St. Clement's Carpark and Machines for Living In

A nice bit of car-park related anger in The Half Moon on St. Clements. The author ain't wrong either, there's an awful lot of really really terrible apartment architecture out there. However, I think its usually much worse than anything inspired by either Corb or Stalin. Give me a machine to live in anyday.

Nice to meet you Christopher. My name is Sally Bowles

Excuse my absence. I’ve been…busy.

So I went to Berlin recently. I love Berlin, its beautiful and ugly like an old man who's had an interesting life. I drank beer by the litre and walked the streets of Prenzlauerberg pretending I was Sally Bowles and he was Christopher Isherwood. What more could you want from a mini-break.

Here are some of my photos. They aren't very good; my camera is awful.

A tiny bike.

Teacups and graffitti

 Dog in a fountain in Volkspark Friedrichshain

more grafitti in Prenzlauerberg

Posters, grafitti, bulletholes and some very old looking signage (above the door). Palimpsests.

Building a new socialist future

 

Berlin is great for urban studies geeks. The history of western Europe is inscribed and reinscribed upon its axes just as the violence of European history is rearticulated as violent, aggressive urban forms slashing through older spaces leaving a bizarre, unfinished and disjointed landscape.  Bismark’s Berlin was created brutally on top of an older city; in the interwar period the city was made again as a wholly new imperial city; during the cold war era wide roads, tower blocks and industry, not to mention the Wall, created a brutal modernist form equal in scale and grandeur but wholly separate in orientation to the imperial cities which lay underneath.  Today, this sense of dissonance seems only to be ameliorated by the continuing impact of the Berlin Wall on the landscape of much of the city (both in presence and in absence) and the barren, windswept and expensive bureaucratic district coming into existence beside the old Reichstag. Each generation punches its vision of modernity through the city’s landscape so that the city consists today of unrelated, jarring, incomprehensible urban forms.

But these layered modernities are constantly disrupted. Amongst this constant recreation and shattering, renewing images of the future is the constant lure of the past.  The large scale urban forms are tempered by beautiful details and small images: the art deco interiors of Hackeschen Markt, the plaques in the pavements where Jewish families once lived, the overgrown graveyards of Judischer Friedhof and Griefswalder Str. Graffiti—ubiquitous and covering the spectrum of artistic merit—is also a key part of Berlin’s aesthetic. In Britain it’s a signifier of urban pathologies but in Berlin it is strangely beautiful, disrupting and reformulating Berlin’s hard lines, articulating a conscious resistance to bureaucratic urban policies.

In many ways, graffiti was key to my understanding of Berlin, because in many ways Berlin was a city I did not understand. It is a walled city with the wall removed, leaving traces in the layout of roads and the orientation of structures which no longer have an relevance to the spaces around them. As an outsider, and as a tourist, its centreless geography is hard to comprehend; as a pedestrian Berlin’s topography makes little sense. Moreover, the social signifiers which structure and decode urban life in Britain—litter, graffiti, demolished sites—seemingly had very different readings and meanings in the German capital. For hundreds of years Berlin sat on top of the fault-line of world politics, and today those tectonic plates have shifted. With this absence of competing powers the city defies and resists interpretation, and that is exactly the reason why it is so wonderful.  

The Life and Death of Great American Cities

I love American cities. I love everything about them, from the gargantuan sophisticated metropolises of the east coast to the anywherescapes of small-town mid-west and further to the low-rise sunburnt cities of California. I love the vertical landscape of New York; the sprawling weird motorways of Los Angeles; the early skyscrapers of Chicago; the kitsch of Miami and Las Vegas. I love the ambition, the creativity, the concrete and steel, the architecture of Gropius and Mies and SOM, Venturi’s Main Street, the engineered beauty of the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges; the unexpected openness of the gridiron street patterns where vistas spill in between blocks revealing open skies and views far into the distance. Gazing westward from Europe, America’s urban places always seemed like the apotheosis of what a city should mean.

BBC Documentary: Requiem For Detroit from Logan Siegel on Vimeo.

Addicted as I was by my fantasies of metropolitan life I have been equally consumed by recent coverage of the decline of these same places. Once grandiose landscapes of the Midwest, constructed by the market are now doomed by the same forces; people and industry leave, and buildings are simply left to crumble. Without the intervention of any form of state aid to keep downtown alive it is slowly reclaimed by plants and wildlife. Of all American cities beset by subprime failure and population shrinkage, Detroit is the archetype: an urban landscape swiftly is turning into a sedimented archaeology of the rise and collapse of America’s motor industry.  And indeed, it has received extensive coverage in this regard: a new book out of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's photos of the city in ruins was profiled recently in the Guardian, while Julian Temple’s excellent Requiem for Detroit (2010) also explored that city’s collapse.

