Kosmograd

From Hodge to Hooverville

Could Margaret Hodge be our very own Sub-prime Minister?

There are more insane ramblings from UK architecture minister Margaret Hodge in this weeks Building Design (20,03.2008). Cleverly giving herself enough rope to hang herself, BD invites Margaret Hodge to show them around her consistuency of Barking, East London, and see what kind of architecture she likes - "Now that’s what Margaret Hodge calls architecture".

She starts off well enough, criticising a spec housing development by Bellway homes, (albeit for reasons that should be within the council and planning departments ability to enforce):

"It's horrible, cheap housing with no facilities: no schools, no transport infrastructure, no buses, no shops. This is just want you don't want."

Then she starts to show a little of her own design 'vision', for the Barking Riverside masterplan:

"I don't think it works," she says. "There are enormous pedestrianised areas. They haven't integrated the housing properly. New communities only work if people have their own gardens, fenced off."

Now it's possible that Margeret Hodge has been feverishly reading nutters like Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman et al, or channeling the spirit of Jane Jacobs through a kind of New Urbanist distortion field, since landing in the poisoned chair at the DCMS in June 200. However, it's more likely that she has made this gross, sweeping statement off the top of her head. Margaret Hodge has nailed her colours to the mast of environmental determinism.

But the killer comes when Hodges takes BD to Barking Learning Centre:

Among her high points is Barking Learning Centre, formerly the central library, designed by Alford Hall Monaghan Morris. This mixed-use building, which is the centrepiece of Barking Town Square’s redevelopment, is an example of the government’s vision for integrated public spaces, with council services, a lending library, educational facilities and residential apartments all on the same site. Hodge is very proud of it.

"Look, a buggy park!" she exclaims, as we view the children's library, a book club meeting in progress. Hodge points out the "welcoming entrance", which she sees as friendly and inclusive, and insists there ought to be a coffee shop here too. Her only disappointment is that the flats have been sold to a buy-to-let investor. "There’s nothing you can do about that." [My italics].

There's the money quote. With one throwaway comment the UK's architecture minister washes her hands of the parlous state of the UK's housing.

Buy-to-let, where investors buy properties as a business venture and enjoy tax breaks, has completely altered the UK housing landscape over the last 10 years. Fed a diet of 'you can do it' property investment programmes such as Relocation, Relocation, Property Ladder and How to be a Property Developer, the middle-classes of England have been steadily sinking themselves in debt taking out multiple mortages and riding the milktrain.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Writing in the Guardian, Sympathy for the buy-to-let devil?, (22.03.2008), Patrick Collinson states:

Lenders keep telling us Britain doesn't have a "sub-prime" problem like the US. Yes we do - in the shape of a million buy-to-let mortgages.

Collinson then details some of the scams and sharp practices that have dominated the buy-to-let feeding frenzy:

"On paper, you couldn't obtain a 100% mortgage for a buy-to-let. But developers offered fake 15% "discounts"; credulous surveyors gave fanciful valuations; lenders skimmed over loan applications. Hey presto, wannabe landlords were able to obtain an "85%" loan which was really 100% of the purchase price, and start building a "portfolio" without spending a penny upfront. And they didn't even have to pay tax on the income.

It wasn't much of a worry to the lenders that the whole thing might later go wrong. They could "package" or "securitise" the buy-to-let loan, mark it down as a profit and take it off their books. Only in the coming few months will we see where in the financial system the losses turn up.

Compare this with first-time buyers. They have to stump up a deposit. They have to prove their income. They have to make monthly mortgage payments from a taxed salary. There could only be one winner in such a one-sided game. With access to easy finance, the buy-to-letter could outbid the first-timer and push prices up to ever more ludicrous levels."

Now the bubble has inevitably burst, not only are tens of thousands of get rich quick investors stuggling to make interest payments on mortgages, but overstretched owner-occupiers are faced with large mortgage hikes, while the banks and financial institutions who have been ridden by this loa of greed and exploitation get bailed out by the Bank of England. As a nation we are overextended on credit per capita to a much greater extent than the US.

