We didn't mean to find a cathedral. We were only looking for an ATM. Jacques had run out of money, and we needed a bank.
But as we drove into Gallardon we realised we had found rather more than just a branch of Credit Agricole. A fine Gothic choir and a marvellously high spire, and a strange, huge, relic of upthrust wall crowning the hill, gave this town a striking silhouette against the low spring sun.
As soon as we saw the apse of the cathedral I knew where I'd seen it before. The flying buttresses, simple buttresses like semi-circles drawn with a child's compass; the simple, wide lancet windows, without tracery; it was exactly like Chartres cathedral.
The silhouette of the church is as striking as that of the town. The choir is gloriously high; the spire, at its north west corner, soars up to heaven. But the whole thing seems to be cut short. Then you realise the nave is there, after all, but it's so low its roofline is hardly visible above the houses of the town.
We went in, of course; after all, the church was next to the bank.
Even with that hint of Chartres cathedral I wasn't prepared for what I saw inside. Beyond the long, wide, rather low nave, steps led up towards the glowing light of the choir; the bleached white of fine, porous limestone. It was like a path of revelation; through darkness to light. I had to raise my head to look at the choir; the whole church is laid out on the slope of the hill, rising and rising again towards the east. It is an amazing place.
Of course, the effect would have been rather different had any of the original stained glass been left in the choir windows. The clear glass floods the apse; it was almost as if the light had become tangible, so strong did it seem.
And a baby sister for Chartres? Well believe it or not, I was right. It was built around the same time, and even the stone used to build the choir may have come from the same quarry, according to a note in the church.
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Monday, 27 April 2009
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Walls, Walls, Walls
Walls in the West have a bad name. The Berlin Wall, symbol of oppression. Prison walls (Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage). The most frightening thing for many of us is a wall without windows, a room from which you can't see out on to the street.
In the other hand, in Morocco walls seem to be a joy and a delight. In Meknes, Moulay Ismail's great buildings seem to be nothing but walls. Walls around the royal palace, walls around the Dar-el-Kebir. Walls that stride a kilometre without a break. Walls that are by now built into the structure of the city, so that houses are built against them, and streets flank one side, so that sometimes the only time you see the wall is in the tiny gap between two houses when you catch a sudden glimpse of crenellation. The huge open space in front of the Dar el-Kebir is hardly a real square, as it would be in Italy, say; it's just the result of building two huge sets of walls a little apart from each other. The walls are the point - the space is just what happens once you've built the walls.
Now here's another thing where the idea of Moulay Ismail's Meknes as the Moroccan Versailles breaks down. Nowhere at Versailles are you aware of walls, as such; indeed the front wall of the courtyard is made transparent by railings, and the frontage of the chateau is a deep U that draws you in, not a flat wall that holds you off. You are meant to see the splendour; you are meant to guess at what's inside. And in the gardens, it's the avenue that dominates, the panorama controlled by perspective - you are meant to see all the way to the horizon; walls are banned, as they'd impose an end to the view, implying that the King's dominion was limited and his reign impotent.
But at Meknes the whole point is that you don't see anything of Moulay Ismail's palace. The walls exclude. It's an inward-looking culture; the palace has to be guarded against attack, against impurity, against the quotidian. There are no windows in the walls; who wants to see the chaos of the streets outside? The dirtiness of the gutter?
So the symbol of Moulay Ismail's rule is the blank wall. No windows. Gates where the ornamentation privileges the flat surfaces of the wall, rather than the arch of the gate. Walls that surround, that blank out the exterior world. There are no vistas, no panoramas, and that may be why so many of these Moroccan walls are determinedly un-picturesque, unphotogenic. The walls at Avila make you want to take pictures; the walls at Meknes don't.
In the other hand, in Morocco walls seem to be a joy and a delight. In Meknes, Moulay Ismail's great buildings seem to be nothing but walls. Walls around the royal palace, walls around the Dar-el-Kebir. Walls that stride a kilometre without a break. Walls that are by now built into the structure of the city, so that houses are built against them, and streets flank one side, so that sometimes the only time you see the wall is in the tiny gap between two houses when you catch a sudden glimpse of crenellation. The huge open space in front of the Dar el-Kebir is hardly a real square, as it would be in Italy, say; it's just the result of building two huge sets of walls a little apart from each other. The walls are the point - the space is just what happens once you've built the walls.
Now here's another thing where the idea of Moulay Ismail's Meknes as the Moroccan Versailles breaks down. Nowhere at Versailles are you aware of walls, as such; indeed the front wall of the courtyard is made transparent by railings, and the frontage of the chateau is a deep U that draws you in, not a flat wall that holds you off. You are meant to see the splendour; you are meant to guess at what's inside. And in the gardens, it's the avenue that dominates, the panorama controlled by perspective - you are meant to see all the way to the horizon; walls are banned, as they'd impose an end to the view, implying that the King's dominion was limited and his reign impotent.
But at Meknes the whole point is that you don't see anything of Moulay Ismail's palace. The walls exclude. It's an inward-looking culture; the palace has to be guarded against attack, against impurity, against the quotidian. There are no windows in the walls; who wants to see the chaos of the streets outside? The dirtiness of the gutter?
So the symbol of Moulay Ismail's rule is the blank wall. No windows. Gates where the ornamentation privileges the flat surfaces of the wall, rather than the arch of the gate. Walls that surround, that blank out the exterior world. There are no vistas, no panoramas, and that may be why so many of these Moroccan walls are determinedly un-picturesque, unphotogenic. The walls at Avila make you want to take pictures; the walls at Meknes don't.
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Empty space - the mechouar
One of the things that most surprised me about Morocco was the huge empty spaces. For instance at Fes, the Mechouar (parade ground) in front of the walls, between Fes-el-Bali (old Fes) and Fel-el-Jdid (new Fes); or the Djemaa el Fna, in Marrakech; or the huge expanses of the Place el Hedim, the square containing the Qubba, and the massive area in front of Dar el-Kabir at Meknes.
Moulay Ismail's work at Meknes is said to have been inspired by what he had heard about Versailles, and it's often compared to Versailles. But in fact the comparison is instructive mainly because although Moulay Ismail achieved bigness, he did not achieve greatness. There appears to be be no significance to the walls and spaces he laid out; they do not create axes, do not relate to each other, do not create an organisation of space.
Place el Hedim (admittedly changed since his time) for instance appears to be a huge, regular rectangle laid out in front of the great Bab el-Mansour. But if you look carefully, Bab-el-Mansour is off-centre - it has no relation to the space.
Nor is there any attempt to regularise or articulate the space. The big square in front of the Dar el-Kabir is not given any organisation by the buildings that face on to it - there are no regular arcades, no features that could make it a focused space rather than just an empty area.
The huge long corridor that runs from past the Zaouia in Meknes is nearly a kilometer long (my reckoning, based on pacing it) - yet it runs from one little gate in the wall to a blind corner. It is not an axis; it doesn't go anywhere. In Versailles, an alley like this would be an avenue, leading to a viewpoint, to a focal monument; here, it's just a long dog-leg with nothing at the end.
This is characteristic of the Moroccan city - though I'd hesitate to say it is a characteristic of Arab cityscapes as a whole. Only in the work of Moroccan architects post-colonisation, borrowing from the repertoire of the French-designed villes nouvelles, do you find regular spaces, articulated by the architecture that surrounds them.
The big squares are empty spaces. They come alive, as the name of Djemaa el Fna ('assembly of the dead') suggests, only when people assemble in them. No people, no meaning. No people, no articulation. No people, no need. It's the people who define the space, and not the other way around.
Moulay Ismail's work at Meknes is said to have been inspired by what he had heard about Versailles, and it's often compared to Versailles. But in fact the comparison is instructive mainly because although Moulay Ismail achieved bigness, he did not achieve greatness. There appears to be be no significance to the walls and spaces he laid out; they do not create axes, do not relate to each other, do not create an organisation of space.
Place el Hedim (admittedly changed since his time) for instance appears to be a huge, regular rectangle laid out in front of the great Bab el-Mansour. But if you look carefully, Bab-el-Mansour is off-centre - it has no relation to the space.
Nor is there any attempt to regularise or articulate the space. The big square in front of the Dar el-Kabir is not given any organisation by the buildings that face on to it - there are no regular arcades, no features that could make it a focused space rather than just an empty area.
The huge long corridor that runs from past the Zaouia in Meknes is nearly a kilometer long (my reckoning, based on pacing it) - yet it runs from one little gate in the wall to a blind corner. It is not an axis; it doesn't go anywhere. In Versailles, an alley like this would be an avenue, leading to a viewpoint, to a focal monument; here, it's just a long dog-leg with nothing at the end.
This is characteristic of the Moroccan city - though I'd hesitate to say it is a characteristic of Arab cityscapes as a whole. Only in the work of Moroccan architects post-colonisation, borrowing from the repertoire of the French-designed villes nouvelles, do you find regular spaces, articulated by the architecture that surrounds them.
The big squares are empty spaces. They come alive, as the name of Djemaa el Fna ('assembly of the dead') suggests, only when people assemble in them. No people, no meaning. No people, no articulation. No people, no need. It's the people who define the space, and not the other way around.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Glimpses of Morocco
Just back from three weeks in Morocco - and it was a fascinating visit, not least in glimpses of a different cityscape.
The European city is a city of open spaces, that don't change their character, that relate to each other logically. Since the Renaissance, there's been a rationality to the way cities are put together.
That logic doesn't happen in Arab cities. Seville, for instance, is the one city I always get lost in, even with the best map I can get.
