Girl Singing in the Wreckage
In all the recent 'what do we do now?' articles that have pervaded the architectural press and blogs (including myself here), aside from the recognition, made with varying degrees of rancour and schadenfreude that the 'radical' architecture of the boom merely provided ideology via titanium cladding, there has been something missing - the question of what, if we take literally (as we should) Walter Benjamin's claim that every epoch dreams its successor, is going to follow the spaces of neoliberalism? Given that this collapsing order has no obvious successors, and given also the likely spiralling effects of climate change, or the endless war that 'unipolarity' will generate, the chances are at least strong that it will look like we have dreamt our successors in the form of nightmares. The always reliably apocalyptically gleeful Socialism and/or Barbarism has a few intriguing and/or terrifying suggestions, posited in his dialectics-via-giallo idiom as the first in a series of 'apocalyptic notes'. He argues for an aesthetic that, abandoning the shininess of cyberpunk and the consolatory pleasures of steampunk, he calls 'salvagepunk'.
Salvagepunk seems to start from what is probably the best mini-encapsulation of architecture during the boom, at least in the sub-primed/credit-crunched Anglo-Saxon economies - this short post at the FJ, which notes that there has been a weird reversal of Modernist and autopian dreams of mobile cities, houses that can be erected and dismantled at will, the lineage that goes from Frank Lloyd Wright through Mikhail Okhitovich through to Archigram, so that while capital has become completely decentred, moving through a network of 'offshore' and non-state sites where it can avoid sordid earthbound neccessities such as tax (cf also China Mieville's essay on the executive floating cities of neoliberalism for Evil Paradises), the thing which sparked off the inevitable crash was the most blandly grounded architecture imaginable - the vaguely vernacular boxes that, from Indiana to Hertfordshire, 'solid', brick-built, traditional, being sold to those who were in no position to join the 'property-owning democracy'. The result has been that, with appropriate dialectical logic, 'finance itself has taken on the dreams of boundary-less freedom we might once have wished for ourselves, while we have invested all our desires and more than we earn in staying put, staying home.'
So the response by comrade Calder-Williams to our stasis and their deterritoriality is to embrace a cranky, broken and dilapidated version of the Walking City, one which is more based on Howl's Moving Castle or Mad Max than Archigram's proto-Monty Python surrealist Disurbanism, a sort of pragmatic apocalypticism where the leftovers of advanced technologies are used in a debased form, montaged together via 'bits and pieces, rags and bones' into new constructions rather than created ex nihilo, or in harmony with nature via the pieties of sustainability. This all strikes me as being a fine first draft for a new (dis)urbanism, if it didn't have that faintly terrifying, survivalist air. I still find the idea that mess is something we should embrace rather than something imposed upon us unwillingly to be a little dubious, as I remain overly attached to the Modernist jingle of 'clean living under difficult circumstances' - but I look greatly forward to the next parts of this projected series...
posted by owen hatherley at 2:03 am
13 Comments:
i guess in the same spirit, we too should add to benjamin's regurgitation of michêlet, and say that not only does each epoch dream its succesor and in doing so plants the seed, but that this process of envisaging and sowing inevitably ends up perverting (or revealing latent perversions). dunno.
brilliant. (Owen hon, forgive this intrusion but this is just a quickie hugeo-thanks for the link, yr the first and ONLY, not sure what "Denke" means ("dreck" ?), but it*s all a first step on our luddite world-takeover quest etc etc) - philippa dddd
I think Mario is quite right about that: the misfiring (the getting wrong of world to come) isn't a fault of implementation. It lies in the envisaging itself. Or perhaps, following Benjamin, in the fact that the dreaming must erase the recent past in order to posit radical change and, in doing so, becomes tied to some implausible nostalgia form of what used to be.
Regarding the survivalist overtones of what I wrote... I think one way out of this is what I'll be dealing with in the third part, namely the idea that we shouldn't think of apocalypse as a global event but rather in the model of combined and uneven development: there are always pockets of the post-apocalyptic, in fits and starts, and we need to get better at dealing with them as both systemic and exceptional, as moments of true apocalyptic brutality that are nevertheless necessary for the functioning of a world order that likes to pretend that "the world is flat."