Barking Learning Centre, held up by Hodge as the shining example of urban regeneration in Britain, is actually just the mirror to the failed state of housing in the UK. Who will maintain the properties at Barking Learning Centre? What can motivate investors, who are losing millions of pounds on the empty promise of buy-to-let, to look after their properties and ensure that they are good places to live?

To bring it back round to Robin Hood Gardens, and it's recent threat of demolition, Amanda Bailieu states in her recent BD editorial:

As one would expect from this government, Margaret Hodge believes the newly built Barking town centre in her constituency offers a more hopeful model for the future of British housing than the rugged, generous and light-filled flats at Robin Hood Gardens.

And yet Hodge cannot find any housing in Barking that actually works.

In the US, the credit crunch and the fallout from the subprime mortgage farrago is refiguring communities and the suburban landscape, creating new housing archetypes - subprime shanty towns and exurban slums. The death of the buy-to-let market in the UK could do the same in this country. Margaret Hodge could find herself with a Hooverville in the midst of her constituency.

What is needed, now more than ever, is a richer mix of housing types and typologies. This needs to encompass social housing, letted accommodation, housing associations and cooperative living, as well as owner occupied dwellings.

Instead of hanging round Barking, Hodge should try visiting Rotterdam.

City of Signs 5

Hidden Towns, by Austrian photographer Gregor Graf, offers a fascinating view of the contemporary city. With careful retouching, Graf removes his images completely of signs and symbols.

What is left is unsettling, the cities seem deserted and uninhabited. The photographs of Graf's home town of Linz are especially provacative, with the flat colours of streets and building facades strongly recalling paintings by Edward Hopper.

This is Graf's description of the Hidden Towns project in Linz:

Borderline urban spaces in Linz, major thoroughfares leading in and out of the city, lined with buildings from the 50s to the 80s. Districts formerly located on the periphery that are today squeezed in between the city's historical centre and the frayed suburban and industrial zones lying on its outskirts. These are the motifs of the four photographic works in Gregor Graf's hidden town - verborgene Stadt series. The "stars" in these photos are are the buildings on Dinghofer, Dametz and Mozart Streets. Back in the 60s this streets were incorporated into a traffic concept that was even then reguarded as only an interim solution to get the rising number of vehicles in the city centre under control. Buildings were torn down, whole rows of houses were shifted and existing structures were were altered. These intermediaryregions became spaces dedicated efficient movement, filled with all the traffic lights and signage systems that entails.

The city as living space is today no longer shaped by the individuals who inhabit it. At the textural level - with words, symbols, logos, directional and traffic signs, commands and prohibitions-the only elements allowed are those that serve the end of law or consumption. Free expression, such as graffiti or the unauthorized hanging of posters in the public space is punishable by law. The real city is increasingly becoming a personality-drained world of corporationsand branding, coupled with the proliferation of rigorous regulations dictating how individuals are expected to behave. Modernism tried to rid architecture of ornament-advertisingand directional systems have now brought it back, under a new guise and with a new function. City centres have evolved into "literary" spaces. New technical possibilities (glass, large print, tickers, digital text production technologies, mega displays, transparent buildings) turn buildings facades into another medium for conveying nwes, with whole buildings becoming there own logo.

For hidden town - verborgene Stadt - Gregor Graf applied a complicated retouching process to remove all graphic elements from his photographic images. They appear as spaces void of signs, making them seem unreal, and cultural interchangable. At the same time, they offer an undisguised view of the architecture and at the clarified spacial systems. The digital editing involved traffic signage and graphics. Signs of wear and tear, such as patina or weathering, and things that hint at human usage were deliberately left unaltered. But the cultural and communicative information we are accustomed to seeing has disappeared. An apperantly virtualized space emerges, which we are unable to reconcile with our normal visual experience. How is a city without signs, without visual regulations, without guiding graphics, perceived? How do we move through this urban construct? Do we still recognize these (non) places?

Previously
City of Signs 4
City of Signs 3
City of Signs 2
City of Signs

City of Signs 4

The recent advert for Sky Movies is beautifully shot across the Brazilian city of São Paulo, that recently decreed to remove all billboards. It is inspired by Tony de Marco's São Paulo No Logo photographs, (Flickr set here), as previously written about here.

It is an advert celebrating non-advertising.

