The Freedom of Aesthetics

An essay published in the "Freedom and Architecture" edition of Architectural Design, guest edited by Owen Hopkins

The Roman Singularity

Published in Platform Magazine, March 2018

Nostalgic Futures

Published in the April 2018 edition of Real Review

Simmering throughout 2014 and 2015, and eventually boiling over in condemnatory newspaper inches and their correspondingly defensive ripostes, was an unlikely, but intensely passionate popular international controversy. Chartres Cathedral, that great inspiration to sensitive architectural romantics the world over, with its sublime interior gloom, its scarred and stained piers and dark, mysterious vaults, was undergoing a major project intended to insure its long-term preservation. As the scaffolding began to come down in the first part of the nave to have work completed, visitors were greeted not by the millennial patina, the layered material scars of time-passed they had come to visit, but were instead confronted by a super-bright, brand-new beige painted finish, complete with Colgate-white applied false mortar lines. The interior suddenly more resembled a neon-luminous faux-medieval French resort hotel than the awesome gloom to which visitors were accustomed.

The declared intention, it became clear, was not just to preserve, but to restore, and to restore to an arbitrarily chosen point along the timeline of the great building’s long and complex history. The decorative scheme conformed to the earliest layer of paint that had been uncovered during exploratory works, the custodians of the cathedral claimed, and so it was ‘authentic’. The “patina of time” that was so beloved by so many generations of visitors was just the accumulated dirt of centuries combined with fire damage, they maintained. This wear and damage had left the layers of paint looking like real stone, which in fact it never had been, it was all just a distraction from the original building’s true architectural clarity, apparently. Critics responded that the accumulated traces of history, and the ability to experience the passing of time as an atmosphere, as a composite of subsequent alterations, transformations and events, as an intricately interwoven concatenation of irreconcilable visions for the same space, was destroyed. The cathedral’s chaotic chronology was eradicated in favour of an impossibly simple, and reductively unitary (and archaeologically dubious), notion of the past, one predicated on the idea of a “perfect moment” in which a building, or a place, was the way it was meant to, that we can discern that moment, and that we should always endeavour to return to it, no matter the “stuff” that stands in the way.

Nostalgia is inherent to the development of modernity. The more our society progresses along the path of economic and material development, the faster change becomes, rendering even historical periods immediately preceding our own -we are talking only a matter of decades- almost incomprehensibly distant and strange. A pervading sense of frantically untethered, abstract and uncontrollable velocity finds in a need for rootedness, a sense of place, and a shared past, its antidote. In other words, Modernity is a form of constant uprooting and travel, and it always and without fail produces a yearning for home. The choice is not whether to be nostalgic, it is woven into the fabric of our epoch, the choice is how we choose to engage with our nostalgia, how we allow it to manifest itself.

In The Future of Nostalgia, the late Svetlana Boym posits two forms. On the one hand is “Restorative Nostalgia”, the easiest, most common, and most dangerous kind, in which a false, ideal past is imagined that must be returned to, one which stands outside of history as the paragon of perfection in the eyes of those who long for it. Anything that does not conform to this necessarily imaginary arcadia is at best not worthy of valuing and is at worst to be swept away. On the other hand there is “Reflective Nostalgia”, in which the past is to be yearned after, grasped at, and preserved where possible, its traces valued and meditated upon, but above all is an awareness of both the impossibility of its return, as well as the impossibility of comprehending it in its full richness and plenitude. The former abhors complexity, it wants to freeze the process of change, to end history. The latter values the layered and the ambiguous, it welcomes the continued effects of time, it is aware of its own position in a continuum and embraces history as something that progresses into the future.

In the instance of Chartres Cathedral, French authorities decided upon a restorative approach, while those (it seems) with a romantic persuasion, erred towards a Reflective position. The eerie, plastic-surgery-gone-wrong results of the reconstructive approach are now clear for all to see on the building’s interior. The restorative mentality, the desire to freeze, to wind-back history towards a perfect moment that never actually existed, is seeping into our consciousness in far less obvious, and far more destructive ways than the occasional heavy-handed preservation project.

Before the second world war there was almost no protection for buildings that today we would consider to be of historic importance. The notions of preservation and heritage were mostly understood as applying to objects of art, and the intangible cultural assets of regional and national traditions. With regards to buildings, the city, and the physical fabric of the nation’s environment, it was individual property rights that trumped all, with a landowner’s right to develop his property as he saw fit, and the protection of this right being the primary motivator of the law. Imagine if Prince Charles decided he wanted to build a whole new façade for Buckingham Palace, completely obscuring the now historic frontage behind (this is exactly what happened twice, in the 1850s, and the 1910s), if Nash’s terraces facing Regents Park were demolished en-masse the way his Regents St was between 1895 and 1927, or if GE Street’s High Courts were demolished to make way for a large office building as Soane’s incomparable Bank of England was in the 20s. This kind of development at the loss of historical buildings was commonplace prior to the 1940s.

The idea that the government, or the public, should deign to restrict what a person could do with their own property, let alone stop them from doing anything to it at all, was extremely problematic. It would take the trauma of the war, and the consequentially massive loss of historic buildings, together with a reorientation of the national political sentiment away from the strictly interpreted primacy of individual rights in general, and towards the custodian’s care of a benevolent state on the behalf of all citizens, to introduce the Listing system that designates which buildings are of special importance to the nation’s collective memory, and should have their preservation enforced by the power of the law.

The post-war period was one of profound national metamorphosis, of large scale construction and the reordering of the country’s existing urban centres, as well as of the creation of numerous -entirely new- metropolitan areas through the New Towns Act. The Listing system was complementary to this national project of modernisation and development. It was intended to pinpoint key projects, important markers in the country’s architectural and social trajectory, whose preservation would benefit the population overall, acting as officially-recognised anchors to a shared and state-sanctioned past, whose presence would actively aid the transition to a new and different future by providing a sense of security that the past was not being completely lost. Not only was the preservation of heritage not mutually exclusive to radical redevelopment, it was intrinsic to it. This was a reflective relationship to Notsalgia writ large. There was a mutual understanding between the past and the present, in which the best of the past was retained under the tacit agreement that it would not prejudice the future. Preservation was an integral driver of change, it was one of the main ingredients that allowed for and fostered the spatial continuation of history.

