Kosmograd

Juxtaposed Tatlin

At the recent From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy, the piece that was causing the most stirring of the luncherati was the 12ft high model of Tatlin's Monument to the 3rd International. It was interesting to see that it still has the power to shock, bemuse and astonish people today. The original model built by Tatlin housed a small boy inside turning a crank to make the cube, pyramid and cylinder rotate.

Tatlin's tower has become the de facto emblem of Constructivism, a visual shorthand, and as such it is often used to illustrate either the grand folly of the Constructivist 'project', the supreme egotism of architecture, and more occassionally a symbol of the radical desire to remake society.

I've come across a number of posts recently that have all used images of Tatlin's outlandish Monument to the 3rd International to compare and contrast against other architectural projects.

Firstly there was Owen Hatherly in the peerless article Delirious Moscow at archinect, putting Tatlin's tower next to a Martian tripod from War of the Worlds.

"Like Tatlin's Third International Tower, whose iron legs and perpetual motion are akin to the Martians' walking tripods, this was something as fearsome, uncanny and technologically terrifying as the alien invasion, and intended to be every bit as threatening to existing society."

Next up is The Los Angeles Times, where Christopher Hawthorne sees Tatlin's monster as a precedent to Foster Crystal Island behemoth in Moscow, even if ideologically they are at polar opposites.

"Perhaps its most obvious forebear is Vladimir Tatlin's "Monument to the 3rd International," a tilting, ziggurat-like structure the Russian constructivist proposed as a tribute to the Communist revolution. In Crystal Island's sharply tapering silhouette there are also echoes of later tributes to Tatlin's unbuilt tower, notably Dan Flavin's 1964 piece "Monument 1 for V. Tatlin," which consists of seven white fluorescent tubes arranged in a skinny triangular form. Foster's design finds an aesthetic middle ground between Tatlin's tangle of steel beams and Flavin's spare, ethereal composition."

At aggregat456, Boromini's Lantern at Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza is placed next to Tatlin's leaning tower as examples of 'A Lazarus Taxon':

"Russian Constructivism is a Lazarus Taxon: a species of architecture that though eradicated from previous historical records, reappears once again."

Then there's the comparison of Tatlin's Tower with 'paraSurf' by Macus Novak, as examples of algorithmically based generative design.

Marcus Novak's recent 'transarchitecture', existing predominantly in Cyberspace, is algorithmically generated or 'bred' and - like Tatlin's virtual structure - can be interpreted as symbol and agitprop for radical innovation beyond the realm of architecture per se.

Allow me to contribute two more Tatlin juxtapositions:

Tatlin's Tower against Gazprom tower by RMJM, both seen as threats to the skyline and good taste in their day.

Tatlin's Tower against OMA's CCTV, destined to be the architectural icon of the 21st Century - radical, provactive, and structurally daring.

Tatlin's unbuilt tower continues to exert a powerful influence over contemporary architectural speculation.

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

RMB City

Chinese artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy, has an exhibition of her Second Life installation RMB City at Lombard Freid Projects in New York from February 29th to April 5th, 2008.

RMB City is an installation created by China Tracy in Second Life, a parody of contemporary Chinese culture - a giant panda swinging on a crane counterweighted by OMA's CCTV building, for instance, and a commentary on the urban development goldrush currently at full steam across China:

"RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future."

You can see more on YouTube here: RMB CITY - A Second Life City Planning:

Brutal Virtuality

Margaret Hodge, UK architecture minister, on modernist architecture:

"When some concrete monstrosity - sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece - fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let's find a third way. This is the 21st Century - a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever."

Hodges comments come a few weeks before English Heritage will make its recommendation to Hodge whether to list Robin Hood Gardens, a housing estate in the Brutalist style, completed in 1972.

So what would Robin Hood Gardens look like in digital form?

Much of what makes brutalist architecture so polarising is that it is so uncompromising - its brooding physicality is almost the antithesis of the pure superficiality of the digital simulacra . Brutalist buildings don't ask to be liked, and as Amanda Baillieu says in her BD editorial, the Robin Hood Gardens estate "is not an esay place to love". Much of their appeal (or 'monstrosity') comes from the raw qualities of concrete, what Le Corbusier called the béton brut, with the patina given by years of staining, weathering and abuse. Can this uncompromising materiality ever be represented in cyberspace?

