The Future is Boring

Or: if you like Shenzhen so much, why don't you go and live there?

Tim Abrahams of Blueprint magazine has recently published a critique of British architectural blogs, specifically naming Things, the two FAT bloggers and the blog you are now reading as purveyors of a sort of all-pervasive nostalgia, which stands in the way of us truly thinking the future. Some of his points are just straightforward banalities about the internet that are very familiar from the attacks of print journalists, very effectively outlined by I.T - a sneer at the 'self-published', the allegedly dubious practice of linking, to the particularly dubious invocation of The Real World. Things has already replied in self-defence, and I think the FJ will be doing the same - but I have a few points to make in response to the specific attacks on me, and then more generally on the question of how internet commentators are cheating glossy architectural magazines out of the future. First of all, one of the more peculiar arguments was the characterisation of my blog as links to what I've written in print, combined with a few online-only musings. Abrahams is I assume aware that I was blogging for years before I ever found my way into print - or rather he ought to be aware of it, as Blueprint was the first architectural magazine I ever wrote for, and that as recently as March 2008. So I'm familiar with the difficulty of fitting any kind of 'critique' into the cramped space of their word counts.

There is an argument worth responding to in Abrahams' rant, but before we get to that, I want to take issue with the specifics. For instance: In addition, one sees how the web has become a medium of nostalgia. This goes for those of a modernist bent as much as a postmodernist one. Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, a blog by Owen Hatherley, author of the recently published book, Militant Modernism, is clearly focused on an interesting collection of articles he has had published plus some online-only musings. This includes an article on Ford which was prompted by a link to a piece about the Ford Anglia on the aforementioned Fantastic Journal. Here we have a fan of civic modernism and an arch postmodernist agreeing on the delights of a car that was popular in the Seventies. This is the kind of scenario that should give us cause for concern.

Years of working at Blueprint have obviously affected Abrahams' reading ability to the point where everything is read with the same glazed-eyes skim with which one peruses the risible, kitsch motorised cock-substitutes that are periodically reviewed in said magazine. Not only have I never mentioned the Ford Anglia, I have barely any idea of what one looks like. I presume he refers to this post, where I start with a link to the FJ's post, and then talk about the specific presence the Ford factory had in the place where I grew up, which, given the bitterness of the memories listed there, can hardly be accused of being dewy-eyed reminisce. However if there is a 'nostalgia' in my writing it is in posts like this (and this, or this). I don't consider my writing about both the wider historical past and my own past - my childhood or teens, my family, and their connection with the recent political past, and the connection of that recent past with design - to be nostalgic as such. I do admit, however, that I linger at it, pick at particular perceived wounds, partly because we are constantly implored not to do so. Move on, forgive and forget, it was years ago, after all. I can't help seeing this in political terms. Going along with the implicit question of why we should care if Park Hill is sold off to yuppies or Robin Hood Gardens knocked down, is the bored question - so what if the Labour movement was obliterated, so an entire history and tradition of working class culture was wilfully destroyed - can't you just get over it and enjoy looking at pictures of the new cultural district in Abu Dhabi?

Although my writing is driven by a feeling that those of us born in the 70s, 80s and 90s were cheated out of a certain kind of future - the future outlined in Patrick Keiller's London of 'what we used to think the future would be like' - equality, technology, infrastructure, sanity - I'm well aware that I write more in this blog about the past than I do about the future. And here, Abrahams' critique seems linked up with a more general one we have heard since the banking crash made suddenly, vertiginously obvious the vacuity of the last 30 years of political thought - what does the Left offer bar a return to the system as it existed before 1979? The first problem with this is the utterly moronic level of futurist thought over the past decade or so, from the 'Singularity' to the starchitects. As anyone who has ever perused the Architects Journal's 'emerging markets series' can attest, we have faced a future constructed by the most brutalised helots, indulging the ego of power and architecture either via an Ayn Rand series of formally whimsical galleries and opera houses for the edification of feudal despots or visiting plutocrats - or perhaps buildings for the oligarchies' rigorously controlled press, or stacked trading floors for now-failed banks. Formally, this always looked 'futuristic', but mostly by drawing on earlier ideas of what the future was supposed to look like, be that googie and space-age design, Constructivism, expressionism, science fiction. Needless to say, this 'future' has been lovingly photographed and spread over the pages of Blueprint for several years now.

But the obvious uselessness of this future doesn't stop Abrahams' question, however clumsily and sneeringly expressed, from having some pertinence. I don't consider it the duty of the critic to predict the future (cf many responses to Mark's recent writings, which seem annoyed specifically by the assertion that the future has turned out to be so boring), but there is an element of truth in the argument that the recession has opened a space which we aren't necessarily filling with a viable vision of the future, but I wonder if that's more to do with the vacuity of the media, old and new, and the necessary length of time it takes to construct a new politics or new forms - we can't just wish them into being. Politically, we can give a series of answers - nationalisation of all privatised utilities without compensation, a 'green new deal' (which, despite the nostalgia of the phrase, would necessarily be a futurist project) to kick-start a less destructive fourth industrial revolution, a move towards participatory rather than allegedly 'representative' democracy - which, in the eyes of the perpetually glib print media, merely sounds like something boringly old. Similarly, architecturally, the future I would like to see would be more defined by its programmes rather than its flashy aesthetics. I'd like to see a massive programme of council housing, an entire new generation of public transport infrastructure (a glimpse?), and a green architecture which doesn't stay at the dumbly symbolic level of tacked-on foliage. I'd like to see such a future, but I don't know if I could draw it. Which brings us back to my alleged co-conspirators in nostalgia, FAT.

The first time I read about FAT and their architecture was not online, but in a typically glib and stereotyped Guardian piece on their Ancoats houses, which played to my prejudices as a fan of 'civic modernism' - good god, postmodernism's back, in the guise of urban regeneration. Yet, from reading Charles Holland and Sam Jacob's writing online, it became abundantly clear that FAT were arguably the only architects in Britain who continued the theoretical sophistication and social seriousness that interested me about Modernism in the first place. Yet, as I.T points out, without the internet there would only ever have been a shallow slanging-match - the mods vs the postmods! - which would have been far less interesting. The difference between FAT and their more ostensibly 'futuristic' contemporaries is particularly obvious in the context of Greater Manchester's architecture. Everywhere, you have buildings which are Britain's nearest approximation of the ManTownHuman idea of what the future is supposed to look like - glass skyscrapers full of overpaid footballers and architects' olive groves, the towering mishmash of the yuppiedromes and dovecots, the titanium-clad banalities of Salford Quays; and in contrast, we have a row of houses which genuinely look like nothing else. Much as I might have huge, huge problems with New Islington and the ever-dubious machinations of Urban Splash, if a new programme of public housing were to emerge, I'd rather it was like FAT's Islington Square than the one-liners and stacked shapeism that have defined the future for the last decade or so. The future ought not to be what it used to be.