I recently went to Baltimore, a city which has witnessed a long-term population decline of many American cities, but has the unique distinction of this having been captured and fictionalised for mass-consumption in high-school geography class-meets-cop drama TV show The Wire. And while there was much that was recognisable off the show, it was of course a far more interesting place that the mini-series can portray. The Mount Vernon area just north of downtown formed street after street of flat fronted brick buildings, built in a neo-classical style in the early nineteenth-century. Indeed, it could have been London; if picture of one on them turned up in Summerson’s Georgian London you wouldn’t blink, apart from the fact that these areas are strangely bare of people or life (more on that later).  The downtown area is a strange mix of 1980s and 1990 shiny glass anonymous highrises and beautiful early skyscrapers. These monuments to America’s golden age are Romanesque or gothic cathedrals at top and bottom with miles of windows elongating an otherwise recognisable architectural form and making something completely new. The inner harbour has been expensively refurbished in the last decade. Its a reassuring non-place of granite pavements, chain shops, and America’s largest aquarium. Surprisingly little of the old warehouses have been incorporated into the new generic spaces. It made me feel awkward. In this distance you can see Baltimore’s diminishing dock area: hard constructivist lines of machinery and metal against an empty sky and reflected in the purple water. Nevertheless, it’s a city full of problems. The city is strangely empty; downtown is full of offices, but few people or shops or restaurants to attract them to spend time in these places. Indeed, white flight has clearly taken place on a massive scale: street after street of empty boarded up houses encircle the central business district, indicating urban collapse on a scale incomparable with anything I’ve seen in Britain. Policing is aggressive. Large cameras, marked out by blue lights are suspended above crossroads at ‘problem’ junctions, indicating an intrusive, aggressive, even colonial approach to policing. It was something I wasn’t expecting in the Land of the Free. I loved it though; it was beautiful and strange and with its mix of architectural styles, jarring of land uses, and clashes of wealth and dereliction, it was just like I imagined an American city should be. I admit it, I was a bit of a tourist, I went Wire sightseeing.

Mount Vernon, Baltimore

So I wanted to write this post about the rise and decline of the great American city (to take Jacobs’s phrase and use it in a way she never expected). But when I googled Requiem for Detroit I didn’t get ecstatic reviews of the film’s cinematography, but rather a Michigan newspaper headline entitled ‘Detroit Cliche Watchdog: Britons continue their obsession with Detroit's ruin.’ Rats. Nothing worse than discovering via a google search (of all things!) that you thoughts are a bit hackneyed and obvious. And what do you know (some further googling ensues...)—Julian Temple is English, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre come from France, while I have only been to two places in America (I lived in LA as a child, and now retuned to Baltimore as an adult); all my knowledge of everywhere in between comes not from experience from gawping at documentaries and sitting in libraries in Oxford. So what does this mean? Why do we in Europe marvel at the decline of the once great American cities of the manufacturing belt? Reflected in the water of Baltimore’s declining dockside and in the glass of Detroit’s abandoned towerblocks, what do we see here in Europe?

2010: the Coalition, the Cuts, and the Cities

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone. I’ve got to admit I’m falling victim, just like everyone else, to the massively uninspired ‘what have I learned this year?’ post. My only excuse is that the five day long eating marathon has somewhat dimmed my capacity for originality.

Despite my dislike of New Year’s Eve parties, I’m pretty glad to be seeing the back of 2010. In Britain the Conservatives are driving a truck pretty much every civilising advance of the past seventy years. Secondary education, heathcare, childcare, local government, not to mention the poor bedraggled universities, are all financially cut and circumscribed in their remit. Despite the protestations of Clegg and Cameron and the rest of them that this is merely a financial shake up, the ideological overtones are obvious. Moreover, the very notion of the British citizen is being reformulated as the sometime-pillars of the welfare state are redefined as luxuries or ‘choices’ rather than rights. But as gloomy as things are even here, things are even worse in Ireland as all the words (emigration, IMF, unemployment, and most of all, ‘failure’) of the 1980s return.  I’m not saying I’ve high hopes for 2011, but at least it’s a fresh start.