What was intended as a limited tool for preserving key buildings within a radically evolving spatial landscape, has since ballooned into something quite different. 2% of the entire building stock of England is now listed in one form or another, adding up to roughly 374,000 listed properties. Added to this are Conservation Zones. Since 1967 whole city areas that are deemed to be of special interest must have all new buildings or renovations preserve or enhance the “special character” of the local area. These were instituted in reaction to a prevailing tendency towards wholesale redevelopment and large-scale infrastructure projects in the 1960s, which were sometimes either endangering, or demolishing whole neighbourhoods. These preservation districts have however since spread across the country (There are now 9,800 of them across England, with the number constantly rising), preserving the “character” of any number of built-up areas that are not in the least danger from anything other than their normal evolution. Conservation Zones are too often simply areas that wistfully conjure up the picturesque image of a previous historical era for which those with political wherewithal are nostalgic. I mention political wherewithal, because it is chiefly those with the time, the inclination, the financial resources, and the know-how, who are able to push for an area they care for, or buildings they care for, to be designated, leading to a disproportionate number of these protections being in areas inhabited by the middle and upper classes.

During the intervening period, the scale of national infrastructure development, and of planned new urban construction has been in precipitous decline, in an inverse numerical relationship with the degree of preservation that is being enforced. Whereas previously Listing and the occasional, surgical use of Conservation Zones, were an ameliorating aspect of universal progress and development, which affected everyone, development and preservation are now in stark opposition, and it is a divide which is marked above all by wealth, with the effects of both being divvied up with stark inequality. On the one hand the wealthier a person is, the more likely -in England at least- they are to live in a ‘historical’ neighbourhood, and on the other hand, due to their access to specialist assistance and consultation, as well as the extra time they are likely to have at their disposal, often combined with an acquaintance towards bureaucratic and professional jargon, the more likely they are to be successful in their campaigns to have their historical areas and buildings protected. They themselves end up defining what is actually considered historical. Many working class and less affluent areas are of historical significance and could be argued to be of such through a new set of heritage parameters, but it is rare for these areas to be looked at, let alone recognised.

It is no coincidence that the value of real estate assets in Conservation Zones is significantly higher than those outside. These areas, and the enforcement of “in character” planning criteria that force all new architecture to progressively reinforce a frozen historical image of the local district in which they are built, effectively lock capital in through the elimination of any future risk of change that might be detrimental to real estate asset values. As each new project is added, and each property is ‘restored’ in idealised heritage form, these zones evolve into reconstructed caricatures of perfectly faux “authentic” pasts, much as the French authorities returned Chartres to its supposedly superior beginnings. In an urban-scale, more drawn-out version of Chartres, the traces and architectures of intervening periods are gradually replaced with buildings resembling (sometimes in abstract form, other times in direct pastiche reconstructions) solely the alleged perfect point in the past that residents and authorities deem valuable. 1950s cosy-modern premises are replaced with brick townhouses, 1960s concrete is replaced with painted stucco and code-stone. The rich get to live in their dream past. Time is arrested, reversed, artificially reconstructed, and it is all done at a profit almost entirely devoid of risk.

Development of course still occurs, less planned, less for the communal benefit, but the economy churns, and flats are built, areas demolished and redeveloped. Only this doesn’t happen in wealthy, preserved areas. The burden of Modernity, which is first and foremost that of dramatic change, now falls squarely on those unlucky enough to not live in reconstructed zones of privileged preservation. The ultimate luxury in 21^st Century England is the luxury to live free of change, to live in an area that is spatially static, in which the only possibly modification is that which goes backwards towards the image of a comforting past, towards an ever more tasteful and sanitised safety deposit box of authentic Britishness. Reconstructive Nostalgia is fused with a form of spatialised economic ghettoization, in which the right to maintain physical connections with shared memories of the past is granted only to those who have gamed the system for their own benefit, while everyone else is excluded even from the cathartic balm of Nostalgia, while nonetheless bearing the full force of constant architectural and economic instability, uncertainty, and perpetual change. What was once a restriction of individual property rights for the benefit of the common good, has come full circle to become a tool to increase the stature, wealth, and environment of those with the most valuable property.

Over the past 35 years the culture of preservation has metastasised from a positive participant in the flux and growth of England’s spatial landscape, into a toxic blockage of the system that does not just reflect the injustices of a late neoliberal country, it actively enables and accelerates them, whilst providing a perfect cover for those benefitting from it most. What is actually individuals taking care of their own, and ensuring unceasing private gain and freedom from the stress of change, is dressed up as a public good solely through the socially acceptable and heretofore unassailable doctrine of ever-expanding Preservation (“look, we are preserving this area, it is so special, who on earth could say that was a bad thing?!”).

We should protect the best from our past, no one nowadays would disagree with that, but it is time that we profoundly question what is protected, why, and by whose pressure, whilst disentangling the image of our complex cities from the reductive, picture-postcard language of preservation, to halt the precipitous rush towards a reconstructive tendency that has taken hold since the 1970s. Nostalgia is fine, it is to be expected, but let’s reflect on it, and lets once again ally the past with progress.  

R7 King's Cross

A Building review in Architecture Today November 2017

I am standing on a terrace 7 floors above the new King’s Cross re-development, and everything is pink, a deep, intensely saturated rich, reddish pink. The concrete paving on which I am standing is pink, the balustrades and handrail are pink, as are the four storeys of façade rising up above me, even the glass reflects the meaty hues of the building’s fins and is a shiny metallic version of the same pink.

The effect is hallucinatory, thrilling, and set against the greys and blues of the London sky, intensely picturesque and painterly. The building is empty, having been externally completed, with internal fit-out only just beginning, and so the total envelopment in colour that I am experiencing is a momentary state. Set to become Neu-Look’s headquarters, this terrace will be filled with furniture, and be busy with variegated employees, as will the two equally pigmented outdoor loggias on every floor. Rather than the building attempting to provide a “neutral backdrop” as most tend to, here all the various activities will be situated within, and contrasted against, a refreshingly confident and virtuoso act of aesthetic place-making through colour, that will easily accommodate the richness and variety of daily life, whilst maintaining a powerful and distinct sense of singularity.