Arab cities seem to be built around private spaces. The streets are simply the gaps between the buildings. They don't run straight - they run via crooked corners; one street near Dar Si Said, in Marrakech, goes round five right angle bends in less than a hundred yards. Where the map shows them running straight across a grid, in fact you'll find a staggered junction, with a little kink in the street.
The idea of following the 'main street' becomes ludicrous. A main street can simply filter away into tiny passageways leading to the dead ends of a kasbah. It's only wider because it leads from the individual houses to the souk - but it does not go from A to B, so to speak; it simply feeds a drainage system, so that the flood of people going down the street turns into a number of trickles feeding into impasses that contain two or three house doors, and that's all.
And you see the buildings, the real heart of the city, only in glimpses and glances. For instance in Fes, as a non -Muslim, you'll only see the Kairouine mosque or the central Zaouia through gateways, obliquely. You can walk round them and trace their pattern, but you cannot enter; and they are intended to remain private spaces, unlike the western Cathedral with its open parvis, its facade, its spires and towers, or the baroque church which announces itself with a facade that is a piece of public drama.
It's this that marks the mysterious appeal of Moroccan cities. Morocco takes this strand of Arab architecture to its extreme - far more so, say, than Oman. Everything is secrecy and indirection.
The European city is a city of open spaces, that don't change their character, that relate to each other logically. Since the Renaissance, there's been a rationality to the way cities are put together.
That logic doesn't happen in Arab cities. Seville, for instance, is the one city I always get lost in, even with the best map I can get.
Arab cities seem to be built around private spaces. The streets are simply the gaps between the buildings. They don't run straight - they run via crooked corners; one street near Dar Si Said, in Marrakech, goes round five right angle bends in less than a hundred yards. Where the map shows them running straight across a grid, in fact you'll find a staggered junction, with a little kink in the street.
The idea of following the 'main street' becomes ludicrous. A main street can simply filter away into tiny passageways leading to the dead ends of a kasbah. It's only wider because it leads from the individual houses to the souk - but it does not go from A to B, so to speak; it simply feeds a drainage system, so that the flood of people going down the street turns into a number of trickles feeding into impasses that contain two or three house doors, and that's all.
And you see the buildings, the real heart of the city, only in glimpses and glances. For instance in Fes, as a non -Muslim, you'll only see the Kairouine mosque or the central Zaouia through gateways, obliquely. You can walk round them and trace their pattern, but you cannot enter; and they are intended to remain private spaces, unlike the western Cathedral with its open parvis, its facade, its spires and towers, or the baroque church which announces itself with a facade that is a piece of public drama.
It's this that marks the mysterious appeal of Moroccan cities. Morocco takes this strand of Arab architecture to its extreme - far more so, say, than Oman. Everything is secrecy and indirection.
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
How gentrification destroys the past
In some ways I have nothing against gentrification. I suppose you could have seen me as one of the gentrifiers of Stoke Newington when I moved in, during the 1990s - wealthy enough to buy a house and do it up, which I suppose counted as 'gentry'.
And I have nothing against regeneration, either. But when it's implemented in such a way that it resembles Stalin's forced migrations, rather than trying to improve the existing life of an area, I worry. I worry, for instance, that we're losing a lot of real history and local culture in the East End to the London Olympics - and that those things can never be replaced. The allotments, the mixed housing estates, the refuseniks of the old council flats, are never going to be renewed.
So I was sad to see what is happening to Sulukule, a district of Istanbul by the Theodosian walls. First of all, it's one of those rather downbeat areas where little wooden houses shelter under Byzantine ruins; part of the continuing history of Constantinople, Byzantium, Istanbul.
Secondly, it's where the Roma of Istanbul now live. (Apparently they've already been chased out of Beyoglu and Fener by high rents. Fener isn't exactly swish.) And they are being forcibly evicted, and sent to live in (expensive) flats 40 km out of the city. Presumbly with the rather cynical expectation that they won't be able to pay the rent.
We saw this kind of thing happening in the UK in the 1960s - the destruction of working class communities in favour of idealistic modern housing. Governments find their working class and Romany citizens embarrassing, and the places they live demeaning - so they want to build utopian projects. Not in order to help their citizens, but so the city looks modern. So it impresses the middle classes, the investors, and (perhaps) foreigners who will invest here.
It's sad. Sulukule isn't just any old community either - it's one of the world's oldest Romany communities, and it's the place where most of Istanbul's gypsy music scene happens.
Sign the petition for what it's worth. I was number 3026.
And on a slightly different subject, I was sad to see the demise of Woolworths in the UK. 'Woolies' didn't have a raison d'être any more, it's true - its variety store format was deeply outmoded. It sold CDs and pick'n'mix, and an assortment of other stuff that kept changing and never really included anything you needed.
But it was part of English life. And some of the stores were classics, Art Deco style 1930s buildings which were defiantly modernist in a still very Victorian-Edwardian style high street. There's one in Ilford that looks like something out of Flash Gordon.
I don't miss the smelly vinyl floor and flickering strip lighting of the most recent stores. But I wonder if somewhere, there isn't a Woolies that could be spot listed, or preserved as a sort of Museum-of-Woolies, so we don't entirely lose our heritage?
(Apropos of Woolies, why is it that every time I have a good idea for something to write about, Jonathan Glancey has it first. I'm getting quite fed up...)
And I have nothing against regeneration, either. But when it's implemented in such a way that it resembles Stalin's forced migrations, rather than trying to improve the existing life of an area, I worry. I worry, for instance, that we're losing a lot of real history and local culture in the East End to the London Olympics - and that those things can never be replaced. The allotments, the mixed housing estates, the refuseniks of the old council flats, are never going to be renewed.
So I was sad to see what is happening to Sulukule, a district of Istanbul by the Theodosian walls. First of all, it's one of those rather downbeat areas where little wooden houses shelter under Byzantine ruins; part of the continuing history of Constantinople, Byzantium, Istanbul.
Secondly, it's where the Roma of Istanbul now live. (Apparently they've already been chased out of Beyoglu and Fener by high rents. Fener isn't exactly swish.) And they are being forcibly evicted, and sent to live in (expensive) flats 40 km out of the city. Presumbly with the rather cynical expectation that they won't be able to pay the rent.
We saw this kind of thing happening in the UK in the 1960s - the destruction of working class communities in favour of idealistic modern housing. Governments find their working class and Romany citizens embarrassing, and the places they live demeaning - so they want to build utopian projects. Not in order to help their citizens, but so the city looks modern. So it impresses the middle classes, the investors, and (perhaps) foreigners who will invest here.
It's sad. Sulukule isn't just any old community either - it's one of the world's oldest Romany communities, and it's the place where most of Istanbul's gypsy music scene happens.
Sign the petition for what it's worth. I was number 3026.
And on a slightly different subject, I was sad to see the demise of Woolworths in the UK. 'Woolies' didn't have a raison d'être any more, it's true - its variety store format was deeply outmoded. It sold CDs and pick'n'mix, and an assortment of other stuff that kept changing and never really included anything you needed.
But it was part of English life. And some of the stores were classics, Art Deco style 1930s buildings which were defiantly modernist in a still very Victorian-Edwardian style high street. There's one in Ilford that looks like something out of Flash Gordon.
I don't miss the smelly vinyl floor and flickering strip lighting of the most recent stores. But I wonder if somewhere, there isn't a Woolies that could be spot listed, or preserved as a sort of Museum-of-Woolies, so we don't entirely lose our heritage?
(Apropos of Woolies, why is it that every time I have a good idea for something to write about, Jonathan Glancey has it first. I'm getting quite fed up...)
Thursday, 25 December 2008
Pedant? moi?
One of the things that always makes me wonder just how gullible human beings can be is the plethora of Harry Potter and da Vinci Code tours. As far as I'm aware there isn't yet a Lion, Witch and Wardrobe tour of Oxford (though there is a Middle Earth tour of Birmingham) but I'm sure there soon will be.
If you've read the da Vinci Code, be prepared for a shock when you get to know Rome. I spotted quite a few howlers - I know my Roman baroque churches extremely well and I can tell when Dan Brown hasn't done enough research. But for a real in-depth treatment, try Scott's marvellous article "The Dirt on Rome's Earthy Chapel". It came up on Google when I was doing a bit of research for a piece on Rome's skeletons - and it's the most amazing piece. Worth reading, in fact, even if you have no interest at all in the da Vinci code, for its superb explanation of a very complex and interesting work of art, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.
If you've read the da Vinci Code, be prepared for a shock when you get to know Rome. I spotted quite a few howlers - I know my Roman baroque churches extremely well and I can tell when Dan Brown hasn't done enough research. But for a real in-depth treatment, try Scott's marvellous article "The Dirt on Rome's Earthy Chapel". It came up on Google when I was doing a bit of research for a piece on Rome's skeletons - and it's the most amazing piece. Worth reading, in fact, even if you have no interest at all in the da Vinci code, for its superb explanation of a very complex and interesting work of art, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Music and architecture
It's taken a long time to convince me that the mathematical appeal of architecture can be as strong as the picturesque.
That may be in part an Anglo-Saxon prejudice. The Gothic still rules in these islands - crags, castles, cathedrals, a cult of the picturesque, and particularly of the delights of buildings that have been built up over the years, accumulating accretions as they have pinnacles and parapets.
The first time that I visited Florence I was underwhelmed. It's only recently that I've come to appreciate the appeal of Brunelleschi's or Alberti's designs - the geometrical patterns that underlie the scheme, the perfect circles of the Pazzi chapel or the multiple grids of San Lorenzo. The reticence of the great palaces, of the arcaded courtyards, the simplicity and purity of the mouldings, just wasn't on my gothic wavelength. Then I came to love the baroque with its wit and theatricality - and still didn't understand the attractions of the Renaissance.