As can be seen from many recent computer games, virtual environments are getting better at representing the dirt in the cracks of the real world, creating imperfect alternate futures. There's no reason why digital architectural models cannot move beyond the shiny plasticity of most of todays walk-throughs and fly-bys to show something more visceral and down at heel, representing the ravages of time, weathering and unsocial behaviour.

In some ways, a digital simulation of a project may be a more accurate representation of it's original aims. Robin Hood Gardens was never used or inhabited the way that the Smithsons intended. Inevitably it became filled with low-income families, as previously mentioned about Park Hill: "sink social housing for the dispossessed, the rootless and the shiftless".

Simon Smithson, the son of architects Alison and Peter Smithson, recalls the early days of Robin Hood Gardens in an interview at BD online:

I think it became obvious soon after the families moved in, and we went to see it. They moved in problem families from the outset, and when we talked to the warden and he showed us that the old peoples' centre that had been smashed up and had to be locked, it shook my father to the core.

But what I remember as a child is how modern the flats were. They were big, light and had central heating, which we didn't have at home. The flats were well built and the detailing was of a quality you simply don't see today. The way the acoustic problems were dealt with was a tour de force.

Given that RHG, if saved from demolition, will never to be restored to it's pristine original state, and will need to be remodelled and adapted to new uses, there is a strong case that a digital archive may be a more accurate preservation of the original building. Imagine a comprehensive digital archive of Robin Hood Gardens, available online with access for all, with drawings and documentation, photographs of the building tracing it's troubled history. Combine this with a collection of state-of-the-art 3D models, available for download under a Creative Commons licence, and including models capable of being experienced, navigated and inhabited with the latest immersive technologies, would be a fine legacy for the Smithson's endeavour.

Inevitably, the more people learn about Robin Hood Gardens the more keen they will be to visit it, to experience it in real life, which is why I support the listing and revitalisation of RHG. But it cannot be preserved as a monument, a shrine to Brutalism - it must be made to work as a building, a place.

Margaret Hodge has backed herself into a corner with her comments. She cannot now do nothing. She must either agree to list Robin Hood Gardens, or commit to a National Digital Architecture Archive. It is my passionate hope that she does both.

Previously:
Virtual Brutality
Luder's Lament
The Alsopification of Park Hill

Virtual Brutality

Another Brutalist landmark is under threat of demolition. This time it's Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, East London. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, and completed in 1972, it looks likely that the local council, Tower Hamlets, will demolish the building and look to redevelop the site.

The only hope is that it receives listed building status, and becomes the protectorate of English Heritage. But conferring listed building status ultimately lies in the hands of the architecture minister, Margaret Hodge, who has weighed in with the following astonishing comment, in the recent issue of Grand Designs, and requoted in Building Design:

"When some concrete monstrosity - sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece - fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let's find a third way. This is the 21st Century - a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever."

This is either visionary prescience or the inane ramblings of a deranged lunatic. There is the germ of an amazing concept here - that we should create a National Digital Archive of high quality 3D models of our countries best buildings, which can be visited and explored in a virtual environment.

That this then presumably clears the way to demolish all that doesn't fit Hodge's aesthetic sensibilities is where she lurches from visionary to tyranny.

While the words 'conservation' and 'heritage' generally cause shivers to run down my spine, the revitalisation of the Brunswick Centre and to a lesser extent the redevelopment of Park Hill in Sheffield by Urban Splash, show that there is plenty of demand for some BoHo Brutalism. Superficially, it took little more than a Starbucks and a Waitrose to transform the concourse of the Brunswick Centre from a forlorn, windswept precinct to a popular urban hangout.

Goldfinger's masterful Trellick Tower was once also held with similar contempt as the Smithsons RHG, and now its flats are in high demand, often selling at above market rates. Likewise the Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, which was a powerful precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Could Robin Hood Gardens also be turned into a desirable residence for owner occupiers? Unless and until more compelling alternatives are put forward, it should be saved.

