Architecture

I meant to write about this article on Shigeru Ban in the Guardian when it first came out, but in all the chaos of moving into my new house, I forgot. Fortunately, the internet has a better memory than I do, and while browsing through my bookmarks I noticed that Dan Hill had linked to it. The article has a fascinating discussion of Ban’s work, especially his use of paper.

Above all else, though, Ban is known for his achievements with paper: he is to paper what Le Corbusier was to concrete, or Norman Foster is to steel. He has spent a good portion of his career exploring its possibilities and repositioning it as a viable, potentially invaluable, building material for the future. In doing so, he might have exposed a giant hole in our current assessment of what good architecture really is.

Architectural possibilities aside, I love paper. Plain, lined, squared; recycled, acid-free, waxy, onionskin; paper is fantastic. It’s incredibly versatile: full of structural and artistic possibility.

I’m always surrounded by paper: books, notebooks, envelopes, sketch books, origami (my sister made me a crane), Post-It notes, journals, papers, drafts of articles and essays. I’ve never really liked doors, so maybe when I build my house I’ll go for paper screens instead.

Stumbling across City of Sound via plasticbag.org, my feelings oscillated between happiness and irritation. Happiness that someone was writing with intelligence, wit and clarity on subjects I was interested in; irritation that they did it so much better than me, on specific topics I was planning to write about.

In any case, don’t waste any time waiting around here; instead, go and read his posts assessing the new ‘Berliner’ Guardian and documenting the New London Architecture exhibition which I went to the other week, as promised. I particularly like that post, because it means I don’t have to write it up myself. Suffice to say that Dan Hill covers it extremely well indeed, with a lot of fascinating detail, and better yet, photos. My brother and I spent a lot of our time there just marvelling at their 1:1500 scale model of the centre of London, finding the places we knew, and knitting together our ground-level knowledge in a way that’s just not possible normally.

As far as the Guardian redesign goes, I’ll limit myself to three comments. Firstly, the new size is convenient, if less than iconic; it doesn’t feel as cramped as the new Times and Independent. I hate the over-friendly masthead—it hasn’t half the class of David Hillman’s Garmond and Helvetica classic, which admittedly has been one of the shaping influences, design-wise, in my life. The Guardian has always been my family’s paper of choice, and it’s shaped my view of what a newspaper should be: well-written, accurate, and wide-ranging, and unafraid to put forward a view on the great issues of the day. The new masthead waters down that forthright image. Mark Boulton has some comments that focus on the typography and the layout; I don’t have his expertise, but I did find the article on the new typeface, Guardian Egyptian, absolutely fascinating.

Lastly, the paper now has full colour on every page. I feel a bit mixed about this. On the one hand, it will give the newspaper a visual versatility previously missing. The art director will have more options, and I can imagine the sports pages benefiting a lot. That said, one thing worries me. When deciding on a photograph to go with an image, will they now have colour simply for colour’s sake, forsaking beautiful black and white? A newspaper is, historically, a black and white medium, but this isn’t just a matter of tradition. Black and white looks good. A well laid-out newspaper page, complimented by a stylish monochrome picture, is a wonderful thing.

Colour should be used sparingly because of the impact it can have, given the appropriate context. If every photograph is in colour, the impact is diminished. When most photographs in a newspaper are black and white, the colour pictures stand out; when they’re all in colour, even the text begins to feel crowded. The signal-to-noise ratio drops. Black and white photographs also seem more serious: this is, again, a question of tone, and to change a newspaper’s tone is something that must be handled with care. Mark Porter, the Guardian’s creative editor, said “If everyone else is shouting louder and louder, the only way you can be heard is by talking in a normal tone of voice - or even whispering.” But with a riot of colour on every page, the Guardian seems to be raising its voice.

Given the recent obsession with architecture around here, it would be rather remiss of me not to follow through that interest in the architectural future of London with a visit to ‘The Changing Face of London’. The exhibition shows off current projects such as the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station. These “mega developments” will irrevocably transform the skyline of London, and this is a great opportunity to see them all in one place.