The imagery of the city scape presented is depicted as a purer, simpler urban realm, a rather surreal landscape of blank spaces and empty billboards.

As Ads without products points out, this could be the opening sequence to a psychological thriller much more interesting than 90% of the films Sky Movies show.

"And even better, way better, is that the damned thing looks like the opening sequence of an absolutely incredible (and a good deal more horrifying, to many in the wider audience, than Cloverfields, which isn’t very horrifying at all) of a very different sort of speculative fiction, one about a specter lurching back from the place where dismissed specters go in order to decapitate the idols of the era, break open the walls of the buildings in the expensive neighborhoods, and leave most bedazzled and exhilarated at the sweep of violence that has rubbled so many things we thought could never go, that we believed, despite ourselves, that the world simply couldn't live without."

Previously:
City of Signs 3
City of Signs 2
City of Signs

Brutalism's last stand

(image from sublime photography)

Cedric Price once wrote, (quoted here):

"What is objectionable,is the staggering conceit and arrogance of those who determine just what part of our built environment should be deemed sacrosanct"

With that in mind, some additional thoughts on the Robin Hood Gardens debacle.

I read Margaret Hodge's article in Grand Designs magazine, reproduced here several times, and still can't work out what she is trying to say.

Hodge, Minister of State for Culture, Creative Industries and Tourism, with responsibility for architecture and the built heritage, seems to be unhappy that her hands are tied when it comes to listing buildings.

"It might have lain derelict and unloved for decades, it might be on the brink of redevelopment to become something of real public value, it might even be just plain hideous: my hands are tied."

It's difficult to establish whether she wants more power to decide whether to save buildings or not, or whether she wants to wash her hands of the whole process. I suspect the latter.

My knowledge of listed building consent is uncertain, and Hodge does nothing to make the process any clearer. If the minister for culture has no choice but to accept English Heritage's decision, then why does she ultimately make the decision?

She continues:

"And they're tied by the good (we hope) intentions of a mysterious and unelected inspector who may be working on the basis of no more than a photograph."

While I agree that the machinations of English Heritage, (an archetypal quango) are opaque, quite possibly full of hidden agendas, and should be opened to much greater public scrutiny, I find it highly unlikely that recommendations to list buildings are made on the basis of a 'single photograph', and certainly not in the case of Robin Hood Gardens.

Hodge concludes:

"Decisions on listing modern architecture should be left to people who are accountable. Who can be booted out if they get it wrong."

As Sir Humphrey might have put it: "That would be you, Minister".

This is Hodge playing the "woe is me" card. One can't help but think she has found herself in a position she feels distinctly uncomfortable in. But as her Wikipedia entry recalls, she didn't exactly shine as Minister for Children, either, and with misplaced remarks about white working class voters, inadvertently became the BNP's best friend, leading to the BNP winning 12 of 13 seats on the council in Hodge's Barking constituency.

Hodge is the ministerial embodiment of the Peter Principle.

Architecture/ the built environment is the Wandering Jew in the UK government. Formely part of the Department of Environment, it now finds itself the unwanted part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Hodge, perhaps hoping for a cushy post watching some opera and opening art galleries has found herself being berated by a bunch of crazed architects, driven bezerk on a diet of Brutalism and Banham, and whipped into a frenzy by Building Design.

Building Design has gone into overdrive with it's crusade to save Robin Hood Gardens, publishing the names of 1000 people who signed their petition to get Robin Hood Gardens listed, and claiming victory in the recent decision of English Heritage to delay making their recommendations to Hodge. But with a circulation of 25,000, the "UK's best read architectural weekly", has only managed to mobilise less than 4% of them to complete the online petition.

Havig being shamefully quiet about the Pimlio School, BD have decided that this is Brutalism's Last Stand, their Alamo.

And listed building consent? The process needs to be made a lot clearer. And while listing may save Robin Hood Gardens from being demolished, it will almost certainly make it harder to modernise into a workable building. English Heritage will need to be involved at every step of any proposals to breathe new life in RHG.

I vacillated before finally signing the petition to list Robin Hood Gardens. Listing might be the worst thing that could happen to the Smithsons' masterpiece, a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Previously:
Brutal Virtuality
Virtual Brutality