and the Tube. I held the camera, my sister the tapedeck.

Having converted the film I was touched to discover younger versions of us both in the now defunct and sorely-missed New Picadilly Café on Denman Street, occasionally looking somewhat self-conscious in front of the camera. If I’d known that the film was to become a historical document I’d have pointed the camera into the cafe at the staff and the other patrons.

Going underground

The soundtrack seems to have been recorded asynchronously. I don’t recall why. It’s most noticeable in the cafe, and apparant too in the final underground scene where at least the closing-door-alarm seems to match roughly with the entrance and exit of some passengers.

Of course, Super-8 film was already an anachronism when I shot the film. VHS was still de rigueur, but Apple’s Quicktime software was already in its second version, signalling things to come. Digitized, streamed and embedded, the film seems not just doubly aged, but almost decrepit; of another epoch. The grainysmear patina of real film with all its fluff, underexposure and colour-bleed is now just a cosmetic option in some app, lending the digital the aura of the authentic, of the crafted. Ironically, the beauty of Super-8 was that you didn’t really need to know what you were doing either. But just look at those black tones! No idea how that happend.

Anyway, take a look at the film. Absolutely nothing happens. I urge you to watch all of it anyway, and if it helps make things more interesting I can reveal that there is an odd moment of audio-creep about three-quarters of the way in, where a French voice can be heard intruding upon the soundtrack. Probably some casette deck balls-up. As you may recall, they didn’t have an ‘undo’ function.

More conventional urban treasure hunting is to be found in picking through boxes of cut-price books. This is of course a popular pastime in Paris, particularly along the Seine. This neat shopfront design playfully tempts the passerby to delve into the shop’s innards. The loss leaders in the boxes draw us in.

This untidy French shopfront certainly does not draw us in, at least not anymore. But the decaying lettering has left us with the decrepit painting business of ‘M. Badin’, which translates as ‘Mister Playful’. Serendipity or joke?

I was not around in the 1960s or 1970s to see the buildings of the South Bank Centre in London, so I don’t know what the signage was like in those days. But I do know that the big colourful signs that are tacked all over the complex now betray a certain lack of love for their architectural heritage on the part of the people who run these buildings. 1960s brutalism, as exemplified by the Hayward and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both pictured here, can indeed be hard to love. That is, it can be hard to love if what you love is flat, multi-coloured, letters-as-cartoons.

These flaky masks deny all the qualities (volume, substance, materiality, roughness, depth, anchoredness) that the buildings stand for. The original design is so uncompromising, however, that the undeniable, unconquerable volumes win out, and the contemporary signage looks like so many price-stickers that one day will be faded, curled and outdated as they cling to a forgotten tin in the back of your cupboard.

The semi-circular terrace is the perfect shape for these buildings because it allows vistas only of the fronts of the buildings. The geometry of the semi-circle means that looking out the back of any of these buildings makes it impossible to see the rear facades of the neighbouring buildings. This is entirely in keeping with the clean and proportioned aesthetic of the fronts, which are possible only at the expense of the jumbled and irregular rears. Thus, the townhouses of Cartwright Gardens were designed so that the only thing that could be seen from the rear would be the gardens of the houses themselves, providing a buffer between the terrace and whatever the next building would have been around 1807.

This is the view from the rear of the Harlingford Hotel, on the south side of Cartwright Gardens. Whatever green space there was visible from here has been eaten up in the intervening years, and now the townhouses have no space out the back other than the closed-in courtyards which act as light- and air-wells. The pressure of space and the temptation of high land prices have taken their toll, and now the genteel terrace contemplates an array of warehouse roofs. The overall effect is that distinctively London look of eras upon eras, spaces upon spaces, blocks upon blocks, where the commercial imperative above all has created a jumble that ranges from captivating to distressing, depending on your mood and your pay level. There has been little to invite hotel guests to glance out the window of the return stairs between the third and fourth floors, from where this picture was taken. Until 2009/10, that is, when the colourful rear facade opposite suddenly appeared. What the children’s colourbook colour-scheme of the new building attempts to distract us from is the fact that the new structure has filled the only unoccupied gap on the entire block.

The new building appears in this satellite image as a grey rhomboid, backing on to the beige-roofed buildings on the north side of Tavistock Place. The warehouse roofs of the first picture shine white in the sunshine in the satellite image. The view from the window at the back of the Harlingford used to include the rear of Tavistock Place, but this is a fact I can assert not from memory but only from deduction. I have stayed in that hotel many times, and looked out that window many times, but I can no longer remember what the view used to be. Now that this new building has appeared, a gap in my memory has opened. Nobody knows the value of an empty site more than a building developer, except perhaps the people who spend the rest of their days gazing out at the object that has taken its place.