Maybe, too, the fact that every other bank in England put up between 1890 and 1930 seems to be in Florentine Renaissance pastiche style, had something to do with it. I was looking at the Renaissance from the wrong side - damning it because it looked a bit like the wretched and inadequate copies that I knew.
Now, after twenty years or so, I've been back to Florence again, and this time I tried looking at the works as if I were an English ecclesiastic of about 1500. Used to the Perpendicular style with its emphasis on almost i infinit e subdivisions of space into panelling and tracery, and looking at a style that was completely different - that tried to achieve the perfection of the basic geometrical form, that was about solids rather than planes, circles and grids rather than arches, simplicity rather than multiplication.
It worked. Brunelleschi seen through these spectacles was assertive, thinking through each geometrical element in turn - circles, grids, arches, domes (Pazzi Chapel, San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito, Duomo) ; Alberti, fluent and austere. And I began to appreciate the way that the geometrical proportions underneath the architecture create a sense of harmony and rest - very different from the aspiration of the Gothic or the drama of the Baroque.
It's a feel for the underlying mathematics, too, that distinguishes the music of JS Bach. (One of the things I found distressingly mechanical, at school, was the harmony teaching - rules, rules, rules, so that we could compose 'Palestrina' style chord progressions. It was so like doing geometry, except that geometry was more enjoyable. Whereas Handel and Vivaldi, more user-friendly contemporaries, create music of great surface appeal, Bach seems to root his music in mathematical progressions.
Sets of variations, the Art of Fugue, the whole edifice of the Well Tempered Keyboard with its 24 keys, show Bach thinking as a mathematician - carrying out processes of change which create new music from a static base.
Now music and architecture are usually kept separate. But a new venture brings them together. The Manchester International Festival has hired Zaha Hadid to create a space within Manchester Art Gallery where Bach's solo cello, violin and keyboard works will be played during July 2009. The work will attempt to echo the logic and mathematical rhythm of the music.
I'm intrigued by this concept - a building not just generally 'for music', but for a particular body of musical work. Wagner, famously, wanted to build a wooden theatre by the Rhine for the performance of his Ring cycle, to be burned down at the end of the tetralogy in a magnificent Goetterdaemmerung. And that's interesting, because this Zaha Hadid work can be seen as a collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) - creating a whole that surpasses the boundaries of individual arts.
(In fact the thing it reminds me of most strongly is the fantastic range of musics and art forms created in Jack Vance's science fiction - attempts to embody a feeling in a perfume, a musical performance, an organ of torture victims...)
That may be in part an Anglo-Saxon prejudice. The Gothic still rules in these islands - crags, castles, cathedrals, a cult of the picturesque, and particularly of the delights of buildings that have been built up over the years, accumulating accretions as they have pinnacles and parapets.
The first time that I visited Florence I was underwhelmed. It's only recently that I've come to appreciate the appeal of Brunelleschi's or Alberti's designs - the geometrical patterns that underlie the scheme, the perfect circles of the Pazzi chapel or the multiple grids of San Lorenzo. The reticence of the great palaces, of the arcaded courtyards, the simplicity and purity of the mouldings, just wasn't on my gothic wavelength. Then I came to love the baroque with its wit and theatricality - and still didn't understand the attractions of the Renaissance.
Maybe, too, the fact that every other bank in England put up between 1890 and 1930 seems to be in Florentine Renaissance pastiche style, had something to do with it. I was looking at the Renaissance from the wrong side - damning it because it looked a bit like the wretched and inadequate copies that I knew.
Now, after twenty years or so, I've been back to Florence again, and this time I tried looking at the works as if I were an English ecclesiastic of about 1500. Used to the Perpendicular style with its emphasis on almost i infinit e subdivisions of space into panelling and tracery, and looking at a style that was completely different - that tried to achieve the perfection of the basic geometrical form, that was about solids rather than planes, circles and grids rather than arches, simplicity rather than multiplication.
It worked. Brunelleschi seen through these spectacles was assertive, thinking through each geometrical element in turn - circles, grids, arches, domes (Pazzi Chapel, San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito, Duomo) ; Alberti, fluent and austere. And I began to appreciate the way that the geometrical proportions underneath the architecture create a sense of harmony and rest - very different from the aspiration of the Gothic or the drama of the Baroque.
It's a feel for the underlying mathematics, too, that distinguishes the music of JS Bach. (One of the things I found distressingly mechanical, at school, was the harmony teaching - rules, rules, rules, so that we could compose 'Palestrina' style chord progressions. It was so like doing geometry, except that geometry was more enjoyable. Whereas Handel and Vivaldi, more user-friendly contemporaries, create music of great surface appeal, Bach seems to root his music in mathematical progressions.
Sets of variations, the Art of Fugue, the whole edifice of the Well Tempered Keyboard with its 24 keys, show Bach thinking as a mathematician - carrying out processes of change which create new music from a static base.
Now music and architecture are usually kept separate. But a new venture brings them together. The Manchester International Festival has hired Zaha Hadid to create a space within Manchester Art Gallery where Bach's solo cello, violin and keyboard works will be played during July 2009. The work will attempt to echo the logic and mathematical rhythm of the music.
I'm intrigued by this concept - a building not just generally 'for music', but for a particular body of musical work. Wagner, famously, wanted to build a wooden theatre by the Rhine for the performance of his Ring cycle, to be burned down at the end of the tetralogy in a magnificent Goetterdaemmerung. And that's interesting, because this Zaha Hadid work can be seen as a collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) - creating a whole that surpasses the boundaries of individual arts.
(In fact the thing it reminds me of most strongly is the fantastic range of musics and art forms created in Jack Vance's science fiction - attempts to embody a feeling in a perfume, a musical performance, an organ of torture victims...)
Friday, 15 August 2008
Playing the room
I recently saw an article about an interesting project by David Byrne (of Talking Heads); he'd taken over an old ferry terminal in Manhattan and made it into a huge musical instrument.
Visitors can 'play' the building through an organ keyboard. Air whistling through the building's pipework makes a flute, or an organ; grilles rattle as percussion, metal hammers strike metal sheets and clang or clash.
The building has become a performance. And it's a performance which is interactive, which appeals to the curiosity of the visitor.
I've seen other installations where visitors turn lights on and off simply by their presence, or start films rolling. (Of course, they don't get much choice in the matter with such a simple installation.) But treating the whole building as a work of art that can be recreated by the visitor is more ambitious.
It's a pity that so much work on building automation is focused on petty quotidian concerns. It's so pedestrian, so limited - turn the fridge on and off, lock the door, heat the house, feed the cat.
But if I had a house I could play like an instrument - or conduct like an orchestra - I'd want to do more than play 'Baa baa black sheep '. I'd want sliding panels to channel the light; different colours and intensities of light ; I'd want to be able to create a corridor or a larger room by rearranging the walls. I'd want to do more than just play music on hidden speakers - I'd want to move it around the house, so I could start a sound in the hall and let it run upstairs and into the bathroom, or swoosh it around the main room.
And ultimately, there's something wonderful about a building that isn't just a container for art - as a room is when we play music in it - but that creates that art itself. A building that acts, rather than just being. That's why we find fountains and wind towers and sun pipes so interesting - because they create the illusion that a building has life, has secrets, is an active participant in our lives rather than a mere box, a construct.
Visitors can 'play' the building through an organ keyboard. Air whistling through the building's pipework makes a flute, or an organ; grilles rattle as percussion, metal hammers strike metal sheets and clang or clash.
The building has become a performance. And it's a performance which is interactive, which appeals to the curiosity of the visitor.
I've seen other installations where visitors turn lights on and off simply by their presence, or start films rolling. (Of course, they don't get much choice in the matter with such a simple installation.) But treating the whole building as a work of art that can be recreated by the visitor is more ambitious.
It's a pity that so much work on building automation is focused on petty quotidian concerns. It's so pedestrian, so limited - turn the fridge on and off, lock the door, heat the house, feed the cat.
But if I had a house I could play like an instrument - or conduct like an orchestra - I'd want to do more than play 'Baa baa black sheep '. I'd want sliding panels to channel the light; different colours and intensities of light ; I'd want to be able to create a corridor or a larger room by rearranging the walls. I'd want to do more than just play music on hidden speakers - I'd want to move it around the house, so I could start a sound in the hall and let it run upstairs and into the bathroom, or swoosh it around the main room.
And ultimately, there's something wonderful about a building that isn't just a container for art - as a room is when we play music in it - but that creates that art itself. A building that acts, rather than just being. That's why we find fountains and wind towers and sun pipes so interesting - because they create the illusion that a building has life, has secrets, is an active participant in our lives rather than a mere box, a construct.
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
"To have built in heaven high towers"
The tower is a symbol of strength, of power, of ambition. Not for nothing does Milton make his fallen angel Mulciber a tower-builder. A tower isn't just a fortress; it's a statement, a claim to attention.
Look at the late medieval Italian cityscape and you'll see it's full of assertive towers, like the Torre dei Guinigi in Lucca - fortresses for the feuding noble families of the independent city state. San Gimignano and Bologna bristle with towers like spines on a porcupine.
Look at the English Perpendicular church and you'll see the loftiness and aspiration of the tower used for the greater glory of God - and the glory, too, of those wealthy families which contributed to the building work. East Anglia is full of fine flint-built towers, with stone used to pick out the details; and Somerset, another wealthy area in the late middle ages, possesses marvellously ornate stone towers festooned with arcading, niches, turrets and pinnacles.
