New buildings are simple: imagination and engineering.
New places are not. Indeed it seems impossible to achieve by artifice the parts with no name, to mimic the bits in between, the pavement’s warts and the avenue’s lesions, the physical consequences of changed uses, the wasteground, the apparently purposeless plots, the tracts without name. It shouldn’t be impossible. One cause of this failure is architects’ lack of empathy, their failure to cast themselves as non-architects: Yona Fiedman long ago observed that architecture entirely forgets those who use its products. Another cause of failure is their bent towards aesthetic totalitarianism - a trait Pevsner approved of incidentally. There was no work he more admired than St Catherine’s College, Oxford: a perfect piece of architecture. And it is indeed impressive in an understated way. But it is equally an example of nothing less than micro level totalitarianism. Arne Jacobson designed not only the building but every piece of furniture and every item of cutlery that would be used in the refectory. There is no escape from the will of the god of the drawing board. At macro level a so called masterplanner will attend to the details of countless streets, closes, avenues, drop-in centres, houses, offices, bridges. The masterplanner is almost certainly an architect. Even though planning and architecture are contrasting disciplines. There are evidently countless differences between a suburb and, say, a shopping mall in that suburb. We are all familiar with the hubristic pomp that often results when actors direct themselves. Appointing architects to conceive places rather than just sticking to buildings is like appointing foxes to advise on chicken security, like getting Hamas to babysit a kibbutz.
The architectural ideal is to fabricate topographical perfection: the immaculate, that is unstained, conception, a creation untroubled by context, by anything so messy as life, by what is already there - hence the covert enthusiasm for gated communities, which of course are not communities but civilian fortresses, expressions of separateness. Hence too the enthusiasm for demolition - which does not destroy just buildings, it destroys the sentiments we attach to buildings, it destroys a little bit of us. There is often a good aesthetic case for demolition. Ricardo Bofil declared in the early 80s that he would only enter the competition for the National Gallery extension in London on condition that he could pull down the Wilkins building and start from scratch: we might of course have got a building preferable to Venturi’s offensively apologetic aberration, but that’s hardly the point. What was at stake was Traflagar Square - and even if Wilkins’s gallery is thoroughly feeble - it is not high enough to dominate the square as it should - it is nonetheless an integral part of the square, an integral part of our conception of London. Bofil - never falsely modest, he is after all an architect - then announced that he would only work in Britain if he could build an entire city - and even petitioned the government to this end.
The human, as opposed to architectural, ideal is to revel in urbanistic richness, in layers of imperfection, in the flesh that is attached to the architectural skeleton. I got sick of Rome when I worked there: too much perfection, too constant a diet of masterpieces - the lumbering sod-you-ness of Basil Spence’s British Embassy was peculiarly attractive. The only town in the Cotswolds that attracts me is Stroud where the tyranny of oolitic limestone is ruptured by brick and slate. Utopia is boring. Skeletons are lifeless. Place is composed of more than an armature and good intentions. It must do what architects are disinclined to do - that is to leave space for those who frequent place, or places. I‘m not referring to polluters equipped with spray cans or lorryloads of Yorkstone-cladding who are the visual equivalent of reeking burger joint operatives. And I’m not referring to space in the sense that architects and urbanists use it: private space, public space and so on - physical volumes and voids. I mean mental space. The space that a creator leaves for his spectator or reader or audience to imagine in. Place, like art, affects us through a private compact, a conspiracy of insinuation. The avoidance of explicit meaning allows the spectator to become complicit, almost to enter into the creative process: the words on a page, the buildings in a street, the marks on a canvas are - if they’re any good - electric triggers, synapse prods. They speak to a combination of faculties: brain, ears, eyes, spine - especially spine. The most technically accomplished, intellectually appealing and well meant work is bereft unless it is provokes joy or grated nerves, unless it is delightful - or emotionally harrowing.
Now, the failure to make place is surely allied to the way in which place is represented - that is, how it is first seen and then shown. The likelihood, as I’ve said, is that the sine qua non of architectural prowess is the ability to imagine in three dimensions, to conceive of a space by means of planar, isometric, dimetric, trimetric, parallel and orthographic projections. By means of axonometrics. These tools or devices, rendered infinitely more potent by computing, have gradually become ends rather than the mere means: method and product coalesce. Virtual buildings - developer willing - mutate into real buildings. I appreciate that we should always put quotes round real but you know what I mean: physical constructs composed of glass, poured concrete, corten, breezeblock, steel, brick and, in special cases, mafiosi chunks. Certain of these metamorphoses from the virtual to the real will succeed, others won’t.