R7 at Argent’s King’s Cross was the first large commercial commission for Duggan Morris Architects (now splitting into xxxx & xxxx), which makes it all the more astonishing for what a virtuoso, inventive, and yet highly poised piece of urban and architectural design it is. The building was designed as a speculative development, and yet the architects managed to work with the client to come up with a scheme that takes a lot of risks, aesthetic and programmatic, all of which seem to have paid off handsomely, with the building now almost fully let.

The ground level is an ingenious balance of different programs, levels, and of interconnected public and private spaces. An arcade runs across the front of the building, leading visitors to a large, publicly accessible street that runs right through the heart of the building, ending at a future row of start-up spaces in the plot to the rear. Made possible by a split core, this rather grand and spatially complex room, pink concrete floor included, incorporates fob-controlled access to the office elevator bank just to one side, visually open to the public save for a low level, unobtrusive barrier (Morris says there are plans to remove this pending operational review in the first year), as well as access, and full views into a restaurant, a three-screen cinema -the angled concrete underside of which is used to delightful architectural effect- and a gym, all of which have the potential to spill out into the shared space in some way.

The mix of programs sharing a common volume, as well as the nuanced relationship with the surrounding streets, means that R7 will be used throughout the course of each day, morning, and night, and throughout the full 7days of the week, contributing greatly towards bringing varied activities to this part of the King’s Cross masterplan. It also contributes buckets of character to an otherwise overly restrained development. It is not only in the loggias, and on the terraces, that one experiences a fleshy rush of racy hues. Walking up the main street towards Granary Square from King’s Cross, R7 happily peeks out from above the drab, dark brown utilitarian shed of St Martins, appearing to constantly, albeit slightly, change hue in the capricious London light, thanks to a special mix of metallic paint that was developed especially for the powder coating of the aluminium façade elements in the project.

Morris explains that the building’s colour came almost by mistake, through the process of physically modelling the various iterations of the project, in which massing options were colour coded, pink being the colour of the massing that was settled upon, by which point the design team had become quite attached to their accidentally adopted hue. There were also contextual reasons that helped justify the colour choice, with the red of St Pancras being a handy reference, but these seem beside the point, the project is thrillingly different precisely because its sense of context is less obvious than the standard adoption of brick, or the faux-industrial (albeit exquisite) reds of cor-ten.

Pink is intensely British, one could almost say it is as much a colour of London’s history as the murky yellow of London stock brick. Pink is the colour of Empire, it was the standard mode of representing the geographic spread of Britain’s colonies across the map of the world. Pink was the colour of the City trader and banker, his breastplate, the chummy indicator of insider-hood in the capital’s vast machine of capitalism. Pink is the very colour of money, it makes up the most defining characteristic of the Financial Times, the bible of Britain, and indeed the world’s upper economic class.

Over recent decades pink has also come to embody other qualities and groups, from the development of a strange, and problematic link between the gender identification of young girls and the colour, to the adoption of the hue by the LGBT community, to its recent emergence as the colour that defines a generation, with a particularly light tone of it being called “Millennial Pink,” and showing up in everything from graphic design to fashion, to music videos, product design, architectural student visualisations, and now, perhaps unintentionally, a very large building in King’s Cross.

Apart from being tempered by set-backs, the building’s mass is further broken up by being divided into two blocks, each coloured in a different shade of pink, one light, like white skin, like the Financial Times or Millennial Pink, and the other a deep, almost red pink, like the warm colour of the flesh under the skin, or inside the body, closer to the hyper-saturation of the pink used in supermarket princess dresses. It is these associations, and more, that are projected over King’s Cross by this intriguing newcomer.

There is a long history of Modernist architecture that exults in the sensual and associative effects of colour, a history that has seen far too few recent offspring. There has also recently been a preponderance of architects in the UK who are only able to generate facades directly justified by their immediate material context, rather than attempting new aesthetic experiments, or orchestrating their tectonics through the referencing of broader cultural contexts. Duggan Morris’ R7 building brilliantly, subtly, and with style manages to leave where the late Modernists left off, as well as -even if accidentally- bringing an incredibly rich world of references and association to life in a building that itself, through its clever layout, will bring much actual -as well as aesthetic- life to its lucky context.

AT&T

In Icon November 2017

There is currently a proposal by Snohetta to slice the front off the base of Philip Johnson’s iconic AT&T Building in NYC, and replace its massive, sculpted, shadowy cliff face of granite with a happy glowing wall of undulating glass. There is no real functional need to do this, so why would they?

After its time in the spotlight, after its moment in intellectual and then corporate vogue, it is the fate of every predominant approach to architecture, every style if you will, to go through first a period of precipitous decline in popularity, and then shortly after, a long and unrelenting period of outright disdain, even in some cases, disgust, followed eventually by a critical rediscovery, an historical revaluation in the light of subsequent developments.

The disdain in part comes from a younger generation of architects and designers who inevitably react with vigour against the dogmas, conventions and trends of their elders, and go about actively “slaying their parents”, they take them on in the battle for ideas, taste, and clients, and always -eventually- win.

Hard fought battles can never really be left behind, and this immediately subsequent generation rarely manages to let go of its animosities towards the great design beasts it has slain, never quite manages to look back on their works with anything close to objectivity.

For the third generation there is no such personal animosity. For them the unfashionable works of the no-longer-so-recent past are simply intriguing items of objective historical interest. They look back and see failures, but also all the successes, and above all, see a whole treasure trove of practitioners and works that were inexplicably withheld from them, treated as taboo, by their elders.

In the same way we look in disbelief at photographs of our parents wearing the inscrutably strange and intriguing fashions of their youth, and wish to imagine what could have brought them to dress in such bizarre and amusing ways, younger designers look with a mixture of dispassionate interest, and aesthetic excitement, at the peculiar architectures that were prominent before they began their educations.

When a style is transitioning out of its period of disdain, and into its moment of critical rediscovery and reinterpretation, there is an inescapable phase of conflict. The older generation, those who see only the devils they fought to exorcise from architecture in the buildings now being rediscovered, tussle with the younger generation, who see nothing more nor less, than a historical period like any other, worthy of study and appreciation.