I thought of all this today when I read about Jean Nouvel's plans for a new tower in La Defense, Paris. The area is currently an office ghetto - busy by day, deserted at night - but there are plans to create more residential and services buildings. All of which could, of course, be done without a tower; but the tower is the icon, the symbol which encapsulates the city-changing ambition of the plan.
La Defense is not actually in Paris. It's in Hauts-de-Seine departement. Any development here will drain residents, jobs and taxes away from central Paris - whose 20 arrondissements are governed by Bertrand Delanoe, mayor of Paris.
So Delanoe has his own plans for a 'mini-Manhattan' of towers to regenerate the poorer east and north areas of central Paris. (Incidentally, are all cities the same - richer on the south and west, poorer on east and north? London certainly fits this schema. So does Berlin, I think - though that might be for different reasons.)
The same effect could surely be gained by high density building six or seven storeys high - which is what gives the centre of 19th century Paris its particular character. But no, it has to be towers - in a strident last burst of phallicism, towers are becoming the twenty-first century city's sine qua non.
But we've seen all this before. Back in the 1960s towers were the thing - and the sleep of reason produced monsters; the Tour Montparnasse, much hated by Parisians, and Centre Point, the greatest white elephant in London. (The French joke about Belgians being stupid, and retail the story of the Belgian terrorist who blew up the Tour Montparnasse - the joke being that if he ever did so, he'd become a French national hero overnight!)
It all reminds me of that 1980s battle between the City of London and Canary Wharf, an unseemly squabble between traditionalists and modernisers that saw petty local interest as more important than the ultimate fture of London as a financial centre. And that battle too saw the aggressive young upstarts building towers - the Cesare Pelli tower at Canary Wharf, at first standing in splendid isolation, then joined by others as the area began to thrive.
And that's the real sadness of towers. The more there are, the less the effect.
There's a place where the M11 comes over the brow of a hill and starts to descend into the Thames Valley, and you used to look ahead and see that one proud tower standing on its own. At dusk, with the lights on inside and a red aircraft warning light twinkling on the top, and the grey of the landscape misty beyond it, it was a view like no other.
And now it's just crowded into a forest of skyscrapers. It's lost what made it special.
"And so the whirliig of time brings about its revenges." Now, it's the City that is building the towers. The Gherkin, the Shard of Glass, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie - towers that have entered the vernacular even before most of them have been built. The traditionalist financiers have turned avant-garde developers, learning from Canary Wharf.
Look at the late medieval Italian cityscape and you'll see it's full of assertive towers, like the Torre dei Guinigi in Lucca - fortresses for the feuding noble families of the independent city state. San Gimignano and Bologna bristle with towers like spines on a porcupine.
Look at the English Perpendicular church and you'll see the loftiness and aspiration of the tower used for the greater glory of God - and the glory, too, of those wealthy families which contributed to the building work. East Anglia is full of fine flint-built towers, with stone used to pick out the details; and Somerset, another wealthy area in the late middle ages, possesses marvellously ornate stone towers festooned with arcading, niches, turrets and pinnacles.
I thought of all this today when I read about Jean Nouvel's plans for a new tower in La Defense, Paris. The area is currently an office ghetto - busy by day, deserted at night - but there are plans to create more residential and services buildings. All of which could, of course, be done without a tower; but the tower is the icon, the symbol which encapsulates the city-changing ambition of the plan.
La Defense is not actually in Paris. It's in Hauts-de-Seine departement. Any development here will drain residents, jobs and taxes away from central Paris - whose 20 arrondissements are governed by Bertrand Delanoe, mayor of Paris.
So Delanoe has his own plans for a 'mini-Manhattan' of towers to regenerate the poorer east and north areas of central Paris. (Incidentally, are all cities the same - richer on the south and west, poorer on east and north? London certainly fits this schema. So does Berlin, I think - though that might be for different reasons.)
The same effect could surely be gained by high density building six or seven storeys high - which is what gives the centre of 19th century Paris its particular character. But no, it has to be towers - in a strident last burst of phallicism, towers are becoming the twenty-first century city's sine qua non.
But we've seen all this before. Back in the 1960s towers were the thing - and the sleep of reason produced monsters; the Tour Montparnasse, much hated by Parisians, and Centre Point, the greatest white elephant in London. (The French joke about Belgians being stupid, and retail the story of the Belgian terrorist who blew up the Tour Montparnasse - the joke being that if he ever did so, he'd become a French national hero overnight!)
It all reminds me of that 1980s battle between the City of London and Canary Wharf, an unseemly squabble between traditionalists and modernisers that saw petty local interest as more important than the ultimate fture of London as a financial centre. And that battle too saw the aggressive young upstarts building towers - the Cesare Pelli tower at Canary Wharf, at first standing in splendid isolation, then joined by others as the area began to thrive.
And that's the real sadness of towers. The more there are, the less the effect.
There's a place where the M11 comes over the brow of a hill and starts to descend into the Thames Valley, and you used to look ahead and see that one proud tower standing on its own. At dusk, with the lights on inside and a red aircraft warning light twinkling on the top, and the grey of the landscape misty beyond it, it was a view like no other.
And now it's just crowded into a forest of skyscrapers. It's lost what made it special.
"And so the whirliig of time brings about its revenges." Now, it's the City that is building the towers. The Gherkin, the Shard of Glass, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie - towers that have entered the vernacular even before most of them have been built. The traditionalist financiers have turned avant-garde developers, learning from Canary Wharf.
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Understanding the mosque
A trip to Istanbul has made me think about the characteristics of the mosque as an architectural form. It's interesting to follow the way Hagia Sophia influenced the mosques in Istanbul - and the many ways in which its invitations were refused by Islamic architects.
First, obviously, the idea of a huge domed space was influential. But this was already present in Seljuk architecture a long time before the Turks became acquainted with the heritage of Constantinople. None the less, there's some evidence that architects such as Mimar Sinan, looking at Hagia Sophia, learned new engineering techniques - specifically, buttressing using exedrae (semidomes) to counter the thrust, the use of turrets to buttress the dome, and the creation of series of cupolas falling away from the main dome which creates the distinctive Ottoman profile - very different from the simple skyline of earlier mosques.
The idea of the dome as representing heaven is common to both the Greek and the Islamic architecture, too.
But now what differs very substantially is the feeling for space. Hagia Sofia is divided up into different zones, only half visible from each other. There's a narthex, an exonarthex, a gallery, whole areas in the corners which seem hidden in some exclusive penumbra, which have no visibility of the central dome. There's even a huge carved marble screen in the south gallery to divide off the Synod's meeting area - and the fact that it is carved in the shape of two fake doors makes it nature as an instrument of closure unmistakable. This is a building made to exclude, to divide, to separate.
By comparison the mosque is a zone of inclusion, with the single exception of the women's gallery. Even when the sultans began to divide themselves off from the remainder of the worshippers, the main architectural feature was the external ramp leading to the sultan's gallery - inside the mosque the sultan's loge is often discreet and hardly visible, except in the magnificence of its decoration. Most mosques appear to strive for unbroken space - the arcades that screen off the aisles of Hagia Sophia almost never appear.
There's another interesting thing about the mosque. It pretty much has to be square. (There is one oval one, apparently, out near Yedikule, and it's a very late baroque mosque. Also, a private mosque - not founded by a sultan and so perhaps less exposed to objections from the Ulema.) That of course gives the architects all kinds of problems in sticking a dome on top. But it also means that creating a baroque style is difficult, because you have to have a square, which is an anti-baroque, classical form.
Architects got round this in different ways. At Nurosmaniye mosque near the Grand Bazaar, the architect created a horseshoe shaped courtyard. In other mosques, the galleries are used to create a feeling of dynamism within the square. But the real successes of baroque form aren't the mosques - they're the lovely fountains and 'sebils' (waterhouses from which refreshments are served) often placed on the corner of the mosque precinct. Here, the round form let architects play with concave and convex forms - the grilles of the windows, the overhanging eaves of the roof. One of the nicest shadirvans (ablution fountains) is that in the courtyard of Hagia Sophia - and I bet of the thousands of people who visit every day, barely any of them give it a glance. It's lovely, and the delicate grilles are as good as anything in the church.
And that brings me to the last thing I learned about the Ottoman mosque. You can't see a mosque as just a mosque, because in almost all cases it's the centre of a complex ecosystem a little like the English cathedral close. Suleimaniye for instance was built within a fine precinct wall, with areas both sides where caravans could spend the night with their camels and tents; there's a graveyard with the mausoleums of Suleiman the Magnificent and Haseki Hurrem, better known as Roxelana, his wife; outside the precinct wall are a row of shops (arasta) designed to pay rent to the mosque, so the development was self funding; there are four separate medrese (schools), a sibyan mekteb or primary school, a hamam (bath), a doctorate school of law, a cistern, a hospital, a kitchen (now a restaurant) and a hospice where travellers were entitled to spend three nights free. Even the houses of the professors at two of the medrese have been included as part of the package.
This is the biggest and best planned unit in Istanbul, but even small mosques like Rustempasha Cami are at the heart of a little community. Here, the mosque is built up above a vaulted basement, with shops in it - you take a little twisting stair up between two shops to arrive suddenly in the light, open portico in front of the mosque. To both sides of the mosque, trading hans were built, and the little shadirvan has been tucked away on one side, below. And of course there's the minaret.
Minarets, by the way, were one of the ways of indicating the status of a mosque. A regular mosque had one; foundations by members of the ruling family were entitled to two; some sultans' mosques have four (like Suleimaniye); and Sultanahmet, daringly, has six.