They will be enclosed interior spaces. They will be confining and limiting. Although we move through them and are moved through them by lifts, escalators, walkways, and although they may be very large - superstores, airports, stadia, corporate HQs - we experience them as finite entities. Our movements too are finite. We are within them. We are at the mercy of the architectural disposition of space and of routes predetermined by utility. Buildings regulate our behaviour. For instance: baggage reclaim, passports, customs - or is it customs, passports - shopping mall, smart signage which is also dysfunctional signage, rank of disobliging ashtrays called taxis. We are constantly aware of a building’s purpose. We are, usually, within it as a result of that purpose. We do not go to a dentist’s surgery for a coffee. We do not go to a cafe to get our teeth fixed. We are controlled by buildings. The majority of them are curtailments. They are monolithic. Provisional gaols.
Places are, on the other hand, heterogeneous and multipartite. Liberating. Places are feasts for the spirit. Or can be, should be. They resist classification. I was standing across the street from Richard Rogers’s law courts in Bordeaux the other day - you know, award winning, sustainable, gesticulatoire, un batiment phare, gestural engineering, an icon, a - yes - iconic landmark that is so achingly iconic that it hurts. But despite all that... it is a remarkable work and is a pleasure to behold: it fulfils its responsibility to the street, to the people who pass by it and never enter it, who use it, if that’s the word, as a backdrop to their daily itineraries. I noticed a man a few metres from me. He was dressed in a touchingly desperate attempt at smartness. Tie, frayed shirt, threadbare but dapper suit, polished cracked shoes. He was grasping a suitcase whose covering of naugahyde was so worn the cardboard showed though like the skin of a dog with mange. He was staring into a hairdressers called Colette Guy. He then walked a few paces along the street and stopped in front of the window of an adjoining house which is a barristers chambers. He put down the suitcase. He reached into his pocket and clutched something. He leant forward towards close to the window unfurtively, not a voyeur. He lifted his hand to his face. He was holding a pair of nail scissors. Using the window as a mirror he trimmed his moustache, patiently, precisely, with deliberation. He tilted his head to scutinise himself in a manner that made me wonder if he wasn’t a former soldier down on his luck. There was no vanity in his gestures. It was as though he was adjusting his moustache to conform to a remembered ordinance of length and shape. Maybe he was going to job interview. This tableau combined with the pod shaped courtrooms which though they suggest a distillery are improbably allusions to the insobriety of judges, and with the cowels above them which recall penitents’ hoods. And with the extraordinarily graceful undulating roof. And with the light-sensitive shutters painted the handsome navy blue which is the colour of the French establishment. For me, though I guess not for the man with the scissors, it was an affirmation of the freedom that is granted by streets. This was a complex interplay. An intimate private act performed in a animated public space before the eyes of justice and before my eyes - he can hardly have been unaware of my gaping. The décor included a sleek tram on Line A, two near identical loden coats so engrossed in conversation that though they almost brushed against our man they didn’t notice him, a wobbly board advertising a restaurant’s prix fixe menu, an area bounded by the courts’ entrance, by a section of ancient city walls, and by the magistrates’ school’s extension. This is a city of very grand, very stately, very boastful setpieces. Here, in contrast, there is a kind of ragged harmony which is almost picturesque.
Given the unavoidable fashionability of narrative in every discipline from psychotherapy to ethnology and given architecture’s thralldom to the fashionable it might be reckoned surprising that narrative forms little part of architecture. But that would be to forget the crude division between the linear and the static, the sequential and the three dimensional. Places are read serially. And to a degree they are created serially: some cities can be interpreted almost dendrologically. The mediaeval walled core, the century by century expansion of rings beyond the walls yet still clinging to them, the burbs which tried to escape the city and coalesce with the country. We experience them sequentially as we move through them. We create, often without realising that we are doing so, narratives of our everyday topographies - these are personal to us and mnemonically potent. And so is narrative central to writing. The shaping of memory and imagined memory, of self or the self we longed to be, of self in relation to place as much as in relation to people. We can, on the other hand, obviously have no memories of what’s new, of what is nothing but freshly manufactured product, of what is erected for the profit of the omnipotent construction industry - which would sooner build that restore, which lies to the government about how many new houses are needed in Britain, which craves land for without land it would be defunct.
Nostalgia is a basic human sentiment. It literally means merely the yearning for a longlost place we once knew. Architecture despises nostalgia whilst failing to acknowledge that it is dependent on it. At least, for the past century it has despised it. It seems to ignorantly confuse nostalgia with the so called nostalgia industry. It ought to go without saying that nostalgia has nothing to do with the nostalgia industry because that industry is selling us someone else’s memories, some generalised yesterday, some collective rather than an intensely private past. The triumphs of revivalism would not have been possible without some sort of nostalgic longing: it’s not of course that Violet le Duc or Ruskin or Morris owned direct memories of the middle ages but they were afflicted by their memories of mediaeval structures. Plus ca change and all that - today’s architects are afflicted by their memories of early modern movement structures. Indeed much of today’s modernism is no such thing. It’s not modernism, it’s neo-modernism, synthetic modernism, an expression of nostalgia for modernism. We are witnessing the modern revival just as our late Georgian and Victorian forbears witnessed the gothic revival. The present is constantly reinventing the past. Implicit in nostalgia is a second yearning, for the self we were when we inhabited that longlost place.