Was reading a fascinating interview with the artist Cyprien Gaillard last night, in issue 7 of Pin-Up Magazine. I really dig what this guy is doing with architecture: recycling brutalist housing into stone gravel-ways (La grande allée du Château de Oiron), transplanting monuments from site to site (Le canard de Beaugrenelle), reflecting on spring break tourists puking on Mayan ruins. See his portfolio here.

I helped survey underground station entrance buildings. I drew worm’s-eye axonometric views of esculator shafts. I discovered Shin Takamatsu. I learnt that Finsbury Park, when spoken backwards, became ‘Krapy Rubsnif’. I played an after-work game of softball against Saatchi & Saatchi. I heard the word “fuckwhip” used as a term of collegial endearment for the first and only time in my life. I commuted to work in bermuda shorts. The office fax machine’s internal clock was set to the year 1902. And I was sure of two things: that I would never become an architect, and that I was definitely going to live and work in London in the future.

One lunchtime I was outside on the banks of the Thames with a couple of guys from the office, and we were looking at this building from across the river:

Minster Court, by GMW Architects, 1991. [Photo: Flickr user stevecadman]

It seems extraordinary that we were able to actually see it from where we were sat, but it was a sufficient view for one of the architects to dub Minster Court “Transylvania”. Looking back now, this small event seems to be ultra significant, since it was my first encounter with architectural satire, which is obviously part of SLAB’s unwritten program.

Quartier 206, by Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners, 1992-96. [Click to enlarge]

So I’m wondering if a dash of nostalgia has anything to do with my new found admiration for the Quartier 206 building, shown above. Built in the early to mid nineties, this was one of a whole ensemble of projects which went up on Friedrichstraße, one of Berlin’s most important thoroughfares. There is a lot to hate about post-reunification architecture on Friedrichstraße. O.M.Ungers’ Quartier 205 is a starchy sandstone waffel, one of the late architect’s many odes to the mystical universality of the square, which houses a branch of H&M. Even the great Philip Johnsson left his mark here, though the bulbous turd he deposited close to Checkpoint Charlie must have been draughted whilst he was on vacation.

But Q206 has something going for it. By day it is an exhausting beige hulk, ridiculously ribbed and encrusted with jutting angular bay elements. But at night it turns into a glowing 8-bit computer game rendered in amethyst. Atari-gothic, or something. Recast Max Schreck’s Nosferatu as a Vice City pimp and this could be the Dark Lord’s Beverly Hills crib. And that’s kind of where we all want to go shopping isn’t it?

One man and his dog

Protagonist Robert Neville’s own personal ground zero is of course Manhattan, which has been repeatedly and gleefully destroyed on film on numerous occasions: When World’s Collide (flood), Ghost Busters II (paranormal slime), The Day After Tomorrow (tidal wave and megablizzard), Godzilla (angry reptile), Armageddon (slight meteorite damage), Deep Impact (tidal wave, again), Independence Day (aliens) and the upcoming Cloverfield (some indistinct entity) are just a few examples. New York Magazine’s entertainment blog «Vulture» recently posted the 10 Best Movie Destructions of New York complete with video clips, which helpfully reduces each film to its money shot.

I am Legend was a must-see: after all, the trailer promised scenes of Will Smith harvesting corn in central park, and hunting antelope on 5th Avenue. These sequences were fascinating, and didn’t dissapoint; unlike the film’s ending which was a predictably heinous turd. The thing which sets this narrative apart from the others though, is the timescale. Deep Impact’s kilometer-high tidal wave obliterates New York in 30 soggy seconds, but Legend’s depiction of gradual ruination progresses at an unperceivable bio-geological pace: fungus spreads, weeds grow taller, wild animals reclaim territory and things fall apart very, very slowly. It is a gritty reminder that what holds our towns and cities together is not just great feats of engineering, but boring daily maintenence.

Today, your place of work. Tomorrow a «vertical ecosystem» [Source: The History Channel]

Anti-architects with access to The History Channel will have some fun on the 21st Jan. with the premier of Life After People, a 2 hour «TV event» which asks «What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever?» Apart from fish, whales and dolphins profiting enormously from the absense of human life, the effects on buildings are studied. Video clips on the programe’s website show university professor Ray Coppinger talking of «vertical ecosystems» when pondering the fait of abandoned skyscrapers.