First, obviously, the idea of a huge domed space was influential. But this was already present in Seljuk architecture a long time before the Turks became acquainted with the heritage of Constantinople. None the less, there's some evidence that architects such as Mimar Sinan, looking at Hagia Sophia, learned new engineering techniques - specifically, buttressing using exedrae (semidomes) to counter the thrust, the use of turrets to buttress the dome, and the creation of series of cupolas falling away from the main dome which creates the distinctive Ottoman profile - very different from the simple skyline of earlier mosques.
The idea of the dome as representing heaven is common to both the Greek and the Islamic architecture, too.
But now what differs very substantially is the feeling for space. Hagia Sofia is divided up into different zones, only half visible from each other. There's a narthex, an exonarthex, a gallery, whole areas in the corners which seem hidden in some exclusive penumbra, which have no visibility of the central dome. There's even a huge carved marble screen in the south gallery to divide off the Synod's meeting area - and the fact that it is carved in the shape of two fake doors makes it nature as an instrument of closure unmistakable. This is a building made to exclude, to divide, to separate.
By comparison the mosque is a zone of inclusion, with the single exception of the women's gallery. Even when the sultans began to divide themselves off from the remainder of the worshippers, the main architectural feature was the external ramp leading to the sultan's gallery - inside the mosque the sultan's loge is often discreet and hardly visible, except in the magnificence of its decoration. Most mosques appear to strive for unbroken space - the arcades that screen off the aisles of Hagia Sophia almost never appear.
There's another interesting thing about the mosque. It pretty much has to be square. (There is one oval one, apparently, out near Yedikule, and it's a very late baroque mosque. Also, a private mosque - not founded by a sultan and so perhaps less exposed to objections from the Ulema.) That of course gives the architects all kinds of problems in sticking a dome on top. But it also means that creating a baroque style is difficult, because you have to have a square, which is an anti-baroque, classical form.
Architects got round this in different ways. At Nurosmaniye mosque near the Grand Bazaar, the architect created a horseshoe shaped courtyard. In other mosques, the galleries are used to create a feeling of dynamism within the square. But the real successes of baroque form aren't the mosques - they're the lovely fountains and 'sebils' (waterhouses from which refreshments are served) often placed on the corner of the mosque precinct. Here, the round form let architects play with concave and convex forms - the grilles of the windows, the overhanging eaves of the roof. One of the nicest shadirvans (ablution fountains) is that in the courtyard of Hagia Sophia - and I bet of the thousands of people who visit every day, barely any of them give it a glance. It's lovely, and the delicate grilles are as good as anything in the church.
And that brings me to the last thing I learned about the Ottoman mosque. You can't see a mosque as just a mosque, because in almost all cases it's the centre of a complex ecosystem a little like the English cathedral close. Suleimaniye for instance was built within a fine precinct wall, with areas both sides where caravans could spend the night with their camels and tents; there's a graveyard with the mausoleums of Suleiman the Magnificent and Haseki Hurrem, better known as Roxelana, his wife; outside the precinct wall are a row of shops (arasta) designed to pay rent to the mosque, so the development was self funding; there are four separate medrese (schools), a sibyan mekteb or primary school, a hamam (bath), a doctorate school of law, a cistern, a hospital, a kitchen (now a restaurant) and a hospice where travellers were entitled to spend three nights free. Even the houses of the professors at two of the medrese have been included as part of the package.
This is the biggest and best planned unit in Istanbul, but even small mosques like Rustempasha Cami are at the heart of a little community. Here, the mosque is built up above a vaulted basement, with shops in it - you take a little twisting stair up between two shops to arrive suddenly in the light, open portico in front of the mosque. To both sides of the mosque, trading hans were built, and the little shadirvan has been tucked away on one side, below. And of course there's the minaret.
Minarets, by the way, were one of the ways of indicating the status of a mosque. A regular mosque had one; foundations by members of the ruling family were entitled to two; some sultans' mosques have four (like Suleimaniye); and Sultanahmet, daringly, has six.
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
The trouble with design
The trouble with design is that you can create a lovely object, but you can't necessarily tell how people are going to use it.
A piece in the Guardian today tells how Oscar Niemayer is distressed by the current state of Brasilia, the new capital he created for Brazil. Designed for a few hundred thousand, it now has to accommodate millions; and the original clear design statement has suffered from the creep of housing estates and shanty towns.
Brasilia is one of those fine modernist conceptions, like Chandigarh or the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, that aims to channel life into a clean, rational design. The problem is that this type of system is non-adaptive; it's difficult to change the design to fit people's lives, and people's lives won't necessarily change to suit the design.
There is a beauty in Brasilia. It's totally planned, self-concious beauty. But it has no room for spontaneity, for the kind of adaptation that individuals make in their surroundings. #
That's where Hundertwasser represents a very different type of modernity, with his idea of a 'window right' - the idea that you should be able to lean out of your window and paint whatever colour you like, as far as your arm can stretch. His buildings are designed for living, not for viewing; for the individual, not the mass or the political or artistic elite.
Now let's look at these themes in the light of modern technology. Hundertwasser's idea is very Internet, very Web 2.0. It's infinitely adaptive and it is planned to be that way. It's possible to extend his architecture, but the extension doesn't have to be an exact copy; the building is a meme. Whereas the Brasilia idea, for all its apparent modernity, aims to be non-adaptive, unchanging, fixed, unadaptable. It is proprietary software, you can't reverse engineer it or develop new extensions or applications. And so, if you can't adapt it and you can't adapt to it, all you can do is destroy it.
I wonder at the fact that the role of the architect doesn't seem to have changed yet. But I wonder if prefabricated building techniques, modular building ideas, and more and more people choosing self-build rather than off the peg, indicate that the conditions for change are there. That the 'Great Architect of the Universe' could become, instead, the systems designer - creating an architecture that would be democratic, that would allow individuals to adapt?
A piece in the Guardian today tells how Oscar Niemayer is distressed by the current state of Brasilia, the new capital he created for Brazil. Designed for a few hundred thousand, it now has to accommodate millions; and the original clear design statement has suffered from the creep of housing estates and shanty towns.
Brasilia is one of those fine modernist conceptions, like Chandigarh or the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, that aims to channel life into a clean, rational design. The problem is that this type of system is non-adaptive; it's difficult to change the design to fit people's lives, and people's lives won't necessarily change to suit the design.
There is a beauty in Brasilia. It's totally planned, self-concious beauty. But it has no room for spontaneity, for the kind of adaptation that individuals make in their surroundings. #
That's where Hundertwasser represents a very different type of modernity, with his idea of a 'window right' - the idea that you should be able to lean out of your window and paint whatever colour you like, as far as your arm can stretch. His buildings are designed for living, not for viewing; for the individual, not the mass or the political or artistic elite.
Now let's look at these themes in the light of modern technology. Hundertwasser's idea is very Internet, very Web 2.0. It's infinitely adaptive and it is planned to be that way. It's possible to extend his architecture, but the extension doesn't have to be an exact copy; the building is a meme. Whereas the Brasilia idea, for all its apparent modernity, aims to be non-adaptive, unchanging, fixed, unadaptable. It is proprietary software, you can't reverse engineer it or develop new extensions or applications. And so, if you can't adapt it and you can't adapt to it, all you can do is destroy it.
I wonder at the fact that the role of the architect doesn't seem to have changed yet. But I wonder if prefabricated building techniques, modular building ideas, and more and more people choosing self-build rather than off the peg, indicate that the conditions for change are there. That the 'Great Architect of the Universe' could become, instead, the systems designer - creating an architecture that would be democratic, that would allow individuals to adapt?
Sunday, 9 March 2008
Two different views of architecture
I've just seen the most lovely little house. The Micro Compact Home, designed by Richard Horden, is a marvellously zen creation - a small space, but light and clear, costing EUR 30,000 or so before installation. It's taken ideas from the Japanese tea house as well as from interiors where compactness is at a premium, such as yachts, and it's used modern technology to create a delightfully spare architecture.
There's already a student village installed in Munich. But most interesting to me were some of the more avant garde projects; for instance, installing MCHs in a spire or 'tree village' around a lift shaft, further developing the theme of lightness and transparence that informs the design. Or the 'Golden Cube' designed as a floating house for the Venetian lagoon (floating houses are one interesting way of adapting to rising sea levels, but what interests me particularly is the way the water is different seen from water level - from a boat or a sandbank).
This tiny, 2.6 cubic metre house wouldn't be easy to live in permanently - though two or three added together might create an interesting, free-form house. (Bedroom, living room, studio...) But it seems exactly right for a low-impact, resitable house in the woods or on the saltmarsh - a sort of Thoreau residence.
A completely different view of architecture comes from the Atelier Van Lieshout with its quirky representational houses. There's a 'Wellness Skull' which contains a sauna, and shoots steam out of its eye sockets, and a house in Belgium modelled on the human digestive system. This is taking organic shapes to their extreme - not a single straight line to be seen anywhere.
The one thing that seems to link the works of both practices is that they clearly believe architecture isn't value-free, ideologically pure. Lieshout refers to sex, power, ideas of gender and of what humans are all about - the architecture reflects humanity. And the Micro Compact Home isn't just a soulless attempt to create a cheap pre-fab, but an idea of creating a modern home that can be impact-free, that can adjust to its environment and be transparent to the world around it.
I don't think I'd want to live in an intestine-house. And I do think I'd like to live in a Golden Cube. But it's refreshing to come across architects who are doing our dreaming for us - which Horden and Lieshout, I think, are doing.
There's already a student village installed in Munich. But most interesting to me were some of the more avant garde projects; for instance, installing MCHs in a spire or 'tree village' around a lift shaft, further developing the theme of lightness and transparence that informs the design. Or the 'Golden Cube' designed as a floating house for the Venetian lagoon (floating houses are one interesting way of adapting to rising sea levels, but what interests me particularly is the way the water is different seen from water level - from a boat or a sandbank).