The ideological tensions of coalition policies are beginning to play out in British cities. The anti-student fees protesters, UK UnCut as the trade unions did a pretty good job of getting their voices heard and getting their point across through taking to the streets in pretty large numbers. I suppose the most worrying tendency which arose out of the month or so of almost daily demonstration is ‘kettling’, which is now seen to be the police’s stock answer to any protest, however peaceful. I suppose I should hardly be surprised. Since the government appears to have removed our rights to many of the services of the welfare state, I don’t know why I thought for an instant that they might respect our right to protest. Instead they immediately label every single demonstrator as a troublemaker, and immediately create an unnecessary antagonism between peaceful protestor and so-called guardian of the peace. The landscape of the city once again becomes an ostensible devise of vigorous state control, and the links between capitalism and urban space are reinscribed.

But over-enthusiastic state policing is merely a small part of the prospective future of the majority of Britain’s cities. Many of Britain’s  cities were built by, for, and in response to, a Victorian industrial boom, and ever since the end of that long era of manufacturing in the 1970s, they have been struggling to readjust and reinvent themselves. That there has been a long, slow malaise in many of Britain’s northern towns which is taking years to improve is hardly surprising when everything from the skills of the population to the layout of the streets is orientated towards industry which no longer exists.  During the noughties the previous administration poured a huge amount of money into conteracting the problems of these post-industrial cities. Gateshead, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and Belfast among others all had their town centres rebuilt, in some fairly problematic alliances between commercial developers and the state (leading in many cases to the privatisation of the very heart of the city). Even more offensive was the use of cowardly words like ‘urban renewal’ to mean ‘social elevation’ when failing council housing was cleared to create pristine owner-occupier apartment blocks. Nevertheless, the sad truth is that the Labour government’s urban policies were far more successful than anything that had come before, and overall the improvement of quality of life in many inner city areas is clear to see. Although we once sneered at the post-modern architecture and grandiose projects of the Blair years, they were hugely important interventions into landscapes which were physically crumbling and socially deprived due to the long impact of industrial decline.

Back in the good old days, I thought this was an immensely stupid looking building

Although its still early days, it seems pretty clear that the days of large-scale flagship projects for the inner cities are over. Local government has already had its funding slashed (n.b. ‘cuts’ have been renamed ‘savings’), leaving it all the more exposed to the lure of capital from private contractors and unable to provide the basic amenities and services which are essential for a functional urban environment. PFI projects for social housing refurbishment have already been scrapped in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Hull, Nottingham, Northampton among others. If the state-sponsored social and cultural projects which did so much to reinvigorate the inner cities during the last ten years are dumped by this administration, then it seems to be fairly sensible to predict a return to the urban malaise and discontent which characterised the Thatcher years. At their best, British cities are places of culture and opportunity but they also require an interventionist state to keep them this way.

 

Celebration USA! Disney, Pastiche, Surburbia and Me

Did you read in the news recently that Disney’s town has had its first murder? The Mouseketeers are ringing their ears, while most commentators appear to be pushing the whole line that one murder in twenty years isn’t all that bad.

If I’d been confined to a town named Celebration, who knows what I might have ended up doing. This place seems like hell. The houses in a range of selected styles, which are only allowed to be painted a selection of pastel colours; while the town square is lit by fake gas lamps and features a range of ye-oldie shops selling nick-naks; there is even a plastic Christmas Tree. The website informs me that it is ‘now snowing nightly’, despite the 90 degree heat. Above it all presides the Disney Corporation, described most excellently by the Guardian as ‘the Vatican with mouse ears’ (oh the mental images).

The worst thing about this scene, however, is not the sinister rodent overlord, but the kitsch and what it represents. The pastel colours, the gas lamps, the front porches and even the typescript used on the shopfronts is all evocative of a bygone age. There really isn’t much modern architecture here, and when it appears its modernist-pastiche, evoking like Grease or Dirty Dancing the ‘golden’ disappeared America of drive in movies and Friday nights at the milkshake bar. It meant to evoke a different America, a better America from forty, fifty, eighty years ago (it’s certainly not a constant) where streets were cleaner, where families stayed together and where a neighbourhood was really a neighbourhood.

 Things were better back in the good old days.

You’d never get me living in Celebration, and it’s got nothing to do with Disney. If I’m honest I can’t see that much difference between this theme-park creation and all the Barratt estates which cover the flood plains of Britain. But I hate the suburbs and I admit it might be my own fault. Maybe it’s because being driving distance away from a public house makes me uneasy. Maybe it’s because I’m not so good at spending time on my own. Maybe it’s all the clean windows and polished doorsteps. Whatever it is, the idea of spending more than two days in a semi-D on a housing estate makes me want to pop open the valium and get started on the gin. Desperate Housewives eat your heart out.