(images from Flickr user Joseph Beuys Hat)

The Island: London Series

On show in the atmospheric Crypt of St. Pancras church at the moment (until 2nd March) is an exhibition of the remarkable drawings of Stephen Walter. Called The Island: London Series, it presents a dense layered symbolic map of London, represented as an island.

While geographically accurate, it replaces the austere, regimented symbolism of an Ordnance Survey map with a rich semiotic cartography, tracing Walter's personal pre-occupations as well as historical references, landmarks, and scattered throughout with the symbols and logos that infest the urban landscape.

It's a kind of proto Google Maps, rendered in crude pencil rather than crisp pixels. But it's a heroic attempt at a individual reading of the city, overlaying much more than the simple geography of roads and buildings. It's an exploration that has obvious touchpoints with the writings of Iain Sinclair, and also Phyllis Pearsall's A-Z of London.

You can see all of The Island here.

Introducing Superspatial

Just a quick note to mention the launch of a new collaborative weblog, called Superspatial, that I am involved in.

Superspatial will focus on architecture, urbanism and architectural speculation, while Kosmograd will hopefully become more refined in tackling issues of disurbanism, urban representation and virtual space.

Currently the only other author on Superspatial is Lewis Martin, from the excellent Helsinki-focussed archi-blog lewism. If you are interested in joining in, get in touch.

Some recent posts on Superspatial:

004. The urban futures of rising tides

003. A bridge too far?

002. Parametric Urbanism on the Thames Estuary

001. Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park

Floating Cities 1

As part of an investigation of new urban typologies I am undertaking as part of TeamHelsinki for the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 competition, I came across this scheme by the Mexican architectural practice Productora, on DomusWeb [via Dezain, inevitably]

This scheme, created for the competition from Arpafil, proposes floating an entire city block above the ground, in part of Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city.

The proposal echoes Corb's urban utopian ideals, of letting the landscape flow around and beneath the built form. But here it is also a programmatic and organisational tactic:

To be able to create new quality public areas in the city, we decided to elevate one of the city building blocks. The new ‘floating’ building provides the City of a new Centre for Dance and Audiovisual Media: a complementary new department of the University which is distributed through the historical centre. The elevated urban block allows us … (1) to create a new reference point in the monotonous and isotropic urban structure (2) to establish a dialectic relation between the historical plaza and the newly created public plaza (3) create views (´new perspectives´) over the very horizontal texture of the existing city - establishing a relation with existing monuments such as the Cathedral. We believe that the city of Guadalajara needs powerful interventions in the neighbourhoods surrounding the actual centre of the City, to convert the city from a uni-central into a pluri-central urban network. The new Centre for Dance and Audiovisual Media could be a first step into this development.

More at Productora's website.

No man is an island

China's Jinbao Daily reports, via Ananova, that developers have turned a house into an island in China after the owner refused to move out.

The villa now stands alone in a 30ft deep man-made pit in Chongqing city, reports Jinbao Daily.

The Chongqing Zhengsheng Real Estate Company wants to turn the area into a £40m 'Broadway' square, including apartments and a shopping mall. But the owner of the villa says he won't move out unless the company pays his price - the equivalent of £1.3 million.

"The villa owner refuses to move, so the real-estate developer has had to dig out all around it to force him to," says a saleswoman at Weilian Real Estate Sales Company.

"He wants 20 million yuan, or he'll stay till the end of the world."

Such hardheadedness has to be applauded.

**** UPDATE ***

There's more about the house in Chongqing in China in the Guardian this weekend, with more details of the homeowner Yang Wu, and his wife Wu Ping. According the Guardian story they have been offered 3.5m yuan (about £233,000 - a lot of money in China) as compensation, but have refused.

The article continues:

"Hold-outs, known as "nails" in China because they stick up despite attempts to beat them down, are becoming increasingly common in China.

Mr Yang's protest has been strengthened by its timing. Earlier this month, the National People's Congress, China's parliament, passed the country's first law to protect private property. Earlier this week, the government reported a surge in illegal land seizures by developers and local governments."