This all puts me in mind of Mike Davis’ splendidly morbid essay «Dead Cities: A Natural History» published in 2002, in which the author references the 1886 novel After London: or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies. In it, Jeffries expounds his vision of the capital city, semi-submerged by a county-sized inland sea blocked by huge dams of debris piling up against the crumbling structures of «ancient bridges» crossing the Thames:

Thus the low-lying parts of the mighty city of London became swamps, and the higher grounds were clad with bushes. The very largest of the buildings fell in, and there was nothing visible but trees and hawthorns on the upper lands, and willows, flags, reeds, and rushes on the lower. These crumbling ruins still more choked the stream, and almost, if not quite, turned it back. If any water ooze past, it is not perceptible, and there is no channel through to the salt ocean. It is a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate.

Scene from Flood, a 2007 British film, based on a novel by Richard Doyle.

Amidst this fictional example of creeping urban decay, Mike Davis reminds us of the aftermath of the bombing of Berlin in World War II. He recalls the words of poet Gottfried Benn who observed nettles as «tall as men»; signs were put up on the Autobahn warning of wolves; 50 strong heards of wild boar «ravaged» the city’s periphery and British troops helped an emaciated population by hunting three species of deer who had moved into the Spandau forests in search of food.

Central Berlin: a swamp waiting to happen

Berlin’s few remaining bomb sites, such as SLAB’s oft mentioned inner-city prairie, are stark reminders of just how close an urban environment is to spiralling back to a wild natural environment. Gottfried Benn’s man-high nettles are no joke; last summer I was fascinated by a thistle in a nearby green spot which grew to a majestic 1.5 meters before it was mown away. According to the Senate Department for Urban Development, Berlin is home to almost 30.000 different plant and animal species, making it more biodiverse than the surrounding countryside. Without the constant efforts of this cash-strapped city, Berlin would return quickly to the swamp on which it was built.

Further decay:
Pripyat.com – Fascinating website about the abandoned town of Pripyat, not far away from Chernobyl. It’s been uninhabited for 20 years, and trees have taken over.
Detroit Public Schools Book Depository – in a building next to Michigan Central Station in downtown Detroit stands the rotting remains of a huge storage space for educational books. Gutted by fire and open to the elements, hundreds-of-thousands of textbooks have been left to decay.
Sweet Juniper – Blog post accompanying the Detroit photos.

Inner city life: it’s sepia-toned

This got me thinking about the word “urban” and its relationship to music. It’s roots in the US go back to 1970s HipHop and R&B, but in the last few years it has become strongly tied with London’s underground music scene. Artists such as Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, Lady Sovereign or the Roll Deep Crew, all from East London, are typical proponants of a British urban sound and are usually lumped together in the genre “Grime”. On his 2004 track Wot Do U Call It?, Wiley pokes fun at the need to label music with simple catch-all terms: “What you called it? Urban? / What you call it? Garage?” he rhymes ironically.

The garage he’s referring to here isn’t where he parks his car, but rather the genre “Garage” – or more specifically, UK Garage – a British spin-off of the kind of dance music which got played in New York City’s Paradise Garage club in the late 1970s to mid 1980s. A close relative is of course “House” music which developed out of Disco, and possibly owes it’s name to The Warehouse, a Chicago club of the same era. The relationship between music and architecture in a post-industrial urban setting is clear, however odd such terms might sound.

Last week a friend introduced me to the numbingly addictive last.fm. This website is a depository for vast amounts of music which is searchable via artists names or, inevitably these days, user definable tags. Music matching your search is streamed to you via an in-browser player, but once your song is over, the software kicks in and automaically loads the next tune out of a relational database. The result is a stream-of-consciousness meander through a collective sense of “genre”.

So I’ve tried something out. Take a look at the sidebar and you’ll see a last.fm widget configured to play music tagged with the word “urban”. Give it a whirl. Next week I’ll reconfigure it and try out “Garage” or “House”. But I’ll have some fun too. In a rural parallel universe maybe there’s a Pastoral dance music scene which has spawned a plethora of sub-genres called “Shed” or “Barn”. I’d like to know what “Haystack” music sounds like, or how you might dance to the stuff people are calling “Silo-Style”. I’ll try these and other tags out, and see what happens.

But what I’m really looking forward to is a future breed of minimal-brutalist Brazilian HipHop called “el Slab”.