But no one seems to mind my objections, and over the years Celebration, with its pastel colours and olde time shops has flourished. So whatever happened to the American Dream? Why are we all looking back to a bygone America of the past when the continent was meant to represent the future? Let get something straight. Patishe and historicist architecture is not cute, and it’s not just a style. Its an ideological statement of conservative values, a spatial articulation of a reactionary position that the ideal path for the future is to return to some golden past (which , in America, seems to coalesce somewhere around 1957). But this is all clearly rubbish; there is no golden past and the fifties may have been a time of nice Cadillacs but they also were a time of segregation and oppression. That a town exists constructed on these very values is a terrifying statement of the current state of America.

You’ll understand that this means that when I’m killing time buying aubergine curry in rusty tins from newsies on Cowley Road I can argue that it’s a radical statement of my faith in the future.

Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles

Reyner Banham is my idol. I love Los Angeles. Everything works.

The Architectural Legacy of the Celtic Tiger

Is it just me or as the fug of the Celtic-Tiger hangover clears, is it becoming strikingly apparent that the overall architectural legacy has been pretty poor? Many easy targets spring to mind, including but certainly not limited to: the miles upon miles of Dublin which splurges on unendingly towards Naas and Louth; the invented archetypal nowhere of City West business park and many others like it which appear to provide an anodyne substitute for urban forms and commercial centres these days; the monstrosity that is the hotelscape of Ballsbridge (even in this context, the Four Seasons Hotel, a neo-Georgian skyscraper must get a special mention for being exceptionally crap); and who could forget the horrendous housing estates (somehow simultaneously cheap and ostentatious)  which got us into this darn fine mess.

  

Smithfield still looks pretty nice.  

  
 

Its not all bad though, right? Many of the buildings on the south side of the Liffey from the centre to Ringsend are pretty good looking and consist of some really great detailing and inventive use of materials. Trinity College’s new library, with its sheet wall of glass over the cricket pitch is not only beautiful but also incredibly functional. The extension to the National Gallery is wonderful: cool, airy, restrained and constantly surprising. The LUAS is great, both aesthetically and for what it does to the city. It’s not often architectural criticism goes where I’m about to, but it actually looks like fantastic a shiny slug, and it does a wonderful job in linking up bits of Dublin (although it could have done much, much more). Much of Temple Bar (although pre-dating the Celtic Tigers height) is pretty good too: intimate courtyards, sensitive and imaginative reconstructions and restorations and some nice uses of urban space (when these urban spaces aren’t being over taken by British booze cruises, that is). 
   

Broadstone Station looking a bit shabby.

But what becomes apparent as I try to take in the changes is just how much has stayed the same. Some of this stasis must be recognised as a good thing. While the property boom of the 1960s tore the heart out of much of the eighteenth-century core of the city, these areas were not targeted in the same way in the nineties and noughties, and indeed, there was enough money sloshing around that some even found its way into preservation. North Great Georges Street is pretty snazzy these days, Castletown has been completely restored, as have many government departments (best of all, the Department of the Taoiseach on Merrion Street). Some masterpieces still stand derelict: Aldborough House boarded up and quietly rotting, Broadstone Station stands among a herd of Dublin Buses, and Henrietta Street still slowly and quietly decays . I suppose the most important thing is that they are still standing at all. However, much has remained the same which really should have changed during the good times. Unbelievably after nearly twenty years of prosperity built on the construction industry, the best buildings in the city still date from mid-century: Michael Scott’s Busaras and Paul Korelek’s Berkley Library stand out as far superior to anything that has come since.  Ballsbridge and Celbridge have been transformed, but walk around the Coombe or Church Street and there still are many cleared sites and closed buildings. Sameness also describes architectural styles. Once upon a time architects so despised the legacy of British building they went out of their way to build in contrast to their former rulers—with some pretty shocking results. In this context the acres of recent Georgian pastiche is pretty surprising as well as incomprehensible; the jarring between scale and style—as well as host of other objections—can only make one long for the brutal but imaginative solutions of their forebearers. 

  

 Henrietta Street surviving. 

 

But then again you get what you pay for when urban development is utterly funded by private finance: little ambition in terms of design and even less desire to build in areas where the returns aren’t certain to be good. It is not only Ireland’s balance sheet which has suffered because of the developers, Dublin’s skyline hasn’t faired much better. It was a boom which lacked vision or ideology or any sort of ambition beyond making money for the rich, and this vacuum of intelligence and thought is all too apparent in the architecture and town planning which it produced. After nearly twenty years of continuous growth we are left with the shocking realisation that in the inner city very little has changed.