It closes on the 10^th of September, so make sure you get to the NLA Space before then if you’re interested. If you just want to gawp over the internet, the New London Architecture site is the place to go. For Adam Greenfield’s inimitably cerebral take on the subject in general, V-2 has the goods.

Speaking of London, Sidney Furie’s 1965 adaptation of Len Deighton’s spy thriller The Ipcress File was on BBC Four last night. It’s a cliché, I know, but they just don’t make films like that anymore. The wonderful cinematography takes full advantage of an effortlessly stylish city (they’ve cleaned the buildings a fair bit since then, mind), and Michael Caine’s insouciant Harry Palmer won’t let you take your eyes off him. Serving up a heady brew of Cold War paranoia, arch commentary on the class system, and a brilliant, psychadelic expression of the Sixties fascination with mind-alteration, The Ipcress File is a classic truly deserving of the label.

As requested, a photo of my new monitor can be found here.

If you’re in London at the moment, you should find some time to go to the current exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, which finishes this Saturday (the 27^th of August). “Wright to Gehry: Drawings from the Collection of Barbara Pine” is a collection of drawings by architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Michael Graves. A lot of them are just sketches, scribbles almost. So why are they so interesting?

Most of the time, all we see is a building, usually a finished building—a complete object. Unless we live or work in the area, and watch it being built, it will spring into existence apparently ex nihilo. A completed object is often mysterious, offering few clues to its development. This exhibition is a chance to open it up and take a peek inside, to catch glimpses of the minds of the creators. Plus, at a fiver, the excellent exhibition catalogue by Neil Bingham is a steal (for those of you not living in London, you can buy it online—obviously it’s preferable to see the exhibition in the flesh, but the reproductions aren’t bad at all).

One image that struck me with particular force was a faded pencil sketch by R. Buckminster Fuller, entitled Study for the Ten-Deck House, c.1927 (cat. 20). The Dymaxion pentagon is made mysteriously, tantalisingly alluring by the caption:

[I]t was supposedly so lightweight that it could be delivered by air, by a dirigible, and dropped into a hole in the ground, like planting a tree.

The idea is fascinatingly poetic and playful. What is the difference between a building and a tree? Not individual survivability. Not complexity. No, it’s self-organisation, replication, repair: the realm of the organic; a realm which buildings may, in time, inhabit. We are now within reach of a future where we will sow the seeds of buildings, water them, and watch them grow.

I don’t want to appear too utopian about nanotechnology, or technology in general. My future is no more than a daydream. But the idea of planting a building is a beautiful one.

Modern buildings are shiny things, all glass and steel. Some are better than others; I detest the plastic boxes that pass for blocks of flats, but the Gherkin is rather elegant. However, my worry applies to all of them. Are buildings being built simply for the moment—for the now? Are they being built to win architecture prizes and make people a lot of money? Clearly there is a need for new buildings, especially in London, which is home to any number of architectural monstrosities, many of them perpetrated in the Sixties and Seventies when clearly people decided it wasn’t worth building anything good.

But what of the future? Buildings age. People live in them, work in them. They get grubby, the sheen fades, the stone becomes grey, not white. Brass is rubbed down, tiles chip, grime accumulates. My fear is that buildings built for the moment will not grow old gracefully; they will, in twenty or thirty years, be grubby and unkempt creatures. One of the pleasures of living in London is appreciating old buildings that have stood for centuries. They have history behind them and within them; they embody the passing of time. They are no longer merely creations of the moment; they have changed with the times, their exteriors altering with the ages. The darkening of brick and stone, the chipped tiles, these things add to the texture of old buildings. In a way, they are improved, not worsened.

Have architects given thought to the future, to what their buildings will look like in fifty years, or a hundred? Have they designed them not merely to function and to appeal visually, but to age, to degrade gracefully?