This tiny, 2.6 cubic metre house wouldn't be easy to live in permanently - though two or three added together might create an interesting, free-form house. (Bedroom, living room, studio...) But it seems exactly right for a low-impact, resitable house in the woods or on the saltmarsh - a sort of Thoreau residence.
A completely different view of architecture comes from the Atelier Van Lieshout with its quirky representational houses. There's a 'Wellness Skull' which contains a sauna, and shoots steam out of its eye sockets, and a house in Belgium modelled on the human digestive system. This is taking organic shapes to their extreme - not a single straight line to be seen anywhere.
The one thing that seems to link the works of both practices is that they clearly believe architecture isn't value-free, ideologically pure. Lieshout refers to sex, power, ideas of gender and of what humans are all about - the architecture reflects humanity. And the Micro Compact Home isn't just a soulless attempt to create a cheap pre-fab, but an idea of creating a modern home that can be impact-free, that can adjust to its environment and be transparent to the world around it.
I don't think I'd want to live in an intestine-house. And I do think I'd like to live in a Golden Cube. But it's refreshing to come across architects who are doing our dreaming for us - which Horden and Lieshout, I think, are doing.
Saturday, 2 February 2008
Interiority - and what you don't see
It's easy to assume that when you've wandered round a city's streets for a few weeks, you know it.
But that's not always the case. It is in England, probably. We tend to build our houses on to the street, so the frontage is the main aspect.
Even then there are exceptions. Wander down some of the mews in west London, and you get a different feel from the grandiose stuccoed facades on the squares and streets. This was the built environment of a class-divided society - "the rich man in his mansion, the poor man at his gate," or in this case Milord in his town house and the servants in the attic and out the back in the mews. For some reason I've always felt more at home in the mews.
Edinburgh is quite similar - at least, in the New Town. Fine, tall, uniform, creamy stone Georgian facades on the main street - and hugger mugger single storey garages and sheds and cottages in the alleys at the back. You can walk the whole of the New Town and practically never come out on to the 'parade' streets if you feel so inclined.
But some cultures have much, much less open to view. For instance, you'll never understand St Petersburg unless you go into the courtyards of the big apartment blocks in the centre.
Outside, they're just grey blocks under a greyer sky. And outside, Natasha is just a bundle of warm clothes with a human being buried somewhere in it, struggling against the wind and slushy snow.
Inside, Natasha emerges from her wrappings and becomes a retired art history professor with a graceful presence and a dry sense of humour. And inside, her flat is lined with books and fine porcelain, abstract paintings, and a spotless white carpet makes up for the fact that the snow outside is grey with the dirt of a whole winter.
Russians keep all their best things inside. Perhaps that's at least partly about living in an unfree society; you keep your thoughts to yourself, and you keep you culture to yourself, and you keep anything that really matters inside your own house.
Southern Spain is like that too. Look at the Great Mosque of Cordoba from the outside and you just see a blank wall, divided by big bulky buttresses, with a few finely decorated doors but otherwise plain. It could be a town wall, a garden wall. It gives you no hint at all about what's inside.
That's something you find in Arab culture in the Middle East too. Courtyards become the focus of life - they are cool, they are secluded. No one does anything on the open street. Souks are interiors rather than exteriors; the market happens inside a huge building, a huge set of covered ways, rather than in the open.
So in Cordoba, you can't understand the city unless you understand the way it is shot through with greenness, the way the fabric of the city and its streets has a weft thread of courtyards and gardens running through it. There are a couple of patios (courtyards) which are always shown off to visitors, of course, but by the very fact of being shown off in that way they've become open spaces - they've lost their interior feel.
It's little alleyways like the Callejas de la Hoguera which goes past the Islamic University, or the Calleja del Pañuelo, which still preserve that feeling to some extent. With the Callejas de la Hoguera, there's that interconnectedness between public and private space which is a characteristic of Moorish architecture in Spain - you're walking down the alley, then suddenly you're in the garden of a restaurant - is this public or private? a through way or a back garden? You just don't know.
Cordoba has an association devoted to the patios. At Christmas last year, they opened some of the courtyards and performed villancicos (the Spanish equivalent of carols). In May, more of the courtyards are open and there's a competition for the best gardens.
That interiority, that feeling of seclusion, is what finally won me over to Cordoba. It's a difficult city to know - because all its best sights are on the inside. But it's worth knowing.
But that's not always the case. It is in England, probably. We tend to build our houses on to the street, so the frontage is the main aspect.
Even then there are exceptions. Wander down some of the mews in west London, and you get a different feel from the grandiose stuccoed facades on the squares and streets. This was the built environment of a class-divided society - "the rich man in his mansion, the poor man at his gate," or in this case Milord in his town house and the servants in the attic and out the back in the mews. For some reason I've always felt more at home in the mews.
Edinburgh is quite similar - at least, in the New Town. Fine, tall, uniform, creamy stone Georgian facades on the main street - and hugger mugger single storey garages and sheds and cottages in the alleys at the back. You can walk the whole of the New Town and practically never come out on to the 'parade' streets if you feel so inclined.
But some cultures have much, much less open to view. For instance, you'll never understand St Petersburg unless you go into the courtyards of the big apartment blocks in the centre.
Outside, they're just grey blocks under a greyer sky. And outside, Natasha is just a bundle of warm clothes with a human being buried somewhere in it, struggling against the wind and slushy snow.
Inside, Natasha emerges from her wrappings and becomes a retired art history professor with a graceful presence and a dry sense of humour. And inside, her flat is lined with books and fine porcelain, abstract paintings, and a spotless white carpet makes up for the fact that the snow outside is grey with the dirt of a whole winter.
Russians keep all their best things inside. Perhaps that's at least partly about living in an unfree society; you keep your thoughts to yourself, and you keep you culture to yourself, and you keep anything that really matters inside your own house.
Southern Spain is like that too. Look at the Great Mosque of Cordoba from the outside and you just see a blank wall, divided by big bulky buttresses, with a few finely decorated doors but otherwise plain. It could be a town wall, a garden wall. It gives you no hint at all about what's inside.
That's something you find in Arab culture in the Middle East too. Courtyards become the focus of life - they are cool, they are secluded. No one does anything on the open street. Souks are interiors rather than exteriors; the market happens inside a huge building, a huge set of covered ways, rather than in the open.
So in Cordoba, you can't understand the city unless you understand the way it is shot through with greenness, the way the fabric of the city and its streets has a weft thread of courtyards and gardens running through it. There are a couple of patios (courtyards) which are always shown off to visitors, of course, but by the very fact of being shown off in that way they've become open spaces - they've lost their interior feel.
It's little alleyways like the Callejas de la Hoguera which goes past the Islamic University, or the Calleja del Pañuelo, which still preserve that feeling to some extent. With the Callejas de la Hoguera, there's that interconnectedness between public and private space which is a characteristic of Moorish architecture in Spain - you're walking down the alley, then suddenly you're in the garden of a restaurant - is this public or private? a through way or a back garden? You just don't know.
Cordoba has an association devoted to the patios. At Christmas last year, they opened some of the courtyards and performed villancicos (the Spanish equivalent of carols). In May, more of the courtyards are open and there's a competition for the best gardens.
That interiority, that feeling of seclusion, is what finally won me over to Cordoba. It's a difficult city to know - because all its best sights are on the inside. But it's worth knowing.
Thursday, 10 January 2008
Space and light
I've just been researching as I write up the Podtour for Salzburg, Austria.
The bonus track (ie, I will be putting it up free on the podtours site) is an introduction to James Turrell's 'Sky space' on the Moenchsberg, near the modern art museum. It's a powerful piece, which has to be experienced, not just looked at. An apparently simple - though actually quite subtly created - circular space with an opening in the roof, it attracts your attention to the sky seen through that opening. White walls, blue sky; after a while you've entered a meditative state. For me, it's Mozart's 'Temple of the Wise' from the Magic Flute - the real Mozart, not the eine-Kleine-not-that-again-Musik-marzipan-Mozart every shop in town is trying to sell.
So I was glad to find an interview with the artist available on the web. His Quaker spirituality, but also an interest in astronomy and powered flight, infuses a lot of his art. It's an interesting interview but I particularly like his assertion: "There is a truth in light."
What I particularly love about his work is that he tries to get us to approach and experience light directly - for itself. None of the cleverness of Bernini, who wants to make light play tricks for him. Just pure, undiluted light. A real joy.
And something I wish, on this very grey December day, I had got here...
The bonus track (ie, I will be putting it up free on the podtours site) is an introduction to James Turrell's 'Sky space' on the Moenchsberg, near the modern art museum. It's a powerful piece, which has to be experienced, not just looked at. An apparently simple - though actually quite subtly created - circular space with an opening in the roof, it attracts your attention to the sky seen through that opening. White walls, blue sky; after a while you've entered a meditative state. For me, it's Mozart's 'Temple of the Wise' from the Magic Flute - the real Mozart, not the eine-Kleine-not-that-again-Musik-marzipan-Mozart every shop in town is trying to sell.
So I was glad to find an interview with the artist available on the web. His Quaker spirituality, but also an interest in astronomy and powered flight, infuses a lot of his art. It's an interesting interview but I particularly like his assertion: "There is a truth in light."
What I particularly love about his work is that he tries to get us to approach and experience light directly - for itself. None of the cleverness of Bernini, who wants to make light play tricks for him. Just pure, undiluted light. A real joy.
And something I wish, on this very grey December day, I had got here...