Pomo, PoMo, Postmodernism, Post Modernism, whatever you wish to call the history-incorporating, symbolically-obsessed approach to architecture that briefly rose to international prominence and acceptability in the 1980s, is going through exactly this transition. It’s viscerally hated by those who grew up and studied at university when it was popular, and who are now the establishment, the current crop of big-name architects. At the same time, it is being reclaimed, researched, and in many ways transformed retroactively, by practitioners who have fledgling offices, and students currently coming through university.

As many Pomo buildings start hitting the 30-year mark, a lot of them are coming up for redevelopment, and very often their redevelopments are at the hands of those very same architects who cannot objectively see the positive or significant qualities of those exact buildings they are being commissioned to modify.

Every period, every stylistic approach produces great works of architecture in its own terms. Every era has buildings that are of outstanding quality, whether what they were doing is currently fashionable or not. These examples, these exemplary projects should be protected for posterity, whether they be representative of Pomo, NeoMo, Decon, NeoNeoRationalism or Blob-ism, or whatever.

Currently it is the turn of the great big Pomo buildings to come under existential threat. Fom No1 Poultry in London, by Stirling and Wilford, to the AT&T Building in New York by Johnson Burgee, and the State of Illinois Center in Chicago, by Murphy Jahn, we are seeing battles being fought to save them.

A popular action for architects to take is to “de-stylize” such buildings. To remove the elements that make the buildings of-their-time. Polychromatic facades are painted black. Pediments are boxed in. Splendidly outrageous ornamental entrance sequences are smashed up and binned. Unusual and inexplicable but delightful protuberances are removed.

This effectively neuters the buildings, it denatures them, eviscerating their symbolic and architectural specificity. It is almost always functionally unnecessary, and is often pure spite, a loathing towards what came before. It is architectural revenge, and in the case of Snohetta’s proposal for the AT&T, it is Architectural patricide write large.

The massive arcades, the vast arch, the tonnes and tonnes of granite, the huge surfaces of masonry untouched by a single window, are simply awesome. I use that word in its original sense. It is not an elevation or street presence that is meant to be cosy and fit in. Neither is it meant to be glowing and happy and as open as a shopping centre, or an Apple store -both things Snohetta’s design is straining every muscle to achieve.

It inspires awe, which means it has a sense of grandeur verging on the frightening, a piquant quality that has been entirely rejected by the current batch of starchitects. In titillating contrast to this its top section is humorously whimsical. It is the frisson of the two together that combine to make this building the inscrutable, fascinating, sky-scraping flagship of PoMo.

Cutting it off at the knees might be one generation’s triumph in having finally, physically humiliated the architecture of their elders, but it will be a vicious theft from those who come after. It would be an act of myopic vandalism towards the generations that come after, and who are now looking upon these works with critical, but highly appreciative eyes. Don’t steal our future by smashing up the past, especially not the very best of it.

“Unexpected, enigmatic, slightly disturbing, and thus much like its designer, it will sit around in Manhattan defying the conventions of its neighbours ancient and modern, annoying the mature and established, and-doubtless-fulfilling their worst fears by corrupting the young”

As Reyner Banham put it so prophetically at the time of the building’s opening, long may the AT&T -and others-  continue defying expectations, and corrupting the young.

Isle of Dogs Pumping Station

This article appeared in the September 2017 edition of Icon Magazine

“Architecture is more than plumbing, just as eating is more than an excuse to make turds”

John Outram

If you look to your left as you come around the Thames on a clipper along the curve of the Isle of Dogs from central London, the fat skyscrapers of Canary Wharf congeal into an impressively featureless mound in the near distance, while in the foreground a teeming encrustation of apartment buildings in an array of mostly 1980s variations on brick vernacular, elbow each other out of the way to get glimpses of the river.

Joyously popping out from the middle of this mountainous architectural compost heap, staring at you as you pass with the gaping intensity of a cyclopean eye, is what looks like the front of a jet engine that’s been lodged in the centre of an industrial shed’s roof, both of which have been dropped on a pair of partially submerged, super-giant brick columns. These are each topped by capitals that are so brightly coloured and fanciful, that if extracted, they could quite happily make for two very successful, gloriously exuberant carnival floats.

And thus is how most Londoners have their first glimpse of John Outram’s defiantly singular Isle of Dogs Pumping Station from 1986-8. At a time when most of architecture was polarised in the popular imagination between the neo-traditionalists, who wanted to recast Britain in the image of an idealised, suspiciously monarchical-looking past, and the Hi-Tech architects who saw themselves as inheritors of another equally idealised past, but this time of great machinery, and pure engineering bravura, Outram’s staunchly complex little manifesto of a building seemed to speak of a much richer relationship both to the past, and to the present.

Unlike the neo-traditionalists, Outram vocally and vigorously utilised the latest technology, engineering and mechanical services, intimately incorporating them into his design language. Unlike the Hi-Techs, he used it as a generative device around which he developed a rich, evocative language of ornament and architectural forms, rather than leaving it to speak only of the functional purposes it served.

Unlike the neo traditionalist’s enslavement to stories already told a thousand times over, and Hi-Tech’s refusal to say anything at all, Outram was a master of creating new narratives and stories and myths through his architecture, by designing his buildings as eloquent overall compositions, and by using material techniques he invented with the express purpose of making his designs ultra-expressive, or as he put it, to allow them to be always “saying without speaking”.

His “Robot Order” (described by one arch-modernist as “sheer terrorism”[i]) was a super-large column type wide enough to contain all the modern electronics and services required by buildings of the time, in a most economical and efficient manner. Neither clinging to the past nor purely technological, Outram always imagines a fusion of the ancient and the hyper-new, for example asking, “what if these big stone columns were now reamed out by some gigantic boring machine and filled with all the electro-mechanical viscera essential to a contemporary building?”

“Blitzcrete”, a rich, almost luxuriously polychromatic concrete filled with large fragments of multi-coloured brick was adopted from make-do techniques using bombing debris developed during the Second World War, while Doodlecrete, a form of “iconic writing” was a manner of casting concrete with bold graphical pattern inlays. The wonderfully named “Video Masonry” was a technique he developed of transferring inkjet colour prints onto precast plaster panels, often shaped like masonry, producing wildly embellished surfaces that attained the kind of “iconic density” he aimed for in his projects.