I’m a regular reader of Design Observer, which is ostensibly a design blog, but in reality has a fairly wide remit, encompassing art and architecture as well. Not only does it have well-written posts on interesting topics, but also (unlike so many blogs) a high standard of discussion in the comments section. This article from a week ago struck a chord with me, despite the fact that I have no idea about the programme they’re discussing. No, it was the initial paragraphs that got my attention, with their mention of the “Muji House”. Here’s Tom Vanderbilt’s blurb:

[The Muji house is] a two-story, open-plan unadorned box designed by Kazuhiko Namba. Like the company itself — the “no-brand” company that even logo-allergic Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition could love — it seems to celebrate “absolute flexibility,” the Japanese concept of “kenketsu” (roughly, simplicity) and “utilitarian materials and rationalised production methods”

A contextually-appropriate mention of Muji or William Gibson are pretty well guaranteed to draw me in, as I (like many, I suspect) am a big fan of the work of both. Muji’s designs seem to embody the side of the Japanese aesthetic that I admire: a simple, practical beauty, seeming to encompass both the homely and the spiritual.¹

When we had building work done on our house, last summer, it was essentially for one (admittedly multi-faceted) reason: to make the kitchen bigger. The kitchen is the real centre of our home; it’s where the family congregates, both for meals, and at other times. We like to be in there; like to be together. I think the cooking and the close-knitness go together: a family that likes spending time together will invest more (emotionally and financially) in its cooking. Nations with great cooking are often nations where the family is important (just look at Italy).

What was wrong with the old kitchen? Well, to begin with, it was small. It was dingy. You had to go through it to get to the bathroom, and it had no view onto the garden. When we had the extension done, we fixed these things. Roofing over the passage that originally went from the back door to the garden allowed us, at a stroke, to increase the light coming into the room, give us a view to the garden, increase the size of the kitchen, and move the bathroom (it’s now where the kitchen was). To really understand all this you’d need a diagram, and perhaps I’ll add one later, but it’s really the principles behind these decisions that I’m interested in.

The environment we exist in, every day, is important. It shapes our lives; to live and grow in good directions, we need the right kind of environment. We accept this as true about parenting, about schooling, and any number of other things. It’s time we accepted it about architecture, the most obvious instantiation of our physical environment. Living in DIY nation, one can’t help but notice that the passion for decorating and redecorating one’s home is obviously something that has a foothold in the national psyche, that in some way defines us as a people. However, to simply accept this is to surrender to platitudes.

The next step is to take on board not only this need to adjust our environments to suit our needs, but the reason the need exists, and its corollaries. There is a claim that, as consumers, it is up to us to determine what the market provides. Currently, in Britain, the market provides housing that fails to meet basic needs: the need for light and space, the need for good design (that’s to say, not ugly). Horrible yellow bricks; ugly plastic doors and windowframes; small windows (good for protection, bad for light): these are the markers of the modern home. They are boxes to hide in, not homes to live in. New buildings are made without consideration for the future: what will they look like in ten years’ time, or twenty? What will they look like when the veneer has worn down, when white plastic is discoloured by exposure, dirtied and damaged, when they look like the monstrosities of the 1960s and 1970s do?

Buildings in the post-1945, Cold War era had an excuse: they were built with the thought at the back of the creators’ minds that it didn’t really matter what they were like as long as they housed people; after all, they’d probably just get demolished in the next war. This excuse, paltry as it is, no longer applies. The only thing that stops people creating good buildings, beautiful, functional buildings that satisfy our needs as human beings, is greed. The housing market makes billions for developers who have no interest in the things they are creating past selling them. This is wrong, this is stupid, this is ridiculous. It is time to take the control of such important things as the environments we live and work in from the hands of corporate stooges only interested in the financial bottom line. It is time to assert ourselves, to tell the market that functional, appealing, holistic design is not a luxury: it is essential.