Saturday, 5 January 2008
Engineering marvel - video
I'm a sucker for the fascinating borderland where engineering meets architecture and design. Here's a great video of the Falkirk Wheel - a unique way of linking two canals at different levels. Instead of using locks or elevators, the wheel balances two huge troughs full of water. (Since a boat displaces its own weight in water, the tanks always balance whatever the size of boat using the wheel.) Since the wheel is in balance, it takes very little energy to tip the wheel over, rotating the top tank downwards and the bottom tank upwards.
The graceful swan-neck design of the wheel's 'arms', the curves of the supports, the way in which every element of excess mass has been cut away, remind me of the elegance and transparency of Gothic architecture. The need for functionality hasn't been allowed to get in the way of aesthetics - both work together to create a lovely structure. Even better, one in which the movement of the components when it is at work creates even more aesthetic interest; it's like a Calder mobile, meant to be seen when working. Which is why I've given you a link to the video.
The graceful swan-neck design of the wheel's 'arms', the curves of the supports, the way in which every element of excess mass has been cut away, remind me of the elegance and transparency of Gothic architecture. The need for functionality hasn't been allowed to get in the way of aesthetics - both work together to create a lovely structure. Even better, one in which the movement of the components when it is at work creates even more aesthetic interest; it's like a Calder mobile, meant to be seen when working. Which is why I've given you a link to the video.
Friday, 4 January 2008
An opportunity missed
Oh dear. After the rapturous reception given to the new St Pancras development in the press, I thought it would be a great experience using it. I was very disappointed.
First of all, it still isn't finished. To get to the terminal from King's Cross involved crossing a wide area of rough concrete, divided only by temporary barriers and traffic cones. The front entrance isn't open (at the moment) so you have to go all the way down to the modern part of the station, then walk all the way BACK to the front of the station to get to Eurostar.
And the 'downstairs' part of the station is crammed with retail. A triumph of consumerism. Plywood fascias where shops haven't been finished.
The e-ticket machines don't work. Having come with my booking reference and bank card, I then have to queue for fifteen minutes in the Eurostar ticket office because the machine refuses to print the ticket. The ticket office of course is nowhere near the machines, and the signage is inadequate, so I waste about ten minutes looking for it.
The ticket office doesn't even have a queuing system installed. It's chaos; no one knows which ticket desks are free and the clerks have to shout to see if anyone is waiting.
I can't see the interior facade of the hotel block, a fine piece of Victorian Gothic, because a crappy 1960s purple and yellow banner covers practically the whole facade, slathered with the names of retailers. This is a shopping centre that also has some trains; a bit like the much derided V&A advert - "an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached".
The modern extension on the back is typical modernist brutalism. Its girdered roof, rectilinear and low, runs with the beams at right angles to the Victorian train shed almost as if it's saying "Sod off, you arty-farty aesthetic crap". The outside looks interesting, but inside, it's typically mean and without aspiration - the low roof is depressing, there's none of the airy, ambitious feel of Barlow's great train shed.
I know Eurostar requires a certain amount of security but the way it has been done means it's difficult to get a feeling for the wonderful space of the train shed; it's divided up by high glass walls. Light wells through to the shopping mall below further subdivide the area, so you feel as if you're on a narrow ledge around the train shed - the expansiveness of the original idea has gone.
It's this expansiveness that I think was the defining characteristic of so much good Victorian architecture. Ordinary people deserve light, space, ambition. Railways were about ambition, too - about the ambition to travel, to find new places, new experiences, new employment. That's why these stations are such exciting places.
By comparison, the new blockish shed makes travel a functional and unpleasant experience. We are only common people. We don't deserve light, space, or consideration; we're just cattle, human cargo to be efficiently processed.
I'm glad St Pancras has been preserved. But how much better it would have been if only the modern architects had been able to share Barlow's great railway dream.
First of all, it still isn't finished. To get to the terminal from King's Cross involved crossing a wide area of rough concrete, divided only by temporary barriers and traffic cones. The front entrance isn't open (at the moment) so you have to go all the way down to the modern part of the station, then walk all the way BACK to the front of the station to get to Eurostar.
And the 'downstairs' part of the station is crammed with retail. A triumph of consumerism. Plywood fascias where shops haven't been finished.
The e-ticket machines don't work. Having come with my booking reference and bank card, I then have to queue for fifteen minutes in the Eurostar ticket office because the machine refuses to print the ticket. The ticket office of course is nowhere near the machines, and the signage is inadequate, so I waste about ten minutes looking for it.
The ticket office doesn't even have a queuing system installed. It's chaos; no one knows which ticket desks are free and the clerks have to shout to see if anyone is waiting.
I can't see the interior facade of the hotel block, a fine piece of Victorian Gothic, because a crappy 1960s purple and yellow banner covers practically the whole facade, slathered with the names of retailers. This is a shopping centre that also has some trains; a bit like the much derided V&A advert - "an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached".
The modern extension on the back is typical modernist brutalism. Its girdered roof, rectilinear and low, runs with the beams at right angles to the Victorian train shed almost as if it's saying "Sod off, you arty-farty aesthetic crap". The outside looks interesting, but inside, it's typically mean and without aspiration - the low roof is depressing, there's none of the airy, ambitious feel of Barlow's great train shed.
I know Eurostar requires a certain amount of security but the way it has been done means it's difficult to get a feeling for the wonderful space of the train shed; it's divided up by high glass walls. Light wells through to the shopping mall below further subdivide the area, so you feel as if you're on a narrow ledge around the train shed - the expansiveness of the original idea has gone.
It's this expansiveness that I think was the defining characteristic of so much good Victorian architecture. Ordinary people deserve light, space, ambition. Railways were about ambition, too - about the ambition to travel, to find new places, new experiences, new employment. That's why these stations are such exciting places.
By comparison, the new blockish shed makes travel a functional and unpleasant experience. We are only common people. We don't deserve light, space, or consideration; we're just cattle, human cargo to be efficiently processed.
I'm glad St Pancras has been preserved. But how much better it would have been if only the modern architects had been able to share Barlow's great railway dream.
Thursday, 27 December 2007
Distinctive locality
I've written before about local distinctiveness - what makes a region or a city special, what gives it that certain almost indefinable flavour that distinguishes it from anywhere else.
Such distinctiveness is of course under threat. Chain stores, the spread of 'one size fits all' architecture, a certain feeling that local traditions are uncool or plebeian, all tend to impose homogeneity on our townscapes and landscapes. Agricultural colleges teach a single 'best practice' for all countryside - no respect for the distinctive feel of terroir there.
So it's nice to celebrate a couple of organisations which are fighting to preserve this specialness.
First, Maisons Paysannes de France, an organisation which promotes authenticity in the way older French houses are restored. It's a truism in the UK property press that 'only Brits buy old French houses, the French like them new'; but fortunately there are many French owners of old houses who do care about their local vernacular building traditions.
Maisons Paysannes offers links to conservation orientated building professionals, as well as publicising good restorations of period houses. In France, where you'll often see a period house that would be grade II* listed in the UK with modern double glazing and a PVC conservatory stuck on the end, they're fighting a tough fight. Good luck to them.
Common Ground is a UK based charity that focuses on the ways people can celebrate their local distinctiveness.
One of the threats they identify is abstraction. In a recent Guardian interview Common Ground founder Sue Clifford picked out some particularly nasty ones; 'sites' for streets or fields, 'the public' for people, 'natural resources' for woods and streams. Even the word 'environment' makes her suspicious. Abstract words blind us to real distinctiveness.
(What she didn't go on to elaborate is that local words are another component of 'real place'. What would Norfolk be without bishybarnabees - ladybirds - or dodmen - snails? And we have lokes, where northerners have ginnels and York has snickelways - though the latter is a fairly recent coinage.)
Common Ground's web site suggests ways that people can celebrate the distinctiveness of their own place - ABCs of differences, photographs, parish maps. These maps are not 'objective' (regular readers know I have difficulty with the idea of any map being really objective; the very assertion of 'objectivity' displays a biased idea of what mapping is about). Instead, wilful subjectivity rules - the maps are written, painted, knitted, embroidered; they include dialect words, pictures of wildlife, old stories and legends.
It's back to the 1960s in a way for Common Ground. 'Think globally, act locally' has been replaced by 'think locally! act locally! buy locally!'
Such distinctiveness is of course under threat. Chain stores, the spread of 'one size fits all' architecture, a certain feeling that local traditions are uncool or plebeian, all tend to impose homogeneity on our townscapes and landscapes. Agricultural colleges teach a single 'best practice' for all countryside - no respect for the distinctive feel of terroir there.
So it's nice to celebrate a couple of organisations which are fighting to preserve this specialness.
First, Maisons Paysannes de France, an organisation which promotes authenticity in the way older French houses are restored. It's a truism in the UK property press that 'only Brits buy old French houses, the French like them new'; but fortunately there are many French owners of old houses who do care about their local vernacular building traditions.
Maisons Paysannes offers links to conservation orientated building professionals, as well as publicising good restorations of period houses. In France, where you'll often see a period house that would be grade II* listed in the UK with modern double glazing and a PVC conservatory stuck on the end, they're fighting a tough fight. Good luck to them.
Common Ground is a UK based charity that focuses on the ways people can celebrate their local distinctiveness.
One of the threats they identify is abstraction. In a recent Guardian interview Common Ground founder Sue Clifford picked out some particularly nasty ones; 'sites' for streets or fields, 'the public' for people, 'natural resources' for woods and streams. Even the word 'environment' makes her suspicious. Abstract words blind us to real distinctiveness.