The Pumping Station doesn’t deploy all of these methods, but it is an exceptional paragon of architectural communication and evocation, a building which speaks of far, far more than its prosaic infrastructural function. It is clearly a temple, but it is no piece of reactionary classical revival, it is a temple of the now, still after 30 years a fiercely contemporary masterpiece that manages to be simultaneously ancient and futuristic, camp and weighty, sophisticated and accessible, and overall a visual delight of the kind very few architects ever manage (or, strangely, want) to achieve, but which Outram managed to attain again and again in his career. Which is why as The Sunday Times put it in 1991, "When people see an Outram Building, their immediate response is to wave and cheer". 

---

[i] A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, James Stevens Curl,  P546

Portman's Progression

This review of  Portman's America: & Other Speculations featured in the September 207 edition of Architecture Today

John Portman is one of those great figures in architecture whom other architects do not quite know what to make of. Clearly a brilliant designer who invented novel forms of space, much like Jon Jerde his incredible commercial success, and the unapologetically vast scale of his projects, has rendered him somewhat suspect in a profession that is beholden to the mystique of the uncompromising artiste, of the creator who somehow manages to not sell out.

This is of course a myth as silly and dangerous as that of that of the deified symbol of Libertarian Individualism, Howard Roark. True architecture, the stuff that changes the way we go about our daily lives, the stuff that bends societies in new directions, is always hand in fist with capital of the largest scale and most inscrutable might.

No one has managed to straddle the divide between the raw might of money and finance, and the artistic perfectionism of the Roark-ian visionary better than Portman. Both architect and (spectacularly successful) developer, he refashioned an entire city -Atlanta- in his image, as well as creating megacomplexes in others, from Detroit to Shanghai and San Francisco, finally realising the Modernist megastructural dream at scales unimaginable up to that point.

Not only did these projects generate vast wealth for himself and other investors, they also consistently (and profitably) pushed the boundaries of how dramatic, theatrical, and awe-inspiring otherwise banal programs could become when joined together and supersized. John Portman never answered to a client, John Portman answered to John Portman, and in an age where so many are lamenting the death of the role of the architect, of the profession’s being side-lined and of its general ineffectuality, Portman’s fusion of the roles of client and architect seem to show a uniquely appropriate way out of that impotent impasse.

“Portman’s America & Other Speculations” is a timely and welcome publication for such an iconic figure who on the one hand designed what Frederic Jameson has cited as the most emblematically Postmodern of building interiors -his Westin Bonaventure Hotel- and whom on the other can be seen as the apotheosis of corporate American Modernism. The book is deliciously illustrated with a series of new photos by Iwan Baan, which manage to perfectly capture the inventive bravura, and lost-era feel of Portman’s works, as well as the kind of future-past urban environments that they generated.

A fascinating fly-on-the-wall conversation with Portman reveals his upbeat, relentlessly positive and charming personality, as well as some of the stories behind his singular path, from when he’d just completed two or three houses and he decided he’d “never making a living on this,” to his relationship with financiers in which he states, “I don’t get to know bankers, they get to know me.” His projects are shown in a rather concise and matter-of-fact manner, and while It would have been wonderful for the architectural drawings to be given more space, and for further anecdotal and interpretative information or material to be provided on each, they present the coherence of his output well.

The two essays, and series of Portman-inspired projects by Preston Scott Cohen’s students, are positive first steps towards architecturally and critically re-engaging with Portman’s body of work. They perhaps however work better as illustrations of quite how much fertile ground there is for further critical assessments and formal analyses of his oeuvre and methodologies, than they do as robust investigations in their own right.

As Mohsen Mostafavi points out in his introduction to the book, even Rem Koolhaas could only bring himself to partially appreciate the city of Atlanta and Portman’s work when visiting in the 90s, stating that it was “a convulsive architecture that will eventually acquire beauty.” As this book now makes clear, and hopefully this will be the first of several assessing his profuse legacy, we now have enough distance from their inception to look upon these projects and see in them the terrible beauty -a uniquely American beauty- that they embody.

Architecture of the Japanese Bubble

Published in the April 2017 edition of Icon Magazine

1980s Japan was a nation hurtling at exponentially increasing speeds into a seething, self-consuming, technologically fantastical, aesthetically ravishing future, fuelled by a turbo-charged mixture of industrial innovation, financial speculation, and the biggest real-estate bubble the world had ever seen.

An unprecedented wave of new development transformed the nation’s cities, feeding off quite literally insane land valuations that saw property selling in Ginza for $750,000 a square meter, and which meant the land on which the Imperial Palace sat in Tokyo was calculated to be worth more than all the real estate in the whole of California combined.

While Japanese corporations were hoovering up companies around the world, small rural towns with more money than they knew what to do with were building gigantic museums, stadiums and bridges, and Japanese businessmen were happy to spend $80 million dollars for a single painting, a riotous sense of raging hyperreality was manifesting itself across Japanese culture.

From the dystopian future Tokyos of Ghost in the Shell and Akira, to Hayao Miyazaki’s anime films with their collapsing together of the past and the present, the fantastical and the banal, and the Western and the Japanese, to the urban condition of the country’s great cities, which were rapidly coming to resemble Ridley Scott’s hyper-saturated, dark vision in Blade Runner, the frenetic financial explosion ignited an aesthetic chain reaction that saw the creation of a whole ecosystem of new artistic subcultures and forms of expression.

The efflorescence of strange new forms was particularly marked in Architecture, in which a generation of designers produced some of the most distinctive buildings to be found anywhere in the world. Unlike other countries where development is usually at a very large scale, the vast majority of construction in Japan occurs towards the smaller end of the development spectrum. Even in times of normal economic activity this allows for younger, and more alternative architects to acquire commissions, but in the boom years it led to a feverish bonanza of commissions for a host of architects with highly idiosyncratic approaches, buildings by a few of the unfathomably more forgotten of whom are shown here.

Hiroyuki Wakabayashi, a Kyoto architect from a product design background, produced the Life Inn in Kyoto in 1986, a mountainous building of stacked cubes inside of which is carved a fragmented, feverishlyornamental void replete with its own grotto waterfall, and exploding, colourful geometries, reminiscent of the most eccentric of science fiction film sets. Through his following projects, the complexity and hyper-ornamentation of that interior void came to conquer the entirety of his compositions. The Unagidani Children’sMuseum in Osaka is an eroded, pre-ruined, 8-story concrete grid-frame in which every single 3metre grid space contains an entirely distinct little building, each of which are formed from an entirely distinct, highly crafted, but clearly Wakabayashi-generated, architectural style.