That said, I think I do tend toward a certain tough band of vanguardist survivor model, against my best intentions.
For those into 'survivor chic' and other forms of post-capital/post-apocalyptic 'glamour' (hurrah! It's all crumbled now we're free!)-
I suggest you look to the super-slums of Africa, Asia and South America, where people do indeed live off vast swathes of debris, waste and spare parts (and may even form modes of exchange through it); but probably dream of the stifling - but still somewhat 'comfy' - airless capitalist mundanity we're always moaning about.
I suggest a cursory look at Adam Curtis' documentaries to see how any number of big, utopian ideas end up perverted (if not the sworn enemy) of the big idea.
I agree with the content, if not the aggrieved tone of your second paragraph (as I think Evan's argument is by no means 'oh aren't poor people chic!') but the third one is a bit baffling. I am very familiar with Adam Curtis' documentaries, but I'm buggered if I know what the relevance here is.
In Sweden, at least, everything new is in the vein of the scientific, "planned society"... A sentiment never far from the mainstream in this country.
The difference from the modernist socialism of the sixties is of course the urban, upper-middle class "ecologism" movement.
The prime example may be "Hammarby Sjostad", a place where system and function is cleverly disguised but makes its presence known in a total absence of spontainety and surprise... A vertical suburb, a gentrificated version of the "sleeping city".
Pretty far from Jane Jacobs in other words. But very very, Swedish.
http://www.stockholm.se/Fristaende-webbplatser/Fackforvaltningssajter/Exploateringskontoret/Ovriga-byggprojekt-i-innerstaden/Hammarby-Sjostad/Bildgalleri/
Other such projects about to be realised:
"Järvafältet": http://www.stockholm.se/-/Nyheter/Bygga--Bo/Vision-Jarva-20301/
"Årstafältet": http://www.arkitekt.se/s48414
Isn't the East End planned along these lines? I've never seen you discuss that.
The psyche of the wealthy world is pulled toward mutually exclusive spheres of possibility:
1. Comfort, order and beauty by design.
2. Authenticity (the conception of The Real World as it was) and freedom of the wilderness.
Public and private spaces have become a collision of these spheres: Urban grocery stores are design heavy, yet incorporate touches of authenticity (rough wood crates displaying fruit) to reassure that all has not been lost in the quest for comfort.
Clean, exquisitely lit homes are filled with references to things that were: typewriters, bird's eggs, film cameras on display.
The salvagepunk world is the nightmare of too much authenticity reasserting itself.
The other nightmare, the ordered panoptic-prison city seems less likely these days. So we dream of the scorched landscape, and the endless squatter-township that waits on the other side of history.
Upandaway - a sort of attenuated version of those Swedish projects is common over here, but it would be a major leap to say that the East End is currently 'planned' like that - we don't do planning. On the outer reaches of the inner east (North Greenwich, the former Royal Docks) there are plenty of blocks in that sort of form, with some minor greenery - the Millennium Village, initially planned by Ralph Erskine (who disowned the project and then died half way through) is the most complete version of it, and even that is right next to about four strip malls.
Anon - very interesting. I suppose the question for me is whether you can have an aesthetic which favours not living in shit which comes from the poor themselves - hence the Peter Meaden quote.
"We don't do planning"
Funny that. A couple of years ago I stayed in London, and took a walk along the river in that area (just opposite the spiky tent).
The view wasn't the best so perhaps that was the "inner east"?
What struck me on that walkr was how little thought had been given to the pedestrian. At one point I had to leap a small distance between two sets of railings, over water, just to be able to continue.
To fix that sort of thing must have been really simple, but as the properties of clearly separate entities that just didn't happen...
A nice but exausting city to walk in btw. It just never ends!
Sorry to be late to the game here, but I am finally catching up on my reading.
Your speculation one salvagepunk and Howl's Moving Castle put me strongly in mind of a "young adult" series I read last year: Philip Reeves's Mortal Engines quartet, which posits a post-apocalyptic series of "traction cities": cities on giant tank treads that hunt, catch, and process each other, enacting the principle of "Municipal Darwinism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_City
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