(What she didn't go on to elaborate is that local words are another component of 'real place'. What would Norfolk be without bishybarnabees - ladybirds - or dodmen - snails? And we have lokes, where northerners have ginnels and York has snickelways - though the latter is a fairly recent coinage.)
Common Ground's web site suggests ways that people can celebrate the distinctiveness of their own place - ABCs of differences, photographs, parish maps. These maps are not 'objective' (regular readers know I have difficulty with the idea of any map being really objective; the very assertion of 'objectivity' displays a biased idea of what mapping is about). Instead, wilful subjectivity rules - the maps are written, painted, knitted, embroidered; they include dialect words, pictures of wildlife, old stories and legends.
It's back to the 1960s in a way for Common Ground. 'Think globally, act locally' has been replaced by 'think locally! act locally! buy locally!'
Saturday, 15 December 2007
Strange buildings
Dubai has become a mad wonderland of architectural dreams and nightmares. An unprecedented (and unecological, for what it's worth) building boom has spurred architects on to come up with ever more stunning, ever more ambitious buildings.
The Pearl for instance is now touted as "a city in a building". It's in a way a take on the Grand'Arche de la Defense, but has two openings instead of one - a cheap shot or vaulting ambition? I'm not sure which.
Dubai already has buildings in progress shaped like chess pieces; the Red Queen would have loved this Wonderland... there's a wave, a sail, ridiculous references in some cases. There's a megalomaniac attraction to sheer size - the tallest, widest, biggest, most of everything.
What I find worrying about the subtext though is that Dubai is creating architecture that turns it back on reality. Microcosms. Malls where you go to experience the inside. Places where you never need to emerge into the 'real' world at all, where you can go from air conditioned car park to air conditioned shops to air conditioned restaurant to air conditioned flat. The 'wild wadi water park' isn't a real wild wadi, like the lovely Wadi Shab in Oman - it's a fake jungle in a mall.
And getting back to La Defense; the great thing about the Grand'Arche is that it belongs there; on that huge axis that runs through Paris, reflecting and subverting the Arc de Triomphe. It's not a 'historically sensitive' building in many ways, but it is rooted in a historic landscape and takes its theme and meaning from that history.
Dubai's buildings, on the other hand, break with any Arab past; which is an interesting architectural tradition, and ecologically interesting too with its wind towers, natural cooling systems. The new buildings are revolutionary, not necessarily in a good way. And they have no reference to anything that came before.
Dubai could become a stunning metropolis. But equally, in twenty years' time it could look as dated - and as kitsch - as the end of the pier show in Great Yarmouth.
The Pearl for instance is now touted as "a city in a building". It's in a way a take on the Grand'Arche de la Defense, but has two openings instead of one - a cheap shot or vaulting ambition? I'm not sure which.
Dubai already has buildings in progress shaped like chess pieces; the Red Queen would have loved this Wonderland... there's a wave, a sail, ridiculous references in some cases. There's a megalomaniac attraction to sheer size - the tallest, widest, biggest, most of everything.
What I find worrying about the subtext though is that Dubai is creating architecture that turns it back on reality. Microcosms. Malls where you go to experience the inside. Places where you never need to emerge into the 'real' world at all, where you can go from air conditioned car park to air conditioned shops to air conditioned restaurant to air conditioned flat. The 'wild wadi water park' isn't a real wild wadi, like the lovely Wadi Shab in Oman - it's a fake jungle in a mall.
And getting back to La Defense; the great thing about the Grand'Arche is that it belongs there; on that huge axis that runs through Paris, reflecting and subverting the Arc de Triomphe. It's not a 'historically sensitive' building in many ways, but it is rooted in a historic landscape and takes its theme and meaning from that history.
Dubai's buildings, on the other hand, break with any Arab past; which is an interesting architectural tradition, and ecologically interesting too with its wind towers, natural cooling systems. The new buildings are revolutionary, not necessarily in a good way. And they have no reference to anything that came before.
Dubai could become a stunning metropolis. But equally, in twenty years' time it could look as dated - and as kitsch - as the end of the pier show in Great Yarmouth.
Monday, 19 November 2007
Things vs Experiences II
Daniel Libeskind obviously believes that the traditional museum - a box you keep things in - has passed its sell-by date. His Jewish museum in Berlin creates spaces that are in themselves an artwork and a reflection of the Jewish experience in Germany. A traditional museum has room only for fulness - for glass cases full of objects. His museum has room for a void - for openness to emotion, to free thought and experience.
While museums have always commissioned fine architectural designs, the nature of those designs has changed. In the Victorian age, museums such as Waterhouse's Natural History Museum provided an assertion of the continuity civilised values by the use of classical, Gothic or Renaissance building styles; but they were essentially containers for a collection.
Now, the focus is less on the fine facade than on interiors that can be experienced by the museum-goer. I suppose that must have begun with the Guggenheim spiral ramp, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1957).
I have a suspicion though that we are losing objectivity. The great thing about seeing objects in a case is that you can make up your own mind about them. Yes, you have to do the work - you'll have to read up on things before you go if you want to get the best out of the place. But if you want to pursue a particular line of thought, you can do so. (One such line of thought led me into the back bits of the British Museum one day to see, in the flesh, an Eishi woodblock print, with its sharp lines and glistening mica background. It wasn't on display - but you could ask to see the reserves; and I did.)
Now, the museum wants to tell you how to experience things. It wants you only to see the best, the most typical things. And it's not a hundred miles from there to dumbing-down - lists of 'Top ten things to know about the Romans in Britain' (and I don't mean Howard Brenton's play), or the critically panned Tutankhamun exhibition, high on glitz, low on scholarship.
That said, Libeskind's work is anything but dumbing down. But it does challenge our ideas of what museums are all about.
While museums have always commissioned fine architectural designs, the nature of those designs has changed. In the Victorian age, museums such as Waterhouse's Natural History Museum provided an assertion of the continuity civilised values by the use of classical, Gothic or Renaissance building styles; but they were essentially containers for a collection.
Now, the focus is less on the fine facade than on interiors that can be experienced by the museum-goer. I suppose that must have begun with the Guggenheim spiral ramp, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1957).
I have a suspicion though that we are losing objectivity. The great thing about seeing objects in a case is that you can make up your own mind about them. Yes, you have to do the work - you'll have to read up on things before you go if you want to get the best out of the place. But if you want to pursue a particular line of thought, you can do so. (One such line of thought led me into the back bits of the British Museum one day to see, in the flesh, an Eishi woodblock print, with its sharp lines and glistening mica background. It wasn't on display - but you could ask to see the reserves; and I did.)
Now, the museum wants to tell you how to experience things. It wants you only to see the best, the most typical things. And it's not a hundred miles from there to dumbing-down - lists of 'Top ten things to know about the Romans in Britain' (and I don't mean Howard Brenton's play), or the critically panned Tutankhamun exhibition, high on glitz, low on scholarship.
That said, Libeskind's work is anything but dumbing down. But it does challenge our ideas of what museums are all about.
Friday, 9 November 2007
The ancient railway revived
A marvellous post by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian about the opening of the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, which reuses the Gothic fantasy that is the Victorian St Pancras station.
What I love about this article isn't so much the puncturing of certain hypocrites who turned up for the opening while advocating the demolition of other, equally important monuments of the Victorian railway age. It's the well researched, grateful roll-call of those who have helped to save the station, from John Betjeman to railway managers you've never heard of.
I do feel sad though in a way that the building has been so grandly 'revived'. London used to be full of marginal spaces, half-ruins, areas where you could start up a shop in an old building for nearly nothing, where artists and actors and anarchists could live on almost nothing, where things could happen, where you could just hang out. King's Cross, Bermondsey, Whitechapel, Spitalfields.
And now? There's nowhere like that left. It's all been cleaned up, formalised, taken over by gleaming buildings.
Spitalfields market for instance was a place I used to go at weekends for organic meat, second hand clothes, old books. You could rent a stall there cheaply and many people did, selling their own photographs, or second hand musical instruments. There was cheap food, there was space, you'd get drawn into an interesting conversation.
And now the space has been taken over by bright modern shops. Bright modern shops with bright modern rents. And the life has gone out of the area. Instead of informality, experiment, spontaneity, there are expensive brands, luxury, credit card symbols on every door.
London has lost something. I don't live there any more and I'm glad; it's not a city of villages any more, it's a city of mortgages.
But with St Pancras revived, at least the city hasn't completely lost its Victorian roots.
What I love about this article isn't so much the puncturing of certain hypocrites who turned up for the opening while advocating the demolition of other, equally important monuments of the Victorian railway age. It's the well researched, grateful roll-call of those who have helped to save the station, from John Betjeman to railway managers you've never heard of.
I do feel sad though in a way that the building has been so grandly 'revived'. London used to be full of marginal spaces, half-ruins, areas where you could start up a shop in an old building for nearly nothing, where artists and actors and anarchists could live on almost nothing, where things could happen, where you could just hang out. King's Cross, Bermondsey, Whitechapel, Spitalfields.
And now? There's nowhere like that left. It's all been cleaned up, formalised, taken over by gleaming buildings.
Spitalfields market for instance was a place I used to go at weekends for organic meat, second hand clothes, old books. You could rent a stall there cheaply and many people did, selling their own photographs, or second hand musical instruments. There was cheap food, there was space, you'd get drawn into an interesting conversation.
And now the space has been taken over by bright modern shops. Bright modern shops with bright modern rents. And the life has gone out of the area. Instead of informality, experiment, spontaneity, there are expensive brands, luxury, credit card symbols on every door.
London has lost something. I don't live there any more and I'm glad; it's not a city of villages any more, it's a city of mortgages.
But with St Pancras revived, at least the city hasn't completely lost its Victorian roots.
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