His Humax Pavilion in Tokyo perfectly captures both the simultaneous impulse to be technologically fantastical as well as moodily historical, and the desire to encrust the entire form of the building, inside and out, in a bristling cacophony of brooding ornament. As he put it “it is an irrational instinct for man to long for the future while latently having a desire to refer back to the past, this architecture is the best embodiment of this instinct.” It looms with fantastically theatrical menace over Shibuya, like a gigantic, ancient, futuristic artefact. Wakabayashi does not need scale for effect, his tiny Maruto 15 and 17 buildings in Kyoto are equally intoxicating in their alien eeriness, and are perfect examples of his total impregnation of form with evocative ornament, absorbing all of one’s attention when on the streets in which they sit.

The most internally coherent and intriguing body of work from the period was produced by another Kyoto-based architect, Shin Takamatsu, whose brooding, obsessively composed and detailed buildings are best known in the West from the Piranesian, chiaroscuro drawings he produced to illustrate them. The drawings do give a strong impression of his intense and rather dark vision of architectural space, but it is only through visiting his works that one can fully absorb the extraordinary richness of his buildings as fiercely personal explorations of architectural synthesis.

His works are deep, sometimes frightening psychological journeys made through the act of architecture. He fuses an exceptional range ofreferences together with newly invented motifs, into designs which rival the mosticonographically elaborate of Europe’s fin de siècle architecture, only here they create a language of overloaded technology crashing together with subjective poetics, personal angst, and history, in a fusion that only late 20^th Japan could have produced.

His Pharaoh Dental Clinic in Kyoto from 1984, and Syntaxretail building from 1988-90 (now demolished), express these qualities perfectly. Both relatively small in scale, with Pharaoh being positively minute, they are powerfully expressive forms, even verging on being frighteningly so in the degree of their intensity. The fierce effect his buildings elicit in visitors was always carefully calibrated by Takamatsu, who has often described the dark and thrilling tensions which pulse in his structures, and which draw passers-by towards them with wary interest, saying of Syntax that it is a “space that is menacing, the parts menacing the whole, the whole menacing the parts, and even the parts menacing each other, just as the whole menaces itself.” Takamatsu produced an astonishing body of work, and much like his Kyoto counterpart Tadao Ando, the precision and consistency, whilst constantly inventing and inquiring, is astonishing.

At the other end of the country, on the northern island of Hokkaido, Kiko Mozuna built an entire oeuvre of buildings, mostly around the municipality of Kushiro, based on his own esoteric cosmic principles. Each of his buildings, and his architectural-philosophical ideas about the nature of architecture were explored through exquisitely complex, colourful, and layered drawings, so intricate that they often approach the visual potency of Mandalas. The blending of influences explored through these drawings is clearly visible in projects like his Kushiro Municipal Museum from 1984, with its strange recollection of ziggurats, mounds, and symbolic Japanese forms, as well as his pre-ruined Nusamai Junior High School, the hyperactive, symbolic overload of Kushiro Fisherman’s Wharf, and the stacked scaled architectures of his Kushiro Castle Hotel.

In Tokyo Kengo Kuma produced the bizarre M2 building, a sublimely surreal nightmare of architectural-historical forms blown out of scale and crashed together in aggressive, purposeful abandon. Originally a car showroom for Mitsubishi, it has since been repurposed as a funeral parlour -a supremely appropriate program for this uncanny intervention into the Tokyo cityscape.

Toyokazu Watanabe’s monumental concrete or steel-grey buildings seem to come straight out of a film by Studio Ghibli, blending Japanese and Western references with an eye for a kind of fantasy picturesque. His relationship to references evolved from his Standard House 001 in Nakano of 1979 that quite literally took Adolf Loos’ unbuilt tomb for Max Dvorak, built its general form, but transformed it through the application of a different materiality (his trademark grey) and numerous domestic apertures, leaving it hovering somewhere between Japanese suburbia and fin de siècle Vienna.

This transformation of precedents rapidly becomes more complex and begins to incorporate far more referents, with his Okamuro House of 1981, merging a suburban house with an observatory, and a coffered dome, in a combination that Charles Jencks has described as “hallucinatory”. By the time he is building large scale works like the Bunka No Sato Cultural Centre on Tsushima Island, the awesome Akita City Gymnasium of 1991, The Kamo CultureCentre of 1994, and the Kamiyubetsu Folk Museum in 1996, each of his projects have become a veritable carnival of incorporated references, blended into fantasy worlds, one of which is specifically crafted, and conveyed, for each of his built endeavours.

Between 1979 and 1984 Takefumi Aida created a series ofhouses in Tokyo based on the game of Toy Blocks. With the intention of rediscovering a sense of playfulness in the act of design and in the associations conjured up by a building, he created structures that in fact come across as rather eerie and sinister in the outsize scaling of what are familiar elements. In their piling-up and profusion, the implied toy blocks of his buildings start to recall the partially ruined and re-appropriated symbolic ceremonial structures of lost civilisations, like a monstrously large and melancholic child was attempting to reconstruct the buildings of Mycenea, or Machu Picchu.

Aida said that “the extent to which a building can be the manifestation of an architect’s sensibility determines the importance of architecture in a given culture,” and as is evidenced by his houses and the other works highlighted here, this was a moment in architectural time in which a culture gave seemingly unlimited opportunities for the most eccentric, and often most gloriously impractical of sensibilities.

In a full-blown fusion of Lebbeus Woods’ Parasitic architecture and Japanese science-fiction Gundam, Makoto Sei Watanabe’s Aoyama TechnicalCollege in Tokyo barely registers as a building at all, for all the world looking like a giant robot insect that has landed in Tokyo and is feasting on the chaos of its urban condition, tearing things apart under its fragmented, robotic limbs.

Even more extraordinarily science-fiction is TakasakiMasaharu’s Kihoku Observatory outside Kanoya City, a vast concatenation of sculptural forms in concrete that is so dynamically expressive, being somehow simultaneously spaceship, and insect like, that one almost expects its columns to start rising up and down, steaming like pistons, or stomping slowly across the ground like huge legs. Masaharu states that “the future is imagination and the present is a melting point of symbiosis”, and in this project, he managed to perfectly embody this notion of a complex present suffused with strange visions of an imagined future.