Meanwhile, BoingBoing offers a cavalcade of homeowner holdouts, often with Google Earth evidence, and the history of Spite Mounds in Seattle Washington, further documented here.

Holdouts, we salute you. (I've move the stuff about the house in the midde of the M62 to a new post).

Cities and Sand 3

The trouble with a tabula rasa is that the tabula is rarely rasa after all.

Adu Dhabi has unveiled it's plans for a cultural district on Saadiyat Island ("Happiness Island"). But by inviting four of the biggest names in world architecture - Hadid, Ando, Gehry and Nouvel to create a performing arts centre, a maritime museum, an art museum and a classical museum respectively on a blank 670 acre canvas masterplanned by SOM, questions inevitably arise as to whose culture will be represented.

In the wonderful book, Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas memorably describes Le Corbusier as a "Cartesian carpetbagger", attempting to get his Radiant City concept of huge cruciform skyscrapers built, anywhere, after the rejection of his Plan Voisin for Paris.

Frank Gehry is the modern equivalent - a non-cartesian carpetbagger. There is no city in the world that wouldn't be improved by a Gehry Guggenheim, Walt Disney Concert Hall or Experience Music Project. Often called the Bilbao-factor, the vision that is sold to most second-order cities of the world is that if they want to step up a gear, the answer is to bankroll at $400 million curvilnear temple to the arts.

Abu Dhabi is the latest city to fall under the Gehry/Guggenheim spell, and here he's really turned the Gehryfication dial up to 11. To paraphrase Spinal Tap further, the question is how much more Gehry could it be? And the answer is, none more Gehry.

Many artists later works tend towards self-reference, endless repeating the formula that worked, reducing their initial breadth of ideas to one unrelenting central theme, an instantly recognisable motif. Obvious examples would be the paintings of Piet Mondrian or Mark Rothko. But it easy for this self-referential loop to drift into self-parody, such the books of our beloved JG Ballard, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Has Gehry fallen into the realms of self-parody? Unlike painters, for an architect to relentlessly churn out the same formal tropes regardless of context or site is more disturbing. From the press release, quoted at Dezeen.

"The site itself, virtually on the water or close to the water on all sides, in a desert landscape with the beautiful sea and the light quality of the place suggested some of the direction."

I'm not buying this at all. Is he doomed to reproduce his signature style around the world for clients with deep pockets and cities with aspirations of instant cultural kudos?

The one-style fits anywhere approach to architecture is one that has it's detractors, and the Saadiyat Island development in Adu Dhabi is one that has attracted criticism as a kind of globalisation, or perhaps more accurately a cultural imperialism.

In an deeply suspicious article, A Vision in the Desert, in the New York Times, Nicolai Ourousoff reviews the designs in Adu Dhabi as a new Xanadu in the desert, but there is an unpleasant subtext to the article which attempts to contrast Abu Dhabi's desires for a quick hit of architectural credibility with the urban decay of Beruit and Baghdad:

"With once-proud cities like Beirut and Baghdad ripped apart by political conflict bordering on civil war, Abu Dhabi offers the hope of a major realignment, a chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East."

This is an abhorrent statement, firstly because it is such a gross simplification and skewed viewpoint of the situations in Baghdad and Beruit, but it casts Adu Dhabi, Baghdad and Beirut as some kind of homogeneous Middle East bloc with no separate identity of their own.

Ouroussoff is rightly called out for this in a discussion at Archinect,in which Javier Arbona writes:

"Ouroussoff is himself putting into practice the very obscurantist colonialism that he dismisses initially as "global branding" and which rewrites its own history. This reeks. But rather than actually succeeding at disabusing the pernicious monumentality of the project that just helps to make more invisible the American violence in the region, Ouroussoff only reveals himself as a pawn to the disappearing act".

Who is the cultural quarter in Abu Dhabi being built for? My guess is that it is more about Adu Dhabi's desire to tap into the Bilbao factor, to increase it's standing in the world, to attract tourists and overseas investment; and to compete with the folks down the road in Dubai, rather than the cultural enrichment of the citizens of the Emirates themselves.

The Emirates are defining their own identity precisely by doing the opposite - an ahistorical non-identity, a brave new world of shining global modernity.