Nostalgia is central to much writing and painting: Gray, Goldsmith, Friedrich, Chateaubriand, Millet, Egg, Dickens, Tennyson, Housman, Stevenson, Hardy, Joyce, de Chirico, Fitzgerald, Borges, and Auden. Who was a modernist, of a sort. A sort that is not necessarily impressed by modernism in other fields: he wrote in Letters From Iceland... Preserve me from the shape of things to be / The high grade posters at the public meeting / The influence of art on industry / The cinemas with perfect taste in seating. A priori, this seems to be directed at that hectoring tendency which made an ideology or cult of modernism, collectivised it, standardised it, laid down rules (just as André Breton did for surrealism) and captiously claimed for it a gamut of moral properties.
But it’s also reveals the poet’s fearful indignation at a world which would yield nothing to write about. A world bereft of the patina of age and of correlative objects and of the uncomfortable and the awkward, where the illicit and the sordid no longer flourish because officious jobsworths have swept them away. The overlooked can only survive so long as authority is lax - when authority goes looking for the overlooked the game is up. As it is today in the Lea Valley in east London. The entirely despicable, entirely pointless 2012 Olympics - a festival of energy squandering architectural bling worthy of a vain third world dictatorship, a jobbery gravy train, a payday for the construction industry, a covetable terrorist target - will occupy a site far more valuable as it was. It was probably the most extensive terrain vague of any European capital city: the English word wasteland is pejorative and lazy. Further it more or less states that the place has no merit - so why not cover it in expressions of vanity.
It has, regrettably, proved to be an almost caricatural illustration of the chasmic gulf that exists between the needs of writers and the aspirations of architects. A writer, at least this writer - and I am hardly alone, sees entropic beauty, roads to nowhere whose gravel aggregate is that of adhoc second world war fighter runways, decrepit Victorian oriental pumping stations, rats, asbestos sheets piled in what for obvious reasons cannot be called pyres, supermarket trolleys in toxic canals, rotting foxes, used condoms, pitta bread with green mould, ancient cheveaux de frise, newish cheveaux de frise, polythene bags caught on branches and billowing like windsocks, greasy carpet tiles, countless gauges of wire - sturdy strands it takes industrial kit to cut through, wire gates in metal frames, rolls of barbed wire like magnified hair curlers in an old time northern sitcom, chicken wire, rusting grids of reinforcing wire, flaking private / keep-out signs that have been ignored since the day they were erected, goose grass, artificial hillocks of smelt, collapsing nissen huts, huts full stop, shacks built out of doors and car panels, skeins of torn tights in milky puddles, metal stakes with pointed tops, burnt out cars, burnt out houses, abandonned cars, abandonned chemical drums, abandonned cooking oil drums, abandonned washing machine drums, squashed feathers, tidal mud, an embanked former railway line, fences made of horizontal planks, fences made of vertical planks, a shoe, vestigial lanes lined with May bushes, a hawser, soggy burlap sacks, ground elder, a wheelless buggy, perished underlay, budlieah, a pavement blocked by a container, cracked plastic pipes, a ceramic rheostat, a car battery warehouse constellaeted with cctv cameras, a couple of scraggy horses on a patch of mud, the germolene pink premises of a salmon smoker, sluice gates, swarf alps, a crumpled portakabin, a concrete block the size of a van, bricked up windows, travellers’ caravans and washing lines, a ravine filled with worn car tyres, jackdaws, herons, jays, a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit, traffic cones, oxygen cylinders, a bridge made of railway sleepers across duckweed, an oasis of scrupulously tended allotments.
That’s what I see: layers of urban archaeology. It’s what painters such as Carel Weight, Edward Burra would have seen, what George Shaw and Julian Perry still see. A site of richness and multiple textures which feeds curiosity. It is obviously decaying. But decay, as anyone who has watched meat rot knows, possesses a vitality of its own. Decay supports parasitism. There is a fungus I long to find which forms a mycorrhizal relationship exclusively with the flesh of a dead horse. Such vitality is infinitely preferable to sterility and stadia.
What an architect sees, blindly and banally, is not richness and severality. But, rather, something that is crudely classified as a brownfield site, that is tantamount to being classified as having no intrinsic worth. And because of the iniquitous generalisation that accrues from classification it is seen as no different to every other brownfield site. A brownfield site is a non-place where derivative architecture can gloriously propagate itself with impunity. A brownfield site is a job opportunity, a place where the world can be physically improved. The architectural urge doesn’t acknowledge the fact that it’ll all turn to dust.