Designed in 1988, Hiroshi Hara’s Umeda Sky Building is a pair of interlinked towers in Osaka that was originally meant to be twice as big, with four interlinked towers. The tops of the buildings are stacked with imagery of clouds, and the profiles of smaller architectures, like literal villages in the sky. Hara calls a giant “crater” in the bridge between the two buildings a “’vestige’ remaining from where a spaceship had flown away”, a never to be used docking platform through the centre of which dramatically rise a pair of outdoor escalators, high above the city. When not reflective glass, its fragmented, collage-like curtain wall looks like it’s made from a whole collection of varied, flattened buildings. As was Hara’s intention (the original scheme was to be called “Sky City”) the project grows out of the Osaka skyline like a Calvino-esque imaginary extension of the city, levitating over Umeda as an impossibly odd reminder of a time that itself seems equally impossible when looked back upon from the mindset of today.

There were many architects working in this period whose careers have flourished during the intervening years, and some -like Kengo Kuma- reinvented themselves to match the changing stylistic sentiment of the times, but the kind of works, and most of the architects highlighted here, were products of an unreproducibly unique moment in time, in a culture that was primed for not just allowing, but actively catalysing the most unlikely forms of architectural brilliance. From the through-the-looking-glass, unhinged logic of the 1980s economic bubble, Tokyo, Kyoto, and much of Japan has been left with a built legacy of wild originality that rivals any of the other great efflorescences of architectural creativity in human history.

The State of Illinois Center

The State of Illinois Center by Helmut Jahn, opened in 1985, sits in Chicago’s downtown like an all-singing, all-dancing, strobe-lit carnival float gate-crashing a funeral. It is vast, takes up an entire city bloc, is 17 floors high, is mirrored, scalloped, canted, coloured, decorated, striped, and historicised. It is about as subtle as an exploding meteorite. It revels in its shininess, and it flaunts its singularity.

It is easy to forget just how exciting the opening-up of architecture was around this time. Like the markets, style was deregulated, decoupled from the stale dogmas of a ubiquitous and super-boring modernism. Philip Johnson stuck a gigantic Chippendale split pediment on top of a skyscraper, Michael Graves put colourful ribbons and cartoon colours on a government building in Portland, Stanley Tigerman built a house in the shape of a conjoined ejaculating penis and vagina.

This was an era in which those architects who were willing to accept the brave new world of aesthetic liberty were free to design as they wished, to forge a ‘style’ of their own, and sometimes in the process become one of the new breed of world-famous, celebrity architects, and no one was better at it than Helmut Jahn.

Philip Johnson made the cover of Time, but Jahn was on the cover of uber-cool GQ. Graves built projects that looked like giant lego sets, Johnson built towers that appealed to the Polo-neck Hamptons set, but it was Jahn that forged a look which was to best represent the contradictions, paradoxes, and obscene pleasures of the time.

The dapper Bavarian with his trademark hat and Versace suits was referred to as “Flash Gordon”, and living up to the moniker he flashily, brazenly, and often brilliantly smashed together Hi-Tech, Modernism, Historically referential Postmodernism, Pop, Googie, and Art Deco, with a flair unmatched by any other architect. It was rare for these to be present in a single design, however the epic scale, and public nature of the Illinois Center was his chance to do just that, and he went all-out, producing one of the most ambiguous, spectacular, and inscrutable buildings of the period.

The full-height atrium is floored in stone paving reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, while the atrium walls look as if the Centre Pompidou -replete with all its primary colours and hi-tech paraphernalia- had been turned inside out and been crossed with Piranesi’s “Le Carceri d'Invenzione”. This is a visually saturated, theatrical interior in the grandest manner, open to all: It is mad futurist pomo, for the people.

The Center’s external volume is treated as one gigantic sculpted shape, sliced at odd angles by the edges of the site, reflective and curved like a consumer electronics product blown up to impossible proportions and clad in a decorative, stripey version of the modernist curtain wall. This seductive alien object, known by locals as “the Star Wars Building”, sits on an abstracted classical colonnade of pink and gray granite, which used to extend out around the Plaza in front, decaying as it did into a ready-made ruin, crumbling out into the city as if the classical could not exist without the hyper-modern.

With the wisdom of the crowd, Star Wars is a perfectly apt comparison. A popular mass market media product in which the future became the same as the ancient past (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away). Jahn’s Illinois Center managed to rediscover the excitement of the future -something very much lost in the march of the sub-Miesian tombstones- while incorporating the romance of a glamorous American past, and all orchestrated with a virtuosity and ease that made the building instantly consumable.

The building is currently in danger of being sold by state governor Bruce Rauner. If this were to happen it would, in all likelihood, be demolished. Much architecture of the period was obscure, glib, or as Venturi Scott Brown proudly proclaimed, ugly and ordinary. Despite the Center’s technical failings (the client cut costs and used single glazing, turning the building into an oven for half the year), it is none of those things, and stands as a monument to the virtues of hyperactive expression, wilfulness, joy and virtuosity over the usual cerebral restraint, and hermetic smoothness of high architecture.

Flash Gordon’s Star Wars Building still sparkles and scintillates, and should continue to do so long into the strange and exciting futures its bizarre design has always hinted at.

Published in Icon Magazine, January 2017

An Endless Playground

This article and the accompanying images sourced from my Instagram feed were published in Abitare in 2015

Rome is a city in which the most beautiful squares imaginable, flanked by the most important, grandiose and sensuous buildings, containing Egyptian obelisks and Roman temples and Baroque fountains are used so efficiently as open-air car-parks, they are so tightly packed with Cinquecentos and Smarts and 4*4 Pandas and Multiplas, that pedestrians can often not cross from one side to the other, as they are unable to squeeze through between the bumpers of the vehicles. Everything coexists in Rome, the dirty, busy, gloriously dysfunctional life of a major metropolis pumps like blood through the accumulated wonders of three millennia, three empires and the 21st Century, and it is entirely blind to the provenance of things, medieval tower or nineteenth century factory, roman temple or neoclassical seminary, aqueduct or wall, if it can be used it will be, if it can’t it will be girdled and set aside, put in a park for teenagers to make-out on.

All cities are to one degree or another filled with the traces of their own history, and must deal with the question of how best to relate to those remains and what they mean to them, with these traces often exerting a tyrannical hold over the collective consciousness. In fact the younger the city is and the less it has been bequested by history, the more its history becomes important to its inhabitants. Seeking legitimacy in their heritage, cities look to anchor themselves in a past that is their own and justifies their current standing. Rome is the precise opposite. There is just too much. There is such an overwhelming, incomparable quantity of history, heritage, buildings, art, whole pieces of city, and infrastructure present all over the city, and from every period of European culture, from Nero to Mussolini, from Innocent X to il Boom, that in Rome heritage has reached critical mass, has become so massively dense and impossibly varied that it cannot be maintained in historical order and collapses in on itself. It implodes in a city-sized singularity in which all historical periods are coeval, in which they lose individual significance, in which time collapses and becomes purely spatial and we can walk in the present between every period whilst smoking a cigarette and chatting on our mobile phone. Rome is the internet as a city, it is the one place in which all architectural knowledge coexists simultaneously in one space, instantly accessible at the same time, and just as people mostly use the internet –the most awe-inspiring collection of information in human history- to watch videos of dancing Chihuahuas and Taylor Swift running from paparazzi, so Rome –the most extraordinary assembly of built material known to man- is mostly a place to buy Pope Francis mugs and complain about traffic on the way to work.

And therein lies the crux of what makes it so truly remarkable: its total and utter mundanity, its complete obliviousness in the face of its own importance. It wears its profundity as lightly as a summer t-shirt, mixing the high and the low, the old and the new, the dysfunctional and the grandiose, the sacred and the profane, the narrow-minded and the worldly, the politically volatile and the permanence of tradition in the most relaxed fashion imaginable. Its streets are magic corridors that transform the past as you walk down them into an agent of liberation, that shows you there is no one style, no one way of doing things, instead you can have it all, at the same time, together in flagrante delicto. For those fascinated by the forms of history, but shackled by the narrow and joylessness of historicism, for those in love with the intermingling of the quotidian and the profound, for those who can enjoy the simultaneous echoes of Bernini and Las Vegas in the zigzagging of a 1950s balcony or the intermingling of Borromini, Zaha and an American Diner in the over-exuberance of a 1990s Bar, for those of such sensibility, Rome is a playground of endless, diverse and exotic pleasures.

Revisiting Pomo

An article published in Architecture Today in the summer of 2016 (above)

Every style, after having achieved a certain degree of success and ubiquity tends to suffer a period in critical purgatory, but few approaches to architecture have been rejected in quite the way Postmodernism was spurned. A movement born out of rebellion against the elite, abstracted, paternalistic codes of taste that had come to define the bloated behemoth of international modernism of the 1960s & 70s, Postmodernism purposefully –brilliantly- turned the accepted canons of architectural value on their head.

The surface -the “superficial”- became a key focus of design, the main vehicle for communicating with the public, directly, figuratively, colourfully. History, hitherto banished, came back with a vengeance, imbuing houses with sophisticated and evocative combinations of historical elements, as well as leaving wonderfully stranded Mayan temples on the tops of skyscrapers. Ornament returned not as crime but as virtue, as a way to introduce character and narrative into spaces that had up to that point been denuded of any comprehensibly human quality.

Pink granite, mirror-glass colonnades, gigantic 12metre high dolphins, chrome capitals, Disney dwarf caryatids, interiors with golden brass palm trees, furniture that looked like a car crash between giant bars of Piz-Buin, rickety old buildings in run-down bits of the city that would have previously been marked for slum clearance by modernist urban planners, Postmodernism was an explosion of repressed energy that expressed itself in a bewildering and delightful array of forms, through a spectrum of practitioners, each with their own specific mix of concerns.

As always happens when a style is successful, its most easily replicable -and least interesting- formal elements were taken up by the industry and rolled out across the world, with every city from Lima to London sporting countless business park office boxes with little pedimented entrance pavilions as their stand-out feature. But the decades-long relegation to being the architect’s go-to bogey man and general object of derision that Postmodernism suffered, and is still suffering, cannot be explained by the ubiquity of its bad copies, or else every other once-popular architectural style would have been derided with the same vehemence, which they were not.

Architects tend to mistakenly equate depth with dryness, and seriousness with being dour, a protestant moral set-up in which it is inconceivable that one can be worthy unless one is seen to be being worthy and nothing but, lest it confuse the picture of a saintly effort toward laboured purity. Irony, colour, surface, whimsy, decoration, play, humour, allusion, these tactics that defined, and still define the Postmodern approach, are not only looked down upon, but viewed as existential threats to those who cling to the idea of architecture as a resolutely structured moral enterprise. Like the religious prude who must control all signs of sexual profligacy as a threat to his moral order, even the hint of a female ankle, architects seek out the social exclusion of the value-disrupting games of the Postmodern building.

This is all very well, but it has been 20years now, and whilst a lot of postmodern buildings were put up in the fifteen years in which it held favour, very few of them were of great importance, and of those, many are now under threat, or will be in the near future. There are numerous Hi-Tech buildings from the same period that have been listed Grade 1 and 2. Not a single postmodern example has been listed, despite (failed) applications having been lodged to save Stirling’s Number One Poultry and Farrell’s Midland Bank from insensitive alteration.

This seeming inability by the Heritage authorities to recognise that the style is not inherently without merit (a view predicated on the moral puritanism described above) is being progressively eroded by a change in attitude amongst a small, but passionate group of advocates. There is currently a campaign to list Farrells’ Comyn Ching –an iconic project for the style and the postmodern approach to incremental urbanism- which has gathered a huge amount of support, and the recently set up Postmodern Society already has five and a half thousand members, the 20th Century Society and National Trust are organising tours and events around the period and style, and the public are keen to revisit and revaluate an era and period that are distant enough to no longer be tainted by the contempt of familiarity, and near enough to retain an aura of association and nostalgia.

The tide of opinion is turning, and it seems the scene is set for a rupture in the puritan consensus, for the return of some colour, and for the protection in posterity of some fabulous, important buildings.